oscaraccorsi

It’s never easy for an artist to write about his or her own work. The artist’s assumptions are bound to differ radically from those of people who have chosen to write about art professionally. Nevertheless, I believe that it may be a useful exercise for this reason: an art critic can only suppose, but never really know, what fuels an artist, the desire that moves him or her. I want to have a shot at describing my desire. In 1994, I entitled a series of works “in ascolto” (listening). For those like me who trained as musicians and use sound as a fundamental part of their work, titles related to sound are natural enough. In fact, there is more to this apparently simple title: it is an effective summary of what I mean - and practise – when I “make art”. The “ascolto” in the title, and not only, refers to a condition of openness and receptiveness to materials and things of the world. By definition, this presupposes a particular, fundamental state: silence; here things have a chance to “speak”, to show themselves and perhaps be seen in a different light. The figure of the artist emerging from this premise reminds me of a medium, i.e. one who doesn’t speak but arranges matters in such a way that, through him or her, things speak, show themselves; and starting from the things themselves one begins to build, reversing the common idea of the design process (thought, design, production). In 1962, David Smith understood this mechanism: on his arrival at Voltri he threw away his notebook full of sketches and ideas deciding to make thirty sculptures with material he found on the spot instead of the three that had been planned, thus reversing his work method; he died prematurely a year later and so we don’t know how he would have developed along this path. I am on the same journey, although with results which are necessarily different (I was hardly four in 1962). We are a long way from the new Dada aesthetics promulgated by Duchamp when he was in New York in the late post-war period – in case anyone saw any similarities there -, or from Pop. On the other hand, we are very close to an “ecological” notion of art, not only because waste material is used (mainly from steelworks), but rather because this material is reorganised with great emphasis on composition and its potential for form and expression, annulling (with silence) any conceptual backdrop. Ecology of thought, i.e. stripping the action of the artist of cumbersome and misleading intellectual superstructures in favour of an art for our senses. Once we have accessed our senses, we automatically access our mind: with no great lucidity perhaps but we’ve got there nonetheless. I think that a fortunate intuition is always quicker and more spacious than any lucid conceptual speculation and can restore something that Western civilisation has almost completely lost: the mystery of things. Here there still resides the authentic, original “die urzeit” (original time) towards which I feel I am moving. Thus the things or situations that issue from my hands cease to represent and, simply, exist, encumber and modify the same space that we inhabit without giving us the reassurance that comes from representation; they ask questions and are asked questions, without answers I hope. What is all this, if not theatre? Certainly a curious form of theatre where the spectator is no longer just a spectator but, more or less consciously, a part of the show. Here, in this temporal free-town, we sense time now overlapping with time before and after. It is an intense and demanding sensation, a temporal short-circuit, changing our bearings of space and time. Those who are conscious of this swiftly decide whether to hold on to the sensation and stay in this space or to leave; there is no half way house. This is my desire: to furnish those willing to listen with a piece of that unexpected moment, that instant of distraction of conscious thought that is the motor of creation and so dense with awareness of our existence in the world, the moment described by T.S. Eliot in “The Dry Salvages”, one of the “Four Quartets”: For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight How this desire takes shape and along what routes only my works, my installations can say. All I can do is describe how they developed – from the first idea to their completion – at a compositional temperature which, in accordance with the creative process I described above, is necessarily constantly hot. On the final meaning of the works there is little I can say, except that I would like to talk about this through questions and not answers. One thing I am sure of, however, is that, to guarantee the result, the first person who must be attracted, fascinated and stimulated by the work is me, otherwise it is of no value. From the brief picture I have sketched it is clear that my journey does not follow a more or less clear path but rather a bundle of narrow alleys that move forward together, cross over, spread apart, slow down, accelerate, stop and start again; they all go toward the new with the possibility of grasping as much of it as possible. Numerous discreet glimpses at equally numerous spaces in language rather than only one. I have often thought that I am perhaps an unusual kind of artist: half composer and half sculptor, from the air to heavy material. Maybe my real job is to stay in the middle, to occupy that space which old academic classifications would call “analogy”, a figure of speech that is well defined in operational terms but so full of potential. This applied to the Italian artist Fausto Melotti, also a sculptor and composer. A source of comfort and pride is the thought that this unusual kind of artist has a role model that comes from afar, the mythical demiurge of music, the smith Tubulcain.