ARTE FIERA OBSERVATORY

Riccardo Venturi
photo

Riccardo Venturi is a contemporary art historian and critic. His publications include Mark Rothko. Lo spazio e la sua disciplina (Electa 2007), Black paintings. Eclissi sul modernismo (Electa 2008) and Passione dell’indifferenza. Francesco Lo Savio (Humboldt Books 2018). He directs the Public Program of the ICA Foundation in Milan, writes for exhibition catalogues, academic and sector publications (hard-copy and digital) such as “Artforum,” “Alias - Il Manifesto,” “Flash Art,” and “Doppiozero,” and the prose&image website “Antinomie,” www.antinomie.it, which he co-founded. He teaches at the Brera Academy, at NABA, and elsewhere. He often crosses the border – not only geographic – between France and Italy. For Arte Fiera 2020 he was a member of the jury for the Mediolanum Award for Painting, assigned to Michael Bauer for his work Homeebottler.
https://independent.academia.edu/rventuri

Ventriloquisms

You’re studying Fabio Mauri’s use of screens. On the table you put a series of photos from Intellettuale - film projections, sculptures and performances – taken at the inauguration of Bologna’s Galleria comunale d’arte moderna on 31 May 1975. You glance from one detail to another and goes from a close-up - the body of Pasolini pierced (if not crucified) by his 133-minute film Il Vangelo secondo Matteo – to the background. Through the museum’s glass doors, you glimpse an exhibit on French and international dadaism installed inside.

But then comes a shock: you remember another performance in that same space from June 1997, two years later: Imponderabilia. The very young Ulay and Abramovic, nude, impassive, feet wide apart, facing each other, two living statues between which the public had to pass when entering. It was impossible for anyone, even shrinking, to pass through the narrow opening between their two bodies without rubbing her breasts or his penis. And to block the passage even more, Ulay and Abramovic had placed two white walls behind them.

It thus happens that your erratic gaze begins to daydream that the four of them meet at the museum entrance: Pasolini (who died 5 months after Intellettuale) and Abramovic on one side, Mauri and Ulay on the other. For some reason you can’t imagine Pasolini talking with Ulay and Mauri talking with Abramovic. “Does the word Salò mean anything to you?,” “What do you think about Warhol’s portraits?,” Pasolini asks Abramovic; “When I was young I had more than 30 electroshocks,” Mauri confesses to Ulay; then the first talks about the screens showing The End and the second about his recent Fototot with photos that turn black and fade away under the spectators’ eyes.

The memory of art doesn’t live only in history, handed down in writing, orally, by fixed and moving images. It also lives in the physical spaces in which it is created (even when it doesn’t seem to leave visible traces). So, when you’re strolling through a show in a familiar exhibition space, a previous show held in the same space may peep through and overlap.

Works can become ventriloquists for other works.

And what if the history of contemporary art and its exhibitions were nothing but ventriloquism, sometimes harmonious, sometimes shrill? You think: ventriloquistic dramaturgy.

So, forgetting the excruciating linearity of the history taught at school and at the university, and putting it in a circle (if not a spiral), you wonder what the relationship is between Intellettuale and Imponderabilia. Which one is the ghost of the other, which one is the ventriloquist’s voice, and what is it saying? Where do they attract and repel each other? What is in the folds of one that is revealed and expanded in the depths of the other? What springs from the meeting between Intellettuale and Imponderabilia in a city like Bologna in those days, the epitome of Fluxus?

You wind up improvising a heated 4-way conversation among Pasolini, Mauri, Abramovic and Ulay: they talk about Piero Camporesi and Giuliano Scabia, about almanacs and pantomimes, of the relationship between gaze and desire, between body and passions.