LET’S GO OUTSIDE
Milan (I), Superstudio Più, March 2010
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THE BRILLIANCE OF WILY E. COYOTE
Daniele Capra
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It doesn’t make much sense to ask if current art has certain and unequivocal answers for (post)modern man’s restlessness, given that the solutions to be found can only with difficulty be subjected to the test of verifiability with which science is obliged to confront itself (and as a result of which it can, at least in theory, distinguish what is true from what is false). And even more so because art shows itself to be a universe of ever increasing questions and lateral thinking; in other words, one that can hardly be measured against definite criteria because its enormous strength results from questioning the status quo, from the playful pleasures of manipulation and invention. As Lyotard has written, ” In contemporary society and culture, […] the question of the legitimation of knowledge is formulated in different terms. The grand narrative has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses, regardless of whether it is a speculative narrative or a narrative of emancipation. The decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, […] or as an effect of the redeployment of advanced liberal capitalism”. [1] Art, instead, allows a recuperation of the narrative approach that Lyotard thinks has been discarded in favour of scientific efficiency and the development of the economic system, and it has put a spoke in his wheels.
Art, then, even though having an enormous capacity for the creation, appropriation, and elaboration of codes, still has as part of its nature a strong explosive component with regards the systems of thought that are available here at the start of the twenty-first century. This is a role which, in a certain sense, brings to mind Socrates and his position vis-à-vis the philosophical tradition that preceded him: simpler problems, a refusal of both rhetoric and the tradition of knowledge, and an approach that was not programmatic. In other words, an almost terrorist conceptual function, as was confirmed by the fact that it cost the philosopher his life. At the same time it is reasonable to expect that artists’ answers or proposed ways of escape are either on a reduced, even tiny, scale, and yet are unexpectedly interesting. But in this field the real value lies, not in the consistency of the solutions presented, in science itself, but rather in the creativity of the questions asked of the observer – of an aesthetic, political, and philosophical order.
It is fundamental that in the last twenty years of the twentieth century many of the macro-utopias that overpoweringly nourished the “brief century” (characterized by the entry of the masses into history, by rapid technological growth, and by various ideologies in the form of opposed -isms) slowly melted away. In other words, these all-devouring utopias – social, political and, at times, even aesthetic – did not take long to reveal all their heaviness and all their blunders, and they more or less rapidly collapsed under the weight of reality: the lightness that underpinned them, to paraphrase the famous novel by Milan Kundera, had become unbearable. In this situation of the end of history, so precociously analyzed by Francis Fukuyama at the beginning of the ‘nineties, the climate of temporal suspension had produced an ideological vacuum that had not been filled, with the effect of a continuous oscillation between a hardening and an extreme loosening of thought. In other words, the trend was that of polarization and the continual creation of small niches: this was demonstrated in the field of art by the pulverization of what, until thirty years earlier, had been movements, and by the fact that the resulting artistic practice became an individual activity.
After more than a decade trailing in the wake of this (individualistic) reaction, the last years of the past century witnessed, instead, the emergence of new ideas and new expectations that were overtly public or political, a result too of the new lymph injected by emergent countries: in fact, we often have the sensation that artists are rediscovering the social aspects of their work, as is shown by the great interest in the theme of cities and urban living, but also in the infiniteness of nature and the heroic aspects of living. Progressively, that is, after having long been smouldering under the ashes, thoughts about utopias are beginning to develop in art again, though not in an intimist manner and even less in an ideological one. These, in fact, are small utopias, without any presumption of explaining the world, but simply having the wish to offer or suggest visions and points of view that do not belong to us and that are, unexpectedly, something different: they are knots, discontinuities, virtuous accumulations that emerge after having sifted through a reality that no longer seems deeply satisfying. These are no longer simple evasions but genuine subversions that show us how an external view – beyond the curtain of normality and the humdrum – is both desirable and necessary. These are formidable, user-friendly Swiss knives for hacking through the hedge in order to see beyond it; they are Popeye’s spinach or the inspired and edgy inventions of Wile E. Coyote. And falling down into a canyon really will no longer be a problem.
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[1] J.F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, University of Minnesota Press, 1984, pp. 37-38.
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