Johan & Levi: il punto

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 book reconstructs the life and artistic career of the photographer Ghitta Carell (1899-1972). A Hungarian Jew, in 1924 she moved to Italy, where she rapidly became one of the country’s most famous portrait photographers. Exhibiting great determination, Carell entered into contact with Italy’s aristocracy and leading intellectual and political circles. She photographed Maria Jose of Savoy and the Royal Family, and the twentieth century art critic and theorist Margherita Sarfatti. Hers were some of the most famous shots of Benito Mussolini, photographs which made her famous and which remain some of the best known images of Il Duce to this day. In 1938 she experienced the nightmare of anti-Semitism and the war, while the post-war period saw her enter a gradual decline. The story of her life and artistic career possesses a much broader reach than classic accounts of the modern period. While often dismissed as the “photographer of power”, or “of the heart”, Carell’s photography is altogether more refined and complex. Her polished work forges a captivating dialogue that melds the tensions and contrasts between avant-garde tendencies and tradition that animated artistic debate in the Fascist period. Her virtuoso figurative oeuvre is infused with distant, at times contrasting echoes, with shades of Renaissance and Baroque portraiture meeting the nascent aesthetic of Hollywood glamour. Her work awaits the critical acknowledgement that the consummate prowess of her art indubitably merits.

This short essay explores the characteristic use of photographic images in Surrealism between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. In particular the Surrealists chose functional images with a documentary or informative purpose, decontextualising them in their art in order to raise questions and unsettle the viewer. The use of these images became a Surrealist gesture in its own right, stimulating the imagination and creating a form of poetry that generates surprise, or the ecstasy so beloved by the Surrealists. This subverts the meaning of the images, lending them added power and connotations that are both artistic and non-artistic.

What is an image and why have images become so important in our daily lives? And what does the gaze mean? Federico Ferrari reflects on our society of images and the cadenced relationship between words and pictures, a relationship that forges our horizon. He focuses on the use made of images and the world they create, and how the gaze refracts: a single vision of the world, a single measure is impossible. The contemporary image calls for a new definition of the gaze, which springs from the unique nature of each vision and is also capable of embracing its plurality. As the number of possible visions is by definition infinite, what really counts is what underpins them and is therefore common to them all. To borrow the terms of set theory, it is an empty set that appears null but also contains something: our gaze. The force that precedes us and is remains open, capable of going beyond all possible visions, all given images. The empty set of the gaze and the power of vision.

Starting with the emblems bequeathed by Duchamp to the second half of the 20th century, the machine and the star, this volume presents three mini-essays on the theme of inspiration and its intermittencies. Beginning with the works of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Alighiero Boetti, Michele Dantini sheds new light on the metaphor of the artist as ‘machine’, on the disappearance of the creative process as an orderly professional routine that had traditionally characterised the transposition of the ‘idea’ into image. A turning point that is in some ways liberating, but also harbinger of alarming implications, experienced in all their urgency by the ‘informal’ generation: how to protect oneself from the discontinuity of ‘inspiration’, how to confer duration to inner time, if everything is resolved in the unrepeatable exceptionality of the moment? Dantini analyses step by step the 'reinvention' of the artist's craft: the curious adoption of readymades to restore plausibility and vigour to traditional techniques, the indefinite dilation of execution times; the practice of the art of repetition and the creation of satisfying routines thanks to 'automatic', impersonal and even delegable procedures. It is up to the 'miserable spectator' and his acuity to grasp in the works a continuity in transition, to reconstruct the underlying metaphors and 'interpret a routine suddenly revealed to be devoid of recognisable techniques and references'.

Born in the late 1960s, virtual reality is today at the centre of renewed interest thanks to the spread of portable and inexpensive visors that have made it a leading medium in the fields of entertainment, culture, architecture and urban planning, and medicine, but also a tool available to artists.So much so that in recent years the opportunities for the production and exhibition of artistic experiences in VR have multiplied exponentially, together with the awareness of the entire art system around this type of work.In a clear and accessible language, Elisabetta Modena's essay takes stock of the historical stages of the use of this technology in the artistic sphere and the theoretical issues connected to it, starting with the need for a new critical vocabulary and new grammar of design, exhibition and conservation.

Augmented reality populates the everyday context with digital and interactive objects, allowing concrete transformations on the environment by means of an intelligent and responsive image. From a mere object of contemplation, the image thus becomes a body, synthetic yet sensitive, capable of involving, sometimes of enchanting and frightening, the interlocutor. It is on this type of entity, ghostly yet real, that Sofia Pirandello's essay focuses, analysing the possibilities that this technology opens up for artistic practice.Beyond the easy observation that every invention entails astonishing achievements and great sacrifices, it is nevertheless impossible to ignore the criticalities that augmented reality brings with it, starting with the acquisition of an enormous amount of data on users, their preferences and movements, which opens up a whole series of questions in terms of social justice, privacy and security due to the use of this technology, even in the artistic sphere.

After the book Camera straniera, devoted to Giacometti, Marco Belpoliti sets out to explore the life and works of another great artist, Francisco Goya. Analysing a series of drawings, portraits and self portraits, the author retraces Goya’s life and artistic career and unveils clues about his “secret”: the progressive hearing loss that began in the artist’s 30s and ended up completely cutting him off from the outside world around 1792, halfway through his life. This disability greatly influenced his art, and the fantasy elements and chimera that inhabit his works are an eloquent expression of the anguish and despair of his isolation.

One of the leading artists of the twentieth century, Alberto Giacometti’s works now fetch a premium at international auctions. His oeuvre addresses multiple themes and spans almost all forms of visual art (drawing, painting and sculpture). In this variegated panorama Marco Belpoliti focuses on a common, very powerful theme in the artist’s work: space. From the circumscribed space inside rooms to that surrounding the artist’s sculptures, especially the large scale creations designed for public areas, Belpoliti is our guide to writings and artworks, declarations and interpretations, family relationships and friendships, exploring not only physical space but also the great artist’s emotional space.

Following the logic of arriving at a definition through pairs of opposites (light/heavy, playful/serious), in this book Massimo Minini analyses and compares two artists who have come to symbolise German art at the turn of the millennium: Anselm Kiefer and Hans-Peter Feldmann. On one side we have Kiefer, the impeccable heir of an art firmly rooted in Expressionism, manifesting sentiments and moods that, under the influence of Jung and Freud, Wagner and Goethe, Hans Baldung and Lukas Cranach, are necessarily profound, weighty and solemn. Kiefer arouses dormant spectres and opts for grandeur in his formats, materials and subject matter (barbed wire, cheval de frise, and sweeping, matter-heavy vistas of ploughed fields). In his world everything is about heaviness, gravity and will. On the other side there is Feldmann, who takes a somewhat lighter view: art is of course a serious matter, but there is no need to overdo it. This curious, ironic and at times bizarre German gentleman was one of the early conceptual artists, but lacked the solemnity of his colleagues, so much so that few took him seriously at the time. So few, indeed, that by the early 1980s his lack of success led to him leaving art altogether, and devoting himself to other things for around a decade. It was Kaspar Konig’s offer of an exhibition in Frankfurt that set his career in motion once more, leading to his present day success and acclaim. The encounter/clash between these two emblems of opposite rationales offers a complex image of a nation’s visual culture.

Artist, photographer and writer, Claude Cahun lived in France in the first half of the twentieth century. Her artistic and political works revolve mainly around the issues of homosexuality and her Jewish origins in a highly anti-Semitic society. This book is the first to examine the iconoclastic urges of Claude Cahun, the compulsion to subvert and destroy the cultural and social references that underpin all of her literary and photographic works. The author starts by looking at the artist’s Jewish, intellectual upper class roots and how she turned her back on her family to develop her artistic identity. We then see how she sets about constructing this new identity, which revolved around her homosexual relationship with Suzanne Malherbe (a.k.a. Marcel Moore), focusing on the portraits/self portraits taken by Malherbe in which Cahun repeatedly uses costume and cross-dressing to obliterate and reinvent herself. This work on self-image and identity is particularly significant in an artist of Jewish origins, whose cultural frame of reference is essentially aniconic and non-figurative.