WESTERN CULTURE has made us used to thinking of art's space as an area for representing something rather than for the event itself. This is in line with a mentality that tends to privilege the content of a narrative rather than the support on which art's language is organised. In this case space cor-responds to a notion of its measure and is considered a fixed and definite entity. The strategy of contemporary art, instead, is based on a different mentality; one in which space is a dynamic and precarious quantity, directly determined by the marks that occupy it. Space has been replaced by a defi-nition of the field, a relative and open area that tends to present itself as both a whole and as an abstract and Separate entity. The space for representation was always the place for what was exemplaty, and this was displayed in an absolute manner, quite outside any temporal dimension: in fact time was space made eternal either by renaissance perspective or by the two-dimensionality of a painting that always dis-played itself as a symbolic form of a recognisable and vener-ated world.
With the notion of the field, art's space was invaded by the discontinuity of time and the passage from the represen-tation to the event itself. Space flexibly makes itself available to marks that organise themselves and define themselves synchronically with their own Support, with an immediate impact and without any sense of hierarchy: there are no highs or lows, no right or left.
Innocente creates his work with this spatial ideology in mind, one that tends to consider art as the place for critical and phenomenological verification of a world that is, how-ever, organised according to hierarchies and economic norms that paralyse it and alienate it: in other words, they make it something different with respect to the social body it would seem destined for.
So space is turned into a labyrinth, an intricate itinerary of a multitude ofpaths each leading to other paths. There is, however, no possibility of a circular return to base because the precariousness of the Tines resists any such reassuring returning movement.
The artist starts from a vision of the world that is no longer a-historic but analytic, one moved by the need to recreate, through art, the world as it is. And so he incorporates into his work the codified signs of advertising, elements which are already fixed in a popular and consumerist style. While he fully accepts the basic vulgarity of such data, his accep-tance respects the linguistic norm of the ready-made, of something that has already been found and, as a result, reveals what is unreal and artificial in everyday objects.
The world's vulgarity responds to the historical situa-tions that determine it and make it irreversible. The little figures taken from another world are placed within art's space with unusual improvisation and create new relation-ships, dlfferent to the those that caused their acceptability and consumption. They marshal themselves in a non-mechanical way, one, that is, that does not correspond to the stereotyped codes of behaviour usual in their own environ-ment.
If Pop art was the apex of the artificiality of the productive world, and if it made a fetish of the details of life, this means that it did not possess the world or have the capacity to judge it unless there was also a pragmatic and optirnistic adhesion to the world itself.
Innocente, instead, with a wholly European ideological malignity, is concerned, not with the particular, hut with generalities and so avoids an isolated presentation and crowds the surfaces of his works with nilnimal events. If advertising needs to isolate the product it presents in order to promote it better, the artist here overturns this attitude and multiplies the presences, creating a multiple and simul-taneous communication.
Innocente agrees with Cage's assertion that all of life is material and that it is possible both to steal from it and he its witness. This testimony is not cold and detached because it is not possible to distance oneself from a world that does not have space for calm and happy contemplation. The world is what it is.. a permanent state of tension produced, not only by the natural move-ment of things, but also by economic overloading and social injustice.
And so art becomes an emotive testimony that can recognise the world's chaos, where disorder is not the con-quering of order but, rather, the degrading of reason to sim-ple economic arguments. These live according to a separate and divisive order and place man in a condition of solitude that makes him asocial and separated from others. Innocente, then, adopts a tactic and a strategy. The tactic is to organise the operative space of art (pictures, the walls of a gallery or museum) using asymmetric forms on which he applies elements that, by being simply leant against the support, are mobile and variable.
The fixed support is often occupied by priapic images; these are the erotic structure against which the structural elements move. The fluidity of the whole has the mobility of music - in other words, the possibility of a multiple and variably modular passage and relationships.
But the variations always occur within the same field, which is that of historical vioTence, even though it is accompanied by the lightest of feints and parries. The strate-gy the artist employs is to produce at the same time both a moral standpoint and a positive affirmation of life and of the aesthetic gesture.
Because if art thrives on the contradiction between the affirmation of itself and the negativity of what it is affirm-mg, it is still true that such duplicity cannot be reduced individually but only exercised as a contradiction. Ring up the curtain: ahead there is Bel Canto, behind there is tor-ture.
Achille Bonito Oliva
