Albania - Alfred Milot Mirashi

Anatomy of a miraculous key

You can use a key to open or to close. This great key-sculpture by Alfred Milot Mirashi was made to open. If every lock has its key, this one is universal. It works anywhere in the world, at any cultural latitude, irrespective of the traditional local symbology. But it does have one limit. It only works when an obstacle on the route to peace must be thwarted, in the meeting between religions and cultures. In favour of dialogue and peace, this mass of iron comprised of solids and voids becomes miraculously light, captivating, penetrating, in keeping with its “phallic” symbology. It is not a blasphemous key. What works this miracle is only art. In short, something human. When art is not rhetorical, decorative, celebrative, or a repetition of exhausted and nauseating forms, it has surprising social effects. We may well hope that Milot’s key will go around the world. On the occasion of the now well-known and established OPEN, the Venetians and their film-loving visitors will certainly pause before this striking sculpture. Oldenburg has scattered throughout the world his enormous pliers, clothes pegs and other everyday objects (an expression that recalls Duchamp). Pop. Like the theory of New Realism of the late, great Pierre Restany, it would be written in some simplifying book. A heresy. And it would be a heresy to involve the American concerning this key. It is antipope in the way it is distorted with respect to its “everyday” morphology. Though animated and tense (a macro-work), its exaggeration here becomes exasperation. It is not supported by emphasis, but by the interest in a form that is “expressive” rather than declaratory, in its irregular, anticlassical twisted anatomy. And tormented. Like all people who reach out, body and soul, in their yearning for peace. Years ago the Italians received a mini-calculator, a gift from the Prime Minister. Couldn’t the United Nations find some way of spreading this message of art and peace?

Text by
Carmelo Strano