89 In 1917, guaranteeing invisibility to his identity by signing in anonymous R. Mutt, in the same spirit as Ulysses' Nobody, Marcel Duchamp sent a white porcelain urinal to the Selection Committee of the Society of Independent Artists of New York, organization he was part of. Scandal. Once out of the invisibility chosen for himself in that circumstance (and, following, in many others, starting with the creation of his female alter-ego Rrose Sélavy), the father of conceptual art, marking the beginning of a new artistic thought, said: «The great artist of tomorrow will go underground». Underground. Therefore, invisible and rebellious. After all, nothing more than invisibility can serve as an amplifier for the ability to imagine, and nothing more than art feeds on the power of images, but there is a word capable of defining the spirit with which contemporary art relates to image, its nourishment: that word is iconoclash. iconodulism icon·o·du·lism | \ īˈkänəˌd(y)ü- li-zəm \ noun Exasperated or superstitious worship of sacred images. iconoclasm icon·o·clasm | \ ī-ˈkä-nə-ˌkla-zəm \ noun Religious movement arose within the Byzantine church in the VIII-IX centuries, contrary to any form of worship of sacred images and proponent of their destruction. Islam was iconoclast in the prohibition of the use of Muhammad’s image, as well as Calvinism and Puritan movement, formed during the Protestant Reformation in a more modern age, that led to the destruction of many statues and effigies in Northern European reformed churches and cathedrals. It was the philosopher Bruno Latour, in 2002, on the occasion of the inauguration of the homonymous exhibition within the spaces of the ZKM, in Karlsruhe, who coined and defined iconoclash: a hesitation, a middle ground, a legitimate doubt towards the bipolar process of creation of the image on which contemporary art is based. Nothing is clearer than his words in the catalogue: «Nowhere else but in contemporary art has a better laboratory been set up, fortrying out and testing the resistance of every item, comprising the cult of image, of picture, of beauty, of media, of genius. Nowhere else have so many paradoxical effects been carried out on the public to complicate their reactions to images. Nowhere else have so many set-ups been invented to slow down, modify, perturb, lose the naive gaze and the scopic regime of the amateur d’art. Everything has been slowly experimented against and smashed to pieces, from mimetic representation, through image making, canvas, colour, artwork, all the way to the artist himself, his signature, the role of museums, of the patrons, of critics. Everyone and every detail of what art is and what an icon is, an idol, a sight, a gaze, has been thrown into the pot to be cooked and burnt up […] A Last Judgment has been passed: all our ways to produce representation of any sort have been found wanting. Generations of iconoclasts smashing each other’s faces and works. A fabulous large-scale experiment in nihilism. A maniacal joy in selfdestruction. A sacrilege. A sort of deleterious aniconic inferno. And yet, of course, as one might expect, here is another iconoclash: so much defacement and so much “re-facement” (see Hans Ulrich Obrist). Out of this obsessive experiment to avoid the power of traditional image making, a fabulous source of new images, new media, new works of art has been found; new set-ups to multiply the possibilities of vision. The more art has become a synonym for the destruction of art, the more art has been produced, evaluated, talked about, bought and sold, and, yes, worshipped. New images have been produced, so powerful that they have become impossible to buy, to touch, to burn, to repair, […] thus generating even more iconoclashes». To destroy in order to rebuild, artworks, faces and identities, presumed iconoclasts, real iconodules, who recognized in invisibility – meaning the annihilation of the image, but also of the self – a necessary act to the continuous rebirth of art. A name above all, that of the art torero Carmelo Bene, supreme cantor of ob-scenity as being out of the scene – or, as he himself said, visibly invisible of himself, in the willingness to constantly lose identity, meaning and direction. Getting lost, to find yourself no more. Gambling your own skin, no matter the price. His art was an overcoming of itself, as in certain masterpieces such as, by his own declaration, Francis Bacon’s paintings, portraits and self-portraits tortured by his artistic gesture, full of suspended dynamic energy in order to transcend the arrogance of an identity only able to celebrate itself, thus to celebrate the nothingness, because the face represents a political place as much as the body, and its cancellation is a clear declaration of rebellion. In the full, ancestor iconoclast furore, the film of Carmelo Bene’s masterpiece Nostra Signora dei Turchi was multifariously trampled, scorched, tormented, in a frenetic editing, by its own creator. Recalling it, Bene admitted: «My cinematographic attendance is obsessed with the constant need to shatter, to mistreat the visual, sometimes even burning and trampling the film. I managed to direct a musicality of the images that cannot be seen». A synaesthesia made possible by means of the invisible. day 2 «The great artist of tomorrow will go underground»
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