about Phallus : Fascinum : Fascism 

The Box Gallery, LA   November 2025 – January 2026

There’ll never be a door. You’re inside

and the castle includes the universe

and has neither obverse nor reverse

nor exterior wall nor secret center.

LABERINTO by J.L. Borges

It was probably my fate to be in Phallus : Fascinum : Fascism. As one of the curators and as an artist, a combination I refused for most of my life. One thing at a time was my motto. But a day comes when old habits stop making sense. I thought I had stopped being a scholar, it wasn’t true. Every inch of my long life is here today tickling my fingers, the ones that write. Only three weeks before the opening in Nov. 15, I received the invitation accompanied by a text that forced me to reconnect with a silenced part of myself: years in which I tried to understand what History is or has been told, mostly invented. Years of swimming in waves of books with two amazing tutors providing help and discussions: Arnaldo Momigliano and Emilio Gabba. A storm of nostalgia submerged me while I was reading Robert Zin Stark’s manifesto. I was inside Borges’ castle without surrounding walls nor center, adjusting my sight to a fog hiding or revealing them like cherished illusions. 

This was my state of mind searching for artists to invite. They all appeared in less than a week. They also read the manifesto and followed, as if jumping on a magic carpet. When the whole exhibition was done, filling THE BOX from floor to ceiling with the artworks of 200 artists, the whole gallery became the castle, barely contained by the building. Hard to explain, I felt so good and happy to be in it. I could be nobody. I could not know names and titles of the single pieces, yet it was not hard to enjoy the variety of other reactions to the manifesto, secretly holding everybody together in different ways. The other curators were also a mysterious entity to me.

A photojournalist asked me to point out to him the other curators, so he could take pictures of them. “I don’t know them,” I told him. “But you are a curator,” he replied shouting at me.  “Isn’t it enough?” he threw his arms in the air, exasperated, and finally went away. He wanted a center that didn’t exist, like Los Angeles, like the art scene in the whole world.

“We create and destroy with our words” said a young artist in a different exhibition, Made in LA. Let me skip the name. This is not a review. He is someone thinking about the emotions of a flower, and its language.  I want to look at the art in the show in a similar spirit, thinking without cages. A dead mother covered with fake jewelry, two enormous black vertical penises, oh, the two towers! A purple cloud cut like a stone, the transformation in fake gold of a plant of corn, a naked artist standing in a wooden replica of his carcass lifting little by little a big, heavy piece of wood positioned as a penis; a cactus trying to scare a snake: “NO ME CHINGAS!” A chair becoming an automatic violinist, a concert for metronomes, a magnified page of the LA Times in which the photographs, one after the other, start moving: the flag, the cars, people. Yes, wonderland, but I’m not Alice. There is a rational choice keeping the exhibition together. It’s called equality. As much as words can still be trusted. And its essential companion, the feeling of equality. 

OMG, HOW MUCH I MISS THE FLUXUS AXES, the LIVING THEATER, and BODY ART, the EARLY VIDEO ART and INSTALLATIONS, maybe because they have been the pebbles on the ground guiding me out of from philosophy into contemporary art. The human body was their common catalyst. In our reality so frozen, stiffened in objects supposed to be appealing, with names giving old and new objects a financial validation, this exhibition offers the opposite: a systematic, quiet, elegant proximity of images coming from famous and from completely unknown artists. A large field of drawings, paintings, photos, sculptures asking to be considered for what they are. Known or unnamed blades of grass, an endless variety: a field in the spring before the pesticides. Please forget the rules! Look at them. Be with them. They are alive. So many artist are here that belong to the forest floor of the LA art world. “Inclusion” was not only a word in the manifesto, it’s real.  As it rarely happens, the exhibition displays a convinced, beloved, respected notion of equal presences spreading a refusal of hierarchy, a sense of freedom, of lightness. Nobody prevails. 

Perhaps my sense of elation will have a short life once THE BOX will dismantle the castle, or not. Every time I ‘ve been in unexpected, exciting situations, not always recognized as “art,” my memory never forgot them. They are in my body, and my fingers can write. 

“It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It is an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion of wanting, of giving and destroying.”  Louise Bourgeois