ART-PRESENTATION: Elisabetta Benassi-It Starts With The Firing
Elisabetta Benassi makes reference in her work to the cultural, political and artistic traditions of the 20th Century, including psychoanalysis and other controversial themes of our age; emerging from the historical background of her pieces is a questioning of contemporary identity and the conditions of the present. She uses various media – installation, photography, and video – as devices in emotionally engaging works that shift the moral focus onto the viewer while tracing troubled and contested timelines.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Collezione Maramotti Archive
The new site-specific project “It Starts With The Firing” by Elisabetta Benassi at Collezione Maramotti takes as its starting point the controversy triggered by the work of Carl Andre “Equivalent VIII” (1966), which is composed of 120 bricks placed on two overlapping rows to form a rectangular shape. The work was purchased by London’s Tate Gallery in 1972 for £2,297. That modest sum didn’t stop the aesthetically conservative Burlington Magazine and a barrage of newspaper articles from attacking the Tate for wasting public money on “spent taxpayers’ money for a load of bricks”. Elisabetta Benassi has referred back to the traces of these press materials, now held in the Tate Archives (put together by Carl Andre and donated to the Museum), to open up and activate the controversy by extrapolating excerpts from the original newspaper cuttings, assembled in an artist’s book and turned into billboards positioned around the town of Reggio Emilia. The unsuspecting visitor of the town sees sentences on billboards located in the outskirts of the town and on buses driving through the historical center of Reggio Emilia. They are in English and talk about bricks: “Upon these bricks”, “Bricks a hot favourite”, “The bricks pull the crowds”, “This Bricks could build a bad reputation”, “A brick is a brick is a brick…”, “My wall is going cheap”, “Gallery bricks silence”, “Money crisis and the art Bricks”, “Man behind the bricks”, “The bricks are useful”, “Art may come and art may go but a brick is a brick for Ever”, and “Bricks are for homes!”. What do these words refer to? Is it an advertising campaign? Are these political slogans? What is the relationship between art and bricks? From the outskirts, to the town to Collezione Maramotti, the posters lead toward the exhibition space, where the works by Elisabetta Benassi create a relationship between “objects” belonging to the history of the location (the first Max Mara factory now housing the Collection) and other elements linked to a much wider story, not solely Italian, by creating “stopovers” in an itinerary that can be assembled at will by viewers. Every room presents a single work that seems to have survived the disappearance of the context that originally housed it. Some “objects“ are presented with their “names”: Prosperity, Empire (which recalls another work by Carl Andre), but also act as metaphors, oracles ironically asking questions, they seem to us both familiar and out of place. An industrial steam presser, carpets wedged into a brick wall, a slanted pillar proudly exhibiting its trademark: these devices ironically summarize the contradictions of history. The instability, the enigmas that these works propose do not have anything vague or evocative. Instead, they address something that sounds all too familiar: the loss of trust in the promises of technique, the posthumous world emerging after the failure of ideologies and their supposed remedies; the surrendering of forces squandering memories and communities and making them feral again.
Info: Collezione Maramotti, Via Fratelli Cervi 66, Reggio Emilia, Duration: 7/5-17/11/17 (closed 1-25/8/17), Days & Hours: Thu-Fri 14:30-18:30, Sat-Sun 10:30-18:30, www.collezionemaramotti.org
