• 1978 - Antonio Scaccabarozzi intervention in Ferrari's Gallery, Verona

ANTONIO SCACCABAROZZI

by ALBERTO VECA

dia - DANTE SPINOTTI

This publication partly illustrates an intervention that Antonio Scaccabarozzi carried out in Ferrari Gallery's at Verona in the past January. As any photographic material reproducing a tridimensional field, also this sequence of images has more the function of pointing out a method of working, rather than of pretending to describe the various moments of the intervention, which are irremediably tied to actual space and time.

In this case, perhaps, the passage from reality to reproduction is not as spoiling as usually is in other examples of works on environment: for the photographic "speech" and the sequence of images are one possible reading of Scaccabarozzi's interventions. A different angle-shot, a different height of the camera would have caught different, new situations. The choice made then is arbitrary, but exhaustive of ways of conceiving space and interventions on it.

Actually for Scaccabarozzi the two moments - that of perception and knowledge of space and that of expressive intervention on it overlap, as expressiveness consists for him in the determination of a method of research.

According wether a bidimensional or a tridimensional field is considered, learning processes obviously change. Now, even though Scaccabarozzi has always used a tridimensional approach - but the term itself sounds improper as it has become rather vague nowadays you may stilI say that there is a difference wether an observer just watches an "objectual" situation, in which he is only partially involved, or, on the contrary, he is wholly involved into the environment, and the size of the intervention exceeds his visual field.

Differences between an objectual and an environmental perception broaden possibilities of intervention and the range of variations which may be carried out; but they do not injure nor modify the research process, which actually relies on an analysis of the ways one gets knowledge of space. It is just in this perspective that Scaccabarozzi works, by distinguishing two fundamental stages in the process of understanding space: a comprehensibility of elementary indications ( the points ) and of their displacing horizontally and/or vertically - an acquired culture, one may say even a memory, of these points, of their size and spacing and a judgement then, a comparison between what we have seen and what we have imagined, presumed.

Memory, perception, but also illusion, judgement, rectification are then the stages in the process of understanding space that Scaccabarozzi emphasizes. In a logical analytical perspective these moments may be pointed aut as distinct, but they are actually contemporaneous, or very nearly, in the real process.

The uniformity of the intervention - that is the choice of a single image and of its syntax - is perceived at the same time as a uniformity of the different - when differently sized points appear equal to each other, being displaced at different distances from the observer - or as a difference of the same - when, on the contrary, distances· vary and the size of points is kept unchanged.

AlI of this may appear, in ,word, as a mere alchemistic play, or as a subtle cerebralism: in fact, by working pointing out the slightest variations, the artist is in the position of moving beyond surface to the root of problems concerning vision and communication. The slightest variation - wether in the size of points or in their relative distance - stilI allows a spontaneous, so to say, discovery, as it requires a comparatively simple shifting and attention. For it is not the question of discovering a communicative intention founded on laboratory methods, or on the device of a previously agreed upon attitude: who is observing rather walks and moves around, first grasping an indication of uniformity, then rectifying - but with no over-efforts, nor directions to keep in mind - his first impression by discovering differences, and finally trying to connect the first with the second reading and to understand the regulating principle and the various experiences which had been chosen as a subject of this operation.

This is why I was speaking above, with regard to the research as a whole, of a kind of indifference between the size of the object and that of the 'environment, or between a bidimensional and a tridimensional approach: what is of interest for Scaccabarozzi is the resulting space between points, or, rather, the relation between the presence of an indication and the absence of it in the visual field. I am talking of indication, for the geometrical reference to point is here of a mere instrumental value, as a functionally fit figure to accomplish the task of referring to a visual system in which images have lost their distinctive feature of being considered as something positive in comparison with a negative background. At the same time what turns to be essential is the observer's behaviour, whose active presence, and the ways and stages through which he approaches to the operation, give rise to a process of perceiving images which goes even beyond the previously suggested indications, as far as these are only cases, examples of a wider process which may embrace the most various aspects of a perception and knowledge of space.

From this point of view a research as Scaccabarozzi's cannot be included in any particular tendency, at least if the old-fashioned but stilI in use concept of style is involved; it is rather close to the works of alI those who prefer to define their method and to compare themselves on it in the research of a role.

Milan, February 1978

Alberto Veca

REAL MEASURE - VISUAL MEASURE

This continuous horizontal measurement carried out on Ferrari Gallery's walls is conceived in three different ways and is sub- divided into: a) entrance hall of the gallery; b) adjacent hall; c) pillar. The uniform height at which the points are displaced horizontally all around the walls is of 161.5 mm, which corresponds to my eyes' height. The points are adhesive and black painted.

The first work (a) is characterized by interventions on the corners (though one of them is hardÌy visible, because of recesses and interruptions of walls) and by changes in the distances from one point to another, which take place at each corner on the measure of 2-12-72 cm. Moreover, the diameter of points ranges from a minimum to a maximal size from the first to the last corner.

The second work (b) is formed by an intervention on five walls; it is on each of them that changes in the distances between points take place, on the measure of 2-6-18-54-162 cm. In this case the diameter of points is kept uniform.

The third work Cc) develops around a square-based pillar, placed in the second hall. Obvirnlsly points turn around the four sides and are spaced at intervals of 2-4-8-16 cm. In this case too, the diameter of points is kept uniform , because of the particular location of the pillar, which should function as a spatial suspension.

My intention in this work - as u l, timately in all of my previous works - is that of testing possible results. In other words, first I take into account 1111 the existing conditions in the gallery - as the quality of walls, the possibility of running around them, colours, heights, the space-distance of any standing-point) and I introduce then other data (points, colour, sizes, displacements, distances between points) according to a certain methodological principles, but in order to attain - though on the ground of definite characteristics and of my basic aims - to unexpected situations; that is to situations which are not the obvious mere application of my methodology, already foreseen, then, but which may even disguise the rule, cutting new ways to wider fields of research.