Page 33 - Studio International - September 1971

completely exhausted by the work entailed. By dimension. At that point the recipient asks the `the correct city gent shrieking like a madman
the end the SPCE worked extremely badly. author (if he is present): what does this mean ? on the Carm-O-matic' and 'the child yanked
I was racked with doubt as always; but as This is the question that a child asks, daily, up by the armpits by its mother, howling abuse
always I protected myself with that show of about the most obvious things. at the machine'.
self-confidence that everyone blithely assumes Two years later, in 1968, I brought another Another three years passed.
taht I have. I was saved from a breakdown by the technological work, the CARM-O-MATIC, I still have the same convictions, but, in
total, silent nearness of Kiki. to the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the addition, a feeling of deep unease.
But the problem had been posed and I felt ICA. My awareness that we are living in a century
it to be important. This time the images were superimposed by of transition, characterized by the fact that
Only one person, Pierre Restany, caught its means of strobe lights on to a rapidly rotating every piece of human achievement of our time
meaning, and this encouraged me to carry on. cylinder. The images were made to appear is temporary, is now stronger than ever. This is
What I wanted to do was to communicate with through the agency of surrounding noises the mark that distinguishes us from our
lots of people by means of unexpected and picked up by microphones. ancestors and even from our fathers.
apparently pointless images. This created a rapid succession of This is why I have come back to definitive
A pointless image is a challenge: it puts the unexpected images, which were serious, but images, designed on canvas, and destined for
recipient into a state of unease and curiosity, basically also a game, something to very few people, as I know. And for the same
frees him for a moment from the rigid workings stimulate the creative faculties of the recipient. reason, through some unavoidable contradiction,
of tradition and transfers him—as far as the image And this spectator, as Umberto Eco wrote in I love inventing multiple work destined, with
is concerned—to a more or less childlike an article called 'Games of the Future', was Utopian hope, for very many people.
In a letter published in the catalogue of my
3 5 exhibition in Milan by Arturo Schwarz,
October 1970, Umberto Eco asked me a heart-
felt question : 'Once you used to say
that you wanted to make possible and to diffuse
a sort of spiritual consumption throughout this
consumer society, though giving both to
"spiritual" and "consumption" their "best" and
most immediate meanings. In other words
you have always given the impression that you
considered that the work of a painter was also
to receive, filter and liberate the world of vision
which surrounds us, to give it back to your
consumers in the shape of imaginative stimuli,
to put it at their disposal so that they may
invent for themselves a wall, a corner of a
bedroom or an improbable window and enjoy
4 it, because liberation also springs from these
acts of the imagination loosed and delighting in
its own happiness.
`And I don't think that it was a bad idea :
basically you wanted the people who used your
signals to be happy and excited, as you were
when you made them. Good. Fine. But now
you've produced an exhibition with equally
"happy" signals and you have called it
"Towards Disaster". Contradiction number one.
`What is this catastrophe for you ? And why
should it become the theme of your painting ?
And where is the catastrophe in these
paintings of yours ?'
The catastrophe is everywhere. It is in man
and in his headlong dash towards the myth of
his unattainable happiness. It is in the longing
for identification with his crazed and
computerized gods.
My imaginary signals are happy. They are
the message I give or try to give to few or to
many of my kind. They are a message of
Utopian hope in a future in which the
imagination might find some space available
in man's system of communications : a space
which is completely denied to it today, and
to which some, despite everything, still
desperately cling. q

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