Translator: Alessio Politi Reviewer: Michele Gianella
Imagine an artist, at the peak of his career;
and a collector,
who wants a portrait from him more than anything else.
It was the 80s.
And today I'd like to tell you the story of a work shrouded in mystery.
We have lost its colours,
we have lost the metrics, we have lost the history;
but we haven't lost the title.
Today I'm talking about the artist Gino De Dominicis.
He had already made several artworks at that time.
Like for example this one,
a performance whose title was quite self-explanatory:
"Attempt to make squares instead of circles
around a stone falling into the water".
Or this other artwork,
for which he had requested an official transporter, a crate.
In fact the work was very cumbersome, it was very complicated to move:
it was in fact a cube.
The title: "An invisible cube".
Days went by,
and the collector pushed for his work:
"Gino, I want to have my portrait!".
So De Dominicis satisfied him and presented this:
a dot on a monochromatic background.
Puzzled as you are today, the collector didn't understand:
"Where is my portrait?" "Where am I?" "I can't find myself!"
Then the title solved the question:
"Portrait of a collector seen from a ten kilometers distance".
This work by Giorgione is kept at the Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice.
It has been made in the first decade of the 16th century,
and we have no doubt about the title.
The caption is very clear, precise, rectangular:
"La tempesta" ("The Storm").
But actually, this title is not a Giorgione's original,
We will see today, in fact, that the title is a modern concept:
it has not always existed as we take it for granted,
much like, perhaps,
"your name is Marco, Giulia, Claudio, Francesca".
Actually this title comes from an inventory
and in particular from a description that gave us Gabriele Vendramin,
who saw the work in the collection of Marcantonio Michiel's.
The title:
"Paesetto in tela con la tempesta con la cingana e il soldato,
fu de man de Zorzi de Castelfranco".
From this description
it seems that they weren't aware of the real subject,
in fact it is a mysterious painting.
It's been a while since this creation,
however history tends to simplify things
and the title became "La Tempesta" ["The Storm"].
I am here today to tell you about artworks' titles
and especially about "Untitled".
Why? Because the reality is that we are besieged, suffocated by titles:
film titles, newspaper titles,
magazine titles, song titles,
album titles, TEDTalk titles.
Even my title, which is "Untitled".
We live in a world of titles, like our own names;
and somehow these titles choke us.
Suffice it to remember a nightmare of minimalist artist Robert Morris.
He also challenged Minimalism itself.
One night, he woke up abruptly, and it dawned on him
captions weren't that innocent after all.
"They are grenades of words,
mumbling gibberish that crush the imagination".
Titles didn't always exist, as I was saying.
In fact, in the past,
the client entrusted an artist with the creation of a work.
He made it, sculpted it,
often aided by humanists, or men of letters.
So the title somehow didn't exist.
Moreover, artworks were very often "transparent",
in the sense that the subject was clearly recognizable.
You see here a "Madonna and Child",
"Saint Peter and Paul", "Saint John the Baptist".
Or also the local patron saints
such as "Saint Lucia" or "Saint George and the Dragon".
Artworks remained
in a specific, recognizable cultural context,
clearly influenced by the environment around them.
Those artwork did hardly move.
The democratization of art,
the birth of academies, the birth of exhibitions,
the development of the market, literacy, the press,
they all gave artworks something that you all have today:
a passport, an identity card.
A way to be able to move through time,
to transmit from father to son,
and through space,
to be able to move in space, to be able to cross borders.
And so artworks slowly begin to take on titles.
I am an art historian,
and I have always loved the freedom of images.
I wondered how the title
could influence so much the perception of a work.
Then we'll do an experiment together: but once we read a title, it's over!
We can no longer see what we imagined before,
we are crushed, we are oppressed, we are conditioned, simply.
However, there are some artists who have played a lot with titles.
Look at this painting, made by William Turner.
I'm taking a breath, because the title is frightening:
"Snowstorm - steam boat off a Harbour's Mouth
Making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead.
The Author was in this Storm on the Night the "Ariel" left Harwich."
It's all a title.
The level at which the titles then came, was incredible.
Duchamp said: "it's another palette colour",
an artwork's fundamental and constituent element."
And some artists,
such as many artists of Surrealism,
played a lot with the titles, as Miró in this case.
You'll say "It's simply an abstract work!".
Instead, it's:
"A woman on the lake shore,
made iridescent by the passage of a swan".
Or how many of you, in this other artwork,
would be able to see
"Figures in the night, guided by snails' phosphorescent traces"?
But then Miró had second thoughts
and then he wrote a letter to his gallery owner, Pierre Matisse,
the third son of the painter Henri Matisse.
He wrote, on October 12th, 1934:
"Dear Pierre, I have thought a lot about the question of titles
and I must confess,
I cannot find any that is not arbitrary.
In the past I have given titles to my artworks -
and what titles, we have seen -
but they always seemed like a joke to me.
I give you permission to give titles, as long as that they don't evoke.
This is something I want to avoid completely:
Composition, for example.
Those literary titles, literary in a surrealistic way."
So titles are a problem for artists, also.
Artworks have to be identified:
but how, if the word, the names, "Giulio" -
affects your perception so much?!
It reminds you of a Giulio you've met, for example.
This work is by the American painter, who mostly worked in England,
James Abbott Mecneill Whistler.
In 1872 he presented this artwork at the Royal Academy in London.
The title: "Composition in grey and black, number one".
He understood the artwork as a chromatic composition,
he didn't want us to see a subject.
He was forced to give a title,
specifying that it was Whistler's portrait
of the artist's mother.
He's furious.
He wonders, he wonders why the English audience,
and perhaps he meant the whole audience,
are unable to perceive an artwork as it is
and they are mainly interested in the story - be careful -
that an artwork is supposed to tell.
The artwork is supposed to tell an image.
But let's leave Europe, the old Europe, and go to the United States,
where Abstract Expressionism was born in the early 40s.
This work is by Jackson Pollock, and it's called "Untitled".
Be careful!
He didn't refuse to give a title, he literally called it "Untitled".
He felt obliged to give a title, then he chose "Untitled".
Do you get the impact and strength
of such an important, unprecedented gesture?
It's confusing: how to call an artwork?
Think of a library where all the volumes are untitled.
How to order one? How to talk about it? How to describe it? How to quote it?
And yet Pollock chose "untitled".
But this choice was not fortunate,
it was not appreciated, surely, by critics.
In fact, a few years later he exhibited this work: "Number 30".
He exhibited it for several years, from 1951 to 1952, '53;
and then,
when it was exhibited, in 1955 at the Sidney Janis Gallery
the title was: "Autumn Rythm".
He had identified numbers
as a solution to avoid influencing the viewer,
but they created confusion.
Imagine the collector: "Number 30", "Number 12".
And so an "Autumn Rhythm" was created.
But there are other painters who have also experienced, more deeply,
the harshness and consequences of an untitled artwork.
In particular, their story is intertwined with this woman:
the "Patron of art" Mrs. Peggy Guggenheim.
It was in 1946, when she invited Clyfford Still, an American painter,
to hold a solo show at her gallery, "Art of this Century", in New York.
She organized the exhibition, invitations and whatnot;
and just before the opening,
she and André Breton went to see the artworks,
with Styll present.
Lots of highly appreciated artworks, were there - but, er, no titles.
"Ah, no. The works are all untitled."
The two were furious.
How to sell an artwork? How to tell about it?
This untitled thing is confusing.
And so, thanks to the research of Professor David Anfam's ,
we were able to reconstruct all the works on display.
The two of them forced Styll, they bound him, crushed him.
They forced him to put titles on artworks.
And they are pressing titles:
"Elegy", "Premonition", "Self-portrait", "Siamese Cat and Daughters".
They're very impactful titles.
Shall we do an experiment?
Look at this work, shown here, originally untitled.
A composition,
or whatever you'd like this artwork to be.
But it isn't,
because Peggy Guggenheim and André Breton gave it this title:
"The Spectrum and the Parrot".
I'm not sure how many of you
could see something different now, on the left:
a parrot clearly, in its shape.
And if you see this work again you will always see a parrot,
you won't be able to see anything else.
Mark Rothko starts to assign
quite recognizable, certainly traditional titles.
We now find "Figure", "Woman", "Landscape", "Metropolitan Scene"
and so on.
They are recognizable titles,
they allow to acquire artworks, to talk about them, to quote them,
they allow the artist to have important reviews.
Since 1946 he has been moving towards abstraction,
he also challenged the term "abstraction".
However, it seems like these figures were expanding on monochromatic planes,
dissolving gradually.
And they follow the words.
And so Mark Rothko, too, in the 40s,
stopped giving titles to his artworks: "Untitled".
However, as in Pollock's case,
he was forced to try to identify his artworks,
and so he used numbers.
But why Rothko wins over all?
Because he changed numbers all the time,
he gave the same artwork different numbers as he exhibited it.
It was totally confusing, you can't grasp anything anymore.
The reconstruction of Rothko's catalogue was in fact very complicated,
for he changed artworks' titles as they were exhibited.
He also changed their orientation.
Imagine the confusion, and the beauty, of such a gesture,
which challenges what we have always believed:
that with erudition, with study,
one day we would be able to get closer to artworks.
Instead it's just the opposite:
it's a dance, a movement, a courtship,
a dedication of love, a commitment.
In fact this is the only way
to experience the artworks,
to embrace them in some way without listing, defining them precisely.
However, even these numbers create a lot of confusion.
And so he also begun to work with an art dealer
and the titles, the colors like the titles, begun to appear.
Here we see "White and Red on Yellow".
Rothko was furious,
because titles look like colours now, they seem to have become the subject,
but that's not the case.
In fact he wrote precisely
that "colours are not the subject of the artwork".
It's not even an abstract composition;
it simply isn't, or is,
what each of you today want to see in this painting.
We needed hundreds of thousands of titles,
so that we could get to the untitled.
Imagine the power of such an unprecedented gesture.
Even Styll, the painter I told you about earlier,
retroactively deleted all his titles
and invented a progressive inventory number
in order to mention them.
An operation that no one had ever done before.
But if I still haven't convinced you of the importance of the untitled,
to shed words off of us instead of filling with them,
then let's think about Ulysses.
When he managed to blind Polyphemus, he said that his name was "Nobody".
And so, when he was rescued by the other cyclops,
Polyphemus said:
"Who blinded you? Who should we look for?"
And he said, "Nobody". Again, untitled.
Only then Ulysses saved his life, because they couldn't find him.
And if it still doesn't convince you,
look at this artwork by the artist Carlo Benvenuto:
a mirror, which invites us to look at ourselves
and for once to escape from us, not to call us,
to take a step back, look without expressing an opinion.
Simply the feeling.
But maybe this is too radical a gesture,
because each of us has a name, has an economy.
We must move, we must have a life,
we must recognize ourselves in some way.
Then I would invite you to go back to Giorgione's Storm.
And, actually, it's a photograph of a contemporary artist
and he didn't call it "storm", he didn't call it "Untitled".
He decided it to be "not yet titled".
Thank you.
(Applause)