In the Bosco di San Francesco,
at Assisi, there is a work by Michelangelo Pistoletto, named Terzo Paradiso, a grove of olive trees
set out in a variation on the sign for infinity. Visitors are invited to
participate in the work by walking on the path through the grove, thereby
duplicating or tracing the expanded infinity sign.
Different as it is in form and intention, this work by Pistoletto
offers an alternative notion of infinity to the one pursued for so long by
Roman Opalka. Pistoletto’s infinity is available by means of its sign, and may
be realised, however briefly, in following its course. For him, infinity is not
an aspiration but a space of possibility. The visitor who walks attentively
along the path may enter a different condition. Pistoletto’s olive grove is a
device for accessing a paradisal renewal of creative possibility.
In contrast, Opalka’s numbers move towards an infinity that never
arrives, a purely numerical, and therefore impossible, infinity. In his long
working life, he never got any nearer to the infinite than in making his first
canvas. Of course, this is something of which Opalka was perfectly aware. His
life’s work may be seen as one long momento
mori, within which the distance between achievement and mortality could be
kept constantly in view. The numbers 1 and 5607249 are the most poignant in his
work.
Where is the place of the viewer in this enterprise ? We can watch
Opalka’s steadfastness, hopefully with sympathy. We can understand, from the
start, the heroic nature of the work, with its built-in certainty of failure. For
us too, it can function as a reminder of mortality, a great chastening example.
But we remain onlookers at a remarkable endeavour.
This sense of spectatorship is confirmed by the aesthetic qualities
of the Detail paintings, the
beautiful flow of marks across the canvas, perhaps a legacy of abstract
expressionism, or tachism, or lettrism, in what is essentially a conceptual art.
The distance here is not that between infinity and mortality but between the
skilled artist and the unskilled viewer. Or one might perceive a distance
between the rigour of the concept and an inherited mode of execution.
The generosity of Terzo
Paradiso is that Pistoletto encourages us to participate in the work more
directly. We become co-creators. Along the course of the path among the olives,
we walk in paradise. To the two connected circles of infinity, Pistoletto has
added a third circle, the three standing for nature, for culture, and for a
sustainable balance between them. This to-be-achieved balance is the third
paradise. Perhaps for Pistoletto infinity itself needs augmentation, by meaning
and participation.
Opalka’s course is one of acceptance – acceptance of the task at
hand, acceptance of mortality. Freedom, or any possible happiness, is to be
found within the condition of things, in faithfulness to the task and in denial
of any possible freedom outside of the task or outside of mortality and the
given. To activate Terzo Paradiso, you
follow the olive path round an expanded infinity, and then you step away from
it, into your own freedom.
