The Significance of Blood
by Robert C. Morgan
Over the past two decades, the use of blood as a medium for art-making has taken a different turn. Its former romantic connotations – as expressed in Cocteau’s remarkable film, The Blood of the Poet – began to move in another direction, a foreboding direction. The previous innocence associated with the poet’s inscription given to the “body” of one’s desire came to a sudden halt. Blood became a signifier less about love – let alone, desire – but of disease, regret, tragedy, and loss. In his recent series of work – based on the literalness of the “body” – Pietro Costa intends to push this foreboding signifier into another frame of reference, a more objective usage, but one that is exempt from the interpretative strategies that have haunted its recent past. Given Susan Sontag’s distinction between the metaphor of illness and its literal effects, Costa has in a certain sense recontextualized the medium by allowing it to exist unaffected by politicized rhetoric. His desire is one of constraint.
In each of the “drawings” included in the series, Costa applies a vial of his own blood between two translucent sheets of mylar vellum. His action offers a proposal in opposition to the politicization of the signifier and replaces it again with its more subtle, intrinsic power. Yet, at the same moment, he rejects the expressionistic impulse as raison d’etre. One may detect an affinity with Rothko, but only in combination with the variations made possible in a process-oriented drawing. Instead of charcoal, Costa uses blood. He interjects neither politics nor expression into his craft. He simply proceeds to model the surface, to give it resonance in a formal sense. To process in a formal way does not necessarily lead to a formalist aesthetic. Costa has made certain of this through his choice of medium. He does not need to “load the signifier” with political baggage in that the choice of blood as his medium will automatically serve that purpose. By remaining neutral through a definitive process orientation – not unlike some of the modular procedures employed by Eva Hesse between 1966 and 1969 – Costa is able to achieve the most active engagement with the surface.