An exhibition to celebrate the power of art and culture, in their capacity to act as transmitting elements that intercept the future, together with their ability to generate hope and energy for human beings.
A powerful stimulus to rise up and start again with renewed vigor after each and every tragedy, through beauty and creativity. The technological means of communication characteristic of today’s mass society exert a powerful lure on users, instilling them with a “narcissistic torpor” undermining, at the root, the interpersonal relationships and interactive dynamics that form the very basis of collegiality.
Since the dawn of her artistic research, Rachel Lee Hovnanian has focused her attention on these phenomena and on the solipsistic and narcissistic tendencies of our civilization, creating a series of works that represent genuine devices aimed at stimulating visitors’ reflection. Visitors who, when they find themselves face to face with the works, are “forced” into an active participation, freed from the passive contemplation characteristic of the media-driven universe and becoming, for all intents and purposes, coauthors called upon to complete the journey conveying the sense of the work. Phenomena analyzed and illustrated in a pioneering manner by intellectuals and scholars such as the American sociologist David Riesman with his 1950 essay titled The Lonely Crowd, by the Canadian mass-mediologist Marshal McLuhan in his ground-breaking text The medium is the message published in 1967, accompanied one year later by the French philosopher Guy Debord with his essay, The Society of the Spectacle. Essays that substantiate the artist’s reflections and philosophy, subsequently translated into a plastic and visual dimension that lays bare the mechanisms behind relational alienation, reifying them through an aesthetic and metaphorically theatricalised revival.
Dinner for Two, after which the exhibition takes its name, was created with acute and eerie foresight in 2012. The work is exhibited based on a site-specific dynamic that allows it to adapt to the various exhibition spaces, as was recently the case for the exhibition hosted at the Southampton Art Center in New York in 2020. An acute reflection induced by a plastic, large-scale multimedia format, on the toxic, increasingly aseptic and separative relational dynamics, fuelled by narcissism and self-referentiality, sharpened by the pandemic-induced social distancing. A sumptuously set table stands in the central nave of the church, an archetypal symbol of conviviality and a fulcrum of human interactions, yet one that also loves to amplify those ritual, liturgical and spiritual moments to which the site is dedicated, inextricably linked to the dawn of humanity in the form of community.
Two diners characterized by a “liquid” video presence – in keeping with Zygmunt Bauman meaning of the term – who, despite sharing the physical space and the ritual of the meal, are immersed in a silent isolation, interrupted only by the notification sounds of their smartphones. Spatial contiguity in the relational distance, sharing of the space and absence of ritual and convivial participation, so close yet so far away. Distanced yet sharing the same space, a little girl, also in digital form – ideally a member of the same family – displays the same solipsistic behaviour. To complete the installation, plastic elements made of marble which contemporaneously emphasize the noble historical element inherent in the material and the artificial “cultural” dimension, “fake” and anti-functional and therefore narcissistic: forms devoid of content and meaning. Symbols and allegories of a masking of the extraneous social dimension and of the threat which the phenomenon poses to the infantile components of civilization. In this so-called post-experiential era produced by digital dematerialisation, characterized by the end of the social era and openness to a post-society dimension (as theorized by the French sociologist Alain Touraine), all interpreted in a context that Max Weber would have defined as the “nascent state”, in which fear returns to be the only driver that determines social action, while art returns to take on an ethical role.
On the rubble of modernism, navigating adrift of the short century of weak thinking and heirs of a liquid society, the creative dimension, as evidenced by Rachel Lee Hovnanian’s works, wages an ethical battle against the pervasive rain of destitute images devoid of communicative value, which assail us on a daily basis and lead to the deflagration of every authentic relational and convivial moment. As the artist reiterates, art and culture provide tools that reawaken us from our current “narcissistic torpor” in which we have fallen, acting as a driving force for the development of a new “lateral” thinking and social cohesion, the only vectors of the transition from crisis to change.