Magic Shop

   "And the days of fasting and silence

    to do the choirs in masses like Amanda Lear ... "

Magic Shop is a song about the discomfort of a man devoted to the sacred in a world that scoffs at his vision. Worse. It trades in it.

The song describes a world in which even the masses, a sacred and ritual moment, sometimes yield to worldliness and include pop-style pieces within them, removing the feeling of the sacred.

Hence the reference, by analogy, to Amanda Lear.

The song continues illustrating the  contradictions and involutions of this world in which the sickle makes us think of the hammer of communism and the grain of money. Even words in their most normal meaning are turned upside down in this strange new age.

The artist Angelo Rossi reinterprets this song in a conceptual pop key.

A fabric bag, fasting  (empty) and silent, suspended like a poster on the wall, he exhibits his receipt. The imaginary shop "Magic Shop" lists the contents of Battiato's text as if they were objects for sale.

The work is a conceptual expression of the social void, where filling the bag is almost imperative.

As Battiato combines the most avant-garde soul with the most popular one of Italian music, so this work moves away and approaches everything that is "making art" in common thought.  The idea of giving dignity to common objects has always been a strong blow against the traditional distinction, commonly accepted and rooted, between what could be defined as art and what was not.

Beyond the strong social denunciation, we go into the field of the intellect, touching on different philosophies, religions, arts and literatures. This is the true greatness of the human being, the ability to decline thought in all its forms and not bend to the elements of our times.

Tribute or reworking? We can talk about it for a long time, but Rossi's operation and all his making art, follows in the wake of the never resolved question of the ready-made, that is a common artefact of everyday use that becomes a work of art once taken from artist and placed as it is in a situation other than that of use, which would be proper to him (in this case an art event), in a language where original and interpretation no longer make sense to exist. Contesting it is like contesting contemporary art. The added value of the artist is the operation of choice, or even of random identification of the object, of acquisition and isolation of the object.

It is important to underline in Battiato as in Angelo Rossi, more the critical, polemical, irreverent and anti-academic attitude of the vision of modern values as a necessary escape from an asphyxiated reality, than the often hermetic and mysterious postmodern traits of some work in itself.

Anastasia Marano