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Damiano BertoliContinuous Moment, Hot August KnifeInvitationPress release / Catalogue text
The Future lasts a long time; or, Damiano Bertoli's Continuous Moment1969 is undoubtedly a key year in the story of the Continuous Moment . In 1969, Rupert Murdoch buys the British tabloid News of the World . Yasser Arafat becomes head of the PLO, diverse terrorist organisations strike across the globe, and the Soviets and Americans escalate the space race. The Yanks land on the moon (allegedly "for all mankind"), and continue to bomb the crap out of Vietnam. The Soviets squabble with the Chinese. Chicago cops shoot two Black Panthers in their sleep. Sharon Tate, Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, is slaughtered by the Manson Family. The world's first ATM is installed in New York. There's Woodstock. Altamont. Lennon and Ono have a Bed-In. Hippie communes breed like rabbits. The radical Florentine designers of Superstudio launch their Continuous Monument . And 1969 is also the year in which Damiano Bertoli is born. If no single image, object or thought can represent the intense phantasmagorical qualities of these seemingly disconnected events of '69, might some odd assemblage of fragments capture something essential for and about our own continuous moment? Here's a head-shot of a mysterious Rückenfigur, gazing out over an ancient city. What about the promiscuous narcissism of Joni Mitchell, warbling her delicate and sensitive tunes to excite the orifices of a world population inexorably becoming part of North America's West Coast? She's a visual artist too, didn't you know? And who's that peeking through a crazy menstrual acid haze? Who would send out those angel ladies on their obscene missions of modern love? There's the rippling silver of a distorting quadrilateral, Malevich's revolutionary impulses become cheesy interior decoration for hippie acid orgies. A gigantic enucleated eye. Think of Tommy , the Who's incredible double-album rock-opera, featuring a "deaf, dumb and blind kid" who "sure plays a mean pinball." A portrait of the young artist as a literally senseless creature, who can nonetheless keep the shining ball in play without tilting. Beyond merely human perceptions, he's got his fingertips on the pulse of the cosmos, slapping the flippers of existence by pure feeling alone. What are the themes that emerge from this heap of broken images? Narcissism: a captivation by the youthful images of dubious or anonymous celebrities. Imaging technologies: photographs, newspapers, books, glossy magazines, films, getting themselves organised into a single ramifying global network. Ultra-Violence: from the quaint personal assault to the apocalyptic nuclear threat, it's on for young and old. As the Bum from A Clockwork Orange helplessly whines, "It's a stinking world cause there's no law and order any more. It's a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old like you've done. Oh, it's no world for an old man any longer. What kind of a world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning around the earth and there's not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more. Oh dear dear land I fought for thee." If you're prepared to run with the Bum's helpless drivel, you might ask what's holding all this extra-planetary lawlessness together. This is where Superstudio tear off their glasses and designer-suits and fly to the rescue in their architectural superpants. Their Continuous Monument project proposed the extension of a single structure across the planet. Flagrantly ridiculous, all that could exist of such a project were Superstudio's manifestos and collages which, as Charles Jencks wrote, projected "a mixture of 'Fascist' 'total urbanization'...and absolute egalitarianism. Everyone has exactly the same room, or the same white square gridiron, which is used for all functions." Continuous Monument was a parody of modernist grandeur, control, and taste, its universal grid presented as the ultimate and the purest development of the human urge to tamper with space. In Superstudio's own words: "all architecture will be created with a single act, from a single design capable of clarifying once and for all the motives which have induced man to build dolmens, menhirs, pyramids, and lastly to trace ( ultima ratio ) a white line in the desert." Against the capitalist fetishism of objects, Continuous Monument projected a global megastructure upon which humans could wander nomadically, fed, watered, and powered-up by a techno-Gaian Super-Mummy. Embrace the love. Tell Tron to go and eat its heart out. In and of itself, the very name Superstudio is suggestive: at once a great ("super") studio, and a transcendence of studio, " Superstudio " implies a great leap forward, beyond existing confines. Yet, if clearly a critique of modernist blathering about the utopian potentialities of architecture, Continuous Monument nonetheless retained something of this utopianism in its very critique. As the Roman poet Horace proclaims, in a famous Ode, exegi monumentum aere perennius , "I built a monument more lasting than bronze." This has usually been read either as a declaration of the existence of the soul or of the power of art to outlast the impotent battering of empirical events. Superstudio bought in, perhaps despite themselves, to this monumental drama. Did our hip friends at Superstudio envisage the Family roaming the Continuous Monument , eviscerating film stars as they went? So Bertoli 's intervention is to dredge up the stinking garbage on which the whole edifice rests. Superstudio wanted to cover the globe in an enormous grid; Bertoli underlines that they really wanted to turn the world into a gigantic tiled bathroom. In the course of his plumbing operation, the eye itself becomes just another bit of junk in the gurgling artscape. For Roger Callois, the eye was at once travesty, camouflage and intimidation; Jacques Lacan noted that such an eye sees in a space that is not itself visual; now Bertoli adds that the whole ensemble's become a kind of space junk, and the artist Gettatore , one who casts an evil eye... If Continuous Monument arrogated both spatial and temporal continuity for its planetary enfolding, Bertoli's Continuous Moment dumps spatial domination in favour of an indefinitely-protracted quasi-existence. A moment is by definition continuous, or it wouldn't be a moment at all (it would be moment s , plural). Which raises serious questions: what qualities does a moment have? where does a moment happen? how long does a moment last? and who for? is there such a thing as a discontinuous moment? These temporal questions implicate the uncertain domain of art and artists today. As Bertoli puts it in an interview with Zara Stanhope: "I think contemporary art will accumulate meaning in a different way to historical art." Perhaps meaning will now accumulate through versions of spinning on the spot... Or perhaps it will happen in a return to the motif of the universal grid, however perverted, ruined, or ironized. In Bertoli's work, such a grid is used to physically or visually or allusively connect disparate objects, images, spaces, disciplines and ideas. Whether the grid is generated through cuts, folds, scratches, juxtapositions, drawing or painting, it arises as a dissimulating speculative bond, connecting the Renaissance to minimalism, perspective with the all-over, art with shit. Along these lines, it's possible to say that Bertoli's own project, his Continuous Moment , is to seize control of those non-existent but universal bonds that bind us not only to what happens, but to what might or might never happen. As Machiavelli put it, prophesying the final destiny of any Continuous Moment : "The future lasts a long time." Eternity is just an art-gallery away.
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