#thebensplainer

Beniamino Foschini interviews Denis Viva (September, 2021) about his book “La critica a effetto: rileggendo ‘La transavanguardia italiana’ (1979)” (Editions Quodlibet, 2020), in which the art historian analyzes Italian Postmodernism, using the Transavangardia movement defined by art critic and curator Achille Bonito Oliva, as a case study. The case study demonstrates the need today for critically examining the relationship between art and politics in recent art history.

Beniamino Foschini: In 2020, you published in Italian “La critica a effetto: rileggendo ‘La transavanguardia italiana’ (1979),” an ambitious and very critical study on one of the ‘untouchables’ in Italian curatorship: Achille Bonito Oliva. Your case-study is Bonito Oliva’s inaugural text on the ‘Transavanguardia,’ published in the magazine ‘Flash Art’ in the October-November 1979 issue. It considered a group of artists – Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino, plus the later ‘purged’ Marco Bagnoli and Remo Salvadori – who received then, and in some ways still receive, critical and market attention and success. In short, the term ‘Transavanguardia’ is a relatively fixed moment in the recent history of art, for the introduction of postmodern concepts, such as cultural nomadism, artistic subjectivity, and the end of ideological grand narratives (concepts, in my opinion, that are not only postmodern). Here, you didn’t focus on the works of these artists and their historical significance, but on Bonito Oliva’s writing and marketing strategy. Since ‘Transavanguardia’ and Postmodernism are not themes limited to the Italian cultural environment, I believe that a conversation about your audacious reinterpretation of the terms, taken from the point of view of Bonito Oliva’s texts, paratexts, and marketing strategies, may be of enormous interest to an English-speaking audience, while we hopefully await the English translation of your book.

The first question is perhaps the most naive: why this book now? If you allow me, it does not seem accidental. Only a few months ago the Castello di Rivoli and its director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, former director of Documenta 13 in 2012, opened an ‘homage’ exhibition to Bonito Oliva – as a critic and a curator, but not an artist – celebrating his position in the ‘temple’ museum par excellence in Italy, which is, among other things, also the temple for ‘Arte Povera,’ a term coined by his ‘opponent’ Germano Celant.

Denis Viva: I answer you with a paradox: the book is born from the historical distance that separates us from these events and their delayed (or retarding) effect, and not from its eventual topicality. Today, ‘Transavanguardia’ appears to be an exhausted phenomenon, already widely historicized in Italy by more than enough retrospective exhibitions. Therefore, it can be examined historically – I use another paradox – since it has ceased to evolve while, at the same time, its effects are still possible to notice. In the 1980s in Italy, the enormous fortune of the ‘Transavanguardia’ was simultaneously the symptom and, in part, the cause of the peripheral position of both our cultural debate and artistic system, with respect to the Postmodern themes that were pervading global discourse. Consider post-colonial studies: reduced by Bonito Oliva to the sole question of identity, regional or national; consider gender studies: the ‘Transavanguardia,’ except for Clemente, is regarded as a triumph of the painter defined by his restless masculinity; or, consider the whole overcoming of Modernist determinism even today I witness in Italy heated debates on painting and its death,’ as if it was a real problem.

However, studying the ‘Transavanguardia’ – leaving its international reception on the sidelines for a moment – reveals derailments, stubbornness, oppositions and peculiarities: this generation of Italian artists resisted reducing the Italian situation – like other geo-culturally connoted ones – to a global Postmodern discourse. Therefore, my interest in the ‘Transavanguardia’ stems from the fact that in this sudden phase of transition, from commitment to hedonism – from the 1970s to the 1980s, wanting to simplify as much as possible – the debate and the Italian art system had taken a turn that still distinguishes it today, and that reveals how a global Postmodern discourse cannot be simply applied to any artistic context (for the better or for the worse). For the rest of your question, “La critica a effetto” is a book that was born from the developments of my Ph.D. dissertation (2008) and that was completed shortly before I got informed of the Rivoli retrospective.

Beniamino Foschini: There are two explosive moments in your analysis. The first concerns Bonito Oliva’s writing: you demonstrate, through the clinical analysis of some of his texts, how he made extensive use of ‘centoni’ [this is how repetitions or self-citations by the same author on several scores are defined in music, editor’s note], repackaging previous texts with new functions, sometimes literally distorting very different concepts. Apart from the evident effectiveness in generating ‘new’ texts drawing on ‘old’ ones, do you believe that this diminishes the historical value of his writing or that this academic practice is in itself a historical-cultural necessity of the time? Or rather, from a DJ perspective – highlighted in the 1990s by Nicolas Bourriaud in ‘Post-Production’ – did Bonito Oliva anticipate the times or vulgarly exercise a bad habit? Your analysis from a literary point of view – something that art historians rarely deal with – would seem to opt for the second hypothesis.

Denis Viva: I am going to give you an even more paradoxical answer than the previous one: I chose to dedicate an entire book to a four-page article, ‘La transavanguardia italiana,’ precisely because I thought that the problem raised in that text far transcended its author and its content. In short, it is an emblematic case-study for a phenomenon that is much broader, but that I could not describe using a holistic and panoramic approach, at least in this initial phase of my studies. Monographic analysis seemed to me the most effective tool.

I decided to examine Bonito Oliva’s writing style and to trace philologically its variants and recurrences, because it seemed to me that all this was a symptom for something else: at a certain point, art criticism abandoned its literary tradition in order to assimilate the logic of mass communication. Undoubtedly, Bonito Oliva is one of the last critics to come from the literary background and one of the first to make himself narcissistically visible in the mass media. Therefore, the practice of reassembly, as well as the writing style – with frequent repetitions of concepts and words – are the result of this transition: the literary rhetoric adapts cynically to the speed of mass communication.

We still know little about Bonito Oliva’s writing process, but we certainly know that this phenomenon describes something different than what we already knew: the figure of the literate art critic is not only supplanted by the advent of the curator, but also by the growing need to communicate through the mass media. Hence the redundancy of the message, the need to package many texts, and the prevalence of oral over written speech are some of the aspects borrowed from mass communication that mitigate his, indeed, very difficult style, while allowing him to achieve a certain popularity (it is very interesting, in this regard, to observe the distance between Bonito Oliva’s clarity on television and his complexity in writing).

Beniamino Foschini: The second explosive moment in your book is its examination of Bonito Oliva’s sociological framework within the post-1977 Italian socialist intelligentsia, attracted by Bettino Craxi and his multifaceted policy as the leader of the PSI [Italian Socialist Party]. This name will say little to the English-speaking reader, but Craxi had been a fundamental, controversial and unscrupulous political figure in Italy, together with his cultural ‘officer’ Claudio Martelli, in outlining and approving the ‘hedonistic’ but ‘leftist’ general trend in the 1980s, also opening up to subsequent identity drifts (Lega Nord and Umberto Bossi) and their plasticized crooked mirrors (Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi). Tell us more.

Denis Viva: On this front, research is only just beginning. I would like to point out, for example, the book by Lèa-Catherine Szacka on the 1980 Postmodern Architecture Biennale, where there is some mention of the relationship between Paolo Portoghesi and the PSI. In my opinion, this sociological approach represents the most promising field of study for various reasons. On one hand, Craxi’s Socialist Party was the precursor of the media spectacularization of political parties – later excessively improved upon by Silvio Berlusconi. On the other, it attempted to introduce some social-democratic reforms and laws in Italy, giving rise to distortions and ambiguities that still persist today. After 1978, the Socialist Party was able to attract many intellectuals, which was also thanks to Claudio Martelli’s skillful proselytism that actively involved them in ideological battles, especially with the rigid positions of the Italian Communist Party.

A galaxy of intellectuals from various backgrounds, even from the most radical left, approached the Socialist Party at that transitional moment, finding hospitality, support and even a liberal attitude. In this relationship, which actually lasted a few years, a series of problems, diatribes and confrontations emerged, which may be typical of a relationship between intellectuals and parties in a contemporary context, characterized by more fluid and negotiable ideological positions and by confidence in media communication.

In short, the Socialist Party established a novel idea for the relationship between political parties and intellectuals, at least for Italy: this is a field of study that still needs to be further investigated. Certainly, I think it is somewhat curious that no one has yet systematically considered the relationship between visual culture and the Socialist Party in those years. To name another important art critic and scholar of that season – Renato Barilli makes no secret of his socialist past. I believe that the time has come to study these events historically and methodically, without being retroactively influenced by their epilogue. I am beginning to discuss these issues with other art historians, such as Jacopo Galimberti. I am confident that this trend, concerning the relationship between art and politics, will continue to develop in future scholarship.

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Conversants: Beniamino Foschini, Magda Wisniowska, and Victor Sternweiler [talking on Skype, in the evening of Nov 11, 2020.]

Victor: We should start our conversation about Kunstverein München’s show ‘Not Working – Artistic production and matters of class,’ [online through 2020-11-22] curated by Maurin Dietrich and Gloria Hasnay, while making clear that we were not able to attend the parallel program, consisting of tours, lectures, performances, and video screenings, which were partially screened online, and an extensive reader was published too. This will simply be a conversation about the actual show. One could claim that such a review can’t do justice to the whole project, but I claim that nobody was able to attend everything, except for the makers, so one can only have a fragmented take on it, and therefore it is legitimate to, mainly or solely, talk about the work installed in the space. 

Exhibition consisted work by Angharad Williams, Annette Wehrmann, Gili Tal, Guillaume Maraud, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Lise Soskolne, Matt Hilvers, Stephen Willats.

A film screening series selected by Nadja Abt, showing work by Adrian Paci, Agnès Varda, Ayo Akingbade, Barbara Kopple, Berwick St Collective, Laura Poitras and Linda Goode Bryant, Max Göran.

A single event screening with films selected by Simon Lässig.

Accompanying program consisting of a book presentation (Düşler Ülkesi) by Cana Bilir-Meier (in conversation with Gürsoy Doğtaş), lectures by NewFutures, Ramaya Tegegne, Tirdad Zolghadr and a publication presentation (Phasenweise nicht produktiv) from a collaboration by Carolin Meunier and Maximiliane Baumgartner.

The reader containing contributions by Annette Wehrmann, Dung Tien Thi Phuong, Josef Kramhöller, Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky, Leander Scholz, Lise Soskolne, Mahan Moalemi, Marina Vishmidt and Melanie Gilligan, Steven Warwick.

Exhibition documentation: https://artviewer.org/not-working-artistic-production-and-matters-of-class/

Magda: To help, I was rereading today the booklet accompanying the exhibition, although I don’t see how the text is really going to address what we see in the actual Kunstverein space. For example, I quote, “The works on view are characterized by a consciousness of how background, socialization, education, and artistic practice are inevitably entangled. They hence allow for a consideration of these categories in relation to the actual lived realities of their producers.” Does it mean that the artists somehow reflect their own social background? Autobiographically on their own lived reality? Well, by large, they don’t. We don’t know what social background these artists are coming from.

Victor: How would you know anyhow?

Magda: Instead, the coherency of the exhibition relies on going through all the positions which were outlined in the booklet’s introduction. So, Stephen Willats investigates the historical aspect of class, Annette Wehrmann performs the interrogation of the economic model, Josef Kramhöller’s is a more personal approach to consumerism, Gili Tal tackles gentrification and cosmopolitanism, and Angharad Williams addresses the performative and fashion , and so on. And at least two of the artists are no longer alive.

Victor: In the time of Covid, where you try to make ends meet, how can you say no? What I’m trying to say is that the precariousness of their class is testified also by artists not being able to nowadays refuse to participate in an exhibition in which they potentially don’t think they fit in. They do it, plain and simple.

Beniamino Foschini: I don’t think it is due to Covid. It’s a general trend. If you're invited by the artistic director of the Venice Biennale, whatever their exhibition idea is, you participate, as an artist. It’s not anymore the time when an Alighiero Boetti could angrily refuse an invitation by Harald Szeemann.

Magda: Is that really the central problem of this exhibition? There are a lot of problematic issues, and I am now again looking at the text, especially at the end, where it states that “today the question of class is not addressed anymore.” That is completely untrue. Much of postmodernism consisted precisely of the critical inquiry into questions of class. I don’t know about you, Bensplainer, but in my time in London we had to read a lot of Bourdieu, especially his idea concerning cultural capital.

Beniamino Foschini: Jameson was my lighthouse at that time!

Magda: It was a big thing! You can’t say really the topic had been ignored since then.

The Bensplainer: Especially after the last Documenta in 2017. 

Magda: I acknowledge that the question of class is no longer about a white male perspective, defined by simple economics. But really? What does this exhibition add to this conversation? 

Beniamino Foschini: I think that the main problem here is when you set up a thematic exhibition. If you, as a curator, have some aprioristic ideas about the specific interpretations on cultural work, then you tend to apply them to your own exhibition making. Although, you tend to lose contact with the works themselves. You tend to look more at the anecdotal parts of the work and at its processes. Let’s be honest, there are no great works in the exhibition, the ones being able to question your own vision of forms and of the world in which these forms happen.

Magda: I think the older works displayed here, as Stephen Willats’ ones, from the 1980s, present some problems: they are, in fact, historical, and at that time had a certain currency, whereas they seem today …

Beniamino Foschini: … nostalgic.

Magda: And dry as well: this kind of class idea, of people living in a housing block – like he documented and interviewed – it doesn’t seem relevant anymore. The other thing is that it seems so British, so entwined in that specific culture. We know this Monty Python sketch, right? This kind of satire, for example, wouldn’t fit German society at that time, I think.

Magda: The other thing I was thinking of, while walking through the exhibition, was Pulp’s ‘Common People.’ (1995) Did anyone think of that? The song is about a girl from the upper classes, who wants to behave as being from the lower. But she never achieves that, because she always has her rich daddy in the background. I think that a potential problem this exhibition faces is of glamorizing this kind of a working-class cliché.

Victor: That song is especially ironic, as it was brought to my attention by a friend that Danae Stratou, the artist, industrialist heir and wife of Yannis Varoufakis, is the subject of that song. 

Magda: Yes, that’s why I mention it. 

Victor: I had a chat with The Bensplainer at some point and we had concerns about the installing too. It seemed, we agreed, like an art fair show display. The question is: how do you display all these works like a survey of an idea?

Magda: It is about all the artistic positions that the text referred to. As I said before.

Beniamino Foschini: If you see such an exhibition, you might consider how it fits a piece of writing, it being a master or a PhD thesis. On the other hand, it really lacks the viewer’s possibility to freely interact with the works. In other terms: how could you translate an idea for an exhibition, if the exhibition itself follows a logocentric and rational process? There is no surprise, indeed: I wanna see something, I don’t wanna learn something. 

Victor: This is a kind of philosophy made clear by the exhibition makers: what can art do and how it can utilize itself, in order to convey politics?

Beniamino Foschini: Do you mean how art can be utilitarian?

Victor: Let’s say you have a curatorial agenda, or an hypothesis: art-making as a precarious condition. And then you, as an exhibition maker, attempt to visualize that. In this sense, these works witness this very aspect, like art illustrating an intellectual point of view.

Magda: Otherwise said, either it is the work that is convincing, or the hypothesis. Right now, it doesn’t seem to be either. About the works I don’t wanna say much, but the text, its arguments can be easily dismantled. In many places, it is simply not coherent. For example, why do you state in the exhibition text that the coronavirus pandemic is what makes visible the rise of social inequalities the exhibition addresses, and then you show works from the 1980s? It makes no sense.

Beniamino Foschini: Works from the 1980s which recall works from the 1960s.

Magda: Exactly! If you were really consistent with your method, you would research the topic, then find out who’s working with it now. Not the artists who kind of work with the idea… just a little bit, so that they can fit your curatorial idea.

Victor: On the behalf of the curators: why should you do a show like that? What are their motivations?

Magda: Of course, you can do a show addressing the notion of class. There’s nothing wrong about that. Even if it were an illustration of ideas, it could work. But you need a good thesis first, while here the positions that are supposed to illustrate it, are weak. Who liked Laura Ziegler and Stephan Janitzky’s installations?

Victor: As a person who attended some performances by Ziegler and Janitzky previous to the KM show, but not to the last one actually at KM, I would say I see their sculptures as stage props. These performances enchanted or activated their sculptures. So, I’m quite neutral about their works in the show, but at the same time I’m neutral about all the works featured. It seems to me that the show has an agenda in representing all kinds of mediums. Photography, video … like a checklist.

The Bensplainer: Maybe old-fashioned?

Magda: It is a safe agenda. If you take Mark Fisher’s ‘Capitalist Realism,’ he states that museums and related institutions are safe spaces where we can make criticism of capitalism, while capitalism itself allows it.

Victor: Yeah, Roland Barthes already said that. On my part, I am totally opposed to the idea of ‘making art’ as a profession, in the capitalist sense. When paying your rent depends on the money from selling your art, then soon you’ll be under pressure to produce, and that in return, I think, ultimately leads to overproduction and junk.

Magda: Then we ought to know more about the artists and how they position themselves to the capitalist model. 

Beniamino Foschini: I think we are derailing the conversation. I mean, after 1989, there is only one religion, which is capitalism, and you hardly can escape this fact (I agree with Giorgio Agamben on this). Insisting on this leftist nostalgia is counterproductive. Art is luxury. Some artists are fighting against this mindset, but we are still in such a system.

Magda: Indeed – and yet the exhibition promotes an anti-capitalist position. For example, The Coop Fund’s aim is to provide an alternative funding, so that is very clear. Guillaume Maraud is also doing a standard institutional critique by creating an alternative fund. 

The Bensplainer: At the same time, these practices are canonized. When KM showed Andrea Fraser in 1993, the questions she raised were novel and on the point. The visuals in this present show are canonized. Stephen Willats repeats a visual language of more established artists, as Hans Haacke for instance. 

Magda: Yes, maybe the only thing Willats adds is a British perspective on the problem.

Beniamino Foschini: Victor, you said on the occasion of our NS-Dokumentationszentrum conversation [link]: „Preaching to the converted.“ Basically, we find here the same pattern. So, you can argue with a lot of reasoning about a motivation for an exhibition – in this case an anti-capitalist agenda – but what I expect is to see works and practices which change the way I see. Sorry if I repeat myself, but seeing works which repeat, without a difference, canonized visual experiences from the past gives me such a kind of déjà vu effect. What is this exhibition about? What are the politics that motivated it? From the point of view of the exhibition making, it is in itself a sort of repetition. In the last Documenta, the assumptions were similar: a lot of nostalgic Marxism and related leftist theoretical positions, which are good, but at the end of the day, the works become an illustration sketched aprioristically by the curators and the artistic director. Here lays the critical point which we really have to address. Paradoxically, if the works are repeating themselves, aren’t also the politics of exhibition making repeating themselves? 

Magda: Yes and no. My question is: why are you repeating these positions? You can repeat a practice under the change of circumstances: the pandemic has changed the parameters. 

Beniamino Foschini: I agree: the pandemic has unveiled changes which were not so clear before that. 

Magda: So, does the repetition offered in this exhibition reflect that? Does our present context require repetition? How are the works from the 1980s and 1990s relevant now?

Beniamino Foschini: Let’s be clear: I don’t consider repetition with a negative value. I remember a wonderful group show at KW, Berlin, in 2007, titled ‘History Will Repeat Itself.’ Precisely, it was interesting because it focused on repetition as a visual device, that’s to say how artists and works dealt with the notion of repetition, be it of other works or of overarching experiences. I remember this great video by Jeremy Deller, ‘The Battle of Orgreave’ (2001), directed by Mike Figgis, in which the artist reenacted the famous 1984 clash between workers and police in Orgreave, South Yorkshire, England, and interviewed some participants from both sides too. By the way, it was a ground breaking show, but if you now repeat because it is fashion, a canon, then repeating loses its critical charge. Moreover, works become simply an illustration of the curator’s idea. It seems to me so frustrating now, especially when Anton Vidokle already addressed the question in his seminal and controversial article ‘Art Without Artists?’ on e-flux already in 2010. [link]

Victor: Yeah, that’s what I find problematic with this show: in this time of existential precariousness, how can an artist be critical or be able to question the politics of an exhibition? You’re invited, you get attention and funds, you simply go along with it. The institutions are creating ideological precariousness by wagging with the money. Nonetheless, I see that an artist needs the money. I think it is an inherent issue of institutional exhibition making, but I can’t see an immediate way out of it. It is a trap. The people in the institutions are also paid to play their role, and if they refuse to, replacement will be found quickly.

Beniamino Foschini: I don’t think that it is the main point here.

Magda: I recognize that there are many artists that suffer contemporary financial precariousness, but there are equally many who do not. Let’s be honest, how many artists, or student artists, may claim that they are coming from working class families? I mean, many are playing the role, but really?

Beniamino Foschini: I have to check it again, but there is a statistic in Bavaria that states that families on the edge of or below existential and financial poverty who are able to send their kids to higher education are 6 or 7%. That’s a ridiculous percentage, especially because these underprivileged students or artists have then a structural difficulty in order to enter the so-called art system.

Magda: Mid- or upper-class people study art. They come from that comfortable background. At any given time, they may or may not have money, but they indeed have a safety net. 

Victor: People that I talked to were missing a critical view on the institution itself and how this show sits within its history and why they did the show there, since the Kunstverein was developed specifically to cultivate an image and space for the bourgeoisie, the middle class, by propagating aesthetic values from the upper class. It was the beginning of the ‘public sphere’ separate from the court, but also was the image of upward mobility and how its members today, generally upper middle class, use the space as a form of patronage and charity as an additive to their cultural capital. So, one might interpret this show as cynical, but I personally think that there is also the possibility of freeing yourself up from that tradition and subverting or bastardizing that project of that middle class of 200 years ago. However, I think that the show is too conventional and there is an opportunity missed here. 

Beniamino Foschini: Sorry if I always bring up my PhD topic about the Russian so-called Avant-Garde. If you analyze it socially, the Avant-Garde cloud was also animated by class and social warfare. Practitioners from the periphery came to the capitals, Moscow and St. Petersburg, and they had to fight with their contemporaries belonging to the urban mid- or upper-class world. For instance, you have Malevich who needs to rent a big apartment for him and his family, in order to sub-let and make a little profit from other people. But he also has to provide meals for them and he can paint only when he has some spare time. You still have today this romantic idea of the Avant-Garde, forgetting that it was also a very hard social situation.

Magda: But, the thing is that the economic or even its symbolic model, doesn’t seem to be really relevant. Class as it was in the 1970s, 1980s or even 1990s doesn’t exist anymore. What about class and technology? You can’t apply for jobs because you don’t have easy access to the Internet, because you don’t own a laptop or a smartphone. You can’t have a flat because you don’t get the notification on time. And flexibility changed the notion of work. There are a lot of structural changes in our societies, which the show’s accompanying text acknowledges clearly, but they are not examined in the work, or at least only in the orthodox leftist way. These positions are repeated nostalgically in the art. To me, the working class today is exemplified by DHL delivery workers.

The Bensplainer: I would add this. Today's working class might also be embodied by wannabe successful TikTok accounts! You may immediately perceive the fakeness in appropriating models from the supposed upper class in order to convey a different idea about yourself.

Magda: Fake it until you make it! TikTok responds to an already established model.

Beniamino Foschini: The novel level conveyed by TikTok is that it is not about hustling or conning anymore. Everybody knows everything is fake, so everybody accepts the coded rules.

Victor: That’s the classic definition of Žižek’s ‘ideology.’

Magda: Coming back to the show, I was surprised that urgent political issues were not questioned. I mean, the rise of populism is an issue, and it is class oriented. I don’t know much about Berlusconi and his years in power, but he did address the narrative of his politics to a certain class and set up a model for the recent years, didn’t he?

Beniamino Foschini: We Italians are not recognized in such a way anymore, but we’re still at the verge of the Avant-Garde! If history repeats itself as a farce, after Berlusconi everything is a farce. He had – and to some extent still has – an appeal to the working class, in the sense that he sold a narrative through which you can change your life only by willing it. At his first election run in 1994 he won in working class’ bastions, where traditionally the former Communist Party won with ease, efficiently selling his abstract ideas on liberty through his glittering television sets. So, already then, you might perceive that categories such as the Left and the Right were structurally changing. And this historical and epochal shift, so charged with ideological questions, is totally forgotten in this exhibition. 

Magda: Thus, I could have accepted as legitimate the exhibition’s assumptions, even if illustrational, if they would have addressed the ongoing complexity of the topic of populism, digitalization, 0-hours contracts, and so on, all related to an idea of the working class. Then it would have been fair enough!

Beniamino Foschini: I would add another topic to this. If you consider the state of satire, especially from the US, comedy is way ahead of visual art. It addresses those topics in a much more effective and creative way than visual art is actually doing. Only because they’re really reaching millions of people.

Magda: Yes, John Oliver, for instance.

Beniamino Foschini: I became a huge fan of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night monologues in the last two years, because he and his authors adapted his style of comedy shifting from weird Hollywood absurdities to overall US social and political issues. So, his and his authors’ craft reached a new level of satire, and the audience’s awareness. What can visual art do, as powerful as it might be, in comparison to mainstream satire? Let’s simply think about how Kimmel dealt with the topic Obamacare and how he related to – his personal history.

Magda: This is important, as access to healthcare in the US especially, is a class issue. But then, yeah, why don’t you simply invite a comedian to KM, then? Ok, you could never afford that, but who knows?

Beniamino Foschini: It would be so wonderful! But this idea should also be declined in a weirder approach. 

Magda: For sure, a comedian in an art space could have more freedom compared to the one he could have on national television. 

Beniamino Foschini: Victor, do you remember Olof Olsson’s performance at Lothringer 13’s cafe in Munich in 2017? 

Victor: Yes.

Beniamino Foschini I found it brilliant, mixing visual and comedy devices, and very generous, because it lasted so long! This kind of transdisciplinary performance says more about social, political and economic issues, than a conventional show, like this one at KM. If I had to make a single critical statement about this show at KM is that it doesn’t move our present cultural perception to a different plane, as satire does.

Author: The Bensplainer – Munich, February, 2020.

Book details: Introduction by Jeffrey Deitch; Contribution by Alison Gingeras and Aria Dean and Johanna Fateman; Featuring artists Nina Chanel Abney, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Sascha Braunig, Jordan Casteel, Mathew Cerletty, Eliza Douglas, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Janiva Ellis, Jana Euler, Jamian Juliano-Villani, Cheyenne Julien, Sanya Kantarovsky, Ella Kruglanskaya, Austin Lee, Tala Madani, Sam McKinniss, Ebecho Muslimova, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Jennifer Packer, Nicolas Party, Christina Quarles, Tschabalala Self, Amy Sherald, Avery Singer, Emily Mae Smith, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. Published by Rizzoli Electa, New York, 2019.

‘Unrealism: New Figurative Painting’—edited by Jeffrey Deitch for Rizzoli New York—has just been released in October 2019. It is a huge volume featuring the work of 26 international artists and deals with the general notion of the ‘figurative’ in contemporary painting.

As a survey, ‘Unrealism: New Figurative Painting’ is a courageous enterprise. At the beginning of the 20th century, the so-called ‘avant garde’ proposed a fundamental turning point in European visual culture, shifting the pictorial concept from imitation to transformation. Since then, a long tradition of modernist art writing has more or less privileged an abstract and superficially formalist canon in criticism and art history. Of course, this does not mean that all artists in the last century have worked in this way - or even within their own practice. Modernist writing on art was—and maybe still is, to borrow from Lyotard—its own ‘grand narrative,’ which frankly can become overkill.

Deitch’s Take on New Figurative Painting

The historical fact⁠ that ‘figurative painting’ continued to exist and be relevant even after the avant-garde break with representation⁠ is often recognized in Deitch’s and Alison M. Gingeras's essays. This is obviously a good starting point. Artistic practice should be here the case study. Deitch presents a visual essay about a ‘counter-history of figuration’ in the 20th-21st century, which features most of the usual suspects. So, yes, there is Francis Picabia and his very weird paintings after Dada; Giorgio De Chirico, who never gave a shit and always did what he wanted; and the German masters of New Objectivity as well as Balthus. I must add however (and sorry for bensplaining) that both of the authors seem to have forgotten the most obvious example of ‘contradiction in the modernist canon.’ This would be, of course, Kazimir Malevich, the discoverer of the ‘Black Square’ (1915), who is also responsible for the still mysterious and indefinable post-1927 parodying figurative painting. At least a few women artists get a mention, some of them key figures in the development of figuration, such as Florine Stettheimer, Tarsila do Amaral and pre-WWII Frida Kahlo, but the list, of course, is longer and tries indeed to cover the whole century with a non-gender biased approach. It's all good and we all agree with the spirit of the enterprise.

However, there are still concerns about the narrative that is put forward by the authors rather than the individual artistic practices that they discuss. For instance, Deitch's introductory essay on contemporary ‘Unrealism’ deals with some heated issues. He affirms that figurative painting is now “back in the vanguard.” My first question would be: figuration is back because of what? The artists featured in ‘Unrealism’ are all celebrities working with internationally recognized and powerful institutions and galleries. Is figuration back because of the market that establishes what is the vanguard, or is it merely fashionable at this very moment? Or what else?

Deitch offers the following as explanation:

First of all, as we are all living in a ‘post truth’ epoch, artists deal with the ‘unreal,’ thus the label: ‘Unrealism.’

If I may speak figuratively - ha!

As is common in today's art jargon, Deitch's contextualization is sociologically determined. He lists: the loss of hierarchies; borrowing from low brow or vernacular culture; hybridization; post truth politics; heteroformity; and finally, the pervasive use of social media. But aside perhaps from social media, haven’t most of these factors been in play since the beginning of modernism? Hasn't “vernacular” culture already played a fundamental role in the most heroic phase of modernist narrative, this damned avant-garde? Technology has changed of course⁠—but the artistic approach to technology has always been more skeptical than enthusiastic. An artist does whatever he or she wants with technology, this action/potential reveals an exchange of interests, an ‘indirect interaction of objects,’ as Graham Harman would put it.

The book's reasoning is still biased I think, by the old-fashioned art historical idea of ‘influence.’ An influence in itself doesn't really exist, unless one insists on a formalist-psychological approach à la Harold Bloom. But influence still seems to be appealing as the lazy option. Especially as it fits the capitalist narrative of the ‘new’ and is thus easily absorbed by the market. So is ‘influence’ really at stake here? All the essays included in ‘Unrealism’ insist on the idea that figurative painting today refers to, or is influenced by, a disconnected canon. Are we still insisting on an old-fashioned art historical approach?

Gingeras’ Take on Wrongness and Black Sheeps

Gingeras' essay has an art historical approach that is more refined, even if it concentrates on sociological issues to focus on the notion of ‘wrongness,’ that is, on being eccentric and not of your own time, to the point of being blatantly misunderstood or even censored. Her case studies are: William N. Copley (CPLY), Bjarne Melgaard, and the feminist pleiad of ‘black sheep,’ Joan Semmel, Anita Steckel, Betty Tompkins, Evelyne Axell, and Christine Ramberg. It’s all very interesting from the art historical point of view, but not really from the theoretical one.

Fateman’s Feminist Take

Perhaps not by coincidence, the more interesting essays are the ones by artists/writers, even though these also insist on a sociological point of view. The very well written—finally!—essay by Johanna Fateman begins with a fascinating theory by LeRoy McDermott, who claims that the Venus of Willendorf is not a synthetic view of prehistoric female body, but rather is a depiction by an ur-female artist of her own body seen from her actual perspective. I love this interpretation! But then, Fateman starts another grand discourse about patriarchy, gender, and white male perspective in relation to the artists of her choice. These issues could well play a role in art practice, no one would disagree. Yet it leaves one with the question: why are the paintings that Fateman picks so relevant now? Because of the issues they address? Fateman quotes artist Christina Quarles: “If you're using a medium or a language that has existed before you, people who identify similarly to you,” can “totally change what it looks like and how it's received by people.” That's right and it gets to the point—a point already mentioned by Ortega y Gasset in 1925: figurative painting is not ‘dehumanized,’ i.e. it is not detached from speaking to actual people. And again a quote by Tschabalala Self: “My work does not comment on stereotypes and generalizations about the Black female body, […] my practice absorbs these fantasies.” Again, a powerful statement, but what artists-critics hear, as Fateman does in a Schillerian way, is—yeah, what your practice really addresses are the sociological questions of race, gender, class and sexuality. How could the artists' words be so misinterpreted?

Dean’s Take on Polarity Real-Virtual

Aria Dean's essay takes a more challenging and formal approach, i.e. investigating the interactive relation between painting and internet visual culture as a means of defining them both. She asks a very fundamental question: “What does representational, figurative painting ‘do’ in a world that is so aggressively structured by the Internet—more specifically, in a world characterized by widespread image circulation paired with an accelerated fragmentation of a cohesive public and subsequent fragmentation of a shared reality?” Explicitly borrowing from Brian Massumi, Dean doesn't see reality and virtuality as a duality, rather a polar play between the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘nonsensuous,’ i.e. if I do not misunderstand, the analog and the digital. But she doesn't really follow through this powerful statement and prefers to finish her essay with some psychological jargon about Caravaggio and Narcissus.

Impressions, in random order

(1) So many words are used for contextualizing a painting, because there is no need anymore today to find the specific words appropriate to a particular painting;

(2) everything is hyper-ideologized, as long as the artists themselves do a visual essay on ‘something else,’ shifting from narrative to personal narrative;

(3) this whole need to ‘explain’ the reasons behind a painting makes me think if this is also an inherent vice of contemporary efficiency. A painting as a refinished product, ready to be exchanged;

(4) I mean, obviously in figurative painting the subject matter—‘that’ reason behind the painting—plays a more prominent role than in abstract painting, but does it really?

(5) the poor state of criticism: even Aria Dean failed to address the consequences of her own words!

The ‘bensplaining’ impression:

Participating artists: Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, Steffani Jemison, Ndayé Kouagou, Kengné Téguia Curated by: Cédric Fauq

Conversants: The Bensplainer and Victor Sternweiler ... sitting on a bench at ca. 11 pm, after the opening of the above mentioned exhibition.

The Bensplainer: So, I think it was a good selection.

Victor: Probably the finest show at Nir Altman’s up to date. But it’s a matter of taste.

The Bensplainer: On the other hand, the eccentricity of artists like Ndayé Kouagou and Kengné Téguia allows us to experience some weirdness. Kouagou comes from poetry, thus he’s not a trained visual artist. Nevertheless, there is something genuine about the way he visualized and acted his performance, as well as he presented his sculptures. Yeah, one cannot really say that this performance was somehow new…

Victor: What do you mean with new?

The Bensplainer: There were many 1960s references. The first name which popped into my head is Bruce Nauman, of course. Magda made a further comment, mentioning Samuel Beckett. So, this is the kind of tradition Kouagou seems to refer to, yet interpreting it freely. On a reception level—thus probably only through my eyes and experiences—I also like to see it as an unintentional criticism at analogous performances so popular in Munich: Kouagou didn’t read. He really performed.

Victor: It wasn’t this type of lecture performance.

The Bensplainer: Exactly. Like those by Tris Vonna-Michell some 15 years ago. I find Kouagou’s performance was properly theatrical.

Victor: I don’t think it was theatrical, in the stiff sense performances in the white cube are exercised nowadays, to my perception. It didn’t come as a thoroughly choreographed piece. He reacted to the audience’s reactions and comments in a natural way—call it postdramatic. He probably did it for the 20th time.

The Bensplainer: Isn’t theater ’theater,’ if you perform a piece more than once?

Victor: Even if it was, he performed it very 'leggero.' The reason why I liked it in particular is that most of the white cube performances nowadays don't seem to be informed by what has been happening in theater domain, they come along either as lecture performances or as sacred rituals in dramatic settings—these performances are oftentimes taken too seriously by their originators. The audience is supposed to be quiet and every move feels like an unwelcome interruption.

The Bensplainer: I wrote a message to Magda before, asking about her opinion on the performance, since she had to leave right after.

Magda’s text response: Ndayé was performing his blackness most strongly (or rather the moment I felt my whiteness as part of the all-white audience) was when he said (and I misquote) "I like boundaries - you stand there and I am here." I think he might have also drawn a line with his hands. I wonder whether previous audiences were so homogeneous. What about the Childish Gambino's musical video?

Victor: I don’t know the video in question, but it is funny, because it might have more to do with her general cultural sensibility apperception, than with Kouagou’s performance.

The Bensplainer: Magdalena’s point is interesting, because formally that is consistent: Kouagou was performing with top half naked, only wearing sort of lacerated beige trousers and black sneakers. Gambino’s costume is similar, as he wears some grayish trousers, which could refer to the Confederates' military uniform during the American Civil War. There’s probably a shared symbolism: this might be Magdalena’s suggestion.

Victor: I don’t really buy into that logic by linking gestures in an art performance, say not wearing a shirt, to the notion of origin or even of politics of blackness etc. I find it a very vague link. In that case we could paradoxically link it to Freddie Mercury's persona, as well. I mean, he performed most of his life topless, on stage. But let’s go to the factual description of the performance.

The Bensplainer: Well, in the first part Kouagou came into the gallery space, he carried a plastic white chair, then put it on one side of the invisible stage of the gallery.

Victor: That plastic garden chair is perhaps the most popular design object ever.

The Bensplainer: He turned on some music from his phone. He started moving quite mechanically à la Nauman, tracing a square around the chair on the floor, at first only step by step – 2 steps each side –, then framing it with tape for the audience. That task remained incomplete. Then he sat down on the chair, and stopped the music. So, the performance’s second act started, and it was about him performing his material, randomly moving his body or the chair outside and inside the taped square. He acted in a Beckett-style text.

Victor: Kouagou seemed to improvise it, talking about love, and “I don’t know what I’m doing here” alike, so back and forth. Quite an ironic commentary of him on the bourgeois type of galleries’ audience, I think. But what do you think about his objects?

The Bensplainer: You mean the sculptures, the Untitled (no dates) hanging from the ceiling? These are more problematic in my view. They were stashed between, I think, two layers of A3-sized Plexiglas. On one side there was printed some texts, which echoed what he recited within the performance. Inside the two plexiglass sheets, there were shirts crystalized with resin.

Victor: Then there was the frame jeans jacket, half folded and wrinkled.

The Bensplainer: This kind of visualization is very typical today—Seth Price’s practice comes to mind—as well as this kind of autobiographical attitude.

Victor: What was written on the objects?

The Bensplainer: Again, some statements which recalled the performance, which showed existential frailty.

Victor: Resembling his performance, so to speak.

The Bensplainer: Exactly, like a repetition with difference.

Victor: I liked the way his objects were installed, hanging from the ceiling in that space. There was no wall behind defining their aura. You can generate 360 images when looking at them—a parallax effect. I would like to see them in a real living space situation and I hope nobody installs them close to a wall.

The Bensplainer: They are theatrical in this sense.

Victor: You insist on the term theater, but then we have to talk about Micheal Fried’s rejection of theatricality. I disagree with Michael Fried here.

The Bensplainer: Me too. So, let’s talk about Téguia’s videos.

Victor: I’m really curious about what you have to say about them, because, at an opening like that, there are so many people one happens to know and to greet, so I had to skip them completely. Prior to that, let’s talk a bit about the objects that were put or installed on the floor of the gallery.

The Bensplainer: I don't know really, since those works by Steffani Jamison didn't really catch my gaze.

Victor: The two transparent Plexiglas objects [Untitled (De Appel) (2018)] with a painted gesture on them, as big as a hand. They looked like those floor caution signs 'Danger – Slippery,' but the objects were transparent. I’d love to see that, installed in a non-white cube ambient where people would bump into. There I think of that Barnett Newman quote “Sculpture is what you bump into when you back up to look at a painting.”

The Bensplainer: As every great abstract painter, Newman has a sense for wit. At the same time Jamison's two sculptures may also be seen as a straight translation into Plexiglas of very common trestles, found in every artist's studio. The ironic element is clear to me, but not its pictorial concept though. On the other hand, Téguia's three video installations challenged me. All three were shown on cube monitors (CRT) placed on the floor and the audio got blasted through rather modest loudspeakers. The three works deal with repetition both in moving image and sound. As for the moving images–being a mysterious shadow figure in Times goes by so slowly (2015), a recut of Disney classic Snowhite in Blanche-Neige is my Bitch (2015), or a fragmented reality in Soul Sista x Kameugné (2014)—they are a reflection on Dara Birnbaum's practice, I suppose. Nevertheless, Téguia added complexity to it with the sound. It is not simply about Birnbaum's manipulation of a found object then, but about his own effort to cover some pop songs while dealing with his deafness. Not that personal narratives were here at stake as a statement: instead, the general claim–that we can understand the world logo-centrically–was questioned here. Who's speaking, and how? And who's hearing, and how? The indeterminacy of perception was accompanied by the observer's possibility to engage relationally with the work, picking up the loudspeaker and listening materially to the sound through its vibration.

Victor: Sounds cool. Can't say anything about it. What’s our next drink? …

Author: Beniamino Foschini - Munich, October, 2019.

"And then you win nature (mechanical philosophy) by imitating it in a mythical way (rhythms, returns, fates)."

Cesare Pavese, 'Diari,' January 10, 1950.

'Eine Sandsammlung' by Renato Leotta (* 1982, 'by now' living and working in Sicily) is a curious exhibition [click here for images], if only one could consider the museological sense inscribed in the title itself: it allows us to reconsider our fragile relationship with a Nature of 'ancient' taste. In the central space of the Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen, Leotta stages an 'uncertain' archeology, an archeology I would like to define better, especially conflicting with many 'archival' claims in contemporary artistic practice. In the exhibition's press release there is a great insistence on the notion of 'archive,' but this is obviously due to contingent needs, whether they are of a conventual order, or of a pedagogical one (in order to understand that contemporary art is concerned).

Thus, a relationship with a Nature of 'ancient' taste: on four pedestals of different height, white on the sides, turquoise on the surface, Leotta has placed 29 sculptures, 'Gipsoteca' (2015). They present as many sections of beaches, by different rectangular bases, that the artist has produced on various Sicilian coasts. If the support of each sculpture is a precise cast of the regular irregularities—thus 'natural'—of the shed in question, on its surface the artist has transposed—yes, taking from, appropriating—the respective sand, made of specific colors and peculiarities, whether the latter might be considered 'kitsch', such as pebbles and shells; sometimes, only sands. First of all, the display of these geographic and geological specificities—of 'simulacra' in the most ancient sense of the term—has a pictorial quality: the rhythm of different sands' colors, of different natural elements, play through various forms with an abstract and planar imaginary. On the other hand, it is 'natural' here to consider consolidated experiences, from which, I believe, Leotta tries to detach himself. The first impulse comes from the 'Non-geography' by Robert Smithson: obviously the 'Nonsites' installations (1968) come to mind. The American artist puts a raw geomorphic material in a regular grid of minimalist containers, being this grid related to similar ones made of maps or documentary photographs (sometimes accompanied by statements), with the constructive function of estranging what is seen and what is experienced inside the exhibition space. However, according to Leotta, 'Gipsoteca' does not question the statutes and places in the sense of an institutional critique—thus presenting an attitude of conceptual taste—but it addresses the pictorial possibility of Nature, ordered by anthropometric symmetries. It shows a taste of a cataloger, which becomes formal, as in the origins of archeology. An archeology that has its prodromes in the formal passion of a Prince of Biscari, Ignazio Paternò Castello, eccentric and Sicilian contemporary to the most famous Winckelmann: from this Derridian supplement seems to breathe the practice of Leotta, a horizon that the artist himself defines 'Hellenic', through his constant research on a presence of an origin, and on a difference of Rossinian type.

 However, this does not have to force the reader in bringing back his memory to a certain 'Trópicalia,' even if a sentimental and ideological proximity can not be denied. According to Hélio Oiticica, the term 'Trópicalia' (1967) was the way to establish a spplement, with respect to the Western evolution of art and its narration. Leotta insists on the 'Hellenic' imaginary of his practice: according to the artist, Sicily does not stand for a search for, or a precise notion of origin, an exoticism somehow historical and castrated, but instead it offers the reason for reconsidering formal processes. It relates to fundamental questions about our necessity for images: why and what is an image, when I think of it, I produce it, I differentiate it from other ones? In this sense, the appropriation of Leotta still plays with Oiticica's 'apropriaçaoes,' out of every Duchampian dogmatism.

 This collection of sculptures has for Leotta a horizon, which he calls 'gliptoteca.' The glyptotheque is basically a collection of sculptures and plaster casts. Starting from the eighteenth century in Europe, the glyptoteque substantially housed plaster copies of Greek and Roman antiquities as well as originals and represented the basis of artistic pedagogy. Every art academy of a certain age preserves copies from the ancient and every art student has, sooner or later, copied from the ancient. But, if there are short circuits in the traditional sense of such a collection – as Canova did realize in Possagno – I love Leotta's subversivity in establishing a 'Hellenic' and geographic glyptoteque, based on sculptural and pictorial work on the field. Of course, this is not meant 'symbolically,' so it is worth to overturn conceptually the 'icon' of an ancient sculpture—many examples: from Jeff Koons to Francesco Vezzoli, who, actually, indulge in a 'baroque' symbolic imaginary. It is factually practiced: Leotta poses himself indirectly as a proto-archaeologist in regenerating the gaze towards most banal and current things, such as a beach frequented by people of all kinds, ages and social status. And his 'Gipsoteca' can be declined indefinitely, as the artist plans and as the title of the exhibition, 'Eine Sandsammlung.' seems to suggest. It reminds me of another object-simulacrum, 'El libro de arena' by Borges, the book of infinite knowledge that everyone is looking for, whose possession they all aspire to.

Work on nature, understood as the perception and reproduction of the latter, is therefore the center of Leotta's practice. Moreover, it shows a very strong difference with regard to a certain 'artpoverism,' from which Italian art seems entangled by too many decades: the use of poor materials does not respond to an estrangement, but to a contiguity, we could say, mimetic, if not 'sympathetic,' as if to say: Nature says more than language.

In the series 'Zeit und Wasser (Mondphase 1–5),' 2017, Leotta shows five average format silver-gelatin daguerreotypes (about 130x120 cm). At first glance, lines and biomorphic forms are visible, but at a more careful analysis there is something 'recognizable.' A certain proximity to the sea suggests me that these photographs have to do with a mirroring, a 'doppelganger' of nature. Still mimesis. This 'double fragile' is revealed in Leotta's own adventure. The artist has produced a wooden box containing sensitive paper; with it he immerses himself in the lunar sea with this surface-supplied diving 'camera obscura'; he obtains the photographic image of the moon's reflection on the sea's surface, thus crystallizing the image of a natural image. Almost obvious: 'Zeit und Wasser' reconsiders the 'Cosmogonies' (1960–61), the extreme attempts of Yves Klein to abandon the authorial order of the subject, in order to leave to plants, rain, wind, and color the 'imprimatura' on the canvas. Leotta goes back to his origins, that of a photographer, and to the simple chemical possibility of the trace. However, the story does not grasp the complexity of every single image, a powerful icon of the zero degree's eternal return.

The 'Multiverse' series (2017), three blue shrouds on which the salt traces leaves its 'automatic' on the canvas signs, is of similar sentiment. But this series seems too indebted to the Western tradition, and to Klein of course, if only for the use of blue: a visual tradition which is difficult to escape, if not to struggle with. In spite of the evident formal and cultural precariousness of these last works, its necessity in the exhibition's display can not be denied, as the spectator has to dive—obviously figuratively—into the expenditure system of the exhibition stage.

With this exhibition, Leotta is able to give a less didactic 'Hellenistic' breath to his work, thanks to the context of the display, of which he is a true 'maestro.' On the one hand, certain hitches are necessary, when one gives himself, as a supplement, to the foreigner of language: in a contemporary normative scene like today, where everyone understands everything, it is audacious to insist on a personal 'Trópicalia.' On the other hand, it is necessary to reiterate the implicit specificities and to repudiate exotic expectations, in order to present to an audience a certain idea of artistic identity.

I would conclude, again, with the Italian poet Cesare Pavese (from his 'Diaries,' 9 February 1950) and I would leave my reader like this: