So, when we talk about In The Time of Art, our thoughts can’t help but focus on the great universal exhibitions that began in the 19th century, in which various countries from around the world took part, exhibiting the latest marvels of science, technique and the art of modern life. So, here is the exhibition of modern life, made of new, or partially new, things, but also things which were there before, because in these events, at the beginning, science and technique were often presented in a version updated with forms and styles linked to the past. A medieval, renaissance and baroque past, but also an even more remote past, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, a past with different styles which were also used to adorn and decorate the present of industrial products, to make them more acceptable to a new society, but which, like all new situations, leave their roots in the past, to reassure us. So, in the 19th century, a new universality appeared, made up of Nation-States and its products, in search of constant reassurance.
So, I would however like to assure you that our Universal Expo has nothing whatsoever to do with this. It isn’t a “sample-fair” of the latest products from the various countries of the world, but an exhibition, which focuses on universal themes through works of art from the 16th century to the present.
So, voilà, here’s a universe made up of parts: parts of mind, parts of body, parts of power, parts of everyday routine, parts of love, parts of hate, parts of life and parts of death. Parts of parts, parts of the One, parts of the Other, parts of art, parts of existence, parts of world.
So, here’s a universe made up of parts and so, here’s a first question too: How can partiality represent the uniqueness of universality?
So, this is why we talk about things represented and things presented, of things which use shapes and pictures to investigate power, routine, mind, body, hate, love, life and death, which are universal in a combined presence of time, space and content. Especially because we hope for and seek stability, certainty and universality, especially at a time like this, when uncertainty, precariousness and recession have taken over the world.
So, in the last decades of the 20th century and at the beginning of the new millennium, we used systems and codes based on Einstein’s relativism (theory of relativity), on Heisenberg’s indeterminacy (Principle of indeterminacy), where reality becomes an opportunity for what is possible, on the philosophy of the ephemeral by Nietzsche and Louis Aragon, on Paul Virilio’s fast mobility as reference points on which we can build our existence, in which there is everything: weak philosophy, creative economy, relative science, historical revision, art and life. So, we have the rainbow instead of monochrome, the liquid of Zygmunt Bauman in place of the solid Karl Marx, the spiral curve by Fibonacci in place of Euclid’s straight line, the postmodern local and no longer the modern international. So, in this way, in the meantime, “between” and “while” acquired productive value in the construction of the world: but…, but…, but…, suddenly everything turned out to be insufficient to organise the critical chaos we ended up in.
So, we have the beat of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil which, according to physicist Edward Lorenz, moving a minute airflow can, by means of a series of cumulative events, cause a tornado in Texas.
So, there’s also Lorenz Poincaré’s mathematical theory of Chaos and the theory of Disasters by the mathematical philosopher René Thom. So, however, when the novelty wears off, no one knows what to do anymore, which answers to give, although everyone wants to go out as soon as possible. So, this requires the rediscovery of shared values, universal ethics, common scenarios which encourage the new multitude to be a community. This is why we wanted to use universal scenarios and show works that acknowledge this fact in a variety of ways. To do so, we asked a multitude for their thoughts on the issues raised: life, death, mind, body, power, routine, love, hate. We did it using new technologies, because we wanted to test their possibilities without forgetting that, to quote McLuhan, “The medium is the message” – read, or reread Understanding Media (published by Penguin, 2008). So, we asked questions on the issues listed above by mail, chat, facebook and text. Using my e-mail address, I asked people about life and death. I sent texts asking about love and hate to the numbers stored in my mobile. Facebook was just perfect for the questions about power and routine, considering the use made of this media by politicians today, starting from Obama himself. Body and mind were the themes of my conversations in chat. Obviously the decision to ask certain questions using one media or the other had, and has, a corresponding logic, because e-mail has an epistolary form which is better suited to questions like life and death, while it’s obvious that those relating to love and hate had to be entrusted to the mobile phone, just as those like mind and body were right for chat and power and routine were perfect for facebook, as I already said.
So, I would like to say that this reflection on “the medium is the message” is already embedded in the media used, media which have a vocation and which, in the end, have to relate to the art on show. Obviously the messages received don’t explain the works in the exhibition directly, but they are presented alongside them in an attempt to create a verbal-visual hypertext. So, in this case it isn’t our intention to explain the works on purpose; we’ve already done it many times and will definitely do so many times again, but this time we’ve tried to leave open the sense of possible relationships to those who wrote to us.
So, quoting Francis Haskell in “La nascita delle mostre” (The Ephemeral Museum) (published by Skira, 2008, page 199): “(…) there’s a paradox which attracts less attention, but is much more disturbing: the higher the level of the catalogue, the more the datasheets are complete, the more the introductive articles commissioned for the occasion to important intellectuals and famous writers are interesting, the more the colours that embellish it are attractive, the greater the damage potentially inflicted upon research.” And he also adds (on page 203), with reference to the work Officina Ferrarese by Roberto Longhi, published in 1934 following the exhibition on the Ferrarese Renaissance held the previous year: “Longhi’s essay is no longer than a hundred pages, proving that exhibitions could finally take their place alongside museums in terms of creative research.”
So, this is why we wanted to hold an exhibition which considered these recommendations too and we opted for creative research, starting from the heritage of works in the Pinacoteca Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, relating them to modern and contemporary works.
So: what exactly does all this mean?
It means that, if we observe the work by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velzquez (copy from) (Roma ?, XVII century) Rittrato di Papa Innocenzo X, for example, and we relate it to the e-mail contribution of the Studio Valentini: “By successive degrees of intensity, Power evokes supremacy, strength and dominion (also seen as the ability to influence the behaviour of others) over others, whether they’re individuals, groups or populations. The exercise of power implicates abdication for those who accept it (as in the case of free waiving of his own supremacy in favour of a super ordinate entity), that’s to say abuse of power (it’s the case in which the tyrant encroaches on individuals' supremacy, depriving them of the very freedom to determine themselves). Economic power, often using media tools, is expressed by a sophisticated activity aimed at the dissimulated loss of the faculties of self-determination. It uses sophisticated instruments developed by the conscience-manipulating industry (just think about agenda setting methods for example) and in relation to caused reflex behaviour processes, with the substantial danger of effective annihilation of freedom.” So, here’s a complex answer, but here’s a more synthetic one by an artist, Claudia Bianchi, for whom “Power is that thing that makes people who are nobody think they are somebody and allows them to overcome an often empty routine.” So, here we see how, between past and present, a thought on various forms of tyranny and manipulation, of which the gentleman in the portrait, identified as Cesare Borgia, is a well-known historical example, is developed in contemporary terms.
So, from power to routine, there’s the work entitled I Cento Re che ridono (1999) by Diego Perrone and Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1993-98) by Gillian Wearing, or Rittrato del Conte Giovanni Secco Suardo col servitore, (1720-1722) by Vittore Ghislandi called Fra´Galgario (Bergamo, 1655-1743), and Una festa popolare (c. 1670) by Job Berckheyde.
So, using this mechanism, we can keep on reading the works. In this way we are obviously using the open techniques of aesthetics of reception so dear to philosophers like Walter Benjamin - read: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (published by Penguin) - Hans Georg Gadamer - read:Philosophical Hermeneutics (published by University of California Press) - Umberto Eco - read: The Open Work (published by Harvard University Press) - or Hans Robert Jauss - read: Kleine Apologie der Ästhetischen Erfahrung (Small Apology for Aesthetic Experience). So, as an example, a text this time, on love and hate, by Alviani: “Loving and hating. I love those better than me. I hate those worse than me”, while the surgeon Pippo Navarra, from New Zealand, transforms the question into a medical record: “Love: a game, an instinctive need which can become illness, but, above all, a very powerful medicine. Hate: something I haven’t known yet”. So, here we are, using hyper textual techniques to produce sense, as we see it, or to trivialise, as others might say. So, however, we prefer the word vulgarise rather than trivialise, because we still believe in the utility and the productivity of intertwining the various levels – law, medium, high and others – of culture and life. So, here are some examples of geometric life and death by Emanuele Quinz: “Life: A vertical line. Death: a horizontal line”, or the rhythmic and paradoxical definition by the Editor of Rolling Stone magazine, Carlo Antonelli: “What is Life for you? Death. What is Death for you? Life”.
So, here’s also Martirio di San Giovanni Episcopo (1743 c.)by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and Madonna col Bambino (1650 c.) by Carlo Francesco Nuvolone called Panfilo, but also The Eggs of my Amnesia (1996) by Joel-Peter Witkin and The Jewish cemetery (1980) by Jeff Wall.
So, try reading Philippe Ariès Western attitudes toward death (published by The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) or Alfonso Mario di Nola La nera signora (published by Newton & Compton, 2006).
So, here we try to intertwine the knowledge of a society which is no longer and not only a society of entertainment, but a society of hyper textual writing, in which and with which a new multitude is rewriting the meanings, also starting from the new way of reformulating the language, which is often more like a futuristic free-worded poem than the scholastic form of writing we’ve been taught since childhood. So, go to www.google.com and you’ll find:
Life: 113,000,000 in 0.14 seconds
Death: 52,000,000 in 0.21 seconds
Mind: 57,300,000 in 0.18 seconds
Body: 57,100,000 in 0.20 seconds
Love: 56,100,000 in 0.22 seconds
Hate: 21,100,000 in 0.12 seconds
Routine: 12,400,000 in 0.20 seconds
Power: 12,300,000 in 0.16 seconds.
So, click every one of these units of quantity and you’ll find quality.
So, that’s virtual, but printed, you can read Nicolas Negroponte, Being Digital (published by Vintage, 1996), but also flick through Jeremy Rifkin, The Age Of Access: (published by Tarcher/Putnam, 2000). In an interview for “Wired”, the magazine known as the Internet Bible, David Byrne said: “(…) blogs and the spread of e-mail have made us all writers, for better or worse”. So, that’s how we keep this free-worded freedom of speech open.
So, now it’s worth introducing the term of “school”, central to antique art and partly for modern art too, but way out of synch with contemporary art. That’s to say, for the antique past, the schools featured in this exhibition are decisive with regard to form, style, characteristics and contents, from the broader example of the school of Tuscan drawing or the school of Venetian colour, to the more localised but nevertheless universal techniques of the Lombard, Bolognese and Neapolitan schools, to remain in Italy, or Flemish to stretch further afield. Particular characteristics linked to materials, sensitivity and contexts. Qualities, which have gone astray, becoming transnational, while certain local characteristics are preserved. Indeed, if we use the work by Simone Berti Die Bauchen (2008) as an example, we see this work, as all his works, makes references neither to the Venetian, nor to the Lombard school, despite the fact that the artist studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Art in Milan, and not even to Italian art in the strictest sense, but to the Flemish style of painting between Bosch and van Eyck. So, this isn’t the case of Pietro Roccasalva, whose painting makes references to the art of Antonello da Messina, particularly to "L’Annunciata”, but also to Gino De Dominicis, who is closer to us. So, while in Italy there is a tendency to avoid talking about schools and the pride of belonging, the same cannot be said abroad if, for example, it is said and written of Victor Man that he belongs to the Romanian Kruje school, a definition rejected however by the artist, who claimed that it was meaningless. Indeed, what is the meaning of “Kruje School”, what characteristics would it end up having? It’s obvious that what was a value of radical belonging in the past when speaking of the Venetian school, now has only an instrumental value. In the same way, when can we and must we definitively place the work entitled The apartment war #6 (2000) by Ilya Kabakov? We could certainly do so with post-soviet art, which is the highest reference for liberal and freedom culture, but at the same time we can see this work, and all of Kabakov´s art, with content and several references of byzantine and suprematist painting. So, here’s another question and another artist: what would be the “Canadianity” of a Jeff Wall belonging to the so-called Vancouver school? His love of English landscapes, bearing in mind that Canada was part of the British Empire until 1982? Or because Canada is a country with immensely sweeping landscapes? What I mean is that artists today communicate with the past, not so much in terms of geo-cultural belonging as from a more cross-cultural point of view. Of course modernity has given us some memorable schools such as Bauhaus or the Black Mountain College and the avant-gardes, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, etc., which were all schools sui generis. There are still schools today, such as London’s Goldsmith College, for example, but they have no localisable characteristics, other than the fact that they are cross-cultural, that’s to say that they are open schools as opposed to be closed around one particular style and therefore almost entirely without any stylistically recognisable elements. Staying on the subject of life, there are examples of supranationality which could continue, but which we leave open to the associative vision of the spectator, also because in this relationship of parts among antique, modern and contemporary, from modernity onward, there has been an enrichment due to the merging of disciplines, which we can find in all works, including those in which you least expect to find it. So, consequently, with regard to the mind and body, it can be said, as suggested by chatting with artists, not shown in the exhibition, vedovamazzei:
“…13.19 vedovamazzei: for vedovamazzei the mind knows you’ll get hurt, the body proves it
13.21 me: how much and why do we get hurt?
13.23 vedovamazzei: how much depends on the power and the build of the body and on the house that’s collapsed on you, in that case the mind confiscates the pain
13.24 me: what do you mean by confiscates?
vedovamazzei: that it takes away what the body is entitled to”
So, you can also read: Susan Bordo UnbearableWeight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (published by University of California Press, 1997). So, also read: Edoardo Boncinelli Il cervello, la mente e l’anima (published by Mondadori, 1999), not forgetting Joseph Kosuth Artafter Philosophy (published by MIT Press, 1991).
We can also see and read works like David con la testa di Golia (1650 c. by Giovanni Antonio Galli called Spadarino and Flagellazione di Cristo (First quarter of the XVII century) by Jacopo Negretti called Palma The Young, compared with Je veux disparaitre (2007) by Ben Vautier.
So, remaining with art, it has been said that, after Duchamp, all art, or most of it, is conceptual and ends up being so even when it is a “simple” painting, because it is created as something ready made, think made or shape made... So, this becomes increasingly evident, especially from post modernity, or even new modernity in which parts of pictures, things and shapes, even when taken from something which has already been given or referring to something which has already been done, end up having a ready made appearance, with a specification that we aren’t copying, but making.
So, the point is: Making what?
So, hence the presentation and representation of the crucial issues of the world, of which the perspective of this exhibition wishes to, highlight universality. Indeed our arrangement writing, paraphrasing Carmelo Bene who spoke of “stage writing” is the creative-productive intent which uses the art of various periods to emphasise age-old issues such as hate > love > power > routine > mind > body> life> death and relate them In The Time of Art, existence and world.
So, this piece was written in Milan in February-March 2009 byGiacinto Di Pietrantonio, a man who, for every single thing he does, has imagined a hundred.
Angel Miguel Navarro, historian of art and architecture, researcher and professor at the University of Buenos Aires, took parst alongside Mercedes Casanegra in the training of FUNDACION PROA’s educational team. Below are excerpts from a text in which he makes references to some of the older works from the Accademia Carrara di Bergamo.
“Gathered thematically according to the criteria chosen for the exhibition, the works can also be organized according to the category to which they belong. The majority (eleven) can be grouped as religious paintings, seven belong to the genre category, six are portraits, three are still-lifes, and one can be considered a landscape.”
“From Boccaccio Boccaccino (c.1465-c.1524), an artist who worked mainly in Cremona, it is the canvas Cain killing Abel, the oldest work in the group, that shows the influence of antiquity and the observation of man and nature sought during the Renaissance (...)”
“Special mention is deserved for the two works by Jacopo Negretti, known as Palma Giovane (1544-1628), member of a Venetian family of artists that worked in many places, including Rome, where he absorbed the novelties of the early Baroque.”
“Setting aside the works of Italian artists, there are others coming from places such as Spain and Holland, which is the case with the two paintings by Job Berckheyde (1630-1693) and two other works attributed to Velázquez. In the case of the former, there are two views similar in composition, both offering a space that penetrates the painting’s surface to immerse itself in a reality that the viewer discovers gradually in the details of an outdoor fair with various actors, including a “charlatan.” The latter shows a church interior with its grand display of architecture. It is worth remembering that the artist made a specialty of architectural paintings together with his brother Gerrit (1638-98). The two Spanish works are portraits by Diego Velázquez (1599-1660); one copies the famous portrait of Innocent X, an image whose impact can still be seen in the work of Francis Bacon, and the other, attributed to the artist, presents a child’s portrait that is impressive in his innocence.”
“It is interesting to confirm the relevance that these paintings of others have and the effects they continue to provoke, especially if we consider them in relation to the contemporary works with which they are presented here. Grouped thematically, it is worthwhile to ask the observer's assessment of the clarity of the message that each proposes, which will become relevant once they understand the intentions of the artists.”
“The importance of the visit of these European works cannot be concealed; their bringing-together will enable contact with works that are rare in our environment, as well as the appreciation of an artistic production that was very significant for Western culture.”