Nature (a face or a landscape, a vase of flowers or a castle) as a model for his/her work. Is this then a new kind of Naturalism or Realism? Or: what is it that distances us from Realism or Naturalism? Is it irony, intellectual distancing that seeks to clone and infect everything it touches – akin to a perverted version of the Midas’ touch? Or a probable deviation or lack of rigour in shape, scale or the materials used to represent the models? Pizz Buin’s colective project uncovers the social and historical need to compile a ‘Catalogue’, a need common to any collector or civilisation. The ‘Catalogue’ derives from a predatory attitude (the desire, the search, the discovery, the conquest, the possession, the consumption of the attained good) and the need to reminisce the action and its successes. Leporello reading the catalogue of his conquests to Don Giovanni, his master, or Solomon Guggenheim and Calouste Gulbenkian listing the works they acquired, all are part of the same breed, those who were more successful in an activity which belongs to all humankind; and to those who seem unable to survive social, cultural and/or psychologically without continuously expanding/exhibiting it as well. What we have here is a Catalogue of all the available works for reference and use/copy to the whims of the decorative needs of a house. After all, the basic sense of a Catalogue is itself perverted. The selectivity of conquest that characterises hunting or murder as one of the (fine)arts, recollecting exploits and showing off trophies are all replaced by voyeurism, delayed memory, buying the image of someone else’s image…and yet it unveils a reality hidden within the good taste of art catalogues. The Pizz Buin Catalogue is the corollary of a kitsch attitude leading up to an excessive and contradictory decoration, with the pieces/art works chosen in a utilitarian manner so as to complete a domestic scene but not exactly museum-like. The sequence they wish comes from the ready-made (a common object appropriate to the artistic context) onto the ‘appropriate ready-made’ is intended to allow the artists to relocate an artistic object (or its copy) in a
‘new’ artistic context (that of the House). But integrating it in an artistic context where it is mistaken with Life (as if regressing to a non-artistic dimension) radicalises it. The artistic dimension of the House is in fact only fulfilled when it is inhabited (used, experienced, lived) as an exhibition-life-show in accordance with precepts to which we might, paradoxically, apply the classic category of unity of Time, Setting and Action. There are varying degrees of distancing in the Work (or set of works of the finished Work). It is a clearly unstable set: it tends to increase indefinitely and not to empty, though the tendency to infinity results in a form of annulment. In the end, the House presents itself as cross between a kind of Dadaist architecture with a kitsch hyper-reality. Schwitters’ quote from his Merzbau, strategically placed in a hidden central part of the house, points to that confrontation. In spite of its formal and material excess, historically it worked as a moment of clarity of intent and seriousness of purpose amidst the chaos and parody that engulfed everything in bad taste, artistic naïveté or brut spontaneity, explained both by the empirical practice of the Facteur Cheval architecture and the ‘box’, lieu par excellence of accumulation (from Surrealism to neo-Dadaism, from the Nouveau-Réalisme to the 90s and after). The House, with its power outages, ruptured sewage, broken cook, mild water in the shower and water leakages, laughter and fights, untidiness or obsessive tidiness, oil sprinkling from the frying pan into paintings or the settled dust left over the sculptures, the cold seeping in through the cracks… is a House with problems. We may start telling the story of what goes on in it with a ‘Once upon a time there was a House with problems which nobody managed to solve. Deep down, maybe no one wanted to solve them as in reality every one felt good living in, or visiting, that House. But can we really end the narration with the canonic: ‘And they lived in it happily ever after?’ There is a point to this question. But perhaps there is no answer to it, or it makes no sense to look for one. |jp
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