Laura Serani, Le jardin des monstres, 2014

L’attraction de Salvatore Puglia vers les arts visuels a rejoint rapidement le territoire de ses études et sa fréquentation de l’histoire, en tant que chercheur, pour aboutir à une recherche basée sur le recours à l’image documentaire comme support d’interventions artistiques, selon une pratique qui considère les traces de l’histoire comme matière à transformer.

Son activité d’artiste implique depuis une recherche permanente de sources  qui deviennent objet de lectures évolutives, dans un processus où démarche historique et artistique sont toujours structurellement liées.

Ses investigations nous plongent dans un univers atemporel ,  habité de références culturelles de toute sorte, un peu à la maniere des encyclopédistes, où affleurent également des préoccupations contemporaines.
En mélangeant époques, faits historiques, textes classiques, mythologie et sciences sociales, Puglia propose des nouvelles perceptions du passé et du present.
Les titres de ses travaux, Ritratto dell’artista da figliuol prodigo,  Six leçons de drapé, Anabasis, L’art de la guerre , Les âmes du Purgatoire, Les préoccupations du père de famille,…. donnent le ton de son oeuvre, originale, subtile et engagée.

Depuis 1986 Salvatore Puglia se consacre aux arts visuels et vit actuellement dans le sud de la France où la lumière rappelle davantage celle de Rome où il a vécu jusqu’à l’age de vingt-cinq ans.

Un pas en arrière, fin des années 70, en Italie lentement ou précipitamment se dessinait l’avenir de notre génération, pendant que l’espoir de transformer le monde s’estompait et le choix des chemins personnels se définissait. Comme autant de matérialisations de désirs et d’intérêts différents, cohabitaient sur la table, piles de feuilles remplies à l’Olivetti Lettera 22, pinceaux et couleurs destinés aussi bien aux abstractions à la Miro’ que Salvatore dessinait sur des cartons longs et étroits,  anticipation du format panoramique affectionné plus tard , que aux aquarelles insipides que d’autres peignaient,  tout en découvrant Tina Modotti,  synthèse d’art et de politique et en apprivoisant le premier Nikkormat qui a gardé la mémoire de ces moments.
En 1980, finie l’été romaine et les traversées de la ville en lambretta, Salvatore Puglia a commencé à alterner les voyages à travers l’Europe et les séjours de plus en plus longs à Paris. Les premiers années parisiennes, vécues dans une atmosphère post bohème et denses de rencontres rue de Condé, seront celles du virage définitif vers un parcours totalement dédié à la pratique artistique, sans hésitations ni concessions, mais où l’histoire devait rester toujours presente, dans une symbiose qui caractérisera tous ses travaux jusqu’à aujourd’hui.

Il y’a quelque temps Puglia écrivait à propos de sa démarche:
« Après avoir pratiqué pendant quelques années le montage de documents écrits et visuels, j’ai été naturellement amené à la tentative de cerner une “photographie de l’histoire”. Me limitant à considérer la photographie dans sa plus stricte fonction
reproductrice, je l’utilise comme pièce à conviction, dans des ensembles à la structure sérielle, qui ne prétendent pas reconstruire un sens mais qui tentent de questionner notre manière de regarder le passé. Les images que je montre sont le plus souvent mutilées, réduites à des fragments qui ne permettent pas d’imaginer une unité qui les prolongerait ; elles sont parfois brouillées par des couches superposées de documents graphiques ou iconographiques. Si la reproduction fonctionne comme un outil de conservation, cela va
nécessairement de paire avec de la perte. L’image originaire étant de toute manière perdue, il reste les infinies possibilités de la recréer dans notre imaginaire. »

L’histoire sociale ou familiale, les histoires d’inconnus ou des siens à travers les images des archives de la police et du docteur Charcot ou celles des albums de famille, ont commencé à habiter des surfaces mutantes en donnant corps à des récits parfois aux allures de labyrinthes où les seuls liens entre les images sont des indices autobiographiques

Encres et laques, fils et aiguilles inventent et soulignent silhouettes et contours,  perforèrent et imprègnent toile et papier calque , s’étalent sur cire, plomb, céramique , verre et miroirs : autant de langages pour récrire l’histoire.
Les recherches de Puglia s’expriment à travers supports et outils différents en jouant la stratification, en allusion à celle de la mémoire et aux traces d’un passé toujours sous-jacent dans la représentation du présent.
Les voyages et les contaminations sont permanents entre l’histoire et l’histoire de l’art mais aussi entre différents pratiques, le dessin, le collage, l’incision, le moulage ..
La photographie au fil du temps est devenue déterminante et prédominante,  avec la ré-appropriation d’images préexistantes ou bien avec la réalisation de nouvelles, mais la photographie interesse Puglia toujours en tant que élément documentaire, vecteur de mémoire, témoin de l’absence.

Sans limites dans l’exploration des champs cognitifs et des langages visuels et techniques,  l’ensemble de l’oeuvre  de Puglia est aussi complexe et multiforme  que cohérente et immédiatement reconnaissable. Des constructions savantes s’accompagnent souvent d’un trait incertain donnant vie à des étranges contrastes entre la pensée élaborée qui préside au processus créatif et le recours à un trait souvent volontairement maladroit
Ce trait incertain, avec le quel Puglia dessine et brode des figures indéfinies qui évoquent des ombres ou les marques laissées sur les murs et les tapisseries par des objets disparus, ou avec le quel, d’une écriture tremblante, il retranscrit  textes classiques, épitaphes et sonnets , est une constante dans son oeuvre

Comme si les certitudes du travail de chercheur se confrontaient à une légitimité que Puglia ne voudrait toujours pas reconnaitre au geste. De ce fragile déséquilibre naissent des oeuvres d’une poésie vibrante.

Autre constante, l’adoption du noir et blanc et le recours quasi exclusif à une seule couleur. Couleur, souvent aussi matière et épaisseur, qui souligne l’écart temporel et attire le regard sur cet élément, introduit dans l’image originelle, qui aurait pu changer le cours de l’histoire et qui en modifie la perception.

Tel un spéléologue de la mémoire collective ou privée, Puglia revisite, méticuleusement et à sa façon, lieux et épisodes toujours inattendus; de ses fouilles émergent des reconstitutions intrigantes qui ouvrent d’autres perspectives d’investigation de l’histoire et des nouvelles visions.

L’exposition Au jardin des monstres réunit des travaux récents axés autour des relations entre histoire et nature, paysage et intervention humaine, relations variables au cours du temps.
Le mot jardin, synonyme d’espace et de nature apprivoisés, contraste avec celui de monstre,  figure, par excellence, de l’incapacité humaine à controller la nature et ses créatures.
Le décor est planté et en avançant on peut s’attendre à toute sorte de rencontres.
Objet des récentes explorations de Puglia, des régions aujourd’hui difficilement accessibles et peu peuplées, come la Tuscia, au nord de Rome, disséminée de sites archéologiques abandonnés où les ruines gardent les traces des fonctions successives recouvertes depuis la préhistoire à nos jours, tombes étrusques, refuges de guerre ou bergeries. A tour de rôle, la végétation ou l’intervention humaine ont eu raison de l’autre. En intervenant sur ces lieux avec l’intrusion d’objets étrangers et anachroniques , à forme de langues ou de feuilles en latex, aux couleurs fluorescents, Puglia opere une ultérieure stratification de lexiques que, tout en renvoyant à l’histoire de l’art, trouble le rapport au temps et la vision romantique du paysage.

Dans ces images, désignées par Puglia Land Paintings, on retrouve ses préoccupations d’ investigation historique et ses dispositifs créatifs habituels.  Mais la surprise est permanente pour ce qui concerne les lieux ré-visités et la juxtaposition des éléments glissés ou cousus dans les images. Des animaux sauvages apparaissent dans une campagne domestiquée. Des traces incongrues d’un passage humain récent investissent des sites à la végétation impénétrables ou des espaces aseptiques. Une langue enduite de pigment rouge fluorescent, rend tout son pouvoir à l’Ogre de Bomarzo, un des monstres de ce parc, extravagance de la Renaissance et repaire de dragons, sphinx et demeures penchées. A partir de l’introduction in situ d’un élément que une fois photographié donne vie à une oeuvre à part entière, Puglia produit celle qu’il appelle une archeologie inversée, en ajoutant des nouvelles stratifications à celles existantes.
Liée au paysage, la question du rupestre, au centre des réflexions de Puglia depuis un certain temps, est posée de façon différente par chaque pièce présente dans l’exposition, permettant de constituer une sorte du traité illustré du « rupestre », dont ses mots introduisent bien le concept :
« Si “rupestre” est l’intervention de l’homme sur la nature, qui devient ainsi “oeuvre” (les peintures, les sanctuaires, les rochers sculptés, les pierres gravées), aussi un artefact humain peut devenir rupestre, une fois qu’il est abandonné et que la nature reprend ses droits.
Certainement, là où nature et histoire se rencontrent, on est dans le rupestre. Que ça soit l’évanescence de l’histoire face au retour de la nature, ou la défaite de la nature face à l’avancée de l’histoire. »

Four Theses on the Aesthetics of Fascism (2003-2015)

Note: for the correspondant images please refer to: Slideshow Four Thesis.
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Thesis #1: The Solitude of Monuments

“I monumenti debbono giganteggiare nella loro necessaria solitudine”

“Monuments must dominate by means of their necessary solitude” (Mussolini, 1936)

These photographic images represent important monuments and works of art that were housed during the Second World War in temporary architectural constructions in Italy. Similar photographs exist for all the other countries involved in the conflict, which leads us to imagine what the urban landscape of Europe looked like during those years.

These wrappings of brick, sandbags and mattresses, poor protection in the case of a direct bombardment nevertheless preserved the frescos and sculptures from the potential effects of an explosion that might occur nearby.

In the documentation of the services of the Italian national patrimony (Direzione Generale delle Arti, La protezione del patrimonio artistico nazionale dalle offese della Guerra aerea [Protection of the national artistic heritage from wartime aerial attacks] these works that were imprisoned and removed from the gaze of spectators for whose benefit they had been conceived, appear to us in the limbo of a catastrophe that, for having been announced, is already present, and sometimes takes the form of the devastation that will make of these beautiful churches a pile of anti-esthetic debris.

The quote from Mussolini that is my epigraph constitutes a manifesto, it seems to me, capable of being taken word by word as an announcement of the catastrophe to come: “monument,” “dominate,” “necessary,” solitude.” It is on the basis of such an ideology that the ancient buildings of Rome, during the 20 years of fascism, were “cleansed,” liberated from all historical stratification and superposition: entire residential neighborhoods (as well as one or two hills) were razed around these monuments in order to render them more visible, in order to give them the status of a symbolic icon, from which one could draw one’s resources.

A reasonably representative example of this thinking is the tabula rasa produced around the Mausoleum of Augustus, which remains as an open wound in the middle of the city, inflicted upon it in the name of an equation between the Roman and Fascist empires. Yet it was a monument where the struggle still took place between, on one side, modernism and post-futurism (somewhat supported by Mussolini, who saw in it the realization of his “new man”), and on the other, a neo-imperial classicism supported by most of the Gerarchi [Fascist hierarchy] of the regime. Such a struggle, which became public and explicit around 1934, was temporarily resolved by the evident compromise of the Italian pavilion of the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris. But towards the end of the decade rationalist architects were obliged to bow before the demands of monumental representation, and a cultural politics that was subordinated to that of Nazi Germany.

During the same years in Germany, there was an absence of veritable esthetic conflicts, but one can point to a cohabitation between a “Dorian” official line – linear, monumental, fiercely opposed to bourgeois and individualist fantasy and experiment – and a strong and sentimental nostalgia for a lost age. The coexistence of these two sentiments might lead us to say that fascism is kitsch. And that is because kitsch, the voluntarist representation of harmony, “is a degraded form of myth” (Saul Friedländer, Reflections of Nazism, New York 1984).

But is there not a striking similarity between the temporary carapaces that I asm showing here, and the architectural realizations of these two regimes? And why do we experience, let’s admit it, a fascination for these formless forms?

Thesis #2 Die Ruinenwerttheorie/The Theory of Ruin Value

“In this context I should perhaps dedicate a few words to the so-called Theory of Ruin Value, which is not Hitler’s. It is my own theory!

I had occasion to see how the rubble from renewing the tramway system in Nuremberg, made of iron and cement, were spread all around it. What an unpleasant impression that pile of trash produced! Seeing it, I told myself that we should not construct our most important edifices with reinforced concrete but, on the contrary, draw on the construction techniques of the Ancients, so as to render such structures agreeable to sight, even if in ruins. Following that, I tried to go deeper into my ideas concerning this, and I realized a large drawing, unfortunately lost, of the Nuremberg Zeppelinfeld. It looked like a ruin covered in ivy. When I submitted my design to Hitler some of his collaborators were there, and they considered it a sacrilege to imagine that Hitler’s Reich might last less than for all eternity.

But Hitler considered that how long his monuments might last was a discussion worth having. He knew to what extent Mussolini’s fascism was upheld by the presence of the imperial buildings of Rome, icons of, or memorials to a bygone era from which one sought to draw one’s resources.

No doubt it was because of the enormous costs of such construction techniques that only a few select buildings – of Hitler’s choosing – were to be constructed according to that theory: the Nuremberg Stadium, for example, the military parade ground, and, in Berlin, the Soldatenhalle and the grand assembly hall, Hitler’s palace and perhaps also the Victory Arch.” (Albert Speer, Technik und Macht, Esslingen 1979)

As an introduction to these remarks it is perhaps interesting to remember that Speer’s Zeppelinfeld, “the world’s largest tribune,” which welcomed 100,000 members of his Party is – although it has been divested of the most evident marks of its original function such as the colonnades and giant eagle – today a recreational park where both car racing and open air rock concerts take place.

Indeed, what interests me in Speer’s discourse is the equivalence that he draws between a ruin and a monument. The monument always has a finger pointing somewhere; it always indicates a direction in time, even if it is there for remembering (Denkmal in German) or for admonishing (Mahnmal). As Leopardi already noted, in the middle of the romantic period (in his Zibaldone di pensieri), one builds a monument to counter the idea of finitude.

I find it interesting to reflect on how a regime at the height of its power can already be interested in the forms of its own demise. For my part, I am interested in “unconscious” ruins. The images used for this work were taken in three places: 1) in Rome, in the Antiquarium comunale of Celio, a veritable open cemetery for archeological relics that – too fragmentary, dispersed or anonymous – didn’t even find a home in some museum warehouse; 2) in Bagnoli, near Naples, in the disaffected or soon to be demolished industrial buildings of the Italsider; and 3) in Potsdam, in the parks where the Kings of Prussia built their own form of identification with classical antiquity during the romantic period.

These piles of rubble are supposedly the antithesis of what Hitler and Speer intended by “ruin value.” At the same time, I am not sure that what made me jump over the fences of these sites in order to photograph them was not a version, perhaps more conscious or more “de-constructed,” of a similar attraction for the ruin in and of itself. Of course, this was not the pathetic nostalgia for a Mediterranean world that took pride in an ancient history and a monumental past, a nostalgia that pushed many German aristocrats to construct artificial ruins [Künstliche Ruine] of painted wood and plaster in the parks of their chateaux. But this fascination for romantic ruins, quite obvious in Speer’s text, and which comes to him directly from the 18th century, is typical for rational beings who gamble their own persistence in future time.

When I photographed the Norman tower site, with its “Roman” arcades and “Greek” temple (this was in 2003), I found it quite amusing that it was in the process of being restored to its “original fakeness.”

I’d like to show here, in parentheses, several images illustrating an esthetic of the ruin. It seems to me that all of them bare witness, in their diversity, to the function of the ruin as a hinge in the linear continuity of time: these are “pre-Benjaminian” images. The fall is not yet the catastrophe.

Capriccio di rovine (Caprice of Ruins) by Giovambattista Piranesi, 1756. Please note the size of the characters in relation to that of the piled up vestiges.

Rovine di una galleria di statue nella Villa Adriana (Ruins in a statue gallery in Hadrian’s Villa), Piranesi, finished in 1770.

The Artist’s Despair before the grandeur of ancient ruins, Johann Heinrich Füssli, 1780.

View of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in Ruins, Hubert Robert. This enlightened and learned artist, projects himself into the future while actively participating in the acquisitions and construction of the new Louvre Museum around 1795.

Thesis #3: Sentimentalisierung ist Verbrechen / Sentimentalizing is a crime

“Art does not find is basis in time, but only in peoples” (Adolf Hitler, 1937

“The artist who thinks he must paint for his time or to serve the taste of time has not understood the Führer. The stakes are for all eternity! To create the eternal on the basis of the temporal, that is the sense of all human enterprise” (Baldur von Schirach, 1941)

The Balilla (named for a young Genoan who, by throwing the first stone, gave the signal for the insurrection against the Austrian occupier in 1746) were children aged from six to twelve who were incorporated into the numerous paramilitary units under Italian fascism (between 3 and 6 one was a son of the wolf /Figlio della Lupa; between 13 and 18, Avanguardista; from 18 on, Giovane Italiano)

In the photographic pose (of course every photograph isolates and “iconizes” its subject) the child is “promised,” consigned by the adults responsible for him to the regime, which will guarantee for him the future into which he is inscribed. That is what is shown in the three variants on this theme that I am proposing in this documentation: a child in uniform giving the fascist salute; a child in uniform with a club; a child in uniform with a portrait of Il Duce. The logical consequence of those images is found here: the stamp on the postcard bears the date June 1941, year 19 of the fascist era. The US hadn’t yet entered the war.

The tenderness implied in placing the young child in front of the photographic lens, the same tenderness as when we take photos of our own children, also carries a threat: this child, who is already a soldier, will be in the camp of the conquerors. His uniform protects him already, while at the same time giving him the symbolic and ideological points of reference for his adult life. At the same time, we know that this father, with all the pride in the world, having lead his son to the corner photographic studio, is an Abraham who is using the lens in the place of the sacrificial knife: “This child is dying,” Chris Fynsk would say (Infant Figures, Stanford UP, 2000).

Indeed, the infans, the speechless child, cannot say by which end he would like to end. These children, subject to photographic surgery – wasn’t I also put in front of a large black apparatus in the back room of a studio that smelled of mold and Odradek, after being dressed up as a little Bersagliere/infantryman, on my head a strange round and stiff hat decorated with rooster feathers? – these children inevitably make me think of those animals that were still being used even recently for scientific experiments.

What finally attracts us in the iconography of these experiences is the fact that its subject is alienated from its individual multiplicity in order to extract the signs of a single one of its attributes. As a result it is known to us as a reified sign. In the same way we observe and interpret that gestures of a loved one, his or her breathing even, as signs that are addressed to us, without seeing that that being is far from us and from our own fascism, that is to say far from the will to coopt the other within our system.

Thesis #4. Colpi proibiti/Forbidden Blows

“Because, for the fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, or has value, outside of the State” (Enciclopedia italiana, vol. XIV (1932), entry on “Fascism,” chapter “Doctrine,” signed Benito Mussolini, but written by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile)

But what does fascism and its esthetics have to do with this work, entitled Forbidden Blows? In fact it is nothing other than the simple reproduction of two plates from the Enciclopedia italiana, illustrations for the article on Pugilato/Boxing, showing defensive blows as well as forbidden ones (which are also listed and included, it goes without saying, in order to be sanctioned).

When we look at these images with a minimum of attention we see how these brave boxers have been placed against a background inspired by classicism. It is probably the Fascist Academy of Physical Education, built between 1926 and 1932, based on the designs of that most official architect Del Debbio, and completed by the time the article appeared in volume 38 of the Encyclopedia (published in 1935).

In fact, as the Encyclopedia article reminds us, boxers, whether amateur or professional, were integrated into the Italian Pugilist Federation, which was attached to the Italian National Olympic Committee, which depended in turn on the National Fascist Party. Only Germany had a similar organization, whereas “in the other European nations federations were social entities without any investment by the constituted powers.”

The context of these images, as well as the information provided by the editor of the Encyclopedia, tell us that we are looking at fascist boxers. But my question is: can a boxer be fascist? Or, to put it another way, can there be fascist and non-fascist boxing? And what would democratic boxing look like? Like me, you have no answer to that question. For one can be boxer and democratic, but not a democratic boxer.

In the same way one might ask; can a child be fascist? And an artist?

All the particulars of fascist esthetics mentioned here (a-contextuality, a-temporality, cooptation, dependence) are not unknown to me. And my own artistic practice is not exempt from the kitsch implied by all of these procedures (de-contextualization, change of scale, reproduction ad libitum, repetitiveness in multiplying images).

What is it then that explains my own fascination for these subjects (the esthetics of Evil accompanied by nomenclatures, classifications, incantatory enumerations, and scientific experiment for which the human is the subject, all these anthropologies and anthropometries that assuredly resemble a theatre of sadism)? What is my own relation to these Balilla photographed, these boxers boxing in the void, and these builders of nothingness?

SP, 2003-2015

Translated from French by David Wills

(Find here the related images: Quatre thèses…)