I do not want to analyze or critique a system, because it is not my job to tell you about it in words. As artists we have learned to use the language of power and the words of others, but by doing this we have put the image aside, making it become banal in the course of any process of communication. We have made it thinner until it has become transparent. We have pushed art into a place that is more and more distant, making it behave increasingly with the manners of politics and the institutions, rather than its own. We have lost sight of the irony of our position that does not belong to the thinking of the majority but to our way of being in the world. We have become too adequate to overthrow the market systems governed by that capital that imposed “value” on our “non-value”. We have neglected the image because we did not believe that it was the most effective weapon anymore, and we have stopped working with our hands and muscles. After having erased the drawing, we find ourselves arranging the blackened rubber eraser lint on the page. The work has to exist prior to cultural institutions and debates, prior to museum spaces. We should not and cannot say “I want to do” because it is in the “doing” that our position is born. I want to take part in the odor of this city, its flowing and its stopping. For an artist, the work is his institution: it consists in the sole fact of working, in the simple gesture, the mere tracing. Our value within society and our anarchy lie in the sign. The work is the museum of itself, impregnated with meaning and community, solitude and survival instinct. What is important is the experience, in its repetition and its readiness to be repeated. What is essential is the work, with its profound vitality. Artists should be like seismographers, recorders of presence, tireless laborers. We speak another language.
TOMASO DE LUCA
Artist. Lives and works in Rome