Whatever Backdoors I Used [To Get] Into BIM's Toilet

Whilst New York Film Festival got swishly underway, our distinguished Milanese superstar cut her teeth with this write up of what might have been the roughest film festival I've ever heard of. Finding it to be a bit too straight-boy: less Jack Smith's Flaming Creatures, more poliziottescho, Holli Would says that you might wanna WIPE your hands after you leave Milan's Amateur film festival.

I want to meet the plug and I meet the plug.

Shortly, I’m half drunk in a taxi bound for a too-many-thousand-meters complex of abandoned offices turned into an artist-run liminal space which is actually patronised by some mysterious entities and led by people with seemingly little control. Most importantly, this space called Bim is far from everything but itself. I don’t go often. I've been literally twice including this one.

Despite the miles of distance we came to take part into this cultural momentum, when we arrive we’re not focused on the independent screening program being held outdoor as much as we are in the provisorily abandoned bar spot that we, just being there, vandalise. I feel people are annoyed by our too open disengagement and we’re annoyed by them judging us.

And so we sit and start watching, and soon enough this turns out to be a terrible idea.

It’s a short movie by Cane Morto, a trio of white Italian guys from (maybe) Geneva, who seem to both endorse and mock a bubbling cauldron of underground signifiers and languages. I feel a little embarrassed for them.

I check them on socials, and what I get is a disturbing level of multi-hyphenation. In what looks like their 16-post-grid chase for artistic recognition, Cane Morto have already done performances, painting shows, video works, public art commissions, organized drawing auctions, happenings… and the list goes on. But none of it seems to really grasp anything reletable, at least to me—and this, trust me, has nothing to do with their possibly being outsiders, naifs, or with whatever backdoor they might have used to get into this world.

I could just call it a case study in ridiculousness—they’re ridiculous amateurs rather than people who actually channel irony within their art practice—but what worries me is the hint of shortcuts being taken.

If anything, they give off an alarming “I-could-do-conceptual-art-too” vibe, like some rookie schoolboys that just want to conquer art—use it, squeeze it, put it to work like a capitalist machine, instead of even sitting down with her, giving her some time, talking with her.

I’m talking about the type of guys who think that they’re smarter than everyone else in the class, including the prof, and this faux belief blinds them to the point that, after the first months of course—maybe after a lesson on Duchamp—they think they’ve already hacked some secret, deep-seated logic behind conceptual art. Fueled by a certain dumb excitement, their little eureka moment convinced them that they can churn out tons of stuff that costs them little personally and can be produced at full speed: this is the conceptual work, this is the concept, the idea, the meaning, and you can multiply is as many times as you want.

Didn’t I deserve an A? Isn’t this how art works, prof?

I need a drink.

Right after, the video we came from far away to watch is finally being screened. Since before it starts, big noise is being made for Loris, Bernardino, and Tres Bones, the trio gravitating around a more expanded Milan-based videoart orbit—operating under the name of NoText Azienda—who, in some capacity, worked on this piece.

Under the lens of a trademark erosive colour treatment, a tough, indigestible story about an immigrant man scammed by his lawyer unfolds. The monologue, describing in first person the experience of the scammed one is poignant, and it keeps it brilliantly simple, it makes me feel the desperation, the hunger, and the praise for revenge, like it was blood in my mouth after I’ve bitten my tongue. It ends into an orgy of sex, abuse, and torture, inflicted to the scammed into the abandoned park of a Milanese suburb.

I stand up and cheer and scream and I couldn’t be more enthusiastic not only because of the coke. I'm so glad these atmospheres can still slip into art realms through those beloved backdoors.

Men dressed like Italian dandies, with 70s suits and haircuts and gelatine in their air, eating in squalid spots with their shirt open to show an hairy chest and a gold chain, bringing on stage their Califano-drama and the squalor of their existential conditions.

Let’s just no bullshit: despite the art world last-decade interest in the last ones, in the ones who lives at the margins, in the long-time misrepresented, these kind of subjects are too ugly, apparently even too virile, and their bad taste is too unredeemable, to be taken into account by Art. No matter how their condition actually is one of misery and crisis, no matter how this world is hurting them, chewing them and spit them on the asphalt.

Downtown New York's Baudelairean beauty has been canonized in Nan Goldin's photobooks, but Italy's national popular discos aren't the ones you'd find there. The poetry rippling through the wrinkles of these old guys ripped straight out of a Poliziotteschifilm resists that kind of canonisation.

The night ends in a bath of drugs, squalor, and misery, to the point that I feel kinda like one of those characters. The day after, a text from Bernardino thanks me for the kind words. I can’t remember those words, but I do believe them now more than I could ever.