February 10, 2017CRACKING ART: BEYOND CROCODILE TEARS.
by Melissa Camilli
2007. Orio Center. One of the biggest shopping center in Europe.
The building turns on the lights, employees start to work and gradually people fill up the space.
They think they are only just visitors ready to do shopping, but suddenly find themselves witnesses of an artistic invasion: 700 colored plastic animals have colonized the environment becoming an integral part of the space.
Art flourishes exactly where nowadays we still think she cannot even take root, in a place that is already saturated by economy and conformed to commercial utilitarianism; the aim is to make peace with it.
In this occasion we see the birth of the Cracking Art crocodile. The choice of this animal is primarily linked to the awareness of the fact that we live in a world that changes over and over again, in which we join the enthusiastic whirlwind of progress without really understand it; we often end up becoming passive, undergoing evolution without realizing where it brings us.
Always keeping an eye on the past, we embrace the advance of modernity without stopping shedding crocodile tears for what we have left behind.However the specimens made for the occasion proudly raise the muzzle: there are 300 pieces among those ones hanging on the facade and those scattered inside and they are 79 cm high, 201 cm wide and 521 cm length.
In our imagination it is a dangerous animal, from which we should keep away. It seems to be strong and charming, but also so aggressive that for the fear we foreclose the possibility of knowing it.
Consequently, how we are still use to naively sing, nobody even knows “how it does”![1]
In this sense, the crocodile is very similar to contemporary art, that in our eyes is always majestic and impressive: as it’s perched in its conceptual claims, we end up running away, afraid of being attacked if we tried to move close for knowing her. It is this fear that the Cracking Art try to throw out with its installations.
Stroking the animal immortalized in plastic and walking next to it in one of the most familiar places in our daily life, makes it almost a friend, a partner.
In this way we become part of a unique and unrepeatable act we work with to build sense.We must not be like Captain Hook, always ready to make war on the crocodile, but more like the self- confident Peter Pan, who in his purity of eternal child gives it a chance and try to communicate.
In addition, as direct descendant of the dinosaurs coming from stone age, this reptile represents our original bond with an art who comes from everything that surrounds us, immediately directed to all.
This message has traveled with crocodile over the years, from Piazza della Scala in Milan, where it was hung outside the office of the Culture Minister Vittorio Sgarbi, to the Grand Canal in Venice during the Biennale of 2007, up to lead overseas, in United States, where its journey continues.
The advance is just beginning.
[1] Quote from a popular Italian song.
