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Last Issue: #31 The Journey
Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (1825-1905). This book is the answer to my thoughts on travel. It certainly anticipated the saga...Read more
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Loading ...Cogito ergo sum, it reads on what is probably the most famous work by German artist Rosemarie Trockel. In actual fact, it is not a painting but a frame containing a piece of knitting like Grandma used to do. The insight of Descartes meets feminine handiwork, through a subtly sophisticated critique of Cartesian dualism, which will not leave us alone and would still have us believe that the mind is separate from matter. “Made by hand” also means made by thought, if we think of the hand as its most faithful exponent, as pianists and those of us who tap away on our PC keyboards know well.
And the hand, body, and physical aspect also mean home. Our home. The place where, more than anywhere else, we know how to experience comfort and discomfort, creativity and mental block. “Homemade” and “handmade” are two branches of the same thought. Two elements of the same experience. There is no doubt that handmade also means a return to one’s roots: this is true of African artist Berni Searle: in her performances she stands in the centre of a heap of flour and with the embracing gestures of someone caressing a child with loving enthusiasm, she mixes flour and water to create loaves in which she also lives: she lives on water, wheat and movement, coordinating her body in a skilful art handed down from mother to daughter.
But there is nothing idyllic about doing things by hand. Just think how the washerwomen used to struggle, as they did the laundry in the river. What it meant to sew without a machine, and even before that, to spin and weave without a loom. When looms were mechanised three hundred years ago, it marked the birth of that industrial civilisation that we complain about incessantly and yet we are unable to give up its civilised aspects: no child labour, no piecework wages, no undeclared work for the elderly. The elderly should have calm, dignity and light, so they can enjoy their lunch in peace, like in Michele Zaza’s portraits of his parents: a farmhouse table and two solemn figures sanctified in black and white. In their own home. With their own food. With their son, whoever he had become, that boy who had reaped his fortune overseas during the 1970s.
Visual art has recorded everything, as is always the case: the tyranny of machines – the camera, for example, whose proud objectivity can be depressing; but also the obvious, banal, even ridiculous idea of an impossible return to the past. We know the frontier that non-Western countries need to cross: they need to make sure that even things that are made by hand are an achievement that deserves recognition, a pleasure, a sign of quality, rather than a burden or a mark of exploitation. The true meaning of “made by hand” is – or rather, it was during the early 1980s – immersing yourself in the childish pleasure of “messing” with materials, colours, life. Without rhetoric, but with stark realism, we can only hope that the world’s children can all “make things at home” for pleasure, and not because they are forced to work for slave wages.
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