Critique
Posted By admin / 15th December 2010
As a magazine we get to see lots of photographs. So many you begin to yearn for only the most creative and the most beautiful to assault your senses. Such was the case when we first laid eyes on the images of Marco Bolognesi from his book Woodland.
With our own fashion shoots within the magazine we always try to do something other than just sell clothes. We want to tell some kind of story that often comes from the theme of that issue. Most of the photography we are sent we find disappointing. There is not enough difference between commercial images used for advertising and editorial shoots which, to us, should be creative in their own right. Most of the time we are left asking where has the imagination gone?
That was why it was such a joy to see Marco’s photographs. I feel that his images hold the spirit that all good photography should contain. He is not afraid to experiment and shows much courage. In his book Woodland, Bolognesi introduces us to beautiful women who inhabit a haunting wood. The images themselves are exquisitely constructed. But there is a disturbing edge to this glossy sweetness that trips up the often cozy and secure world of fashion photography. The accessories seem to pierce the skin of the models giving a slightly menacing, sado-masochistic quality to the images.
To behold such images such as those of Marco Bolognesi restores one’s faith in creative photography and image making.
Lee Taylor
Editor/Publisher
FLUX MAGAZINE
Posted By admin / 15th December 2010
Probably there is no point in describing Marco Bolognesi as a photographer. Yes, his images are photographs but not really photography. They are something else beyond photography. Some people might call it art. Sure, there are many experimental compositions on his work. A film for him could be a canvas for a painter.
As for me I don’t care much if it is art or not, after all, it is a work to express his imagination and it is something special and mysterious: simply it might be too original and unique to explain.
When I saw his work for the first time, two words EXPRESSION and FREEDOM, came across in my head. For a long time I tried to figure out his work with these two key words and a while after I noticed that these two words could be interestingly juxtaposed by prepositions in many ways, creating visionary equations such as E of F, F of E , F on E, E on F, E in F, F in E, F with E, E with F ( using expression =E and freedom=F).
Each of those relations of E and F are acceptable to his work making impossible to choose one among them to define and enclose Marco’s work into one title. In this sense his work has so many aspects and it is so powerful, the kind of power that it is brought to us by his originality and imagination drenched in every picture and every aspect of his world.
It is a pleasure and a joy to lose oneself into Marco’s project Woodland: as you may notice, Bolognesi focuses on women’s face as objects all the way through. And each image has unexpected accessories(including the spot-on make up and hair work ) which brings something surreal in it and create interesting compositions at the same time.
Marco’s work has the energy that comes from being the one responsible of the new creation and at the same time the ironic detachment of the spectator who admires and falls in love with the artist’s women too beautiful to belong to our time.
Posted By admin / 13th December 2010
“Under the “ideal” conditions of our developed industrial world, to the alienation which coexists with the pervasive automation taking place in the world of work, the reduction of working hours and the interchangeability of skills… Eros and our life instincts have been unleashed into unchartered territories”.
H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilization
That the technological and industrial advancements of today have led to profound changes in society is quite clear, but that the advent of the revolution of the machine having far reaching implications for Eros would appear to be most certainly less apparent. And yet technology has gone far beyond merely providing us with tools that make our lives easier; it has opened up a new world and endless possibilities that years ago were mere flights of fancy and that have now turned into reality, even when they belong to the ephemeral world of the web.
This is where Marco Bolognesi’s exploration begins. It stems from a
fascination with the very essence and rationale that are the driving force behind an age that favours change and hybridization of form and content, that disregards any preconceived ideas based on certainty. His is a world that embraces the vast realm of social integration and multiple identity. Bolognesi’s journey begins with Ma’aM and develops through his subsequent work, and culminates in the genetic modification of his Babylon Federation cycle and the synthetic and physical union found in Synteborg.
However, let’s proceed in logical order, as Ma’aM does not only play a thematically fundamental role in Bolognesi’s subsequent research, it is also a seminal work that lays down the roots that unfold into a bigger picture and paves the way to even more in-depth research that has far reaching implications for further development, and which at the time it was conceived revealed complete maturity.
Let’s begin with the conclusion drawn by Marcuse in the quotation we read at the beginning of the article: today’s world has witnessed a veritable explosion of energy, instincts and a change in the way we relate to one another with the advent of modern technology and internet communication. The destruction of barriers and ethical boundaries brought about by the web has made a radical contribution to modern day thinking and has eradicated stale ideas. This has, without question, led us to rethink our understanding of our obsessions, it has also encouraged us to reflect deeply on the control and domination that today’s society perceives as a form of freedom and which instead has the exact opposite effect. Mobile phones, Skype, the internet and digital technology have overcome all the spatial and temporal constraints of the past and paved the way for an emotional spontaneity which expresses itself unequivocally in the bond between the dominating mistress and her submissive slave. Yet Ma’aM does not consume itself with the turbulent energy emanating from a controlling relationship experienced with genuine sincerity. No, it slowly evolves with increasing perspicuity once the elements that shape the composition’s overriding character become clearer. These elements create the very fibre of a work whose lexicon, grammar and content are implied in such a way that they attract each other in order to create a complex identity with a strong and intense visual impact.
H. Marcuse, Eros e civiltà, Italian Translation, Einaudi, Turin
In this context, the emotional link between the protagonists plays a decisive role because it is strong enough to act as a frame to a concrete, material and physical entity which permeates its environment with a magical tactility that envelopes the protagonists in a mantle that absorbs all memories and sound, leading them to another dimension that overcomes any concept of space and time. The spectator in this way creates his own perceptions and stimuli that are awakened by what he sees, but that all-embracing warm, black mantle that he almost feels he can touch is not the only catalyst in Ma’aM: every single detail, the whip, belt, models’ make up and outfits represent a system of symbols that clearly lay the scene out, but they also contribute to a basic fact: they promote a filmic narration that has been ever-present in Bolognesi’s research and which here palpitates with rhythm unleashing a host of themes embedded with aggression. The vision Ma’aM conjures appears to be set within a context that is not consumed within the confines of a photographic image, but that is actually ready to evolve and question itself in order to create the rich plot of Ma’aM, a series of photographs in which darkness is like a flash of lightning and whose objects become metaphors and obscurity a cover, in which the afflictions and taboos present in our societ y intertwine with an “outbreak of nudity” and “composed sexuality” with which today’s technology “tatoos its message directly onto our skin”, developing a tactile sensitivity and stimulation that takes sexuality to new dimensions…2
2 Loosely taken from M. McLuhan, Dall’occhio all’orecchio, Italian Translation, introduction by G. Gamaleri e C.H. Conford, Armando Editore, Roma, 1986, p.50.
Elena Forin
Font:
Dark Star – Bomar Edition / Silvana Editoriale 2008
Posted By admin / 13th December 2010
If, as Antonio Tursi believes, today’s man, like his Baroque counterpart, finds himself in a precarious anthropological situation, it is as a result of a widespread instability which affects both art and politics, civil development, systems for obtaining knowledge and interpersonal relationships.
And yet the similarities between the 17th century and today lie not only in the macrostructure of a society veering towards uncertainty, but also in the significance of an allegorical world centred around pomposity and the prevalence and stratification of content and meaning, just as Marco Bolognesi’s work does, in which conceptual maps and aesthetic bodies meet in a debate on the life and times of contemporary man. What emerges from this is the cyclical and continuous nature of a world which has a multitude of relationships with time and a restless personality, where the collapse of certain categories has left us with all but a few symbols which, like the Babylon Federation, simply emphasise the boundaries in which our identity can express itself.
Belts, whips, arms and uniforms become therefore a metaphor of a universe
that has wilfully chosen segregation in order to face the pot-pourri of science, technology, power and image of Dark Star.
Elena Forin Why have you chosen to call this publication Dark Star?
Marco Bolognesi It’s in homage to the John Carpenter film of the same title and his work. Dark Star was his first feature film and as a seminal work had a strong influence on his style. I have, through this book, portrayed my world, or at least a part of it, and my vision of the universe.
1 A. TURSI, Estetica dei nuovi media – Forme espressive e network society,
Costa & Nolan, Milan, 2002
Can you tell us about the discovery and creation of your artistic universe?
It’s essential for me to make visible a universe which is a metaphysical place: it’s a sort of parable hovering between reality and illusion. Edgar Allan Poe said that the reality we see, and the world in which we live, is only a dream in a dream. The English cosmologist John David Barrow instead talks about our vision as a phenomenon that is linked to the instruments surrounding us that are capable of making us see, and in this way he makes a distinction between a visible universe and a Universe with a capital U. I believe that Western culture (that is, if we can talk of such a thing as Western culture in our globalized world) tells us and teaches us to see certain realities and to make a distinction between what exists and what does not exist. Through art I can confront these contemporary themes by focusing on the transformation of human beings through the birth-death-birth process conceived in terms of a cyclical pattern.
You believe, therefore, in the concept of the eternal individual, of lives that have no end…
Exactly. An “Ouroboros”, one of a handful of symbols known to all people and throughout the ages: it’s a depiction of a snake swallowing its own tail, a cosmic serpent depicting a totality that symbolises the devourer and devoured. I find it fascinating because it is the metaphor par excellence that expresses the ambivalence between the beginning and the end, good and evil, male and female and the cycles and eternal flux of energies. It was the symbol of the universe in ancient Egypt and is the inspiration behind my own universe.
The ambivalence you express in Ma’aM was a starting point for your subsequent research. What changed with the past and what were the values you chose to embrace with this series?
Ma’aM coincided with my arrival in London and my coming into contact with a different social and cultural environment. It was here in London that I began questioning a lot of things, first and foremost my ideas on culture which in Italy I had found overwhelming.
What do you mean by this?
Everything is possible in London because it’s easy to loose oneself; one can disappear and subsequently reinvent oneself later. You can act out a variety of roles whilst feeling completely free, something which unfortunately in Italy is impossible to achieve.
I based my whole universe on Ma’aM and it marked a turning away from my earlier vision. Through Ma’aM I in part revived by deep interest in Guido Crepax, whose work fascinated me. I tried to “translate” his work into photography, through role playing images, as expressed in the relationship between the dominator and dominated. Sure, it’s shocking, but it’s also light and takes an irreverent stance on relationships of power.
Femininity achieves a defining consecration within the universe of Ma’aM …
The theatre of Ancient Greece was centred around men, in fact men played women’s roles. The complete opposite can be said of my work, mine is a world of Amazonian women. I am convinced that women will be the dominant force of the future: some time ago I read an article which claimed that the difference between men and women did not lie in their hormones, but in their genes. Indeed, women have more active genes than men and this consequently gives them greater opportunities and an increased aptitude even in scientific research. This makes me believe that it’s very well worth studying women, even when it comes to my personal work and I don’t believe that all this pondering is pure science fiction. No, it will become an imminent reality.
Sexuality is interpreted as the backbone of all relationships and plays a very important role in your research. What changes did you make from Ma’aM to Geiko?
I believe that the body is a type of writing, being able to manipulate it is important in terms of linguistic stratification in order to be able to build a new vocabulary. The eroticism of my photographs clearly declares a deep respect for the body and sexuality of women. I’m not interested in constructing a photo based on shocking images, as do Nobuyoshi Araki and Terry Richardson. I’m more interested in evoking emotions that grow from within.
Linguistic stratification transforms itself in your work into a visual collage, which played a fundamental role in Woodland. We have a taste, through your sketches and polaroids, of how your vision and how your way of looking at the world builds a superimposition of symbols and meanings through objects…
My approach to work has a connection with the cinematographic techniques associated with filmmaking, because I proceed in different phases that can sometimes overlap in, if you like, a prescribed order. My photographs are conceived and are developed after a lengthy rapport with an idea. Each phase adds something new to the preceding phase and forms a substrate to the next phase, just like a collage.
It all begins with a sketch that helps me to develop a concept upon which
I then construct my projects.
The link with the world of fashion is an area that needs to be clarified and confined to precise limits: can you elaborate on this relationship?
The world of fashion interested me because of its psychological masking and adeptness at transformation. A dress on a body can change an individual’s role and transform the person wearing it into something completely different. This is because an outfit can cover up and accentuate other characteristics. The artistry and daringness of fashion interest me hugely and I relate to it in the same way a fashion designer draws inspiration from cartoons and illustrations. Fashion mirrors the society which creates it and the catwalk reflects society through symbols and metaphors.
Your C.O.D.E.X. B. are not the synthetic hybrids of Synteborg, nor are they the creatures that are a mixture of robotic limbs combined with natural bodies. They are individuals with a heightened power. What role did science fiction play behind the inspiration and development of this project?
Science fiction is a part of my culture. I’m drawn to it because not only is it a description of an imaginary world of the future, it also uses metaphors to narrate the future and describe and develop contemporary issues. A prime example of this is Terry Pratchett’s “Only you can save mankind”. What emerges in this book, written for a young audience, is the subject of the first war in Iraq. I wanted to create individuals who were a hybrid between the X-Men, the mutant “homo superior” conceived by Stan Lee and the cyborgs, like the Terminatrix, in “Terminator 3″. The character of Mistique in the X-Men, with her inconstant beauty and powers, is a great inspiration for the C.O.D.E.X. B. series, which is a work in progress, as is Alien’s Ripley a character who had a fundamental impact
on women’s image in the 1980′s.
The cinema plays an important part in your research: what role does it
play in visual and content terms?
My work has essentially very strong links with cinema, if nothing else because I feel a close affinity to the medium’s capacity for vision and because I want this vision to be an important part of the achievements I make in my research. I’m interested in the work of Cronenberg and the way he uses the human body and Shinya Tsukamoto’s depiction of posthuman women with deadly robot arms in Tetsuo: The Iron Man.
This cinematic influence was highly influential in your last short film “Black Hole” I wanted to take my research into the obscure to a deeper level and chose a visionary route combined with a gothic setting at the fringes of reality. In Black Hole I experimented with concepts that up until the making of the film I had developed exclusively through photographs. The fusion of the individual with artificial intelligence in Black Hole is altogether more fulfilling. Unlike my past experiences, this fusion rather than expressing itself in physical and practical terms, is more conceptual, insofar as man, made of flesh and blood, becomes whole with his computerised and mathematical components, thus creating a new race capable of greater transformation than other human beings. I developed the work that I had already tackled in Cyborg Faces centred around a human beauty grafted into which were technological and artificial features such as piercing to strengthen and increase the potential of my subjects, turning my creatures not so much into synthetic robots but into beings with an elevated humanity who are the survivors of an inhospitable land. This has led me to believe that the dramatic contrast between human naturalness and the technological frigidity of the microchip and the metal artificial body parts of the face were a very important element in the conception of this cycle.
In your Baylon Federation and C.O.D.E.X. B. cycles we are party to a conflict waged between the synthetic, real, virtual and hybrid. Science fiction, horror and cyberspace: what is Marco Bolognesi’s world?
I have a great appetite for science fiction. Films like Dune and Blade Runner opened up my universe. But certain horror films also hold inspiration for me. The mask of the protagonist in Dario Argento’s Phantom of the Opera influenced Synteborg. I wanted some of my synthetic creations to receive special treatment, as does the character of Betty. My women are, just like the protagonist in the film, physically forced to look out into the homicidal world that surrounds them, unable to avert their eyes.
The idea of genetic modification, already a feature of Babylon Federation is another fundamental aspect of your work which highlights the recurring theme of the juxtaposition of the cinema, technological research and literature…
It’s about deconstruction and de-contextualization, which carried a certain weight, together with a vision of futurist Nazis, in the Philip Dick book “The Man in the High Castle”. What I wanted to do was de-contextualize the customs steeped in history of certain epochs by mixing them with fetish images in order to create a language which would discompose symbols of power and sarcasm in order to create post human women who do not belong to our times yet they wear the symbols.
We find in Geiko an accumulation of all your previous experiences, where the inhibited sexuality of Ma’aM and the collage work of Woodland and Babylon Federation work in combination, as does the concept of the latent conflict found in C.O.D.E.X. B. What kind of influence could far eastern cinema have on an already highly developed concept?
I have a love-hate relationship with far eastern cinema. I find the visual and latent conceptuality highly interesting, but often the narrative structure is too slow. The Korean filmmaker Byung-Chun Min in Natural City and the Japanese filmmaker Kazuaki Kiriya in Casshern both explore the relationship between androids and the human race within the setting of a chaotic and hyper-technological future in which man has to fight in order to preserve the capacities that make up human nature. Far eastern cinema is strongly inclined to bring to light the vision of a future that criticizes that is heir to a technological inheritance but that also leaves space for emotional responses allowing the human race to distinguish itself from androids. Detailed dreamy images, my familiarity with the world of cartoons and an informed relationship with a range of expressive media that result in an end product that is unconsciously real intrigue me enormously, as does my contact with videogames.
Posted By admin / 9th December 2010
Alienation and fetish are the horizon not of the modern world but of the different assets, or indeed, of the different types of sovereignty governing our universe. Fetish flirts with hedonism in art and fashion. Very few grasp its tragic rapture. Still for the time being a woman’s body harbours power: her decorated flesh is still today sectionalized by the desire we call wealth, be it human, social, symbolic or technological. Bolognesi’s images are striking in the way their icy coldness precludes their fetish nature from being regarded as sexy. Let what is really attractive appeal to our senses.
Bolognesi seduces us into looking at the world with depraved eyes. We find ourselves in a world in which we reinterpret the ethical values bent on the redemption of the aesthetics and politics with which they have been traditionally linked. What our artist is proposing is total depravation. His views are based on a strict analogy between the religious belief that evil is the only reality here on earth and the aesthetic view of worldly depravation is the only possible artistic solution on earth. The two extremes defer to divine grace. Flesh can be pardoned by the divine, as well as by beauty. Both that which is divine and beautiful can evoke human flesh, as long as the flesh does not conceal its own damnation.
Total depravation is a religious concept of human existence which draws inspiration from protestant reforms, the very ones that have had a greater sway on capitalism and modern society. The Latin meaning of the verb to deprave is to wrench, twist and deform, all of which has very little to do with today’s current usage of the word, when used to sanction corruption of the senses and spirit. No, indeed the corruption of bodies and souls is held to be the only way man can attain his lost origins. Salvation is derived from our downfall simply because we are on earth, and because of our arrogance in creating a world according to our image and likeness.
Bolognesi’s images are part of an image bank that today encourages the critics into questioning their legitimacy and survival as an institution and that questions the very survival of canons of art. What is the difference between the imagery we have imposed for at least the last thirty years on products of the culture industry (which is so rich in all types of posthuman perversion) and the imagery conjured up by a small number of extreme artists? Artists who have absorbed the avant-guard movements on the lines of the knight’s move in chess, or rather the double movement of disenchantment and re-enchantment with works of art, its disorientation and ensuing consecration, have pushed depravation to the limits in their universe and have distorted it. If in the 20’s and 30’s it was art that was at the forefront of an avant-garde movement or at least one that promoted with dynamism and hot-headedness images of mass culture and the whirlwind trends of fashion, today the reverse is the case. The traditions of the avant-garde movement at the dawn of the new millennium are now confronted by the collective imagination that it helped evolve at the beginning of the last century. Artists like Bolognesi take it upon themselves to give an alternative meaning to the instruments of the horror movie bent on depravation in order to satisfy the whims of the general public.
Three centuries of sensory development lie between the automatons of the 18th century and the techno-somatic and bio-political hybrids of Stelarc. The phase of heavy machinery was long and protracted, and that of digital devises ephemeral; from low definition machinery as a means of reproduction and construction of reality to their high definition and user friendly devices. Our modern day technological solutions have erased the endless and remote psychosomatic experience which was a fundamental part in the making of mankind and his passions and which now is destined to resurface through the internet. The ever increasing ability to express in a highly defining way goes hand in hand with the virtual world and has in recent years been sanctioned by the transformation of photography into a numerical language: from a loosely defined photograph embedded in the tradition of painting, to the well defined language that can associate itself with and contribute to the realization of all other media. The images of obsessive cleanliness that Bolognesi reveals to us are inspired by the transition – and therefore momentary suspension – between the material nature of production processes, i.e. the quality of the traditional art of theatre, sculpture, painting and photography which is an immaterial reproduction of a product, and the image of our time achieved through digital reproduction.
Bolognesi works on both banks of this ford, in other words both behind the scenes and on stage. Before he takes a photograph he makes sure his models are meticulously prepared. His punctiliousness in rendering his models exactly as he would like them is one of his most distinguishing trademarks. He works by flash; distinctive elements of life are literally ripped apart from their historical and symbolic bodies only to be assembled together as accessories that shape an individual. This time consuming bricolage gives the body a new subjectivity to what was dispersed elsewhere and became lost in objectivity. This is the behind the scenes work.
The stage setting is the final image. This entails much preparation, inspiration from other sources and eventual fulfilment, it must feel like a flash photograph. Flash photography, albeit a photographic technique, will always play an integral part in this medium. Its inhuman nature is the result of a violent intrusion of technology into the physiology of our eyes, which becomes incapable of seizing hold of the movement and grabbing it as it flows. So, a photograph transmits, or rather it allows us to share the zone, bubble if you like in which small and big events take place which the flash is capable of seizing better than any printed image can. But it goes beyond the set. The printed image is the only way that the temporal and spatial elements of a flash can surface. It is a concept of time and space that escapes the social order of continuity. The precision of Bolognesi’s compositions consists in transforming the bodies of women in such a way as to ensure that the combination of their accessories are reflected in the flash.
Aesthetics – even when not creating order and peace – manage to keep what is shattered inside itself. Having lost their sense of belonging and identity they become a blend of all that which can potentially dissipate itself and decompose. The same applies to creators of art, according to their feelings and to those who make art their philosophy of life. Can aesthetics be applied to accessories? This question is liked more and more by fashion designers (and markets) who nowadays have to work much harder on designing accessories than the outfits themselves. The outfit – the sartorial object that gives shape to a body – is restrained by the structure of bodies, that is the skeleton, limbs and joints – which remain unchanged. This is heavy. Today’s outfit, which is an altogether less elaborate affair than that of ancient times – now disappoints our gaze. Why? Because the life of a body inside this social simulacrum continues to expand in the several prosthesis available now through technology where the organic and inorganic parts live and thrive in everyday life.
The accessories that have accumulated over space and time in complex societies are replacing the outfit as imitation and alteration of the nude figure which, when dressed, exhibits all the aura of its time. This has existed forever (even the rags of the poor showed the other side of this coin). However in the extreme climate of our digital world the outfit has always been more abused by the huge number of accessories of which the bodies and human flesh of modern life have made use. This array of accessories is the debris of modern life – and this is how Bolgnesi portrays them – yet in their grace they recall a lost beauty. Not that which we have degraded but that which we have banished because of divine fate, yet another requisite of our roots, this is the destiny of every organic and inorganic creation. I pose the question: do artificial limbs come first, or is it our body?
Posted By admin / 9th December 2010
Bolognesi belongs to a group of artists that best capture the spirit of the times. We can discuss their work, as art critics are prone to do, by going into some detail over biographies and catalogues of work or by opening our eyes to the world they perceive and lay open to us. I prefer the second option, its suits me best. And the images I have in front of me would definitely be best described in this way. They are representations that are armed yet dispersed, of a shattered ephemeral or lasting image that continuously rejuvenates itself. Some thirty years ago I used the formula “armed and dispersed” to define anonymous Italian pornographic cartoon artists of the seventies. These artists, whose work was of varying quality, preceded the work of Bolognesi.
A metropolitan setting, then a black background, here and everywhere: blue women, naked, armed by their bodies more than by the pistol they carry, celebrate a sophisticated rite made up of citations. They’re both light and heavy, these citations, just like their pistols (technology par excellence, excellence of technology, its ultimate raison d’être). They know they are toys but that, as toys, they know they can be used as pistols. This fundamental concept that the innocence of each and every playful object is wicked and consequently contains within itself the irreversible and unchangeable truth of the post Holocaust era, of the nuclear bomb, must be ever present when we look at the work of Bolognesi. He loves science fiction cinema and is well aware of the fact that the cinema has always associated itself with the last and most horrific catastrophe that has befallen mankind. Where the past and future are obliterated by the flash of a photograph and the fluttering sound of the of the cinema projector: from Babylonia to the Roman Empire, the Via Crucis to the great natural catastrophes, the death of heroes to the King of Nazism, and lastly Manhattan’s Twin Towers to Total annihilation. A menacing blue pervades this emptiness of a world suspended in darkness. The sadomasochism of our forgotten memories. Woeful happiness.
These citations made by Bolognesi, became embedded in our memory when it was all over, when “pop” became “art”. Or the opposite would be better, when art melted into a restless and desperate life, baseless, but retaining all the passion, in ways and customs. From when Warhol (the last artist who was conceded the title of neo-renaissance artist) and Baudrillard (the last sociologist and philosopher who was considered to be a neo-metropolitan) ended the discussion that Marcel Duchamp (a man of too high intelligence) had started and never finished, in order to give it endless life; unwilling to leave his heritage to a museum. Playing a part in the world, not just being. And that end game, that disappearance of art only to transform into something else, goes on. Even today.
Bolognesi’s blue women who in the bottomless pit of his/our head, dance immobile, fixed by a photographic flash. Yet because of their conscious awareness of the fact that they are masks they remind us of the opening titles of a James Bond film, with their changeable sexuality, colour and nature. Sinuous, deadly women. Harmonious, aesthetically appealing, positive and politically correct, and very different from the dark and hard image that follows, portrayed by extreme artists and exploited for entertainment by global hypermarkets. There exists and affinity between intent, thought and experience between the super, or global market and the superhero. What they share is the physiology and psychology of the masses. Of course, it is fashionable to use the word masses, yet no other word better really explains that we’re not talking here about society, but of lives that have been really lived. We’re not talking about subjects, but about flesh.
No power crazed activity of “Spectre” as featured in the Bond movies would have been able to embrace the current and everyday conditions of life in Bush’s Western Empire and the vast number of people who aspire to take his place. Bolognesi, in his work as a professional artist and bricoleur of time and space belongs to the imploding world of the X-men, to their bodies and changeable senses, affections and desires, just like the archeo-industrial indulgences of Alien. He, like me, adores the heroic and feline intimacy of Ripley, the mother-warrior, a mother inseminated by monsters, whose body she cleanses in preparation for war. Or does he conspire to the pornographic irony (if there is such a concept) of Russ Meyer, the precocious manipulator of cinema and sex in all its openness and ingenuity who after having given much pleasure to artists and enthusiasts of the super 8mm now endeavours to satisfy the ever growing appetites of internet bloggers. The vision of John Carpenter, the director of the cult film Dark Star was not made to reflect illusions of reality. They are the threshold between the immersion and emersion of ectoplasms: in the deep blackness of Bolognesi’s mind his avenging women are illuminated by a blue light. Yet what is the reason behind their quest for revenge? Perhaps there is nothing they need to take revenge against.
Perhaps Bolognesi is engaging in a playful commentary recalling the figures of his childhood with this cycle, or with what remains of these figures. The early childhood of Bolognesi’s generation no longer had the piazzas, meadows and streets to grow up in, or to believe that they were growing up in. They had the television screen and a kaleidoscope of a thousand metaphors every split second. Inside this fluorescent generation living between night and day and heaven and earth: just like the tireless waves of television, homeward bound travellers, with an unexpected insight, have sought their own initiation into the world where the palimpsest stood still and yet tore itself apart, allowing them to experience the cyclical rhythms of myth. This is the world of the cinema and cartoon, well distanced from literature and painting.
A type of film and a certain type of cartoon. Their rejects. The myth associates itself with the elected few who feel this to be their mission. And the elected look for rubbish amongst diamonds and diamonds in the rubbish. This was the stuff of fables reinterpreted along modern lines: Edgar Allan Poe embedded a diamond in the knife handle that The Man of the Crowd hid between the folds of his casual outfit. That was his image, the inauguration of fashionable man. A man’s way of being.
Our tradition as modern people has experienced, albeit not continuously, deviations from the everyday union between society and its institutions: travels to the Far East and Africa, underground explorations, rambles along forgotten paths between mountains and forests and strolls along the shop windows and avenues of Paris. This feeling of being exiled is repeated and now belongs to those who, instead of musing over history or daily news, associate themselves with personalities from the world of the cinema and cartoon characters who reject any connection with reality. They love looking amongst the industrial and post-industrial imagery and feel they can build something concrete, as does Bolognesi.
Superheroes play a part in men’s souls. If we work on the assumption that each and every one of us has a soul, then superheroes are intrinsically linked to us. Their souls do not fly in the skies of the spirit. No, they are immersed in a sequence of dreamlike imaginary images of modern day life and aspire to real posthuman life. We can’t celebrate the divine origin of the individual in superheroes, what we can do is celebrate the human tragedy of those who tried to seek their divinity because of their desire for freedom and a need to take control. Just as Siegfried bloodily slays the dragon, the bodies of these fantasy characters who try and attain reality are bathed in the rhythms of the everyday and humdrum life of the ordinary, weak and lost man in the street. Man’s aspirations to invulnerability are intrinsically linked to the tormenting weakness.
A book recently written by the American novelist Deborah Eisenberg, The Twilight of the Superheroes, can throw some light on the subject. It is set amidst the dusty fog of Manhattan’s Ground Zero. It depicts the impotence of the world and the trash superheroes that are the mythological heroes of modern times. The very same characters who were the twilight of the gods. And we know that at twilight, the regime of order (the height of visibility) gives way to the regime of disorder, where sight is overtaken by all that it tends to exclude. Where it is surrounded by the sensory perceptions of the skin (and the blue of Bolognesi’s bodies emanates and odour and vibration of their skin).
Culturally accepted by progressives like Umberto Eco as a result of their openness, the superheroes of the mass cultural media in order to establish themselves and express their human philosophy, overdoing it, have worn the outfit of everyday weakness, of all earthly shortcomings. Their capacity for salvation has exploited man’s every neurosis, illness and accident that has befallen him as a result of nature and science. There are now literally hundreds and thousands of superheroes, as a result of the viral exchanges between East and West. They represent a community of senses that has found its own medium in globalization and its vintage clothing in the customs of local traditions lost in time and space. An impossible community that is now living its own twilight. Bolognesi, with the steadfast strength of he who lives on these frontiers creates his images from superheroes weakened by their re-discovery of the sacred. With the intense colours of admonishment which, as futurism has taught us, are also those of feelings and effects.
Posted By admin / 13th January 2009
Bologna is best known for its towers and its tortellini and it was here that Marco Bolognesi was born in 1974 into a prominent intellectual family. His grandfather was an artist and Marco graduated from Bologna University where he attended classes in drama, art and music. After a spell working on two award-wining video animations about terrorism for the national TV network the RAI, and a period as an assistant director at Cinecittà in Rome where, for a time he pursued his dreams of becoming a movie director, he came to London. Although his film years were seminal he felt that the cinema system in Italy was too creatively narrow. From then on he decided to render his personal vision in stills. For it was London with its vibrant art and fashion scene that was to lure him to come and work as a photographer. And London, with all its razzmatazz, its multiculturalism, its tolerance of gender bending and dressing up, and its wealth of demotic street style, is now where he lives and works.
Subcultures are, by definition, always in dispute with a society’s overlaying orthodoxy and style is the arena by which disputations with the mainstream are made manifest. As Dick Hebdige wrote in New Accents Subculture: The Meaning of Style “The cycle leading from opposition to effusion, from resistance to incorporation encloses each successive subculture.” By definition the style of a subculture defines not only its members but signifies its resistance so that the particular signs become emblematic of and synonymous with a particular subversive position. Through a complex articulation of specific codes and practises the fashion photograph, the advertisement and the porn shot all silently highlight the differences between ‘subculture’ and ‘normal’ styles.
Marco Bolognesi’s gorgeous girls are rendered speechless and sightless, turned into objects of desire with zippered eyelashes and lips or eyelids stapled with safety pins. Many have the delicate oriental faces of a geisha. They are beautiful and submissive but there is a twist, for here in this glamorous yet liminal world where Madame Butterfly meets punk fetishism, Bolognesi’s stylish women artfully confound our readings of what it means to be female. Are they compliant and submissive or mistresses of their own projections? Or perhaps they are simply mutations, cyborgs, willow-the- wisps of the imagination born from the fantasies of cyberspace, the internet and comic strips, taken from the catwalk or films such as Barbarella. Blindfolded and gagged, their faces made up with the artifice of a Pierrot doll, we are asked to attend to the surface, to their presentation and not to their inner worlds. Instead of speech, flowers sprout from their painted mouths rendering them inarticulate. Thus gagged they become asexual fantasies, objects of glamour and desire that feed into both male and lesbian sexual fantasies of submission as well heterosexual female fantasies of being in possession of the perfect face and body. What we do know is that their look is highly wrought, that it is fabricated and placed somewhere between the worlds of the ‘straight’ and the culturally ‘deviant’.
The radical aesthetic practices of Dada and Surrealism with their collages and ‘ready mades’ culled from the irrational world of dreams, from the abject dolls of Hans Bellmer to the fantastic hats and headdresses of Eileen Agar, are echoed in Bolognesi’s images. Surrealism and its bedfellow Dadaism mined the unconscious and set free the repressed sexual imagination from the confines of the 19th century drawing room. Its legacy in the late 20th century was punk with its zips and safety pins, its appropriated objects or bricolage and its illicit iconography of sexual fetishism. The appropriated rapist masks and rubber wear, the leather bodices, the fishnet stockings and extravagantly sharp stiletto heels, along with much of the paraphernalia of bondage, spoke of resistance to the mainstream. Illicit and subversive Punk, to which Bolognesi owes so much, became a badge of freedom from conventional mores.
There was a moment in the 80s when female sexual fetishism was seen as a mark of the liberated woman. Those such as Madonna appropriated the imagery of S&M as a sign of empowerment and an act of female emancipation. It became permissible for women to admit that they found fetish clothing such as leather and rubber sexually exciting. Research shows that Skin Two magazine was bought by nearly as many women as men, while in the other camp feminists such as Andrea Dworkin argued that S&M outfits eroticised women’s oppression. Marco Bolognesi’s images confound these issues of female sexual freedom, for they have been taken by a man and are thus the result of the ‘historic’ male gaze upon the female subject. But Bolognesi is a man from a generation that presumably understands the signs of sexual politics so that these images take on a degree of irony and ambiguity.
The relationship between clothes, fashion and fetishism is complex. Clothes function as icons of commodity fetishism because consumerism uses sex and sexually charged codes to give fashion meaning. In the case of fashion direct sexual gratification is neither really the point nor the purpose. Fashion is about dreams, about what is unobtainable and, at a particular moment in time, what is considered erotic and visually pleasing. Fashion is aspirant. Bolognesi’s use of black and white is, here, not a sign of race or cultural interchange but of the visual gratification achieved visually when opposites are laid one beside another. Pleasure is also sought through the over-emphasis on a part of the body; a breast, an eye or mouth. Thus fragmented women become the ultimate postmodern sign.
Marco Bolognesi presents this dream world with perfect technical bravura. The classical perfectionism of Mapplethorpe comes to mind for, as with Mapplethorpe, Bolognesi’s images are impeccably flawless and perfectly honed specimens frozen in time. All the zips, pins and leaves on his models have been painstakingly added by hand. There is no digital manipulation or trickery involved. Again things are never quite what they seem. Bolognesi’s world is a place of beauty and youth, eroticism and freedom but also one where much is masked, hidden and rendered silent. Here baroque meets Punk and S& M confronts post-feminist critique as Marco Bolognesi exposes the soft-underbelly of our aspirations. Ambiguity reigns.
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic who writes regularly for The Independent and The New Statesman.
© Sue Hubbard
Posted By admin / 20th December 2008
Marco Bolognesi’s artistic journey recently reached an important milestone, a culminating point, if you like, arrived at through previous experiences: in his Synteborg cycle he creates images of female faces through digital recomposition thus giving life to a completely artificial “cyborg” beauty which makes use of mysterious props taken from everyday life. On one level, we could interpret these works as his desire to recreate a groundbreaking futurist classical beauty, very much reminiscent of the “legend of the artist” of Zeusi, the Greek painter who, in order to express the full beauty of Elena, painted the most beautiful bodily features of five different maidens to create an exquisitely proportioned image.
In this respect, Bolognesi is very much a follower of an ideal that sees art in successful pursuit of the creation of a perfection that is greater than the natural world is capable of, yet he is equally aware of the fact that this “renaissance” is not wholly possible today. Thus, the artist has been able to add a number of discordant codes in his work, or dissonant “viruses”, bringing to light a new and different kind of beauty, and one that could be admired in the centuries to come.
These works, however, lend themselves to yet further interpretation: if it is the destiny of the human race to be substituted by artificial replicas, and if the world in the future were to be populated by androids and cyborgs, then both men and women would now paradoxically be seen as vestiges of history, like archaeological finds dating from an irredeemable past.
In this way, contemporary artists are, most likely, glimpsing into the future with the eye of an archaeologist and are, as a consequence, salvaging and preserving what may be our memories of the first human species to have deliberately chosen to extinguish itself. They seek to recompose harmony, proportion and canons of beauty with the surviving fragments of a world and nature that future generations will only be able to imagine. They are buttressing the ruins of a far away humanity in order to find once again the classical and unattainable ideal of beauty.
Posted By admin / 15th December 2008
The greatest authors of dystopian fiction and the most progressive science fiction writers, such as Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, James G. Ballard and William Gibson, were all conscious of the disorientation and anxiety that are the malaise of modern life, where the memories and nostalgia for the past accentuate not only our fears for the present but also our apprehension for a future riddled with mystery and the unknown. It was not by chance that many of these writers1 were drawn to the work of Giorgio de Chirico, one of the first artists to explore the tensions, enigmas and threats that were building up at the turn of the 20th century. De Chirico, moreover, was one of the first artists to expose the condition of the artist who, like a two-faced herm, “sees” prophetically into the future and aspires to idealistically re-compose the lost harmony of the past.
Marco Bolognesi, even if almost obliquely, is interested in engaging in a dialogue with this lost beauty, or perhaps more accurately, with the ideal of beauty that for centuries epitomised the secret code of classical harmony, which had since time in memorial been sought after but never attained fully. De Chirico conjured up that ideal with paintings of statues of Arianna and Apollo, arched spaces and architecture, and through the custom of putting his own stamp on works of the past; all his work, possibly even more so than any other radical avant-garde manifestation, proclaimed the impossibility of recomposing that lost mosaic and of resurrecting the past which for us today is but a cluster of ruins, fragments and archaeological finds.
In fact, de Chirico depicted a world where man no longer holds a place and is substituted by the “orthopaedic” phenomenon embodied by the statue, the forebear of the android and cyborg, the fictional beings that have had such a dominant presence in the arts and 20th and 21st century thinking and that feature in the work of Marco Bolognesi. In fact, Bolognesi in his cyborg-face cycle creates a new artificial beauty, and opens a conscious dialogue with the visual stereotypes of the feminine beauty portrayed in glossy magazines and the influential and “classical” perception of the woman’s face whose natural aesthetic is in conflict with the tangible presence of today’s electronic world.
The artist, not by chance, has exploited all the contradictions of our digital world, whose obsession with the immaterial is based on the palpable existence of keyboards, cables and loudspeakers, hardware and software casing, optical filter surfaces for pixel diffusion and numerical codes which create the images and sounds of the new IT universe.
The faces of Bolognesi’s cyborg women are constructed from computer components, connectors and microchips, elements that are, in effect, the “ruins” of a modern world in continual and rapid transformation. A world in which the innovative and ground breaking technology of just a few years ago is now obsolete and, paradoxically, appears to have fared less favourably than the ruins of the ancient world.
The artist chose this iconography possibly with the “unwanted or useless objects” (kipple) of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in mind, the Philip Dick science fiction novel with its inspired vision of “posthuman” truths (the block buster film Blade Runner is based on the book). Bolognesi’s graceful and attractive women, indeed they are almost unreal when juxtaposed with out-of-date technology and particles of unwanted or useless objects made up of the mass of debris that has literally invaded our world and daily lives, symbolize the entropic presence of the end of personal and collective life, a vanitas (that recalls the work of de Chirico) after the fall of the gods which hails the destruction and eventual replacement of human life as we know it.
J.G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium, 1996; P. K. Dick, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 1965
