“[…] hunc inter fluvio Tiberinus amoeno verticibus rapidis et multa flavus harena in mare prorumpit […]” Virgil.
What remains of the mythology of the blonde Tiber, strictly linked as it is to the birth of Rome and over 2000 years of history, as its waters dwindle season after season?
The epochal changes of waters in the twenty-first century speak of a revolutionary upheaval that is not limited to the social but also affects cultural, mythological, and poetical identities. As transformations occur at increased speed, there is a need to rethink cities, waterways, fountains, and agricultural foundations. These are not just systems but also cultural substrata linked to food and modus vivendi that have shaped the anthropological and existential beliefs of pre-Roman populations, each with its meanings and interpretations of what it means to be ‘Italics’. Waters are relocated and redistributed, with systematic overexploitation of the aquifers, while the beds of the streams, brooks, and rivers are dried out.
As waterways capitulate under the pressure of scarcity, there is no longer a place to safely hide Romulus and Remus along the banks of the river Tiber. We are obliged to reimagine our futures without water. Water that, even if abundant, is increasingly polluted with PFAs, lead, chlorine, and nanoplastics.
In post-postcapitalistic societies of exploitation of common resources, the definition of water is solely conceived in economic liberal terms and as a privatization of the public’s existence through the creation and management of scarcity. In Italy — and in Rome in particular — these Western forms of liberalism are translated and substantiated in conniving corporate structures that harmoniously and cohesively blend mafias and politics.
The talk will examine the stark realities of the Italian state which has abdicated its role and has become an enforcer of corporate water exploitation and future necropolitics of thirst.
Keywords: Thirst, water, necropolitics, tears, drought
The artist acknowledges the support of the Museo delle Periferie.
With thanks to Giorgio de Finis and Linda Mazzoleni.
Now that I am less occupied with the works of art I created for the Venice Architecture Biennale, I have the time to write a post that I wanted to publish for a rather long time.
It is about the economics of art and the role that buyers, collectors, commissioners [1], and patrons play in my life. Since I look at this relationship both with the eyes of a curator — who has been an art gallery director — and with those of an artist — who has moved across cultures, you will find that my perspective will shift from time to time. I will not always be writing from the perspective of an artist or a curator, but at times I will be a hybrid creature, concerned with the legacy of my works of art and how to avoid their financial exploitation at the expense of those who have supported my career over the years.
I would find few things as loathsome as for my works of art to skyrocket in price to benefit a few at the expense of those who have stood by me in the past through many years of hardship and difficulties. So, if you are a flipping collector, one that flips works of art to gain some money in the short term, I am not the artist for you. Please, go and flip somewhere else. I am not a shopkeeper who is trying to make a fast buck by turning around objects, selling them to other people who will buy and flip them for profit. That is a world that has never interested me.
If it seems that I am bluntly cutting out some of my possible buyers, I hope that by doing so I will find those who are:
a) more interested in the realization of seminal works of art and projects;
b) buyers and collectors who value owning something that only they possess;
c) commissioners and patrons who enjoy sponsoring a project that is unique and will acquire, in time, a place in the long history of art.
There is something else, I am at a point in my career in which I want to solely concentrate on my works of art, without any distractions, and finding the right buyers, collectors, commissioners, and patrons will allow me to do so.
You will find that many of my works of art are for sale on Saatchi Art at the moment, besides the gallery that represents me, because it is one of the more reputable and reliable online platforms. I chose to utilize Saatchi Art during this pandemic period, since I have slowed down my travels but not my work. It has its issues of course, but overall it offers a good and reputable service.
In the first section of this rather long post, I tried to offer an overview of my approach and answer the questions that most often are asked by buyers, collectors, commissioners, and patrons. I wanted to give you, the reader interested in purchasing my work, easy access to answers you might be looking for. I thought it might help to know each other a little more and understand 1) what it is that I am after and 2) why I only sell original, one-of-a-kind, works of art and not multiples.
I hope you will find it, if not enjoyable, at least helpful. The answers provide a clue to the type of artist I am and the type of buyers, collectors, commissioners, and patrons I am interested in working with.
This post will hopefully facilitate the encounter of two minds and provide the opportunity for a ‘moto dell’anima’ (assonance with another soul) in the discovery that we share some of the same values, outlooks on the world, respect for the works I have done with all the time and sacrifice that went into them, and appreciation for what you would like to achieve with your purchase or commission.
To sell soulless mass-produced objects is not for me. If I wanted to be a merchant I would be in commerce or flipping houses or doing some other job that was mainly and solely concerned with money. For these reasons there are rules with my works of art, enshrined in a contract with my obligations as well as those of the buyer, to ensure the works of art’s long-term viability.
If after having read this preface you decide that I am not your type of artist, please know that there are so many out there to choose from and support who might be closer to your values and modus operandi.
I also work as a curator, therefore, I assist buyers by consulting with them and recommending artists that would be suitable for and add quality to their collections. I understand the multiple nuanced reasons behind buyers’ and collectors’ choices.
Thank you for having read this preface and here are my answers to questions I have been asked in the past. I hope you will find them useful.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS TO GET TO KNOW EACH OTHER
Do you do multiple prints of the same works of art? No, I don’t. Once the sale has happened, the object has been shipped, and it is in the hands of the buyer that is the end of it all. Only one object will exist, no longer in my caring hands but yours. Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Damien Hirst are the artists whom I appreciate the least in the way they historically mass-produced and sold multiple versions of their works of art.
Why the prices are so high? This is simple, between production costs, research, travel, and living expenses, works of art have a cost. The works of art reflect that as well as the fact that they are one of a kind. In earnest, if you look at the percentage that is taken by Saatchi Art and the production and living costs, the works of art are priced in a very reasonable manner. Here is a breakdown of commission percentage and costs for your convenience, just to offer an insight.
100,000 = 1,000 shipping + 34% Saatchi percentage 35,000 which leaves 65,000 that are taxed at approximately 40% = 39,000. This does not include materials, equipment, and other costs for the production of the works of art or living expenses.
If I wanted to buy more works of art would I get a discount? If you were to buy a whole series you would get a discount. The reason is that I prefer for a collector to have a whole section of my works of art and to take care of them. I do not like to split them up. Particularly when they are a series connected by a logical thematic thread. If for example, you were to buy the whole series of Tools for Catching Clouds or Órthos, there would be a substantial discount. For the purchase of single works of art, there are no discounts.
Do you sell and work with everybody? Yes and no. I sell to buyers I like, collectors I trust, work for commissions I find exciting, and engage with patrons I respect. So, I sell to a range of people as long as they understand and are willing to take care of the works of art they buy and ensure the visibility of the works of art by allowing their participation in international shows at top-tier institutions.
How do you ship? I ship from Italy, where I am at the moment, with a reputable international shipper. It depends though. If for whatever reason I were to execute a painting, an installation, or do my printing process in New York, for example, I may travel to the printers to supervise the printing process and ensure that everything is as it should be. I would then have the work of art delivered to the buyer, collector, commissioner, or patron.
If a work of art gets destroyed will you replace it? This is an important question, one that I have often discussed in my curatorial lectures. The answer is: yes, if I am alive and, after that, if I agreed with the buyer and the collector the curatorial guidelines in the sale’s contract on how to substitute the work. If the work is destroyed after I am gone, there will be a series of legally-binding frameworks in place. It is of course easier to substitute or replicate a work of art that is made from a digital file than something made of marble that is destroyed. Although, in some cases, I have left guidelines on how to do that if it should happen. Legally, I am not obliged to substitute anything after it has left the premises. I will consider it and generally do it if they are works of art that can be printed or can be executed mechanically, with a clear understanding that the owner will cover the production costs. It is more complex and nuanced if it is a painting, an installation, or a sculpture.
Is it true that you sign your works of art with your blood? Yes, this is true. I sign all the works of art on the back with a bloody fingerprint together with my signature, the title of the work, and the date of creation. Also, the work is photographed and registered with a lawyer with the name and information of the buyer to ensure proper documentation.
Is it true that you destroy your works of art and why do you do that? Yes, it is true. Over the years I have destroyed many of them. I never wanted to keep storage facilities since I am not a museum or a collector. Also, scarcity increases value.
For example, this recent slate of works of art for the Venice Architecture Biennale will be destroyed after a few years, if unsold or not acquired by a museum. Their value will be added to the cost of the next group of works of art.
My time, all my expenses to gain my accumulated experience, my travels, my living expenses, and the hardware, software, tools, and materials I use for a work of art or a series have a cost.
Can you explain that better? My costs of living include my education (my MA and my Ph.D.), the travels to attend exhibitions and conferences, books to buy, the materials for the works of art, the software and hardware, and all the related costs to function and create in a post-postcapitalistic environment. Then there is the time that goes into the creation of the works of art. The costs of keeping a studio, a house, and paying all the related bills necessary for a professional creative environment. These are costs that many people do not factor in. All of these costs are calculated in the pricing of my works of art.
Is it true that you currently are selling time? Yes, I am currently selling yearly slots of my time. It is an experiment and I am curious to see how people will react to it. All the works of art produced during that year belong to the buyer. It can be more convenient for buyers, collectors, commissioners, and patrons to own a year’s worth of production around a specific theme. 2022 is dedicated to a project titled The Lady and the Revolutionary Parrot.
It is a bargain for the buyers and it frees my mind. At the end of the year, the buyer will get a minimum of twelve works of art or more. It depends on the type of project I am working on. I have not invented anything new, I have gone back in time and adopted old practices of mecenatism and patronage.
Do you or the buyer choose the project? This depends on the buyer. If I can realize the project I want, theme unknown and no questions asked, the year is less costly than if I were to be commissioned for a project that the commissioner had chosen from a list of projects I had proposed to them or something that they chose they wanted me to realize around a specific theme, issue, or location they were to propose.
Do you have a slate of projects to choose from? Yes. I have a long list of projects that I want to realize. Unfortunately, I have only thirty years ahead of me, if I am lucky, and therefore there are only thirty yearly projects that I can reasonably realize. As time passes it will become more and more expensive to purchase a year of work.
This is because with age I will need assistants, I will be slower, and there will be cumulated costs from previous years.
Can one buy more than a year? Yes, people can buy as many years as they wish to. All thirty years if they want. The structure is well-thought-out and flexible enough to satisfy the specific needs of buyers, collectors, commissioners, and patrons. Even if they wish to realize a really large and complex project.
Why do you sell time? For two reasons: 1) I want to spend my time doing works of art, solely concentrating on creating as my main activity; and 2) I want to realize a series of art projects that I believe are important. Selling time yearly allows me to have the peace of mind of being able to do so.
What if you don’t sell anything, works of art or time? I will keep producing works of art as I do now. The costs of today and the past years will continue to accumulate on future works of art, making them even more costly.
Perhaps, at some point while I am alive, I will finally be ‘discovered’ and given some long-awaited award for my artistic career and my acceptance speech will be something along these lines, which many may have thought of at least once in their lives but no one has dared to give: Well, it took you, bastards, long enough to realize I am a genius. I would like to thank myself. Fuck you all. Thank you very much. Good night!
WHO IS MY FAVORITE BUYER?
My favorite buyer is someone who has already decided what they want and like. They looked online thoroughly and with calm and have found the works of art that they want to have. They may have an issue with sizes, particularly when it comes down to prints or photographic prints. In this case, I am inclined to slightly alter sizes, with the clear understanding that only one print will be produced at that particular size. No other print of the same work of art will be ever done, not even at a different size. The price will not change if the size is smaller – as someone asked once. While it is relatively reasonable and easy to print at different sizes, I find that alterations in the size of paintings and sculptures lead to a new painting or sculpture. In this case, when the alterations are substantial, the work and time investment required starts to take more the shape of a commission. For example, I am not one of those artists who gets annoyed if someone wants to commission a painting with a particular color or with a set of measurements already pre-established.
On the contrary, I find it interesting and a challenge.
I find it less interesting when I am asked if a particular work of art already realized could be made in a different color or a different manner. There is a very strong set of reasons why a work of art looks the way it does. To ask to alter it means to ask the artist to alter the process of creation and the thinking behind it to bend the work to a need that has nothing to do with art and all with design and commodification. The answer, in this particular case, is always no. The reason is that art is being cheapened to respond to conditions that have little to do with art itself and a lot to do with a lack of understanding of what artistic processes are. If as a buyer you believe that a question like this seems normal and obvious to ask of an artist it means that we interpret art in a very different fundamental manner. I am principally interested in buyers who have an understanding of what fine art and artistic processes are and can distinguish them, at least intuitively, from design processes. For me, art is not made to solve a need or a decorating problem but to share a vision.
As I stated, in the case of works of art that are printed, the exclusive right of the buyer purchasing it has only one exception: it does not apply to museum or gallery exhibitions. The reason is simple, I retain the right to alter and produce previous works of art in different contexts and adaptations for museums and gallery exhibits only, not for further commercial purposes. For example: if I realized a photograph at 67 cm. x 100 cm. and sold it, I reserve the right to create a version 6700 cm. x 10000 cm. or to print that image on vases or cloth, for example, to use it in a video, or project it on a wall. The reason for this is that I wish to retain the freedom of production of works of art for future exhibitions.
This will also increase the value of the original work since being exhibited in international venues, in its original form or any other form, is one way that a work of art’s value increases. A knowledgeable buyer knows and understands this. Also, should something like this happen, I always ask if the buyer is interested in purchasing the new work of art or to purchase it and donate it to the museum where it has been exhibited with the clear indication that is their donation to that particular institution. The original buyers always have a right of first refusal. When buyers decide to support a new production for a museum’s exhibition or collection, particularly if they are buyers that I have known over the years, the works of art are priced accordingly.
I always keep in mind who has supported me in the first stages of my career. This is also the reason why I prefer buyers who will allow museums to borrow and exhibit works of art, who feel as invested as I am, and who have the intention of being part of my journey.
My ideal buyer is someone that enjoys my works of art, but who also understands that they have a responsibility towards the works of art themselves in ensuring their visibility, when necessary, by sharing them with the world to see.
It might happen at times that even seasoned buyers are uncertain about the works of art to buy. They are unsure for a complex set of reasons: is the new aesthetic area that I am exploring worthy of support? Or, is it too challenging and it will not provide them with a long-term investment value? I always suggest getting something that speaks to the buyer, forgetting everything else. No matter the reason for making the purchase or the need that it should absolve, I always suggest to my buyers to choose something that they are drawn to or challenged by. I have seen people displaying third-rate works of art by contemporary artists as a way of confirming their status with everyone knowing that despite the amounts disbursed the works of art would not hold their value. Art is a long-term game, in my view, and what may not be in fashion today will be highly prized tomorrow, and what is considered fantastic now might be outmoded and of no value in the near future. But more than that, for me it is a piece of my soul placed on the wall to speak to people.
For this reason, I demand more of my buyers and ask them to almost behave like collectors.
WHO IS MY FAVORITE COLLECTOR?
There is a difference between buyers and collectors. Although collectors are buyers and buyers might become collectors, the main difference is that a collector will own multiple pieces of an artist’s production.
My favorite collector is someone who enjoys my work, understands its roots, and emotively connects with it. Someone that wants to have it for themselves and keep it, more than turning a quick buck around. Someone that attaches greater value to their intellectual and emotive ability to have jumped on my bandwagon earlier on, more than someone who arrives at the last minute to get something, now that everyone else is doing so. I prefer an earlier adopter and shaper of taste to a follower of trends and fads. This expectation of collecting and collection generation generally goes a long way to explain why there are some rules I have put in place with my lawyer, to ensure that my works of art have a) scarcity, b) are easily identifiable, and c) are tracked every time they change hands.
This is of course my understanding of what a collector should be. Today, this understanding of collecting as supporting is an approach that is becoming more and more common as collectors understand the importance of their role and ask to be more than just wallets that financially support galleries and artists. They want to feel emotively connected to the works of art and the artists that produce them. They wish to share an understanding of life that is embodied in a work of art or wish to share a common goal in the realization of a project, small or large that it may be, in the development and betterment of their collection.
I cannot refrain from using Eraclitus’ phrase: “One is worth one hundred thousand to me and nothing the masses.” It is not an elitist philosophical approach, as interpreted by a large part of the Anglo-Saxon scholarship that has reduced and vulgarized a valued pre-Socratic philosopher, but it is a statement on the quality of the emotive engagement between two people. It is about ‘connection.’ It is about that emotive engagement, that goes under the name of sympathy (σῠμπ&θειᾰ in its original Greek form), or moto dell’anima (flight of the soul) that stands for suffering together or for sharing an idea and an understanding of life. It is the certainty and the emotion that arises from knowing that two people are sharing a particular journey or a passion in life.
This is why I find it important to engage with my collectors and to acknowledge the sheer joy that arises by finding someone else who sees and acknowledges my aesthetic interpretation of life and current events. If you can’t recognize and engage with my vision and my emotions as well as acknowledge and respect them, why should I engage with you? What for? Money, particularly in the age of the pandemic, is no longer a good enough reason and for me it never was.
Therefore, I would expect of a collector that they will find my work interesting, either because it fits within the material remits of their collection, or within the conceptual framework, or because they are interested in the structure of my work.
Whatever the reason for a purchase, I believe that a way to best serve a collection is through a commission. A collector needs to commission artists to produce works of art in response to their collection. I have done that in the past and I have noticed that commissioning artists generates new works of art that might become seminal moments in the history of art in addition to adding value to a collection.
The events surrounding the commissioning of the Seagram Murals by Mark Rothko and how they came about make a clear point: great art is quite often the result of contrasts, clashing, and differences that arise out of the ability, of the artist and the commissioner, to take a chance. Or, as in the case of The Rothko Chapel, commissioned by John and Dominique de Menil, a moment in which three people join forces in creating a masterpiece from what initially appeared to be a failed commission.
WHO IS MY FAVORITE COMMISSIONER?
Commissions are tricky. I have found over the years that it is better if I don’t paint portraits. There is something about my work that upsets the sitter and the commissioner. I have in my portraits a certain psychological bluntness that translates into a virulent representation of sensed intimacies in the painting. I do not paint portraits of people as they are but how I sense they are, which creates long and exhausting discussions on why I did it in the first place, where my inspiration came from, if they gave out those vibes, and if it wasn’t better for me to censor myself a little bit because they felt violated in their intimacy. It is since the 1990s that I have not painted a portrait. I just don’t want to deal with the palava of the sitter and the commissioner. In this sense, I understand Lucian Freud and his barrier of silence to avoid fraught relationships with his sitters.
Once I upset the person that commissioned the work and the sitter, the fiancé, by painting a portrait that showcased them through what I felt was the sense of their relationship. Obviously, drama ensued and I ended up not being paid with a portrait at home of two people whom I had upset by doing what they asked, in the manner I thought best, and following their guidelines. All that work and time to be paid in return with grief and upset. I had that painting hanging on my wall as a constant reminder of failure and of the unpaid expenses and time. The sitter is a body, a collection of experiences made flesh that the artist captures and renders not in its beauty but in a dramatic rendering of scars past, present, and future. At least that was what this artist tried to do.
A few years ago I saw the same couple at Art Basel in Miami and they said that they had come to realize that they loved the portrait I had done of them since it shed light on the true nature of their relationship. They were apologetic for what had happened and asked if I was willing to sell it to them. Unfortunately, I had to tell them that I had burnt it in one of my cleansing fires.
Most commissions are for portraits of people, so this limits my field. Although I am thinking that at some point I should perhaps restart painting human subjects. There is also the fact that I don’t believe in taking up commissions with too many restrictions.
I enjoy taking up new aesthetic challenges – last year I realized a series of sculptures with vegetables and strings. Nevertheless, I also have come to understand that I enjoy a certain degree of freedom and I increasingly tend to favor commissions that, like in the case of The Rothko Chapel, offer the opportunity for greater freedom, support, and trust in the realization of a project.
Commissions are a huge investment of time, effort, and emotive engagement (at least for me). It is an attempt to make two visions collide by refining expectations, thoughts, and ideas. My system of art producing is based on a process that lets things unfold and develop leading to a final stage in which all the pieces fall in place harmoniously and coherently, at least according to my logic.
A commission that restricts me too much, not just in the theme or the size or the medium of the work of art but also in the process, is something I generally avoid.
If I am bound to the commissioning process so tightly that alterations and deviations which might render the work of art more interesting and exciting to me become forbidden, then generally speaking I tend to refuse. It is like, for me at least, mutilating the potential of the work of art and its development. It is for this reason that I prefer commissioners who leave me free to follow my aesthetic creative process. There are very few people willing to trust in the artist’s aesthetic development process. I was incredibly lucky with the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale because I was left free by the curator to explore, develop, and create, following the nature and the potential of the works of art themselves.
If by taking up the commission I end up doing more than what was agreed, that ‘more’ stays with the commissioner. It is my way to say thank you but also a way of ensuring that a coherent body of work emerges from the commission and it is not just a violent imposition of rules. This is the reason why I prefer commissions to be time-bound. This allows for works of art to be developed around a theme, with the use of a specific medium or material, or by responding to a particular public or private space, during a specific time-span, leaving me free in the development of the works of art.
WHO IS MY FAVORITE PATRON?
I have three favorite patrons. One has died two thousand and thirteen years ago, from the time I am writing this post, and the other I am unsure ever existed. I also liked another patron, this one is the third, that I had in New York in the early ‘90s who allowed me to perform by sitting on a shelf in his loft as if I were a work of art during one of his lavish parties. I sat there for the whole night until everyone left. It was the best experience with a patron and the worst experience I had as a performer. To be considered for all intents and purposes as an object after a few seconds of explanations, “Oh, it is an artwork!”, and to be treated like any other object of the house and to be ignored as a human being was more daunting of what I had expected. It was what I wanted and it had worked perfectly, giving me insight into the nature of categorization and social commodification, a topic a was interested in and continued exploring ever since.
I think patronage is difficult. It demands that patrons genuinely like, empower, and invest in the artists they support. I am not here to write an essay on the malaise of contemporary patronage, but I am interested in showing examples of the type of patronage I believe is constructive and fruitful. I have witnessed patronage, and there are historical examples of it, where there was too much do ut des for my liking.
An excellent example, although it seems more of a legend, of what good patronage is can be found in Italo Calvino’s book, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, at the end of the chapter On Quickness.
“Among Chuan-tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years,’ said Chuang-tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen.”
We don’t know who the king was. We don’t know if he ever existed. If the whole story has even a glimmer of truth. This is not the point though. The point is not even the methods and processes chosen by Chuang-tzu for the creation of the crab, that is speed, on which Calvino focuses. The point is that “the most perfect crab ever seen” had been made thanks to ten years of aesthetic and financial investments. The speed of art production, its immediate realization, and its standardization are approaches characterized by the greed of production in which the focus shifts from the work of art to the bank account.
It took Chuang-tzu, already an expert draftsman, ten years before he was able to realize “the most perfect crab ever seen” in only “an instant” and with “a single stroke”. But the quickness of the execution in that instant and with that single brush stroke had to be preceded by ten years of work, research, preparation, testing, exercising, and thinking. The king made those ten years possible so that both he and Chuang-tzu could reach the same objective. I guess the lesson I took from Calvino’s recounting of Chuang-tzu was not one of quickness but one of hard work, mutual trust, and unwavering patience in the reaching of a shared goal.
If the king was a mythological figure, part of legends and perhaps someone who never existed, Gaius Maecenas (c. 70 – 8 BC), from whom the word mecenatism has derived, was a personal friend of the Roman Emperor Augustus and the most influential cultural sponsor of his time.
His approach was very similar to that of the king in Chuang-tzu’s story. Maecenas was perhaps slightly more pragmatic, the works of art sponsored had to align to an idea and vision of the Roman Empire that could make a mark in the field of history. In this he perhaps merged art with propaganda for the first time, creating a conundrum that has beleaguered art and artists ever since. Ernst H. Gombrich writing on “Art and Propaganda” for The Listener, December 7, 1939, brings an interesting case in which art is used to send a clear socio-political message.
“A little known incident, related by the Czech chronicler Václav Hájek (1541), may serve to illustrate its effect in far remote days. In the year 1404 two English students of theology Jacobus and Conradus from ‘Kandelburg’ (Canterbury) came to the University of Prague. They proved to be so fond of discussion and of raising unorthodox questions concerning the Pope and his spiritual powers that they were suspected of Wyclifite heresies and were finally warned to guard their tongues lest they came to grief. The threat silenced them but could not make them surrender. They asked the innkeeper of the Black Scythe where they had taken lodgings, a certain Lucas Wlensky, to allow them to have one of his rooms decorated. When he gladly consented to such an unexpected offer, they ordered a painter to represent on one side of the hall the life and passion of Christ in all its humble simplicity, and on the wall opposite the life and conduct of the Pope in all its contrasting pomp and glory. No comment was needed. We may well imagine the sensation which these pictures caused at Prague. Jan Hus, then a young priest, approved of them publicly in his sermons, and incidentally the Black Scythe must have prospered.”
Gombrich although understands the innate danger of art being bent to other finalities which are not its own, also understands and points out the role of power in supporting the freedom for the realization of a work of art.
“But in spite of so much evidence to the contrary, power can succeed in making art its spokesman. If it is only broadminded enough to foster its growth without interfering, art in itself, art pure and simple, becomes the most powerful, the most lasting propaganda.”
I guess all of this to say that I prefer commissioners and patrons who will use their power, financial and otherwise, without interfering with the processes of art.
MULTIPLE CHOICES FOR MULTIPLE PEOPLE
In conclusion, to recap it all, I am the sort of artist who, although likes an aesthetic challenge, prefers to be free in his work processes and outcomes. There are many artists that feel comfortable with having strict parameters within which to work.
Since I prefer experimentation in my work to develop new aesthetic approaches, I need more freedom in the artistic process to explore different avenues.
Although there is merit in repetition, I feel more at home with trying something new. I believe that seminal moments in the history of art have been made by those who experimented and broke the mold and not by those who simply toed the line. If I had the money or the influence thirty years ago I would have supported the careers of Rebecca Belmore or Angela Davis.
If you are someone interested in commissioning, sponsoring, or being a patron reflect perhaps on the possibility of sponsoring a public space performance, a video, a public or private intervention, an unusual sculptural project, an innovative painting, a new media work of art, or a catalog publication. These are media that have become part of the canons of art history and that were shunned fifty years ago.
In the satirical words of Guy Richards Smit who drew a caricature of a man giving an award to an elderly woman in a wheelchair: “On behalf of the Institute, I’d like to thank you for accepting this long overdue acknowledgment of your artistic achievements and not just telling us to go fuck ourselves.” Exactly the opposite of what I wrote at the beginning of this post.
Therefore, my approach is simple: if you are a late arrival to the game, that’s ok, but to reach the point where I am at, the point where you feel secure to invest in my art, I had to spend money and time for over thirty years, both of which now are cumulated in the pricing of my works of art. There was a cost and this cost is factored in the current pricing, and costs will continue to cumulate yearly. I couldn’t disagree more with how Saatchi Art suggests to price works of art, by the inch.
I believe, like any other capitalistic endeavor, works of art should be priced considering investments, time, and expenditures. Nevertheless, I have decided to experiment with the Saatchi Art platform to see if it might be possible to achieve more of the freedom that I require to continue producing works of art.
As an artist, I also have a rather large mission statement: To create art that will shape culture for centuries to come. With such a statement it is not so easy to find collectors or commissioners who might identify with that particular goal. Nevertheless, there are people that over time have jumped on my bandwagon and have supported me in the realization of an art project or commissioned a particular painting or sculpture.
I wrote all of this to provide you (buyer, collector, commissioner, and patron) with an idea of what the fundamentals of my artistic practice are, how much I care, and what I’d like to achieve. Also, I spoke freely of the difficult act of balancing the demands of material restrictions that are part of a commission with the need for freedom of artistic production.
If you felt that through this writing I spoke to you, contact me with a brief of what you would like me to consider or with the pleasant news that you wish to buy a year of my time leaving me free to pursue a project of my own or one that you would like to choose. If commissioning is not for you, you can always buy one of the works of art you might happen to like and that is for sale on Saatchi Art.
If instead, by chance, you wish to ‘patronize’ me, well you are more than welcome to do so. I am always curious and willing to take new challenges head-on and to discover the opportunities that life has to offer.
The year 2022 is for sale here on Saatchi Art.
[1] Commissioner and commissionee are equivalent to employer and employee. They who order the creation of the work of art (commission) are called commissioners. The artist who accepts the commission to produce the work of art for the commissioner is called commissionee.
“Silence does not mean surrender!” Lanfranco Aceti, Athens, 2018. Performance. Curated by Artemis Potamianou.
Peripheral but not Irrelevant: Peripheries’ Contribution to the Centrality of the Globalized Cities (Periferico ma non Irrilevante: Il contributo delle Periferie alla Centralità delle Città Globalizzate) is the talk that I will give to discuss some of my recent artworks installed at and performed as part of the Italian Pavilion, Resilient Communities, curated by Alessandro Melis for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. The talk will be based upon a recent performance realized in Rome in piazza del Campidoglio, the square designed by Michelangelo, as a collaboration between the Italian Pavilion and the Festival delle Periferie, directed by Giorgio de Finis for the Museo delle Periferie. Peripheral but not Irrelevant will take place at the Teatro di Tor Bella Monaca, on Sunday, May 23, 2021, 15:00 in the IPER Spazio hall, https://iperfestival.it/programma/ .
The images and video discussed at the Festival delle Periferie are part of a new collection of works of art titled Tools for Catching Clouds and belong to the overarching larger work of art titled Preferring Sinking to Surrender installed at the Italian Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale.
Aceti’s recent body of works of art continues to engage with notions of democracy, resilience and resistance, alternative imaginaries, and counter-narratives that are kept alive, embodied, and narrated by the bodies of gender and racial minorities. The conceptualization of these works of art was developed and researched in 2017/2018 as part of a one year affiliation at ACT @ MIT.
The talk will analyze what roles the peripheries, and the people rendered peripheral, can play in determining the success or failure of the great centralized centers of power. Can the periphery propose alternatives to an idea of society and living that is centralized and centralizing and by its nature, destined to gigantism and correlated problems, and therefore not sustainable, and inexorably expanding until reaching the moment of collapse?
The artist will present the performance filmed in Rome and related works of art realized for the Padiglione Italia, Comunità Resilienti, in collaboration with the Museo delle Periferie. The performance will see its focal point in the cities of Rome and Venice to be then presented in other European and world cities. Aceti considers art and architecture as structures that the ‘body’ can alter by offering new narratives and behaviors. The performance contrasts the demands of the ‘center’ with the instances of the resilient communities of the peripheries, using the white flag as the canvas upon which personal histories, deemed ‘irrelevant’ and relegated to the footnotes of history by official historiography, can actually be written.
The artist acknowledges the support of the Italian Pavilion and of the Museo delle Periferie.
With thanks for location scouting to: https://www.cassinoadventure.com .
“One world approved thy wisdom; another, mine.” Antigone, Sophocles
Zero Fucks to Give is a work of art for Platforms Project, Athens, Greece, May 14-31, 2020. It consists of a talk, a manifesto, and a video performance. It is part of a larger set of artworks started in 2017 with the same title. Zero Fucks to Give: A Talk, a Manifesto, and a Work of Art revolves around the concept of personal freedom, right and wrong, and one’s standing within society. It explores aesthetic issues as well as the conditions within which artists and curators operate in the 2020’s.
This particular work of art, together with the series that it belongs to, encapsulates the reactions of those who have been socially distanced for a long time already. Distances within society have never been the same for everybody—forms of social distancing, seclusion, exclusion, and segregation have always existed and have become only too visibile in the past twenty years. The works of art face up to the hypocrisy of contemporary discourses and the idiotic aesthetic responses to the structures of social exploitation of contemporary advanced capitalism. This is a form of capitalism which announces its concern and willingness to show a more humane face only to revert back the policies of ‘society first’ as soon as they are no longer necessary to protect itself. Then, and only then—once out of danger—this capitalism reverts to long historical policies, never abandoned, of culling the masses. This last piroette happens when the danger is truly circumscribed to those who do not count or have ‘no relevance’ within society.
Therefore, the artist continues his exploration of themes related to social upheaval, labor exploitation, crises, racial and gender discrimination, political and economic failures, populism, anger, and violence—the apocalypse in a few words—not because of temporary fashionable fads, but because he has always been concerned with social inequality.
The video work, curated by Artemis Potamianou, announces an artwork within an artwork. Simultaneously to Zero Fucks to Give, Aceti announces a new body of work entitled Trans-Mutations. These new artworks consist of the artist shedding his physical form and becoming embodied for a biennium in someone else: a young Serbian artist, Dea Džanković. She is the performer and artist that Aceti has chosen to embody him in Zero Fucks to Give and to be the first body occupied for the first biennium of Trans-Mutations.
“The themes of the videos, layered through the complexity of recent events, bring the viewer through a journey that constantly challenges perceptions and established stereotypes,” said Artemis Potamianou, explaining the spectacle of truth as absurd reality realized by Aceti through what appears a simple video-talk format. She also added that “the work of art absurdly reveals the hypocrisy of our contemporary societies and at the same time offers a challenging view on the roles that we all play in the simulacral construction of art representation.”
“Even if you encounter opposition, have conviction and finish what you start. People in the end will understand.”
Kotoko Wamura
Living After the Apocalypse is a curatorial proposal I conceived and developed when I was invited to submit a conceptual framework for an art and architectural biennial in 2011. While I was writing and preparing the proposal an earthquake happened in Japan and the city of Fukushima and its surrounding areas were flooded by a Tsunami and covered by the radioactive fallout following the collapse of a nearby nuclear plant. Certain that the events would make my proposal even more relevant — floods, fires, and disease were and are projected to increase due to environmental stability — I kept on working and tried to explain what the title meant, what the biennial would have been like, and what type of events would take place.
The proposal was not selected.
I have enough experience to understand that work is never wasted, at some point or another with enough time somehow my themes or approaches will become relevant or someone will acknowledge their importance.
The focus of the proposal is incredibly relevant today, ten years later, and will continue to be relevant in years to come. The blind and self-centered optimism that has characterized the past fifty years, the arrogance of anthropocentrism, the certainty that this is life and not a fragile instance of it, appear to have continuously led human ingenuity to the point of collapse.
Granted that the theme I had chosen for the biennial was complex, I did not feel that there was any pessimism in it — although this was one of the reasons for its rejection. On the contrary, I felt that there was a positive approach in seeking solutions and resolutions to humanity’s problems. Using technology and ensuring access to it, changing and shaping behaviors through design, altering and understanding the roles of art, architecture, and engineering not as knee-jerk responses to disasters but as tools able — if not to prevent possible disasters on a global scale — to at least allow communities and people’s standards of living to continue after the apocalypse is, in my mind, the best way of acting positively and proactively. The problem was the premise upon which the theoretical and philosophical constructs of the biennale were based: the acknowledgement of the incapacity of humanity as a whole to alter its course. Therefore, the obligation to accept — at least in hypothetical terms — the inevitability of disaster.
The concept was simple: what if we have run out of time and it is no longer possible to stave off disaster? Shouldn’t we be using art, architecture, design, technology, and scientific thought to reimagine and redesign a) the way we live and b) to adapt to the new landscapes that we might be forced to live in? The possibility that something might happen, or the certainty that it might happen in a not too distant future, does not spur humanity to action. The irrational greed of today, under the disguise of economics, trumps even future losses. Even when it is economic folly not to prepare for the future by sacrificing a little today in order to avoid major economic losses tomorrow.
Living after the apocalypse was the main focus of the proposal. How can we continue to keep on living by retaining the same standards of life, and perhaps even try to improve them in the midst of disasters? Is it possible to reduce the impact of a catastrophe to zero or even take advantage of it? Can we reimagine the disaster in financial terms as an opportunity for gaining knowledge, expertise, and also financial remuneration since research has its costs? This was a tangential point to the proposal but one I had to make since the only way to attract sponsors is to show them how they can monetize any given situation, and I thought that this would interest international brands in architecture, design, and engineering. I had not calculated the extent of the myopic perspective of most CEOs. In their terms as well as in political terms, preparing for a disaster today that might happen ten or fifty years later is a useless endeavor if considered in the context of contemporary short-term approaches.
These days I believe the curatorial proposal I wrote ten years ago might have a slightly different reception.
In the proposal the concept of living was meant as continuing to go about one’s business without much disruption or with no effort. It was a way of considering contemporary dystopia not as an unfathomable accident but as a certain disaster that would happen sooner or later in the timeline of one’s existence. Philosophically the proposal would also examine the inability of humanity to act collectively and outside the remits of greed. It would pit the local against the global, to argue that the survival of the local against global interests would represent the best chance for human survival and the preservation of a nation state. Therefore, the concept of living was juxtaposed to the concepts of surviving, scrounging, stripping, lingering, sustaining oneself, clinging, pulling through, and all the other synonyms that would imply a basic existence.
Living After the Apocalypse was meant to find tools and ways of living in harmony, living with comfort, living with joy, and living in symbiosis with the natural environment. The proposal had at its core the following idea: let’s assume that global warming will happen, nuclear disasters will plague the earth, earthquakes and tsunamis will strike with greater force and more frequently, and that pandemics are normal, and let’s see what we can invent to redesign public and private spaces accordingly and what role art can play as a cultural and creative human endeavor in this context. Let’s see if we might continue to live without mass culling, the solution of most disaster movies and some ‘politicians’ over the centuries, but instead with a gradual reduction in population growth in order to save resources.
Today, at the time of COVID19 and an accelerated climate change bringing increased meteorological destructions, it would have been rather useful to have a reimagined structure of our society with emergency response technologies ready to be deployed. For those venture capitalists out there, who do not venture very far, these response technologies could be sold to anyone who might want them and could afford to pay for them in their dire moment of need. The current gains of the pharmaceutical industry show how profitable investing in ‘future disasters’ can be, no matter what they are: flooding, fire, earthquakes, tsunamis, or diseases.
The possibilities for creative ideas and technological deployment are immense, particularly if we can reimagine social interactions, architectural spaces, and scientific approaches. If it could be possible to develop small peripheral communities as test beds of survival techniques and methodologies, the sharing of their accumulated knowledge might be able to provide opportunities for the survival of a form of centralized state. Nevertheless, this approach clashes with the need for bureaucratic control and the fear of change. Autonomy has always been considered an enemy and smallness something to be overcome in favor of bigness and centralization.
Technological examples of what could be an alternative to large architectural buildings for hospitals could be offered by the concept behind the SciFi medical pods, the best of which is from Armadyne, realized for the movie Elysium (2013). The medical pod, for those who are fashion conscious, is stylishly designed by Versace. These pods could be deployed in public spaces.
The lack of preparedness that was exposed by the Covid19 worldwide events or by the Fukushima Nuclear Plant’s collapse open up larger socio-political questions that both as an artist and curator I feel I should ask:
The last question is one that I can answer: the mandate of art institutions and of the artist should be that of having the courage to shape cultural and aesthetic agendas ahead of time by anticipating the future and presenting projects that are challenging, unusual, and thought-provoking and able to provide the viewer with multiple scenarios of aesthetic thinking and knowledge. The role of art institutions and artists is certainly not that of running after fashions, corporate dictates, and pandering to and entertaining audiences, like most art organizations have done in order to demonstrate their success. A different aesthetic model — one that is more in tune with and more inclusive of contemporary social, financial, and environmental issues — should be put in place.
In my biennial proposal, Living After the Apocalypse, I wanted to institute a prize named after the former mayor of Fudai in Japan, Kotoko Wamura, who out of sheer vision, memory of previous historical events, and unwavering foresight initiated and supported the construction in the 1960s of a 50 foot sea wall that was able to withstand the force and waves of the 2011 tsunami. His vision, at the time, was considered a folly. Nevertheless, he completed the construction of the wall, saving the lives of 3000 people in 2011. Sadly, he was no longer alive when his foresight saved the very people who had considered him mad and ostracized him for the amount of money that he spent on a wall that they thought useless. This proposed prize conceived for the unrealized biennial, Living After the Apocalypse, was to be awarded to the most daring and visionary idea coming from artists, architects, designers, and engineers.
LIVING AFTER THE APOCALYPSE (The Original Proposal 2011 © Lanfranco Aceti)
Living After the Apocalypse started from the assumption that humanity is no longer able to avert environmental catastrophes: harsher weather conditions, rising sea levels, pandemics, earthquakes, tsunamis, and human made disasters. Therefore, how could we redesign, build, and create communities that are able to survive the collapse of a centralized and inept (at best) system of management of services and production?
The proposal for the [name withheld] biennial, Living After The Apocalypse, embodies a message strongly focused on human agency, following cultural traditions of pro-active and farseeing engagement, in opposition to visual imageries of mere survival — as in traditional dystopian visual representations that only offer and fetishize visions of collapsed and dysfunctional architectural, urban, and social landscapes.
The curatorial concept for the exhibition and the conference, the two main outputs of the biennial, proposes to launch an international message of positivity, empowerment, and human agency. By stressing the word ‘living’ the exhibitions, conference, and art/cultural events will place emphasis on contemporary art, architecture, design, and engineering as the key factors that — by envisaging the future landscape and focusing on retaining living standards in the face of contemporary crises (economic, social, political, and environmental) — will make the difference between succumbing to disaster, mere survival, and living after the apocalypse.
The biennial will launch the message that foresight, advanced thinking and planning, research, and creativity can lead the way in pre-empting future crises and developing new architectural models, service systems, cultural frameworks, aesthetic thinking, and technologies that can ensure living standards even after the apocalypse.
The biennial will reject the idea that the apocalypse is a disaster that communities have to succumb to or that cannot recover from. It will launch a series of initiatives (research groups, project incubators, exhibitions, and cultural events) that by uniting the creativity of contemporary arts, architecture, advanced technology, new scientific thinking, and innovative social models can provide alternative solutions to the traditional representations of inevitable disaster and doom.
The biennial will acknowledge the foresight and planning of visionary artists, architects, designers, and engineers who are able to imagine and present a future for a quality of life in spite of pending theories of doom. The biennial will seek to empower these visionaries and at the same time acknowledge the possibility that humanity, as a collective global force, will not be able to avert the current environmental, social, economic, and political crises that mark the current post-postmodern world. Therefore, those who can should think, invent, create, and act.
Focusing on the spirit that characterizes the hosting country and allows it to present itself as a safe haven, the theme of this curatorial proposal is to present the hosting city and the hosting country as the locus where art, architecture, design, science, media, and technology meet in order to deliver a positive message of future sustainability and resilience despite and in spite of current global representations and incidents of doom and conflict.
Credits
The images in the post are from: Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp, 2013.
The images in the slider are two sketches of Anemone: The Data Gate, Lanfranco Aceti, 2011.
Digital Media and Democracy, aka From Democracy to Post-Citizenship is a panel I am organizing at MIT for the Media in Transition 10 conference entitled Democracy and Digital Media with the assistance of Rob Halperin. The panel was developed following the encouragement of Professor William Uricchio, Department of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. The panel seeks to engage with and discuss issues related to contemporary populism, art representations, aesthetic social engagements, and revolts as represented and mediatized in twenty-first century visual media. The panel will take place May 18, 2019, in Classroom 66-160 from 3:15 PM to 4:45 PM. Thanks to Deniz Cem Onduygu for the poster and to the Goethe Institut Boston for their gracious support.
From Democracy to Post-Citizenship: The Art of Populism and Revolt in Twenty-First Century Visual Media
Lanfranco Aceti [chair]
The Western World is currently grappling with the rise of a populism that, if it is characterized either by a right-wing or left-wing ideology, is also based on an idea of purity that has its roots in the Donatist heresy (fourth century AD) that has since become the slogan of reformist movements within the Western World as well as the accusation leveled by counter-reformists.
The failure of democracy, and the state’s transformation into a digital media corporate governance for the few, has created a perfect storm of anger and resentment.
The return to purity, to a golden Arcadian democracy, is seen in dichotomic terms that identify anything that is existing, current, and institutionalized as the swamp of nefariousness. As such the swamp and anything that is swampy has to be drained and cleansed.
The panel will discuss the possibility that we are moving beyond anger and entering a new globalized phase of violent economic class confrontation (visible across all media) between the plebs (seen and condemned as such by the elites of the right and left) and anything or anyone that is seen as establishment (independently of their ideological affiliation).
The transnational nature of these movements speaks of a generalized malaise that is dependent upon economic structures of social exclusion which, similarly to the enclosure in Britain, segregate large sections of the populations in economic slavery.
No longer stakeholders in these societies, why is it a surprise that post-citizens, left and right, are now willing to tear institutions down and start anew?
Panelists’ Abstracts
The Alarm Bell Rang in the Silence: Witnessing and Memorializing Democracy through New Media
Lanfranco Aceti
The arrival of Donald J. Trump—and the populist movements across Europe—was all but a surprise to a few intellectuals. While signs of social crisis and cracks in the new post-democratic corporate order were perceptible across social media, the ‘majority’ lived in a faulty consensus that displayed a self-delusional inability to read and understand the mood of anger and disenchantment in the populus.
The traditional media presentation of post-democracy—a defective ideal of democracy with lower expectations as the best of all possible worlds—did not perceive the revolutionary charge of digital media visual imageries. If post-democracy is a lesser democracy and as such slipping towards dictatorship, where is the point at which democracy through post-democracy becomes dictatorship? What is the number of people that can be cut out from society in the name of economic gains before the social body collapses?
The Great Recession gave numeric indicators to the amount of people who are necessary to be disenfranchised in order for a ‘democracy’ to slip into a populist frenzy. Nevertheless, is this really a populist frenzy or an easy label for people who have been marginalized, disenfranchised, and forgotten to favor vulture capitalist practices dismantling across the globe post-fascist democratic constitutions?
If democracy is ending, digital media have witnessed and memorialized the confrontational context of the processes of transformation into post-democracy. It is in this visual digital media context that the righteous anger of the ‘forgotten people’ has to be inscribed in the larger issues of social injustice and economic slavery.
Democracy, Slave Revolts, Emotive Data, and New Media
Vincent Brown
Is it possible that there is something in the historical slave revolts in the Caribbeans, but also in other socio-political historical contexts, from which contemporary people can learn? What is the role that collected contemporary data plays in shaping the perceptions and realities of failing democracies across new media? What if the emotive charge of data (both historical and contemporary) that represent the angst and plight of entire populations has been too easily dismissed in the name of scientificity and objectivity, and this has led to faulty interpretations and historical re-interpretation of events?
The essay departs from the recollection and analysis of pre-existing data concerning what may be defined as marginal historical events in the Caribbeans, which nevertheless were inscribed in and part of larger historical shifts rebounding across the globe as historical markers left by imperialistic power struggles and confrontations, and unveils the emotive personal histories and representations that characterize and shape popular moods and mindsets.
Similarly to these historical events, the current socio-political contemporary American history is characterized by minor events and data that are interpreted and constructed aseptically. Decontextualized and vacuumed of any emotive charge these data represent the basis upon which an interpretation of the ‘mood’ of society is constructed.
The essay argues the importance of understanding and fully representing the emotive value of data, the impact that they have on personal and collective histories of small minorities, social groups, and citizens at large if one wants to understand phenomena and movements such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, or #YellowVests.
Populism vs Democracy and Social Media… and other Disasters
Mischa Kuball and Gregor H. Lersch in conversation
In this conversation, Mischa Kuball and Gregor H. Lersch analyze the contemporary artistic and curatorial definitions of public space, democracy, and art. Recently, these three definitions have taken center stage in history and have undergone a substantial change from the interpretations and attributions they had in the 1970s.
The current conversation will serve as a platform to discuss, via the project series public preposition and the exhibition and public art project res.o.nant by Mischa Kuball, the latter presented in the Jewish Museum Berlin from 2017 to 2019. Curator and artist examine the aesthetic and curatorial implications of addressing these topics within an extended socio-cultural context.
The conversation will focus on the relationship between historical sites and their context, using, as one example among others, the Jewish Museum in Berlin and Lersch’s curatorial approach to issues that extend the role of the museum beyond traditional definitions and borders.
Anticipation and interaction in the context of art performances and time-based interventions are the aesthetic tools that the artist employs in order to engage with democratic frameworks and new media. The works of art and projects spring from site-specific analyses of the locus in which they take place. Within their aesthetic structures, they incorporate social, political, or communal specificities and challenge the audience by being fleeting and temporary interventions that rely on the potential of an altered perception of seemingly familiar / suddenly unfamiliar urban and social contexts. These projects ask their viewers to reconsider the modalities of their engagement with democracy, populism, and new media.
Democracy, Performance, Activism, and the Public Domain
Stefanos Tsivopoulos and Vera Ingrid Grant in conversation
In this conversation, Stefanos Tsivopoulos, artist, filmmaker, and lecturer at Parsons, and Vera Ingrid Grant, Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, analyze both the current interchanging social landscape and the way citizens come together in public spaces to voice and claim their rights. There have been countless gatherings, demonstrations, and marches in recent months in the United States and, in many capitals and cities around the world, marching has become a vital tool in the hands of people.
The discussion draws inspiration from Stefanos Tsivopoulos’ One Step Forward Two Steps Back (2017), an ongoing project conceived for the public space—more specifically, conceived as a performance-protest, taking place in front of buildings and other public domains that represent political power. The first edition of the performance took place at the Constitutional Square (Syntagma) of Athens in front of the Greek Parliament, in 2016, and the second in front of the White House in Washington DC, in June 2017.
One Step Forward Two Steps Back is stripped of any political message; there are no shouted slogans, no placards, no bull-horns, and no chanting. It is based on a subtle choreography of 12 performers walking one step forward and two steps back, in silence, for an uninterrupted cycle of 24 hours. The public, the tourists, and the passersby are challenged to observe, inspect, and relate to this palindromic flow of bodies, as activism, as a silent demonstration, a transient sculpture of human bodies, or simply an act that reflects upon our political times.
Cultural Prosthetics: Projections and Instrumentations
Krzysztof Wodiczko
The democratic process depends on the communicative and discursive vitality of the public space.
This demands the creation of psychosocial and cultural conditions for people to open up and fearlessly speak in public, as well as devising the aesthetic and media means and strategies that inspire and assist not only their open communication and expression but also their public reception.
These who are least heard, understood and whose unacceptable life situation and experience is least acknowledged, should be first to receive an opportunity for such communicative project.
Unfortunately, many among them are so overwhelmed by the very experience they may wish to make public –and which we should all hear– that they keep silent. Creating conditions for them to open-up and communicate in the Public Space –and for the public to come closer and listen –requires exceptional help: psychological, cultural, artistic and technological.
My Projections and Instrumentations intend to offer such help. These projects are both psychotherapeutic and political as well as developmental and civic. I call them cultural prosthesis.
In my presentation, I will elaborate on the social, psychological, technological, aesthetic, and design aspects of some of my projections, and instrumentations developed with less privileged city dwellers who for the sake of their own lives, lives of others, and society at large, have made use of such projects to appear, speak, and be heard in the public space.
Biographies
Lanfranco Aceti (artist, curator, and professor, BU/MIT)
Lanfranco Aceti is known for his career as an artist, curator, and academic. He is the founder of The Studium: Lanfranco Aceti Inc., and editor in chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press). He has exhibited and curated internationally and currently is working on empty pr(oe)mises a curatorial project with the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST) as well as a series of new artworks and international performances on populism, democracy, and the body.
Vincent Brown (professor, Harvard)
Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. Brown is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery and producer of an audiovisual documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits. He is currently writing a book about African diasporic warfare in the Americas.
Vera Grant (director and curator, University of Michigan)
Vera Grant is the deputy director of curatorial affairs and curator of modern and contemporary art at the University of Michigan Museum of Art. Previously, she has been director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center at Harvard University, executive director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. She has lectured and published widely on race and visuality in 20th century American and German culture.
Mischa Kuball (artist, KHM)
Mischa Kuball has been working as a conceptual artist since 1977. Using light as a medium to explore architectural spaces and social and political discourses, he reflects on a variety of aspects—from sociocultural structures to architectural interventions—emphasizing or reinterpreting their monumentality and context in architectural history. Public and private space become indistinguishable in politically-motivated participation projects, providing a platform for communication between the audience, the artist, the work itself and public space.
Gregor H. Lersch (curator, Jewish Museum, Berlin)
Gregor H. Lersch is head of exhibitions and curator at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Recently he curated presentation by Mischa Kuball and James Turell. Beforehand he was Lecturer at the Chair of Art and Art Theory at European University Viadrina Frankfurt/O. From 2005 on he coordinated and co-curated exhibitions like “Side by Side. Poland-Germany. A century of Art and History“and “The New Hebrews – A century of art from Israel.” both at Martin-Gropius-Bau.
Stefanos Tsivopoulos (artist, Parsons)
Stefanos Tsivopoulos, an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker, has exhibited in art institutions and film festivals worldwide. His films are typified by a visual language that merges cinematic tropes and allegoric narratives with some of the most urgent socio-political and economic issues. In 2013, he represented Greece at the 55th Venice Biennial with the multimedia installation History Zero. He has also exhibited in documenta 14, Kassel; the 2nd Beijing Biennial; Manifesta 8, Murcia; the 1st Athens Biennial.
Krzysztof Wodiczko (artist and professor, Harvard)
Krzysztof Wodiczko is Professor in Residence of Art, Design and the Public Domain at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He is renowned for his large-scale slide and video projections on architectural facades and monuments. He has realized more than 90 of such public projections in the United States and across the world. Since the late 1980s, his projections as well as designs of communicative urban equipment have involved the active participation of marginalized and estranged city residents.
Reduced: Uninfluential, Disintegrated, and Bent is a new exhibition and sculptural installation by Lanfranco Aceti. With a series of writings on paper, paintings, photocopies of stones, foliage, and grass, rolled out fax paper, videos, and vinyl cutouts the exhibition explores the meaning of reduced forms of democracy and citizenships. The consumption of what is left, the remainder to use Baudrillardian terminology, is a hypermarketed but nevertheless a diminished experience. It is a consumption of the already consumed—a hyperphagia of waste based on the social needs of devouring and re-appropriating a grandeur inherited but never conquered.
Started in Athens, on the Parthenon, the exhibition builds up on previous international exhibitions, performances, and works of art by Lanfranco Aceti, continuing an imaginary dialogue—started in 2008 with the Great Recession—between the artist and the nation state. The meaning of the word society, according to the artist, changes as the crisis deepens touching evermore larger numbers of people. Civility, culture, and ideals in what is the general and most obvious discourse fall prey to basic needs and feelings of anger, demands for revenge, and acts of violence. What institutions and people fail to acknowledge are their own shortcomings, their own collusions, and their own participation in a systematic oppression of disenfranchised people who are pushed to the margins and constantly tempted with the delusion of yet another version of the ‘self-made-man’ and reprimanded for their ‘own’ failures, shortcomings, and impossible existential conditions. Their inability to reach the status of ‘self-made-man’, is a fundamental flaw of their personality, genetic, surroundings.
Plauto in the Asinaria wrote homo homini lupus, with the attributed classic interpretation of the ferociousness that man displays towards his fellow man. The works of art start from the Parthenon, as an emblematic locus, and reanalyze the failures of contemporary reinterpretation of democracy. They reflect, two years later, on the statement by Horace that conquered Greece took captive her savage conqueror and brought her arts into rustic Latium (Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio in Book II, Epistle 1, lines 156-157). The exhibition constructs a different understanding of what learning from Athens should have meant outside the curatorial, and rather timely, ungrandiose failure of documenta14.
“By some Romans, Greek contributions to artistic and intellectual life were deemed exemplary; for others, Greek intellectual and popular culture represented a composite of sordid threats to solid Roman values—although by the middle of the 2nd century B.C. this latter view was surely waning. From then on, Romans tended to idolize not only Greece’s past glory, but those Greeks whose creation it was, as well.” [1]
The artist chose this particular quote in order to showcase a) the complexity of the relationship between Rome and Greece, b) the nuances of the process of learning from each other, and c) the historical stratifications and the inheritances of these relationships across centuries that were swept under the carpet of self-aggrandizing attempts at celebrity art and celebrity curating.
The article, from which the above quote was taken, is published in a volume titled Greece in Rome: Influence, Integration, Resistance. The volume could be rewritten and reframed in contemporary times with the following title: Greece in Europe: Uninfluential, Disintegrated, and Bent. This is the title chosen for the catalog that will display the works of art with writings by the artist.
Aceti uses both the exhibition and the catalog to create the basis upon which the exhibition Rendered stands. The relationship between society and the individual, severed and disposable, moves from one of disappointment and delusion to one of anger and revenge. The exhibition, although is rooted in historical issues and specific places moves from the locus of Athens to the locus of Rome, to abandon both and move into a universal landscape. This is a show that is both about Athens and Rome and their pitfalls, but also about human nature, post-democracy, and the post-citizen condition.
[1] Albert Henrichs, “Graecia Capta: Roman Views of Greek Culture,” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 97, Greece in Rome: Influence, Integration, Resistance (1995): 244.
But I Can’t Help Myself: Against the Resurgence of the Millennial Issues of Ignorance and Idiocy is Lanfranco Aceti’s inaugural lecture at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (KHM). The lecture focuses on the role of contemporary politics in reshaping our understanding of society and the modalities for practicing art. Professor Aceti introduces a series of concepts and frameworks to define his aesthetic approaches beyond the current issues of ignorance and idiocy. The inaugural lecture is scheduled for Tuesday, June 12, 2018, at 7 pm at KHM.
Abstract
In more ways than one the third millennium has been a disappointment, at least for these first eighteen years. Far from ushering in a new age of enlightenment, amiability, and acceptance, it has infected our lives with a resurgence of miserization, class divisions, and collapse of ethical values. To use the words of someone who the author considers a great politician and an icon of matriarchal values in the twenty-first century, former British MP and actress Glenda Jackson, people know “the price of everything and the value of nothing.” [1]
We are now witnessing the post-postmodern results of the seeds that have been planted to dismantle the very ideas of society, civility, and conviviality. The resurgence of nationalism, racism towards migrants, and national isolationism are the obvious results of a myopic globalization for the few, corporate dismissal of other people’s struggles, and a fundamental lack of empathy as global political policy. The events related to the financial collapse of Greece and the EU policy towards migration and race are two blaring and glaring examples of contemporary violent and unethical policies. The current social upheavals, particularly within the western world, are layered in a socio-political context that has favored and continues to incite anger, thereby promoting its final result violence as functional policy. Anger and violence in all of their forms (verbal, physical, psychological, political, and etc.) have increasingly and incredibly become forms of legitimized response.
The stark choice that the millennial victims of capitalism are left with is, therefore, that of viasmopolitics [2] as legitimate response in order to re-establish their participation within a society from which they have been excluded and within which are nevertheless chained and obliged to struggle. If post-democracies have produced post-citizens, as the writer has argued, the politics of rape and violence conducted by the states or by meta-institutions towards established notions of society as convivium are generating plebiscitarian responses of counter-violence.
Viasmopolitics, the politics of rape and violence, are the modality through which the contemporary “necropolitics” [3] are being delivered and are the “plagues of the ‘new world order’.” [4] If the plague of viasmopolitics for Jacques Derrida would represent ineluctable events, in this context the politics of rape and violence are actually either the result of a willful choice or the inevitable consequence of social, corporate, and political ignorance and idiocy.
The disenfranchisement of post-citizens, as a consequence of viasmopolitics, leads to a division between the state and the citizens in which both perceive each other as enemies and engage in a spiral of institutional destruction in order to deliver their own brand of ‘change.’ “Il sesso è politica?” “Naturalmente” [5] “Is sex politics?” “Naturally” is Pier Paolo Pasolini’s response. It is in the contemporary politics of sex, rape, and violence that a clearer understanding of society appears in what has become the institutionalized vicious circle of viasmopolitics as a form of oppression and retribution.
Keywords: Viasmopolitics, necropolitics, violence, anger, rape, post-democracy, post-citizen
[1] Barnet Bugle, “Glenda Jackson Launches Tirade against Thatcher in Tribute Debate,” YouTube Video, April 10, 2013, https://youtu.be/SfsZjoD2Frk, (accessed May 31, 2018).
[2] Viasmopolitics, in the definition of the author, are the violently sexualized politics of dismantlement of social structures that subjugate people while impeding and delegitimizing their right to criticism and protest.
[3] Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 11-40.
[4] Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. by Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 91.
[5] Pier Paolo Pasolini, Interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini, October 31, 1975, YouTube Video, August 5, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&time_continue=68&v=w9Ef1y_OY-U (accessed May 31, 2018).
The Museum of Contemporary Cuts presents Anatomy of a Dream, a new solo exhibition by Lanfranco Aceti, curated by Artemis Potamianou for Platforms Project, Athens, Greece. This body of new works of art is made of three painting diptychs with acrylic paint on raw linen canvas. One of the diptychs features spent matches embedded in the paint itself. The diptychs are juxtaposed with a sculptural object realized with a shadow box, two photos, burned matches, and ashes.
Anatomy of a Dream is a continued aesthetic exploration by the artist through a conception of contemporary society and its politics as the locus where love, sex, politics, and power intertwine with the concept of the dream, constantly generating both the illusion of love as well as setting the premises for its collapse.
Aceti, talking about this new body of work, explains that it emerges from a very intimate and visceral understanding of the collapse of the dreams of love and social frameworks. The works of art provide a thread to engage with the artist’s analysis of the collapse of the dream that characterizes a love relationship between two people or between people and the nation state.
The artist believes that we have moved on from the assumption that we can still “[…] cultivate an impartial altruism, by asking people to love the nation as a whole, and thus all of its people.” [1]
Contemporary politics and love are on commodified terms in which using and being used is the transactional mythological currency of contemporary existence. Love is no longer the key to personal or societal happiness but the cracked cornerstone upon which reality seeps into opaque dreams and shambolic illusions.
Love can no longer be conceived as “[…] the key not only to the personal happiness of the central characters, but to the happiness of all, of the whole community, as they sing: ‘Let us all rush off to celebrate’ (‘corriam tutti a festeggiar’).” [2]
With the commodification of relationships there is the inherent impossibility of loving and being loved, the inability to understand the conditions of love based on an illusory understanding of what ideals these love relationships should fulfill. There is no longer the ideal of a sacrifice for love for the existence of the other and thereby the existence of all. It is in this post-postmodern structure of consumption that conflict arises from the reality of the process of appropriation, within which one or both parties betray and are betrayed.
“The personal collapse and the collective collapse are embedded in the choices that the artist has made for the materials,” explains the curator Artemis Potamianou. “Raw linen canvas is a mirror for the raw feelings that people are currently experiencing. Nothing has been left to chance. The captions, the connections between the works of art, the material used, all conjure together to transport the viewer through a personal and political journey of love and betrayal, of sex and power, of personal and social politics.”
Spent, consumed, used up, exhausted, finished, depleted, and burnt out are words that the artist uses to refer to both the works of art and the role that people seem to play in their relationship with the nation state and with each other. Anatomy of a Dream is a post-mortem of the rotten corpse of Hypnos, the god of illusions and dreams, under the harsh light of personal emotional realities and social understandings in order to find a new and different way of overcoming the sense of betrayal. In a contemporary reinterpretation of the words of Mozart we rush off not to celebrate the possibility of love but to grasp the opportunity of repeating, over and over again, acts of consumption and betrayal.
[1] Martha C. Nussbaum, “Teaching Patriotism: Love and Critical Freedom,” University of Chicago Law Review 79 (2012), 213-250.
[2] Martha C. Nussbaum, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 28.
With thanks to Enia Gallery.
Project Manager: Vasiliki Gkini.
List of artworks
1 Lanfranco Aceti, Cut From the Same Cloth, No. I, 2018. Acrylic on raw canvas with raw feelings, 101×76 cm.
2 Lanfranco Aceti, Cut From the Same Cloth, No. II, 2018. Acrylic on raw canvas with raw feelings, 101×76 cm.
3 Lanfranco Aceti, Hypnos, No. I, 2018. Acrylic on raw canvas with raw feelings, 101x76cm.
4 Lanfranco Aceti, Hypnos, No. II, 2018. Acrylic on raw canvas with raw feelings, 101x76cm.
5 Lanfranco Aceti, Spent, No. I, 2018. Acrylic on raw canvas with raw feelings and spent matches, 101x76cm.
6 Lanfranco Aceti, Spent, No. II, 2018. Acrylic on raw canvas with raw feelings and spent matches, 101x76cm.
7 Lanfranco Aceti, Every Motherfucking Day, 2018. Shadow box, acrylic, two photographs, two pin pricks, spent matches, and ashes, 48x33x7cm.
Looking Straight is a new series of self-portraits by Lanfranco Aceti realized for International Women’s Day 2018 as part of a performance in Barcelona at MACBA. The artworks are inspired by Piero della Francesca’s iconic profile portraits of the Duke Federigo da Montefeltro and Duchess Battista Sforza of Urbino (1465-1472). The original Renaissance portraits are a diptych while the new series realized are triptychs.
The artworks explore issues of gender in portraiture, and self-portraiture in particular. What does the construction and definition of one’s sexual identity entail? Where does fluidity begin and end? Is there a clearly demarcated area in which, against the nature of the very concept of fluidity, there is an actual beginning and an ending of gender lines? These issues are also linked to the use of the definition of gender typologies to create turfs within which to impose ideological restraints and set the basis for fascistic discourses. This approach flaunts the very nature of matriarchal discourses and the gender culture expressed in the 1960s and 1970s by gay, lesbian, and transgender people.
The artist focuses on the issue of self-portraiture at a moment in which the culture of the self is at its parodistic and paroxysmal apex. It is a cultural moment in which self-obsession clashes against the desire and, more recently in 2020, the obligation of re-engaging with the notion of the ‘collective body’. Self-portraiture in this case stands not solely for exploration of the individual as such but also an analysis of the varied connections to the larger structures of society and to the many other individuals with which ‘the one’ shares the common destiny of the many.
The reflections of the artist focus also on the role that media, as a material tool, allows for the creation of self-portraiture. The digital collage and the kaleidoscopic constructions hint at geometries of construction of the image while flaunting it. The artist also brings back the formality of the portrait through the rigidity of the pose while wearing a mask that exposes ideological concerns. Fascinated by the construction of Luigi Pirandello’s One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand, the artist exposes the reality of the infinite possibility of composing and re-composing, via illusory structures, in the attempt to rediscover a real self, hidden behind the sedimentation of constructions and roles that are superficial shiny mirrors of nothingness.
No name. No memory today of yesterday’s name; of today’s name tomorrow. If the name is the thing, if a name in us is the concept of everything that is situated without us, if without a name there is no concept, and the thing remains blindly indistinct and undefined within us, very well, then, let men take that name which I once bore and engrave it as an epitaph on the brow of that pictured me that they beheld; let them leave it there in peace, and let them not speak of it again. For a name is no more than that, an epitaph. Something befitting the dead. One who has reached a conclusion. I am alive, and I reach no conclusion. Life knows no conclusion. Nor does it know anything of names.
It is in the same fashion that a portrait is not the person but at best an instance of the person and it does not capture life but it reveals, at best, a glimpse of life or a hint of it through artificial means and constructions. It allows us to approximate a form of knowledge but does not offer a full knowledge. Portraits, and in particular self-portraits and selfies, are an artificial construction of what people wish to be, attempting to give a conclusion to life in an orderly and structured manner, as if they could. It is the attempt to kill life, nailing it to a wall to present the best version of one’s-self as if they were butterflies nailed and preserved in a permanent death, reminding us of the amazement that one might prove at their flight if they had been alive.
Where Is Space? is a conversation between Professor Vincent Brown (Harvard) and Professor Lanfranco Aceti (MIT and BU) on issues of space and its relationship to the construction of contemporary visual, literary, and historical contexts and narratives. Professor Brown will talk about space, time, and slavery in the context of contemporary digital media and discuss these topics with professor Aceti. The lecture will take place in the Plimpton Room, Barker Center, Room 133, Harvard University on Thursday, March 22, 2018, from 6:30 pm to 8:00 pm.
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at the Mahindra Humanities Center, the conversation will be published by LEA for MIT Press as part of larger project that analyzes issues of time, space, movement, matter, light, and the unknown. The corresponding volume will be using a new publication platform, Contemporary Arts and Cultures (CAC), realized at the MediaLab that Aceti, as editor in chief of LEA, has been testing as part of its experimental endeavors for LEA/MIT Press.
“‘So that the rough sand should not harm the snake-haired head (anquiferumque caput dura ne laedat harena), he makes the ground soft with a bed of leaves, and on top of that he strews little branches of plants born under water, and on this he places Medusa’s head, face down.’ [….] But the most unexpected thing is the miracle that follows: when they touch Medusa, the little marine plants turn into coral and the nymphs, in order to have coral for adornments, rush to bring sprigs and seaweeds to the terrible head.” [1]
from, what can historically be understood as, sites of trauma and the complexity of visualizing, narrating, and historicizing concurrent events and timelines which coexist, intertwine, and spur global and local interactions. It is the locus—with its multi-layered and sedimented texture, the inevitable result of embracing and connecting with multiple visions, narratives, and histories—that offers us the possibility of retracing, analyzing, and understanding the space we occupy, as well as, ourselves as repositories of compounded histories.
What are, then, the metaphors and allegories that we can use in order to understand space? What is the space that we occupy today—is it in fact one that is drenched in trauma, social and political upheaval, and systemic pauperization of entire communities? Is there an inclusive space of utopia capable of realization beyond the capitalistic / nationalistic dystopia of a return to a golden age, forever dreamed about but never capable of existence? More importantly, how do we travel to such a space and will we recognize it if we see it?
[1] Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 6.
This event is graciously supported by the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, Contemporary Arts and Cultures, Operational and Curatorial Research, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and MIT Press.
With thanks to the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Biography
Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies, is a multi-media historian with a keen interest in the political implications of cultural practice. He directs the History Design Studio and teaches courses in Atlantic history, African diaspora studies, and the history of slavery. Brown is the author of The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Harvard University Press, 2008) and producer of an audiovisual documentary about the anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits broadcast on the PBS series Independent Lens. He is currently writing a book about African diasporic warfare in the Americas.
Can You Feel It? I Can Feel It is a new installation work by Lanfranco Aceti created for the exhibition, When All is Said… and Done, curated by Artemis Potamianou for the Lubomirov/Angus-Hughes gallery in London. Participating artists include: Lanfranco Aceti, Aggelos Antonopoulos, Bill Balaskas, Jackie Berridge, Jimi Efthimiou-Dimitris Mitsopoulos-Vivi Papanikola, George Harvalias, Lady Michelle, Frini Mouzakitou, Giorgos Papadatos, Artemis Potamianou, Clay Smith, and Mark Titchner.
Composed of twenty-four panels that alternate the words ‘YES’ and ‘NO,’ Aceti’s most recent work of art represents a mockery of the role that referenda have played within the European Union, as well as the value attributed to those same words within the context of an intimate relationship. The artist, who has worked for years with themes of labor exploitation, social exclusion, political upheaval, and financial enslavement, continues to explore the relationship between sex, love, politics, and power. Set within a contemporary context in which even personal relationships are constructed on capitalistic terms of exploitation, use, and abuse, the affirmations ‘YES’ and ‘NO’ have acquired a different meaning. The hypocrisy of the question asked—and the hypocrisy of the answer to that question—no longer holds true in a context in which everyone is aware of everyone else’s misgivings.
The expression of consent, or its negation for that matter, is no longer freely given and is relinquished and surrendered based on a lack of equal standing and/or deliberate suppression of freedom. In this respect, consent is given in response to a question that is no longer offering choices, but rather expecting pre-determined answers, as well as demanding the compliance of the respondent. In the artist’s aesthetic approach, this contemporary predicament became abundantly clear in recent and past European referenda which were repeatedly submitted to its citizens until the population voted in the ‘right way.’ Aceti’s work analyses the current state of socio-political participation and broader notions of consent that are now based upon the unspoken stipulation of conforming to expectations and desires of the body politic. This semantic shift is reflected in the same way personal relationships, reduced to forced forms of exploitation, no longer express a freedom of choice, but reinforce bonds and ties enslaving intimacy to the expectation of what is required and not the ‘reality’ of negotiating between two different, and at times, opposing desires. Using one another and expecting compliance nullifies the answer of a ‘YES’ or a ‘NO,’ which no longer reflect the expression of an inner desire, but the necessity of deferring to the will of the questioner.
“In recent years I have been focusing on the representation of the nation state as a physical person. It is an ancient metaphor that in the contemporary landscape of socio-economic crisis has allowed me to reflect upon the relationship between western post-democracies and post-citizenship. The relationship that is being explored in the artwork is one that straddles the domains of love and hate. It is in this context of conflict—in which the nation state and its citizens are personified—that the relationship becomes one of confrontation and warring whereby questions and answers are constructed upon treacherous lies, wary misgivings, and shifting meanings. No one means what they say, or says what they mean. It all becomes a pantomime in which love and power blend seamlessly within a struggle that is continuous and inescapable.”
Through its materiality, Aceti’s artwork—made of trash bags, acrylic paint, and non-lubricated colored condoms—wishes to engage with contemporary trash politics, false referenda, unrequited love, pragmatic lies, and alternative realities.
It is in this context that the artist explores the chaos of contemporary post-democracies, the idea of post-citizenship, and the concept of social rape as perpetrated by current politics. In the midst of the collapse of social decency in both personal and political relationship, the artist asks the question: “Who is fucking whom?”
Lanfranco Aceti, Can You Feel It? I Can Feel It, 2018. Acrylic paint, trash bags, and non-lubricated colored condoms. Dimensions: 200 cm x 579 cm. Panel detail: 50 cm x 50 cm.
Annunciation is the latest performance and sculptural installation by Lanfranco Aceti. As part of the exhibition nEUROsis, the artwork was realized in Limassol, Cyprus, with the support of the non-profit organization NeMe. Curated by Yiannis Colakides, the project was developed as part of a year long residency in which the artist explored via thorough research themes and concepts related to apocalypse, post-democracy, post-citizenship, activism, political art, and rebellion. Annunciation is a twisted representation, via a performance and a sculptural installation, of the contemporary socio-economic crisis that encompasses the multiple contradictions and conflicts that characterize our understanding of the world we live in.
“It is in this critical landscape that contemporary dystopia continues to unfold undermining financial, social, political, and ethical frameworks while favoring the resurgence and return of a patriarchal rhetoric of divisive nationalism,” said Aceti while explaining the research and the thought processes behind the works. “The works are supposed to be beautiful and haunting at the same time—a harbinger of happiness and incredible sadness. Imagine an invisible virus unleashed by Pestilence, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Why should the ‘person’ who unleashes the virus be also ravaged by disease and unhappy? Death is not necessarily a harbinger of horrors. In the name of Love, and through the abuse of Love and lovence, [1] horrors and tragedies have been consumed.”
Aceti conceived Annunciation as a public performance and sculptural object that masterfully proclaims that the end of the world is starting now. The act of announcing, despite the message and its meaning, is embedded in one of the most beautiful islands of the Mediterranean: Cyprus. Cyprus is the birthplace of Venus the goddess of love and as such, in the mind of the artist, the best place to announce its end and the beginning of Death. The piece exists as a combination of multiple conceptual contradictions in an aesthetic landscape of homogeneity and post-modernity that barely pays lip service to ideas of diversity and irreconcilable differences. Although the artworks are embedded in a landscape of sufferance, since historically and in contemporary times the Mediterranean has been a locus of social tensions, the moment of this visionary announcement is one of beauty which clashes and annihilates the dread and ominousness of the message.
Aceti in his analysis refers to “an annunciation” as a moment of liberation from the decaying concept of nationalism and the burning flames of post-democracies in the Mediterranean, Europe, and the USA.
“The question I kept asking myself over and over was: How would I announce the Apocalypse?” said Aceti. “The response came in the form of this performance and its sculptural elements.”
[1] Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London and New York: Verso, 2005), 122.
Image credit: Lanfranco Aceti, Annunciation, 2018. Performance and sculptural installation. Photograph: Jonathan Munro.
]]>Disobedient, Discontented, and Disruptive: Politics of Aesthetic Resistance and Resilience is a presentation by Professor Lanfranco Aceti at Art, Culture and Technology (ACT) @ MIT. The presentation, on Tuesday, February 13, 2018, is part of ACT luncheon series and engages faculty and students with the affiliate’s research and thought processes in the creation of new scholarly works, curatorial projects, or personal exhibitions.
“The repressed who sides with the revolution is, according to the standards of the beautiful life in an ugly society, uncouth and distorted by resentment […]” [1]
The lecture will discuss art within the context of ethical values—beyond the contemporary market and economical forces that have reduced all human endeavors to commodified outputs and outcomes. The re-introduction of ethical values, or more simply the re-introduction of ethics within society, brings art back, not so much into a Kantian aprioristic world, but into an ideological and social framework that can be identified as the superior teleology of art and society. In fact, both art and society have been eroded by militaristic, corporate, and oligarchic constructions that manifest themselves through the narratives of the body politic and through concepts of post-society, post-state, post-capitalism, post-democracy, post-citizenship, and post-art.
If art cannot exist any longer as a social endeavor and if anger can no longer be represented within an aesthetic context, if it is considered ‘uncouth’ and is subject to ugly society’s forms of control and censorship, then one must ask where is the public space that allows an analytical and reflective existence. The relationship between uncouth people, hierarchical societies, and public expressions of anger is further complicated by an historical impossibility for anything other than the institutional history of the ‘winners,’ also known as the truth [2] of the body politic, [3] to be widely represented, aestheticized, narrated, and memorialized.
[1] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 67.
[2] “Rooted as it is in the interconnected concepts of universality, objectivity, and canonicity privileged by the (Anglo-American) critical establishment, the battle about the authority of anger surrounding feminist criticism can be read as a battle for or around ‘truth’: an inscription of the discourse of ‘the true’ constructed and disseminated by agencies of institutionalized authority (including the university and the media) that works to appropriate or silence the voices of opposition or dissent.” Brenda R. Silver, “The Authority of Anger: ‘Three Guineas’ as Case Study,” Signs 16, no. 2 (Winter, 1991): 341.
[3] “The Body politic is after all a myth which can ultimately be sustained only by consensus.” Nicholas Mirzoeff, Bodyscape: Art, Modernity and the Ideal Figure (London: Routledge, 1995), 84.
Image credit: Lanfranco Aceti, Annunciation, 2018. Performance and sculptural installation. Photograph: Jonathan Munro.
]]>Professor Lanfranco Aceti (Boston University) and Professor Doris Sommer (Harvard University) have joined forces to deliver a student experience in interpretation of complex texts within art spaces. The semester-long course titled Arts in Barcelona, analyzes how national conflicts and civil unrest affect forms of cultural production. Professor Aceti chose The Politics of Friendship by Jaques Derrida for the class Arts in Barcelona because of its focus on nationalism and its relevance to the challenges and complexities involved in arts administration on the international and national scale.
Professor Aceti was delighted to use Professor Sommer’s “Pre-text methodology” in interpreting extremely complex philosophical texts. Professor Sommer, who is an expert in Latin American studies, has developed a series of workshops that can be embedded within an art institution like the Harvard Art Museums within which reading becomes a form of creative activities and creation of new content from the participants. The workshop fosters a community understanding, as well as a sense of togetherness which allows for familiarity and mutual support in the intellectual interpretation of highly academic contextualized content.
Thanks to the support of the Harvard Art Museums and in particular of Alexandra Gaydos, students from BU were able to participate in a series of workshop activities based on collaborative efforts that linked Derrida’s text to the artworks exhibited within the galleries of the museum: Joan SnyderSummer Orange; Lorna Simpson 1957-2009 Interior, 2009; Morris Louis Blue Veil; Joseph Kosuth Complicated, Titled: Art as Idea as Idea [Society]; Georg Baselitz Saxon Motif ; Victor Grippo Analogia I; Gunther Uecker Spiral White; and Alberto Burri Legno e Rosso 3 (Wood and Red 3).
When asked about the pedagogical structures of the workshops put in place by Professor Sommer, Professor Aceti said that “the Pre-text Workshop allowed for students and faculty to bond together, as the choice of Derrida’s text dealt with the theme of familiarity and allowed for a reflection on issues of nationalism, love, and society. I wanted people to reflect more on the issues of nationalities, the disappearance of social structures, and the divisions existing within our contemporary worlds. The Pre-text Workshop had a surprising effect of creating a community, independent from nationalities, between all participants.”
All workshop participants had to choose one phrase to analyze from the text that they felt was closer to them and their personal history. Between the many phrases chosen, the following quote perhaps explains what could be a way of understanding our social interactions and the lack of friendship in contemporary social politics.
“Aristotle recalls not only that it is more worthwhile to love, but that you had better love in this way, and not in that way; and that hence it is more worthwhile to love than to be loved.” [1]
[1] Jaques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), 7.
Lanfranco Aceti is known for his social activism and extensive career as an artist, curator, and academic. He is a visiting professor and research affiliate at ACT @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the Academy of New Media Arts Cologne (KHM), and professor and director of the Department of Arts Administration at Boston University. He is the founder of The Studium: Lanfranco Aceti Inc., the founder and Director of OCR (Operational and Curatorial Research in Contemporary Art, Design, Science, and Technology), and founder and Director of MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts). He has exhibited and curated internationally. In 2017, he exhibited for Shimmer, curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A), at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra; Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation. In 2018 Aceti is preparing a new series of exhibitions and performances.
Doris Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991); Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999); Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004); and The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014).
Alexandra Gaydos is Project Assistant for the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art at the Harvard Art Museums. Alex works under the Division of Academic and Public Programs to support a broad range of activities in the museums’ Materials Lab. Alex has over a decade of experience working in studios, fine art galleries, and community art venues and is interested in the arts as a vehicle for expression, connection, advocacy, and meaning-making.
Sarah E Bradshaw is an alumna of the Arts Administration masters program at Boston University. She and Professor Aceti have previously worked together, both during her time in the program and on the summer 2017 Comparative Cultural Policy course to Dublin and London. This term, she is assisting Professor Aceti with the Arts in Barcelona course and the Pre-Text seminar established by Professor Sommer. She currently works at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as the Executive Assistant to the Director.
Polly Lauer is Cultural Agents’ Research Coordinator. She is a 2017 graduate of the College of William & Mary, where she studied History and Latin American Studies. Next year, she will begin a doctoral program to study Latin American History, focusing on the importance of community radio as a cultural and political tool in Central America.
Jahnvi Singh is a learning experience designer from India, and a Pre-Texts facilitator, with hands-on experience in the field of crafts & making, education, and human-centered design. She has worked with young learners, educators, school leaders, museum curators, artists, environmentalists, and more to create cultural learning tools and connect classrooms to the real-world in a way that makes every day learning effective, valuable, and adaptable to the 21st century.
The head image credit: Joseph Kosuth, Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) [Society]), 1968. Photostat mounted to board. Detail.
]]>Lanfranco Aceti’s new work, Baked: The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off (2017), is based on a neon installation from the exhibition, nEUROsis, curated by Yiannis Colakides for NeME. The artist defined these new works of art as a “series of perspectival studies envisioned through tinted glasses on moving life.” The artworks consist of prints and screen paintings, but also incorporate a series of combinatory gifs that focus on a single text and image. The text and the image, itself, are static and obsessively repeated, while embodying—through changing colors—movement, alteration, and evolution.
The neon installation is part of a series of works titled, Sowing and Reaping, which analyze issues of contemporary ideological oppression, labor exploitation, commodification, abuse, and absurdity. The neon artwork spurred the creation of an image which led to the development of an aesthetic analysis of the effects of both color and movement.
The images created via this process exist as colored lenses of personal perspectives and experiences; and are rooted in a socio-political history that has become, over the past decade, a recognizable reflection, increasingly personalized and historicized, of a present struggle.
Motivated by alterations and seriality in the long history of art, the artist sought to merge the complexity of representation of time, movement, and feeling. Resumed in Pablo Picasso’s statement, “colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions,” Aceti explored the relationship between color and emotion, which constituted the basis for an experimentation on color and movement, not perceived in traditional terms, but as the movement and alteration of emotions via the change of color in a static framework/image.
The artist’s intention is not to reclaim an operational environment, interpreted in traditional terms, rather to focus on recognizing the indelible alterations and re-interpretations of statements, words, and phrases that are embedded in the strifes of contemporary social histories. The seemingly empowering phrase, “we bake our own destiny,” is a clear reference to the self-made mythology of the American dream, which clashes—manifestly and symbolically—with the deterministic reality expressed in the title of the artworks. The title, Baked, references the hope and the tiredness (“Baked is where you are too tired to fucking get off of your couch”—from the Urban Dictionary) inherent to a condition of sustained ideological abuse, consumption of propaganda, and self-immolation as exploitable victims.
The series is, in itself, a form of revelation, uncovered in the work’s subtitle. The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off leaves no space for misinterpretation. This series of new works continues a line of thinking, research, and aesthetic exploration that the artist began thirty years ago, focusing on the existential dramas and exploitative natures of institutions and their accomplices. The Annunciation, Sowing and Reaping, and Baked: The Truth Will Set You Free, But First It Will Piss You Off create a trifold series of exhibitions which explore the consequences of socio-political decisions. The artist pursues this exploration as an attempt to find escape and refuge from the tensions and pitfalls of a landscape that appears unequivocally immune to such consequences.
]]>Remainders at the End of a Summer Bliss, by Lanfranco Aceti, is a curatorial essay that surveys Bill Balaskas’s exhibition, Remains of a Summer Bliss, at the Kalfayan Galleries, Athens and Thessaloniki. Featured on their new platform, Contemporary Arts and Cultures (CAC), the essay is published by the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), MIT Press. In a globalized context of ruthless capitalism, this curatorial essay examines from afar the drama of Mediterranean societies which have ensured their own demise by operating according to Mediterranean values of corruption and ineptitude. The analysis of this collapse is not a simplistic survey of the reasons that may have lead to these circumstances, as they are all partial and inadequate in justifying the past two decades of progressive failure, but is rather a sharpened and angered acknowledgment of the cultural inability to rebel, to generate change, or to alter a course that has been set forth by ‘other forces.’ It is this miserable existence—between the inability to resurge caused by a lack of self-criticism and the constant shifting of blame while waiting for yet again another political savior—that the curator attacks via a critique that refuses to take prisoners.
This critique visualizes a Mediterranean both engulfed in flames and lit by the flashing colored lights of parties—as in the opening scenes of The Great Beauty (La Grande Bellezza, 2013)—that celebrate with the twitching of bodies in the engulfing flames and lights not the end of life, but the last throes of death. Summer is at an end, and the only thing left is the cultural trash upon which we celebrate the iconicity of de-valued and de-moralized existences.
Through detailed analysis of Balaskas’s works and related exhibition, Aceti lashes out against contemporary societies and examines how each artwork pins to the wall the hypocrisies, platitudes, and certainties of a world at its wits end.
Remainders at the End of a Summer Bliss is one of several chapters included in a forthcoming book entitled End of a Summer Bliss.
]]>It’s Time is a conversation between Prof. Sean Cubitt (Goldsmiths and Harvard) and Prof. Lanfranco Aceti (MIT and BU) on issues of time and its relationship to the contemporary databased and mediated narratives. The lecture will take place in the Plimpton Room, Barker Center, Room 133, Harvard University on Monday, December 4, 2017, from 6:30pm to 8:00 pm.
Inspired by Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium and Umberto Eco’s Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at the Mahindra Humanities Center, the conversation will be published by MIT Press as part of larger project that analyzes issues of time, space, movement, matter, light, and the unknown. The volume will be using a new publication platform, Contemporary Arts and Cultures (CAC), realized by Travis Rich at the MediaLab that LEA has been experimenting with as part of its experimental remits within MIT Press.
“This motif can also be interpreted as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time. And the same significance can be seen in the reverse operation, in the expanding of time by the internal proliferations from one story to another, which is a feature of oriental storytelling.” [1]
Prof. Cubitt will analyze motifs and structures that are emerging from the contemporary usage of databases as archives of times and time based narratives. These are engineered structures that simultaneously appear to liberate from and freeze in time images and their narratives.
What are, then, the old media structures that can be still recognized as metaphors and “rearview mirrors” (Marshall McLuhan) in our twenty-first century data driven societies? And what is the role of time in the complexity of representation and narratives that characterize individual and social phenomena?
[1] Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, trans. Patrick Creagh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 37.
This event is graciously supported by the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University, Contemporary Arts and Cultures, Operational and Curatorial Research, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, and MIT Press.
With thanks to the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Event coordinator: Candice Bancheri.
Biography
Sean Cubitt teaches and writes about the history and philosophy of media, and is especially interested in environmentalism, media technologies, media arts and political aesthetics. He has worked in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the USA and has ongoing research collaborations and honorary appointments at the Universities of Melbourne and Oslo. Sean is on the editorial boards of a number of journals and is a series editor for Leonardo Books at MIT Press. His most recent books are Finite Media: Environmental Implications of Digital Media and The Practice of Light: A Genealogy of Visual Technology from Prints to Pixels. He is also half of the thriller-writing team Lambert Nagle.
]]>The Museum of Contemporary Cuts presents a painterly and sculptural text work by Dutch artist, Willem Jan Smit. At the Sculpture Garden pavilion on the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki, Smit marries the two media with the complexity of the positive and negative architectural space.
“The Sculpture Garden pavilion presents and shines a light on a fissure in the homogeneous representation of the community,” explains the artist. “The pavilion proposes a narrative of the unlikely rendered possible. It is a fiction and a reality at once. During the installation of the work, passersby would approach to ask for clarification on the nature of the development, filling in the blanks themselves and projecting their own unfulfilled desires. The fictional aspect of the work is about what may be coming soon or what the imagined scenario of this development could entail. Who will be using the space and what sort of community will it house? The reality is that new possibilities—unthinkable and not thought yet—are now open for exploration. This exchange creates an aesthetic fiction on the edge of reality.”
The artist’s concern with the disappearance of public spaces within which communities have been able to congregate, organize, and advance their agendas plays with the presence of multiple pavilions across the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki. The Sculpture Garden pavilion in the hands of the artist becomes a community statement of what may be possible, raising the expectation that something new may be housed in it in response to the needs of the community.
“It Is Conceivable that She Will Refuse, is a layered artwork that plays in between the public and private spaces—explains the curator Lanfranco Aceti, research affiliate and visiting professor at Art, Culture, and Technology (ACT) in the Department of Architecture at MIT. The artist has been able to render visible the role of the ‘public house’ and its relationship to state legislation and its restrictions. It is a piercing of the architectonical space through which it is possible to see the failed negotiations at play—between unimaginable homes and the heteronormative restrictions imposed by a public arena.”
The aims of the artist are oriented towards the nurturing of a future wherein true emancipation and equal rights—regardless of race, sexual preference, or economic status—are conceivable for all beings, particularly those who are currently living under suspended or partial citizenship. Smit, moving from the Dutch experience of lesbian couples wanting to conceive via IVF—a successfully resolved issue in the Netherlands but not in Greece—extrapolated the general notion of conceivable in order to analyze the unthinkable that can be conceived and realized within the public space.
The artwork is constructed as a believable fiction—a conceivable space within which unthinkable possibilities of the public sphere are fertilized for evolution. This process allows the unimaginable and unimagined homes and family lives—gendered, racially, and economically excluded—to be included within the urban texture.
The artist has chosen to insert a questionable scenario, proposed equally in text as in material, about what is conceivable. The text is dubious because the subject is indistinct. What we do know is that the main character identifies as feminine and that it is possible for her to have her own will, but her primary trait is that she has free will, which poses the question, what are the oppressive forces on this feminine subject? The material suggests change, not necessarily progress, through the possibility of economic growth or investment. It also foregrounds typically gendered labour, window washing, erasure, and the ceaseless production of cleanliness. The painted windows function within the realm of scenography and are a common indicator that an interior is being modified, one can expect the establishment to open again soon respawning question of: “What is to come?”
For the Thessaloniki Biennial and their chosen theme, Imagined Homes, a progression of the imaginable spaces sparked imaginable community centres, pubs, clubs, raves, and lesbian, gay, and trans bars. The question of what is to come could be presented as the idea of the inclusion of the excluded collectives. Imagined Homes prompted the thinkable presence of the unheard minorities in the public sphere.
Conceivable is the operative word in this painterly and sculptural installation which, based on Merriam-Webster’s dictionary sample sentence, “It is conceivable that she will refuse to go,” was shortened to imply and implicate innumerable scenographies and scenarios—once unthinkable—to be conceived as possible.
It Is Conceivable that She Will Refuse was realized with the support of The Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Arts Administration at Boston University, and the Friends of Thessaloniki’s New Waterfront Association.
Artist Bio
Willem Jan Smit (NL, ES) is a contemporary artist and activist who is exhibiting internationally. Currently his work can be viewed at the Athens School of Fine Arts annex in Hydra and at Beton7 in Athens. Smit largely works in sculpture and installation though his practice, conceptually based, will assume whatever necessary form depending on each project’s requirements. Text and painting play an increasing role in his practice. His latest intervention was, Ad Nauseam, at documenta 14, shortly after a solo exhibition, They Were Shown the Door in a Matter of Minutes, in Athens as part of the Platforms Project for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts. For the fall he is engaging in a series of public works the first of which will be during the Thessaloniki Biennial. He studied in Vancouver, Canada with Liz Magor, Geoffrey Farmer, and Garry Neill Kennedy. His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.
Curator Bio
Lanfranco Aceti works as a curator, artist, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ MIT and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. As curator he previously worked as director of Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including 75Watts by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen, acquired by MoMA and Paolo Cirio’s Loophole4All, awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica. Recently, he curated End of a Summer Bliss at the Kalfayan Gallery, as well as The Small Infinite at the John Hansard Gallery with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. Lanfranco Aceti has participated in numerous art fairs such as Art Athina, Art International, Supermarket, and Contemporary Istanbul, either as a curator or as an artist. In 2011, he curated the exhibition Uncontainable as part of the parallel events of the 12th Istanbul Biennial and exhibited artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. In 2016, he curated a range of artworks as part of THE SOCIAL at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Athenaeum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and other public spaces in Boston and London. In June 2017, he curated a new public performance, One Step Forward Two Steps Back, by Stefanos Tsivopoulos on the White House sidewalk in collaboration with the Cooper Gallery at Harvard University. He is currently curating Empty Pr(oe)mises for the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens.
]]>Supported by the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, the Mediterranean Garden pavilion on the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki has a contemporary art installation by Lanfranco Aceti, curated by Camilla Boemio. Known internationally for his socio-political stances and performances that have taken place over the past thirty years, the artist has conceived a site-specific installation that engages directly with the theme of the Thessaloniki Biennale, Imagined Homes. He has created a public window into the dismantling of contemporary society, its crisis and the consequences on the private home. Through the metaphorical and physical act of ‘airing the dirty laundry,’ the artworks speak of engendered social frameworks, body conflicts, and political individual freedoms that have been dismantled and betrayed.
“I wanted to address this crisis as a breakup between lovers,” explains the artist. “It is the end of the relationship between two people, one of whom embodies the nation-state and the other the collective citizens. It is the aftermath of a quarrel and the lovers have separated. They are both leaving the roof under which they shared dreams, hopes, and cares. The nation-state—embodied in a physical person—is constructed and imagined as a selfish patriarchal, individualistic, and immature man. The people—conceived as one single feminine body—are imagined as a woman with matriarchal values of community, self-sacrifice, and support.”
In the imagined narrative of the artist, the lovers are parting ways. The artworks contain a frozen moment in which objects—once expressed as tangible metaphors of partnership and living in the home—are now being divided and discarded. What is left of this relationship is on public display in the Mediterranean Garden pavilion within which Aceti, by engaging with the architectural elements, creates reflections of visible and invisible spaces tracing the lines between private, semi-private, semi-public, and public engagement. The remainders of the relationship are the artworks made of discarded sheets that bare the traces of the bodies and the now forgotten relationship. These are objects that are disposed of, thrown out from the window of a private home onto the street. The dirty sheets, soiled with bodily fluids, are not only a record of a past relationship but also simulacra of a social and political collapse of wider relationships in the Mediterranean. The sheets and the writings upon them offer—in contradictory terms—both a visible public record of the violent oppression of living together and the hope for the possibilities offered by the re-acquisition of freedom. The writings on the sheets are curses that can be addressed to anyone by substituting The Mediterranean Garden pavilion acts, in the artist’s narrative, as a coded and decodable cabinet of curiosities and narratives in a game of reflections between the inside and the outside—challenging the idea of inconsequential actions and legacies between lovers or between the state and its citizens. For the artist, it is risible that an offense has no bearing or consequences in a relationship; also risible is the notion that the economic crisis has had little impact on the conceptual and physical construction of the home on all levels of private and public engagement. The artworks unveil their long-term effects on relationships and homes that are now characterized as destabilized, wrecked, or destroyed. Women remain at the center of this engendered crisis resulting from patriarchal and phallic values of greed, pillaging, and inconsequentiality. The consequences in the Mediterranean context heavily weigh upon women’s ability to reconstruct homes and bring back together a torn apart society via their capacity for familial, professional, and social engagement. Politically seduced, contractually violated, and solicitously abandoned to a destiny of misery by a selfish lover, the narrative of the artworks presents an apparent future that is made of tears and a painfully eked out living. This is juxtaposed to the emotionally charged painted curses which also speak of response, action, and reaction, and invite viewers to rethink and take advantage of the multiple possibilities offered by the now severed responsibilities of the wrecked home. The title of the installation, Knock, Knock, Knocking, speaks directly to the lover and the nation-state. “I wanted people to remember the name of a selfish lover and for them to identify that name with the nation-state as a means to make the installation relevant to personal instances and narratives of defeat and rebirth. As an artist, I wanted for this breakup to have a clear emotional comparison—an actual physical embodiment in the dirty bed sheets which air in public the traces of the physical body. We have all separated with a lover and experienced the feeling of rejection and hurt. This is the feeling that people are currently experiencing in the Mediterranean due to the betrayal and complete disregard for the very basic notions of the social contract by the nation-state.” For Aceti, society has stopped existing a long time ago, The Mediterranean Garden pavilion, with its architectonical cabinet of curiosities, offers the possibility of the impossible—the simplest of ideas, that another life may be possible without this nation-state or “moron of a lover.” As we are so often taught to not ‘air our dirty laundry,’ the installation antithetically brings into the public space—via curses and bodily fluids—expressions of anger and hatred towards a situation that it is commonly expected to be dealt with only privately. The artworks embody personal feelings and speak directly to the sentiments of betrayal, abuse, and violation. The artist stresses the importance of embodiment in order to ensure that anger can lead to severance and rebirth through the redefinition of one’s identity both personally and politically. “I wish for this anger to be directed towards a person in order to ensure that they—the selfish politicians of this nation-state—will not come back knocking at my door with ideas of social responsibility, service, and community participation. If these concepts have no value in a free market society, then there is no reason for me to engage any longer. As post-citizens within post-democracies, we no longer have any responsibility toward a nation-state that has moved beyond the idea of social contract. If we live in post-nation-states, requests for my social responsibility, service, and community participation have to be acquired through payments in hard cash, since we are paying for a miserable existence in these advanced-capitalistic societies. Yes, the message of the artwork to the ex-lover and the ex-state is that we are moving on and please don’t come knocking!” Knock, Knock, Knocking was realized with the support of The Museum of Contemporary Cuts, Arts Administration at Boston University, and the Friends of Thessaloniki’s New Waterfront Association. Artist Bio Lanfranco Aceti works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ MIT and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People? an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On a site-specific choral performance he designed with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship. In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and Knock, Knock, Knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki. Curators’ Bio Camilla Boemio is a writer, curator, university consultant and theorist whose practice deals with investigating the politics of participation in curatorial practices, the intersection of culture, the social architecture, politics and contemporary aesthetics. In 2016, she was the curator of Diminished Capacity the first Nigerian Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale. In 2017 In 2017, she curated Delivering Obsolescence: Art Bank, Data Bank, Food Bank a Special Project at the 5th Odessa Biennale of Contemporary Art. Boemio co-founded, with Fabrizio Orsini, and directed the thematic AAC Platform in Rome. She is member of AICA (International Association of Arts Critics) and she is curator at Artist Pension Trust.
What is in a curse? And who are the accursed? The artist, Lanfranco Aceti, has created a performance titled Accursed and curated by Areti Leopolou that addresses the theme of the Thessaloniki Biennale, Imagined Homes, by bringing the privacy of the home into the public space. The accursed plebs—lower class and middle class alike—voice their angers and frustrations at the Thessaloniki Concert Hall in the form of curses addressed to the state, politicians, financiers, and everyone else involved in the post-modern dismantling of the idea of socially rooted matriarchal values of collaboration, sharing, participation, service, and care.
Twelve women between the age of fifty and seventy years old will form a semicircle laying bare objects from the privacy of their homes. Armchairs, side tables, and crystal vases placed in the public space symbolize the idea of a specific home inherited from the second part of the twentieth century; one made of useless rendered sacrifices, betrayed by upward social mobility and deluded dreams of social existence. The twelve women are surrounded by the Thessaloniki Chorus which will be singing an acapella version of a composition collated by the artist from Lamentationes Prophetae Jeremiae of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Lamentation of Christos Samaras.
The history of curses in the Mediterranean goes back thousands of years to the invocations for misfortune on enemies, real and imagined, asked of Greek and Roman gods. The invocations are for love, economics, and political issues, creating a layered landscape in which the private and the public blend in the desperation of the lives of those accursed and cursing.
By expressing their unmitigated frustrations in the form of curses, the performers will break the lament of the chorus in order to articulate vulgarity, anger, and a sense of freedom based on the certainty that nothing else is left to lose—not even dignity since this is a construct of the body politic to restrain and control with values and morals, behaviors and resistance both within the public and private realms.
The artist conceives the relationship between these twelve women and the state as a very personal one, in which the state is a person and the idea of sufferance in privacy is subverted and rendered loudly public. Aceti argues that the body politics and the millennial continuous reference to the state as a body/person—a physical prerogative more recently acquired by corporations but started by Agrippa Menenius Lanatus in 494 B.C.—requires today a personal response that is clearly emotive, irrational, emotional, and uterine. This response has to be manifested beyond and outside the phallic boundaries set by the patriarchal state and recover its original matriarchal cavernous chthonian roots. It is an aesthetic approach that wears the millennial insults towards matriarchy and its social frameworks as a badge of honor publicly stated to incise within the public realm the idea and role of a different social approach so often disparaged in the name of the failed ideologies of free market and unethical economics.
The inferno in which ‘plebs’ have been and are being condemned to is the same inferno within which these people—moronic politicians, shitty financiers, and corporate fuckwads—deserve to be condemned to by these publicly imposed curses. Aceti invited the twelve women to either author their own curses or adopt the ones he wrote, imagining how to punish and torture those at the helm of contemporary society’s corrosion, as if they were in a contemporary Dantesque inferno. The artist’s curses speak of thousands of elephants on viagra raping the ass of a politician, of guts ripped out and dragged away by cats and dogs, and of the rotten shitty flesh of children’s sweet cheeks.
Accursed, as a performance, is all about shifting the idea of who is on the receiving end of a curse: the dismantling of society cannot just affect ‘neo-plebs’ and ‘post-citizens’ but is a rebounding curse that will render corrupt politicians—at some point in time—accursed. No longer submitted to structures of power and control, at least as a new ideological framework, people—as post-citizens—are free to reimagine their own individuality and the frameworks for new societal norms.
“The conclusion,” writes Michel Foucault “would be that the political, ethical, social, philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the individual from the state, and from the state’s institutions, but to liberate both from the state and from the type of individualization which is linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.” [1]
“It is time—explains the artist—to show some guts: either our guts or the guts of those who have caused and continue to cause this mayhem in order to preserve privileges and entitlements. A curse is an apotropaically vulgar and absolutely fantastical expression of feelings and desires that most likely will never happen. In repressed Western society where people are condemned to the obligation of hypocritical optimism in public and to the capitalistic misery of depression, solitude, and anger at home, the opportunity for the voiceless to voice their apotropaic wishes publicly is one that offers a moment of imaginary revenge, the possibility for social re-engagement, and the opportunity to make a public stand.”
In the fraying fabric of contemporary society there is a process of reaction that argues for a returning to a status quo ante—that of an ideal state as a body within which society perhaps existed—which is identifiable with a fascistic return to a golden age. This performance is not a lamentation and a commiseration for what has happened, it is a public voicing of silenced private feelings restricted to the home. It is a rally to launch a woman’s cavernous cry for war.
[1] Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, Vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et. al. (New York: The New Press, 2000), 336.
Poster Design: Deniz Cem Onduygu, https://www.fevkalade.net.
Images: Lanfranco Aceti, Accursed, 2017. Installation and performance, Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art. Photography: pSari visual, www.psari-visual.com.
The performance program ACCURSED took place in the framework of the Thessaloniki Performance Festival. The festival is part of the Main Program of the 6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art which is organized by the State Museum of Contemporary Art and co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Regional Development Fund).
6th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art
“Imagined Homes”
30.09.2017-14.01.2018
www.thessalonikibiennale.gr
For the performance Accursed, realized on October 13, 2017, Thessaloniki Concert Hall, 7 pm to 10 pm, special thanks to the Thessaloniki Concert Hall Organisation and to the Mixed Choir of Thessaloniki: Artistic Director for Accursed, Mary Konstantinidis. Performers: Aquili Claudia, Bouloni Olga, Gazi Marilia, Kakkou Yetta, Kimpiri Popi, Kliroporou Dimitra, Panagiotara Maria, Papadaki Mariangela, Saltiel Eleni, Sariani Nicola, Simeonidou Eleni, and Skoumbourdi Tommy.
Artist Bio
Lanfranco Aceti works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is a research affiliate and visiting professor at ACT @ MIT and director of the Arts Administration Program at Boston University. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK at the John Hansard Gallery; Who The People? an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by the Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus; and Hope Coming On a site-specific choral performance he designed with the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and realized in front of Turner’s Slave Ship. In 2017, Aceti prepared a series of new artworks for an exhibition entitled Shimmer and curated by Irini Papadimitriou (V&A) at the Tobazi Mansion in Hydra, a new large choral performance titled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece; and knock, knock, knocking a public space installation in the Mediterranean Garden Pavilion of the New Sea Waterfront of Thessaloniki.
]]>Aceti explained, “Kuball has suspended over The Fifth Column on the north lawn of the White House two drumsticks that play an electronically revisited version of the Radetzky March. Issues related to the throes of collapsing empires and the destruction that accompany their falls oblige contemporary viewers to take notice of the twisted marching of patriarchal idiotic rhetorics of war. Twisted tweets and insults are the quotidian background beat of the de-construction of a world descending into the madness of Fascism. This is a fascistic world in which people have a responsibility via their a-critical resigned participation, cowardly derelictions monumentalized in persistent silence, or fake revolutionary stances out of convenience.”
“This solemn new march will give the beat to the continuous threats and always impending confrontation between North Korea and the United States of America is unveiling the real measurements of tiny hands and tiny minds,” Lanfranco Aceti explained. “We are in contact with numerous schools in the US and across the world in order to have the march played every morning for opening classes, but also to mark the beginning of everyone’s daily activities in the public and private workplaces. A petition has been presented to the American Congress for the march to substitute the current national hymn.”
Mischa Kuball, Drums for the President of USA, (Radetzky-March), 2017, follows previous installations on The Fifth Column, with artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Grayson Perry, and Sarah Lucas.
Aceti explained that Kuball had been chosen because of his artistic practice which, spanning over 40 years, has faced up to the challenges of artworks in public spaces and uncomfortable social themes and issues.
“As #COTUS,” Aceti concludes, “I have been contacting a number of international artists and making poignant selections which reflect the spirit of contemporary political art, activism, and aesthetics. Countercurrent to a partisan criticism rooted in political ideas of moral superiority and divinely inspired righteousness, the artworks chosen question at large the framework which have characterized the past two thousand years of history and that, unequivocally, continue to be repeated—cyclically and blindly—across time, geographical areas, political landscapes, and pseudo-cultural contexts. It is in this unreasonable presence of the reality of the unimaginable characterizing this turn of the twentieth-first century that outlandish artistic and curatorial projects find their raison d’être as rational counterpoints to the decline of collective social reasoning.”
Drums for the President of USA will stand on The Fifth Column for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Lanfranco Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.
#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards #warpigs #mischakuball
]]>Where Is the Problem? ‘Empathy – Apathy’ is a new group exhibition at Beton7, Athens, curated by Eva Kekou, that sees the participation of Lanfranco Aceti (IT, UK, US) and Willem Jan Smit (NL, DE, ES) together with Eirene Efstathiou, Yiannis Theodoropoulos, Anna Lascari, and Stefania Strouza.
Lanfranco Aceti and Willem Jan Smit present three new artworks as part of their summer long conversation on the complexity of contemporary artistic practices that reflect upon social and identity issues. The three artworks were produced specifically for Beton7 and one of them was realized in situ as part of the collaborative and community based approach that the two artists wanted to explore over the course of an entire summer.
Lanfranco Aceti, The Biggr The Bettr, 2017. Hand stitched sequins on silk, 40x60cm.
Willem Jan Smit, NOT TOO BIG, 2017. Reversible sequins fabric and hangers,120x220cm.
Willem Jan Smit and Lanfranco Aceti, Men Smear, 2017. Nails, rubber gloves, and crude oil rub from Piraeus spill on found tarpaulin, 130x170cm.
The three artworks responded to the philosophical framework set by the curator who explained that the chosen titled Where Is the Problem? linked “the local with the world, the special with the general. It refers to sarcasm and humour in order to deal with problems in ‘societies in crisis’ and ‘transition societies’ which remain inactive and passive, often developing a bipolar and ambivalent attitude to the problems they face.”
Aceti and Smit linked philosophical, economic, and gender issues focusing on how we perceive size and construct our relations in terms of size within contemporary globalized societies. By mixing contemporary events, the oil spill on the coastline of Athens, and the individual relationship to the concept of ‘big’, is bigger really better?, the two artists generated a visual conversation between three aesthetically different artworks which fundamentally question the basis of our social engagements.
The exhibition can be visited from Tuesday 19 September to Friday 13 October, 2017 at Beton7, Athens, Greece. Opening hours: Monday to Friday, 2 PM – 7 PM. Opening: Tuesday September 19th, 8 PM.
SHIMMER is a new solo show by Lanfranco Aceti and Willem Jan Smit who came together under the curatorial framework of Irini Papadimitriou, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The two artists merged their aesthetic practices for SHIMMER and generated for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts and the Athens School of Fine Arts in Hydra (GR) a scathing visual analysis of contemporary political art. The exhibition takes place from September 12, 2017 to October 15, 2017.
“The foundation for the defiance in contemporary art practices of activism and art actionism—explain the artists—clashes against social constructs which conspire to blind us to socio-economic exploitation via artists posing as activists through socially mediated platforms for a sprite of screen time or a couple hundred likes.”
It is in this context of aesthetic egotistic Hollywoodification of champagne socialists, click activists, and re-upholstered armchair revolutionaries that the exercise of fashionable prepubescent anger—as a response to the processes of exploitation and necropolitics of nation states—has to be delivered as an optimistic and benign participatory visual message. This is a message that is prettily aestheticized and homophonically heteronormative in relation to the sound of the chorus within which artists are singing the same uninspiring dribbling and re-ingested vomit produced by the same corporate hymn sheet.
Trapped in the swampy glue of contemporary social media and impossibilitated to counteract the hypermediated and metastructures spewed by institutional taxonomies for hunting, trapping, and cataloging behaviors and human activities, the functional aesthetic response is the soiling of oneself with the shimmering of superficial blindness of Arcadian landscapes, shining objects, and the glistening of bodily fluids.
It is in these post-capitalistic ideological failures that the Mediterranean—as a regional and variegated cultural area bent over to corruption, loosely connected and still so similar in its hypersexually inspired patriarchal servitude despite its multitude of differences—flaunts about beauty not as solace but as a weapon in the hands of others and by which to be pierced. Blinded by an obvious aesthetic of oblivion conjured by the silvery shimmer of waters—which renders vision both blind and starry—the complex inheritances of borders, routes, and narratives, sinks in the depths of a sea of darkness covered by the bedazzling light of incessantly and collectively regurgitated reflections. Not much is left to see below the reflective surface of contemporary necropolitics which make of their liquidity and constant changing sparkles an attractive shining body of obfuscating lights.
The awareness of this blinding quality of the Mediterranean waters and their metaphors is at the core of the exhibition SHIMMER in Hydra. The phenomenon of shimmering is presented by the artists as an experience that does not unveil but conceals, making it impossible to reveal the fullness of contemporary sorrowful experiences.
Accustomed to suffering— as a constant process of plunging from one crisis into another, political failure to political failure, falling of an empire into the rising of a new one—the socio-political Mediterranean understanding of life is characterized by a staring in the blinding light of the sun reflected upon the sea. The wavering and weaving process of post-capitalistic narratives of uncertainty exists—in the Mediterranean context—within the certainty of the inscrutability of the undercurrents of events that remain invisible to the naked eye but not for this reason less known or felt in the destructive strength of their invisible forces. These are objects that the artists present as shimmering superficial constructs concealing their darker and deeper nature.
LANFRANCO ACETI (IT, UK, US) is an artist, curator, and academic. He has exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, the Thessaloniki Biennial, and numerous other galleries and museums. He is visiting professors at ACT@MIT and professor at Boston University. His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.
WILLEM JAN SMIT (NL, ES, DE) is a contemporary artist and activist who has exhibited internationally. He has shown in Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. His latest intervention was, ad nauseam, at Documenta 14. His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.
IRINI PAPADIMITRIOU (GR, UK) is a curator, producer and cultural manager, working at the forefront of digital culture. Irini works at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Watermans gallery. She also collaborates with the British Council Creative Economy.
1 Lanfranco Aceti, the Biggr the Bettr, 2017. Sequins on stretched silk, 40x60cm.
2 Willem Jan Smit, Not Too Big, 2017. Reversible sequins fabric and garment hangers, 120x240cm.
3 Willem Jan Smit, Blow Me, 2017. Reversible sequins fabric and garment hangers, 140x300cm.
4 Lanfranco Aceti & Willem Jan Smit, Fuck the Fucking Arcadia, 2017. Local shopping bags, 212 x 285cm.
5 Lanfranco Aceti, I Will Keep Forgetting You Every Single Day, 2017. Found text on linen, ink and shimmery gold paint, not too big, suitable to decorate apartments.
6 Lanfranco Aceti, Throwing Shimmery Shade, 2017. Reclaimed chairs from Mandraki dump, mylar tape on parasol, 200x188cm.
7 Willem Jan Smit, Sweet Dreams, Fais de Beaux Reves, Óneira Glyká, 2017. Rope from nearby chapel, dimensions variable, string theory.
8 Lanfranco Aceti, Spa Day, 2017. Performance with mule and youth.
9 Lanfranco Aceti & Willem Jan Smit, The Rehydration of Hydra aka Snakes on a Ladder, Straight Off the Plane, 2017. Iron can, ladder from the water processing plant in Mandraki ditch, garden hose, couplings, metal wire, spray heads, and water.
10 Willem Jan Smit, Yammer Yammer, Bad Mammer Jammer, 2017. Farewell performance with megaphone.
11 Lanfranco Aceti & Willem Jan Smit, Miss Congeniality, 2017. Garbage bag runners from mansion windows. Sized to the building.
Many thanks to the Athens School of Fine Arts and the participating students without whom this project would not have been realised so graciously.
]]>Lanfranco Aceti #COTUS (Curator Of The United States), who chose Sarah Lucas for this particular installation at the White House, said that the artwork “blended several media including participatory performance.” “It will be so exciting,” stated the artist, ”to see people dragged on the North Lawn of the White House to meet their fate. It will be even more interesting to see politicians who fall foul of this new ordinance, to be punished in such a public,interactive, and spectacular way. My concern is that the initial inspiration that is community based and for a common good might be re-oriented toward capitalistic monetization and economic exploitation—a Disneyfication and Hollywoodization of the events, with the selling of popcorn, soda, and pork chop on a stick, more focused on entertainment than a moment of reflection on the importance of truth and its definition.”
Sarah Lucas’s Oboddaddy 1 (2010) follows preceding installations on The Fifth Column of artists like Maurizio Cattelan and Grayson Perry.
Aceti explained, “Lucas has been chosen because of her artistic practice which since the 1990s has proven to carry, as Ken Johnson writes in The New York Times, “a deeper resonance, which comes from how they connect the viscerally low-minded and the intellectually high.”
“As #COTUS,” Aceti concludes, “I am extremely proud of having been afforded this opportunity and having chosen Sarah Lucas’s artwork. Although Lucas could be identified as a feminist artist, her artworks carry the beauty and hypocrisy of contemporary heteronormative society. They exist as a reminder of other things that have been eliminated from the picture. Accusations of vulgarity towards Lucas’s work have remained unfounded because the artworks—if compared to contemporary social behaviours and sexual practices—appear rather elegant and full of composure. The same can not be said, however, for the vulgarity with which we are constantly subjected to by our institutions, politicians, and fellow citizens. It is my hope that, once the law is enacted, the ceremony of pillory of condemned common citizens and politicians alike will be called Penetralia in homage to the artist who has provided this wonderful instrument.”
Oboddaddy 1 will stand on The Fifth Column for the next forty-nine days, after which it will be substituted by a new artwork selected by Lanfranco Aceti, Curator Of The United States or #COTUS.
Suppository is, as stated in the Oxford Dictionary, “A medicinal preparation, typically in the form of a small, solid cone or cylinder of a base material that becomes soft or liquid at body temperature, administered by insertion into the rectum, vagina, or urethra (or, esp. in early use, any body orifice other than the mouth).”
#curatoroftheunitedstates #cotus #museumofcontemporarycuts #fifthcolumn #thefifthcolumnandthefirstforty-ninecards #penetralia #sarahlucas #suppository #fakenews #porkchoponastick
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The book emerged from a conversation between Lanfranco Aceti, Director of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR) and Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press), and Paul Thomas, the director of the Transcultural Imaging Conference.
Cloud and Molecular Aesthetics is an open access book by Leonardo Electronic Almanac edited by Lanfranco Aceti, Paul Thomas, and Edward Colless. It is published by MIT Press with the support of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR) and Goldsmiths, University of London.
With thanks to the team of editorial assistants at Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Candice Bancheri, Ashley Daugherty, and Michael Spicher.
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“A child in the dark, gripped with fear, comforts himself by singing under his breath.…The song is like a rough sketch of a calming and stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos.” [1] The posters—tiled, multiplied, and repetitive in themselves—create a refrain, a visual cue not dissimilar from the tune of a song which repeats itself over and over again. The posters exist both as a single images and as a collective group linked to larger and globalized socio-cultural networks. The photograph displays the collected garbage of a documenta 14 venue in Athens, which includes remnants of publicity and documentation of a quinquennial that attempted to create intercultural dialogue in name but in reality existed as a conflicted process of exploitation.
“The Museum of Contemporary Cuts,” explained the curator, Lanfranco Aceti, “is working with Smit this year because of his original aesthetic approaches and worldviews, which move beyond national boundaries and ghettos of incommunicability by engaging and embracing the contemporary contradictions of local/global public spaces, communities, and networks that exist inside traditional and operational frameworks.”
Smit has addressed the relationship between the space and the object in his aesthetic processes of production by providing a multitude of personal responses to authoritative power. With the public installation of ad nauseam, the artist analyzes the difficulties of intercultural communication and questions the relationship between Kassel and Athens outside the frameworks of body politic and politicized optimism, to generate a statement that challenges the role of institutionally endorsed art and self-aggrandized branding strategies.
It is through these rebelling gestures that Smit argues in Deleuzian term the role of the watchers as those who safeguard, construct, and sell institutionally approved rebellion. “What they watch for are the movements, outbursts, infractions, disturbances, and rebellions occurring in the abyss.… not a line of writing but a line of rigid segmentarity along which everyone will be judged and rectified according to his or her contours, individual or collective.” [2]
The excision and rectification is embedded in the tiled posters which contour the documenta 14 experience of the artist in Athens in an outburst of rebellion against the aesthetic embellishment of art constantly sold as a motif for participation, interaction, and engagement.
Aceti explains, “In his aesthetic practice Smit wanders between documentary sculpture and the less-traditional (and condemned) forms of aesthetic expression which exist at the borders of traditionally conceived art forms. It is this intersemiotic translatability of the aesthetic of the art object that makes Smit’s practice appealing.”
In fact, the artist—although moving between genres and conventions—has developed his own articulated language to point to the servitude of contemporary art and to already enslaved and “blunted forms of rebellion.” As defined by Adorno, “conventions and genres did not just stand in the service of society; many, however, such as topos of the maid-turned-master, were already a blunted form of rebellion.” [3]
It is in the complexity of the institutional engagements, rules, guidelines, and strict behavioral imposition that the artist is able to show his unsuffering of contemporary aesthetic and cultural exploitation. Willingly or unwillingly (but always mostly a-critically), the glittering circus of art participates in the processes of exploitation to reinforce and restate—ad nauseam— the currency of contemporary body politic.
[1] Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1987), 311.
[2] Ibid., 200-201.
[3] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), 203.
Artist Biography
Artist’s Biography: Willem Jan Smit (NL, ES, DE) is a contemporary artist and activist who has exhibited internationally. He has shown in Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. His latest intervention was, ad nauseam, at documenta 14, shortly after a solo exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, They Were Shown the Door in a Matter of Minutes, in Athens as part of the Platforms Project. Currently he is engaging in a series of public interventions and has been invited to participate in numerous biennials between 2018 and 2019. He studied in Vancouver, Canada with Liz Magor, Geoffrey Farmer, and Garry Neill Kennedy. Smit is preparing a series of performative and process works, as well as participating in a range of international exhibitions with his sculptures and paintings.
His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.
]]>What is a protest? And what does it mean to picket, to resist, to respond, and to give voice to one’s social and political concerns? In the wake of growing political uncertainty and the news of the United States withdrawal from the global Paris climate accords, a protest will occur from dawn to dawn, starting on June 3 at 5:12 am to June 4 at 5:12 am, on the White House sidewalk on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. As political protests go, this may be the most unusual of them all. There are no shouted slogans, no placards, no bull-horns, or chanting. This political protest presents the bodies of people walking one step forward and two steps back in silence for a cycle of twenty-four hours. Speaking to the complexity of contemporary times, the bodies of the participants will carry messages through the visible and invisible signs of their existence and characteristics of their bodies.
In a moment in which protests are becoming a post-modern representation of the frivolity of entertainment and festive participation, what does one make of a person, of their history, and their repeated actions throughout a lifetime of labor? How does the contemporary self redefine physical embodiment of political activism?
Stefanos Tsivopoulos originally choreographed the well-known saying, “one step forward, two steps back,” which many Greeks used to say in order to sum up the current sociopolitical and economic condition in the country. The saying represents the belief that even though we move onward, we’re actually heading back because the steps forward are not enough to move us towards our goals or social-political progress. Tsivopoulos incorporated in the choreography gestures and movements from the ceremonial ritual that is performed by the Evzones, the National Guard situated in front of the Greek Parliament. The choreography was performed by two performers facing the Greek Parliament. Each step forward they took, was followed by two steps back, amounting to a backward movement that eventually located the performers away from the Parliament, and towards an existential place they couldn’t foresee.
Lanfranco Aceti together with Vera Ingrid Grant had initially proposed to the artist to replicate the performance in front of the United States’ White House, as a way of representing the weariness of the body engaged in the turmoil of contemporary post-democratic political processes; experiencing the “jagged grain” of lament and frustration, and yet vibrant with unruliness.
Stripped of any specific political message, the performers are dressed in black (as in the Athens performance). There will be 12 people, forming couples of two, who will alternate and walk on the sidewalk of the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue from 5:12 am of June 3 to 5:12 am of June 4, 2017.
The sociopolitical implications—of what is a very simple action—will speak volumes towards the understanding of a society devoid of conflict and will invite people to consider and re-interrogate the roots of social and political processes, which appear to be historically cyclical and stagnant.
Tsivopolous explained that when he “spoke to Lanfranco, one of the two curators, I told him that my original idea was to have it in real time and for a longer period of time, and maybe in a reaction space. This political contested space becomes part of the work and people, the passers by, everybody can become part of the work at the same time. So that’s how the whole discussion started. I’m extremely happy that of all the places on earth, we are able to do it probably in one of the most contested places that is also very well-known—and given these times as well.”
“Tsivopoulos’s work poetically focuses on the contemporary political processes,” explained Aceti,“which are currently pushing people further and further away from current political parties, institutional representation, and collective participation understood in traditional terms. The political protest in front of the White House shows the distance and divide that is being created between post-citizens and contemporary politics. Because of the event’s location, this is not not just a political happening but a much more open ended engagement that straddles between politics and art. It asks even larger questions which are basic to our lives as human beings: what is it that we have been fighting for as a society, why have people died, what is it that people have died for, and—most important of them all—was it worth it? So what could be seen as aesthetic and political questions become incredibly large philosophical questions. What I find appealing in this protest/performance and its participants is the notion of inscribed identity of the body as it relates to its sociopolitical context.”
Professor Vera Grant added, “the visual language and interpretation that we use in the States is so different from the Athenian landscape. Occasionally they kind of cross territories and connect, but very often there is a disconnect. So I was very interested in the translatability of this performance piece here in the States and in this particular moment. I think it has wonderful opportunities written in. It seems this particular climate since the election, and all the dynamics around the election year, have unleashed so many thoughts, feelings, and moments of activism that have drawn artists in. Art is pushing its way to the center of that conversation in wonderful ways. The whole idea of how art is a part of these greater conversations—whether it has agency, whether it has the ability to activate change or not, and what the role of art is. These have always been questions, but in this moment there is just this energy! This is a space were ‘we’—and when I say ‘we’ I’m talking about a certain group of people and artists that do want to effect change in society—take action.”
This project—a pop-up event—is a collaboration between the Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) and the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art, Hutchins Center, Harvard University.
Following the event in Washington there will be a series of talks and discussions at international Universities which will lead to a final publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press).
Artist Biography
Stefanos Tsivopoulos is a Greek artist and filmmaker living and working between Amsterdam, Athens, and New York. His works often results from long-term research into historical films and photographic archives and is driven by an interest in the social, political, and economic aspects that determine the world we live in. He has exhibited extensively in both art museums and film festivals around the world.
A selection of Tsivopoulos’s recent exhibitions include DOCUMENTA 14, Friedericianum, Kassel (2017); Kunsthaus Zurich (2016); MACBA, Barcelona (2015); Tate Modern, London (2014); MuCEM, Marseille (2014); 2nd Beijing Biennial, Beijing (2014); Haus Der Culturen Der Welt, Berlin (2013); SALT, Istanbul (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); Manifesta 8, Murcia (2010); Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2010); Witte de With, Rotterdam (2010); BFI Southbank, London (2009).
In 2013, he represented Greece in the 55th Venice Biennial with his video installation History Zero.
Curators’ Biographies
Lanfranco Aceti works as an artist, curator, and academic. He is the director of Arts Administration at Boston University. He has done a range of exhibitions and public space interventions at renowned international venues including Tate Modern, MoMA, and the ICA London among others. He is Editor in Chief of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (MIT Press, Leonardo journal), for which he has edited more than twelve volumes. He has lectured internationally at prestigious institutions such as Yale, Harvard, RCA, Goldsmiths, and Central Saint Martins. He worked as the director of Kasa Gallery in Istanbul, where he exhibited a range of innovative artworks including 75Watts by Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (acquired by MoMA) and Paolo Cirio’s Loophole4All (awarded the 2014 Golden Nica at Ars Electronica). Recently he performed and curated Hope Coming On at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, as well as curated The Small Infinite at the John Hansard Gallery with artworks never previously exhibited from the estate of John Latham. Lanfranco Aceti has participated in numerous art fairs such as Art Athina, Art International, Supermarket, and Contemporary Istanbul, either as a curator or as an artist. In 2011, he curated the exhibition Uncontainable as part of the parallel events of the 12th Istanbul Biennial and exhibited artworks on the media facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb. He has exhibited numerous personal projects including Car Park, a public performance in the UK; Who The People? an installation artwork acquired in its entirety by Chetham’s Library and Museum in Manchester; and Sowing and Reaping, installation artworks acquired in their entirety by the National Museum of Contemporary Art of Cyprus. As of 2017, Aceti has been asked to curate and prepare a series of exhibitions and projects including a large performance entitled Accursed for the Thessaloniki Biennial in Greece.
Vera Ingrid Grant is the director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. She most recently curated THE WOVEN ARC (Summer 2016); and the Art of Jazz: NOTES (Spring 2016) at the Cooper Gallery; and The Persuasions of Montford at the Boston Center for the Arts (Spring 2015). Her curatorial approach leverages theories of visual culture to create an immersive exhibition experience charged with object driven dialogues. Grant is a Fulbright Scholar (University of Hamburg), has an MA in Modern European History from Stanford University, and is currently a fellow (2015-16) at the Center for Curatorial Leadership (CCL). Her recent publications include: Luminós/C/ity.Ordinary Joy, as editor; and author of: “E2: Extraction/Exhibition Dynamics” (Harvard University Press, January 2015); “Visual Culture and the Occupation of the Rhineland,” The Image of the Black in Western Art, Vol. 5, The Twentieth Century, (Harvard University Press, February 2014); and “White Shame/Black Agency: Race as a Weapon in Post-World War I Diplomacy” in African Americans in American Foreign Policy, (University of Illinois Press, February 2014).
“The choice fell on Mr. Smit,” explained the curator Lanfranco Aceti and the artistic director Artemis Potamianou, “since his practice has been dealing for many years now with issues of rejection, remainder, and reminder. Through a contradictory embrace of contexts, traditional structures, and processes of aesthetic production, Smit has addressed the relationship between the space and the object.”
His approach is a reinterpretation of journalistic and/or archeological practices, which— as an “instant romanticism of the present” as Susan Sontag calls it—redefines cultural samples and their inherent historicity. When people come to places often they are said to ‘be part of the furniture,’ or for the furniture to be part of people’s histories. The work stands between the process of documented quotidian history, undocumented people’s presences, and documented object’s historicity. Subsequently, by focusing on the being in the picture and through the transposition of culture samples into the gallery space, Smit communicates the translational nature of the aesthetic process, itself.
Challenging aesthetic norms of what sculpture or painting or installation or plain photographic documentation is, Smit’s artistic practice presents a series of new works that are the result of the serendipitous nature of life interpreted as an errare. An “errare,” in the definition given by the Harvard scholar Giuliana Bruno, is a process of s/he who straddles the worlds of aimlessly wandering and persistently blundering.
Smit’s process of aesthetic production becomes a work of art in itself—since his samples are steeped in a walking through the city of Athens, for this particular show, in order to transport what has been abandoned a sense of belonging and affection for the unloved, the discarded, and the no longer useful. “It is in this very approach that Smit’s works are no longer objects but people—not simply in a metaphorical sense, but in the sense of recording traces that have been left by the human presence over the object” explained the curator. “By touching them, using them, and abusing them, people imprint themselves physically and psychologically on everyday objects, which acquire in their scuffs, marks, physical alterations, and manipulation a reflection, an aesthetic aura, or an almost invisible trace not just of their owners but also of their intrinsic existence as objects.”
THEY WERE SHOWN THE DOOR IN A MATTER OF MINUTES is a borrowed sample sentence from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Language lends the opportunity of looking at his works as if they were constantly playing and shifting roles, therefore being at times objects and at times their owners, both reflecting each other in a permanent game of mirrors. Ambiguity must be at the centre. The vicious constant exchange of roles and parts, at times comedic and at others dramatic, to be played within the larger stage of society and life leaves the viewer with a different understanding of the mediocrity of everyday objects, actions, and people. By looking at the hyperreal of mediocrity—as the artist defines contemporary lives in Baudrillardian terms—he unveils the superficiality and hypocrisy of contemporary living, shifting words like vacuous, mediocre, and banal from the discarded objects to the so called ‘empowered’ lives of their owners and viewers.
Artist Biography
Artist’s Biography: Willem Jan Smit (NL, ES, DE) is a contemporary artist and activist who has exhibited internationally. He has shown in Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Great Britain, Greece, and the United States. His latest intervention was, ad nauseam, at documenta 14, shortly after a solo exhibition for the Museum of Contemporary Cuts, They Were Shown the Door in a Matter of Minutes, in Athens as part of the Platforms Project. Currently he is engaging in a series of public interventions and has been invited to participate in numerous biennials between 2018 and 2019. He studied in Vancouver, Canada with Liz Magor, Geoffrey Farmer, and Garry Neill Kennedy. Smit is preparing a series of performative and process works, as well as participating in a range of international exhibitions with his sculptures and paintings.
His artworks are held in numerous private and public collections.
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