Surely, the image of the flames rising high in Piazza Municipio in Naples is even fascinating in its powerful destructive force. A show that leaves breathless and dismayed, as unstoppable lava flows that overwhelm everything, as it must have happened with the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 d.c. in Pompeii and Herculaneum, just a few kilometers from here.
But let’s not exaggerate, hold off the memory and risky mental associations (the land of fires, with its black fumes to spread dioxin in the air, another example). Only - let’s say - the Venere degli Stracci by Michelangelo Pistoletto burns. A few days away from its location in Piazza Municipio, the 10-meter-high resin reproduction of Bertel Thorvaldsen, the most frigid among neoclassical sculptors, and the mountain of rags with the installation are reduced to ash. The metallic, blackened, solitary and desolate skeleton remains, witness of the destruction, archaeological find before time. The artist and the mayor talk about reconstruction.
Shame. The new artwork generated by the stake is, in its own way, a masterpiece and makes Pistoletto a contemporary Giordano Bruno, a misunderstood genius, a martyr devoted to a sacredness of vilified and misunderstood art. Why give it up? All the more so since humanity does not remain without this Venus conceived in 1967 and has the versions exhibited at the Fondazione of the Master in Biella, at the Castello di Rivoli, at the Tate in Liverpool and at the Madre Museum in Naples itself, if it really is pining for nostalgia. Moreover, the installation, like most conceptual works, at first sight does not arouse admiration, it must be studied to be understood.
In summary: Venus as a symbol of immortal beauty, understood according to the Socrates and Plato thought for whom beauty is good (Kalòs kai agathòs), is opposed to the heap of rags, bleak vision to emblem of who we are and what we produce. The work, born from the protest against consumerism in the 60s and 70s, had ended up recycling itself in the last Neapolitan edition with the assumption of ecological nuances, more pertinent to the current collective sensitivity. Poetics of refusal to denounce refusal. Police stopped a 32-year-old homeless man, likely guilty of iconoclastic ferocity. A discard of society would, therefore, have burned what society discards.
The ragman who sets the rags on fire: we are at the law of retaliation, we have what we deserve.
