SI Fest 015: Mustafa Sabbagh. "#000 - Tuxedo Riot"

About

Incipit «Art needs no longer to be an account of past sensations. It can become the direct organization of more highly evolved sensations. It is a question of producing ourselves, not things that enslave us». Guy Débord, International Situationist no.1, 1958

In John Cage, it was the silence. In Gilles Deleuze, too much long nails. Revolutionary acts starting from an habitus (or from a bad habit, as a Bourdieu 2.0 would have meant) burning out in revolution, and betraying art. As silence for Cage, as nails for Deleuze, at SI Fest 2015, Mustafa Sabbagh presents # 000 - Tuxedo Riot: his revolution in black tie.

Tuxedo: elegance and anarchy, because - from Plato to Edgar Wind - «If the ultimate desire of a man is to live without hassles, perhaps the best advice that you can give him is to keep art far from his home». Nature buries any kind of tragedy in order to formalize its beauty, but the darkness of silence, as the scratching nails’ one, is more deafening than a bombardment, more excruciating than an open wound.

In exhibition, rebels in tuxedo by Mustafa Sabbagh - which also discloses, for the first time on the occasion of SI Fest, a series of unreleased artworks: black Mothers and black Vesperbilder, vague Venuses and tarmacadam soldiers, mystical raptures pervaded by an hauntingly calm - that fills nature, such as a man or a #000 – always bearing within itself the seeds of revolution, ready to take root in Saints = in Human beings.

Tuxedo as a semiotics’ lesson by the artist who has embraced Simmel’s and Goffman’s lesson, because «There's no need to fear nor to hope, but only to look for new weapons». You can smell revolution through scattered petals, betraying recent storms; you can smell revolution through pulsing veins, betraying latent angers.

«The tired has only exhausted realization, while the exhausted exhausts all of the possible. The tired can no longer realize, but the exhausted can no longer possibilitate». Riotous exhausted like Beckettian damned ones, emptied but never tired, ready to fill the void of a #000 with an inexhaustible creation, directed by the cantor of a fully recognizable beauty - thanks to the stylistic features that have made ​​him famous on the international contemporary art scene: a sophisticated, autistic, destabilizing beauty. In one word: a revolutionary beauty.

In exhibition also two videos, as a single tautology of passion and pain, circular and out of sync to itself; a poor fellow named Christ and a poor devil named Jude, both beautiful and sumptuous as only artworks can, one to another’s shadow, one to another’s lost cause, one to another’s losing game, in an eternal and sacred exchange of roles, as eternal and sacred is human life.

4'33'' for John Cage, #000 for Mustafa Sabbagh: the value of a revolution is an aesth_ethical figure, because it is only emptying from themselves, through the most elegant war of position, that art can habit its armour in order to win and, at last, to get lost.

Explicit

«And, like two young men of the world, they spoke of ties, hats, double-breasted and single-breasted jackets, as if there was no war, and as if they were not there waiting for the revolution». Joseph Roth, The Silent Prophet, 1978

textus receptus: fabiola triolo

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SI Fest24: [HABITUS]

The artists: MUSTAFA SABBAGH, LARRY FINK, MIKE BRODIE, GABRIELE BASILICO, FELICE BEATO, PAOLO VENTURA, GIULIA MARCHI, MARTINA BACIGALUPO, CLAUDINE DOURY, TOMMASO TANINI, SIMONE DONATI, MONIA PERISSINOTTO, FRANCESCO FRANCAVIGLIA, THOMAS VANDEN DRIESSCHE, ENRICO DE LUIGI, JACOPO BENASSI, GIANPAOLO BARBIERI, SETTIMIO BENEDUSI, TONI THORIMBERT, GIOVANNI GASTEL, MARCO PESARESI