Berlusconismo in the Lecture Performances of Chiara Fumai

By Emily Verla Bovino

In anticipation of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s expulsion from the Italian parliament, talk show circuits in Italy buzzed with debates on the ventennial of Berlusonismo. Meanwhile, Milan-based artist Chiara Fumai was traveling to northern Spain for an exhibition on current European lecture performance, at the MUSAC in Leòn. . Though the particular blend of political and cultural nihilism called Berlusconismo is named after Berlusconi, he is not its inventor. The phenomenon was already evolving, but crystallized when he, as an entrepreneur and television tycoon, became the first prime minister of Italy’s Second Republic in 1994. Berlusconismo continued to intensify when the currency change from Lira to Euro symbolically cemented Italy’s membership in the European Monetary Union. Amidst the transition from the twentieth century to the twenty-first, Berlusconi’s nine years as Prime Minister register as the second longest term in office since Fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

The majority of political theorists are wary of facile comparisons. ‘Silvio Berlusconi is not the new Benito Mussolini,’ they insist. For many, however, the concrete differences between Fascist governance and Berlusconi’s so-called conservative liberalism have never been reassuring. Cautionary thinkers have asserted that, with its legalization of nepotistic privilege and its supreme dominion of the image, Berlusconismo is – to quote Paolo Flores d’Arcias– Fascism’s ‘functional postmodern equivalent.’ Berlusconi once displayed a bloodied mouth for cameras at the end of a political rally in Milan. The gesture calls to mind the pose of Joseph Beuys photographed after allegedly being punched in the face during a performance. Surely the association is a coincidence. Or is it? A doubt always lingers. The temptation to attribute absolute self-consciousness to political actors is typical of Berlusconismo-inflected spectacle and permeates contemporary Italian culture. Italian users of video-sharing sites flush the networks with conspiracy theories that simultaneously celebrate and deride Berlusconi, the father figure everyone loves to hate. In the midst of the media frenzy over Berlusconi’s impending decadenza, Chiara Fumai left the province of Milan – Berlusconi’s post-industrial stronghold – and headed to Leòn.

Enrico Ghezzi’s RAI3 rebroadcast of Berlusconi’s televised address, in which the entrepreneur announced his intention to create a political party.

Video still of Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas, 2012, in exhibition at MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Castilla y Leòn). Lecture Performance: New Artistic Formats, Places, Practices and Behaviours. 15 October to 6 July 2013. Image Credit: MUSAC

Installation view of the wall painting and projection Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas, 2013, in exhibition at MUSAC (Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Castilla y Leòn). Lecture Performance: New Artistic Formats, Places, Practices and Behaviours. 15 October to 6 July 2013. Image credit: MUSAC

Italian television satirist Sabina Guzzanti’s Vilipendio Tour, 2008.

Italian television satirist Maurizio Crozza’s impersonation of Berlusconi’s videomessage anticipating his expulsion from Parliament, 17/09/2013

Anonymous animated trailer posted by a YouTube user featuring a veiled woman who plays death with a Berlusconi-Pinocchio. Image credit: Burqa: vent’anni di Berlusconismo in un cartone animato (Burqa: twenty years of Berlusconismo in an animated cartoon).

Talk show interview on an Italian commercial television channel. The interview regards traces of Berlusconi in rising centre-left politician Matteo Renzi. Tracce di Berlusconi in Renzi? L’analisi di Giovanni Orsina (Traces of Berlusconi in Renzi? Analysis by Giovanni Orsina).

Basically all of the new European lecture performers profiled at the MUSAC survey show, entitled Lecture Performance: New Artistic Formats, Places, Practices and Behaviours , tend to combine three contemporary ritual modes: the academic mythologization of knowledge for expertise; the manipulative poise of a state address; and the subtle illusionism of hand and prop in a magic act. Many of the works shown at MUSAC focus on the space between hands and face, between vision and touch. The resulting impression is that contemporary lecture performance developed for both pedagogical and therapeutic purposes: both a form of aesthetic education and a form of aesthetic exorcism, it is intended to teach and transgress the rules that regulate art in post-industrial economies. Thus, the lecture performer always seems to be reminding viewers that his/her flapping lips and talking head are just diversions from idle hands.

There is no trace of morality in Fumai’s deliberate Berlusconismo. For Fumai and her Italian peers, there is no hypocrisy in the fact that the populist networking tactics of Grillismo – named after former television comedian and current leader of the Five Star Movement Beppe Grillo, the primary force of cultural opposition to Berlusconismo – were developed from within the media world of Berlusconi’s entertainment empire. In the 1990s, Berlusconi proposed himself as the antidote to an anti-liberal culture stifling entrepreneurialism; in the early twenty-first century, Grillo has offered himself as patriarch in the struggle against partiti cadaveri or the cadaver parties. For Grillo and his sympathizers, the cadaverist class or caste of living-dead, are intellectuals, politicians and administrators out of touch with the people they were elected to represent. As proponents of pure democracy, Five Star Movement members have no faith in the liberal state: they insist that the ideological systems of historical liberalism are dead and must be buried so that more relevant political forms can be developed. Fumai’s lecture performances are sympathetic with this tendency: her objective, however, is not political action, but the restyling of aesthetic politics.

Beppe Grillo in Milan: ‘Dead Politics, kept alive by Newspapers and Television’

Notably, the Five Star Movement has placed a moratorium on its members appearing on political talk shows. ‘You are not media, you are mediums who help all these dead people communicate from the beyond,’ Grillo shouts at the cameramen that follow him through the streets. In fact, on Italian television, opinion leaders are coddled in cozy environments and venerated in supernatural holograms; rarely are they just talking heads in screen windows. In scenographic environments of television talk shows, they often stage absurdist scripts of statistics and acronyms like deliberately costumed variety performers. Their burlesque comedies of crisis are always staged at the center of an auditorium. Audience members are individually selected for their composure and buona presenza, or good presence. There is never a disruption, a protest, a placard, because audiences have willfully enrolled to play the mesmerized. The audience knows that cathartic hypnosis can only be achieved in repetition with barely perceptible variation. Fumai’s performances follow a similar logic of difference and repetition, resemblance and disquietude. She plays a self-operating machine whose mechanical micro-movements of jaws and fingers mock the appearance of a moralistic artist. Her dress is intentionally understated but identifiably designer (somewhat reminding of Andrea Fraser in this regard). At the same time, her facial features are reminiscent of the – often surgically enhanced – ones of the Italian television personality: the narrow nose, the pointed chin, the full lips, the long straight dark hair tinted red.

Right: Andrea Fraser in Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk, 1989. Image credit: Kelly & Massa Photography. Left: An experiment of animal magnetism on a sleeping woman, woodcut, c. 1845. Image credit: Archivio Iconografico del Verbano Cusio Ossola.

Ballarò: Anna Maria Bernini deputata PDL, 21/05/2013 (Anna Maria Bernini, representative of PDL, 21/05/2013) posted by RAI (URL

Ballarò: Marica di Pierri: La Corruzione in Politica non è Finita, 08/10/2013 (Ballarò: Marica di Pierri: The Corruption in Politics isn’t Over, 08/10/2013) posted by RAI

The cast of characters on political talk shows in Italy is interchangeable as long as an ideological balance is maintained in their respective self-fashioning. The right-wing donna di Berlusconi, or Berlusconi woman, cocks her head under a bang wig, like a Venetian seagull picking through paper bags. The left-wing anti-globalization activist holds her neck in regal tension under a sculpted updo of dreadlocks held up by scarves. The questions of the talk show mediator guide the self-aware guests through the disorienting projections of their own enlarged images around them. Would the representative vote on the parliamentary expulsion of Silvio Berlusconi mark the end of Berlusconismo? Or was Berlusconi’s electoral success merely a symptom of broader cultural narcissism? In Castilla y Leòn, the first of two performances presented by Chiara Fumai featured a reading of Italian-American writer Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto (1967). In Chiara Fumai Reads Valerie Solanas (2012), Fumai performs an interest in Solanas comparable to that of the post-industrial netslave: the netslave is always convinced that the key to going viral is catching a ‘surf’ through the right bits of information. The quest is not to create something new, but to ride the magic waves of circulation like an astute broker trading human capital. The lecture performer is a disc jockey whose speculative sensibility for what should be copied or stolen shapes rather than anticipates demand: the style-hunter trumps the laborer. Fumai does not read SCUM Manifesto out of nostalgia for a script never filmed or a fictional world of militant feminist solidarity never realized. For Fumai, Solanas’ manifesto is the identifying attribute of a caricature. Just as the mutant superhero Wolverine has his retractable bone-claws, so the angry lesbian of comic exaggeration carries SCUM Manifesto with her on man-killing escapades.

A strip from Italian-American artist Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, 1995, often associated with Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto. Image Credit: Giant Ass Publishing.

With a knife rather than a laser pointer in hand, Fumai’s pseudo-academic mockery reconnects the SCUM Manifesto to Solanas’ experiences as an animal research assistant in a psychology laboratory (see Sara Warner, Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. 34). Accompanied by a powerpoint presentation of diagrammatic drawings, Fumai guides her audience through male ‘pussy envy’ in the boxes and arrows of a castration-logic-made-scientific-maze. In a wall painting created by Fumai for the MUSAC exhibition, the same power point slides she flips through in her live performance, reappear in their totality as post-minimalist pastiche: in this context, Fumai’s textboxes on gender politics read like a parody of artist Lawrence Weiner’s balls of wood/balls of iron (1995). “A male artist is a contradiction in terms,” sneers Fumai-playing-Solanas.

1988 televised performance of Franca Rame’s monologue, “The Rape.” The monologue recounts the story of Rame’s kidnapping by a group of right-wing extremists. Franca Rame – Monologo “Lo Stupro.” (Franca Rame – Monologue “The Rape”). Posted by BoDtion.

Infomercial star Joanna Golabek’s show broadcast on several shopping channels in Lombardy. Italia Coast2Coast – 10/05/2012 Le Sexy Televendite di Joanna Golabek. (Italy Coast2Coast – 10/05/2012 The Sexy Infomercials of Joanna Golabek).

In Chiara Fumai’s work, the lecture performer is both the snake-oil-selling charlatan and the cantastoria, or traveling storyteller of the Italian town square: what Italian performance duo Dario Fo and Franca Rame called the giullare della piazza. She is a malingerer, a faker, a hysteric, self-hypnotized to reenact symptoms. Fumai is an infomercial host preying on insomniacs, a tarot-shuffling psychic responding to costly television call-ins, a communications shaman who believes cultures change through mystifying circuits of manipulation. Fumai’s version of the lecture performer is a punked-out compulsive self-marketer: an impersonator of cut and paste identities combined with mash-up plagiarism, and the re-mixed biography of a chat-room addict. She plays the contemporary lecture performer as a despairing entrepreneur-of-herself in an age when shares in social networks can be bought, sold and traded on the stock market. This is the ideological moment of ‘how what you know shapes your life.’ In preparation for reperforming _ I Did Not Say or Mean Warning_ (2012) – a guided tour of the Fondazione Querini-Stampalia’s Venetian Renaissance collection – Fumai began by directly addressing the Castilla y Leòn audience. The scene played out like the opening sequence of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso, 1975, only without the presentiment of murder in velvet red curtains. However with Fumai, Argento’s Lithuanian psychic medium Helga Ulmann is transformed into an art museum docent surrounded by the heavy black veil of an occult rite. Her talent is not for reading minds but for communicating with the mysterious muses who haunt canonical artworks.

Opening sequence of Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red, 1975).

Chiara Fumai is a cipher for postmodern pagentries of monomanic phantasms. She impersonates what Grillo would define as a news anchorwoman called to serve a caste of cadavers: a medium assailed by ghosts that, in life, were obsessed with the idea that everyone should love them, while no-one did. In Fumai’s performances, witchcraft and institutional critique, feminism and libertarian misogynism, masonic propagandizing and insurrectionary diatribes combine in a swampy muck-about. The resulting mess is perturbing precisely because it is not as superficial as it seems. The ghosts that haunt Fumai are all real, though some are more actual and others more virtual. Among the actual ones are Solanas, and Carla Lonzi, the feminist art critic of post-economic-miracle Rome. Among the virtual is a group of Italian feminists committed to armed struggle that Fumai invents. She uses them as a legitimating excuse to sign subliminal cues of destruction into her Querini-Stampalia docent tour. The fierce mouthing of whispered words and the sharp motions of fingers crossing her throat, animate the previously dull demeanor of textbook recitations on Renaissance paintings. Through the self-induced trance of recounting Old European canonical art history from memory, she possesses herself with the desire for a transgressive past. Her goal is to give this myth a force that will allow it to carry weight as a conspiratorial fiction in the present. Figuring most prominently among Fumai’s ghosts is the virtual Chiara Fumai herself. However, this is not just about a narrative play between fact and fiction. Fumai is not a micro-historian questioning dominant narratives, but a somnambulate recklessly stumbling around the table of a séance. In her lectures, she appears on the verge of imploding from the entanglements and scattered angles of her desperate appropriations. Indeed, she treats her own body and biography like the very stereotype of Italy – an industrialized rural economy, pushed by austere measures to post-industrialize when it had only just begun to accept itself as ‘modern.’ Fumai’s work knowingly verges on anachronistic kitsch, the retro-futurism of steam-punk fantasies – while directly reflecting on the present. In her gestures and emulations, the Italian right-wing, Berlusconi-shielding female front takes on the character of a secret society. The so-called Berlusconi woman manipulates the plasticity of the female body to engender phallocentric power. In recent years, Berlusconi himself has slipped into performing his own dead image: he looks as if he was already embalmed for lying in state, a stuffed effigy of his own future. One recent transmission of a popular television talk show Piazza Pulita has interpreted this disquieting transformation in Berlusconi as the beginning of an uncanny metamorphosis. Animators produced a graphic in which Berlusconi’s face morphed into the smiling portrait of his daughter Marina. Daniela Santanchè – a former member of Berlusconi’s cabinet who is notorious for forcibly unveiling Muslim women in Milan – was asked to respond to the question of whether the future of Italy might be the rise to power of Berlusconi’s female progeny.

Political talk show Piazza Pulita on the private television channel La7.

After Berlusconi was voted out of the Italian parliament in late November 2013, among the first parliamentarians interviewed was Forza Italia party member Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Benito Mussolini. ‘Un colpo di stato’ – a coup d’etat – she exclaimed. Minutes before, Berlusconi had appeared on a stage built under his Palazzo Grazioli apartments in the center of Rome. In front of a large vinyl print of a clear blue sky, Berlusconi stood dressed in a black t-shirt and blazer. With his hands outstretched on a plinth-like podium, his arms and head formed a firm black triangle on the azure backdrop. He held himself in this alchemical symbol as though summoning the force to telepathically transform his offenses into victimization. In his public address, he spoke of his expulsion from parliament as ‘un giorno di lutto per la democrazia’, or a day of mourning for democracy. Only a month earlier, Erich Priebke, a Nazi executioner involved in the massacres at the Roman Ardeatine Caves, had passed away in Rome’s Tiburtina neighborhood at the age of one hundred. Attempts to bury Priebke had failed when gatherings of demonstrators reportedly learned of funeral locations, and met his hearse in the Roman streets with bottles and bats in hand. In a newspaper editorial, the historian of Fascism Emilio Gentile insisted that the reaction was worrisome: Italians had still not confronted the social and cultural roots of Fascism (read his article in La Repubblica here ).

The increasing interest in Fumai’s lecture performances in Europe has met with relative ambivalence in Italy. In an enlightening synchronicity, however, while her images have been presented at Documenta last year and now in Spain, Italian institutions organize re-enactments of Roman artist Fabio Mauri’s Cos’è il Fascismo? (What is Fascism, 1971/2012; one should mention though that Fumai currently has a show up at A Pallazo Gallery in Breccia ). This coincidence suggests that perhaps Italian ambivalence is a result of Fumai’s antics unintentionally pressing an uncomfortable question: ‘What are the New Liberalisms?’ The principal lesson of Berlusconismo is that new liberal market fundamentalism and faith in deregulatory privatization have always been more ideologically ambiguous than their traditional association with the new European right may suggest. After allegedly being expelled from Southern Italy by Mussolini, Fumai’s admitted father-in-art, famed occultist and poet Aleister Crowley, wrote in a poem included in his Book of Lies of 1912/13: ‘Dirt is matter in the wrong place. Thought is mind in the wrong place. Matter is mind; so thought is dirt. Thus, argued he, the Wise One, not mindful that all place is wrong.’ Crowley titled the poem ‘The Duck-Billed Platypus’, an allusion to his Australian muse Leila Waddell by way of the eponymous Australian mammal – the strange and curious animal that combines features of a duck with that of beaver, thus a great representation of the mystery of the two-in-one.