Page 9 - TOP 10 CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS - Volume I
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ingenuity, and honesty that save us from something that does not belong to him.
vulgarity. However, it is difficult to ‘find’ Because he has been persuaded of the
ourselves in times that smell of death, fact that he creates his own works he is
corruption, and rot. But reality does not firmly convinced he is the author of these
have a stench; it is corpses that smell and works. ON THE CHARACTER OF ART Art
the cities are full of them. In the hands of (and hence literature) has no gender; it
these corpses everything is vulgar, even is neutered and ambiguous. More than a
nature itself. I suffer immensely from ‘being’ it is a ‘being-able-to-be’. Eugenio
having to see nature made vulgar, and Montale was one of the first to say as
even more so from having to admit that much. It is a perennial question that never
this is possible. “Bodies, indeed, must gives an answer. It always asks questions,
be disposed of more than excrement putting in doubt the sensitivity of those
itself.” Heraclitus. By exasperating the who would question it. It is ungraspable,
Greek concept of art, modernity has unspeakable, a suspension, an altering of
rendered the concept of creation an the logical rules proper to the kingdom of
absurdity. Creation is an absurdity as ‘ex paradoxes - a contradiction that cannot
nihilo nihil’, meaning nothing is created do without itself. It lives through imitation,
from nothing. The modern artist, like the simulation, and fiction. The only form of
‘author-demiurge’, is a presumptuous sincerity that can be gleaned is that it
madman as he is devoid of the sense does not deny the drama of existence,
of necessity. He is an ungainly ape - a the tragedy of human life, precisely
tragic ape. The tragedy is underpinned when it is called on to give an answer to
by fixed, insurmountable canons: the these questions. But even if it managed
subject of deciding is the subject that to propose solutions, these would be
must be decided. This is the revelation of impossible to realize in reality, because
its comic nature. The ‘author-demiurge’ art is always a fleeing from real time, a
becomes a mad, pathetic clown, aping temporal negation that, in order to affirm
himself; a tragic ape persuaded of the itself, annihilates the concept of art itself.
fact that the being is nothing. Faced
with necessity he seems to be limited in A. Pagnes ©World Of Art magazine
his movement, stupidly haughty about
