The
Untouchable. by Achille Bonito OlivaCOMMENT
Was bom in Turin in 1949.
From the end of the 1970s lives between Paris and Bologna.
The
Untouchable. by Achille Bonito Oliva
The
Untouchable. by Achille Bonito Oliva
"My family was a loose one, wifh a father who worked in showbusiness, in
variety shows, and from early child hood I was pschologically different: for a
time I couldn't even attend normal school as I was practically aufistic. I didn't
want to be touched, nor did I touch anybody. I was unable to learn because I was
incapable of forming relationships".
Gian Marco Montesano, with thése words, tells us exactly what is behind his
painting: from them we can evince the strategy of an artist developing his
omnipotence from the imaginative life of an infant more than usually
self-sufficient and thus not attainable by nor sensitive to adult formative
influence.
We all know how in the adult-child relationship the adult utilizes, both
voluntarily and involuntarily, his weapons of size, economic power and authority,
figuring as an oppressive and hierarchical presence. Montesano, in his declared
inability to establish relationships, inherently decided from the beginning to
reject oppression, invasion and assistance. Right from the start he took on the
dignity of an artist, willingly enclosed in the territory of a completely
manoeuvrable language, and a sovereign subject of his own will, impulse and
formal decisions.
In the adult field of painting, his decision is expression in a figurative
language, in a soberly chromatic form obeying an impulse pointing to the
expression of an explicity distanced universe, distanced both in time and space.
This iconographical distancing creates a connection between the two different
states, adult and infant, of his sensibility, supported by his need to preserve
himself and his imagination from any and every system and relation.
By spatially and temporally removing his figures, he guarantees their
untouchability, respects their fragility, exploits painting as a rarefied
habitat, purified from all encumbrance and sterilized by the bidimensional
reality of the canvas.
Montesano knows the rules of perspective, the spatial hierarchy of illusory
depth which has developed in Western Art, but chooses to use it minimally, as an
echo of a cultural memory that cannot be identified in present time. The artist
lives the historical drama of mannerism, suffers the pathos of distance and the
impossibility of finding himself in the safety of perspective and its profound
meanings.
For this reason he uses perspective while at the same time continually
underlining its inaccessibility, the impossibility of identifying with a
comforting, maternal representation. Montesano chose in infancy to be an orphan,
and to isolate himself from all relations, refusing even to be touched and
comforted. As an adult, then, he expresses his art in figurative painting which
is just as much an orphan, refusing to be reassured by anything, including
perspective.
Perspective presupposes weight and stature, corporeal, social and political, and
is the theatre of conquests and exploration.
Montesano, instead, constructs spatial signs and locates in them adult and
infant figures, both male and female, all relieved of any responsibility of
possession. The figures ask for nothing, being unable and unwilling to establish
relationships or contact, either physical or psychological.
This iconographical universe is not the fruit of a pathetic regression towards a
mythical infantile status, but rather a laborious and elaborate construction
by an adult of a possible human condition. Art exactly serves the purpose of
empowering the individual imagination in an effort to demonstrate how it may be
possible in time to solidify the infantile impulse towards a self-sufficient
dignified solitude. Self-sufficiency in artistic expression ferments Montesano's
omnipotence, and is manifested in a sequence of works, all characterised by
subdued chromatic tones.
In his art the artist always attempts to evidence empty space, to avoid the
rhetoric of the full, the sign and the colour. He wishes to avoid any
affirmative authority in art and to evidence instead the painful trek of the
conscience and contemplation. The painting establishes an obscure process
manifesting itself through the representation of the painful presence of
distance. It stoically points the way to irreconcilability with the demagogy of
a simply emotive communication.
Montesano is philosophical in his representation, not seeking to anaesthetize
through aesthetics but rather to express himself in a language capable of
creating visions and viability.
The vision is given by the image described in the work, which presents the theme
of distance almost in the form of captions, in the descriptive clarity of the
visua) field. Here the eye flits and creates mobile relations, while intuiting
that the soul of the work does not offer much hope that such relations can be
formed. Paradoxically the figures have the dignified solitude of the ready-made
Du Champs, a presentation which does not find explanation and justification in
the narrative animus.
There is no narration because there is no reconstruction of a theatre of the
memory. There exists instead the impulse to contruct a figurative universe, on
the one hand animated by the stylistic recognisability of an epoch and on the
other hand rendered inanimate by the philosophical conscience of the artist who
proffers no false hopes of contact among his figures.
Montesano feelingly uses the readymade procedure, assimilating it entirely into
his painting, which refuses internal conciliation and external communication.
The irreconcilability does not, however, produce metaphysical atmospheres,
mysterious depths or dramas of the memory. Where there is distance, it signifies
not only pain but also conscience.
Like painting in the great mannerist tradition, here everything is solved
outside of any philosophy. Painting is a stylistic symptom realised within the
field of its language. It is separate from life and will not compete futilely
with it: much better, instead, to construct a self-sufficient iconographical
universe where figures do not imtimate that they would more suited to another
place. Montesano's paintings have about them a sense of here and now which seems
to simulate a memory-linked process, but which instead desires only to formulate
the image of an untouchable present, both for the past and the future: it is a
wall, no matter how crystal-transparent and uncrossable it is.
In Montesano there is a tormented condition of melancholy, the description of a
distance which apparently only the desire for the absolute can evidence. Clarity
of the image denotes the torment, the exactness of a feeling which cannot be
prevented even by the knowledge of its impossibility, of the inevitability of
the impulse towards isolation.
Memory is not a device for engaging a regressive process from real life, but is used as a convention, the recognised object of the collective imagination, and is recognisable in its stylistic disguises. Memory is thus readymade, the formally-displaced past in the present, but immobilized in a still representation. Montesano produces, then, a deliberately orphaned painting, searching for no mother and father, but also avoiding confrontation and conflict with life while seeking no emulation of life: like Heidegger, the painting is saying: "The terrible event has already happened". Thus it is not possible to repair or use art as the expression of grief. Montesano offers us a sequence of works in which a new form of love is declared, a love which does not consist in being stunned, or in the confusion between art and life, but which is an iconographically coherent declaration of a condition of untouchability that is comprehensible to adults, and which he has had to guard patiently in his infant's imagination, and which now he can finally embody in art form.
Achille Bonito Oliva
Translated by: Bernard Keeling
from Gian Marco Mostesano "Se da lontano..."
Mazzoli Editor 1994
STORIES' END by VALERIO DEHÒ
Christianity is a religion for historians.
I am convinced that we make history because we are Christians
Marc Bloch
Gian Marco Montesano paints the stories of History. And the fate of stories is that they live on and dissolve in such a way that they become tales which go on to produce other stories. The strong religious quotient in Montesano's work mixes and overlaps with a committed, political component so that the artist's Catholicism on the one hand and his autonomist militancy on the other find haven from the rigors of political correctness. Never has Montesano attempted to conceal his past: on the contrary, his work is strewn with references to it. A singular cultural syncretism ensures that his paintings bring together fragments of a sentimental and ideological European romance involving all elements in a language that is as light as a nuance and as final as a farewell. At this moment in time, Christian Europe is coming together while its identity is being blurred among the myriad races and faiths invading it. The result is a desperate globalization which heightens difference and di~dence alike.
History and religion are transformed into paradigms for an artistic activity that is central to contemporary experience, and are far removed from the tedium and vagueness of the conceptual. Our tendency to think in terms of History has been nurtured by Christianity. Since Christ, everything has begun and everything will end when the Kingdom of God has triumphed over indifference and ignorance. It was Georges Duby who wrote: "There is a Christian way of conceiving of what history is. Is not historical science European? What is history in China, the Indias, black Africa? Islam may boast admirable geographers, but where are the
historians?"
For those of us who live in Europe, History is a way of being which is closely related to the dominating religion of the past two thousand years. Within the history of art, religious and historical subjects have become genres, developing specializations, schools and outlets of their own. One need look no further than the quantity of holy pictures produced during the Counter-IZeformation.
In the 70s, Montesano alternated works dedicated to the great events of history, such as Germania requiem o L'armeé rouge a Berlin (1973), with works inspired by the more trite and obvious strains of religious iconography, including catechism illustrations and devotional images in which the high tradition of painting is transmuted into convention in a bid to educate the masses. Two of the principal issues addressed by the artist came about in almost parallel fashion. Montesano has always trained his attention on narration and the potential to communicate images that thrive on events only to reproduce the memory of themselves. Consequently, we find ourselves deep in a forest of simulacra, our path plotted out in visual targets suggesting emotional distance from what has happened and what might happen. The religious sphere is an integral part of Montesano's background, and he is blessed with a lucidity that enables him to reduce this to a limpid, composed, deliberately bloodless iconography. In paintings such as Vale, o valde decora (1978), the annunciation is planted firmly in a holy setting, probably a church. The Madonna genuflects on a pew upon which lies a missal. In his hand, an Angel holds a lily, the symbol of virginity, while a Dove-Holy Spirit illuminates the head of the Mother of God from on high with a powerful ray of light. The black and white checkered floor alludes to a fifteenth century artifice aimed at amplifying perspective, yet the space in this case is too narrow, the vision too close up. Montesano is at pains to synthesize other spaces and other stories within the ecclesiastical setting. All is motionless because it has happened so many times before: what we are contemplating is neither an event nor a mystery but an image. It is curious to observe that symbolic excess is emphasized by a lily emerging from below, perhaps from the floor, perhaps an abandoned gift from a grateful devotee. In another work from the same year, Die Krippenspiel (1978), we are regaled with a full postcard effect which is more than a little disquieting. The little angel, in a Merlin the Wizard cartoon costume, pays homage to an infant sporting a copious mane, a powerful endowment, against the biological norm. The stars in the sky are complete with rigorously sugared halo while the star of Bethlehem glows inside a shed like a neon Christmas decoration in a condominium lobby.
The sacred hearts pulsating in the various versions of Sacro cuore dell'arte pose further problems re the issue of sincerity. Ineffable is their assigned significance as the exaltation-acceptation of values, or their role as the elaborators of a spiritual mot d'esprit. Here, the exercise of simulation is at its most undetermined. Helena Kontova, drawing a parallel between the almost synchronic painting and photography of American artists such as Robert Longo, David Salle, and Cindy Sherman and the work of Gian Marco Montesano wrote: "While the American artists were training in an objective analysis detached from representation, Montesano was adding something more personal, selecting familiar themes and places such as images of children and their parents, bouquets of flowers and holy places. This underlines a significant difference, suggesting a detachment between what we desire and the homologation of our sentiments as imposed by a society where image counts more than contents, where sentiments which once brought with them meaning have been lost among simulacra of
themselves" (1).
The issue of simulation is central in Montesano. While on the one hand it approximates representation at a zero setting in an apparently unconditioned adherence to the world of images, the work also betrays a paradoxical critical distance being taken. By reproducing what has already been reproduced, the impression created by the artist is that of looking through the wrong end of a telescope, a dark room in reverse. No naturalness, no necessity, and above all, no call to order. Montesano has always painted and he was among the first to understand that painting could be reinstated as a contemporary language while keeping its conceptual paradigms intact and eschewing the neo expressionism of the transavantgardes. La prima volta come tragedia, la seconda come parodia is the title of one renowned 1991 painting by the artist. This is the substance of a lesson in historyand not only the history of art.
The only possible difj'erence is indifference, the sole acceptable legacy of an entire century which has produced everything and its opposite in a search for a stability that may prove impossible to achieve. This does not automatically exclude an emotive aspect to the work, though it does bolster its stictly cognitive and rational
aspect (2). However, the fact remains that this detachment and coldness, so alien to Italian art, provide the conditions required to celebrate the latest in a long line of pronouncements of the death of painting. Basically, what is needed, and what we should expect from art, is that it function as a workshop for extreme experiences, and that it succeed in stimulating all the catastrophes and apocalypses possible, exorcLse them, and continue apace in its quest, never losing sight of the horizon, "the island of the day before".
History is transformed into a collective récit, though it is up to the individual, as he picks up on it in an image, in a song in a play even in a paintin to turn it into experience. For Montesano, art participates in the staging of history, its analytical powers of analysis being on a par with its powers of persuasion, its reasons useless, futile even. However, by the end of this "theater of cruelty" in whlch everything appears ln its unbearable lightness, the artist manages to conjugate what history has never managed to: he separates the vanquishers from the vanquished and judges the irony of events on their particulars, their lapsus.
This is not to invoke the death of the media. What the Argentinian Adolfo Bioy Casares wrote in Morel's Invention is true: that "To die is to become an image". However, there is more to this than the fact that spectacle society favors symbolic exchange (Baudrillard) and that, consequently, all that there is left to do is to wander among the simulacra of a reality that is slipping away like sand through our fingers. It is true that the symbolization of our society has reached levels we could not even have hypothesized only twenty years ago, but it is also true that we have learnt to live with, communicate with and even get to know these simulacra. Artificiality has asserted itself as a conscious and rational dimension, with simulation losing the negative connotations that afjlicted it during the last century. Sociology provides too many answers, History is not perceivable, there are too many stories the sum of which is zero. `A religion proposes exposure to the Truth. But it is not enough. Truth is embodied in an explanation of history. Every metaphysical principle claims to be a motor capable of setting in motion and crowning the end of Human History. What happens when History ceases to exist, is annulled to give way to our desires, and assumes an aspect that is at the same time volatile, dark and light?"
(3).
WAR OF HEROES
The cancer of time devours us.
Our heroes have either killed themselves or are in the process of killing themselves
Henry Miller
Certain recurrent images in Montesano regard the theme of war, the communism-nazism dichotomy and the attendant heroes of these two now defunct ideologies. And this is compatible with the artist's work since, on the one hand, it affords him often exhilarating forays into estrangement, while on the other hand, his magnifying glass is allowed to dwell upon the celebratory aspects of a world laden with rhetoric though not without a certain humanity. I guardiani dell'arte (1992), with Hitler and Mussolini in full uniform before the erotic marble whiteness of Canova's Paolina Borghese, evokes the considerations that every dictator has expressed on art. What stands out here is the nudity of the sculpture, its whiteness providing a stark contrast with the blackness of its
august visitors. The metaphor of art as a woman to be coveted and possessed is certainly fuel for lengthy and depraved discussion. The little-big father figure of Stalin is a frequent presence. Photogenic and exemplary in his guise of historical character, we have long since been accustomed to seeing this figure deprived of the terribleness of his prime. he f latters or threatens, who is to know? In Historikerstreit (1997), he engages in a long distance dialogue with his antagonist, while everybody knows the two had colluded before Europe was sectioned up in the notorious but highly effective Molotov-von IZibbentrop pact.
Montesano prefers to line his subjects up and hear what they have to say: only rarely does he intervene with alienating elements of paintin, though this he does, for instance, in Un mondo di fratelli (1993), which sees Lenin contemplating a fireplace complete with hanging Christmas stockings: even this giant waits up for Santa Claus. The artist never intervenes above the lines. Often, he will experiment with the juxtaposition of color with black and white - the artist was among the first to do so. As a graphic effect, this amplifies conventionality time as it rumbles past, the addition of color warming the memory with a faint hint of sentimentality. For Montesano, History and stories are the representations of a power which must be manifest if they are to exist. Montesano is familiar with theater, a medium he has practiced, and through his works he brings life to a drama over a number of paintings: but it is a silent drama, at times ironic, at times participatory. It seems to echo a philosophy of history courtesy, of Giambattista Vico, of whose fundamental work Michelet would state: "The motto of New Science is as follows: humanity is the work of itself '
(4).
For this Neapolitan philosopher too, passion was a source of irrationality and terror, but its story is fuelled by that natural mother of advertising, propaganda. The people-power opposition crops up in numerous works. Children look on at soldiers, the soldiers smile at the power they wield, their arrogance and the debris are a stage curtain that has yet to be completely raised. La nostra vittoria non là, su quei campi cruenti che abbrividiscono, ma qui, è la nostra vittoria (Our victory lies not out on
those bloodstained, shiver-inducing fields, but here)(1992) is the representation of suspended, immemorial time. The story is over, all that remain are silent men, a child with a beret on his head, simple gestures, eyes lost in contemplation on an empty tomorrow.
Heroes are nowhere to be seen here. The leaders have said what they had to say and done what they had to do, and it is increasingly hard to distinguish the victors from the vanquished. Meanwhile, the Fúhrer, as he walks along a railroad with his back to us, explains a fundamental principle he has ... he who thinks solely in economic terms will never be able to act in social terms (1984). The titles in Montesano's work are often jolting, but by tracing these declarations on aesthetics back to dictators, the artist turns them into conceptual artists, often very good ones at that. In practice, the Fiihrer seems to be in step with our times: by criticizing the omnipotence of the economy and its intrinsic barbarity, he is favoring the power of a cohesion of ideals
(5). In creating such effects, Montesano proves himself to be highly skilled at putting us on the wrong track. This too is a refiection on stories which are possible to tell, and this is why stories must come to an end.
Drawing upon a universe swamped with images, be they photographic, pictorial, or traditional, Montesano cultivates an involuntary homage to the mass media which he sees as something of a "caracterisitica universalis" for a sizeable part of young art (comic books, photography, pattern videos and so on)
(6). Montesano is no longer at the age when an artist can break through on the crest of the communications wave to produce art for mass consumption, and nor are there the requisite margins for a culturally connoted retrieval of what is already seen, the everyday. Most of all, however, Montesano has never made an issue of his relation with photography. He has always taken it for granted, as if it were a data base of the contemporary, in much the same way as sixteenth and seventeenth century incision constituted a picture gallery that was rarely seen first hand. The artist draws a distance between himself
and spectacle society by endeavoring to strip figurative photography of its historical and sociological references. The simulacrum is not seen as subjecting reality completely. And neither does the artist set out to criticize the mass media, which are useful to everyone and which we exploit whenever we can. The moral of the story as far as Montesano is concemed, smacks of "the land where everything is perfect and everyone is happy", surely a reference to an individual past where bad memories are hung out to dry in the sunshine of time.
In this sense, photography constitutes an infinite archive from which the artist extracts the files that interest him, the files with which he wants to operate. He is not courting photographic (conceptual, realistic) effect in painting to appropriate a visual paradigm: this would not be possible, but we accept its documentary value: the truth of it is never discussed. On the other hand, accustomed as we are to Italian painting which has always been distinguished by its emotional and at the same time symbolic capacity, the work of Montesano has always aroused suspicion in this context. The fact that he is so distant, essential, cold, almost merciless and therefore an anomaly as far as Italian tradition is concerned, has led to a somewhat simplistic interpretation of his work, as if it were a research founded upon a vision which, in the age of the media communicattons sprawl, were burnt out and absent. While substantially simpler in one respect, the situation is, in another respect, decidedly more complex. The artist is pursuing an extraniating element which he situates entirely within the work itself rather than in its context. The main reason for the complexity is the fact that the choice of each image calls for a research with a specific finality, not to be taken as an indication of poetics but a capacity for organizing the contents.
Such a choice may simply entail choosing a certain cut, which is a way of favoring a partiality of vision in order to state the entirety of the concept, or rectifying the original photographic datum though a series of additions or
subtractions. It is all a question of mathematics, pure and simple. Clearly, in cases such as O capitano, mio capitano (1989), the symbolization process is more sustained and to the fore. Elsewhere, as in Les neiges d'antan (1998), we seem to be contemplating CartierBresson, yet it still and always has been painting. However, it is difficult to explain particular meanings because Montesano aims to create in his paintings an atmosphere that reveals itself to total vision. The symbols belong to a comprehensive philosophy which all the various figurative instances comply with. The German soldiers of the last war or the young shepherdess among the skyscrapers of New York, the saint addressing a mute population of animals, or the white Pope at large in the dark awaiting crowd are all fragments of a political discourse on art which is quite undaunted by paradox or provocation, and which goes way beyond instant emotion to elaborate thought.
Indeed, what Montesano is staging is a contorted and unauthorized encyclopedia of the century's end. His is a silent spectacle. Let me correct myself: this is not spectacle. Some color does, at times, break through the black and white, a process which has subsequently been picked up on in editorial and television graphics. Color becomes light and our attention is rewarded: an almost parodic moral judgement on the ability of a contemporary artist to bring light. Montesano is well aware of the fact that to be professional in the field of art you have to eschew specialism. We could laud him as a dilettante. Only a dilettante can be continually surprised and smile at what has happened in the course of a century of unacknowledged tragedy, episodic agony, and genial idiots subjugating the masses and producing ideologies. Moreover, the individualism of the artist enables him to take part in the great social and political events without committing himself totally: it is up to the traitor to save humanity from cultural anonymity and economic servility.
The whole of Montesano's output is ambiguous in that it says a lot but reveals nothing. The same care he applies to his titles, often in
foreign languages and always full of fresh insights into the work, are the proof of an artistic procedure that leaves nothing to chance. In a painting like C'era la neve (1994), the title calls to mind a personal memory, the wintry tepidness of a snowfall watched through steamed-up window, while the picture itself represents a baby holding up the insignia of a troop of motorized German soldiers. The image of war, the folded flag, the simple joy of the child (we do not know the reason for such joy and neither do we care), are concealed behind serene, literary evocation, so serene that we are led to doubt whether it is actually representative of the way things are.
NUR ARCADIA
In the air there is / pollen of you.
Umberto Tozzi
Montesano has an innate taste for parody. Like all skillful players, however, he never lets slip whose side he is on. It is difjîcult to tell when he is being serious and when certain Arcadian strains of his work will unleash a bitter aftertaste. At times, it is the title that serves as the vector of the piece. Often, however, we are completely misled and the meaning refers to the entire corpus of the work, almost as if the paintings were a novel in episodes, which is to say the paintings.
The emphatic sweetness of certain works - one need look no further than some of the childhood stereotypes or the recent cinema divas, leads us to suspect that Montesano is holding out on us. It is not so important to establish how far the artist can go with his simulations and depictions when so many emotional situations are actually composed of different, even opposing states of mind. Even a great artist like Gustav Mahler was afJ'licted with a similar problem not being averse, when his music had reached a dramatic peak, to slipping in an el ement of banality. However, an explanation for his behavior was found during a conversation with his friend Sigmund Freud. "During our walks in the streets of Leida, he recalled that as a child, every
time he witnessed a particularly unpleasant scene in his family he would run away: one day, after a particularly violent fight between his mother and father, he had gone out into the street where an or gan grinder was playing the popular Viennese aria Ach, Du lieberAugustin'. Mahler had realized that the juxtaposition of drama with fiivolous enjoyment had been fixed forever in his mind and that each one of these states of mind necessarily brought with it the disappearance of the other".(7)
Something of the sort happens to Gian Marco Montesano. Dystonia is an essential part of his work, rather than an attempt at performative effect on the viewer. Irony is a very serious think but with this artist there is no satirical intent. Critique of a painting passes through the painting itself and this, in semiotic terms, is a metalinguistic operation. However, unlike the conceptual avantgardes, it is an operation that has no need to look beyond the context of art. Everything remains within the realm of art yet outside of the tradition of the new. Montesano thwarts the public's assumption that any contemplation of an artwork must be accompanied by astonishment, and his oil paintings intervene precisely on the expectation of the scandal courted by a large portion of art this century. Of course, a Montesano work such as Grazie dei fiori (1986) differs from a painting sold in the square in Capri because the intentionality and the cultural paradigms are so difi'erent. In no way is his Arcadia relaxing what it does is to dissuade the aficionados of figurative ari from not believing what they are seeing or at least to reason on what is before them. Alexander Pope said: "Parody is the last resource óf the spirit". However, parody can only be executed by the intelligent and cultured, and this limits things considerably. Again, distance is important as it requires that you observe reality without it seeing you, and that you resist the infamous Homeric siren's song that underscored the dialectics of the Enlightenment. "Parody, as Proust was well aware, is also a sort of exorcism, a way of shaking oneself free of an overly committing, invasive, cumbersome, and obsessive work of art" wrote Guido Almansi
(8). Parody, for artists, has often been reserved to their masters, a technique with has enabled them to emerge from received or required teaching without pointlessly betraying the coherence of their choice. The most glaring example is that of Picasso who warned against copying oneself, in so far as he considered borrowing the ideas of others to be a duty of intelligence.
Closer to Montesano is Baudelaire's "Frapper sans colére". He in not out to convince at all costs. He is far more gratified and convinced by his own "teatrum mundi" than by any superficial polemic or news story. There is no art he needs to free himself of unlike Picasso with Goya (Portrait of Artist) and Tielazquez (Las Meninas), in Montesano's case there is a considerable past to cope with, stories to conclude, an array of photographs to archive.
Not coincidentally, a recurrent figure in the work of Montesano is that of the adolescent whose natural immaturity places him outside of History but firmly within a History of his own making which he is trying to construct among a thousand dangers and pitfalls. The adolescent and the shepherdess in Douceuer et couilles d'acier (1989), for example, are locked in an eternal contrast with a surrounding environment into which they cannot be assimilated. The
deed and structured adult world, politically and economically correct and closed, might arouse disgust among those who feel they dó not belong to it. This is not to say that the refusal is partial. Literature has developed this topic of western culture alongside the great tales of "development" and the rites of passage between one age and another. The most explicit and political eulogy to immaturity was achieved by Gunther Grass in "The Tin Drum ", not forgetting Witold Gombrowicz's less famous "Ferdydurke"
(9).
For this reason, there is a peculiar shiver to Montesano's Arcadia, the effect not unlike certain bucolic images with which black and red totalitarian regimes crammed their propaganda. "Nur Hitler!" (Only Hitler!) screams one poster preserved in the Imperial War Museum of London: here, however, the context of algid, burnished blond youths conjures up the vision of a quiet and cheering afterlife, like some allin package tour to Ibiza. On the other hand, the utopias of re foundation demand exclusivity and blind faith. The sweetened helps the bitter pill along. The deathly and the cloying can complement each other, as in the novel "The Body Burner", by Ladislav Fuks, set in a Czech city on the eve of nazism
(10) In any case, we cannot pretend that the artists haven't wamed us.
GAME OVER
We do not want to work with the spectacle of the end,
but to the end of the world of spectacle.
Luther Blissett
In Summer 1989, National Interest carried an essay titled "The end of History" by Francis Fukuyama, an American scholar of Japanese origin. Three years later, Fukuyama would resume his original subject matter in a book which went on to become a bestseller. What are we to make of a declaration such as "The end of History?" The theory goes that the victory of liberal democracies is proof that all societies are evolving in the same direction. Gone are the political alternatives: human relations, as they evolve, hdve opted for the definitive form of government, eschewing all alternatives.
With the collapse of Marxist regimes, Fukuyama's thesis would seem to have been confirmed - even Cuba is getting ready to imitate the USA while China is already doing so. Of course, this is not to say that History will cease to be a producer of events: many things will still happen. What has come to an end is the competition between different models for the organization of relations between citizens and governors: the liberal model provides us with the only viable economy. Liberal democracies alone have proved capable of ensuring that freedom and equality coexist. When social problems and injustices do arise, they do so because the mechanisms of democracy have failed to be put into practice rather than because of any design fault in the system.
As History comes to an end, a character called 'the last man' makes his appearance. Hegel founded his anthropology on man's need for social
recognition: man does not struggle simply to satisfy his needs but aspires to demonstrate his own value: an animal will act upon due stimulus, while man is pushed by a desire. And this desire consists of communicating his value to others. Man channels his tension into obtaining esteem for what he considers himself to be and the acknowledgement of his rights. "For Nietzsche, there was little distinction to be made between Hegel and Marx because their objective was the same: a society which would embody universal recognition, though he doubted the validity of unifying such recognition. Is not the quality of the recognition more important than its being universal? And would not aiming to universalize this recognition directly devaluate it and render it
banal?" (11)
Naturally, the philosopher who conceived of "The desire for potency" would criticize the "slave morality" of democracy's leveling effect. A man who renounced his own desire for assertion in exchange for the guarantee of a daily newspaper and a decent plate of maccaroni was of no interest to him. "No shepherd and a single flock!" Nietszche would write. "Everybody wanting the same thing: everybody equal; anyone who thinks otherwise can dispatch himself to the asylum!" We are reminded of a painting by Gian Marco Montesano, Una nave, un equipaggio, un comandante: perhaps this is the last man to be consigned to a heroic, solitary destiny. He is certainly the protagonist of a poem by Walt Whitman and he patently belongs to art, suspended as he is half way between the "Monument to the Sailor" and various evocations of literature and cinema that finish with Achab-Gregory Peck: he is not alone but the life of his men and the destiny of his ship are depending on him.
As far as we are concerned, the dimension of the History is that of the story, the narrative dimension. It has been said that Montesano applies his temporal selections to written History, to stories. The technical distance of photography coupled with the intellectual distance of irony enable the artist to herald the end of stories and the great romances, just as the ranks are being broken and everyone has
been delivered back to his own Fate. One need look no further than Ethik des reihen Willens (1994), in which a squadron of soldiers on horseback is plunged into an abyss, guided by "a blind will to fall into line". They are obeying an order which, for them, is equivalent to a moral imperative. Mass society and the all-pervading "desire for democracy", on the other hand, are pushing us towards indifference, placing everything on the same level, and denying all hierarchies of value: The great blind Argentine writer Jorge Louis Borges maintained that democracy is, in itself, "a strange aberration of statistics". Perhaps he really had seen what would happen.
As time piles up memories of this century's on the shores of the present, the game that is the world is turning into a spectacle that smacks of "dèja vu". From Ionesco, we learned that corpses can become enormous and awkward things, rising and bloating like a huge loaf of bread. Better getting rid of them.
Valerio Dehò
from "montesano"
Gain Carlo Politi Editor 1998
1 Helena Kontova, "Dramatizing Indifference", in Bolletino # 164, Galleria il Milione, Milan, 1996.
2 "There are two persistent problems. Firstly, despite our conviction that aesthetic experience is in `some' way emotive rather than cognitive, the vacuity of formulating in terms of the emotions which are produced or expected has left us unable to state exactly in what way this occurs. Secondly, despite our acknowledgement of the fact that emotion, in aesthetic experience, tends to be denatured and often overturned, the patent futility of explaining this in terms of a special secretion from certain aesthetic glands leaves us unable to state `why'. One response to the second poser might be found by responding to the first: perhaps emotion, in aesthetic experience, operates the way it does because of the role it plays. " Nelson Goodman, The Languages of Art, Est, Milan, 1998, p. 213.)
3 Luther Blisset, Net.gener@tion, Mondadori, Milan 1996, p.132.
4lacques Le Goff, under "History", Encyclopedia, Einaudi, Torino, 1981, pp. 566-670.
5 On this subject, see George Steiner, "No Passion Spent": "We no longer speak in terms of a nation but of a
Volk. Hirsch subtly and incisively argues that the precise difference between nation and Volk can be formulated only in terms which are immanent rather than
secular. As an identity, volk transcends all individúal identity; a volk shares the same
faith; a Uolk pursues a promise. The promise is not merely social or economic: in the final
analysis, it is a religious promise. Voting Hitler is an act of faith: according to
Hirsch, it is a Kierkegaardian leap into the unknown, towards the possibility of an
inspired, prophetic messianic leader. "
6. The theme of widespread media images has been hailed as an innovation. This only applies in terms of
quantity. Art theory had, of course, already addressed this issue and reached the same conclusions some four centuries
before, see for example Gian Paolo Lomazzo's Temple of Painting. The "superpainting" Lomazzo had fantasized about is a unifying figure of all
"pictorial languages", a replica in the art field of the real obsession of the times --
"universal language", as promoted by prophets and humanists. The language of images is universal and precedes verbal or written
communication. Such ideas are recurrent in tracts on art in the period of the
Counter-Reformation." Victor I. Stoichita, The Invention of the Painting, Il Saggiatore,
Milan, 1998, p. 105)
7.Roland Jaccard, Freud and Viennese Society, in Psicologia contemporanea, vo1 N, n. 23, 1977, p. 42. B.Guido Almansi and Guido Fink, Almost Like, Bompiani, Milano, 1976, p. 140.
9. "Ferdydurke" is resolved in a bitter parable on modern life. Gombrowicz seems to be saying that the banality of slogans and the arbitrary nature of habit reawaken the adolescent lying dormant in us and bring us violently back to an absurd, puerile condition. In other words, much-trumpeted maturity is nothing more than a mask, and wildness is the true substance of contemporary man. (Angelo Maria Ripellino, preface to Ferdydurke, Einaudi, Torino, 1961, p. 6)
10. Angelo Maria Ripelino's gloss of the extraordinary career of the cremator invented by the Prague writer: "The obsessive passage, the lugubrious design unfurl in a climate of tenderness and mawkish warmth. Throughout the novel, the funereal mixes with confectionery. Mc Strauss, who distributes cremation policies for Mr. Kopfrkingl, is a confectionery salesman. Before killing Mili in the crematorium, the affectionate father buys him an anorak and a cream garland. Here, stomach-churning delicacies and honeyed talk are the clues to a death." Gadislav Fuks, T'he Body Burner, Einaudi, Torino, 1972, p. IX
11. Francis Fukuyama, The end of History and the Last Man, Rizzoli, Milano, 1992-1996, p. 315.