Cesare Pietroiusti
Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can]
6 September 2020
Cesare Pietroiusti
Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can]
6 September 2020
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Cesare Pietroiusti, Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can], Taranto 2020
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Cesare Pietroiusti, Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can], Taranto 2020
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Cesare Pietroiusti, Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can], Taranto 2020
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Cesare Pietroiusti, Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can], Taranto 2020
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Cesare Pietroiusti, Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can], Taranto 2020
Cosa possono i corpi [What bodies can]
Cesare Pietroiusti
Taranto, 6 September 2020
On 6 September 2020 Post Disaster and studioconcreto hosted for the first time in Taranto a performance by artist Cesare Pietroiusti that took place in the open spaces surrounding TaTÀ (Taranto auditorium Tamburi, a former school building now managed by the theatre cooperative group Crest). TaTÀ is located in via Grazia Deledda, in a highly suggestive and symbolic context, which testifies to the processes of redemption that the city of Taranto aims to trigger by means of cultural production.
By letting the place, its landscape and its architecture directly inspire the artist, the performance has dealt with the concepts of theatre, ritual, and collective bodily experience. In its unfolding it has opened up a critique of the condition of marginality, which is in turn one of the focal point of Post Disaster’s artistic research. Post Disaster aims at promoting the construction, sharing, and de-centring of knowledge, which is usually catalysed by city areas that enjoy cultural prominence. This activity is also in dialogue with studioconcreto’s research, which is centred on proxemics in non-conventional, mostly self-organised spaces that form a counterpart to the planning of institutional projects.
Is it possible to inhabit the margin as a privileged locus, as a condition for freedom and as a possibility to escape dominant logics?
The meeting point was piazza Fontana, next to the inhabitable sculpture conceived by the artist Franco Carrino. Later on the programme continued by crossing the Tamburi neighbourhood to reach the TaTÀ theatre.
Intervention promoted and supported as part of the extraordinary 2020 program on culture and entertainment of the Puglia Region and with the support of the General Direction for Contemporary Creativity – Creative Living Lab II Edition Award, in collaboration with Post Disaster and with the moral patronage of the Municipality of Taranto.
Cesare Pietroiusti
Taranto, 6 September 2020
“When you brought me here [in Piazza Fontana, T.N.] for the first time, I realised I knew this place because I had talked about it with Nicola Carrino, the author of this urban installation, an artist whom I luckily got to know and with whom I have shared a great amount of time and thought. Then I have seen the space where our walk will end, that is a modernist theatre on the outskirts of the city, and it immediately came to my mind a text which in the history of the second Avant-garde, i.e. the Avant-garde of the 1960s, became fundamental for a very peculiar reason: it aimed at criticising minimalism and instead, with time, it ended up celebrating it. I won’t give a lecture in art history, I rather invite you to reflect on presence, each one is invited to reflect on one’s own presence, to elaborate together a concept, and if something isn’t clear please invite me to stop and clarify.
Michael Fried was the author of the text with the title Art and Objecthood, that deals with the connection between artwork and object, a text dated 1967. More specifically, it refers to the most famous and iconic minimalist works of that period, the mid-1960s, mostly from the New York area, with artists such as Bob Morris, Donlad Judd, and others. Big factory-made objects, without a representation aim, objects that did not represent but themselves. It was not abstraction in the strictest sense, since abstraction is a more pictorial phenomenon that concerns surface. Those were real objects such as cubes, spheres, parallelepipeds that merely represented what they were. Nicola Carrino’s language is clearly influenced by the minimalist experience of the New York art scene.
What was then Michael Fried’s criticism? Fried argued: “These objects don’t represent anything, so it’s useless for me as a viewer to look at them, to look at them gives me nothing. But what are they in the gallery, in the museum where they are placed? They become a sort of decoy, things that attract people and actually create a sort of theatre scenery”. So, he claims they aren’t artworks but “theatre props”, they should not be “looked at”, rather it was the presence of those who entered the exhibition that became, together with the objects, a part of the scene. This interpretation is very interesting because in Fried’s mind this was a criticism, he was saying that minimalism isn’t art, it’s something else, it’s a basic element for a theatrical and performative backdrop.
However, what in the 1960s was a criticism, in the 1990s became the vision of the artwork as the creation of a context in which it’s the public that “makes” the thing, the artwork, people give meaning to the situation and with time, as I said, this interpretation from a criticism became a celebration of minimal art.
If we think about it, Michael Fried talks about theatre. Yet, in our traditional understanding, theatre means a representation oriented by a story, a plot, a scenario, in which actors play a role. If we go to a theatre to see a minimalist object, we don’t play any other role than that of visitors of a museum or an art gallery, and each time – this is the hypothesis on which I would like us to reflect tonight, singularly or as a group as we’re now – each of us gives meaning to the minimalist object, gives meaning to a new situation that brings together the minimalist objects and the person.
Here we’re about forty people and we’re dressed in a certain way, we have varying ages. Had forty people other than us been here instead of us, the scene would have looked different. Therefore, the particular theatre we are now creating, suppose that we’re interacting with Carrino’s parallelepipeds, becomes a particular theatre to which the presence of people gives each time a different meaning.
Now, it becomes clear that if the object doesn’t represent anything, I quite agree with Michael Fried, it’s almost useless to look at it. I understand that maybe Carrino aimed at representing the key that opens the city, creating an artefact that combined the pure and simple minimalist object with the staircase and the seat, the footstep, and a reflection on that very basic modules that are the right angle and the L shape. However, we can consider these artefacts by Carrino as minimalist objects. I understand that it’s not just that, in fact the fountain is a real fountain, but it’s true that these objects require from us to create each time a new situation. Hence, each of us gives meaning to the object, to these objects. Every time we come in contact with them, each of us is not merely in the condition of the viewer who looks and interprets something that already had its own meaning, rather we attach a meaning to the object.
This is my hypothesis. It is an imposed meaning, I am aware of this, but this is the hypothesis on which you are invited to reflect: we give meaning to the place where we are, we give meaning to the place through a bodily presence and eventually also through a discursive presence – where that’s possible and dialogue can take place – with language, words, place, and the physical object we see. It’s us to give meaning to the thing, there was no meaning before, and every time it changes according to the fact that every singularity or particularity of the group creates a different sense, a different meaning. We could define this function presence; here I’m using a philosophical concept of phenomenology, which at the same time is understood by all: the presence of our body and of our speech, that gives sense to the place where we are.
It is clear that if I walk into a supermarket to do my grocery shopping I’m giving meaning to a system, no doubts it’s a rather repetitive meaning, all of us who go grocery shopping do the same thing. Probably we don’t feel the presence, we imagine that the supermarket would be there either way, it would function the same way, regardless if we’re there or not. On the other hand, a situation like this invites us to reflect upon the fact that our presence is meaningful, that our body alone is already enough to give meaning to that place. It is curious that the beginning of our walk was a square inspired by a minimalist object, by a pure and simple object that refers to the minimalist artists’ works, that were specific and had no representative function. So, it was no longer an artwork but rather a theatrical backdrop, and it’s curious that not me but the organisers themselves chose to end our walk in a theatre. So, to keep our discussion as light as possible, we’ll do the reflections about theatre over there.
To keep it short and simple: Situation A: grocery shopping at a supermarket, stereotypical situation;
Situation B: non-representative minimalist object, i.e. meaning attributed by the presence of the body, of the speech, of the singularities.
Let’s add that there’s an intermediate situation between A and B, namely movement, to go from one place to another. Even when I go to the supermarket, this movement that is constrained by buses, streets, and traffic, in that moment I am already performing a certain socially oriented action/function, and during that transit unforeseen events can take place. Hence, our walk follows the idea that on the way we don’t do anything specific, but we rather keep open to observation and to a form of presence, in other words to the possibility to give meaning to the place we’re crossing, which wouldn’t exist if we didn’t cross it.
I believe that some of the rather marginal places of this walk are interesting from this point of view, so our walk heads towards the former Department of Communication Science, now hosting the TaTA theatre, but the final point is an abandoned open air theatre.
I invite you to participate in this walk trying not to give an interpretation nor an aesthetic, urban or social judgement of the places we cross, but rather trying to see how the physical presence of each of us and of the group as a whole gives meaning to a specific object, to a specific place, to a specific crossing where we’ll be. This could happen or not, it’s not a duty but rather an invitation to reflect in a certain way. The hypothesis is that the sensation of presence – the possibility that our singularity may give sense to a urban situation – is the basis of political action and perhaps also of artistic action. Thus, since we will cross some rather unusual areas, it can happen that this function is activated. On the one hand, this is a very simple process, on the other it’s a complicated one. Let’s imagine we can do this, and again, this is not a duty but rather an invite to reflect. It seemed to me very interesting to start from this place [Piazza Fontana, T.N.] both thanks to my friendship with Carrino, and because this is a strong and meaningful example of a urban intervention where the minimalist object is not a monolith with a cinematographic iconic power, but rather it calls us to consider the square as a place with a welcoming character, and at the same time as a reflection on forms as elements that determine the subtleness of perception: in Carrino’s view, form was very important.
