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ANDREA
PAGNEZ
Anatomy
of an Artistic Spirit - Angel Orensanz |
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Today, in artistic and
poetic activities in general, I think it is absolutely necessary to
retrace past paths again; from a strictly objective and not a deliberate
subjective point of view. Only in this way is it possible to express the
complexity of our time. The importance of recovering the concepts of
“place” and “continuity”, the necessity of historiographical revision -
avoiding any cult of trend and tendency - will produce a vital,
synergetic development and a straightening in whatever the artistic
expression.
Ideologists subdued by the concept of “progress” (material,
intellectual, etc.) have partly increased a sense of “uncomfortablness”
in the human condition. The results of this progress have contributed to
the destabilization of man. He is no longer able to find his own center
(both socially or individually) within reality. He is constantly
conditioned to achieve accumulation, to acquire wealth, to pursue arid
careers etc. - not only for economic safeness but mostly, to affirm his
own identity consequently he has lost a certain sense of profound
aesthetic pleasure.
He wrongly tries to find his own legitimacy exteriorly, but doesn’t find
it due to a consumistic system solidly founded on deprivation: a
necessary assumption needed for its surviving and affirmation. Perhaps,
too pretextly, contemporary art abusing metaphors even if ripe with
undoubtful evocative values), has focused its effort on finding the most
suitable symbol. But symbols - apart from a few involuntary, sporadic
cases - can’t be configured as autonomous objects.
Today, in contemporary art, the tragic
sedimentation of signs, words, objects, its addition
to something that is totally contrary to what it really is and being
less, is due to the fact that art seems to become a perfect surrogate of
fiction, an analogical simulation of imitation. Rather than conceiving
forms and images, we presumptuously give form to ideas!, we communicate
a sense or a meaning, without having previously understood its content,
or, worse still, without having previously singled it out.
Within this progressive exhalation of the artifice, concepts are
deprived from their substantial dynamically, consequently and inevitably
producing, an affected effect, rather than the necessary debates and
participation. What should evolve will subsequently devolve.
Art is changing its own identity: it is becoming a way of a conceptual
communication that just produces effect however, requesting and
soliciting an effort of acknowledgment that is the exact contrary to the
deceitful appearance of its supposed “truths”. This, at the same time,
creates difficulties for the artists as well as for the creative
management, and definitely creates difficulties for the fruition of
shown art works in galleries, museums or alternative spaces.
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The
public should be totally free to choose “how” to view, in accordance to
its real effective needs and desires.
Contemporary art is truly art when viewed and recognized in all its
passed meanings. It ought to have qualities such as continuity and
openness, though now unfortunately, it only seems to survive because it
has been dequalified to an inferior range, as if it were simply one of
the many ordinary commodities. The congestion of signs and images that
characterize our society and culture is subdued by a constant,
progressive impoverishment of the messages’ inner meanings, which the
artists wish to profuse in their works. Today, messages only exist as
mnemonic stipulations, weakly reactive: they are mere graphic or
decorative signs. Nevertheless, if the artists’ desire is to reach an
almost absolute ethical beauty, they will have to conceive a highly
‘opener” art, and also maintain a boundless faith in the public’s
fruition. In fact, even if the artwork is autonomous and definite, it
will still give rise to the inevitable, personal interpretation that
renders it existent to one of its possible aspects.
Therefore, it is possible to configure the faculty of interpretative
freedom with the creative participation of the viewer, who is capable of
establishing a sort of creative dialogue of the artwork he is viewing:
sometimes this dialogue is determined by the viewer himself, at other
tunes it is determined by the inner intensity of the artwork itself.
Consequently, it appears that only “simplicity” (intended as a lack of
affectation) is the value to be pursued; but how can this simplicity be
possible, if nowadays art is surrounded by scenery of an extremely
complex and differentiated reality, where eclecticism of the
contemporary thought is dominant? Art cannot avoid observing and
referring to its own time, because to evoke other possible or imaginary
worlds is a form of mystification. Therefore, at this point, the six
memoranda for the third millennium on which Calvino wrote about in his
“American Lessons” just few years ago - Luminosity, Quickness,
Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, Consistency - must be duly kept in
mind. If we want to improve and develop our culture, perhaps we should
pursue this way.
However, it is also logical that artists mustn’t deliberately look back
on history: they should be conscious that the most important thing to do
is to go over once again history’s space-temporal contest. Conflicts,
contradictions, dystonias, in one word the continuos failures of
contemporary art, follow the fact that today art seems to have the
chance of realizing
“possible utopias”, while, to the contrary, all it does is put mankind
in front of its ordinary condition, continuously covering it with the
fictitious veil of fiction. |
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Enticed in this
factious process, art not only mystifies reality, but also itself as
it belongs to reality. Inevitably, both authors and public become
participants, protagonists who have lost all trace of innocent
behavior because they are entrapped inside cultural habitats
continuously mutable and discordant.
Today human behaviors
are induced, as needs are artificial. This is the historical
condition of today’s mankind. This is the new mechanism of its
cultural production. If we ask for conditions (and concepts!) of
such lost freedoms, we stray from the point (and at that same point
we will arrive) of not accepting reality, that reality that man
compromises with, and corrupts day by day. Inside this reality,
human potentialities are strongly reduced, while values are only
dictated by the individualistic, particular deformities of taste,
and the unrefined uniformity of fashions.
It is a reality that our comprehension has difficulties of holding:
a reality often indecipherable, most of all because man obtusely
continues to be an accomplice, a slave, a victim of his own greed:
he doesn’t research what he should be searching for. If it is true
that mankind moves towards a culture of “becoming” and not of “being”,
we have to understand that “becoming” doesn’t coincide with “having”.
In the culture of “having” we would look like just temporal dwarves,
deprived from each sense of “existing”; if, instead, we were to
choose the culture of “being”, we would still have some hope in
simply confirming ourselves as Men and Women. To be objective,
honest, sincere, it doesn’t cost so much...
However, a part from this personal consideration, I believe that
art, nowadays, must look for continuity, progressive shifting,
gradual transformation, and active integration, adopting languages
capable of sintomatica]ly and semantically re-conducing mankind
toward the present experience of “today”. If the artificious and
artificial needs of contemporary man will cause artists to be more
open and reflect on how serious the problem of the “artificiuos” is,
only then can art be considered once again as an “anticipation” of
what will be tomorrow, giving us new notable and logical answers to
our questions. (to be continued in the next number)
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Andrea Pagnes
Andrea Pagnes is an
artist, writer, curator and senior editor for the international art
and culture magazine World of Art. He lives in Venice.
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