ART AT HOME
Touchstones for gold
by Giuliana Carbi

The reappearance of topics related to relativism in philosophy, the extra-disciplinary discussion of these topics and the application of widespread forms of relativism to the general interpretation of the world and of society, in this case reserving the prevailing interest to the moral direction of relativism, can easily be understood.

Indeed the particular situation of our global present time leads us to consider extremely reasonable turning our attention back to a model, relativism, that now seems to be able to give a general plausible meaning to the personal experiences of the people thrown in this particular present time. Or, at least, applying this model to an omnivorous and all-absorbing present time, which tends to limit people’s expectancies within the time span of physical existence, seems to provide a temporary answer to the widespread feeling that humanity (governments and supranational authorities) considers obsolete, or at the very least lost, the list of values that were in force for previous generations, and nowadays is not able to build legitimate ones (new lists of values or values having new validity) that may guide today’s individuals to decide what is their sense or non-sense of existence, and to act accordingly.

It might be useful to reaffirm that before the use of a touchstone to test gold, before the unification of weights and measures, or before using the Dow Jones index, i.e. before any of the many abstract elements governing economic life, even when it is unscrupulous and aggressive, before all this, that nowadays seems the only moving force of man’s actions, in all cultures of the globe, no matter how radically different, how primitive, violent or meek they might have been, there used to be parameters, no matter how different in the various cultures, used to evaluate the mutual behavior of responsible relation among individuals within that specific group.

The acknowledgement that this need to control actions and practical behavior (customs) by means of regulations is a universal standard in all human cultures, without distinction of how they might be placed historically and geographically, is one of the most incredible discoveries from the beginning of anthropological science. In addition, it is cultural relativism that has taught us that it is not possible to superimpose the terms "universal" and "absolute", as universally there are, sets of principles for practical behavior, which are however used in set historical and social contexts; on the other hand, there are no ethical principles that are historically and geographically absolute.

From an anthropological point of view, during the first half of the 1900’s, it was also a common belief that a relativist approach could be useful for self-criticism and the demolition of the prejudices and the certainties that Western ethnocentrism considered as "absolute". This was a good intention. Actually it can certainly be said that the ever growing knowledge of the multicultural dimension of the new European Union, that nowadays is a current topic, originates from this radical new method used for the anthropological study of the world’s cultures.

For instance, building a European identity can provide a useful testing bench to assess whether a reduced rationality, merely instrumental in scope, can in fact re-establish itself as project-based rationality within a complex geographical territory made up of instantaneous events, and is capable of taking care of even the smallest of its cells.
In the very particular scenario of Central-Eastern Europe, currently and constantly in transition and richly diversified even between bordering regions, the search for identity (be it individual or social) and the long standing “geographical” and “historical” contradictions (one example for all, the absence of certainties and of homogeneity that has always constituted the “ambiguity” of the Balkans) are exemplary “assets of experience” upon which to build a possible future.

Today, nearly a year and a half after the expansion of the European Union, the founding countries of the European Union must face the problem of absorbing the immense influx of people from the East and respect different cultures living together. They must make sure that many identity politics that grow stronger and stronger do not lead to fraternal wars.

The establishment of "local" groups of membership (i.e. in groups with a strong sense of identity) is another important need for men, because a strong sense of identification allows a univocal defense strategy of the group from external danger. In ancient times the Greeks were "Greeks" as they considered "barbarians" the rest of the population of the planet. Groups with a strong sense of identity at the same time had, as we have already seen, internal rules, but could break them when outside of the group, for example when facing an enemy (Christian warriors were forbidden from using the deadly crossbow, but the use of this weapon was allowed if it was pointed towards an "infidel"). Further examples of closed groups could be seen in the "resistance" of some European representatives to the approval of new regulations concerning redistribution on a Community level, in economic monopolies, in the total absence of scruples of new terrorists, etc.: these are to be considered through the ancient idea of protecting the interests of the group. Except that it is not the initial common interests for survival that are involved, it is a part of a more complex machine of self-affirmation and domination.
One of the aims of relativism is seeing whether it is possible to thoroughly reformulate the sense of belonging of a very large and diversified set of individuals by calibrating the new common scales of rights and duties (at the "Conferences de la chaire de civilisation européenne" of 2002, Krysztof Pomian stressed that speaking of rights is not enough, it is of paramount importance that we speak of the mutual duties of European citizens).

Rudolf Carnap said that it is not our duty to set prohibitions but only to reach agreements. Albert Einstein, quoting Schopenhauer, said that man is certainly free to do what he wants, but he is not at all free to want what he wants.

It might even be said, without any risk, that we are living in an era of simplification. This simplification in a certain way concerns relativism. It is indeed the misinterpretation of the aims of relativism that leads to placing on the same level categories of abstraction without taking into account the respective contexts of origin. One could say that such a result was predictable: this simplification was nourished in an instrumental manner by the radical doubts concerning the possibilities of the thought that permeated from philosophical settings throughout the cultural world in the 1900’s. It used the same painful fragments of variable insignificance scattered by the consciousness of not being able to claim a meditation on a systematic and unitary existence, to attack thought itself. From the difficult direction that re-established a possible ontology as a criticism to knowledge, simplification has extended and scattered itself.

The problem of the relativity of knowledge has been an important topic of the 1900’s, involving the scholars studying all the philosophic and scientific disciplines, and has set the dialectical passage of the Modern period in its transformation. In the complex genesis of this model one should also consider the importance of a specific aspect that has basically guided artistic research for a century (from the impressionistic study of the vision to the contextual simulation of pop art) and according to the different perspectives that have interrogated themselves on the actual correspondence with the reality of the representation.
The impossibility that was experienced in this research to identify reality and language led to the unexpected result of shifting attention from objects (works of art and their formal interpretation which allows to organize chronological orders) to the artist’s thought, by delineating its entire complexity with reference to the actual works of art that represent what appears on the surface, articulations of the context. Perfectly in line with relativism’s request of integrated projects, art finds itself at the turning point of the awareness of its "conceptualism", it abandons modernist scientism (Marcel Duchamp) and discovers itself as "submitted to an anthropologic process" through a preliminary questioning of its century-old specialistic ability of allowing to "test abstractions of experience" (Joseph Kosuth) and its punctual role in contemporary society. A society where man, in the dishevelled and windy game of freedom, despite a consciousness for the alterations made by the subject to the contents of knowledge, seems to live in an eternal present time and forgets to ask how to give value to his life.

Socio-anthropologic analysis in the 1960’s, discovered that contemporary society had a tendency to eliminate functionality from closed-up local groups, and that for this reason it is possible to assist to the decline of the sense and of the reality of the community (Stanley Diamond). At the same time interpretations were given about the new organization of reality in a hyperreal and unmaterial sense as a falsification of social life and loss in the planning for the future (Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord).

In this society that no longer relates itself to time by planning for the future and that prefers simplification, there is also an interruption of the basic experience chain through which people learned (in local groups) to understand their own humanity (in a way that is understandable to anyone because self-identification, one’s own joy or pain for events that occurred to a person close to us cannot be compared to the emotions experienced for the same events that occurred to one or a multitude of strangers). From this point of view, the enormous success, nowadays, of reality shows is emblematic. These shows use exactly this type of interruption as their strategy. Their success is due to the fact that they can be considered as an artificial substitute for the local group. Through the comments of the media’s shows people share in a fictitious environment, limited and in common, in which voyeurism, gossip and other elements come close to the object of their interest and are transformed in an individual life experience.

The sense of belonging and the sharing of values tied to specific contexts are the first rudimental applications in learning to realize one’s own humanity, and are useful to avoid a behaviour that is opposed to a group’s principles. Afterwards there should be the beginning, for each individual, of a path leading toward a balanced interior life that may reflect the value of human life, of activities and of man’s relations. This condition is much more complex, as there are a limited number of "touchstones" that may be used to attempt to attribute a certain value to one’s life.

In every culture a privileged role in this teaching of awareness has been entrusted to a human activity kept, so to speak, aside in a niche of freedom, but its distinctive traits with respect to other activities cannot be given a univocal definition because of specific differences (Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz). Even though the name remains the same, each time, the concept, the extension of the concept and the theory of art are adjusted to the interpretative needs of that period of time.
I would like to dwell upon one of the modern definition variations of art considered by the Polish scholar, i.e. an activity that is carried out and is enjoyed both for certain causes and for certain purposes, which receives the acknowledgement of a function expressing both the interior life of the artist and stimulates the interior life of the receiver.

We are aware of the fact that the absolute recognition of a value cannot be demanded rationally. We are also aware of the fact that this special artistic activity in our contemporary age has laboriously accomplished the thoughtful assimilation of its conceptual and its material aspect (historical relativity of thought and of artistic products). Therefore, the idea that art might have the possibility to infuse in the world that we have just described, a sense (presumed but shared) of protective return to the certainty of the immutability of the individual’s identification with his (collective) idea of identity and human equality, might be considered insane or utopian. On the other hand, the individual desire of identifying within art a place where time is still or – what might be considered the same – is densely wide, to the point of "upsetting" our relationship with external reality, is the main reason that makes art unconditionally well established and why it is considered a remarkable mediator and of fundamental importance for the continuity of human awareness, to the point that this might be considered the most tenacious preconceived idea of civilization. The mechanism of self-identification is similar to those that are utilized for the recognition of the sense of belonging to local groups, but the level of abstraction is very elevated and proclaiming the need for art is not the same as understanding its products. (Investigating the reasons for this constant contradiction may be, I think, a good experimental field for relativism).

Numerous good educational campaigns have brought contemporary art to our homes. We consider it more and more a collective global richness rather than privately owned objects and these changes have led to a strengthening and a diffusion of attention to this intrinsic possibility of providing a sort of "emotional supervision".
The request is to provide it as well for an age in time that seems to disperse itself in loose situations and a great number of mishaps (completely different, and it will be more and more unsustainable, is the aggressive economic speculation in the field of art that is being carried out nowadays). The category of people that is able to produce relative works (immersed in history), but with causes and purposes that are suitable to the permanence of this very particular emotional universalism, must respond to this with the utmost responsibility and honesty.

I believe that the rigour of causes and purposes of the Italian representatives here at this exhibition, strongly individual and original in the international artistic panorama, is demonstrated by their works with strong evidence, and is much greater than what I might be able to describe. I am honoured to be given the possibility to select them.

BRIGITTE BRAND

The dimensions of these pictorial masterpieces are considerable and nonetheless they overflow. The picture has the preciseness of an archeological relief and therefore, apparently, it intends to carry out an objective examination of the architectural composition of the buildings that the artist visited in India. But a special vibration can be felt: in the realistic rendition of the representation there is a certain kind of irregularity that is difficult to perceive. It must be there without a doubt, because the observer has the impression of having slipped, without noticing it, beyond the window-screen. The viewer perceives that he is physically experiencing the grandeur and the mystery of the monuments and that he can turn his gaze on their sculptural details form inside the painting. The viewer cannot stop observing in detail because the astonishment for what he is doing and  its duration is too great. The observer returns to certain details that have already been observed. He looks at them in  the painting’s entireness. He finds something new on the background, that he had not noticed before, which inexplicably takes him back to the foreground. He knows that he is standing in front of a painting but he is living in India while he is looking at the picture. Unconsciously this slows him down. He knows that he cannot conquer with his sight and that it can only be used spontaneously. He already feels that it will be a pity when he will come back from this strange journey that nourishes like a good tasting food, with an ancient flavor, that reminds of childhood, when the relationship with spatial dimensions was extremely improbable and nonetheless reassuring.
Brigitte Brand’s intimate devotion to painting shows the degree of her extraordinary sensibility. Her research is characterized by the transmission of a panic sense of spatiality, even if it involves a plain room. In the case of the Indian cycle she slightly skips perspective plains and points of view creating a mild and enveloping vortex that sets as its unusual subject of research, by means of the extremely ancient painting, but in a very modern way, the magical union of ingenuousness and passion that everybody would like to preserve.

EMANUELA MARASSI

This video, presented as an installation and derived from a performance, is a continuation of a research work developed in progressive stages (groups of works) that the artist has been carrying out, since she began as a feminist in the early 1970’s, on similar and interrelated topics such as over-interpretation, misunderstandings and the hypocrisy of rituality and of social behavior, and at the same time it is a decisive episode of future developments. The topic of "Continental breakfast", whose first version was created within an international research project on identity curated by Trieste Contemporanea, is the reaction of a girl who has lived a pampered life in the Western world who is forced to help some by-standers tried by the lack of water and food. The choice made is  a strongly dramatic action that uses traditional theatrical instruments and that, furthermore, requires music to underline every stage of the action with improvisations and starts.
While the ten minute duration of the video seems much longer, the action intrigues us: it takes place in a timeless location and it is produced in a symbolical world as it would be in a classical tragedy. It seems theatrical, but we get the feeling that it is something different because it requires our alert analytical and objective attention, as a possible process of association, that touches emotional areas that differ from those touched by theater. Differently from the progressive subjectivization that we would use to react to the theatrical narration (that, for this reason, might have a cathartic and purifying power on us), while watching this visual and performative work we find ourselves, being very careful observers, always from the outside.
With an exact, clear and horrible bewilderment, we know, when the action has taken place, that this was exactly what the artist, leading us wisely, wanted us to discover: in real life we might personally have a disposition, maybe, to act for a certain cause, but actually, we are rather unconcerned about doing or not doing something, and we prefer to just be onlookers without paying too much attention to what will happen because, we believe, that it will take place – no matter how terribly catastrophical – far away from us.
Once more Emanuela Marassi does not betray the aggressive innocence of the intuition and the direct simplicity that has characterized until now her extremely original artistic work on "sweet" social irony. Her latest work, however, by pretending to show as a theatrical subject the dramatic scenario of future life, asks the spectator, unlike with her previous work, not only a self-criticizing smile that might make him reason and eventually spur him to modify his behavior, but to take a personal and urgent stand concerning the common actions that must be undertaken to give life a different future.

MAURIZIO PELLEGRIN

Maurizio Pellegrin revises the principle of composition as order and weaving: momentary order governed by actual energy (and emotions) and predestined weaving that stands behind elements such as potential energy of the origin. He accomplished this, on wide surfaces or in environmental installations that are undoubtedly huge, not only in terms of dimensions but also as a test that he puts himself through. One may take as an example, the feat that had never been attempted before to create eight simultaneous museum exhibits or the fact he maintains a daily relationship with two antithetical cities (as well as cultures) such as Venice and New York.
This is to exemplify that this artist does not shrink from the loyal attempt to artistically represent demanding existential matters such as the contemporaneous presence of the varying and the permanent, of multiple specificity and abstraction, of presence and history.
His works might be described as contextual original areas in which a dialogue between two groups of entities is carried out. The first ones are groups, or rather categories, of functional objects that have been preserved and have reached us from the past, the second ones are cloths, bandages, hanks. Both categories are set up according to a reassuring harmonious and aesthetical order. Security is also inspired through their repetition. The functional objects preferably hold a relation of equality: these are for example sets of paint brushes, molds for shoes or sets of clubs. The deuteragonists express a sense of protection and care, they collect, so to speak, and preserve, the essence of the objects by joining together their contemporaneous presence. These objects are bandages and cloths that now have finally been dyed, for having understood that there is responsible joy in the task that they have been assigned, to testify the story of existence that these objects convey. The protagonists on the other hand, are narrators chosen among the utensils because they are the ones that through their extreme dedication, to the point of their own functional exhaustion, have assisted energy in action. All the elements of the work of art speak of the activity as a release of energy and they rest recognizing themselves in a common world. Likewise, this leads us to think that, man’s activity is the sum of his history and a mirror of his interior life.

ALFREDO PIRRI

"Art is [...] the fire around which tired and hungry people gather. The responsibility of the artist today is to blow delicately in the ashes so that something continues to keep us warm, or to sell off the precious dust to the first bidder who will turn it into fertiliser for other flowers", is what Alfredo Pirri wrote  in an important text, "On the responsibility of Art" (published in the impressive monograph "Where light hits. Exhibitions and works 2003-1986" dedicated to him by Skira last year). In complete opposition with respect to the opportunistic and aggressive regimentation of artists of this last generation, in this text he openly declares that it is necessary to search for a new geography of the theoretical territory of art. According to Pirri an artist’s job involves great responsibility, because he must be able to generate new forms and the process of this elaboration must be conceptual as well as materially constructive, while the materials and the method of execution that are chosen must be suitable to the artist’s aims. The sensorial richness of his works corresponds to all this, to the point that his particular study of the materials (light, for example, that is often reflected) produces moving expressions of reality, that are parallel to the modern dynamic spectator. But these are also expressions of reality, that despite being images and belonging to the field of representation, must originate from a Thought that has engaged itself (and that is why I wrote it with a capital letter) with the complexity and with the nature of pure contingency of the present time, because art – these are still Pirri’s words - is "a place where sense reposes, a departure station towards the world".
The present time, especially the time of critical assimilation of contemporaneity, that is no longer able to bind time (neither to implant it, nor to project it), is a condition of unpredictability in which, however, a biologically trained individual is thrown in to put order in the occurrence of events in a plot of sense, and culturally equipped with project tools able to lead him to an evaluative choice, because otherwise he would live the paradox of the witness who is an actor of the unpredictable. This type of calling is expressed with strength in Pirri’s artistic production. Not just for the ethical aspect that it implies, as it should be already shared, but because the transmission of the experiential interpretation of the world leads to the indifferent tranquility that is achieved by dominating one’s own passions. Thus, for example, "Passi" (footsteps) a recent work, conceived to be itinerant in exhibitions set in different cities (and cultures), is an extraordinary metaphor of history and of communities of individuals that are in agreement with each other: consists in a mirror surface placed on the ground respecting the limits and the shapes of each site; the surface has been shattered by the by the steps that have already been taken, but it’s a solid ground for new steps.