Roberto Cuoghi

Italian artist Roberto Cuoghi is best known for a decision to take on the appearance of his father. Once he adopted the habits and diet of a fifty-year-old man, the artist, age twenty-nine, developed health problems associated with an older generation: excess weight, high cholesterol, and short-sightedness from wearing glasses. Cuoghi’s refusal to document this transformation was viewed unkindly by the art world, which was quick to put an oedipal spin on the material (a situation that simply heightened the work’s acid commentary on our contemporary obsession with staying young). In this and other undocumented, anti-spectacular performance work, Cuoghi pioneers a form of dandyism that—though radically distanced from the archetypal images of campiness or languid grace propagated by the fashion and advertising industries—stems nonetheless from the dandy’s continual aestheticization of the quotidian.

The works presented at Bergamo proceed from this logic. Discreet, they suggest disjunctions in the fabric of reality. The installation Untitled, 1996–2003, is a verdant swath of greenery that, with the addition of a hidden motor, appears to be in the grip of epileptic convulsions. In the video Foolish Things, 2002, which was broadcast on late-night German television during Manifesta 4, a melodramatic song accompanies a looping, endless sunset. Deploying the dandy’s key strategy, these works use artificiality as the medium for a profound renewal of our perception of the real.

Translated from French by Emily Speers Mears.