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From the catalogue of the painting projects
exhibition at IULM university, Milan 1995
1995 "SEVEN MARVELLOUS TEMPLES"
I have lived in Italy almost a quarter of century.
Wandering, I travelled along the peninsula many
times. To feel places, perhaps to feel myself.
And now I am searching for the magnificent
views more specifically. Seven. It is an emphasis
of many building-symbols, marks of themselves.
But I need to meet a hundred sage men and see
other places even more adequate.
I need to meet a hundred architects and painters
and poets to see other wonderful symbols representing
the Fine Arts...
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The seven wonders of the ancient world...
The great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens
of Babylon, the statue of Zeus in Olympia, the
temple of Artemis in Ephesus, the Mausoleum
of Alicarnasso, the Colossus of Rhodes, the
beacon of Alexandria.
For many centuries people's identification
and identity.
------
The short period of our old modern world is
coming to an end. Two symbols, two models: the
Tour Eiffel of the past century and the recent
glass pyramid of the Louvre Museum.
Our new world, that will not be modern or post-modern,
has no wonderful monument:
We must listen to hear the true voices of a
new feeling for beauty.
Seven wonderful temples. Today:
The Music Temple, the Painting Temple, the Sculpture
Temple, the Literature Temple, the Dance Temple,
the Cinema Temple and the Temple of Immaterial
Arts.
In marble and granite, a hundred meter high
if possible.
Temples, exhibition spaces and telematic archives
of the entire world Fine Arts.
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Armed with microscopes, artists find in today's
life one or some of their own fragments.
While Kandinsky was still worried about the
idea of an objective and spiritual fruition,
the Academy post-Duchamp and post-Malevich,
has given power to any object or behaviour of
those who want to introduce values and alphabets.
This reality produces myriads of small rewarding
adventures. To be kind enough, we could say
that now the artist activity is an extremely
interiorised one. Many are the artists, and
art
and everything. This seems reassuring and alive
in a making philosophy, a life philosophy and
in a methodology one.
Looking back, one could be even more convinced
to believe in progress: the ancient world, the
world in the centuries of the 7 wonders, was
tending most probably toward an exterior vision
of life, really exterior or less interior than
our present world is. It seems that some dictators
(or politicians) entrusted some (or many) valid
artists, with tasks that they accomplished in
an exemplary way. And society, or societies,
and peoples, busy with other problems, where
indifferent and not much involved. It could
have been.
I look at some Eighteenth-century engravings
representing the 7 wonders. They are a plausible
depiction because many civilizations left their
description for each monument in the course
of the centuries.
I feel sad. I watch from the window (from any
window). In little more than a hundred years
we have built straight and high lines most of
all, as for example our houses, smooth and clean,
one over the other infinitely, vertically and
horizontally, where everything and nothing can
happen... All smooth and free.
*
I look at my dusty microscopes.
I close my eyes and see the Colossus of Rhodes
with his legs stretched apart and ships passing
under, while children play around the little
toe of his left foot...
I open my eyes again and see my children playing
around the feet (which feet?) of the Two Twins
(but which Twins?).
Of parallelepipeds.
Alzek Misheff
New York - Milan, April 1995
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