Leaving aside the enormous scenic and lighting work of the entire exhibition and the scenes from the films at the back of each room (elements that make visiting the exhibition an experience in its own right), let us focus our attention on the PARA BELLVM room and, more specifically, on the contemporary aesthetics of war in the exhibition, one of the most seemingly mundane of the moment, VITA DVLCIS at Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome.
In his book Interregno – Iconografie del XXI secolo (Interregnum – Iconographies of the 21st Century), in the chapter Netflix & Kill, Mattia Salvia focuses on how our relationship with war has changed over the last twenty years. It has always been impacted by popular curiosity, the ecstasy of heroic commanders following a victory in important battles, recounted across all classes of society with pride as well as, in other cases, fear. However, the technology that ushered in mass society critically transformed war, imploding at its peak, during the First Gulf War, in that ‘dominance of the visual over presence’ which Jean Baudrillard spoke of. The war increasingly acquired aesthetic features, not so much through the old and new triumphal arches erected at the end of the war, but in its making and becoming an everyday image – depowered, transformed and translated by the various subjects present in the process of creation and transmission.
Thirty years later, the “consumption” of war has worsened, as the contemporary war in Ukraine reveals, with YouTube live broadcasts – such as the one on the dangerous battle in the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, seen by more than 80,000 viewers -, Reddit channels witnessing the war day by day, as one would do with an episodic television series, brandizations (this is the first time that it is possible to buy t-shirts, mugs, magnets and anything else related to a contemporary war phenomenon, to show one’s support, as one does with sporting events), and again slogans, artificial and contemporary mythologies, meme wars on social networks between official profiles of governmental organisations, etc. There is also, if we are honest, a “comic” line in the immense war drama, typically found in contemporary TV series: several videos of amusing Ukrainian peasants finding military vehicles abandoned by Russians and picking them up with their tractors.
War has become a variety show, mass entertainment for the entire globe, and the ‘dominance of the visual over presence’, in the Age of the Internet, has become the dominance of action (personal, through media technology and their diverse news from the frontline, which always says everything and its opposite at the same time).
If the war in Ukraine were being fought by Homeric heroes, or perhaps by great Roman emperors, the underlying impression, the veiled perception, would be similar to the one we find in the PARA BELLVM room of Francesco Vezzoli’s exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, entitled VITA DVLCIS. Let us be clear, not because Vezzoli has suddenly become a dramatic and gloomy artist, as befits the topic of war, but it is war that has become pop, absurdly ‘fun’, exciting and superficially dramatic, like a football match. This is with the exception of those who are living the war, of course.
This daring, provocative and grotesque simile focuses our attention on the proverbial other side of the coin with respect to what was mentioned beforehand, namely Vezzoli’s ability to represent the present time, in a depth hidden and concealed by a substantial Warhol-like superficiality. Like the brilliant artist from Pittsburgh, Vezzoli showcases History: if Warhol exhibited his present, in the fast-paced development of a society of consumption and images, Vezzoli achieves this with the past, immersed, like all of us, in the postmodern spiral of indeterminacy, even temporal indeterminacy. In this pastiche, the genius loci prevails, Rome and its greatest empire of the past, and the zeitgeist, our own, that of an increasingly analogue-digital society, disarmed and alone yet hyper-connected through the infosphere.
It is precisely this ability to capture the spirit of the time that transforms the PARA BELLVM room into a theorem of contemporary war perception, as if to create a link between the ruins, whether original (the sculptures of Ancient Rome) or simulated (Vezzoli’s works) with their absolute opposite, the rubble (those of Soviet buildings gutted by missiles).
Let us start with the title of the room which, we might say, encapsulates all past and present hypocrisy concerning the subject of war. PARA BELLVM, the final part of the locution ‘Si vis pacem para bellum’ by the Latin writer Vegentius, is an incitement to secure the right means of defence to ensure peace for one’s state, but is also the motto of the Deutsche Waffen und Munitionsfabriken, which named its best-known type of bullet ‘Parabellum’. ‘Prepare for war’ to make war, satisfy the manly need of those who command the state, to fight, but under the pretext of peace.
In the room we find a kind of triangle, with the work at its centre creating meaning. The triangle consists of two heads looking at each other, those of the god Mars and Alexander the Great, taken from the Baths of Diocletian and Palazzo Massimo respectively. Vezzoli’s Para Bellum (Portrait of a Roman General) is a marble sculpture representing a contemporary Latin head wearing a bronze bicycle helmet, and the torso of the Emperor Domitian dressed as a fighting Hercules, also taken from the Baths of Diocletian. At the centre we find two related works. One by Vezzoli, Achilles!, represents the bust of the demigod who is the protagonist of the Iliad, his face coloured by a pop flower. The other is of Roman origin, the remains of the sculptural group of Achilles and Penthesilea (also from the Baths of Diocletian).
Whereas Vezzoli’s Achilles is magnificent and triumphal, a pure aesthetisation of war, in the allegory of the handsome and proud hero who carries positive and just values, with that delicate little flower perhaps representing his presumed homosexuality – certainly concealing his violence, blood and death – the remnants of Roman sculpture beneath it show its foul, immoral depths, precisely because they are the ruins of a concept (originally as magnificent and triumphant as Vezzoli’s work). This second work eliminates, that is, the aesthetic translation of the medium, making us see beyond the lying screen, showing us, in a kind of irrational perception, the real war. In the Iliad, Penthesilea was the queen of the Amazons who came, after the death of Hector, to help the Achaeans. She is killed by Achilles, who takes off her helmet and falls in love with her, performing a necrophilic act on her corpse. Man’s lowest instincts, exacerbated by war, are conceptually represented here in the remnants of a heroic translation of the past.
Depending on the war propaganda we rely on, Vezzoli’s Achilles could today be Volodymyr Zelenskiy or Vladimir Putin, curated in every detail for the world’s cameras. The group of Achilles and Penthesilea – between the figurative and the conceptual, and with its hidden meaning unleashed by time and the destruction of its original beauty – could instead be any of the countless horrendous deeds carried out by the two armies, in the unveiling of what lies behind the heroic charisma and the realisation that in war there are no good guys or bad guys, nor even righteous ones, but only opposing geopolitical and economic interests.
The cult of war and the cult of beauty have always been intertwined across history, but their contemporary use, lessened by the use of new technologies and staged, as it is lessened in the staging of Vezzoli’s war room, compromises their meaning, transforms their dimension and turns them into functional propaganda. Achilles is never simultaneously hero and necrophiliac. On the contrary, we can say he is always a hero, just by transforming his lust for blood into mastery with the sword and the event of necrophilia into heroic victory and divine supremacy over the queen of the Amazons.
Vita Dulcis. Paura e desiderio nell’impero romano, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Roma, 22.04 – 26.08.2023
images: (cover 1-3) Francesco Vezzoli, «Achille!», 2021 VITA DULCIS, Sala PARA BELLUM, ph: Daniele Molajoli (2) Francesco Vezzoli, «Para Bellum (Portrait of a Roman General)», 2023, VITA DULCIS, Sala PARA BELLUM
