A reasonable apology for the obscene: on Sgarbi and Morgan at Maxxi

“Our origin is obscene, our end is macabre”.

Andrea Emo wrote it in his powerful Notebooks of metaphysics: it is a phrase that immediately comes to mind when watching the entire video and not just that posthumous two/three-minute short film starring Morgan and Sgarbi at the Maxxi, a museum complex that has apparently been transformed, according to certain media reconstructions, in Nando Cicero’s film set and immediately furrowed by combative open letters, requests for resignation and political and somewhat Quaker racket raised by the glowing progressive world, Calenda included. Because video frames are circulating with profanity, screams, heavy jokes, sexism, absit iniura verbis, and then we get caught up in the blind whirlpool of reminiscences and we even take it out on Maurizio Costanzo, God rest his soul, ‘ guilty of having launched the Sgarbi-character. However, some of those who whine, whine, threaten letterheads or worse stamped ones, wave deferred open letters, circulated like the video ten days after the summer solstice, the date on which it all happened, could really tell what did Morgan and Sgarbi talk about in all the remaining, very large, time?

Because the full video is clearly visible, lasts an hour and a half and hasn’t sunk into the Cambodian dark web, yet it doesn’t seem to interest anyone. Those two minutes of trashy curtain raiser, complete with a Magnotta-style telephone curtain, are only of interest, and it doesn’t seem difficult to understand why: lacking any political or social topic, the left wanted to reinvigorate themselves by puffing out their chests to the cry of ‘when’ it was us, the exhibitions always arrived on time’, exalting the clarity imbued with geometric power of the Museum under the accounting management of the past. Hence the magical forgetfulness, the singular amnesia, of the remaining part of the conversation in which Morgan and Sgarbi talked about and about Céline, whose ‘Guerra’ for Adelphi, Carlo Michelstaedter, Roth, Salinger has recently seen the light in the bookstore , and much more that we will talk about later. And Michelstaedter himself seems to have described with admirable precision the prevailing reaction among the institutions governed by the right, in the face of the controversy that has arisen and the circulation of the short film, “the remorse for a specific fact committed, which is not finished repentance for that fact, but the terror for one’s life destroyed in the irrevocable past, for which one feels still alive and powerless in the face of the future, is the infinite worry that gnaws at the heart”.

On the right, in the pyrotechnic corollary of worries, apologies, justifications, ‘I keep family’, it was as if that entire evening had consisted of nothing but those two minutes, taking the bait and invoking a moral demeanor which, in hindsight, he is the sworn enemy of any art, ancient or contemporary. Because on the other hand, if one listened to the moralizing fury, duly alternating current, of the left, one would detonate any museum of contemporary art worthy of the name with dynamite. After all, the left was in government when in 2016 it was thought well to box the statues so as not to disturb the sight of the visiting Iranian delegation and therefore it could well be that there is some true, pure moralism in all of this. One might ask them, having arrived at this point and having ascertained that some swear words are considered more serious than having concealed marble nudities, who do you prefer to begin with in your sly iconoclasm?

From the Viennese shareholders with their blood, their real wounds, the urine and feces smeared on or on the flags, or what do I know, from the photos of real corpses of Andres Serrano, in ‘Morgue’, or from the porn and sadomasochistic nudes of Robert Mapplethorpe, or ‘Shoot’ Chris Burden, spoilers: did he actually get shot at with a gun, or of ‘747’, filmed here shooting, again seriously, at a plane about to take off? Or do you prefer to ban Marina Abramovich or Carolee Schneemann with her performance ‘Meat Joy’ or Marc Quinn with his decapitated head filled with her own, very real, blood by the liter? Or why, while we’re at it, not banish forever the purple carnography of pain, death and macabre destinies narrated by Teresa Margolles’ photos? Wouldn’t we want to let Marcus Harvey go free, who had the boldness to make a portrait of the infamous serial killer Myra Hindley, Ian Brady’s lover and accomplice, made with a child’s fingerprints? It’s all too easy to think back to Manzoni’s artist shit, to be collected and disposed of by the AMA, without a doubt.

Imagine if some of these artists, and tens, hundreds of others, had to apologize for having said, created, created or just thought something inappropriate or obscene or repugnant to common sense. Precisely for this reason there is no Sgarbi/Morgan case, except in the instrumentality of the political tussle. Watch that hour and a half, uncut, all beautifully spread out on YouTube. Listen to them talk about power, ‘power manifests itself in saying no a priori’, conservatism and the distinction with reactionary thinking, Savinio, Adelphi, Leopardi, Hofmannsthal, as well as the authors already mentioned above. Look at everything with a mind free of prejudice, and if in the end you still consider everything inappropriate, obscene, disgusting, become aware of the fact that for you art at its best can be the photograph you took of yourself at the sea and posted on Instagram, accompanied by the citation of some book you have never read.