Parallel Lines: Lorenzo Bruni
paolo parisi museo gemellaro palermo per manifesta-2
Federica Belli: The language of photography is still among the most contemporary ones, notwithstanding the diffusion of digital art. Which factors make photography such a relevant medium in our time?
Lorenzo Bruni: I can’t help but think of the new market for NFTs and digital images in general. You have to think, though, that Beeple's work Everydays: The First 5000 Days, which made him the third most expensive living artist at Christie's auction in 2021, is composed of computer-generated images that comment on the events of the day, images that were created by him as a way to experiment with the graphic programs at his disposal, drawing inspiration from the daily practice of painters from the past. This work, therefore, is the fruit of the contradictions generated between digital images and the world of social media, in which our private sphere and our freedom of opinion have transformed public space. However, the work does not investigate these same contradictions, but simply partly documents them and uses them. Photography is contemporary when it performs a meta-photographic action on medium itself, creating a dialogue between frozen instants and the context it addresses.
F.B. This introduction naturally leads to an in-depth discussion on your view of photography as conceptual reflection. How does this coexist with your work as a curator for The Phair Fair?
L.B. I am interested in those who pursue a particular path on investigating the relationship between observer and observed object. I come to photography from my background as an art critic. My training in the world of photography in the American sphere, which is related to Robert Frank, Diana Arbus, Dorothea Lange, might suggest my exclusive interest in street photography or documentary photography. Actually, in them I found an iron practice related to investigating the limits of photography, not just in terms of its production, but also its conveyance and perception. That is why I can safely refer to them as the origin of the investigation that from the 1960s, again in the U.S., would be led over the decades by different artists such as Ed Ruscha, Cindy Sherman and then Nan Goldin. For that same reason, moving to our Italian territory, I am interested in Giacomelli and Ghirri. I understand them in a deep and complete manner, beyond their obvious documentary or aesthetic strength, owing to my awareness of the research of artists who adopt the language of photography – Franco Vaccari, Gianni Melotti, Franco Vimercati, Lisetta Carmi, Letizia Battaglia, and the younger ones including Francesco Jodice, Paola de Pietri, Paola di Bello and Armin Linke. Theirs is a type of image – we cannot speak only of photography in their case – that creates a dialogue between the worlds of documentation and art, expanding the limits of what we mean by reportage and artistic photography. This is why I felt perfectly comfortable from the beginning in following the project of the new photography fair in Turin called The Phair; it brings together, without any kind of separation, pure photography galleries with art galleries that also work with photo-artists. Such a fair could only take place in recent times, since it required from the general public a new perspective on reportage and news-photography as not competing with an art-related research. Rather than the efforts of specialized critics, in this case, it has been the algorithm of the world wide web platforms that paved the way for a different perception of images.
F.B. Are you implying that contemporary photography has nothing to do with composition or with an aesthetic problem?
L.B. The photographic image is increasingly an abstract information rather than an image. As Amir Zamir – head of the visual intelligence and learning lab in Lausanne – has stated in Armin Linke’s video work, currently on display in Bologna at the MAST for Image Capital, countless cameras are capturing parking lots and airports only to be processed by computers – and not humans – just to improve the organization of data profiling so that the right advertising can reach the right people. We must take these aspects into account when re-thinking how we transform aesthetic categories and how young photographers can intervene in this landscape. Tackling serious work through photography for a young photographer or artist in our time has become much more difficult compared to the past. And not just because we are surrounded by digital photographic images that seem even more real than their original object, but mainly because we have become image producers in addition to being consumers. That is the effect of social media. Precisely for this reason, the point nowadays lies in giving presence to the world, rather than just visibility. In saying this I am considering the reasoning of Nicholas Mirzoeff in his book How to See the World, the one where he reflects on the fact that censorship today no longer entails the subtraction of images, but rather their overabundance. An overabundance that leads to mutual anaesthetisation and annihilation.
malick sibide-2
F.B. Being a photographer, I can’t help but find this topic extremely relevant. I am now curious about which artist in particular brought you to reflect on such issues at a global scale.
L.B. At the turn of the 2000s, the most relevant and contemporary reflections on the language of photography were those produced by artists who were actually confronted with the novelty of the video form. I am thinking of artists such as Elisabetta Benassi, Deimantas Narkevicius, Anri Sala, Candice Brietz, Anika Larsen and Tacita Dean – these were the first to address, in weirdly early times, the issues of archival and reactivation of collective memory. From 2010 onward, this trend spread in an uncontrolled way through the work of artists from different nations who addressed a post-colonialist vision of the image. This trend intertwined with the research of a new generation of pure photographers who were interested in an abstract type of photography, precisely to counteract the excessive production of digital images that increasingly clogged personal digital archives. The current interesting artists are precisely those who are now trying to bridge the crack, the rupture that occurred in the early 2000s. It’s with the 2002 edition of Documenta and, particularly with its focus on Allan Sekula and the South African photographer, David Goldblatt, that a trend opposite to the previous one – which centered around breathtaking and self-referential images by Jeff Wall and Thomas Demand – came to life. In the upcoming years, these two trends increasingly overlapped, mainly because of the constant changes in the view of both the photographic object and of interpersonal communication. The way we record and share memories has almost nothing in common with the way we did it some years ago.
F.B. Your professional figure combines the roles of critic and curator to the point that the two almost merge. How does your work change, on a conceptual level, in managing exhibitions in the case of the nonprofit space BASE in Florence, as opposed to managing a commercial fair related to new experimentations – for instance in fairs like The Others, or working with art spaces in Lithuania and in Amsterdam?
L.B. At university, I had the chance to study with Enrico Crispolti and I found myself collaborating with Fabio Cavallucci at Tuscia Electa, where we could invite international artists such as Joseph Kosuth or Jannis Kounellis to create a site-specific dialogue with the Tuscan countryside. For this reason, the theoretical and curatorial practice have never seemed parallel to my eyes, but rather in constant dialogue. Over the course of the years, I slowly realized how I was shifting from the question of which exhibition would give a voice to the latest art trends to being able to think pragmatically about the critical tools with which to put trends in a coherent dialogue with recent art history. This led to the creation of the book Who is my audience?, in which I investigate the new performance trend in relation to a group exhibition of the time. The same goal brought me to organize the exhibition and then the book 66/16, a project in which I investigated six alternative roads towards the concept of dematerialisation of the work of art, starting in the 1960s and coming to the more recent practices in a world dematerialised by social media. Such dialogue between practice and theory has allowed me to collaborate for a long time with Pier Luigi Tazzi and, more recently, to devolve most of my energies to teaching, while continuously coordinating a nonprofit space in Florence, Base Projects for Art, a reality founded by artists who invite other artists to exhibit in a totally democratic and non-hierarchical way.
Via Nuova Arte Contemporanea, 2006. jankowsky, parisi, rossella biscotti, roman ondak
