Alessandro Romanini - MANN 2018

ASK THE DUST OF TIME

ALESSANDRO ROMANINI

“Tradition is the tending of the flame, not the worship of the ashes” Gustav Mahler

“Vigilant life calls for adversaries. When the human awakens, it is the images of hard materials that trigger great joy. In the robust world of materials, the nervous life and the muscular life join forces”
Gaston Bachelard

With this exhibition, Aron Demetz fulfils his dream of synergizing what have been the two requirements of his artistic development since the time of his training and which have dialogued with each other in all his sculptural production: an analytical observation of classical works and the hands-on scrutiny of sculptural materials.

Two emotions rise in the artist contemplating and probing the sculptures placed around the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. Pervading and chilling feelings prompted by works that seem to have spawned all the history of art and its countless formal, technical and ethical solutions; and, as the artist himself states, “from which all we artists feel we come”. The first is linked to the sensation of stepping close to the origin of art, prodding the artist to explore the cultural past and, more crucially, the aesthetic process. It is linked to that sense of reverential awe that accompanies a respectful investigation pursuing expressions of our past, traceable centuries later in our culture, language and institutions but, most of all, in our monuments and sculpture.

The common origin of Western art and culture – ab Homero principium – is the birth of the principles and dynamics, be they manifest or hidden, handed down and assimilated over time by art and artists. When works are observed with the artist’s probing and sympathetic eye, this common origin fuses the sensitive experience adopted by Winckelmann re the Laocoön with that of Lessing, in search of “original” images of art and poetry, original, archetypical images of poetry and art, which the artist seeks in the forms and materials.This same origin also leads to the concept of history as an uninterrupted sequence of events that produces the present, both philosophically and in formal-sculptural terms. “Tradition is the tending of the flame, not the worship of the ashes,” as Mahler said.

For most artists, and Aron Demetz is one of these, classical art is not simply a store of exempla but a more ethical than aesthetic approach that continues inexorably to manifest itself and of which artists are asked to be custodians and promotors. Artists are fascinated by the way every age shapes the classical concept. Indeed, every age structures its own sense of the classical in order to then forge an identity for itself. This explains why the “classical” concept concerns not only the past but also the present and, hence, an idea of and about the future. It successfully grasps the innermost rather than the superficial or merely formal “classical” message and lends it continuity by creating synergic interaction between its own subjective needs and the structured languages of the day. The artist as such feels a responsibility to continue this tradition. This ethical attitude is in keeping with that stated by Novalis and namely that antiquity “is not actually given to us – it is not at hand – rather, it is yet to be engendered by us.”

The “classical” is not a historical-diachronic need but an ethical approach seeking a language of its own and an order; one that may well appear as disorder but is structured in a mediated and premeditated arrangement of forms and their technical solutions. In the common understanding, “classical” is what comes before and defines what is original and paradigmatic; that on which the swells of different classicisms will be based in the following centuries. Aron Demetz is closer to the thought of Paul Valery who in his 1944 Variétés says: “The essence of classicism is to come after. Order assumes a certain disorder to be overcome.” The other key element is what can be called the material’s feeling, which leads

an artist to experiment with all the potential of a material and, more importantly, to defer some authorship expectations to it.

Completing these principal reflections are two observations or, rather, issues raised by the artist and prompted by repeated visits to and study of the MANN collections, which helped drive his research centred on creating specific works for this exhibition. The first issue is linked to the “masterpiece” definition, which elevates a work onto an unreachable pedestal, removing it from history and projecting it into what is supposedly a universal dimension; this deters investigation of the work and deprives it of the chance to generate productive fruits in future creative generations. The other issue arises spontaneously: at this particular time in history, what is the sense in seeking
“shared” origins when the most popular tendency is to differentiate one’s own origin from that of those around us?

The artist’s principal reflection focuses on the material, for so long now at the heart of his research. The material, primarily marble, is a vehicle, a bearer of history and of “classical” values but also a motivator that steers the artist’s creative path. Materials are connoted by the classical culture in the broadest sense, long before the artist’s hand and style step in. It is the connotations and historical content intrinsic to the materials that an artist about to produce a work is asked to address. The content linked to the natural, “extractive” constituent of the materials must then be factored in. As in the case of wood, this constituent broadens the spectrum of connotations and that of the transmission of knowhow bound to the work methods.

In his “Salon of 1846”, Charles Baudelaire had already said that “sculpture is boring” because linked to a material and titanic past that leaves it dawdling in the ranks of ancient and no longer fashionable styles and disciplines. Sculpture is a discipline of barbarians and primitives, “a Caribbean art”, as described again by Baudelaire when those islands were inhabited only by natives, for its ancestral and primeval feel or, even better, for that gut reaction that sees sculptors more inclined to overcome the difficulties of the action than of the thought. The visceral nature of the action and the material connote a discipline and the body of knowledge surrounding it. The transmission of knowledge that overflows from the technical sphere into the socio-anthropological province informing artisans, technicians, artists and social communities – invested with all these theoretical and practical notions – translates the idea into an aesthetic which is also ethics. Homo faber, well described by Richard Sennet and by Hannah Arendt before him, differs from Animal laborans as, during the production process, he asks himself not only “how” but also “why”, thereby introducing the fundamental and structuring ethical component into the productive act. The ethical component is fueled by the stratification of knowledge accumulated via persistent experimentation which has seen the coming together of abstraction and practice, hand and mind.

During the creative process, the artist is constantly fuelling his self-interrogation as to his role at this point in history, especially in light of the dialectic between abstraction and production, imagination and manual work. Aided by all the superb sculptures in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, he reboots the historical-diachronic path that saw the artist as an “artisan”; he who could create by modelling and forging in Homerian and archaic times, a public figure who offered his technical skills to his community. This image of the artist changed in the classical period of Aristotle and Aristophanes to an individual stripped of his social dignity. The status was recouped by the Encyclopédie of the Enlightenment which restored the same dignity to Homo faber as enjoyed in Archaic Greece, but it was then contested in the Romantic period by the dialectic clash between artisan and artist. This distinction contrasted a collective subject handing down knowledge incarnate with an individual resolutely steering and creating his artistic product. In this particular understanding, the artist’s originality makes the transmission of his knowledge difficult and it remains his secret.

For Aron Demetz, materials constitute an infinite paradigm of creative possibilities, many prompted by the material itself and its chemical, physical and organoleptic prerogatives. To the artist, the process of realization is just as important as, and sometimes more so than, the end product. The artist’s action is therefore melded into a synergic process of time – one of planning and realization, with all its unpredictability – and space, into the structural
syntax of sculptural works, abstract imagination and concrete operation.
This process is based on trial and error. It is an uncharted path in the area of physicality, characterized by unpredictability and chance, failure, changes of mind and of approach, and allegiance to the initial idea carried forward with the flexibility of a vision shaped by testing the material. It is a “learning by doing”, generous with its teachings but only if the artist is willing to accept and indulge the suggestions and signals given by the materials; and, above all, if he is able to predispose an “authorial” space allocated to the exclusive use of the materials in the conception phase.

With regard to this acquired knowledge, Peyron described the forming activity as a doing, which, as it does, invents the way of doing. Materials and technical aids are extensions of the artist’s hand and mind. The more tool, hand and brain are synergically fused into a single device and carry forward a coordinated action, the more the process and product will be perceived as a good one. Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, founders of the Purist movement, also adhered to this principle when theorizing the “origine mécanique de la sensation plastique”. The hand/mind synergy advocated and sought by Aron Demetz had an early supporter in Leon Battista Alberti when, in the prologue of De Re Aedificatoria, he stated that the role of the architect, and by extension of the creative, is to be a master of both the devising – “tum mente animoque diffinire” – and the realizing, by way of intelligence and method. In the second aphorism of his Instauratio Magna (1620), Francis Bacon also concurs that intellect, creativity and hand must work together if something is to be completed via the skilful modelling of materials, which are turned into a work of art. Nor should Henri Focillon be overlooked, having devoted his essay “Un eloge de la main” to such thoughts and included it in his Vie des formes.

That adopted by Demetz is an “Oriental” approach – mediated in the West by Gutai and perfected by Fluxus. It invests reality, in all its permutations, with a creative responsibility, a sharing of the authorial responsibility with the
artist. This responsibility is forged at the time of a material’s original genetic structuring and is enriched during the process, throughout all the work phases, when the method seeks to impose its own rationales and is open to dialogue with the material’s resistance. The artist deploys the talents of the strategist in the field, combining them with those of the organizer who coordinates all the technical-material requirements, trying to steer them in the synergy with the abstract-ideational constituent, and with those of the officiant in the complex rituals that oversee the creation-material dialogue. He manages the rigid technical procedures and the syncopated and karst-like progress made by the unpredictable material, going with its flow in the context of a creative vessel, with assertive wisdom and the malleable direction of an orchestra conductor.

Aron Demetz aligns himself with Gaston Bachelard’s thought, by which a work of art is born out of the encounter between the artist’s unconscious and the imagery peculiar to and innate in every material, governed by the primary categories of soft and hard and the generative metaphors of concave and convex. Creativity is the idea become form thanks to the laborious and energetic mix of Homo faber and material, punctuated by a dialectic of attraction and aggressiveness. It is the encounter between the organic energy of the hand and its appendages and the inorganic energy of the materials, in a joint struggle against the incumbent inertia of entropy and indifference. It is from this dialectic, from this constant struggle, that the work of art springs and the idea is concretely translated; this is why Aron Demetz wants to leave tangible aesthetic-sculptural traces to illustrate all the phases of the process. Similarly, when he chooses the installation form, he disseminates traces of the work that led to the aesthetic product and the fundamentals of his creative sculptural alphabet, which is recomposed in an expressive syntax.

The works are a metaphorical elaboration of all the processes required to translate the idea into form, abstraction into cultural matter; the technical elements are even “beautified”, transposed from their functional dimension to that of the sculptural language, as among others are crucibles. These elements are key to his research and production but, more importantly, they constitute the drive and fulcrum of a metalinguistic reflection that the artist has been conducting for many years. His research draws dynamics of learning and knowledge into the same context, transported by the dialectic of hand-mind, abstraction-manual work; the role of the artist in the current historical framework; and the disclosure of the artistic practices. All this is to break free from the fiction dynamic linked to the widespread dissolution of the immediate and tangible relationship with reality. It is matter generating matter; forms inspire and produce forms and materials tend to materials, as in the case of natural resins that ideally repair a wooden figure just as they do tree trunks in nature. It is the epistemology of matter observed in its epitome.

The ethical approach presiding over the artist’s work, aligned with that emanated by “classical” works, is a battle fought by Aron Demetz against the progressive and unstoppable dematerialization of the work process and also the material to the advantage of cathodic and digital metaphors. It is a process by which creativity migrates from physically dense reality to rarefied media simulacra. It is no rearguard defence of the “material” creation and the craft behind it but a valorization of the mind-hand, abstraction-production coupling, with all the procedures and difficulties involved; without this coupling there is no depositing of experience and so of knowledge. It is not a nostalgic yearning on the artist’s part or his opposition to the spread of technologies; rather, it is a critical gaze on their widespread proliferation that risks obliterating both physical and mental “work”.

Analysis of the artist’s more than twenty-year output – built up despite his young age – as a whole and his research path sheds full light also on the exhibition’s installation path, which this catalogue seeks to explain. Over the years, Aron Demetz has created a sculptural process of self-reflection that bridges the gap

between ancient and contemporary, inserting classical Graeco-Roman art and its disciples, such as Michelangelo, Canova and Bernini, as too the dynasty held together by figures such as Medardo Rosso, into the same sphere of analysis and elaboration. Using materials, he has succeeded in fashioning a dialogue between the apex of aesthetic purity and the progressive dissolution of the matter, symmetrically coupling the idea and its realization. With sculpture, he has illustrated the assimilation of the concepts that led to the loss of the object as a unit and its celebratory purpose while maintaining the sacredness of the creative sculptural process.

Aron Demetz shows that he has explored in depth the poetics of the object, from Minimalism to Arte Povera, and the conceptual paradox into which they led sculpture, as too the essence of sculpture as a language in the wake of Arturo Martini’s declarations on the death of sculpture in 1946. Paraphrasing Bachelard, there is a risk that the man/artist finds himself as a mere philosopher before the universe deprived of his tireless encounter with the substance of things of his world, that is, deprived of the very prerequisite of his identifying role as a creative individual and species. No progress can be made by the artist in terms of abstract elaborational capability without acquired knowledge of the difficulties imposed by the materials and method. An idea, a project, is born out of intimate knowledge of the material and the broad paradigm of accompanying solutions. Paradoxically, even if the end product departs from its material structure, it remains the artist’s conviction perfectly translated into his works.

Aron Demetz shows – also to a diachronic analysis of his oeuvre – that he has assimilated the ability to create a dialogue between the inseparable phenomena that are the very essence of sculpture, that is, gravity, weight, the search for three-dimensionality and form, and the expanded syntax of the sculptural language, enriching it with “phonemes” that lead it in a fruitful departure towards new nouns such as movement and time-duration, especially in the installation dimension. His latest production, which benefits greatly from the “metalinguistic” reflection on the making of sculpture, clearly reveals echoes of and the thinking on the formless – which was followed by the minimal and conceptual experiences. It boosted sculpture’s value as a performative and procedural-operational act, a value already alluded to in his “burnt” figures, his original take on the attempts already made by Italy’s Agenore Fabbri. Aron Demetz’s time-duration is more closely linked to the concept of memory than to that of performance. The figure, the fulcrum of this Alto Adige artist’s research and the fruit of his sculptural operation, is increasingly disentangled from the subject representation and centred on the theme and its mnemonic reverberations.

The figure is the conveyor that, throughout the plurimillenary history of art, has managed to transmit ethical and formal values and serve as a tool of experimentation, often reaching degree zero and annulment, disappearing only to reappear cyclically over time at a karst-like pace. The figure is to Demetz the basis of the elaboration but also the means of calibrating space and the drive behind the signifying activation of the rooms housing the work. It is the anthropological symbol of the experience and so of the mnemonic stratification and, ultimately, the receptacle of knowledge. The sculptural figures are not reminiscent of anything real; they have no real referent to indicate a process of mimetic reproduction; instead, they reference the subjective experience of a specific body that leaves “forensic” evidence, an indicator. The term “indexical” fits this type of experience to perfection. The Alto Adige artist’s figures are a slightly totemic and hieratic presence. It is not a symbolic presence or that of a representative image but one of a void, a shadow in a context that invites the “active” spectator to a first-hand, primigenial, subjective experience: the onlooker’s physical experience projected onto the work. It is a return to the original experience of the sculpture as a corpus that the observer “places” in the space. The sculptural work in Aron Demetz’s
poetic is not a separate object – in the Minimalist sense – but a stimulator and aggregator with which participating spectators develop their self-reflective narratives, “forced” to build their own new perceptive paths in response to the spatial contextualization.

In this context, Demetz has structured a dual operation, prompting spectators to disentangle themselves, using their own perceptive and subjective map, among contemporary and classical works, in a play of references and volumetric-time dialectics. The artist makes his thought regarding the body/space relationship known in the installation dimension and in that of the works’ display. Structuring a path marked by contemporary and classical sculptures, the historical connotation of the architecture and the context in general, he tries to free visitors from the so-called enslavement to the right angle, that sees the contemporary individual exiled from the natural dimension and from subjective perception, and “contained” by the architecture. Demetz’s installations – as too the assembled sculptures as a whole – want people to “feel” the space; they convey the importance of the space, the so-called context, for the purposes of the expression. The works, the figures, dialogue with the spatial syntax, the light and the time of the experience of those volumes, and with the genius loci, confirming the convinction that art colonizes the space, it eats the world, it strongly infects it and it stamps an indelible mark on it.

For the young artist, space is a raw material in the same way that wood and marble are, the noumenon and the base element of the construction of meaning. The space is material in the structuring and linguistic sense of the
work and it is what determines what is possible and what is not. In this context, the artist sees space as not only that perceived by the senses, what can be seen and measured, but also and more importantly what the historic and anthropogenic stratification of that specific place represents and is. The artist is asking the spectator to understand or “grasp” the space. Understanding the genius loci, “listening to the place”, is an appropriate and ethical endeavour that preserves the memory of the phenomena that have constructed the human experience. The model of the classics serves as an example in this train of thought. Via his research, Aron Demetz has managed to pair identification with the sculpture with the material rather than with the form, as linked to the results of Arte Povera and Arte Informale, and with the concept that a sculpture, as an object, can embody an idea. In his work, these concepts apply from the single sculpture to the environmental and installation dimension, which finds its ideal context in the spaces of the archaeological museum, a context able to demonstrate that it is the physical place that embodies the expressive will of Demetz’s work.

Ultimately, the work of this artist is closely linked to the concreteness and physicality of the materials, even when eroded, dismembered, lightened, liquefied, variously altered and liberated from the mimetic representation of reality and from figuration tout court. However, it is open to dialectic and synergical dynamics both in its historical and cultural spheres and in its forays into syntactic spatial ones such as installation, design and architecture. The techniques and materials, coordinated by the artist’s idea, open themselves to a play of relations prone to factors that, although not crucial to the work, do feed its linguistic expansion, such as space and the spectator. Just like the materials, the latter becomes a co-author, being asked to interact actively and break free from a merely passive and contemplative role, completing the inductive-semantic path inscribed in the work itself with its subjective interpretation. As this exhibition concretely shows, artists such as Aron Demetz abundantly fuel the debate on sculpture and on artistic perception, reinserting the art of sculpture rightfully among the espressive disciplines. Aron Demetz’s sculpture dialogues with the classical and modern past at the same time as with the present, in a continuous process of action and meaning, reinvented each time on the basis of historical testimonies, personal myths, au-
tonomous practices, collective memories, biographical dimensions and universal aspirations.