It is possible, moreover, to identify internal divisions within radicalism that lend greater complexity to the subject. One can argue in fact that there exists a variety of ways of understanding the term. Thus, works that have brought about changes in the language of art can be thought of as radical, along with those that have shown a capacity to analyze and penetrate social and/or political situations, even when clearly not a few of the experiences are interwoven.

Many episodes linked to the historical avant-gardes (especially Futurism and Dada) can be considered radical phenomena. Here, however, I see such episodes as important antecedents since the term radical would not assume its current meaning until the early 1960s. It was only from that period on that artists found themselves working directly with reality, violence and excess, while adopting extreme social and political stands and acting with a kind of “actionism” that had been theorized and subsequently “represented,” rather than acted on by the historical avant-garde. It is certainly impossible not to define the positions expressed by Marinetti in the First Futurist Manifesto as radical. ^[1] Clearly, however, the acts that were carried out and the provocation given voice were not thought of as art by the Futurists, but as something else. We have to wait for Duchamp's gestures and especially the 1960s when, his ready-mades now fully digested, reality becomes artists' field of activity and their alphabet. In the `60s then, along with the different imagination conveyed by the emerging counterculture at the time, ^[2] many artists from a wide range of sensibilities and trends found they were in good company in choosing to break down every possible barrier delimiting “competency” in artistic representation. The frame, the gallery's white walls and the distance between representation and reality were actually erased by a good number of artworks, from the happenings mounted by Allan Kaprow and Fluxus, Beuys's actions and Hans Haacke's Condensation Cube or Waves, to Michael Heizer's excavations or Richard Long's circles on a beach, Kounellis's horses in a gallery, Daniel Buren's bands of color, and so on. The sudden forceful appearance of reality in art is not an obvious development, however, and is not any less free of repercussions and uncertainties. To focus one's own interests and creativity on reality and the political might well amount to rejecting the world of art. Maybe as Maurizio Cattelan suggests in an interview published here, the only true form of extreme radicalism, of repudiating the rules and authority of the art system, is flight. ^[3] It is a deligitimization that leads to negating the importance of one's reference points. Examples abound of artists (as well as critics, gallery owners, etc.) who at some point begin to think that “serious” things are done elsewhere, that the real world is governed by other laws, and that one has to answer to them. As far as Italy is concerned, two examples come to mind, Piero Gilardi and Carla Lonzi, and I'm sure every country can come up with examples of its own. Piero Gilardi organized solo shows at the Sperone Gallery in Torino and Ileana Sonnabend's in Paris and was part of the group of artists mentioned in Germano Celant's “Arte Povera, appunti per una guerriglia.” ^[4] In 1968, however, the artist decided to merge his art with his personal life, developing his creative work inside psychiatric hospitals and political movements in Italy, as well as traveling to Kenya and Nicaragua in search of different forms of collective creativity. ^[5] A somewhat similar case is Carla Lonzi, who in 1970 decided to definitively abandon her role as militant critic in order to found Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, a publishing house that was to prove for a number of years one of the most important breeding grounds for feminist consciousness not only in Italy. ^[6]

No doubt both of these flights from art (if we can call them that) spring from the difficulty one encounters in unifying experiences in the artistic field. In '68 the generalized political contestation led to seeing art as a field of minor relevance with regard to a totalizing politico-social commitment. For practically all artists, art and politics traveled along parallel paths in their lives and they lacked the means for reconnecting them in a single experience. Yet slowly the two were indeed reunited for some artists and politically active collectives, especially American ones, that had made several attempts to interweave the two fields. In that regard, I think the actions and works of collectives like Group Material or Gran Fury, or even Guerrilla Girls in their way, who began to “show” their political activity starting in the 1980s, transforming a decision reached by the group into an aesthetic proposition, have certainly been important. Another limit was broken down and the fields of ethics and aesthetics found themselves superimposed one atop the other. A choice made by the collective, or the decision to present oneself hidden behind a mask as the Guerrilla Girls have done, is also a way of denying significance to the very idea of the author (or the single author) and undermining the foundations of that castle of Romantic conventions that places the figure of the artist on a pedestal, from which we expect inspiration and genius. Later the possibility of working on the web would give a final push to that edifice, which had preserved both the aura of the work of art and the concept of the author as a characteristic of artmaking. Here I need to take a step back once again, however, and return to the 1970s, which began with a series of works that makes the body—the body as a field of action and experimentation—the center of attention. A number of pieces are emblematic in this regard, works like Vito Acconci's 1970 Trademarks, in which the artist marked with his own teeth every part of his body that he managed to reach with his mouth; or Chris Burden's 1971 Shoot, a performance during which a friend of the artist shot him in the arm with a .22-caliber pistol from a distance of five meters; or again Marina Abramovic's 1973 performance Rhythm 0, where she invited members of the audience to do whatever they wanted with her using 72 different objects, including ballpoint pens, scissors, chains, etc. All of these works (along with others by Gina Pane, Urs Luthi, etc.) pushed the limits and the possibilities of experience further and further back.

Also in the early 1970s appear the first graffiti that were to go on to become a more widespread artistic phenomenon in the second half of the same decade. Art flooded back into the street, existing as an identification of the self and one's own group. It was transgression, run-down environment, tension, collective rite. Graffiti makes concrete the idea of a spontaneous poiesis that uses not cultured references but popular culture, music and a creativity that springs from the low without any preexisting hierarchy, a creativity forged by challenges out in the field.

Graffiti artists also put us in mind of another fact, namely, that those groups of kids were made up of Greeks, Portoricans, Cubans and African-Americans, implicitly demonstrating that culture and art are no longer the exclusive heritage of the Western tradition. The sudden influx of minorities (or better, majorities, in demographic rather than economic terms) into contemporary art proves fundamental to understanding the distance between the political/artistic commitment of the 1960s and of more recent years. The art world has awakened to find itself no longer white, male, Western and heterosexual, but like the real world, rich in outlooks, different cultures and even ways of understanding one's own sexuality.

The padded world of art thus found itself in contact not only with different habits and a different chromatic or iconographic sensibility, but also with problems of exploitation, violence and a disequilibrium of power that Western society had created and shifted to its margins. The violence turned against oneself in the work of Acconci, Burden or Abramovic can indeed turn against the very society that has marginalized, conditioned and exploited us. And the performances of Brener or Kulik were quick to bear witness to that. What occurred in the 1970s and 80s with individual or groups of activist American or European artists was amplified and rendered harsher by a far more serious economic reality and repressive situation in places like Russia or Latin America in the 1990s. Among many examples, I might mention Angel Delgado's performance in which he defecated on a copy of the regime's official daily organ Granma during the show “El Objecto Esculturado” (mounted as a way of officially recognizing the collaboration between Cuban institutions and young artists). Delgado's gesture was a very provocative one indeed (especially when one thinks of the treatment reserved for dissidents on the island), and offers major similarities with performances enacted by Kulik or Brener from the former Soviet Union. Even in this instance it is clear how high the very real risk is of ending up in jail for a gesture of defiance vis-à-vis a government that is anything but inclined to accept acts of provocation or dissent.

With a spray can of paint Brener sprayed a dollar sign on a work by Malevich hanging in Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum and in fact paid for his gesture with imprisonment, an extreme gesture of rebellion toward the so-called Western “free market,” the commercialization of art and the violence contained in the mechanisms of selection and promotion in both art and life. However, the personal risk the artist runs cannot be the sole standard for evaluating the importance of a work of art, nor can it be considered in and of itself the only characteristic of radicalism in art and politics. Operations that are conducted entirely in the context of art and which are conceived and carried out in the artist's own studio are probably more radical than the former, in which there figures a major component of transgression with respect to the rules governing society. In other words then, the nth tag sprayed on train wagons, which is punishable by a hefty fine, even a quite stiff one, and imprisonment (theoretically), is certainly risky, although it is equally true that it adds little to our consciousness, is incapable of changing our point of view, and indeed cannot be taken as a real embellishment of the blighted space of cities' poorest quarters.

In the last decade the desire to break down stereotypes and preconceptions, as it continues to evolve, has spared no one, no longer limiting itself to going against “bourgeois mentality,” but also striving to discern the tolerable limits to the politically correct on the left. Bruce LaBruce, for example, has directed a porn film (Skin Flick) for the German production company Cazzo Film in which the gay erotic imagination blends with skinhead machismo (notoriously not overly tolerant with regard to the various types of “diversity”). Santiago Sierra works in an even more radically “unacceptable” way, showing us in a kind of mirror that thanks to money, one can do, if not everything, then certainly quite a lot in every sense of the word, even exploit people and violate the code of ethics. In one recent show inside a deconsacrated church that had been transformed into an exhibition space, he paid a number of Eastern European prostitutes to disrobe and assume positions that would easily satisfy any man's erotic fantasy, then had their vaginas covered with polyurethane. ^[7] On other occasions he had people masturbate in a gallery, had a line tattooed down the backs of six individuals, and had the hair of unauthorized, mainly African street merchants dyed blond during the Venice Biennial. At the Pusan International Contemporary Art Festival in Korea, Sierra realized an installation with 68 people who blocked the entrance to the show, displaying signs that bore the inscription “I am being paid 3,000 wons [£1.90, twice the country's minimum wage] per hour to undertake this job.” Obviously this goes beyond the formula “Show us what we don't want to know exists” adopted by Andres Serrano, to name just one artist. With The Morgue, for example, Serrano gave us very beautiful images (which possess a kind of “intrinsic classicalness”) of dead people in morgues. This work goes further because Serrano's gesture isn't limited to an image; an act is carried out and its questionable taste in terms of ethics detracts nothing from its coherence with “the spirit of the age.” Perhaps though, as in the case of Serrano, who shared with Mapplethorpe the distinction of being the most provocative artist vis-à-vis bourgeois respectability throughout the 1980s, ^[8] even this manner of doing art is limited to using the techniques of the moment. It is an art of relationships, of exchanges with people, things or mechanisms rather than mere images. ^[9] And after all, while the world of art prides itself in being open, flexible, ground breaking and democratic, are we prepared to see every aspect of reality reflected in art?

The art of Teresa Margolles, to continue with Mexico and Mexican artists, evinces another way of operating that is based on the same mechanisms used by Sierra. Margolles has collected organic liquid from morgues (Fluidos, an installation from 1996 in which she indeed presented 270 litros de materia químico-orgánica recuperados de la morgue), used human fat taken from liposuction centers to paint one of the gallery walls in Berlin's Kunstwerke, and eventually went so far in a piece from 1999 as to place the remains of a child inside a cement block and put it on display (the remains were bought earlier from the mother, who didn't have the means to pay for a proper burial). The distance between her morgue and Serrano's is emblematic of the treatment of death and its representation, but it also suggests how changed the concept of radicalism has become in the last few years and, in truth, just a few miles apart. Perhaps what's at work here is only a discourse of identity in which there is a shift from the concept “I'm different and marginalized and proud of it,” and I make that the center of attention, to “I buy therefore I am” (as Barbara Kruger has put forward several times) and I make you see even the shabbiest aspects of that... And by the way, I cost...

That the Mexican economy is crushed by the colossus to the north might be one explanation for the attention the new generation of Mexican artists is focusing on the mediation of money. Although she continues to bring to light how economic problems are essential in artistic processes as well as those beyond art in the real world, Minerva Cuevas works in a completely different manner. Under the name Mejor Vida Corp., ^[10] this artist, who is still quite young, has created an agency that aims to raise people's standard of living. In the course of her “actions,” she has given away subway tickets, put together fake student identity cards that guarantee a reduction on the price of admission to museums and reduced fares on public transportation, cleaned public areas without being asked to, printed fake bar codes to buy products in supermarkets at ridiculous prices... in short, has built an alternative economic system while often stepping over the bounds of legality. Along with those acts, the artist has also reworked advertisements by major Mexican companies, aiming to stand their intentions on their head and unmask uncomfortable truths. Hans Haacke, ^[11] the titular god of an ethical art committed to revealing the mechanisms of the “enchanted” world of art and society in general, obviously casts his long shadow here, even if, in the work of the youngest artists mentioned above, an element of irony, disenchantment and active construction of potentially real mechanisms for destroying the rules of the game makes their output a product that is absolutely different and up to date. The common denominator here is the wish to highlight the ethical, moral and institutional chaos in a world that embraces the economy, for which everything has its price, as the sole value recognized by everyone (while denying it).

In a situation in which the multinationals shift their own production and interests to wherever there are fewer rules (or none), who knows, perhaps an attempt to introduce an order in things with a positive, constructive attitude is in fact more radical. And thus, to turn to the political phenomena around us in recent years, one is right to wonder whether the attitude of the antiglobalists, who are more capable of giving rise to mediation, isn't indeed more radical than the attitude espoused by the “black blocks,” the violent demonstrators in Genoa. And further, whether an oeuvre extraordinarily ethical like Alfredo Jaar's, or Lucy Orta's social support, or Park Fiction's ^[12] pragmatic and ecologically committed action aren't in fact more radical than Brener's destructive acts or Santiago Sierra's and Teresa Margolles's “payments.” From a strictly linguistic point of view, the distinction for being the most radical would go to the latter, but as I said at the start, it is certainly difficult to agree on the concept of radicalism. Then again, is a critical reading mainly based on a “evolutionist” line of development radical enough? Or this, is radicalism itself a standard for making a judgment?

In the end, the field can be broadened and, with a little bit of rhetorical showmanship, one can affirm that the two most radical images in recent years were put together by Bush père and Osama bin Laden. The former in the early 1990s, with a war waged with infrared images and “without bodies,” or better, without ever showing (or nearly) images of the dead. It has been called a “surgical operation” several times and the images were truly fascinating because they were abstract images of a future (present) of so-called smart bombs. Yet the images are those of a new narrative of victors with ancient rules: the more beautiful they were, the more they reassured us, we in the West, that war is not so dirty. In the second instance, the image is completely obvious even if it seems impossible, a piece of pure fiction put out by the most sophisticated Hollywood studios. At the same time, in a highly refined production the image was filmed, reproduced, shown, even commented on by the adversary, introducing a feeling of incomprehension vis-à-vis reality since every catastrophe to which we “aspire” with films like Independence Day was indeed made “real.” On many sides we hear it said there is a before and after 9/11, not only because of the nearly 3000 American deaths (a ridiculous figure compared with the great numbers of dead from previous and current wars—and what more is to be said for the million Tutsis massacred in Rwanda in 1994?), but also because of both the manner and the symbol. The attack was carried out in the heart of the United States, in the heart of the city that symbolizes modernity, in the heart of Western economic power—in the heart of each one of us, who for the first time in the postwar period felt threatened inside our homes. Moreover, the tragedy proved a media image rich in cross-references and connections, skillfully constructed, with meticulous care and cunning, tightly linking reality and fiction as never before. ^[13]

If “form followed fiction” in that case (to paraphrase the title of Jeffrey Deitch's show), reality has now managed to imitate fiction so well that it completely absorbs it, luring it into its net and appropriating a radicalism that had been solely a creature of our imagination until then.

Radical art (reality) is no longer conveyed by symbolic images but processes that produce images. Art must needs settle accounts with reality, a reality that has indeed absorbed and digested the fiction that was imitating it. Thus Christoph Draeger's Crash and Johan Grimonprez's Dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y seem like almost prophetic reflections on airliner crashes and 9/11, and especially our voyeuristic fascination with disaster and death...And what better radicalism than confronting our own fantasies? And where do the utopian projects of Peter Fend (who founded Ocean Earth Construction and Development Corporation in 1980) or Marko Peljhan's Makrolab fit into this particular panorama? ^[14] Are these also radical? And how are we to consider the work of Kendell Geers? His is an oeuvre of keen and continual opposition to stereotypes and conventions of every stripe, even in terms of the artist's own identity, with Geers deciding that in theory he was born in May 1968 since he is the offspring of that protest.

There remains one thing, however, that proves more difficult to explain: Why do museums and institutionalized galleries, central to cultural policy—and consequently (or previously?) to the economy as well—take any interest in an art that negates power, combats it, often detests it and seeks to destroy it? ^[15] Is this once again a quest for our fears of being destroyed, which lie at the basis of disaster films, or simply a way of riding the nth trend that can be absorbed by a market in search of something new? Or is it a healthy passion that drives us to seek to understand and discuss the world around us, which is implicit in every cultural and artistic gesture? To each the chance to blend, in doses that he or she sees fit to absorb, the various ingredients of this hardcore cocktail.

Footnotes

^[1] I need only quote points nine and ten of the Manifesto published 20 February 1909 by Le Figaro under the title “Le Futurisme”: “9. We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman. 10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.”

^[2] I find four events very interesting in this regard, the work done (February-April 1996) at Exit Art and The Drawing Center in New York, and the related shows Counterculture. Information from the Underground Press to the Internet (curated by Brian Wallis) and Cultural Economies: Histories from the Alternative Arts Movement, NYC (curated by Julie Ault).

^[3] “When it can no longer struggle against the wind and sea, a sailboat has two possible courses. It can heave to (the jib hauled in against the wind and the helm alee), which puts it at the mercy of wind and wave, or fly before the storm, taking the seas abaft with a minimum of canvas. Far out at sea flight often remains the only way to save the ship and its crew. It also enables one to discover the unknown shores that heave into sight at the horizon, rising up from the sea's newfound calm. Shores forever unknown to those who have the apparent good fortune of being able to follow the route sailed by cargoes and oil tankers, the route that skirts the unexpected, which maritime transportation companies impose,” Henri Laborit, preface to Éloge de la fuite (Robert Laffont: Paris, 1976).

^[4] Flash Art, (Rome, Nov. 1967).

^[5] For further information on his work and choices, see Piero Gilardi: Dall'arte alla vita dalla vita all'arte (La Salamandra).

^[6] For further information and a bibliography of the works published by both Scritti di Rivolta Femminile and Carla Lonzi, see Marta Lonzi and Anna Jaquinta, Vita di Carla Lonzi (Scritti di Rivolta Femminile, Milan, 1980).

^[7] As Pier Luigi Tazzi explains in the introduction, “When one of the two positions was assumed, the gallery owner would cover the area around the vagina with black plastic roughly cut from trash bags. Then two employees from a specialized firm sprayed the covered area with polyurethane. Whenever the spray cans of polyurethane were empty, the black plastic covering now slathered with white foam was removed and tossed on the floor of the church, which was devoid of any “officiating priests” and witnesses, and they passed on to another position and another girl. When the entire operation was carried out on all 18 girls, photographed by Sierra and filmed by the artist Teresa Margolles, the prostitutes were paid by the gallery owner 105 euros each and allowed to dress once again.” The show, Poliuretano espreado sobre 18 personas, took place at the Poleschi Gallery in Lucca in March 2002.

^[8] The debate that the artist's Piss Christ sparked in '87 is well known to all. Timothy Potts, director of National Gallery of Victoria, was indeed forced to close the show in which this piece was displayed.

^[9] Even though the harshly critical reception reserved for Chris Ofili's piece The Holy Virgin Mary (also realized with elephant dung) for the show Sensation comes at a much earlier date, it can be situated in the wake of these examples. On the other hand, it can also be seen as a shift to a succeeding attitude, given the significance accorded the mental connections and constructions: the show's title, hardly chosen by accident by a major advertising executive like Saatchi, and the fact that it wasn't the image but the material that provoked a scandal, would seem to favor the latter hypothesis.

^[10] For a complete panorama of her work, or to make use of her free services, visit her web site at www.irational.org/mvc/.

^[11] How can one not recall here Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971, a piece dating from 1971 that resulted in the cancellation (six weeks before its scheduled opening) of the artist's solo show at the Guggenheim in New York, a work that Thomas Messer, director of the museum, defined as “inappropriate”?

^[12] A group of artists (from various disciplines) who managed to save a park in Hamburg from real-estate speculation. For further information, see www.parkfiction.org.

^[13] Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates, 2002: “...One should therefore turn around the standard reading according to which, the WTC explosions were the intrusion of the Real which shattered our illusory Sphere: quite on the contrary, it is prior to the WTC collapse than we lived in our reality, perceiving the Third World horrors as something which is not effectively part of our social reality, as something which exists (for us) as a spectral apparition on the (TV) screen.”

^[14] See www.makrolab.ljudmila.org.

^[15] This holds for the present show, but a similar question can be raised with regard to London's White Chapel and the late-2000 exhibition Protest & Survive curated by Paul Noble and Matthew Higgs (even if the concept of radicalism in that instance probably proved to be a broader one and linked more to representation than action), as well as so many other occasions in which this same short circuit occurred.