This book reports in an illustrated and compressed way, the history of Plexus International and its journey, from 1982 to 2008. It starts in the early 80s from the Lower East Side Community in New York on board on a metaphoric art slaves’ ship. I have chosen an illustrated book format for let speak images for themselves. In selecting these photos, throughout more then 10.000 collected images stored in the Plexus archive, I applied again the Alfred Schutz’ phenomenological and methodological approach1 utilized within my Ph.D. at the N.Y.U. titled Plexus Black Box, a multicultural aesthetic inquiry completed in 1997 and published in 2007 by the Academic Press of Sapienza University of Rome. The "unique quarter of century" documentation reported in this book aims to acknowledge Plexus International for its historical non-stop art efforts despite the vanishing art groups and movement among the Art world. The ordinary standards of modernism, postmodernism or any other Ism, significant for the Art World, in making Plexus actions were not taken into consideration while it was conceived as global art events. As a result, it comes about a cross over through traditional criticism boundaries and the existing art definitions, its labels and art categories. But it would be difficult to label Plexus activities under the existing art categories, mainly because Plexus intentionally resist to definitions. And so it does continue today. The main strategic Plexus art activities moved in the 80s was to shift its focus from the New York Art world to the House of Slaves in the island of Gorée, Senegal where in 1988 was release the Plexus Art Slavery Manifesto against any form of slavery. Facing Dakar, Gorée is a sanctuary for the African Diaspora and Reconciliation: from the 15th to 19th century it was the largest slave trading centre of the African coast, but also it was one of the first UNESCO’s world heritage sites, today under increasing dramatic sea erosion. By setting its own art stage outside the Western Art world, the Plexus international conceptual action moved to identify the Door of No Return of the House of Slaves of Goree as the historical site from where to start a symbolic “repatriation of art” into the community. In New York, 1986, at the Cultural Community Center CUANDO in the Lower East Side, Plexus International performed the art opera n.3 EVE. This opera signify the escape of an artists group from the NY Art world on board of a metaphoric art slave ship: by refusing the hierarchical star system of the Art world, 220 artists acted intentionally the selling of themselves directly to the art market throughout an art slave’s auction event. The artists, as slaves, were chained up jointly with their art works board the art slave ship, thus underlining that for them there’s no separation between artist, art, and art community and so they dissent against the dynamics of the art market which impose its production mechanisms coming from the traditional business commodities. It performed the artists survival need for create their own independent choice without pressures and interferences from the art market system. And it was dedicated continuing the 1984’s Lower East Side community calls “In Order to Survive”, meant to arise attention for the starving status of the artists in the community as well as for the increasing gentrification of the Lower East Side. The Departure of Plexus Art Slaves Boat from the Lower East Side of New York City Artwork by Anita Steckel, 1971; CUANDO, Lower East Side, New York 1986. In 1987, in a megalithic sanctuary of Sa Itria, Gavoi, in Sardinia, centre of the Mediterranean sea, the beginning of Western civilization, 160 artists of 23 different nationalities arrived for the Plexus art co-opera n. 4: Il Serpente di Pietra, the first international art slaves market show, produced and managed by artists in the first person. Against the hierarchic pyramidal structure of the star system’s art market, I burned my image as Plexus artistic director, previously announced in 1986, in New York at the moment of the art slave’s ship departure from CUANDO, Cultural Community Civic Centre, in the Lower East Side going to the 1987 Sardinian Plexus Serpent art co-opera. The presence in Sardinia of so many artists and scientists, coming from several different places free to have an open and critic dialogues with their work of art as, at the same time-space, and work on the same subject/object (the serpent myth), was a positive test for Plexus International to continue the voyage of its metaphoric art slaves ship. In 1988, within a theatrical art parade among hundred participants from the Dakar Medina in the Island of Goree, at the House of Slaves it was presented the Plexus Art Slavery Manifesto: a statement against the enslavement of art traded just as an other commodity. It was also pointed out the disengagement of the artists from the community and the need to re-discuss within the community of art the negotiation of a new type art contract. It was proposed the opening of an Art World Bank to be produced and managed by artists in the person as ownership Bank shareholders. Since 1988, the Door of No Return has been the aesthetic and ethic stage from where Plexus International started to challenge that the notion of the artist’s identification is conferred to the artist only by the Art world. Instead, Plexus claimed also for the right of a community-based artist’s identification. From 2004 to 2006, through The Erosions Show, an international travelling virtual event that was also staged, as art events, in Senegal, Australia, Italy, New York and Spain, Plexus collected almost one thousand digital artworks that were inspired to multiplex meanings of “erosions”: from the erosion of the humankind historical memory and heritage to the erosion of the biodiversity and cultural diversities, from the erosion of civil liberties and human rights to the growing erosion of freedom and peace in the living planet. In 2006, almost one thousand digital artworks arrived from all over the world and exposed in the Plexus virtual gallery www.plexusforum.net, 418 paper reproductions were united together as a very long art roll-meter to perform symbolically the measurement of the erosion of the Door of No Return as well as of the memory of Humankind. Performed outside the frames of museums, art galleries and other conventional art spaces, Plexus art events usually took place in open landscapes, community-based environments and symbolic sites, and on the occasion of historical anniversaries. Built one upon the other, Plexus events were arrivals as well as departures of an endless survival Plexus art journey. Each event took place in its own present but was made up of past concepts and activities, projecting its various parts into the future voyage. Like a chain, it was a non stop travelling event, in which concepts, people and performances were compressed and connected together, very often by contingencies. Scientists, artists and community people, representing various cultures and ideologies in Plexus events created a complex multicultural art environment, in which voices not usually heard had the opportunity to emerge. Plexus events, in which on some occasions participated hundreds of artists and scientists, coming from different parts of the world, mainly in New York, Dakar, Rome, Sardinia, Amsterdam, and Australia, were fully financed by the participants themselves, without grants or market support. Plexus international has played a seminal role in the conception and realization of numerous cross-disciplinary and multicultural art projects which are still an unexamined part of the contemporary history of art. Contributions by artists coming from a vast mix of cultures, many of them at the "margins" of the Artworld were of a very disparate nature, yet the Plexus underlying open structure accommodated them all. Plexus art events were simultaneous and compressed presentations of science and art, made against the specialization and the fragmentation of the knowledge and the control of the art market system, as open art forms, crossing separations, categorizations, and classifications. In essence, Plexus International acted like an interdisciplinary multinational network for artists in the first person. Born in New York in the 80s, with an Italian alternative cultural background experience from the 70s, Plexus International is operating since then as an open co-authorship art ventures, coproduced and managed by “artists in the first person.” It started its activities in 1982, in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. It was at once an idea and a place. In New York, in early eighties, Plexus staged three large art operas: Goya’s Time, New York, 1985, with the participation of 67 artists; Purgatorio Show, with 350 artists; Eve, the Escape of Donna Purgatorio from Anno Domini, with 220 artists. During its years of activity, from 1982 to the present, Plexus International has operated as an open creative experimental framework for global art projects, art co-operas and art operas, coproduced by the artist in the first person. These Plexus global art projects, made in the 80s for the 90s, were a compression of time-space, myth, science, art and relativity, in which as in a modern rite, 150-350 artists and scientists worked together, tuned in a metaphor to celebrate and deconstrue together. Plexus art operas and co-operas had specific forms in relation to the geo-political and historical conditions in which took place. Plexus utilized rational and a-rational methodologies in a coloured framework of global vision and relativity to create its global art events, involving more than a thousand of artists and scientists, chronologically reported in the book. Against any form of contemporary or ancient slavery, the eroded Door of No Return of the House of the Slaves, as the symbol of the erosion of the memory of humankind, became for Plexus International the place from where to start the repatriation of art into the community to overcome the fake concept of autonomous art. Current financial reports show that art is traded against money just like a other high speculative commodity, such as gold, diamonds or slaves. For this economic transformation of the value of a work of art into money, labels and definitions from the Artworld are essential, together with the absolute claim of the autonomy of "art". In reaction to the current art trade system, Plexus International moved towards the concept of “The artist in the first person,” that means without “filters”, or “mediators” of the artworld between the artist and her/his artworks. Today, “artworld filters” are making very difficult for artists to be free to express themselves and to have a critical and independent dialogue with the audience. It is very dangerous because these art mechanisms or art over-structures are also separating artists from their own art. These interferences have created the figure of “the artist in the third person”. The “second person” is the Art Market. The pressure of the market on artists is pushing too much and too fast the exposition in public of their artworks before sometime they are ready to be exposed. The monetary pressure and the myth of fame have create a deep gap in the development of the art research, the same that is also happening in the scientific research. The research in art or in science cannot depend only from the needs or rules of the money market. These economic and political interferences cannot be accepted by the artist and by the scientist inside their researches. The economic value of a art work cannot be the only way to measure the future artistic life of an artist. In Plexus art cooperas the artist in the first person was at the same time together the producer, the consumer and the final art product, and not just a passive vehicle for the art market”. If today an artist has to choose between the market’s acceptance and the freedom of her or his art work, it is safe to not forget in the moment of the decision that the artist is in the first person the creator of art who is free to create and survive without the market. Instead, the art market cannot exist without artists producing the art that the market needs to exist and trade. The artist in the third person, where the artist is defined only by reference to his/her market position and saleable commodities, is an effect of the modern art market, a hierarchical star system based on false notions of “marketability” and “rationality.” The modern art market is a sacrificial system which obliterates the artist, leaving only a product. At the point at which art became alienated from culture and community, the artist, as artist in the third person, lost all art memory and became slave to rational considerations. To exist, the artist in the third person must incorporate market influences and other interferences into her/his inner artistic process. At its worst, these interferences defined the very discourse of her/his artistic creation. Art is suffering from the pressures of rationality and marketability. Plexus art operas and art co-operas had its historical roots in jazz, scientific laboratories, happenings, and in the history of modern art. Plexus artoperas were conceived as a multi arts format based upon an improvised interaction of many art forms, made by a conducted improvisation, following a libretto made by one or more authors. The Plexus art-coopera, instead, was made through a compressionist art process built on a modular construction of individual art contributions, of any kind, all converging into a collective anti-libretto, mutually made by “insider” understandings of an ongoing deconstruction process of collective understandings, imaginations and emotions, with no libretto by anyone. The modular construction was the Plexus facilitatory process to allow individuals to work together as a organizational design of energy as well as a choreography of collective energies of so many different individuals coming from many different art fields, scientific specialities and cultures that had to be organized in time and space, and in a story telling way, in which every fragment, every subject, every object that took part in the total generic explosion was guaranteed in its own identity. Rituals were very important in Plexus art operas by giving continuity and connecting one activity to another one. Within this overall compressed art context, the ritual of documentation became significant part of Plexus by keeping in it the life of the community and bringing people together. The ritual activities of the documentation became a form of collective joint participation in which each one gave up something in order to share in a global participation which turned to become a contemporary art form. In Plexus events, the metaphor was utilized as a multi-category framework, a crossing over between knowledge and unconsciousness, to create common ground between artists and scientists from various cultures with different values. The metaphor is ultra-rapid integrated communication system, it works with nanoseconds (billion fractions of a second), the time-scale of our computers. One nanosecond is so fast that it exists before its rational thought. The metaphoric language of art in Plexus events was used to cross the boundaries of specialistic fields, working by concatenated structures. In Plexus events, the mythology was used artistically with metaphoric references to science and marketing that modernizes the myth as a “commodity symbol” and the artist in the first person was not only the producer but also the consumer and the final product of the Plexus rite of art. Since its beginning, it was conceived as an interdisciplinary and multicultural project committed to the achievement of a heightened understanding of alternatives enhancing human experience. Over these years the Plexus aim was achieved through the organization and documentation of large international collaborative arts events. In its events Plexus International encouraged, among all participants, face to face dialogue and creative and critical interaction. Artists, scientists, and audience, representing various cultures and ideologies, traversing separations of languages, disciplines, places, and individual differences, managed a complex multicultural art environment, intentionally, to bridge the gap between the community and the academy. Looking for the acknowledgment of art as an underestimated resource for an effective sustainable development to evolve towards an open society, Plexus has situated "art" in an expanded community more related to a broader heterogeneous multicultural environment. Plexus art co-operas were made in the 80s for the 90s as a dematerialized electromagnetic art food to be consumed by artists and audience interacting with the geographical and historical context where they were placed. In the 90’s, in Plexus events, the notion of well-being emerged as the link between art & science and the community. By overcoming the fake concept of autonomous art by means of a more complex interdependent vision, Plexus International has linked the notion of "art” to the concept of “well being" as a paradigm enhancing the quality of life for all. During a series of science & art events made in the 90s and early 2000s on the theme of “Eating Art”, Plexus International started to present “art” as a ‘food’ for nourishment, a compression of high ‘know how,’ a sustainable resource for all human beings. The radical transformation of today’s scenery and the complexity of the issues raised and their interdependent components required, within the people-centered bottom-up sustainable development paradigm, not only new multicultural perspectives and transectorial models, but also creative approaches for a change of perception and consciousness. At this time, in a global world in crisis, Plexus International sustainable art model might be invaluable to grasp possibilities of global interaction, among artists, scientists, communities and institutions. Art was for Plexus International the timer of the environmental radar of our unknown body-machine to fly out the limit of rational worlds and markets. Plexus ritual activities, which easily could be characterized as chaotic activities, turned into a kind of art form which ended by also documenting the unity and coherence of all this chaos. The Plexus Black Box became in the 80s the unifying element of a collective participation in which the ritual final photo of that moment was the key ritual element of a documentation for Plexus own history. The Plexus Black Box was conceived in 1989 in Rome by the participants of the art opera 1992 Cristoforo Colombo: Viaggio nel Pianeta Arte. The idea was metaphorically to "freeze” Plexus and its activities within a "black box," for the need of the historical survival movement, in order to be preserved for art history. The Plexus Black Box materially consisted of records and relics of Plexus history and performances. Many records were compiled images made as frames of reference or "quotes" of other records. Over the years, Plexus events were built one upon other. Each Plexus event took place in its own present but it was made up of past concepts and activities while it projected its own various parts into the future activities of Plexus International. By "freezing" Plexus within a conceptual black box, they were in effect defending their own, individual and collective, artistic and cultural identities, as well as the survival of the group. It was a conscious act of recall of the struggle of the artists in the community, who were running ahead toward their own future. The erosion of the Door of No Return was the Plexus metaphor for a change of route in the human use of human beings, linking art and well-being to sustainable development. Through a continuous non-stop documentation, Plexus concepts, people and events were linked together. The nature of Plexus International was like a chain, its concepts connected together and ultimately representing one total persistent purpose: the linkage of art to the community and to the notion of well-being. Looking for the acknowledgment and the recognition for the arts as community primary resources for an effective sustainable development, Plexus has situated art in an expanded community more related to a broader heterogeneous multicultural environment, linking the notion of "art" - as a resource for sustainable development - to the concept of “well being" - as a multicultural paradigm enhancing the quality of life for all. By organizing several international events on the theme of the "well being in the XXI Century" and on the issue of cultural identity and multiculturalism, Plexus International’s collaborative attempt in the 80s and in the 90s was to raise the consciousness in different communities about the interdependence of art, well-being and reconciliation, as critical issues for the survival of humankind. At this time, in a multicultural world, where individual and cultural identification are of paramount concern for all, this book has the overall aim to outline an open community-based art model that was initiated by Plexus International to grasp possibilities of global participation. After 25 years of ongoing documented art events, as reported in this book, Plexus International is still acting and resisting through the usual historical shortness of art groups and movements in contemporary art history. It continues its art journey by providing a unique aesthetic and historical ground for community-based art identification for many artists, outside or at the margins of the ArtWorld, to get their own independent artistic identification. Therefore, I hope that this book will serve to provide to Plexus International the necessary historical credit line to continue its endless art journey. The radical transformation of today’s scenery and the complexity of the raised issues and their interdependent components require, within the people-centred bottom-up sustainable development paradigm, not only new multicultural perspectives and transectorial models, but also creative approaches for a change of perception and consciousness.
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A Preview Book Presentation: Plexus Art Slavery by Sandro Dernini Published by University Press La Sapienza 4 March 2011, 6.30 PM Caffè Savoia, Piazzetta Savoia 14, Cagliari
The preview book presentation of Plexus Art Slavery by Sandro Dernini, published by the University Press of Rome La Sapienza, will be held in Cagliari on 4 March 2011, at 6.30, promoted by CUEC Editrice, at il Caffè Savoia, piazzetta Savoia 14. Introduction by: Mario Argiolas, director CUEC Editrice and Luigi Migliaccio, director University Press La Sapienza Rome. Present: Alessandra Menesini, art critic – Sandro Dernini, author. Per more info: Mario Argiolas: Cuec Editrice: info@cuec.eu; tel. 070.271573.
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This book catalog illustrates, with more than 427 images, its story from 1982 to 2008 on board a metaphoric boat of art slaves. Plexus International is a part not yet completely explored of contemporary art history. In the early 80’s, Plexus shifted its focus from the New York Artworld to the House of the Slaves of Gorée, Senegal, where the flag of the Art Slavery Manifesto was raised up against any form of slavery and the art trade as a commodity. The author, the founder of Plexus International, reports like in a photographic reportage the most important stages of this ongoing art journey. After 25 years of events, performances, conferences, shows and happenings, involving a thousand of artists and scientists around the world, Plexus is still active within an art environment known for the brief historical duration of its groups and movements.
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