The Idea of Voice

Hans Ulrich Obrist's recent interviews with Dario Fo, Alberto Garutti, Luca Cavalli Sforza and Franco Vaccari offer a departure point for a reflection on the importance of oral tradition.

Language and thought are the protagonists in Giorgio Agamben's 1985 Idea of Prose. The text is a collection of about thirty concise philosophical treatises. These diverge in their prose format, and refer in a more or less explicit way to the short forms of Hellenic philosophical tradition (fable, short story, apologue, aphorism). Far from setting monolithic demonstrations, Agamben seems from time to time to seek the most appropriate way to put an issue to the attention of the reader, awaken his interest, to make him grasp the essential aspects of the idea exposed. Potentially, these ideas are endless: The Idea of Caesura, The Idea of Vocation, The Idea of Love, The Idea of Shame, The Idea of Glory, The Idea of Death ... One gets the distinct sense of how this collection, though short, has an open formula, and could potentially cover all fields of knowledge and experience.

Almost by analogy, so could be described the curatorial practice of Hans Ulrich Obrist. Open, incremental, multi-faceted: publishing projects, touring exhibitions, marathons, interviews, the latter amenable to The Interview project. Voice and accumulation are the essential elements of this project, started in the mid-nineties by Obrist. The many world views gathered by the Swiss curator, which are now reaching an encyclopaedic number, do not take the form of an argued critical essay, but that of a dialogue between the interviewer and a diverse list of thinkers and practitioners.

Top: Franco Vaccari, <em>Esposizione in tempo reale n. 4: Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio</em> [Real time exhibition n. 4: Leave on this wall a trace of your passage], 36th Venice Biennale, 1972. Above: Luca Cavalli Sforza in one of his travels amongst the pygmies © Arnoldo Mondadori Editore — Top: Franco Vaccari, *Esposizione in tempo reale n. 4: Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio* [Real time exhibition n. 4: Leave on this wall a trace of your passage], 36th Venice Biennale, 1972. Above: Luca Cavalli Sforza in one of his travels amongst the pygmies © Arnoldo Mondadori Editore

The interviewer intends that this shouldn't be a unique event but rather place over time, over several years. Although the interviews transcribed in Obrist's extensive publications preserve their role as historical evidence, is due solely to the physicality of the voice and the bodies of the people involved, which unfold in all its power in the form of dialogue.

On 1 April 2012, in the Sala delle Cariatidi [Caryatid Room] of Milan's Palazzo Reale, Obrist interviewed four guests: Dario Fo, Alberto Garutti, Franco Vaccari and Luca Cavalli Sforza. This year all of them have been or will be featured in major exhibitions in the city: Cavalli Sforza at the Museo di Storia Naturale, Dario Fo at Palazzo Reale, Alberto Garutti at the PAC, and Franco Vaccari at Palazzo Reale, as part of Addio Anni 70. Arte a Milano 1969 / 1980, a project curated by Francesco Bonami with Paola Nicolin.

The set of stories constituted a rich picture of personal poetics, construction of an operational method, relationship to politics and civil society.

Alberto Garutti, <em>Credo di ricordare</em>, 1974. 32 B/W photographs, courtesy Galleria Diagramma, Milan 1975 — Alberto Garutti, *Credo di ricordare*, 1974. 32 B/W photographs, courtesy Galleria Diagramma, Milan 1975

Dario Fo has made explicit from the beginning the importance of the voice, and along with it of oral tradition, in social discourse. He retraced his beginnings, his early practice of storyteller on the train that carried him daily in Milan, experiencing firsthand the more effective ways to get over the first threshold of suspect with the public. While touching various aspects of his background, the practice of painting, drawing and set design, increasingly related to writing, meeting with Franco Parenti and the production of his first screenplays, Fo's speech took on a political tone clearly. From contemporary global issues, such as the reasons for the current economic crisis, he has moved to specific places and experiences, Italian and Milanese. The occupation of the abandoned Palazzina Liberty, from 1974 to 1979, with the growing support of citizens and the collaboration of artists like Sebastian Matta, the personal commitment to build an informed public opinion, in relation to terrible massacres like the one in Piazza Fontana and the following throwing off track activities, the works about these bombings themselves (such as Accidental Death of an Anarchist), his candidacy for mayor of Milan, the desire to establish a new school for the city.

The theme of the master, of the reference figures, latent during the interviews with Garutti and Vaccari, returned with Cavalli Sforza in the center of the discussion, as it had been with Dario Fo and his paradoxical quotations from his friendship with Manzù: "The ancient copy us all."

Two photos of the occupation of the abandoned Palazzina Liberty, from 1974 to 1979, during a show by Dario Fo and Franca Rame. Photos by Enzo Jannacci at Palazzina Liberty. Archive of Franca Rame Dario Fo

As Fo's interview rotated around a public dimension, even of clashes and tensions, Alberto Garutti's revealed a more intimate dimension, of veiled skepticism with respect to the extreme political tension of the seventies. This in some respects may be the result of a generational gap, while for others it is associated with a specific poetic, already revealed in his first work exhibited in 1975 at the Diagramma gallery, Credo di ricordare. Consisting of 32 B/W photos, the work represented the room where the artist lived and a number of objects, and then all the single objects photographed individually. Garutti, an architect by training, considers an artwork as a learning experience. Like Gino De Dominicis and Emilio Prini, he shows a certain scepticism towards the construction of a catalogue raisonné, and develops a research on the theme of error, imperfection and doubt (starting from the Essais of Michel de Montaigne). In the work of Garutti there is a clear processuality and a rooted ethic, where a reflection on the domestic landscape and openness to the dimension of contemporary public art coexist: to go out of galleries and museums, in order not to close ourselves in an island of self-referentiality. The importance of the involvement and acceptance of work by citizens is evident in works such as those made in the nineties, or the more recent room in Bolzano. Garutti considers as an indispensable element dialogue sustained over time, while the interlocutors are multiple: curators and scientists of the CESI (for a recent exhibition at MAXXI in Rome), ordinary citizens and gallery owners. While Fo excoriates the art system, including it in a broader indictment of contemporary capitalism, Garutti recognises as legitimate market practices, sale and exchange in the arts, and ironically underscores their relevance already in the title of a complex work such as Campionario [Sample book], that mixes place, art market, social relations and patronage.

Alberto Garutti, <em>Campionario</em>, 2008. Digital print, courtesy Galleria Massimo Minini — Alberto Garutti, *Campionario*, 2008. Digital print, courtesy Galleria Massimo Minini

Franco Vaccari is known for his experiments in visual poetry and his attention to different forms of anonymous poetry (like graffiti on city walls, to whom he dedicated his first book, 1965's Pop esie), discovered after a fundamental experience of crossing and observation of public spaces. Vaccari has a degree in physics. This has greatly influenced his career, both from the biographic point of view (after graduation, his morning work at a research centre allowed him to spend many afternoons reading texts of all kinds, including The Way of Zen by Alan Watts) and the theoretical one. Some of his recurring and closely interrelated themes derived from physics, as the concept of feedback and that of real time: this differs from the performance as it is not a linear process, something that has already a given plot, but it's structured over time by incorporating random elements, without tending to a goal from the outset. Such is the case with Alice in the Cities (1974), a film by Wim Wenders with no story, where the journey becomes the key device. The exhibitions in real time, up to now about forty, require the intervention of the public, a practice nowadays abused, but innovative in the seventies. The self-taught interest in psychoanalysis and psychology has led Vaccari to work on the technological unconscious (studies collected in the 1979 book Photography and technological unconscious) and to consider physical activity in the production of dreams. These become interesting because source of production of necessary images, in opposition to arbitrary images, induced by the desires and the will of the artist. His album and diary of dreams, developed over many years, has gained a metaphorical, ritual dimension, as a form of crossing the "swamp of doubt" that each artist meets during the early stages of his career.

Travel and ritual are the two elements on which the exhibition at Galleria 2000 in Bologna in 1971 is centred. The displacement, the concealment of the author are at the heart of the 1968 reportage Città vista a livello di cane [The city seen at dog height], and his participation in the 1972 Venice Biennale, where visitors met a blank wall, a photo booth and the invitation in four languages to leave a photographic trace of their passage, for a fee. Surprising is also the video Cani lenti [Slow Dogs]. Filmed in 1971 in Super 8, the dogs were shot in slow motion, their step coinciding with the beat of a song by Pink Floyd, in an artistic transposition of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Similarly, the video Mendicante elettronico [Electronic beggar], presented in Graz in 1973 as part of Trigon, was influenced by the theories of McLuhan.

Franco Vaccari, <em>Cani Lenti</em> video still, 8mm, B/W, music by Pink Floyd, 12', 1971 — Franco Vaccari, *Cani Lenti* video still, 8mm, B/W, music by Pink Floyd, 12', 1971

Luca Cavalli Sforza is a world famous geneticist, first trained in Pavia with Adriano Buzzati Traverso, and later in Cambridge with Ronald Fisher. Cavalli Sforza began in 1952 a statistical analysis of demographic data, focusing his research in the Alta Val Parma (the highest section of a valley in the Apennines). A strong knowledge of both Greek and Latin allowed him to access information contained in the parish books, where the Church had gathered the names of the baptised, and the genealogy of the inhabitants. Further on he evolved the research through the collection of blood samples of inhabitants of seventy-five mountain villages. Crossing skills in genetics, demography, anthropology, Cavalli Sforza has produced real genetic maps, helped by the first modern computing technology (in the fifties has been available for him the first computer in Italian universities).

Thank also to his move to Stanford in the seventies, Cavalli Sforza has gradually extended the research on the human species to other disciplines such as archeology and linguistics, finally studying the hereditary aspects of behaviour. The effectiveness of this method of work was then amplified by his frequent travels and explorations, useful to test on the field the hypotheses previously made, and in turn give impetus to extend and refine the research instruments.

The theme of the master, of the reference figures, latent during the interviews with Garutti and Vaccari, returned with Cavalli Sforza in the center of the discussion, as it had been with Dario Fo and his paradoxical quotations from his friendship with Manzù: "The ancient copy us all."

The Idea of Voice

Hans Ulrich Obrist's recent interviews with Dario Fo, Alberto Garutti, Luca Cavalli Sforza and Franco Vaccari offer a departure point for a reflection on the importance of oral tradition.

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