Johan & Levi

Desmond Morris draws on the legacy of the medieval bestiary – in which descriptions of animals were accompanied by their allegorical, moral or religious significance – and leads us into the realm of the surreal. Combining the expert eye of a scientist with the sensitivity of a painter, he delves into a mysterious realm populated by creatures that crawl, fly and hybridise: these are the eccentric reinterpretations of visionary artists such as René Magritte, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning or Remedios Varo, who, in portraying them, exorcised their own demons, created parallel worlds, evoked personal memories or conjured the spectre of war. After revealing the symbolism and anecdotes behind some of the most extravagant works of modern art, he allows them to shine in all their enigmatic splendour.More than a mere parade of the bizarre – from Leonora Carrington’s hyena to Salvador Dalí’s elephants, from Max Ernst’s birds to Leonor Fini’s cats – Bestiario surrealista is a lively and witty celebration of one of the most revolutionary movements of the 20th century. A must-read for lovers of Surrealism, zoology and natural history.

In our age, marked by growing anxiety over a world that is disappearing and by the sense of living in a state of permanent crisis, ecology represents a frontier of possibility, drawing on intelligence, attentiveness, care and creativity. The term, initially technical and academic, has now become ‘branched out’, coming to encompass movements of resistance and regeneration.Filipa Ramos, tracing the history of the divide between humanity and the environment, tells us of artists who have centred their work on ecological issues, offering transformative proposals. Before them, in the 1960s, a number of pioneers – Joseph Beuys, Nancy Holt, Ana Mendieta, Joan Jonas – used various artistic languages to raise public awareness, anticipating the most recent generations.In these pages we read of attempts to interact with seal pups, of spiders displayed in a museum as masterpieces, of the revival of pastoral traditions and of river journeys to rediscover forgotten sounds. We learn to respect the enigmatic nature of certain peoples, that right to privacy all too often violated by the colonial gaze. And above all, we learn to move beyond our outrage at the state to which we have reduced our planet and to start afresh with those – such as Britta Marakatt-Labba, Tomás Saraceno, Eduardo Navarro, Pierre Huyghe or Tabita Rezaire – who are at the forefront of the fight against the devastation of the Earth.

What is “emotional geography”? Giuliana Bruno answers this question in her Atlante delle emozioni (Atlas of Emotion): an expert and compelling foray into fields ranging from geography to art, architecture, design, fashion, cartography and cinema, on which she explores a varied and fascinating landscape in a unique attempt to condense the cultural history of visual-spatial arts in a single map. Seeing and travelling are inseparable, the author argues, demonstrating this through an evocative montage of words and images that turn the voyeur into a voyager, also revealing that not only sight and site, but also motion and emotion, are invariably connected. Bruno opens up the world of emotional imagery through artistic movements, historical trajectories  and cultural memories. In doing so she talks about artists such as Gerhard Richter, Annette Messager, Rachel Whiteread and Louise Bourgeois; architects like Daniel Libeskind and Jean Nouvel, and the work of numerous filmmakers including Peter Greenaway and Roberto Rossellini, Chantal Akerman and Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier Paolo Pasolini, Wim Wenders and Wong Kar-wai. She also discusses the architecture of cinema and its precursors – the cabinet of curiosities, wax museum, anatomical theatre, magic lantern, georama and panorama – garden design, the veduta, the arts of memory and mapping… and, last but not least, her own travels to Italy, the country of her birth. The fascinating and daring visual journey on which Giuliana Bruno is our guide, offers novel views and interpretations at every turn. Atlante delle emozioni is an affective map that puts us in touch with the mental landscapes and inner worlds of what the author calls “emotional geography”, a highly-significant interpretive category taken up by scholars the world over.

Can Machines Make Art? The giant leaps of generative artificial intelligence confront us with a dilemma. If in the mid-twentieth century a brilliant scientist, Alan Turing, could imagine a machine capable of thinking like a human being, today ChatGPT and other programs do much more: they write texts, compose music, and create images that are now difficult to distinguish from the products of flesh-and-blood artists. Can systems like DALL-E, Midjourney, or Stable Diffusion truly replace humans in one of their most emblematic and elusive activities? Can art exist without an artist?To answer these questions—and many other queries on a topic of great relevance—Luigi Bonfante guides us through the discovery of the machina artifex: its mechanisms, potential, contradictions, and the theories shaping its evolution and its forays into the artistic realm. Starting from a concept of art as a process that necessarily involves human beings, the author takes a close look at AI creativity, highlighting affinities and divergences between the human and the non-human, as well as the possible dialogue between these two dimensions. Particular attention is given to those who, like Pierre Huyghe, have embraced the challenges of this new medium to outline a new "posthuman" aesthetic.Arte senza artista is a reflection spanning history, technology, and philosophy—an essay in which art, observed through the prism of artificial intelligence, still emerges in all its complex humanity. Getting to know the machine better thus becomes a way to understand our own expressiveness, and therefore ourselves.

A large Etruscan-period terracotta jar, 14,838 bronze objects, including finished items and tools (axes, fibulae, knives, sickles, razors) as well as unfinished objects, production waste and raw ingots of copper and other metals.This hoard of foundry materials, discovered in 1878 near the Basilica of San Francesco in Bologna, is an exceptional testament to the city’s metallurgical activity and industrial importance during the Villanovan period, between the late 8th and early 7th centuries BC. The discovery of this ‘storage room’ is attributed to Antonio Zannoni, an eclectic figure in late 19th-century Bologna who coordinated numerous excavations both within and outside the city’s urban fabric and applied himself to documenting archaeological activity with scientific rigour: excavation surveys, cataloguing of finds, maps, photographs and meticulously detailed reports have made his documents invaluable sources. Enriched by a foreword by Laura Bentini and extracts from the excavation notebooks, this volume republishes and recontextualises the text and the 56 photographic plates with which Zannoni meticulously documented the excavation and the finds of the so-called “Bologna Foundry”.

Linda Nochlin explores the theme of the fragment as a metaphor for modernity, tracing a long historical and visual trajectory that begins with Füssli’s emblematic drawing, in which the artist is depicted as a small, terrified figure beside an enormous ancient foot – a symbol of the modern condition as the irreparable loss of a past wholeness.With the French Revolution, the fragment takes on a positive value: the mutilation of bodies and the toppling of royal statues express the destruction of the Ancien Régime and the foundation of a new order. In the nineteenth century, the dismembered body becomes an image of trauma and history, and Géricault mocks it by painting severed heads and limbs, always poised between scientific dissection and romantic melodrama. At the same time, the Impressionists and Manet depicted cities and bodies with fragmented compositions: the fragment entered the very structure of the image. Cézanne and Van Gogh worked with sculptural fragments that evoked tensions between tradition and modernity, eros and sacrifice, art and life, culminating in the extreme act of self-mutilation. In the twentieth century and beyond, from the Surrealists (Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer) to Louise Bourgeois, Cindy Sherman, Robert Mapplethorpe and others, the fragment destabilises the subject’s identity, gender and integrity.For the author, the fragment should be conceived as a constellation of specific cases and differences within a plural and ever-changing modernity, in which the loss of unity and the search for new totalities coexist in tension.

Whilst Pop Art may not be a movement characterised by manifestos and group demonstrations, it is at the very least a relatively cohesive trend, a set of practices that utilise images, objects and the languages of mass culture (advertising, comics, packaging, the star system, design) to showcase, celebrate, critique or play with them. This spirit was driven by a desire to experience the contemporary world with a positive rather than a negative attitude, in a climate of exuberant optimism.In this critical overview of Pop Art, written in real time before the movement was canonised, Lucy R. Lippard dissects the phenomenon – which first emerged in England and then independently in America – and its international legacy. She examines both its iconic figures – the spiritual fathers, the precursors and the five ‘diehards’ – and lesser-known names, as well as the artists who preceded them: the Abstract Expressionists.By capturing the energy, contradictions and social context without the retrospective lens of later textbooks, Lippard offers one of the first systematic analyses of how mass visual culture comes to constitute the very language of contemporary art.

This volume brings together the principal writings of the sculptor Francesco Somaini (1926–2005), who devoted one of his most fruitful creative periods to the theme of the city. A pioneer of urban art in Italy and Europe, Somaini pursued his artistic exploration by moving beyond previous artistic traditions, influenced above all by American architecture from the 1960s and 1970s onwards, following his solo exhibition in New York and his monumental sculpture projects in Atlanta, Baltimore and Rochester.His experience abroad took place during a crucial period, characterised by a strong social and political commitment to the reality of metropolitan life. His editions of classics in sociology and urban planning are crammed with marginal notes; his theoretical treatises, veritable manifestos, openly criticise modernity and the sterile symbolism of the International Style, with its megastructural utopias and the devastation of the man-made landscape driven by industrialisation. Somaini hopes, not without a certain urgency, that sculpture will finally take the decisive step and become a form of social critique, with the aim of re-sacralising public spaces.He thus conveys his project ideas through statements of artistic intent, lectures and conferences, but also through drawings of great imaginative power and photomontages, his medium of choice for his proposals for urban design interventions. Through a careful selection of unpublished texts, notes and sketches, Fulvio Irace offers a synthesis and contextualisation of the Lombard master’s original career and his contribution to the international debate on the future of cities.

Versatile and tireless, over the course of a career spanning more than sixty years, Gio Ponti (1891–1979) redefined the spirit of Italian design, working across all fields of the applied arts: from residential architecture to interior design, from ceramics to glass, to furniture and beyond. His boundless creativity allowed him to explore and reinterpret the most diverse styles of the 20th century, from the Novecento movement to Rationalism, always in search of beauty in all its forms. As founder and editor of Domus magazine, he absorbed and disseminated international ideas and established the canons of the ‘Italian home’ – a space where all the arts meet and coexist in harmony – helping to export the ‘Made in Italy’ brand. Today, Ponti is celebrated not only for masterpieces such as the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan, Villa Planchard in Caracas and the Hotel Parco dei Principi in Sorrento – emblems of modernity – but also for iconic furniture that continues to be reissued and to inspire new generations of designers around the world.

Le Corbusier (1887–1956), born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, devoted his life to designing buildings that have become symbols of the Modern Movement. From the Villa Savoye in Poissy, through the utopian Cité radieuse in Marseille, to the design of the city of Chandigarh in India, his works have made him one of the most important figures in 20th-century architecture. A tireless theorist, when he could not realise his ideas, he expressed them through books, conferences and lectures around the world. The ‘five points of modern architecture’ and the idea of the house as a ‘machine for living’ have left an indelible mark on the discipline. A visionary and, at times, a provocateur, he owed many of his insights to the hours spent painting and drawing, leaving us a rich artistic output which, even today, awaits proper recognition.

In 1872, a man photographed a horse. It may seem a trivial act, but it marked the beginning of a revolution destined to change our perception of time and space. The man behind it was a figure as ambitious as he was enigmatic: Eadweard Muybridge, a brilliant landscape photographer and tireless experimenter who sought to ‘split the second’ – that is, to open a breach in time to reveal what the eye cannot isolate: movement.Photography, after all, was born and developed in step with a world that lives, travels and communicates at an accelerated pace, an expanding world made smaller by the telegraph and the railway. And it is no coincidence that the man funding those studies on movement was none other than Leland Stanford, owner of Occident – the champion trotter immortalised in Muybridge’s chronophotographs – and magnate of the Central Pacific Railroad. Not just any patron, but the very embodiment of the tensions between capital, private interests and progress that animated late-nineteenth-century America, and in particular California, the land of dreams reaching towards the future.Un fiume di ombre is not merely the story of a life; it is the account of a technological and cultural gamble. The breathtaking landscapes of Yosemite Valley and the views of San Francisco, created by ‘flaying the city’ and flattening it like an animal’s hide, are not mere backdrops; they are stages on a journey leading to the snapshot and – shortly thereafter – to cinema and the media industries. Rebecca Solnit paints a panorama which, like the grand urban vistas for which Muybridge was famous, weaves together different times and perspectives into a single vision, with a gaze that, starting with a horse, traces the gold rush, delves into the fractured world of Native Americans and reaches as far as Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

How do we look at art today? In a very different way from just a few decades ago. We alternate between moments of total immersion in the works and others in which, smartphone in hand, we take photos and videos, scan QR codes or share on social media. The 21st-century viewer’s experience is a hybrid one, a constant oscillation between physical presence in the exhibition space and remote connection to a technological elsewhere.To describe this, Claire Bishop analyses four different practices of contemporary art, whose structures and expressive strategies respond to new modes of perception and attention characteristic of digital culture: ‘research-based art’, with its overload of information to be sifted through, typical of web browsing; exhibition-performances, designed to be viewed live but also captured on a mobile phone; ‘interventions’, a category historicised and theorised here for the first time, for which the public dimension, online circulation and the resulting virality are indispensable; finally, the fascination of many artists with modernist iconography, whose déjà-vu effect once again points to digital media and their endless collection of decontextualised images.At the heart of every discussion lies what Bishop calls ‘disordered attention’, a form of spectatorship based on complex dynamics between the subject, time and technology, as well as on the questioning of thought patterns, dominant narratives and exclusive rules. Without the obligation of depth or absolute concentration, dictated by modernist norms such as the white cube and their corresponding social models, the artwork of the new millennium lends itself to a freer and authentically collective experience.