Lyricism, intended as a central position assumed by
the subject in reference to the world, cannot, categorically, belong to
our world. This does not mean that in the works currently being produced
there are no lyrical insinuations. However, they are uniquely due to
the singularity of sporadic intuitive sparks typical of an author, and
not to a natural “ingenuous state”, a natural inspiration that
characterises its substantial uniqueness, its essence or its
hypothetical creativity. This no longer occurs. Any work whatsoever,
nowadays, even though it maintains a certain level of systematicity,
always lacks organicity. In the current context, man, and hence the
artist, is de-centred within a void, within flatness and the uniform
nature of existential chaos, ensnared within the demagogic viscosity of
a phantom creative belief system. Contemporary art desires to retrieve
and experiment. By exasperating formal expression, it seems to
endlessly want to offer new possibilities, new openings. And yet the
formal characteristics of a work only rarely coincide with or clearly
express contents in their entirety; more often than not (perhaps even
despite the author’s own conscious wishes), they are mystified. Openings are therefore dilated to such an extent that they become a
murky whirlpool where only fiction and simulation survive in any
definite form. Form collapses, and along with it the contents, as form
is the substance that lies hidden behind the qualities of content.
Hence, totally devoid of naturalness, art becomes and is an essentially
voluntary, gratuitous, hence vulgar, act. Contemporary thought is eclectic. Man is moving ever
closer to a culture of becoming, and not of being. Art, in general,
thus becomes an evocation of other possible worlds, provided that it
does not have history at its complete disposal without having first run
through its spatiotemporal context. But nowadays this does not happen.
Now man is disappointed by art because he expects from it the
realisation of something that is other-than-himself. He expects new
indications, while art can only manage to pile dust on dust. The most
tragic and painful aspect is that in this culture of becoming man is
ever more aware that he is a creature that can in no way go beyond
itself. Faced with the rapid-fire mutations of objective evidence, he
is destabilised and incapable of finding his centre within the real.
The artist, the poet, incapable of taking charge of the real that is
incessantly eluding his grasp, substitutes it with a universe of signs,
colours and words that endlessly repeat the painful truth: “man is a
creature that possesses no means with which to move beyond itself. he
is a prisoner of his own making, incapable of fighting himself”. This
is an implacable repetition that, however, remains immutable before the
void of life; it continues to repeat itself precisely in order to find
an escape route, a solution to dramatic, anxiety-ridden tension. Yet in
our era, people often become artists to satisfy a need for identity; art
is used to affirm a depressing and lamentable individuality, and this is
an agony we are all guilty of having brought about. Art is art. Poetry
is poetry. Writing is writing. And this is all.
|
The origins of this agony can be found in the figure of contemporary man
himself. At the end of the 20th century, in order to survive (in the
existential sense) his de-centrality in reference to reality, to the
impossibility of affirming himself as a being in the world, man struts
forth as a grand actor representing himself, a manipulator of his own,
and therefore others’, image, a hoaxer who loves (even though in the end
he is forced to do it) to continually represent himself within different
scenarios. A chameleon, a manqué protagonist who has lost all trace of
behavioural innocence, even though he fully intends not to forego an
attempt to retrieve an improbable and indefinable naturalness of action
and production: a standard-bearer, in other words, of constant
contradiction. This is a behavioural trait that is obviously induced and
dictated by artificial needs. But this is the historical condition of
current man; this is his new nature, and these are the mechanisms of his
cultural production. Not to accept this given would imply the onset of
incalculable risks, not the least of which is that of offering the
current territories of society’s imaginary constructs, and therefore
art, an other, a different territory. Perhaps this territory might
appear to be purer, more just, but it is imaginary none the less. In
art, which in any case has to remain faithful to its time if it is to
maintain any sense, past meaning must be made to resound, as the
qualities of any work are determined more and more often by singular
choices. Man stands on the verge of the 21st century as an extremely
hyper-individual being; he is exasperated and continually wrong-footed
by reality, by his own and others’ misleading, artificial appearance.
The problem of artifice is none the less a serious and complex problem
that offers vast opportunity for replies and reactions. The only
possibility of saving the naturalness of being and producing, as a means
of guaranteeing the survival of human quality, is to lead artifice to
its extreme consequences, and that is further, beyond.
This is an extremely difficult and complicated task precisely because it
is paradoxical. But art cannot, nor, above all, should it, balk at this
task, even though it is now abandoned and reserve-less in the process of
disillusionment from which the concept of the “poetic” arose in our
century. But an art that gives no illusion or that is only reasonable –
to indirectly cite Leopardi – is like a reasonable beast: there is
simply no such thing. In order to communicate and rediscover the dimension of the sensitive,
man has no choice but to go beyond himself, further than himself.
Communication, as Dino Formaggio has it, is an act of the body; it is
neither intellectual nor intellective. Communication has nothing to do
with information: it is an emotional reaction, it is communion. Art
that expels emotional reaction only breeds fraud and deception. Sign,
word and colour must be linked and organized together within the body.
The body takes no prisoners, and when it gives in to deception, it
confesses. Always.
©World
Of Art magazine
|