It is turbulent years like 2016 that make us question our perception of norms and standards that were previously taken for granted by most. This realisation isn't exclusively negative; sometimes it is good to be unpleasantly awoken from a state of idleness. Such would encourage us to revisit past ideas and produce new solutions to enable the defeat, or, less ambitiously, the taming of those obstacles that define these troubling times.
2016 has also been an abundantly eventful year at the University of Malta. It has been challenging to keep up with the many activities organised by different departments. Above all, there were two seminal anniversaries that were commemorated by a variety of interdepartmental talks, seminars and conferences within the Faculty of Arts.
The first was the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More's Utopia, a philosophical text that spurred numerous ideas on the prospect of improving society and hoping for a better future. The second marked the 400th year since the death of Miguel de Cervantes, author of the unparalleled masterpiece Don Quixote.
The Utopia Anniversary Events were coordinated by Kathrin Schödel and Katrin Dautel from the Department of German, Jean-Paul De Lucca and Ivan Callus from the Departments of Philosophy and English respectively. Their objective was to discuss historical manifestations of utopia and to see how different communities envisioned this concept across the years. However, the global contemporary socio-political condition was the matter most vigorously debated by both concordant and opposing factions.
For the concluding event in a series of talks held at the beginning of this month, Dr. Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci was invited to contest the relationship between utopia, dystopia, and the visual arts. The ideal and the notion of idealisation have been central to art production since classical antiquity, which is why modern and modernist artists visually assailed the overripe obsession with ideal beauty by proposing alternative worldviews. The twentieth-century was a melting pot of artistic philosophies all attempting to achieve a utopian reality.
With the complex title 'Back in the USSR.....The Beatles, Auden, Pound, and me living in Zamyatin's We, in 1984', the paper was split into two sections; the first was a critical assessment of the author's own personal participation within a utopic era, followed by a comparative cultural analysis that focused on the political scenario of the second half of the twentieth century.
Schembri Bonaci's paper recounted his political activity in Malta as a student in the late 1960s and early 70s that were tied in with the dreams of the 1968 international student movement. He then spoke of his time as an ambassador in Soviet Russia when artistic activities were very much a part of his life at the embassy. His personal experience was used to discuss certain ideas and their later development as the century progressed.
Utopia was at the core 1960s counter-culture movement. People desired an alternative reality to one overcome by war, nuclear destruction, discrimination, violence and oppression. Schembri Bonaci, through his own experience of trying to attain that dream, attempted to analyse the problems and paradoxes embedded in these utopian aspirations. By looking at the decline of hippie culture and its neutralisation under capitalism, his conclusion was rather disheartening but admittedly addressed the uglier side of the drive for a utopian future. The paper provoked reactions from the majority of those present, and many found his position to be contentious. If we have been taught one important thing in 500 years of Utopia, it is that ideals have no finish line since those who desire a better future will always maintain a critical perspective on reality.
The second paper was delivered at the end of November at an international, interdisciplinary seminar on the work of Cervantes organised by the Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies. The novel subject debated the presence and, more interestingly, the non-presence of Cervantes in Maltese modern art.
According to Schembri Bonaci, the Maltese situation shows a history of collective cultural forgetting that is enveloped by the British colonial past. A very interesting point made was how the Sette Giugno riots were caused by the class politics of bread prices, wherein the windmill became a symbol of oppression for the Maltese people. Therefore, the windmill was both an enemy to them and to Don Quixote. Yet, as the author showed, the Maltese translation of Don Quixote changed his title from 'Don' to 'Dun', giving him the semblance of a clerical figure rather than a modern hero.
Don Quixote was often cited in the visual arts during the modern period. Daumier, Picasso, Dali, David Smith and others revisited the lives of the protagonist and his side-kick Sancho Panza. In spite of the book's global popularity and Malta's close links to European culture, Cervantes was not a source for artistic reference. Only in more recent years did Anthony Catania visually explore the literary intrigues offered by Don Quixote's adventures.
Instead of resorting to a critique of this absence, Schembri Bonaci explored new trajectories as to how the many layers evinced in the narrative of Don Quixote were absorbed by Maltese artists. By demonstrating how modern artists appropriated lessons from the past and transformed these into new images and new meanings, the author discussed the works of Maltese twentieth-century artists who displayed corresponding ideas to those in Cervantes's novel.
The humour-as-critique method visible in Giorgio Preca's folk paintings was one of the main common elements. In fact, such is profuse in Maltese culture. The satirical figure Ġaħan, together with Juan Mamo's protagonists in Ulied In-Nanna Venut fl-Amerka, are very Don Quixote-ian in nature. Josef Kalleya's 'love for the impossible' was proposed as a shared attribute, that which could be referred to as quixotic.
Schembri Bonaci identified the quest for the chivalric in Antoine Camilleri's works; the contrast between the dignified aims of the hero and the world of non-fiction emanates from Camilleri's compulsion to portray his own image beyond the confines of the materially possible. The author showed Camilleri's mythical rendition of self in unattainable or unimaginable physical states to be similar to the trial and tribulations of Don Quixote's search for fulfilment in romantic ideals.
This essay follows another presented last year at a seminar organised by the Department of French that explored the relationship between Maltese and foreign art beyond the conventional binary of Italian and British cultural identity. Research on Maltese modern art has focused on these two nations and has avoided analysing the wider spectrum of our art historical development within a socio-political context.
The two papers delivered this year to mark the Utopia and Cervantes anniversaries were intimately linked. Both dealt with the hopes and aspirations that humans imagine for themselves. More so, the desire for being another or experiencing an alternative to that endured in the mundanity of existence devoid of imagination. Despite the apparent paradoxes of ideals, More and Cervantes's books embody that eternal desire for a human world bearing a common creative spirit; free, exciting and wonderful. Let us not forget their lessons in 2017, and the years to follow.