Testo pubblicato sul catalogo Differimentismo (Edizioni
dal Sud, Bari, 2005) presentato in occasione della mostra personale di pittura
dal titolo "Lo Sguardo e L'Eclissi. Extra-grafie di Luciano Ponzio"
(14-23 gennaio, 2005, "Artoteca" della Vallisa, Borgo Antico, Bari)
This evening we are going to speak about the relation existing
between artistic vision and reality as representation. It seems that only through
artistic vision it is possible to comprehend surrounding reality as process
of becoming, as what is alive and what does not come to an end, in order to
observe reality as life and not as inert repetition in the static version which
is ruled by representation. The artist is still able to single out the insufficiency
of the world of representation, the poverty of its "logical" organization, the
inadequacy of its system based on the hegemony of a sense over another; this
is a system that, inexorably, chains up reality to univocal needs which are
alien to it.
Everybody accomplice: murderers of the signs of art in the name
of liberty and representation!
Aware of being inscribed within the culture of recognition of
the self - within grim seriousness, culture is serious - individuals fight for
an absurd identity and, withdrawn in being and in representation, they calm
down and fall asleep in a disembodied, frozen and devitalized ideality.
In representation, posture is assumed, position is taken up,
inflexibly set out, never contested. Subjects are recurring, reproduced and
disposed in a certain order, following a scenical ideal aesthetics to make characters
comfortably "sit down". In a collective narcissism, the parasitics of identity
fixed themselves in a self-ammiration gaze in the same way in which Narcissus
threw himself into the deceit of imprisonment in his own mirroring.
The sugary repetition as truth has been assumed by people lulled
by the agreeable rhythm and by the charming, by current "melodism", by mass-mediatic
nihilism, by the show-biz - in virtual and visual representations: what is repeated
is always the truth. Someone believes in representation because he or she had
been provided with it. Routine, entertainment, daily "telecast" repeated endlessly.
Mesdames, Messieurs, j'ai le plaisir ce soir de présenter la REPRESENTATION:
a completely accepted nonentity in a nauseating exaltation where individuals,
devoured by a career of useless activities, wait for retirement as their utmost
aspiration.
REPRESENTATION IS BACKWATER!
In order to submit to the world, man resorts with difficulty
to deceits, petty tricks and antidotes to try to keep watch, at any rate, on
the "human dimension" of the world, to grant always the truth, and to humanize
what cannot be humanized (WAR). With skilful homicide, man isolates objects,
he makes them objects, communication objects, elements of representation; he
furtively formats/edits them in order to recognize; he nails words to commentary
in an unavoidable reduction.
Artistic vision does nothing but show man the need of producing
a new impossible space, intellectually richer, which exceeds the limitation
of a world dying with its boots on. So assault to materialism, to idolatry of
objects through the genocide of murderous rules committed in the real world.
(Artistic vision wants) To create a subsequent system, another architectonics,
to re-invent the world, its liberty, its peace.
To act the violence of abstraction - often refused because politically
indecipherable, or theoretically indemonstrable - means neither to exert creativity
on the existent nor, even less, the umpteenth attempt of commercialization of
art through the premeditated production of "disfiguration", self-destruction
and extinction in the various "artistic" practices of image torture: auto-celebrative
and voyeuristic images of human cruelty (from bad taste art to images of torture).
Technique is the charity offered to the artist; a mere invention,
a mediation, a compromise to intimately fit art in with life. Artist has exceeded
the antithesis between art and life as metaphysical and ideological opposition-imposition.
Art and life are here and now! Metaphysical features and cult of technique do
not constitute a privilege. On the contrary. It has been demonstrated how artificial
technicalness creates inhumanity from industrialization to militarization of
the world.
The artist is not on service! He or she is, par excellence, the
deserter of reality as representation. The artist is unfaithful to reality,
to job, to culture, to language. He or she is always stranger, lost, exiled
to representation. He or she is stranger and refractory to all institutions:
he or she is stranger even to his or her linguistic country! The artist has
the uneasy duty to support extraneousness, non-belonging. The artist is the
one who, even without surrending to irresponsible and evasive imaginary, utopia,
is able to dare continually. Artist is the one who, with "amateurish" and "of
a reader" approaches, learns by unlearning, by not accepting anything known,
anything existing (existent is here intended as what is commonly demonstrated
through gravity and its laws within which a body necessarily stays). His or
her scarce capacity to expose his or her works is an explanation of the artist's
non-involvement in the world of goods, in the service company, in the fixed
courses and in gallery owners and in its market.
Art is superfluous. And otherness manifests itself in it in everyway.
Work of art, in this sense, does not work. It is an excess with no return. Work
of art reveals the inactivity of art. An art without audience; it is not constituted
neither as social cell nor as a monumental work. This inactivity lets the artist
to disinterest him/herself in present time and to project him/herself in a supreme
extra-space. Artists that nowadays question, or not, themselves about the contemporaneousess
of art, generally forget to question themselves about a vital issue, namely:
contemporary art, I agree, but contemporary to what? Art, at the most, shall
incline to the unfeasible.
Painting was not born to describe man and what he does. Its aim
is not to decorate a text and to enslave it. Painting is the privileged and
primordial place of destruction of imitation, or of representation. Painting
transcends any idealism and it is able to trespass the complete picture of narration
in order to acquire artistic visibility out of ordinary visible. Painting can
yield on canvas those signs which are not yet extinguished in the symbolic meaning
and in the pathological. A painting in which action, movement challenges the
text, never specifying, underlining, defining, distinguishing it, never representing
it. Far from tracing back to identification, at the most, leading again to the
unrecognizable, to the never-ending discourse.
A hand-to-hand struggle, a duel, a vis à vis takes place
between artist and work of art. The painter of reality desperately tries to
represent and he or she does not know he or she cannot realize the painting
dreamt. He or she tries to grasp a text by guarding, by reuniting, by dominating
it, finishing by believing that representation of this will represents him or
her in his or her ideas, thoughts, and intentions. This kind of artist is not
so far from that famous painter (Max Ernst) who, after having painted a garden,
realized that he forgot to portray a tree and so he immediately decided to cut
off that tree! As author and as man, the artist says nothing. The artist - absent
and faraway, by wearing modestly the cloth of stillness - has the gift of indirect
speech and he or she is able to work on the world by remaining outside it. A
gift of speech, (is) a talent of pure loss: an unconditioned gratuitousness
without alibis. And the work of art will, all of a sudden (sur)render, and often
it will happen when there is no need for it.
To comment/write on painting is always imprecise and, sometimes,
it is possible to sink in the night of nothing. Tonight we do not want to come
out from indefinite in order to state precisely. Theoretically, we should not
give any definition of painting, otherwise there will be the disloyalty itself
of its movement/shifting and of its way of becoming tormented, "labyrinthical",
abysmal. Everything we have said has already started to etch the impossibility
to define it. To differ/defer also means to undo and to surprise, to situate
differently, to render the Other, the otherwise and, possibly, the elsewhere.
