 |
Press |
| Survival
Cell by Valerio Dehò |
|
Press |
| Survival
Cell by Valerio Dehò |
| Do you remember that
episode from the first (legendary) television series
"The Twilight Zone" in which a bank emplovee
locked himself in a bank vault in order to comfortably
read the newspaper and when he came aut he discovered
that the world had been destroyed by an atomic explosion?
Breaking the rules saved his life. If he had diligently
been working, he would have been burnt to death by the
H-bomb. By going against the rules, he survived the
catastrophe. In the time of Picasso, Matiss, and Braque, representation of the atelier meant raising the artist’s dignity ti that of creator. The room cluttered with materials, often messy, inaccessible and holy like a millennial church darkened by time and by prayers, is a topos of art from mannerism onwards. The place in which the artist makes his/her creations is sacred to humans and to the gods. Similar to an alchemist’s den, it is a place of trasmutation a meeting point of imagination and manual creation work. Picasso bought back the painting of his own atelier which he hard previously sold to his merchant Kahnweiler. This was an extraordinary and noble gesture Braque then, after the cubist period, devoted his best paintings to this subject. And wasis not perhaps Brancusi who donated his own atelier to the French state, now refurbished right in front of Beauburg? This is why we are tlking abaut survivl and about a vital space to be saved from any future catastrophe. Franco Vaccari’s idea was to bring the artist’s laboratory nearer to that spontaneous architecture which can be seen from the train under overpasses and on the outskirts of big cities. So as to say that art’s space is human space and it can not be any other way. And the contrast with technology is possible and livable in that we must face it, but we must also gain something from it or else it is better to close ourselves in a bank vault with a newspaper. Asking artists from all over the world to send pictures of their own workplaces and circulating them on the Web is an attempt – a successful one given the number and quality of participants – to connect and display creation spaces. Creative spaces are those places in which you get your hands dirty in order to give substance to the mind’s images. Vaccari believes in technology enough to understand it. He did not make a fetish out of photography and so he is not making one out of digital communication. Above all, he was the first person to bring the concept of real time into the artistic field. But he also knows that’s every union is a challenge, an enlargement of Knowledge, and he has always worked on the communication issue. This was true even in 1972 when he gave visitors to Venice’s Biennale the chance to photograph themselves with the Photomatic (those machines you use to make passport photographs) and thereby themselves become a work of art. The message comes out of a hide-away, from one refuge and reaches another refuge. The cellular exchange creates a tissue which does not, however, endanger the survival and autonomy of the individual cells. In the end, virtual reality has not yet found any paradises. We have not yet moved past those artificial Baudelairian and fin de siècle (the last siècle, that is) paradises. There is a powerful and flexible communication tool, but in general people riskj disappointment when they move from virtuality to reality. This too must have a meaning. This explains why Vaccari, when he constructed his agricultural-clochard environment with stratigraphs of lived life and rugs full of dust in the Casa del Giorgione, made Internet present and visible but only through a half-closed door of the artist’s room. The artist presented himself again as what he has always been : an enthusiast as much as a professional voyeur. But thinking back to the documents and photographs collected in these months, it seems clear that this CD Rom is our survival cell of contributions made by all of the artists and those like me, Ennio Bianco, and Giorgio De Novellis who have helped Franco Vaccari in this umpteenth project . In any case, the CD Rom production company guarantees that its products will last for 100 years. We need much less time than that, and I fear that others will have to tell us how it ended up how it ended up turning out. The eternity of art will take care of the rest. Valerio Dehò |