A HOUSE FOR INGMAR BERGMAN

 

 

A terrible frisson Modernity brought upon us… the unending call for Freedom.

 

“Breaking the box,” at all levels, came to be the call to arms of so many “modern” years… Yet, a great artist like Ingmar Bergman thought that this freedom was actually shameful, that as a result of this omnivorous freedom an incredible sterility came upon us… and here, in this thought, he “met” someone like Emil Cioran, who wrote something similar: Ancient man was enslaved by the gods, yet highly creative! Modern man is free, but “highly” sterile, despite the frenzy mentioned above. Let us listen to Ingmar Bergman:

 

“I think that people today can dispense with theatre, because they exist in the middle of a drama whose different phases incessantly produce local tragedies. They do not need music, because every minute they are exposed to hurricanes of sound passing beyond endurance. They do not need poetry, because the idea of the universe has transformed them into functional animals, confined to interesting – but from a poetical point of view unusable – problems of metabolic disturbance. Man (as I experience myself and the world around me) has made himself free, terribly and dizzyingly free. Religion and art are kept alive as a conventional politeness towards the past, as a benign, democratic solicitude on behalf of nervous citizen enjoying more and more leisure time…”

 

Yes, “leisure time…” No wonder, then, that a newspaper like The New York Times has a section called Arts & Leisure, and one called Science… We can only ask what the scientists would say if there was a section called Science & Leisure…?!?

 

The fact that art is associated, by the most celebrated newspaper in the world, with leisure, is quite telling… and thus we can only agree, unfortunately, with Ingmar Bergman.

 

Yet, if the great director kept making films, “out of curiosity,” as he declared, then perhaps we should continue our work as well…! So we ask you to design A House for Ingmar Bergman. A house for “a child that looked for human contact, obsessed by his imagination, turned into a hurt, cunning, suspicious daydreamer.” - as he himself  wrote.

 

An UNFREE house.

 

 A House for Ingmar Bergman.

 

Please send your works, in any form and any size to ICARCH Gallery, 709 Washington Street, Evanston, Illinois, 60202, USA, and / or electronically to: icarchgallery@yahoo.com An exhibition and publication will follow with all the works received. The deadline is November 1^st, 2007. There is an entry fee of 25$ payable when submitting the work.