Leonardo Caffo. What does it mean to do something for an audience of the future?

Eighth episode

Transcription of the eighth episode of The Disappearance of the public, a new podcast series in which Leonardo Caffo, currently a Philosopher in Residence at the Castello di Rivoli, thinks about the idea of the public, its disappearance, its different characteristics and qualities.

Manuela Vasco: Hello everyone. Welcome to our weekly appointment with Leonardo Caffo, currently a philosopher residing in our museum, with whom we are discussing the idea of the public, its disappearance, its different characteristics and qualities. I’m Manuela Vasco from the Communication Office of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art – Cerruti Collection and I will take you to this new series of podcasts from the Museum. Today we would like to ask Leonardo Caffo, whom we welcome, what does it mean to do something for an audience of the future and not of the present? How do you speak to the audience to come?

Leonardo Caffo: First of all, once again thank you for these questions, which from week to week allow me to deepen this research project on the disappearance of the public and its new adjectives, in a constant dialogue between art and philosophy. Before answering and entering into the theme “what it means to do something for the public of the future, not current and how we can speak to an audience to come” – or the question you ask me today, Manuela – let’s remember a little the context in which we are moving. I am a philosopher in residence, which then in fact means that it is philosophy – personified by my humble person – that is in residence at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art and the director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev with whom we tend to discuss on the idea of ​​the public. What does the otherness that observes us mean? Which public has disappeared with COVID-19? Which has reappeared now that COVID -19 di seems to have momentarily paused and museums like ours have reopened? We have addressed numerous issues that are precisely the themes of which the podcast is a final result but which in reality imply a r continuous and constant research on the different faces and nuances that the public can have. From the beginning, ever since we talked about the fact that the public had already disappeared for a while, both when we talked about a digital audience up to the very last episodes in which we dedicated ourselves to historical memory – to the public of the past, for that matter. say, referring to the Angelus Novus in Walter Benjamin’s reinterpretation and then especially when we dedicated ourselves to the public of objects we supported, we worked on a thesis: the strong public, the real one, the real one, the one that observes you as such , that modifies you, that structures you, that conditions you, that forces you in some way to be an actor and not only part of a reality that transcends you, but to be the real actor, the presenter of theses, theories, objects and events is the most anticipated audience, the most unexpected audience. We even left ourselves with the idea that the objects in our rooms, objects of art, objects and design are somehow a strong form of public. The question you ask me today – and which I have been preparing for during the week – is a question that is paired with our penultimate podcast on the audience of historical memory or the past. What did it mean to speak to a past? Which past? To whom and for how? As we ask ourselves what it means to speak to an audience about the future, there are some important issues at stake. As always, we start from philosophy, then we try to understand something about art, then we rewind and look for the meaning of the evolution of today’s podcast. In these days, so complex for museum reopening, we are slightly less confronted with the director, but the input is always the same: there is art on the one hand and philosophy on the other. “Future” in philosophy means a lot of things but an important distinction in my opinion with respect to what it means if a “public of the future” exists and what it means to speak to a future audience, is what Jacques Derrida – philosopher we have mentioned very much in relation to the non-human public, especially in the public adjective animal. Jacques Derrida in a series of researches on the concept of the future distinguishes between the “future” and what he calls “the future” in French that we could translate into our language as “progress”. The future – Jacques Derrida tells us – is not something in question. It is evident that tomorrow will exist. It may be very different from today, the sun may not rise – although inductive thinking forces us to think that the sun will rise tomorrow – there may no longer be the human species or art, but somehow the future is not in question. The future exists, it exists, even in a relativistic or circular vision of time like that of Friedrich Nietzsche or of dismissal of classical time, like that of contemporary physics, if by “future” we mean the time that follows the present time, it will. The real point is progress, or the morally and aesthetically oriented future. That future that is being crossed. That future that makes us think clumsily – in a progressive theory – that tomorrow will be better than today or in any case the idea that in some way the land of our children – as they also say within often moralistic frames – will have to be better than we left it. In fact, this distinction between future and progress and this somewhat popular saying on earth that it is on loan to those who will come not as a gift from those who have come, actually leads us to the idea of ​​what it means to be observed by those who have come. still not there? In Anglo-American philosophy, a little more technical, we speak of a concept, namely the “trans-generational”. It is a concept of the social anthology, of philosophies, of social sciences, with which we try to understand all those objects – above all precisely of the social debate, political debate, artistic debate and conceptual debate that are made today for tomorrow, or rather for still be alive tomorrow. If we think about it, the monuments are there not as a memento of the present but they are there for someone who will become and who will see them later. The monument itself is the proven proof that the public of the future is a public that forcefully enters the debate. But be careful to feel in the future. We think of the artistic and literary movement of the early twentieth century that falls precisely under the term of Futurism. If we think of what the Futurist Painters’ Manifesto of February 1910 was – what is called in literature the first Futurism – the slogan we find – which maybe makes us smile because more than 110 years have passed – was: “Comrades! We declare to you that the triumphant progress of the sciences has brought about such profound changes in humanity, as to dig an abyss between the docile slaves of the past and us free, we are sure of the radiant magnificence of the future. ” If we for the future start thinking about the future of today compared to yesterday or our future or thinking that our future will be better than that of the past – which in reality of our present – we do not understand exactly the point. It is one thing to talk to the future, which once again turns the question of the public as the futurists did about who produces the action, who produces the scene. Another thing is to think that we can really be observed from the future, exactly with that metaphorical and stylistic fiction that has governed all our research on the disappearance of the public in these months of philosophy in residence at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art. Trying to understand – exactly how we were trying to understand what it could mean that an animal looks at us, not that we look at an animal or that we think an animal looks at you (because even the attribution of subjectivity is a great projection of selfishness) – what mean that the future is watching us. I give examples of works which visitors to our museum can go and look at. Maurizio Cattelan’s work Charlie don’t surf from 1997 is a quote from Francis Ford Coppola’s famous film Apocalypse Now that relates to that scene in which Americans attack and destroy a Vietnamese village to get to a beach and then ride a horse. the waves with their surf. Cattelan obviously uses this quote to explore the infinite declinations of the cruelty of our species. This work is a mannequin with infantile features, with the features of an elementary school age child, probably sitting on his desk. He seems diligent, calm in his being at school but in reality, he is forced into an extremely forced situation, in a situation of total immobility because his hands are pierced by pencils that nail him to the desk. This here in my opinion is a beautiful example of what it means to talk about the future. It is no coincidence that Cattelan mentions this scene from Apocalypse Now where the future – perhaps of the children, of the people who would have been the future adult audiences of the Vietnamese village – is traded, destroyed to surf the waves. As does the language of the future, which should somehow communicate with the audience of the future. This language is education and also school education, it is there that we form the audience of the future. There is nonsense behind this thing – and we have seen it a bit with what the audience of young people means, what it means to be looked at by young people, to recognize young people, adolescents, a point of view – as if the audience of young people, children, was not already a sufficient audience in itself and you need to wait for it to become an adult audience in order to have a real look, to be able to really observe reality. We pretend by abstraction, by metaphor, to think that education is actually a way to train the public of the future. Cattelan wonders at what price, what kind of education, what school, what kind of constraints, what kind of freedom are we giving? At the price of what are we going to trade it for? Let’s try to take small steps forward with respect to what was also the definition of public that I tried to give in previous times starting from this more general analysis of what it means to speak for the future. The disappearance of the public lies in the concept of the production of knowledge, which is a fundamental thing in a research area like the one we are doing here by making philosophy and art dialogue in an extremely limiting way. it is a way of suggesting not to do this, not to do this other, to limit the will to power in this direction or another. The abstraction for the public, to think that there is only one type of public and therefore to manipulate the same word “public”, actually means to force the presence of the articulation of the “public” signifier to function in a purely intellectual way. What will they think of me if they know? What will become of me if I do this? Who could observe them if I did this other and the next step often is to abstract an extremely moralistic kind of public of the future, from which we think we must be observed and judged for our deeds in some way heroic or morally directed, while in reality seeking to speak to the public contrary to what is normally thought has to do with the famous warning – here we quote this beautiful book we have already done in one of the last episodes – by Louis-Ferdinand Céline Journey at the end of the night in which it says “Talking to the future is talking to the worms “. The audience of the future is the only audience that does not exist among those we have talked about in these episodes. Contradicting me, and creating a contraction with the question you asked me at the beginning, the audience of the future is not a real audience because the audience of the future is often an abstraction aimed at postponing what we could have done today to tomorrow. The crises that we could have addressed today are aimed at an audience of the future who will have to deal with all these problems. One of the philosophical thoughts that has also greatly influenced contemporary art that perhaps leans more to the counterintuitive response that this time I am giving you, is what is called acceleration. There are various types of accelerationisms on the left and on the right, there are accelerationisms not by chance linked to the Futurist movement of Depero, of Martinetti, of Cangiullo, of the 1920s. Let’s put it this way, the simplification of the idea that since the future is in danger anyway, the future is dangerous and dangerous for all the ecological crises and for all the social crises we are opposed to, we might as well accelerate the production of knowledge, accelerate production. culture, accelerate economic production to wrap the future in a kind of imminent present in which – here is the key word – an alleged tomorrow is anticipated in the here and now. I do not believe that art and especially contemporary art and today’s art should look to the future. Contemporary art is about the future and progress in a sophisticated relationship that for me is described by these words: anticipation and anticipationism. It is not that he is trying to “talk to the worms” as Céline would say, that is, to those who will come after us or who will eat us precisely. But it is trying to show today in the here and now in the only kind of present time despite the obvious existence of the future that we said at the beginning of “what could happen tomorrow if”; “What will happen tomorrow when”; “What can it mean to exemplify here and now rights not yet acquired, matters not yet resolved, objects not yet invented”. This also has to do a lot with the desire to detonate with the paradox of the contemporary of which Giorgio Agamben speaks in the beautiful pages of “What is the contemporary” in which he says “how it is possible to enclose a contemporary work in a museum from making it archaeological, a work that is oriented to the future immediately becomes oriented to the past “. Obviously, museums are very complex and articulated devices and it is perfectly possible – theoretical paradox aside – to use a museum as an open system in which the work is not investigated, but simply enjoyed. But if for a moment we remain within the circular that is the paradox highlighted by Agamben, here it is the audience of the future to whom we should perhaps address and speak. An audience of the future that observes us constantly observes us observes us daily and expects and wonders what will happen what will happen. We are therefore ourselves. We think we are the present but in reality, in a very particular, very articulated way we are the future. Perhaps not the future of the interventionist or authoritarian poetics of classical futurism – which then, how to say, immediately resulted in movements that somehow, while distancing themselves from fascist ideology, were linked to a more reactionary than revolutionary form – but a future that belongs to us in the moment in which thanks to art and through art we are able to take the words of philosophy so vague and so distant, so truly “worm-oriented” and actually position them through the image in the wonder of the touch of the here and now.

Manuela Vasco: We thank Leonardo Caffo, currently Philosopher in Residence in our Museum, with whom we are discussing the idea of the public, its disappearance, its different characteristics and qualities. I’m Manuela Vasco from the communication office of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art – Cerruti Collection and I thank you for being with us to listen to this podcast, reminding you that the programs of the Castello di Rivoli are primarily made with the contribution of the Piedmont Region. We also thank the CRT Foundation, the City of Turin, the City of Rivoli and our partners Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo and Intesa Sanpaolo Gallerie d’Italia. The digital programs are also realized thanks to the Compagnia di San Paolo Foundation. We look forward to seeing you for the following episode next week with the philosopher Leonardo Caffo.