"Der realistische Maler: »Treu die
Natur und ganz!« – Wie fängt ers an:
Wann wäre je Natur im Bilde abgetan?
Unendlich ist das kleinste Stück der Welt!
–
Er malt zuletzt davon, was ihm gefällt.
Und was gefällt ihm?
Was er malen kann!"
(Nietzsche, Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft)
The concept of the intrinsic value of art, the concept of art
for the art's sake, is unacceptable in artistic research. In this direction,
the relation of responsibility between art and life - even here it does not
depend on the fact that art adheres to life as it appears - results, Bakhtin
taught, totally renewed.
Art is not restricted to world boundaries, a world that had been
already defined and interpreted in the way in which the gaze (auto)represents
it. Art does not remain trapped in a world that imposes the identical, art lives
beyond the borders of "reality" and continually re-proposes it in new perspectives
and in new relations. The search for otherness is achieved, in the artistic
text of painting, with the research of an image that is other. It is not about
finding a (unique) "theory of art", it is about performing a never-ending experimentation.
In this way art in general, and specifically painting do not merge into routine,
into practical and functional application, as well as into the "market logic".
What follows is the trend of taking one's distances from representation and
from State image through which, in art, anything substantial can be said.
Artistic participation with life is a wider form of responsibility
towards life than just living life from the inside. The artistic point of view,
because it is external to life, establishes a kind of relation that consists
of looking always at human things from the "extreme threshold", and so quite
ironically, with a more or less evident serious-comic attitude. In this way
the artistic point of view overturns the serious, "realistic" vision of the
modern time of the world, it unsaddles the shortsighted vision of life, which
is embalmed in the roles fixed by contemporaneity. The artist is always a bit
"belated" respect to him/herself and to his or her contemporaneity because with
his or her outdistanced position grants the artist the possibility to live beyond
earthly worries. Distancing projects art into the "great time".
Art and life are mutually implicated; life looks on art not as
ornament and decoration - the use of colours as cosmetics (Malevich) - but as
research, criticism of "the world of objects" and art looks on the renewal of
life. Life, in order to be life and not inert repetition and maintenance of
settled order, renews itself through the relation with art. Life cannot be indifferent
to art but it must be responsible towards it. Art shows otherness of life, its
ambivalence, its double, its possibility otherwise sacrificed - namely, the
possibilities that official ideology, the established order, habits, prejudices,
stereotypes, routine of everyday life, prevent art from perceiving and living.
Life must recognize that its relation with art is a relation of dialogical involvement.
Life must answer to artistic depiction, to the return - also in the sense of
restitution of freedom from what impoverishes it - that art proposes.
