APPROACHES - In The Words Of . . . .
From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988.
This decade seems to have produced a lot of stars and very few planets, you will tell me. But, let's be careful! The sixties and seventies have seen the extraordinary consecration of Joseph Beuys, talented draftsman and "assemblist," great lord of Arte Povera and yoga master of the Happening, art world champion of all classes, a Picasso of the concept . . . Magnificent Vice-Chancellor of the Free University. What offices, titles, functions: an impressive honors list worthy of Dada chieftain Baaderk, but which corresponds to a well-oiled and faultlessly efficient and deliberate mechanism ... The man with a hat that seems eternally screwed onto his head is given to the solitude of the greats, on the pedestal that was erected for him in postwar Germany, happy to find in himself all the contrasts and contradictions of our chaotic modernity . . .
All that remains for us from now until the year 2000 is to watch for the advent of symptoms of a revenge of the spirit against the form, of the alchemists against the mathematicians, for the advent of a kind of humanism that can synthetically maintain the dual meaning of things.
The deviant function must use new words and new objects to rediscover the immemorial applications of the game of life and chance. The European soil is not the most arid in this matter . . . Let's pay attention to what is happening under the hippie uniform of a Jacquet or under the bourgeois motto of an Asnaghi: The road of Tao goes through the poverty of the rich world and the wealth of the poor world, through the scrap metals of a Tinguely and through the tropical lianas of a Frans Krajcberg. Vicenzo Agnetti dopes the calculation by means of literature and restores the silence by inverting the sound. He reminds us also very appropriately that the ethics of indifference goes over into the world's wisdom, and that this kind of humor is an initiation code. The other face of art at the end of this century will have a symbolism that is endlessly exacting in its deep idealism.
A symbolism of effusion, liberated and liberating: Idealistic symbols, beyond the yoke of metaphors, will try to push their roots deeper and deeper in the real. Neither Surrealism nor a Realism a fortiori is the real, but they are nature, in its foundation and its essence. On the horizon of the third millenium we perceive a neospiritualist intuition of an integral Naturalism, a gigantic catalyst and accelerator of our faculties of smell, of thinking, of acting: a pantheism of sensitivity, an ultimate refuge of synthetic humanism, and soon its demise. The Judeo-Christian civilization will then cease to have all the answers.
[An Exerpt From: Ferrier, Jean-Louis, Director and Yann le Pichon, Walter D. Glanze [English Translation]. Art of Our Century, The Chronicle of Western Art, 1900 to the Present. New York: Prentice-Hall Editions. 1988. p. 751]
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