HOPERAPERTA

 GLITCH. THE ART OF INTERFERENCE
SAMMLUNG MODERNE KUNST (MODERN ART COLLECTION) | ROOMS 21–26

1 DECEMBER 2023 UNTIL 17 MARCH 2024

By Roberto Walden

Errare humanum est? Judging by what is on display in this exhibition in Munich, one would say not. Error passes from machine to man, from man to machine, and becomes divine, a work of art, the last frontier of trash art of Anglo-Saxon memory.

 How are we to place these motifs born out of the observation of a series of errors, or rather, malfunctions in the operation of technologies? Transported into the human sphere, with all due respect to AI, it would be like giving Andy Warhol a whack on the head and then, recording his verbal reactions, transforming his semi-conscious babbling into poetic music. According to the laws of probability, the chances of a coherent poetic fragment, based on stochastic iconicity, being grafted on after such treatment are extremely random.

Aleatory but not impossible, so why not try, why leave the thankless task of showing the perimeters of epistemological fragility to machines? It would be an interesting operation (just a suggestion, but who knows, maybe some American museum will take up the challenge) to tie a talented figurative painter to a chair for a few days, then fill him up with amphetamines and then untie him in front of an blank canvas. By a game of stochastic probability, by breaking with the current banal authorial motivations, we could perhaps finally obtain that absolute masterpiece of Balzacian memory, that 'Chef-d'œuvre inconnu' that so tormented the sleeps of the first European avant-gardes. Try it to believe it.

But let us come to the exhibition in question, which aims to raise to the status of a new avant-garde a trend, Glitch Art, born from the disturbance in the functioning of an electronic or digital device.

A word that originates from the linguistic crasis of two terms, the Germanic glitschen and the Yiddish gletshn, that Teutonic rigidity skilfully mixed with historical Jewish irony. Here, then, is a new frontier of art, accessible to all, but above all to machines, which are finally projected with full rights onto the contemporary art scene.

Not that there hadn't already been numerous attempts in this direction, but never had it reached the boundary of human futility, which stands outside the game, which it enters only as a judge capable of turning error into work and vice versa, work into error. Pop art last, preceded by a century of abstract painting and why not, something of early romanticism too.   Anti-classical as a universal recipe for the art of the last two centuries.

What, then, is left of the form-beauty equation, if not a perverse focus on absolute form, devoid of any earthly or spiritual referentiality? Form dominates as the influencer of taste, and the only quest allowed is therefore the spasmodic search for the new, whose limit is set by the infinity of human stupidity.  Apollo vs. Frankestein, the most pregnant contemporary myth to describe the author's position in today's art world. Belvedere's Apollo collides with Mary Shelley's Frankestein and ends up in the dustbin. Thus today's work does not give up the search for the canon, but finds it where the false consciousness of the zeitgeist can now act undisturbed. Try transporting this Zeitgeist into the world of active needs, food and sex for instance. How many beautiful ladies, fanatical of the latest trends in art today, would be willing to spend a night of pleasure with the mythologies of Mary Shelley, or would they not rather prefer a robust Apollo as a night-time companion? Ad majora.