Lo scintillio della seduzione
“Next to the driver sits a woman; why doesn’t the man tell her something funny? Why doesn’t he rest his hand on her knee? No, the man curses the driver in front of him because he’s going too slow, and the woman doesn’t even think of touching him with her hand – mentally, she’s driving too, and she curses him as well.” (Milan Kundera, Slowness, Milan 1995)
Today, more and more often, art serves as a bearer of diversity because it is a space for slowness. A “marginal” territory where the gaze sharpens on the insignificant and the infinitely small; the emotion of a gesture nourishes itself from touches explored with almost obsessive delicacy; time, projected into an unproductive dimension, stretches to accommodate an act that sometimes rediscovers meticulous manual labor, almost exaggerated. The work becomes a privileged domain for a “subtle” physicality and the “long” time of labor, in opposition to the speed of the media and the regime of pure virtuality that characterizes the contemporary.
Yet, never before has the fate of the work, outside of the artist’s studio, been so directly proportional to the extent and speed of its circulation. Mediatized, the exhibition, which by definition is the place where the work is offered for execution by its audience, in a necessarily contemplative dimension, multiplies in the fast consumption of visual messages on which our perceptual experience is based. The event replaces the exhibition, while the image replaces the work. The act it carries with it dissolves into the act of appearing, and in this form, the work fully participates in the vertigo of acceleration that defines contemporaneity.
“The most erotic part of a body is perhaps where the garment opens? (…) it is the intermittence, which is erotic (…) it is this sparkle that seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-disappearance.” (Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, Paris 1973)
Caught between being, which pertains to its ontology, and appearing, which concerns its existence in the world; between a phenomenological value that shifts into the dimension of the virtual and an ontological value that asserts its need for reality; between the slowness that originates it and the acceleration that makes it live, the work can find a hope of fulfillment. The “sparkle of seduction” lies in a fault where a comforting, plagiaristic edge, tracing the inconsistent contours of the image, meets a subversive edge that gathers the breath of humanity.
Balanced on this fault, the work consumes its state of precariousness, searching for an existence within the forms of appearance. But by riding this precariousness, it can rediscover meaning and assign meaning to its discourse on the world, presenting itself as a metaphor for a contemporary condition that, by relating to the work, more generally concerns humanity.
