For years, innovation has been the fetish word emblazoned on every project and slogan, the first entry in cultural agendas, the promise of every electoral platform. An answer demanded even before the question is posed, a disguised dogma that has replaced the call for shared meaning, value, and direction.
I imagined Innovation as an allegorical figure: sacred but not divine, hostile because it is an expression of power. I depicted her in uniform, half officer and half priestess. She still bears the military face of her origin — since even the smallest domestic invention is born from technologies designed and tested for war — but she spreads with the unquestionable tone of faith. She holds no high rank, quite the opposite: the hierarchical pyramid beside her reminds us that she occupies the lowest rung, that of the good bureaucrat of infinite Progress, the true essence of the modern world.
Around her sways a chain, her principal attribute. It is not a chain that binds or imprisons: it is made of 0s and 1s, the bits of binary language, a symbol of extreme simplification. To innovate for innovation’s sake means precisely to surrender to a mutilated, unpoetic vision of the world, one that reduces present, past, and future to an endless series of combinations and repetitions, without nuance or complexity. Her small, half-closed eyes, as if focusing on something very distant, look toward a future that need not be clearly discerned, since as soon as it is realized it will already be surpassed. At her sides appear the two Martyrs: Meaning and Desire, sacrificed on the altar of infinite Progress, nailed to a cross topped with the symbol of the binary pair.
The red and green behind her — opposite colors, maximally contrasting — create around her a field of permanent tension: attraction and repulsion, promise and conflict. In the background, words in German evoke the perverse logic of Progress, of which Innovation is only the latest byproduct: “Everything that can be done must be done.”
The Avant-gardes have long since ended, and with them the parenthesis of art’s autonomy from its historic function of religious and political legitimation. If the artist’s work can no longer be detached from the increasingly convoluted mechanisms of a market-based society — except by condemning itself to oblivion — it can at least reveal how those mechanisms function, and offer spaces for genuine reflection and discussion. It can still resist, continuing to inhabit the poetic and philosophical space of complexity.
Visit the gallery Allegory of Innovation
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