Motion of a Nation
Galleria V.M. 21 Contemporanea, Rome, Italy
More than 30 international and Italian artists – working in video, installation and photography – contribute to Galleria V.M. 21 Contemporanea’s current exhibition, which ambitiously attempts both a ‘crosscutting view of the artistic scene’ and an examination of national identity, via an appraisal of the ‘flag’. Opening, as it did, within days of the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy, the show provided a timely opportunity for artists to address the notion of nationhood in a frank manner.
It was curator Antonio Arèvalo’s declared intention to avoid hosting ‘Motion of a Nation’ in a museum, so that the opportunities for resistance allowed by the gallery space could be engaged with freely – the point being that no museum in Rome, or indeed Italy, would permit the levels of subversion appropriate to the subject in hand. Whilst this is doubtless true in light of the closed nature of the Italian museum scene, such an explicit reference to the choice of ‘gallery’ over ‘museum’ surely necessitates that the subsequent gallery-held exhibition manifest precisely the kind of radical political message that the museum prohibits. Given the concrete political limitations of art as such this was always going to be a thankless task, but one that at least keeps questions as to art’s political capacity – or lack thereof – at the fore, whilst allowing for one or two important opinions to be aired along the way.
Italian artist Costa Vece’s Made in Romania (2005) – a Romanian flag composed of three appropriately coloured garments held together with pins – highlights Italy’s failure to assimilate its legal and illegal immigrants, whilst relying on cheap imports and labour to prop up its ailing economy. Similarly, Alejandro Vidal’s photographic triptych, A Song Before Sunset (2010), shows an Italian flag being hand washed in a plastic tub, mimicking a protest ritual common lately in South America. The implied message here is that Italy needs to clean up its act, rather than merely wash its hands of its duties regarding financial corruption, neglect of international and internal obligations, women’s rights, and so on. Similarly Marco Bernardi’s Black Flag, 2010, which waves back and forth atop a motorized armature in the centre of the largest of three rooms, implies that what is needed is a genuine, perhaps even anarchist, overthrow of the powers that be. That these things are implied rather than blatant is no fault as such. Art, after all, hints at, flirts with and generally skirts around the social and political sphere. One might ask whether a genuinely combustible art might even be desirable. Not because we shouldn’t aim for a better world, but because art ceases to maintain its detached critical distance when it results in genuine political confrontation.
All of this begs the question whether there is much point in political art at all, or if it is merely an elaborate distraction from more pressing realities. Yet although I often despair at political exhibitions, ‘Motion of a Nation’ could well have that despair backfire upon the gallery, due to its failure to capitalise on moments where individual talent shines through. Aside from the works mentioned above, these moments include works by mixed-nationality collective Alterazioni Video (Slovenia: Proposal for a New National Flag, 2011, comprising painted designs) and the photographic series, ‘Made in Italy: Sfoglie di Garibaldi’ (Petals of Garibaldi, 2010), by Stefano Scheda. Whilst the former work attempts a direct political intervention via a redesign of Slovenia’s flag in order to better differentiate it from those of other nations, the latter pictures a woman tearing through an Italian flag made of fresh Italian pastry, to reveal herself naked, yet in a pose so unassuming it deflects any eroticization. Garibaldi, from whom the work derives its title, like many other male national heroes and/or heads of State (Mussolini and Berlusconi among them), took the role of ‘Father of the Nation’ perhaps too seriously, having spent his life post-Italian unification secreted away with various mistresses on a private Sardinian island. The idea that political power, which is generally in the hands of men, should be a licence to cavort endlessly with (inevitably) less powerful women is still subscribed to in Italy today, to comic and tragic effect. Where art can be of use, it is surely in communicating what the mass media – controlled by the head of State – cannot. Though how that message is conveyed beyond a cultural clique is yet another perennial question.
Where this show otherwise seems raw and unresolved in places, one could cite the extent of its ambition as cause for failure. However, just as a white flag is waved to symbolise surrender, one wonders if Bernardi’s Black Flag, waving perpetually yet automatically and lifelessly, might symbolise a cul-de-sac for political art in general; a point at which artists must either choose between art and politics, or seek an entirely new working method which somehow incorporates both. If this fact has been demonstrated unwittingly it is nonetheless highly significant.
Mike Watson
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