Stefano Cristante

In a hypothetical history of human inventions, the creation of cultural events has its own little-but less and less ephemeral-position. Human knowledge has had to face up to the challenges of techniques and machines, but also devoted growing parts of its own work to the so-called immaterial sphere.
Beginning from periods previous to the Christian dating of the history of the world, the various civilizations always used symbolic-artistic collective representations in order to express feelings and words, emotions and reasons. That is, to give a complex meaning to existence.
Even though lacking in all material and tangible aspects, all this expresses an extraordinary bond, able to gather and keep entire societies together.
Moreover, since we called ourselves "modern," the need to represent ourselves through the aesthetics of the immaterial and the technique of organization has greatly increased: since the Great Universal Exhibition in London in 1851, when a phantasmagoria of goods and products, inventions and innovations found space in the amazing Crystal Palace, specially built with the glass and iron of industrial capitalism, modern men have been trying to confirm the presence of art and wits in the societies in which they live.
Artists, said the great media expert Marshall McLuhan, are real social antennas: they pick up the transformations in progress, and interpret them as moments of a field of tensions that gives birth to the narration of society. Nevertheless, society itself feels the narration, and therefore transforms and modifies itself. The creation of cultural events is the specific field where the time dating occurs in function of artistic emergencies.
We could say that, from the beginning of the eighties of the twentieth century, an entire artistic scene was preparing to prick up its antennas. Western cultural industry had already interjected and digested the libertarian pulsations of the previous decades, reshaping lifestyles suitable for heterogeneous palates, though belonging to the same universe, the one of youth.
The film industry had trouble in facing up to the offensive of an increasingly global and spectacular television, comics were spreading through science-fiction and mutation aesthetics, design and fashion and custom were proposing the revival of the new Anglo-Saxon bands (although from a post-punk point of view), literature was becoming more and more intimist and personal, as well as visual arts, even if more and more clearly marked by the advent of new technologies.
Under this general surface, halfway between a strong need for modernization and a return to the forms of participation of the sixties and seventies, various underground worlds were becoming restless. Among them the world of those, thirty years old at most, who devoted a considerable part of their time to artistic expression.
Young artists have always existed, and the historical avant-garde of the early twentieth century and their maudit inspirers (impossible to forget that Rimbaud completely discarded poetic writing when he was not yet even twenty years old) already evoked the connection between youth and artistic innovation. Nevertheless, the phenomenon I am dealing with is different: highlighting the conditions for an only relatively elite background, which, on the contrary, is actually quite common in all the main Western countries, and particularly in Europe.
To simplify I wish to suggest the following hypothesis: while the previous generation saw in politics and in the movement its own entryway into the world, the generation I am writing about was shifting toward the galaxy of art. While between the late sixties and late seventies (following different courses according to the specific history of each country), thousands of young men and women gave life to collectives, magazines, sit-ins, and demonstrations, as well as organized film-club debates, shows and exhibitions of alternative information, in the early eighties many of the young seemed to be interested in cultural production, not as a means to widen the protest, but as an end in itself.
This was an important and significant change: it could be considered as a return-therefore as a withdrawal, above all, from the common field of politics towards the individualizing achievements of art-or as the symptom of an insufficiency of politics as an all-absorbing activity, able to monopolize the dynamism of the youngest generations.
After the countless revolutionary promises thickened into a collective (and sometimes mass) dimension, the individual drift could even represent a sensible result, counting on logics of reaction and juxtaposition to a "participatory excess."
But if we look deeper into events, episodes, and youth biographies, that is not exactly the way it was: to put it metaphorically, we were not confronted with a generation of orphans of the revolution, who were throwing themselves into the alleviation of art, and retiring at home. Rather there was a deeper energy creeping into the life of young people. Although they existentially met politics, young people were choosing a more research-oriented direction.
In this sense, the fields of art and cultural production represented an enchanted garden to be explored, ready to be observed in its deepest botanical mutations.
If in the socio-economic field the transition from one epoch to another is between industrial method and post-industrial method, in the artistic-aesthetic field the passage is between the modern condition and the post-modern condition.
In this sense, cultural production serves a post-modern transition that was already offered on a silver platter: once all avant-gardes, all provocations, all conceptualities, all puns have been mastered, the multiplicity of expressive forms finds in the artist its own clay to model.
Useable registers are wide, technological forms expand and proliferate entering the artistic action, mental elaboration deals with the body, and returns it to an altered scene, where its collocation is evident, and it is no longer a marginal collocation.
Music becomes a complete environment, a frame of everyday life. Punk-inspired naturalness still persists, leading to the creation of thousands of bands in a jumble of musical ambitions, passions and confusions, but the sensitivity towards hearing and towards the complexities of listening: little experimentations follow one another, music creeps into the artistic fields and names them again (what would video art be without music?).
But it is also the design boom, the attempt to include art in habitation, with no fear of facing the chill of living the future in an ergonomic way. And with no fear of renovating gifts and fancy goods from the past, nostalgic sign of the post-modern.
Each specific field (photography and comics, cinema and dance, sculpture and ethnic music) has its own small deflagration, under the young artists' creative boost: and yet all arts, as a whole, compose a dynamic picture. A network of transformations impressing the observer.
Obviously, there is a sociological aspect as well.
The question can be approached under many different points of view: the proliferation of art and theater schools throughout European countries starting in the seventies, mass university replacing elite education, which passed through a crisis because of student protests but in particular of the basic change of Western societies from Fordist to Post-Fordist, the latter needing a widely skilled staff with specific technical backgrounds.
To be underlined as well is the overlap between media and everyday life, where media narration circulates extensively among the audiences-youth included-and, in an extreme need of increasingly up-to-date myths, addresses music and art in general (and to sport) in order to draw out provocative personalities, possible references for young minds able to take from cultural industry what they need in terms of opportunities and visions.
More artists than before, more experienced than before, more immersed than ever in the media stream: this is the elementary portrait describing some plausible causes of the "young artists" phenomenon of the eighties.
We can add some black and white to this picture: those are also the years of a substantial internal restoration of the management of world capitalism; through the liberalist policies of Thatcherism and Reaganism the Right defeats the Left, that is the social relationships between capital and labor reverse after thirty years of the tendential advance of welfare policies. The labor and social democratic defeat gains substance while a whole geopolitical system, real socialism, is falling apart and prepares to gravitate around the West.
This difficult phase shift marked a certain creative seesaw ranging from the reassembling of optimism to the love for the dark side, for the dark atmosphere surrounding the victories of a West that seems to win without restraint, without worrying about the consequences of its victories.
Turning into disenchanted visions (some even said cynicism) the ambitions of a post-political generation.
I now ask the reader a slight shift of attention. It is difficult for me to write about the Biennial of Young Artists using only the register of historical and sociological reconstruction. There are many autobiographical facts hidden in this event, so I may as well present a few.
Generally speaking, I do not believe that cultural creation could have such powerfully objective motivations to present itself on the scene as the result of simple summations of historical processes. So much so that in some important realities, USA included, the youth movements, even if similar in their occurrence to the European ones, never gave birth to such events as the Biennial. It was the market to move in these countries, following typical styles and modalities of a market-oriented economy (and sociology as well): advertising, events, and cool hunting.
Things also heavily depend on operative peculiarities, and on their contacts. In fact, I should add to the chessboard I outlined the single pieces: cultural associations above all. I have no intention of tackling their analysis and collocation, yet, to those developing an interest in this subject-youth cultural phenomena-or in ecology, sports, and civil rights, it is obvious that the role played by cultural associations has been fundamental, in particular in the early phases of their organization.
At that time, a group of young Italians, all about twenty years old and with "political backgrounds," found in ARCI (Associazione Ricreativa e Culturale Italiana), an association able to meet their theoretical reflections and to create a working sector based on the multiplication of young creativity (ARCI Kids). Through this small structure (however recognized by the mother association providing salaries and service supplies, also including a reasonable budget for travel and creation of cultural relationships, in particular abroad), we succeeded in interlacing profitable relationships for quite a long period.
First of all, at the beginning of the eighties, with the local authorities interested in setting up initiatives aimed at opening contacts with young people and areas that had been avoiding institutions for more than twenty years.
And this was definitely not only an Italian phenomenon. So much so that the first ally in the Biennial initiative was the "Ayuntamiento" of Barcelona, with its own "area de joventud," able to finance most of a meeting held in 1984 as a prologue to the Biennial itself (it was called "Tendencias") and to host, the following year, hundreds of artists in the new spaces of the Casa de la Caritat with the first official edition of the Biennial.
The network of alliances under construction was made up of a small group of permanent members (including the Municipality of Turin, the Municipality of Bologna, the French association Peuple et Culture, the Municipality of Montpellier, the Municipality of Thessaloniki, the Algerian association Amis de la Biennale de Tipasa, and the Clube Portugues des artes e ideias), and a growing number of local bodies from throughout Mediterranean Europe.
The relations between associations and institutions within the network were not always easy. On the contrary, behind the Biennial it was possible to perceive, in its inception, a theoretical conflict between civil society (and movements) exponents and administrators. Agreed that the framework of action was common and that we considered of equal importance the creation of an event devoted to the exploration of young contemporary art in a precise geopolitical frame-the Mediterranean one-the conflict was taking place on contractual basis: some people-for example, we "associative agents"-asked for more space and resources to make the Biennial a symbolic event of cultural innovation, and others wished to improve the impact of the event on the institutional policies. After all, the divergence was tactical, and not strategical: that is the reason why the organization of the Biennial survived for twenty years on a concentration of heavily financed cultural events.
The "Mediterranean" vocation of the Biennial is a result of the subjectivities of its organization as well. There were no objective processes to drive us towards such recognition; on the contrary, the process of European unification seemed to be at the core of the political and cultural debate.
But the Biennial proposed a deviation, looking toward the South and East. Why? Maybe because of apparently fortuitous facts, such as the relations with Algerian and Turkish institutions met in the maze of EU Directorate-Generals, or the bilateral inter-associative visits, or even the meetings financed with the budgets of the Youth for Europe program.
Also for the vision of cultural streams gradually penetrating the Maghreb and Balkan countries, and that united the youth imagery with no more respect for national boundaries and their own cultural industries. Streams that obviously were not alien from the contact with overseas and Anglo-Saxon productions, however prone to a reinterpretation of styles and contents, extremely attentive to an international creative vocabulary that made it possible to know (even without the Internet) the world of small labels, theatrical experimentation, video art, new art galleries, and new fashion stylists.
Without the Mediterranean, we thought, we will lose the urgency of interaction between artistic scenes, as well as between already strongly interdependent societies. Without working on creative confrontation (and on the recognition of different traditions) the social and economical divide could widen. Without a not only European but also Mediterranean "creative class" a territory always drawn into conflicts and contrasts could have fallen again into its own contradictions. There was the need to demonstrate, through the most complex and active sectors of citizenship (youth and artists), that dialogue was multiplying the chances of cultural emancipation.
During these twenty years of the Biennial, this strategical intuition underwent hard trials: the Balkan war, the explosion of Algerian fundamentalism, the Kosovo war, and the Gulf war, the worsening of the Israeli-Palestinian war. Still, during its various editions, the Biennial has always been a small common territory, open to every presence, including the most embarrassing ones. Even better, chez nous, the Algerian kids played together with the Israeli ones, and Sarajevo became the very symbol of the event.
Our capital cities, the hosting cities of the Biennial, also were inclined to run a slight risk: not only were they exposing themselves to the observation of the national and international press, but in particular to the criticism of the opinion leaders of the cultural and artistic world, that could be involved only to a minimum extent in the local organizational process. In addition, due to the complexity of the event, the difficulty in coordinating so many partners and hundreds of artists, we always had plenty of criticism. However, the cities of the Biennial, from Barcelona to Athens, Thessaloniki, Bologna, Marseilles, Valencia, Lisbon, Turin, Rome, and Sarajevo, have always profited from the Biennial to launch new exhibition and show venues, to hold a dialogue with the local art scenes, as well as with the young audience, or at least with its most advanced sectors.
Evidently, one regret remains: the Biennial has never yet been able to dock in African harbors. In 1990, Tipasa, Algeria, hosted a twin event of the Biennial: "Rotte Mediterranée." A few months later extremist fundamentalism began to martyr a country already worn out by a corrupted and inconstant ruling class. For Algerian artists to even travel to the city hosting the Biennial became a hazardous adventure.
But let us return to the phenomenology of the young artists.
I have described above how a consistent part of them came from an environment that was aware of the de-ideologizing role of art and culture. However, this told at most that the environment where the young artists of the eighties took their first steps was the youth movement, both student and university movements.
However, the Biennial was gaining strength and the editions followed one another: how were young artists changing? What were they looking for, what did they want, what proved intolerable or vice-versa fundamental and impossible to renounce for them?
In the first-and unfortunately not yet repeated-sociological research carried out on the artists of the Biennial (on the occasion of the 1988 Bologna edition), the young artists showed characteristics largely different from those of most of the young people. Through comparison of the data obtained by distributing 382 questionnaires with the data processed during the same period by the IARD institute concerning the Italian youth, it was possible to outline a certain number of trends. 1 In addition to predictable results (for example, the higher presence of artist parents in the sample of the Biennial, or the higher percentage of art school education), some data emerged upon which to reflect more carefully. Young artists showed a greater awareness of environmental issues, a greater associative bent, and a greater nonconformism in the organization of everyday life, a greater attention to vegetarian alimentation, greater traveling experience, and greater cosmopolitanism, made substantial by a greater knowledge of foreign languages and countries. In brief, it was possible to sense the emerging of a new-and considerable-youth elite. An inwardly differentiated elite (with very different attitudes, for example, between young architects and poets, or between designers and comic-strip artists), able to endow themselves with a series of instruments for being visible and, though far from political and even artistic avant-gardes of the early twentieth century, deep-rooted in a "libertarian" attitude we might say.
Upon superficial examination of some of the above-mentioned data, we could surmise a different version of the traditional bohemian attitude attributed to the artists, in particular young artists, by a large part of last century's public opinion. On the contrary, further investigation through a considerable number of interviews (see note 1), revealed that, for the greater majority of the young artists at the end of the eighties, artistic identity represented the perspective through which to look at the world, identifying its problems and priorities, and-above all-choosing not to turn their own art into a sudden and improvised experience, but the source of creative tension that could have lead to the adult condition.
This represented a great change, in comparison to a few years before as well, when the perception of young creativity seemed still to take place within the perimeter of merely experiential chances: trying to be artists was a little commandment of the most shrewd young world, hypnotized by the corrosive simplicity of punk and the ease with which four or five boys or girls could start a rock or punk band and perform on stage shortly thereafter. Not to earn a living with their music, of course, but to prove to themselves that it was possible to make art, and to grow with such art on the fringe of adult society.
The young artists of the Biennial said something else and posed other problems: they were extremely serious in stating the importance of their own work, and from that work, they intended to gain their means of subsistence. Of course, an evident fluctuation persisted between market-oriented choices (as it was for young architects and designers) or more underground and alternative oriented choices (poets and comic-strip artists), with important fields where the position of the artists was on the edge of the need for a comparison with the market and the wish to continue frequenting the alternative zones (musicians are an impressive example in this sense). In other cases, such tension was between an underground attraction and a need for institutional relations, as was the case of young theater actors and dancers.
The situation of the visual artists was also very complex since they were already interested in the opportunities offered by private art galleries (who aimed to individualize the artist) but inclined to experiment with forms fatally crossing the collective dimension and the multimedia places of creation.
Dilettantism, even ingenious and provocative-as it was in some previous generations-left room for an extreme attention to professional issues: such a cure meant long-lasting investments not only in the marketing potentialities of their works and creations (and therefore in the whole circuit needed to achieve this goal), but also in the instruments for their own artistic growth, in the chances offered by the exchanges with other artists, in the discoveries of new contents.
The question now becomes more delicate, because the overall numbers of the Biennial show that from 1985 until the present thousands of young people passed through the different editions. Since it is a matter of a lot of artists and from very different fields, the question concerning "content" and "quality" of the works of art becomes really arduous.
Some of these artists became international celebrities, as for example Madre Deus, from Portugal, or the Italian Maurizio Cattelan, and Vanessa Beecroft. Others are famous and appreciated in their native countries. Others in more specific, very niche circuits.
Some others - I don't know how many-stopped their own artistic production (but who knows how many of them maybe remained in the art system as critics, teachers, or producers).
Certainly much has changed from the first editions of the Biennial up to now. At the beginning of the eighties, both unknown young men and women and locally well-known artists participated in selections (managed by commissions made up of experts and convened ad hoc by the institutions involved), competing because of the international opportunity offered by the event. Therefore, the quality fluctuated greatly: as well as excellent works or productions, there were mediocre and déja vu products, and for every music group developing its own original research there was a multitude of groups aping the most mannered Anglo-Saxon pop-rock. When I visited the 2003 edition of the Biennial in Athens, I had the opportunity to interview numerous artists for an Italian audio-visual production. To be honest the average quality of the works of art and productions impressed me. Many of those creations, even in the awkward field of the visual arts, always under the severe scrutiny of critics and experts, would have made an impression in totally adult and hallowed art events. I visited the 2005 Venice Biennial and noticed a great many points of contact with what I had seen in Athens. Perhaps it was not sheer coincidence that one of the curators of that edition of the Venice event, Rosa Martínez, was a specialist from Cataloñia whose wide curriculum vitae includes the direction of the Barcelona selections of the Biennial of Young Artists in the nineties.
There is no need to dwell upon this aspect: it stands to reason that the link between the small Mediterranean exhibition of the eighties and the main international art events of the new millennium is well established and natural by now.
Young artists have their own phenomenology: they appear as a specific group in comparison to the wider youth world, but also with the strong sectional feature of adult artists. Two lines of reasoning have to be followed: as to youth in general, the young artists distinguish themselves by cosmopolitanism and their love for research and experimentation, and for a certain nonconformity. 2 Moreover, and this is the dimension yet to be investigated by sociologists and anthropologists, art increasingly assumes the connotation of "a value in itself," able to contain, as in a Chinese puzzle, all the values of each singular artist, even though pursuing a creative autonomy addressed toward the others. As if art, for these young people, is more and more communication than provocation.
In comparison with adult artists, differences are more enigmatic: it is useless to deny that many young people look for success and consecration, even more shamelessly than before, but their adult points of reference do not seem to be inferior to them. On the other hand, the rise from the ranks is often very hard, and for each one of them that becomes an appetising and decisive ingredient for exhibitions or festivals, a great many others toil after an honest artistic handicraft. The myth of the wasting (and wasted) youth misfires, and with this also the esteem of youth as a value and a difference. Yet, a bonding agent for youngartists could be found, I think, in the community spirit, which makes them, at least on the occasion of the Biennial, reciprocally curious, no matter how far away their forms of expression and cities of origin are. There is no organization that helps them in this sense (I repeat that setting up and succeeding in inaugurating the Biennial is already in itself a strenuous and extremely complicated operation): they look for the space by themselves, and thus they manage to find it.
Friendships, loves, sympathies: during those ten days of meeting, if not an ethic, at least an aesthetic community is recreated.
Not a negligible phenomenon indeed these days.
Finally, a few lines on the pragmatics of the Biennial. International events usually have one (or more) curator, who takes upon himself honors and burdens of the selections. This is not true of the Biennial of Young Artists.
Selections are carried out locally, on the basis of a series of necessities negotiated during the assembly meetings (the representative of Bologna asks for a presence in graphics, following upon a specific work made by that municipality on graphics itself; the representative of Thessaloniki asks for a musical presence for the same reason, and so on).
Exhausting, but unique. In this way, artists (except for a few individual invitations from the host city) are selected according to a horizontal, network practice, attached to local competitions.
This is why the BICEM continues to be a formidable container of both individual and collective stories and adventures. Art is concerned, but costume and sociology as well. This inner hybridization probably prevents the Biennial from standing out among the critics' most cuddled international art events, but makes it an invaluable place where the youngest artists are-actually-not only signifiers of artistic tendencies, but also social and cultural events.
In existence for twenty years without losing its peculiar identity: this is the excellent contribution the Biennial gave to the history-less and less ephemeral, as I wrote at the beginning of this essay-of cultural events. The Biennial of Young Artists is not for everyone: it is for the observers who have the will to take a deeper look under the surface of things. And what lies beneath is not a layer made up of little provocations and youthful haughtiness that could be soon reabsorbed by the market, but a stream of thoughts, ideas, and projects flowing into the sea. An ancient and astonishing sea. Always the same one. 1 Giovani artisti d'Europa is the title of the final research report on the young participants in the 1988 Biennial, edited by Pier Paolo Giglioli and Pina Lalli. The Research Committee also involved Furio Radin, Livio Sansone and the undersigned. 382 questionnaires were distributed and twenty-one extensive interviews were conducted. Young artists from France, Spain, Portugal, Yugoslavia, Greece, Cyprus, and Italy took part in the Biennial of Young Artists of that time (December 12-21, 1988).