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01/11/2006: "ART AND REALITY" by Alberto Sughi
I would like to start with greetings and best wishes to all those who take part in our discussions. I gain a great deal of pleasure from reading your opinions and comments, and in trying to answer them, in my own way, by incorporating your ideas into new and later discussions.Today I will touch on a subject that has always been very dear to me: the relationship between art and reality.
In the early 1900s, great interest in the themes of work and social justice had already been expressed by many artists. This could be interpreted as the natural conclusion of the process of emancipation that had occurred at the end of the preceding century. In Italy, this interest in social themes was expressed and obtained important results in the works of the early Futurists. More precisely, we can recall that the "Expanding City" (by Boccioni) was originally entitled "Work". In the same year, 1911, Carrŕ painted his famous work "The funeral of Galli the anarchist". This is evidence of the relationship between the Futurists and the Anarchists, and between the Futurists and the Trade Union movement.
This centrality of the theme of work did not decrease, but was rather more present than ever in a great artist of the Fascist era, and who considered himself a Fascist: Mario Sironi. It was to continue, then, up to the beginning of the 1940s, in the works of many artists. It is important to state immediately that this was not only happening in Italy, nor even mainly in Italy: the world of the disinherited, the poor, the workers, as well as the desire to fight against social injustice, has been an important source of inspiration for many twentieth century artists from Picasso to Leger, from Orozco to Permeke and Bensahan. We must certainly also consider literature and the cinema, above all, American cinema, which represented the world of work and the struggle for emancipation with the same, if not even more intense, enthusiasm. This is essential when examining a large part of artistic expression at that time.
The period did not last long: social themes that seemed to have found a place among the main sources of inspiration for artists, directors and writers were gradually abandoned. Artists, not only in Italy, started to concern themselves with other matters. The world was changing. After the victorious war against Fascism, at the end of the fifties, we entered, more or less consciously, a period that took us centuries away from our more recent past, and weakened our certainties in the modern world. Still waiting to enjoy the benefits of this technological and cultural revolution, people today are still paying a high human cost. This is what Saul Bellow wrote on the subject: "In private life, disorder or near-panic. In families - for husbands, wives, parents, children - confusion; in civic behavior, in personal loyalities, in sexual practices (I will not recite the whole list; we are tired of hearing it) - further confusion. And with this private disorder goes public bewilderment… It is with these facts that knock us to the ground that we try to live…
The decline and fall of everything is our daily dread, we are agitated in private life and tormented by public questions…
And art and literature - what of them? Well, there is a violent uproar but we are not absolutely dominated by it. We are still able to think, to discriminate, and to feel. The purer, subtler, higher activities have not succumbed to fury or to nonsense.”
(from: Saul Bellow – Nobel Lecture December 12, 1976 http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1976/bellow-lecture.html)
Bellow believes that artists, true artists, are still able "to think, to discriminate, and to feel". Is it wrong to place this trust in the artist's determination not to fear his own loneliness? We need, above all, to listen to those voices that do not sing along with the masses. Owen Barfield has commented that we cannot stand the eternal mechanism that replaces what really counts with a stage of chatterers about what really counts.
In the sixties, artists' interest in social themes started to decline, while the fortunes of movements that proclaimed themselves "neo-avant-gardists" and heirs of the Historical Avant-garde were growing. Given their experimental nature, they were able to find a consonance with the great transformations of the day. They were also able to vindicate a natural connection with those theories that point only to technological development as the ultimate aim of progress. In this way, mankind, the soul, destiny are no longer central to artistic reflection. Artists are improvised wizards and alchemists, producing works with hidden meaning. Arnold Hauser states that the public has to realise that in works of art we are confronted with a set of rules that we have no knowledge of. This separation between art and public taste will then be repaired, using almost medianic techniques, by singular critics and art historians, who speaking as if they were priests or witch doctors, hypnotise the public to feed its market. It is enough here to quote some words by Achille Bonito Oliva "Since the style does not reflect the world, it belongs to its own mystic nature, and therefore specifically to the imagination, which elaborates for mankind the hope of immortality". If, then, there are those who, despite everything, cannot manage to suspend their natural distrust, they can always be attracted by the value of a painting in dollars, and since "commerce is concerned neither with the soul, nor with noble aspirations" interest in the essence of art is replaced by interest in the commercial value of the work. There are certainly other scenarios that could be investigated, if one wanted to understand the complexity of problems that originate in the increasingly difficult relationship between art and reality. The whole universe of the visual arts and representation finds, in television, an instrument that, while absorbing the most modest perceptive possibilities (being directed at a huge public) also contributes to form, address and finally pollute the "imaginary", of which it presents the most banal and indulgent "image". "To live better in the eyes of the people". This aphorism, by Cicero himself, captures the aptitude to assign representation to its more natural consumption: and who can say that art is not to be included in it, perhaps by one of those homologating processes that are in the very nature of mass communication? And who can say whether the great escape from reality corresponds to the repossession that art operates on itself, and for itself, in an attempt to emerge unscathed by contamination? The popularity of photographic images had already provoked, in its time, something similar. The advent of TV has been even more upsetting. It has not only taken on the task of representing the visible, but also aims to decipher its meanings, to become a tool that changes, modifies and, in some cases, transforms the very reality that it represents. The ground under our feet is very uneven, but it is our ground, on which we can plan and build something positive. We have to find the strength "to think, to discriminate, to feel", the strength to speak out. "God save us from a guilty silence, my dear friend, because an evil silence exists, strangling every activity of the Spirit and it is the source of no emotion whatsoever." (Giorgio De Chirico) And the advice I always keep for myself and my friends is to try to become a voice to counter the "guilty silence". The aim of art is certainly not to publicise ideas or to send messages, but it cannot avoid being a free and creative comparison with reality. The word “Moral” is to be used with caution, like medicines. However, nobody can do any artistic research - difficult, problematic, and interminable - if they are not sustained by profound moral convictions. It is this tension that allows us to proceed along our path at the cost of losing so many things on the way that we thought we could never do without.
Alberto Sughi (JAN. 2006)
For more info on Alberto Sughi see. www.albertosughi.com
