There are many ways of traveling. Some people travel in their own memories, some in their own room or garden, some in their own mountains. Some travel to unknown places, through landscapes, memories, and visions that are not their own, and […] in the vast expanses of the planet and in its innumerable memories, they look for their own shadow, their own identity, their own special nourishment for existence.
-Ettore Sottsass, Esercizi di viaggio


When Italian artist Luigi Ontani left for his first trip to India in the winter of 1974-75, he was looking for what he called “a different possibility,” a place that would be “most definitely Other” from his country of origin, which was dominated by capitalism and plagued by domestic terrorism (Ontani 2003, 49). At the time, Italy was going through an extremely tough period, the so-called anni di piombo (years of the bullet), as violence escalated in the activities of terrorist groups from the right and the left, and the oil crisis of 1973 inaugurated a decade of recession unprecedented since World War II. India had been a favorite destination for hippie and beat counterculture since the early 1960s, and it attracted many artists and intellectuals from Italy including industrial designer Ettore Sottsass, painter Mario Schifano, and art historian Cesare Brandi, among others. For Ontani, India first represented the projection of an exotic desire, matured during the artist’s adolescence in the provincial town of Vergato in the hills near Bologna, reading novels by Alberto Savinio, Aldo Palazzeschi, and Giovanni Comisso on exciting travels and transgressions that stimulated his imagination, as did the late nineteenth-century Orientalist castle in Moorish Revival style, known as the Rocchetta Mattei, in the nearby town of Grizzana. Other writers who fostered and confirmed Ontani’s interest in India were Guido Gozzano, Alberto Moravia, and Piero Paolo Pasolini. But for his first trip to India, Ontani chose Pierre Loti, whom he referred to as his “literary alibi” (Ontani 2007a). Loti was a much-traveled naval officer known as a dandy and one of the greatest figures of fin-de-siècle exoticism. Ontani left for India in 1974 with a copy of Loti’s L'Inde (sans les Anglais), on the cover of which he had glued Henri Rousseau’s portrait of Loti. However, that trip was far from any dream of exotic travel. It was a long, solitary, extreme trip, a sort of “heroic undertaking,” in which he put himself through “vital, existential tests” in search of “a total loss of bearings,” as he described it to Giancarlo Politi (Ontani 2003, 49). By the end of the trip, he had shed many pounds, and his original return ticket had long expired. But he had initiated the photographic self-portrait series “En route vers l’Inde (d’après Pierre Loti)” (“On the Way to India [after Pierre Loti]”) in homage to Loti, who titled the first chapter of his book “En route vers l’Inde.” 

Ontani conceived the series as an open-ended quadreria (picture gallery), a work in progress to which he has since continuously added new pieces made during many subsequent trips to India. In fact, the series was realized in collaboration with Indian photographers based in major urban centers such as Delhi, Jaipur, Varanasi, and Madras. The sepia-toned black-and-white photographs were painted in watercolor, according to a technique then common for photographs of marriages and rituals. Generally popular before the initial widespread availability of color photography in the 1950s, hand-painted photography still survived into the 1970s in relatively small and remote places like Ontani’s hometown in Italy. Ontani’s choice of collaborating with locals had an important precedent in the work of Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti who began commissioning carpets with world maps and square scripts from Afghan women embroiderers in Kabul in 1971. Another Italian artist who followed Boetti’s example was Francesco Clemente who started collaborating with Indian sign painters in 1976. Clemente was based in Rome, like Boetti and Ontani, who moved there in 1970, and the three were friends.

“En route vers l’Inde” is, by now, comprised of probably over one hundred individual pieces ranging from life-sized to miniature. They feature Ontani posing as Hindu deities, Greek gods, mythological characters from the Hindu, Classical, and Judeo-Christian traditions, and figures from paintings, mostly by Old Masters. The series also includes allegories and clichéd scenes, partly invented and partly inspired by Indian publications on religious, popular, and mass-media subjects. Citations are at times collaged from different sources and are rarely literal, as Ontani allows “the adventure of enacting the poses” to contribute to the creative process (Ontani 2007b). Whereas, in the 1970s, he posed alone or with animals, mostly in the studio and sometimes with a different background added using manual montage, in the early 1990s, his studio mise-en-scènes began to include younger male figures.

“En route vers l’Inde” was first exhibited in May 1978 at L’Attico, the gallery run by Fabio Sargentini, widely deemed to have been the most advanced in Rome at the time and reputed for shows like Jannis Kounellis’s live horse exhibit in 1969. Sargentini had traveled to India himself in 1972, organized a Tantric art show the following year, and, in 1977, promoted a collective traveling exhibit in India called “L’attico in viaggio,” to which he invited Clemente, Ontani, and Giordano Falzoni. To my knowledge, there is no photographic documentation of the L’Attico installation of the series, but two months later, the same quadreria was presented at the 38th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, where sixteen objects dotted the wall in a dynamic display, far removed from the white-cube style of hanging works discretely in a row at eye level and instead reminiscent of the experiments of the international avant-gardes: pictures were hung above, at, and below eye level, with two pieces even touching the floor. Over the course of the following thirty years, the series has been exhibited in different combinations, interspersed with always new pieces but in a consistent collage-like hanging style, reminiscent of the 1978 Venice installation and adopted by Ontani for other series, such as his 1970s photo-montage series “Tappeti volanti” (“Flying Carpets”). Recently, different versions of “En route vers l’Inde” have been shown in Italy at the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Bologna and the Museo d'Arte della città in Ravenna.

Ontani calls his impersonations tableaux vivants or quadri-non-quadri (paintings-non-paintings). Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of these works is that they combine the different media of performance, photography, and painting. In contrast to performance trends of the time, Ontani did not use photography simply to document actions but instead intended each painted photograph as a unique work of art, similar to a painted picture. “I liked the idea of a simple pose that could become a painting without being a painting and the idea that photography could allow me to express a possibility of painting that is not bound to the painting medium,” he said (Ontani 2007b). And by that he meant the possibility of constructing fictions and visual narrative, as seen in the paintings by Giorgio de Chirico and his brother Alberto Savinio. One of Ontani’s poses from painted figures is Autoritratto nudo d’après Chirico (Nude Self-portrait after de Chirico, 1978), after a late self-portrait of the founder of Metaphysical painting, who represented himself seated and loin-clothed like Saint Sebastian or other such Christian martyr.

In Christian iconography, Saint Sebastian is the figure that more than any other has been associated with homoeroticism. And indeed he is one of the most frequent subjects of Ontani’s work and one with whom he identified early on as “a simulacrum of ambiguity”: both the ambiguity of androgynous beauty, as in a male youth, and the ambiguity of art (Ontani 2009). In “En route vers l’Inde” Saint Sebastian is featured as San Sebastiano JaipurAno (1976). The title’s word play, typical of Ontani and activated simply by capitalizing the letter “A,” gets lost in translation. Literally the title translates as Saint Sebastian from Jaipur, but in Italian, “ano” is both the inflexion to form the name of a country’s national, as in “americano” (American) and the word “anus,” hence the reference to homosexual pleasure, the Orientalist trope of licentiousness, and the conflation of sacred and profane. 

Ontani’s first Saint Sebastian was San Sebastiano nel bosco di Calvenzano (d’après Guido Reni) (Saint Sebastian in the Wood of Calvenzano [after Guido Reni], 1970), a life-size color photograph and a self-portrait on many levels, including an association with Guido Reni, a prominent seventeenth-century painter born in Calvenzano, a hamlet of Ontani’s hometown Vergato. Reni painted several versions of Saint Sebastian that have inspired homoerotic fantasies for their heightened sensuality. For example, in the 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, one of Ontani’s favorite authors, the protagonist’s encounter with a reproduction of Reni’s Sebastian prompts a homosexual self-awakening. And Mishima himself morbidly identified with Reni’s depiction, posing as Saint Sebastian in a celebrated 1966 photograph a few years before his 1970 ritual suicide by seppuku (self-disembowelment).

In the 1970s, artists such as Lucas Samaras, Suzy Lake, and, most famously, Cindy Sherman, began to embrace photographic self-performance to explore issues of sexual and social identity in their photographs. Though Ontani seems more focused on investigating cultural identities via appropriation, and his work stands out for its idiosyncratic qualities, he should nonetheless be acknowledged as a pioneering figure in the context of the 1970s. Early on and ever since, he has taken up the artistic strategy of traveling in time, space, and culture, as, in his words, a way of “undertaking a journey into identity: a sort of mirage where I use my facial and physical appearance as a simulacrum for further identities” (Ontani 2003, 43).

The constant presence of Ontani’s own effigy raises the issue of narcissism, one of the most productive concepts in psychoanalysis. Helpful in understanding how narcissism plays out in Ontani’s work is Frankfurt School philosopher Herbert Marcuse’s contribution to the debate on the subject in Eros and Civilization, first published in 1955. In contrast to the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, who sees narcissism as a negative and pathological condition if occurring after puberty, Marcuse offers a more sympathetic approach. Analyzing the myth of Narcissus, which psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan also takes as the starting point for his theory of identification and the formation of identity, Marcuse observes that when Narcissus gazes at his own reflection in a pool of water, he does not recognize his own image as “self” but rather as “other.” And although he wastes away and dies, absorbed in contemplation, he metamorphoses and continues to live as the flower that bears his name. According to Marcuse, narcissistic identification can therefore be understood as a process of “integrating the narcissistic ego with the objective world” (Marcuse 1969, 168). In a recent study on the question of identification with place, architecture historian Neil Leach capitalizes on Marcuse’s interpretation and proposes that if narcissistic identification is to be enriching and transformative, the mirror must not reflect the given, but reconfigure the given. It must operate as “a form of window into a new version of the old—as though what exists on the other side is a metamorphosis of what exists on this side” (Leach 2006, 130). And it seems to be just this kind of mirror that reflects Ontani’s image in “En route vers l’Inde”: it reveals the potentialities of his own world by opening into another world, the world of India as “a different possibility.”


LIST OF REFERENCES 
 
Leach, Neil. Camouflage. Cambridge, Mass: MIT, 2006. 

Marcuse, Herbert. Eros and Civilization. London: Penguin, 1969.

Ontani, Luigi. “Ontani on Ontani,” in Luigi Ontani: Genthara. Gent: S.M.A.K., Roma: Italre, 2003.

Ontani, Luigi. Recorded interview with the artist, New York, May 17, 2007 (a).

Ontani, Luigi. Recorded interview with the artist, Vergato, December 22, 2007 (b).

Ontani, Luigi. Unrecorded interview with the artist, New York, June 24, 2009.

Sottsass, Ettore. Esercizi di viaggio, Translation by author. Turin: Aragno, 2001.