131 spectacle. Movements such as Extinction Rebellion, Last Generation, Just Stop Oil thus hit priceless works of art by throwing paint and canned food – alright, but they do it on the outer glass that protects them, not really intending to disfigure them, but rather to convey in the most flamboyant and controversial way that art too won’t be able to survive on a burning planet. Personally, I do not think these actions are disrespectful for art as a product; I think these are high forms of respect for art as a symbol. Berlinde De Bruyckere replies to me that she would prefer to leave the question open – and, I think, my position is probably due to the fact that I do not create art, so my love for art can never be comparable to the love of a parent for his daughter, because in the eco-activists there is in any case a form of instrumentalisation of art – but she tells me what she thinks about vandalism in art, which is different from the dissent of eco-activists because it is anonymous, therefore coward and unaccountable, sterile, not open to confrontation, violent and unmotivated: «I remember that in 2008 in Gent, where I live and work, a wax figure, one of the Schmerzensmann series that was on display at KASK, the Fine Arts Academy, was vandalized twice in the exact same spot; the foot of the figure was destroyed and, soon after restoration, destroyed again. I would like to quote Stefan Hertmans who described the incident in a striking way: “Twice, Schmerzensmann V, 2006 was damaged during the exhibition, each time in the same way and in the same place, resulting in its premature eviction. That act, and especially the almost ritualistic repetition, suggests a perverse awareness of the scope of the intervention. Ultimately, vandalism is always a double-edged sword. Where the work of art is violated, the anonymous perpetrator also inscribes his defeat: he has lost to the object that offered him a confrontation. He has driven the symbolic violence back to meager literalism and thus put himself out of the game. He ended up damaging his own field of vision and testified to an uncomprehended self-loathing. But there was more at stake. Aptly, the smashed foot of this artificial and headless body gave the impression of belonging to the artwork, as if the power of the sculpture was able to absorb the aggression and thus show the enormous potential of suffering through which it immediately transcended the damage into part of the presentation”». Art capable of regenerating itself. Art capable of regenerating. Art capable of healing. In the documentary Louise Bourgeois. The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine (2008) by Marion Cajori and Amei Wallach, on a piece of pink paper one can see, written in that immense artist's handwriting, art is a guaranty of sanity. Her art was a mending of what was broken in her: her mother restored tapestries, and Bourgeois' world-renowned, mammoth spiders paid homage to her mother, giving herself comfort. Respect for illness and disease, enshrined in charter (and lately only there, the writer herein lives in Calabria) through the right to health and care, found the most fertile shelter for De Bruyckere in that anatomical part able to give life: a vagina, sacred as a reliquia. I too return to Istanbul, in 2012, to tell you about Yara, wound in Turkish, a cycle of three sculptures that give body to as many vulvar forms protruding from the wall and in your face, as feminist art claimed. But their semantic encoding changes when these artworks are connected to their source of inspiration: a medical photo album from 1890, found in an Istanbul library, bearing portraits of women next to glass vases containing their removed ovarian tumour masses. The women, wrapped in burqas, reveal a flap of their bodies through an oval cut in the garment showing their scar, like a memento mori. From being a work of feminist denunciation, Yara thus expands to embrace the denunciation of a certain scientific-voyeuristic approach to illness, which tends to relegate the disease to an anatomical area without considering the body it belongs to, the person it belongs to, the context it belongs to.
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