frank gerlitzki in memory_identity group show@MK2 Art Space, Beijing/Caochangdi
keep it for later: slogans, stories, anecdotes...memories_identity
MEMORY - IDENTITY
We live in suspicious times. The beginning of the 21st century is marked by the unstoppable growth of economic forces that influence and control politics and daily life. In Society, a certain form of narcissistic individualism is entertained by media, fashion and codified social life-style. Our daily life presents an endless number of choices none of each is really important enough to affect our real condition. Identity, has become a very flexible and uncertain concept and it is not linked anymore to the notion of time and duration (lasting). The promise of the contemporary world is that we can become "what we want", that we can "live everywhere". This appearent openenness can often become the source of radical attitudes whenever all the promises fade into illusion and lead to various forms of violence. Different "last minute-ideologies" become masks to dissimulate a nihilistic sense of powerlesness. Memories and identities are borrowed and distorted to justify a display of rage and aggressivity. The former Nobel prize for economy Amartya Sen describes this situation perfectly in his book "Identity and violence". Another driving force is the compulsive quest for the next new thing: the "new" and the "young" , even if, often the "new" and the "young" are objectively not interesting and as a matter of fact "not new". This situation puts a strong pressure on younger generations and push them to take on professional behaviours and very competitive attitudes very soon, giving up the anarchy and the courage of their age to a more calculated and strategic thinking. Our society succeeds at being, at the same time, permissive and repressive, supporting an edonistic consumerist mass culture and introducing more and more rules, laws and procedures in people's life. I deliberately took a look at two books that predicted a kind of future to which our reality is becoming similar: one is Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and the other is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It is interesting that in both books, what has taken the world to accept the "controlled society system" is not an act of power, violence or constriction, but , instead, the fact that people have slowly "forgot" and have become alienated, passive and inconsistent. In Farenheit 451 an aggressive visual and virtual culture spreads dependence and addiction until people become sort of shapeless "morons"; then books are left apart and there is no need anymore to publish them. At this point power can manipulate and re-write history and prove that books are dangerous and need to be banned and destroyed. In Brave New World, whenever a complex emotion, or the drive towards an illogic behaviour arises in someone, he/she can take SOMA, in order to escape the weight to deal with it, to contain it and learn to live with it. In a similar way, "to remember" has a negative connotation, is "waisted time", because it takes the individual away from the efficiency to live by his/her own immanent desires and just "enjoy". Again in Brave New World specifical manipulative education makes sure that any time an individual faces a moment of emptyness, indecision or hesitation, some built-inside mechanism turns on and provides an authomatic pragmatical solution to the problem. Exercising memory creates a special intimacy between a person and his/her inner life, an empty space where silence is both a protection and a meaningfull void. As the mind wanders, looking for images, smells, tastes, it also considers and confronts, it selects and judges and establishes a relationship between what it was and what is it now, trying to make sense out of it. Memory is a vital instrument to exercise our intellectual and chritical capacities. and it is linked to identity in a complex, subtle and often contraddictory way. The tensions and the possibilities which may appear while exploring this link, can become at the same time a creative force and a tool to be able to "lift the veil" and show what lies behind the gloittering screen of nowadays hyper reality. Giorgio Agamben recently wrote "to be contemporary is to be able to see the darkness behind the light of one's own times...........the contemporary individual is the one who receives in the face the darkness of his own time". Somehow this make me think to another sentence and another concept. The sentence is the well-known passage from St John's Apocalypse "....and I see through a glass darkly::" while the concept is that of the "double" presented in the visionary writings of Antonin Artaud. The artists I put together in this exhibitions, altough they come from different countries, different generations and use different media, are linked by a similar perception of the"zeitgeist". They engage and stress today's celebration of the surface to try and see through it. Their research does not follow the speed of the contemporary art attitude and their skeptycism makes them aware to be inevitably part of the post-modern condition, but at the same time, prevents them from taking its appearent irreversibility for granted. Their artworks are neither celebrating the system nor passively asserting defeat and loss. They switch from different communication registers and borrow from fragments of reality and personal history to keep questioning, keep searching, keep proposing possible alternative mental and physical spaces and eaesthetic experiences. In physiology, when we experience a lack of light, specific cells called off-cells, located in the peripherical part of the retina, are activated and generate the kind of vision we call darkness. This means that "seeing the darkness" is neither a non-sense, nor a passive action, but ultimately an active one that generates awareness. Functioning as cultural off-cells these artworks help us to see the darkness beyond the shiny surface.
Alessandro Rolandi
MEMORY - IDENTITY
We live in suspicious times. The beginning of the 21st century is marked by the unstoppable growth of economic forces that influence and control politics and daily life. In Society, a certain form of narcissistic individualism is entertained by media, fashion and codified social life-style. Our daily life presents an endless number of choices none of each is really important enough to affect our real condition. Identity, has become a very flexible and uncertain concept and it is not linked anymore to the notion of time and duration (lasting). The promise of the contemporary world is that we can become "what we want", that we can "live everywhere". This appearent openenness can often become the source of radical attitudes whenever all the promises fade into illusion and lead to various forms of violence. Different "last minute-ideologies" become masks to dissimulate a nihilistic sense of powerlesness. Memories and identities are borrowed and distorted to justify a display of rage and aggressivity. The former Nobel prize for economy Amartya Sen describes this situation perfectly in his book "Identity and violence". Another driving force is the compulsive quest for the next new thing: the "new" and the "young" , even if, often the "new" and the "young" are objectively not interesting and as a matter of fact "not new". This situation puts a strong pressure on younger generations and push them to take on professional behaviours and very competitive attitudes very soon, giving up the anarchy and the courage of their age to a more calculated and strategic thinking. Our society succeeds at being, at the same time, permissive and repressive, supporting an edonistic consumerist mass culture and introducing more and more rules, laws and procedures in people's life. I deliberately took a look at two books that predicted a kind of future to which our reality is becoming similar: one is Farenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and the other is Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It is interesting that in both books, what has taken the world to accept the "controlled society system" is not an act of power, violence or constriction, but , instead, the fact that people have slowly "forgot" and have become alienated, passive and inconsistent. In Farenheit 451 an aggressive visual and virtual culture spreads dependence and addiction until people become sort of shapeless "morons"; then books are left apart and there is no need anymore to publish them. At this point power can manipulate and re-write history and prove that books are dangerous and need to be banned and destroyed. In Brave New World, whenever a complex emotion, or the drive towards an illogic behaviour arises in someone, he/she can take SOMA, in order to escape the weight to deal with it, to contain it and learn to live with it. In a similar way, "to remember" has a negative connotation, is "waisted time", because it takes the individual away from the efficiency to live by his/her own immanent desires and just "enjoy". Again in Brave New World specifical manipulative education makes sure that any time an individual faces a moment of emptyness, indecision or hesitation, some built-inside mechanism turns on and provides an authomatic pragmatical solution to the problem. Exercising memory creates a special intimacy between a person and his/her inner life, an empty space where silence is both a protection and a meaningfull void. As the mind wanders, looking for images, smells, tastes, it also considers and confronts, it selects and judges and establishes a relationship between what it was and what is it now, trying to make sense out of it. Memory is a vital instrument to exercise our intellectual and chritical capacities. and it is linked to identity in a complex, subtle and often contraddictory way. The tensions and the possibilities which may appear while exploring this link, can become at the same time a creative force and a tool to be able to "lift the veil" and show what lies behind the gloittering screen of nowadays hyper reality. Giorgio Agamben recently wrote "to be contemporary is to be able to see the darkness behind the light of one's own times...........the contemporary individual is the one who receives in the face the darkness of his own time". Somehow this make me think to another sentence and another concept. The sentence is the well-known passage from St John's Apocalypse "....and I see through a glass darkly::" while the concept is that of the "double" presented in the visionary writings of Antonin Artaud. The artists I put together in this exhibitions, altough they come from different countries, different generations and use different media, are linked by a similar perception of the"zeitgeist". They engage and stress today's celebration of the surface to try and see through it. Their research does not follow the speed of the contemporary art attitude and their skeptycism makes them aware to be inevitably part of the post-modern condition, but at the same time, prevents them from taking its appearent irreversibility for granted. Their artworks are neither celebrating the system nor passively asserting defeat and loss. They switch from different communication registers and borrow from fragments of reality and personal history to keep questioning, keep searching, keep proposing possible alternative mental and physical spaces and eaesthetic experiences. In physiology, when we experience a lack of light, specific cells called off-cells, located in the peripherical part of the retina, are activated and generate the kind of vision we call darkness. This means that "seeing the darkness" is neither a non-sense, nor a passive action, but ultimately an active one that generates awareness. Functioning as cultural off-cells these artworks help us to see the darkness beyond the shiny surface.
Alessandro Rolandi