ARTICLES

Indirect Style. Fundació Foto Colectania, Barcelona

With Indirect Style I, an exhibition of 8 contemporary artists using photography, the forgotten, lost or failed utopias of the past scratch their way back into the present. Indirectly, as it were. If, as curator Martí Peran proposes, a direct style would have the actors of history speak in their own voices of their own experiences, an indirect style would be more roundabout. The direct style confronts us with a face, telling us its heartfelt story in the first person. Yet as Peran argues, this seductive combination comes with a limitation: as these witnesses are locked in time, they can never be repeated, denoting an authentic endpoint. They cannot guide us into the future.

The indirect style, in turn, relies on the interpretative capacity of a narrator, who here views, collates and arranges the fragmentary remains of history. The photograph, whether as a past document or present-day tool, is the vehicle. In a well-wrought metaphor, Peran recalls Ernst Bloch’s “anticipatory footsteps” (Bloch wrote of “anticipatory consciousness” in The Principle of Hope, an inspiration on ideas of utopian reconstruction). Misplaced marks from yesteryear, the broken shards of human desire, to be picked up anew.

Le quattro volte

Director: Michelangelo Frammartino
Year: 2010

According to a quote from the New York Times featured in the poster for Le quattro volte (2010), the film by Michelangelo Frammartino “reinvents the very act of perception”. Nowadays, the intellectual and emotional connection with the plot and characters which make up standard narrative cinema can have the same effect on a multidisciplinary erudite and an entertainment-seeking amateur. However, there is some supposedly elitist cinema left which fans of good history and of the construction of memorable human types should also watch.

This film belongs to that “other cinema”, pejoratively labelled as “museum cinema”; films which help cleanse the gaze, fine-tune our hearing (there are no dialogues or music, but a lot of sonic life) and re-educate the brain, which is tormented by over-stimulation and by the imperative need to obtain “chewed-up and prepared” information (which is constant, one-directional and obvious) through the media.

Frammartino, a multimedia artist with a solid academic background, decided, he says, “to find himself”, in a remote Calabrese village, where he took his camera to capture, with archaic fascination, an almost philosophical gaze. This unique perspective was originally centred on the human figure, the shepherd, before focusing on everything around him. The depth and ambition of the result is not without humour, it must be said. Some scenes, such as the domestic-goat invasion, would have made even Jacques Tati chuckle.

The success of the connection between the director and the viewer depends, largely, on knowing, guessing at, or, directly feeling the richness of content concealed behind the apparent bareness of the work as a whole. This determines whether or not can be achieved the “risky” perceptive experience posed by Frammartino and other “poets of time” (of slow time, some would say), from Abbas Kiarostami to the masters of neorealism, as well as fanatics of dreamlike experimentation, such as Phillipe Garrel and Tsai Ming Liang.

Along this same comparative line, between a profound depth and a lightweight form, we must highlight the fact that reducing Le quattro volte to its anecdotal plot would be the same as attaching the mere label of documentary to its filmic nature. It is not a documentary, but it does include landscapes, animal behaviour (in Cannes there was a “special mention” to the shepherd’s dog, the only “professional” actor to appear onscreen) and anthropological details (including the Fiesta de la Pita, an ancient rite first filmed by the documentary-maker Vittorio de Seta in I Dimenticati, more than 50 years ago). In other words, the film can be perceived as a mere window into this beautiful land where, as he tells us, Frammartino spent his childhood summers.

However, the true value of the work emerges when we understand the cosmology of Pythagoras (who is believed to have been born in this region), according to which human beings are a sensitive body whose four components –fire, water, earth and air– interchange and transform into one another. Through this Pythagorean prism, the true leitmotiv of the author, we shall reinterpret the poetry contained in the way in which the old shepherd, who eats ashes and dust from the church floor to cure his disease, dies on the night he loses them in the forest; the way in which, after his death, a billy goat is born; this billy goat, in turn, becomes lost in the forest, and collapses next to a tree; this tree is first the object of devotion by men, and then it is felled to make coal, which will make fire, and, therefore, life. A brilliant allegory on the harmony of “dust to dust, ashes to ashes” and the belief in the transmigration of souls.
 

Keith Rowe. Concentration Of The Stare

The history of artistic modernity could be written like the peculiar relationship between music and painting. This relationship has been linked to the move toward abstraction, where painting attempted to follow music as the most “abstract” of the arts, an ideal which should be pursued. This has been expressed in texts by Kandinsky and Klee, and in the tittles of many paintings and sculptures from modernity, such as composition, sonata, symphony, etc.

As time went on, painting liberated itself almost entirely from representation, and it was music which, trapped in sentimentalism and the description of romanticism, began looking for external examples to emulate. This gave rise to a large part of the New York school, with the inexpressive paintings by Barnett Newman and, even more so, Mark Rothko. On the other hand, contemporary American music left behind the dictates of dodecaphonism and serialism and gave rise, among others, to Morton Feldman.

GUSTAVO MARRONE. Don’t Turn Out the Light.

No apagar la luz is the title of a book, or a journal, or an artist’s book; it is also the title of an exhibition which, in an expanded way, widens the very concept of “exhibition” at a certain art centre. The fact that this review appears in the “Books” section should help us read it with one eye on the parameters of an exhibition review (or almost, or excessively, depending on its role), while we also pay attention to that same quantification of what is observed, in the sense of a dramatic (artistic) action is condensed in an object which, for philological convenience, we agree to describe as “book” (or almost, o excessively, depending on its role as well). To simplify things: No apagar la luz should be seen and read under both these premises, as both offer the key which gives us access to one of the most consistent, unusual, lucid, and intelligently emotional art productions made in Spain in the last two decades. Its author is Gustavo Marrone (Buenos Aires, 1962).

Alighiero Boetti. Game Strategy

Since the 1990s, the criticism of the narrative of the history of art of the 20th century, in the canonical version laid out in the United States, has opened up many lines of research which have attempted to correct, complete and diversify the historiographical perspective toward a more complex and less linear interpretation. The result has led to an inclusive opening of feminist, postcolonial, gender and multicultural discourses, applied to the reconsideration of figures and movements from the Latin American and Eastern European art scenes, as well as marginal and minority personalities who have carried out their work in hegemonic centres, such as Gordon Matta-Clark and Louise Bourgeois. This reinterpretation has been carried out in a very pertinent and systematic way by the MNCARS in the last few years, and it is on this basis that we must examine the exhibition on Alighiero Boetti, curated by Lynne Cooke, Christian Rattemeyer and Mark Godfrey, in coproduction with the London Tate Modern and the New York MoMA, emphasising the consensus on the need to revise history.