IN/ACTION.
Against pastime, boredom

8.11 - 9.12.2018
Santa Maria Della Scala Museum, Siena

IN/ACTION. Contro lo scacciatempo la noia (IN/ACTION. Against pastime, boredom) is the overflowing of a timeless imaginative flux, moving continuously between some Fluxus practices and the works of six living artists, producing a visual platform for a critical investigation into boredom and its relationships with technology.

The exhibition proposed in the walls of Santa Maria Della Scala in Siena opened up with a video by artist Aideen Doran, an artist who, through the readaptation of the literary work Oblomov (1849) written by Ivan Gončarov, presented boredom as a form of active resistance to the incessant request of performativity and work to the present day. In the video, a detached and impersonal voice reads the script, affected by the theories of Jonathan Crary and Jan Verwoert, while a series of digital and analogical images allude to the limits of technology and human body, caused by the hyper-acceleration of production and consumption cycles. Exhaustion becomes a plague and "our hero" Oblomov, with his not doing, acts as an action against the commodification of time and attention.
In the same room, the environmental installation Gli Imbambolati by artist Benni Bosetto, created in March 2018 inside the ADA Project spaces in Rome, was presented in a reduced version adapting to the rooms of the Siena museum. In the series of bas reliefs that push out from the floor, it's possible to glimpse human figures. Their faces point upwards, observing the sky and the clouds beyond the ceiling of the museum. The same ones that Aristophanes considered, in his homonymous comedy, "powerful divinities for those who don't want to do anything". The dazed Imbambolati becomes a metaphor for a condition of contemplation, in which time and space are suspended in favor of a new emergence of the imagination.
A corner table presented some paper based material, including artist's books and accessible writings related to Dick Higgins' essay Boredom and Danger (1968), published in the ninth issue of The Something Else Newsletters. In this paper, the artist proposes a reflection on boredom and danger, starting from two pieces of Erik Satie, Vieux Sequins et Vielles Cuirasses (1913) e Vexations (1893). This last one, repeated 840 times during its performance, opens a discussion on the euphoria that comes after the initial boredom during his listening. Higgins, even considering John Cage's interest in the dialectic between boredom and intensity, highlights what he calls "super boring”, a special kind of boredom that goes beyond the initial level of simple boredom. The text ends by stating that work must light up on the new attitudes of our mass society through boredom and danger, instead of being a mere commodity.
Original copies of Silence (1961) and Notations (1969), both written by John Cage, were displayed under cases, together with the book Du Cheval a Christo et autres ecrits by Nam June Paik. Re-editions, photocopies and images of various related writings are instead accessible, including copies of Satie's Vexations and Cage's 4′ 33′′ arrangement, as well as new editions of Silence and Notations.
In the exhibition display, Higgins' research created a direct contact with the musical score 4′ 33′′ by John Cage. The work was presented, in its first version, during a performance by David Tudor, held in Woodstock in 1952. Made up of three movements, tacet (30") – tacet (2′ 23′′) – tacet (1′ 40′′), the score invites the musician not to play for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, as the title indicates. According to its author, the resulting silence turns out to be its opposite: the sound. The silence, as it's conventionally considered, doesn't exist, since the surrounding environment becomes part of the exhibition, erasing the subject-object and art-life dichotomies. The same work was celebrated in Nam June Paik's video A tribute to John Cage, through the re-enactment of 4'33", recreating the musical score with different images and sounds. The video is made up of ten parts, corresponding to ten musical pieces that, put together, reconfigure the strength of John Cage's work. One of the central pieces presents the re-execution of the 4′33′′ by Cage himself in various places in Manhattan, chosen through the I-Ching technique of throwing coins. The uncontested zen attitude, the chance and the democratization of the sound, essential for Cage, emerge in Paik's work also thanks to the stories and interviews of friends and colleagues and thanks to some traces of other Paik's works, such as Zen for Tv, Tv Bra e Tv Cello.
The exhibition continued in a second room with the diptych Untitled by Matteo Cremonesi. The artwork is part of a photographic research aimed to provoke a kind of exhaustion and boredom of the gaze. In his work, details of ordinary office apparatus and economic landscape such as printers and xerox machines appear in their monotony. The artwork constructs an ambiguous dialogue with the formal structures and the predefined technological patterns. In this way Untitled shows a visual tension that attempts to disclose the impotence of observation.
In the museum space, the Reification series by Dario Maglionico is presented by two paintings, Reification #44 (2018) and Reification #49 (2017). The artist recalls domestic situations, in which the protagonists' intimacy seems to constantly compare itself with technological devices. The figurative language is fragmentary and the narrative discontinues. The depicted scenes create a sense of estrangement and suspension, in which a simultaneous relationship between different temporalities emerges: the everyday ritual and its digital doubling. His paintings trace the social and cultural passages of our time, such as the video Fire Gazing by Rustan Soderling. Placed inside a vaulted recess, the video presents and investigates the mythical and spiritual dimension of technology. The wheel, the clock, the USB cable and other objects, which appear in the fire of the bonfire on the screen, symbolize technological evolution. The artist states: "And as the primeval tribes gathered to stare into an open fire at night hoping to see a glimpse of something, so do we stare at our various screens, hoping for the same".
Under the video, the artist's book An Anthology of Chance Operations, published by La Monte Young and co-published by Jackson Mac Low, was presented. Several Fluxus artists including George Maciunas (who created the graphics) contributed to the creation of one of the first examples of an artist's book in which the content is the work of art. Inside its pages one can find scores, visual and concrete poems, improvisations, meaningless instructions in which chance, as indicated by the title, leads to a series of indeterminate events and situations of full potential. The book collects a series of works, including Compositions 1960 #7 by its publisher, created to be played simultaneously by as many instruments as possible and with the minimal variation.
In the last video, Noia (Boredom) by Mauro Folci, the tension of the scene is determined by the suspension of the distinction between man and animal. The gesticulation between the human hands and a lion's paws alludes to the concept of deep boredom described by Heidegger: the philosopher distinguishes the animal environment from the human world and, in this perspective, boredom is useful to understand what the world is for the human being. The animal is incapable to gather the world as loaded of potential because it's constantly stunned by the inhibitors that also prevent it from getting bored. In the state of boredom, the transition from the animal environment to the human world, in other worlds the anthropogenesis, is in question, leading to the man's essence.
A display case containing the artist book Water Yam by George Brecht closed the exhibition. The flux-box, as it is called, contains several cards (in the edition presented, 72) in which some “event-scores” are printed: indications, notes and images aimed at carrying out actions within the Yam Festival. The choice of the name (the yam commonly indicates the sweet potato) is related to the organizers' desire to create a series of intangible events and works that were inspired by everyday life and that possessed the ability to escape from the commodification of art.

IN/ACTION. Contro lo scacciatempo, la noia was a research and exhibition project curated by Lisa Andreani, Matteo Binci, Gloria Nossa, Milena Zanetti, displayed in the historic Santa Maria Della Scala Museum in Siena in 2018. It was selected following the workshop We still use microscopes as clubs. Media between depletion and aesthetic chance (held by Maurizio Guerri) inside the Just Image program curated by Michela Eremita, on the occasion of ToscanainContemporanea 2017. The jury was composed of Michela Eremita, Elio Grazioli, Maurizio Guerri and Daniele Pitteri.