Freed passion

A quick review of the artistic passions, emotional drive, irresistible attractions and unmotivated fury of artists that are capable of making history.

Marina Abramovic and her boyfriend Ulay run in great strides towards each other, as if attracted by a magnet.
Their bodies slam into each other. They fall, they get up, they do it again and again, until they are totally wiped out. Is this nonsense? Maybe, but it is definitely passion. Only a few images like this performance, staged at the Venice Biennale back in the seventies and documented today in nostalgic black and white strips of film, are capable of synthesising so accurately the physical and violent but at the same time moral and mental temperamental drive that makes us go at all costs in a specific direction. No matter what the consequences may be: nothing can be done to counter a determination that goes beyond the notion of personal safety itself.
A man and a woman. But also a mountain or a desert: what makes Hamish Fulton walk to Japan, to the Himalayas, up alpine glaciers or down endless stretches covered with underbrush? It cannot be his fondness for photography, since he has produced only very few pictures that are hardly more interesting than postcards. It cannot be that he wants to challenge his physical fitness, as this would more likely be the case for a mountaineer or a professional sportsman. Fulton is an artist, instead. His form of art is walking, showing us this inextinguishable drive, this having to walk for miles and miles, regardless of the fact there is no special reason for doing so. The special reason is experiencing passion, even though in his case it is a passion for nature and for perceiving it through all his senses, including tiredness and hunger.

Haim Steinbach is in a shop. He looks around; touching, buying, picking, captured by an irresistible attraction for objects and their design: in his gaze there is a dash of madness, but it has almost nothing to do with the desire to own things. He wants to understand how shapes change one season after the other, one fashion, as it were, after the other, he wants to understand the reason for new fashions and how new lifestyles are embodied in objects and shop windows.

In his novel L’opéra, Emile Zola tells the story of a painter who destroys his own life because he cannot finish a painting , his only painting, the very one for the sake of which he gradually gives up his beloved one, his friends, his own health. The writer sharpened what he saw: painters like Cézanne, mostly, but also Manet and the other Impressionists, whose lives were driven by an unreasonable and inscrutable fury which, however, became understandable when viewed from their stance.
Romantic exaggerations? Maybe. But even in the driest years of minimal and conceptual art, what fervour lies behind the gestures that reduced sculptures to mere boxes, copper plates or cement blocks, or behind the tautological phrases the young Joseph Kosuth wrote out using a string of neon light? Even the action of reducing is born from an urgent need, from being overwhelmed by a need that is asking in no uncertain terms to be heeded.

Perhaps history, at least the history of art, is always written by rational people; surely, however, those who make history, those who build it before someone else comes along to arrange it in tidy categories, those are people who seem to be fanatics.
Otherwise, how can someone be brave enough to renew something – this holds true for the expression of art as it does for any other expression – if he/she is not driven by such a force? Reasonableness leads to diplomacy, it knows how to negotiate and wait, but it has never conquered territories or invented paths that no one had ever walked on before.
There is no need, however, to die or consume oneself with solitary work as does the main character in L’opéra. Passion reveals itself also in much less sentimental ways and in teamwork: take Andy Warhol and his Factory, with its walls covered with aluminum foil, a place half of New York went to and certainly its noisiest part; imagine him as he touches up the poster of Marilyn in Niagara and then hands it to his assistants so that they can apply a gold- or orange-colored background: how different, for example, from the physical and individual gestures of any German Expressionist or of Emilio Vedova.
Despite his open coldness and his ability to run a real factory, also Warhol’s life and actions were dominated by a vector which went well beyond reason and the possibility of stopping it: he tried to stop being an artist, soon after he had been attacked, but he was forced to start again. There is nothing you can do about it when novelty runs in your blood, when you do something without knowing why but just knowing that you simply must do it, when you live in that merciful condition that makes you look ahead and that’s that. In ancient times it was called “enthusiasm” (literally “entering in god”), today we prefer to talk about “strong motivation”.

No pioneer lives outside this condition and every artist works in the hope of becoming a pioneer. But for this to happen, if there is passion one must know how to recognize it and treat it properly: if it is matched with stupidity, then it will burn out very rapidly. It must be freed from all collateral thrusts, as if they were weeds, such as the desire for security, immediate acknowledgement by the public and rapid economic gratification. Every time Brancusi sold one of his works, he would cry. And passion should be developed sternly: it is not enough to slam into each other’s body once, you need also to get up and start all over again.