A hard life for women artists in Basilicata
Vita dura per le artiste in Basilicata
ENQUIRY BY P. TOTARO-ZIELLA FOR THE DAILY “LA NUOVA BASILICATA” – Interview with TERI VOLINI
Full text of the article published on 24 June 2000, “Vita dura per le artiste in Basilicata”
1 – What does it mean to make art and be an artist today, and what is the role of art and the artist in this mass society, indifferent to every stimulus except base provocation?
I consider art an activity essential to the psychophysical survival of human beings; a means of investigation, a real social laboratory: nothing to do with its commercial exploitation and mystification.
In my view Art can allow us to realise a utopia: by refusing the norms that commodify us with impunity, we can rediscover the pleasure, freedom and generosity of making.
Art can be a song that involves us, and the Artist a person who gives magnificent gifts, helping to improve the way we perceive and live life.
2 – What role does your art have in this society? Is it aesthetic-hedonistic, socio-political, interpretative-denunciatory, educational-communicative, testimonial-prophetic?
Art can really help us actively create a better world, fostering our awareness, moving us away from the alienation and estrangement produced by conformist culture and the frantic pace of life.
It can push us to seek more authentic values.
It is political action, because it can bring about a renewing turn in society. This, of course, has nothing to do with the propaganda of political ideas, let alone party ones…
3 – In your experience, what are the central themes and the life or artistic motives that led you to these choices?
There is always a common thread linking the works, even though the painting cycles differ. It expresses love for Nature and Life, emotion before Beauty and Mystery; attention to the Feminine and its sacredness, the wish for it to reawaken and once again receive authority and acceptance, together with the values it carries.
Fundamental is the awareness of the connection between all beings and the Universe.
4 – Are these motives life choices, or purely rational or contingent ones; are they psychological explorations or perceptions, observations or themes that develop along a red thread?
I am horrified by the idea of a rational, contingent art, directly tied to “commissions”, to economic, religious, political or mass-media power – which, with well-devised planning, gives the artist of the moment fame, money and value for a certain time.
In reality it is a perverse mechanism that benefits only the coordinators – multinational or provincial – of such “operations”.
As for me, I believe in the therapeutic and growth-giving value of art: besides experiencing it personally, I can also see important transformations taking place in those who experience my works.
I think this can happen when works have a great deal within them, so that they are able to give a great deal.
The energy that entered them at the moment of artistic creation passes into those who look at them, and communicates powerfully.
Art can help us get back in touch with the “non-rational”, with that world and those experiences which a certain kind of mechanised, technological, consumerist culture takes no account of at all…
Through Art we can attune ourselves to the invisible, spiritual world; we can once again hear the deep voice of Nature, becoming sensitive again to its messages…
5 – Among these themes, what do you favour: impression, expression, symbol, gesture, form, plasticity, aesthetic sense, subjective reading or social research, popular or ancestral recovery?
I could say that in my current research I favour archetypal Symbols; yet it seems to me that these themes present themselves better in their mutual relationships, with no need to choose one and exclude another.
Unfortunately, separating, distinguishing and cataloguing is a characteristic of excessively rational “masculine” thought, and in the field of art – paradoxically a patriarchal domain – one feels its heaviness.
I think there is more harmony and completeness in an inductive knowledge that reads things in their totality and transversality.
Artistic creativity has been monopolised throughout the “historical period” by the dominant culture, becoming a male prerogative. Women were denied access, since that kind of culture decided that creative-generative “power” should be enough for them – a power downgraded to service, or cloaked in rhetoric (…the feminine mystique). This way of thinking, which also polluted the concept of art in past centuries, is still present, and its harmful consequences can be felt daily, above all in the provinces, where they are most visible…
6–7 – What is your way of making art? How do you face a blank or empty space? Are you more driven by form/matter or by content/idea, more provoked by colour or by drawing, more attracted by tone or by rhythm? Does the work come first and then the idea, or the other way round, or are they born, develop and contaminate each other at the same time?
Colour and rhythm are fundamental in my work: the harmony of the forms created rests on them. For the rest, I see no separation between body and mind, matter and spirit, the idea and its materialisation.
Many works are born “pictorially”, that is, giving priority to colour, which creates form by itself; later, or already while working, perceptions, memories and suggestions for new languages blossom.
This is what happened with my latest research, “The Dance of the Rope”, in which a thin Red Ribbon – which in the triptych of the same name links three maidens engaged in a joyful, cosmic creative dance – took on a life of its own, itself becoming the protagonist of an extraordinary Journey.
The Red Ribbon has become a builder of symbols, a transmitter of messages – indeed, itself an archetypal symbol with a powerful evocative function…
From painting I moved, with the utmost naturalness and no dichotomy, to an equivalent mode of expression, in its turn many-sided, since it makes use of forms such as Land Art, Body Art, Fiber Art, Participatory Art…
8 – Do you perceive an evolution in your art? What are its extremes, phases, key passages?
Evolution is fundamental for everyone, let alone for the Artist, who should “see and make others see” what often escapes our distracted eye: for example, that it is FLUIDITY, certainly not rigidity, that reigns in the Universe.
So we must not fear change, but consider it a source of enrichment and growth.
Artistically, this leads to an exuberant creativity and to the birth of new languages, not only original but effective.
If one enjoys the favour of the Muse, one may receive the gift of cyclically reconverting one’s work through a medium that allows one to communicate validly what one wishes.
9 – What are your relations with society, with political power, with the public, and what models do you propose?
Relations with these are difficult and complex, since I believe that the Artist should please no one – neither society, nor political power, nor the public.
Her task is not to conform, nor to reassure, but rather to make people think, to question herself and others continually.
Not necessarily by scandalising or going to extremes, which can be a disguised form of conformism, practised to be noticed at all costs, according to the aberrant rule “speak ill of me, as long as you speak of me”.
10 – When you create, do you have the public, and pleasing the public, more in mind, or do you pursue the idea of art as research and realisation, as denunciation or as subjective and mass removal?
Pleasing anyone – the public, the critics or political power – is certainly not worthy of “true” art, even though, unfortunately, we see numerous examples of this pestilential practice, in the present as in the past.
Throughout the “historical” period, “artists” have too often distinguished themselves by their slavish obedience to the canons of religious, political and economic power, which “sponsored” their work, leaving them very little freedom to express their ideas. I intend to go into this subject in depth.
Despising and rejecting the old unhealthy models is fundamental for the aware Artist; it is not so for those who usurp that title and, as Luciano Fabro writes, make pseudo-art: they are only sellers/pushers of works, social climbers.
Artists enjoy great privileges, but these come with great responsibilities, which one cannot ignore by turning a deaf ear, or by burying one’s head in the sand…
11 – What are sign and drawing, matter and word for you?
Placing a “sign” that gives rise to an image or a word makes sense if behind that sign there is the Artist’s inner world, and if this world is alive, true, innocent.
The effectiveness of that sign will depend on the strength of conscious thought, but also on the power of the unconscious – provided the Artist is willing to channel it outside herself, and knows how to express it with effective means, which should be many-sided and constantly evolving.
12 – How important is colour/matter in your art, how do you handle it and what must it represent?
I mostly use pure colours, and I like to set complementary colours side by side, so as to create vibrant images. I use a lot of yellow, which however does not refer only to sunniness, but rather to the enchanting splendour of the moon and the twinkling of the stars. I also love Sèvres blue and violet, and I mix the other colours myself from the primaries…
13 – How important is form in your works?
One of the colours I used least in the past, red, has become, in my latest research, the absolute protagonist. Colour itself, which already built the forms in the paintings – this TOTAL RED – has become pure form: a builder of images and archetypal symbols, it draws or weaves them on a large scale, and indeed itself becomes an archetype with a powerful evocative and media function.
14 – And how significant is structure?
It is colour itself that creates the structure: in the paintings, all the colours do; in the performances, RED alone: changing its scale, each time it bursts through definitions, deciding to take on unusual forms of art – Light Art, Soft Art, Breath Art…
This powerful purple structure, incorporating colour, matter and sign, thanks to its intrinsic strength and its flexibility, becomes the protagonist of a Journey, both real and spiritual, which the Artist makes together with all those who wish to take part.
The recently woven reticular structure, the Web, besides expressing the totality of the connection among human beings and between all creatures and the planet, could also serve to cage – and, one hopes, eliminate – the fatal myth of the narcissistic, megalomaniac pseudo-artist, to make room for involvement and awareness.
15 – Do you favour colour or drawing?
As I have already said, in my paintings it is colour itself that creates the forms; these are, however, surrounded by a strong black line, which sometimes precedes and sometimes follows the laying down of colour, accentuating it.
The velvety black so present in my paintings is an important colour: it does not only serve to bring out the others, but has a value of its own: it has the beauty of night, it gives form to mystery…
Black has in it all the strength of the earth – dark, fertile, shadowy; far from being a funereal colour (the power of the dominant culture’s stereotypes!), it represents life itself, which has its origin precisely in the damp darkness of the earth and of the womb…
Colour has a strong symbolic charge, which however has no absolute value, being relative to the culture that influences us.
16 – How is the figure interpreted and transfigured?
The late Cesare Vivaldi described my painting as “perched on the edge of Art Informel, but without falling into it”.
Indeed, rather than drawing forms, I create them as in a process of “cellular growth”, in which small globes of colour, merging into one another or expanding, define the structure of the work…
In my most recent painting cycle, “The Awakening of the Goddess”, I returned to the female figure, itself a creator of vital forms, expressing its complete harmony with nature: her body is also earth and sky, and with them in turn it interpenetrates and is transfigured in the light…
17 – Is your art more attentive to reality or to the imaginary, to nature or to what lies behind and within it? More to perception or to intuition?
Nothing is more “real” than the imaginary, even if our rational culture denies it. Dreaming itself, which in ancient times was a sacred activity, can bring us into contact with the spiritual world and receive advice, guidance and healing from it.
Nature, then, is the great teacher – neither obtuse nor lacking a behind or a within; on the contrary, endowed with a deep spirituality.
By showing its beauty and mystery, the Artist can contribute to its preservation and to the renewal of that respect for it which humans seem to have forgotten.
Nature teaches us that, contrary to what we rational beings assert with absolute certainty, there are no such clear-cut separations between body and mind, good and evil, beautiful and ugly, superior and inferior, and so on…
The aware Artist seeks balance between opposites, not dichotomy.
18 – But how is this everyday reality interpreted? Is it represented through symbols, signs, gestures, colours, recovered languages, or a fusion of these?
Rather than documenting everyday life, art can bring out its automatisms and incongruities, raise questions, and stimulate reflection, new thoughts, renewed ways of acting, new languages.
With the awakening of archetypes, then, through the “simple” and powerful rituality of Symbolic Actions (my favoured means of expression at this point in my path), Art can even lift us beyond everyday time, into a vaster and more universal dimension.
19 – Is the imaginary experienced through perception, intuition, psychological exploration or sensation?
Speaking of the imaginary and of the image, I like to refer to the Greek root of the term closest to them, which is to see. In Greek culture, dreams are not made but seen; it is as if they came to us, and all we have to do is manifest them…
And who can do this better than the Artist, the person who, expressing herself through images, brings into the open the visions (the imaginary) that already exist and makes them visible to others?
The effect is explosive when she manages to express the collective imaginary. One can then speak of the universality of language, of the universality of art.
20 – What is the best way to read one of your works, and what should the public look for in order to interpret it correctly?
Both the “construction” and the reading of my works happen in successive layers: images appear one after another, often one out of another, as if by magic.
Confused forms, at first incomprehensible, reveal themselves on closer observation, speaking to whoever has entered into communication with the world enclosed in the work.
It is enough to enter it, keeping the channels of communication clear and one’s whole de-conditioned sensitivity available.
The phase of absorption, which determines entry into and incorporation in the heart and very fibres of the work, allows the visitor to experience it, to enjoy it fully, and sometimes almost to become part of it.
The visitor can then share in the same creative and vital energy that entered the work at the moment of creation, in a magical symbiosis with the Artist’s world.
Later there may be an interpretative, informative, “rational” phase, but the first kind of approach is fundamental.
Just as important, in my view, is for the public to lose the bad habit of looking at works in order to “recognise themselves” in them, to be reassured by what they already know.
Art should instead encourage new knowledge, even if this demands more effort.
In the same way, the public can take on a less passive role, not limiting itself to the mere enjoyment of works.
Performances too can do a great deal in this sense: the public, from simple onlooker, can become a precious co-author of the work of art.
This new attitude leads to the deactivation of pseudo-knowledge, inhibitions and prejudices about art, helping to form a new individual who is aware of what she sees and what she does….
Beyond the aesthetic fact, it is a personal education in doing and living.
21–22 – What cultural and artistic references to Basilicata, if any, are there in your work? How are they perceived, experienced and handled?
Today, throughout the aware world, people are realising that we must restore value to the culture of the Earth, against the overwhelming power of the hyper-mechanised culture that has prevailed until now.
Personally, I was lucky enough, above all in childhood, to be in close harmony with the natural world, and this is the fundamental Lucanian cultural reference I carry within me like a treasure.
Poetry, magic and beauty entered me with the scent of wild pinks and broom… with clay kneaded beside a stream, in summer, at the age of four: the first indelible sensations…
With the fairy tales of an aunt who was an unwitting cantadora, with the tales told on midsummer evenings by the old “comari” of my little village, woven with goblins, monacielli, talking crickets and a thousand mysterious creatures…
A formidable imprinting, of which I am only now fully aware, which took place without my knowing thanks to all the beings, real or fantastic, inhabiting that “Enchanted Mountain”, the place of stone I come from, which suggested forms and colours to me with its theriomorphic and anthropomorphic features.
The perception of that landscape has become universal: relived in memory and expressed in a fervent polychromy, it is no longer only my mountain, but the mountain of the world.
This sense of the strength of the bond with my land – together with the tendency not to shut myself in narrow spheres, but to broaden knowledge – continues even now in my way of life.
Cyclical distancing, real or symbolic, is in my view indispensable, not only for cultural growth and comparison with other realities, but precisely to understand one’s own better.
That is how one learns to dispel many prejudices and to revalue unusual aspects of one’s own culture…
One of the disadvantages is a certain weariness, caused not only by objective difficulties and the real effort of sustaining this kind of life, but above all by the frustration that comes from a sharper perception of how inadequate, in many ways, the reality to which one periodically returns is compared with one’s own heightened needs; and at the same time there is inner resistance to the way of “escape”, which many – more practically – have chosen, emigrating for good…
23 – Do you give more importance to the landscape, to the agricultural and pastoral tradition, to the divinatory-sacred character, to the fabulous-enchanting heritage or to the classical tradition?
With the series “The Enchanted Mountain” – dedicated to Lucania “between reality, memory and dream” – I referred not so much to the landscape pure and simple as to the evocative fascination of the places, to the mysterious power of attraction I felt emanating from them.
Later, as the vital tension grew, I tried, with Cézanne, to translate “what is entwined in the very roots of being, in the impalpable source of sensations”, arriving at hierophany, the manifestation of the sacred, passing from manifold space to the body – the female body – “promoting the assumption of the woman’s body into a glorious body”. Celebrating in woman the power to give and perpetuate life, I sublimate her into a divine creature (M. Grazia Longhi).
24 – What trait of the Lucanian people, in your view, could become a national theme, and how?
I fear that “national” is taken to mean conventional culture, and I regret that it is thought necessary to conform to it, without daring to question it.
The Lucanian character would benefit from a new awareness of its own intrinsic value – not to be confused, of course, with provincialism or parochialism, but certainly outside globalising standards and the fashions spread by mass-media power…
The distinctive Lucanian character is far removed from the image into which it has been forced and stifled by a false sense of progress, by an exasperated, misunderstood modernisation which – after amply despising and demonising a “magical” culture so rich and particular, which survived intact and preserved in our region even longer than elsewhere, and which De Martino so well highlighted in his studies and journeys in Basilicata in the 1950s and 60s – has in a few decades brought it to almost complete disappearance.
People themselves no longer recognise themselves in it; indeed they suppress it as something to be ashamed of.
Ancient rites, customs and precious traditions are disparagingly called superstitions and hastily discarded.
If one tries to rediscover them and give them value, one risks being accused of regression.
In my view, without fear of going against the tide, we should recognise in the Lucanian character its adherence to an “alternative” culture, whose value lies not in homologation but in a diversity no longer felt as a handicap but as a richness.
It is in this sense and in this way that it can be recognised “at national level” and beyond – indeed, becoming exemplary…
25 – What, in your view, is the main cause of the poor knowledge of Lucanian art and Lucanian artists?
Franco Solmi, in a text dedicated to me, asserted that most southern artists appear on the art scene like meteors, only to disappear quickly.
Apart from my doubts about the real value of such “appearances” in general, the reasons for the difficulty Lucanian art has in establishing itself beyond the region are many… (women artists would deserve a separate discussion, since they are often penalised even earlier and even more within the region than outside it…).
First of all, the relative isolation, the distance from major national and international centres, the difficulties of transport, which still exist (I, commuting to Milan, know something about it!); but above all closure – indeed two kinds of closure: one external, institutional and social; the other internal, of the very people who, belonging to the world of art, should practise the most generous openness, while instead they do everything to practise the worst mechanisms of competition and exclusion.
The fine result is isolation and fragmentation, which leads neither to growth nor to an intelligent, healthy “collective” promotion – certainly easier than individual promotion; but this is prevented by the perverse mechanisms above, as in the tragic tale of the frog and the scorpion: the scorpion, with an instinctive blindness and arrogance stronger than anything else, chose to sting to death the frog that was carrying it across the river, knowing that in this way both would drown…
In general art is held in low regard, as one can see, if there were any need, from the place it occupies – to speak of the most followed media – in the television news: it very nearly comes after the weather forecast!
Of course, considering the behaviour of many people in the world of art, perhaps this lack of interest is justified – but one should not tar everyone with the same brush.
In my view we must begin to reconsider Art, distinguishing quality actions within it, avoiding first of all the perverse mechanism of inadequacy by excess, whereby one punishes those who do better and more, whose only fault is that they please no one…
In this regard – and just to seek some small consolation in the fact that similar things happen in other fields too – I am reminded of what the Italian-American L. Chiavola Birnbaum, author of “Black Madonnas”, points out about Marija Gimbutas.
Over a lifetime of excavations, the great Lithuanian archaeologist discovered irrefutable evidence of an early model of matrilineal society; this allowed her to state that civilisation did not begin, as was thought, with warriors and forts, but with women and ideals of peace and the sacredness of life…
Well, Gimbutas – this eminent scholar and researcher, author of twenty books including “The Language of the Goddess”, who directed five excavations, knew more than twenty languages and received many honours – besides being opposed by her colleagues and by the traditional academic world, and after attempts at ironic or sarcastic belittling, was criticised for having crossed the boundaries of several disciplines, formulated her hypotheses on a large amount of data, and acknowledged her debt to another great unconventional scholar of the nineteenth century, Johann Jakob Bachofen – who was himself punished with silence for his monumental, documented study on origins, which had the great defect of not conforming to the dominant culture (and he got off lightly, since so many others were actually eliminated by that fatal “culture”…).
To come back to us: as for political and mass-media power, it is not for me to recall that the responsibility of service should be stressed, together with the need for a different, non-clientelistic attention towards those who, having talent and working seriously and hard, would deserve real and official recognition.
I believe the saying is “give honour where it is due”…
As for me personally, and referring to the situation in the region, although I can boast the appreciation and esteem of many, as a woman artist I suffer bitter disappointments, noting obvious attitudes of misogyny, and at times responses inversely proportional to the quality and complexity of my work.
Some have even suggested that I limit my activity, my curriculum being, in their opinion, decidedly too voluminous…
But there will be a chance to tell about this, in due course, in my Memoirs…
27–28 – How much do environmental factors (economic poverty, small population, poor communications) and cultural factors (lack of familiarity with art, and a certain ambiguous attitude of over- and under-valuation) weigh on contemporary Lucanian civilisation? If you had to define Basilicata culturally today, skipping the stale, picturesque view of the past, how would you describe it?
In Basilicata too, an overestimation of the importance of economic growth over cultural growth has prevailed, and much has been misunderstood in this respect. I would consider serious reflection indispensable…
But we should also agree on the meaning of the word culture.
In my view, even more serious than lack of schooling is illiteracy of sensitivity and of awareness, and this is only one of the many misunderstandings that mark culture in general – and ours is no exception.
As for the past, it must be reviewed with great care. Used as we were to being regarded as a Cinderella – according to which, together with all the Souths of Italy and of the world, Basilicata was considered a land of backwardness and a concentrate of every superstition – we hastened to deny en bloc everything belonging to that culture we were “forced” to be ashamed of; and in doing so we thoughtlessly eliminated what was important and precious in it too.
We could have many surprises if, reconsidering it with greater wisdom and fewer prejudices, we discovered that, like many “denied” cultures, ours too still has much to tell us.
Provided we are still in time to save something of this thousand-year heritage, which expressed precise values and a surprising conception of the human being in relation to nature and the universe.
29 – What are your artistic references in Italy, and which artistic experience, moment and place fascinates you most?
Both as an artist and as a cultural organiser, researcher and president of the Delta Centre for Art and Culture, I have soft – that is, unfrenzied – contacts with various national and international realities.
I work in particular in Rome and Milan, where I have a studio and collaborate – always softly – with magazines and cultural groups.
I am very fascinated by the new possibility of communicating through a worldwide network – the Internet – and I hope that its good use will allow us to overcome the suffocating tyranny of the mass media, giving us an alternative, more democratic means to communicate, to know and be known, eliminating, besides distances, many perverse links in the chain.
As long as we do not limit ourselves, there too, to simply marketing ourselves and our work.
Perhaps the universe of electromagnetic waves, personalising the forms of communication, will give us the possibility of a higher quality of individual experience, provided that the use of telematic technologies does not exclude the magical, the telepathic, the ecstatic, the real, life (F. Bolelli)…
30 – What are your European and non-European references? Which experiences attract and intrigue you?
So far I have shown my works in more than 60 solo exhibitions and in group shows, regionally, nationally and internationally, in particular in Italy, Switzerland, France, England and the United States, preferring unconventional venues of high cultural level, given my invincible resistance to entering that frenzied consumerist circuit which has nothing to do with art. Until things change, I prefer transversal, alternative references – certainly more precious.
At this point in my journey, I favour on the one hand placing my creative action in space, in search of a renewed, primal sense of thinking/making art; and on the other I refer to experiences that expand and overturn paths, so that there are no obstacles to a fuller understanding of human and artistic reality.
There are interesting contacts not only with places (favouring the Mediterranean area – Malta, Crete, Egypt, Turkey – and their cultures, above all the submerged and lesser-known ones) but with times: I find it fundamental to visit and study the most archaic “sites”, especially the primitive ones, with all their load of authentic artistic expressiveness – what the great art historian Sigfried Giedion called “the most beautiful and accomplished form of representation the world has ever known” – which seem to me not only very topical but far more illuminating than so much later art or pseudo-art of the historical period.
I am interested in experiences of art/life that are neither obtuse nor conventional – those that allow us to see the world outside the “well” in which we often live, believing it to be the only true reality.
TERI VOLINI