Postcard from Genoa | blog | frieze publishing

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Postcard from Genoa MARCH 10, 2015

by Barbara Casavecchia

A Constructed World performing 'Man Has Named All the Animals' at Villa Groce, Genoa.

The collaborative project A Constructed World at Genoa’s Villa Croce Museum

It all started in Milan, in July 2014, with a puzzling performance titled Speaking Eels at the Battaglia Art Foundry. A Constructed World – a collaborative project started in 1993 by Australian artists Geoff Lowe and Jacqueline Riva – played along with two young performers dressed and made up in blue, an artist (Simeone Crispino, from duo Vedovamazzei), a writer (Michele Robecchi) and a musician (Steve Piccolo, a founding member of The Lounge Lizards), armed with makeshift percussion instruments, and electric guitars with their bodies partly sawn off. The songs lamented the global decimation of the eel species, forced to endure the tyranny of humans, while a bronze eel and a pole, casted on site for the occasion, were displayed to the audience (a reference to the biblical story of Moses attaching a bronze serpent fixed to a pole, so anyone bitten by a snake looking at it would be healed).

A Constructed World, Fire Works Room, Villa Croce, Genoa. Photo Nuvola Ravera. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

It was not announced that the same eel would be the protagonist of ‘A Dangerous Critical Present’, ACW’s recently closed exhibition at

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Villa Croce Museum of Contemporary Art – a white Neoclassical villa overlooking the docks and harbour of Genoa. What exactly started and ended in Genoa, though, is rather difficult to pin down. ACW’s practice, based on video, installation, painting, series of happenings and live events incorporating, they write, ‘speech, conversation, not-knowing, live eels, music, dancing and absences as their media’, is not least about resisting the idea of organisation. Over the last years, their practice took the form of the group research and performance collective Speech And What Archive, made up of artists, curators, art historians, philosophers and occasional guests (most of them Parisbased, like Lowe and Riva themselves). Their output embraces the participation of random audience members as well as of experts of various disciplines, each one characterised by a specific language, while it opposes the notion of art as an area of ‘education’ instead of open experience.

A Constructed World, Explaining contemporary art to live eels, installation view. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

And if it’s sometimes difficult to follow the plot of ACW’s creations, it’s easy to be seduced by their music, poems, jokes, costumes and DIY ‘special effects’ – a breath of fresh Dada air, with fair amounts of laughter and conviviality thrown in, while knocking down the fourth wall.

Michele Robecchi, who recently added a new chapter to his collaborations with the artists in the form of an essay, writes: ‘Curator Sébastien Pluot, one of the ACW’s oldest associates, has succinctly but poignantly described this all-embracing concept with the words “A Constructed World – you have to have been in it”.’

The exhibition was busy with people. Opened in December with a live arts evening, with jam sessions of blues and jazz music, slam poetry and readings, it was then used as a classroom, set and rehearsal space for the museum’s MaXter Program for young artists, where Lowe and Riva acted as tutors. Subsequently, it included a series of encounters, a crowded Christmas party, and a closing event with more music and songs, including an adaptation of Bob Dylan’s 1979 song ‘Man Gave Name to All the Animals’, while philosopher Fabien Vallos explained the exhibition’s title to the bronze eel as ‘the experience of the absence of guarantees’, at the intersection of crisis, criticism and modernity. In the meantime, ‘A Dangerous Critical Present’ expanded also online as a website where the documentation on the show is interspersed with random piles of images, videos, feeds and comments circulated via social networks and uploaded by visitors, so that it exceeds the format and limits of the standard catalogue.

A Constructed World, a detail of Explaining contemporary art to live eels. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

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Ilaria Bonacossa, Villa Croce’s director, who curated the show with Anna Lovecchio (they both performed in the live events), labels ACW as ‘post-Fluxus’. The duo’s choice to use blue as signature colour, which in the exhibition keeps reappearing in different shades and media, as a sort of visual soundtrack that eases navigation, brings up obvious associations with fluxes and fluidity.

‘A Dangerous Critical Present’ assembled works from the last fifteen years, without ever following a retrospective or chronological order.

The works were distributed in six installations, one for each room, each with a title corresponding to one of the modes of operation of ACW. It reminded me of a memory palace, where each of the objects in a room is just a tool to memorize and recall a fragment of life from the past.

A Constructed World, a detail of the Paintings and Paper Works room. Courtesy ACW/Villa Croce.

The first installment, ‘Fire Works’, conjured up a series of videos and small sculptures whose lowest common denominator was destruction by fire. In the video Le Feu Scrupuleux (2008), for instance, the protagonist (played by Lowe) first succumbs to the materialistic pleasures of Michel Millot’s L’ecole des filles (The School for Girls, 1655), the first erotic novel ever published in France, then repents and turns its pages into ashes – as a matter of fact, the book was seized as unbound sheets at the printer and publicly burned in Paris. The second room, ‘Explaining contemporary art to live eels’ – a parody of Beuys’ mystical 1965 performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, on the ineffability of art – is titled after an ongoing project by ACW, started in 2003, which asks art experts to perform their dialectical discursive skills in front of an audience of speechless eels. Originally, it involved live specimens of Anguilla Anguilla, released back into water after the lessons. Since the numbers of these mysterious catadromous fish (living in fresh water but spawning in the sea), swimming for 6,000 km kilometres from the European shores to the Sargasso Sea, dramatically dropped by over 90%, the now endangered species has been replaced by simulacra. Mouth open in front of a microphone dangling from the ceiling, they swim in a sea of blue plastic lining, while a collection of paraphernalia from previous performances coats the walls. Next door, in ‘Atheism & Luck’, a series of cheap plastic white and blue praying carpets with the word ‘athéisme’ woven into them are paired with a chandelier adorned with lucky charms, suggesting a temporary suspension of disbelief. A personal favourite was the ‘Pre-emptive Drawings’ room, where beautiful blue watercolour sketches on paper revealed the careful planning of several past and future performances of ACW, their construction of a disciplined frame for improvisation to take place.

A Constructed World, Le Feu Scrupuleux, 2008. Video still. Courtesy ACW.

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The issue of translation – from sketchbook to reality, English to French and back again, from real time to archive, from cognoscenti to amateurs – is recurring now and again in ACW’s world. Recently, their drawings have been included as illustrations in the book Une traduction d’une langue à une autre (A translation from one language to another, Les Press du Réel, 2014), edited by Sébastien Pluot and Yann Sérandour. The paintings of the following ‘Paper Room’, entirely covered by a collage of photos, drawings, notes (my pick was ‘Michel Foucault is a Fatherfucker’), song lyrics, a blue Chroma key screen, attempt a visual translation of the performative experience of the Speech And What Archive, with exhibitions and actions in Australia, France, Sweden, UK. The final room, ‘Crématistique’ (Chrematistics, from the Aristotelian definition of the art of getting rich), offered what an exhibition is usually expected to display: a painting, two sculptures on a plinth, a large video projection. Nonetheless, the painting (Nature Dance, 2013) offers a ludicrous choreography of ass-faced figures; the surface of Amphorae (2013), two fake Greek vases, was covered in blue dots, to obscure the ‘obscenity’ of the porn website imagery attached to them, and the video The Parable of the Talents (2013), shot on the Aeolian island of Filicudi off the coast of Sicily, and interpreted by actors in impromptu ‘classical’ outfits, presents the parable of talents appearing in the Gospel of Matthew as a glorification of profit-making, and hence as the archetype of the rampant capitalism of our times. ACW’s exhibitions often take place in fairly small, peripheral spaces with no abundance of means, while central, rich, hyper-sponsored institutions often play it safe, to multiply viewers, tickets and numbers. I think this says a thing or two about our ‘Dangerous Critical Present’.

About the author Barbara Casavecchia is a contribution editor of frieze and a free lance writer and curator living in Milan, Italy.

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