“Killing art to resurrect it”
a cura di Giorgia Antonini and Giulia Ferlito
It’s implicit in the very word: something able to contrast the official culture, the conformist and uniformed culture which society (a certain kind of society) intends to impose on its members. It is above all a way of being together, of thinking and imagining a different world. Counterculture is a form of creativity freed of competitiveness, productivity, and market rules. Even though it’s impossible to define exactly what counterculture is. It is a term we will use from here on for the sake of convention and convenience.
Nowadays too, it must lean towards these things, to create a community able to contrast the overall situation of compliance and submission to the laws that oversee freedom of thought and expression. Creativity is a human prerogative and cannot be exclusively left in the hands of those professionals who are selected through grids of monetary value and price. Value is something else all together and depends on intensity, on the ability to communicate and become language.
There are paper remains (and these are entrusted to libraries and museums that take an interest) and then there are those (rather more interesting) immaterial ones related to memory and the handing over to others. They are at times transient, invisible signs that sink deep and re-emerge like karst rivers. They are drowsy and then light up again. They are embers smouldering under the ashes. It is you, you who are asking me these questions, that represent in person the possible signs. If you perceive their vitality then it means that something good was done and something has remained. To be used again, as well as investigated.
Because nowadays I still keep on contrasting, in as much as possible, an artistic system enslaved to the market, which sees in the market its aim and legitimacy. I keep on fighting against, against the worshippers of Corpus Christie’s and Corpus Sotheby’s. I think it is essential to free oneself from such a narrow and paralising vision. Art is not an end but a means to expressing a point of view, a tool of intervention, something to hurl things against. Against those who aim to deaden it and turn it into a fetish.
I don’t think that counterculture has become mass culture. Perhaps certain superficial and picturesque displays have been moved on to fashion, communication, the imagination. But to talk about actual counterculture you need to refer to alternative practices of thinking and doing, you need to take roads off the beaten track, often solitary paths, make choices in terms of life and behaviour in which it is necessary to take sides, also paying a price. To continue being “the other” without being absorbed or regimented. For instance, denying oneself, if needs be. In a system where art has become an industry (of consent as much as of dissent), even the mere abstaining, restraining oneself, without giving in to the mania of overproduction and consumption can be a good start.
The public sense, the community, the reconstruction of an identity devoid of conceptual schemes and cages. The friends with whom one shared hopes for change. A possibility turning to fact, imaging together unprecedented scenarios eluding the canons present at that given time.
It is not up to me to say, every existential path must be examined both by those who lived through it first-hand but also by those who watch and know it only from the outside, afterwards. Both stands contribute to form an overall evaluation. There is no unequivocal vision. Surely, though, the experience of “Lotta continua” and Indiani metropolitani (1977-1978) represent in my view an important time, both for the rejection of the artist’s role and for the chance to invent a new political practice. Killing art to resurrect it in everyday life was a good experience.
As Marcel Duchamp put a moustache on The Mona Lisa, it’s our turn to put a moustache to the George Washington engraved on the dollar note. Unfortunately, the Euro doesn’t even have a human portrait to mock, only monuments. We could, however, mark these monuments with murals. Street Art vs Wall Street Art. In the end, the Berlin Wall, thirty years ago precisely, fell destroyed by pickaxes but also crushed by the colour of the graffiti it was covered in.
Counterculture is not an abstract category nor a school of thought or even something to join. You end up part of it as you would end up inside a cosmic hole that puts two different worlds into contact. It has in any event provided me with lenses with which to watch and study reality without being taken in by appearances and memberships.
Never lose your early enthusiasm when everything seems possible and achievable (everything is possible and achievable if you are true to yourself). Never let the highest bidder get you. Always be wary of clients. Never barter your utopian dream with the lesser evil.
Any “countercultural” event has its reasons for being, its own deep sense, its own dimension, there is no such thing as a hit parade or a platform for the top three events. In small, marginal, underground worlds germs very different from each other hide away. It’s up to those who want to avail themselves of them to pick the most infectious one.
Certainly customisation, the inability to keep the collective self alive, money (intended as currency of exchange for ambition). We need to rediscover a gift economy and reclaim the pleasure of free things, the joy of doing something without expecting anything in return.