Koi Dan Trinacria
– Published on the occasion of the exhibition at National Gallery Jakarta
Indonesia (4 – 15 April 2008)
– Text by Rifky Effendy and Robert C. Morgan
On Filippo Sciascia’s Works | By Rifky Effendy
In 1936, Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940) wrote an essay, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, that had influenced the discourse on art practice and analysis on contemporary culture. It was said on this essay that the technology ability to massively reproduced image had carried a big effect, not only on tradition and our intrinsic value on (western) painting practice, but it also significantly shifted our way thinking on what we saw and experienced. The disappearing “auratic” aspect in art was not merely caused by our shifting values on art aesthetics but also gave way to a new aesthetics and art practice. Especially concerning the authenticity value in modern art practice[1]
Art practice had also span their wing, explored the medium related to the reproduction technology. The Dada and Fluxus movement had stated and gave way to the possibilities on new medium exploration aside from painting and sculpture, such as photography, video, sound, and then computer – the immaterial – had become the common representation medium in this era, frequently labeled multimedia art or New Media. Alas, conventional painting medium still found its rightful place in any art practice up to these day, though with new approaches too.
“My pictures are smarter than my thoughts”
– Gerhard Richter –
Filippo Sciascia, from the very beginning, had had an interest on the representation problem resulting from technology. Although using video as medium, but he had treated it differently compared to other new media artists. Sciascia spent his time exploring many materials, in the form of painting on canvas, still, wood, mattress, et cetera, mostly resulting in the many portraits of women in various poses. The blurred to pixelated portrait series created by Sciascia in his early days, of course had to pay his due to a certain modern art thought development. In various ways, the portrait of faces in his painting instead of representing exoticism and sensuality had swayed our focus to the problem of representational medium itself.
In the 1960’s decade, the painter Gerhard Richter in Germany gave an important value in painting practice connected to photography. Many Richter creations in this era came from the core problem originated from photography image world. Photographic image and film in this era had become a popular “language” in society, which went along with the development of mass media and entertainment. In literature world, the flooding of images as a form of language or a “linguafranca”, did not escape a scrutiny of study and discussion. The contemporary art reading owed a big deal to Ronald Barthes, French structuralists critics, with his many writing on image subject and its relation to the western industrial society culture.
In one of his essays, “Myths Today”, released on 1965, Barthes proposed a concept of Myth where an invisible relation exist in the secondary level of interpretation, behind a photographic imagery in mass media. Barthes’ semiology study pointed to the interest in reading/exposing photographic image through further interpretation, not merely the meaning from an objective reality. Even though as a tool camera stand neutral, but in production relation it is always connected to ideology in a certain other social practice. These images as predicted by Benjamin have even reproduced their own meaning, apart from the origin. Every image had grown arbitrarily in the public spaces.[2]
Richter photorealistic painting had a connection to this situation. His painting came from the image/photographic world, whether it’s popular or personal. He expressed it back to the canvas medium, poeticizing it and politicizing it. The joy of photographing and staring at pictures, as a ritual of modern society, had brought upon themselves a critical view in the midst of image flood of the 20th century modern living. It had become a “contemplation” activity to further understanding of its cultural values. The works of Richter then entered a warring zone between painting imagery and photography. In some of his work, he even reproduced by re-taking a picture that came from his painting. The created/produced image took the observer to a situation where images can’t be stopped. Simultaneously, the image even gave another impulse to the creator to discern.
The real is produced from miniaturized cell, matrices, and memory banks, models of control –and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these.
Jean Baudrillard
Further on, Filippo Sciascia re-articulated the image problem connected to a more complex imagery production technology: digital video sound/picture; The video and digital sound were processed through computer, unlike the conventional cinema which is still analog and formed as a result of exposure over celluloid film materials. In digital video, every move was produced electronically frame by frame, in other words, the way of working on, the materials and its nature is completely different. Every captured picture electronically dispersed into pixels.
Sciascia explore the technical possibility of making a technical language into artistic potency, such as blowing up pixel, cut to cutting pictures, with the changing of colors or what sometime got spotty, scratches and lines, seemed to be a disturbance on TV monitor because of a weak and inaccurate signal reception. What seemed to create an optical disturbance to the eye, but the relation between the visual aspects with digital sound added upon it, creating a machinery era sign effects, in three-dimensional spacing perception. Dragged us to a space where we can sense the texture of the image movement in every second on the screen. The repeating movements, slow motion, infrequently cut by inter-frame dissolve and fade in/out and the voices that came from the software, adding a dramatic ambience, theatrical even. The video and sound ramblings was like a battlefield in a second by second perception, invoking a tense atmosphere.
The imagery movement in Sciascia’s video display did not stop there. He then transformed the picture into oil and canvas materials. In some of his work especially from the 2002 – until now, he explored the ability of oil in acquiring the character from digital images. Perhaps, this is the critical stage where an immaterial new media was recontextualized by the painting reality. Sciascia then dragged himself closer to the image that he created from his video, as a scientist do, he dispersing every picture frame. Entering the furthest point in digital land.
As was said by Benjamin about the difference on painter and cameraman analogized between a shaman and a surgeon:
“ The Magician maintains the natural distance between the patient and himself; through reduce it very slightly by the laying on of hands, he greatly increases it by virtue of his authority. The surgeon does exactly reverse; he greatly diminishes the distance between himself and the patient by penetrating into the patient’s body, and increases it but little by the caution with which his hand moves among organs. In short, in contrast to the magician – whom still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him. “ [3]
Sciascia might have both of this side; a shaman and at the same time a surgeon. At one side, he does an incisive cut and entering the far insides of image through camera and the many high-end multimedia gadgets. At other side, he had move further from image, casting a spell to call on spirits. Instead, this image was represented by technology and in his canvases; he put forth a new media reality – which is immaterial – into the opaque reality of painting. In this stage, he seeks out the possibilities of appropriating the surface produced by oil on canvas with the surface made by projection, whether through monitor tube or wall projection.
Here is the difference between Richter’s mode of creation and Sciascia’s. Richter cut through the image of photography, which is a freezed reality (decisive moment) and lost its space and time aspect. To be contested by transforming them into painting, returning them to a classic representational model, but with the automaticity of machine era. Richter found and explored the studium (in Barthes concept), which personalized the public image into the poetic region (punctum) – returning it into an imagery politic ritual spectrum (in Benjamin term). Richter had challenged the image mechanization by putting its mode of production in topsy-turvy, to indecisiveness or simulacrum (in Jean Baudrillard concept).[4]
In his creation, Sciascia but start from the imagery poetic subject, combine into a series of drawing alignment, constructed from the unlinear digitally programmed language weaving. A series of machine produced image, so cold, screaming to our senses. Returning them to serenity, taming them to drag them back into their charisma, a painting re-enchantment in artificial intelligent era. Sciascia seemed to struggle with the existence of his own created images. Experimenting by playing on the reality while scratching the subtle values through the reality technologizing weaved within the unity that consists of bits in electronic stream.
For Sciascia the quest was not intended to leave the old method in representation strategy, but merely to find again the meaning of today reality in a media implosion. Therefore, Sciascia creation represents the mainstream thought of art, since the impressionists until the conceptualists. From the photographic era to the information his works, critically present and endless questioning of intrinsic value that has to be considered in the art-media reality and daily life.
The interaction of the artist, video camera and audience evokes the relativity of roles and shows the analogies between man and manmade technology
“Filippo Sciascia”
[1] Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations; Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Shocken Book. New York. 1969. pp. 217 – 251.
[2] Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Hill and Wang Press. New York. 1972.
[3] Benjamin, Walter. op. cit. p. 233.
[4] Punctum in Roland Barthes term is a mental image, such as an “arrow piercing through the heart”. Meanwhile, Studium stands for the appreciation level to the formal side of observing a photograph.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Noonday Press. New York. 1981.
Punctum in the work of Gerhard Richter, according to Hal Foster, was articulated through the subtle element in the detail, by the scratches of rakel to paint.
Foster, Hal. Return of The Real. MIT Press. 1996.
Filippo Amato Sciascia’s Uncertain Allegory | by Robert C Morgan
“… we must rediscover the structure of the perceived world through a process similar to that of an archaeologist.”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1)
Over the past four years, Filippo Sciascia has been working with the perception of video as an allegorical medium. For Sciascia allegory is a matter of interpretation based on a set of images for which he attributes a fundamental symbolic meaning. The characters within his uncertain allegory are anthropomorphic manifestations of his own mind characters that constitute the personae within himself. These characters describe an internal state of being, a conflict in which there are questions being asked. These questions relate implicitly to how he (the artist) perceives the structure of his internal world. In this sense, Sciascia’s video allegory like most allegories suggests a feeling of absence. He exists in a dream. His reality takes on the feeling of a dream and this is how the allegory unfolds.
I came to know the work of Sciascia during a visit to Bali in the summer of 2004. At the time, Sciascia’s studio was filled with medium and large-scale paintings in monochromatic tones that were taken from a video he has recently shot. Sometimes there would be phrases printed in English over the paintings, suggesting a kind of narrative or perhaps ancillary information that offered some oblique clue to what the image meant to convey. I sensed earnestness in these paintings, but also an eerie removal, a kind of detachment, as if Sciascia wanted to remain independent from their striking intimacy. Was he embarrassed by the intimacy? I don’t think so. Rather it was a matter of finding the necessary aesthetic distance, the kind of distance familiar to early modernism in Italy as introduced by the philosopher Benedetto Croce at the outset of the twentieth century.
Sciascia’s roots are from Sicily. He moved to Bali several years ago where he now resides and works as an artist in self-imposed exile. In central Bali, he became involved with Gaya Art Space near the town of Ubud an area known for its cultural activity, namely traditional painting, dance-theater, decorative arts, and music. Here he began to show his work and, eventually, started curating exhibitions of work by other artists. Even though his “video painting project” is removed from traditional Balinese culture, the environment offered him the necessary breadth and distance whereby he could concentrate more fully on his work.
Allegory is a type of narrative, and video is the medium that Sciascia employs as a form of digital representation. He chose video (DVD) partially because of the distance it offered him, but also for its speed, accessibility, and convenience. His training in film and his ability to shoot and edit film played an important role in the way he works with video. Within each of the three consecutive videos he has made – in fact, they are a trilogy that explores one large n
Sciascia has stated his debt to post-World War II filmmakers, such as Federico Fellini’s “8 ½,” and Jean-Luc Godard’s “Contempt,” for the kinds of self-exploration they employed within a cinematic context. For these directors, film was an extension of self-exploration. Their films hold a feeling of indeterminacy, an expedient use of chance operations that allows the narrative to become allegory rather than imposing a predetermined structure upon it. In this sense, the story is self-exploration at a distance, a little outside the reach of the viewer. This longing for resolution without revealing it is precisely what Sciascia wants to adopt in his own story line, and thus, to keep the narrative at a symbolic arm’s length.
In a “story board” notation made in reference to his first video narrative, Sciascia discusses the role of Kadek, a Balinese woman and the subject of his first video painting project (2003). He states that the concept for the painting is not to represent Kadek in terms of portraiture but to incite a relationship between the human eye/brain mechanism and the video camera. Sciascia believes that the similarities between these two systems are important in coming to terms with how the viewer interacts with the painting as a still extension of the video medium. Such an image constitutes a much different kind of representation than if the painting of the woman were based on chemical photography, as in Photo-Realism.
From the perspective of the twentieth century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one can make the assumption that any perception will subsequently define one’s inner-reality. It is a matter of how one reads and interprets the external visual world according to perception or how one’s angle of vision functions in relation to the phenomena that presupposes the existence of an external reality. Thus perception is the basis by which one forms one’s sense of being (in the world). There is little doubt that Sciascia understands this precept and is willing to apply his art against it not against it in the manner of a disagreement but in the matter of offering his “video painting project” as a parallel counterpart to it.
While fantasy pervades much of Sciascia’s earlier video, entitled “For Your Consideration Only,” the recent one, entitled “Sophia 19: 38,” more accurately clarifies the semiotic discourse that exists in relation to his related paintings. In the latest narrative, three dominant characters the Artist (or “Mr. Artist”), Freedom, and Conscience circle around one another in an allegory that suggests the pursuit of sexual identity and the role of the artist in society. The triumvirate is really one person namely Mr. Artist while Freedom and Conscience are internalized specters of his duality. A young Asian woman the same performer who played “the Amazon” in the first video enacts the role of Freedom. Conscience is played by a young male actor with balding head who wears a white suit. Mr. Artist is also young. He wears a dark suit and dons trendy Milanese eyeglasses.
The narrative concerns an artist’s struggle to define himself. What is the price of Freedom? At one point in the video DVD the Asian female Freedom, in a rather spectacular sequence, comes riding a horse into an empty gallery space. Freedom becomes an allegory that has intervened in Mr. Artist’s dream, and thus, he is obliged to consult with (his) Conscience who haunts the Water Palace in the ancient region of Karangasem east of Bali. In another sequence of the video, Mr. Artist confronts both Freedom and Conscience lying in parallel supine positions on the floor, but he is powerless to revive them. Each of these episodes is represented as paintings. Two other striking images show Mr. Artist and Conscience standing between a small herd of buffalos and a stark view of the artist’s rumpled bed. The “Sophia” paintings are less obvious in their pixilation than the earlier ones. Instead, they tend to be more refined with less evidence of their video sources.
There is a phrase that appears in one of the “storyboard” notation that says: “… to dive into the deep and rise again.” The reference could be to the Irish poets Yeats or to numerous other religious sources, but the point of this phrase is interesting and curious in relation to Sciascia’s overall body of work. There is something timeless about the structure of these video allegories as there is in some of the paintings. The interface is far from pointless. Sciascia wants us to communicate his vocabulary of images as his personal semiotic lexicon his a posteriori dictionary of signs and symbols that reference the dream. In referencing the dream, Sciascia is also representing his desire for freedom. In this sense, Sciascia is part of the age-old tradition of the romantic artist the artist who longs for inspiration to further his vision of the world, whether it is within the perceived world of things and events or in the internal symbolic world that so fascinates Sciascia.
In either case, or specifically in the case of “Sophia 19:38,” the desire for freedom holds a lingering effect. Relative to this lingering effect, Sciascia has over the past two years created several object/images that employ various distinct media, including charcoal, gesso, paint, objects of various kinds, wax, rolled canvas, and blackboard. In fact, the blackboard motif appears in various guises and permutations. On one assemblage, a thinly rolled bolt of canvas, tied together at various intervals, is mounted against a primed canvas and touches a small blackboard that lies facedown on the floor. These disparate elements while holding semiotic values within Sciascia’s allegorical narrative are collectively titled “Trinacria,” in reference to three referential points on the Italian peninsula. This allegorical title suggests that the artist is at
While the twenty or so works identified with “Sophia 19:38” evolve from concerns related to painting and assemblage, not entirely removed from the influence of Rauschenberg, they hold a clear conceptual or semiotic underpinning within the narrative structure that sets them apart from Sciascia’s previous works.
Whereas in 2003-2006, Sciascia’s paintings relied more on a cinematic and photorealist approach to interpretation often taking images directly from the moving images the recent works are more lyrical, more open and poetic. The focus is again on banal details such as a pair of walking feet, a girl on horseback, a boy’s head sleeping, a Corrida (bullfight), a pair of slippers in which the readymade object is “assisted” to use the familiar term of Duchamp. For example, the bull in the Corrida is accompanied by the addition of three tightly rolled canvases applied at intervals against the surface of the painting, or a pair of slippers if filled with charcoal and chalk. In another object, a model airplane is covered in gesso with an enormous stainless steel caliper gripping the top portion of the fuselage. The point, of course, is to extend the meaning of the object, to take it away from its normative functional meaning and thereby give it another meaning through de-familiarizing its context. This method was not only used by Duchamp but also employed by the Russian Formalists and Surrealists in the twenties. By putting unlikely objects together, one to another, the meaning changes. This is precisely what Sciascia wants to achieve.
What is moving about Sciascia’s work is that he cannot escape his existential domain his struggle between Freedom and Conscience and this is where the profound conflict of his work resides. All significant art is founded on a struggle or a conflict. This is evident in the works of Picasso and Duchamp, in Boccioni and Gino Severini. Art is always squarely within the realm of conflict within the realm of contradiction and confrontation and this is precisely where Filippo Sciascia has chosen to work. One might say that he is an artist or to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, an archaeologist bound to uncover the exigencies of his fate according to perception.
While this is an irrefutable aspect of his working process, one cannot deny the allegorical impulse in Sciascia: to give objects a transferable meaning. This is made evident, as the still-frame image has shifted into a new semiotic territory. Here meaning is both indexical and transferable, that is, unimpaired by its original context. With “Sophia 19:38” the culmination of his triadic allegory the meaning of the still-frame image changes through extension, addition, and expansion. By compounding a single sign into a set of meanings through pluralizing its effects the still-frame no longer functions as a mere excerpt or
The viewer must become less prepared to encounter the work of Sciascia. It is continuously projecting outwards. This narrative is still contained within its own semiotics, but its poststructural declension has given these image/objects a new and vital role. Sciascia’s universe of signs weaves both inside and outside the narrative. In the process of weaving, the allegory expands into an illimitable universe of signs made possible by the viewer’s (or participant’s) intervention. For the moment, Filippo Sciascia is outside his own culture in search of a new one that may somehow illuminate the past. Then there is the lingering question: Who is Filippo Sciascia? The question continues as he works both within and outside the still-frame. It is within this transient moment this uncertain allegory where he continues to seek clarity.
1 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The primacy of Perception (edited by James Edie). Northwestern University Press, 1964, p. 5
Robert C. Morgan is an artist, professor, curator, and international art critic based in New York City. He is the author of several books, including The End of the Art World. He travels widely in Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, where he lectures on issues related to contemporary art, artists, and culture. In 1999, he won the Arcale prize for international criticism, awarded in Salamanca (Spain).