Mostra personale di Marco Chiurato
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A margine di una mostra vissuta
Come in un teatro di posa uomini e donne, loro parti, sono colti nell’anonimato. Calchi di gesti normali, o semplice apparire di una sessualità onnipresente che, nella cultura moderna, rivela in maniera goffa il bisogno di sacro.
Affascinati dall’efficacia degli strumenti perdono di vista l’infinita immensità del cantiere, che è la vita, la sua coscienza. Se macchina costruita dalla ragione, essa dà risultati prevedibili; se altro, almeno incuriosisce per l’incertezza e la diversità.
Ad ogni passo della mostra affiora il paradosso, non evidente, schiacciato com’è dalle immagini-oggetto. Nel giardino, il burka è un ‘campo’ senza confini, una improbabile gabbia di voli e seduzioni sfuggenti, all’unisono come vuole la solitudine vera. L’ingresso è facoltativo, per nascondersi o apparire. Il velo, del resto, è proposta, distanza che chiede di essere coperta, riconosciuta e anche condivisa.
Il frastuono parigino, sotterraneo e costipato, nasce dalla frenesia, dall’esibizione ripetuta, anonima e sullo sfondo paesaggi popolati da corpi senza volto, coperti da un velo bianco, diverso dal burka per colore e stanchezza. Donne o uomini?
Ermafrodito, figlio di Hermes e Afrodite, è equilibrio, segno di un’unione perduta che i testi sacri ricompongono nel rapporto fra generi. Come ci ricorda Ida Zilio-Grandi (con cui mi scuso per l’incomodo) ‘nel Corano è detto che Dio creò l’intera umanità da un’anima unica, e quest’anima è di genere femminile, e che poi creò il suo compagno di genere maschile. La tradizione esegetica successiva si affanna per rendere la prima anima maschile e il sopraggiunto compagno femminile, per armonizzare il discorso coranico alla tradizione biblica cosiddetta yahvista. Ma, in realtà, il Corano sembra proporre l’idea, anche questa biblica, è la tradizione ‘sacerdotale’, di un essere umano unico bipartito e duplice, composto di due parti reciproche e complementari’. Una goccia d’acqua cade sulla testa di ermafrodito come su un fiore pronto a disperdere le sue spore nelle ali di uccelli, diversi per itinerari e fiducia nel vento.
L’emulazione denuda, ti priva della certezza di non essere emulato. Cristo, in questo, non ha paragoni (almeno per i cristiani e per chi ne esalta l’irripetibile testimonianza). Egli può guardarsi allo specchio senza timore, perché non è lo specchio che ha soppiantato la sua immagine, emblema dei teologi scismatici citati da Borges in Aleph. Il profilattico rappresenta una verginità dolorosa (il suo calco, forse), l’impossibilità di procreare un essere della sua grandezza, ma anche un dono, l’impedimento ad una insostenibile sofferenza per chiunque altro. Nello specchio Egli vive la solitudine, l’abbandono della Croce, e ripete silenzioso il suo urlo lancinante, l’attimo che precede la sua morte sul Golgota e il tremore della terra. E’ noto il seguito: un mondo fattosi macello dove la donna, forse più dell’uomo (anche per via della ‘armonizzazione ‘ fra i testi) è fatta a pezzi. Per la ‘meraviglia del mondo’ è ricomposta in un bancale di sette piani (sette come i giorni della creazione, riposo compreso) dove culi e tette d’asporto attendono la conta e l’imbarco a prezzi cif o fob, dipende dal cliente. La destinazione è il piacere di una sigaretta dopo l’amplesso, attendendo l’esito di quattrocentosedici piccoli viaggi verso il noto destino. Una pausa che sconsiglia la scelta fra sessantatre possibili joint di ganja: per dire, molti spunti di pochezza a confronto di piccoli-grandi piaceri.
Difficile resistere e far valere la propria identità. Un pavimento di bambini incollati e diversi, e tutti uguali, ci ricorda la nostra normalità: feti con gambe già adulte (noi ancora bambini) circondano un diverso. Forse mi riconosco in quella solitudine, anche se qualcuno viola la regola d’ingresso consigliata dall’artista.
Domenico Patassini, per Marco ‘distratto dalle sue opere’.
Marco Chiurato
After thirty years of pictorial-extrapictorial experiences linked to the body as an "artistic locus” (1960-1990), that chapter of history seemed finished. The human body - usually male – was conducted to its extreme assimilation to mass communication (the body as merchandise, a duplicate, a tautological body). We should recognize that the diverse research attempts lead to a multiplicity of “restitutions” through different languages and techniques: photography, paintings, performances, videos, polymaterial sculptures.
This artistic trend, initiated by the great Francis Bacon, Piero Manzoni, and Yves Klein in the 60s, brought art to that sense of “total space” through numerous stabs into matter reaching a superb synthesis: poetry, anguish, allegory, symbol, humour.
Never before did the “human mass” almost seen as a “res estensa” undergo such an incursion in the attempt to answer to the new inquiries of the counterculture. The result was given back to conceptual art: the res cogitans as the extreme result, the idea of art...art as idea, art as product, the artist as art.
Marco Chiurato was born in 1973, when these events had reached the climax of this creative explosion. But Chiurato has had the fortune to present himself in the contemporary scenery being biographically similar to various generations (pertaining to the eighteenth and nineteenth century in particular) who with their work managed to pierce an epoch. This breakthrough reached its greatest climax during the turn of this century. The artist in this way, although not aware of the stimulating and rich atmosphere preceding him, investigates – through different paths – the bodily universe between primary phenomenon (that is to say pertaining to psychic phenomenon and in part instinctive-subconscious) and secondary object (that is to say the product of culture).
Chiurato, not fully conscious, passes through these first years of the millennium 2000, thirty years after those pioneers who made their first artistic researches on the body and at the dawn of the new millennium. He starts his artistic production with the humour, the impudence and the existential curiosity, typical of the young. There is an instinctive desire to play with life head on and there is also the world of sentiment. The first movement, that particular “affrontement” inevitably pushes the artist towards the great challenges of the relationship between couples and the inquiries of the single, that is to say the existential questions on love affairs and personal identity.
We left him in 2005 right in the middle of that “Pandora vase” without a lid which represented the exhibition “Sculptured Passions”. The tropic line of that research can be found between two works. The first one consists of a tomb-stone where one finds the following words: “correspondence of the love senses”, with three plastic flowers and the mould of a hand imprint. This work-installation represents the exile of objective existence from the world. He is a true Klein follower, saute dans la vie, a leap into life, almost as if an interior eye opened itself to a new form of consciousness or to a series of questions never before asked. This journey includes all the existential stopping points: suffering, impotence, cruel destiny, hope, fear, death, linked to the annihilation of all the correlated emotional gradations.
The second work, is a kind of plate in terracotta, similar to those chocolate augural plates that the artist composes on his cakes in the laboratory underneath: “you can’t ask me to be like Her.”
There is a heart, a kind of engraved “M”, somewhat recalling the female organ.
Although in an initial form, we find an intense work of personal elaboration where Chiurato unleashes in his own psychic universe (primary) and generally this should occur in the closed spaces of his ego or in the psychoanalytical room. Chiurato instead wishes to operate in close contact with the secondary place par excellance: The cultural, the social, the world of acquaintances, of his friends, of production. In this sense, the artist accepts to include in his personal universe, the set of a work of transformation to begin a reverie where the largest number of people are asked to participate. He takes his risks by asking the participants, sometimes forcing them, to go beyond their condition of mere spectators, conscious of the fact that those who are watching are in reality watching themselves, and those who attempt to enjoy a product can actually be a sort of “producer”. In the struggle “head on” with the primary objects, inevitably and in first position, appear the sexual icons. But residual, emptied of the generating element and catalogued under gender and species, in anonymous alterations, almost as if it were the butchering of web pornography that cannot exhibit but body parts decontextualised and dissected. Eros and Thanathos, love and death seem to wander amongst the works leaving behind from place to place just as many realizations. The libidinous figures pertaining to the oneiric production or the unconscious of the artist make way to exceed the boarders of social resistance. Chiurato, not able to present himself as a hunter of “works made of skin” – in the manner of Harrison Ford in the film Blade Runner – applies himself to obtain moulds. Once again personal identity is achieved through material alteration. But the artist searches in the replicate, the narcissistic reproduction: in the duplicate, the artist in reality produces and reproduces himself. Therefore, the mischievous game of the total and crude material representation deprived of any identification becomes in a way cannibalised in the collection of trophies. The theatre of the non-personal, the non-intimate, becomes in this way a collection of the performances where the artist conserves – and signs – the formal reliquaries. The alienating work of a culture of professional services is brought here to its extreme consequences: what is alienated here is not the product of the producer, but it is the selfsame producer to become a product of the enjoyment of others. The spectator, maliciously attracted to the forms, becomes in turn the object in the standardization of communication.
Sometimes, the operation plays with the tautological transposition of the senses (“fly-dick” or “pussycat-pussy”) so frequent in psychoanalytical language: not at all a simple “spirit motto” that the horizon of meanings is sending to the multiple interpretations which the artist attributes to his world but offers to the interpretative work of the spectator.
The question of sexual identity presents a simulacrum-testimony of the difficult work of individuation: the gender, or sexual identity of gender which seemed until yesterday the new interpretative category, brings up new and problematic solutions: the search of “all” or of the indistinct: one and together two, male and female, autonomous and self-sufficient, independent and self-generating, depersonalised demiurge, omnipotent and at the same time impotent, diverse but tremendously “the same”. Icarus becomes an “adult” in the exact moment he falls into the sea of life.
Gino Prandina
11th September 2007
Introduction to the exhibition Sexibithionism.
The internet era has given us new interpretations on sexuality, recognized by many sociologists as a form of web surfers desire to search for body parts not necessarily belonging to a definite individual. The mind is intrigued with these anatomical elements at our disposal, already present in our personal fantasies under the form of fetishism. When the web is used to search for a relationship of friendship, a love affair or just sex, we create the identity we desire, idealizing the characteristics of our interlocutor and eliminating those barriers created by letters and telegrams. It is my conviction that the world of today is centered on the so-called singles, capable today of perfectly surviving the disillusions caused by weddings and romantic relationships. Furthermore, the political debate on the role of the family today and on the rights of the couple or the continual chattering around the legal unions of couples living together can be seen as an attempt, in an era of profound changes, to salvage whatever is left of an outdated and ineffective system. The founding values of society serve only to maintain a discrete group peacefulness, through the homologation of the so-called “normality”.
A similar period existed after the Merlin Act of the post-war era where entire areas of personal freedom were lost, throwing prostitution into the streets, and making pleasure a colossal business linked to organized crime. The brothels, similar to internet today, offered a place where male fantasies could take place, and the concubines were ready to stimulate desire through their gestures, body language, and the alcove.
Marco Chiurato open the doors of a house which may nostalgically recall the brothels of the past, with its atmosphere of turn of the century, which functions as a container for male fantasies that inspired so much literature and cinema.
The spaces which record this collection of patient work, exhibit penises, vaginas, bottoms and breasts. They fasten in the terracotta and in the plaster the consciousness, especially of the younger generations, that the human body can be seen as an object to explore with the same curiosity one can look at a technological gadget of unknown properties. Dozens of body parts that can be put together or taken apart like a puzzle of human flesh, which were donated by the exhibitionism and hedonism of common people. Our insecurities or ineptitudes become an alibi for a confrontation with others; therefore it is possible to show our intimate parts to others, reducing it to shreds while our name is safe. In this complex game of role-playing with false names and identities, the frustrations of different generations and where the triumph of the logic of market is realized. Never before has there been such a lack of criticism as in this society of school education for everybody and the will to idolize someone or something in exchange of our freedom of choice. Here the idolization regards the object penis, the object breasts, in the conquest of the dimensions, of forms and colours as we would like to see them in our fantasies.
A wall of breasts and the will of someone to exhibit without the necessity of showing their face, which is the anatomical feature that allows no space for malice, but only the consciousness of naturalness which becomes modelled sculpture without academic idealisms. The mere exhibition seen as a gesture to reify the possessed object, is the meaning of the butcher setting which wants to amplify the selling of flesh hanging on the ceiling before being cooked and eaten. It is a melancholic reminder of the so-called red zone in Amsterdam, organized accordingly to promote “fast love”.
In the center of a texture of unique pieces which cannot (maybe) be humanly repeated, stands out in its virginal nature, the hermaphrodite which explains how nature has foreseen so many possibilities, increased by man through surgery and opening new human prospects for some time now. The anonymous hermaphrodite is similar to the monument dedicated to the unknown soldier: each one of us can recognize ourselves in it whether born man, woman, hermaphrodite. This remains true if we choose to modify our own body, which deep down remains an outfit we model to learn who we are and who the others are.
Chiurato invites us to meditate on one last thought through the installation Different Children, which eliminates the judgement on what is different, the deviant element in society, by supposing that the choice of a majority on arbitrary laws can hide a presumed truth. A series of new born babies identical in their aspect are the premise of a human community who would like to consecrate the equality in behaviour rather than in ones rights, condemning sexuality as a form of moral filth. The newborns, placed on the ground, identical in their birth, will be different all the same because invited to follow different paths, to the prejudice of the inapplicability of imposed rules and in favour of new forms of aggregation which see in the body the architecture for animation of an internal vitality.
Davide Fiore
11th September 2007
SEXHIBITIONISM (Marco Chiurato)
OTTOBRE 2007
La mia attenzione cade su una mostra che aprirà tra due giorni.
Rileggo due volte l’articolo.
Dopo due giorni sono all’inaugurazione.
La mostra non é in una galleria o in posto dove normalmente le mostre vengono fatte: è una bella villa privata.
Si entrerà da un piccolo cancello in ferro battuto; si attraverserà un giardino ben tenuto e poi si entrerà nella villa.
Entro dal piccolo cancello in ferro battuto.
Nel giardino ben tenuto c’è già molta gente.
Faccio pochissimi passi e noto subito in fondo al giardino una grande voliera:dentro ci sono delle colombe bianche.
Stanno volando.
Sono quasi all’entrata della villa e mi rendo conto che la voliera con le colombe bianche è in realtà uno stupefacente “fermo-immagine”.
Non ho dubbi: sono già tra un capolavoro.
Esco in strada e ricomincio il percorso.
Entro in villa.
Sono nell’atrio o in un corridoio: è difficile capire, c’è troppa gente.
Riesco a vedere la prima stanza.
Esco in giardino e comincio a telefonare:
“Dovete venire subito!”
Ci sono tornato quattro volte.
Luca C Matteazzi
