“No historical justice can be achieved if the future is not addressed. There can be no past or other responsibility towards our present except to the extent that there is our own towards the future. Choosing a lineage means choosing a tradition”1. As Franco Fortini concluded his Clarifications in 1962: and, it must be said, sixty-two years later these words have lost none of their strength and relevance. The assumption of responsibility – always: but in particular in periods of great change, as is undoubtedly the current one – is exercised on the present, but even more so on the future. It is clear how an idea (and a practice) of this kind, which organically connects the different dimensions of time, collides and clashes with the presentism current. A presentism that already has a very long and, so to speak, rather dusty history: it is a presentism, in fact, that has lasted for over forty years, extending its shadow back and forth, continuously.
Presentism and the loss of responsibility in contemporary art
Presentism is ontologically contrary to the concept of “historical justice”, cheerfully disengaged, and happily irresponsible. Except that this alleged apolitical nature of his is, as everyone (even children) knows by now, a disturbing kind of political position: retrograde rather than retrograde, obscurantist, irrational. Above all, this apolitical nature is based on the total abolition of that unwritten law, of the avant-gardes as well as the neo-avant-gardes, which states: “art is the experimental form of life”. Through the works (at least those that function as they should), the artists first, and all those who then enjoy them, experiment, precisely, a possible life beyond the contingent one. Let’s experience what could be. The progressive narrowing of the field of the work to the decorative-mercantile territory, the limitation of its possibilities and the amputation of its operation – that is to say: of its transformative and evolutionary capacity – explains many aspects, including the shrinkage ours imaginative ability. That is, the ability to imagine a different condition of the present and the future. Yet, a few years after Fortini’s statements, these instances had also established themselves forcefully in the field of visual art, leaving us predicting not years but decades: a whole new era of the relationship between art and life: “…everything comes down to ‘building’ the intuited idea. The effort is therefore aimed at communicating it through a medium that allows nothing for ambiguity and semantic openness. The result is a physicalization of the idea, an idea translated ‘into matter’, a model, enlarged format, of mental and factual learning, naturally not a vitalistic and orgiastic physicalization, but ‘mentalistic’. The author, placing himself at the convergence between idea and image, becomes the true protagonist of the event, integrating himself with the actuality and evolutionary evolution of his ideas. (…) Thus cinema regresses to its freest and most elementary manifestation, a single moving image. (…) Unlimited sequence shot which now becomes in Warhol and Godard an unlimited sequence cinema, a continuous alternation of fake and real actions and contractions, of cinematic apprehensions flaunted as possible acquisitions of and on reality, such as to define every event, of n meters of film presented to the public, the ‘end of a beginning’ (Godard)”2.
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The need to go beyond the decorative value of the work of art
Since the 1980s, the trend reversalinitially disguised with the neo-expressionist and citationist guise, then clarified with the fall of these trappings from the nature of new post-conceptualism that has characterized much of the last thirty years… Except for a few bright exceptions, the work has tended and tends decidedly towards the decorative, even when it is cloaked in statements and declarations, of intent and intentions. But being “form of life”, the perfect model for trying a different way of existing, and coexisting, is not at all a sport or a diversion: in such a moment, in such an era, it is the aspect to be sought instead ( to be found) with more assiduity and consistency. One might even think, indeed, that indeed this generalized renunciation on the part of contemporary work is one of the factors that has contributed to the increase in intensity of tension and conflict: an acquiescent art (and culture) are in fact – it is inevitable – an integral part of retreat, not of progression. Regardless of how much the works are valued.
Christian Caliandro
1Franco Fortini, Clarifications, in Verification of powers, Il Saggiatore 2017, p. 51
2Germano Celant, Arte Povera, Galleria De’ Foscherari, Bologna 1968, publ. in Precronistoria 1966-69, Quodlibet 2017, p. 66
Article published on Artribune Magazine #77
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Tags: Contemporary art times great change
