Italy Arts Part 1

A look at the artistic activity in Italy in the mid-seventies returns a broad panorama: alongside significant researches of individual personalities, with poetics that are not schematically classifiable but in any case based on the critical awareness of their own formal status and on a very precise identity of the raison d’etre of art as an autonomous reality and a discipline that has its own value in itself, an analytical pictorial line is revealed that reflects with rational and empirical methodicality on the perceptual process and on the technique of one’s own doing (as a means that objectifies knowledge and as a significant practice in the organizational verification of its primary components: surface-support, color, sign) and an area of ​​peremptory minimalist presentations.

In the overall picture, the orientation towards cold analyticity, the asepticity of the conceptual sentence, the dematerialization of the work or its assimilation to the natural physicality of poor materials, to a dimension, in general, more mental than visual, or rather to a visual dimension that is intellectualistically alluded to rather than constructed ” canonically ” and manually: desecrations, provocations and heterogeneous reasons, political, social, cultural, widely vulgarized, depriving art of its own individual entity, beyond the conception of the artist faberand expressive, owner of an organized technique. In the decline of the decade, however, the need for a rethinking of the specificity of the tools and languages ​​of the codified categories of painting and sculpture is highlighted, accompanied by a more direct communicative efficacy in the figurative sense. Unconditional was, in fact, the trespassing of the territory and of the modalities of art in order to cancel or make the very notion of art all-encompassing: the “ un-definition ” of art had in fact been expanded into the most diverse directions of the project, ready-made object(extrapolated from its context and invested with new intentions in a sort of normalization à la Duchamp), of the concept, writing and action in the most unusual fields of the so-called often multimedia aesthetic research, open to the most advanced technologies and an engaging spectacle of event. Thus, sometimes even within this situation, aspirations emerge to rediscover the original connotations and values ​​of art, drawing from different sources and with different reasons, within the sphere of tradition. This reconsideration of the specific historical-artistic data is a fact repeatedly indicated as a primary necessity, but with arguments and purposes of a very different nature, for example. by C. Brandi and GC Argan and, in other respects, diagnosed by M. Calvesi as “return to order”, as a possible reaction to the sterile ” mental ” avalanche, to its consumerist reworking and to the mass fortune of the neo-avant-gardes which sanctions its exhaustion. The tendency to destabilize conceptualism (be it linguistic-tautological, numerical-cerebral, ideal-noetic or behavioral) uses, with insistence and with different variants, the “ quotation ” of the “ historical image ”, in a folding certainly not dramatic in the past, and summarizes manual practice by exercising it on a material to be given shape, as an irreplaceable means of the work being there for a reconstituting unity between work of art and artistic operation in the expectation or presumption of an art superior.

In a process certainly not new and also present in the next experiences of the Sixties, especially of pop declination through the citation-infraction, the ” media ” translation, sometimes ” contaminated ” by manual interventions, of iconographic stereotypes also assumed by the “ high ” art culture with widespread prensility – prensility of which C. Pozzati (b.1935) is a clear example, an attraction to repeat history, an attraction already felt, is affirming, with even divergent methods and intentions moreover, in the same conceptual-behavioral context, almost yearning for a concrete soul, imbued with symbolic images. This attraction is expressed, for example, by G. Paolini (b.1940) with various implications, by J. Kounellis (b.Tableaux vivants and with blow-ups, or from Salvo (S. Mangione, n.1947) with effractive copies ” homages ” to the masters with ” ancient ” techniques and with replacement interventions, and by L. Fabro (n. 1936) with the recovery of materials of opulent artisan tradition. All of these artists, with the exception of V. Pisani, found themselves involved in the theme of a 1974 exhibition in Milan, La repetition different, curated by R. Barilli. The exhibition, alongside foreign artists such as A. and P. Poirier (born 1942), E. Arroyo (b.1937), J. Baldessari (b.1931), included, among other things, multiple citations by V. Adami (b.1935), by E. Tadini (b.1927), and the puzzles kitschby E. Baj (b. 1924) and U. Nespolo (b. 1941), to document three levels of “different repetition”: iconic, conceptual and behavioral.

According to Themeparktour, this ” presence of the past ” is a symptom of the search for a gratification connected no longer only to the possible validity of a conceptual choice but to the desired emotional ” enjoyment ” of the artefact: it is articulated on the centrality of doing in which opposing and casual polarities coexist, free re-propositions or evocations or parodies of museum ” icons ” or popular-folkloric images with sophisticated or primitive stylization cadences and with signs of ” bad painting ”. This situation is presented not as a repudiation of the “68 characters” but as an “internal reorganization” for a “qualitative change, after a program developed mainly in its quantitative aspects” at the review Ten years later. The New-New, curated by R. Barilli, F. Alinovi and R. Daolio at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Bologna in 1980.