“Twenty-two less two” an installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto
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Critique on “Twenty-two less two” an installation by Michelangelo Pistoletto 53rd Venice Biennale 2009 Thursday, June 4th, 2009
The main corridor of the Arsenale exhibition crosses the space which accommodates Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Twenty-two Less Two (2009), an installation that is constituted from 22 gold-framed mirrors against bright white walls. An expert’s formulation could be “Mirror and wood 22 pieces 300cmx200cm each”. The choice of the gilded and heavy frames implies a respective content. The content of a mirror should not be other than the reflections, and the manner that the mirrors are assembled could be the evidence.
Biennale had already started and even mirrors have always been an integral part of Michelangelo Pistoletto’s poetics, the visitors might have wondered about the simplicity of this installation. Pistoletto haven’t been for first time there but he has already participated nine times in the Venice Biennale (1966, 1968, 1976, 1978, 1984, 1986, 1993, 1995, 2003 and 2005) and most of these times his works were exploring the theme of reflection and the universality of the mirrors. His obsession and continuous work with mirrors led him to denote: “If art is life’s mirror, then I am the mirror maker.” (Michelangelo Pistoletto, Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, 1978). The mirror which reflecting yesterday someone, today reflects you and at the future will reflect someone else, for him this is the “point of connection between memory and future”. But also, a mirror is a window that always situates you at the center offering a 180 degree perspective looking around and theoretically situates you at the middle of the eternity showing that every spectator could be the center of the universe. As Pistoletto used to add a narrative element on his reflective objects, this time this element seems to be the
reflection itself. Within the gilded frames, on the surface of the mirrors, the reflection of the other mirrors untill infinity is visible. Even though the absence of the theme in the finite boundaries of this hall is meaningless, the absence of the theme in the infinity suggests the void as the ascendant issue with one exception: the presence of the spectator an inseparable part of these works. This placement of the self (everyone’s self) as the exception of the void should be the theme of an installation like this one.
The formation of the language that could express a questioning like the one indicated above is apparently supported by the emergence of the photography as the dominant means of representation. The intention to understand what photography is will be the module to reflect what this June 4th, 2009 installation is NOT. I will use the example of creative representation via drawings of the participants of important trials, in contradiction to Degas work. Degas, being clearly influenced by the first pictures, their random shots and the peculiar syntheses, he overcome the traditional structure of placing the theme on the picture, to represent – through a new methodology – the society of his time, when speed started to play a distinguishable role, and therefore, the role of the painter of people could not be other than his participation in their routine. What Degas saw in the pictures and reflected in his work, was the power of the media to objectively render what a random glance captures. A photo, even though at first seems to possess the time, it has not time in fact it is moreover an explicit expression of quiescence. The estate of the photograph to refer to time is actually its capability to present the space within the limits of its frame. Any change of its represented limits and its content causes radical modification. Isn’t therefore obvious the purpose of the use of creative representation in the court, and why all the vacillations, the emotional changes and reactions, during the whole period of the trial, have to be printed in a sole picture that will be later published in a newspaper page for the purposes of which it was initially produced.
Friday, June 5th. 2009
“…the artist put his final touch with the help of a wooden hammer during a crowded performance in the afternoon of June 5th.” ( artobserved.com ) I believe that the impression created by the space where the installation was situated on June 4th, was that of a big hall in a very important museum, or that in the lobby of a governmental building.
It had to be so striking that even the fingerprints on the mirror surfaces should have been a major disturbance. Still, Pistoletto made a performance in which he smashed all but two of his big "intangible" mirrors filling a large gallery as huge crowd watched adoringly and applauded ( www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2JwlFNUlg8 ). I am sure that this action caused rather shock than joy in the attendant audience. It is by all means a revolutionary action because, among others, it symbolized the collapse of the formal attitude towards art, although the purpose for which this exhibition was initially set as such was exactly that: to integrate the audience. Even though Pistoletto could perform this dramatized act alone before the exhibition started, he preferred to do this in public, and this choice was made for at least one more reason. He intended to show that the constitutional attribute of the mirror (reflection) is perpetual. A smaller part of the mirror presents the same reflection with a bigger mirror. That is something that never ends. Mirrors break, and as they break they are multiplied and through that they create a universe, and as they aggregate, they intensify the feeling of infinity. This action was chosen to be a public action so as the audience to witness the transition from one status to the other. Even through a materialistic perspective, the ruins are intangible and practically uncountable, and according to Pistoletto “they pass to a metaphysical dimension”.
"Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it." The famous expression of Mayakovsky, that at the language level, retains an incoherent resemblance with the act of the performance, at a substantial level renders with great accuracy what happened. One of the purposes of art is to identify ways to express what it cannot be told, and this is what Pistoletto actually does when he works on the issue of infinity.
1+3 ways to see the exhibition
Walter Benjamin introduces the notion of Messianic time in contradiction to Historical time. At the expectancy of a Messianic event, the life stills. For those who had seen the installation only on June 4th, and who knew or suspected what would follow, the exhibition, could do nothing else than to surrender in the quiescence, to the absence of time. What impact could that produce to the spectators? Even though they could be able to visualize through a mental procession the image after the performance, it is beyond any doubt that these spectators that suspected what would be followed had an urge to see the performance that was stimulated by the installation itself. It is clear that the event that would follow was an active part in that situation. and were interposing itself between the void and itself.
Sunday, 7th June 2009
The 53rd International Art Exhibition, “Making Worlds” opening.
In the antipode of what happened on June 5th, for those who visited the installation after the event one unique negative Messianic time stands. The impact of the event is so obvious and so strong that displaces what is seen from the first role and leaves to the apparent the mission to signify the event itself. The spectator tries to reconstruct through his imagination the course of action that proceeded that specific time. He observes the crack lines on the surface of the
mirror which divide the shivers and he tracks the strong strikes that have caused this result. The signs are what abstract our subjectivity from the historicality of the event. This is one narrative element which Pistoletto added to his installation probably unconsciously.
"dividere per condividere."The mirror reflects the self-portrait and the way of conceiving it was always a core theme in Pistoletto’s work. But unlike what happened on June 4th, the feedback that you get from the mirrors is not the pure image of self, but this varies. Through these crack lines in the mirrors, the whole scene is being endlessly fragmented. Through what remains from the reflective surfaces, the spectator could observe the image of his self endlessly repeated and fragmented. His could see, through the holes and shards the parts of his body to absent, or others to be partially duplicated. This duplication process even connected different and distinct forms in one –endlessly repeated- shape. He considered this duplication a way of sharing the world infinitely. And this exact expression of Pistoletto becomes more accurate and clear, if we discover its artistic origins, and the way he becomes integrated in this, using the mirrors as a tool. At first, Arte Povera, shares common attributes with pop art, in the sense that both use inexpensive materials and due to the fact that they both differentiate from the classic approach to creative representation. But yet, they are very different in the purpose they are meant to fulfill. Pop Art serves the capitalistic system of massive reproduction. Pistoletto, with his mirrors, suggested a democratic spirit. In that, his image represented "everyman," each of us were represented in the world by our images.
The mesh is the combat field. Paul Virilio said “eye’s function has become the weapon”. “Twenty-two less two” is a privileged scene where this quote applies. The smashed mirrors and the multiple reflections create a mesh in which all the spectators participate. This mesh shares the attribute that it does allow to multiple visitors of this installation to control the space but not on a peer to peer basis like before the mirrors smash. This makes the game of interactivity more interesting but also implies a kind of war. This war becomes more and more intensive because of the fact that most of the spectators hold a camera. You can watch and target with the camera through a series of reflections that the view of your opponent has not yet discovered. At the same time you can also be spied. Therefore, potentially, for every spectator, one pair of virtual spaces is thus created; his own private space that is controlled from his glance and the space that is controlled from those that observe him. These spaces are not geographically coherent, but they are capable to create structures of estate. Exactly as every estate being established in space has the power to control, it deters and blocks the subjects of power from free expression but at the same time, it retains the power to create.
Sunday, 22nd November 2009
The 53rd International Art Exhibition, “Making Worlds” closed
With the “Progetto Arte” manifesto in 1994, Michelangelo Pistoletto, referring to the artists, he set the question: “what role this world reserves for them?” What he suggested is that it is time for artists to consider the necessity of creating a relation between many other fields; to create a new structure through which art to become a socially responsible part. He discovered that there is a global power, an economic system that eliminates the differences to which the artists should resist, and they must be led to a re establishment of the ancient connection between art and power.
Pistoletto had presented "Seventeen less one", which features broken mirrors, at the Yokohama Triennale 2008. What led him to repeat a similar concept one year later, especially in a globalized environment where the artistic production becomes almost automatically global? I spontaneously recall Malevich who in 1915, painted the “Black Square” which was an attempt to transform in a painting what is unable to be historicized, and to paint one non-representative picture. What is paradox is that he continued to do this until 1924. Between the first painting of 1915 and the last of 1924, one substantial difference is laying.
Even though, everywhere the installation of Pistoletto is being referred as one fact, I have examined it as separate actions, in relation to the timeline that differentiate what it is conceived by the unsuspicious spectators. When using this pretext, I focus on the Event and I indicate the “violent” performance, to be the moment during which the whole incident was structured.
