Who will you meet?
I’ve been wondering for a long time now, since the months of lockdown, about how we will or won’t change in the post-pandemic. And I’ve more and more clearly reached the conclusion that either there’ll be a radical change by humanity, and the pandemic will turn into an epochal opportunity to establish a balance of sustainable and responsible prosperity, or the status quo will be restored, a worsened version of it in fact. In my opinion, there can’t be any halfway. The post-pandemic won’t be grey, it’ll be either black or white.
In this extraordinary situation, art once again proves it has a central role. Because it’s now time for a revolution whose epicentre is evolutionary, and not political anymore. The definition and the pursuit of a different vision of the concepts of country, planet, common good and community are becoming more and more important. But a different, alternative version is not enough anymore. We need a ‘lateral’ one, the product of an effective and refundational discontinuity. ‘Lateral’ as artists’ thought is, their ‘bullfighter’s step’, as Michelangelo Pistoletto has called it. The thought that sidesteps ‘the bull’ of habits, authorities, pre-constituted order, big corporations, but also ‘the bull’ of the immanent present we are immersed in or, better, we have been entangled in for a long time.So, to answer the question I’ve been asked, who will I meet? I’d really like to answer Michelangelo Pistoletto, but in this context it would appear too self-referential. The alternative is therefore not strictly speaking an artist, but a curator, probably the most visionary and ‘lateral’ of our times, that is the Italo-American Carolyn Christov-Bakagiev, currently the director of Castello di Rivoli Musem of Contemporary Art and of the Francesco Federico Cerruti Foundation in Turin.
To be fair I wanted to meet her and I’ve actually met her, on Skype, with remote modalities more and more common in times of Covid-19. But I did meet her and interview her for the magazine I direct, Exibart. We talked about the future with a ‘lateral’ vision. It emerged that the current most urgent issue, i.e. the relationship ‘man-nature’, should not be declined towards a de-anthropocentricization. Without wanting to be conservative, the true problem is how to re-anthropocentricize through a cosmopolitan alliance with non-human living beings (plants, etc.), avoiding undermining the ecological vision, trying to deal with the need to protect free will – be it of a plant, an animal, a human being – in a predictive and algorithmic world (Internet of things).
This loss of free will in our advanced digital society represents the biggest danger, inasmuch as – according to Carolyn – the best algorithm we could write would undoubtedly identify the destruction of the human species as the only solution to our planet’s problems. That is the destruction of a parasitical species which has worn the Earth out, upsetting its balances. We are therefore facing a serious philosophical problem: how to get human existence to make sense again. If we carried on in the same direction we have been heading, there’d be no way to justify the presence of human beings on the planet. But there’s another crucial issue: the need for a collective participation, involving us Italian too (we will have to learn to question ourselves), in the rewriting of history, including the history of art, in a global sense.
That canonic history, of art but not only, which at some point was very much centred on Europe and Italy, is in fact going through a major worldwide crisis because digitalization and globalization have made us aware of incredible civilizations from other centuries, from China to South America. In changing the definition of History of Art, we can’t take for granted that the Renaissance perspective is more important that the bidimensional flat vision of the Australian Aboriginals. These considerations lead us directly to our most recent events, to the terrible and worrying issue of the tearing down of statues of historical figures occurring a bit everywhere in the Western world. In this respect, so far the debate has been confined to two opposite positions: revisionists vs non-revisionists. But the issue requires a ‘lateral’ sidestep to understand the actual symbolic and non-symbolic meanings, and its possible future effects.
Carolyn Christov-Bakagiev’s thought is once again enlightening. She interprets the destruction of art as a sort of terrible premonition anticipating the destruction of bodies. She told me how shocked she was when, in March 2001, the Buddhas of Bamyan were blown apart. Her apprehension was not only in connection with the loss of the artistic object in itself, she felt there was something more. Six months later, on the 11th September of the same year, the same terrorist organization hit and destroyed the Twin Towers. So today, when she sees the heads of sculptures rolling, she thinks about long-repressed aggression and violence, she thinks about Robespierre. This doesn’t obviously mean not being sympathetic with the Black Lives Matter movement. The United States are guilty of an ‘original sin’ based on slavery, on the exploitation of the free labour of slaves, and US society would stop if the poorer part of the population, mainly black, didn’t do the humbler jobs.
It is therefore obvious that US society presents deeply-rooted contradictions and hypocrisies. Although Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev concurs that the actions of Black Lives Matter and other movements in progress are vital, and that this terrible internal sufferance will lead to improvements, the destruction of human-like statues, of people and power, scares her quite a lot, because it is a sign that inevitably makes her think of a consequent drop in value of the human body in future conflicts, which might not be that far ahead, accelerated by the present pandemic.
The survival of human culture and of the value of society’s life reveals itself to be, once again, intertwined with this issue around the level of the symbolic, which is the level of art.
