Pietro Sanguineti

tilt (S), 2002

Since the late 1990s Pietro Sanguineti has been realizing a work group of three-dimensional words conceived at the computer transformed – in a kind of ‘simulation of the simulation’ – into three-dimensional sculptures. The word ‘tilt’ seems at first like a company logo that had been removed from the roof of a skyscraper, where it had once secured the luminous presence of a company or brand name. The word ‘tilt’ appears on the display of a pinball machine, accompanied by appropriate sounds, when the player bumps the machine in an effort to influence the course of the ball, which makes the machine tilt and shuts it off. An aspect of ‘contamination’ is reinforced by a symbol that appears under the word ›tilt‹ in the sculptural display – the Biohazard sign, connected with one of the biggest chemical scandals around the American firm Dow Chemicals. Highly infectious materials can, of course, cause biological systems to tilt, as it were. Thus a number of different levels have be connected in this work: the aims of the ‘bourgeois avant-garde’ and Conceptual Art connects with the hysteria about viruses and contamination in our social, economic, and cultural systems; the relation of the real to the fictive connects with the problem of image space and its site (Frank Stella, for example); the relation of image and language connects to their reified forms as commodities, and so on. In this respect, tilt situates itself in relation to the politics of art as well as society.