Art and poetry

I often hear contemporary artist that, in order to explain the ridde of contemporary art to the laymen, liken their work to music. Music doesn’t represents things (with a few exception such as “Le Quattro Stagioni” by Vivaldi), and yet it conveys emotions. But I think that this likening is somewhat ill conceived. Contemproary art does represents things – actually, it imitates things so well that it usually present the thing that should be represented itself! Kounelli’s horses is so good an imitation of 12 horses that the horses … are actual horses in a staple! Morevoer, the feelings that arise from a piece of art are probably more mental than the very direct emotions raisen by music. Bach is very mathematical, and yet it is full of passion; the deep pleasure I feel when I look a performance of Rikriit Tirvanja is almost completely intellectual. This intellectual side of art is not new to contemporary art: Mona Lisa is nice to contemplate, but becomes terribly involving only after understanding.

In my opinion, a better likening would be with poetry. Poetry is basically grounded in metaphor, and it seems to me that the same can be said of contemporary art. When Damien Hirst arranges hundreds of pills on glass shelves he makes a metaphor; when Jeff Koons puts his electric hoovers on a pedestal he is doing an hyperbole (another rhetoric figure). Metaphor ethymologically means transport, and Duchamp’s ready made are “transported” from their original context into a new environemt. Art of the first half of the XXth century is still mimetic, although it is the mimesis of the not representable (Kandinskyj tries to represent spiritual entities, Malevic the fourth dimension), art of the second half of the XXth century is metaphoric. It is perhaps a coincidence, but many – well informed and by no way conservative – don’t like it and found it … rhetorhic, giving unjustly the fault to the market of art.

Metaphor is a short circuit, that flashes reality and illuminates – hopefully – the hidden meanings of things. The subject of classical art is truth, the subject of poetry and contemporary art are experience. The difference is not big, but important.

contemporary art

After a century of experimentations it seems that contemporary art has eventually developed his language. If you visit a museum of contemporary art you see pieces that are different and diverse, but that nonetheless all speak a common tongue, consistend and easy to recognize. A few – for instance Philippe Daverio - see the similarity among these works as repetition, and the fact that the works of nowadays are very similar to those of a few decades ago as crisis; but it is useful to recall that this is not at all new. After three centuries of experimentations, from Giotto to Raphael, classic arte eventually developed his language that was adopted almost without variation by all subsequent artists - from Raphael up to the invention of photrography. XVII and XVIII century art is somewhat repetitive, but it certainly does not represent an example of crisis. The comparison of recent contemporary art to mannerism is certainly not new, but my feeling is that we are already beyond mannerism.

Art of the Reinaissance tried to represent the reality, following the precepts of Aristotle; and the cornerstone of the art of the Renaissance is the discovery of perspective. It is more difficult to define the nature of contemporary art: the cornerstone is certainly Duchamp’s Fontana, but it’s difficult to find something coherent in the many roads that the art of XX century has explored; in my opinion, contemporary art instead of reality tries to represent feelings – the roots of contemporary art are in the Romantic movement of XIX century that eventually originated the Impressionism.

Museum

"Fontaine" by Duchamps has many meanings, but the ultimate meaning is an irony on museums, that instead of preserving art destroy it. Much of the art of XX century share this idea that art cannot be put in museums, and many artists tried to make this impossible, by creating very large instalments that are unfit to traditional museal spaces - but the museum didnt resing, they created even larger, huge buidings, such as that of Bilbao or MAXXI! Fortunately it doesn0t exist yet a museum that can host the creations of Christo.

Kitsch

I was unaware that the famous "Fountain" by Duchamp was proposed to an exhibition that required, for exposition, that the work should conform to given measures, should be made from a range of pre-defined materials and should be signed. When i read the story, I suddenly realized (contrary to my former interpretation http://castorphans.blogspot.com/2008/06/letteratura.html) that Duchamp was simply saying: "your art is a pissoir; in fact my pissoir complies with the standards you demanded for your exhibit."

In other words, Duchamp, that is sometimes considered the beginner of contemporary glorification of kitsch, was in fact launching an attack to the kitch of academic art.

Anyway, from "Fountain" on, the debate of contemporary art has been fundamentally wether to denonce kitsch (for instance the movement of Arte Povera, or, among critics, Daverio; or to accept its forms and to do art in this framework (for instance Koons, Damien Hirst, or, among the critics, Bonomi).

Anyway, kitch has a long history, dating back at least from XVII century; I have just read a wonderful little book (F. Gualdoni, Kitsch, SkiraMiniArtBooks) that presents a round-up of many shamefully kitsch works: many are nonetheless true masterpieces (for instance the painting by Lorenzo Lotto with Love pissing on Venus).

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letteratura

L’occidente è oppresso di letteratura. I letterati ci hanno convinti che ogni sapere si riconduce alla loro disciplina. Le parola sono importanti, ma le idee sono più importanti delle parole con cui vengono espresse. Alle parole si richiede solo di esprimere precisamente ed efficacemente le idee, e alla letteratura di fornire mezzi sufficientemente potenti per questo compito. Il risultato dell’iperenfatizzazione della letteratura è che oggi, che stiamo passando dalla società della parola alla società dell’immagine, noi contemporanei, abilissimi a parlare ma ignoranti di immagini, assistiamo a un collasso del pensiero. Vaglielo a dire a Baricco, che le immagini, teste Michelangelo o Leonardo o Picasso, non potessero essere piene di pensiero, e che non saperle maneggiare è dovuto al fatto che abbiamo la lingua troppo grossa e gli occhi troppo piccoli.

By the way, the collapse of ideas following the fall of the sovereignity of words affected visual arts too. The aesthetics of banal that reigns today is only incidentally related to the society of consumption. I suspect, it is more directly related to the passage from the society of words to the society of images. Visual art, in particular contemporary art, is a very sophisticated language, that has been refined and perfectioned in three centuries and that in the last 50 years has become largely independent of literal expression of ideas – the reason for its “difficulty”. The aesthetics of banal tries to be understandable to people that manage well the speech, but not so well the images – I cannot see much difference between Jeff Koons and Duchamp, apart from the fact that Duchamp cannot be expressed properly in words, whereas Koons can be translated in words. Koons, Freud, Hirst, are Charons, ferrying literary people in the Hell of Images, already explored by Giotto, Tiziano, Vélazquez, Van Gogh and Yves Klein.