Gianni Motti The Great Menace

In September 1920, a few months after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, the anarchist Mario Buda parks a horse-drawn cart loaded with ­explosives and scrap metal in the middle of the Wall Street financial district, ­causing a bloody explosion that heralded the spectacularly “successful” and ­ever-relevant posterity of the car bomb. The car bomb, which was to become the hallmark of terrorist action for acronym-studded rebels, unscrupulous intelligence agencies, and totalitarian regimes all over the world, was the manifest culmination of a half-century of ­anarchists’ ­pyrotechnical dreams of blowing up monarchs and plutocrats.7 7  - See Mike Davis, Petite histoire de la voiture piégée, Marc Saint-Upéry (Paris: Zones, 2007). The ­technique has several advantages: it infiltrates day to day life by ­disguising one’s intentions in everyday actions; it strikes directly at the heart of the despised system by attacking strategic and symbolic targets; it is simple and cheap to implement; it is sure to have considerable impact, as much by the material damage produced and lives destroyed as by the media exposure it garners, enabling perpetrators to remain anonymous while broadcasting their cause and their determination.

While the comparison may seem in bad taste, given the casualties involved, this brief tactical description of the car bomb may well serve to present a set of artistic practices patterned on mechanisms of terrorist action — without the collateral damage. Gianni Motti’s actions and ­performances put him in a unique position within the field of political art, and more generally in contemporary art. He made himself known in the mid-1980s, when, in the manner of terrorist groups, he claimed responsibility for disasters that were totally out of his control. When the Challenger space shuttle blew up in 1986, he communicated with the international press to declare his responsibility for the accident. He repeated the stunt a few years later after an earthquake in California, becoming an artistic demiurge successively authoring a dense plume of smoke many hundred cubic meters thick, an earthquake, a fault 74 kilometres long, and millions of dollars in material damage. Sitting quietly at home and following the news, Motti invents an opportunistic form of terrorism while bleeding the notion of authorial signature and legitimacy in art. In a society where everything is an event and all events are bound to some form of copyright or individuality, he becomes the author of the authorless event and, in a Duchampian gesture of unprecedented ­brashness, transforms it by an act of will into a work of art. His declarations seem to be the ironic counterpoint to Jack Gold’s film The Medusa Touch, where Lino Ventura confronts the paranormal and telepathic powers of a man who can cause airplanes to crash even as he lies in a coma. It may not be a coincidence then that Motti, in 1997, devised a novel strategy for overthrowing a government by organizing a telepathic séance with the intent of causing Colombian president Semper to resign and had it covered by the main opposition newspaper El Espectador.