REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY ART
Sometimes
I find myself thinking on the meaning of nowadays’ art, on
the different kinds of today’s works and on the innovative
power of nowadays’ art towards a standardized Society. It
is not easy to find complete answers to these questions,
but it is certainly possible to deepen the reflections. The
end of the so-called short century is the end of that
creative attitude typical of the avant-garde movements, in
which Artists could share contents, aesthetic and formal
features. Their expressive researches had led to a form of
representation far from reality which ended up with the
creation of abstract expressionism. All this meant the
creation of absolutely unreal images which produced a more
and more psychical and multiple approach to the work of
art.
The postmodern, -a word that I do not like as it reminds me
of an easy way to label something hard to define- seemed to
overturn the principles above thanks to the recovery of the
real form ad by the eclectic but up-to-date revisiting of
the aesthetical experiences of the past In that period, the
absolute ‘alteration of course’ meant to propose art as a
medium to move from what is nature to what is culture. But
these days this seems to be an obsolete assumption: men are
part of the nature, of the environment in which they live.
Therefore, no clear separations exist between the
environment by which they are surrounded and the culture
they produce.
Today, globalization, the internet and the wide use of
computers make the concept of postmodern obsolete. And this
feeling has been very well caught by the Exhibitions, which
contain informal, unexpressive, problematic, unpredictable
works. Images are often cold, detached and they represent
the most banal scenes of every day life. Repetitive
video-works, digital sounds and images, cheap plastic
materials, coloured pieces of paper and things from
supermarkets are more and more used This, lead the Artist
to be very far from the conventional professional
classifications. Today’s Art finds its origins in the
aesthetic experiences of the Sixties and the Seventies, but
it is clear that these considerations of mine are meant to
give the reader a snapshot of the present, which surely
dates back to old times, with its very complicated
peculiarities. And all this needs time to be better
assimilated therefore producing a clear and detached
analysis.
In Contemporary Art, anyway, a lot of peculiarities can be
found: the Artist’s action is less striking and he is free
to be creative. The use of poor and basic materials is more
and more widespread as well as the trend of using great
urban areas for ephemeral works.
It
is certainly an Art willing to exist in everyday’s reality
and therefore it has got something political in it. This is
a little detail but it must be considered. In a World which
has been deeply changed by new scientific technologies,
where all the ideologies of last Century (Capitalism,
Marxism, Psychoanalysis…) have become obsolete, the Artists
seem to be more interested in the formal features of the
visual communication than in the personal, expressive
contents of their own works.
So, can we have a revolutionary, unconventional,
deviational Art, yet? Maybe not, because no more
assumptions exist. The great ones like Michelangelo,
Caravaggio, Picasso and many others operated in periods in
which common mentality was far away from reality. And this
feeling was very well felt, showed and expressed in their
own works. They indeed broke with the social standards of
their time by representing everyday life in a harsh and
dramatic way therefore proposing a revolutionary,
deviational Art.
In
today’s globalized Society, there is something more:
today’s globalized man is surrounded by personal and public
problems caused by the sensation of loss of moral values
and by the feeling of being powerless towards the
globalized events. It is a sort of disease with no cure:
the hope in finding new rules is destroyed by the
instability and mutability of times. So the Artists deceive
themselves by looking for the way to create non-conformist
works but they often end up to create inconsistent ideas.
Each Artist tends to consider himself/herself so original
to feel a sort of new movement. But only a few of them can
manage to stand the constant change of taste and trends in
nowadays’ Society.
This originates a fragmentary and inconstant artistic
production, where every contrast exist, where everything is
ruled by the market.
This is just the success of faddishness, which destroys all
the expressive values as well as the noble concept of
immortality of the art. We must face and accept the fact
that these days everything in our lives is going to
expire…and the same happens to Art.
In this Society so full of contrasts, everything has lost
credibility: transgression has become a fashionable
attitude; cultural deviationism has become something
expected; rebellion has become something refined. Thus, Art
is expected to be anticonformistic, otherwise it is not
Art. And this is the reason why the XX Century’s subversive
Art has weakened. Anticonformism has become something
ordinary, a sort of cliché, a new habit. Contemporary
Society has absorbed everything and it is dangerously more
subversive than Art could foreseen.
Today, the globalized civilization’s anticonformism has
gone much further than that suggested by Art. Art, then,
struggles to follow this new kind of Society and ends up
being unable to produce real contrasts towards reality in
which the non-conventional and deviationism have turned
into a new form of contemporary tradition.
Renato Cerisola
BIBLIOGRAPHY
•
Barilli Renato, Il ciclo del Postmoderno, Ed. Feltrinelli,
Milano 1987
•
Carrier David, Fare arte oggi, in Tema celeste Marzo/Aprile
2003, n°96, Editore Alberico Cetti Serbelloni, pp. 60/63
•
Kuspit Donald, Stress sociale e arte deviazionista, in Tema
celeste Gennaio/Febbraio 2003, n°95, Editore Alberico Cetti
Serbelloni, pp. 46/49
•
Dorfles Gillo, Ultime tendenze nell’arte d’oggi, Ed.
Feltrinelli, Milano 1988