culture
NoonOctober 21, 2022 – 10:30 am
In an essay the importance of the discipline on geopolitics and the art that the CIA likes
from Marco De Marco
Be careful to underestimate aesthetics. When we mention it, most of the time we think of art, beauty, harmony. But you don’t mess with aesthetics, because it is much more: it concerns “the immense universe of sensitivity”, it refers to the religious and the transcendent, it is “the imaginary that constitutes the collective experience of the community first and then of societies, up to the so-called mass society of the present era ”. And for this reason, from the beginning, aesthetics “is in the very structure of the political, economic and military”, that is, in the choices of those who govern, in the use of resources and, expanding the discourse to the maximum, in the conflict between man and divine, between man and nature, between man and man. Aesthetics have marked history and the destiny of the world can depend on aesthetics, if only one thinks of the persuasive power of the imagination, understood not only as books, paintings, sculptures, cinema. But also as information, communication, propaganda, fashion.
Dario Giugliano, who teaches aesthetics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples, talks about all this in The community of meaning. Introduction to a geopolitical aesthetic (Castelvecchi). And it does so by crossing the centuries from antiquity to the war in Ukraine; citing the classics and paying homage to reference masters such as Chambers, Givone, Masullo, Žižek; and finally finding inspiration and confirmation also in the actuality of the correspondences from Kiev and Zaporizhzhia. Which makes the book, divided into short chapters, dense and stimulating, and such also because it is questionable.
The premise is that corporeality is not just a physical datum and that “we are what we have”, that is, our body, our ideas and even our things. In the sense – with regard to things – in which, for example, Primo Levi in If this is a man, when he describes the human “demolition” inside the Nazi concentration camps, where everything was deprived, even of a handkerchief, an old letter or a photograph of a loved one. “These things – Giugliano quotes – are part of us, almost members of our body (…) and it is easy for those who have lost everything to lose themselves”. Therefore, things, like ideas, are the aesthetic, creative datum that enters our life. Just as, more generally, emotions can influence geopolitics, evoked in the subtitle, through what Giugliano defines as “a conjunctural bond between forms of artistic expression and the manifestation of political power”. An example? Better: a direct testimony.
We are in Naples, in 1986, at Villa Pignatelli. Giugliano notices a painting by an American, a certain Foster unknown to most, exhibited in an exhibition on the local avant-garde after the war. Certainly an oddity. But the work of that abstract expressionist, taken up with relief in the catalog, showed that in the Naples of those years, as well as in Italy and in Europe without Mussolini and Hitler, someone had managed to give a meaning, a direction , to the new season that was about to begin. And that that someone was in reality something: American cultural hegemony, that is the expression of a world that represented itself free, in expression as well as in traditional forms. Nothing accidental, however. Foster’s painting was rather – Giugliano’s thesis – the effect, one of the first, of a very precise strategy, aimed at freeing Italian culture from the residues of the fascist one, but also and above all at stemming the charm of that Soviet. In short, aesthetics as a weapon of the cold war. Neither more nor less than what, in all wars, has always been done by erecting statues, creating myths, telling plots and imposing one-sided versions of the facts. A reasoning so far very engaging and convincing. All the more so since the American plans solicited by Truman and then by his successors are now known, in support of those anti-communist initiatives reductively defined as “covert psychological operations”.
However, Giugliano never mentions the equally indefatigable role of the KGB, as long as it remained operational, manipulating the media and disrupting social groups in Europe. And therefore it not only risks placing the heterodirection of political and cultural processes only on the capitalist side; and to consider instead the free adhesion to a value system possible only if addressed to the other side, the socialist one. But it also goes so far as to see the hand of the CIA behind the public success of the entire movement of abstract expressionism, of the Pollocks, of the de Koonings, of the Rothkos, or rather of authors for whom still today there is a queue in the museums in the middle. world. And then the question is: all this for anti-Americanism, that is, for a current of thought that is very current, widespread and obviously legitimate, or for pure – if we can say so – aesthetic judgment?
21 October 2022 | 10:30
© Time.News