FMR is a bi-monthly magazine published simultaneously in English, French, Italian and Spanish.

 

To preserve the magazine in your library, FMR offers its subscribers an elegant library case for the 6 annual issues.

 

Editorial for Issue 18

Two pointers. In Le Besoin de croire, Julia Kristeva talks of an “understanding of extreme singularity” as being the most distinctive attribute of art. “Suddenly, the fact of not being modern has become a matter of indifference to me”, noted Roland Barthes in his diary for 13 August 1977.
So, after the century of the Avant-gardes came to an end – or rather, perhaps, as it “ran out” – there were those who were already aware that art was too serious a business to be left to the professional intellectuals and their blinkered mandarinate, like some esoteric rite in the hothouses of academe.
The cultural act may take the form of a gesture which is completely heedless of the here and now, yet still be every bit as revolutionary as those which are conceived of as deliberately radical. It all depends on the specific weight of the personality in question, on the density and tension of the work.
Bambaia and Romanino were not of their time: they lagged behind what then passed for modernity. They chose this course and then followed it: precisely as Leonardo Cremonini and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg do today. Their awareness became language, and discourse. Their “singularity” emerges with particular sharpness, like a chance truth in a theatre of society trivia.
Their truth does not engage with the topical – it does not wish to; it engages with a system of values which is far more potent and enduring; it asks us questions, stirs up doubts, as only the masters can.
In its latest guise, previewed in the last issue, now more than ever FMR is taking the form not just of a journey through styles, and periods, and forms, but also, and above all, of a constant burrowing beneath externals, in the name of a sensual intelligence which will always
be clear-eyed, never complacent – in the name of a luxury of being which finds expression, above all, in a non-topicality all its own, indifferent to the need to seek acceptance from ever less credible intellectual authorities. The caustic and paradoxical Jonathan Swift was coming to the same conclusion around the year 1704, when his Tale of a Tub was published: “I claim an absolute authority in right as the freshest modern, which gives me a despotic power over all authors before me”; furthermore: “…it hath been observed both among ancients and moderns, that a true critic hath one quality in common with a whore and an alderman, never to change his title or his nature; that a grey critic has been certainly a green one, the perfections and acquirements of his age being only the improved talents of his youth.” We like other talents. Precisely.

Flaminio Gualdoni