Art Actions from Everyday Life
Carla Subrizi
A new paradigm
for artistic creation is emerging at the close of the twentieth century. It represents
a substantial change in our very perception of the work of art as art ceases
to be a product as much as a way of being and feeling in the world. From an organically
conceived object, art becomes the organism itself, and thereby finds a new center.
The meaning of art shifts, and its unity becomes contextual fragments. The art
work now becomes a project, a series of clues that the observer follows, uses,
and enriches with his own actions. The work of art becomes a work in progress,
like matter in a centrifuge that pushes ever outward from the center. Art becomes
a relative entity that sets in motion cognitive and interpretive models of non
traditional realities.
Already in the
1990’s, artists were focusing on a function of art bound to everyday life.
If artists of the 1960’s spoke of life, it was conditioned by ideological
allegiances and politics. Artists sought a relationship with life through extreme
actions and situations. The new generation of artists, however, seeks a relationship
with life through a rapport with the banality of the present moment, recognized
and lived as day to day experience. The artist Ottonella Mocellin intervenes
with her photographic images that put forward seemingly ordinary situations in
which one senses, however, the constant possibility of discord. The photographs
are fragments of personal histories that have lost a beginning and an end. Underneath
photographs of women, men, and children, Nicola Pellegrini puts captions that
change the sense of the image. The portraits are radically transformed in a manner
that is sometimes cruel through latent thoughts in the minds of the subjects
that are expressed in margin notes.
While the spaces
that characterize everyday life and time begin to assume a fundamental role in
much recent art, there are heterogeneous approaches to them. Recent art has returned
to happenings and performances but is now empty of self referential meaning.
The works don’t simulate events or become emblematic situations but integrate
into daily life with simple actions and gestures. These seemingly ordinary operations
often provoke a short circuit, deviating attention from where it might ordinarily
be focused. An example is artist Gillian Wearing’s work "Signs that
say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants
you to say" from 1992-93. Through such interventions, the work becomes a
surplus of everyday life. The work of Marco Formento and Ivano Sossella and their
"Supplemento" project that began in the 1980’s is a case in point.
Emilio Fantin’s project of inserting flyers into daily newspapers and the
additions and obstructions that Martin Creed projects on walls, pavements, and
doors, also illustrate this concept.
Nello Teodori’s
video works "Beyond the Institutional Confines of Art" and "Art
is Not Equal for Everyone" come out of the analytical and conceptual roots
of the art work as a piece of information. Teodori edits pieces of television
documentaries together and adds text to reopen the meaning of the images above.
This work exploits the dynamics of a real system of communication by miming it
or reproducing it as a Ready Made. In "Contemporary Art" a video work
by Nello Teodori, he changes the original sense of the tape making art of these
generic transmissions by changing their orientation and meaning. In his world
the artist positions himself in a critical way outside the rules of the art world
and marketplace of art. He is not making objects to be sold through the appropriate
venues. Nonetheless, by altering the meaning of the broadcast, it is appropriated
into the realm of contemporary art. In so doing the artist becomes the medium
for communication. He transfers the meaning of a museum seeking to invite visitors
to a site that uses the museum’s resources for entirely different ends (I
am thinking of the work of Tomasso Tozzi).
The artist creates
interfaces, losing the traditional relationship of the artist subject as creator
of works of art. The artist at times becomes a curator (see "Curated by
Nello Teodori" another work of 1994) in which he curates his own exhibitions
and actions making the gallery space into an artistic medium and reorienting
traditional relationships in the arts. This causes a de-centering effect that
liberates art from representing something. Attention is rather focused on the
artist as a "work in progress" seeking his own identity, and his current
identity is called into question. The Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila in a video
installation called "Today" (1996-97) explores the internal relations
of a family. The images are portraits, scenes from everyday like, and dialogues.
The ways of depicting individuals and interiors are similar to the documentary
style. Lacking narrative continuity, "Today" consists of broken fragments
of life whose identity and connections must be pieced together.
Identity is "under
construction" in its continual exchanges with other individuals, objects,
and situations. In a recent work by Emilio Fantin ("All People Dream,"
2002) a group of people live together for several days from morning until night,
so that dreams become a context for people to seek common ground. Dreams are
not the only common experience but in dreams one can revisit experiences of the
day. Cesare Pietroiusti projects videotaped encounters with students of a technical
school. In this project, Pietroiusti and his students unite to think a series
of "non functional thoughts" together ("Non Functional Thoughts"
was the title of a project realized by Pietroiusti between 1997 and 2000). In
the first part of the operation, in class, the artist asked the students what
they would take with them if they were to find themselves in an environment from
which they could not leave for several days. Pietroiusti writes on the chalkboard
certain items that the students indicate are necessary. In this way the necessities
are put to one side and the non functional items (the fulcrum of this exercise)
on the other. The non functional thoughts are delineated as the potential to
think beyond conventions, moving the horizon and objective in such a way that
the thoughts return as excess fragments that are liberated from the fetters of
conventional thought.
The rapport between
artist and participants is dialectical, and is developed in real time as a lived
experience by both. This rapport is modified by variables related to individual
participants, places, and situations, and the results are rarely what one might
expect. The artist searches for a sense of that beyond which he sees along with
its functions, uses, and behaviors. In "The Laboratory of Potential Art,"
(Alberto Zanazzo, 2000-2002) the artist projects a series of encounters around
several themes but "art" remains on the margins (one could say it remains
to be made), like a point of view that outwardly redefines itself without arriving
at conclusions about the definition or function of conceptual art through these
encounters.
The work of contemporary
art seems to collect heterogeneous materials. Through this practice there is
an affirmation that the work is not resolved in an organic object to exhibit
but rather in the expansive search with which the work is arrived at or how it
enters into a conceptual relationship with the surrounding contextual space.
The work becomes a place of launching different hypotheses. The question doesn’t
refer to "who" we are but addresses the social and cultural roots of
identity. It reconciles theory and practice in the subjective consciousness through
different ways of creating and thinking. The artist assumes the role of critic
but not through taking polemical or extreme positions. Rather the artist puts
into practice an experience, a way of creating, and ultimately a way of living.
