Angelo Crespi

The exhibition “Condensare l’Infinito” by Michele Ciacciofera, hosted at the MA*GA museums in Gallarate, the Passerelle Centre d’Art Contemporain in Brest and the Building gallery in Milan, evokes the artist’s journeys from the Mediterranean to Brittany and finally to Scotland, crossing the Pre-Alpine and Alpine ranges.The catalogue explores the artist’s creative journey and takes the form of a geographical atlas punctuated with theoretical and visual references, aiming to recount in a fresh way the history—or rather, the stories—of the emergence of the relationship between humanity and space. Michele Ciacciofera, using a variety of artistic techniques, including installation, sculpture, painting, drawing, theatrical performances, video and sound, freely combines media and methods of exploring nature, history, mythology and humanity. This diversity is reflected in the volume through five sections dedicated to five archetypes of the artist’s work.The authors—Alessandro Castiglioni, the book’s editor, Melissa Bianca Amore, Angelo Crespi and Loïc Le Gall—each from their own perspective, examine the concepts of time and space, outlining the possible paths through which humankind marks its passage and leaves its trace.The texts are in Italian, French and English.

Contemporary churches often resemble industrial warehouses, swimming pools, bars or garages. They almost never have a façade, and bell towers are a distant memory. Inside, they are disorienting and sterile, like waiting rooms, and instead of a dome there is a ceiling that brings to mind not God but the tenant upstairs. The rose windows have been replaced by skylights, and the sacred images by bland works of abstract art that evoke a vague spirituality devoid of transcendence; in homage to minimalism, the altars look as though they have come straight out of an Ikea catalogue. The horror of these new places of worship is the price the Church pays for modernity: after the Second Vatican Council, it abandoned traditional forms, preferring the most daring architectural extravagances or, worse still, eagerly submitting to the bureaucracy of planning committees.And yet, new, grandiose cathedrals are springing up everywhere: these are the museums, designed by celebrated starchitects, driving forces of tourism and billion-pound investments, places no longer intended to preserve memories but to serve as luxurious packaging for contemporary art, themselves works of art, icons, places where culture becomes religion. Hordes of the faithful set off on pilgrimage: just as they once went to Chartres, they now head to the Guggenheim in Bilbao or the Tate Modern in London to worship the idols and relics of the contemporary age.In an amusing and amused manner, Angelo Crespi surveys these ugly churches, relating them to the guidelines of the Italian Episcopal Conference, which offers architects a comical little handbook born not of faith but of a sort of post-conciliar pauperistic moralism; on the other hand, he rails against the designs of deconstructivist museums—enormous alien spaceships made of glass, iron and concrete—which increasingly dominate the urban landscape, serving as entertainment factories and mills of meaning and consensus.

Dirty socks, inflatable footballs, sharks in formaldehyde, stuffed donkeys, stones scattered on the ground, and a lot of pornography and scat. Irreverence, nonsense and senseless amusement appear to be the new categories of contemporary art, where the market alone defines a work’s value and no aesthetic judgement is allowed. Today, the only thing that has a meaning is the artist’s brand which, aside from the end result, churns out art like rabbits produce their young, obeying the command of blind production and profit, while contemporary art museums, empty shells without content, authenticate the prices of these new “pieces of junk”. The only problem is that this new art aspires to being compared with traditional art, to engaging with the greats of the past. A new name would have to be found for it, a new category for a new taxonomy in which to place all those ugly, senseless and often badly made things that call themselves art. Angelo Crespi has a name for these new works: sgunz As a disenchanted but competent viewer, he plunges  the knife into today’s rotten system: critics, curators, gallerists, famous artists young and old, all victims and promoters of a self-perpetuating mechanism. Following the tried and tested school of thought extending from Robert Hughes to Jean Clair, he gives us a manual for survival in an ever-more intricate jungle; a lifeboat for anyone who has lost their bearings, for those who go against the current and still believe in art. Real art, that is.