06-2004
THIS WILD DARKNESS
Massimiliano Gioni
Abstracts from the author's Manifesta 5 catalogue text

Maybe we have been asking for too much: we want art to tell us everything about peripheral geographies, global economics and social, possibly interactive, practices. Or alternatively, we expect art to reveal the mechanisms of fashion, the ups and downs of pop culture, the hallucinations of consumerism, and the ebbs and flows of corporate hyper-modernity. In the midst of all this frenzy, we might have forgotten what goes on behind closed doors, what happens in those obscure spaces we call minds. The brain is a labyrinth, sometimes more tortuous than the world outside. The paths connecting our minds to reality are complex, often interrupted, always convoluted. As a matter of fact, art might not be about understanding or reflecting our world, but about creating new, possible universes.

The works of many artists in this edition of Manifesta suggest the possibility of discovering the world by closing our eyes, and diverting our attention towards the inside or towards our immediate surroundings. It's not a retreat, nor a form of escapism, but rather an immersion in a constellation of microcosms founded on individual, at times even maniacal, rules. As debates, discussions and struggles about borders, territories and occupations abound, some artists feel the urge to proclaim their own autonomous state - a state of mind. They write intricate laws and proclaim private systems of belief, they draft intimate mindscapes, they trace the boundaries of psychological geographies, while inventing personal idioms and secret codes. Their languages gain strength from a radical obscurity: suddenly they seem not to care about some kind of international Esperanto. They each practice a vernacular form of speech, adopting and forging cryptic signs. It's not so important to be immediately translatable, or perfectly transparent. Opacity, instead, becomes valuable: ambiguous metaphors proliferate; idiosyncratic symbolisms generate misunderstandings and short-circuits of logic. Some even turn to mystical thinking. Evoking is more important than identifying: suggestions are preferred over absolute definitions.

Language is a recurring preoccupation for many artists today. The practice of multi-linguistics is often taken to the furthest extent, producing parallel realities where individuals speak radically foreign idioms. Carrying out ambitious exercises in imagination, immersed into hallucinatory tours de force, artists suggest that the whole world, and the languages we use to describe it, can be re-invented. These imaginary micro-universes don't develop horizontally, or subscribe to the rules of geography; they grow deeper and deeper.

Some artists prefer to start from more domestic scenarios, mapping the route of a sentimental journey or preparing the conditions for long, distant, armchair travels. Sculptures and installations - resembling waiting rooms or industrial quarters - acts as direct projections of the artists' imagination, as self-portraits in the shape of buildings. A private, often mysterious, iconography is created: forms are repeated, endlessly transformed and re-combined, their places permutated and their associations slightly modified, as recurring elements in a grammar. In other works, maquettes, maps, dioramas and scenarios turn into relics of a future that has never arrived. Fictional nations, clandestine societies and unknown civilizations are discovered: paranoia takes over geography, and transforms it into conspiracy theory.

A skeptical attitude towards reality informs many of the artists working today. Doubts flourish, theorems are arbitrarily applied and absurd speculations are carried out with clinical precision: a dream science is invented. While some artists seem to rely on a rarefied, abstract order that can be grasped only by suspending our disbelief, others base their experiments on the principle of trial and error. It's a much more physical interpretation of science, but the results are just as illogical and anti-practical: giant, cranky bachelor machines, running on empty, or fragile interventions that can subvert any routine. Objects change shape and function, and anything becomes possible, as long as one can invent his own rules and try out new combinations.

Inventing your own rules doesn't mean withdrawing completely from reality or living in a world of absolute solipsistic illusion. Many artists still believe that art can serve as a testing ground for experimentation with possible alternatives to the real. But these transformations, before being applied on a grand scale, have to be tried out within smaller groups. In an attempt to negotiate the space between collective needs and one's own desires, artists imagine micro-societies where individuals behave like organisms of a larger body, entertaining parasitic relationships or more symbiotic functions. The secret codes and private languages invented and spoken by different subcultures seem to be the epicenter of many works on view. At times systematically, other times with more levity, artists investigate how cultures, societies, and associations are built and around which symbols they gravitate.

The complex system of beliefs that shape national consciousness are addressed by many artists in this edition of Manifesta. It's not so much a geopolitical fascination that leads this kind of research: it is instead a more psychological or anthropological approach, which aims at understanding how this sense of belonging is built and on which references and foundations it is maintained. It's not about the physical manifestations of nations, but rather about their mental images, the internally assimilated values that shape our credos.

Geography has become a fixation, imposing itself as the exclusive paradigm used to describe our world and contemporary art alike. And yet, as we were too busy debating borders and global transitions and national quotas, we haven't realized that many artists were already looking elsewhere, embarking on a trip along the spirals of time. History has slowly crept in with ruins and debris casting shadows in the work of many young artists; the stratified and complex wealth of local traditions and personal memories become a reservoir of images and inspirations. There is nothing regressive or conservative in this attitude, especially because the past no longer appears as heroic or monumental, but rather consumed and decayed. Nobody seems to care about a triumphal conquest of one's own origins. Instead, a feeling of loss and longing emanate from the works of many European artists of today, like a romantic spleen updated. A suggestive, obscure symbolism emerges especially from videos and films. As less and less artists seem interested in shock tactics and frontal attacks, capturing impalpable emotions and states of being becomes crucial. Dark and ghostly manifestations permeate many works, like phantoms called upon a séance. It's as though, in spite of digital connections and information technologies, artists still perceive the world as a mysterious space.

Time has become a privileged site of investigation for many artists. Moving along the vertical axis of history, they unearth public tales and forgotten myths in a sort of anti-systematic archeology of knowledge. It's again a strategy that aims to question national beliefs and official narratives, but also a way to give a personal shape to the past. Time thus emerges as a torn cloth that can be continuously woven and taken to threads - a multi-layered stratification of time zones. All together, and each in their individual way, many artists experiment with archival images and cinematic, perched moments, creating a tapestry of visions and sounds, a magic lantern that projects chimeras and sudden revelations of our social unconscious.

What we forget is often as significant as what we obstinately remember. In the lapses of memory, in its ruptures and holes, we store images and fears, which can suddenly jump to the surface. As many artists seem to declare a renovated interest in the secret space of our mind, they are also discovering the obscure place where images disappear, the black holes of our brain. Amnesia, analyzed both as an individual pathology and as a metaphor of culture's infinite processes of repression, is at the center of many works in this edition of Manifesta.

To many other artists the real appears as a much more polemical and threatening space, cut to pieces by ethnic tumults and cultural clashes. Rather than experimenting with alternative microcosms, some feel the need to document their own surroundings and describe that nebulous territory where international politics and individual psychologies overlap. This particular form of reportage, this para-journalistic approach, never claims to have access to a final, superior truth. It proceeds by posing questions, instead of formulating straight answers; and it often prefers the format of the personal confession to the presentation of some kind of omniscient, detached author. That's why many documentaries produced by artists and filmmakers today deploy fragmented narratives and convoluted stories, while often bringing together different temporalities and sudden flashbacks. Art has taken a more confessional approach, and it's focusing on personal stories. Even when addressing cultural phenomena and social transformations, artists depart from an individual point of view in which narrations reveal themselves slowly, emerging from the pages of a family album enveloped in the fog of nostalgia. Often filmed with very basic means and shaky hand held cameras, these documentaries filter the world through the eyes of individuals, as though the trauma of conflicts had damaged our ability to experience reality objectively or at least collectively.

Out there, in the real world, slogans and catch phrases get sharper and sharper: the dictatorship of communication and branding has imposed super-effective refrains and jingles. To this over-simplistic, often one sided, perception of reality, many artists have reacted by staging and occupying schizophrenic environments, increasing the degree of complexity and the obscurity of their languages - they are speaking in tongues. As reflected through these works, the corridors of our minds seem to be resonating with impenetrable rattles, broken words, spiritual noises. It's the hiccup of reason, the stutter of confusion, reminding us there are no solutions, only problems.