Esposizione Triennale di Arti Visive, Rome 2014

Last Paradise

Edited by Daniele Radini Tedeschi

Published by Giorgio Mondadori

GIORGIO VULCANO on BASIL COLIN FRANK

” People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that is terribly unjust and offensive to beasts; a beast could never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears for an entire night, even if he were able to do it.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The twentieth century served as the cruel stage of wars, genocides, and violence of extraordinary proportion and intensity. Hence the epithet “the century of darkness”, which the Bulgarian philosopher and essayist Cvetan Todorov used on the occasion of the conference History, Truth and Justice: the Crimes of XX Century[1] that took place in Siena. The intention of this international event was to merge different levels of interpretations, which, although often influencing each other, had never been compared in a systematic manner. The conference tackled an historical analysis of crimes and acts of violence inflicted by states, examined the role that memory and morals played in the reading of the twentieth century, and examined the difficult relationship between international and collective justice in both people and institutions. It is also thanks to literature, film and art that today we can gain a better understanding of the atrocities that occurred in the past century: some poignant examples are the Shoah, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and the brutality endured by indigenous populations. These phenomena, which shook public opinion and contemporary conscience, profoundly changed what can be defined as “the anthropological self-perception of the contemporary world”. In the 1980s the exhibitions Primitivism in XX Century Art and Les Magiciens de la terre (The Magicians of the Earth), which took place respectively in New York and Paris, accelerated post-colonial debates on the arts, bringing about a renewed interest in an old problem.

With his photographic, digital, and sculptural works, the Israeli artist Basil Colin Frank prompts us to reflect on man’s cruelty, violence against the individual, social and political conflicts, racial discrimination – all of which profoundly mark our time. Basil’s exploration of these themes steers clear of moralistic and rhetorical stereotypes. The 2009 work Have you seen the Cape (Het jy die Kaap gesien) uncovers the deep contradiction between the bergie, the homeless population of Cape Town, and diamonds, the precious mineral resource of the Southern hemisphere: against the backdrop of Table Mountain, the site of ancient settlements as well as civic and political symbol of the city, emerges the figure of a poor man and the outlines of the precious stones. This sharp dichotomy is reminiscent of Lorna Simpson’s Waterbearer (1986), which exposed the condition of many black women as victims of both racism and sexism. The object of Basil Frank’s criticism is apartheid, the hateful legislative system that emerged from the 1948 South African elections; apartheid forced the majority of the black population to carry a passbook to enter white areas, banned interracial marriages, discriminated against people of colour in both education and the workforce. The system of racial segregation of public infrastructures and services – from educational institutions; schools, the post office buses and public amenities, to benches, public toilets and beaches – was institutionalized as an integral part of the Apartheid racist regime enforced through legislation. This shameful policy of separation, first brandished by South African minister DF Malan [2], was definitively dismantled in 1994. This was the year when Nelson Mandela, undisputed leader of the black minority, imprisoned for close to three decades, was at last freed and later elected head of the free (but not yet peaceful) State of South Africa. In his 2008 Red Bride piece, the artist condemns the violence inflicted on women and children, with particular attention to the countless cases of physical maltreatment, persecution, sexual abuse and genital mutilation in Pakistan, Darfur and South Africa: the photographic image, revisited in digital form, evokes the human body in extreme conditions. This work brings to mind Eva Hesse’s 1969 Contingent, a series of latex, fibreglass, and cheesecloth constructions alluding to the human body from a proto-feminist stance. In Transmutation Basil Colin Frank examines the ancient notion of alchemical transmutation, transferring this idea from inanimate objects to the human soul. Amid a vortex of tiny tubes resembling bones is a skull; perhaps this is the X-ray of a soul and a conscience finding a second life and renewed dignity in a super-terrestrial dimension.