120 gardes, Scapigliati Maudits Dadaist Situationists, have been underground. The Velvet Underground, Lou Reed and Nico, choreographed by Andy Warhol. Free radios. Underground by Emir Kusturica, in 1995, with the music by Goran Bregović. Fanzines are underground, and in general all the alternative press is. Street art is underground – and when someone expose it in museums with pompous authorities at the ribbon cutting with vin d’honneur, it means that no, they had it all wrong about what underground really is. Under as subculture, to mark a distance in the system by communicating one's own values through an immediately visible component, therefore perfect to be semiotically loaded: style. Shape that becomes content, strengthened by its own precise identity, which, starting from clothes (and often from music, another preferred means of expression), becomes ethical, social and political communication. From nineteenth-century dandyism to contemporary hipsters – passing over the years through zazous, existentialists, glam rockers, goths, paninari, hip-hop, grunge, all subcultures – the conflict with the system is not detonating as for the counterculture, but the claim of one's own identity stands out clearly against mass homologation, translating itself into a real aesthetic code that involves dress, lifestyle, language. As Emanuele Coccia underlines in 2017 in one of his famous lectiones magistralis at the Festivalfilosofia, subcultures neither write manifestos nor produce books or treatises, entrusting their entire message to the dress as a symbol, an object-threshold between themselves and the world, liminal subliminal, metamorphic work to transform people into what they wish to communicate about their individual and collective identity. Subculture is the one belonging to Sapeurs in Congo, followers of La Sape – Société des ambianceurs et des personnes élégantes, who embrace the style of Western dandies as a weapon of resistance to Belgian post-colonialism: Congolese who, in the bidonvilles of Kinshasa or Brazzaville, carry on with effort the job of life in a periphery of the world, claiming the poetry of their own identity shining in their tailored suits, brightly colored as a bright contrast, fedora, tie clip, clutch bag and parasol umbrella, elevated on skid row. And it also draws from subculture that squad using as a foxhole those luxury outposts represented by the haute couture shows to shake up the system from the inside, shifting the focus to rough, raw contemporary aesthetics, light years away from the prevailing taste of the erotic bourgeois boredom and of Photoshop planers. An aesthetics of discomfort, that tastes like clandestinely distilled vodka and gopnik subculture – the post-Soviet generation in acetate suits and hooligan attitude – consecrated where they could have never even set foot, from via Montenapoleone to Faubourg Saint-Honoré, at the hands of Demna Gvasalia and his brother Guram (artistic directors of Balenciaga and Vetements, respectively), of Gosha Rubchinskiy, head of GR Uniforma, and of their stylist Lotta Volkova. All coming from the former Soviet bloc, all careful to make concrete the no logo ethical revolution originated from Naomi Klein’s fundamental investigation: a shock from the inside, starting from fashion places and fashion logos, détourning like Debord's situationism, sabotaging the emblems of globalization as of the conceptual economy identified by Klein. (Ed.'s note: one can say: «Big deal, they do it for money». Well, my friends, so much the better. It’s about time to stop thinking that pursuing an ethical claim might get you in trouble; if such actions are successful also from the turnover point of view, the achievement, beyond that economic, is also and above all ethical. Because it takes a position, because it sheds light, because it calls to responsibility, as well as being able to win, from all points of view). Against, counter to as counterculture. «Art – and nothing besides! It is the one that mostly makes life possible, the great seductress of life, the great stimulant of life. Art as the single superior counterforce against all will to negation of life, art as the anti-nihilist par excellence», wrote Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) in the posthumous collection Will to power (1901). «Our religion, our morality and our philosophy are forms of man's décadence (forms of declining life, forms of life hostile to life). The countermovement: art». It was Nietzsche who firstly thematized the need for art as gegenbewegung, as countermovement, called upon to overturn the ugly into the beautiful, the declining life into ascending life; against the nihilistic moralist, Nietzsche opposed the artist, capable of saying yes to life thanks to an aesthetic countermovement able to turn shape into content. What makes the counterculture different from the subculture, although both are avant-garde dynamics, is the disruptive critical scope against the dominant social paradigm: in the common rejection of conformity, subculture lives with it, while counterculture opposes it with precise alternative political and social models, for which an equally precise system of artistic reference that connotes clothing, music and thought acts as a glue. Counterculture have been the Hippie movement in the sixties, psychedelia and pacifism, civil disobedience and free love, the communes, bohemian style and that long hair that gave the title to a 1967 musical, Hair, still on the bill on Broadway and whose plot is imbued with deeply shareable values. Counterculture has been the Punk movement in the seventies, whose first priestess, Vivienne Westwood, is still super-punk today in
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