There’s this thing that happens when you walk into a space like YBCA and someone’s decided to call the thing a retrospective. That word alone, retrospective, it’s already half-dead on arrival, embalmed in institutional reverence before the first note even sounds. But what I’m getting from this image, from whatever the hell Luciano conjured in that particular moment, is something altogether more feral and unfinished.
The photograph doesn’t give you much, and maybe that’s the point. There’s an audience; you can feel them, the way they’re leaning in or pulling back, and there’s this sense that something happened or is about to happen, that razor-edge moment where art stops being polite. What gets me is that Luciano’s working in a form that’s supposed to be respectable now, canonized even, this whole lineage of experimental composition and sonic exploration. But the real ones, the ones who actually mattered, they never wanted that kind of mausoleum treatment. They wanted to crack you open.
And here’s where it gets tricky, right? Because a retrospective is basically saying, “Here’s what this person was,” like you’re already writing the obituary while they’re still breathing. It’s the art world’s way of filing you away, putting you in the permanent collection of Things That Were Once Dangerous But Are Now Safe To Discuss At Cocktail Parties. Luciano’s trafficking in noise, in disruption, in the kind of performance that should make you uncomfortable, and then some curator comes along and throws a spotlight on it, frames it, gives it a title card.
The real question isn’t whether the work still has teeth. The question is whether the context has already pulled those teeth, sanitized the whole damn thing. Because once you’re in a place like YBCA, with its clean walls and its fundraising galas, you’re already compromised. The institution wants you to be radical in ways that don’t actually threaten anything, that give the donors something to feel sophisticated about while they sip their wine.
But maybe, and this is where I’m talking myself in circles, which is exactly what this kind of work should make you do, maybe the fact that it happened at all, that someone got up there and made something that refused easy consumption, that’s worth something. Even if it’s trapped in amber, even if the retrospective format is inherently contradictory to the spirit of the thing itself. You show up, you bear witness, you let it mess with your head a little. And then you walk out into the night and try to figure out what the hell you just experienced, why it mattered, whether it mattered at all.