Maurizio Bolognini - Infinito personale

Maurizio Bolognini. Infinito personale
opere/works 1988-2006
2007
64 pgs, cm. 27
Language: Italian/English
Publisher: Nuovi Strumenti
ISBN: 88-87262-47-0

Indice / Contents

Maurizio Bolognini o dell’ascetismo tecnologico
Maurizio Bolognini or Technological Asceticism
Mario Costa

Metafore e traslochi
Metaphors and Moves
Sandra Solimano

Macchine programmate: l’infinito fuori controllo. Conversazione con Maurizio Bolognini
Programmed Machines: Infinity out of Control. A Conversation with Maurizio Bolognini

Opere / Works

Cronologia dei principali lavori
Chronology of Main Works

Nota biografica
Biographical Notes

In 1925, Ortega y Gasset pointed out for the first time the tendency in modern art towards "dehumanization" and highlighted in particular the total and intentional inexpressivity of both works of art and artists: "there can be no doubt that there is a trend towards the purification of art. This need will lead to a progressive elimination of human elements [...] And a moment will come in this process when the human content of the work of art will be so slight as to be hardly perceptible [...] What is important is the undoubted presence in the world of a new aesthetic sensibility [ ...] the tendency to 'dehumanize' art [...] the art we are talking about is not only 'inhuman' because it does not contain human things but also because it consists precisely in this 'dehumanizing' activity [...] For the new artists aesthetic pleasure derives from this triumph over the human" [1].
Ortega, whose attitude towards this state of affairs was one of some uncertainty and doubt [2], was primarily interested in the sociological aspects of the ensuing formation of an art for that "class of the privileged" which interested him so much, but, leaving this aside, his observations were both ahead of their time and extremely lucid and valuable.
What was missing from his analysis, however, was an attempt to understand the causes of the phenomenon he described, or rather - differently expressed but amounting to the same thing - he failed to make the connection that others would later make in a rough way between it and what had happened and was happening in the field of technology.
For undoubtedly the "dehumanization" of art and the "technologization" of the world go hand in hand and are two sides of the same phenomenon.
Philosophical thought itself lives through the development and the repercussions of technology and each time can do nothing else but transform into great metaphors ideals which are nothing other than the being and the ways of functioning of the technical devices of the time.
To take a single example: what was the effect of the experiments carried out by Newton on the "optical conprism" from 1664 onwards on the philosophy of Spinoza, the constructor of optical apparatuses and friend and correspondent of Huygens?
Even in 1806, in Fichte's "The Way Towards the Blessed Life", the "optical prism" continued to perform its "ontological" function without it being very clear whether it was a mere illustration of the theory or indeed its matrix and foundation: "your sensitive eye is a prism in which the sensible world, which is in itself pure, uniform and colourless, is refracted in varied colours on the surface of things. You certainly do not conclude that the world is in itself coloured but only that it is refracted in colours in your eye and on your eye through a reciprocal action. You cannot see the colourless ether; you can only think of it [...] divine existence, existence in the sense in which I understand it, in the sense, that is, of manifestation and revelation, is absolutely and necessarily in itself light, albeit interior and spiritual light. This light, free of itself, is divided and refracted in diverse and infinite rays and thus in each of these separate rays is distinguished from itself and from its primitive source".[3] "The Way Towards the Blessed Life" was written some years before Fichte's death, and in it Fichte, with a strong ascetic intonation, almost proposes the cancellation of the very raison d'être of the individual, and the fact that all his thinking revolves around the functioning of a technical instrument, the "optical prism", takes on an important meaning.
In short, "dehumanization", "technology" and "asceticism" are intrinsically interlinked and connected ideas, and often they work together. This is true today more than ever.
In the twentieth century, and despite the constant reappearance of neo-romantic and variously expressionistic tendencies, the intense activity of the "dehumanization of art" proceeds, always in connection with the irruption of technology, and it represents the most lively part of the aesthetic experimentation of our time and that which is most appropriate to it.[4] Within this whole context the work of Maurizio Bolognini takes on paradigmatic and almost all-inclusive value and meaning.
He started out, towards the end of the 1980s, in a way which was already complete and everything was clear to him from the very beginning.
"Inexpressivity" and the setting aside of all interest in "subjectivity" with its interior stories formed the starting point. He likewise set aside "meaning" with its whole apparatus of metaphors and symbols [...] Elsewhere I have described the type of "exercises" he carries out by activating in the abstract the physiology of the electronic machine, and I have shown how this physiology (lack of control, randomness, flow, the acceptance of the hyper-subject...) is objectivized and gives rise to a concrete and varied series of works. [5] What remains for me to say is that if in future we wish to capture and understand the anthropological and spiritual age we live in, we shall have to turn our attention to these works by Bolognini.

(from Mario Costa, Maurizio Bolognini or Technological Asceticism)

1. José Ortega y Gasset - The Dehumanization of Art (1925).
2. "It will be said that new art has not yet produced anything which is worthwhile, and I feel very inclined to think the same [...] Who knows what proof of itself this nascent style will give! The enterprise it undertakes is marvellous: it wants to create something from nothing. I hope that in future we will be content with less and obtain more" (op.cit.).
3. Johann Gottlieb Fichte - The Way Towards the Blessed Life (1806).
4. I have tried to illustrate and argue for what may appear to be non-apodictic statements in numerous parts of my theoretical and militant work.
5. See my writings, to be found in various catalogues: Maurizio Bolognini e la casualità tecnologica (1996 and 2002), Bolognini e la domesticazione del sublime (2003 and 2005), Maurizio Bolognini: SMS Mediated Sublime (2004).

I met Maurizio Bolognini for the first time personally in 2003 when I invited him to Villa Croce for the exhibition "The Journey of the Immobile Man", an exhibition showing the works of some of the major artists in the field of international video art, from Paik to Bill Viola. It was immediately clear that Maurizio's work had little to do with the mimetic, environmental or illusionistic use of video and audio technologies to which the exhibition referred. Emblematic and not without a certain fascination was the simultaneous presence in two connected and adjacent spaces of his Sealed Computers and the virtual figure of Laurie Anderson in miniature - almost a hologram but in fact only a video-projection on a three-dimensional outline.
More recently (2005) Bolognini put on a personal show - almost a retrospective - for the Museo di Villa Croce and on this occasion I had the opportunity to deepen my knowledge of his work through a conversation I had with him that was then published in the catalogue. Despite - or perhaps precisely because of - this opportunity, I must say that my first reading of his work, decidedly atypical compared to the rich bibliography about him, continues to seem to me to be a possible reading, which in some way disregards the position of Bolognini in the constellation of Technological Artists, and brings him back into what is for me the more familiar field of conceptual research and to one of the central themes of Conceptual Art, that of reflection on the great categories of existence, the coordinates of space and time. From Manzoni's Linea Infinita to On Kawara's One Million Years, from Anselmo's Infinito to Claudio Costa's much warmer and anthropological incursions, the attempts to arrest in an image or in an idea the elusive dimension of space (and thus of time) is a thread running through the artistic research of the latter half of the twentieth century which, in these and other artists, makes use of the categories of the metaphor and the symbol, triggering off in the spectator a mechanism of attunement and complicity which in effect virtually completes the paradox of an impossible materialization of the infinite.
Maurizio Bolognini's out-of-control infinities are located (provisionally) at the end of this path, where there is a movement, which may not appear evident to the distracted spectator, from the virtuality of the idea to a reality where space and time are truly (or at least potentially) infinite, where the images are produced and planned within the container of a computer which is then sealed so that no one, not even the artist, can intervene in this random process which develops parallel to our lives. The openings to visibility which the artist grants by connecting some of the machines to a video projector are after all only an aid to the abovementioned distracted spectator because the "magic" of this mysterious and invisible, but absolutely true, universe, is performed precisely in the mental dimension which, before an old computer, re-enacts in the attunement with the artist the mental attitude of imagining what is not seen and thus in some way participating in this construction. So even before a work whose aesthetic value seeks to be minimal we again find, albeit in different terms, the indispensable presence of the person using it.
The element of more or less conscious "participation" by "others" is one of the founding aspects of Bolognini's research, which, as is well known, often involves third parties. These can be programmers called upon to intervene, each in their own way and independently of the other, on a starting programme (as in Atlas 2, 2001), or a general and not identifiable public which, as in the exhibition at Villa Croce, modifies the programme of combinations of infinite lines through text messages sent to a mobile phone connected to a computer. These and other "actions", normally and rightly interpreted in terms of "electronic democracy", can in my view also be seen as a sort of practical example of an artistic operation that involves a more complex relationship of conceptual sharing. Bolognini does not like the term metaphor and yet when he talks about transferring some "creative" functions from man to the machine he is perhaps unwilling to see that metaphors are precisely transfers (modern Greek uses the word "metaphor" to refer to house removals!).
And if this is so, I hope he will accept at least in part my first interpretation of his work which saw, even in the always very painstaking and calculated formal aspect of his installations, in the positioning on the ground of machines no less than in the tangle of cables, a more comprehensive metaphor of the human condition.

(from Sandra Solimano, Metaphors and Moves)

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