Paolo Bartoloni – Head lecturer, Dep. of Italian studies,
University of Sydney

Opening of the exhibition "Ispirazioni", MLC Gallery, 20 May, 2006

Thank you to the MLC Gallery and especially to Megan Gordon and Miriam Cabello for inviting me to open the exhibition "Ispirazioni". I’m not an art critic, but I’m a literary and cultural theorist with an incurable interest in interdisciplinary and cross-cultural events. Most of all I’m originally from Italy. These are perhaps the reasons that convinced Megan to confer upon me the responsibility and the honour to say a few things about this significant exhibition.

As I was discussing with Megan the keys I could use to enter the works exposed in the Gallery, we mentioned the notion of identity, of Italian identity and the ways in which this identity is understood and negotiated as it encounters other identities and other cultures. Back then, I hadn’t seen many of the works on display tonight, but I now realize how pertinent the discussion of few weeks ago was in relation to "Ispirazioni".

What’s happening here? A group of contemporary artists have placed themselves into a willing and open conversation with images and echoes of a culture and a tradition whose significance is still obvious but perhaps barely thought of, apart from usual clichés about Italy’s history, culture, food, language and so on.

There are many things that the works collected here invoke and evoke, but one in particular that resonates clear is that cultures and traditions, doesn’t matter where they come from – Italy, Australia, Japan, - are inherently open, available to a dialogue with the other; a dialogue which doesn’t impose passive reverence but active production.

The works of the past, be them classical, baroque, rococo, demand and require the intervention of the present to remain relevant; to stay, in a word, alive. It is in this sense that the works in this exhibition might be considered as active interventions of the present on the past, invoking simultaneously the category of the pastiche, the citation but also, and perhaps more importantly, that of translation. If what Walter Benjamin said in 1923 is correct, that is, that translation is the necessary continuation, a kind of extension of the original, the works here are then convincing translations, the creativity of which supplement the original at once opening and enriching it. They become in other words what the original wasn’t, and yet potentially could have been.

At this exhibition testifies to, the inherent dinamicity and becoming of all works of art – their true value – seem to be brought to light, to emerge, to be given form when it undergoes an encounter with an other from itself. It is this encounter that explodes and breaks apart the apparent rigid closure of a work, presenting it again with its many possibilities and, indeed, its many identities. It is not by accident, I think, that Mirian Cabello titled her work "Captives", at once citing Michelangelo’s "I prigioni" and departing from it by, and excuse the apparent rhetorical flourish, staying close to it. Michelangelo’s imposing testimony to the power of the unfinished is here demystify but also intensify by adding layers of meanings and suggestions that take the pure and classical shape right into the domain of the contemporaneous.

It is indeed interesting, and not insignificant, that the often perceived greatness but also monolithic and static events of Italian culture – to the extent that many Italians perceived their cities as museums, good to look at but not good to interact with – is challenged by the encounter with Australian artists, and the filter applied by artists from Italy grown in the proximity of "Arte povera" and conceptual art.

Quotations, citations, translations, they all point to a journey to a place where we’ve been without really being there, and to our condition of travellers whose belonging, be it spatial, linguistic or cultural, is inherently changeable, dynamic, and permeable.

For further reading visit http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/ccs-purdue.html