The exhibition has been running since Saturday 12th Behind the Curtainat the Flavio Stocco Gallery in Castelfranco Veneto. It will last until November 4, the eve of the American presidential elections, the choice of dates is not random. We asked the curator of the exhibition, Ernesto Francalanci, to publish his presentation.
After what and on several occasions Settis and Montanari, as well as other authoritative voices, have written about Olivi‘s commitment towards critical points of the system, the sad fate of Venice, the last supper of the Biennale, the tragic Italian political condition, the moral suicide of the artist, the carnival of the world, the need to defect from hatred, a further reflection can accompany the “artistic controversy” launched by Olivi against America (that America), against Capitalism, against Power. A controversy, in the literal sense of the word, a battle of ideas and works that respond to today’s demand for truth.
Today we ask the artist, to whom for centuries society has entrusted the task of creating worlds of total invention, above all to help us understand what no other story resolves. We ask today’s artist to help us understand “reality” and to reopen the painful possibility of comprehension. It is that same desire for truth that ran through, for example, the Berlin expressionism of the 1920s, years whose climate we find today in our time of spiritual misery.
Some of Olivi’s works, in their pop acidity, echo that cry that Grosz, Heartfield or Fritz Lang had critically launched. War and capitalism are the twins that we must defeat: an impossible task, Freud replied to Marx who, in 1932, urged by the League of Nations, questioned him on the war issue: Thanatos always wins on eros.
The verses of theInternational by Franco Fortini:
We are the last in the world. / But this world will not have us.
The process of hiding attention and dissent obscured the lively streets on which the comrades sang. We are in silence today. We are not in the catastrophe, we are After to catastrophes.
America’s responsibility is documented. From this US military outpost that is Italy, which constitutionally must repudiate war, but which is bound by a deadly contract, we, like Olivi, want to escape by recalling the winged words of Archilochus: I have left my shield behind a bush, others will take it over. Our red sign of courage is the desire for peace and not for weapons. AND We desert (2024) is a word-work, a word constructed with scraps of rhetorical communication that has filled pages of irresponsible journalism.
How can one, after Gaza, after the last genocide, still want to play the violin or paint a face? This, however, is the artist’s destiny, to have to continue singing while raising alarm sounds, of piety and attention. Because the message that comes from the “zone of interest” on this side of the Auschwitz wall teaches that, more effective than any word of Hannah Arendt, evil has the same face as us. We have a shared responsibility for everything that is happening in the world.
For Olivi, being against America means being against that America which continues to upset the world in international wars, in the perennial madness of an export of democracy, and is certainly not the one that has produced and produces art, culture and science, as demonstrated by the painful irony of a work like To America with Love, 2020, whose stars are the faces that promoted its image.
To America with Love, è also the title of the exhibition that brought together many of the works we are talking about, and it is a piercing cry of love and hate. The same one that the great scourges of the world raised to the sky American Way of Lifefrom Borroughs to Timothy Leary, to Paul Auster or al cannibal Easton Ellis.
Olivi’s works do not meet the criteria of an aesthetic judgment except by reflection: what they want to communicate and share is an ethical judgment. Historic. Political. Olivi’s “moral operettas”, of Enlightenment tradition, follow a critical path that crosses the sick territory of the West: from the political and cultural crisis of Europe to the global responsibility of the USA and, higher up, to the very sky of Power, of the invisible but pervasive power of capitalism.
All of Olivi’s works speak of this power, a power which, to paraphrase Agamben, proves increasingly incapable of governing the emergency that it itself has produced: the climate catastrophe, the wars, the end of humanity, perceived, as he says Blanchot, “a simple fact about which there is nothing more to say” and which “does not even deserve attention”. Our habit of weapons, Montanari writes in a text for Olivi, is so ingrained that we no longer see it scandal.
Olivi bears witness to this power that capitalizes on bodies and souls with works dedicated to the universal currency, that dollar which, in its material representation, contains the most shocking secrets of the distant mission that fatal words codify: The Great Seal (The great seal), He nodded at the start (The deity agreed), A new order of centuries (The new order of times).
But at the heart of the coin its etymology: advisewarn. This heart is a black hole, Black Hole (2023): fatal attractor and whirlpool of a universal shipwreck, in which all the value categories of modernity have sunk. In Gold we Trust (2020) Olivi recites the obscene prayer of the god of money, a dollar half illuminated with gold and half with letters of blood.
There are specific faces at the top of the power hierarchy. They rulethey command. One of these faces is that of Trump. In Olivi’s imagination, Trump, like Scrooge McDuck, has a dollar sign in his eyes (Self portrait2020). Unlike Disney’s funny symbol, this dollar belongs to the ferocious world which is no longer that of a capitalism regulated by the New Deal but by the deregulated one of the neoliberalism of the nineties and then by the illiberalism of the white supremacist movements during the presidency of Donald Trump .
Trump’s eyes, but they could also be those of anyone else in government of the Empire, reveal a ferocious soul, to be responded to only with the conscience of rebellion. Day of Wrath: every day, as Agamben reminds us, must be the day of our wrath: the day of crisisof the separation of right from wrong. It is the day evoked by Olivi in the work Scent of War (2023): all the flags frame the heart of Power, where Capital accumulates, the mechanism that produces differenceconflict and death.
The American flag is in pieces (flagse2020): America comes to terms with its controversial history and its present crossed by an irreversible structural identity crisis, being now incapable of maintaining its global hegemony. The American flag, which we looked at with naive happiness when it waved on the campuses of protest and in front of the great art museums, and whose stars were covered by Olivi of faces that have made the history of the nation, now flies over a world in rubble.
A work it definitely is politics: Missing (2023) documents the disappearance of Europe from the geopolitical map of the world, the new map that testifies to the extension of the “great game” that reigns by dividing, oppressing countries, people, cultures. Raising barriers, digging ditches, extending deserts between bodies and souls. The end of humanity, which in the time of the avant-garde, as witnessed by Benjamin, meant the sinking of conscience, today also becomes the possible end of man itself. If you lift the curtain of the small installation Behind the Curtain (2024) the atomic mushroom is surrounded by the stars of the European Union: in the world of catastrophe they shine mockingly on the soldier’s uniform. We are surrounded by infinite veils, curtains, curtains, which we must tear apart to see beyond. Seeing beyond death has become a spectacle.
The frame of Missing it is a garrulous waving of flags that move in the wind of the national choirs, unaware of their condemnation that the wise men of Ventotene signed: never more flags, never more nations. Countries only. Populations only. Only men.
That America that cannot be loved was last modified: October 28th, 2024 by ERNESTO L. FRANCALANCI
That America that cannot be loved last modified: 2024-10-28T17:49:16+01:00 by ERNESTO L. FRANCALANCI
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