"Language is the house of being and man lives in that house" (M. Heidegger).
In our times of mass communication, being seems to have abandoned language, oblivion to be descending upon its absence. Appearance has the primacy in rendering of world, creating its own world. A world viewed as an available stock, with a sense of life that is closed upon itself and reduced to mere function. The essence of technology dawns very slowly. This dawn is the night of the world, feigning to be a technological dawn.
What remains of being in the twilight-earth? Even the collective imaginary is massified. The power of mythological figures, the awe of story-telling has become sheer aberration, peopled with absurd figures whose unredeemed brutality reveals our darkest side. If in society the meaning of mourning is masked by technological noise and its fascination, if despair is mutely consumed in privacy, art becomes a scenario where it commits suicide, spectacularly and repeatedly. In communication flows, a modality of being appears, takes shape. If the world is shaped by technology or money, then technology and money, rather than art, shape the world.
Without authentic communication, a place where there is being, is art still conceivable? An art that overcomes the blindness caused by mass communication, lending itself to the interplay of interpretations?
Heidegger sees the opening of the openness of truth in the work of art. But how can we enter the Heideggerian story and be open to its vision if we havenít been able to preserve a certain way of seeing? Only a way of seeing that goes beyond can see openness! It is a hazardous experience. Yet it is the only experience allowing to grasp an event in its most authentic form and to approach art. If poetic language is not a ìsignî alluding to something already given, but is the place where being appears, happens... the work of art is an unveiling. But for this to happen, the making of art, once it has accepted, without being subjected to them, the channels of communication as a flowing, and once it has put an end to the rites of self-destruction, must make itself available to speech to unveil the non-said (being).
Communication as a work of art can become a space, to create space, in the constant breaking down of places for the benefit of open vastness. It is a being that has to change and a response that seeks the ways to make that possible. It is a feeling free even within structures that can be traps. It is freedom from the interpretative codes of the various languages, used with awareness, without assimilating them with any absolute standard of judgement. It is cultivating vision and turning to the future as to the place of the possible fulfilment of desire. It is maintaining active that fundamental motivation for life that, despite everything, can be renewed each day and be directed towards meaningful purposes. The only meaning we have left: a temporary, fragile, frayed meaning... All in all, cultivating the vital impulse that is the only thing that can go beyond and overcome the solitude of whoever lives in places of possible freedom, searching for travelling companions to call other forms of reality back to being.
Actually, reality is the collective sphere. Reality is the result of the desires of the greatest number. You cannot think about overcoming, without thinking about the desire that wants it and the freedom that allows it. Desiring is a perception and, at the present moment, desiring tensions are intensely directed towards consumer activities. The conditionings binding them are invasive and efficient. Only an eros that is wholly aware can avoid falling into the traps of the market-world and remain close to the fundamental needs that can be renewed. An eros able to elude the traps of the everyday, where managing desire destroys it, losing it in consuming (consuming prevents overcoming).
What does art reveal today that is so essential? By communicating, art leads us to go beyond, and by doing so directs functional thinking to another way of thinking, where what counts is not objectivation but the riddle. In art, thinking becomes will to power, to become form. If this does not occur, if there is no sharing, is remains powerless. It is just a private fact having no effect on society, so it does not create a world. Creating a world depends on numeric strength and shared intentions too.
Now that the world has become vision of the world, there is no longer anything to guarantee the correspondence between a sign, a meaning, a representation and reality. Languages, having lost all foundations, are invested with new responsability. Limit, boundary, threshold, edge, verge, paradox: words often used, recently, by those who interpret our times. As though attempting to solve the riddle of existence had led us to the brim of the world. But we cannot turn the world into a paradoxical world of boundaries! We have to go beyond...
Thought has gone beyond the limits of reason and lives on an open horizon. As soon as the barriers of reason are destroyed, as soon as the absolute value of calculating thought is questioned, the scenario changes and is revealed in its shifting inconsistency. Concepts such as fragility, precariousness, lightness invite us to redesign a world free of dichotomies; exposed to non-meaning, but also to interpretation in constant, reciprocal tension. Creativity can only be enhanced by this perpetual challenge! Actually, we no longer have to replace one form of conditioning by another, but to free potentials.

Guggenheim Public