Autopsy. Roberto Fratini oral exhibition

Faustian and annoying, no one knows better than an actor how much submission fuels the liberation of creativity. All the “methods” of the century sought to make the workers of the lie masters of their means of production—and worthy of lying. Inner truth and the fragile introspective work of finding it would, in short, constitute a competition as moralising as that of manual labour in the Marxist world view: this manoeuvre of the ethical redemption of art as work would occupy almost the entire discursive field of the historical avant-gardes. Stanislavsky was in some ways the prophet of the paradigm of self-exploitation that awaited in the intricacies of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and it would find its most radical unfolding not in the mass epic of the socialist revolution, but in the individual lyricism of the finally liberated and free to come clean subject, the cannon fodder of the neoliberal paradigm. 

The two instances that make up the title of Stanislavski’s main text, “The Actor’s Work on Himself”, announce the endless availability of the emancipated, unique, umbilical, hypersensitive and creative postmodern subject, to prostitute their intimacy, to allow themselves to be precarious in the name of autonomy, to manipulate themselves with an energy that surpasses the wet dreams of any exogenous manipulator: to unreservedly come clean in the arenas where new luxury subjectivities compete, while lying (and lying to themselves) as they breathe.