POLITICAL MURALS AND PEOPLE OF MISSION, SAN FRANCISCO (original) (raw)

Mission San Francisco a Photobook

In the contemporary world, images and visual reports have taken the place of words. The illusion was thus created that the images were "true" and the words "interpretation": the report was therefore replaced by reportage which was a mixture of true and fiction. Things aren't like that. The question is: can an essay be written only with images? Can a photograph of reality be more convincing, clear, manifest, evident than a description or narration or linguistic analysis? If, however, it is credible, as Man Ray claims, that photography is never a representation of the "true" but in turn a form of interpretation (what, how and why a given aspect of reality is photographed), then this essay expressed in the form of images is an experiment in photographic essays and not in simple visual documentation of a text or a journalistic report. Art is destined to no longer be art, creative invention, worship of beauty, but rather a representation and critical interpretation of reality? According to Hegel, who discusses this in his "Writings on Art," it is impossible today to create works starting from an aesthetic impulse. The "beautiful" would thus have lost its function of seeking the sublime or sublimating the real. The naivety that Schiller discusses in the essay "On Naive and Sentimental Poetry" would therefore have given way to the social function of art, transforming the artist from a "sublimator" into a critic of the human condition in search of the "truth" (the "truth" as a necessity discussed by Bahr in the essay "The Overcoming of Naturalism"). Today, however, we need to talk about overcoming neorealism, or rather the birth of neo-neorealism which would follow a more abstract post-modernism otherwise a post-post-modernism.The only possibility of rediscovering a pure, naive art is then offered to us only through the street, both thanks to the manifestation of its raw daily reality, and through the naive but profoundly "political" representation of the world. The murals and sidewalks of Mission in San Francisco thus represent an example of this new approach to the discourse on art as a representation of the world through naivety that seeks truth beneath the crust, or rather the matrix (as in the film "Matrix") of the world which, as Marx argues, is historical, economic, and social.