Back Together Again
Regenerating the measure of art
Back Together Again is the programmatic title of Dragana Sapanjos's exhibition, which through art invites us once again to rediscover our love for life and for art, both constantly endangered as never before in these times, denser than others with the risks of illness (pandemic) and of wars near and far, and of their effects.
The artist confronts this on several levels with a complex and multidisciplinary exhibition. Although she works in the field of the visual arts, and thus in a form of expression that should concern above all sight, she does not disdain to use methods and means capable of activating the other senses as well. Indeed, the exhibition welcomes us with music and song that our ears hear even before we enter. Yet this is not experimental music and song, nor ethnic music harking back to folklore, but so-called Italian popular music, with one of the best-known and most beloved songs, and not only in Italy: Gino Paoli's “Il cielo in una stanza” (The Sky in a Room). It is, of course, a romantic song for couples in love, but if it is taken up by visual art, it means that the artist sees in it – or wants us to see – other things as well: for example, the fact that this song speaks of space and of the possibility of going outside to find oneself in a place without space, because it is immense, indeed infinite. Visual art, moreover, especially in the form of the fresco, but also in Leon Battista Alberti's Renaissance theory of the perspective window, was born and realised with the intention of breaking through the wall of the room on which it is painted and bringing the outside inside, and in most cases the outside was nature. So art in general – and Sapanjos's art is no exception – serves to activate a dialogue with nature, making it present and thus pointing to its necessity for humanity.
But let us enter the exhibition, where, adding sight to hearing, we see a sculpture composed of a perforated black pedestal that also acts as a loudspeaker, from which the song spreads and expands, while on top it holds a formless sculpture of white plaster and gold leaf. On close examination we discover that it is not merely an informal exercise but a giant popcorn, and thus a food central to humanity, above all to the pre-Columbian civilisations, which venerated it as if it were gold. Indeed, the artist has applied the gold leaf to the part of the corn kernel that remains visible at the centre when it is transformed by heat, by cooking, into popcorn. Our artist therefore also speaks of food and of the transformation of natural matter, and of the passage from the almost spherical form of the corn kernel to the informal one of popcorn. Here the artist also approaches the theme of measure: the popcorn sculpture is not a cast, and so not a one-to-one scale of a popcorn, but an oversized representation of it. For art, dimension, measure, is a central question; giving the right form and measure is necessary for the work to function. To stay with sculpture: imagine if Michelangelo had made the David not 5.20 metres tall but 1.80 metres – it would not be the same thing. That is why – beyond the entertaining contents that the artist also puts into this exhibition, which we will discuss later – I wanted to point out how the exhibition, and therefore the works it contains, speak of questions internal to art, and in this case to sculpture. Moreover, another question that Sapanjos's works make me think of is the attempt to give some answers, or to pose some questions, about what art is, how art is made and who makes art.
In choosing popcorn, the artist chooses an element whose form produces itself as a result of the heating of the corn, which in turn produces itself from seed to cob; and this question of the form that forms itself is again a central question of art, whose challenge the artist, as a creator of forms, accepts. Here we find ourselves choosing, as with still lifes, whether we prefer a real basket of fruit or the one painted by Caravaggio, a real popcorn or one sculpted by Dragana. At the same time she also tackles the question of time: once popcorn is made we eat it and it disappears, while the one made by the artist is not eaten, because it is destined for eternity, like the immensity and the infinite of Gino Paoli's song. However, we have said that irony, play and entertainment are other elements the artist has always brought into play. To begin with, popcorn has almost always been linked to festivities such as birthday celebrations, but above all to the world of cinema. When we go to the cinema, next to the ticket office there is always a bar selling drinks, sweets and popcorn to keep us company while we watch the film. The great author of Tales of Ordinary Madness, Charles Bukowski, interviewed when this novel was adapted for the screen, replied that what he liked about the cinema was that he could sit there eating popcorn and drinking Coca-Cola. But this reflection of Sapanjos's comes from far back, from when she still lived in Italy and created the work PoMeCA (Park of Modern and Contemporary Art), 2005, an all-white miniature amusement park. Its attractions were made from famous works of art, for example the Ferris wheel made from Duchamp's miniaturised Bicycle Wheel. One of their features was that they were placed in a small box, also white – once again a matter of measure – which could be slung over the shoulder and carried around for sale, mimicking the vendors of drinks and popcorn who once circulated in cinemas. Those were miniaturised and static works, unlike real rides, whereas in the current exhibition the artist also addresses the question of technique, with the work in the third room, where on a black base we find the machine used to make popcorn – technique and technology, then. Here, however, the machine does not produce popcorn, because the burner is switched off, and on the nozzle of the flame there is a little figure modelled by the artist that rotates continuously, like the world. This being tells us that we are in the world in a world already made, since popcorn, created by the explosion of the corn kernel, is also a metaphor for the Big Bang of the world, the cosmos, the universe beginning to form. The machine is still connected to a black gas cylinder, from which, however, no gas and thus no flame comes out, because the gas has run out – an evident allusion to the energy crisis gripping us in these times of war. And if from the end of the exhibition we go to its centre, that is, to the second room, we find on the wall a large glass corn kernel. It is the seed from which everything is generated, the exhibition too, which is, as we have said, an exhibition of visual art. Glass was chosen precisely because it is the material of seeing, whose transparency allows us to see through and thus to go beyond: a metaphor of the seed of art, from which everything is Back Together Again, and from which life and art regenerate once more.
Translated from the Italian.