| Square & Share The art of the Occasion Francesco Morace May 2000  • Intro • MemorAbles and... • The art of the Occasion |
Accordingly, artistic expression is transformed from serving as the generator of an aesthetic and a message, into a process of expressing a sensibility, a vision, a vital relationship, an attraction that ascribes to the logic of passion, but one that is filtered and justified by the mind and its interpretive capacity. In this new context, the artist’s task is to interpret, not so much the world that surrounds us, as his own personal passion by means of the external world in the dynamic context of his relationship with the Vital Occasion.
In the contemporary imagination one is thus witnessing the emergence of a renewed role for art that is supported by new theoretical thinking. On the one hand, there is the emerging new centrality of people and ideas, on the other, one is witnessing a growing need for creative and relevant projects that are capable of keeping pace with the enormous growth in vital energy and cultural expectations generated by the emerging sociological, technological and cultural forces.
At the center of a tetralogy that we could describe as P to the fourth power, in which people, places, plans and projects compose a dynamic system of mutual multiplication – we find the concept of “Occasion” used in the sense of an opportunity for transforming the present and breaking with the past, gathering up the energies and driving forces that artistic and vital reflection can propel into the future. Proceeding in this manner we obtain the following equation P4 = O, in which O, the Occasion, represents an opportunity for an encounter – as maintained by Walter Benjamin - between History (people and products) and Poetry (ideas and projects), while at the same time constituting the modality of development of an archetypal past that, by means of permanently sloughing off the present, in the sense of occasion, is capable of conceiving the future.
It is in this context that there emerges the possibility of proposing a new way of thinking about the art of the occasion, a context in which occasion is meant to refer to a magical place in which analysis meets synthesis, as Mario Perniola points out in his book, Transiti (Transits).
During the current phase of chaotic consumption, the force of life occasions (a concept that, along with Mindsyles, is replacing lifestyles) is completely bound up with the concept of strange attractors which prove themselves to be capable of transforming themselves into potential occasions: occasional beauty, for example, is seductive because it implies – as said by Stendhal and recalled by Perniola – the promise of happiness. It is connected with novelty, curiosity, imperfection and intoxication. The contemporary art world (as well of the world of consumption and everyday life) is increasingly orienting itself in terms of these four variables. The life occasion is also demonstrating itself to be highly compatible with the artistic way of thinking and creativity. Paul Valery – a great theoretician of the occasion – wrote that our thoughts are exclusively supported and developed by occasions.
I this context, artistic activity reveals itself to be increasingly close to a poetic experience of daily life that initiates at the lowest level, with people’s creative sensibility, which is proving to be increasingly relevant in terms of the aesthetic-perceptive relationship with the world. Indeed, the relational aesthetic, organically bound up with everyday life, makes it possible to animate life time from an existential point of view and enrich it from a cultural point of view. It is the sphere of art defined in terms of live and vice versa. In this context artists become relational by vocation, natural engineers of life time. As in the most advanced experiences of relational art – this is certainly the case in regard to the two French artists, Rochdy Caribi and Christine Bouvier – the relationship is presented by means of a proximate space that renders it familiar, near, immediate and accessible. This apparent contradiction between the concepts of globalization/virtuality and proximity, in reality constitutes the great occasion and the ultimate reason of relational art and, at the same time, life, in the sense of an occasion. As Pierre Restany wrote: "relational artists develop paradigms of interactivity that function like fragments in the interpersonal sphere: miniature models of existential situations that tend to promote dialogue and exchange. These structures define spatial-temporal zones, tiny fissures in everyday life within which existential normalcy expresses itself in a more spontaneous, gratifying manner”. This dynamic could become equally decisive in the world of personal existences. Having entered the third millennium, once again life appears to have everything to learn from art and art a great deal to borrow from life.
» by Francesco Morace, may 2000, from Artbeat 2. Arte narrativa videoclip, Castelvecchi Arte, Rome 2000
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