#tellthemisaidno

[theexquisiteplot]

Planning to withdraw from the art world ?#tellthemisaidno #martinherbert #theartistjustleftthebuilding #institutionalcritiqueweek #myunpopularposts

[lisa-andreani-blog]

Emptiness is not always a lack of critical visions [ENG]

Two weeks ago I bought a new bibliography branded Sternberg Press. Here I want only to point out one of the protagonist of the book “Tell them I said no” so as to raise up some reflections. The author, Martin Herbert, collects ten essays related to various artists who adopted an antagonistic position toward the art world and its mechanisms. My desire to underline one of these artists, the not so famous Christopher D’Arcangelo, is connected to this shared need to diverge and go far away from the trajectories of the society. I think that most important thing to highlight of this figure is his ability to formulate the right questions and, in addiction, the real paradox is that he used the void, the blank space as the only one answer. A blank that has something in common with this power of discretion that I’m working on. Reach the aim of a dematerialization of art was a travel that D’Arcangelo started in a condition of overlapping contexts (the 60′s and 70′s) where the zeitgeist played its role. Few are the documents about him, few were the institutional actions that he made during his short career, only from 1975 to 1979 when he decided to suicide. Surely the main credo of the artist could once again stress this power an empty space.

“When I state that I am an anarchist, I must also state that I am not an anarchist, to be in keeping with the (….) idea of anarchism. Long live anarchism.“

Later, since the action that he made in the Louvre in 1978, the absence started to be the establishment of his presence. Thus, when he decided to lift Thomas Gainsborough’s Conversation in a Park (1745) off the wall, he left a open question and got away. No traces of him there, only an empty space where was pinned the following question:

“When you look at painting, where do you look at that painting? What is the difference between a painting on the wall and a painting on the floor?”

The concept of a blank space changed shapes when he transformed it in something that belonged to reader and spectator. His intervention in the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art’s journal was a sort of void page gift with which anyone could do everything, also installed it in anyplace in the viewing space of LAICA. A gift that was also a transfer of control from the institution to the viewer. The same open opportunity was presented in another action when D’Arcangelo brought a large quantity of flyers at the Metropolitan Museum for a proposal of an Open Museum where for seven consecutive days any one wishing to install an artwork or an object or to performing could do that. The upsetting actions of D’Arcangelo left forever an empty space for an answer which maybe will never be completed. Just because the creation of a new society and approach in the art world but not only is not so easy to realize, today in particular, but the ability to construct a conversation where point out good and critical questions is perhaps a start.