allegato scansionato - Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea

00A_Saggio CrispoltiOKk2:02_Saggio Campiglio 12-03-2009 14:57 Pagina 29
Cavallo indomabile, 1984
Indomitable Horse, 1984
that gathering momentum of events and the manifold
creaking that comes from all over the edifice of worldwide
consumeristic optimism every day altered Vacchi’s
condition from that of a powerless prophet—a sort of
visionary Cassandra of the 21st century and hence entirely
aiming at being listened to and understood solely
in the future—to one of an involved present-day witness,
a credible indicator of a crisis already underway,
palpable and endured everywhere, albeit in different
ways. And in my view it is, if anything, the harshness
and complexity of the imaginative as well as ideological
and ethical implications of his painting—rather than
any insufficient clarity of his enthrallingly visionary
propositions, which are quite unequivocal—that constitute
an inevitable limit with respect to the immediate
appeal of “communicative correspondence”.
This means that even though the overall projection of
Vacchi’s imagination aims at constituting a proposition
substantially and unquestionably intended “for future
reference” (and as such certainly established on the
present-day scene as one of the most significant examples
of the possibility of such intimate testimony for
the future of the collective trials and tribulations of
our days), his vivid, imaginative pronouncements are
not necessarily confined to the status of hypothetical
divinations of catastrophe but also comprise at least disturbing
iconic propositions of a direct and dramatic
grasp of the monstrous and ambiguous reality of our
contingent present, both mental and behavioural, individual
and collective, in brief, of our horizons and
our memory. The topological visionary dimension
opened up by Vacchi’s figural imagination proves in fact
to be motivationally in a state of direct friction with
the contingencies of its present—more social and collective
than individual—just as much as Otto Dix’s
captiously accentuated realism with its evident eschatological
basis in the early 1920s. While the latter is an
eschatological realism developed through a merciless
analysis of the sociological contingencies—including the
everyday ones—of German society caught up in the lacerating
consequences of World War I, Vacchi’s factual
realism of visionary pronouncement works through
the present-day relevance of relations evocatively involved
in a perspective of common destiny.
These are the basic motivations underpinning the complex
course of Vacchi’s pictorial exploration for over half
a century and unquestionably plotting a path of imposing
experience and multiple connections that is,
however, characterized precisely by the fact of being deliberately
“discordant” with respect to the clear and codified
context of the contemporary art scene. 16 This is “discordant”
insofar as it is estranged, extraneous and al-
Enrico Crispolti
ternative, reflecting a dimension of complexity of real
investigation in its development, in the field, as opposed
to officially institutionalized models that are now
worn out, rundown and, in a word, innocuous, as can
be seen in increasingly explicit terms on all hands. And
precisely to the point of having by now actually codified
the recognized distance of detachment—and indeed
the substantial cultural and social gap—characterizing
the activities of both the major and the medium-large
public museums, galleries and institutions, and not only
in Italy (from the Venice Biennial to Documenta, in
particular, as well as the various bodies operating in
Italy, such as Macro, Maxxi, Gnam, Gam, Gamec,
Madre and Arcos, etc.). This institutional activity is in
actual fact wholly centralized and functions solely in
terms of pressure groups, thus being repetitive, trite and
soporific but for this very reason also certainly harmless
on an art-critical plane and marked by intellective
speculation, as against the vivacious and multifarious reality
of unfettered, varied and unpredictably stimulating
investigation that is freely developed elsewhere. Underpinning
this is in any case the intensification of a
schizophrenic clash within the sphere of artistic culture
to which I first drew attention on various occasions
over ten years ago. 17
By adopting a lobby-directed, defensive mentality to
invalidate and sterilize any area of possible confrontation,
this institutional activity works more than
ever today to force into a dimension of solitary opposition
those in particular who, like Vacchi, have
continued over the years to express intimately antagonistic
and critical imaginative propositions of such
power as to turn their solitary choice or deliberate
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