Johan & Levi: Saggi d’arte

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.

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.

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.

‘It is not a profession but an attitude,’ said László Moholy-Nagy, who in the early 20th century fought to free design from the stranglehold of commerce in which it had been trapped since the Industrial Revolution, restoring to it the task of building a better world. In all its many forms, design has always played an important role as an agent of change, acting as an interpreter of social, political, economic, scientific, cultural and ecological issues to ensure a positive impact on our lives.Alice Rawsthorn, one of the most influential voices in this field, explains how new generations of designers are responding to global challenges such as the climate emergency, rising inequality, humanitarian crises and gender discrimination, demonstrating the same ‘resourcefulness and creativity’ that Moholy-Nagy wrote about and carrying out ambitious social projects, using cutting-edge technologies to create new products or recover and put old ones back into circulation, in line with a constantly growing trend.With an eye on historical figures—the pioneers of a design approach attentive to the needs of the individual and society—the author traces the evolution and most recent developments of this discipline, also in relation to art and craftsmanship, from which it is separated by increasingly porous boundaries, and to sectors such as medicine or sociology, to which it now offers a valuable contribution. A priority for attitudinal designers is, in fact, to be more open to collaboration with a variety of specialists, with a view to building a diverse and inclusive community to present a united front against the many challenges of our time.

This volume offers the broadest Italian collection of writings by Clement Greenberg (1909–94), an essential author for anyone with an interest in the period full of formal revolutions that saw the quick succession of artistic avant-garde movements as from the late 19th century. One of the most influential and controversial figures in 20th-century American art criticism, Greenberg bore witness to the decline of the three-dimensional illusionism of easel painting and the gradual triumph of abstract art leading up to the goal of radical flatness, which he saw as the hallmark of modernism. One of the first to sense the shattering importance of the painting of Jackson Pollock and the American Abstract Expressionists, he subsequently endorsed the practitioners of Post-Painterly Abstraction, including Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. With a corpus of over three hundred essays, Greenberg’s militant criticism accompanied more than forty years of new American art and made a crucial contribution to New York’s replacement of Paris as the world capital of art. The texts are selected here in order to highlight the European cast of his critical thought. The influence of Kant and Trotsky as well as Italian thinkers like Croce and Lionello Venturi can be discerned in a critic capable of taking an exemplary approach to the development of modernism in the visual arts and asserting its values of objectivity. Alongside an acute socio-cultural analysis of the phenomenon of mass culture and its social consequences, Greenberg addressed longstanding topics such as beauty and quality and objective values in art, prompted by the urgent need to oppose the degradation of kitsch and academicism. An undisputed champion of American art and highly controversial figure, Greenberg still remains a primary interpreter of modernism. Over fifteen years after his death, his legacy of writings is an indispensable aid to orientation in the complex artistic panorama of the second half of the 20th century.

Lucid exponent of the American New Topographics current in the 1970s, and constantly engaged in deconstructing the politics of places and representations, since his debut Lewis Baltz has combined his visual art with thoughtful critical - and self-critical - writings. The reflections gathered in this book offer various perspectives on his forty year career and the transatlantic context it developed in, with pieces that accompany the early topographical pieces, narratives embedded in the text-image works of the late 1980s, and a substantial series of essays devoted to some of the most important photographers and artists of the twentieth century. In the latter, attention to the enigmatic materiality of the works is combined with a cool, disenchanted critique of their cultural, and also political worth. In this vein there are essays dedicated to Walker Evans, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Michael Schmidt, Allan Sekula, Thomas Ruff and Jeff Wall, which explore the potential and limits of modernist photography. The book also contains detailed appreciations of artists like Krzysztof Wodiczko, Félix González-Torres, Barry Le Va, Chris Burden, James Turrell and Robert Irwin, John McLaughlin and Alessandro Laita, contemporaries of Baltz's with whom he shared artistic and life experiences. The book also offers insights on more general issues, such as the landscape and cities "in the age of nothing special". While the gelid calm of Baltz's post-apocalyptic imagery helped purify the photograph of the last thirty years from the rhetorically opposing currents of social exposé and revelation, the harsh, even caustic tone of these writings continues to be relevant, challenging the presumed certainties upon which we base the institutions of art and photography.

If we know what we know about the extraordinary art revolution of the second half of the sixties, about Arte Povera, Conceptural Art, Process Art and Land Art; if we now see in Boetti, Pistoletto and Zorio some of the most important exponents of their generation; if we know what Lucio Fontana’s last comments were or we have read about recently discovered figures such as the ones by Agnetti, Baruchello, Dadamaino, Mulas and Griffa, it is also thanks to the news reports, the reviews, the essays, and the publishing and teaching work of Tommaso Trini (Sanremo, 1937).This anthology fills a gap that has long needed to be filled and contributes to drawing up a more accurate map of the panorama of Italian art criticism, leaving aside tired polarized ways of thinking. Through painstaking research and discussion carried out by Luca Cerizza in conversation with the author, the book brings together for the first time a selection of Trini’s art criticism: from pioneering texts dedicated to the future protagonists of Arte Povera, to the series of in-depth descriptions of other key figures in the post-war years, as well as newspaper reports and analyses – some of the earliest international ones – that define in real time the characteristics of the post-minimalist art movements that shook up the second half of the sixties. Trini is revealed here to be a keen-eyed witness and a perceptive interpreter of much of the best art in this half-century. This book gives art lovers (but also the general reader) sparkling well-paced criticism written with intelligence, where the “militant” stance never strays into sectarian or ideological positions.

Robert Lebel (1901–1986) was an outstanding poet and novelist, a refined art critic, an expert on antique painting, and an eccentric collector. Today he is remembered primarily for his celebrated monograph on Marcel Duchamp that came out in 1959, after ten years of intense dialogue with the artist across the Atlantic. However, if we were simply to describe him as a Duchamp scholar, we would risk overlooking the many facets of this important witness to the culture of his time. This first collection of writings on Surrealism, composed by Lebel between 1943 and 1984, aims to rectify a partial view of his career by illustrating the complexity and depth of his ties with the movement founded by André Breton. The selection of theoretical texts, monographic essays and critical notes is accompanied by photographs, most of which have never been published. The writings fully conveys the protean nature of an intellectual who dons, in turn, the guise of the reluctant adept, the stubborn viewer and the impartial commentator on Surrealist adventures, in order to render the vicissitudes and controversial relations of its protagonists, starting from the time of his American exile. Lebel is like a loose cannon, but still able – thanks to his humour and irreverence – to maintain an independent viewpoint, due to a deep aversion to any form of militancy or collective action. But this detachment does not stop him from turning his “hyperlucid” gaze on an artistic universe filled with truly subversive characters  – from Roberto Matta to Isabelle Waldberg, Yves Tanguy and Jean-Pierre Duprey – attesting to its passions in a sumptuously classical and free style. In revealing both the brilliant and frightening aspects of a seminal movement of the 20th century, Lebel is not only motivated by a desire to show us the less familiar side of the  works by the artists,such as Lam, de Chirico or Ernst. He also seeks to respond, at every stage of his life, to a question put to him one day, which we now ask ourselves again: At what point are we with Surrealism?

In recent decades, there has been a proliferation of artists who, in shunning technical virtuosity, have produced works that challenge the very definition of painting. Enormous canvases overflowing with smudges and failed attempts bear witness to an intense struggle with the medium. Works of modest dimensions are further diminished by an uncertain hand and a sloppy style. Others still opt for self-sabotage, concealing their content behind torn canvases. Why on earth should painters sign paintings doomed to failure? Perhaps to free art from the yoke of the market and the expectations that have weighed upon painting for centuries.Artists such as Albert Oehlen, Mary Heilmann, David Hammons, Christopher Wool, Michael Krebber and Raoul De Keyser choose the path of impermanence, moving away not only from the idea of the ‘masterpiece’, but also from any semblance of completion. After all, Cézanne, with his tormented reinterpretations of Mont Sainte-Victoire, or Giacometti, with his unfinished portraits, already demonstrated a certain distrust of the finished work. The history of modern art is studded with acts of negation, of radical rejection: an attitude that finds resonance in Asian arts and philosophies, where the “unfinished” is perceived not as a flaw but as a quality to be appreciated and sought after.In the essays collected here – published from 2009 onwards – Raphael Rubinstein traces a genealogy of ‘provisional painting’ and explores an art capable of asserting its own transience as an authentic value.Afterword by Luca Bertolo

As he razes Carthage to the ground, Scipio Aemilianus recalls the words of Heraclitus: ‘A heap of rubble thrown together at random is the most beautiful order in the world.’ Scipio is convinced that every warrior is the architect of a new universal harmony. Yet, according to Albert Speer and Victor Hugo, not all ruins are created equal, and creating them well is an art. The former shapes buildings destined to produce beautiful ruins; the latter, a ‘martial arts critic’, is so struck by the sight of a gutted tower that he makes it the template for the new Romantic aesthetic. Ruins provide models for art, but the reverse also occurs, if it is true that the Allied bombs drew inspiration from the Ruins of the Old Kreuzkirche, painted by Bernardo Bellotto in 1765, to determine the face Dresden would have on the morning of 15 February 1945.Not even a promise of destruction can interrupt the spectacle of war. Thus, in the midst of an air raid, the manager of a German cinema clears away the rubble preventing the screening of a Nazi propaganda film. A few kilometres away, Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau has returned to its original state of debris scattered across the city streets, from where the artist had gathered it years earlier to elevate it to a work of art.What Jean-Yves Jouannais presents to us in these pages is an exclusive circle of heroes obsessed with sieges – that is, obsessed with sieges – who, without renouncing their commitment to the war effort, have amended its laws, feeling more inclined towards art. From antiquity to the present day, they inhabit spectral spaces, strewn with debris that the author describes with hallucinatory realism, so much so that the reader will feel as though they are touching the incandescent matter of the ruins of Berlin, Ebla, Halberstadt, Luoyping, Hamburg, Dura Europos or Stalingrad.

In the Futurist manifesto Antitradition, published in 1913, Apollinaire reserved 'mer...de aux critiques'. Just over a hundred years later that j'accuse has retained, intact, its scandalous force. Where is criticism today? Condemned to a slow euthanasia, it has become a residual genre: the figure of the critic has been replaced by that of the curator.And yet, at a time when works of art have become increasingly cryptic, this practice linked to the origins of modernity would play a decisive role. In order not to allow the esotericism and volatility of so many current art experiences to exclude us from pleasure. And to create a feeling of proximity to creations that are not infrequently repulsive. But, in order to still make sense, criticism can only go back to its original reasons. To remodel, through words, the painted signs. Reaffirm the centrality of the work. Telling how a painting came into being and what it represents; what its author's objectives were; how he formed himself; what techniques he used; what relations he had with the society in which he acted; what symbols he referred to. And again: teaching one to see better what is in evidence, but also what hides in the shadows. Finally, not to let oneself be seduced by the myth of the eternal beginning, to give oneself as a restless history of the present. And, at the same time, as a 'partial, passionate, political' exercise (in Baudelaire's words). Critics such as Roberto Longhi and Lionello Venturi, Giulio Carlo Argan and Francesco Arcangeli, Cesare Brandi and Filiberto Menna, Giuliano Briganti and Emilio Villa, Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva, Carla Lonzi and Lea Vergine, among others, have interpreted this philosophy with different and distant sensitivities and cultures. To the topicality of their lecture is dedicated Armi improprie. Which suggests an exciting journey through ideas, theories, books, articles, projects, exhibitions, corsair experiences. Thus drawing the outlines of a possible canon of 20th century Italian art criticism.

Misunderstanding is part and parcel of human relationships, and when those communicating are Erwin Panofsky, the foremost theorist of medieval and Renaissance iconology, and Barnett Newman, exponent and leading theorist of Abstract Expressionism, disaster is assured. Especially if no one is willing to come to terms.A controversy around the term 'sublime' gives the go-ahead for a much broader reflection on the state of aniconic art. In the United States in particular, it announced itself as completely alien not only to the figurative tradition and the categories of formal beauty and European-style classicism, but also to the abstract art of the Old Continent itself. The main objective of American abstractionism was to free itself from all proportions and the rigidity of form and geometry, without renouncing content, an aspect that critics and theorists such as Panofsky found difficult even to imagine.In this anthology of essays, edited by Pietro Conte, the positions of supporters and detractors of that current emerge, which set as its goal the constant search, the attempt to arouse terror mixed with pleasure, with the loss of all coordinates and fixed points, still expressing, but in a completely new way, the sublime.