22/2/2010
The Agent of Displacement
NGBK, Berlin
The Artist as the Perfect Dilettante: Not Knowing How to Do Anything, Potentially Doing Whatever. Lecture by Cesare Pietroiusti.
The Artist as the Perfect Dilettante: Not Knowing How to Do Anything, Potentially Doing Whatever. Lecture by Cesare Pietroiusti. The artist is the social figure who defines his own work in the intermediate space between disciplines, crossing over or invading different fields. In some case he is the one who can put together different specialists, at times creating a situation where each one of them can see his own field according to an extra-disciplinary, or even 'non functional' logic. The artist is the social figure who doesn't-know-how-to-do-anything: if he is not an 'expert' in any specific skill, he will have a lesser tendency to (or temptation to) fall into bravura, in the hypnosis of special effects and in the flexing of technological muscles. The contemporary artist is the perfect dilettante: he or she who doesn't-know-how-to-do-anything, but who takes the credit for the potential to do whatever, crossing over various disciplines, making specialists work in unusual ways, and using technologies instrumentally. The action terrain of this perfect dilettante isn't proscribed to a certain territory or to a given space; instead it is defined by a vector component, by a movement between one space and another. His field of action - in effect more an action than a field - can be defined as displacement. Cesare Pietroiusti (Roma, artist) has published 'Non-functional Thoughts' (1978-1996) and has founded Evolution de l'Art, the first gallery that deals only with immaterial artworks. He is currently teacher at the IUAV in Venice. A lecture within the frame of the project 'Transient Spaces - The Tourist Syndrome on the topics of contemporary mobility, tourism and migration'. A project by uqbar, initiated by Marina Sorbello and Antje Weitzel.