Exhibitions, Portugal, Porto, 18 September 2010
Body’s Archives
FIND | FIX | FORGET
love & consumerism
by Anita T. Giuga
“All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled.”
(S. Sontag, On Photography, New York, 1977, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, p. 120)
Danilo Pavone creates at Galeria Serpente, Porto, an ambience of a relational order. In fact, the artist enables the dialogue between the objects and with the spectators as if these were being invited to enter the mind zone that stores memories. Pavone opens the photographic curtain on the end of a love story, disregarding, however, diary elements or those purely sentimental.
There is no biographical element of style without style in a Wolfgang Tillmans or Nan Goldin way; rather emerges the desolation of abandonment, condensed around the bolt of temporality, rarefied in multiple shots and exposed in the archives that the body generates in a centrifugal way. The scene has, in fact, the purpose of questioning the formalization of affective memory, at least as we believe it or want it to be.
That pure time, manifested by the ruins of lost intimacy, reveals, using a famous Walter Benjamin quotation, the aura of things, and the appearance of a distance in proximity.
The key to this installation is, therefore, neither historical (in the sense of a timely recovery of events) nor just photographical. In fact, the paradigm lives “here and now” of a fragment of the past encapsulated in the constellation of the present. The duration of love and its palingenesis in the commutation of failure into a full experience constitute, in effect, the unprecedented milestone of the project. This work in progress unfolds and summarizes the critical backstage as well, in a looped (endless) video/performative hypothesis for the entire duration of the exhibition.
Pavone buries the natural asymmetry of things assembled in the representative space under a layer of thick white paint; a thickness with the task of containing almost entirely the visual dissemination. The photographs constitute the paramimetic element of contrast and evaluation, through the printing hues, the measurement of colour temperature and, using an optical counterweight, it approaches the minimalistic candour of the spaces. The construction of this mémoire was calculated in every detail, as if the entire environment should be, in its turn, resumed in a documentary shot: to observe, evaluate and, finally, store. Just as the marriage clothes are stored after the ceremony is over.
In the ambiguity of personal history, imposed by the experience of the ruins, it seems logical that all three figures of oblivion identified by Marc Augé some years ago are here overlapped, namely return, suspension and rebeginning1. And among these three figures, the oblivion, as rebeginning, implies, in a Nietzschean way, forgetting the past and inaugurating a new era, a time open to unexpected possibilities. Pavone keeps a sampling of his own existential files in an open storage. The platform thus evolves in an aesthetic circumstance in situ: a container disposed by collections and catachresis (from the Greek katáchrēsis 'abuse', derived from katachráomai, 'I use'), a figure of speech used precisely to describe something for which language does not offer a specific term: an artificial form that has nothing to do with nature. Here, as Andrea Bruciati reminds us in his recent pamphlet, Il secolo breve: la seduzione della katácrēsis2, is with the ease of the today’s champions, with no ideologies to betray, or mimetic narratives to obey that Pavone inscribes himself in the European context, developing combinations of images and objects full of existential derivations. He is an author who extends the second of shooting to magical realism: spatialized, abandoned by the canons of reference, and thus, inaccessible. We are facing a vindication of consumer needs (romantic), that falls in the bitterness generated by neuralgia due to daily needs and unrealistic expectations of a Hollywood happy ending.
The objects displayed are neither things, valuable in their use, nor the metaphor or the transfer of accumulated aesthetic: they are, instead, the footprints of a presence.
Art’s reparative filter this way encloses plain forms and debris, so that the representative passage is simultaneously accidental and universal. The memories are absorbed into the hyperbole of a bourgeois house, which is the gallery. The recovery of long sequences of images survives ob-scenely, as a body without organs (Artaud). Nevertheless, Pavone, starting from the paradoxical experience of the spectator-actor-photographer, eventually integrates the detachment of the body of the other as a collective condition, subject to continuous development and essentially far from a definite conclusion. However, the end experience moves in a rehabilitation spiral somewhat bitter but far from tragic.
This form of colonization in progress, almost a viral incursion into the territories of extra material sculptural collage, expresses former areas of the psyche close to conflict, game, obsessive repetition and war; dynamics that we have implemented in ourselves, in our own standard emotional basis.
The metaphor of a broken condition of stability finds its iconographic code (Bruciati) in the staging of the absence of the other; an interlocutor that reveals himself little more than a ghost in a mirror:
When we look in a mirror, and then go away, we think it's over. Not at all. We go about our business and no longer think about it, but in the invisible space corresponding to that mirror our image remains.3
Pavone portrays the pantomime lovers crystallizing a facial expression or a set of simple messages ultra encoded within a series of empty bottles that rise to the level of mental objects. A Save Our Selves (SOS) that shows a cry for help (a tautological message in bottle), practical or moral, open to the world of others. ‘I need your help’, subtly says Pavone to the public, almost caught by the emulation of an emotional (Latin e-movere,) paroxysm; scanning, briefly and obsessively, on vivid pictures the key phrase of all couple crises.
Pavone chooses busts and portions of female faces, sometimes sober, sometimes caught in the pose of a pseudo pornographic Eros. Bodies of another time, a time outside time that remains eternal, in an augmented reality overexposed and multiplied by object prosthesis; a fractionated imitation by plastic habits. Brides naked...
Nothing more than mannequins made of meat closed in the fascinating parenthesis of that extended time.
These ‘brothel saints’ are caught up in the sadness that follows pleasure: mutilated faces, or with what endures in the mind of a look that is placed on protruded areas of the body. So, everything takes place in bed (assumed, and all too real), the core of the entire installation. That battlefield on which to pursue the idea of a fabled unity.
The curtain, the theatrical cloth, stresses in synthesis, an imaginary threshold.
The royal door balances, instead of opening wide at absolute apogees and hypogea as birth and death, and stops at the lead screen of a naked wall. This symbolic access forces the frontier of what, by its inexpressible nature, works to the scandal on the open scene: the horror vacui of intimacy. Pavone approaches a subcutaneous layout of magnitude orders and metaphysical principles of male and female. Undefined, and ever so fragile.
The impossibility to transcend the horizon of painful events stands on the revêrie of the eternal return of good and beautiful as a unique substance and of possible reunification of the present with the past. And suddenly a hesitation opens a passage: a splinter cracks that first inner silence. The leak is the event that lets in the other with violence: the archive is a trap, an unusual collection of ruins, a monstruum. Trying to objectify the time of the loss is a lie. One can, at best, turn a loss into a place of legalized art exhibitions, re-updating non-homogeneous fragments. You can only try to recap the splinters stuck in the optical subconscious (Benjamin), straightening out what survived the translucent space of a museum without walls (Malraux).
CURATOR’S SHORT BIO:
Anita T. Giuga is currently attending a Ph.D in Aesthetics and Practices of Art at the University of Catania (Sicily, Italy), based in Siracusa. She is also a member of the executive exam board of the 19th Century Art History subject. In the last years she has worked as a freelancer, collaborating with Universities, organizing seminars and collaborating with contemporary art magazines such as Flash Art, Juliet, Espoarte, Giudizio Universale, art a part of cul(ure), Spruzz. Furthermore, she works as a critic, freelance curator and as project manager for cultural events.
FIND | FIX | FORGET
love & consumerism
by Anita T. Giuga
“All that photography’s program of realism actually implies is the belief that reality is hidden. And, being hidden, is something to be unveiled.”
(S. Sontag, On Photography, New York, 1977, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, p. 120)
Danilo Pavone creates at Galeria Serpente, Porto, an ambience of a relational order. In fact, the artist enables the dialogue between the objects and with the spectators as if these were being invited to enter the mind zone that stores memories. Pavone opens the photographic curtain on the end of a love story, disregarding, however, diary elements or those purely sentimental.
There is no biographical element of style without style in a Wolfgang Tillmans or Nan Goldin way; rather emerges the desolation of abandonment, condensed around the bolt of temporality, rarefied in multiple shots and exposed in the archives that the body generates in a centrifugal way. The scene has, in fact, the purpose of questioning the formalization of affective memory, at least as we believe it or want it to be.
That pure time, manifested by the ruins of lost intimacy, reveals, using a famous Walter Benjamin quotation, the aura of things, and the appearance of a distance in proximity.
The key to this installation is, therefore, neither historical (in the sense of a timely recovery of events) nor just photographical. In fact, the paradigm lives “here and now” of a fragment of the past encapsulated in the constellation of the present. The duration of love and its palingenesis in the commutation of failure into a full experience constitute, in effect, the unprecedented milestone of the project. This work in progress unfolds and summarizes the critical backstage as well, in a looped (endless) video/performative hypothesis for the entire duration of the exhibition.
Pavone buries the natural asymmetry of things assembled in the representative space under a layer of thick white paint; a thickness with the task of containing almost entirely the visual dissemination. The photographs constitute the paramimetic element of contrast and evaluation, through the printing hues, the measurement of colour temperature and, using an optical counterweight, it approaches the minimalistic candour of the spaces. The construction of this mémoire was calculated in every detail, as if the entire environment should be, in its turn, resumed in a documentary shot: to observe, evaluate and, finally, store. Just as the marriage clothes are stored after the ceremony is over.
In the ambiguity of personal history, imposed by the experience of the ruins, it seems logical that all three figures of oblivion identified by Marc Augé some years ago are here overlapped, namely return, suspension and rebeginning1. And among these three figures, the oblivion, as rebeginning, implies, in a Nietzschean way, forgetting the past and inaugurating a new era, a time open to unexpected possibilities. Pavone keeps a sampling of his own existential files in an open storage. The platform thus evolves in an aesthetic circumstance in situ: a container disposed by collections and catachresis (from the Greek katáchrēsis 'abuse', derived from katachráomai, 'I use'), a figure of speech used precisely to describe something for which language does not offer a specific term: an artificial form that has nothing to do with nature. Here, as Andrea Bruciati reminds us in his recent pamphlet, Il secolo breve: la seduzione della katácrēsis2, is with the ease of the today’s champions, with no ideologies to betray, or mimetic narratives to obey that Pavone inscribes himself in the European context, developing combinations of images and objects full of existential derivations. He is an author who extends the second of shooting to magical realism: spatialized, abandoned by the canons of reference, and thus, inaccessible. We are facing a vindication of consumer needs (romantic), that falls in the bitterness generated by neuralgia due to daily needs and unrealistic expectations of a Hollywood happy ending.
The objects displayed are neither things, valuable in their use, nor the metaphor or the transfer of accumulated aesthetic: they are, instead, the footprints of a presence.
Art’s reparative filter this way encloses plain forms and debris, so that the representative passage is simultaneously accidental and universal. The memories are absorbed into the hyperbole of a bourgeois house, which is the gallery. The recovery of long sequences of images survives ob-scenely, as a body without organs (Artaud). Nevertheless, Pavone, starting from the paradoxical experience of the spectator-actor-photographer, eventually integrates the detachment of the body of the other as a collective condition, subject to continuous development and essentially far from a definite conclusion. However, the end experience moves in a rehabilitation spiral somewhat bitter but far from tragic.
This form of colonization in progress, almost a viral incursion into the territories of extra material sculptural collage, expresses former areas of the psyche close to conflict, game, obsessive repetition and war; dynamics that we have implemented in ourselves, in our own standard emotional basis.
The metaphor of a broken condition of stability finds its iconographic code (Bruciati) in the staging of the absence of the other; an interlocutor that reveals himself little more than a ghost in a mirror:
When we look in a mirror, and then go away, we think it's over. Not at all. We go about our business and no longer think about it, but in the invisible space corresponding to that mirror our image remains.3
Pavone portrays the pantomime lovers crystallizing a facial expression or a set of simple messages ultra encoded within a series of empty bottles that rise to the level of mental objects. A Save Our Selves (SOS) that shows a cry for help (a tautological message in bottle), practical or moral, open to the world of others. ‘I need your help’, subtly says Pavone to the public, almost caught by the emulation of an emotional (Latin e-movere,
Pavone chooses busts and portions of female faces, sometimes sober, sometimes caught in the pose of a pseudo pornographic Eros. Bodies of another time, a time outside time that remains eternal, in an augmented reality overexposed and multiplied by object prosthesis; a fractionated imitation by plastic habits. Brides naked...
Nothing more than mannequins made of meat closed in the fascinating parenthesis of that extended time.
These ‘brothel saints’ are caught up in the sadness that follows pleasure: mutilated faces, or with what endures in the mind of a look that is placed on protruded areas of the body. So, everything takes place in bed (assumed, and all too real), the core of the entire installation. That battlefield on which to pursue the idea of a fabled unity.
The curtain, the theatrical cloth, stresses in synthesis, an imaginary threshold.
The royal door balances, instead of opening wide at absolute apogees and hypogea as birth and death, and stops at the lead screen of a naked wall. This symbolic access forces the frontier of what, by its inexpressible nature, works to the scandal on the open scene: the horror vacui of intimacy. Pavone approaches a subcutaneous layout of magnitude orders and metaphysical principles of male and female. Undefined, and ever so fragile.
The impossibility to transcend the horizon of painful events stands on the revêrie of the eternal return of good and beautiful as a unique substance and of possible reunification of the present with the past. And suddenly a hesitation opens a passage: a splinter cracks that first inner silence. The leak is the event that lets in the other with violence: the archive is a trap, an unusual collection of ruins, a monstruum. Trying to objectify the time of the loss is a lie. One can, at best, turn a loss into a place of legalized art exhibitions, re-updating non-homogeneous fragments. You can only try to recap the splinters stuck in the optical subconscious (Benjamin), straightening out what survived the translucent space of a museum without walls (Malraux).
CURATOR’S SHORT BIO:
Anita T. Giuga is currently attending a Ph.D in Aesthetics and Practices of Art at the University of Catania (Sicily, Italy), based in Siracusa. She is also a member of the executive exam board of the 19th Century Art History subject. In the last years she has worked as a freelancer, collaborating with Universities, organizing seminars and collaborating with contemporary art magazines such as Flash Art, Juliet, Espoarte, Giudizio Universale, art a part of cul(ure), Spruzz. Furthermore, she works as a critic, freelance curator and as project manager for cultural events.
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