Achille Bonito Oliva

Peter Hill

The Albury Wodonga Superfiction 1993

Collaboration Peter Hill and J.J. Voss (Photographer)

Achille Bonito Oliva

Achille Bonito Oliva has, arguably, been the most influential European critic of the past decade through the publication of his books The Italian Trans- Avantgarde and The International Trans- Avantgarde much of which was also printed in Flash Art magazine. Peter Hill interviewed Bonito Oliva when he visited Edinburgh recently and discovered amongst other things, that the trans-avantgarde continues to mutate.

Peter Hill: In your writings, and in conversation, you frequently mention 'linguistic Darwinism' in relation to the visual arts and state that its overthrow helped to give birth to the Trans-avangarde and its nomadic concerns. How did this come about and why do you think it happened when it did?

Achille Bonito Oliva: Up until the early seventies - to be precise 1973, avantgarde art had believed in the concept of evolution and had practised the ideology known as linguistic Darwinism. This year was a crisis year for politics, economics, ideologies, morals, in fact all areas of knowledge including figurative culture.
Up to the period of conceptual art, artists held the view that art and evolution in art, progressed in a straight line. The artists of the trans-avantgarde were aware of this crisis which they observed in previous models and so they replaced the ideology of linguistic Darwinism, which had collapsed, and the concept of evolution, which over decades was replaced through the idea of cultural nomadism. Internationalism in art, which had been the dominant concern for decades, was replaced through the artists of the trans-avantgarde by a nomadism which was capable of causing a short circuit between the traditional avant-garde and local traditions, between internationalism and regionalism.

PH: This nomadism that you speak of - does it, for example, stray into the future. And here I am thinking of artists such as Scharff, Haring and Schabracq, of science fiction art and TV art?

ABO: The myth of the future is not part of the trans-avantgarde. The trans-avantgarde lives in the present, and if we consider the present as an ongoing process then the trans-avantgarde has a pragmatic, real and concrete relationship with the future - not an abstract one. It is not concerned with any one fetish, or technique, it uses all possible materials, not just paint and canvas. We are talking about a mentality that exists outside dogma but within time, within a time that is feverish. We can speak of a warm trans-avantgarde and a cool trans-avantgarde. The former reinstates the manual aspect of painting while the latter takes to itself the instruments of technology or borrows abstract and conceptual idioms. Within both of these the main operative function is quotation.

PH: Following on from that, if the trans-avantgarde can be seen as being like a large umbrella under which many things co-exist, is there a space under that umbrella for the work that has come out of the East Village, and its European equivalents, such as neo-geo, simulism, appropriation, and fake-ism? Is there room for Lawler, Steinbach, KOS, and Trockel, as well as Kieffer, Schnabel and Clemente?

ABO: We are talking not about a school but a mentality, and a mentality that is capable of eliminating the differences between diverse poetic modes. Prior to the trans-avantgarde we had painting in colour and conceptual art in black and white. Now even neo-geo and neo-conceptual artists are quite happily using colour, the neo-minimal sculptors are using both warm materials and painters are employing methods of both figurative and abstract quotation. Artists are concentrating on an idea of art that has form as its end product. Before the trans-avantgarde the idea held of art was an idea of process. This is an art that oscillates between two poles - one being Duchamp, the other Picasso. It is a balancing act that can hold together all possible art historical references, and that can go beyond any and all previously recognised parameters. Artists are treating art history as a ‘ready made'. It is about constructing end products.

PH: New figuration, bad painting, - broadly speaking, the trans-avantgarde - heralded a complete return to Painting after years of conceptualism and minimalism, and not just a return to figurative painting. The recent return to abstract painting is seen as part of this movement ......?

ABO: Yes, of course, there is both the figurative trans-avantgarde and the abstract trans-avantgarde. There are artists who re-instate painting and artists who return to iconic or non-figurative idioms. If one is concerned with quoting then one must be free to use all references.

PH: Is there a relationship between your ideas of the transavantgarde and that strange beast that has become known as post-modernism?

ABO: The trans-avantgarde and Post-Modernism are two parallel phenomena that came into being in the seventies under the influence of the collapse of many different systems which I referred to earlier. What is the difference between them? Post-Modernism is very definitely linked to architecture, it originated in American society in a pragmatically orientated culture geared to the idea of patchwork, of assembly. Post-Modernism travelled from America to Europe. The trans-avantgarde is a response in the field of art that is typically European, typically Italian, to the crisis in cultural models and it is linked to the consciousness of a deep tradition in art history. It travelled from Europe to America - a reverse itinerary.

PH: Can the idea of progress in art ever be equated with anything other than the refinement of techniques and materials?

ABO: It is not like that at all. Progress in art is about movement in more than one direction. For example, in the historic avantgarde, futurism existed alongside metaphysics with Boccioni and Balla, the Cubism of Picasso and Braque, and also the mythical imagery of de Chirico who gave us painting that appears to be classical even though metaphysics was the matrix of surrealism. And so the evolution is of the artist and of theories of art - not of materials and techniques.

PH: Let us talk about individual artists, first of all within Europe. Is it possible to contrast the work of Enzo Cucchi with that of Joseph Beuys?

ABO: Cucchi is a visionary artist. Like Joseph Beuys he reclaims materials towards an evocative end. He uses a typically Italian formalising principle that in my opinion refers to Piero della Francesca. He reaffirms the great romantic principle of the 'genius loci'. His identity is both Italian and European. European in that he is an artist who tends towards a form capable of giving expression to this eclectism of style.
The difference between Cucchi and Beuys lies in the fact that Beuys is a shaman. Beuys is an artist who tends to set out from the great Germanic tradition that one finds in Schopenhauer at the philosophic level and in Schiller at the literary level and what they all have in common is the idea of art as a form of intervention in history.
Cucchi uses materials to expressive ends in order to produce a classic form, a balanced form, and in this sense his ideal model would lie mid-way between the painting of Piero dell Francesca and the sculpture of Giovanni Pisano.

PH: How then would you contrast the Italian/European Cucchi with the American David Salle?

ABO: They have a great deal in common because they are both artists of the trans-avantgarde. The linguistic references of David Salle range from Francis Picabia to Andy Warhol up to and including the idiom of cinematographic technique and the imagery of Walt Disney. The differences lie in the different use he makes of this attitude. Whereas Cucchi uses eclecticism of style to create depth in his representation, David Salle uses this eclecticism of style to create lightness in his.

PH: If the 1960's gave us art as presentation, and the 1970's art as representation, would you agree that the art of the 1980's is an art of simulation?

ABO: I believe that in the eighties art is an elaboration of all three possibilities that you have mentioned. All means are now used. What is certain is that art has regained its spiritual dimension and this is due precisely to the over-coming of consumerism on the one hand and Marxism on the other. It is spirituality that brings into sharp focus the artist's own subjectivity and identity.

PH: What is happening in Italy today? Who are the artists following on from Cucchi, Clemente, Chia, Paladino and De Maria?

ABO: The new artists of the post-trans-avantgarde have acquired a freedom of operation that uses paint towards a formal rather than an experimental end. There is now a wave of abstract painters reclaiming and appropriating the abstract idioms of the 20's and 30's. We are heading towards a new morality based on an order of form rather than based on the hedonism of the painted gesture.
PH: I would finally like to ask you how powerful - if they are powerful - are the market forces exerted by collectors such as the Saatchis, the Ludwigs, and the Panzas, upon the shaping of contemporary art?

ABO: The great collectors exert a sociological power in the sense that they are capable of determining the strength of a movement, of a current, or of a group of artists. Through money they can condition the rise, the birth, and the end of galleries. They can condition the mentality of the curators of museums, they can condition snobbery in other collectors. They tend not to collect single works of art but the production of single artists and as a result effect a radical shift in the idea of traditional art collection, which is concerned with the choice the collector makes of the single work. In these collectors on the other hand we are faced with a collector who chooses the artist and his entire work cycle and follows him through the years.
Now, the difference between the critic and a collector such as this is that the collector operates through the economy and the critic through theory. This is not in itself a competitive relationship, it can be complementary. It often happens however that these collectors, given their economic strengths, break free from the authority of critical theory and tend to impose their own point of view - which is influenced by the economic gesture. The real difference between the critic and the collector is that the critic provides a social awareness of the artist. These collectors generate a propaganda of the artist, and propaganda is a phenomenon typical of mass society.