Intervention at “FLUXUS FETISH”
A study day organized by SNSF Activating Fluxus at Archivio Conz, Berlin
November 3, 2023
Intervention at “FLUXUS FETISH”.
A study day organized by SNSF Activating Fluxus
at Archivio Conz, Berlin
November 3, 2023
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Was Frasncesco Conz a saint?
For the Catholic faith, “saint” is one who, following the example of Jesus Christ, animated by love, lives and dies in the grace of God; in a particular sense, it is one who in life has distinguished himself by exercising the Christian virtues in a “heroic” form or by giving his life for the sake of the faith (the martyrs).
This definition already poses problems for us.
We cannot say that Conz followed the example of Christ, except perhaps in the multiplication of wines, but all jokes aside, what we can say is that: animated by love of art Conz lived (and perhaps even died) exercising his virtues in a truly heroic way.
If by virtues we mean those dispositions of mind aimed at the good, which consist in a person’s ability to excel in something, to perform a certain act in an optimal manner, or to be or act in a way deemed perfect according to a moral, religious, or social point of view based on the culture of reference.
So once again: was Francis Conz a saint?
Or a holy man, a guru?
A hermit, an ascetic, a person who within a given organization or environment served as a charismatic leader?
Charisma he certainly exercised. In fact, he still exerts it.
It is really hard not to be charmed by his personality, his history, his accomplishments.
As for moral, religious and social perfection………
OK. Better to change the approach.
In 2005, when I was working on the never-finished book “The Secret Museum,” I wrote this introductory text that Francis Conz liked very much:
« In the summer of 1999, St. Francis of the Church of the Exquisite Panic withdrew to the wooded slopes between Vajo dell’Anguilla and Vajo dei Falconi (the valleys of the eel and the falcons) for one of his habitual retreats in silence and meditation.
In the course of his stay he asked himself how best he might with all his being take part in the Passion of Art, and in its mystery of love and suffering.
In the course of his itinerant meditation, the solution appeared before him in the form of a modest country cottage which he found to be imbued with a spirit of beauty, completeness and natural harmony that he felt to be the seal of his calling.
Francesco was thus enabled to found in that hermitage the personal and secret museum he had so much and so long desired, and to shape it in the light of that image of absolute utopia for which his heart and life had so deeply and so dearly yearned.
It’s to be hoped that pious spirits will not be shocked by the comparison drawn between the creation of Francesco Conz’s Secret Museum and the founding of the hermitage at St. Francis of Assisi’s Sanctuary of La Verna. A hermitage is a place of arduous access where one or more individuals can voluntarily withdraw from the concerns of the secular world in order to lead a life of prayer and asceticism, and no other terms suffice if we’re truly to understand the extraordinary story of the founding of the Secret Museum.
The living of a life of austerity, the perception of such a choice as a virtue, and the constant search for a dimension of greater spirituality, even if in terms of a secular culture of art, are all to be seen as essential elements of the life lived, and the options pursued, by this proud collector from the Veneto.
Francesco Conz is likewise in no way a stranger to the thought that the numerous restrictions he has imposed upon himself can have led him to a greater freedom in many spheres of life, no less than to a greater capacity for clarity of thought.
His absolute and unbinding faith in the aesthetic principles which he in fact pursues has often led Francesco Conz to exclude himself from the major circuits of the art world, no less than to a number of clamorous disputes with museum directors, critics, artists, and other personalities who populate the world of art for reasons entirely of self-celebration. ».
What motivates Francis Conz is certainly not only ambition.
The fundamental points of reference for Francesco Conz are to be found in the ideas of thinkers such as Emerson and Thoreau, who saw a life withdrawn to a place as close as possible to nature as the source of salvation from the corruption enacted by society.
Their concept, in fact, was not far removed from the concept of ascetic isolation to which I referred at the beginning.
Moreover, religion is present on many levels in the notion of art that Francis Conz developed.
It is no accident that he speaks of his “conversion on the road to Damascus” when he recounts his first encounters with Fluxus and Aktionismus that would lead him to a radical revision of aesthetic notions.
It is also no coincidence that Francis Conz constantly compares the artists he deals with to the saints of a secular church of art. An idea that was the basis of another possible edition I proposed to Francis at the time.
In this context, one must also attribute a new and very important value to the huge collection of fetishes that constitutes an important and, in my opinion, ingenious part of the Conz collection.
Brilliant because it responds to a shift in discourse of which Conz seems absolutely aware.
Dematerialization of art. From object to experience.
Over the past century, there has been a radical shift in the world of the arts from the production of objects to the production of concepts and experiences.
Moreover, increasingly the production of an object has taken a back seat to the possibility of exposing the public to a creative moment.
This is evident in performances where the intention is to bring the audience into close contact with a creative moment.
It is no longer about exhibiting a work of art, but directly exposing the viewer to creation.
This is a path of dematerialization of art that characterized much of the twentieth century, particularly with the advent of performance and the increasingly pressing need to break through the barrier between art and life.
The equation art = life, in the twentieth century took on a value antithetical to that pursued until the nineteenth century. If until the beginning of the twentieth century it was a matter of transforming life into an aesthetic experience, thus transforming everyday life into an aesthetic fact, with the avant-garde movements people began to consider and value everyday, often insignificant, facts as true artistic moments and thus with an aesthetic value.
Not made beautiful and interesting for the glitz and elegance lavished in them but exactly the opposite: valued for their simplicity and ordinariness. Think of the radicalism of Brecht’s Events.
It is clear that this attention poured on a small gesture or a small everyday fact has completely altered the concept of a work of art.
The work no longer requires any special technical skill on the part of the creator.
If Ready Made has swept away centuries of technical refinement, with the advent of performance we have in effect gotten rid of the art object as well, while with Events we have gotten rid of the artist himself since anyone can perform the action at home or at the limit just imagine it.
We are at the ultimate evaporation of the artist as an agent of transformation of meaning and of any context that grants meaning to the operation itself.
Everything is art and anyone can make it.
Which means, also, that nothing is and no one can make it.
What has been created is a vacuum of object, a lack of object.
That is to say: collapse of illusion. And here I refer precisely to the crisis of the concept of Vorstellungrappresentanz as worked by Lacan in his Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis.
The emergence of this representational vacuum has paved the way for the dissemination of a whole series of new objects: photos, videos, performance relics, documents, or anything else capable of documenting, witnessing, a creative action operated by the artist.
These new objects have two important characteristics:
They are essentially fetish objects that protect the collector or art user from the horror of the void of representation that has been created in performance.
They are essentially market objects, initially wanted and packaged more often by the collector or dealer than by the artist himself.
Let us start with the first characteristic.
It is a fetish object that protects the collector.
The rest object, which enters the market as an “art object,” is but a scrap, often useless and ugly and sometimes even obscene, of the attempt to represent the sublime expressed in performance. It is a fetish object that stops at the threshold of the unwatchable, the emptiness of castration, and protects the collector by giving him the possibility of the enjoyment of horror in the form of the macabre (also found in most reliquaries and horror films) or invective.
An object on which all love and/or all hate is focused.
Hate understood as a way to avoid the Real.
The central aspect is in my view that these objects enhance the testimonial value inherent in objects or documents referable to a moment of artistic creation. In more strictly psychoanalytic terms we might say that the value of witnessing a process of sublimation that has taken place becomes central.
That is to say, the work of art presents itself as testimony to the mystery of artistic creation.
These are objects that somehow attempt to restore the veil function performed by the artwork object.
In this regard I refer to the famous apologue of Zeusi and Parrasius.
Zeusi entered a competition by painting a bunch of grapes so realistic that birds tried to peck at it. Parrasius, on the other hand, painted a tent. Confident of his victory, Zeusi tried to pull it aside to see his rival’s work, but when he realized it was painted he admitted defeat: he had succeeded in fooling the birds but Parrasius had succeeded in fooling a painter!
The apologue is taken up by Lacan in the aforementioned Seminar XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis about the work of art when he says,
« Parrasius makes it clear that when one wants to deceive a man, what is presented to him is the painting of a veil, that is, something beyond which he demands to see. »
A mystery at the center
In Seminar VII The Ethics of psychoanalysis, Lacan develops the three possible ways of sublimation, also articulating their implications.
They are: religion, art and science.
In all three, the reference is to the possible articulation of emptiness, of lack, in the forms of avoidance, edging and denial.
That is to say that in all three, at the center of their ordering and development, there is a point of impossible, of mystery, which is worked on in different ways.
In science, mystery does not exist, cannot exist, everything must be explicable by the development of knowledge. Scientific theories, increasingly developed and refined, aim to fill every possible mystery of reality and knowledge.
Religion, on the other hand, places mystery at the center of its system and exalts it in the form of dogma. That which is not comprehensible, inexplicable, mysterious, is a manifestation of God’s will and man must accept it. What is needed is not knowledge but belief.
Art, on the other hand, is that third way that neither wants to deny nor avoid the basic question that mystery poses, but tries in every possible way to allude to it, to say something about it.
Both art, religion and science have their document objects, witness objects. Objects that have the fundamental dual function of being able to be preserved and to spread a system of knowledge.
For science, the object is evidently the scientific one. Scientific experimentation develops precisely from the possibility of taking reality as objective data and drawing consequences from it. Either the object of study becomes evidence, and thus has scientific value, of repeatable testimony everywhere given the same assumptions, or it is nothing, it has no foundation, it is not a scientific object.
For religion, the object is basically the relic. That is, an object that bears witness to the life of God or one of his prophets or saints. The relic appears in all religions and has contributed fundamentally to the spread of a particular religious system precisely because of its being easily transportable and, if necessary, easily multiplied (thanks to relics by contact).
As far as art is concerned, we have seen that the evolution imparted to its system in the twentieth century brought to the forefront, beyond the artwork object, this new object that we will call object-fetish. An object that bears witness, makes reference, relates to a moment of mystery.
And this is where the relic object takes on, with twentieth-century art, an extremely interesting role because it emerges as a point of contact between the religious system and the art system.
These objects, in both art and religion, are meant to avoid the encounter with the real, or rather to respect this emptiness as Lacan indicates, through its ostentation and “sacralization” into a work of art.
The fetishes accumulated by Conz, on closer inspection, serve exactly this function.
And in my view they respond to the idea, repeatedly expressed by Conz, of the need to create a new secular creed at the center of which is art.
New creed made necessary by the overcoming of religion by science, with a clear reference to Robert Delford-Brown and his New Church of the Exquisite Panic.
We come here to the second characteristic, namely that they are objects that respond to the market. Feature that tells us something about the change of discourse, from that of the Master to that of the Capitalist, which I will try to develop very quickly in the final part of my talk.
The Four Discourses + 1
In the XVII seminar The reverse side of psychoanalysis, Lacan introduces a scheme where four terms already used extensively earlier in his teaching find their place. The four terms are:
S1 = The Master signifier
S2 = The Knowledge
$ = The Subject
a = The plus-of-enjoyment
These four terms are placed within the pattern in places that themselves have fixed designations. To be precise, the places are:
The naming of places is fixed, so that the top left place will always be the agent’s place, but the entered terms rotate. The agent’s place will then be occupied now by S1, now by S2, etc. In this way, four different structures of the same schema are formed.
The last feature of the schema is that the terms rotate while remaining essentially bound together by the relations established by the main of the discourses introduced by Lacan, that of the Master.
In essence, the Master’s discourse grounds every other possible discourse.
It is the foundational discourse because it is configured as the very discourse of civilization, that is, of the very idea that something like a discourse can exist.
The Master’s discourse is the key discourse of all discourse theory.
In it is clearly represented the fundamental servant-master dialectic that Lacan borrows from Hegel and that is used at several points in his teaching.
The place of the agent is thus occupied by the Master signifier, S1, while the place of Truth is occupied by the Subject, $. A bar inexorably separates the signifier from the subject. In practice, it is the formula of original repression.
The place of the Other is occupied by Knowledge, S2. The Master signifier, S1, and Knowledge, S2, are related by an arrow that indicates the elementary and essential structure of the signifying device.
Knowledge, the Other as the treasure of signifiers, is mobilized, activated by the Master signifier.
The structure of the Master’s discourse is thus the foundational structure of every possible discourse because it allows the mobilization of the signifying chain, because the subject finds place in it as represented by a signifier for another signifier, and because this operation allows the production as remainder of a fundamental element in the structure of subjective desire: the object a.
By rotating the terms of this first discourse we will have the other 3:
The discourse of the Hysteric
The discourse of the Analyst
The discourse of the University
There is not time now to develop the entire articulate theory of the Four Discourses, nor to address the concept of “object a,” the cornerstone of all Lacanian theoretical production.
We can, however, indicate that art, in psychoanalysis, must be placed in the locus of production.
Now, if such production is manifested in the Master’s Discourse we will have the production of an object a.
For example, a poem:
In which the Agent, S1, is none other than the Poet. That is: the self-identifying auto-nomination of the subject.
Which relates itself to Literature as Other, S2.
And it produces a poem, that is, something that captures the subject’s desire (object a).
But the Truth is nothing other than the impossibility of being completely expressed by the subject. That is, something in the Subject remains unspeakable, inaccessible, barred indeed. $ barred precisely.
If, on the other hand, it were manifested in University Discourse we would have the production of a barred subject.
This is what happens, for example, in Conceptual Art.
Where the Agent is the Knowledge that interrogates the artwork object in its status (object a).
Which produces a tautology, a short-circuit that highlights the impossibility of saying anything new about the object of inquiry since the product of the operation is but an a-subject.
That is, a subject subdued, dumbed down, stupefied by the unfolding of knowledge.
What remains inaccessible is Truth: the artwork is only a veil over the Thing (Das Ding).
And what does the art-fetish object respond to?
I think the fetish object, as already stated, is an attempt to restore the veil function that came to fall with the shift from the Master’s Discourse to the Capitalist’s Discourse, as Lacan has pointed it out to us since the 1970s.
That is, a subversion of the right side of the schema of the Master’s Discourse.
The Capitalist’s Discourse disrupts the foundational relation of the Master’s Discourse in that the $ (Barred S) passes into the agent’s place. Thus the subject is no longer represented by a signifier and can no longer mobilize the signifying chain.
This inversion, whereby in the place of Truth we find S1, tells us that the subject can no longer name itself and remains divided.
In essence, the place of the Agent is occupied, by the barred subject, by its lack, its incompleteness, as in the Hysteric’s Discourse.
In the Discourse of the Capitalist, however, the “object a” loses its (impossible) relation to the Truth of the subject, to the truth of its lack, which characterizes the Discourse of the Master in order to become something usable to fill this lack.
That is, an object of consumption, a continuously consumable gadget.
The artwork is not consigned to the discourse of art, it is not put in relation to a knowledge that can interpret it and put it to work, but it is consigned to a system of consumption that reduces it to a gadget. That is to say, it mortifies it, fixes it in a certain economic value, which can change in the course of various market speculations.
This operation changes, subverts, inexorably the status of the work of art.
I think it is precisely in order to take the object away from this devaluation to a gadget that the fetish object, the relic object, is introduced and placed in value.
Object, however, which in itself cannot be a work of art.
To appear as such it needs the construction of a rigorous system of knowledge.
The relic object, to be such, needs a system of certification and sanctification.
In parallel, in art, the fact that what remains, the waste produced during a performance, cannot by itself sustain the aesthetic discourse put forth by the artist has not escaped Francesco Conz, who has given himself body and soul throughout his life to the task of healing this wound.
While a traditional work of art, a painting, a sculpture, can be enjoyed as a thing in itself, or can be understood as a manifestation of intrinsic formal aesthetic value, the remainder object, the discarded object, needs a system of knowledge.
The object in itself cannot be a work of art without the support of the rigorous construction of a system of knowledge.
This more intimate aspect is, in my opinion, what guided Conz in building his collection as a true Intermedia shrine. The need, that is, to create a homogeneous and organic system of knowledge.
The establishment, that is, of a true doctrine and the creation of an endless series of relics to be sent out into the world to spread the new creed.
So, to answer the initial question: Francis was a Saint’homme, or better yet a Synthome of art.
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Bibliography:
Robert Delford-Brown, Ikons of the First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Archivio F. Conz, 1992
Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960 The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Routledge, 1992
Jacque Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Vol. Book XI), W. W. Norton & Company, 1998
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Book XVII), W. W. Norton & Company, 2007
Peter Manseau, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead, Henry Holt and Company, 2009
