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7/1/2010

Piero Maniscalco

Artists' House, St. Petersburg

The death of art coincides with neither the winter nor the autumn of the imagination since neither are static concepts but dynamic and structural metamorphoses, innate in the nature of all those who are unable to relinquish the necessity of doing or thinking. Certainly the death of art is important even though not to be compared with the death of God; each originates from human pride that wishes to free itself from any rules or constraints to pursue a wild and absolute freedom, something which is impossible since our every action is technical and linguistic and cannot therefore be considered free from each and every link.

We belong to history, we are genealogy and memory. We are immersed in anthropological continuity, we resemble our ancestors intellectually as well as physically, we inherit our destinies of long life and intelligence in addition to our diseases and obsessions.

We are the children of mimesis, of the essential imitation of gestures, signs, words, and emotions which we learn and repeat. Sometimes we touch upon originality either through excess or by failure; when we decide to exceed because we consider our allotted field is too limited, or because of an inability to redo what has already been done. Or sometimes when a desire to be different arises, in the struggle between fathers and sons, in the struggle between generations for power and the desire for primacy, in a delirium for power which seems not to see or fear any obstacle.

We are also capable of interruptions, of making realistic conquests from points of imbalance, of delaying formal processes that were formed out of previous imbalances and then going ahead because the language of art proceeds through imbalances, with uncertain agreements placed in crisis by continual experimentation particularly by those artists whose expressionist inspiration is total. They invest constantly not only in form and content but also in materials and techniques, questioning the same statute of art within which many different elements are presented as co-existing within a single conceptual network which permits no diffusion or escape.

We live in a paradox of intelligence, which has to convey diversity with a scanty vocabulary which is no aid to comprehension but rather wraps it in contradictions which are obstacles to works frequently brought to a halt because of excessive chaos and confusion, particularly when considering the conformity of the great art events such as Venice or Kassel where the same artists are always to be seen copying themselves and each other. Fortunately this leads to the formation of independent artists who follow their own routes, sometimes unofficially without support or publicity, but from whom we can expect really new things.

What does the death of art mean but the liberation of all energy in an eclecticism in which everybody can place limits through preference, idleness or need, but which is theoretically infinite. So can this concept be anthropologically denied by the same thought that hypothesizes it, where the meeting point is with the same idea of making, of changing and of putting chaos into order and order into chaos.

Here is evidence of an oscillating trend, a procedure that employs both high and low language in transversal activity where different codes are mixed, such as used to occur between different objects in the room of wonders. This has taken place since Dadaism, Futurism and Cubism, within the violated substance of art, were realized in the hybrid terms of a blasphemous association of unconnected materials, far from any aesthetic value, being the remains of obsolete tools recalled for a new life, glued, painted, camouflaged or, Duchamp-like, placed on a pedestal and becoming the centre of attention.

In this sense the importance of installation is confirmed as a kind of ritual signalling the existence of a metaphorical, tautological trend by amplifying its meaning and presenting things as they are.

Itinerarium means not only progress, purely dynamic and purely now, but also the distance between one place and another, grasping the differences, the changes and the mimetics which are produced by the tribalism which courts metropolism. It occurs precisely in order to display the persistent classicism and decay of those without language in an invisible centre that belongs to all the centres of the world like a former frontier that is the extension of all frontiers and of the world. As if there were an above and a below where those who are above walk on the heads of those below, without noticing that those below are gradually sinking until they drown and enter a huge cemetery, like zombies, wandering without knowing why, bearing the weight of others on their heads.

All this involves using the means of technique but also the convergence of irreconcilable elements and play. Contemporary art is all this, but it is also a search for content made of apocalyptic and integrated things which may serve our time in intermediate figures which are difficult to define, or even name, other than in a primitive or barbaric manner. This is evident in the segment of catastrophe that tries to redeem itself from ghostly annihilation and finds a corporeal state, a being in itself that will become for itself.

A way of thinking able to measure itself against all possible imaginable lack of grammar and language must correspond to this way of acting, but not merely for self-referring pleasure. It must also allow for a spatial and temporal tension that takes construction material from all sides, from all countercultures, from all the non-integrated and the outcasts, with the aim of making a new lingua franca that speaks to all, even if this is impossibly utopian.

It is true that utopias are dangerous, but without some distant idea of an order which can be used as an excuse, as poetic and intolerant, disorder will become intolerable, will become a burden and a grief for others perhaps as is Merz’ igloo or Kounellis’ steel and coal enigma, which is also mirrored in Fibonacci’s numerology or Bernini’s baroque. From these we take the concept of theory and practice, but only in reverse where, first of all, refinement and smoothness existed and now barbarism and primitiveness respond to mechanization which makes everything possible and everything copiable. Here the artist who chooses nomadism and nonconformity as his direction in art has no reciprocity , at least in the short term, although in the long term everything is possible as with Piero Manzoni’s hard-boiled eggs. But this is not as important as the moment in which the outrage is carried out.

Piero Maniscalco is an international artist par excellence, though strongly linked to his birthplace on Monte Jato. He has laid his hands and his eyes on the four cardinal points and currently he contemplates the waters of the Baltic sea from the resurgent splendour of Saint Petersburg. He is continuously in search of a new identity, just as Marco Polo or Matteo Ricci have done through the ages, changing themselves without ever forgetting their roots. Truly local or truly global, as one has to be these days if you wish to remain uncrushed by a xenophobic provincialism, smelling the perfume of spices from afar and seeing all that happens in the courtyard next door. Abandoning the dead weights in order to travel swiftly and lightly, bearing only what is necessary to proceed towards the unknown future with the aim of enriching your virtual self that succeeds by extending the real self, just as the club extended the length of Hercules’ arm.

From one mythology to another, migration is not only in space but also in time, mixing fragments of different languages in works of art that are conceptual investments beyond the ordinary. They create works of harmonic beauty in order to involve others. Indeed, all Piero Maniscalco’s works are events that must be seen together with him, in his mixture of clowning and oracular power, taken over by that interior monologue of his great dream to change desire into reality, just as occurs in the golden legend of the artist, half prophet and half madman, tense as a bow whose arrow will fly to hit the target that maybe does not exist. From the track of its flight in the great book of common legend, one can see one of many possible keys to decipher it.

All this determines the strength of his poetical substance and his technique; it makes him one of the most interesting figures of contemporary art. With a wide range of options that makes his work so attractive and compelling, in its conjuring up of an imaginary world that is not just sheer imagination but a combination of different elements from barbarism to the utmost refinement.

No doubt some are paintings to be hung on the wall but they can also be read as a reminder of past events and not just as detached shop items. Basically they are contributions to memory rather than pure documentation fashioned with a neutral tool, in being loaded with meaning that action alone could not convey, in a dialectic of immobility and movement like the relationship between writing and speaking which end with being complementary and define the basic traces of a created work born from a deep need to communicate, expressed through a wish to represent both comedy and tragedy, taken from theatre and from myth, from Apollo’s splendour and Dionysius’ blushes.

In Ex Port the subject concentrates on the elements of communication with the technique of American graffiti, acquired by the artist from that group of New York painters hiding under conventional names, like secret agents operating in enemy territory, who were introduced to the Italian public by Francesca Alinovi and have since become cult figures. The mocking mood of pop art is also incorporated to depict any pretext that could be taken as art. Jean Michel Basquiat with three or four others such as Ronny Cutrone, A One and Ramatzle have entered these realms of time. Maniscalco, some twenty years later, appropriates this formal and nonconformist distance and paints platforms, doors, curtains, breaking the taboos of easel painting without repudiating traditional painting, while maintaining a thoroughly Italian and European expression.

The Aeolian Harp is a game between architecture and wind that encounter each other on the crest of a mountain, producing a mysterious sound like an enchantment from the past. The work features a marvel of nature and renders it participant in realizing a myth; the work undertakes the function and becomes the producer of an unwritten score. This illuminates certain relationships with nature and the environment, different from those of ordinary thoughts, always balanced between wide extremes and the indifference of neglect. A form of land art carried to the threshold of one’s own house in a beautiful setting capable of amazing the spirit of everyday and admitting it to the world of fantasy.

In the Mirror of Palazzo Butera Maniscalco confronts the enigma and looming presence of architecture and history, whose stature seems to inculcate fear and respect. The only thing to do is turn to the play of baroque on baroque, placing a series of mirrors on the floor and filling them with all the reflections of vaulted ceilings and walls above, creating a virtual reality that becomes at the same time a deception and the definition of a new perspective from below. This happens just as the ancient palace is awaking from the stupor of neglect, remembering redundant baroque melodies and other mirrors finally freed from the light.

Odysseus on Monte Jato is certainly one of the most moving moments of this itinerarium, beginning with the pilgrimage of many people to the mountain where today silence reigns supreme but where once the people from Greece recited their poetry and worshipped their gods for so long until the moment when the last one had left and the meadow took over once more. Then centuries passed and the walls fell until it was as level as though they had never been. Until that day when Piero Maniscalco placed in the centre of the rediscovered theatre a ship full of wine bottles, floating on a wide mirrored surface like the sea, reflecting the blue of the sky and the clouds seeming like the foamy spray. My voice informed the audience about what they were seeing, sounding like a priest performing a ceremony.

Nature, archaeology, artistic installation, everything contributing to make a unity out of so much, sufficiently strange and fascinating to give the impression of having seen the flash of a buskin or the gleam of a sword, of having heard a verse from Homer. Strange tricks of a late afternoon!

Labyrinth in Limine is a very civilized work, constructed in the Dionysiac spirit and intended as a presentation of the libido in an evocative ritual of Mediterranean sensuality. It arises from the encounter between an ancient homosexual aristocracy and the myth of wild embraces with female creatures in the mystic exaltation of the senses achieved with music, drugs and frantic dancing with attendant and concealed satyrs, in search of the search itself rather than of the accepted myth.

The scene is represented by a display of objects used in an adventurous rebellion against the laws of nature, creating a hybrid that can only remain alone, confined to a state of perdition. This design comes not from madness but from the urges of narcissism and self-reference of those who ignore others and look only at themselves, convinced that they can recreate the world in their own image.

It matters little if the two peaks always complete their contest by providing inspiration to whoever renews the challenge and to the spirit of the winner who is entitled to give his name to a new stage in the transformation of the world. The artist is like Daedalus, he is like Theseus, because he can use his imagination to deviate from the usual course of things and sometimes also from the same fate of language which is given new names. This provides a possible escape from the alienation and neurosis which condemns whoever cannot resist looking outside their own limits and feels strongly their inability to proceed in any other way, to move the pieces of the game which risk falling onto them and crushing them under its false weight and their own negativity.

The Itinerarium is still running its course so it will need other routes and other meetings to determine the scheme of its achievements. Those who will one day draw their conclusions can use the explanations of this account, the points of reference contained within it and the terms used in an early description. One can find everything from learned quotations to anthropology, ethnology, philosophy, mechanical engineering, identity-seeking graffiti, expressionist painting, mythological installations, to mirrored baroque fantasy, wild gesture, the nomad spirit and courtly Ariosto-style gesture.

This is all done quite naturally, as if this collection of work has been created to remain together or else its components would never have met. The point of juncture is the artist’s brilliantly creative mind that first saw them in his visionary, hallucinatory dreams. He has made them the stages of his biography, finding inspiration for further explorations that convey his unconscious desire to attain the highest levels of achievement, first for himself and then for others.

To do this he involves his imagination in a continuous correspondence between himself and others, in a theatricality that only allows pauses and short interruptions of the coming and going that provide its texture. The warp and weft come from a magic loom, just as when you deal with places in the world and the mind that have heard the song of the sirens, seen the actions of the Titans and now confront the flight of jet aircraft and space laboratories in the sybil’s cave where anything may and does happen.

Opening 8th january

Artists' House
Uliza Piestila 93 - St. Petersburg

stampa

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