Tucci Russo
08.10 - 28.01.2024
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An hour north of Turin, tucked in a mountainous valley near the Swiss border, is the village of Torre Pellice, an unusual location for a leading Italian art gallery, Tucci Russo Studio per l’Arte contemporanea. In the 1990s, its eponymous dealer, a key player in Arte Povera, moved from the city of Turin into a converted red-brick factory. If the scale of the gallery is impressive, so is its mountainous setting.
For the first time I truly understood the impact of the setting on Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote, “On the mountain of truth, you can never climb in vain.” This from a man wracked and wrecked by pain. In nearby Turin, Nietzsche lodged in the Piazza Carlo Alberto which now bears a plaque dedicated to his memory. There, in 1889, he wrote Ecce Homo; there, he ‘lost his mind.’ Or so we are told. The trigger? Seeing a horse abused by its master. It is reported that Nietzsche rushed to cradle the horse’s neck in his arms, that he broke down in tears. The rest? Eleven years of ‘silence,’ or ‘incoherent seclusion,’ before his death in 1900.
Nearly a century later, in 1996, another tragedy occurs. This time, it is the Ghanaian-German poet and activist, May Ayim, who jumps from the 13th floor of a Berlin building. Hospitalised for severe depression, she finds she can no longer continue. As in the case of Nietzsche, we cannot truly know what precipitated her decision to plunge to her death. As Gilles Deleuze reminds us – you cannot judge a life by the way it ends, but you can hold fast to the legacy it secures. He too would choose to fall from a building.
As for so much talk of death? It is because Robin Rhode’s new show, The Abandoned Garden, found inspiration in Ayim’s struggle – the struggle of those born in between worlds, displaced or marginalised and vulnerable. Exile and non-belonging can bear bitter fruit. But it can also sharpen one’s insight. This, certainly, is also the inspiration for the Venice Biennale 2024 theme – Foreigners Everywhere – given that Europe is fast becoming provincialised or, as Susan Sontag predicted – ‘nasty’ once more. For one cannot travel through Europe without acknowledging its fraught bipolarity – those committed to the EU, those who would jettison it.
Am I gloomy on God’s day? It would certainly seem so, given where I stood, in the ‘mountain of truth.’ Certainly, it seems paradoxical to speak of an ‘abandoned garden’ in the midst of such a breathtaking setting. But then, carbon dioxide levels are at their highest point in 800,000 years. Ours, says Anthony Appiah, is “a small, warming, intensely vulnerable world.”
It is this vulnerability, evidenced in Nietzsche and Ayim’s plight, that is Rhode’s core concern. His show is by turns tender, beautiful, and sorrowful – what it cannot ignore is the grim paradox, the agony and ecstasy that holds us all in thrall, irrespective of where we are positioned on this earth. Ours is a perverse time, illusion precarious, even dangerous, truth exacting.
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One cannot understand culture without understanding its location. Rhode’s show at Tucci Russo is as much informed by dereliction as it is by grace; indeed, it pivots about this charged crux. So, while the opening of Rhode’s show was good, soulful, resolute, one could not ignore the despoilment at its root – the abandoned garden.
I spoke with Tucci Russo’s widow, Lisa, the director of the gallery. It was she who was my kind host, she, poised, thoughtful, who encountered the work of the younger Rhode in Venice, 18 years ago and, together with her late husband, ensured his place in the Arte Povera pantheon – his works housed in the Castello di Rivolli and at GAM, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea. Unmoved by glamour, by ‘surfaces,’ Lisa Tucci Russo reminds me that “an exhibition must be a choice,” a decision pointed, loaded. In the case of Rhode’s show, it was the aching dance of beauty and dereliction that, together, conspired to uproot complacency and power, a bedazzled surface, and direct our attention to an inescapable trauma that shapes all our lives.
This is the show’s core impact. Rhode makes no declaration, harbours no outrage. What we see is a series of large photographs which are also paintings, a dance – of death? Of life? For while the overall impact seems and feels easeful, one cannot suppress the abandonment at its core.
As Maria Popova grimly notes in Figuring, our existence is “impervious to beauty and indifferent to meaning,” no matter the desperately mounted efforts on behalf of the contrary. The aggravated bipolarity of the world attests to this fact – allegiances are treacherous, belief complex, more so in a time as dangerously absolutist as ours. It is within and against this mortal grip that Rhode presents his post-Edenic vision, after The Fall, a vision, for Rhode, that is mired in “conflict, displacement, environmental degradation, urban decay.”
“It is far less nature itself that is yet in danger than our attitude to it,” John Fowles reminds us in his glorious little book, The Tree, a recognition all the more baleful given the callous felling of the Sycamore Gap at Hadrian’s wall. If nature is doubtless sickening, it is we, its corrupt custodians who are sickened the more.
Can we overcome the damage we have wreaked, the ennui and despair that holds us in thrall? I pose these questions as the spectre of yet another world war looms large. For it was there, in that majestic setting on the Swiss-Italian border that the news of war in the Middle East reached me. There, against the odds, Rhode’s Abandoned Garden tolled that in the midst of ruin beauty and grace remain, no matter our supposed indifference to it.
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Rhode has repeatedly photographed and painted a specific wall in a Johannesburg township. As a psycho-geographic framing device and hook, an ethico-political and emotional trigger, it affirms that, irrespective of one’s displacement, or exile, no one is from nowhere. Based in Berlin for the past 20 years, Rhode remains rooted to the folly that is South Africa. A man between worlds, for whom a ‘planetary humanism’ is not an option, he also knows the deceit factored into so-called ‘universality.’ Global wars are the grotesque spectre, populism and fanaticism its trigger.
That said, Rhode elects an embroiled yet life-affirming vision. Against psychic and socio-political attrition, he chooses to paint in blues, photograph in black and white, in the hope that this subtle calibration can, momentarily, appease us. On a worn white wall, a blue bower prevails – “a shady place under trees or climbing plants in a garden or wood,” an inner-city Eden after The Fall – against which Rhode stages the dance of a boy and a girl, his Adam and Eve. In the maw of a gang-ridden township, he stages his Blue Eden, his ode to “transience and the fragility of beauty… the inevitability of change.”
It is what Rhode’s images do that matters most, in Rhode’s case their vitality in a grimly bigoted heartsore time. Staging the shoot, with dancers he has worked with for over a decade, was a decisive act. Not only is the city the artist’s creative grail, it is, perforce, the epitome of economic and moral collapse – a city betrayed and abandoned.
Unsurprisingly, in a pornographic era of victimhood, in a shattered city, Rhode’s Adam and Eve dance beneath raindrops like ripe seedlings, carry each other along a leafy lane, are bound, lovestruck, in the embrace of a splendid weed, or buoyed along a vein of laced branches. There, in this filigreed blue world, the young couple bend, wheel, fly, leap – theirs an infinite grace recorded in blues, black, and white.