What does working on art mean nowadays? Artists and creators as social actors in evolution – from Plato until the robots today, in conversation with curators Giulia Piscitelli Pier Paolo Pancotto Daniel Knorr
Alberto Burri and the amount of time devoted to artistic work – working in and for art
Economists Bruno Frey and Werner Pommerehne emphasized qualitative and quantitative data, such as the amount of time devoted to artistic work, being a member of a group or association, the amount of income earned, recognition by the art community, and specific expertise, perhaps a degree from an art school.
Artist Alberto Burri, who was also a physician, wanted to translate the suffering he experienced on the battlefield during the war into the tearing of burlap sacks, the screaming expressionism of the combustions, and the painful deformation of plastic matter of the Celotex. Cracks excavated layers of overlapping memory, the surface of a wall furrowed by branches of cracks that undermine its solidity, unity and wholeness.
Fernand Léger and Le ballet Mécanique
Fernand Léger, also responsible for theatrical set designs and the experimental film Le ballet Mécanique in 1924, far from the labor-related aspects of denunciation or introspection of an entire society pursued by painters between the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries was passionate about the energy and dynamism of industrial civilization in the first half of the Twentieth century. Interested in the decompositions of forms that can express the robotic sense of modern life through a mosaic of machine-inspired elements instead of depicting the working class in art.
Andy Warhol sublimates his advertising and fashion magazine beginnings into his own itinerary, while minimalist Robert Mangold in the 1960s moved to New York City serving as janitor and later librarian at MoMA. Bansky, a subversive and satirical artist and writer, immortalized a bruised child intent on using a sewing machine on a New York wall in 2012 to evoke child exploitation.
working class in art – Kazuko Miyamoto, minimalism
Exponent of minimalism, Kazuko Miyamoto, born in Tokyo in 1942, and then moved to NYC where she lives and works, combines industrial technologies and rational processes. One of the first string constructions-installations, that would remain a constantly evolving practice, was created in Sol LeWitt’s loft, where Miyamoto had started working in the year 1968 as an assistant. By emphasizing the gesture of creation and incorporating elements of disquiet imprecision, the artist responds to and reinvents her own version of minimalism, applying a gaze coming from her cultural roots. «Being Japanese – affirms Miyamoto – you are minimalist anyway».
Work in art, the privileged gateway to transcendence and Hegel’s idealism – Ethics and aesthetics
About Ethics and aesthetics. In Hegel’s idealism, artistic activity empowers man to access the Absolute. Art becomes the work of a genius who, guided by his inner self, expresses the meaning that inspires him to spread it to the rest of the world. Through art, man can contemplate the light of ideas, rise far above his own personality to achieve liberation and catharsis from the everyday.
Working class in art. Close to Hegel, Friedrich Schelling recognized in art a privileged gateway to transcendence. Daniel Knorr, born in Bucharest in 1968, is an expert in blurring outlines. He represented Romania at the 51st Venice Biennale Art Exhibition and ranged with his works between galleries and public spaces, texts and newspapers, between advertisements and conversations. Depression Elevations is titled a series of works that began in 2013.
Robots and work – the industrialization and the basic human needs
«An early work of mine which started in 1999 was called Begging Robots» – says Daniel Knorr. The series went on until 2012. There are several versions of the Begging Robots: a robot with a dog, an interactive robot, a robot for public spaces, a robot worm. The Third Law of Robotics laid down by science fiction author Isaac Asimov is, «A robot must protect its own existence». The robot for public spaces has a crank on its back that works like a dynamo.
When it is operated on, the robot says, «You look great today, can I please have a euro?» There’s a slit in the front where it holds a robot baby in its arms. When you insert a coin, the robot says, «thank you». The work refers to the industrialization of begging and explores the extent to which basic human needs, for example the right to food, collide with an increasingly automated, robot-controlled world. In such ways the Begging Robots reflect on the human anxiety about replacement of their labor power by robots and machines.
Working in art – my artistic practice is conceptually driven
«My artistic practice is conceptually driven. Material is motivated by an original idea. I call that materialization. I even see an idea as material. My work European Influenza was shown for the first time in 2005 in the Romanian Pavilion in Venice. It was materialized in the perceptions of the viewers, in the press articles and in conversations – even in this text a materialization of the work is taking place.
The series Depression Elevations, which I started in 2013, was originally motivated by the traces we leave behind in the streets to display our activities. Something ephemeral, a puddle, is the content of this activity and closely coupled with the value system of our society. The visualization or revelation of this now relatively invisible activity gives rise to a new narrative.
The artwork is connected to places the puddles come from: historic, romantic, incidental etc. The subsequent series of works Industrials traces the molding of industrial objects and surfaces that changed over time as a result of natural phenomena or human intervention – for example, a tin roof that was swept away by the wind and run over by cars, thus taking on a new shape».
The aesthetics of objects about work – Giulia Piscitelli
The aesthetic object is transformed into a mirror of the communicative ability of its author and the sensitivity of the user in finding his sense of the world within a deformed and sometimes distorted representation of reality. Phenomenology wanted to define the intersubjective and projection aspect that the role of the artist was assuming according to other categories. Edmund Husserl, the founder of the methodology and a member of the Brentano School, considered by many to be the father of contemporary research in cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, considers it first and foremost in the ability to describe things as they offer themselves to the gaze. For Phenomenology, every object can be reduced to the object of pure looking, and in art this entails flowing into a purely aesthetic dimension.
«In the past, the territory in which I live was called Terra di Lavoro or Campania Felix», says Neapolitan artist Giulia Piscitelli, whose Slave in Silver Leaf, a site-specific intervention made on the occasion of the artist’s Naples solo show at Madre museum in Naples in 2014, should at least be mentioned in the specific theme.
Giulia Piscitelli: The whole human body is a brain, and the hand is a learning tool
Ethics and aesthetics in work is a transposition of a symbol taken from a historical atlas and usually used to visualize the development and trend of slavery within the great empires of antiquity. Terra di lavoro, continues Piscitelli – «is a designation that was eliminated in the fascist period, by which the wealth and fertility of the land was meant. It is no accident that a temple dedicated to Mater Matuta, goddess of the morning and the dawn and therefore protector of the birth of men and things, was found in Capua. With these premises, it would not have been possible to be indifferent to the concept of labor and fertility, where fertility is not delegated to a female organ but to an organ of science of knowledge and the unknown».
The whole human body is a brain, and the hand is a learning tool – Giulia Piscitelli responds to the question of what is her operating process in art – in almost all my productions there is the intervention of my physical hand, this is my practice.
«Like an eye lidless eye opening at the tips of your fingers», wrote Jacques Derrida. «Whatever I make I have only one thought», Piscitelli concludes, «to find that thread of light on the top of a golden frame, as if that light came to my eyes from inside the frame, although I know that this is actually impossible, but I stubbornly continue the search for it».
Working in art – Pier Paolo Pancotto and Fondazione in Rome and the Art Club
The 1990s ushered in the «era of the curator», linked to the growing centrality of this eclectic presence. The philosopher Yves Michaud, repeatedly criticizes the worldliness of the star curator, whom he stigmatizes as a «jet-set flâneur». Lea Vergine has deprecated the poor preparation, narcissism and albagia of young curators-vedettes.
«My curatorial practice», explains in counterpoint Pier Paolo Pancotto, independent art historian and critic, curator of La Fondazione in Rome and the Art Club exhibition program at the Académie de France in Rome, «is based on a direct relationship with the artist and knowledge of his or her work nurtured constantly through study and, in the case of a living performer, dialogue. It is a relationship that begins with an initial intuition, usually generated by the vision of a work, followed by an in-depth study of its author’s creative path that, opens the way to contact with the artist. The development of this dialogue, both on an individual and professional level, is the indispensable prerequisite to the planning of an exhibition project.
The elaboration of the latter, particularly with regard to the venue of the exhibition and its setting, is inspired by the same criterion of empathy. The professionalism of an artist, expressed on both the intellectual and operational levels, is a component in the exercise of curatorial practice. One thinks, among others, of Carla Accardi and her daily painting practice, rhythmically cadenced in the time and space of her Roman studio; or of Eva Marisaldi and her manual skill, capable of mixing craftsmanship and technology, tradition and innovation; or again of Ciprian Mureşan and Şerban Savu, who to the logistical sharing of the atelier add, often, that of design and execution».
The ethos of work – Plato and the action of the artist
The ancient Greeks did not use the term create referring to the action of the artist, but constantly resorted to the term making since they considered such activity only a téchne, that is, a practical faculty resolved in the mere representation of the real world, as Plato teaches. A concept that is later extended to Christian thought. In the Middle Ages, on pain of head or condemnation for heresy, creation was associated only with the demiurgic action of God.
The univocal holder of perfection and freedom, the repository and enforcer of natural rules and laws. During the Renaissance this idea of imitative technique, this narrow and limiting mimesis, radically changes direction and unhinges itself, opening wide to the artist a range of infinite imaginative possibilities and the breath of freedom of invention.
Art-work. Marsilio Ficino and the conception of artistic activity
The Neoplatonic philosopher Marsilio Ficino in the fifteenth century redefined an unprecedented conception of artistic activity, the ability to pursue and implement one’s own vision without necessarily forcing oneself to imitate nature. The artist’s work breaks away from the bonds of immanence and shines similar to divine action, generating an incubation that gives birth to something new in a perfect way.
From this moment on, a diametrical reappraisal of artistic work, for centuries imprisoned within the cage of the technique of reproduction, is imposed. The Eighteenth century witnesses a further step forward. The artist rises to absolute master of his gesture, but even more he becomes totally conscious of and almost identified with the inventive value of his making.
With Kant’s thought, the concept of creation frozen in divine intervention is overcome to reconcile the action of art with that of nature. An encounter sanctioned by the German philosopher in granitic words. «Genius is the innate disposition of the soul (ingenium) by which nature gives rule to art». God is dead in short. Thanks to Kant, the definition of artistic work as a social and primary element in human existence is established.
Defining the work as the exhibition of expressive differences – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, French phenomenological philosopher and close friend of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to a momentous rupture, embraces the sense of a philosophy of painting, defining the work as the exhibition of expressive differences. It is an expressive image that brings out the meaning of the world, it is a symbolic exchange in which its essence is manifested, capable of summarizing invisibility in a gesture to make it tangible to the viewer.
The artist’s work is a vehicle of primal, innate and structural openness to Lebenswelt, the world of life. All consciousness is perceptual consciousness. Merleau-Ponty, who died in 1961, writes «the completed work is not that which exists in itself as a thing, but that which reaches out to its viewer, invites him or her to resume the gesture that created it and to join with the painter’s silent world».
Special thanks to Galleria Fonti, Naples-Zurich and Lorcan O’Neill Gallery, Rome.
