Ale Guzzetti: quarant’anni di carriera tra arte interattiva e robotica.
by Jacopo Maltese
Visual Cultures e Pratiche Curatoriali, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milano
The exhibition Hopeful Monsters. Sculture sonore (Sound sculptures) 1982 – 2022, encompasses forty years of Ale Guzzetti’s research in the field of interactive art. The exhibition, conceived as an overview of the Lombard artist’s career, aims to highlight the specific peculiarities of his work, that is, the constant relationship between the work and the public, between art and technology, between the visual and the auditory. This project seeks to shed light on the themes that have always animated his artistic production and of which he is a skilful interpreter.
The early 1980s saw the birth of his first Electronic Pictures (1982), works that, like his Ricerche di semiografie musicali (Research on musical notation) (1985 – 1987), stem from his interest in sound, its propagation in space and its transformation into a tangible image. The experiments of the 1980s thus led Ale Guzzetti to the creation of works that investigate the relationship between sound and image. If in Electronic Pictures what apparently appear to be abstract forms are instead devices capable of reproducing noise, the notation, on the other hand, represents scores of musical motifs previously processed by a computer.
Being of the same era, the sound sculptures Observing Objects: Majorino Poetry (1988) and Imaginary Playmate (1989) are in dialogue with the external environment, in particular with the public. The works were created through the use of everyday objects, such as bottles, buoys and tubes, elements that have no logical connection to each other but which, combined with electronic structures and light devices, create interactive works of art. The particularity of these works is, as repeatedly emphasised, the relationship they manage to establish with the viewer. In fact, in response to stimuli from the outside world, these sculptures emit sounds and produce lights. By manipulating them directly, the spectator can change their light intensity, volume and timbre. The distinction between artwork and audience is definitively removed. The sculpture is no longer a passive object, placed on a pedestal to be observed, but becomes an active agent, possessing its own agency, able to act with its own autonomy when prompted by the viewer. Constant interaction brings the works to life; the artist himself, a modern Daedalus, creates sculptures and installations that have their own autonomy, their own life and their own memory. Ale Guzzetti gives them a voice, just like in a Greek myth, revealing the soul of the things that surround us and with which we create a symbiotic relationship.
The attempt to create autonomous works of art capable of movement and of emitting sound is in fact a theme rooted in Greek myth. Like Hephaestus, the god and master forger, Daedalus was able to construct works that have now become part of the collective imagination. The Athenian inventor, endowed with great intelligence, is said to have made countless famous creations, of which automata, namely sculptures capable of moving autonomously and sometimes, as reported by some commentators of the time, speaking, are the emblem. Daedalus is but an initial figure in a process that, starting from myth and continuing up to the present day, sees the figure of the artist approach that of the ‘magician': the artist becomes the one capable of shaping a new reality, a new life. The work of art is no longer a mere copy of the world but takes on a freedom of action of its own, becoming capable of interacting and relating with people. Guzzetti’s research is therefore part of a long history of experimentation involving the main figures on the international art scene and which, starting after the Second World War, thanks to artists such as Allan Kaprow (1927 – 2006), opened up a new way of perceiving art.
The interest shown in sound and the relationship between work and audience is also a constant factor in more recent works. 50 Voices Choirs (2020), for example, consists exclusively of a choir of 50 anatomical elements (mouths and ears) which, activated by the presence of the audience, reproduce sound motifs. The result generates a series of sounds that pervade the room and join the murmur generated by the audience and the noises coming from the other installations, creating an increasingly complex and interconnected interaction.
Ale Guzzetti’s works do not only seek a relationship with the public but also with the great masters of the past and their art. Impossible Interviews (2021) is a work in which the grotesque and expressive faces, typical of the production of sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736 – 1783), realised with the aid of a 3D printer, dialogue with three self-portraits in which Guzzetti portrays himself in a fantasised style, appropriating the stylistic approach of the German artist. The end result is a group of six works that converse with each other in which, once again, the theme of mutual encounter is investigated.
From the 18th century, we move on to the 20th century with the work Vampiri del ‘900 (Vampires of the 20th Century), (Picasso, Dali, Warhol and Beuys), created in 2020. The sculptures depict the faces of four emblematic figures who catalysed the last century with their art and personality. Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973), one of the foremost protagonists of 20th-century art, represents a crucial junction between 19th-century tradition and contemporary art; Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989), Catalan painter and emblem of surrealism and the role of the artist within society; Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987), an obsessive and eccentric personality, a leading exponent of American Pop Art; and finally Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), a world-famous German artist who through his actions conceived art as a magical-ritual process, a liberating act. Their faces, marked by ‘iconic’ elements, are placed on large hands, giving life to monstrous creatures. This is completed by an audio file reproducing the original voices of the four artists with whom it is associated.
The exhibition, staged at the contemporary art gallery Il Chiostro, ends with two works representative of Ale Guzzetti’s entire production: the series Vetri Parlanti (Talking Glass) (1996 – 2017) and the Techno Garden Project.
The first is composed of works conceived from the 1990s onwards, in which blown glass sculptures house electronic circuits capable of listening to and processing the surrounding sounds, of seeing and reproducing the spectators’ images through micro-cameras, and of emitting light signals in relation to stimuli coming from the external environment. Originating from the fruitful collaboration with maestro Massimo Lunardon, an artist specialised in glass working, the works are conceived as “hybrid” structures capable of combining a noble material, such as glass, traditionally consecrated, to making art with electronic materials such as circuits, wires and electric cables. The Talking Glass series stages the art-technology pair, as well as manifesting the oft-stated interest of the relationship between the work and the public.
On the threshold of the new millennium, since 1999, Ale Guzzetti has been working on the Techno Garden Project whereby small interactive sculptures are installed in the world’s most beautiful gardens: from the Galapagos Islands to Japanese Zen gardens, from Tanzania to the floating gardens of Burma, from the Omani desert to Uzbekistan. They are small autonomous organisms, powered by solar panels, capable of interacting with the surrounding environment, producing sounds and lighting up at night, in a few words merging with the landscape itself. A unity in which we bear witness to the birth of new prolific relations between diametrically opposed worlds: the plant and animal kingdom and the artificial kingdom. The aim is to go beyond the idea of monumental sculpture, through microsculptural works capable of offering a new perspective with which to observe the landscape. Gardens, which have always been an essential component in different cultures, become the settings in which these small sculptures, the result of the most advanced technologies, take on a new identity that is increasingly integrated into the natural dimension. Technology is no longer a tool used by man for production, but becomes an autonomous being guided by its own laws capable of relating to the environment, animals, plants and man.
In conclusion, Hopeful Monsters. Sculture sonore (Sound sculptures) 1982 – 2022 allows us to grasp the central nuclei of Guzzetti’s poetic approach and how they have evolved over time. From Electronic Pictures to the Techno Garden Project, each work in the exhibition offers different points of reflection, ranging from robotics to figurative arts, from ecology to anthropology, capable of investigating the current state of art.