Agamben co-curated the Italian Pavillion at the biennale this year and apparently it's an ultra conservative, Berlusconi influenced, show of figurative paintings and sculptures. Discuss.
I've been researching this and I cannot find anything about Agamben connected to it. Nor can I find anything that makes sense of it for me.
Having said that is it a critique of Italian politics on the level of form?? Like current Italian politics is a mannerist/pastiche of cubist/fascist politico-aesthetics?
"There are those who think this sort of thing is sick. "Art has become a hospital," wrote Vittorio Sgarbi, the commissioner of the nearby Italian Pavilion, "not visited by healthy people except by chance."
Inside his pavilion there is more nonsensical slag: Sgarbi, a maverick critic and TV personality who hates most contemporary art, has invited leading Italian writers and intellectuals, Dario Fo and Giorgio Agamben among them, to select the works.
Boorishly provocative, the resulting show is full of horrible, kitschy things, appallingly installed - with its cliched sentiments and rubbishy populism, it is like a tour of Silvio Berlusconi's brain."
The work by Bertana about trying to repatriate the Jews of Poland looks interesting. I think I've found your 'in' as an artist, you need to reclaim your ethnic identity as a jew.
i actually think working the jew angle through the historical lens is pretty dead-end. I am not really interested in using judaism in any personal capacity as a basis for exploration. I pretty much feel that "jewishness" stands for "otherness as such" in the same way that a readymade becomes art by being put in the gallery. More precisely, anything interesting about judaism stems only from distinctions made on the level of structure and not on the level of content. Hence the absurd difficulties people have answering the questions "what is a jew?", and "what is art?". The added complication to this view is that if you do a work reclaiming your jewish roots, ala Bartana (?), is that it never particularises a universal concern. Ie. if a spaniard does a work regarding the spanish civil war, all its particularity is embodied as pointing to the universal - it can stand for histriocity etc. I think this doesnt occur effectively when a jew does a "jewish" work - it will always fail - but maybe im being self-consciouss as a jew in this view?
Please tell me if these views are illegitimate and racist cos I am sure they need more scrutiny.
I've been researching this and I cannot find anything about Agamben connected to it. Nor can I find anything that makes sense of it for me.
ReplyDeleteHaving said that is it a critique of Italian politics on the level of form?? Like current Italian politics is a mannerist/pastiche of cubist/fascist politico-aesthetics?
Cubo-fascism?
From Adrian Searle's review in the Guardian;
ReplyDelete"There are those who think this sort of thing is sick. "Art has become a hospital," wrote Vittorio Sgarbi, the commissioner of the nearby Italian Pavilion, "not visited by healthy people except by chance."
Inside his pavilion there is more nonsensical slag: Sgarbi, a maverick critic and TV personality who hates most contemporary art, has invited leading Italian writers and intellectuals, Dario Fo and Giorgio Agamben among them, to select the works.
Boorishly provocative, the resulting show is full of horrible, kitschy things, appallingly installed - with its cliched sentiments and rubbishy populism, it is like a tour of Silvio Berlusconi's brain."
The work by Bertana about trying to repatriate the Jews of Poland looks interesting. I think I've found your 'in' as an artist, you need to reclaim your ethnic identity as a jew.
http://lttds.blogspot.com/2011/06/photo-review-tour-illuminationsillumina.html
i actually think working the jew angle through the historical lens is pretty dead-end. I am not really interested in using judaism in any personal capacity as a basis for exploration. I pretty much feel that "jewishness" stands for "otherness as such" in the same way that a readymade becomes art by being put in the gallery. More precisely, anything interesting about judaism stems only from distinctions made on the level of structure and not on the level of content. Hence the absurd difficulties people have answering the questions "what is a jew?", and "what is art?". The added complication to this view is that if you do a work reclaiming your jewish roots, ala Bartana (?), is that it never particularises a universal concern. Ie. if a spaniard does a work regarding the spanish civil war, all its particularity is embodied as pointing to the universal - it can stand for histriocity etc. I think this doesnt occur effectively when a jew does a "jewish" work - it will always fail - but maybe im being self-consciouss as a jew in this view?
ReplyDeletePlease tell me if these views are illegitimate and racist cos I am sure they need more scrutiny.