Lara Demori

In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016) published his pivotal The Open Work, proposing a new awareness of the art object and developing groundbreaking perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetic and a  historical  point of view.  Concurrently,  artist  Piero  Manzoni  (Soncino 1933 – Milan 1963) designated his spectator's works of art by applying his signature to their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’  pedestals.  In so doing,  he forged a  new dimension,  both problematic and interactive,  between the author and the audience.  This article adopts  Eco’s aesthetics to discuss  Manzoni’s Living  Sculptures and  Magic  Bases series,  both from  1961.  Reading  Manzoni through the lens of  Eco’s semiological model reveals the paradoxical nature of both series, works that disrupt the canonical opposition between audience activation and passive spectatorial consumption. The adoption of Eco’s theory, therefore,  reveals the sarcastic raison d’être of  Manzoni’s dystopian yet constructive practice. Manzoni will be also paralleled here with two contemporaneous Latin American artists, Alberto Greco and Oscar Bony, whose works manifest striking similarities but also fundamental differences. Manzoni’s approach will then also be investigated in light of the theories of Guy Debord and Julio Le Parc.

https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/09/23/jannis-kounellis-itaca-per-sempre/

Ithaque est ma mère, Ithaque est ma jeunesse, Ithaque esta mon viel age. Itaque est ma mort. Jannis Kounellis

Un vecchio barcone si staglia all'orizzonte marino. Sulla poppa distinguiamo la sagoma buia di un uomo immobile. I toni di bianco e nero e il forte contrasto della composizione rendono la direzione del suo sguardo indecifrabile: potrebbe volgerci le spalle, o ammiccare sornionamente allo spettatore. A una prima lettura, la foto ci restituisce una sensazione di solenne immobilità. Dopo un'analisi più attenta, ci accorgiamo della scia bianca che segue la mole dell'imbarcazione e taglia l'oscurità del mare: si tratta di un peschereccio in movimento. Dove è diretto? Lo scatto è di Mimmo Jodice che immortala Jannis Kounellis dal golfo di Napoli per il Manifesto della mostra alla Modern Art Agency del 1969. Come riporta Menna (1979), l'imbarcazione ha da poco lasciato il porto di Mergellina e l'artista "sta dando un ultimo sguardo a Castel dell'Ovo".

This article explores the shift in tenor and style undertaken by the Milan-based Movimento Arte Nuclear in between 1951 and 1959. Specifically, it explores the Enrico Baj's anarchic humanism affecting his depiction of the human figure influenced by the postwar trauma of a looming nuclear catastrophe.

Stemming from Grosfoguel's decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer away from the alternative between Eurocentric universalism and third world fundamentalism in the production of knowledge, this article aims to respond to this query in relation to the field of the art produced by Latin American women artists in the past four decades. It does so by investigating the decolonial approach advanced by third world feminism (particularly scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and by rescuing it from-what I reckon to be-a methodological impasse. It proposes to resolve such an issue by reclaiming transnational feminism as a way out from what I see as a fundamentalist and essentialist tactic. Following from a theoretically and methodological introduction, this essay analyzes the practice of Cuban-born artist Marta María Pérez Bravo, specifically looking at the photographic series Para Concebir (1985-1986); it proposes a decolonial reading of her work, which merges third world feminism's nation-based approach with a transnational outlook, hence giving justice to the migration of goods, ideas, and people that Ella Shohat sees as deeply characterizing the contemporary cultural background. Finally, this article claims that Pérez Bravo's oeuvre offers the visual articulation of a decolonial strategy, concurrently combining global with local concerns.

Marta María Pérez Bravo was the first artist in post-revolutionary Cuba to investigate the female body creating a thick web of cultural, religious and political references. She did so adopting the photographic medium, which bears the legacy of Cuban recent political history: I am referring for example to Alberto Korda who, through photography, conveyed images of the revolution and propagated the canonical portraits of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro among others.
In a similar documentary vein, Pérez Bravo has used photography as a testimonio of her gestation in Para concebir (1985-1986), and of birth, breast-feeding, and child rearing in Recuerdo de nuestro bebé (1986-1987). As observed by scholar Gerardo Mosquera, the photograph No matar, nir ver matar animales (Neither Kill, Nor Watch Animals Being Killed, 1986) from the series Para concebir – where the artist brandishes a knife against her pregnant belly - is perhaps the most well-known Cuban photograph after those of Che Guevara.
This paper aims to investigate the anti-romantic iconography of gestation represented by Marta María Pérez Bravo in the aforementioned series, emphasising her will to render through the narrative of a personal experience and a crude portrayal of the pregnant female body mythical beliefs embedded in the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte. Concurrently, this talk aims to reconnect Pérez Bravo’s practice with the history of Cuban photography of the twentieth century.

The work [of art] is something more than its year of birth, its antecedents or interpretations made of it. And how it is ‘something more’ is usually explained when it comes to a crucial ‘opening’ or ‘ambiguity’ or ‘pluri-signess’ of the work – meaning that the work of art is a matter of communication that asks to be interpreted and then completed and supplemented by the ratio of the user.
U. Eco
                 
In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessadria, 1932 – Milan, 2016) published the pivotal book The Open Work, intellectualising a hermeneutical model that frames a new understanding of the art object and unfolding pioneering perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetical and a historical point of view. Concurrently, artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 – Milan, 1963) declared spectators works of art by placing his signature on their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’ pedestals. In doing so, the artist forged a new, problematic, interactive dimension between the author and its audience.
The aim of this lecture is to adopt Eco’s aesthetic paradigm to discuss Piero Manzoni’s Living Sculptures and Magic Bases (both 1961). The reading of Manzoni’s works through the lenses of Eco’s semiological model unfolds the paradoxical nature that pertains to both series of works, since the effective participation of the audience is undermined by issues of reification of the body and the spectacle. The adoption of Eco’s theory therefore reveals the dystopian – but constructive – sarcastic raison d’ être that affects Manzoni’s practice.

Piero Manzoni’s (1933-1963) pneumatic sculptures ‘Bodies of Air’ (1960) are forty-five kits containing a white balloon, a tripod and a mouthpiece. The buyer is free to choose whether to leave these tools enclosed in the wooden box or to inflate the balloon and put it on the tripod following the instructions left by the artist. For the price of 200 lire per litre, the balloon could be blown up by the artist himself. In the same year the artist realises sixteen examples of ‘Artist’s Breath’: a balloon inflated with Manzoni’s own breath and attached to a wooden support with a string and two lead seals; the support also bears a metal plaque with the artist’s name and the title of the work. Having the breath dissolved over the years, what remains today is the deflated shell of the balloon, now stuck on base underneath.
Both series prompt further reflections: on the one hand, the use of a volatile element such as breath jeopardises both the possibility of preserving the work as well as its authenticity, blurring the boundaries between reproduction and originality; on the other the presence of pneumatic sculptures to be assembled by the buyer increases the audience’s agency and consequently problematizes the role of the artist.
Following on from these premises, this paper aims to discuss the use of the ephemeral trace of the artist - his breath - in relation to ideas of authorship and sovereignty, the role of the public, and the interplay between authenticity and serial reproduction.

As scholar Claudia Calirman points out, despite the absence of an official aesthetic or visual code prescribed by the military regime, the style that emerged from the Brazilian exhibition Do corpo à terra was renamed as ‘the aesthetics of the margins’. Its curator, Frederico Morais, interpreted the works exhibited – or better ‘performed’ – in the show as examples of Guerrilla Art. Do corpo à terra took place between 17 and 21 April 1970 in the streets and in the park of the city of Belo Horizonte in the state of Minas Geiras, at the same time as the exhibition Objeto e Participação in the Palácio das Artes. The label ‘Guerrilla Art’ characterised specifically, but not only, the actions of artists Cildo Meireles and Artur Barrio. Both executed highly controversial works: the first burned living chickens, the latter dispersed “bloody bundles” with a corpse-like appearance in the streets. Hélio Oiticica took part in the exhibition in a different manner, staging a situation that bears little connection to the notion of guerrilla art. The American artist Lee Jaffe executed Oiticica’s proposal since at that time Oiticica was already in New York. The work was called Trilha de açucar: Lee Jaffe created a long line of white sugar poured into a trench dug in the Serra do Curral, famous for its rich red soil. Focusing on the interaction between ephemerality, art and the environment, and excluding the direct participation of the public, Oiticica’s proposition provoked considerable criticism: his work was accused to be ‘an insult of the poor people of Belo Horizonte’ because it displayed the same hypocritical dimension that Brazilian artists attributed to the Arte Povera movement. Oiticica subsequently denied any involvement with the making of the work.
Analysing the ground-breaking, but under-studied, exhibition Do corpo à terra, this paper aims to discuss and reflect upon a twofold issue: the significance of an ‘aesthetics of the margins’, its premises and its contradictions, and the apparently troubled reception of Arte Povera in Brazil, starting off from Germano Celant’s conceptualisation of the movement and ultimately shaping a transnational dialogue between diverse artistic practices that questions the geopolitics of power in the circulation of ideas, trends and artists.

At the beginning of 1951, the artists Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo released their 'Manifesto Nucleare' and proclaimed themselves not simply 'nuclear painters' rather 'painters of a nuclear era'. Deliberately influenced by the international postwar concern with the atomic bomb and nuclear energy, these artists adopted ambivalent strategies, neither slavishly embracing the fascination for new scientific discoveries, nor consciously condemning the danger of a possible nuclear catastrophe.
The Italian Nuclear artists distanced themselves from Fortunato Depero's 'Manifesto della pittura e plastica nucleare' and from Salvador Dalí's so called 'Nuclear mysticism.' They were aesthetically inspired by the mushroom-shaped cloud of the atomic bomb and prefigured sub-atomic landscapes inhabited by sub-human martian-like figures. This interest was paralleled by their use of painterly media, suggesting an autonomous energy or the hidden life of matter, visible only on an atomic scale. 'Matter,' they stated, 'has more imagination than ourselves.'
While possible connections with contemporary American science-fiction have already been exploited by current criticism, little attention has been given to the Nuclear movement in relation to the national and international cultural and political context. Analysing the last number of the Nuclear review 'Il Gesto' dedicated to 'Interplanetary Art' (1959), this paper aims to reflect the radical shift undertaken by Nuclear artists at the end of the Fifties: a curious and ambivalent attitude gave way to a stridently cynical one. Interestingly, this shift in tenor was coincident with the beginning of the construction of the first nuclear power plants in central and southern Italy.

Artist Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) was one of the most significant Brazilian intellectuals working in Brazil and abroad between the 1950s and the 1970s, decades marked by cultural renovation and socio-political turmoil. Scholars have argued that Oiticica adopted a ‘marginal’ position, both socially and aesthetically. Unable to recognize himself as part of the bourgeoisie, he also never fully belonged to the favelas’ microcosm. Indeed, the artist affirmed that ‘artists [and] philosophers “act marginally” since they do not have a specific social class’ referring especially to a ‘Marcusean concept’ of marginality.  What is the relationship between an oppressive dictatorial regime that burdened Brazil for nearly twenty years and Oiticica’s notion of ‘marginality’? Is this ‘marginal’ attitude pretentious? Fallacious? Revolutionary? This paper aims to address heterogeneous entanglements between aesthetics and politics in Oiticica’s practice, particularly looking at the works he produced in London and New York from 1968 on.

Western scholarly criticism has placed little or no attention on the controversial roots of the concept of ‘antropofagia’, not only from a theoretical point of view but also in terms of historical re-enactment. This notion addresses the 'cultural struggle' faced by Brazilian intelligentsia to emancipate itself from trends imported from abroad - trends which contributed to a ‘modernization’ of the national cultural scene, stuck at that time in the vestiges of an old fashioned parnassianism of French influence.
On these premises this paper aims to analyse the paradoxical early formation of the anthropophagus attitude as the corner stone of Brazilian modern era, particularly emphasising the relation between literature and the visual arts and taking into account three crucial events: Anita Malfatti’s exhibition in 1917, the ‘Semana de Arte Moderna’ in 1922, and the Manifesto Antropofago, dated 1928.

At the beginning of the 1960s art institutions imposed a fixed dichotomy wherein artists were either marginalised or placed within the mainstream. Despite belonging to peripheral and US-subjected countries, Hélio Oiticica and Piero Manzoni overcame this restrained duality and embodied the shift from modernism to postmodernist propositions.
Accordind to these premises, this work-in progress essay raises diverse questions, particularly whether is possible or not to establish connections between artists in different contexts under the fresh perspective of a zero degree art and thus overcoming the fixed polar categories of avant-garde/neo-avantgarde, modernism/postmodernism, etc.
Adopting a comparative approach, this paper proposes a novel understanding of Neo- avantgardes by analyzing both Oiticica’s tension between an ‘anthropophagus’ attitude towards European constructivism and the Anti-Art will of a cultural zero and Manzoni’s conflict between the survival of a lyrical symbolism and the emptiness required by a zero degree art. At the same time it reassesses a ‘south-south’ horizontal axis between marginal regions, surveying their resistance to hegemonic political and cultural models.

This talk discusses Milan-born artist Piero Manzoni’s most (in)famous work: the Artist’s Shit.
In 1961 Manzoni produced a series of ninety sealed cans containing thirty grams of his excrements and sold them at the same pay rate of the gold, thus comparing the human waste to a luxury commodity. Analysing Italian political and cultural context of the time, this talk examines the mockery at stake in this peculiar work of art, its criticism to the idolised role of the artist, and its commentary upon the production of series and multiples dominating the art market.