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Marco Evaristti and the Open Work
By Anna Karina Hofbauer
Throughout the 20th century there was and still is today at the start of the 21st century an ever increasing interest in the role and meaning of the recipient in relation to the work of art. Art history has of course always challenged the observer, but principally on an actively contemplative level. As Georg F.W. Hegel put it:
Regardless of how much it is presented as being a self-contained, internally coherent world, the work of art does not really exist as an isolated object for its own sake, but for us, the public, who look at it and enjoy it.
The audiences perception and enjoyment of art obviously constitute a factor equivalent to its contemporary worth.
But it took some time before the historical Avant-garde at the beginning of the 20th century really opened up the work of art in the sense of allowing the public to intervene. This is the thesis of Umberto Ecos The Open Work and the claim of Tommaso Marinettis 1913 manifesto Teatro di Varietá. The distance between the audience and the art itself should disappear with time, resulting in the audiences active participation. The Variety Theatre is alone in seeking the audience´s collaboration. It doesn´t remain in static like a stupid voyeur, but joins noisily in the
action, in the singing, accompanying the orchestra, communicating with the actors in surprising actions and bizarre dialogues. Right up to the 1960s the Avant-garde set out to involve and challenge the audience in happenings, for example. In the 1960s and 1970s so-called reactive environments and closed-circuit-installations employed technology to engage the audience. But the Fluxus movement, for example, also tended to give the observer a place and a key role in relation to the work. It is within this long formal and philosophical tradition with its strong roots, that we can place the participatory work of Marco Evaristti.
His installation Helena was first seen at Trapholt in Kolding in February 2000 and later in a slightly modified form at Kunstraum Dornbirn in Austria in 2006. Helena consisted of ten Moulinex Optiblend 2000 mixers, standing on an ordinary, everyday table. Each mixer was filled with water, thus providing an aquarium for an orange goldfish to swim round in. The mixers were plugged in and ready to be switched on and this was made visible to the audience. Anyone who pressed the yellow button would kill a goldfish and transform the contents of the liquidiser to cold fish soup. So the audience became arbiters over life and death in a situation where it was crystal clear what would happen if they pressed the button. In Helena the audience were faced with two possible choices: either to push the button and kill the goldfish or to leave the liquidiser alone and preserve its function as an aquarium. The installation puts temptation in the way of the visitor, challenging his/her ethics and morals. If one pushes the button, one becomes part of the interactive work, thus breaking ones own boundaries.
But what was the essence of Helena and what was Evaristtis real intention in allowing the audience to participate in this way? Evaristtis idea was to divide visitors to the museum into three groups: The idiot, who pushed the button, the voyeur, who loves to watch and the moralist. According to Evaristti, more than one person pushed a button at Trapholt. At Kunstraum Dornbirn a female visitor did the deed, knowing full well that she was being recorded on video in the act of taking the life of a goldfish. The artist regards the media and the public as the voyeurs. Groups such as the Animal Protection League and others who complained were the moralists. Evaristti sees the installation as a social experiment: if art is reality expressed via lies, he in his own work wishes to express reality via reality. That means, that when it is matter of permitting the audience actively to participate, allowing them to liquidise goldfish into fish soup, Evaristti uses real goldfish, not dummies. Despite the implicit rules of the museum, the intention of Helena was to see if anyone would push the button.
Evaristti contends that, Here one sees evil, sadism, our animal instinct, because we know that, if we push the button, there is a chance that it could work. The fulfilment of the work occurs at the moment when the visitor decides to push the button, grabbing the opportunity to participate. The participatory element in this otherwise sculptural work leads to a modification of reality, in which it is not Evaristti who comes over as irresponsible and spineless, but where he passes on the ethical and moral issues to the observer. The opportunity to show ones true colours, to give evidence of ones own morals and opinions can be regarded as a possible message. Another form of participation occurred in the work The Line of Fame, in which the public became co-players in the public space. On 10 June 2004 Evaristti laid a 1.6 kilometre long red carpet, stretching from Rådhuspladsen to Kongens Nytorv in Copenhagen. A sign on Rådhuspladsen encouraged people to take a walk on the red carpet, to enjoy a sense of importance, to be a temporary VIP. It is Andy Warhols fifteen minutes of fame that Evaristti is making reference to. In the exhibition Pink State, which saw the light of day at Kunstraum Dornbirn in 2005, visitors could not only walk around in a magnificent man-made landscape, but also go fishing for real fish in the constructed lake, play pétanque, go trekking in the mountains or relax in a tent.
In the exhibition, Just Use it !, at Nordjyllands Kunstmuseum in Aalborg, Denmark chose Evaristti and the Austrian artist, Dieter Buchhart to collaborate on an installation, which was finally entitled Loving Family. It involved multicoloured balloons hanging in a corner of the exhibition space, each balloon printed with one of the following words: mother, father, child, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, grandmother and grandfather. In front of the, roughly speaking, 100 balloons there was a SoftAir gun, which the public could use to shoot and burst the balloons with. Thus the spectator became an active, shooting museum visitor. Buchhart and Evaristti provoked and challenged people to break their boundaries and posed the question of whether they made an emotional connection between the labels on the balloons and the members of their own families. Was it just a question of shooting a balloon down or was it something more profound, or was it a brutal act anyway to burst a balloon with the word mother on it? For many the emotionally charged balloons symbolised a recognizable familial relationship and a sheltered existence. Some of the balloons had no labels on them and represented the outsiders in the group: were they easier to shoot down? As the artists themselves stated: We live in a society totally based on functional labels, which indicate that the family is a closed group, but that same society expects a great deal of individuality. Thats a bit of a paradox! Evaristti often involves a slice of reality in his works, so the work ultimately becomes a social experiment and a study of the spectator.
Playing VIP on a red carpet for a short while, performing leisure activities in the name of art or liquidising goldfish in kitchen appliances in hitherto determined, coded frameworks, all these are of course actions, whose fundamental guidelines have been pre-defined by the artist. At the same time the work still contains and provides a good deal of freedom and openness in terms of its relationship to the visitor. But to what extent does Evaristti control the works message and the observers participation and reception? According to Umberto Eco the aesthetic message sent from an object or (in this case) installations should be regarded in accordance with a system, which contains historically loaded expectations, which most art in fact does. These expectations are recognisable from their particular code. Eco departs from the conventional and obvious codes function, in that he gives each message an individual aesthetic code. This opening up of a stagnant ideology concerning the aesthetic nature of a work of art immediately releases infinite meanings. It permits an opening up not just on a philosophical level, but clears the way for the observer to be a receiver, a collaborator with an actual role in the aesthetic context.
The observer must enter into a relationship in order independently to cause changes in the work, which releases an otherwise unobtainable reception for the active visitor. The works to which Eco refers do not appear closed, and there is no definite message. Evaristti consciously creates works to be used and which are dependent on the observers initiative to reorganise the form. Ultimately this transmits an individual meaning and message, which is created out of the individual aesthetic code, which the individual work contains. As Eco says: Consequently the [works] do not appear as finished works, which need to be experienced and understood according to a given structural guideline, but as open works, which are completed by the interpreter at the precise moment when they are enjoyed aesthetically.
By Anna Karina Hofbauer, 2007
Curator and art historian
PAGE 1
Georg F. W. Hegel, Ästhetik, vol. 1, Berlin & Weimar 1965, p. 259.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Variety Theatre (29. september 1913), in: Michael and Victoria Nes Kirby: Futurist Performance, New York 1986, p. 181.
Dieter Buchhart & Anna Karina Hofbauer, Sollen wir alle Menschen verklagen, die Meeresfrüchte essen?, in: Kunstforum International, vol. 162, November December 2002, Ruppichteroth 2002, pp. 270279.
Ibid., p. 275.
According to Dieter Buchhart and Marco Evaristti
Umberto Ecos The poetic of the open work or Opera aperta consists of a collection of texts, which were Ecos contribution to the 12th International Philosophy Conference in 1958. It was not until 1962 that the texts were published with the title Umberto Eco: Opera aperta. Mailand 1962
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