Rise your gaze and look

Alberto Garutti (1948-2023) conceived his works in continuous and constant dialogue with the people who surrounded him. His critical, ethical and poetic stance toward things and the world resonates in his writings, collections of thoughts and short notes. In this issue of Bulletin we offer you a fragment, as an exclusive preview excerpt from the volume “Alberto Garutti” edited by Studio Celant, the most comprehensive overview of Garutti’s activity and practice, which will be presented at Museion on August 29th.

SPECTATOR

ALBERTO GARUTTI AUGUST 2022

There are times when I think of the corpus of my production as a long, endless form of dialogue with viewers. As if all the works each embodied one of multiple forms of encounter, from the very first works conceived in my studio to projects set out in the landscape. Encounters with local residents for public works, with institutions, the political world, passers-by, animals, insects, plants, neighbors, skies, rooms, cities; and then encounters between the folds of the art system with collectors, with the horizon of their lives, with museum institutions, with the public at exhibitions, fairs, biennials. The etymological root of the word “spectator”—the Latin verb spectare—implies the notion of gazing, but also of care, expectation, attention, and simple movement in a certain direction. “Look at, face toward, go toward.” I believe that a work only exists in the critical, ethical, and loving gaze of the beholder, in the unique and special encounter with its recipient. A work is never complete, never gives itself in its entirety, and is ambiguous by definition. Great works, bearers of complex meaning, containers of the future, elude us. They can even lie. Where do we think we could ever find the truth of a work? By moving toward it, in the continuous search that the viewer — and the artist is always the first viewer —is necessarily invited to make. In this regard, certain works have been key pieces for me, fragments revealing the development of my thinking, with the aim of exploring, and trying to touch, the very space between the work and viewer.

For example, the phosphorescent glass plate in the Hotel Palace in Bologna, created for “Territorio Italiano” (1995) curated by Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, is one; it is also a physical metaphor for an encounter. It was the first work that began to fully thematize this theme. Intimate and secretive, the encounter between the work and the viewer takes place at night. The work is ambiguous and transient. It appears in an icy glow at the crossing point between wakefulness and sleep. It is only visible to those who spend the night there. In the hotel room—which is both a public and domestic place at the same time—the work becomes a metaphor for art itself. This work, which would later give rise to the series on semiinvisible phosphorescent furniture in Cosa succede nelle stanze quando le persone se ne vanno? [What happens in rooms when the people have left?], is for me a manifesto of intent. Within the specialized space dedicated to art—galleries, museums, and biennials—I invite the viewer to look for the work, to take responsibility for their personal gaze. To look for the work itself. Considered from this perspective, the museum room furniture for “Spazi atti / Fitting Spaces” in 2004, or recently the dozens and dozens of public and private seats at an art fair, are transformed by a thin veil of phosphorescent paint that only appears at night, when the institution is closed. On one hand, suggest that the viewer poetically imagine what is not visible, and on the other hand to reflect on the problem of artistry, on the elusive nature of the work of art.

When Christina Vegh commissioned a work from me for the Gesellschaft in Hannover (2016), I decided to work on a manifesto piece related to the critical responsibility of the viewer’s gaze outside the museum. We bought up a page of the city’s largest-selling newspaper and created a caption-work, Opera dedicata a chi ora alza gli occhi e guarda [Work dedicated to those who, now, rise their gaze and look]. I was inviting readers to raise their eyes away from the news sheet before them and look at reality; to make their own critical way of looking at things: what Maurice Blanchot called a “gift,” awareness of one’s existence.

When developing my public projects, I theorize the process in reverse, in which the work must necessarily go “toward the public.” And it is precisely in this sense that I emphasize the crucial action of the artist “coming down from their pedestal” to encounter the people and build a relationship devoid of any rhetoric or authorial arrogance.
In the space of the city, I imagine myself “at the service” of the viewer, whom I think of literally as the patron of my work. In the same way that those doing marketing research analyze and study the evolution of people’s taste in order to market a product that can anticipate the trends and productions of the future, I can say that my encounters with residents-viewers that precede the realization of my public work are a tool, a necessary means to activate the process, and to produce the necessary conditions for the construction and propagation of the work. I call this manner of operating “Machiavellian,” in that I use the encounter with the people as a tool to try to absorb a fragment of the city through their stories, and then give back and dedicate to them another story that has been modified and transposed through my work. This is why I am very concerned that the recipients of the work, that is, the viewers and passersby in the city, fully understand the meaning behind the work, regardless of whether they consider the transformation of the
lighting system in a square, new benches in a landscape, or a golden roof on an old rural architecture, as a work of art or not.

The work moves circularly, is generated through the encounter with the viewer, and returns to the viewer without mediation or specific reference systems, until it dissolves and blends with the place, things, and people. When I decided to transform and radicalize my retrospective exhibition at PAC in 2012 into a four-month performance on
the relationship between the public and the museum, I recorded the voices, comments, sounds, conversations, and gossip
spoken by all the visitors to my exhibition, thereby turning the viewer into both a subject and object. I imagined a script that was self-generated and out of my control, spoken by a character with the voice of the public.
Almost as an unexpected and natural consequence of my early work in the 1970s on the critical consciousness of the individual, on a subject reflecting on himself or herself, my works lost their form in the museum and mutated into an endless open conversation between the dozens of works on display, the space of the rooms, and the multitude of its visitors.

The presentation of the volume “Alberto Garutti” is held on the occasion of the exhibition project “Piccolo Museion - Cubo Garutti. A Story.” The exhibition takes place 20 years after the opening of the Piccolo Museion, which was created in 2003 by Alberto Garutti in the Don Bosco district of Bolzano and commissioned by the Italian Culture Department of the Autonomous Province of Bolzano.

Over the years, the Piccolo Museion - Cubo Garutti has welcomed and activated numerous projects and artistic interventions in public space. In addition to tracing its challenges and peculiarities, the exhibition looks at the Cubo as an object of reflection, dedicated - in the words of Alberto Garutti himself - to “all those who passing by, even for a single instant, will look at it.”

Curated by Frida Carazzato, in collaboration with Angelika Burtscher and Daniele Lupo (Lungomare)
Until September 1st, 2024