Reflections on art today by Professor Antonio Dentale
(translation by Mrs. Penny Ewles-Bergeron)
Lecture for those in the field:
Painters – Art critics militant and qualified – Directors of state
and private museums – Collectors – Presidents of public and private
institutions – Professors and Directors of Art Academies and Institutes –
Journalists of modern art both local and national – Art ministers –
Councillors responsible for culture etc. etc.
Dear Pica,
I do not believe it will be possible for me to write a short and readable
missive, as you had asked me, to explain the reasons that bring you to reflect
on the use of the space that until now has functioned as a “meta-gallery”.
I say “meta” because this space of yours rather than being defined as
a gallery (relative to what an art gallery is today) resembles you and in some
way resembles us. (When I say it
resembles us I implicate myself and I don’t know whether this is does you harm
or good.) Because, dear Pica, you
have to admit it. You never do
things as they should be done and herein lies both your strength and your
weakness. So, how should things be done?
Who knows how they ought to be done?
To bring myself into it I would say that roughly our generation is very
much a handmade product and as such we carry the mark of the hand that made us,
its particular bent, the imprinting
of a family or even of the lack of one. And
therefore if we don’t belong to a family network passing down our trade from
father to son, we are a little unusual. We have had to invent our life somewhat.
And that’s what we have done.
But let us return to that definition of a “meta-gallery”. Things
you do are always a little bit like that, and your “ellipse” was like that too. A
“meta-shop” in its décor - a
mixture of various things, various experiences, ambitions and needs.
You were young then and as the saying goes, “you
had family” to back you up.
At that time your agenda was dictated by motivations that could not be
denied. Today instead it is the
desire for “meaning” that is foremost amongst all other considerations.
What is this mysterious desire for meaning? Before getting to that via an explicit definition that
relates to you (/us) in the first person let us try to identify the area of
interest. Dear Pica you are surely
aware that an art gallery today is, and was also in the past, substantially a
commercial enterprise, and amongst these not the least savvy. A commercial enterprise which deals in illusion, the
superfluous, the imaginary, in short the pointless, at least seen from a
pre-post-modern point of view - but if instead from post-modern perspective it
deals with the heart, with the food on which “desire” feeds.
And yet contemporary reality has produced much more efficient instruments
for routes into the imaginary - with faster returns and speed of production -
with respect to which an art gallery that wants to compete at the more or less
popular level finds itself at a disadvantage. This is why there are museums that focus on leisure time and
tourism and are maintained at public expense.
Private galleries must therefore adjust accordingly, must find a suitable
label or else take refuge amongst sellers of luxury and ultra-luxury goods.
One must frequent the right circles, disguise oneself as a supplier of
the most exclusive status symbols, wear the latest fashions and above all exude
“charisma” even if one doesn’t happen to possess it, in a game of
reciprocal reflection of images: I’ll let you believe you’ve got it because
you’d do the same favour for me. Better
still, you know what I’ll tell you? The
ideal state is really that of being a man like any other, or rather a man
without character but disguised with the slightly snobbish mask of belonging to
a limited circle of the privileged few.
It occurs to me in the process of telling you this, that at other times
of your life, in your own way, you’ve known how to play this game.
But it was exactly because it was at those other times and the game was
played according to rules that don’t apply any more or at least don’t work
for the role of an art gallery.
But let us proceed.
A
desire for meaning, I was saying.
Your life itself expresses this desire.
Obviously everyone to a greater or lesser extent looks for meaning and
often we put up with a fragmentation and repetition of multiple meanings.
Let me explain.
That which is called purposeful rationality is the same thing that has
allowed us to live longer, to enjoy better health, to multiply at least
potentially the possibility of enjoying a “degree
of freedom” which was unthinkable till only very recently.
This rationality, however, is not offered to us gratis.
It comes with a price. While
it promises freedom for all by public and private decree, the freedom to span (but
with the risk of schizophrenia) multiple personalities (with the personal
responsibility nevertheless of altering their hegemonic balance), promises the
availability of the use of a technological apparatus that has the potential to
widen, improve, transform one’s social life and maybe also one’s biological
life, it does tend, however, to obscure most efficiently – besides the obvious
difference of access in a society that is more and more diverse in terms of
earning power, with both enormous wealth and great poverty – the impossibility,
or at least the difficulty in compressing into some general meaning shared by
all, the nature, use, hierarchies, rules and benefits that derive from this
complex mechanism.
Or perhaps it is better not to set oneself the problem of formulating a
synthesis, however provisory, of function and meaning and at least, even at
polar extremes, it is better to imagine a tension that corrects, moderates and
directs each to the other and vice versa?
Meaning is multiplied into infinite little communicating streams;
infinite senses are available on the surface as if in a virtual supermarket,
giving each person in any given moment the chance to choose his own sense, with
the illusion that this choice is actually his own. But the supermarket does not offer personalised quality but
standardised quantity. More or less
all the same, different but average. The
supermarket is the kingdom of homologation.
And thus this purposeful rationality, while it promises freedom and
individuality, seems actually instead to distribute, along with its multiple
benefits, as much a subtle and chronic dependence on the most unknown
technological processes, (if not unknown in terms of end purposes, certainly in
the rationality that generates and governs them), as it does a banalisation and
homologation of collective and subjective narratives through which it becomes
more and more difficult to orient oneself in public and private life.
Paradoxically the more complex and rich with potential the techno-useful
paraphernalia we have available to us and which we use from the computer to
medicine, from integration of technical and communications systems to the
possibility to intervene in biological life itself, the less we have access to
narratives capable of giving us back some generalised meaning.
I perceive, however, dear Pica that what I said to you could be
misunderstood. I am not in search
of some religion, or of some strongly normative ethical concept.
These are indubitably times of solitude as well as times of freedom.
When there are no longer more or less definitive truths, giving meaning
to life becomes a subjective question and a personal matter.
This meaning - that first was
derived from taking part in important events whether social, interpersonal or
collective, or to be more precise by sharing ideas belonging to the ‘common
good’ such as the nation, or
coming down to the particular, such as one’s class or group of affiliation -
today after the meltdown becomes solely one’s own biography.
And so this becomes the centre of attention, the potential investment one
aims at to restore meaning to one’s life.
Herein lies the difficulty. To
entrust to each the ultimate meaning of his own existence means to focus on the
intelligence and subjective consciousness, that which was first produced through
a social working upon the imaginary, through an effort of infinite intelligence,
a sort of collective brain, which planned the means and the rules of existence
through a process of trial and error. Today’s freedom casts the responsibility for one’s own
life and relative success back to each individual person.
But are we even really sure that this freedom is really freedom? An open and secular society, based on a “contract”, a
pact between its members, must it not anyway, when all’s said and done speak
the language of some general interest? And
a freedom free of rules isn’t it free will and rules without freedom aren’t
they an authoritarian despotism?
I say only that the stronger the mechanism to which I entrust my life –
that mechanism of purposeful rationality that coincides with the structure and
framework of the world – the stronger must be my capacity to control it and
the relative awareness of it. The
ability to steer it and not only in that direction imposed on you by authority (which, amongst other things, I haven’t a clue just now
where that resides), but also in the direction derived in an impersonal way from
an absolute dependence on functionality (it’s enough that it works, Woody
Allen would say) or else the implicit limitation by which the function is
completely separated from meaning, and we are back at the beginning again.
In summary I am talking about a possible increase in understanding and
awareness of the individual that does not seem today to me to be on the cards,
wavering as we are between the truth
of what works and the truth of what grabs us, fascinates us, pleases us
empathically, without knowing why (M. Magatti).
Hesitating between a rationality of procedures and their relative
protocols and a pursuit of obscure drives that gravitate deeply into the “gut
feeling” unifying the people,
substituting public opinion, in a logic of instincts and not reason.
And it is well known that empathy, passion and fascination, if not
governed by a lively reason translate into an a-critical identification stripped
of any capacity to evaluate and if these are then expanded into the monolithic
body of mass psychology… give birth, as has sometimes happened, to disasters.
I am talking about an increased sense of responsibility that would be
very hard to achieve, whereas instead the contrary seems to be occurring and the
resolution of conflicts and contradictions is entrusted more and more to
impersonal mechanisms which are hailed as miraculously endowed with therapeutic
power. Above all the market.
But now, dear Pica, returning to the problem of art, of its difficulties
and the space that it represents or that it imagines it represents, I would like
first of all to dwell on a thought that seems to me a necessary prelude to any
other consideration. I would like
to ask both myself and you the reasons for and any possible connections between
the doubts that arose from running your gallery and the situation now.
Why now exactly?
The first thought that springs to mind is that there could be some
connection between your doubts and the last exhibition, that of Checco, alias
Francesco Moroso. With Checco we go
back to the beginnings. He is like
the salmon that, returning to the river where he was born, struggles against the
current to its source to deposit its eggs and, exhausted, dies.
Checco, innocent as a child, but also ever perverse, returned to the
place where human thought busied itself with discovering an incontrovertible
all-embracing knowledge which would explain the world relieving it of the terror
that life with its “becoming” inspires in all of us.
An incontrovertible and unquestionable knowledge as an alternative to
opinion which, everybody knows is by its own nature, moot. The greatest possible
reassemblage of sense and meanings. When
the technical sphere was severely limited and the explanation of the world was
approximate if not non-existent, it was metaphysical truth that ordered people
about. And so first myth and then, (despite Plato), religion and art
functioned as explanation and reassurance promising immortality and meaning. The
first in the space of another world, the second in the time in this one.
Then everything changed. In
our younger years as fierce critics of the present, we had an idea of the
relationship between function and meaning, an alternative to the one that
prevailed then. A reassembling of
meaning around an eschatological perspective of the future which saw history as
a linear process towards progress and modernity. We thought that with the weapons of criticism, transformed
then into the tragedy of the 70’s into a critique of weaponry, we could and
should change the world. At that
time and in a kind of a delirium of omnipotence, we felt accountable for the
general fate of this world to which we often had only scant capacity to hold on.
Even those like you, who for reasons of contingency and therefore also of
character, had learned, spurred on by necessity, to fall on their feet, to use
the few chances offered to them, to keep at least one foot on the ground, to
operate as an outsider, as a self-taught and a slightly wild entrepreneur, even
those like you have at heart lived their lives afflicted with a guilt complex
and looking for a reassembling of meaning that would be a parallel if not an
alternative to the capacity they show in (if only) setting themselves up
comfortably. Afflicted by a hidden desire for profligacy.
In contrast with what happens today when a natural superficiality comes
with a strong circumstantial ability we, on the other hand, came with a natural
or imagined depth and by a probable and unwished for circumstantial lack of
ability. Now, however, dear Pica I
realise I’m generalising something which was perhaps only some personal
inadequacy, turning it into the distinctive trait of a generation.
But that’s how it was. Take
these points for their potential usefulness or else as fragments of reasoning
which, because they come from the personal, try to capture some trace of the
more general.
As I was saying, there was some relationship between your doubts and
Checco’s exhibition, because that show by contrast has everything in it that
is lacking in contemporary art. Even
if what’s lacking in contemporary art today is useless, but being currently
lacking makes art superfluous and perhaps pointless.
As I was saying to you, in times past, the life of men was shut into the
normative enclosure of a “narration”,
constructed principally by religion - and art was in some senses a secular
branch of that. The space occupied
by men was limited by the principle of non contradiction.
A thing was
this and could be nothing else other than this. And values and norms were
like this. Artistic creativity was
the realm of expression and realization of the “self”
but via a long and hard apprenticeship. A
useful and recognisable social role was constructed through the learning of
rules of a given trade and a language, and the process also had the effect of
moderating and civilising that egoistic narcissism which today, by contrast,
turns up rude and unformed in this as well as in other areas of public life.
Social order kept the kingdom of impulses at bay in an arrangement where
all individuals were subject to the general interest and where rigid hierarchies
determined personal boundaries. And
art sanctioned, today we would say par
excellence, the greatest possible reassembling of functions required for
that social order, giving it semantic content and charging it with high meaning.
Certainly life for most and perhaps all people then was much shorter and
much more difficult. If we found
ourselves at the bottom of the social pyramid, the possibility of survival was
scant. But here we are not looking
back at the past with nostalgia.
The Industrial Revolution, accompanied by capitalism and democracy in a
three-way relationship in which the third of these terms has sometimes been
dormant, or at least a long time coming in the slow process of this story,
finally disembarked at the threshold of the nineteenth century (before or after
according to the different circumstances of each nation) and after having worked
for a long time underground (the Italian Renaissance, the de-centring of a
planet around which the universe no longer turned, Reason and Tolerance as
incubators of the individual, the Enlightenment and finally the French
Revolution with the far from negligible postscript of the Jacobin Terror) broke
out into this rigid world that had remained substantially unchanged for so long,
setting off a radical transformation with the accelerating velocity of a falling
“body”.
Today, however, knowing that this journey has neither direction nor
limits; that it moves on without promising future liberation if not that which
we will build ourselves even in the face of equations where the variables
greatly outnumber the known terms. And
so the inclusive logic, to which more or less open modern societies aspire, has
a double nature. That of
liberalisation and thus of the possibility of putting into action resources and
energies in sufficient vast quantities such that, at least in the West, we have
changed the face of the planet and the life of men more in the last two hundred
years than in the preceding two thousand years, but also that of the reduction,
it would once have been said, to commodities of each thing, of everything, human
life included. Transforming that
which, at least intentionally, was the universe of quality into abstract and
priceable quantity, makes everything possible, legitimises any behaviour, and
renders any obligation superfluous because everything is subject to the logic of
buying and selling.
In producing itself, this different social order necessarily changed
artistic production. Here too the
process was a long one and began in distant times. Mannerism with the Baroque, Rococo and finally Neoclassical
spoke for the first time with the language of “convention”. No longer a mimetic transcription of an innocent relationship
with reality but rather a conscious ideological display tending to persuasion
and not truth. Then came the
individualistic exultation of subjectivity, of feeling, of pathos to the point
of positing the Stendhal syndrome as a possible reaction to the sublime, a
swooning of the senses, an hysterical response to the all too engaging embrace
in the form of an almost orgasmic high as a metaphor of the ecstasy of holiness.
I appeared to the Madonna, as C. Bene
would say. All this at the dawn
of the Industrial Revolution as antidote and response to the impoverishment of
craftsmanship, to which artists in some way belonged, and to the incipient
de-individualisation of the “realisable
product”. And finally,
turning the page, the twentieth century launched “truth” as secularised and
viewed in the context of the death of God, tending to baptise, among the newborn, the avant guard who, liberated from rules and
prescriptions and having as sole object a precocious exaltation of the self
against the universe of tradition, in a ferocious as well as iconoclastic
killing of their forefathers, adopted the strategy of critique, of
self-referential thought, thus beginning the cycle of performative freedom which
chooses the rules of the game for itself.
But it doesn’t end here. Between
the end of the 50’s and the 60’s, after a long hiatus of a call to order,
the avant guard popped up again. It
chased out the leadership of the recent past to try its fortunes once more.
In particular, in Italy, squeezed as we were between two churches,
catholic and the communist which – one through the framework of an explanation
of the world according in more or less religious terms, the other through the
reuniting of theory and practise entrusted to the ideology of the organic
intellectual set against a background of overcoming every division by the
reconstructing of the unity of humankind first and then of communism – the
avant guard was forced to follow the route of a pervasive and asphyxiating
education.
In this situation the avant guard represented almost a third way, a
lifestyle, a way of trying to choose for oneself, even if collectively, some
sort of reassemblage of meaning. Even
if in the form of exception, of revolt against hardened truth, of individualism
as a desire to pitch into crisis those habits, rules, linguistic institutions,
mythologies that were obstinately attached to the past.
Being part of the avant guard meant contributing in the final analysis to
shifting one’s personal centre of gravity from the observation of prohibitions,
from the containment of drives through the narrative of duty, to “desire”
which, unlike today, was not at that time solicited by an almost coercive
invitation. Then it was strongly
held at bay at the very limits of legitimate behaviour, by restraints both
internal and external. Post-modernity
hadn’t happened and consumerism was only just beginning.
In this context it really did mean choosing the way of modernity and when
there is modernity one can even critique it, but when there is none, you need to
look for it and if possible track it down. Neither should one marvel too much if soon afterwards it
transforms itself into post-modernity. Today,
however, we know that trying to establish the rules of the game oneself we
anticipate that performative freedom that by now is offered to all at discounted
prices in the end of season sale.
To sum up, right from the beginning the avant guard, despite what it said
about itself, gave impetus to that desire for rationalisation that aimed
entirely at a process of renewal, if not of a complete conquest of those “values”
that worked as a brake upon development, which prevented “non-evaluative”
behaviours entrusted exclusively to cost-benefit considerations.
Amongst the “values” which had to be got rid of was that idea of the aesthetic
as the realm of the beautiful, of feeling, of the empathetic and pacific
dimension and the overcoming of polarity in the world mindset. Or rather nostalgia for the “one”,
of definitive synthesis, the implosion of complex plurality and its infinite
contradictions. The desire for utopia outside time and history. Nostalgia for a
mythical primeval origin or otherwise the hope for a recomposition at the end of
times (or of time) and of history. The
refusal of this complex plurality which, when all’s said and done, is life.
The unmentioned and unconfessed aspiration to the immutability of the
eternal against the mobility and precariousness of the “finite”
and becoming.
Narrowly avoided, this utopia of overcoming the polarity mentioned above
will lead the intellectuals and artists “of art, of literature, of the culture
of refusal of the denial of art, of literature, of culture”, when in the
restorative desire to radically change the world, realising on earth that
paradise that religion promises in heaven, it moves us to think of the death not
only of art but perhaps of all culture as a separate entity.
With the afterthought that quality and meaning would be resuscitated –
after the political revolution that seemed then the order of the day and which
offered in a most unfriendly way the two-way choice of getting involved or on
the other hand stopping the world and getting off – no longer as “separate
things” but as absolute freedom of all and for all.
In the “non time” of a
perfect society all the differences and all the specialisms of the technical and
social divisions of work would disappear. In
this case the intellectuals and the artists, of at least many of them, would
decide to commit mass suicide, as a separate category, and through a relative
militancy even if just as observers or at most fellow travellers.
This revolution will never happen, but for a few years, this climate
contributed to the decay that characterised the second half of the 70’s.
And so in that decade came the slow agony of the avant guard and perhaps
also the death of the idea of culture in all its forms and routines.
When this terrible adventure of a politics exercised in the realm of the
impossible, motivated almost exclusively by a senseless impulse to murder and
suicide, governed by the ideology of all and quickly, will end then we will be
in another world. We will be in the 80’s.
On the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall, of that process of
globalisation that will change the face of the world, in the climate of the end
of ideologies, and the rediscovery of the private and so on.
Then those behaviours, those strategies that at first seemed so sensible,
that made us heroic protagonists, necessarily strongly nonconformist and daring
because in fact we were setting ourselves up even if slowly against a social
reality frozen in a system of rules, in defence of a concentration of effort
towards the accumulation of savings, then, in those years and still today it all
appears to us absolutely ridiculous, useless and void of any plausible reasoning.
In a world that has made liquidity its raison
d’être, transgression its rule, speed its principal driving force, the
avant guard no longer has any reality.
And drawing a charitable veil over what still remains to us we can only
define tautologically – with Donald Thompson, English economist with a passion
for art – contemporary art as that which is sold in the most cases by auction
houses dedicated to contemporary art.
As is clear this is a tautology completely founded upon the worldly and
financial prestige of the auction house. Thus
not only the artists have disappeared, who from now on live only by reflected
light, ceasing to have visibility or glory but, on the contrary receive an
eventual immortality in time from the quantity of money which changes hands and
from the relative economic subjects determined by such transactions, but at this
point they seem to have disappeared – or at least to become actors of the
second or third rank – the critics (I would like to be able to say this to a
certain friend but I think he knows it already.
He is too intelligent not to know it) and perhaps the gallery owners too.
At least those small ones, or else all those figures who in the process
of modernising the system of art keep, one might say, a foot in both camps
performing on one hand the role of discoverer, as inventor or creator of the
artist, using writing to effect rescues in the terrain of theory and
popularising through noble motives more or less connected with philosophy and
aesthetics, and on the other hand the role of manager, organiser and mediator
between the world of culture and that of economics.
Today in contrast with the time of the avant guard everything has changed
for ever. And how could it be
otherwise?
“If once the importance of works
of art set their economic value as well, today things are turned on their head:
the economic value is in fact often what defines the importance of the work of
art.” (F. Bonomi).
As you see, dear Pica, a complete reversal of hierarchies.
Art is no longer the place of freedom and meaning, but a luxury object
charged only with the power that money has placed within it. Its heart, as a
mirror, sends back to us the face of the symbolic power of the person who buys
and sells it. Perhaps not even a
status symbol but a reflection of a “status” to be found elsewhere, through
a chain of possible back-references in a game of mirrors one in front of the
other.
But now let us return to ourselves, dear Pica; I began by telling you a
few pages back, if I’m not mistaken, how today you, but I should say we, are
so acutely sensitive to the question of meaning.
And so spontaneously appears the question of what makes us at this
precise moment so interested in this question of all questions.
When the afternoon turns towards the evening a sort of sweet melancholy
pervades the dusk and then in the stillness of a reflection, that for each
person can only be solitary, we ask ourselves what the day meant.
Because if it is true, as Berlusconi has sworn to us, that we will have a
long life of at least 120 years of good health and so we have fifty useful and
active years ahead of us, it is also true, however, that, citing V. Gassman, we
have a long future behind us. And
so, in conclusion, it is perhaps in this question of all questions that your
gallery disappoints. And how could
it be otherwise?
But don’t let yourself be saddened or discouraged dear Pica.
You know very well that life begins again from the beginning.
Don’t be cast down if many young artists, not only young ones, seek out
the ways of worldly and financial success, even through available shortcuts. Incidentally I want to remind you that here they won’t find
many these days, that the more or less tough selection doesn’t happen on the
basis of dubious quality, least of all that of the market which here hardly exists. And don’t be too disappointed at
the persistent indifference of the state institutions.
They haven’t ever taken you or us into consideration.
Do you remember the begging of alms on the occasion of the conference
organised towards the end of the 70’s with Benedetto Gravagnuolo and
Attilio\Belli when we brought the best of architectural culture to Naples?
Even in that case state institutions were deaf and blind.
You predicted all that.
So enjoy this afternoon that is the prelude to an evening and a night
full of stars, invent something as only you know how, begin from the beginning,
keep these reflections of mine safe, say hello to your two young sons, don’t
spend money and finally keep us in your affections.
Bye,
Antonio.
Naples, 4th of February 2010