These cities are inevitably a reservoir of energy and violence, of vitality
and depression, and recent generations of artists, conditioned by all this,
have produced an art of documentation that records the negative side of the
modern city. The city with its unstable equilibrium is in continual tension
between the speed at which communication flows and the reality of a place in
which specific and limited identities coexist and assert themselves.
Necessarily, at this moment in time in which terrorists have put on a
sort of media performance that has visually upstaged art, a different "creative
trend" is emerging that is capable of representing new contents and open
to small-scale utopias and unprecedented values of construction.
The model for all this is Laurana’s “Ideal City,” which represents
the faith of Renaissance man in art, reason and planning. In the last century
it was undoubtedly Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” with its "Modulor"
(in which growth is regulated by a Fibonacci series of numbers) that constituted
a model and a planning parameter, and one which is still relevant.
The same spirit can be found at other times as well, for instance in Futurism
and in the more farsighted research of the historic avant-garde movements: Umberto
Boccioni, Antonio Sant’Elia, Tatlin, Malevich, Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky,
Louise Nevelson, Gaudí and Mondrian. We can, in this way, identify a
line taken by an art that has become habitable, in relation with other expressive
languages such as architecture, design, music, drama, and photography.
The “Radiant City,” which investigates the constructive aspect
of the visual representation of the metropolis, runs all the way from the Renaissance
model through the historic avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde to the work of
the most recent generation of the new millennium. Among those who experimented
with it over the period from the fifties to the seventies were: Lucio Fontana,
Robert Smithson, Mimmo Rotella, Denis Oppenheim, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, Daniel
Buren, Hans Haacke, Lawrence Weiner, Panamarenko, Dan Graham, Kingelez, Nam
June Paik, Superstudio, Bernd & Hilla Becher and Luigi Ghirri.
In particular, Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-75) deconstructed, punctured,
and reassembled fragments of architecture through real interventions and photography,
utilized as a field of virtual action in which to reshape the condition of a
separate city into a livable whole.
Vito Acconci has moved on from the somatic zone of the individual body to analyze
the vaster area of the body social through concrete interventions that modify
the appearance of the city. His work is placed at the service of a public that
utilizes and contemplates the art form integrated into the landscape. The desires
and needs of daily life have been reformulated by some young artists, especially
in Europe, into a sort of "behavioral architecture and design" that
goes beyond the traditional relationship between form and function of the city
and the object, as in the case of the Roman group Stalker and the Dutch one
Droog Design. With his igloos Mario Merz anticipated the convergence between
art and architecture through forms that re-establish the balance between human
beings and their environment.
The artists most representative of more recent research are: Thomas Struth,
Cristina Iglesias, Julian Opie, Günther Förg, Thomas Hirschorn, Costa
Vece, Tobias Rehberger, Armin Linke, Frank Thiel, Pierre Huyghe, Kendell Geers,
Grazia Toderi, Adam Berg, Amador, Jordi Colomer, Olivo Barbieri, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer,
Luca Vitone, Carlos Garaicoa, Nils Norman, Italo Zuffi, Doug Aitken, Emily Allchurch
and CRIMSON.
If the metropolis has turned into a megalopolis, the computerized system
of social communication via the internet has found a means suited to its context.
A territorial identity in transition has gained the upper hand, in the name
of an ethnic pluralism that is nevertheless homogenized by a hypertechnology
which invades every field, completely altering the relationship of the human
being with reality, under the banner of chemistry and fragmentation. The drugs
of the future will follow the evolution of what are the pillars of our society:
liberalism, individualism, productivity at all costs. The great multinational
pharmaceutical companies are on a war footing. We are entering the era of psychochemistry,
whose substitutional products have just been an already obsolete precursor and
Viagra a symbolic example sent out to test the waters’ (Claude Olievenstein,
Droga. Un grande psichiatra racconta trent;anni con i tossicodipendenti, Cortina,
Milan 2002).
Such an outlook impinges on the creativity of the most recent generation
that of Web Art, which lies in the “concept stores,” dominated by
the figure of the “veejay” which his “scratch” eye mixer
of images even on the laptop, where they are assembled into B-movies, news footage,
trash TV, pursuing the aesthetics of the sample not covered by copyright. The
chemistry of montage still dominates the new imagery of the century, liquid
and dematerialized, modified and artificial, i.e. outside any parameter of the
plausible. In a post-Darwinist and post-ideological age, art is a forum, to
paraphrase the Romantic Victor Hugo: the desire for a visibility over the horizon.
In this macroscopic urban perspective, the city condenses within itself a new
multiethnic population on built territories and geographic areas.
One undoubted emblem of an architectural globalization is the systematic
design of the bridge, as an object and link between different places, separated
by distance and often by social diversity as well. Foster and Calatrava are
the creators of architectural forms that marry function and fusion: new forms
of the bridge. This urban fervor seems to be contradicted by the autarchic and
iconoclastic shelling of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, in Afghanistan, by
the Taliban: a tribal extremism in defense of an all-too-modern Islamic identity
against the homogenizing threat of Western globalization… |
