In May 2005, Tomaso was invited by C. Severi (IUAV University in Venice) to deliver a lecture to students of architecture and design. He was asked to speak about his work process and give insights into how an artist thinks and works.
This is the transcript of the first of the two-part lecture series. You can read the Italian version here.
Venetian lecture #1
I’ll start immediately with an example, and I’ll show you two photos of one of my installations from 1997 called “Rio Negro for beginners” (about the name: there are many Rio Negro, in Spain, in the whole of Latin America. The one I chose for the title of my cycle of works comes from the Rio of the Amazon, described by Humbolt in his “Voyage aux regions equinoxales du nouveau continent” (1807), a monumental work in 35 volumes that’s also one of the most beautiful adventure books that I know). (Description of the work/project, photos 1 and 2).
On this work, I’ve written in short: in the darkness of the forest, I move gingerly, cautious of not stumbling, of not hitting my head. I focus on moving ahead, everything else, I imagine more than see. Nevertheless, just the idea of the entire forest guides me, tells me where to go, what to do.
In a gallery, I see the artworks as they are presented, at the height they have been hung up, I see the people; but there’s also the rest of the space, silent and patient, devoid of paintings, devoid of people. Therefore, I began with a simple idea: the space of a gallery is bigger than that occupied by the artworks and by the eyes of the viewers and, by veiling it, I tried to make it visible. From this starting point, as always, the work then went ahead of its own accord, in a direction I had never expected. I have my own ideas on that which seems, that which evokes, that which is remembered. Carlo Severi calls it dual sky and that’s very well; the children who saw the exhibition were slipping away between the bars of the walkway and playing between the net and the floor pretending to be fish, safe from the adults who couldn’t follow them. Even this was very well!
The second work that I present to you is “vedere, ricordare, dimenticare” (to see, to remember, to forget) from 2000 (photos 3 and 4, description of the work). Here, I won’t have any less difficulty because I would have to make you listen to a sound — that of a falling drop of water. You have to imagine it, and in reality, few (people) really heard this sound; at the inauguration of the exhibition, there was too much noise. As you can see, this time the subject is a space completely in the mind, that between seeing and forgetting. A memoir by Borges (Ireneo Funès o della memoria) and a film by Chris Marker (Sans soleil, Without the sun) were the infinite sources on this subject. The underlying idea is that seeing feeds itself off of forgetting, like remembering does off of seeing. There’s no difference between the drop that falls from the first bucket into the second and the other that ends up from the second (bucket) into the third — the sound of one is the echo of that of the other. In parentheses: have you noted that the sound of a drop of water is among those that get to us the most, but also those that are very easy to forget as soon as it ceases? Therefore, for the entire duration of the exhibition, every afternoon after the inauguration, the gallerist’s assistant took a long ladder and climbed it to pour all that was forgotten into the bucket at the top, that of seeing. All the private rituals, all of them, together maintain the order of the world.
At this point, I would like to say a couple of words about how I work. I define my work process as one of waiting. Classic examples of such systems are the photo cell that rings the bell when we enter a store, or another, more concerning, a carnivorous plant lying in wait for an insect. I construct installations that stay in a sort of sleepy standby, waiting that somebody curious or attracted or irritated of the setup falls into it, wanting to reconstruct that part of the work, which is not visible (for this, like the concept that follows, I redirect you to an article by Carlo Severi: presence of the primitive, masques and chimeras in the work of Joseph Beuys). I always have the fear that the themes that I take up are very elusive and delicate; due to this, over the years, I came up with a kind of method that I call “rarefaction” — I try to isolate as far as possible that which I want to say from every context (in the second example that I showed you, I removed almost everything; only the three black buckets remain and the sound of two drops of water, practically a little more than the title. In physics, rarefaction also means cooling and that is what I try, to freeze a concept in order to observe it better. The article by Severi on the presence of the primitive in the art of Beuys, which I mentioned before, and who I consider — just to show my hand here — one of my greatest and unattainable masters, speaks of the contrary, of those objects, usually of ritualistic use, in which, for example, a lizard, a human body, and the masculine gender are fused in a chimera. The effort of the primitive artist in choosing the features of the three elements to be highlighted, in alluding to others, and our parallel effort to construct a single form raise, according to me, the temperature of the work, just like when we compress a gas in a cylinder. In the more classical chimera, the griffin, the space is not only occupied by the body of the lion and the rostrum and wings of the aquilus, that we can see, but also by the head of the lion and the body of the aquilus that are not seen: they are all there, they’re constrained, but they’re there. When I lived in Berlin, I would often go to the museum of ethnology with my little son; in the long German winters, on many occasions, we warmed ourselves in front of the display windows of oceanic art and the habit of using the thermometer as an instrument to supplement a reading of the images has remained with me.
I’ll add a third and final installation with the title “voglio vedere il mare” (I want to see the sea), which I did in the mountains, in the Brenner Pass last year (2004), filling up an old bunker in disuse with a ton of seawater (photos 5-18). I confess without much remorse that I did all this work (and it wasn’t less) in order to fulfill an old dream: looking at the mountains and feeling the fragrance of the sea at the same time. The title recalls the famous phrase of the dying Segantini: I want to see my mountains, which was also the title of one of the last great installations of Beuys. The bizarre effect of being in one place and feeling the odour of another is rather, if you’ll permit using the word, destabilizing, perhaps because the olfactory is an archaic sense in which we put a lot of trust and when, evidently, it tricks us (we’re not at the sea!), we feel a subtle discomfiture and also a comical one.
When I go to see an exhibition, I’m always irritated when I realize that my colleagues try to shock, when they use devices like virtuosity (the hyperbolic, unheard of). Some time back, I saw a series of images by a very famous photographer, clicked in a mortuary. The title was more or less: “wives beaten to death by their husbands” (photos, that I don’t have the slightest intention to show you, not because they are horrendous — that they are — but because they lack compassion, they redouble the death without the extenuating circumstances that an assassin could, or could not, have had). Instead, I’ll describe to you the work by a very capable colleague from Berlin, Manfred Butzmann. He spent months and months roaming cemeteries in North Germany because he realized that on the lapidaries from a period spanning the longest time (from ’600 to 1850, more or less), there were only the names of men. Often, however, was added the acronym USE that means und seine ehefrau: and his wife. Butzmann made an enormous amount of frottages (photos 19-28) of these lapidaries using a white, diaphanous cloth and then attached these shreds of fabric to the wall with two small nails in a huge room, leaving the door and a window open; a light wind ruffled the walls covered with these pitiful kerchiefs. And, I swear to you that it seemed you could hear the screams of protest of all those women who were robbed of their names. I think that artists don’t need trickery, that they should be sober by nature. For the primordial way of thinking, it’s a real miracle that the branch turns green every year and, that when the branch is green, the planet is again realigned in that same position; for the scientific, instead, the miracle is that in an accelerator, the (subatomic) particles behave like they’re supposed to. The meteors, the extinction of dinosaurs, the roof tiles that fall on the head are all spectacular, but aren’t accorded any explanation because we know well that the world and life are mysteries. As regards figurative arts, I think that the manner of seeing — and of feeling for that which we see — has been the same, always, at all the latitudes and in all cultures. Studying these constants means taking the everyday experience seriously, and at times, also chasing the banality till it is constrained to tell us its secrets.
Tomaso Boniolo, May 2005
Bibliography
- Alexander von Humboldt: Viaggio nelle regioni equinoziali del Nuovo Mondo (1807), Italian edition, Palombi, Roma
- Jorge Luis Borges: Ireneo Funès o della memoria (1944) in Finzioni, Italian edition, Einaudi, Torino
- Chris Marker: Sans Soleil (1982), Nouveau Pictures DVD [English version, also contains La Jetée (1962)]. IThe complete text of the letters “of Sandor Krasna” appeared in the French magazine Trafic (1983?)
- Carlo Severi: Présences du primitif (1992), in Les Cahiers du Musée National d’Art Moderne n°42, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
photo 5-18
Photos 19-28
