A Walk 6/7
by Salvatore Lacagnina
The Banquet in Honour of the Princess of Saxony, completed between 1772 and 1773 by the Tyrolean painter Ignaz Unterberger, is one of the rare surviving records of the many celebrated receptions hosted by the Borghese family at the Loggia dei Vini. The scene, seen from above, emphasizes the theatricality of the celebration. The numerous guests crowd in circles beneath the pavilion around the table, and around the Loggia; some observe the scene from above, seated along the parapet. There is something in this view that recalls the horseshoe-shaped structure of Italian-style theatres which, in the eighteenth century, had spread rapidly. «Ways of seeing», as John Berger would say?
“Let’s make LAVINIA a Walk,” we wrote at the beginning of this story. And over time we have imagined different possibilities, physical and metaphorical, for a walk. LAVINIA is, among other things, a walk through history and through its manifestations in the city of Rome. If one walks for ten minutes, following Via Po, Via Basento is easily reached. Hidden in a clandestine printing press at number 55, on November 20, 1943, Leone Ginzburg, writer and anti-Fascist, was arrested while organizing the Roman Resistance. During his confinement in Pizzoli, in Abruzzo, he had completed the memorable revision of the Italian translation of War and Peace: “War is the historical world, peace the human world” he had written—perhaps optimistically—in the introduction to the Einaudi edition.
Carlo Ginzburg, son of Leone and Natalia Levi (who became a celebrated writer as Ginzburg), has been one of the most important historians of the post-war period. Among the founders of microhistory, he developed the so-called “evidential paradigm.” In a famous essay he reconstructs a method based on the analysis of “infinitesimal details, outwardly insignificant clues” and, even, the residues of official documents to decode a collective mentality or an entire culture: Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method. Among other things, he brings together three figures trained as doctors: the art historian Giovanni Morelli (to whom we owe the so-called “Morellian method” for the attribution of paintings), the creator of the detective Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, and the future inventor of psychoanalysis. “In all three cases, perhaps infinitesimal traces make it possible to grasp a deeper reality, otherwise unattainable. Traces: more precisely, symptoms (in Freud’s case), clues (in Sherlock Holmes’s), pictorial marks (in Morelli’s).”
But the evidential method is older than modern science, Ginzburg warns: “For thousands of years mankind lived by hunting. In the course of endless pursuits hunters learned to construct the appearance and movements of an unseen quarry through its tracks: prints in soft ground, snapped twigs, droppings, snagged hairs or feathers, smells, puddles, threads of saliva. They learnt to sniff, to observe, to give meaning and context to the slightest trace. They learnt to make complex calculations in an instant, in shadowy wood or treacherous clearing.”
For the historian, it is a matter of finding the most philologically reliable paths through which to reconstruct a history different from the grand narratives imposed by the “victors.” A gilded silver cup, then, or the record of an Inquisition interrogation of a “heretic,” become traces through which the darker aspects of history emerge, the narration of the lives and thoughts of those whom power deprived of a voice, sanitizing events and even memory. “An object that speaks of the loss, destruction, disappearance of objects. It does not speak of itself. It speaks of others. Will it include them too?”
Peter Friedl
Last Jest
Anyone entering the Loggia dei Vini finds a garment abandoned by someone who seems to have discarded it quickly. Perhaps before a sudden escape. Its proportions appear to be those of a child. The doublet, breeches and surcote suggest an undefined period between the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, in an equally undefined place within the so-called West—perhaps corresponding to the period of the Loggia’s best-known use by the Borghese family?
The hat, the collar and the footwear reveal that the owner must have been a professional jester: evidently a person of small stature or perhaps a person with dwarfism. Judging from the quality of the fabrics, he must have been the fool of a wealthy court. Why is it here? What happened? The jester has disappeared, where did he go?
Like the detective Dupin, or like the historian Carlo Ginzburg, or through the many methods of imagination, anyone who spends time in the Loggia can reconstruct their own story of the jester. They can also invent it or dream it.
Often, Peter Friedl enters the gaps within a history, an event, a concept and condenses them into a work which, in turn, meticulously seeks to leave blind spots that anyone can open, through imagination.
Last Jest evokes the costume of Hop-Frog, the protagonist of the story of the same name by Edgar Allan Poe, the “master of the macabre,” the creator of Dupin, the investigator who most inspired the characters of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.
Hop-Frog is a jester, “dwarf and cripple,” “of prodigious muscular power,” who walks by hopping like a frog because of his misshapen legs—hence the strange nickname, which so amuses the “fat” king and his court. Toward the end of the story, the fool, violently humiliated by the king, invents a prodigious prank for the masquerade which delights the king and his seven ministers, organizing the cruelest revenge: the king and his seven ministers are to terrify the guests by appearing as orangutans, using flax costumes coated with tar to make the disguise as convincing as possible.
The king and the seven ministers end up chained together, suspended from a chandelier, and burned. Hop-Frog disappears with his beloved Trippetta, a court dancer, also small in stature, and neither of them is ever found again. It is the extreme gesture of an exemplary rebellion against power, the liberation from chains, from the costume that marks a profession and a destiny.
Last Jest is an open work that operates on multiple levels. It is a work on costume, on art as a historical document; it evokes but does not represent, narrates but does not necessarily refer. The final action, the final joke, the “last jest.” It certainly has to do with theater—a recurring theme in Friedl: a theater torn to pieces, where action is frozen or impossible. It is a work that concerns history, the relationships between aesthetics and politics, between power and submission. Hop-Frog, beyond his physical strength, has a “more terrible kind of power in the imagination that conceives perfect revenge in the cataclysmic inversion of power relationships.”
“I now see distinctly,” he said, “what manner of people these maskers are. They are a great king and his seven privy-councillors—a king who does not scruple to strike a defenceless girl, and his seven councillors who abet him in the outrage. As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester—and this is my last jest.”
Edgar Allan Poe, Hop-Frog, 1849.
Peter Friedl considers himself a failed artist. He began making drawings more than sixty years ago and still continues every day. He lives in exile.
Selected solo exhibitions include: Report 1964–2022, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2022); Teatro, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and Carré d’Art - Musée d’art contemporain, Nîmes (2019); Teatro Popular, Lumiar Cité, Lisbon (2017); The Diaries, Grazer Kunstverein, Graz (2016); The Dramatist, Artspace, Auckland (2014); Peter Friedl, Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2010); Working, Kunsthalle Basel (2008); Blow Job, Kunsthal Extra City, Antwerp (2008); Work 1964–2006, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Miami Art Central and Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille (2006–2007); and OUT OF THE SHADOWS, Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2004). Friedl’s work has also been exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; MoMA PS1, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, and Museo Tamayo, Mexico City. He has participated in documenta 10, 12 and 14 (1997, 2007, 2017); Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019); 1st Anren Biennale (2017); Taipei Biennial (2012, 2016); 48th and 56th Venice Biennale (1999, 2015); 10th Shanghai Biennale (2014); La Triennale, Paris (2012); 28th Bienal de São Paulo (2008); Manifesta 7, Trento (2008); 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008) and 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (2004).
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding, Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder, Gianni Politi
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Piero Golia, Johanna Grawunder,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still on view: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Ruth Ewan, Piero Golia,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska
Still visible: Ross Birrell & David Harding,
Enzo Cucchi, Ruth Ewan, Piero Golia,
Gianni Politi, Monika Sosnowska