Johan & Levi: il punto

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.

This short text by a key contemporary Spanish-American fiction author focuses on two of his chosen themes: the creative process and the relationship between visual art and literature. César Aira addresses them from the perspective of the writer who seeks inspiration, stimuli and methods in art. He has become quite conversant with the intrinsic mechanisms of contemporary art, after seeing a reproduction of Duchamp’s Large Glass in 1967, which cast a spell on him that has never been broken. Aira has always found the unorthodox in contemporary art to be an inexhaustible source of visions. An outsider to the art world, his perspective is fresh and original, as when he applauds the potential of distance between work and viewer or speaks of the stubbornness with which contemporary artists refuse to have their works photographed. Ultimately, he concludes that, with respect to past eras, a work of art today is more relevant when there is less possibility of its being reproduced photographically.    With an afterword by Francesco Bonami

Charles Baudelaire, considered the father of modern poetry, also wrote some of the most influential and daring prose pieces of the 19th century. A frequent presence at the Paris salons, he made a point of expressing his theories on modern art and artistic philosophy through incisive, unflinching criticism.This brief essay revolves around the principles of Romanticism, as Baudelaire takes the reader through a methodical analysis of Delacroix and Ingres, revealing his conviction that the pursuit of ideals is a key ingredient of artistic expression. His perspective is of great help in understanding art criticism in 19th-century France, plus changing opinions on the essence of Romanticism and the artist as a creative genius.The preface by Adolfo Tura offers a new perspective on this fundamental text, highlighting its importance for today’s public.

In September of 1988, a young Nathalie Heinich went to see Harald Szeemann in his studio in Monte Verità. She interviewed him, seeking confirmation of her feeling that the figure of the curator increasingly resembled that of the artist. And who better to tell her than Harald Szeemann, whose thirty years of curating exhibitions brought forth an approach all his own?Once the youngest-ever Director of the Kunsthalle Bern, Szeemann was also the General Secretary of documenta 5 in Kassel (1972), but he attained mythical status with the ground-breaking “When Attitudes Become Form”, a cathartic 1969 exhibition that broke with the past, in search of a new aesthetic. Among curators-creators, Szeemann is a “case apart”, thanks to an inimitable style that, found far from the beaten path, always heeded his own instincts, shifting the focus from the official value of a given work to an almost sentimental relationship with the artist and the materials on exhibit. A curator-creator must rely on his or her sixth sense, on private obsessions, focussing not on career advancement but on subjects that they, and they alone, can address.In defending his or her uniquely personal outlook, the curator moulds the contents of each exhibition, as well as the logical link between one exhibition and another, establishing a magnum opus which increasingly resembles one large, personal work driven by an intimate necessity, fuelled by the scenarios of a biographical arc, and not simply by chance or the dictates of an institutional program.

After serving as the Kunsthalle Bern’s youngest-ever director, and as the general secretary of documenta 5 (Kassel, 1972), Harald Szeemann severed his ties with the institutional world, taking a radically different approach to the form and content of exhibitions by expanding their focus to include not just the modern art on display, but also private and historical considerations conveyed through the very layout of the exhibition itself.This brief essay, based on historic documentation, interviews and previously unpublished notes found in the Szeemann archives in Lucerne, analyses a series of exhibits conceived of by the Swiss curator in the seventies, but never actually held, and in particular that entitled “La Mamma”.Part of a trilogy (“Le macchine celibi”, “La Mamma” and “Il Sole”), the project drew on a variety of disciplines, including history, religion, the visual arts, theosophy and feminism, as well as literature, psychoanalysis and anthropology, all for the sake of creating an exhibit with no art, but rather devoted to the study of women, to the evolution of the maternal figure and to the general idea of a female divinity.

Ando Gilardi is hailed as the most irreverent photographer and academic to come out of Italy in the last century. In this brief essay in the form of a dialogue, Gilardi, author of cult books on photography and a truly eclectic figure, makes a mischievous and amusing foray into the concept of stupidity in the photographic realm, starting out from the fabled laws on this very subject formulated by the economist Carlo M. Cipolla.The text is accompanied by around 30 images of nineteenth century photography on the theme of stupidity taken from the immense photographic archive - Fototeca Storica Nazionale – founded by Gilardi himself.