Elisabetta Benassi
Lady and Gentlemen
Fondazione Adolfo Pini, Milan
Curated by Gabi Scardi
14.09.2021 – 17.12.2021
Dear Betta,
These watercolors reproducing the cheques bearing the signatures of the Masters and gathered by Luciano Anselmino, carry the flavor of the 20th century, of Dadaism, of the philosophy of art and life as a game, which I personally miss a lot. Anselmino didn’t live long, like many of his gifted and intuitive contemporaries. It is futile to wonder what he would have thought of our merely evocative and publicity-driven world. As it’s futile, I believe, to ascribe to this collection of cheques a dubious and casual value of “prophecy.”
His idea is simple and brilliant: to recombine the elements because things themselves never make sense, but rather their reciprocal placing. Therefore, the signature of the Masters is the conceptual and more classic hinge of the authenticity and uniqueness of the artwork, when found on a cheque brings us on the verge of a revelation. Both elements, the artwork, and the cheque, aren’t pure, they are second degree items, so to speak, because they need a network of covenants in order to exist.
There is no difference between art and money: they are abstract and intangible gold reserves which manifest themselves in the entrapment of time and matter we live in, through imperfect and questionable symbols, not unlike the old platonic ideas: painted canvases, sculptures, urinals, coins, cheques, digital information… all fragile things threatened by the risk of forgery. However, money is the most powerful creator of metaphors in existence. Several poets associate it with words, aiming at its inclination to circulate; with the same reliability, Freud compares it to shit, shifting the attention to the delicate mechanisms that preside retention and release. If you think about it, the beauty of these shifts is that they easily bypass the conventional distinction between material and spiritual.
The triangle created by money, words and shit is probably the most credible constellation we trust when trying to think about aesthetic production, not from the point of view of the item itself, but rather from its social circulation, in other words from its power of persuasion and ultimately from its mythology. It’s the deep science bottled in Manzoni’s tin, easily understood as a money box or word container: we think we are handling one thing but there come the other two, there’s no way out, nobody can make sense of it restoring a sort of innocent literalism.
All of this to tell you I also love your idea of placing such dynamic metaphors inside those refrigerators that, as a matter of fact, look like display cabinets thus sending us back to the original idea of the frame. I wouldn’t be able to tell you why and you might not be able either, but those cheques of Anselmino fit beautifully in there. As if, out of time, you had been able to wind up an old toy to make it work once more.
Emanuele
Emanuele Trevi, “Carissima Betta”, in Gabi Scardi (ed.), Elisabetta Benassi. Lady and Gentlemen, exhibition catalogue (Milan, Fondazione Adolfo Pini, 14.9 – 17.12.2021). Milan: Nero, 2021, n. p.
