[Translated] Not as an artist but as a mere viewer of art, I must preface this by saying that I am not so familiar with Nico Vascellari’s work. I found Horse Power, the video performance presented at the Video Art Week last November, interesting: a three-night experiment in which nine stuntmen drive cars on whose front hoods are installed life-size wax sculptures of animals. I’ve been to a couple of Roman concerts of his band Ninos Du Brasil: ita was fun. I found the anagrams Dream-Merda and Resist-Sister printed on the T-shirts an effective marketing and sales campaign via Codalunga (his online shop), a bit of a “paraculata” (‘a smart-ass gimmick’) we would say in Rome’s slang, which properly exploits the image-brand he has created of himself over the years.
Incidentally I consider this to be his real talent. In short, I admit that I started with prejudice, even with some irritation at this social promotion campaign to which several VIPs and semi-VIPs lent themselves a couple of days before the event, which certainly fueled in me, but I think in many, the image-preconception of Nico Vascellari “artist-socialite,” well-dressed, not making a wrong move, liked by the right people, and liked because he’s liked, perfect for the gregarious mentalities to which we are, especially in Italy, all accustomed and even a bit resigned.
NICO VASCELLARI’S PERFORMANCE “DO YOU TRUST ME?”
However, it is also true that for operations like Do you trust me? communication plays a decisive role and is an integral part of the work, especially today when you have to scramble so hard to get a second of attention. So here it is, at first glance, having started the “live” performance from his Roman studio via the YouTube channel of Codalunga, his gallery in Vittorio Veneto (his home town), as I watched Nico alone, dressed cool in black and barefoot, in the space set up with amplifiers and mixers, obsessively repeating the phrase “I Trusted you,” I thought: ridiculous, antics. Really 24h like this? How does he piss? How does he shit? How does he resist? Will he be on drugs? This is pure exhibitionism. This thing even hurts art, because it alienates ordinary, already prejudiced people. And on Whatsapp already began the criticism with friends, the jokes, the private memes, the imitations, with that classic sense of circumstantial superiority that shields you from your own weaknesses. Someone even commented in real time on the event channel, and then attached the screenshot.
Meanwhile, though, that phrase so obsessively uttered was getting into my head.
(I TRUSTED YOU)
(I TRUSTED YOU)
So I disconnected. Enough! I have better things to do, I’m going to bed and watch a series.
(I TRUSTED YOU)
Really, what a bullshit performance!
(I TRUSTED YOU)
Maybe I do some reading (but really that guy is all this time repeating this stuff?). Let me go check again. Oh he’s always there, damn it.
I TRUSTED YOU
I TRUSTED YOU
I TRUSTED YOU
I TRUSTED YOU.
So I start reading the comments. There’s a little bit of everything. Derisive, celebratory, detracting, deferential, accusatory comments, a social ruckus (you almost visualize it around him), where the differences cancel out: VIPs and non-VIPs, onlookers, people a bit out of their minds, Italians and foreigners, friends and foes, with the number of views going up and down compared to an enigmatic baseline on the 500-600 viewers who come and go, who disconnect and hang up. As do I. And it would be interesting to know the unique hits, but even if it were only 1,000 or 2,000 this — I am beginning to admit — is already a major achievement. Some argue that this is stuff already seen, already done, 1970s, an epigone of Abramović. Already here I disagree, performance art should instead be repeated, or can be, because they are ahistorical, they are like rituals, they mimic them. It is not a question of old or new. If anything, there is something to be asked about their necessity: why are performances done, why are they watched? They are like memories of rituals, I would almost call them “ghosts of rituals,” past but also future, of configurations that perhaps never took place or never will again, one-off rituals, which, however, reveal the psychic necessity of the performance-ritual ab origine, in every culture and in every time.
DO YOU TRUST ME? — (FIRST) COLLECTIVE SOCIAL RITUAL?
And then on the distorted triple notes of this riff I realize that I am really thinking, with less prejudice. What am I looking at? Well, maybe it is the first collective social ritual I am witnessing, that I know of at least. First for me anyway, and I think for many others, especially the “uninitiated,” but maybe critics and curators will tell us that better.
In short, Nico has staged a kind of “live” shamanic act that sends out his electric mantra of distrust or confidence lost or found. But then what is the point of this “digital eggregora” – “I trusted you”? – to which perhaps the premise that announced it via VIP “Do you trust me?” is now also clearer. Whatever you want: trust or not trust in your neighbor pre- or post-covid, trust in yourself, in the world, in civilization, in government, in God. Or maybe in love: I trusted you, I trusted you, but you betrayed me. Who knows? it depends on each person’s free associations, because this phrase, these words, lose their referent, their context, and so they become “mana,” they are magical, they don’t really mean anything anymore, they are iterative (the pure act of believing and not believing) and reiterative, until they become mere phonemes that melt away in the head like a psychotropic substance.
NICO VASCELLARI’S PERFORMANCE AND LOCKDOWN.
Even the choice of timing seems perfect, the last day of lockdown, before the supposed newfound freedom.
DO YOU TRUST ME?
I TRUSTED YOU.
In short, here repetition knocks out rational thinking, trance is an altered state of consciousness, where we are no longer us, we are redundancy of us, we are physiological body, active biology, present to itself, vocalized. We become animals or divine beings, no longer trapped by ego, we are closer to unseen combination of Se-Es exchanging and reflecting and reverberating with each other, in this case amplified and distorted by the speakers.
I TRUSTED YOU
He took a big risk Nico, but it may be the best thing he has done (I repeat: of which I am aware). Once you’ve seen it for even a minute, that damn electric mantra gets in your head. Even if you turn it off, even if you’ve laughed at him, he’s inside you by now. Because you know that meanwhile he, in that elsewhere, is going on. Perhaps what I witnessed made me also better understand the nature of performance art in general: a concept in action, just as conceptual art is performance of thought.
I TRUSTED YOU
What else to say? Perhaps of Nico’s extraordinary physical endurance? It really takes a lot of preparation to reiterate such an act for 24H, but most of all it really takes a lot of conviction, and perhaps a kind of love, a kind of generosity, that of the shaman, who serves the spirits and becomes a messenger for mortals. What has he delivered to us? In the infinite blind and varied happening of things, everything makes sense and nothing makes sense. Something has happened, though. A small event dissolved in eternity, yet significant. Not insignificant.
I TRUSTED YOU
In the end I trusted you too, Nico.
MAY 4, 2020 NOTE: I learned only later that the reference used by Nico Vascellari is a performance by American comedian and performer Andy Kaufman. In “I Trusted You,” from 1977, which can be found on YouTube, Kaufman, dressed as Elvis, repeated the phrase for about 3 minutes mocking the audience. So we seem to understand the insight was this: to turn Kaufman’s teasing into a 24-hour performance, giving it another meaning.
–