tel. 39 (02) 29 06 21 28 fax 39 (02) 29014767
Our perception of the future. | |
|
Our perception of the future - I mean of us humans born in the second half of this century and about to enter the third millenni- um - began when we were children and people spoke to us about space conquests, of a new race towards the unknown, of travel through the blue ether. The years of the bomb and the atomic ter ror had passed: the indelible images of the mushroom over Hi roshima, of the corpses immobilized as atPompeii, seemed grad ually to fade in our memory as new men, ready for peace and tol eration; yet they remained as an icon in perpetual memory of what others, worse than us, had been capable of doing. A little more than thirty years have passed since three astronauts landed on the moon and since the late, and never to be sufficiently lamented, Stanley Kubrick's 2001 Odyssey in Space showed us a monolith navigating in the immense obscurity of space, and revealing in its interior a small photo, an extraordinary film sequence epitomiz ing the wish for a new beginning, with us humans firmly placed at the centre of space. Space as element to be overcome, to be surpassed, to be looked at with other eyes, perhaps seeking a god there. Culture and art speak of this tension: for Lucio Fontana the work of art is a "spatial concept", the overcoming of a certain iden tify in order to confront the unknown and conquer ancestral fears. And yet in spite of the doubts and nightmares, everything seemed to transmit a positive image/ a great confidence in the future which was imagined as better than the present, even in cartoons for chi/dren - our great-grandchildren with their transparent au tos and their clothes simitar to those now worn by Mariko Mori or in TV programmes of popular entertainment; at the Sanremo Festival In 2023 Dalida sang of a happy tomorrow, though one she would never see. it's really true: we humans are really incapable of resisting At a certain point the degeneration re-began. We succumbed once again to an ever more insinuating disease of anxiety, which sug gested to us day after day that it would not have been so easy har moniously to manage either the present or the future. The lacera tions we suffered did not go away, in spite of all the good inten tions- A/berto Burn spent his whole life describing them with a piti less sense of realism, combined with sublime poetry, expressing them with burnt pieces of wood and plastic, with torn bits of sack ing and black holes that went nowhere. The degeneration or us humans, incapable of finding god, is translated into our doppel gangers, the ultrabodies coming from who knows where to threat en our existence, to take our place, identical to us but at the same time different (cf. Don Siegel's mythical film of 1956, and also the works realized in partnership by Enrico Baj and Piero Manzoni in 1958 before the /otter's final departure from the Nuclear group). By technology the u/trabody is transformed into an a/ien endowed with destructive force, an invincible machine because born from man himself who lost control of the possibility of reproduc ing himself as a force for good, as happened to old Doctor Frankenstein. Right up to the final act, the perfect done, the exact and monstrous replica, the genetic manipulation, the predetermi nation of characters, Blade Runner in the novel of Philip Dick and in the subsequent film of Ridley Scott. And so people begin to ask themselves: where is man? It is a ques tion that Sergio Ragalzi posed to himself right from the early Eighties, those years so light-hearted and carefree before the fi nal fall: to say it in the words of Nanni Balestrini: "the magnifi cent 1980s aduiated by all the alberoni/the years of shit insinu ated by the malicious the years/of the restoration of opportunism of cynicism/with lots of money cocaine photomodels for whoever's in/heroin and muccioli for whoever's out/junk tv to turn all of us into iiots /the culturally most vapid and squalid years of the century/in which swarms of intellectuals & collaborationists/well organized into clienteles and handsomely paid told us lies about the marvels of the ephemeral or the postmodern." It was then that the magnificent Sexual Relicts marked Sergio Ragalzi's debut at Fabio Sargentini's Attico gallery in Rome in 1984, and I remember those gigantic pictures, flat, burnt outlines of which nothing remained but a mere male or female identity, basic principle of reproduction. But what could such private, such monstrous beings ever give life to? What could ever distinguish the man created by nature from his artificial copies? Does there still exist a human iconography in the postbiological evolution? And everything is so surprisingly positive. Or will we always have to pay the usual price the creation of "freaks", of side-show monsters to whom we eve deny a compassionate glance in our horror? In his reply to such questions Ragalzi gives expression to all possible despair, a silent black cry of absolute integrity, without precedent, yet one that does not exclude a clear-sighted critical attitude to the ever more fre quent canalization of the body, the postorganic, the mutations, the fear and the grief. A reflection very similar to that given, over fen years later, by Dinos & Jake Chapman, the most powerful con temporary interpreters of the monstrosity that may derive from sci ence, with so much misplaced sexual excrescence, blood mixed with the horrors of war and peace. From those sexual relicts to his present works contemplating the future in Genetica 2093 Ragalzi has worked in a de-evolutionary sense, gradually stripping his works of any element of consolation: from human beings to insects, then larvae, cocoons, viruses, embryos, always covered with black lead-resistant and totally achromatic paints - a kind of Manzoni in negative - sculptures and paintings of large dimensions in which the gesture - a gesture of informal origin that cannot but make us recall the most virulent and declaratory Vedova - insin uates itself in the body to the point of rendering it desperately alive, in spite of everything. But do you know what a body is? If is a residue, a remainder; it is no longer hardly anything at all, but so long as at least a little of it remains, the man, the artist, the intel lectual must be able to defend it, to arrest it and not let if die. In every exhibition of Ragaizi what therefore remains clear is the last stage in the chain, the last transition which does indeed find com plete synthesis in the final work, but always leaves a door open, once again in spite of everything: these new gigantic black embryos in plastic material, even light in their faint movement, are the rejected children of a failed evolution, abortions of the future. And yet they breathe, sentinels of the past. Today, in March 1999, it seems to me even more difficult to speak of the evolution of the (human?) species or advance any kind of ypothesis on our perception of the future. Probably the icons in perpetual memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945, will still remain deeply embedded in our memory; and yet the images and the voices of another war, geographically rather close to us, follow each other in rapid succession on the TV sets thatglad den the houses of the world, between one soap-powder commercial and another publicizing the latest fashionable car. And it is not so much the war that terrifies us as the degeneration that other bodies similar to us cause us. Emigrant, refugee, diverse, alien: words that invade our con sciousness, words we fail to accept, words we cannot accept, because our conscience prevents us from accepting poverty, misery, death. It is better to move away than take sides, and wait with patience: per haps, thanks to the war, there will be less extraneous bodies to threaten our hardwon but illusory well-being. Perhaps the genetics of 2093 will have other implications, other questions to be resoved and we shall all be happily similar as in Gattaca.For the time being what we have is still the daily dose of media and telematic death. For the time being Ragalzi leaves us here a large picture with the title Origin where the human embryo is in the process of fusing with that of an ape from which it derived its origin and the beginning of time. Strangers at home. Should we go forward, or turn back? Luca Beatrice | |