Politi vs Lo Coco #01
Original Italian text by Helga Marsala (Artribune.com). Translated by Raul Carbonella
The piece of news is strong, and it attracts a lot of attention and causes astonishment, even regret. No, this time we are not speaking about the infamous Italia pavilion in the last Venice Biennale, taken care of by Vittorio Sgarbi, or another improbable example of public art event. We are talking about something hidden, far from the spotlight, concerning the life of ordinary people who had ran up against art and happened to be in a mess, unexpectedly. A very fine mess. Especially if the one who has to square up with it is a 26 old boy, definitively unprepared for the event.
The boy is Luca Lo Coco, from Palermo, a restless, brilliant guy: sharp, critical spirit, creative disposition and an insane will to say his piece. And he did say it, some years ago, with an operation that perhaps was not fully conscious at the beginning, but then resulted in an interesting example of net art and later of mail art.
The matter came out more or less like a sort of game, but soon it assumed the form of a biting, precise provocation. A well-made provocation, moreover. His target was, no less than, a ‘dinosaur’ of the Italian art publishing: Giancarlo Politi, historical director and publisher of the magazine Flash Art. Five years ago Luca was just 20, as he made him hit the roof- a difficult story, which epilogue, not happy at all, came out in the last days.
Let’s proceed neatly. In 2005 Lo Coco, suddenly fascinated by the art world, bought his first art magazine, the most institutional, the most popular one, Flash Art Italia, of course. What did the guy look for? He wanted to inform himself, to see something through in the Babel of the system, to find the most talented artists of the moment, to discover which way contemporary art was going. On the contrary, after a few pages, the only thing he found was disappointment.
“As soon as I opened that which I had considered the most beautiful magazine, I was aghast at the unbelievable quantity of advertisements I had to face before seeing the first page about art” tells Luca, interviewed by Artribune. “The page I yearned for was titled, in red letters <The letters to the director>, next to the epigraph a sort of ‘holy picture’ of a bald, smiling man; the whole thing framed by a thin, violet line which reminded the vestment of a sad priest during the Lent.” Ironic and a bit sour, Lo Coco. He goes on: “By reading those letters, I didn’t find anything but an acid teacher knuckling harshly his students. I kept on flipping through the magazine. After about half an hour I shut it. I was looking for art and what I found was only art market.” Lapidary, the fellow, he gets to the point.
A few months later all Luca’s anger and astonishment resulted in a so effective and original idea, that can be considered as an art experiment. Which place for the action? The web, of course, powerful instrument to reach as many people as possible in a very quick time. “I had no technical knowledge of the media, so I turned to a friend of mine who works as a webmaster”, tells Luca, “and he gave me the website www.ashartonline.com as a present for my birthday”.
Here is the scandal: a website. That’s all. Name, layout and contents almost same as the above-mentioned magazine. An imperfect copy, a scarcely different repetition. Two less letters to make “flash” turn into “ash”. An unequal twin was born really of the ashes of the new reader’s delusion. “On ashArtonline.com you could find from little differences in the news to real corrections to the magazine articles, in order to start the critical process. A free-for-all forum completed the work”. A perfect camouflage, a subtle, debunking, situationist experiment, which wanted to creep into the recesses of the system to question it.
All went off smoothly for months, the number of registered members grew up day by day, and a section in particular started to be very popular. On “Letters to the director, the latter end” everyone who had received impolite answers from Mr. Politi (or Mr. Impoliti , translator’s note) could reply and say his piece. Brilliant.
From January to June www.ashartonline.com was active, infecting Internet users like a virus and getting itself talked about, more and more. From that point on it was no game anymore.
The Director had received the first feedbacks, and started to get worked up, seriously. Time to give it up? You never know. But after all it was a site about art…ok you are right: provided with some healthy criticism, maybe. So Luca decided to go on, creating a new section on his website named “ash Art Diary” and inspired by the famous papery diary by Politi, which edits contacts and addresses of the art system operators. Luca’s diary was strictly virtual and it was built up in only three weeks: an extraordinary data collection of about three thousand email addresses of Italian artists, art critics and curators. For free download, of course. A hail of downloads in few days. Everyone stole, everyone drew from that cheeky file, totally free and open. A great success generated by an incredible activity of data searching and entering, a deed of democratic sharing far from the usual logic of market and money.
How did Lo Coco find all those addresses? “By using the ones I already had, taking them from my cc incoming mail, or simply finding new ones in the Internet. After all, how do you think Politi created his database? With a five days searching time I could enter 10.000 addresses, you just need a bit organization” tells Luca.
Well, that was the last straw. This time Politi works himself into a rage. “On the 31st of July 2007 a bailiff in a great sweat caused by the 40 degrees in Palermo at that day, rang at my doorbell and gave me a pretty bundle made by dozens of pages, which the Big Director’s lawyers nicely had sent to me.” It is the first step of a long, complicated lawsuit; almost five years of hearings, papers, nuisances. Meanwhile the site has been banned. ash Art doesn’t exist anymore.
24th September 2010: the trial is over, finally. In favor of…? Try to guess! The young artist/activist from Palermo is sentenced to pay ‘only’ for the legal costs, about 7.000 Euros. An happy ending, in some ways, since the accuser had claimed for 200.000 Euros damages! According to the judge, the confusion between the two websites was objective and harmful. Exactly what the accused wanted to do: playing with the critical simulation, creating a short-circuit, overturning the rules of the game, ironically.
Anyway, Luca has not 7.000 Euros. On the 19th of April 2011 he received an injunction to pay and about one month later another bailiff visited him, serving a foreclosure upon all goods in Luca’s apartment. “My mom and my brother want to put me out” he comments and says on: “If I would do all this again? Sure! After all, perhaps, I still believe in ‘pure’ art.”
Family Lo Coco’s furniture is still at home, to this day. However the civil court is now working on its removal and the subsequent auction sale. Certainly justice has run its course but…was all this necessary indeed? The ban on the site, wasn’t it enough already? “Politi had never asked me to give it up, neither a phone call nor a letter I had received from him but the one from his lawyers, directly” tells Luca. Well, the Big Director has taken a victory home but now he would cut a dashing figure, if he would pay that little amount himself, saving furniture, furnishings and fittings.
There is another doubt, though, even more pressing. Lo Coco was at the beginning of this story a very young unknown artist, actually maybe he was not yet an artist at all, he was not integrated in the art circuit, just a name among thousands other names. He was a 20 aged boy from Palermo who believed in the purity of art, who cultivated the irrepressible spirit of a creative activist. His logo itself is a sort of stylized, mocking sneer, a laugh in the system’s face, in its rules, in its hypocrisies, in that “taking oneself too seriously” which sometimes results to be pathetic.
A doubt, we said. How would Luca’s operation have finished up, if it would have been imaged by…a random name, Maurizio Cattelan? It’s plain: no complaint, no trial. Quite the opposite, would Politi have dedicated to him a nice cover? Probably yes. The umpteenth stroke of genius by the rebel artist who teases the system: this would have been the matter in hand! The system would have appreciated it and would have said to him “thank you”, even making a bow to the irreverent superstar.
