This congenial invasion is the outcome of an easily identified process. It all began with the amount of available merchandise being increased to the nth power, the result of industrial productive capacity arriving at full maturity. And so, once the consumers’ needs were met, industry was obliged to invent new marketing strategies aimed, on the one hand, at making buying ever more appetising and creating conditions in which this appetite could never be fully satisfied, and, on the other hand, at keeping abreast of aggressive and intense competition.
It was soon clear that the most successful product was not simply the one that best fulfilled its functions. The articles that merited the much sought after description of ‘cult merchandise’ were those that most satisfied the consumer’s imaginative and symbolic desires: they stimulated a conceptual and perceptive awareness that became far more important than mere functionality.
If a toothbrush is to attract the potential buyer’s attention it must do far more than simply be an efficient instrument for cleaning teeth. What is even more important is to engage the prospective buyer’s mind and senses with a futuristic design, all curves and colours, that will convey the message that, far more than with a plastic stick, oral hygiene is guaranteed by a superhero worthy of an animated cartoon.
And speaking of cartoons, let’s not forget how the market has discovered how to batter its way into our free time, offering us every kind of bait, such as the videogames that are the protagonists of this show. But we could add countless others, beginning with the holy trinity of the present age: television, music, and cinema.
In fact the spectacle of merchandise is never out of the limelight. It is not by chance that we speak of the being in a ‘spectacular society’. In fact the person who coined the phrase, the Frenchman Guy Debord in La société du spectacle in 1967, used it in an extremely negative sense. He considered the ‘show biz’ aspect of commodities as one of capitalism’s underhand moves in its attempt to subvert us all. In a certain sense this is true, even if we ignore the obsolete Marxist concept that every aspect of consumerism is necessarily evil. Today, instead, we can happily admit that things have not gone all that badly: the market itself has given birth to certain dynamic and evolutionary expressive forms and, above all, it has liberated the aesthetic side of things, for so long excluded from a life given over to work and hardship but now democratically extended to the masses and not just to the well-to-do.
Sadly there are still many reasons for maintaining that we have yet to arrive at a new paradise, but at least it no longer seems necessary to demonise industry. The anti-globalisation movements seem mainly moved by the aim of stopping the control of means and resources from falling illegally into the hands of the few, rather than contrasting good and evil, light and darkness, according to the dogmas of past ideologies.
And so to art: how do artists react to a situation in which creativity is no longer their exclusive domain? I think that this question itself holds an important key to understanding the actual state of inquiries. When art was cut off from daily life and when the majority were too absorbed with providing themselves with food, housing, and fighting against the spectre of death even to think about aesthetic satisfaction, something that was the privilege of those few who could afford it, creativity was left to a few excellent professionals: artists. But what are they left with today when every firm employs hoards of creative people and we are all exposed to a shower of imaginative stimuli? Well, they are left with their peculiar task of criticism, vigilance, and experimenting. There is also room for integration, perhaps in certain cases for celebration, as long as it is active and constantly on the alert, ever ready to point out eventual crookedness, to show new points of view, to arouse new ways of seeing.
With this premise we can start to consider Marina’s work. It has as its starting point one of the most extraordinary products for recreation: videogames. If you are the same age as she is then you will know them well, you will have spent hours with them, alone or with friends. Only a very few other means for passing time rival the effect of videogames on the younger generation, thanks to their fascinating scenarios, and high-voltage and engrossing situations. And don’t think we are dealing with something second class. The language of videogames is sophisticated and refined: it has known how to make the most of discoveries made by artists, of the latest solutions of the avant-garde, and has made them attractive, and within the reach of everyone.
Marina is defenceless in front of such deliciously knowing images. And so she has decided to add nothing to them: she restricts herself to spreading out a series of screens just as she found them, ready-mades, picking the best available titles. Look, she seems to be saying, marvel at these miracles.
But obviously the procedure has a much wider aim than this. For a start these are not real ready-mades. Marina is not content to bring them into the gallery as they are, but she adds her own extras, surprising and unpredictable in their apparent incongruity: petit-point embroidery and clay modelling. The visual speed of videogames, which use up images in frenzied rhythms, is absurdly slowed down by being translated into the handicraft of another age. I say another age because it belongs to times that are no longer ours but, if anything, are those of our ‘granny’, in the sense that the time structure that so disturbs us is immeasurable with respect to that of the artist’s hands. And so what we are seeing is the formulation of an impasse: we are bombarded by fascinating images which no longer belong to us and in front of which we feel ourselves to be inadequate.
Like some modern Penelope, but now the victim of a wildly fluctuating – or rather immobile - time, Marina works within a sealed off timeless bubble. But not without an aim, because it is precisely this laborious meditation on images, this slow scansion with needle and thread or with the surface of the thumbs, that allows us to spark off a new awareness, to set off ‘another’ vision of things.
This first contradiction creates many others, of which I will limit myself to underlining the one expressed in the title Marina wanted for the show: Home of the Brave. This stimulates us to consider the short-circuit between the intrepid fighter’s heroism as the protagonist of a videogame, and the homeliness of the person taking part in this tremendous adventure comfortably sitting in his armchair. On the other hand Marina has always loved to surf over life’s dialectics, as can be seen in another series dedicated to the reproduction of the packaging of psychotropic drugs and executed once again with petit-point.
Finally, from a strictly formal point of view, I would like to point out that the embroidered pieces lead us to make a surprising discovery. Paradoxically this translation into embroidery does not alter the nature and the beauty of the videogame icon: the logic of the electronic mosaic generated by the texture of the pixels, made even more grainy by the digital design, is perfectly repeated by the rhythms of the stitches that divide up the image into a series of separate and distinct chromatic units, each placed one after the other in orderly lines.
To end, it is useful to mention an illustrious predecessor, the divisionist Georges Seurat who was the first, in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century, to sense that the icons of the era about to begin would be crumbled into the dust of discontinuous stimuli.
Guido Bartorelli