REFLECTIONS ON CONTEMPORARY ART
Sometimes I find myself thinking on the meaning of nowadays’ art, on the different kinds of today’s works and on the innovative power of nowadays’ art towards a standardized Society. It is not easy to find complete answers to these questions, but it is certainly possible to deepen the reflections. The end of the so-called short century is the end of that creative attitude typical of the avant-garde movements, in which Artists could share contents, aesthetic and formal features. Their expressive researches had led to a form of representation far from reality which ended up with the creation of abstract expressionism. All this meant the creation of absolutely unreal images which produced a more and more psychical and multiple approach to the work of art.
The postmodern, a word that I do not like as it reminds me of an easy way to label something hard to define- seemed to overturn the principles above thanks to the recovery of the real form ad by the eclectic but up-to-date revisiting of the aesthetical experiences of the past In that period, the absolute ‘alteration of course’ meant to propose art as a medium to move from what is nature to what is culture. But these days this seems to be an obsolete assumption: men are part of the nature, of the environment in which they live. Therefore, no clear separations exist between the environment by which they are surrounded and the culture they produce.
Today, globalization, the internet and the wide use of computers make the concept of postmodern obsolete. And this feeling has been very well caught by the Exhibitions, which contain informal, unexpressive, problematic, unpredictable works. Images are often cold, detached and they represent the most banal scenes of every day life. Repetitive video-works, digital sounds and images, cheap plastic materials, coloured pieces of paper and things from supermarkets are more and more used This, lead the Artist to be very far from the conventional professional classifications.
Today’s Art finds its origins in the aesthetic experiences of the Sixties and the Seventies, but it is clear that these considerations of mine are meant to give the reader a snapshot of the present, which surely dates back to old times, with its very complicated peculiarities. And all this needs time to be better assimilated therefore producing a clear and detached analysis.
In Contemporary Art, anyway, a lot of peculiarities can be found: the Artist’s action is less striking and he is free to be creative. The use of poor and basic materials is more and more widespread as well as the trend of using great urban areas for ephemeral works.
It is certainly an Art willing to exist in everyday’s reality and therefore it has got something political in it. This is a little detail but it must be considered. In a World which has been deeply changed by new scientific technologies, where all the ideologies of last Century (Capitalism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis…) have become obsolete, the Artists seem to be more interested in the formal features of the visual communication than in the personal, expressive contents of their own works.
So, can we have a revolutionary, unconventional, deviational Art, yet? Maybe not, because no more assumptions exist. The great ones like Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Picasso and many others operated in periods in which common mentality was far away from reality. And this feeling was very well felt, showed and expressed in their own works. They indeed broke with the social standards of their time by representing everyday life in a harsh and dramatic way therefore proposing a revolutionary, deviational Art.
In today’s globalized Society, there is something more: today’s globalized man is surrounded by personal and public problems caused by the sensation of loss of moral values and by the feeling of being powerless towards the globalized events.
Renato Cerisola
