Denis Viva

Apparso quarant'anni fa, La trans-avanguardia italiana di Achille Bonito Oliva è stato uno dei più controversi articoli della critica d'arte italiana. Ultimo del nostro Novecento a sancire il successo di un movimento ar tistico, esso ha decretato, allo stesso tempo, la fine del modello culturale delle avanguardie. Ancora oggi la sua interpretazione è al centro di una contesa tra le due fazioni che seppe generare: i sostenitori del " ritorno alla pittura" postmoderno, da un lato, e i detrattori del " riflusso" targa to anni Ottanta, dall'altro. Questo libro avvia una rilettura di quel testo a partire da ricerche inedite, riflettendo soprattutto sulle nuove funzioni e il nuovo statuto della critica negli anni in cui essa si lasciava alle spalle le contestazioni politiche e la sua lunga tradizione letteraria.

https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4vq1q8fv#article_abstract

In 1996, the Italian artist Giulio Paolini was invited to design the cover of the book L'occhio di Calvino by Marco Belpoliti. The book was one of the first to study the role of images in Italo Calvino's production, becoming an ideal background for Paolini's cover: a collage portrait of the writer while he was proofreading one of his texts. This image raised one of the major questions which was already addressed twenty years before, when Calvino and Paolini first collaborated: the crisis of authorship and the multiplicity of the self, which Calvino will also stresses in his Six Memos for the Next Millenium. This article tries to explore the specificity, the limits and the legacy of their theory of authorship by analizing the portraits of Giulio Paolini in comparison with Belpoliti's and Calvino's texts.

Denis Viva’s “Pluralism as Revisionism: Annitrenta at Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1982” will contextualize the controversial Annitrenta exhibition of Italian art of the Fascist era. This exhibition was mounted during the so-called “riflusso” (a tendency toward individualism and disengagement prevalent in Italian society during the Eighties). Seen as an attempt to legitimize this tendency, Annitrenta was fiercely criticized by its detractors as a regressive revision of Italian history. Viva analyzes the exhibition’s most divisive aspect: its avoidance of postwar strategies to distance Fascist art, neither adopting a “neutral” formalist approach (as Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti did in his Arte moderna in Italia in 1967), nor a Marxist-critical one (as a conference titled Arte e Fascismo in Italia e in Germania tried to do in 1973). The exhibition’s curator, Renato Barilli, introduced a perturbing double-edged method: on the one hand, he revisited the arts of the Ventennio through the de-ideologized mapping of the Thirties, presenting an “ethnographic” exhibition which aimed at documenting the painting, design, fashion, music and atmosphere of that decade, while on the other he legitimized his methodology by invoking the concept of pluralism, which promised an inclusive, detached approach to the Fascist period. Viva links this call for heterogeneity and non-hierarchical history to the Italian politics of pluralism in the Eighties as a way to address fragmentation, social conflicts and political radicalisms. Reconstructing the peculiar approach and polemical reception of Annitrenta, Viva tries to understand how its attempt to overcome the divisions concerning the memory of Fascist past has in turn become a divisive spectacularization.

During the 1970s, at the apex of “dematerialized art”, the art magazines contributed a great
deal to turn visibility (the photographic circulation of artworks, news on the artists, etc.) into
an economic value. In a country like Italy, where museum validation was still lacking, neoavantgarde periodicals such as Flash Art or Data introduced new communicative strategies
(community building, indirect advertising, etc.) in order to provide a trans-national audience for Italian art. This study tries to enlighten the impact of advertising on art magazines’
preferences and their criteria of newsworthiness by analyzing some quantitative data.

Considering as a point of reference the exhibition on the Environmental Art The Space of Image, held in 1967, the article explores the Art photo-documentation published on the Italian Art Periodicals during the Sixties. Thanks to the database www.capti.it, this study proposes a new reading of the photo of Environment and Installation, also based on a statistical approach. The origin of this photographic genre shows some unexpected relations with other photographic practices: the reportage, the photo of architecture and the Art galleries advertising. The documentation status of Photography is thus contaminated with different editing practices.

Within the Pop Art scene, the work of Roy Lichtenstein has been unquestionably associated with the language of comics. One of the approaches that could further contribute today to the discussion about the relationship between Lichtenstein’s paintings and comics may come from a comparison with the media studies of Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin. Their notion of remediation could help scholars to reframe Lichtenstein’s work in terms of a remediation of comics. However arguable this formula might be, this notion will allow us to better re-connect Lichtenstein’s formal strategy with the media culture and context of his period. In the first part of this essay I will try to describe the formalistic hybridization between comic style and the painting agenda carried out by Lichtenstein. In the second part I will explain on which basis this hybridization reveals some modernist contradictions about mass culture. Then in the third part, I will examine how Lichtenstein attempted to reform some aspects of comics in order to re-use them in his painting. Finally, I will speculate about the hypothetical audience addressed by Lichtenstein. Joining together different media, all along his career, he ended up reforming not only his favorite medium but both media, painting and comics at the same time.

"In this symposium I will compare the historiographic methodologies that appeared in Italy at the beginning of the eighties with the opposite postmodernists theories sustained by critics like Benjamin Buchloch.
The so-called “Return to painting” in Italy, including labels like “Transavanguardia”, tried to rehabilitate figures usually linked with anti-avantgardism and reactionarism, like Giorgio De Chirico after his disengagement with Surrealists, or Mario Sironi, who influenced Fascist style.
Italian critics associated with neo-figurative tendencies rejected as outdated any ideological judgement regarding realistic painting and its claims to a national style, particularly those derived from the historicistic interpretation adopted by Giulio Carlo Argan, the most influential contemporary art historian in Italy after 1945.
The exhibitions held after 1979, like “La Pittura Metafisica” or “Anni Venti”, proposed a new vision to re-evaluate Metafisica’s role, in opposition to Futurism’s supremacy based on an avanguardistic progression.
This effort to revise the political reactionary engagement of figures like Sironi or De Chirico, was preceded by the ex-Communist historian Renzo De Felice’s broadly reconciliatory approach toward Fascism in his lengthy biography of Mussolini.
At the same time, Communist Party, leaded by Enrico Berlinguer, began a renovating political strategy to emancipate itself from totalitarian policy of U.S.S.R. This change had a correspondent approach among art critics and historians close to the Party that culminated in the “Biennale del Dissenso” (1977) where artists persecuted by the sovietic regime can exposed their banished works.
The Revisionist tendency -and its art-historical version- deeply influenced Jean Clair, who was, during the seventies, close to italian critics like Luigi Carluccio and who organized Les Réalismes (1981), the most fervent attempt to eliminate the “avant-garde” category in historical methodology.
From the opposite side, Buchloch accused Clair of being a “new reactionary anti-modernist” and promoting an approach to the arts “outside the historical and political context”.
Buchloch’s Postmodern thought aimed primarily to revise Greenberg’s Modernism while, at the same time, reaffirming some of its aspects (such as the distinction between the avant-garde and kitsch) thus contradicting Clair’s theory.
In placing Greenberg’s theory at the center of Postmodernism’s change, Buchloh didn’t consider the possibility of other historical legacies in different political contexts such as Italy or France."

Being a symbol of Arte Povera's engagement during 1968, Mario Merz's Igloo di Giap was often discussed
as one of the most blatant reference to the guerrilla and the Vietnam War. But how did the Third-worldist
theories or the Italian students' protests inspire Merz in combining an Eskimo architecture and a sentence
of the vietnamese general Giap? Was the Leftist anti-Americanism the only reason which brought him to
adopt the igloo? This article tries to delve into the political context of Italy around March 1968, when the
Igloo di Giap was fistly showed, a week after the clash between students and police at valle Giulia in Rome.
Involving the reception of Giap's sentence, the scientifi notions about the igloo, or the vision of the Eskimo
in Italy, this study aims at presenting the problematic message of the Igloo di Giap.

This study aims at reconsidering one of the most famous photo-documentation of Arte Povera: Claudio Abate's view of the Dodici cavalli vivi by Jannis Kounellis at the galleria L'Attico in Rome (14th January 1969). This photograph is now considered as the intersection of different authorship expectations and especially through its contextualization into the Fabio Sargentini's activity of L'Attico gallery and its art review Cartabianca. As Brian O'Doherty proposed this photo-documentation could also be included into an ideal history of artistic display in the XX Century.

«Pendant de longues années l’Italie eut en Balla un grand peintre qu’elle ignora totalement». In 1950 these Christian Zervos’ words incited Italian Art Critics and Literature into being aware of the international and increasing relevance of Giacomo Balla’s work. It was the beginning of a renaissance which will recognize a new pivotal role in the Italian context for the old Futurist painter. His renaissance was totally involved in the self-accreditation and controversial strategy of the young abstract painters in the post Second World War period which proposed a new nonfigurative interpretation for his work. According to them, from Forma 1 to Origine or other gruops like the M.A.C., Balla became a prompt precedent for Italian Art in the history of abstraction.
However, from a more careful historical point of view, since 1948 until 1954, the Balla’s reception was limited and it never delved into those potentially modernists aspects of his style. His innovative outcome was only connected to the critical debate of that time or it was just conceived in terms of “historic primacy”. No young artists seems to deeply learn from his style and the major part of his legacy concerns the most predictable question of dynamism. Finally the reappearance of his Compenetrazioni iridescenti and the related abstract interpretation provided by Enrico Prampolini and Ettore Colla in 1952 opened a new phase of a more modernist reception for Balla. Only Piero Dorazio’s reticoli (one of the most and long-lasting interested in Balla among the young artists) will turn this new critical approach into a new painting style.

«Pendant de longues années l’Italie eut en Balla un grand peintre qu’elle ignora totalement». Nel 1950, con questo giudizio, Christian Zervos esortava la critica e la storiografia italiana a prendere coscienza del crescente riconoscimento internazionale suscitato dall’opera di Giacomo Balla. Era il principio di una riscoperta che, durante la sua tarda maturità, investirà il maestro futurista di un ruolo e di un’attenzione sino ad allora inediti nel panorama italiano. La sua vicenda si trovò, infatti, interamente coinvolta nella controversa auto-legittimazione delle poetiche non figurative nel secondo dopoguerra, dettando ai più giovani i termini di un recupero storiografico che fosse, ora, d’interpretazione tutta astrattista. Chiamato in causa da più parti, da Forma 1 ad Origine, passando per il non secondario appello del M.A.C., Balla divenne l’esempio di quel contributo tempestivo all’astrazione internazionale che l’Italia aveva a lungo cercato.
Tuttavia, ad una più attenta analisi storica, emerge quanto la fortuna di Balla negli anni 1948-1954 fosse stata circoscritta e non avesse riservato un vero approfondimento su quegli aspetti potenzialmente più modernisti della sua opera. La sua portata innovativa fu, più che altro, limitata al dibattito critico, al primato storico, lasciando poche tracce stilistiche nei giovani astrattisti, spesso di scontata derivazione dinamista. Sarà soltanto nel 1952, con la comparsa delle prime compenetrazioni astratte e la contestuale lettura astratta, fornita da Enrico Prampolini ed Ettore Colla, che si aprirà una reale pagina modernista per Balla. Una maturazione della sua eredità stilistica che giungerà soltanto con i reticoli di Piero Dorazio, uno dei giovani artisti, da più tempo e con più cura, attenti al messaggio del maestro.

Between the 1960s and the 1970s many Italian young artists attributed to their debut the value of a manifesto. This aspect soon appeared in those pioneers, such as Giulio Paolini or Vettor Pisani, who carried out a metalinguistic kind of art. Starting from those examples, this
article studies Sandro Chia’s false debut at the La Salita Gallery in Rome, between April and May 1971. Entitled L’ombra e il suo doppio (The Shadow and its Double), the show alluded to the well known Pliny the Elder’s tale about the origins of Painting and it was, misleadingly,
recognized as his first solo show by Chia. Reconstructing the real career of the artist by a philological approach to the documents, this article adresses the poietic and poetic value attributed by Chia to his own debut

This essay is focused on some cases (Roy Lichtenstein, Tano Festa and Giulio Paolini) of art-historical reproductions used as a visual resource for the artworks, occured during the 60s. Through the parallel investigation concerning the historiographic debate on reproductions and thanks to the notions of Intermediality and Remediation, this essay points out an unexpected interference between art praxis and Art History in the field of media. The resort to reproduction, as a tool for art historians and a visual resource for the artists, introduces new issues about methodology in Art History.

This article is focused on the issue of geo-cultural identity in the group of Transavanguardia. Examining its Tuscan members and their participation at the Biennale di Venezia, this study trying to reframe the theory of "Genius loci" promoted by their mentor, Achille Bonito Oliva, into the wide context of global art at the beginning of the 1980s

Up to now historical studies have thoroughly not investigated the cultural background and the early professional biography of the five painters Achille Bonito Oliva has includeded in the Transavant-garde (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola  de Maria and Mimmo Paladino) yet. The main obstacles to these studies go back to the birth of Transavant-garde. From one side, the documents concerning the past of the artists -those that would not justify the belated rehabilitation of the "traditional media"- were suddenly not taken into account; and, from the other side, it emerged a clear and schematic contrast between the Transavant-garde and the preceding experience of the Arte Povera and Conceptual Art through which the militant criticism interpreted this shift.
The essay focuses on the story of the two transavant-gardists, Paladino and de Maria, with the aim of reconstructing how they join from the end of the sixties up to 1977, the "Environment-Painting" (a form of expanded and wall painting, here cosidered as a preliminary step to the Transavant-garde). The historical investigation has taken up again this corpus of documents intentionally ignored, and it has focused on the experimental beginnings of the two artists -beginnings related to the envirnoment, the performance, and particularly the photograph.
Therefore, the essay tries to give a more complex interpretation of this corpus by comparing with the contrast suggested by the militant criticism and by founding out the continuity elements of painting, or the pictorial iconography, already present in the Italian neo-avant-garde (Arte Povera, Conceptual, etc...).

The first Italian abstract sculptor Fausto Melotti was late rediscovered, at the end of the Sixties, in order to reconsider the Italian Art of the Thirties not only in propagandist or provincial terms. The essay aims at underderstanding how this historical re-evalution and Melotti's self-perception as a sculptor could cohabit in the artistic milieu of 1971.

Paradoxa is an exhibition which does not seek to present an exhaustive survey of the current developments in Chinese art. Rather, it takes a cross section, makes an incursion and offers an opening to let us take a sample of it. The three artists invited to Paradoxa, Xie Nanxing (1970), Chen Wei (1980) and Cheng Ran (1981), are all part of the generation
that was born after the Cultural Revolution, of which they might just
have some childhood memories. They grew up at a time of reforms, and
came of age when their country had already become a global power. This generation experienced (no-longer clandestine) contact with other cultures as an opportunity. It witnessed, with some apprehension, the deep-reaching social changes of recent years, and saw the private sector gradually overcoming the public sector in the arts, at times with astonishing results in the markets.

Focused on the notions of paradox and contradiction, every edition of Paradoxa explores a different national context of the Far East Contemporary Art (Japan 2016, China 2017, South Korea 2018). This edition deals with the controversial and political identity of the whole Korea. In a moment in which this nation is at the core of the geo-political stability of the Pacific Area, Korea seems to become again the phantom of the deep ideological conflicts of the XXth Century. As a tragic consequence of this Western projection, Korea bears the scars and the shape of the Cold War, of the counterposition between an open-to-Westenization world and its antagonists. Calling into question this simplification, Korean artists (Yee Sookyung, Park Chang-kyong, Kyungah Ham) try to open the issue of their "trans-korean" identity on different political basis, aiming at involving other possible cultural background and alternative representations.