Flash Art March-April 1999 (p. 49)

 

Giancarlo Politi is An Art Terrorist

 

To all Flash Art readers:

Flash Art is an art rag.  Giancarlo Politi is an art terrorist.  Together, they advocate violence against museums as a viable form of artistic expression.  While they only champion such actions in a thinly-veiled attempt to provoke their readership and increase circulation, they are directly inciting post-art kamikazes to attack and destroy living works of art.

Most recently, one such misguided disciple took a tamer to a sculpture on loan to the Kalamazoo Institute of Art from Detroit’s MCA.  American Beauty by Jef Bourgeau had portrayed a young child sleeping in her crib -- now her sleep is broken irreparably. 

Flash Art’s irresponsible journalism and Politi’s huckster advocacy of such art criminals as Alexander Brener can no longer be tolerated.  Only the totally ignorant could be taken in by this bogus extremism.  Posing as a sentinel of contemporary art, Flash Art is anything but – with Politi as its mouthpiece it only glorifies the destructive gesture, those hostile ideas that kill art.  Standing on the promontory of this century, what good is there to bash in the doors of our previous glories.  The function of art should not be to remind us of its deterioration, but to counter it.  Exactly what has made our culture falter has been its increasing inability to create the new. 

Taking all this into consideration, Detroit’s Museum of Contemporary Art believes Flash Art and Giancarlo Politi are aesthetically culpable for this most recent attack.  In lieu of immediate legal action, however, and to forestall any such future incidents, the MCA is willing to simply accept a more reasoned response to this letter than Mr. Politi is probably capable of composing,

Yours sincerely,

Peggy Kerr

Assistant Director, MONA, Detroit

 

 

Art, Sunsets, and Malaise

 

Dear Peggy Kerr,

I have always believed, perhaps mistakenly, that art must be a product of the society and cultural context in which it is created.  It should therefore also express the maladies and contradictions that this society produces.  In fact, if art is not to show us and emphasize these maladies then what is?  Perhaps you are one of those many innocent people who believe that art is solely and exercise in beauty?  This concept has been in decline for some time (if ever really existed in the first place), something I would have hoped that you had noticed in Detroit too.  Unfortunately this is not the case.

Defining me as an art terrorist seems to me to be rather excessive; even though I believe that, working within the ambit of art, a degree of permanent tension and attention is necessary in order to comprehend its motivations, demands, and continual mutations.  No lesser than Jan Hoet, formerly the curator of Documenta and currently Director of the Museums of Ghent, lucidly explained in the pages of Flash Art the motivations behind the artistic gesture of Alexander Brener, who is not exactly as criminal as you call him.

I do not sit behind a museum desk beatifically contemplating the horizon and its sunsets, but as I have said many times in the past I feel that I am perched on the rim of an erupting volcano.  I have never justified nor exalted those who for diverse motives, have destroyed works of art or simply added something of their own to them.  Rather, knowing perhaps a little more about the history of art than you, and above all knowing artists, I recognize the iconoclastic trait that runs through them all and, without ever justifying it, I try to understand it.  The new is frequently the opposite of the old because the young true artists possess an explosive energy that the old have since lost.  The making of authoritative art that has sense today means working in unexplored terrain and territory, it also means opening lacerating wounds and moving toward the unknown.  It is my duty, as the publisher of an art magazine with a strong following amongst artists and the public, to inform our readership about the state of this art, of our society and culture.  It is not my duty to issue prescriptions and pills for happiness about which I know nothing.

I shall leave the Prozac to you, Peggy, as no matter how terrifying reality may be I prefer tackling it with a clear and open mind.  I attempt to comprehend that drama and the motivations of the Kurdish “terrorists,” I feel for the desperate clandestine immigrants and I already have visions of new civilizations arising on the ashes of your American and my tired Europe in which millions of Muslims will have pacifically but inexorably invaded.  At that point our aesthetic concepts will be erased as everything will have to be rewritten, as has frequently happened in the past when one civilization or culture has been superimposed over another.  Art is today the only territory which allows me to anticipate this shifting scenario. 

I shall leave it up to you then, sweet, innocent art bureaucrat, to defend a condition of art and culture that has only ever existed in romantic fiction and within your “assistant director” mentality in Detroit.  The true artist has always been in the font line, ready to sacrifice and to be sacrificed for his ideas.  Not sat behind a desks preparing biographies and critical notes on works locked in storerooms. 

 

Giancarlo Politi