CULTURE AND PLAY IN THE WORK OF PIERRE POGGI
Enrico Pedrini: In his book "Homo Ludens", Johan Huizinga focuses his attention on play as a cultural system. This duality of "culture and play" is composed of play, which is presented as something objective, perceptible and determinable, and of culture, which on the other hand is the qualification that our judgement applies to everything in the world. In the work of Pierre Poggi, art confronts this unreal world, which is present more and more in the media system, where fictitious actions simulate real ones. What led you to carry out this investigation?Pierre Poggi: They were reasons of a personal type, in both the ped-agogical and psychological meaning of the word. My attitude to play is similar to childlike creativity stripped of all prejudice. In my art too I always try to maintain this "freshness". So my interest in the soccer world could be expressed in these words: "Now I play football simply using the tools of art to relate to our contemporary world."
EP: What can you tell me about the work you want to show at OPEN, among the plants on Venice Lido?
PP: The work began from an article in the Corriere, where along-side a black cross there was a list of all the people who had died for reasons connected with football from 1963 to the present day. It triggered this hallucinated vision through an association of im-ages (military memorials). "Campo Santo" is a project, an environ-mental work; an evocative parody of the place of rest composed of 22 white crosses, where a referee acting as master of ceremo-nies and shaman, impeccably dressed, musically reinterprets the choral chants of the fans crowded round a hypothetical terracing. A kind of litany, a clown-like lament. You might ask, "What have crosses got to do with a football pitch?". Newspapers are famous for having short memories, if we consider the number of fans who have fallen on the "field" from 1963 until today. Surely that is suf-ficient reason to commemorate those victims, sacrificed in the name of a leather ball, with this surreal and at the same time ab-surd installation.
EP: The two elements, play and art, tend more and more to assume, in the collective unconscious, the function of nourishing the consumer needs of the "society of images". Art must therefore cope with this dualism and use its own language to investigate this attitude in which the value of truth is replaced by communication.
PP: Yes, art has a duty to deal with this problem if it raises questions and perhaps tells some truths through its communicative power, even though today art in turn runs the risk of becoming bulimic.
EP: Investigating art highlights the symbolic values that accumulate like a kind of sediment in society, which has made the economy its only possible "creed". I'd like to know what you think about this.
PP: Today more than ever art is part of this economic mechanism, we must not be hypocritical about it. You only have to read the quotations for contemporary artists to see the situation of demand and offer.
Text by Enrico Pedrini
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