allegato scansionato - Archivio Crispolti Arte Contemporanea

00A_Saggio CrispoltiOKk2:02_Saggio Campiglio 12-03-2009 14:57 Pagina 31
“discordance”—aimed as such precisely at a form of
communication that finds fulfilment in its subversive
impetus substantially as testimony “for future reference”—into
a present-day challenge. In fact, they turn
it into a relentless warning on a massive scale that
can indeed scarcely be ignored already in the present,
in the depressing vacuum of invention currently due
to the crushing levelling effect of demotivating, hetero-directed,
globalized consumerism—when the invasiveness
of globalizing institutional indifferentism
does not indeed prompt the growth of deep dissatisfaction
and discontent to levels of almost insurrectionary
opposition, the assertion and organization of
radical otherness and peremptory defence of the freedom
of expression and the possibility of free exchange
of ideas between the various explorations carried out
in the field. This sort of impatience does not, however,
fit in with a long-range critical and monitory
stance like the one chosen by Vacchi.
At the same time, if the most authentic basis of artistic
investigation can now be identified precisely as an
individual alternative capable of opening up a possible
different cultural pathway of existential identity (albeit
one that, as noted above, is constantly involved in
creative renewal by its very nature), the condition of
free exploration, when substantially innovative, can
only prove to be a minority position in sociological
terms and one that must consciously pay the inevitable
penalty. This is because its avant-garde propulsive force
manifests itself in the capacity of motivations individually
generated and expressed in innovative contrast
to the prevailing tastes, ideas and conventions of the
culturally and socially dominant majority, which in the
present situation proves to be more than ever the object
and victim (albeit often in conscious collusion) of
an invasive globalization of a consumeristic, levelling,
demotivating and deindividualizing nature. It is in the
awareness of this inexorable alternative condition as its
contextual mode of being and operating that the “discordance”
deliberately chosen by Vacchi as a margin of
resistance originally took shape over time and still asserts
itself to guide his increasingly individually motivated
creative steps moment by moment. Not as avoidance
of confrontation with reality, but on the contrary
as the possibility of further subjective fulfilment of allembracing
and wholly objectified realities. And this
takes place precisely in the outcome of the prophetically
alarming, monitory objectivization of the process
that characterizes the particular condition—deeply participative
through the self but ultimately stretching far
beyond a horizon of the self—that Vacchi has identified
and described as “self-devouring” over the last few
Enrico Crispolti
years. 18 As Tonelli points out, this is “not expressionistic
reaction or expulsion, violent onslaught or revolt,
but painful meditation, slow absorption and organic
transformation of the visionary capacities prompted
by an unconscious mass that is forced and penetrated
by history, facts and reality. [...] Vacchi recounts the organic
transformation of the self into ‘history’ or transpersonal
event.” 19
We thus have a process of the actualising introjection
of reality that takes place through deep and total remotivation
of the fullness of personal existence at the
subjective, individual and existential level: a process of
“autophagy” or “self-devouring” within which, however,
the subjective dimension, experienced all the way
to its extreme mortification of passional intensity, finally
re-establishes itself in an overwhelming form of
objectifying imaginative extroversion capable of transforming
the plunge into the individual abyss into a
possible revelatory image of a contingent collective
moral climate. In this way, we have a sort of “introjective”
reversal of every nexus of ideological, civil and
social passion—or collective memory and history—
within that whirlpool of “autophagic” existential passion
(and at the same time of invigorating passional escalation
of the imaginative visionary dimension), in
which the moods and pipedreams of actual experience
are taken to extremes and metabolized along with setbacks
and failures at the human level, fear, terror, regrets,
cultural intentions, hesitations, desires, dreams and
defeats. At the end of this, through extraordinary evocative,
self-prompting and self-stimulating passion, the
yardstick of mere accentuated, extreme subjectivity
(which remains crucial) is finally resolved in an objectifying
epiphany of mysterious premonitory rituals. As
though involving within its own development the possibility
of a more extended process of catastrophic premonition
of overall “self-devouring” of the reality of the
time, and indeed the most urgent realities of our day,
of the various societies of today, beginning with the
dominant ones, as well as the very reality of nature. And
Vacchi is committed to bearing witness to this destiny
and the alarming final condition suggested in an extreme
act of awareness and resistance through an objectified
range of imaginative propositions of the utmost
intensity and visionary, creative abundance.
Through the “autophagic” vortex of his lived experience
he develops a merciless process of mental self-revelation
and self-acceptance displayed through imaginative
emblematic references of an archetypal, mythic
and biblical nature resolved in images that are deeply
disturbing when they are not deliberately annoying
and alarming.
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