122 It is therefore necessary to draw that line. And only art can take charge of it, because it is honest, provided it is honest. Glimpses of light before it gets dark. Making visible what is not. Ethics in art means also this: opening the perspective of a third landscape. track #09 manifesto of the third landscape As for an eccentric gospel, the stories of the artists told in these pages are therefore parables, each one underlying a message. An art giant the likes of Carmelo Bene, in a lecture at the Teatro Argentina in 1984, said: «The artist, if ethics is also assumed, must be not only in the odour, but at least in the stench of sanctity». Through the parables of artists in the stench of sanctity such as the Anarchitecture Group or the CCCPs – but also Jackson Pollock, Romeo Castellucci, Genesis P-Orridge, ultimately all the artists who can truly call themselves such, vision and courage – it emerges that the ethical power of art lies in the willing to move the bar of thought forward and, through the symbol which represents its mother tongue, to transmit a message for those who want to interpret it, and therefore to grow. Through the parables of Matta-Clark and the CCCPs, for example, the common message is that “end” means an end, not the end. An end means a transition, a passage, from one attitude to another, from one experience to another, from one paradigm to another. Not the end, but an end; not the future, but the futures; not the world, but the worlds, with all the life there is, with all the diversity that deserves to exist and to be represented, in order to be heard. Culture is not the recreation time, but it is that lever that allows you to understand that the crisis – krísis, decision – is nothing more than a threshold to be overcome through a reset of worn-out paradigms. Fact: we are in crisis, as it has always been cyclically in the history of humanity, from the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire to the collapse of the Third Reich, passing through market collapses and population collapses caused by epidemics. Fact: in the contemporary world, the paradigm to be overcome is that of anthropocentrism, which is devastating life and the planet. In a phase of epochal transition like the one we are going through, art and culture outline the alternative; in this case the alternative, poetic and powerful, is that of the third landscape. It was 2004 when the Manifesto of the Third Landscape of the agronomist, biologist, entomologist, landscape architect, writer – and, allow me, poet – Gilles Clément appeared, putting into words what art puts into images. «If we stop looking at the landscape as the object of a human activity, we immediately discover (will it be a forgetfulness of the cartographer, a negligence of the politician?) a multitude of undecided spaces, devoid of function, which it is difficult to lay a name on. This whole belongs neither to the territory of shadow nor to that of light. It is located on the margins. Where the woods fray, along roads and rivers, in the forgotten recesses of the crops, where cars do not pass. Among these fragments of landscape, there is no similarity of form. One point in common: they all constitute a land of refuge for diversity. Everywhere, elsewhere, this is driven out». The baptism of a third landscape was born in Clément from the idea of third estate: «A space that expresses neither power nor submission to power». It refers to Sieyès' pamphlet of 1798: «What is the third estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto? Nothing. What does it desire to be? To become something». It is neither the infinite nor the finite; it is the indefinite, the unfinished, the imperfect, to be preserved and cared for in its own identity, to be supported in its natural movement. The desert with its nomadic life, the uncultivated, the wild, the marginal, to take care of, a loving care. The third landscape is a setback to the anthropocentric paradigm in order to enter into dialogue with the other from itself, understanding its development over time and modulating one's own behavior in a continuous relational pas de deux with it, to preserve it, and thus to preserve ourselves. What is needed, to use an expression by Karl Jaspers, is existential communication, a true encounter with the other, to be revealed through the liebeskampf, through the loving struggle: an exchange between equals whose aim is not the victory of one over the other, but the declaration of each existence and of the freedom that opens one to the other. The third landscape is authenticity, spontaneity, anti-rhetoric, squad against adulterations of truth, unvarnished life, defective because it is true, beautiful because it is true. In Ottilie’s diary (1809), Goethe wrote that «The greatest men are connected with their own century always through some weakness»: the measure of greatness in contemporaneity is then given, for humanity, by the ability to elevate a defect, a
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