MASCARATA _
2016
2016
The Masquerade - some notes on Dario Picariello’s work,
text by Eugenio Viola - Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá – MAMBO
text by Eugenio Viola - Chief Curator of the Museum of Modern Art of Bogotá – MAMBO
“The mask is connected to the joy of alternations and reincarnations, [...] is linked to movements, to metamorphoses, the violations of natural barriers, to ridicule, to nicknames (accompanied by their names); it is embodied in the playful principle of life; at its base is the relationship of particular reality and image, a feature of all the most ancient forms of rituals and performances.
It is the mask that clearly reveals the essence of the grotesque1”.
The term “mascarata” in ancient Neapolitan indicates the Italian equivalent of “masquerade”. The theme of the mask and the masking is polysemic and links to several disciplines, ranging from ethnography to sociology, philosophy, and psychology.
The mask alludes to an identity, it becomes a complementary tool and an accomplice. Marcel Mauss observes that a variety of roles, names and functions play in masking, even though their potential cancellation2 is also at stake. Unsurprisingly, the masking process introduces, more radically, a vast symbolism of the body that becomes a multilayer, serial and dynamic, expression of a liquid identity, constantly in transit. Essentially it is a linguistic assembly with physiological, psychological and sociological features3. The studies conducted by Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais’ work are fundamental. They investigate the sources and the evolution of popular culture, linked to the forms and symbols of Carnival - what the scholar defnes as grotesque realism, which is the image of the comic culture system , where the “low” element, and the material body, constitutes a deeply positive principle.
Bakhtin’s words indicate the mask and the masking as examples of the traditional culture and in the re-elaboration of the carnival reality, from which the various forms of the grotesque derive, and by extension the mechanisms and processes through which it is possible to enter diferent evels of perception of the existent.
After all, the need for masking generates a need to get away from oneself and from the fat banality of daily routine, to escape from a rigid identity schematism and to observe from another diferent, alienating perspective.
The need to masquerade is linked to the need of avoiding being recognized and to be able to act more freely, to break from the constraints of a pre-established order. It allows, essentially, access to an alternate dimension, the participation in a ritual of collective emancipation and it ofers the ability to make one’s own personal contribution to the redefnition, albeit playful, of empty stereotypes, of ossifed laws of sterile principles and rules to overturn. The mask creates a deviation from a supposed normalcy and in the frst place compared to an encoded and socially accepted image. From this viewpoint, the act of masking embodies a strong cultural value, which afects more or less deeply the social structure where it happens.
Masks have a clear importance in the Carnival economy: behind the gaudy and exaggerated features of the masked bodies lies a dormant soul, temporarily replacing the soul everyone carries during the rest of the year.Traditional societies used to celebrate a rite of propitiation, purifcation and regeneration during Carnival. Bakhtin, in his pioneering studies, points out that all these forms of rituals and performances were very widespread in all the countries of medieval Europe, standing out in terms of richness and complexity in the culture of Romance countries, especially in France. They were organized on the principle of laughing, totally “diferent” compared to the forms of worship, and to “serious” ofcial ceremonies, organized by Church in the feudal state system. They revealed, basically, a parallel aspect of the world, of mankind and of human relations, unofcial, external to Church and State themselves: they suggested a second world and a second life of which all the men of the Middle Ages took part, in greater or lesser extent, on some particular dates. All this had created a particular dualistic world, and it would be impossible to understand the cultural consciousness of the Middle Ages, nor the same culture of the Renaissance without an overlook on this duality.
«The carnival, in opposition to the ofcial holiday, was the triumph of a sort of temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the existing regime, the temporary abolition of all hierarchical relationships, privileges, rules and taboos - Bakhtin detects. It was the true feast of time, of becoming, of alternations and renewal. Against any perpetuation, any fxed term and each end. It turned his look to the unfnished future4». A very special meaning, in the context of these festivals, had the abolition of all hierarchical relationships, unlike ofcial holidays, which celebrated inequality instead: people had to appear with all the signs related to their title, grade and state, and consequently occupying the place assigned to each rank. On the contrary, at least for Carnival, everyone was considered equal, the particular form of the family and free contact between people ruled, separated in normal life by insurmountable barriers related to social, economic and cultural inequalities. All Dario Picariello’s research gleans from the symbolic density of the mask and the possibilities, potentially endless, related to masking. In particular, Masquerade is a project inspired by one of the Irpinia carnival versions, which dates back to the midSeventeenth Century5. Originally these representations were from Naples as Carnival skits, sung to the sound of the trombone and bass drum, and quickly spread throughout the kingdom, where they permanently implanted in the early Nineteenth Century. They were represented in the palace courtyards, taverns and squares, until they were ofcially forbidden, for the licentious and potentially subversive character, in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, to fnally assume the features of a play during Carnival, rooted in the vernacular meanings that survive, even today, in Irpinia: the Carnival of Montemarano, the dance “O ’ntreccio”of Forino, the “ndrezzata” of Cervinara, the “Squqqualacchiun” of Teora, the noose of love of Sirignano, “a’ Mascarata” of Piazza di Pandola and that of Biagiana, the foats of Paternopoli and Gesualdo, the “Zeza” of Mercogliano, which is probably the most known because it was used by Pier Paolo Pasolini as the soundtrack of his Decameron (1971). Each of these territories preserves diferent traditions, passed down over the centuries. Common to all of these representations is the exclusive participation of men, who almost archetypally, as in ancient Greek comedies, play female roles, as in the past women could not be exposed to public stages. All of them also have close links with the rural world, with a culture belonging to the auspicious rituals of re-establishment of the annual cycle of countries.
Especially in Masquerade, players, dressed in typical folk clothing, celebrate a wedding to the rhythm of a relentless music, performing the traditional fgures of Botta and ’Ndrezzata (woven). The wedding guests, the so-called beautiful (men) and the handsome (women), are dressed up and attend the event dancing to the rhythm of the Rossini Tarantella, whose the folk revival is played with “street” instruments.
A series of fxed masks are interpreters of the parade with is directed by the leader to the sound of music, the “pim’ommo”, the most beautiful and the best dancer, dressed in velvet breeches, shirt, waistcoat and a hat with a plume. As time passed, the Masquerade was softened by the addition of the “beautiful” signifcantly interpreted by the women of the town, whose costume consists of a large brightly colored pleated skirt and an embroidered light blouse. Outside the row the “mpacchiatrici” rage, men dressed as women wearing the same costume, equipped with wigs and garish makeup, whose role is to organize and incite to dance and to celebrate, armed with “Scoppetta”, i.e. a powder loaded gun and shot with a puf on passersby.
The bride is a man dressed as a woman, whose dress is borrowed from one of the young ladies of the town who got married in the year, who gives passersby cloth bundles with wedding confetti, while the groom, usually loutish, gives mimosa twigs to the ladies on the balconies with the aid of the socalled “scaletta” (ladder).
In the photographs of this series, as in all his previous production, the mysterious nature of Picariello’s photographic medium shows a revealing character. Here in particular, the prosaic topic redeems in the name of a suspended epiphany, in which the sacralization of the profane and the desecration of the sacred end in bipolar tensions coexisting in the artwork’s space.
His mysterious locations, always strictly calibrated, have a wise formal construction, resolved through complex, yet made by a few simple elements, mises-en-scène. On the one hand they denounce a relationship with the the tradition of tableaux vivants, or recall a dramatization of the image that refers to the same origins of photography, on the other hand are placed on the back of a long line of artists, related to the tradition of the so-called staged photography, genre that exploits the narrative and illusionistic potentials of photography and that includes diferent personalities: from Gregory Crewdson to Jef Wall, from Sandy Skoglund to James Casebere, from Hiroshi Sugimoto to David Lachapelle, from Sarah Moon to Leslie Krims, from Cindy Sherman to Nobuyoshi Araki, from Yasumasa Morimura to Joel Peter Witkin, to reverberate in a younger generation of artists such as Adi Nes, Shizuka Yokomizo, Jemima Stehli, Thomas Demand, Bernard Faucon, William Wegman, Elad Lassry and many others.
In Masquerade, Picariello plays with the slippery relationship between identity and representation: the character who appears in the photos of this series is always represented by the artist through a series of alienating self-portraits. He is placed in front of the audience in such a (un)displayed manner that produces an efect of mystic masquerade, where masking and wearing someone else’s clothes recall, rather than the mere matters of clothing appearance, the question of identity, where the self-portrait actually returns its reverse in a narcissistic, complacent and decadent swoon. «As always, the artist faithfully adheres to an established code, in this case to individual identity, the rule of one, Alberto Boatto properly observes. But it is only to overwhelm him, to fnd, between the classical myth and the lesson of psychoanalysis, a dual identity6». I is an Other (Rimbaud), for «doubling and doubling equal to look oneself into the mirror7». Besides, the ironically self-referential relation extends here to the tools of the trade, which became material support for images, camping on refective panels, on photographic speakers, on annular fashes, softboxes and on tripods.
The young artist’s photographs appear as still images, made in a thick and thin atmosphere, sometimes timeless, as in the series made in the former prison of Procida (Five hundred and one, 2015), a building which was originally built as the castle of the Avalos at the end of the Sixteenth Century and later transformed by the Bourbons in the penal colony, where the images are not linked to a possible scenario or to a supposed chain of events but only the free viewer’s interpretation can try to retrace. More formally, every single detail in Picariello’s images is vividly captured as if it were a painting, locked in the moment when the complexity of reality seems to stop and everything remains hopelessly suspended. The audience looking at his photographs is forced to stop discerning between reality and fction, trying to imagine what happened or maybe what is going to happen. In this sense, Picariello plays with the sense of alienation and with an atmosphere of unreality that breaks from everyday life, creating an uncanny visionary imagination, thanks to a virtuous use of light, often unidirectional like a Caravaggio strong chiaroscuro, designed to create images with a strong perceptive impact, gifted with a visual appeal that produces a sense of very pictorial optical perspicuity, almost neoFlemish. In this way, Dario Picariello’s photographs remain veiled by a sense of suspense and ambiguity. They do not return so much the visible world, but rather what the invisible is digging in the inscrutable, made of emotions and thoughts, memory and symptoms.
1. M. Bachtin, ed. it.
L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare. Riso, carnevale e festa nella tradizione medievale e rinascimentale Einaudi, Turin 1979, p. 47.
2. M.Mauss, ed. it
Una categoria dello spirito umano: la nozione di persona, quella di “io” in “Teoria generale della magia e altri saggi” Turin, Einaudi, 1965
3. M.Mauss, ed. it.Le Tecniche del corpo, in “Teoria generale della magia e altri saggi”, Turin, Einaudi, 1965
4. M. Bachtin, cit., p. 13
5. The “Masquerade” is also a folk dance of Ischia, among the most famous Italian dances of sword, related to Buonopane, in the municipality of Barano d’Ischia. According to tradition, it is staged on the day of Easter Monday, although it is not inspired by the resurrection of Christ. It symbolizes a moment of peace and the end of hostilities between the inhabitants of two villages, Barano and Buonopane. The origins of this dance are still unclear.
6. A. Boatto, Narciso Infranto. L’autoritratto moderno da Goya a Warhol Laterza, Bari, 2005, p. 193
7. Ibidem
The term “mascarata” in ancient Neapolitan indicates the Italian equivalent of “masquerade”. The theme of the mask and the masking is polysemic and links to several disciplines, ranging from ethnography to sociology, philosophy, and psychology.
The mask alludes to an identity, it becomes a complementary tool and an accomplice. Marcel Mauss observes that a variety of roles, names and functions play in masking, even though their potential cancellation2 is also at stake. Unsurprisingly, the masking process introduces, more radically, a vast symbolism of the body that becomes a multilayer, serial and dynamic, expression of a liquid identity, constantly in transit. Essentially it is a linguistic assembly with physiological, psychological and sociological features3. The studies conducted by Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais’ work are fundamental. They investigate the sources and the evolution of popular culture, linked to the forms and symbols of Carnival - what the scholar defnes as grotesque realism, which is the image of the comic culture system , where the “low” element, and the material body, constitutes a deeply positive principle.
Bakhtin’s words indicate the mask and the masking as examples of the traditional culture and in the re-elaboration of the carnival reality, from which the various forms of the grotesque derive, and by extension the mechanisms and processes through which it is possible to enter diferent evels of perception of the existent.
After all, the need for masking generates a need to get away from oneself and from the fat banality of daily routine, to escape from a rigid identity schematism and to observe from another diferent, alienating perspective.
The need to masquerade is linked to the need of avoiding being recognized and to be able to act more freely, to break from the constraints of a pre-established order. It allows, essentially, access to an alternate dimension, the participation in a ritual of collective emancipation and it ofers the ability to make one’s own personal contribution to the redefnition, albeit playful, of empty stereotypes, of ossifed laws of sterile principles and rules to overturn. The mask creates a deviation from a supposed normalcy and in the frst place compared to an encoded and socially accepted image. From this viewpoint, the act of masking embodies a strong cultural value, which afects more or less deeply the social structure where it happens.
Masks have a clear importance in the Carnival economy: behind the gaudy and exaggerated features of the masked bodies lies a dormant soul, temporarily replacing the soul everyone carries during the rest of the year.Traditional societies used to celebrate a rite of propitiation, purifcation and regeneration during Carnival. Bakhtin, in his pioneering studies, points out that all these forms of rituals and performances were very widespread in all the countries of medieval Europe, standing out in terms of richness and complexity in the culture of Romance countries, especially in France. They were organized on the principle of laughing, totally “diferent” compared to the forms of worship, and to “serious” ofcial ceremonies, organized by Church in the feudal state system. They revealed, basically, a parallel aspect of the world, of mankind and of human relations, unofcial, external to Church and State themselves: they suggested a second world and a second life of which all the men of the Middle Ages took part, in greater or lesser extent, on some particular dates. All this had created a particular dualistic world, and it would be impossible to understand the cultural consciousness of the Middle Ages, nor the same culture of the Renaissance without an overlook on this duality.
«The carnival, in opposition to the ofcial holiday, was the triumph of a sort of temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the existing regime, the temporary abolition of all hierarchical relationships, privileges, rules and taboos - Bakhtin detects. It was the true feast of time, of becoming, of alternations and renewal. Against any perpetuation, any fxed term and each end. It turned his look to the unfnished future4». A very special meaning, in the context of these festivals, had the abolition of all hierarchical relationships, unlike ofcial holidays, which celebrated inequality instead: people had to appear with all the signs related to their title, grade and state, and consequently occupying the place assigned to each rank. On the contrary, at least for Carnival, everyone was considered equal, the particular form of the family and free contact between people ruled, separated in normal life by insurmountable barriers related to social, economic and cultural inequalities. All Dario Picariello’s research gleans from the symbolic density of the mask and the possibilities, potentially endless, related to masking. In particular, Masquerade is a project inspired by one of the Irpinia carnival versions, which dates back to the midSeventeenth Century5. Originally these representations were from Naples as Carnival skits, sung to the sound of the trombone and bass drum, and quickly spread throughout the kingdom, where they permanently implanted in the early Nineteenth Century. They were represented in the palace courtyards, taverns and squares, until they were ofcially forbidden, for the licentious and potentially subversive character, in the second half of the Nineteenth Century, to fnally assume the features of a play during Carnival, rooted in the vernacular meanings that survive, even today, in Irpinia: the Carnival of Montemarano, the dance “O ’ntreccio”of Forino, the “ndrezzata” of Cervinara, the “Squqqualacchiun” of Teora, the noose of love of Sirignano, “a’ Mascarata” of Piazza di Pandola and that of Biagiana, the foats of Paternopoli and Gesualdo, the “Zeza” of Mercogliano, which is probably the most known because it was used by Pier Paolo Pasolini as the soundtrack of his Decameron (1971). Each of these territories preserves diferent traditions, passed down over the centuries. Common to all of these representations is the exclusive participation of men, who almost archetypally, as in ancient Greek comedies, play female roles, as in the past women could not be exposed to public stages. All of them also have close links with the rural world, with a culture belonging to the auspicious rituals of re-establishment of the annual cycle of countries.
Especially in Masquerade, players, dressed in typical folk clothing, celebrate a wedding to the rhythm of a relentless music, performing the traditional fgures of Botta and ’Ndrezzata (woven). The wedding guests, the so-called beautiful (men) and the handsome (women), are dressed up and attend the event dancing to the rhythm of the Rossini Tarantella, whose the folk revival is played with “street” instruments.
A series of fxed masks are interpreters of the parade with is directed by the leader to the sound of music, the “pim’ommo”, the most beautiful and the best dancer, dressed in velvet breeches, shirt, waistcoat and a hat with a plume. As time passed, the Masquerade was softened by the addition of the “beautiful” signifcantly interpreted by the women of the town, whose costume consists of a large brightly colored pleated skirt and an embroidered light blouse. Outside the row the “mpacchiatrici” rage, men dressed as women wearing the same costume, equipped with wigs and garish makeup, whose role is to organize and incite to dance and to celebrate, armed with “Scoppetta”, i.e. a powder loaded gun and shot with a puf on passersby.
The bride is a man dressed as a woman, whose dress is borrowed from one of the young ladies of the town who got married in the year, who gives passersby cloth bundles with wedding confetti, while the groom, usually loutish, gives mimosa twigs to the ladies on the balconies with the aid of the socalled “scaletta” (ladder).
In the photographs of this series, as in all his previous production, the mysterious nature of Picariello’s photographic medium shows a revealing character. Here in particular, the prosaic topic redeems in the name of a suspended epiphany, in which the sacralization of the profane and the desecration of the sacred end in bipolar tensions coexisting in the artwork’s space.
His mysterious locations, always strictly calibrated, have a wise formal construction, resolved through complex, yet made by a few simple elements, mises-en-scène. On the one hand they denounce a relationship with the the tradition of tableaux vivants, or recall a dramatization of the image that refers to the same origins of photography, on the other hand are placed on the back of a long line of artists, related to the tradition of the so-called staged photography, genre that exploits the narrative and illusionistic potentials of photography and that includes diferent personalities: from Gregory Crewdson to Jef Wall, from Sandy Skoglund to James Casebere, from Hiroshi Sugimoto to David Lachapelle, from Sarah Moon to Leslie Krims, from Cindy Sherman to Nobuyoshi Araki, from Yasumasa Morimura to Joel Peter Witkin, to reverberate in a younger generation of artists such as Adi Nes, Shizuka Yokomizo, Jemima Stehli, Thomas Demand, Bernard Faucon, William Wegman, Elad Lassry and many others.
In Masquerade, Picariello plays with the slippery relationship between identity and representation: the character who appears in the photos of this series is always represented by the artist through a series of alienating self-portraits. He is placed in front of the audience in such a (un)displayed manner that produces an efect of mystic masquerade, where masking and wearing someone else’s clothes recall, rather than the mere matters of clothing appearance, the question of identity, where the self-portrait actually returns its reverse in a narcissistic, complacent and decadent swoon. «As always, the artist faithfully adheres to an established code, in this case to individual identity, the rule of one, Alberto Boatto properly observes. But it is only to overwhelm him, to fnd, between the classical myth and the lesson of psychoanalysis, a dual identity6». I is an Other (Rimbaud), for «doubling and doubling equal to look oneself into the mirror7». Besides, the ironically self-referential relation extends here to the tools of the trade, which became material support for images, camping on refective panels, on photographic speakers, on annular fashes, softboxes and on tripods.
The young artist’s photographs appear as still images, made in a thick and thin atmosphere, sometimes timeless, as in the series made in the former prison of Procida (Five hundred and one, 2015), a building which was originally built as the castle of the Avalos at the end of the Sixteenth Century and later transformed by the Bourbons in the penal colony, where the images are not linked to a possible scenario or to a supposed chain of events but only the free viewer’s interpretation can try to retrace. More formally, every single detail in Picariello’s images is vividly captured as if it were a painting, locked in the moment when the complexity of reality seems to stop and everything remains hopelessly suspended. The audience looking at his photographs is forced to stop discerning between reality and fction, trying to imagine what happened or maybe what is going to happen. In this sense, Picariello plays with the sense of alienation and with an atmosphere of unreality that breaks from everyday life, creating an uncanny visionary imagination, thanks to a virtuous use of light, often unidirectional like a Caravaggio strong chiaroscuro, designed to create images with a strong perceptive impact, gifted with a visual appeal that produces a sense of very pictorial optical perspicuity, almost neoFlemish. In this way, Dario Picariello’s photographs remain veiled by a sense of suspense and ambiguity. They do not return so much the visible world, but rather what the invisible is digging in the inscrutable, made of emotions and thoughts, memory and symptoms.
—REFERENCES
1. M. Bachtin, ed. it.
L’opera di Rabelais e la cultura popolare. Riso, carnevale e festa nella tradizione medievale e rinascimentale Einaudi, Turin 1979, p. 47.
2. M.Mauss, ed. it
Una categoria dello spirito umano: la nozione di persona, quella di “io” in “Teoria generale della magia e altri saggi” Turin, Einaudi, 1965
3. M.Mauss, ed. it.Le Tecniche del corpo, in “Teoria generale della magia e altri saggi”, Turin, Einaudi, 1965
4. M. Bachtin, cit., p. 13
5. The “Masquerade” is also a folk dance of Ischia, among the most famous Italian dances of sword, related to Buonopane, in the municipality of Barano d’Ischia. According to tradition, it is staged on the day of Easter Monday, although it is not inspired by the resurrection of Christ. It symbolizes a moment of peace and the end of hostilities between the inhabitants of two villages, Barano and Buonopane. The origins of this dance are still unclear.
6. A. Boatto, Narciso Infranto. L’autoritratto moderno da Goya a Warhol Laterza, Bari, 2005, p. 193
7. Ibidem
translations by
Alessandra Di Sante
Alessandra Di Sante