My Idola cover features Michelangelo Pistoletto's Venus of the Rags, and this says a lot about my evolving thoughts on him. Reaching ninety years, fertile with an inventive life, has shone a spotlight on him, his work, and his artistic philosophy – a sacred irreverence towards dogmas and fetishes, even those of the Arte Povera movement itself. He never treated this movement as a habit, a uniform, or a banner, but rather as a viewpoint projected outwards, towards encounters with others and the world. The fact that a significant installation of the same Venus… was burned in the most beautiful square in Naples, which was transformed for the occasion into a place of abomination, an exercise in violence against anything considered “different” from one's own mental block. Those who did it were victims of mass subculture, unaccustomed to using intelligence and understanding, which Pistoletto sought to engage in a bid to open a debate that goes beyond the cloying dialectic of the beautiful and the ugly.,
but one can understand that the arts, following the great tension of 20th-century avant-gardes, are no longer solely about measure and harmony (the fine arts), but visual arts, based on immoderation and experimentation with the new, are added to them. Pistoletto's intention has never been to please, but to make understood, in a form that is ethical, moral, and pedagogical, before it is aesthetic; but also aesthetic. But, to say that there is a mass subculture should not be a dumping ground for responsibility towards others, but an assumption of awareness of the need to do what one explains and to explain what one does; there are no curses and misfortunes by destiny, not even in the city of Ortese and Malaparte, it is not said that the sea must never wash Naples and that skin is of a forced anthropology to repeat Masanielli and Pulcinella, but also Marottian libraries and Edoardian and Amelian spirits. The beautiful exhibition at the Chiostro del Bramante in Rome is, has been, a virtuous example of how enigma can reveal virtue and knowledge.
KLESSIDRA | EDITED BY FRANCESCO GALLO MAZZEO
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