| ON BIENNIAL |
| THEME |
| ARTISTS |
| INSTALLATION VIEW |
| PANEL DISCUSSION |
2nd BIENNIAL OF QUADRILATERAL BQ_2
Slippery Heroes? When in autumn of 2006, Branko Franceschi invited Sabina Salamon, Rita Kalman, Nevenka Sivavec and myself to brainstorm on the subject of the Second Quadrilateral Biennial of Rijeka, the five of us secluded from the world, and in the tranquillity of a country hamlet in central Istria conceived the theme of the exhibition to be a research on and around the Culture Hero. Suddenly, I was caught by this idea. However, its very vastness, even after having discussed it for one whole year with the artists whom I had decided to invite to exhibit, caused me to still have perplexities. To my mind, the culture hero of our times is a complex concept and a slippery prey … Culture is rarely seen as heroic, nowadays: there are no more intellectuals taking stage, engaged in social and political issues. Culture has – apparently – pervaded all of the society's fabric. Thanks to the democratic processes of the end of the 20th century the once monolithic concept of culture has been eroded by multicultural and interdisciplinary approaches. It is now common sense that almost everything belongs to one or another field of culture. Street culture; drug culture; rap culture … all individual and marginalized appetites and habits have automatically won a pedestal granted by Culture. I know, this sounds terribly retro’ and even reactionary. But how can an all pervading "culture" can have the critical and independent standing in a dialogue with Society, if it is only one of the many undifferentiated, diffuse elements of the same Society? Moral standing is a matter of authority, which implies at least some distance. We now witness that only "commentators", television "anchor persons", "testimonials" have authority – all of them more or less linked to and depending upon marketing strategies … This is a big step away from an independent intellectual, bravely voicing his/her poetic and political analysis of society and therefore taking risks. What are heroes for? They have been a form of collective voice and have represented the awareness of "common people" expressed in a form alternative to constituted powers. Nowadays would-be heroes would find it difficult to stand for a culture that has lost its capacity to talk as an alternative voice to the established power and its tendency to pervert justice; a culture unable to speak with authority and independency. This silence of culture is a terrible thing. If a voice cannot make itself heard, there is only space for screams. The silence of culture is one of the reasons for the growth of terrorism … but this is not the place to discuss this issue further. Elisabetta Benassi works with video and presents enigmatic, gentle "stories without a script" which attain a concise, elegant and mysterious simplicity and could be defined as the visual correspondent of proverbs. "The Dark Horse of the Festival Year" shows a person of uncertain sex and age, riding a motorbike by night, with a lit torch fixed to its back wheel. The restrained economy of the scene is almost monochrome, although filmed in full colours. The scene is staged in an abandoned area of Palermo, where palaces torn by the Second World War still stand empty. Riding in circles around the palaces the mysterious figure – which happens to be the artist herself - describes the space; and the torchlight projects shadows randomly on the vast walls of the lonely, empty buildings. All of a sudden, the ghostly shape of a rearing horse rises clearly and soon after disappears … an ephemeral image of hope, joy and amusement …and this happens over and over again at every passage of the motorbike. The image of the horse, in spite of its appearance of a spontaneous and miraculous event, is made by the projection of the light of the torch on an iron wire fixed to a wall, ingeniously plied in a way to create the horse-shaped shadow. In the self-imposed simplicity of means, the artist suggests a route of alternative freedom and, why not, of gentle amusement, an independent place of creativity where even the dispossessed can afford to create beauty. Images have a certain power of their own.An image lasts, while the represented reality fades . . . this is where the magic of images comes from. Indeed, images seem to be able to escape the transient character of reality, and to trust to an indefinite future the legacy of this reality. In the most remote antiquity of humankind, the first images ever were the funereal testimony to the dead; a funereal portrait being not only the memorial, but almost the only warrant of the true individuality of the dead body lying beneath it. Conversely, the value of each image was represented and warranted by a dead body – similarly to how the worth of paper currency is guaranteed by a gold reserve of similar value. This is why we believe in the message of images. Over many centuries the necessity of a real corpse has been substituted by a different warranty, the ideas. But the place of ideas in the global market is being more and more substituted by goods and anything which is marketable. In the work presented by Fabio Mauri ideas and their representation find again a space for discussion. The "Machine to Pierce Watercolours" (Macchina per forare acquerelli) stands with the old-fashioned authority and self-confidence of this large obsolete medical machinery, still in use in provincial hospitals. Actually the "Machine" is ready-made; in fact a very large drawing compass coming from the studio of the 19th century sculptor from Rome is a centrepiece of the work. Almost like a gigantic insect, the machine menacingly raises its sharp arms towards the unaware and innocent watercolours … one guesses if pressing a small button or a hidden lever the mechanism might suddenly come to life and abruptly destroy the watercolours. In a corner of the exhibition hall a small model of the "Machine" is also on show, providing an ambiguous presence, almost suggesting the possibility for anyone to recreate the destruction device in a D.I.Y. fashion. In ancient times heroes gained eternal fame through their actions, or grand gestures … but heroism in modern times – an inference from Mauri’s oeuvre - resides most often in the will to restrain, to renounce, to change the course of an action. Mauri’s kind of hero is caught in an inner dialogue on responsibility. We are now more than ever aware of the responsibility coming from pressing that Green or Red Button. It would be all so easy… More than big, muscular heroes, nowadays we possibly need affordable, agile, "take away" strategies of heroism which could be used in everyday situations by common people. Maybe a new form of heroism is to be able to speak out clearly our own point of view. The work by Antonio Riello, "Walk of Fame", engages the public space of the city of Rijeka. Similar in shape and colour to the original brass stars, fixed on the pavement of the streets of Hollywood celebrating names and careers of movie "stars", Riello’s stars are instead made of adhesive plastic and "celebrate" the undoubted celebrity, and yet more than dubious careers of international porn stars. Celebrity, any celebrity in the mass media dominated world is a value. Triviality becomes celebrity in a different context. The spaces of a street and a square have been, ever since the "bourgeois era", the places of public celebration of great political figures and heroes; here the artist "steals" a right to grant public approval to a "hero". He provocatively assigns a status of the public hero to personalities who are not only famous but – at the very least! – controversial. This bizarre installation, well aware of a risk of raising a debate and controversy in Rijeka, is central to the artist’s strategy. Riello often challenges the banal easiness and cheap safety granted by everything belonging to popular culture. Never aggressive, he unveils gently, yet with sharp precision, the underlying net of interests which - well before any ethical concern – are the deep reason for publicly shared values. For Rijeka, Paolo Ravalico Scerri orchestrates a complex video installation, titled "Bubble Man". Through a series of different screens one can see the hands of fishermen busy in displaying the daily catch on the shelves of the city market of Rijeka: the wet and shining skin of the dead or half-dead fish make a fascinating but also sickening image. Other screens present a youngish man, wandering through a desert landscape in an attire resembling a formal, but partially undone, business suit. He half jumps, half dances whilst blowing soap bubbles in the air, possibly a visible sign of a state of recently acquired freedom, or anyway of mental lightness whose reason is not investigated. On a smaller screen, Pope Benedict XVI blesses an invisible crowd (or maybe us?) in a wide gesture which is amazingly similar to that of the "bubble man". It is the similarity of the gesture which allows the Pope to be presented at the same level as the young man; and this is not at all a criticism of values and sincerity of religion. More interestingly, it is as if similar gestures can be put on the same compartment, or "shelf" of an ideal archive of all possible gestures. The comparison of the gestures comes before any attempt to understand their meaning: it is as if a monkey, rather than a human being is evaluating the similarities between the two scenes. But this apparent lack of judgement between a different meaning of a papal ceremony and that of a young man’s lonely dance – and their very different social impact and consequences – directly relate to the power of representation of visual art and its attitude to create debate and to provide material for criticism through visual and sometimes very simple means. Contemporary Heroes don’t have an easy life. Ok, in the antiquity the title of Hero most often came at the cost of life – while now it is necessary to find new strategies to win the attention of the media. That makes the task almost impossible – and heroic. Perhaps the elliptic, indirect, metaphoric strategies of artists could be a new way to heroism. When words have been inflated and have lost consistency, maybe one simple and naked image can still attain a low, imperfect, but still very humane kind of truth. Vittorio Urbani
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Grad Rijeka,
Odjel gradske uprave za kulturu
Ministry Of Culture of the Republic of Croatia,
Primorsko-goranska County