In the figure and artistic practice of Renato Spagnoli, there exists on
the one hand the declared desire for an art that refuses, structurallyunruly, and at the same time, the watchful antennae of someone who does
not want to make refusal a comfortable refuge but rather a starting
point to open up to the world. Spagnoli never shied away, he never chose
isolation. He acted, he exposed himself, he produced. First a worker,
then a railway worker, then an artist, but always an anarchist, not in
the aesthetic sense of the term, but in the political practice of doing.
---- In this sense, Spagnoli never conceived of "putting oneself out" as
an individualistic choice or a form of aestheticizing purity. The
refusal of the structures and rules of the system did not imply,
according to his vision, refuge in an intellectual ghetto or in a
self-referential mysticism, but rather required an opening towards
operational forms capable of acting in the present without dogmas. Art,
understood as liberation, could not allow ideological closures; instead,
it had a disposition to make the work the point of impact between an
internal need and a context to be transformed. For Spagnoli, the meaning
of the work was never exhausted in the one who produced it, but was
completed in the gaze of those who encountered it: "my intention has
always been to involve the spectator in the determination of the final
judgment", he declared, in an open and never prescriptive involvement.
His artistic production coherently reflects this position: it is
repetitive, obsessive, radical. The A, the first letter of the alphabet,
constantly returns in his works, deformed, emptied, sectioned,
multiplied until it becomes a pure form, a matrix, a symbol that loses
its original meaning and opens up to new readings. "It is so difficult
to find the beginning. Or rather: it is difficult to begin from the
beginning. And do not try to go even further back", wrote Wittgenstein,
and Spagnoli seems to have taken this difficulty literally, trying to
reformulate the starting point each time.
And it is precisely a departure at the heart of this story.
In 1974, in fact, Spagnoli participated in an exhibition at the Grand
Palais in Paris entitled Grands et Jeunes d'aujourd'hui. For this
occasion he created a series of large-format canvases, using double bed
sheets with spray paint, to be conveniently transported from Livorno by
train in a "small" suitcase.
That journey, today, is recalled by Laveronica Arte Contemporanea
together with the Gian Marco Casini gallery, in a new action through the
Tuscany-Sicily route. The work will be transported by train as then, but
the sheet is now accompanied by witnesses and anarchist militants of
yesterday and today: Tiziano Antonelli, Pippo Gurrieri, Natale Musarra.
The journey will end in Ragusa, where Spagnoli's sheet will be waved on
the stage of Primo Maggio. The journey is not a simple recollection but
an opportunity to reactivate a thought, to put a practice back into
circulation, to make the work emerge again as a detonator of relationships.
Looking at Spagnoli's sheet, one almost has the impression that the
minutely repeated A sign could come to life and, abandoning the surface,
resonate in space. Like a prolonged cry or a warning, depending on the
point of view. The recent film work Preemptive Listening by the English
artist Aura Satz comes to mind, in which over twenty experimental
musicians were invited to imagine new forms for the siren: from the
sound of the harp to the rumbling of the Earth's core. The siren, freed
from its traditional meaning of alarm, is transformed into an ambivalent
code. It can still be a warning signal, but it can also become a tool
for reading the present, an echo of an ongoing crisis or, in the era of
predictive policing, a latent threat in itself. Freeing itself from the
weight of past catastrophes, Satz's film evokes alternative ways of
responding to the siren's call as a path to possible futures.
Even the journey of the sheet, which today is repeated with other
bodies, in another time, can be thought of as a siren. Not because it
announces something definite, but because it opens up a possibility. The
sheet is not a monument, but a mobile object, a relic of a legacy not
yet pronounced. "The work of an artist is an ordered model of behavior,
even if in contrast, indeed in opposition to the rules of the
established and sacralized order," wrote Spagnoli, and never before has
this definition seemed as necessary. Because it reminds us that art is
above all the construction of ways of being in the world, of forms of
relationship, of the possibility of disobedience.
In one of his interviews, Spagnoli candidly states a beautiful
imperative: "one must participate immensely." I focus on the term
immensely, which has to do with both the intensity of participation, its
breadth and finally its obstinate duration over time. In a contemporary
context marked by permanent states of alarm, by a constant proximity to
the idea of catastrophe and by a widespread sense of impotence, this
exhortation retains all its urgency and beauty. Perhaps this is where we
need to start again: from a form of participation that is built over
time through continuity, presence, the assumption of responsibility, in
a real proximity, in the space of a train car or a square.
May 1st
10 am Piazza San Giovanni- Ragusa, presentation of the work 7457 by
Renato Spagnoli
Comizi -Spazio libri - refreshment - by the Anarchist group of Ragusa (FAS)
6 pm Galleria Laveronica Modica,
opening of the personal exhibition of Renato Spagnoli "Ma avuto la
rivolta tra le dita"
from a text by Tea Paci
in the image: Ma avuto la rivolta tra le dita. Renato Spagnoli,
invitation, detail
https://umanitanova.org/ma-avevo-la-rivolta-fra-le-dita/
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