Catalogue

Film festivals have played an important role in stimulating cultural growth in Italy since the inauguration of the Venetian prototype in 1932, offering the public an opportunity for contact with different and distant experiences. The proliferation of such events on national territory as from the 1980s has made them a key channel for development of the audiovisual market and the boosting of local economies, giving rise to marked competition between festivals and the strenuous pursuit of financing. In the present-day context of severely reduced public funding and a general cutback on private investment, the future of the film festival system is necessarily bound up with an understanding of the economic spinoffs involved and culture in general. How is such value to be measured? The study presented here develops a model, applicable also to other spheres, that highlights the ability of festivals to provide stimulus for the local economy by triggering virtuous processes of increased demand for goods and services in the areas involved. This in turn means a return on investment capable also of attracting private backers, whose decisions are inevitably linked to a return, directed or indirect but in any case evident and immediate. In order to complete the overview of the economic value of festivals, this time in more specific terms, attention is also focused on their technical role of the manifestations in the sector of film production and promotion, above all for independent films.

If it can be said that every era has its own approach to collecting, the contemporary period is marked by a reciprocal bond with artistic practice, to the point that the two activities often overlap or even merge. Examples abound: from Joseph Cornell, who hunted down oddities to put in his mysterious boxes, to Claes Oldenburg, who exhibited a collection of sentimental items as a work in its own right; from Marcel Broodthaers, who was inspired by collecting to become an artist, to Hans-Peter Feldmann who, channelling Malraux, has long been cutting out, classifying and sticking images to create an unusual museum. Collecting is no longer just the preserve of non-artists accumulating large quantities of objects, but has become a means of expression for artists who gather things to construct works of art, inspired by Warburg’s notion of assemblage. From another point of view, collectors are artists who express themselves using images charged with symbolism that become an extension of their personas. As soon as the eye alights on them, the objects gain extra properties: stripped of their original function and knowingly combined, they interact in an organic whole that resists defacement. And thus the collection rises to the status of work of art. Eclectic, transversal and highly personal, these collections are poles apart from the closed, predestined world of museum collections. It is to this private, creative dimension that Elio Grazioli refers in his exploration of collecting, from the Wunderkammer to the collage and the assemblage: collecting not to serve a purpose, but to pursue a passion; a collection that is not a showcase but a game for aficionados who appreciate the unexpected. And this form of collecting is a practice that has much to teach the institutions, with its greater freedom and stonger urges.

 “Even those who don’t know me know me, so make up what you like”: this is how Mario Schifano warded off the would-be biographers who besieged him. So effectively that one of the most prolific and popular Italian artists of the 20th century – who was also one of the most forged and most talked about – is, paradoxically, one of the least known. Through a multi-voiced narration by people who “experienced”, followed and bore with him, Luca Ronchi offers us one possible biography of Mario Schifano, with all the dark sides, surprises, weaknesses and intimate aspects of a personality who has become a legend. The setting for the journey through time on which Ronchi takes us could only be Rome, the “big cosmopolitan village” that during the war welcomed Schifano as a boy returning from the white beaches of Libya. In the early 1960s, Mario began painting the monochromes that would make him an icon of Italian 20th-century art on his terrace that functioned as an open-air studio at Piazza Scanderberg,  beneath the unforgettable skies of the Eternal City. He also decided to continue his pictorial adventure in Rome and to construct, in a spate of “lucid madness”, his “underground” universe in the name of diversification and “cross-fertilization”. He founded a pop-rock group; made avant-garde films; hung out with intellectuals and aristocrats; changed cars, outfits and TV sets every two seconds, and was arrested and “pilloried” for drug use. Just like “a small puma, whose musculature and ability to spring one would never suspect, and very refined in his movements and behaviour”, Schifano was a gadabout, always on the move. Possessing an innate charm and the “good looks of Rudolph Valentino”, he was also a Don Juan, seducing stars like Marianne Faithfull and Maria Schneider, and also the three most important women in his life: Anita Pallenberg, Nancy Ruspoli and Monica De Bei, who gave him a son. In the popular imagination Schifano will perhaps always perfectly embody the romantic conception of the artist as a wild-living genius. But behind the fame, now that he is no longer the talk of the town, there is a painter about whom we still know very little.  And one who, in his last days, liked to quote the words of Lucian Freud: “the man is nothing, the work is everything”.

Written in first person as anecdotes on his debut in the profession, the legendary art dealer’s memoirs conjure up the atmosphere of the now bygone world of Paris in the late 19th century, when the painters rejected by the Salon were gradually coming to the fore and the young Ambroise Vollard was taking his first steps. Having arrived in the capital to study law, he dropped out and began to haunt bookshops and markets, where he unearthed cheap prints and drawings that were to be his initial stock in trade. A ruthless businessman, he also had a priceless sense of which way the wind was blowing. He visited Manet’s widow and returned to home with an entire collection of the master’s drawings. He made friends with Renoir, Degas and above all Pissarro, who followed his advice. He looted the studios of Cézanne, Vlaminck, Derain and Picasso, and took a bold stance in the avant-garde market by exhibiting works by Van Gogh and Gauguin. His daring diversification, from painting to prints and books, also had an effect on the artists around him. Combining his longstanding passions for literature and graphic art, he became the publisher of deluxe art books illustrated by painters and exhibited together with paintings in the same shop on Rue Laffitte. The time was right for anyone with a gallery on the “street of paintings” and focal point for art dealers and collectors, where it was easy to run into artists like Matisse, Renoir, Degas, Redon, Apollinaire and Jarry. It was during unforgettable dinners often graced with such guests that Vollard used his keen ear to pick up every comment and capture the greatest artists of the age with extraordinary verve in vividly living dialogues and slices of life. While these are the true protagonists of his memoirs, those capable of reading between the lines will also form a precise image of Vollard himself, the picture dealer par excellence and unquestionably the most immortalized, as shown by the innumerable portraits executed by the painters of his entourage, some of which are reproduced in the book.  

There was once the easel painting with a solid frame and a complete perspective system in which a illusion of reality was embedded. Then the Impressionist landscapes appeared on the horizon and began to give instructions to viewers as to where they must stand, the right distance for observation and the attitude to be adopted. But this was not the end. The huge canvases of the Abstract Expressionists, fraught with vital tension, expanded still further laterally and came to break through the border. The frame, now reduced to a parenthesis, dissolved to liberate illusion and its function was transferred as though by magic to the exhibition space. The time was ripe for Marcel Duchamp to hang 1,200 coal sacks from the ceiling of Galerie Beaux-Arts in 1938 and stand the visitors on their heads. For the first time the exhibition space was treated as a box, a display window to manipulate. Duchamp’s gesture “dispatches the bull of history with a single thrust”. The years go by and, as in an echo chamber, it will appear more successful all the time. The white cube begins to devour the object. The context upstages the work exhibited and becomes a “chamber of transformation” that turns whatever enters it into art. The gallery can also remain empty, be filled with rubbish, remain closed for the entire period of the show, simulate a space of real life, be wrapped with tarpaulin and rope together with the entire museum building, host tableaux vivants or shocking happenings. The same scenes would probably not attract the slightest attention outside the white cube, but inside it even our everyday life – the café, the bedroom, the service station – becomes art, an experience that goes beyond looking. As though on board a spaceship, scrutinizing the Earth as it disappears on the horizon, Brian O’Doherty reconstructs a history of the art of the 20th century from the perspective of the evolution of the exhibition space, now to be regarded as the undisputed arena of discourse.

Like a virulent virus that spreads like wildfire, art collecting can lead those infected to authentic excesses like clearing out their homes to make room for works and spending entire fortunes through a longing for possession so strong as to become irresistible. What strikes the spark? A bent for financial speculation, pure intellectual delight or the desire to become someone by building up social prestige on the foundations of art. While there are many possible reasons and approaches, from militancy to passion, putting together a collection is in any case a pathway of self-knowledge and discovery. Il piacere dell’arte offers an overview of contemporary collecting in Italy, which has become an increasingly authoritative undertaking in recent times by virtue not only of the enterprise and initiative involved but also of the ever-greater planning that characterizes many collections. Starting from the fundamental historical background and an examination of the fertile terrain out of which outstanding figures like Giorgio Franchetti, Giuseppe Panza and Marcello Levi emerged and arriving at their contemporary counterparts, the book also seeks to identify the causes of the “lack of modernity” of Italian collecting, hampered by heritage restrictions and one of Europe’s highest rates of VAT. While these bureaucratic and fiscal impediments work on the one hand to obstruct dialogue with the institutions (unlike what happens across the Atlantic, where donations to museums are incentivized by tax relief), on the other they give rise to the strong development of private initiative and foster the opening of numerous foundations to the public. This is the most peculiar feature of the Italian panorama, a complex and multifaceted reality whose potential proves all the more interesting to examine by virtue of its social aspects and organic character.

Paris, 1 July 1867, the inauguration of the Universal Exposition. With the end of the American Civil War, the landscape painters, members of the first authentic American school, returned to Europe convinced that they deserved praise, prizes and medals. Rather than acclaim, however, it was bitter humiliation that awaited them. The French critics shattered their dreams of glory with cruel, sarcastic comments on the large canvases crammed with majestic waterfalls, age-old trees and boundless horizons, pouring scorn on the best that a nation eager to assert itself in the arts as in the economic field had to offer. The American exhibition, said the French, “is unworthy of the sons of Washington … young and crude, in the midst of our old cultures it gives the impression of a giant lost in a dancehall”. The unexpected humiliation led first of all to self-examination and criticism. Why was the land of Melville and Poe unable to produce painters with the expressive power of its greatest writers? What should the painters of a young nation do to earn the respect of the Old World? Was it possible to bridge the abyss between them and European art? For the time being there was no choice. They were forced to bow to the tastes of the French, the undisputed arbiters of world painting. In actual fact, the Parisian failure of 1867 became a stimulus that prompted the “sons of Washington” to transform the defeat suffered into a challenge. American painters set off for France in their hundreds and settled in Paris, where they attend the course of masters like Gérôme and Cabanel. They then founded new “colonies” of artists, like the legendary one at Pont-Aven in Brittany. The success of the greatest amongst them, including Whistler, Sargent and Cassatt, paved the way for a host of others. Backed at home by the colossal resources of philanthropists and patrons of the arts as well as extraordinary museums such as the MoMA in New York, they succeeded in surpassing Paris in the space of two generations and making America the new home of art, the pulsating centre of world painting that was also to attract renowned French artists. The epic tale of American painters recounted by Cohen-Solal moves from Paris to New York, Giverny to Chicago and Pont-Aven to Taos. The turning point came with the 1948 Venice Biennial and the first-ever exhibition in Europe of eight canvases by a largely unknown artist, namely Jackson Pollock, soon to be acclaimed all over the world as the first absolute master of American painting.

Conceptual Art was one of the most important movements of the second half of the 20th century. Starting from its origins in the 1960s and the principles formulated by Dan Graham, Joseph Kosuth, Sol LeWitt and Lawrence Weiner, Alberro addresses specifically its New York trajectory through the career of Seth Siegelaub, who unquestionably played a key role. An eccentric, multifaceted art dealer, Siegelaub employed wholly unconventional methods of promotion to support artists who seemed to create works out of nothing, sponsored them with shrewd and diplomatic business acumen, and paved the way for the appearance of a new type of actor on the art scene, the freelance curator. Alexander Alberro offers an unprecedented overview of materials and reviews regarding the most important works, embedding Conceptual Art in the social context of rebellion against traditional cultural institutions, commercialization and the dawn of the globalized world. A new perspective emerges, however, from his meticulous reconstruction. In actual fact, this movement had no intention whatsoever of rejecting the market but rather aimed at revolutionizing and conquering it. It was to this end, for example, that Siegelaub founded Image Art Programs for Industry Inc., a firm that used contemporary art to confer added value on companies seeking social visibility, and drew up the Artist’s Reserved Rights Transfer and Sales Agreement, a new type of contract aimed at limiting the overwhelming power of collectors, galleries and museums and increasing the rights of artists. In the end, this instrument involuntarily set the seal on the wedding of art and capitalism.

This book is the first in the last thirty years devoted exclusively to the photographic work of Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008). Through examination of the photographs taken in the crucial period from 1949 to 1962, Nicholas Cullinan retraces the artist’s trajectory, reconsidering his work as a whole – including painting, collage, sculpture and performance as well as a mixture of all these elements – from an essentially photographic viewpoint. Rauschenberg began to study and use photography in his works in the late 1940s and early ’50s at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and felt its attraction so strongly as to be torn for a certain period between it and painting. In the end, he chose both. The photographic dimension (images taken from the mass media and found photographs as well as his own personal snapshots, family photos and landscapes) distinguishes his combines, transfer drawings and silkscreen paintings, developing still further in the Spreads and Scales series to culminate in the last works of the Runts series. In addition to finding a place as elements of his works, some of Rauschenberg’s photographs also serve as documentation, casting light on works either lost or undergoing transformation, configuration and reconfiguration. There are also shots of artist friends like Cy Twombly, Jasper Johns, Willem de Kooning, Merce Cunningham and John Cage engaged in creative action. According to the American curator Walter Hopps, “The use of photography has long been an essential device for Rauschenberg's melding of imagery ... [and] a vital means for Rauschenberg's aesthetic investigations of how humans perceive, select and combine visual information. Without photography, much of Rauschenberg's oeuvre would scarcely exist.” As the artist himself said to Barbara Rose, “I’ve never stopped being a photographer.”

Belgrade, 1974: Marina Abramović set fire to a monumental five-pointed star, the symbol of the Tito regime, and laid down inside it until she was overcome by the fumes and fell unconscious. Naples, one year later: the artist challenged the public to use any of the objects laid out on a table on her resolutely passive body and one spectator pointed a loaded gun at her throat. New York, 2002: she lived and fasted for twelve days in a suspended structure set up in the Sean Kelly Gallery, drawing sustenance only from the fascinated gaze of spectators who watched her drink, sleep, wash and urinate. James Westcott was one of them and this was his first encounter with the self-proclaimed “grandmother of the Performance Art”. It is also the opening scene of Quano Marina Abramović morirà, an intimate biography of an artist who has been flirting with death for forty years by using her body as the focal point of legendary performances. Launching herself into performance art initially meant rebelling against a “militarized” upbringing under the tyrannical control of a mother who imposed Communist cultural dictates and never kissed her. The complete break with Belgrade and take-off of her career began after she met the German artist Ulay. Together they toured Europe in a Citroën van transformed into a mobile home and staged performances laying bare an extreme symbiosis that culminated in Nightsea Crossing, repeated ninety times in five years, which involved them sitting immobile and gazing into one another’s eyes for seven consecutive hours across a table. In their last performance as a duo, they set off walking from either end of the Great Wall of China to meet in the middle three months later and say goodbye. Again a solo artist and soon to receive the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennial, Abramović finally arrived in the limelight of New York, from where still dominates the international art scene. She has often been asked whether she has ever been afraid of dying during her daring actions. She answers, “What if I do? Life is a dream and the death an awakening. We should rather think about how precious our existence is and the senseless way we waste it.”

Bacon’s reaction on being asked by Daniel Farson whether he was happy to have won a place on the Olympus of art was one of sincere indifference. He cared nothing for the tinsel of fame, still less for posterity, and often remarked that we are nothing at all once we are dead. He did not believe in God, morality or love but described himself nevertheless as an optimist. An optimist of nothingness living on the feelings of the moment. Life is so senseless that you may as well make something extraordinary of it. This Nietzschean paradox also guides an approach to painting marked by the ability to take advantage of the creative accident, as when he threw paint at random onto the canvas to see what would come out of it. Like a tightrope walker poised between abstraction and figuration, Bacon combined intentional fortuity with the calculation of a gambler. He went against the tide of artistic fashion, which embraced abstract art in that period. He sought to paint the tragic beauty of life, and if he distorted the human figure it was only in order to extract a greater and more violent truth. A similar intent seems to animate this book, vivid personal recollection rather than official biography, which unearths material collected firsthand during a friendship that began in a club in Soho in 1951 and lasted over forty years. Farson’s is a stark, unvarnished portrait of an artist of extremes, capable of great love and fierce hatred, immense magnanimity and pitiless slander. Between a bottle of champagne and a caustic comment, we follow his madcap forays between the gutter and the Ritz, which always ended up in Soho, the bohemian quarter of London, the second home – if not the first – of writers and artists who drowned their talent in alcohol. Bacon’s descent into the homosexual underworld was paralleled by his irresistible artistic ascent. The works marked by the explosion of a raging sexuality were to go down in history as masterpieces, but whenever he was asked what he did, he would say that he was just an old queer.

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.