The Mirror of You Absence of Gravity: Excerpts from Nuovo Spazio Italiano – Fabio Cavallucci

The Mirror of You Absence of Gravity: Excerpts from Nuovo Spazio Italiano

Fabio Cavallucci

They are determined and disillusioned. They prefer MTV and mp3s to history of art and classical music. They toy with themselves and with art, having first deprived it of all its aura and drawn it closer to daily life. They do not have great passions or fears, they don’t even have great ideals but carry out their research following paths linked to practicability. They do not worry about style and use all means of support as well as all concepts.

This is what contemporary young artists are all about. It is impossible to categorise or group them or even trace a geographical map. The majority of them have already adapted that varied, dynamic, accessible and word-wide international style, with the obvious exception of the few who still withhold a local touch: exotic in the East and analytical in the West. The works of art of these young artists cross well-known reference points, from the conceptualism of Duchamp, minimalism and arte povera, to expressionism and pop, but with the added vitality and colour deriving from extra-artistic fields such as comics or video-clips, advertisements and satellite images.

Innovation at all costs seems not to be their ultimate goal. The desire for change, the desire to be avant-gardist belongs to the pervious century.

The good thing now is that everything is possible (only Informel is forbidden, except in a few developing countries). After all it is great to be citizens of the world, all similar yet different. It is the achievement of perfect freedom and perfect democracy.

One of the main themes introduced in the artwork of these young artists is the concept of space, intended as a physical space, a social space and a virtual space. The equivocal relationship between materiality and immateriality has become one of the main issues, as much as the fusions produced by new technologies. The spasmodic research for concrete forms, one of the dominating lines of twentieth century art, ceases to be a univocal trend. Everything can take place on the surface.

This is the net generation, fruit of a horizontal society, from which all depths emerge. Within the net everything instantly surfaces, every page floats to the screen, no abyss needs to be fathomed, no secret to be revealed. If our society so stubbornly defends privacy, this is because privacy has ceased to exist. Therefore these youngsters have the possibility of manifesting their desires and obsessions without any problems. What was once censored by an aesthetic super-ego can peacefully emerge and come to light.

If the sub factor has vanished, the super factor has too. What we are lacking now is a supermundane sphere to aspire to and a divine spirit of the world to retire to. Today the zeitgeist and the collective unconscious travel along the electromagnetic waves of mobile phones and computer network connection.

Since artists have lost all higher and lower reference points, not to mention lateral ones, in other words the ideological pretexts or great inspirations to change society, all they can do is to resort to themselves and to their own fixations. Art becomes an individual path, a way of finding a place in the world, of interpreting it to provide a personal vision of life. This is a very particular vision, a weak projection like the energy that circulates among the microchips of computer systems.

Also our Italian young artists are like this. They are a bit trendy and a bit engageé, a bit free and easy and a bit resigned to the situation. If they do not achieve great success it is not their fault but that of the Italian art system which does not support them enough, them and all the others of past generations. Therefore only a few self-made-artists manage to assert themselves, mostly by moving abroad.

At the height of globalisation and at a time in which all languages tend to uniform to a common layout, what still needs to be understood is if any local trend or any aspect based on roots and inclinations which could define Italian art as such, still remains. In other words, some reason that could help distinguish Italian art from German, or British, or American, or Chinese, or even South African art. Since we are so attracted towards the rediscovery of local values today, or towards the research of typicality in the work of an artist from Kosovo or an Australian aborigine, is there any feature that stands out and thus enables us to say "this is Italian"? Certainly Italian art lacks the drama of German art, the nonchalant elegance of French art, the spectacular aggressiveness of British art, the feeling of decay of the body of Polish art or the conceptual essentiality of American art. Certainly Italian art at times holds on to the umbilical chord of tradition, so much so that that it easily emerges on the international scene in moments in which the artistic pendulum moves towards the past, like for example what happened with the Metafisica and the Transavanguardia. But through artistic globalisation these values disperse and tend to disappear.

If one ever wanted to find a common denominator for young Italian art this could easily be "lightness", a concept recently adopted for an exhibition at the Lenbachhaus in Munich in which a few of the artists present in this selection were invited.

As Calvino taught us in Lezioni americane, this could seem easy, After all, immaterial and light weight technologies have lead us from the age of "heaviness" and centralisation to the age of dispersion: everything loses gravity and value.

Lightness is immediately linked to irony, hovering with detachment over things, seeing the world from a distance. The performances of the 1960s and ‘70s, which really put to test the body and the mind, become a sensational event now, with added final applause. Video, in the past, introduced strong-felt ideological and political energies in its black and white experimentation. Today it reveals itself in most cases as a sophisticated and elegant product, or at least a well edited film. All is life but also performance, all is in and out. The opposites draw nearer and the borders fade away.

The strong point of these artists lies in the fact that they are a mirror of present society, a society which is simultaneously ironic and absurd. Life carries on flowing for each and every one of us, but its projection impalpably flutters through the communication media. This is the age of lightness, in which even wars and catastrophes assume the profile of representation, and art–the sovereign representative–slightly and lightly worms its way through the meanders of reality. o