fine | fake - Art in everyday life

Our magazine is printed on simple sheets of paper but imperfections or color inconsistencies make every fne|fake page a unique one.

The waiting is our fuel, the entertainment is our goal: both of them are refected in our shared forward-looking point of view. You are waiting to relax, sat on your favourite armchair in the most intimate corner of your house, while you are leafng through, admiring and breathing our new issue. We, the editors, are waiting for you to dive into our new issue because it meets your needs and your unique artistic nature.

This magazine was certainly created for each of you because we believe, in a broad sense, that art is for everyone, and that everyone can be an artist in their own way. That is why we thought of a new print magazine: it gives an essential multi perceptive experience to those who, like you, are always looking for new and sublime emotions to feed your cosmopolitan soul and your style.

Now, it is time for us to write what you, our dearest readers, expect to fnd in our magazine; we looked for news and contents that meet your need to feel good, surrounded by beautiful things, and to live in harmony with what is happening around you.

Francesca Liantonio

La nostra rivista è stampata su semplici fogli di carta ma imperfezioni o incongruenze di colore renderanno ogni pagina di fne|fake unica.

L’attesa è il nostro carburante, il diletto la nostra meta: entrambi rifessi nello sguardo lungimirante di noi che scriviamo  e di voi che leggete; voi in attesa di coccolarvi avvolti dalla vostra poltrona  preferita nell’angolo più intimo della vostra casa mentre tra le mani sfogliate, guardate, ammirate e respirate il nuovo numero della rivista; noi editori in attesa  che vi immergiate nel nuovo numero perché in sintonia con  i  vostri bisogni, con la  vostra indole di artista sui generis.

Certo, perché questa rivista è stata pensata per ciascuno di voi poiché abbiamo la convinzione che l’arte in senso lato è destinata a tutti, così come tutti possono essere artisti, ciascuno a suo modo.

Per questo abbiamo pensato ad una nuova rivista cartacea: essa offre un’esperienza percettiva plurima irrinunciabile per chi

come voi è sempre alla ricerca di nuove e sublimi emozioni con le quali nutrire il proprio spirito cosmopolita e il proprio stile.  Allora non ci resta che scrivere ciò che voi, nostri lettori, contate di poter leggere nella nostra rivista; abbiamo cercato novità e contenuti affni al vostro  duplice bisogno di sentirvi bene dentro circondandovi di cose belle,  di vivere la propria vita in armonia con quel che accade tutt’intorno.

Francesca Liantonio

| Publishing Director

Francesca Liantonio

| Editor in Chief

Giovanna Sala

| Art Director & Graphic Designer

Francesca Liantonio

| Contributors

Any65, Eduardo Boffoli, Heristal M., Nicoletta Manno

| English Traslation

Claudia Munafò

| Proof reading

Anna Maria Cometa

Giuseppe Liantonio

| Print Morganti S.r.l. Milano

cont ents

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Mario Merz: the art of building an igloo. / Mario Merz: l’arte di costruire un igloo..........................p.16

The last cover of the Floppotron collective. / L’ultima cover del Floppotron collective.................p.26

architecture music painting

21st century painting: stencil and graffti art. / La pittura del XXI secolo: stencil e graffti...p.34

4| sculpture

Living sculptures by Vanessa Beecroft. / Le sculture viventi di Vanessa Beecroft..........................p.44

5|

Across the sunrise: a topos for everyone. / Attraverso l’alba: un topos alla portata di tutti............................................................p.52

6| dance

Degas e Norman McLaren: from canvas to stop motion. / Degas e Norman McLaren: dalla tela alla stop motion........................................p.60

7| cinema

“Everything else is just disappointment and trouble.” The Great Beauty. / “Tutto il resto è delusione e fatica.” La Grande bellezza..............................p.70

8| videogames

Choose your pixelated path: Undertale. / Scegli

il tuo percorso pixelato: Undertale.............................................p.80

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architecture

Mario Merz: the art of building an Igloo.

translation by Claudia Munafò

text by Francesca Liantonio

Mario Merz’s igloos have now arrived in Milan: the city pays homage to the great artist of threedimensionality and the event represents a “symbolic” return to his hometown. The 31 igloos displayed at the Fondazione Pirelli Hangar Bicocca come from different museums and have found the right showcase to convey all the explicit and less explicit messages of the great artist Merz.

Sono giunti fnalmente anche a Milano gli igloo di Mario Merz: un omaggio della città a questo grande artista della tridimensionalità ma anche un ritorno “simbolico” alla città che gli ha dato i natali. Ospitati dalla Fondazione Pirelli Hangar Bicocca ben 31 igloo - alcuni dei quali provenienti da musei - hanno trovato la giusta vetrina in cui mostrare tutti i signifcati - espliciti e meno espliciti - di cui il maestro Merz li ha caricati.

| Sentiero per qui, 1986

| Senza titolo, 1994

| Acqua scivola, 1969

| Igloo di Giap, 1968

| Senza titolo, 1984

| Luoghi senza strada, 1979

The huge space of the Navate of the Hangar Bicocca and the igloos create a landscape of great visual impact, also because of the relationship - both in the space dedicated to the exhibition and the displayed worksbetween the sobriety of the materials and the place. As far as igloos are concerned, just talking about sobriety would be reductive in terms of the message of their creator. The reason is that the analysis of the materials used for the igloos and their shape is much more complicated.

In fact, the shape of the igloo is the result of the artist’s long search for the place and the space lived by human beings, an architectural shape (the half-sphere) that includes natural and urban elements.

Besides the metallic structure of the igloos, the natural and industrial materials used for the cover have, in some way, a poetic, symbolical or evocative meaning depending on the inspiration of the artist during their creation: the Gaddaf’s Tent (1981) is a windy and painted tent, where the structure supports the painting and vice versa. The result is a three-dimensional painting. The whole exhibition of the igloos at the Hangar Bicocca - but not only - can be considered an effective compendium of Merz’s search and, even if it doesn’t show the entirety of his production, it is an undeniable fact that they are an important part of it.

In fact, the igloos represent the culmination of the artist’s path towards the realization of an art strongly connected with space: an architecturally perfect, yet primordial, shape that, in a humanistic point of view,

was frst of all the expression of the complexity of the social and industrial environment in the second half of the 20th century. It became the expression of the world’s nomad society of the new millennium and it is and will always be the expression of human condition and life in the world, as well as the precariousness of his existence.

In Merz’s works, stasis doesn’t exist, everything is moving: every time, the elements and the materials are used depending on the place and the context, to be recombined for the next display of the same work. Equally, the igloo can symbolize a womb, a dome, a hut, a tent, a skull or the earth. The igloo will always be important to Merz. It is important when it has an osmotic relationship with the environment that surrounds it or when it is withdrawn, as an expression of separation and meditation. In the igloos, contemporaneity and primitivity coexist in a circularity where the time has stopped; they are architectures based on time that go beyond time to make people think about the changes that affected the concept of family, relationship and the relation between nature and society, starting from the way of inhabiting. In the igloos and with the igloos, the artist pushed the process of abstraction to the limit, blurring the line between interior and exterior, modifying the relationship between painting and sculpture, highlighting the link between the individual and society, perfectly combining art and life.

| Noi giriamo intorno alle case o le case girano intorno a noi?, 1977 [1985 reconstruction]

The last cover of the Floppotron collective.

translation by Claudia Munafò

text by Francesca Liantonio

There is a new type of orchestra in the world of music since almost 10 years: the Floppotron, created and directed by the unique Paweł Zadrożniak. It is the most popular hardware orchestra of the web, composed of obsolete IT equipment: 64 3.5 inch foppy drives, 8 hard disks with rotating platters and 2 perfectly synchronized scanners that amaze people with their magical sound.

Un nuovo genere di orchestra si è affacciata al mondo della musica da circa un decennio: The Floppotron, ideata e perciò diretta dal singolare maestro Paweł Zadrożniak. Si tratta dell’orchestra hardware più famosa del web, composta da apparecchiature informatiche obsolete: 64 foppy drives da 3,5 pollici, 8 hard disk a piatti rotanti e 2 scanner perfettamente sincronizzati tra loro tanto da incantare, oltre che stupire, con il loro magico suono.

This unique musical “collective” was built by Zadrożniak, a Polish software engineer, computer geek, electronics enthusiast and, frst of all, the creator of one of the funniest electronic projects of the last few years.

The Floppotron has amazed everyone with its performances, from Star Wars soundtrack to The Final Countdown by Europe; from Paradise City by Guns N’ Roses to Thriller by Michael Jackson, from Ghostbusters by Ray Parker Jr. to Game of Thrones, Friends and Pulp Fiction soundtracks and so forth. After playing Take on me by A-ha, a classic of the 80s, the Floppotron is back in the spotlight with its latest cover: Bohemian Rhapsody, the iconic song by Queen.

For the occasion, there is also a guest star: an analog modem. In fact, in order to compose the Queen’s song, the engineer decided to expand the foppy orchestra’s size adding the Bullet Modem E56K. It allowed him not only to have the “sound” of a fundamental part of the song but also to evoke a great nostalgia in the minds of the internauts who really used analog modems in the past.

Thanks to his intuition, the orchestra conductor tuned the sounds of the devices with an electric motor (and created a melody): in fact, both scanners and foppies use stepper motors to move their sensored heads that scan the image or process read/write operations on a magnetic disk.

Since 2011 - the year of their frst music video with just two foppy drives - Zadrożniak’s mechanic ensemble has not only increased its instrumentation, but also continued to spread: the orchestra conductor has a YouTube channel that contains all their covers and a Patreon webpage of the project to economically support their growth. Patreon is an Internet platform - which is widely used by YouTubers, web artists, writers, podcasters, musicians and so on - that allows the artists to be paid directly by their patron fans. More precisely, Zadrożniak wants to build a better and bigger machine to create funnier contents: a new Floppotron 3.0. The donations will help him buy more hardware - always older than 10 years - to reprogram and to transform so that the sounds become music to the ears of an ever-growing audience.

painting

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21st century painting: stencil and graffti art.

translation by Claudia Munafò

text by Francesca Liantonio

The so-called street art includes all the forms of art created in public spaces, sometimes without offcial permission, with the most various tools like spray bottles, stickers, stencils and so on.

Tutte quelle forme d’arte che si manifestano in luoghi pubblici, spesso illegalmente, con le tecniche più disparate quali bombolette spray, adesivi, stencils, ecc.. fanno parte della cosiddetta street art - arte di strada o arte urbana.

Syren in the Island of Capri”, frst Street Art intervention in the Island of Capri by Ozmo and Eron.

Instead, graffti are a subsection of street art because the technique is different. As opposed to street art, graffti aren’t limited to the use of spray paint and the subject is not always connected to the study of calligraphy. On the other side, both of them can share the same place and type of execution. This is why people think this two forms of contemporary art are the same, like the media origin of the words suggests (graffti and/or writing). However, street art cannot be mistaken with graffti because it is a separate category which is conceptually and visually different from the other, and it intertwines with hip hop culture.

Graffti are a social and cultural protest based on the expression of creativity in public locations that spread all over the world. Most of the times it is considered vandalism, which is a punishable crime. Sometimes it is connected to the act of writing a pen name (tag) everywhere, as if it was a logo.

The writers who tag public transports or historical and artistic buildings with impunity have nothing to do with this art. People who are interested in it express themselves in safe places, like the “halls of fame”. They are places provided by community administrations where local artists can express freely their creativity. Painters, regardless of their inclination or origin, study to self-improve and to create their own distinctive style so that their artistic work can be recognized and appreciated. “Stencil graffti” or “stencil art” is a form of graffti that makes use of stencils created by the writer for each one of his works and then the image is transferred to a surface through the use of spray paint. testo italiano a p. 114

| Work in progress by Sten & Lex at Pilastro Library, Bologna.

| “You are worth more than many sparrows!”, Ozmo at MACRO Museum Roma.

Sometimes multiple stencils and colours are used on the same image. The stencil is cut out of a selected medium (a cardboard, for example) to create a sort of negative of the image to reproduce. The image is transferred to a surface through the use of spray paint or pigment on the stencil, the colour will go through the cut out sections. Compared to graffti writing and street art, the process of stencilling is faster and allows to reproduce an image as many times as you want. This is why this tagging technique is very effective.

A lot of young people are drawn to this unusual art because of different reasons. Some of them want to criticize private property, claiming the streets of their city. For others, it is an easy method to produce a political message and many artists appreciate the publicity that their artwork can receive, without having to depend on galleries and museums.

In fact, street art gives the opportunity to have a potentially wider audience than traditional art galleries. Basically, the most recent methods and artistic theories include graffti and street art and they focus on the cultural view of the globalised world and its contradictions, just like an old potential imaginary time survived from the end of art, where, apparently, everything is possible and nothing is really “different”.

| “Graffti is a crime”, Banksy.

This new art of the 21st century is the answer to the primary need that created it: communication. All the artists want to convey a message to their audience and to people in general, despite what and how they paint. As a consequence, contemporary art is not and cannot be considered simple and superfcial.

Banksy is the most famous street-artist in the world. His work is full of metaphors on the world and contemporary society. He sees art as a way to protest and beat the system. Banksy was already active in the early 2000s and now his 20 years career shows no signs of slowing down. His career is based on a success that actually grew in the street. He created and spread the concept of street art more than anyone else. His art comes from pop art and graffti, and he widely uses stencils. If you want to verify the authenticity of his work, you can visit his offcial website or Instagram account.

sculpture

|4

| White Madonna with Twins, 2006

Living sculptures by Vanessa Beecroft.

translation by Claudia Munafò

“Life is creation, unpredictability and, at the same time, the complete and automatic protection of the entire past.” Bergson, a new spiritualism philosopher, thought that accepting the existence of the body as an instrument to enter the conscience would make its existence concrete. It means that both real and spiritual lives are always connected and problematic.

Vanessa Beecroft’s art has a different yet similar aim. She makes her models be silent and she isolates them from the rest of the room. In this way, the viewers are lead to think about their role and behavior and to question their existence and their inner selves.

text by Eduardo Bofoli

“La vita è sempre creazione, imprevedibilità e, nello stesso tempo, conservazione integrale e automatica dell’intero passato.” A tale affermazione era giunto Bergsonflosofo di un nuovo spiritualismo - attraverso l’assunzione dell’esistenza del corpo come strumento per penetrare la vita della coscienza e indurre quest’ultima ad un’esistenza altrettanto concreta cioè alla consapevolezza che la vita - sia nella sua dimensione reale che spirituale - è sempre condizionata e problematica. Modalità diversa ma intento similare ha l’arte di Vanessa Beecroft la quale riducendo al mutismo e all’isolamento perfromativo le proprie modelle, spinge il lettore ad una rifessione sul proprio ruolo e il proprio atteggiamento, ad interrogarsi sulla propria esistenza e sul proprio Io.

This last consideration allows us to fnd the elements that point out the artist’s bond with Renaissance art in her work. She is considered the most provoking artist of contemporary art. She has a more or less explicit and aware tendency to show her inner world. In this way, the viewers will think about her world and their one too.

Beecroft’s work is focused on the rediscovery of the female body through tableaux vivants, photos, videos and sculptures, mixing a classic and a modern aesthetic like the construction and objectifcation of her inner self. In the artist’s work, the models and their bodies hold different poses in silence and their faces are inexpressive: they are living paintings where their erotic bodies show their imperfections as well as the lack of the curves of a mother. Therefore, the search of beauty and perfection is not essential anymore. Instead, the dualism life/ death is essential and you can see it in performances like “VB 66” where 50 models posed at the Mercato Ittico of Naples in 2010. The woman embodies that truth: even if it is still, it would implode. testo italiano a p. 118

«Don’t talk, don’t interact with other people, don’t laugh, don’t move theatrically, don’t move too fast or too slow, be simple, be natural, be unemotional, be diffcult to approach, don’t be sexy, behave as if you were dressed, as if there wasn’t anyone in the room.»

| VB 66, Naples 2010

This is how Beecroft talks to her models and it is the only way to make them pose as she wants. The impassivity and/or impersonality of both the models and the viewers let the artist condemn the complex and diffcult relation between the female body and society. The artist has the merit to have managed to focus the society’s contradictions against men. In fact, in the performance “VB 65”, also known as the “last supper” performed at the PAC in Milan in 2009, the models were all black

men. According to Beecroft, they represent beauty and dignity but they are vulnerable and melancholic too because they are abused, just like women. They wear a tuxedo and no shoes, they are sat at a table and eat with their hands. The aim of the artist is to use her art to force the spectators to respect those men who are usually excluded from social life. All of Vanessa Beecroft’s work represents the opposition between “real time” (the performance) and “eternity” (photos and videos).