Sanremo is Tony Pitony's urinal
- Laura Rifiuti
- 6 days ago
- 11 min read
Hiw pop disguises itself as avant-garde
It is difficult to imagine an artist like Tony Pitony entering the true canon of art history (in its broadest sense). And yet, some have gone so far as to define him as a "conceptual artist"—a qualification that is, in itself, telling of how his figure is being interpreted. This issue touches upon—however implicitly—broader problems: the role of the traditional canon, the idea of Bildung (that synthesis of cultural and intellectual formation which could once emerge even outside formal schooling), and its viability today, in a society that is no longer even the massified society of the twentieth century, but something else entirely. Added to this is the long-standing debate on the end of the avant-garde, a subject on which the bibliography is by now vast. However, this is not my intended starting point, at least not directly.
I believe that today, when faced with seemingly unsettling cultural phenomena, one must also raise questions regarding their reception. By this, I do not mean only—or primarily—inquiring into how the artist wishes to relate to their audience, but rather how the audience perceives the artist in the first place, which categories they apply to them, and why. It is perhaps on this ground that one can better understand the mechanics of certain "pop" phenomena regarded as disruptive: many forms of contemporary culture, despite presenting themselves as innovative, are in fact constitutively mainstream, as they operate through materials already circulating and recognizable within popular culture.
But let us take a step back. The specificity of the mainstream phenomenon—Tony Pitony, as we shall see, but also, in a certain sense, Marina Abramović or Banksy—is not merely characterized today by its degree of "iconicity," which is always easily integrated within the horizon of a broad audience. It is not, in short, the intrinsic (yet neither naive nor unproblematic) capacity of the mainstream to be self-exhausting—that is, to signify itself because it exhausts within itself and its own image all the semantic value it intends to represent. Rather, it is the fact that it characterizes itself primarily as a discourse of reuse. Within an exacerbated and relentless recursivity (words, syntagms, but also concepts and archetypes, as we will see), the very sense of its making and its sole mode of existence nestles within reproduction.
This involves not only the reuse of signifiers—formulas, phonic strings, or text fragments—perhaps fossilized and reduced, precisely, to an ever-greater iconicity (one thinks of the success of slogans that were pop from the outset, such as Almeno tu nell’universo, La voglia la pazzia, or, perhaps less obviously but indisputably, Libertà è partecipazione). It also involves the recovery of actual semes: more complex semantic structures, yet sufficiently circulating and pervasive to be reclaimed and reabsorbed within the horizon of a new, fundamentally subcultural fruition—an industrial, massified, and, clearly, televised fruition. Moreover, even the singer-songwriter tradition of the 1970s, which established itself within the realm of pop political engagement, however inspired by more complex cultural forms, both determined and was symptomatic of a shift in public interest from poetry to song (which by necessity constrains itself into simpler forms), and thus the migration of the pole of communicability and expression from the former to the latter.
Let us return to these recoveries, both formal and semantic. This latter form—that of the semes—strikes me as a mode of reuse that is perhaps less perceptible, yet even more implicated and substantial than mere linguistic borrowings. The reuse of signifiers occurs, evidently, at the superficial level of lexicon (pop slogans) and yields specifically expressive results. This outcome may appear paradoxical because these linguistic tiles, while being repeated ad infinitum—and thus trivialized and emptied of meaning—actually acquire an ultra-sense in their becoming, almost, plastic figurations. The language of the song, in short, while playing at evoking the poetic word in its "mellification," acts as if it were inflating with air; this is why I call it a (paradoxical) ultra-sense: the word expands itself precisely because it represents (almost) nothing, because its oversized, supererogatory sense lies exactly in saying nothing other than itself, and thus already saying everything. The icon is nothing but a manifesto of itself, a word-referent. And indeed, is it not enough to say "il cielo in una stanza" to already understand everything? We have already heard it, already understood it a thousand times; and we will hear it a thousand more, and we will understand it even less, and therefore, all the more.
If, however, the recovery of lexical tiles yields—as I mentioned—predictable results on a linguistic level, the reuse of semes involves a different sphere: the psychic and behavioral dimension which is, upon closer inspection, the most quintessential element of the human. In other words: the "avant-garde" nature of a performer such as Pitony (and this also applies to indie culture, as we shall see) is actually constitutively mainstream. Indeed, it is based not so much on the formulaic repetition of pre-formed linguistic material (though the title L’uomo cannone bears a dangerous resemblance to La donna cannone), but rather on a sort of psychic hoarding of expressive forms, behavioral models, and procedures perceived as belonging to a given movement or artistic manifestation—in this case, the avant-garde. It goes without saying that these semantic data are introjected through forms of fruition that are already canonized, diluted, and fossilized by popular culture; what follows is a second-degree recovery that privileges external and more obvious aspects at the expense of deep historical analysis and its relative intellectual or "intellectualistic" implications—which, moreover, "do not work" today. The mere scent of the avant-garde is enough, then; the flavor is intuited without the need to take a bite. It does not matter what it actually tastes like—it is enough that it reminds one of the avant-garde, because, in fact, all the hallmarks of the artistic avant-garde as introjected and consumed by pop culture are present: disruption and provocation, the flirtation with kitsch and trash, the shock effect, the absurdity that is simultaneously understood and not understood, and the rejection of the market—above all, the rejection of the market. Technical competence and the presence of an "authorial consciousness" are, in the end, an ideological cover suited to an audience that believes it is engaging with "high" and entirely innovative cultural manifestations, already earmarking them for a "proper" Bildung destined to last far longer than a few seasons.
As I stated at the beginning, however, it remains difficult to imagine, because the mainstream, no matter how much one tries to conceal it, betrays itself easily. The fact is that the relationship with the market is far more problematic than one would like to believe, and this is perhaps, curiously, the element that truly brings the "mainstream avant-garde" closer to the traditional avant-garde, such as Dada. The two primary outcomes of the avant-garde, then—consumption and protest—are once again brought into relation, "generating the consumption of protest": "the market commodifies the rejection of the market" (Picone, The Post-Avant-Garde). The difference between the classical avant-garde and the mainstream one might lie, instead, in the relationship with truth—which, for the contemporary mainstream artist, is also necessarily post-truth.
Let me explain. The audience—increasingly accustomed in literature to moralistic and socially committed models, and trained by social media to demand absolute Authenticity and Moral Integrity from anyone in power—has little tolerance for ambiguity and fluctuation. The singer-artist who presents themselves in a certain light will be expected to adhere strictly to the ethical code to which they claim loyalty; if the artist passes themselves off as avant-garde (as in our case), they will be careful to declare themselves uninterested in market logic and avoid appearing compromised by it. Yet, if this compromise does emerge as a reality (from a "no" to Sanremo to a "yes" to Sanremo), a paradoxical way out will be found (a "persimmon on stage"), because, after all, this too is a performance: and a performance that is all the more successful for being unexpected. The mainstream artist must, in short, be a sort of wizard of post-truth—a communicator before being a singer-songwriter, a sculptor, and so on.
Idiosyncratic inconsistencies—which are inherent to the individual but poorly received in a television persona—are congruously reabsorbed by an artist of this kind, for instance, in their relationship with television. This relationship is undoubtedly not that of the intellectual—which is always critical and analytical, however irremediable and compromised (think of another chronicler of our time, of a far different caliber, such as Walter Siti). In this case, however, we could not be further from the model of the intellectual (or the twentieth-century intellectual, if that is how we are accustomed to thinking of them). And we are far from it because not only has the epistemological paradigm in mass-media society shifted, but the existential paradigm itself has changed over the decades. The relationship with television can only be visceral—existential, indeed. It can only be that atavistic and aspirational attachment (the screen as a space toward which one tends, into which one ideally projects oneself) that is bred precisely within television subculture: that is, today’s ubiquitous "average-ness" (medietà). On the artist's part, the very notion of their work has changed—and I believe this is evident—because the cognitive relationship established with the work during the creative act itself has changed. The work is, first and foremost, a performance because it is inserted—and indeed conceived from the outset, as is inevitable for a mass-media generation born after and within the media—as one of many aesthetic forms immersed in the flow, in a semiosis that is eminently (if not almost exclusively) audiovisual.
To return to our point: Pitony is free to contradict himself like almost no one else on television or social media, because contradiction is part of his persona by definition—since his persona traces the gestures, discourses, and behaviors (all those elements I previously called semes) of the quintessential anti-system, anti-everything artist. And if he is anti-everything, he can, in some cases, even be anti-self: from this stems a freedom that is rare today. But this is the point, the persona: not only because the anti-system character is ultimately a creation of the system, but also, and above all, because Pitony himself was able to give life to his anti-system persona by drawing exclusively from the way the system (i.e., pop culture) conceives, reworks, consumes, visualizes, and imagines the "anti-system." As for TV, he can deny it all he wants, and we can grant him the right to change his mind, but the goal is always, in fact, to appear on screen. Because, mainstream or not, the irreality of the screen and the virtual dimension are the only spaces in which this artist—like everyone today—is able to conceive of himself and his own art, to sell his image, his performance. What could be more popular, massified, and anti-anti-system than this?
But it is not only Tony Pitony. The indie genre, at least in its most popular fringes, experiences its relationship with the market in a similar fashion. To return to the modes of reuse—whether lexical or semantic—one might consider, for example, the most broadcast lyrics by the now-disbanded group Thegiornalisti, an album such as Completamente Sold Out, and specifically a song like Riccione. The latter is constructed exclusively through the use of topoi and mythologies well-codified within the Italian popular imagination: the Romagna Riviera, the myth of football, nights at the seaside, Ferragosto. Everything informs a widely saturated imaginary of meaning, which clearly functions precisely by virtue of the continuous reiteration of known forms and identifies in nostalgia a sentimental deficit to be filled at all costs.
Tony Pitony’s experiment is certainly very different from these fringes of indie, yet he too, as I mentioned, finds his most defining stylistic hallmark in reuse—a reuse that is also literal and plastic, as seen with the Elvis mask. Moreover, in my view, the Pitony experiment also acts upon nostalgia: nostalgia for an era (more mythical than real) of strong cultural assertions, of a vivid debate composed of courageous people with something to say. It is as if there were a sort of unconscious, collective nostalgia for Dada. We want, we need, an art that lives against the system, that speaks of the commodification of art using our everyday commodities—the institutional program of Dada. Thus today, from pop music—which is typically the expression of acceptable common feeling—we need someone who instead says the unsayable. This is an urge that evidently emerges even among those who would not tolerate, and would indeed cancel, certain misogynistic, anti-feminist, racist, or homophobic accents in rap. Perhaps it is perceived that Pitony, in his "irreverence of trash," is a step above, partly because he is technically skilled; he is thus asked to be censurable yet uncensored, to shun simplistic dichotomies, to deliver an intellectual performance grotesquely disguised as anti-intellectual. Being ready to distort himself and compromise with his own identity, being ready to lie and expose his own lies, is part of his anti-respectable performance, in which everything screams: do not believe me.
The Pitony experiment has (for now) succeeded because it has intercepted a significant fault line within the majority of the left-wing public—a sort of repressed, telluric, anti-conservative energy that quivers to destroy and go against everything it officially professes. Fundamental nihilism is among the most original accents of the singer's voice, without a doubt. But despite what one might wish to believe, it all remains more instinctive than organized—more the expression of an emotional regurgitation than a truly intellectual and structured intention.
Is this yet another fleeting form of our present, where everything is exhausted within itself? It is likely—more likely, perhaps, than the possibility that a canonical Bildung, whether institutional or not, could be reconstructed from this very attempt. Perhaps what prevents a return to the concept of traditional formation is exactly what the mainstream artist lacks: namely, faith in form as the center of expressive experimentalism and as a legitimate vehicle for one's message. Indeed, there is a fundamental inability to trust formal research and, consequently, complexity. The primary channel of performance—the body—remains an ephemeral vehicle, a sort of filler effect where everything depends on the extemporaneity of the execution and, even more so, on the iconicity of the performative gesture, of the "statement." Will Tony Pitony resurrect the avant-garde? I do not believe so. But it is true that he bears its most external signs; therefore, if this resurrection truly confirms itself in the near future, it can only be precisely that—external: appearing as a second- or third-hand epigonism rather than an innovative expression.
Even more so than in Duchamp’s time, the artist today is entangled with the market; within the context of commercial and public success, the durability and preservation of an intellectual originality that distinguishes itself from the cauldron of mainstream discourse sometimes seems an overly optimistic hope. One could further investigate the relationship between the mainstream and economic success, or between the mainstream and communicability; following the same thread, one could also speak at length about literature—but I do not wish to do so now, not least because many have spoken of it before and better than I. I will limit myself, however, to noting a dual track that strikes me as typical (and which could be explored in a further reflection). Non-mainstream literature, even from a position of quasi-self-exile, recovers or can recover avant-garde forms in a structural—and therefore vital and perhaps lasting—manner, even if little known. Conversely, Pitony’s "futurism," the indie genre, and for instance the literature of so-called "neo-commitment" (neo-impegno), like all artistic forms in the broadest sense that assume a posture of contesting the system, do so from a distinctly mainstream position. They are mainstream even when they would prefer not to be. They are so because, fundamentally, "mainstream" signifies everything that is conceived, designed, and (almost) exclusively devoted to belonging to an aesthetic fabric that serves as an offshoot to pervasive and audiovisual media, sliding and integrating into them without friction. In short, mainstream and non-mainstream are not, at their core, two different ways of positioning oneself in relation to the world, the market, or the system; they are, rather, two different ways of working and proceeding, as well as of critically understanding one's work and calibrating it—this, yes—to one's audience.
The Pitony experiment, undoubtedly destined for even greater success in the near future, demonstrates that the "lust for being hissed at" (voluttà di farsi fischiare) is not today merely the masochistic and self-indulgent desire of the elite avant-garde. Being hissed at on X-Factor—not only by the studio audience but also, intentionally, by the widest possible public—is instead a form of protest against one of the many systems that prevail today and can therefore be derided. It is a protest that is self-evident above all in its mode of presentation: accessible, public, irreverent, grotesque, televised, immediate, iconic. Consumable, in short; commodified and, therefore, irremediably mainstream.
Sanremo is Tony Pitony's urinal
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