Incursioni

In 1937 Duchamp cut off his head. In this untitled work, a dreamy woman appears next to the artist\’s severed head. In her hands she has a tape measure and wears an old-fashioned priestess\’s or maenad\’s robe. How do you look at a work by Duchamp? What would that tape want to measure? Can the enigma of a montage that challenges or even oustes the viewer be deciphered? Thus began Salvatore Settis\’ forays into the works of ten important artists of our time. Duchamp, Guttuso, Bergman, Jodice, Pericoli, Bruskin, Penone, Viola, Kentridge and Schutz represent the shockwave of contemporary art, which overwhelms established rules and habits. But does their work really involve a drastic rejection of tradition or the ability to forget it? \’Between the ancient and the contemporary,\’ Settis writes, \’there is a perpetual tension, which is continually re-articulated in the flow of critical languages and taste, in market mechanisms, in the functioning of institutions. Sometimes even in harsh controversy with the art of the past, but without being able to ignore it\’. Every artist knows this and perhaps his public knows it too. The quotation, the parody, the stratification of memory, the return of a gesture are just a few traces of the relationship that binds the masters of today with the past. The courage of the incursion from one artist to another, from one work to another, is the way to explore connections and distances without giving up the essential condition of knowledge: the ability to feel foreign in every place.