WHY CAN’T I BE YOU? by Danilo Venturi

Portraits by Ruggero Lupo Mengoni – collection by Alicia Declerck – styling Wowo Kraus – writing Danilo Venturi – models Niina Turunen & Alessandro Ferrara.

McLuhan’s big prophecy of the media as content at the end didn’t come true, at the opposite, from Matthew Barney on, the body is back on stage as main media, depending at worst in which way it’s used for communicating identities, archetypes, characters and moods.

Fashion in the new millennium is technoprimitive. Like for our ancestors it ignores taboos, traditions and the main lines of the sacred space when it comes to heal the sense of incompleteness and dissatisfaction that the human, devoid of habitat and habitus, is feeling with the self like it is. Nonetheless, much more of the animal-human and the moral-human, the current digital human is joining groups based on interests and backgrounds and experiencing several possibilities of differentiation amongst and towards them. In a continuous nomadic move, the digital human is finding moments of singularity, monads, situations in which time and space are overlapping, in which the relative becomes absolute, for starting to be nomadic immediately after. The nomad monads are unique and recurrent situations of redefined identity, whereas the photoshopped portrait signs a negotiable relationship between face and visage. The dress, that includes not only clothing, but also body modifications and other non-clothing items added to the body as part of completing self-representation, is following this pattern too, which is intrinsically erotic, exposing what from inside has to be presented outside, in the social environment. Therefore, the new erotic is ERROTIC, in the sense of wandering from error to error, like in a post-Darwinian evolution, towards the next identity, for anyone to become what he/she is. Nietzsche said that man is a transitional entity not yet stabilized. In the e[scapes], a new state of nature including body[scapes], land[scapes] and urban[scapes], where it’s possible to hide or being visible in the famous fifteen minutes of glory, where to belong or to distinguish, there are two big opportunities: the PERMANENT EPHEMERAL and the DISTINCT AMBIGUITY. The e[scapes] can be ESCAPES whereas, as told by Baudelaire, no one has the right to scorn or disregard the element of transitoriness, of the ephemeral, which undergoes so many mutations. If this element is suppressed, one succumbs to the emptiness of the worst possible dis[grace]: an abstract and determinable beauty. In front of a common enemy the ancient Cretans, divided in tribes and gangs, used to merge in a common front, from here the word SYNCRETISM. The permanent ephemeral and the distinct ambiguity are saving the human from his narcissistic wound, the nightmare of a never ending duplication, the indivi[dual] become divi[dual] and multivi[dual], simulation, sort-of, mere representation of what once was simply lived, replica, virtual and physical simulacrum of his MaLuhanian double, dual, split, equal twin of a dead god fallen from paradise to the hell, the place where separation and repetition are the condemnation. With the permanent ephemeral and the distinct ambiguity, what was divided out of a process going from Victorianism to a recent corporate [dom]inated free[dom], can become today the NEW EQUAL, where inside/outside, subject/object, corporeal/corporate, physical/virtual, male/female, straight/gay, body/mind, natural/artificial, animal/human/machine, left/right, public/private, primitive/civilized, good/bad, dirty/clean, sacred/profane, function/emotion, nature/culture, and so on, are back in a dialectic relationship able to produce new meanings, definitions and identities.

The slash, graphic symbol of two distinct directions equally possible (aut aut), can be interpreted more as dynamic conjunction of two or more convergent senses or GENDER SHIFTS (et et). The square brackets are indicating embedded meanings in one word or/and interlaced signifiants between more words. The same can do mirrored portraits, equal and different, unique and double, common souls or souls in common, not necessarily good & clean or bad & dirty  (doxa) like in the biblical tradition of Abel & Cain, but much more probably, in the era of the lost innocence where the sweet Heidi has transformed in Hi-D, good & dirty or bad & clean (paradoxa). Materializing or dissolving, embodying the other or self-unbundling, back-to-humans or floating eternauts, minded corpses or ghostly bodies, unexpected ghost tracks of expected track lists or the whole track list in one face, personalities who make the garments’ meaning, self-standing entities, weirdos, demons that with their stripes are drumming the devil of duality out (the word devil means dividing). In the last rites of modernity or, preferably in the post-modernity, the dichotomy between monism and dualism is exceeded by the nomad monads. The distinction between beauty and ugliness has become more a dialectic between linear and grotesque, correctness and corruption, attraction and repulsion. Sensuality and sexuality are far beyond Mapplethorpe because what previously erotic is now errotic, a process of renegotiation running on the track gender/degender/transgender/regender.  There’s no age, or better, all the ages are at the same time on the same track, including generation (Patty Smith), degeneration (Ruth Flowers) and regeneration (Yoko Ono). These portraits and bodies are belonging to the global city, the metropolis beyond any possible heteropolis and überopolis. Escaped from the seriality, where customization was a personal exception, they better make sense of the opposite costumization, a state of art where Newyorkese japonegros are living, but also where Ono Kazuo, Buto and “Admiring la Argentina” are featuring.

Last year we launched our creations with a certainty: we are the totems without taboos. This year, because there are no taboos we want to challenge with few questions pushing the limit beyond: who are you? Who am I? Why can’t I be you?

Danilo Venturi

References

Adamson G., Pavitt J., Postmodernism. Style and Subversion, 1970-1990, V&A Publishing, London, 2011

Bippus E., Mink D., Fashion Body Cult, Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgard, 2007

Klanten R., Ehmann S., Schulze F., Doppelganger. Images of the Human Being, Die Gestalten Verlag, Berlin, 2011

Lynch A., Strauss M.D., Changing Fashion, Berg, Oxford, 2011

Venturi D., Luxury Hackers, Lindau, Torino, 2011