Leonardo Carella

During the last morning of our stay in Bilbao, we all gathered in the classroom of most of our exchange partners and the teachers told us that we had to summarize the positive and negative aspects of this experience, mainly thinking about how we cooperated and how we communicated all together with the Spanish students. The results were various: for most of us, the experience had been, in general, quite positive and the main problems were obviously in their masochistic timetable and in the use of a different language but, for others, there was a serious problem in the communication and in the integration because of a (presumed) difference in the use of English, the (presumed) indifference of the people that participated to the exchange, and the (presumed) lack of common interests. Well, in general, it’s obvious that the part of the exchange and of the project we enjoyed the least was all the work we had to do as students but, in the end, the work is a part of the experience .Cooperation could have made it easier (in facts, the groups that truly cooperated, also worked better and enjoyed more their days at the “Colegio Alemàn”). In the end, all the teachers and the students agreed that the most important thing is tolerance, that could have avoided some misunderstandings between us and, if we learn it, could be helpful also in our future relationships.

On Friday the 16^th of April, we went to the Guggenheim museum and, after a very interesting visit of the permanent collection and the exhibition of the works of Anish Kapoor and Robert Rauschenberg, we went out and we asked the people who were there and who accepted to be interviewed, 5 questions concerning the subject of our work:

• What do you think about Modern Art? / What is the meaning, according to you, of Modern Art?

These questions were interpreted in different ways: most of the people answered that Modern Art basically consists in abstract art, a girl, instead, is the art of a specific period (she said from the Renaissance to the 70s).

• Which could be the motivation why artists started to paint abstract figures?

About this question, the interviewed people answered that it was mainly because the artists had to represent something “below” the reality. This could be a “psychological” explanation, but someone also gave a more practical one, but true as well: with the invention of photography, it became quite useless that an artist represented people or landscapes exactly as they were, because this could be done better by a photographer.

• Is it possible that these artists are making fun of us?

This question was a sort of provocation and everyone answered that modern artists seriously think that their abstract forms have a meaning, except an Italian boy who answered, obviously joking, “yes”.

• Do you think you could be a modern artist?

Everyone at the beginning said that modern artists have something more than normal people, and so that they couldn’t be artists. But someone, then, also had the great idea that maybe through Modern Art, someone wanted also to say that everybody could be and everyone is a modern artist.

• Is it possible that people will understand Modern Art only in the future when Modern Art will be something “old”?

Most of the people agreed with this idea, but someone also answered that Modern Art is conceived to be “lived” at the moment and not to be “studied” as something of the past. In this way, it’s necessary for us to understand modern and contemporary works of art right now.

In conclusion, we found in some people a deferent but, at the same time, banal and very unspecific approach to Modern Art, with some exceptions, that is to say, on the one hand, the actual interest of some people and, on the other, the explicit indifference and the idea that Modern Art has no sense.

Gonzalo Quincoces, Pablo Ruiz de Gordejuela, Matteo Giovannetti, Matteo Perilli, Leonardo Carella.

This is just a brief summary of the subject and the aims of our work about the language of the Modern Art. The most important part of our work consists in a video with some interviews that we are going to take near to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.

Many Italian and Spanish painters, such as Raphael, Caravaggio, Velazquez or Goya, are generally believed to be the most influent, creative and innovative artists of their period. But what about Dalì, Picasso, De Chirico and Boccioni? It’s important to think about how artists and intellectuals interpreted our culture also in the XX century, probably because their works may be beautiful and interesting, but also because their restlessness, their fears, their values and, in general, their way of thinking are near to ours. But what is the problem in accepting Modern Art? Surely the problem is their overcoming of the figurative art and their independence from visual references to the natural world. Is it right to think that refusing concepts as form, color, human figure or perspective may be a way for representing reality? Or Modern Art is just a speculation? How could Malevich’s Black Square (in the picture below) represent something real? The thoughts are different but, in general, normal people’s interest in Modern Art is limited to some particular movement that are however linked to figurative art, such as Gauguin and Fauves’ Post Impressionism, Art Nouveau, Surrealism or Cubism. Could somebody, except the art critics, understand Suprematism, German Expressionism, Pop Art or Body Art? With our interviews we are going to try and understand how Modern Art, in an evoluting town as Bilbao, is considered.

The Black Square, the “masterpiece” of Suprematism by Kazimir Malevich (1913)

Gonzalo Quincoces, Pablo Ruiz de Gordejuela, Matteo Giovannetti, Matteo Perilli, Leonardo Carella.

The main characteristic of our school, the “Liceo Classico”(classical studies) is the study of  the language and literature of the ancient Greeks and Romans, also because their categories of thought, their beliefs and their philosophical issues influenced very much the whole western culture. So we are going to talk about their point of view about strangers, also with the  aim to understand the root of a certain mistrust or hostility towards people belonging to another cultural or ethnic group, that unfortunately in the course of history has often caused intolerance, wars and ethnics cleansings.

Also in one of the first literary documents of the western culture, the Odyssey, it’s evident how the Greeks (or, better, the Achaeans) didn’t consider human the Cyclops, not because they were physically different from them (in facts, Homer doesn’t mention any “single eye in the middle of the forehead”), but just because they didn’t cultivate their land, they didn’t eat bread, they drank pure milk and, in general, because they had different habits. Then, in spite of the  flourishing and rich culture they expressed, in some ways, we can say that the Greeks of the Classical Period (V-IV century BC) were, also in the relationships among the people who were Greeks themselves, what we would call parochialist and classist: just a few, male, adult people born in the “polis” (the town) had civil and political rights.The law, with some differences between the different city-states, considered foreigners, women, slaves and subjugated populations as inferior human beings. But when in the V century BC, the divided (and so, politically weak) poleis (plural of polis) had to face the Persian empire, that was politically solid and militarily strong, in the  aim to survive, the different towns had to fight together against a common enemy, overcoming the old rivalries between them. And so, it became necessary to find some shared values that unified all the Greek “poleis” and made them absolutely different from the dangerous strangers: the Persians, the barbarians. This word came from the Greek term “bàrbaros”, that meant only “anyone that is not Greek”, and it’s onomatopoeic, because, to the Greek ear, someone who did not speak the Greek language, babbled, producing a sound like “bar bar bar”. However, it’s in the restless atmosphere of the wars against the Persians that Greek orators started to create a negative stereotype of the Persians: they described them as vile, lustful, impious, immoral and womanish people, unable to govern through a democracy and so cowardly subdued to a king. And also the philosophers agreed with this opinion and tried to support philosophically this idea of a precise and strict difference between Greeks and all the other population, the Barbarians. Aristotle, surely the philosopher who most influenced the occidental culture, said that the barbarians, being subjected to a king because of their nature, were all biologically slaves and so the race of the Hellenes, who were free, democratic and morally superior, had to dominate all the other inferior cultures. After the crisis of the Greek poleis and the Roman conquest, the Romans (who were, at first, considered barbarians too) tried to assimilate Greek culture and so inherited also this tendency to justify their imperialism because of the superiority of their habits (the Mos Maiorum). But also in the successive centuries, even if Christian religion and the fall of the Roman Empire changed radically the culture of Europe, a certain ethnocentrism that validated the preeminence of European and Christian culture because of a hypothetical biological superiority, remained. In conclusion, evil and illogical discriminations, such as the racism and the nationalism, might have their origins in the classical culture; but we live in a modern world and we should overcome this ancestral hostility towards the different people and we should respect all the individuals and every culture, also realizing that, if we don’t have prejudices, it’s possible to integrate our way of thinking with the other populations’ one.

Authors: The students of the class 3A of the Liceo Bertrand Russell of Rome - Alexandra, Leonardo, Virginia, Anastasia, Noemi.