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 The
fatty coloured girl has a meek smile and dresses an aggressive t-shirt.
From Marsano, in Bahnofstrasse, in the armoured and luxury street,
even plants and flowers arrangements ooze richness: placed into ancient
stone vases, the strong tones thoroughly dispensed, readying a décor
excluding any kind of excitation, any pleasant laxity.
Seated at tables, high society young scions, fair-haired and beautiful
and gymnastic, raise long cigars, corollary of abundant meals: double
cream herrings, game with red kail and spaetzle, a sub-species of
gnocchi, chocolate mousse. To understand how they will be as old it's
enough to observe any other table companion: hawk-like and flabby
faces, wizened and injured bodies by an ictus, an infract...At the
at the end of the line their bodies express an aura of quite satisfaction,
the old variant of the euphoric happiness of their younger homologues.
Both are the portrayal in flesh of  what a talented
French writer, Alain de Benoist, defined some years ago as “le
peril suisse”, the Swiss peril: that is leaving history throughout
the economy door.
Only a bizarre mind could have the idea to organize in Zurich an exhibition
about the end of the century: Veltuntergang & Prinzip Hoffnung.
Organized by Harald Szeemann, trustee of the Venice Biennial Exhibition,
the exposition clusters 200 works, form the XV century up today: Floods
and Last Judgements, hells, ancestral fears spread open in face of
visitors.
Talking about the theme of artistic comparison between past and future
we sort having the worst of it.
The XX century twenty problems Thomas Hirschor exposes in his Ein Kustwerk,
ein Problem, and covering from the Palestine topic to drugs,
from nuclear matter to childhood, from immigration to the Kosovo matter,
turns out in press clippings panels mounted on wood and tied up with
silver plated paper as it were a party feast or an parish explosion.  The Dalai
Lama books, plastic wrap, at the foot of any stand add a touch of
smart squalor. At the sound of a sophisticated comedy music of the
forties, some videos screen clips of pictures at the sign of the catastrophe:
When Worlds collide, by Rudolph Maté, 1951, The Day the Earth caught
fire by Van Guest, 1961, Bomb by Kubrick, 1966. There's space
also for an episode of the Dreams of Kurosawa, that regarding
an engineering in tears for the nuclear menace that will destroy
the world. Nevertheless the atomic bomb nightmare topic that
so much marked the post-war culture and feed a pacifism ever cross-eyed
and often in bad faith, is strangely absent. A giant photo recalls
the “sarcophagus “ of Chernobyl, the pyramid-shaped cover
that was put on the exploded reactor of the atomic plant in seven
months. Nowadays, travels agencies of Kiev offer, according with authorities,
a tourist package including a visit to the plant.
After the dress rehearsal of a earth apocalypse by the means of two world
wars, revolutions, hundreds of local wars,  blood decolonisation
when it comes the time to tell it visually, the impression the contemporaneous
culture gives is to default.
There's neither greatness in horror nor fascination in ill and restless
wondering about. Die Katastrophe that Friedrich Dürrenmatt pictured
in 1966 is not but a railway jam of bridges falling down and cars
and trains crashing. Altar for a UFO of Eva Whipf seems an Egyptian
little temple coming from a junk-dealer. Only the Parsifal of Kiefer,
giant oil picture on Urtica fibre, has a murky grandeur, as if over
fifty years, nobody knows anymore how to formulate a no-aphasic subject.
Painting celebrates its own funeral and the epitaph the most fitting
is that Nur immer lustig, only and always happily, Alfred Kubin painted
at the beginning of the century: on the edge of the precipice, guided
by death playing the violin, and a devil making light and cracking
a whip, a procession of damned souls, drunk and pleasure-looking set
off towards nothing.
 By contrast,
centuries between the fifteenth and the middle of the twentieth with
the catastrophes, destructions, the ill and the possible redemptions
knew how to communicate, were able to make themselves understood.
Visitors pass from the frightful grey devils of Michelangelo in the Last
Judgement (filmed by the Japanese TV) to the Resurrections of bodies
of Luca Signorelli, from the Apocalypse of Dürer to the Battle between
gods and Titans by Luca Giordano (the painter Mrs.Ciampi does not
like, never mind, we will get over), from the Leviathan of Swanenburgh
to the nightmares of Füssli, from the End of the World of Miller to
the Satan of Martin. So it parades in front of the visitor eyes hallucinations,
tremors, open-eyed dreams, abysses of perdition and exaltation that
over time have sided the way of humanity and whose illustration was
at the same time medicine, warning, revenge and realization. Visionary
genus and realistic genus applied themselves with sublime savagery
to outlook for their contemporaries what next future could deserve
them whereas the next day would be the last one.
Nevertheless, Tomaso da Celano had already told everything, a little
later the year 1.000: “Dies irae, dies illa/Solvet saeclum in
favilla”.
"Weltuntergang & Prinzip Hoffnung"
The end of world & the principle of hope
by Ernst Halter and Martin Müller,
organization by Harald Szeemann.
Kunsthaus, Heimplatz1. Till November 7th.
Opening time: from Tuesday to Thursday 10-21, from Friday to Sunday,
10-17. Closing on Monday. Catalogue Offizin
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Mensile di scienza medica,attualita` e cultura