The role of the spectator is a delicate and difficult issue currently being taken up in contemporary art. It is precisely though the consideration of the spectator’s position that a concrete difference from the great machine of mass communication can be seen, and it is in this consideration that art takes back for itself a certain autonomy and a profound reason for existence.
Eva Marisaldi, Liliana Moro, and Grazia Toderi have contributed much to this debate. While on a superficial level their works may seem quite different, it is evident that on a deeper level they share many common problematics. What ties them together is related to that same persistence with which these three artists, for about a decade, have been raising analogous questions and in turn providing varied responses.
Leaving behind relations of genre and generation, I will bring to the forefront three important elements in their works: the gaze, the game, and narration. Gazes which cut through the work and speak directly to those who look at it; simulated games, represented and lived; unfinished narratives, suspended and interrupted – together these aspects of their work reveal a profound communicative adroitness and knowledge. This aptitude can be heard in differing nuances in all three of these artists, who linguistically in their pieces mark a definitive break in regard to the central problematics of art of the past decade, and a fundamental step for artists (both male and female) of the current generation.
The Gaze
To focus upon the spectator’s attention, or at least to foresee the spectator’s position as a work unfolds, is no new task either within an artistic context or in the context of mass communication. The open work of the 1970’s, the sensorial involvement of the happening, the actual physical presence of the spectator that is required by a performance art piece, the installation made to create a space into which the spectator must enter – these are only a few of the approaches which show that for several decades artists have been exploring modes of communication with their audiences, and moreover establishing with their audiences a process of substantial exchange which is aimed at giving shape to the ultimate form of the work of art itself. The same is true for theater, one thinks for example first of Brecht, and more recently of the new theater of the seventies and eighties), as well as for cinema, from Eisenstein to Hollywood, and for the logic of television. The twentieth-century spectator occupies an ever increasingly important position, and at times the rules of the game do not allow them to remain passive in the face of what they see.
In the works of Eva Marisaldi, Liliana Moro, and Grazia Toderi one often finds traces of “signs” which indicate the modality of the work’s fruition, or the way in which the work may be comprehended -- signs which give advice to the spectator without reducing to a conceptual machine a piece that is an emotionally involving vision.
What comes to my mind first of all is the appeal for attentiveness which is present in several works of all three artists. By appeal for attentive I mean the grouping together of devices of various types in a way that more or less directly points to a modality of looking suggested by the artist herself. The works of these artists ask for a gaze that is consciously focused and which does not end in contemplation tout court. From their works emerges the desire to put into action an exchange which is considered to be crucial to the work, and in some cases even constitutes the piece, and is not an added feature displayed simply for show. There is the desire that the spectator experience the viewing of the work as a voyage in which the other occupies a position that is fundamental in every aspect.
Eva Marisaldi, on more than one occasion, has included in her installations written directions that accompany the visual part, and which are like a sort of user’s manual. They are not intended as a constraint, and indeed are often lightly inscribed on aluminum. More than impositions they seem to be advice, a sort of internal caption to the piece which removes a part of its ambiguity without eliminating all together its ambiguity. Such captions point out a possible way to approach the piece. The theater of Brecht again comes to mind, in which the use of the sign-board does not impede the engaged gaze of the spectator, but instead serves mainly the function of giving the spectator special access to the work. It breaks the integral enchantment of the spectator while at the same time it keeps in tact his or her sense of vision. In Marisaldi’s La portata umana è nulla [The human carrying capacity is zero], 1993, — a well of quicksand three meters deep – the following note is given: “The well is three meters deep. Its capacity is four thousand liters. The human carrying capacity is zero. It was not created to cause damage. This is an invitation to pay attention.” The note has a contingent function (a warning to avoid the risk of falling into the well), but the figurative aspect of the note alludes to the relationship between attraction and fear that is triggered by looking at the unknown. In Ragazza materiale [Material Girl], 1993, the gallery is divided into two parts. In each half, various objects are on display. In this installation as well there is a set of directions, very explicit, which suggest the modality of approach preferred by the artist: “A false wall divides a room in two, proposing two different focal points. You are asked to go to only one of the two halves. You can complete what is missing from your viewing, through what others tell you or remain with an incomplete experience.” The note in this case invites us to open up a relationship with other spectators, to trust them if we want a complete vision of the show. It invites us to notice, once again in the figurative sense, that the idea of “seeing” everything by ourselves is not only illusory but more precisely impossible. With these assumptions we have in front of us two possible roads to take: the unresolved desire which each person completes by imagining that which he/she did not see, and the opening up of a relationship with the other. Although directions are extended to the spectator it is not obligatory that one follow them, however respecting them makes sense in the context of a specific reflection, not only on the incompleteness of viewing but also on the unavoidable panorama of differences built by possible stories that describe the “missing part” told by different people.
Moving on to Liliana Moro, when I speak of the appeal for attentiveness in her work, I intend both the process by which the artist on more than one occasion puts into play “lowering” or “reduction”, and also her work on dimensions. I am thinking in particular of Abbassamento [Lowering], 1992, a parade of thousands of paper dolls in front of a conglomeration of medieval constructions that are also in miniature; Carne [Flesh], 1992, an installation in which a variety of stucco-filled vases brimming with toy soldiers are displayed on the ground; Città [City], 1994, a proper city made of cardboard, complete with electric lines and pulsing little red lights. To conceive of a reduced scale, miniaturized and spread out on the ground, is to ask a specific movement of the spectator. The artist, asking me to stoop down, is also extending to me an invitation for concentration. She is telling me that it is not sufficient to sweep over the work with a glance from above and move on, but instead that an explicit movement of my body is necessary. I must get close to the work that is calling out “look at me,” but according to different rules than those to which I am accustomed. The usual exposition of a show in which one gets up on stage, or in which a piece of art is put on a pedestal for display, is overturned by Moro’s work along with the implications of such traditional gestures.
Moving finally to the gaze as it is put into play by Grazia Toderi, it is evident that in this case the terms are laid out on a temporal plane. A recurrent theme in Toderi’s video installations is the use of a fixed image, or an image that varies only slightly, for an extended time (usually around thirty minutes). Such images seem to be related more to painting than film, and the major difference from the former is the time requested of the spectator on the part of the artist, that is the duration of the video. This technique is seen for example in Autoritratto con problemi, problemi [Self-portrait with problems, problems], 1994, in which the image that appears is that of the artist under the helmet of salon hairdryer while a superimposed rolling text of Ingeborg Bachmann appears and disappears according to the average time it takes to read the text. In Zuppa di eternità e luce improvvisa [Eternal Soup and Sudden Light], 1994, the time of the image – the artist underwater who is trying to open an umbrella – is divided up by fades to black that follow the pattern of her breath. In the first case we are asked to experience the viewing by reading, spending a certain amount of time in front of the work (if I remember well about 80 minutes) in which things may happen, or else we can resign ourselves to going home with an incomplete viewing. In the second case, time is not visual but physical. It is an internal rhythm which allows one to go beyond the surface. If the use of the temporal dimension unveils a “hidden instruction manual,” we will see how the later work of Toderi, such as the 1997 video Terra [Land] becomes diversified to the point in which different temporal dimensions exist within the same work.
Narration
Even though personal experience is a fundamental reserve visible at first sight in the works of Marisaldi, Moro, and Toderi, all three of these artists are not interested in fully handing over lived experiences, nor in the exclusive construction of an autobiographical story. To tell one’s own story does not imply the display of an objective vision of the facts, but rather the authenticity of experience mediated by one’s own language. Grazia Toderi in Nata nel ’63 [Born in ‘63], [1996], uses powerful traces of collective memory such as images of the first man on the moon. But the history of the twentieth century remains in the background as the spectator’s attention is concentrated both on the cyclical movement of the doll in the foreground, and on the contrast between the doll and the supposedly ‘magnificent, progressive fortunes of humanity’. Narration is rarely developed, more often it is present through traces and is a resource that leaves the spectator free to imagine what happened or what is about to happen. Emblematic in this regard is Toderi’s Terra, to which I previously alluded. The work shows an airplane hovering above a runway but it is unclear, for the duration of the video, whether the plane is on the verge of landing or taking off. This suspension gives us the freedom to give meaning to the work and inevitably brings with it an indelible gray zone.
Analogously, in the work of Marisaldi, the narration that unfolds through traces plays on the presence of “white spaces” that give a relief to the spectators. Molte domande non hanno una risposta [Many questions have no answer], 1997/1998, was a work born from the artist’s request that various people and friends pose a question to her. In the show Marisaldi gives form to her responses either through something she has written, with drawings, photographs, objects she has chosen, and even by asking two other people to curate her own show. The result is a polyphonous portrait of great intensity that is simultaneously a group of questions in front of which the spectator feels immediately personally involved, even before he or she has seen the response chosen by the artist.
Moro has worked in more than one occasion with fables, using stories as a soundtrack that is as important as the visible elements of her installations. In Autoreverse [Automatic Rewind], 1992, the vases used in Carne occupy one room of the gallery, while in the other darker room one listens to various fairy tales simultaneously read by the artist. She not only plays the role of the narrator in the tales, but also does the voices of each of the charcaters. Repetition eliminates the final word of the stories, which go on without end, thus the title Autoreverse. Moro’s work, Nessuno [No one], 1993, again is extremely interesting in regard to the spectator’s role. In the gallery are four loudspeakers from which one hears a person reading the director’s notes from Beckett’s Happy Days. Moro gives us elements for the construction of the theatre set, but not the set itself. The presence of one little house has an evocative value: for the construction of our own “happy days” we can rely only on ourselves. In Intermittenza [Intermittence], 1994, Moro constructs a small theater (again, it is a set without a scene) with a loudspeaker that plays the text of Mariangela Gualtieri’s Antenata [The Female Ancestor]. Words about absence, “io sono la mancanza – la mancanza che sono – sono ciò da cui manco – sono tutta mancanza – e non c’è nostalgia – essendo ciò che manca – adesso e sempre io” [“I am absence – the absence that I am – I am that from which I am missing – I am only absence – and there is no nostalgia – being that which is absent – now and forever it is I”], together with the presence of the voice create an “intermittent” space in which the spectator is lead to live their own absences and their own presences.
The game
Reflecting on history and on the notion of the game, Giorgio Agamben departs from the rule that Lucignolo tells Pinocchio when the latter arrives in the Land of Toys: “Each week is made up of six Thursdays and one Sunday. Just imagine if fall vacation began on the first of January and finished at the end of December.” This is the point of departure that Agamben uses to explain the antithesis between the ritual and the game in which the first “fixes and structures the calendar preserving the continuity of the lived” and the second “alters and destroys it, dissolving originary sacrality into human time”.
The game that is present in the work of Eva Marisaldi shows exactly human fragility, (evidenced in the patchwork cloth dolls with multiple malformations in I rimandati [Those who are sent back], 1992), danger (the wooden dolls of her 1992 work Controfigure [Counterfigures] that break when they bend), but also a collective experience that implies a certain responsibility (the coloring books of Progetto torpore [Torporific project], 1992).
In the work of Liliana Moro as well the game augments the subject’s relation to reality, rather than creating distance as it may seem at first sight (it is not by chance that Agamben points out that miniaturization is a process which transforms reality into a game). The game in Moro’s work is a device to keep alive a tie to childhood (through the activation of the gray zone of imagination), but most of all to tell cruel stories with no happy ending thus creating space for an authentic experience that neither offers consoling solutions nor needs to use pure autobiography in order to manifest itself.
Toderi’s work is very different in this regard. The game, which in her current show at the Castello di Rivoli functions as a type of overarching theme, allows her to stage desire as an alternate dimension, far away and different from any contingency. Her work in this regard is motivated by the desire to represent aspects of the human condition that remain without any concrete specification, and indeed we see that the figures in the Castello show are so dark that we can only imagine their faces. Atrio [Atrium], 1998, is a diptych in which two figures, a man and a woman, are filmed from behind. It occupies the internal space of the Castello di Rivoli which joins the women’s and men’s quarters. In the installation both the man and woman throw a ball. The woman throws one ball at a time into a dark door in front of her, the unknown from which mysteriously it is returned. The man is juggling without feeling the need to interact with anything outside of himself. In contrast to the work of Marisaldi and Moro, in which we see the game used as a code which enables them to talk about the world that surrounds them, the game as it is used by Toderi moves in the opposite direction, that is, it moves away from the specific and is the key which gives access to the transcendent. Thinking once again of Agamben’s reflections about the loss of the sacred in the game, one can perceive the desire to return to a confrontation with the sacred, reopening a dialogue, no matter how difficult, with an absolute dimension.
Together Marisaldi, Moro, and Toderi tell us of experiences that go beyond the knowledge that creating art means to communicate and to share what is common between us. Their works contribute to an ongoing larger process aimed at a re-reading of postmodernism which moves away from some of its more superficial and resigned aspects. It is not enough to work on declensions of the readymade. Marisaldi, Moro, and Toderi know this, and they speak a common language reinforced by the desire to imagine autonomous hypotheses able to move beyond the tired criticism of the present.
Copyright © : Emanuela de Cecco, June, 1999
N.Paradoxa : Issue No. 10, 1999