GIANCARLO TOGNONI AND HIS TIME
Giancarlo Tognoi's art is part of that period which was the second post-war period, so to understand the importance of Giancarlo Tognoni's research it is necessary to make an analysis (albeit synthetic) of the events that affected the world of art in this period.
The facts that characterize the world of art after World War II are nothing short of anomalous for a world, that of art, which can only evolve if it maintains its intellectual independence.
The auction market was born with the French group “the bear skin” (1917). The spirit of the first group of investors was not only a help for art but also a support for artists, but this system over time began to affect what is identified as the value (even in an absolute sense) of art.
Thus it was that at a certain point the value of art was exclusively linked to its value established by the market. In this way, any intellectual participation between the world of culture, artists, art historians and works was canceled, destroying a process that was and is the heart of what should be called Art.
After World War II, when the Reconstruction began: enthusiasm saw the Italians first in Europe and art was no less.
Artistic research resumed within cultural circles through the work of many talented artists. However, the international relations generated by the two blocs, the Soviet communist one on the one hand and the American one on the other, wanted to use art as a propaganda tool, so there was socialist realism on the one hand and abstract expressionism on the other.
The theorist of socialist realism was Andrei Ždanov, he writes: “Comrade Stalin called our writers the 'engineers of the human soul'. What does this mean? What obligation does this title impose on you? This means, right from the start, knowing the life of the people in order to be able to probably represent it in works of art, represent it by no means in a scholastic way, dead, not simply as "objective reality", but to represent reality in its revolutionary development. And here the truth and the concrete historical character of the artistic representation must join the task of ideological transformation and education of the workers in the spirit of socialism. This method of literature and criticism is what we call the method of socialist realism. ”
Andrei Zhdanov was a very high figure in the hierarchy of power in the Soviet Union, he even went so far as to establish the details of the guiding principles that artists had to follow in order to be accepted.
Socialist realism, promoted by the Communist Party, presupposed a fidelity, even of an ideological type, to the principles and rules of Soviet Communism, otherwise artists were excluded from the possibility of expressing themselves.
Abstract Expressionism was an art movement that started in the United States after the Second World War. It was the first typically American artistic phenomenon that, with systems that had nothing to do with art, influenced the rest of the world and which had, among others, the objective of radically moving the capital of art from Paris to New York , from Europe to the United States
Abstract Expressionism also had its theorist, Clement Greenberg, who raged for many decades in the USA and who managed to build hypothetical high theoretical motivations, which should have justified the birth of so many disgraces and consecrate their continuing market success.
In his book Avant-garde and kitsch, he describes how a society at a certain point will question a priori the acquired knowledge, therefore the artists, frightened by substantial choices, would take refuge in the various virtuosities and in the choices linked to the solutions derived from the study. of the masters of the past.
In his thinking, art should reject any expression that is connected to nature, abstracting from everything that can connect to something previously known, which is based on rules developed in the world of art over millennia of history.
However, it should be considered that it was nature, with its rhythms, that inspired the Greeks for the golden section and the theories of beauty.
It is therefore not clear from what principle the refusal to the expressions of nature should derive, it almost seems that in Greemberg there is the will to cancel any knowledge acquired and developed over time to impose new rules, supported only by a market, very often conditioned by buyers anonymous, who with their expensive purchases definitively consecrate as "art" things that, inevitably in the future, will have to deal with the true history of art.
However, in this vision of Greemberg, although it should be the expression of an unidentified avant-garde, nothing new is found, it seems rather a reinterpretation of Dadaist ideologies, aimed at erasing all that had been the past in order to start with something fundamentally based on nothing, in this way the direction and the working methods that identify art, are decided by a small number of people, positioned at a level of power, authorized to decide in a dogmatic way what should be art and what that it doesn't have to be.
In fact, the system apart from the results is not different from that of the Soviet dictatorship[3]. It must also be added that this hypothetical avant-garde that opposes kitsch should be the new guide of art for the masses, forced to accept a new concept of beauty rained down from above, even if they will not be able to perceive the sense of all of this.
This way of imposing an aesthetic sense based in fact solely on the appreciation of a market that does not represent culture or society, created and creates a lot of confusion and a sense of emptiness of values, in fact beauty is not something that can be to impose or acquire, but derives from a universal perception of harmony and balance, based on the rules that generate creation and which are therefore part of our very nature.
This the Greeks had understood very well, they precisely observe that nature that according to Greemberg should be rejected.
Abstractionism was the current most rewarded also by young artists who entered the art world, who despite supporting a thought of freedom and rupture, and very often were ideologically aligned to the left, in fact, unbeknownst to them, they supported a "capitalist" plan, which was secretly implemented through market manipulations.
This is now more than well known and documented.
Despite this, the "official criticism" never wanted to take the side of the truth, never giving any importance to what had happened, even if all this had in fact obscured the truth about the value of art.
In this way those who for reasons of international politics conditioned the world of art, carried out a very skilful operation, they did not differentiate between right or left artists, the only condition was to support abstract expressionism, in order to radically deny the realism promoted by socialist ideologies.
The lack of talent of the artists was clearly expressed, because they willingly accepted a situation that had nothing to do with the path of art.
This action not only supported false artists and killed the sense of art, but also gave mediocre and dishonest people the opportunity to be counted with the masters who in the past had suffered and fought to build a legacy that will never be lost.
The concepts of free art were reaffirmed, freed from any constraint towards reason and reality, a not new idea, born with Dadaist thought. In fact, we read from the Dadaist manifesto:
"... The work of art must not represent the beauty that is dead ... .. Criticism is useless, it can only exist subjectively, each his own, and without any character of universality .... The new painter creates a world whose elements are its own means, a sober and precise work, without an object .... Art is a private thing. The artist does it for himself…. abolition of memory: DADA; abolition of archeology: DADA; abolition of the prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute irrefutable faith in every God who is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA. "
However, this thought was abandoned by the Dadaists themselves, who closed the movement in 1922 with the funeral of the Dada movement.
The restoration of these ideas meant that the concept of beauty was abolished. We went from art to non-art.
In addition to the artistic results, even the artists do not represent the figure of a cultured person, who worked on historical bases in search of solutions that do not forget the universal objectives of art and beauty, very often he has become a gossip character, a kind of court jester, possibly eccentric, in order to collaborate in shifting the attention from artistic research to the apparent originality of expression, giving much more importance to appearance than to substance.
The image, or the stereotype of the artist, was created. It is sometimes not unusual to see in art fairs or in art galleries of characters with a gray hat, an unusual dress that is automatically assumed to be artists.
Now, however, if you want to make a constructive speech, it makes no sense to identify guilty and generate processes to discredit someone, also because in all this, despite the fake culture there were still artists who, unaware of what was really happening, however, they did an artistic research that has made progress in a world, which, even with all possible efforts by organs of power and politicians aimed at destroying beauty, still retains a soul that will never stop working for the true spirit of Art.
I think it makes much more sense to do a historical analysis, to go in search of all those artists, which despite the obstacles and the stance of what has been and still is the position of official art (supported by the market), they worked against the tide, for an idea of an evolutionary revolution of culture, just as it happened in the time of the Impressionists, today as then, trying to discover the avant-gardes means discovering the real work of an art world aimed at the progress of ideas, to the evolution of research, keeping the alleys steadfast with the dimension of beauty, which is the true vocation of art.
If we consider music, dance and even poetry as an art, we know that to express oneself in these disciplines you need knowledge, talent and training, a knowledge derived from all that the artists of the past have left us with their effort and experimentation. .
Artists receive an inheritance from the past that must be preserved and developed, to take art further and further, on a path capable of interpreting the evolution of the thought and culture of humanity.
[1] Andrei Aleksandrovič Ždanov was a Soviet politician. In the Stalinist period he was the arbiter of the cultural line of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and President of the Praesidium of the Soviet of the Union. 1896 - 1948
[2] Clement Greenberg was an American art critic. 1909 -1994
[3] Clement Greenberg was to the Western world what Zhdanov was to the socialist world. Harold Rosenberg and Leo Steinberg did the same work as Greenberg, although they did not match his fame and madness.
Luigi Fassi in a long article dedicated to Clement Greensberg begins as follows:
"In the summer 1987 issue of Artforum, in the section:" A Critic Looks At A Critic ", Kay Larson, an important American critic, published a long article entitled The Dic-tatorship of Clement Greenberg, in which American critics attributed to Clement Greenberg a heavy series of accusations, including those of having caused “the death of painting in the late sixties, the ideological paralysis of art in the early seventies and the subsequent revolt of the postmodernists. The artists - Larson continued - consciously or not, still gravitate around the ideas of Greenberg, which have dominated the entire critical discourse on art since I lived and which for too long have had the authority of a priori propositions, outside of which every other legitimate formulation, possibility and option, has been banned and considered unacceptable ”.