Carmelo Bene: un lottatore contro il suo tempo
Author(s)
Oppedisano, Francesca Rachele
Date Issued
April 26, 2007
Type
Doctoral Thesis
Abstract
Our thesis is focused on the last part of the Carmelo Bene activity, from his death in 2002 back to the past twenty years.
The Carmelo Bene carrier has several times being announced by the critics, announced in the deep sense of a series of rebirths, under different points of views: considering his activity as an actor, a philosopher, a poet, a writer, a director, or, more generally and erroneously, as an author. We intend to reconsider his activity under a new light comprehensive of the art history including, above all, the XX Century art critical thinking as the product of the artist though himself. At this regard, three artists show the importance of the critical thought born from the creativity to be considered at the same level of the artistic product aroused from the same acts: Giorgio De Chirico, Alberto Savinio and Marcel Duchamp. We have to specify that the heterogeneity that leads Carmelo Bene into different fields means the impossibility to reduce his activity to only one of these fields and the possibility to look “off screen”, the most desirable result for a research work. His being “Off screen”, in the cinematographic language, leads us in a difficult position: do we have to come in or out? Do we have to put attention to what is happening outside the limit of the image? Sound – word – image are the staff of which the art of Carmelo Bene is made.
We mean the Voice, the Word and the iconographic density of the Image produced by Carmelo Bene, such as films and performances. Around these tree terms we tried to discuss the recent problematic come out from the death of the author: how to preserve the artistic legacy of such polyhedral and complex subject that refused in principle the idea of a memory preservation naming his Foundation “Immemoriale”?
The first part of the thesis analyzes the historical and cultural factors from which Bene moves and the substantial reasons of an impossible historical contextualization of his art. Moving from the assumption of an essential concept that refuses the idea of a subject as an object, we start rejecting the name of our treatment: Carmelo Bene became CB, more precisely, the Inorganic un-nameable CB Machine. We then analyze the possibility to tell, to refer on this Machine, and focus our dissertation on the epistemological origin of the CB Machine findable in some parts of the James Joyce Ulysses, one of the masterpieces that CB has attended at the very beginning of his life till the end. The “ineluctable modality of the visible” and “audible” are two modalities through which Carmelo Bene passes through the comment, announcing a deep gap that will involve in the future the different plans of the so called CB Machine: the images are not rapresentig the text, the images produced and the text emitted are the symthom of the vacuity of the sens, something perceipt as a reciprocal insufficiency. A Machine called at different times by the critic Wicked Machine, Actorial Machine, and anthropological Machine. We believe and argue that two more characteristics should be added to the previous ones in order to show in a better light the Carmelo Bene activity as an artist: the Bachelor and the Heroical Machines. These two terms, as we’ll see further on, have to be understood from the point of view of Marcel Duchamp’s art and Gilles Deleuze’s thinking.
Due to his modus operandi, our Machine is essentially structuralist. The idea of a Structuralist Hero comes out from Deleuze lending us one more adjective for our Machine. But, in our case, assuming our hero as a Machine, the sacrifice is already being consumed before having given form to the revolution. The Machine is a Rebel Machine itself.
In the second and third parts of the thesis, on account of the archival documents and manuscripts we analyze more deeply the theoretical alliance of CB with some of most important thinker ad artists of the past: E.M. Cioran, Gilles Deleuze, Martin Heidegger, James Joyce, Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer, Max Stirner, and, above all, Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. At this regard we try to reconsider the idea of a desiring Machine which belongs to Deleuze-Guattari (Cfr. Anti-Œdipus, 1972) from the point of view of the CB study on Jacques Lacan Seminaries and Scripts. Far from the idea of a desiring Machine, CB is closer to the idea of a Bachelor and Androgynous Machine in the sense of Marcel Duchamp’s Grand Verre (Cfr. La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même, 1915-23).
As example of the complexity of the modus operandi of our Machine, we show how an idea inspired from the lectures of Lacan becomes a creative act, which inform the performance entitled Hommelette for Hamlet. Finally we conclude our tour reporting the difficult relationship between CB and the Institution marking how important was for him to be recognize and supported by the Institution in the last part of his activity, though remaining out of the Institution.
In Appendix we report the Four Moments on All Nothing which is a sort of testament that the artist has decided to leave in video, a summa of his theoretical and artistic thought.
The entire critic on Carmelo Bene has never stopped retracing the theoretical and artistic alliances which have informed his art. Only with the support of the archival materials, we have intentionally tried to ignore, without never disregard it, all the critic produced on CB, together with and after CB. We wanted to go imprudently deep into that places within his thought, retracing their origin, without the comfort of those authoritative voices whose exclusivity, yet for a long time, is destined to overstay till a courageous act of rethinking will be able to overstep all the art and the critical thinking enclosed in one of the most important Artificer of our time.
Additional information
Dottorato di ricerca in Memoria e materia delle opere d'arte attraverso i processi di produzione, storicizzazione, conservazione, musealizzazione
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