97 ouverture We were setting up a major solo exhibition, in 2016. More than two hundred artworks, rigorously divided according to the artist's production cycles, surgically nailed to the walls, sown on the ground going along with a masterful sense of composition, emerged from petroleum black or candid white bodies of water, rumbling sound carpets between electro and operatic, in a former shipyard made sacred by art. On the eve of the inauguration, in that rarefied and clinical silence that marks every rehearsal and precedes every occasion you care about, we noticed some blemishes: a scratched artwork, another not belonging to the series in which it was placed, an audio out of sync with its video. Slight panic, thank goodness we brought more, ready for replacements. «That's okay», said the artist, who evidently had foreseen everything, while accentuating that scratch. Fore-seen. I can still hear his words: «You always have to introduce some short circuits. There must always be a doubt». After some time I realized that ethics, in art, is in that disruption. Ethics, in art, lies in the trigger of that doubt. track #01 aestheticsanaesthetics Good evening to those who read the words. Good evening to those who look at the images. Good evening to those who read the images, this writing speaks for them. For those who want to feel the images. Not merely in the heart, too easy, highly inflated and also quite rhetorical; I mean in the stomach, in the muscles, in that almond in the brain called the amygdala, imprinted onto the retina, on the back, as memory. It is right from there that they are capable of triggering a doubt. It is right from there that thought can deflagrate. Man for man’s sake - I mean, human being for human being’s sake. And image for art’s sake, to be human. (Ed.'s note: we are not talking here about the zillion images that we scroll bulimics on Instagram, give us this day our daily pixels, and not even about that art piled up in fairs as if it were cannon fodder – because you know, this is not the time for gathering, much less in art, where gathering has always been toxic). I am talking about art as experience, as John Dewey wrote in 1934, marking a clear-cut distinction between the aesthetic and the anaesthetic experience: the former, capable of pushing the person who lives it one step forward in the evolving process; the second anaesthetic, chloroform indeed, vacuous satisfaction of an equally vacuous pseudo-beauty. Fullness, of sense and senses, as opposed to emptiness, because art is for Dewey the driving energy in the search for a sense of things. Like culture, but with an extra golden arrow in its quiver: that of aesthetics – that, please be careful, goes far beyond a curlicue. A society expressing itself according to a full aesthetic experience represents the state of bliss of humanity, because that society is certainly expressing itself, also and above all, according to ethics. I’m feeling lucky, Google blinks under the search bar: if it has ever happened to you, as it has sometimes happened to me, that when faced with a work of art, your senses and thoughts are short-circuited, then you have had a full aesth/ethical experience. You have lived art as experience. (For the record: last time it happened to me has been in Milan, at the Prada Foundation, in front of an installation by Louise Bourgeois that hit me straight in the stomach. I still think about it). Under a continuous crossfire of little pictures each of us is constantly subjected to – anaesthetic experiences stifling beauty to a jumble of clichés, to watch for a moment and forget even sooner – with art I’m feeling lucky. As is often the case, it only takes to wonder about the origin of things: in the mid-eighteenth century, Alexander Baumgarten coined the term "aesthetic" for philosophy, embracing its original meaning of aísthesis, perception, inaugurating a live and sensitive method to listen to the image. To hear what it says, beyond what it shows. To experience it. Rather than sterile contemplation, aesthetics means action; this allows it not to be relegated to the only harmony of forms, but to finally be able to go further, to embrace the disturbing, the uncanny, the other than itself. Then, by its very nature, art as aesthetical experience opens up to life as ethical experience: having the will to listen, knowing how to hear, and not just to see. In the synapses, in the muscles, in the nerves, not just in bored eyes. The rest is anaesthetic - or even, as Ulay said, «Aesthetics without ethics are cosmetics».
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