117 track #08 away outside under against In giving baptism to Arte Povera, in 1967, Germano Celant (1940-2020) wrote an editorial-manifesto declaring the positioning and the assumption of responsibility that the nascent artistic movement he brought up would have occupied: «A new attitude for taking repossession of a ‘real’ dominion over our existence leads the artist towards continual forays outside of the places assigned to him, eradicating the cliché that society has stamped on his wrist. No longer among the ranks of the exploited, the artist becomes a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantages conferred by mobility, surprising and striking, rather than the other way around. An asystematic way of living, in a world where the system is everything. Freedom, in the visual arts, is an all-contaminating germ» (Germano Celant, Arte Povera: Notes on a Guerrilla War – in Flash Art n.5, 1967). Art is the profoundly free and profoundly ethical possibility of expressing themselves alternatively, of investigating other ways and other worlds, probably better ones, to be traveled through the high visions to which it is called. In front of contemporary art, there can be no catechism, nor academism, nor standard procedures, nor univocal interpretations; but above all, in a historical moment in which saying "art system" is equivalent only to saying "art market", in front of art there can no longer be a system. They have been able to mess also with the moment of cure – which, now that it is called curatorship, only implies putting a caption as politically correct as possible, looking for a justification at the expense of something that by nature should never, ever justify itself, lubricating the media-driven hosanna. This ain’t about cure, cure means care for the other. Michel Foucault indicated in self-care as a work of art the aesthetics of existence. So, art is the cure. Cure is ethics, art is ethics, the system is cosmetics. A systemic vision so (ill) conceived of art, instead, fences it and cuts off its wings within institutional contexts that, for the most part, reek of mothballs, concentration camps, artworks as upholstery. Right to hell the system if it corroborates classism, elitism and the distancing of people from culture, mechanics that are anything but ethics. Away from an art system bent on everything, except art. Let's go outside, let's go under, let's go against. Let's go away. - Christian Caliandro, Critica viva. Creare immaginario, Artribune, Feb 20, 2017 Outside as eccentric, that is, outside the center, peripheral: it is in periphery that art reunites with men and the environment, far from presentialism, authentic. Outside as different, therefore bearer of richness, freak, like the poetry-filled feature film by Tod Browning (Freaks, 1932), furiously opposed until 1969 because played by actors considered «blunders of nature, that modern science and teratology will rapidly eliminate». Fuori!, as the name of the first Italian association formed in 1971 to protect the rights of homosexuals – an acronym for the Italian Revolutionary Homosexual Unitary Front, which later merged into the Radical Party – which, marching together with feminist and transsexual groups, brought forward primarily human claims for a more inclusive society. Outside as the title of the 20202021 Rome �uadrennial of Art, which embodies the visions of 43 outsider artists. Outside as free. Under as underground, the most experimental kind of art and culture, baptized by Marcel Duchamp in a conference in Philadelphia in 1961 that became historic precisely by virtue of that baptism: «The great artist of tomorrow will go underground», subterranean, clandestine. Ethics from the root, underground railroads were, in the nineteenth century, the secret networks used to free slaves fleeing from the south of the United States, those of pacifists who refused enlistment by taking refuge in Canada during the Vietnam War, the movements of European resistance (the Undergrounds) during World War II. Underground was the Beat Generation with Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. Almost all the avantAway the polite, respectable, condescending works. Away the works treating the present problems as topical issues or of general interest, to be treated, indeed, rather than to be lived in depth. Away the didactic works. Away the works whose comprehension is zero. Away the works that are not brutal, courageous, cruel (in the sense of Artaud, not in the sense that you think). Away the works animated by a chilling, irrepressible, irredeemable conformity. Away the cool works. Away the nostalgic works. Away the hypocritical works. Away the classist works. Away the works animated by a debris and cheap exoticism. Away the stupid works disguised as clever works. Away the works full of quotes from unread books. Away the works promoted by curators who have never read the books cited in the works they curate. Away the obedient works. Away the timid works. Away the cool works (I had already written that, but it's okay to repeat it). Away the works that do not stand, too, as an existential model. Away the ignorant works. Away the inauthentic works. Away the captivating works. Away the dead works - born already dead. Away the works that are purely and simply works.
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