1. Art As A Globalisation Of Meetings<\/p>\n
Sh\u014dz\u014d Shimamoto\u2019s first paintings, shown in 1946 at the Hole Showa 21<\/em>, are called Hole<\/em>, referring to an opening or breech. Insistence on \u201choles\u201d precedes, accompanies and follows (at least up to the Papers <\/em>of 1985) the act of foundation in Osaka in 1954 of the GUTAI group, whose name \u201cconcreteness\u201d is said to have been suggested to Jiro Yoshihara by Shimamoto himself. The Gutai Manifesto <\/em>of 1956, mimicking the style of similar manifestos of the Western historical avant- gardes of the early twentieth century announced among other things:<\/p>\n To today\u2019s consciousness, the art of the past, which on the whole pres- ents an alluring appearance, seems fraudulent. Let\u2019s bid farewell to the hoaxes piled up on the altars and in the palaces, the drawing rooms and the antique shops. They are monsters made of the matter called paint, of cloth, metals, earth, and marble, which through a meaningless act of sig- nification by humans, through the magic of material, were made to fraud- ulently assume appearances other than their own. These types of matter, all slaughtered under the pretence of production by the mind, can now say nothing. Lock up these corpses in the graveyard. Gutai Art does not alter matter. Gutai Art imparts life to matter. Gutai Art does not distort matter (\u2026). Granted, our works have frequently been mistaken for Dadaist gestures. And we certainly acknowledge the achievements of Dada. But we think differently: unlike Dadaism, Gutai Art is the product that has arisen from the pursuit of possibilities. Gutai aspires to present exhibi- tions filled with vibrant spirit, exhibitions in which an intense cry accom- panies the discovery of the new life of matter.<\/p>\n In this and in other programme documents published in the Gutai magazine, <\/em>the group feels the need to underline the important differences compared with pointillisme <\/em>and fauvism <\/em>first of all, <\/em>but also in comparison with Western masters such as Da Vinci, Poussin, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Utrillo and Dal\u00ec, names listed according to a view of the past that certainly does not aim to be chronological, but appears topological (insofar as each name indicates the \u201cplace\u201d of a particular killing of the life of the material through form, sign and colour).<\/p>\n Moreover, the Buddhist Sutta Nip\u0101ta <\/em>Canon says, \u201cContemplate the world as emptiness (…), always in a state of remembrance \u2013 thus spoke the Blessed One.\u201d<\/p>\n And the \u201cremembrance\u201d mentioned refers to a \u201cco-arising\u201d or \u201cdependent origina- tion\u201d of the \u201cworld as emptiness\u201d itself, in which the events do not run along a chrono- logical line nor can they be grasped in advance by form, meaning identity\/differ- ence because each potential figure, in its impermanent eternity, includes other pos- sible figures – but never definitively – as it is, in turn, includable in others:<\/p>\n It would take infinity to count \/ all the Buddha\u2019s universes. \/ In each dust mote of these worlds \/ are countless worlds and Buddhas<\/em>[1]<\/p>\n Thanks to the efforts of Michel Tapi\u00e9 \u2013 the great French critic known for his association with the Informal season, having visited Japan in 1957 \u2013 the work of the Gutai group began to come into contact with European and Western art cir- cuits. In this climate, between 1958 and 1968, Shimamoto started to grapple once again with \u201choles\u201d in his Esquisse Hole Series <\/em>cycle, where the action of the paint rubs against and consumes the layers of paper matter of the painting causing lac- eration or perforation. A year earlier, the artist carried out an experiment, which was defined as \u201cconcrete music\u201d <\/em>(later acquired by the Pompidou Centre Collec- tion in Paris), in the wake of what John Cage was doing, rolling dice or tossing coins, following the teachings of the I Ching <\/em>or the Book of Changes<\/em>, and in close contact with the artists of the artists\u2019 Club on East Eighth Street, New York, includ- ing J. Pollock, F. Kline, M. Rothko and R. Rauschenberg.<\/p>\n This serves to emphasise how Sh\u014dz\u014d Shimamoto, above all, was an artist and excellent witness in the ethopoietic essence of his ergon<\/em>, on which hangs the pos- sibility of inhabiting a world shared by all in a different way. A form of fruitful globalisation of creativity, in total contrast with the economic, political and cul- tural scenarios of today\u2019s globalisation. This began as an extension on a global scale of Western models by now reduced to one way of thinking, beyond the meta- narrative and myths with their accompanying propaganda; it is realised as a multiplication of divisions, oppositions, exclusions and \u201cnaturalisation\u201d procedures to prevent any kind of otherness.[2] The globalisation sub specie artis <\/em>of which Shi- mamoto has been for over sixty years an untiring activist in every corner of the globe, beyond any discourse of abstract syncretism or eclecticism, seeks to move towards authentic encounter. And any encounter, in the strongest sense, does not come about \u2013 despite the current scenarios of the global <\/em>world \u2013 through preven- tive exclusion, nor assimilation, nor yet through \u201cnaturalisation\u201d at any cost. But in reality it only happens in the erotic symballesthai <\/em>of absolute singularities \u2013 in the suspension of the anticipatory and recursive form of differentiation \u2013 each of which can only dance around each other, as in the \u201cdance around the One\u201d of Plot- inus and Proclus, so that the harmony of the different rhythmoi <\/em>is \u201cinvisible (aphan\u00e9s<\/em>)\u201d, divinely \u201cstronger\u201d than any \u201cvisible harmony\u201d (Heraclitus fr. 54).<\/p>\n This ethopoietic<\/em>[3] habitus can only be accompanied by a radical change in the horizon and artistic potential of the event itself. If the poiesis <\/em>of art is what vio- lently interrupts any kind of conversation, as P. Celan wrote, the \u201ctriple game\u201d[4] of contemporary art as a fundamental part of the universe of globalised commu- nication tends to constantly and universally restore the machinery of conversa- tion, doing everything to \u201cavoid communication breakdown, namely the advent of the incommunicable (…), the advent of absolute differences\u201d.[5]<\/p>\n Well, from the start, the actions of the Gutai Group and Shimamoto forced viewers into an exercise in acrobatics comparable to a blind leap over the irregu- lar spaces between natural stepping stones in a stream, as happens, essentially, in the Chanoyu tradition, the ritual of the \u201ctea ceremony\u201d (which begins following an asymmetrical pathway of raised stones in the r\u014dji<\/em>, the garden in front of the tea hut). In this regard, in the 1956 second collective exhibition at the Ashiya city park, \u201cGutai open\u201d, an experiment that would seem to anticipate both Western Land Art and the \u201cconstructed situation\u201d of the situationist Internationals, but which was at the same time also something very different, referring directly to Karesansui <\/em>(the art of arranging stones on a gravel base) \u2013 Shimamoto presented his Please, walk on it<\/em>, which invited visitors to climb and walk precariously on a narrow and irregular pathway made up of precarious planks, each ready to fall in a different way as soon as a foot came to rest upon it….<\/p>\n 2 GUTAI IS EVEN ZEN<\/em><\/p>\n The art of Shimamoto, \u201csamurai acrobat of the gaze\u201d (according to A. Boni- to Oliva\u2019s[6] definition) was doubtless influenced by Zen philosophy, but, in the meantime, cannot be situated exclusively within the dimension of a mere mani- festation or actualisation of Zen art in modern terms. If there is an opening up to the spirit of Zen behind Shimamoto\u2019s work, it has to be sought and conquered anew through a most radical distancing from the tradition even though it will be lost each time. What is more, as the book of Lin Chi <\/em>says, \u201cIf a man seeks the Bud- dha, he will lose the Buddha, if he seeks the Way, he will lose the Way\u201d….<\/p>\n The protracted exhibitions, actions and performances that Shimamoto set up in Naples in the spring and summer of 2006 at Palazzo dello Spagnuolo and the Academy of Fine Arts, promoted and organised by the Fondazione Morra, bore the title \u201cGutai is even Zen\u201d<\/em>. And the first Holes, <\/em>coming straight after the war, like those of 1954 and the later \u201958-\u201968 series, despite their apparent similarity to the holes and cuts presented by Fontana in roughly the same period, should be read pri- marily as artistic manifestations of the practice of \u201cnon-obstruction\u201d in order to experiment with the possibility of abandoning oneself to that \u201cworld of emptiness\u201d intimately characterised by closures (anatt\u0101<\/em>) and impermanences (anicca<\/em>). In addi- tion, before founding the Gutai group, Master Yoshihara had been involved in the Bokujin-kai movement, that aimed to revive the ancient art of calligraphy, and Shi- mamoto himself had been very much struck and influenced by this Japanese cal- ligrapher Nantenbo who had lived across the 19th and 20th centuries, and who not only used much larger characters than traditional calligraphers, but also deliber- ately allowed his characters to have \u2018nijimi <\/em>or smudges\u2019, \u2018kasure <\/em>or fading\u2019, \u2018tobichiri<\/em>: splashes, sprays\u2019 and tare<\/em>, \u2018dripping\u2019.[7] The art of calligraphy \u2013 that uses the sumie <\/em>(literally \u2018ink and water\u2019) technique \u2013 has also maintained the indissoluble unity of writing and painting, unlike in the West, where the two practices, perhaps origi- nally one,[8] went on to became distinct, in order to cultivate the four virtues at the basis of traditional calligraphy: \u2018precision\u2019, \u2018regularity\u2019 \u2018consistent roundedness\u2019 and \u2018energetic elasticity\u2019, it is not enough to have a grounding in theoria, <\/em>illumi- nating the corresponding t\u00e9chne<\/em>, or even diligent exercise, but what is required is an intense practice of meditation engaging the body and mind of the disciple as a whole in order to create the right emptiness <\/em>(neither a lack, or an excess of empti- ness), namely to bring to the empty \u2013 that is never other compared with the full \u2013 into the heart of the full itself, into each stroke and between <\/em>strokes, so that spiri- tual\/vital breath may circulate freely. It is interesting to note that this seeking of the void \u2013 that is not at all the nihil absolutum <\/em>of Western ontology[9] \u2013 can, according to Zen Buddhism, be realised through the art of calligraphy only through medita- tion as an action, namely \u2013 translated into Western terms \u2013 through a praxis <\/em>rather than, and before, any poiesis.<\/em>10 From this point of view, while the West has ended up assigning art to the realm of poiesis<\/em>, in the East, painting is and remains first and foremost a praxis <\/em>in the sense of a non-obstructing action.<\/p>\n 3 THERE IS NO COLOUR WITHOUT MATTER<\/p>\n As we have said above, as soon as Gutai art \u2013 born to \u201cgo beyond Mondri- an\u2019s work, as Yoshihara proclaimed \u2013 comes into direct contact with contempo- rary Western forms of artistic expression, on the one hand, the interpretation of a critic like Michel Tapi\u00e9 tends to trace it back to informal matterism, while on the other, both Yoshihara and Shimamoto are particularly struck by the encounter with Jackson Pollock\u2019s action painting<\/em>. These are aspects worthy of reflection.<\/p>\n First of all, it is clear that the will to put the lessons of Mondrian behind them does not mean denying in any way the aspiration characteristic of the ascetic research of the Dutch artist, to express One-Twoness as calm-in-movement[11] \u2013 because, in fact, this was precisely the aspect that had initially drawn Yoshihara and the other members of Gutai so strongly to Mondrian\u2019s work\u2013 rather it con- cerns the reduction of art to pure contemplation of the Idea by neoplasticists under- stood as a \u201cschool\u201d[12] engaged in the Neoplatonising myth of \u201cRaffaello without Hands\u201d. In this regard, Shimamoto\u2019s \u2018Neapolitan\u2019 works, staged in 2008, may be considered emblematic: the Nike of Samothrace<\/em>, the Venus de Milo, the Psyche of Capua<\/em>, but also the semi-framed Buddha<\/em>, placed on a chair above a pile of plas- tic cups and smeared with smudged, sprayed, poured and dripped paint.<\/p>\n As for his relationship with the material Informal \u2013 constructed by Tapi\u00e9, but apparently validated by works such as the 1960 Untitled <\/em>series (plaster and mixed media on canvas) \u2013 it should first be noted that while Shimamoto paid particular attention to children\u2019s artistic expression, in France, the \u201cmateriologist\u201d[13] J. Dubuf- fet had been interested since 1922 in the forms of expression of the so-called \u201cinsane\u201d, the mentally ill, and he had been particularly struck by a book published in 1922 by a psychiatrist in Germany, Dr Hans Prinzhorn, entitled Bildnerei der Geisteskranken.<\/em>[14] What Dubuffet and Shimamoto both sought in the art of the mad and infants was: a) a form of expression not yet conditioned by cultural pat- terns and pre-established forms, b) holistic attention to the world understood as an undivided whole and which was therefore in contrast with the hyper-analytical attitude typical of the technical-scientific mentality capable only of separating, dividing, and dissecting. In this regard, at the Anticultural Positions <\/em>conference held in Chicago in December 1951, Dubuffet, argued:<\/p>\n When I wish to observe something closely, my temperament leads me to look at it together with its context, as a whole. (…) If there is a tree in the country, I don\u2019t bring it into my laboratory to look at it under my microscope. I think the wind which flows through its leaves is necessary for the knowledge of the tree and cannot be separated from it.[15]<\/p>\n Michel Tapi\u00e9 (former neo-Dadaist painter and sculptor) began his career as an art critic when working on the catalogue of Dubuffet\u2019s second exhibition, held at the Drouin Gallery in Paris in 1946, where the fledgling critic wrote that Dubuf- fet had embarked on research \u201cwhere matter has gained the upper hand over paint, […] paint that only exists insofar as the matter requires it […]; in other words, the problem of colour has been replaced by the problem of matter\u201d.[16]<\/p>\n If we open the Gutai Review issue of 1st April 1957, we read an illuminat- ing text signed by Shimamoto entitled For the Banishment of the Paintbrush<\/em>, where among other things he says:<\/p>\n [\u2026] as a line without thickness does not exist, a colour without its matter does not become concrete [\u2026]. Even if an artist does his best to lavish his spiritual genius through the paintbrush, trying to refuse any colour materiality, in every canvas the dyeing substance giving colour to the picture will be easily recognized [\u2026] I just said it: a colour with- out matter does not exist. […]<\/p>\n For his part, in his Prospectus aux amateurs de tout genre<\/em>, Dubuffet wrote: There are no colours, but only coloured materials (…). A black satin, black cloth, a black ink stain on a card, black paint on some shoes, the black soot from a chimney, tar […]. Black is but an abstraction; black does not exist; there are black materials […].[17]<\/p>\n For the French artist, painting can exercise its perennial and inexhaustible research on \u201cliving matter\u201d by testing every material (going beyond any presumed hierarchy, including \u2018pictorial\u2019 and \u2018non pictorial\u2019 materials), in the sense of an endless adventure \u2013 \u201cto begin a painting: an adventure that will take you where? No-one knows …\u201d[18] \u2013 which never achieves a result, but which, as in a dance, bounces back at the very moment of leaping forward, always in flight, indulging in the flow of its rhythms:<\/p>\n The starting point is the surface to be animated \u2013 either a canvas or a sheet of paper \u2013 and the first spot of colour or ink that flows: the effect that is produced, the adventure that comes from it. It is this mark, as it is enriched and oriented, that should guide the work.[19]<\/p>\n For Dubuffet \u2013 a Western artist who challenged the single mind-set of the \u201casphyxiating culture\u201d[20] of the West \u2013 painting is the beginning of an adventure without end that, in having to do with the mystery of material, manifests a real poet- ic experience of art in its ergon, <\/em>coinciding with an original poetic experience of thought tout court<\/em>. For the Western tradition, poiesis <\/em>is \u201cany cause (a\u00ectia)<\/em> that leads from the non-existent to the existent\u201d, according to the famous definition in Plato\u2019s Symposium <\/em>(205 b, 8-9). And in the Sophist<\/em>, Plato himself writes: \u201cwhen someone leads to existence (eis oys\u00edan<\/em>) what was not, let\u2019s say you produce (poiein<\/em>) insofar as it draws out and which is produced (poieisthai<\/em>) to the extent that it is stretched out\u201d (Sophist<\/em>, 205b, 4-6). Poiesis <\/em>indicates, therefore, the event that is the well- spring of appearance of what, by some \u201ccause\u201d, is brought to existence from its original hiding. Western philosophy of art and the modern aestheticism of artistic work, which is still dominant in the so-called Global world, have theoretically con- centrated on the hypostatisation of the result of producing, we could say on its excre- mentum <\/em>(in the literal sense of the term) and what has often happened in spite of <\/em>art itself, and the thought-driven actions of artists. Dubuffet and artists \u201cof matter\u201d \u2013 not at all limited to bearing witness to a mere \u201cwillingness to regression\u201d, as sus- tained by the more myopic critics \u2013 mean to fully experience the backlash of a way we could call palintropos <\/em>(to use once more an expression of Heraclitus), i.e. such that in moving forward in the direction of form \u2013 and as poiesis <\/em>it can only pro- ceed, taking form, <\/em>from the hidden to the no-longer hidden \u2013 at the same time, in one<\/em>, it flows back, irresistibly attracted by the invisible to an endless background made up of what comes before <\/em>the start of each form, to which Plato had already given the \u2018mongrel\u2019 name chora<\/em>. The determinately formed thing, which becomes visible in it – the work – thus becomes a figure of the revelation of the pure possi- bility of the emptiness of matter itself, \u201cthe emptiness of emptiness\u201d, as one might say in the Taoist and Buddhist terms of the east. So if it is true that, for the West- ern tradition, poiesis <\/em>can only take place as a giving shape and can only come to an \u201cend\u201d, thus, in the unfolding of an entity which is formed matter, the intent of the material artist is to try to find the form of pure matter – before it becomes enveloped in the forming form (eidos kai morphe) <\/em>– knowing that, however, no work could achieve this as a result<\/em>. We recall that Plato\u2019s chora <\/em>\u201cshould not be called earth or air or fire or water\u201d (Plato, Tim\u00e6us<\/em>, 51a): it is indeterminate (aoris- tos)<\/em>, invisible (anoraton<\/em>) and amorphous (amorphon) <\/em>and yet it is also \u201cthe same as a form\u201d (eidos ti<\/em>) (Ibidem), which, however, is \u201coutside (ekt\u00f2s<\/em>) of any form\u201d (Ibid) and has nothing to do with the ideas with respect to which, however, it is coeternal. Therefore, the plunge <\/em>into the ineffable permanent impermanence of mat- ter \u2013 chora<\/em>, a background distinguished by an infinite autometamorphosis \u2013 to which the informal-material adventure aspires, cannot, in the end, but give promi- nence to the research assigned and incorporated into the artistic act<\/em>. Not, howev- er, to the point of hypostatising it and debasing or denying what, however, is to be produced as a created work. The latter, in fact, even in its intrinsic perfectio<\/em>, never realises, as entelecheia<\/em>, the result of the research, its truth<\/em>, but carries within itself the indelible aura of negativity<\/em>, which, far from indicating a lack or privation, sig- nals and announces the fact that the adventure of the search continues to other impermanent perfectible perfections[21]. In any case a backlash, again a palintropos movement,<\/em> prevents the poiesis<\/em> from opening out and becoming independent of praxis,<\/em> to which it was originally, and remains, intimately joined.<\/p>\n As M. Tapi\u00e9 brilliantly intuited, despite springing from entirely different theo- retical matrices, Gutai moves towards a similar experience. What does it mean, in the first Gutai manifesto – that objects like \u201cpainting, pieces of cloth, metal, stone and marble are filled with false meanings by human hands, and instead of presenting themselves through their material, take on the appearance of something else\u201d? And in what sense, because of some \u201cintellectual purpose, have materials been completely killed so they can no longer communicate anything to us\u201d? Western culture, some- times with the complicity of art, considers materials only in terms of their usability, predetermined by their form. On the one hand, they are fixed in their particular rigid and crystallized form that the logic of t\u00e9chne <\/em>has given them, and on the other, as bodies thus formed, they present themselves in their full and complete willingness to be manipulated for the satisfaction of human needs. And what, in this way, exists only to be produced, manipulated, consumed and destroyed is, as Aristotle teaches, \u201cformed matter\u201d, as such installed in its given identity, so as to repel and exclude from itself any other thing determined differently (on the basis of its form). Thus, the \u201cintellectual\u201d concept of Technique results in the suffocating and death of materials! And this, then, is why the not revolutionary, but simply \u201cconcrete\u201d, Gutai art does not aim to \u201cchange materials\u201d, but to \u201cbring them back to life\u201d starting from a prac- tice wherein form (r\u016bpa), <\/em>(roughly equivalent to the Greek morph\u00e9<\/em>) is emptiness:<\/p>\n \u201c[…] form is emptiness and emptiness itself is form\u201d, <\/em>as we read in the Heart Sutra. <\/em>Since form, far from acting like the Aristotelian princi- ple of determination \u2013 <\/em>which means that all matter assumes and main- tains its own identity to the degree to which it excludes and refutes any other \u201cformed matter\u201d \u2013 is, on the other hand, what manifests its being itself identically in all matter in its particular configuration, only insofar as it is immersed in \u201cporous\u201d[22] reciprocity with all others. This can reawaken the experience of the mystery of that \u201cworld of emptiness\u201d, in which every reality is an event and where the art-producing energy does not in fact lead to the production of works as autonomous and independent forms and in their specific self-consistency. And the paintbrush is the main instrument of this enslavement of the \u201clife\u201d of materials to the rigid, independent and closed identity conferred upon them by form and there- fore the sole end purpose of simulacra thus obtained, which is usability and the supremacy of the human wish for power.<\/p>\n The keen interest in action painting <\/em>by the Gutai group \u2013 fed by the redis- covery of the sketches, splashes and drips of Nantenbo\u2019s calligraphy \u2013 can be explained in the light of this perspective. Pollock was the first contemporary West- ern artist to bend technical poiesis <\/em>in the direction of action and gesture, trying to \u201cliberate colour from the brush\u201d, as Shimamoto put it, as the \u201cactive brush\u201d ends up \u201cexploiting material colour to the full, subjecting it to the narrative intent\u201d. Shi- mamoto also recalls that the Gutai artists used everything to the same purpose: \u201cwatering cans, umbrellas, vibrators, abacuses, shoes, toys. And even the feet, or firearms, and yet more. And amid all these even the paintbrush might reappear (…) no longer (…) to humiliate and kill the qualities of colouring materials, but to make them even more alive\u201d.<\/p>\n 4 ART AND VIOLENCE<\/p>\n The Bottle crashes<\/em>, with which Shimamoto had been battling since the early 50\u2019s and whose intensity made them increasingly theatrical[23] \u2013 one thinks especially of those of Venice performed at the Cloister of San Nicol\u00f2 in 2007 and the performance at Punta Campanella in Naples the following year \u2013 express a strong sense of violence, even when it becomes A weapon for peace <\/em>as in the 2006 work in Piazza Dante in Naples.<\/p>\n Western art is steeped in violence to the extent that it seems, in some cases, to be inseparable from violence24. Just to give some random examples, Caravaggio, in his Judith Slaying Holofernes<\/em>, makes us witness \u201clive\u201d, so to speak, the act of a bloody decapitation and, in painting the Medusa <\/em>on the circular shield donat- ed by Cardinal del Monte to the Grand Duke of Tuscany, he restores the Gorgon to being a head, not a face, a head that has just been severed from the body, reac- tualising before our very eyes the original act of violence, which, according to the myth, led to this. Obvious traces of this violence remain in the spilled blood drip- ping, immediately below the face, whose mouth is wide open in a scream, which \u2013 instead of reproducing the wide and hideous gash of the mythological Medusa \u2013 almost seems to anticipate certain works of Francis Bacon, who, speaking of the oil painting Head VI <\/em>(1949), said, \u201cI wanted to paint the scream rather than the horror\u201d. In general, as already mentioned, the poet Paul Celan, in der Meridian<\/em>25\u00a0(from a speech of 1960) states that to make poetry it is necessary to break \u2013 vio- lently \u2013 the continuum <\/em>of discourse and violence \u2013 the speech continuum, bring- ing into play something that imposes itself \u201cbrutally\u201d, breaking in and lacerating. And speaking of the contemporary, it was in 1960 that the first bloody actions of the Orgien Mysterien Theater of Hermann Nitsch and the other protagonists of \u201cWiener Aktionismus\u201d were performed, <\/em>followed by performances in the early 70s by Chris Burden, Claudio Cintoli, (who in \u201cHaqeldama, the field of blood\u201d <\/em>depicts the eternal cycle of birth and death through action based on the exposition and flowing of menstrual blood), by Marina Abramovich (Art must be beautiful\/Artist must be beautiful <\/em>and the disturbing Lips of Thomas<\/em>), up to the experiments of Gina Pane in the \u201880s and the works of the painter-photographer Andres Serrano and Orlan\u2019s repeated teratomorphic \u201csurgical operations\u201d. As for the world of music, radical innovator John Cage said, \u201cI\u2019m going toward more violence rather than tenderness, towards hell rather than heaven, the ugly rather than beautiful, impure rather than pure – because by doing these things they become transformed and we are transformed\u201d.26 In such a way, the artist, as a thinking being, appears to turn himself into a medium of that violence that Nietzsche describes in Human, All Too Human<\/em>, when referring to philosophers as men who are \u201cnot wise\u201d and imprudent, but who are, however, \u201ceducators\u201d in the strongest sense, insofar as they violently hurt individuals and communities, so that \u201cwounded here and hav- ing became weak, it is, as it were, inoculated with something new […]; its strength must, however, be great enough to accommodate in the blood and assimilate this new thing\u201d.27 Kandinsky himself, in 1912, emphasised the inseparability of art from violence, all the while distinguishing between the violence committed oppor- tunistically by the self-proclaimed artist as a means directed exclusively towards \u201cmaterial ends\u201d,28 from superhuman violence, which is \u201ca revelation of the divine force of Truth\u201d.29 In this, Kandinsky\u2019s text seems to anticipate the words of Ben- jamin in 1921, in his essay A critique of violence,<\/em>30 where he distinguishes between divine pure violence and impure mythical violence.[31]<\/p>\n What does the artist do then? Violence artistically presented on stage in a drama <\/em>does not destructively or sadistically turn against the life of the living. Precisely because it is a mimesis <\/em>by a hypokrit\u00e9s<\/em>, who is both mime, priest and interpreter[32]. The man of Technique – one who thinks and calculates strictly on the basis of means-end rationality – is convinced that he can appropriate violence to himself, to use it in order to achieve his human, all too human, ends. Whereas the artist is the mortal in search of truth, which, knowing that he absolutely cannot make use of violence that, in its divine origin (as Benjamin underlines), cannot be appropriated, does not belong to any man, nor is it exploitable \u2013 and puts on stage, sub specie artis, <\/em>the drama <\/em>of a crude and lit- erally hypocritical mimesis <\/em>of violence, as if seeking to purge for cathartic and apotropa- ic purposes, all the impure violence that has bloodied the world so as not to obstruct the empty spaces for the possible eruption of divine violence capable of recreating time and again the meaning of the world \u2013 dissolving all fixation and stagnation. 5 EVENTS AND WORKS<\/p>\n Q. \u2013 Your artistic activity seems characterized by two very strong ele- ments, present ever since the 1950s: the production of \u201cworks\u201d and the cre- ation of events. What relation is there between your work and your events?<\/p>\n A. – I used to produce works that were the expression of a violent throw of bottles. Both television and newspapers came to see me often, but not to publish the finalized work, rather to describe the scenario of their creation. Initially I was angry when I realised that the final work was almost never shown, but then I started to think differently (\u2026). So I can say that the relationship between my work and my events has been taught me by journalists.<\/em><\/p>\n The question asked and the words of the reply, uttered by the artist in 2008, touch the heart of the question of the poetic experience of art as a poetic experi- ence of thought, of which Shimamoto acts as a medium<\/em>, as a man \u201cseeking the truth\u201d (as he himself says in the same interview). Many of the artistic currents of the twentieth century (particularly in the sec- ond half of the \u201cage of extremes\u201d) tried to escape this \u201cphilosophical destitution of art\u201d (to use an expression of A. Danto[35]), trying to bring it back to its nature as performative action. For some of these artists, what remains of a performative event, preserved and exhibited in galleries and museums, is only the document, track, or literally the \u201cmonument\u201d (from mneme, <\/em>recollection) of the work, but is not the work itself. And, in these terms, the apparently most radical position from the theoretical point of view was that of the International Situationists, whose doc- uments, together with the writings of G. Debord, announce the wish to kill off the work of art as a reified alienation of free creative subjectivity, in the objectivity of a given product, which, in a capitalist society, is reduced to a pure commodity. Hence the necessity to replace art, as a producer of commoditised reifications, with \u201cconstructed situations\u201d, i.e., with the design and the realisation of concrete, non-permanent possibilities of collective experience, in which the free flow of vital and creative energies is never again separated in the givenness of a product. The inherent limitation of these artistic responses to the philosophical ousting of art, however, resides \u2013 as emerges in the most explicit way precisely in the appar- ent radicalism of the Situationists \u2013 in the claim to emancipate themselves from the objectification, reification and commodification of art, applying and being bound to the deep logos<\/em>, which is at the root of this \u201calienation\u201d and which is an essential element in the original structure of the Western cultural tradition: oppo- sitional, excluding, and abstract diairetic logic founded on the either … or <\/em>dichoto- my. The question, then, is not resolved at all in the alternative between either (aut<\/em>) art as pure action, or (aut) <\/em>as object, nor in the replacement of (aut<\/em>) the reification of the work carried out by (aut) <\/em>the reappropriation of non-reified and non-reify- ing production. Because the problem is not that of determining whether art is here or there: or in the event or the thing. If art should not be reduced entirely and exclu- sively to the givenness accomplished by a created work, this in no way implies, on the other hand, a necessary relapse into a sort of mysticism of action. Contin- uing to think and act on the basis of this oppositional logic of abstract negation (aut … aut<\/em>) \u2013 which is the same logic that led to the Western gap between praxis <\/em>and poiesis <\/em>and the exclusive reduction of ergon <\/em>to the product\/result of t\u00e9chne <\/em>\u2013 entails continuing to consider art, in one way or another, as the mere object of a logical-defining thinking extrinsic to it, refusing a priori <\/em>to follow to its conclu- sion the path of seeking to know the implications of the fact that the ergon <\/em>is, as such, a living act of thought as understood in Thinking art<\/em>, or an art that is no longer a mere thinkable\/thought object in an act of thinking performed elsewhere. Since it is here that the true and profound alienation of Western art lies.<\/p>\n Shimamoto\u2019s way of working \u2013 in the meeting of East and West, where his search for \u201ctruth in painting\u201d unfolds \u2013 makes us reflect on this and nudges us in another direction. It really was the Western journalists who taught the Japanese artist \u201cthe relationship <\/em>between the event and the work\u201d!<\/p>\n In any artistic pursuit of truth \u2013 as the art of Shimamoto shows – it is neither a question of deciding between the event and the work, nor of abstractly abso- lutising a fully created work, nor yet of privileging the event, considering the thing\/work as a simple trace, document, or testimony, since, on the one hand, the created work has the same opening (anatt\u0101) <\/em>and impermanence (anicca<\/em>) as the event and, on the other, the performative action takes place as a kind of cosmic writing\/painting, whose background is the universe itself as a \u201cworld of empti- ness\u201d. In Shimamoto\u2019s ergon, <\/em>it is not the difference, but the gap between <\/em>the musi- cal compositions and the increasingly spectacular outdoor performances <\/em>and paint- ings, sculptures, and postcards of the 70s\/80s, that equates to the unfolding that takes place in the unrolling and rolling up of traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings, in which the \u201cdouble birth\u201d from the void and at the same time <\/em>the \u201cdou- ble death\u201d in the void takes place. So that the aletheyein<\/em>, or the artistic truth mak- ing of what the west calls poiesis <\/em>\u2013 as a mimesis <\/em>of emerging from obscurity to the coming into being of physis <\/em>itself \u2013 is an emerging from the vacuum return- ing into the vacuum itself, beyond any opposition and any relationship. So, in the end, acrobatically dancing this poetic experience of thinking draws our attention to Panic writing, that both the poetry of art – with its violent breech of the conti- nuity of every conversation and communication – and the poetry of philosophy as the art of the Muses[36] bring about, and to the rhythmos <\/em>of its breath, which vio- lently breaks and disrupts the predictable and orderly pulse and structuring of every possible kosmos <\/em>made up of episodes of the \u201cfull\u201d. <\/em>So this poetic experience of thinking is musical without compare!<\/p>\n In this regard, Shimamoto\u2019s musical experiments too seem to mature through the encounter (in the strong sense mentioned at the start) first with John Cage\u2019s multimedia <\/em>happenings. Cage had been interested in Zen Buddhism in the late \u201840s and 50s \u2013 and then the search for Fluxus <\/em>and lastly the trance music <\/em>of the \u201cshaman\u201d Charlemagne Palestine, whose Strumming <\/em>for piano Shimamoto used in his per- formance \u201cA weapon for peace\u201d in Naples in 2006. On the basic level of inter- pretation, musical expression acts in Shimamoto\u2019s theatrical and pictorial actions as an \u201cabsolute difference\u201d alongside <\/em>other absolute differences, as was also the case with the happenings <\/em>that began in the mid-40s with the music of John Cage, Merce Cunningham\u2019s dance and the action painting <\/em>of the New York artists of that time. But, at another, deeper level, we could say that music \u2013 understood as empty and concrete music <\/em>\u2013 expresses the quintessence of Shimamoto\u2019s artistic acrobat- ic dance. What kind of music? Music as an autoschediastic event. The adjective aytoschediastik\u00e9s <\/em>(\u03b1\u1f50\u03c4\u03bf\u03c3\u03c7\u03b5\u03b4\u03b9\u03b1\u03c3\u03c4\u03b9\u03ba\u1fc6\u03db) is used by Aristotle in the Poetics <\/em>(1449a, 10), where the philosopher notes that tragic theatrical action, but also comedy, dithyra- mbic poetry and ithyphallic ceremonies, may have originally been of this kind. The word is translated as \u201cimprovisation\u201d, even though its root is that of a verb, which literally means \u201cI produce something of my own without pre-arrangement\u201d. So we can define as autoschediastic the poiein <\/em>which is realised performatively in an action or a performance that is not merely the manifestation of something that has already been fully foreshadowed in another place and at another time, in an ideal-project-based prefiguration and which, therefore, does not happen as the more or less faithful re-presentation of a separate and anticipating form. This of course does not mean that this becoming visible does not have a form and rejects any compositional figure \u2013 such a thing would be impossible \u2013 but it implies that the latter are not definitively conceived before, and independently of, the perfor- mative action itself. Autoschediastically, the ergon<\/em>, therefore, is nothing but the event that you make happen, which, however, while thus remaining a unicum<\/em>, may very well be otherwise called into play and replicated any number of <\/em>times on dif- ferent occasions, in different places and at different times, so that it will be this unique and always different possibility <\/em>that will produce the permanent imper- manence of the work itself. In autoschediastic action, the event of its work, the event of its realisation in the real time of its occurence, is different each time in itself, by itself, and the duration of the work over time is inseparable from the irre- peatability of the pure event that is brought into play, only once, <\/em>each time. In these autoschediastic events, in some way, shapes and figures are reborn each time and die in the particular work being carried out, within the concrete implementation of which they influence, in real time, the unpredictable developments of the per- formance. So, in its radical fullness, what we might call the party <\/em>of art is cele- brated, or the fact that any given realisation, even in its finished perfection<\/em>, on the one hand is not the mere re-praesentatio <\/em>of shapes designed and composed before and elsewhere compared with the here and now <\/em>of their presentation, and on the other, it simultaneously manifests that intrinsic self-negativity of the work which acts both in the unfolding of the specific implementation, as in its constitutive opening up to more futures, in the continuous reiteration of the adventure of the search. Pride of place among these autoschediastic events goes to that pulchritu- do vaga <\/em>which Kant, in his Critique of Judgement<\/em>, attributed to music, especial- ly when it is \u201cmusic without text (Musik ohne Text)<\/em>\u201d[37] and is expressed by \u201cfan- tasies without theme\u201d (Phantasieen ohne Thema)<\/em>[38] (where the ohne<\/em>, the \u201cwith- out\u201d, is not to be understood as mere deprivation-steresis<\/em>, but anyway describes a work its perfectio<\/em>).<\/p>\n In this, the artistic <\/em>ergon as a musical monstration (in the deepest sense of the term), can express to the highest degree that \u201cfinality without purpose\u201d, which for the Kantian West characterises free and useless art and for the Buddhist East has the power to shock, to awaken and astonish us inhabitants of time, exposing us, with no more barriers, to the impermanent permanence of the \u201cworld of emptiness\u201d.<\/p>\n Romano Gasparotti<\/em><\/p>\n [1] Buddhist text cited by G. Pasqualotto, Estetica del vuoto. Arte e meditazione nelle culture d\u2019Oriente<\/em>, Marsilio, Venice 1992, p. 52. Pasqualotto writes: \u201cThe Buddhist theory of imper- manence does not simply mean that \u2018everything passes\u2019: once impermanence is understood in the light of the idea of emptiness, it is possible to grasp in depth the interconnection <\/em>of tem- poral partitions, as well as the events that they distinguish and classify. Thus, no time partition remains separated from the others, and the various events do not remain prisoners of their assigned time partition: it could thus be said that, for Buddhism, every event is eternal, not because it lasts forever, but because it is made up of the wires of an infinite network of caus- es and effects that link them to past and future events\u201d (p. 57).<\/p>\n [2] We examined this critically in R. Gasparotti, I miti della globalizzazione. \u201cGuerra preventiva\u201d e logica delle immunit\u00e0<\/em>, Dedalo, Bari 2003.<\/p>\n [3] The term is taken from Michel Foucault, cf. Dits et \u00c9crits 1954-1998<\/em>, Paris, Gallimard 1994<\/p>\n [4] Cf. N. Heinich, Le Triple Jeu de l\u2019art contemporain. Sociologie des arts plastiques<\/em>, Paris, \u00c9di- tions de Minuit,1998<\/p>\n [5] M. Zanardi, \u201cArte al presente\u201d<\/em>, in Kainos<\/em>, 10, 2010. Thus, for Zanardi, communications and politics machinery \u2013 according to his perceptive essay \u2013 do everything possible \u201c\u2018to not repress\u2019 the event, but to anticipate it, to promote it, control it or neutralise it through its planned pro- duction or placement in contexts that tame its appearance\u201d. These relentless machines \u201cfear the thought that is at work in art\u201d and thus focus on the promotion of the name<\/em>, which \u201cworks as a fetish that distracts from the encounter with the \u2018thing\u2019 of art.\u201d (Ibid)<\/p>\n [6] A. Bonito Oliva, Sh\u014dz\u014d Shimamoto. Samurai, acrobata dello sguardo 1950-2008<\/em>, Skira, Milan 2008. Catalogue of the exhibition dedicated to the Japanese artist held in Genoa at the Museo d\u2019Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce from 13th November 2008 to 8th March 2009.<\/p>\n [7] L. Mango – A. Mardegan, \u201cIntervista a Sh\u014dz\u014d Shimamoto\u201d<\/em>, in Sh\u014dz\u014d Shimamoto. Samurai, acrobata dello sguardo 1950-2008<\/em>, A. Bonito Oliva (ed), Op. cit.<\/em>, p. 137<\/p>\n [8] There is an ancient fragment of the aforementioned Heraclitus – 59DK – that an authoritative English-speaking interpreter, G. S. Kirk, translates as: \u201cThe track of writing is straight and crooked\u201d<\/em>, while Giorgio Colli, in the third volume of La sapienza greca<\/em>, translates it as: \u201cLa via dei pittori \u00e8 dritta e sinuosa\u201d (\u201cThe way of painters is straight and winding\u201d, tr.) <\/em>The Greek word for \u201cpainters\u201d according to one version or \u201cwriters\u201d according to the other, is graph\u00e9on<\/em>, which refers to the Greek verb grapho<\/em>, whose etymological Indo-Germanic root can be traced back to *gherph<\/em>, a root with echoes of meanings connected to hacking, pressing down, scratch- ing, all of which originally had to do as much with decorative painting as writing.<\/p>\n [9] The void, for both Taoism and Zen Buddhism, is, in fact, form (r\u016bpa) <\/em>\u2013 \u201cHere, o Sariputra, form is emptiness and the very emptiness is form\u201d <\/em>reads the Heart Sutra. <\/em>If we really wanted to find a distant Western equivalent to such a notion of \u201cform\u201d, we should not associate it with Eidos<\/em>, but with morph\u00e9<\/em>, that in Greek philosophy indicates form not as a logical principle of the lasting identity of a specific thing, but as what constitutes its sensible appearance.<\/p>\n [10] It is worth recalling that, for the theoretical lexis of the West, as is clear from Aristotle\u2019s ethi- cal writing, forms of doing are primarily attributable to archmodels of praxis <\/em>and poiesis, <\/em>which differ in their purpose and aim. While poiesis <\/em>has as its object the production of a thing<\/em>, dif- ferent and external in relation to the technical acts whereby it is realised, in
\nThus, Shimamoto\u2019s bottle crash actions, becoming in time more theatrically pictorial[33], encounter in their staging violent Western artistic and performative practices, bringing with them the charge of the superhuman cry capable of pro- ducing a \u201cbeautiful flower\u201d[34] and in which breaks forth the force that turns pre- assigned meanings upside down in order to allow possible new ones.<\/p>\n
\nShimamoto comes from a tradition, which not only, as we have said, recog- nises no divergence at the root of all forms of making, between praxis <\/em>and poiesis<\/em> \u2013 so that the efficacy of the technical product is one with the inherent goodness of the action \u2013 but in which even the difference between \u201cthing\u201d and event does not exist. Beyond, then, the irony of the final part of the reply, it was precisely the encounter with Western art that induced Shimamoto to reflect on the relationship between work and event, where, however, to speak of a \u201crelationship\u201d, to the West- ern mind, implies assuming an original and irreducible difference between the two terms. It should be noted that in the European tradition culminating in the mod- ern aesthetisation of art, the abstract reduction and identification of the ergon <\/em>– that, in Greek, is a vox media <\/em>that meant \u201cwork\u201d, as much in the sense of an activ- ity taking place, as in that of the product of this activity \u2013 it goes hand in hand with the tendency to consider the work of art as what is only the occasion and the object of thinking, that is, and is practiced elsewhere, outside art and, primarily <\/em>in the philosophy of art (in the genitive only objective), with the result that art is not allowed to be an independent and direct manifestation of thought in action (Thinking Art <\/em>in this sense).<\/p>\n
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