of Marco Senaldi * - Flash Art n.274 February - March 2009
REALITY SHOW
ITALY IS A magnificent country, or a nightmarish place? In Italy you pay too many taxes, or if they evade even more? The Italian industry stands for excellence, or pollute like crazy? The Italian universities churn out export brains, or are incestuous dens of ill repute? And the Italian artists, finally, are misunderstood geniuses or provincial mammon? Turn it as you want, if not opposed to these questions it leaves. Or rather, what comes out is the usual image of Italy, a country not a country paradoxically, a jumble of contradictions that rebound, which are repeated, to avoid even a hi would like to resolve, and eventually exhausted all with the result which goes some way forward. Yet, come on you do in the end all this talk, lash, chain, rend clothes, and then sew rimettersele, perhaps in reverse, the next day something in common perception and perhaps in the things themselves, has changed.
The first change is undoubtedly the level of debate. Almost imperceptibly, as the general din, we passed by the subtleties of political, ideological or extreme invective at a different level, I would say irresistible transparency. Assault as a journalist Marco Travaglio can give the mafia in an (in fact condemned) as Senator Dell'Utri, and this remains in parliament, but then leave it to the spokesman of his party, Capezzone, the task of apostrophes in direct Tv own labor by the epithet of "asshole".
A level (rank) higher Berlusconi himself can go to remember as a "hero" Vittorio Mangano, his groom Mafia, and his opponent Antonio Di Pietro may retort, without this, however, generate any real consequence. In another area, the controversy between Francesco Bonami and Achille Bonito Oliva about the exhibition "Italics" follows this pattern: it is openly accused what he would once have been cautiously whispered in the ears of a confidant. Although much linguistic and mental openness does not generate any real change, but in fact makes things interesting from another point of view, that is what we define "meaningful." Italy is a unique case in which ultimately all tacitly know that the ability to provide an objective reflection or not is left to the politicians (aware of the fact that, as Mussolini said, "govern Italians is not difficult, it is impossible") or to journalists or media (which are already widely placed for bands arthritis), or to religious leaders (historically discredited by a close geopolitical exaggerated), and even the so-called civil society and its representatives, which are also frequently collude with the potentates of various rank. What remains then, if not in artistic terms the translation of this mixture of the evils of '(ex) Beautiful Country, and their relative finishing creative? The result, which is itself paradoxical, is that, today, if a sociologist wants to know how it works in Italy, would do better to see a reality show that analyze (though debatable) indices Istat. If one wants to reconstruct the history of the country would do better to watch a recent movie quality, instead of compulsive often contradictory sources. And if an Italian would understand that maybe it would be good live country began to look around and notice that its artists produce works.
After many decades, of "cultural inferiority complex" and "let's not
recognize ", and" because we are not a normal country "(how can we think of certain films as London fog, in which the national Albertone eviscerated whole xenophiles that sets us apart?), Today many artists, writers, directors and designer back to concentrate on issues typically local, with the knowledge that there are events of a marginal province of the empire, but made their way to become epochal worthy artistic subjects. It is no coincidence that the new Italian cinema of the various Garrone, Virzi, Sorrentino, Vicari, has focused on issues of policy and company absolutely Italians - as the Camorra, or the political longevity of Andreotti, often in close correlation with the emerging narrative of such writers as Saviano, Ammann, Veronesi, Brizzi. On the other hand it is no coincidence that the new Italian designers like Giulio Iacchetti, have even produced a book-store all the objects, real or virtual that define the Italian identity, the timing of Brother Coccoina to guess, from the Feast Unit licorice Taboo (collected in the Italian collective volume, Corraini, Modena), while Roberto Giolito has revived, with sensitivity and intelligence, a myth at all like the Italian Fiat 500 (Marketing of the ghost. Nuova Fiat 500, Fulvio Carmagnola, in OT / Orbis Tertius, 1, Mimesis, 2008). The Italian photography should be noted recovery for this: think of the work of Francesco Jodice or Paola di Bello, Massimo Siragusa or Paola Salerno to understand it. However, here is crucial to establish some distinctions. A number of artists and works has focused on failures Italian with great seriousness, but inevitably modeled on traditional attitudes. The same example of Gomorrah - the book most of the film - shows that when dealing with subjects as "high" tend to use language as high, with severe "levied civil" as in this case, the recovery of neo-realism, but style not likely to be more in tune with the times. In many operations in which the current returns the old cliché of the complaint, will keep a (unjustified) confidence in the fact that there is something to (d) stating to someone, and that you can do so from a place of (d) neutral statement, was not involved, "objective" facts, which Instead absence is what makes the situation so paradoxical (and throughout history) of our country.
Some recent works of art that have touched the sense of Italian, however, are their inability to take a stand "objective." Transactions of the Art Parade Francesco Spampinato spixellate with Italian flags, or the work of the Border goldiechiari imagined, the sound installation that reproduced with samples of splashing water and flush the Italian anthem Brothers of Italy, and Berlusconi's face turned into an icon in the Byzantine mosaics of Leonardo Pivi testify, rather than a desire to pillory "Italian customs and traditions, the radical comparison with an identity ghostly, detached from itself as the edges of a blur, where the cult of football, the photo of the leader of Mameli anthem (all other things strangely connected!) exchange roles and meanings. In this sense
, Cattelan's work, which often touched on the theme of Italian identity, is deeply indicative
. From Lullaby away 1994 installation made with the rubble of the CAP after the attack which had destroyed up to All, in 2008, the nine marbles that seem to many murder victims, Cattelan has never surrendered to the logic of simple complaint, preferring the indirect way of 'reflexive questioning and ambiguity. It is no coincidence that his Collodi Charlie Do not Surf (the boy with his hands pierced by two pencils) is dedicated to the eponymous ballad Baustelle - nor is it a coincidence that the applicant an allegory in contemporary art, its starting from Cattelan, up to the parody of that ingenious and irresistible duo are Bertozzi & Casoni, through Manganelli and Carmelo Bene, is the very un-heroic Pinocchio. In this sense, rather than searching for the roots of an alleged Italian identity, our own best artists have grasped the truth of our land lies mainly in a difference in nature, self-dis-identity for itself, certainly opened by someone like Pirandello. It is in this key should be recovered traditions of anti-dis-traditional Italian. Honestly, it's nice that a liquidator of an international level as Bonami has included in his exhibition "Italics" figures such as outdated or Guttuso Ferroni, but in a sense, what is truly remarkable is not the gesture to include in the show, but I wonder that it has aroused. This is also a typical feature dell'italiotismo most vulgar: in France, for example, when a person reaches a historical range, may be subjected to fierce criticism even posthumously, but it automatically goes to join a pantheon which is no longer removed, and in which are placed so that Napoleon Louis XVI, the Céline Sartre. Here, instead, the newest claims to make a clean sweep of all those who preceded him, so, although it is impossible not to sign the fierce criticism that someone like Luca Beatrice ideological waste sent to Arte Povera, it should also have the magnanimity to admit that now stuff is stored, is part of our history such as Futurism
or visual poetry. So, in an exhibition on Italian what is most astonishing is the presence of Guttuso (move undoubtedly talented), but rather the lack of authentic Italian anti-heroes: if we agree on Cattelan, why not enter the unforgettable two episodes of Carmelo Bene by Constance in 1994? In that task the media, in which a character so little TV as well had the courage and folly to give himself a meal in a public immensely bigger than him, all the force thrives Malaparte italianity most paradoxical and most true. And we should not say the same of television interventions De Dominicis, or forgotten, but insanely brilliant Luca Ronconi's Orlando Furioso (1975), which, before the eyes of today, can not remember the elaborate visual mechanics of a Dean or a Matthew Barney? And when the money as an artist Alfredo Jaar in his last Italian staff, goes great with posters asking "where is Gramsci", the operation is inevitably ideological as Gramsci's flag is raised to blessed "national consciousness" that 'Italy does not own and whose absence is indeed the characteristic, and its "ashes" should instead be approached without fear of those few who have shared with him the shaping the destiny of this country for good or evil, albeit from different sides politically, like Croce, Gentile or even of historic education reform which we are all (finora!) inevitably sons and debtors. These are the things that today's artists showing at times to understand except that, perhaps, a bit 'too late. Now, now that we were riappassionando to our country, other companies are overlooking the stage
of History, and perhaps the whole of Europe is intended to be an inevitable decline. Now that we have understood something, not for our alleged virtues and always repeated, but for our own flaws, now is the time to take leave. On the other Part of this strange destiny is in line with an unforgettable insight into one of the best dis-Italians who have never trod the native soil, that is Pier Paolo Pasolini, who shortly before his death he said: "It is therefore absolutely necessary to die, because, as long as we live, no sense. "
* Marco Senaldi, art critic and philosopher, is working with the chair of Aesthetic Education, University of Milano-Bicocca.
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