101 track #03 the slant truth Recovery and actualization, reacting to intimately perceived urgencies – two ethical actions in themselves – are therefore the fundamental gestures that contemporary art fulfils starting from tòpoi, artistic interpretations of deeply ethical values. There is nothing else to prove: art is ethical by its very birth certificate, and when I hear squirming people talking about "ethical art", "social art", or "political art" in the anxiety of elevating rhetoric chores unable to move the bar of thought even one step further, I always get a hives principle; they are trying to blow smoke, my friends, because all art is ethics, all art it is social and political, when it is capable of prescinding the image to feed on imagery, to produce imagination, even in the form of a fertile doubt. But there actually is a rupture between the ancient and the contemporary and it lies, as we said, in the new importance given to identity, which in my opinion responds to a precise historical and sociological reason. We were saying: a time lasted nineteen centuries in which art was the most imaginative teacher, whose patronage belonged almost exclusively to the central power or to the clergy. But then the twentieth century arrived, the unscrupulous use that dictatorships made of art and culture – despite the artistic relevance of some nascent movements, I am thinking above all of the validity of Nazi-Fascist architecture or of the sculptural mastery by Adolfo Wildt despite (because art is often despite) – which turned education into propaganda, expression into dogma. The rejection of a unified thought that could involve aesthetics lubricated a privatization of art that was a reaction to a disillusionment, to the artist's disenchantment with an authority in which it was no longer humanly possible to be reflected. The twenty-year Nazi-Fascist period and its double-dealing relationship with art, unmasked and defined by Walter Benjamin as the aestheticization of politics through an artistic and anything but ethical propaganda, puts an end to an era, and the individual fights back, and art fights back. A danse that responded to the growing social atomization, which favored the autonomy of the artist from his traditional role at the service of decreasingly universal powers, increasingly questionable from an ethical point of view. A danse that turned into a solo, in which, as in any dance, the value is given by the gesture. Art is par excellence the place of the symbol, and powerfully symbolic was the revolution accomplished in the post-war period by Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), which subverted a hitherto untouchable canon of art history – that of the verticality of the artwork, which limited the artist's capability to move – simply, but radically, by removing the canvas from the easel and moving the artwork to the ground, decentralizing himself as against the classic focus of perspective and allowing to immerse himself in his own making. Even the use of brush, and sticks, and syringes, no longer corresponded to the canonical gesture of painting, but to the act inaugurated by Pollock of dripping, of throwing the color on the canvas, a tacit but impetuous scream, a stance of the artist ready to face the unknown too, because he first could not have known what position the color would have occupy. Power of the gesture, artistic act of rebellion: thanks to the immersion in the horizontality born with Pollock, art definitively frees itself both from the fence of the contemplation of the work and from the barrier of the reproduction of the sole beauty, induced by the Platonic definition – by now at dusk – of art as mimesis. And it becomes experience no longer only in the appearance of the work, but also in the gesture that creates it, triggered by an artist who can now claim himself as independent, free to pursue his own research, to be followed by the patronage and no longer to follow it – because art indicates ethics, but it is sacrosanct that there is also an ethics for art. As if to say: there is a symbolic and ethical faculty also in making, in práxis, because if it is true that art is all the more sacred the more it is capable of instilling an ethical value through the symbol, then the artwork is a relic, and its process of creation is liturgy. (sacrosanct: defer the man back to the man) This is why the violent absence of love screams, silent and powerful, in the artworks by Felix Gonzalez-Torres. Two clocks stopped at the same time (Untitled - Perfect lovers, 1991), an unmade and empty double bed (Untitled - Billboard of an empty bed, 1991), two simple and switched-on light bulbs, whose cords remain intertwined (Untitled - March 5th #2, 1991), in the constant prayer of sharing, of an active participation of the viewer: his most famous artworks are heaps of candies or fortune cookies, equivalent to the weight of his beloved and disappeared Ross, which everyone is called to take and take away, possibly to eat, a lay Eucharist whose remembrance should not be extinguished, a communion.
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