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We never fail to expect everything from someone each time we meet; in an ideal sense we are all virgins, and against all logic we hope to find a destiny in every possible face.
They say that it has vanished, but Art, or whatever we mean by Art, has penetrated into every part of reality. It is in museums, it is in galleries, but it is just as much in debris, on walls, in the streets, in the banality of everything made sacred without further forms of preamble. It does not spy furtively on reality; it follows it, it walks beside it. This makes it impossible to judge a work by its plastic qualities alone; it must be judged by its relation to a particular aspect of reality. Art seems thus to have retrieved a set of ethical values, values that are not made visible through language but by the position of the artist, who is today able to recover the privilege of dialogue with the social context only if the artistic product can be collocated in a social space that belongs to shared and public life, with instruments of language that are part and parcel of the daily routine of production. The systems of art and reality have become virtually identical, since there is no longer any distance between power (art) and daily life. Humanity has freed itself of the great narration, and the confused identity that once underlay the modern certainty of self seems to have been reborn in an almost revolutionary form in the person of the citizen. And the corpus of knowledge that only a few years ago self-sanctioned its status as the embodiment of universal truth and power has been able to survive only by allowing the other, namely the citizen, to speak in its place. The subject that was claimed to have been abstracted from reality now has no other alibi than that of its plain and simple existence. An existence that can also be that of the citizen-artist, the citizen-critic, the citizen-exhibitor, and when direct responsibility is assumed for this survival, it comes easy to dream of the definitive end of history.
The best solution is to consider everything as being completely unknown, and to stroll or lie down in the woodland glades or on the grass and to start everything from the beginning again.
Today, creativity is a natural condition of life, a general condition; and this is the electromagnetic model of creativity. Now language is becoming more and more mobile on a skein of networks. No longer content to remain at the heart of the world, it pushes up to the surface, because the network teems with the powerful dynamics of interacting creativities that make constant and subjective participation an imperative. If the civilization of Ancient Greece, having invented the alphabet and phonetic script, exploited the figure of the artist to recover the perceptions of the senses and the expressiveness of art, this is by now unnecessary, since we haveat our disposal a technology of communication that starts from the alphabet but goes way beyond, incorporating all the senses and broadening the horizons of creativity. It is as if all this could make Peter Handke say: 'I no longer doubt art, although I often do not want it. Many times I have caught myself taughing while I write, not because what I was writing was particularly funny, but because it seemed to me to be the truth.'
Rimini, february 1996
This text contains passages drawn from Baudrillard, Bonito-Oliva, De Kerchhove, Parmesani and Ponge, in a free adaptation by the author. |
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