Una versione di questo testo è stata pubblicata in "Corposcritto"
3 (primavera 2003), accompagnata da tre Non-Oggetti.
Luciano Ponzio
ARTISTIC
VISIONS
"Il y a une immense différence entre
voir une chose sans la crayon dans la main, et la voir en la dessinant. Ou
plutôt, ce sont deux choses bien différentes que l'on voit. Même
l'objet le plus familier à nos yeux devient tout autre si l'on s'applique
à le dessiner: on s'aperçoit qu'on l'ignorait, qu'on ne l'avait
jamais véritablement vu"
(Paul Valéry, Degas Danse Dessin)
Any kind of discourse about body appears lacking of definition because of
a number of tones. As a matter of fact, the metaphoric use of the word body
can be found everywhere: everything is body, or rather there is a wish to reduce
everything to a corporeal unit, to the body-cult. The body shape is shown in
numberless variety but it is also strongly conditioned by the tendency of affirmation
of identity - Malevich would say that the sole thing that the State acknowledges
as real is what owns a name - as well as by the hysterical incarnation of things
(more evident in Western culture) that, after all, rapes and reduces every body
to a private body.
Painting, also, "held by the leash of figurative art" (Malevich), had been
unified, stuck and obliged to mould itself on the shape of the world, to show
itself under the light of the world.
However, this world would never have been able to force painting to a complete
surrender! Painting neither reproduces the trompe-l'oeil of life, nor
conforms to the "happy rendering" conducted by the logic guardian of reason
that would like to reduce art to illustration, to what requires enough index
for the gaze that auto-represents the world.
Painting, with its signs of excess, does not render reason and it knows perfectly
that it is idle about the idea of meaning; it is aware of not being able "to
embrace" existence or being or, even less, to fix the world on canvas but in
a relation of likeness, of depiction, of differing/deferral.
For painting is fundamental to differ/defer in some degree from "realistic"
reality in order to sur-vive beyond any code and time (since this the artistic
value of a work of art). Even "the word is groping" (Merleau-Ponty) about the
idea of making the object to mean.
If we remove from our spirit the idea of an original text of which our language
is the translation or ciphered vision - says Merleau-Ponty ("Indirect language
and the voices of silence") -,we shall see that the idea of a complete expression
is absurd, that all languages are indirect or allusive, that all languages are,
if we prefer, silence.
Painting is a vision that is other, turned inside out, apocalyptical. Apocalypse
- generally negatively and pessimistic intended as "end of the world", "catastrophe"
or "disaster" - is now brought back to its primary and positive meaning of "revelation",
"disclosure". Malevich's square can be considered the icon of the Apocalypse
that, under its black light, reveals to man, prisoner of his horizon, the flimsiness
of "the world of objects".
Nietzsche affirms that the essential of the black art of obscurantism is not
the wish of darkening minds but of dying black the image of the world, of obscuring
our idea of existence.
In Nerval's Aurélia, apocalyptic vision is constituted by the
dream as an alternative to reality and as revealer of an invisible world:
"Arrivé sur la place de la Concorde, ma pensée était
de me détruire. A plusieurs reprises, je me dirigeai vers la Seine, mais
quelque chose m'empêchait d'accomplir mon dessein. Les étoiles
brillaient dans le firmament. Tout à coup il me sembla qu'elles venaient
de s'éteindre à la fois comme les bougies que j'avais vues à
l'église. Je crus que les temps étaient accomplis, et que nous
touchions à la fin du monde annoncée dans l'Apocalypse de saint
Jean. Je croyais voir un soleil noir dans le ciel désert et un globe
rouge de sang au-dessus des Tuileries. Je me dis: "La nuit éternelle
commence, et elle va être terrible. Que va-t-il arriver quand les hommes
s'apercavront qu'il n'y a plus des soleil?" [...] Arrivé vers le Louvre
je marchai jusqu'à la place, et là, un spectacle étrange
m'attendait. A travers des nuages rapidement chassés par le vent, je
vis plusieurs lunes qui passaient avec une grande rapidité. Je pensai
que la terre était sortie de son orbite et qu'elle errait dans le firmament
comme un vaisseau démâté, se rapprochant ou s'éloignant
des étoiles qui grandissaient ou diminuaient tour à tour. Pendant
deux ou trois heures, je contemplai ce désordre [...]. Les paysans apportaient
leurs denrées, et je me disais: "Quel sera leur étonnement en
voyant que la nuit se prolonge..."".
Nerval assumes dream as real life and he grants himself only a few glimmers
of reality by provoking a crisis in the "realistic" point of view of reality.
Dream and reality coincide in a unique reign with never ending possibilities
of vision.
The same speech can be efficiently made for "the dreamer" by Dostoevsky in
Belye Noci (White Nights). Here the unbroken whiteness of five
spring nights help to give cause to rarefied, rough visions, diachronic, (Malevich
would say) "alogical" processes of reality.
Leaving the Earth, the earthly cares for the uncontested vision, means to
provoke and to try another life where it is possible to see the sky revealing
and opening in a thousand aspects of unheard-of magnificence (Cf. Nerval).
The darkness, "the black sun" of the artistic vision makes "illuminated" reason,
conventional logic collapse. Van Gogh, Bataille affirms, started to confer to
the sun a value that it did not yet have before that moment (after the night
of December '88, when he cut off his ear with the slash of a razor and then
offered in a licensed brothel). He let it enter in his canvas and it is from
that moment that all his paintings started to be irradiation, explosion, fire.
When this "sundan" started suddenly nature start to jump, plants got on fire
and Earth waved like a speedy sea or it exploded : nothing remained of the stability
which constitutes the foundation of things (Cf. Bataille).
By going forward in our criticism towards a representative painting, with
a specific interest in the analysis of the "portrait", it would be useful to
make reference to some works of literature such as: L'œuvre by Zola,
Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu by Balzac, and The Oval Potrait by
Poe (the second work in the optic of Leiris, while the latter in the one of
Derrida). In spite of their differences it is not hard to find a similarity
among these three texts. As a matter of fact, either in L'œuvre
by Zola, or in Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu by Balzac, or in The Oval
Potrait by Poe what is shown is the impossible union between art and life
by way of a narration that certainly is dramatic but that is also particularly
critical towards the representation as mimesis of reality.
Each one of the said texts tells the story of three different artist-painter
who, one way or another, show to have the same obstinacy and doggedness in the
belief of being able to reproduce life on canvas. Zola, Balzac and Poe's narration
tendencies seem to simulate the artist as vain he or she chases the impossible
reconcilement between art and life. These narrations reach the climax when the
three artists-painters start to believe they obtained this impossible conciliation,
the superimposability of art and life. Because of this illusion, the painter
Frenhofer (the protagonist of Balzac Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu ) -
who with his maniacal perfectionism will transform his painted woman into an
incomprehensible pulp except for a naked foot - will not hesitate to assert
in front of his (painter) friends that his work "is not a painting, it's a woman!".
Similarly, in Zola's L'œuvre, the model Christine, Claude's lover,
was jealous of one of his paintings and reproved him for it:
"Tu me repousses, acheva-t-telle violemment, tu te recules de moi, la nuit,
comme si comme si je te répugnais, tu vas ailleurs, et pour aimer quoi?
Un rien, une apparence, un peu de poussière, de la couleur sur de la
toile!... mais, encore un coup, regarde-la donc, ta femme, là-haut! vois
donc quel monstre tu viens d'en faire, dans ta folie! Est-ce qu'on est bâtie
comme ça? est-ce qu'on a des cuisses en or et des fleurs sous le ventre?...
Réveille-toi, ouvre les yeux, rentre dans l'existence".
Moreover The Oval Potrait ends with the dramatic exultance of the husband
- the painter - who, after having used day and night his wife as model in order
to perfectly portray her, soon after having traced the very last touch: "stood
entranced before the work which he had wrought; but in the next, while he yet
gazed, he grew tremulous and very pallid, and aghast, and crying with a loud
voice, 'This is indeed Life itself!' turned suddenly to regard his beloved:
She wasdead!"
Each one of these three stories tells about the paradox of an inevitable and
twofold defeat: the loss of art and the loss life.
The distance between art and life is irreducible and non eliminable. Each
vain attempt in the other way precipitates in representation, in a maniacal
as well as destructive identity. The gap, the distance, the distancing, the
differing/deferral of art and life are the conditions themselves of artistic
representation - even what it "performs" - in order to yield on canvas the possibilities
that otherwise would be sacrificed.
Moreover Lévinas in his essay of 1948, "La réalité et
son ombre", speaking about the range and the interpretative power of the artistic
vision, sets "image", which he considers characteristic of the artistic vision,
against "concept". Image reveals the otherness of the object that is interpreted
from a cognitive perspective and then kept in the identity expressed by the
concept. In this way the object results "double": not only an object of knowledge,
subjected to a concept, but also an object that is other from itself and as
real as itself. Light does not repudiate shadow, and the image depicted by the
artistic text is the double of the object, which, according to Lévinas
is "the shadow" of reality. Lévinas says: "reality is not only what it
is, what is disclosed in the truth, but also its double, its shadow, its image".
Everything and everybody is what it is as well as its image, identity, otherness:
likeness consists in this non coincidence, in this relation that art seizes
in the image. Image is otherness that escapes from identity, Lévinas
says it is like a cloth bag with holes, unable to contain it/otherness.
In the same way Borges, in his poem Les coses - in the collection "Elogio
de la sombra" (1981) - describes the indifference of ordinary objects with
respect to who uses them believing he or she is able to master them, while they
do not even feel his or her death. The other from the object, its non, its nothing
(Malevich) remains completely indifferent to all the problems that trouble human
realism of the objective practicalness.
Malevich's "non-object" is indifferent to practical realism, to the object,
to the excess of form, to the rotting of theory and practice of categories that
want to manipulate, to fix and to embalm the object in identity.
The non of the objective being, being non-objective, is unrelated to
the apparent order of practical realism, to its purposes, to its necessities
and to its failures. What simply is a negative with respect to the objective
world, is a nothingness that gives back to the world its indifference.
The relation existing between art and life is inevitable as well as indivisible
and non-eliminable - life is intended as a life free from man's petrifying and
scientific gaze, a man that continually gives signs of a more and more elucidated,
intellectual synthesis of the world.
With Malevich, painting has been freed; with the turning point of suprematism
art has been de-tested from its unbroken "mortification". Art had been also
de-tested from the obstinate general claim that wanted it as a substitute for
life, or even worse as a "servant" of State, Culture and Information. Art subordinated
and reduced to mere functional and cheep/convenient expression. Moreover the
general perception of the world had been awakened from its state of numbness
caused by the protraction of a predominantly practical as well as utilitarian
position.
L.P.
Bologna, 2003
(translated by M. Messina)
