THE RITUAL OF IDENTITY

These artworks by Antonio Syxty demand attention. I say that especially for insiders of the art world who could be tempted, at a first glance, to immediately catalogue these pieces under “images which express the taste and the spirit of their time”. A playful and mediatic style, a pop chromatism which sometimes turns into glamour, many allusions to everyday news stories and many also to history, the right mix of high and low culture, a specifically cutting sense of irony and, especially, an object which is as trendy as it gets nowadays: the credit card. Upon close observation, however, these pieces reveal something very different. Such as an anomalous form of estrangement, radically other to the postconceptual matrix which is so fashionable these days. By this I do not mean that Syxtyʼs work is completelyforeign to that tradition of sorts which is internal to the idea of avantgarde, for whom Duchamp is the founding father and conceptual art the latestnoteworthy incarnation: if anything, I see Syxty as an apostate. I see him as someone who occultly cultivates his own metaphysical heresy, in a difficultly decipherable sense of the word. My point of view is possibly influenced, or perhaps simply fuelled, by having seen many of his performances – still, in these works I recognise that same oracular tone, that hypnotic fixedness, that same cruel gaze which characterises certain Greek myths. The singular quality of these pieces is traceable also in the many dramaturgies of a theatre director with a performerʼs past and a performer with a visual artistʼs past – the visual artist who periodically returns. It is a quality derived from the incendiary combination of a sense of fate paired with a distorted perception of everyday life, of the visionary paired with the scoundrel, of an instinctive search for the archaic paired with an attention, an interest in consumersʼ trends. But let us give these images true consideration – let us avoid falling into the trap and immediately endorsing a sociological reading: yes, it is true that the currency they speak of is the same currency we use to buy a museum ticket or to pay at the supermarket. But that currency is also an idol, a surrogate of divinity. A sense of the sacred which has been altered, contaminated, commodified – or maybe an absolute profanity, or most probably both: this is what I see in Syxtyʼs works, what seems to me to pervade his entire oeuvre. Even in the theme of identity, the threadrunning through all of our artistʼs endeavours (after all, isnʼt the exchange or the transferral of identity the ever-present theme of myths?) I seem to intercept a distorted obsession for the identical – that is, in the repetition / interruption of a formula which is at the heart of rituality.

Roberto Borghi,  art critic. 

The images and icons chosen on a credit card nowadays are undoubtedly readable as ideograms which somehow, through different ideas and meanings, conceal or reveal aspects of our lives. By enlarging a series of imagined credit cards, each with different functions, Antonio Syxtyʼs project makes visible a socio-cultural terrain which had previously been ignored; in other cases he shows certain known functions of the cards in an ironical key, emphasizing the emotive aspects conjured up by the image and text chosen to reflect the cardʼs possible usage. In all these cases, Syxty makes his makebelieve cards function as part of an idea of economic framework, suggesting that the usage of these cards would be – implicitly – possible. Thus, both conceptually and visually, Syxtyʼs project investigates the space of present-day art and finds its own place within it.

Horatio Goni, artist and gallerist. 

A credit card is also a debit card, in the sense that credit relies on a debt of some sort. Both one and the other imply that there is a loan, and a loan presupposes trust: trust is the essence of money, it is the very soul of monetary exchange. Trust in the Central Bank, in banks in general, in the workings of the financial system, in the delicate yet powerful mechanisms of the institutions? No, it is a much more concrete and base form of trust, in an act which is repeated by convention. Because the trust we put into accepting a banknote as a payment is nothing but the certainty we have of being able to spend it immediately after we have received it, which is also why it will be accepted without question by somebody else. A credit card is tender which is signed by ourselves, not by a Central Bank, and endorsed by somebody – not necessarily a financial institution – who gives us their trust. A credit card declares that somebody trusts us: hence it becomes the ID card of our spending capacity, a certification of our eligibility as consumers. Who is entitled to issue such a precious document? Many different entities and thus, the number of credit cards in circulation is huge. In such a context, nothing forbids Antonio Syxty to imagine an even larger number of credit cards, multiplied by an exponential number that coincides with the multitude of buyers / users, where each card is able to represent and summarise oneʼs personality, behaviour, desires, needs, obsessions, and vices. The imagination of this ʻtrust marketʼ cannot be inferior to that of marketing, which is why they share the same limits – which is to say no limits at all. It is reasonable, then, to imagine that every consumer would have his or her own personal card, a card which is as unique as its holder, which intimately reflects the consumerʼs personality. And this is where Syxtyʼs work generates a relevant and absolutely essential reflection: we put our trust into a piece of plastic which is supposed to tell us everything about the person who owns it, which we expect to describe its holder in their every psychological nuance. But a human being is more interesting, more alive and more vivid than any object created as a representation of the human. Better off trusting a person, any person. Better off trusting the original.

Pierangelo Dacrema, full professor of Financial Markets and Institutions at University of Calabria (Italy) since 1993

The credit card is the emblem of a concept, recently expressed in ZygmuntBaumanʼs latest publication in Italy – a concept which also gives the volume its title: lives we cannot afford. Our societies, western or otherwise, are based on debt. Banks and credit societies prefer those who donʼt pay. Antonio Syxty, a newcomer to the art world, entitles his exhibition Money Transfer. His is a big game in economics: he has blown up the credit card to nine times its size and has created new ones. These are credit cards which inhabit the world of dreams. The most current is perhaps the Shareholder Card which carries the image of a loaf of bread. Will we end up buying bread with a credit card? Who knows. But will we be able to pay back the debt? We are an army of flies who use the Family Card. Annoying and odious asflies are to most people. As flies buzz around pausing on things we find repellent, we go around buying, signing bits of receipt paper and increasing our debt. We believe what we are buying is happiness. But is that really the case? Two rats who stare at each other but arenʼt able to meet – is this the fate of true love? Paul Eluard peeps out from his card: his is a Poetry Card. The poet isnʼt he who is inspired, but he who inspires others. Times have changed and these days, it seems, inspiration is born all too often in shop windows.

Angela Madesani, historian and art critic.