Carmelo Bene – Four Moments on the Whole Nothing – 4°: Art
Translated from Italian by me (WTFPL).
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But if this – let’s call it so – artistic result is so vilely subordinated to the success decreed by the vision of others and to critical appreciation, the phantom aristocracy of symbolic work is degraded to a vile workplace, if not even shamed into a recreational-groupish good-for-nothing amusement.
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The history of art, with very rare exceptions, is a consolatory and decorative routine. And here no one wants to be comforted, on the contrary: I want to remain inconsolable.
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(Miserable) artists and relative (miserable) consumers.
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Ah, art… insane puzzle in the (official) moronic aid of abetting every Ministry of Cultural Heritage, set up to pamper the dead art-crusts for the sole purpose of warding off the quivers of life’s oblivious present moment, to arrange museum concentration camps for tourists who abuse their incomprehensibly-free time.
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What to do? […] We need to go beyond forms. This subtraction can also be obtained through an adding system, avoiding trivialities such as the white painting, the theater within the theater, random music, etc.
A feeling, isn’t this perhaps the only desirable recognition for any aesthetic product? A feeling incorporates all of our senses.
«When you tell yourself “I’m not a painter”, that’s when you have to paint.» Van Gogh. Neither painter, nor musician, nor reader, [nor] actor, etc. […] It is this extreme all-encompassing globality of the creator that can wipe out any relativity about the artist, and also proclaim the definitive decline of the sectoral critics.
Once the art of the history of art has been exceeded, every critical embellishment of existence is finally nullified, at last.
( Ed.: And then, he starts talking bullshit, which I’ll leave below, just for the sake of it. It’s inevitable, on the other hand, since unfortunately his passion is this horrible art form called theater, which can do nothing against cinema (the non-Hollywoodian one, of course). To justify these fools who wriggle on stage, it’s clear that it helps to paint the finished and material work of art as something negative, because then maybe the theater is going to be something better. The megalomaniac and narcissist Italian southerner – think of Black American Christian priests singing – is certainly fascinated by the crazy d’Annunzio-esque idea that the artist himself is the piece of art. Obviously, the human being is nothing other than the tragedy that he is, and only the finished material work that survives him after death can be the bearer, at the moment of its fruition, of that transcendence which otherwise, in front of these wretches who wriggle on stage, Bene included, is lacking; and it is lacking because the same human ridiculousness that they were trying so hard to overcome, happens to be on stage too. The piece of art, left alone and freed from its author, can finally soar in its perfection and emanate its transcendence. )
What matters in art is not the artistic product, but the working process of the craftsman in relation to which – here Jacques Derrida is impeccable – the work is nothing but a residual fallout, an excrement – in its etymon: what detaches and falls from the living organism of life. Art is life as a non repeatability of the event, living only once. And therefore the work is the dead matter, it is the corpse expelled by event. The destiny of each work of art is not in the work itself, it is in the art at work: it is the artist’s process of creation that transcends the work. It is the sensation that strikes us in front of Francis Bacon’s canvases. Above all, a genius is the one who exceeds his works: the act of artistic execution is more decisive than the doubtful work; and here I literally quote Derrida again: «Genius leaves traces, works, residues; but what is truly ingenious and artistic is found in the ductus: in the gesture of the signature, rather than in what remains of the signature.»
Hence every art would be without work, and perhaps without artists. By now reduced to a sort of mass collage, any artistic endeavor has the fate it deserves: from the escape from life to the intellectual labyrinthitis, from the reiteration of Wagner’s total theater to the hallucinations of multimedia, from the fickle gratification of the market to the bureaucracy of democratic commissioning.
The craftsman is never the author of his own work. He is himself, if anything, a living masterpiece.