Ugo Castagnotto - Constructing new evidence
Memorial should or could be titled the misunderstanding. In fact, what the work, as art, communicates is not what the photograph documents or recounts. This difference is the aesthetic sense of the use that Berti makes of the photographic language.
From the misunderstanding arises the action on style. The deeper the operation, cutting like a scalpel into common sense, the more substantial is the flesh of what is normally thought to be reality. Photography has this weight, more than other artistic languages, because it is often mistaken for reality: or at least, it is believed that its purpose is to record it faithfully. Thus it happens that, when the author of Memorial recounts the story of the events behind the pictures, the first reaction is to assume that the narrative form is the form of the work.
The gravity of the theme makes it disconcerting that the artist is carrying out an aesthetic operation. Let us be clearer about it: a lesson in style. Style means distancing oneself from stereotype language and from its claim to be the "photograph" of reality.
The symbolist poets, who were the first to have had the sense of being avant-garde and of the "revolutionary" mission of poetic language, have for this reason theorised the poetic significance as an unyielding distance between words that common sense has rendered equal. The impossibility of explaining poetry with a paraphrase, makes its limiting value approximate silence, absence, semantic zero. Subsequent avant-garde artists all grope around in this dark area of language. When they seek visibility and legitimisation, they are forced to explain themselves through the voice of "movements", collective voices to which the artist delegates the task of explaining clearly, in the words of everyone, the obscure nucleus of the work. To what extent is all of this applicable to photography?
Photographs cannot be taken without light. The chiaroscuro of artistic meaning is not necessarily that of the art photos displayed in the windows of camera shops. If there are shadows, the passer-by assumes, rightly, that it was the lateness of the day or the obstacle of a wall that has given a picturesque quality to the display of ordinary objects. Twilight is in the landscape, not in a chiaroscuro area of our thoughts. Attributing sense to the camera, rather than to the photographer, is the fault of no one, unless perhaps of the illusion that this gives us of being in direct touch with reality. To say the contrary, to say that the photograph does not document, is to row against the current.
But where can space, a proper space, be found for poetry, art, within a photograph, unless in that which it doesn't document?
The stylistic value is not in that which has to be told, but in the difference "expressed" by the non presence. In the absent meaning.
This has an obvious consequence: it is of no importance who has taken the photographs and in what sort of style they are taken. They are not photographers d'auteur. Like the game of "Find the Lady" the significance is not in the shape of the cup, but in the bafflement of finding that the ball is hidden under one of the other two cups. To make the enticement more alluring, Cristiano Berti has placed not a ball under the cup, but something with the weight of a brick, then to make it disappear. It is almost impossible not to fall into the trap of giving the story a literal sense of documenting facts that prick the conscience; of being called to share sentiments of abhorrence and sorrow. The danger for Berti, of being victim of moral smugness, is very real. The common feeling of political correctness, the modern form of pedantry, is apt to produce an urge to condemn and a sense of moral commitment wherever the symbols that it has devalued appear; taken in, in just the same way as adolescents lured by the social campaigns of Oliviero Toscani for Benetton. The moral substance of the subject is, instead, a sign of the light-handedness with which the artist has substituted reality.
Every work of art is a substitution of reality. This is where beauty and style are to be found. When the innovative art of the impressionists exploded forth, seen in that new way of conceiving physical phenomena was, among other things, a mental leap made possible by the new theories on matter, understood no longer as something solid and firm, but as a series of relationships. Is form not also like this? In more recent times, when art photography came back into vogue, during the 1970s and 1980s - I am thinking of Cindy Sherman and others like her – we had to come to terms with the expression "documenting reality". Hal Foster, in an original critical study on the renaissance of photography in the last quarter century, titled by no coincidence The Return of the Real (1996), focuses on this problem, not only in photography, but in all art, speaking of "substitution of reality". Thanks to this obvious formulation, American post-war art is re-ordered by stringing together the beads in an order dictated not by the content matter, but by the form of expression. From this minimal grammar of the system of signs, the American critic gives direct derivation to the aesthetic of photography, in more recent times, which, as with minimal art, "documents" (we can appropriately say in this case) the material it uses, the meat of the work. Foster considers Richard Prince (who re-worked the subject of the Marlboro Country icon) not as a follower of Pop Art, and even less as a hyper-realist. It is possible to be convinced by this once it is accepted that he documented something other than the publicity icon with which we are all familiar: he portrayed its vocabulary. The literal-material of the photograph lacks function, like a key without a lock, a cross without Christianity. Emptying it of meaning, the work of the artists renders it self-referential.
From the liberation of photography in the 1980s up until today there has been a spread of experimental activities in many directions. From these lines of escape there has been a real drift, a voyage of discovery in all directions using a single common compass: stylistic research. The beach to keep well clear of, conceptual encumbrance.
We shall limit ourselves to two emblematic examples which, standing at opposite extremes on the plain of inspiration, both place emphasis on the removal of the "thing" itself and of its antagonism with the image. The Atlas Group / Walid Raad collects pictures of models of vehicles used as car-bombs in Lebanon, searching out new evidence for facts that have in themselves a strong objective likelihood, such as those relating to the war. Far distant from this type of inspiration we find Lucinda Devlin, who in the cycle “The Omega Suites” portrays the scenes of capital executions, making it an aesthetic experience that is formally "treated". The first treats the picture as an historical point of reference. The second, on the other hand, expresses an inertial state of the picture. They are very different processes, though both are still concentrated on style, the perpetual game of hide and seek between form and content.
The enquiry in Memorial turns, instead, on the explantation of the expressive material from the narrative content. The poetic reality in Berti's work does not consist of elements placed in the artist's field of vision - I am thinking of the narrative photographic back-drops of Hamish Fulton - nor in the simple linguistic distance from the icon, as in Devlin's work (Berti does something similar in Sweet Home, where pictures of comfortable living rooms, arranged as in a home interior magazine, are associated with diagrams showing levels of radon, a radioactive gas naturally present everywhere). The aesthetic challenge of Memorial is played out at the precise point where the search for expressive form arrives for the "missing" appointment with the material reality of the event. It has nothing to do with conceptualism and, if anything, has more in common with form "performed" as the material experience of the form, the incarnate form that shocks in Nitsch and in Gina Pane.
Style is to be found in the way in which reality is hidden and art constructs new evidence. The aesthetic pleasure, like material wrapping of a tragic content, becomes deeply embarrassing. The artist removes us from the embarrassment by taking away the content that cannot be documented. If the real object were a flower there would be no hesitation in talking of beauty. Talking of beauty that passes through pain is an awful risk for an artist to take, on his own shoulders.
© Ugo Castagnotto, 2004
from: Memorial, exhibition catalogue, Centro Studi Piero Calamandrei, Jesi, 2004
