CONCEPT: Man today finds himself in a situation of great uncertainty and precariousness. His condition resembles that of a hiker who has walked for a long time on a frozen surface and who, when this surface thaws (a metaphorical but currently also very real image), feels that the ground shakes and breaks into a thousand splinters. The surface of traditional values and concepts is broken. It is difficult to continue on the path. Philosophy has tried to diagnose this situation, a diagnosis of the worries and fears that plague today's man and the dangers that threaten him. It believed that it could identify the essential causes of all this in nihilism.
Nihilism first appeared officially between the 18th and 19th centuries, especially with Nietzsche. According to the German philosopher, the roots of nihilism can be found in Euripides and Socrates in Greece, when the Apollonian aspect of life overwhelmed and concealed the Dionysian. Nietzsche himself gave a dry and precise definition of nihilism: there is no goal; there is no answer to the "why?"; what does nihilism mean? - the becoming worthless of the highest values.
According to Nietzsche, nihilism is therefore the senselessness, the situation of disorientation that occurs when the binding nature of the traditional answers to the "why" of life and being is no longer given. This happens when the references, the highest traditional values that have given an answer to this "why" - e.g. God, truth, the idea of the good - lose their value and perish, creating the conditions of senselessness in which humanity is floating today.
But what does a "revaluation" of the previously valid values mean for us in concrete terms? What does it mean for us creators, us members of the VBK, in today's art? In relation to our own artistic media?
My intention and invitation is to try - with emphasis on the intention of the attempt - to go beyond the usual aspects or "values" that we believe in, to which we are accustomed and bound. I call for a personal confrontation - an intimate game with our individual action towards our own media (painting, sculpture, video...) - with this ambiguous concept of nihilism: nihil (nothingness) and the destruction or revaluation of traditional values.
It is an attempt, on the one hand, to make a clean slate of ourselves through our own aesthetics or art, and, on the other hand, to confront the concept of nothingness. Because nihilism has eroded truths and weakened religions. At the same time, however, it has also dissolved dogmatism and overthrown ideologies, teaching us to maintain rational thinking, the paradigm of transversal and prudent thinking that allows us to sail between the rocks of the sea of precariousness in our journey of becoming. Nihilism has made us aware that we have no roots, that modern man moves by sight in the archipelagos of life, the world and history. In disappointment, there is no longer a compass to guide us, there are no previous routes and paths to follow, nor pre-determined goals to reach. So what does the revaluation of the values that have been valid up to now mean, what could it mean for each of us? I invite you to try to move away from the values that we hold onto subjectively and objectively. To try to understand which values can change - since values are indispensable to us anyway.
To investigate whether there are other positive and negative values that go beyond all values within the human or non-human sphere, that are beyond all values that can be classified within a system of good and evil. This investigation should, of course, go far beyond a historical comparison with the aesthetics and artistic movements of the 20th century, since Dadaism and other movements have already directly confronted the disturbing diversity of contemporary thought in their own way, and much of contemporary art and literature would be incomprehensible without this confrontation. It is about nihilism precisely because tabula rasa, the destruction and revaluation of values, a crisis of acquired and conquered preconditions, also means a new beginning. It is about starting again from what has been partially or completely destroyed. And perhaps finding new ways, or at least questioning one's own aesthetics, one's own approach and acting in the name of something else.
Perhaps this other something is inside us, hidden from everything that was there before. Or perhaps it is outside us, in a source of inspiration that we have not recognized until now because we are too wrapped up in ourselves. Nihilism therefore means going beyond oneself in order to see the whole and oneself (again), far away from ourselves.
At the same time, my proposal is also an invitation to grapple with the actual concept of nihilism itself, with nihil: nothingness.
Author: Andrea Cataudella, Berlin 2022 https://andreacataudella.com/