Progetti
2013
DANIEL GONZALES: THE DOOR TO THE ORIGIN OF THE WORLD MASSERIA TORRE COCCARO
Ab origine. Pre-thinking Daniel Gonzalez's The Door to the Origin of the World
Lukas Feireiss
If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern.
William Blake
Incipit
"In the beginning.." or "Once upon a time.." Isn't that how every tale always starts off? The grand opening line, a first sentence or a fragment thereof. In the beginning God created heavens and earth. Once upon a time there was a beautiful maiden who lived with her wicked stepsisters. Words saturated with heightened attention and anticipation, and mysterious urgency. An inceptive invitation alluring legend and myth, promise and mystery. An open call to the reader's imagination to follow a storyline unraveling in the mind's eye. The world of literature is full of it. Think of Cervantes, Melville, Dickens, Kafka, Beckett, Vonnegut, Pynchon, Thompson…The list is sheer endless: “Somewhere in La Mancha. Call me Ishmael. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams. The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new. All this happened, more or less. A screaming comes across the sky. We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Some of these opening lines are so well-known that they are remembered long after the book. They entice and stimulate the reader, set the subject, the tone and possibly the style for the whole work. The opening sentence becomes the threshold of the narrative. The passage and portal to the story, unlocking the imagination and spurring exploration of new worlds and ways of thinking and seeing things.
Threshold Magic
The specially conceived work of Argentinian artist Daniel Gonzalez for Masseria Torre Coccaro in Southern Italy's Apulia most deliberately attempts to create such a treshold-experience through a unique way of spatio-performative storytelling that evolves around a mysterious Door to the Origin of the World. Leading to an abandoned tuff cave in the scenic garden of the formally fortified country house and now five star hotel bordering the Adriatic Sea, the door made from old weather-and-time-beaten driftwood endowed with rough crystalline rocks, acts, as Gonzalez puts it, as "a passage to a new dimension". A place where "our imagination bonds with historical memory and personal experience." Here the door, as basic element of architecture, is poetically apprehended in its operative character, controlling not only the transport and transmission of person, object and information but also of our imagination. French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan noted likewise in one of his seminars: "A door is not at all a real thing. […) A door also belongs to the symbolic order and we do not know whether it opens towards the real or the imaginary." Gonzalez's doorway surely opens to the latter. It is not so much a stable architectural object but a magical switch on the threshold of otherness. A portent of transition and transformation. By opening up The Door to the Origin of the World at its festive inauguration with a choreographed cacophony of sounds and performances emerging from the cave, Gonzalez pushes the idea of the "threshold experience" (Schwellenerfahrung) – which German critic and essayist Walter Benjamin asserted as necessary component of ritual and as a practice of symbolically articulating transitions from one mode of existence to another – to the extreme. We witness the simultaneous sonic performance of Dracula Lewis who once described himself as having "a talent for making electronic music that sounds like dying" along with the traditional popular tunes of a local village band marching through The Door to the Origin of the World. It does not stop here, but wait, there is more. Hereupon a small flock of goats and a group of elderly ladies – so called "grandmothers" – wearing wildly customized handbags come forth from the cave. The performance then finds its culmination in a catwalk show of the musicians and grandmothers at the nearby Pino Pascali Museum in Polignano a Mare. Gonzalez’s comprehensive artwork, that strives to collaboratively make use of diverging forms of artistic creation, here subversively reenacts rituals and rites de passage abound in threshold magic that are becoming ever more unrecognizable and almost impossible to experience in contemporary life.
Down the Rabbit Hole
Just as in Lewis Carroll’s famous children's novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in which a little girl follows a white rabbit into an improbable world of the paradox and the absurd, let us in the following accompany Gonzalez through The Door to the Origin of the World into an equally unpredictable and marvelous realm. Yet not a dreamy underworld populated by talking playing cards, grinning cats or riddling caterpillars, but an exhilarated territory of ecstatic symbols, metaphors and cross-references consciously or unconsciously drawn from the seedbed of cultural history. Intoxicated allusions to etiological myths, creational visions and rituals of Dionysian abundance.
Gonzalez understands The Door to the Origin of the World – as the title already proclaims –not merely as a threshold for imagination but as genuine gateway to the very origin of the world. Therewith adverting to creation myths – symbolic narratives of how the world began commonly found throughout human culture – Gonzalez picks out the creative act per se and in principe as central theme of his work. Such "accounts of a creation", as Romanian historian of religion and philosopher Mircea Eliade wrote in Myth and Reality, describe how reality came into existence: How something was produced, began to be. Placed in "the fabled time of the beginnings", these tales – as semantically and culturally complex they may indeed be – are the opening-lines, the threshold of the narrative structure of the culture and society that shares them. While creation myths are not literal explications, they do serve to define an orientation of humanity in the world in terms of a birth story. Tongue-in-cheek Gonzalez boldly bears and delivers such images of nascency by rendering homage to French artist Gustav Courbet provocative oil on-canvas L'Origine du monde (The Origin of the World) in his titular reference. Painted in 1866 – and actually once owned by the aforementioned psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan! – it portrays in sprawled nudity a close-up view of the a woman's thighs, torso, part of one breast – and, at the centre of attention, her genitals. It does not take a genius to put one and one together here: the origin of the world, a cave, a door, female genitalia. The explicitness of the implication and the erotic humor is stunning. But again, it does not stop here, there is more. Mind, that the Gonzalez's womb-cave accouches in virtually Fellniesque manner a group of "grandmothers" carrying handbags. Grandmothers, really? Or literally speaking 'Grand Mothers': overbearing and domineering Übermütter. Personifications of the life-giving and nurturing aspects of nature, embodied in the apotheosis of the 'great mother'. Yet represented by women in their post-fertile menopause period in the last third of their life span? It's never that easy with Gonzalez. Here confirmation and contradiction live together in a paradoxical state of unity. But since the Freudian can of worms is already open now: Handbags, really? Or maybe rather external miniature representations of a woman's waiting-in-vain womb. Be aware, that the purse began as a symbol rather than as a useful accessory. In ancient times wedding purses for example filled with money were often given to couples as a symbol of the womb, which would hopefully soon be filled as well. So from the beginning the purse has been associated with womanhood, femininity and female sexuality. Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams remarked that the purse was a symbol of woman, and that putting something inside it represented sexual intercourse. This argument is dramatically stressed by the caprine company of the purse-carrying procession of 'grand mothers'. The goats distinctively recall the very birth of Greek tragedy (Ancient Greek: τραγῳδία, tragōidia, "he-goat-song") in praise of Dionysos, the god of grape harvest, winemaking and wine, ritual madness and ecstasy in Greek mythology, and the Satyrs, a troop of the god's male companions with goat-like features. It so happens that greek plays to the honor of Dionysus were given in the Greek month of Elaphebolion (March–April) which further coincides with Gonzalez’s extravaganza scheduled for late April. Against this backdrop, the 'grand mothers' can justly be interpreted as uncanny revenants of the God's female followers: maenads who in their liberated frenzy and raving devotion subvert the oppressive restraints of the powerful and at the same time represent fertility, fecundity and agricultural bounty. The celebration of the ritualistic ecstasy, manifest in Gonzalez's Dionysian cross-referencing, additionally underlines the principal theme of the 'threshold'-crossing from one state to another, so dominant in The Door to the Origin of the World.
Dirty Baroque
Here as in Gonzalez' entire artistic oeuvre – ranging from large scale installations in public space to hypnotic sequin banner-paintings and unique wearable pieces –the threads are held together by the artist's enigmatic personality and enthusiasm. The passion and vitality of his artistic explorations is literally conterminous. In a carnivalesque turn-over the observer finds her/himself equally piqued, moved and even vexed in the position of the participating performer. Gonzalez artistic tour de force opens up unexpected zones of action and reflection that inspire and stimulate. A paradoxical approach lies at the heart of these works, one that is reminiscent of the German poet and playwright Berthold Brecht's theatrical 'distancing effect' of purposely presenting falsehoods on stage in order to jolt the audience out of its usual bourgeois complacency. But in an ingenious twist of Brecht’s claim to turn the audience members into consciously critical observers by means of their deliberate estrangement from the play, Gonzalez'shigh-impact performance artworks seek to engage their audiences in what they are witnessing through the alien nature of the theatrical performance itself – engagement through alienation, so to speak. In sharp contrast to the prevalent clear and sober rationality of intellectual minimalism in the contemporary arts, Gonzalez self-confidently acts upon the maxim "more is more". Seemingly casual he borrows and adapts elements of dramatic, emotional and pop-cultural iconography and assembles them in strikingly chromatic phantasmagoria of ornate elaboration. His distinctly idiosyncratic style blends everyday-culture and pop-culture with a baroque luxuriance of images. Yet, a baroque grandeur marked by the multiple fissures of Post-Modernity's sample source eclecticism. A rough and imperfect, intoxicated and dirty baroque style of excessive ornamentation, ironically employing elements of 20th century mass culture, such as advertising, comic books and other mundane and often kitschy cultural objects to produce drama, tension and exuberance in his delirious artistic work.
The Raconteur
By establishing and at the same time questioning a discourse on artistic production Gonzalez situates his own creative development at a moment of transition, a threshold that lives from the continuous contact to equally stimulating and contradicting perspectives. Eccentric and redundant, noisy and abundant. A grand assemblage of exhilarated influences and maelstrom of inspirations. But "wasn't the whole twentieth century a victory lap of collage, quotation, appropriation, from Picasso to Dada to Pop? Who hadn't gotten what memo?" rhetorically asks American novelist Jonathan Lethem in The Ecstasy of Influences and thereby accurately expresses Gonzalez’s artistic credo, that freely draws upon existing ideas and quotations, images and narratives. And like a teller of tales Gonzalez weaves this patchwork and motley together into a shimmering rag rug of marvelous stories and fables. A personal narrative, that attempts to makes sense of the baffling world, both around and inside us. In doing so he re-establishes the very concept of storytelling as itself a fundamentally creative act – not merely a vehicle for some prefabricated reality – that lives from active collaboration by the listener. Appropriately described by Nigerian novelist and poet Chinua Achebe as an ongoing and potentially endless continuum of "stories create people create stories create people create stories". In doing so, Gonzalez exposes, but never explains. Unwittingly following the mantra of creative-writing "show, don't tell", he enables the viewer and participant to enjoy the pleasure of discovery and experience his story through action, senses and feelings rather than his exposition, summarization and description. For The Door to the Origin of the World one of many possible beginnings is thereby instituted as 'In the begging' – at least for the duration of the narration.
As curator, artist and writer, Lukas Feireiss is engaged in the cross-border discussion and mediation of visual and popular culture in the urban realm. In his creative work he aims at the critical cut up and playful re-evaluation of creative production modes and their diverse socio-cultural and medial conditions. Feireiss is currently visiting professor for space&designstrategies at University of Art and Design Linz, and teaches at various universities worldwide. He is the editor and curator of numerous books and exhibitions in the fields of art, architecture and design.