Curated by Raffaele Gavarro

February 17 - March 16, 2013

ART AND FIAT / ART AND REALITY / ART AND ETHICS

And what if the current Fiat model were simply the mirror of Italy today? And what if, even more, that model corresponds to an idea of ​​the world today?
If someone were wondering what art, an exhibition and a critical reflection have to do with the largest Italian industry, try to answer these two simple questions. Because if the answers were only positive in one way, then I would confirm - as in fact I already do - that without a shadow of a doubt art has everything to do with Fiat.
These two worlds, the industrial-economic one and that of artistic production, inevitably intertwine at a precise point in our daily life. Exactly where the understanding of reality is not only the result of information and consequent evaluations but concerns being in the world, contributing to the different dynamics that cross it and discovering the resulting complexities. Of course, what I'm starting to tell you about has to do first of all with the role and function of art in the world and in the time we are in.
Art today is clearly deeply intertwined with the financial and social dynamics of our globalized world. The work of art has become a product, and as such it obeys many of the typical mechanisms of the market. And even if it is not a stock, it is not a barrel of oil, it is not a gold bar, just as it is part of the dynamics of national and international markets, subject to investment flows, speculative bubbles and of course the probable consequent explosions.
Of course, art is not just this. A work of art is not reducible to a rising or falling dash on a diagram. Obvious. Even if it is precisely this new character, so to speak, that has made it coherent with our world, or rather that has made it physiologically conform to the current socio-political-economic system, so as to guarantee its survival. In fact, it is very likely that if it had not been so, art would have really disappeared, dead, as some at the time predicted. Being produced saved her. But of course, it also became his new damnation.

The interesting and surprising thing, even paradoxical in the results, is that in this becoming part of a state of things that required its transformation into a product, art had to seek, and found, a function other than that which he had made art as such. Throughout the twentieth century, we have witnessed this process of research and new identification. Essentially this development consisted in the loss of mimesis, that is, the ability to transform a thing into an image, or even into a simulacrum, that is, devoid of the real functions that it held in reality. Simplifying, the whole twentieth-century history of the avant-gardes, neo-avant-gardes, post-avant-gardes and post-avant-gardes, can be read by following the traces of this liberation, which obviously has experienced accelerations, slowdowns, stops and even some regressions, but which ultimately led us so far, to an awareness of art quite different from the one with which we had reached the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, today we do not await the confirmation of that hypothesis of perceptual knowledge of the world through its duplication, in which the likelihood was strictly proportional to the decisive aesthetic quality, but rather we ask it for direct knowledge of the world through its being inside it as an element that identifies its logic, and possibly temporarily or permanently disturbs its state. In other words, we can say that from a knowledge of the world through aesthetic perception, art has chosen the path of knowledge that is an experience of the world through its own participation in it.
So let's get to the point that concerns us, to Sandro Mele's Fiat and American Brothers. Of course, each of us has his own idea of ​​Sergio Marchionne's business strategy. Someone will agree with what he is doing. Others don't. American Brothers naturally expresses one of the possible opinions, which is that of total disagreement, obviously, and undoubtedly takes the side of the workers, even those who have accepted the choices of the CEO. When Sandro Mele started the work, using video and photography, the reality of what was happening entered directly into the displays and fixed itself in our mental circuits. They were the same things that were seen on the news, talk shows and news websites. But it was obviously not the same way of seeing and understanding them. We had been there directly and had talked to people. You had seen the anger and helplessness, frustration and despair. But what followed was not simply the possibility of a story of what one had witnessed. Instead, the possibility was being created of giving shape to a real block of reality to be juxtaposed with that developed by the media. Not a different way of looking at reality, but definitely a different way of becoming reality in reality. The images came out and re-entered the displays, they remained in the mental circuits, they became drawings, again photos and again video, they took the invisible form of sounds, and they formed a force field that held together the facts with their inevitable meanings. The exhibition has two boundaries, two signs of the extension of its field, on the one hand, the great drawing by Gramsci blindfolded and on the other the Fiom worker with the mask of Marchionne. On the one hand Turin, Italy, and on the other Detroit, the United States of America. These are the theoretical and practical poles, of thought and action, among which the exhibition moves as a body of works that has a clear path of completeness, and that runs through the sense of a logic of adamantine purity. In the middle of the field marked by the two symbols there is a people of people who work and who hope to continue to do so, who enter and leave the factories, the layoffs, and who see their economic capacity and their freedom gradually reduce. . A people of people increasingly dependent on the imperative and abstract will of the financial market and not on the one where cars are sold and bought. The harshness of the drawings, paintings, and graffiti on paper, which form a kind of shouting crowd, is the identification with this population of people. It is their voice that you see in the signs traced almost violently on the paper.
What was inevitable for Sandro Mele, as he proceeded to build this block of reality and as he struggled to position it in the rapidly flowing reality around him, was to ask himself that ethical question that would ultimately give the only possible meaning to all American Brothers. Not so much and not just wondering if everything that was happening was right or not. As if being there to give shape to reality would have had the strength to change the meaning of what was happening. That is, if in its own proceeding, in looking, feeling, recording and reconstructing, reality would have been affected by its action. That is, if we, as individuals and as a community, would have been affected by the perturbation of reality that its action brought about. And above all, if this disturbance would have induced us to ask ourselves questions in a different way from those provoked by the media. The answers to these questions become in turn questions, precisely of an ethical type.
I believe that today this is art. I believe that this is what art does today.
I believe it can even really change things.
Because from the moment a question is posed to which someone tries to correspond, at that point reality itself can only be different from the previous instant in which that question did not exist.
This is the sense in which art today takes on an ethical character, with all that this assumption entails in terms of its function in our world.