Catalogue

6 February 1963: at the age of just 30 Piero Manzoni was found dead of a heart attack in his studio in via Fiori Chiari. From that moment on his reputation as a provocateur and wild child preceded him, with his most subversive work, Artist’s Shit, elevating him to cult status. But what actually came before and lay behind those 30 grams of pure artistic output? Flaminio Gualdoni sets out to explore exactly that in this biography that traces the guiding themes of Manzoni’s works, lending order to a jumble of hitherto fragmented materials and setting aside any apocryphal hypotheses. Milan’s “dolce vita” nightlife and the artist’s youthful bike expeditions; the early experiments under Fontana, in the search for a personal style, and the partnerships with young Italian contemporaries and international avant-garde movements which brought acclaim and recognition. This fast-moving career relegates Manzoni the private individual increasingly into the background, turning the spotlight purely on Manzoni the artist. What emerges powerfully, even in his continuous, incessant experimentation with all kinds of media – from painting to designs for immersive environments – is the compact kernel of an aesthetic adventure around the very essence of the work of art. And his life, in the dual sense of everyday existence and exceptional artistic undertaking, was necessarily an integral part of this tenaciously pursued adventure. In the words of the artist: “There is nothing to say; there is only to be, to live.”

What is pornography? A mere sociological phenomenon or an aesthetic category? And above all, how has pornographic representation changed over the last few years with the evolution of the media? With a broad approach encompassing various spheres of contemporary reality, from photography, the visual arts and web performances to television and cinema, Bruno Di Marino examines the many facets of the presentation of obscenity. From Courbet’s Origine du Monde, Duchamp’s objects, Man Ray’s Four Seasons and performances of an erotic and political nature, this in-depth historical and art-critical investigation takes us behind the scenes of porn with the photographs of Sultan and Greenfield-Sanders, and on to the big screen with the successful alliance of experimental and X-rated cinema in the “hot” films of masters like Gioli and Warhol, pornographic found footage and the new frontiers of video art and video clips. The key turning point comes with transition from the private sphere to the Internet with the infinite universe of YouPorn and the proliferation of increasingly daring forms of interchange between the real and immaterial worlds. The last two decades have seen a spectacularization and normalization of pornography that has definitively violated its taboo also – and indeed above all – for the female public, giving rise to a uncontrolled increase in amateur production and hence a crisis for professional hardcore. Having become a fragmentary and boundless hypermedia archive of forms, codes, languages and images, pornography is now a world midway between fiction and reality that even threatens to transform essential aspects of everyday life into a sort of mise-en-scène.  

On his death at the age of just 34, Alfred Jarry (Laval, 1873 – Paris, 1907) was already a legend in the Parisian salons, albeit more for his irreverent anti-conventionalism than his literary genius. It was not until decades later that he was recognized as one of the fathers of the avant-garde and Ubu Re became the emblem of radically modern theatre. His influence was so deep and lasting that a community of adepts still maintains a posthumous dialogue with his ideas today through the College of Pataphysics, where Italian intellectuals like Italo Calvino, Enrico Baj and Umberto Eco figure alongside other great names in international culture. For many, however, Jarry is still just the author of an absurd, grotesque play and his life a mere string of outlandish anecdotes: his disruption of the literary Tuesdays held by the wife of the editor of the Mercure de France, the total identification with Père Ubu that ultimately devoured him, the disdain for any form of respectability, the scatological sense of humour, Herculean bouts of drinking, exploits with revolver, bicycle and fishing rod, and the dying wish for a toothpick. The anecdotes remain in this first full-length critical biography and are indeed augmented due to a host of new sources. Alastair Brotchie draws upon this previously unpublished material with discernment, however, and thus manages to separate the man from the myth and go beneath the mask to reveal the wild and delicate monster that was Alfred Jarry. We thus have the trajectory of a man determined to invent and destroy himself and the world around him by means of a philosophy erected on the principle of the identity of opposites, the linchpin of Jarry’s entire universe and fulcrum of a still incredibly vital body of work capable of encompassing both the clowning of Ubu and the subtleties of pataphysics.

Joachim Schmidt (Balingen, 1955), paradoxically known as “the photographer who takes no photographs”, has worked with photography since the early 1980s without producing any images of his own. Asserted in 1989 on the 150th anniversary of the invention of this medium, the principle of taking no new photographs until use has been made of those already existing is one to which he still adheres. In the present-day civilization of images characterized by an ever-greater proliferation of photographs to the point of habituation and meaninglessness, Schmidt has decided to halt production and confine himself to seeking out, collecting and using photographs already taken by others. This boundless material also include picture cards, exhibition invitations, posters, postcards, photos found in flea markets and archives, and images downloaded from websites and social networks. The German artist captures them from the great flow of contemporary communication, files them, appropriates them, combines them with one another and sometimes manipulates them in search of possible new meanings. A collector, recycling enthusiast, cataloguer and environmentalist therefore rather than a photographer, Schmid has left his imprint on theoretical debate about this medium. His stance combines two fundamental themes of contemporary art, namely Duchamp’s idea of the ready-made and the “death of the author” envisaged by Roland Barthes. Having investigated all the forms of mass photography and all of the different associated languages, he has probably seen but above all used more images than anyone else in the world over the last few decades. His new and ironic call today is therefore for people not to stop taking photographs.

Jacques Henri Lartigue (Courbevoie, 1894 – Nice, 1986) had his first camera at just eight years of age and from then on never ceased to take pictures of a gay and carefree life: children’s games, picnics, elegant ladies in the Bois de Boulogne, trips with friends, car races and the first aeroplanes. The albums built up over a lifetime are a meticulous record of a family and an entire century. Lartigue succeeded in capturing modernity like very few others and his work now belongs to history.

The exhibition of “Programmed Art” was inaugurated in the Olivetti Store in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milan, on 15 May 1962. The name Arte Programmata was coined by Bruno Munari, who launched the initiative, and Umberto Eco, the theorist of kinetic art as a paradigm of the “open work”, was responsible for the catalogue. The young and very young artists included the Milanese Gruppo T (Anceschi, Boriani, Colombo, Devecchi and Varisco) and Gruppo Enne from Padua (Biasi, Costa, Chiggio, Landi and Massironi) together with Enzo Mari and Munari. Others were to join during the show’s two-year tour. Packed in crates painted orange with the name Olivetti clearly evident, the works are a small but important symbol of the Italy of the economic boom and the fruitful wedding of avant-garde art and industrial research. The show was in fact produced and sponsored by Olivetti, the first company ever to act in such a capacity, in the period of its venture into electronics and production of the Elea 9003, the world’s first transistorized mainframe computer. Fifty years on, this book not only reconstructs the show through the works and the documentation of its genesis (including the anastatic reproduction of the original catalogue) but also takes a broader look at the electronic adventures of Olivetti, a company that sought to address the social and cultural implications of the dawning digital era.

Conceived by Giulio Paolini, one of the best-known and most acclaimed conceptual artists, this book takes stock in a certain sense of a life lived in the art world both as a leading participant and as an observer of the key stages in its evolution over the last forty years. It opens with a text in which the artist uses words to illustrate his philosophical and artistic stance. Short pieces written by figures on the art scene close to the artist then introduce the nine thematic sections into which the nearly 150 collages created specifically for this project are divided. In keeping with Giulio Paolini’s international prominence, the final section presents English translations of all the texts.

A fisherman’s vest over a white shirt, jeans and a felt hat. In the winter a long lynx fur lined with blue silk. In his youth a black tie with a hare’s jaw tiepin. This was how Joseph Beuys presented himself, an unmistakable look midway between clown and gangster. On making his appearance, he always did the opposite of what was expected, delighting in actions that initially seemed senseless: wrapping himself in felt, living with a coyote, scraping gelatin from a wall, holding the same position for hours, sweeping a forest, explaining paintings to a dead hare, bandaging a knife after cutting his finger. All this – and the fat that heals, the felt that warms, the honey that feeds and the batteries that recharge – in order to transmit energy and give the spectators a salutary shock, to broaden their awareness. Creativity is a “shaping” of freedom and the heritage of all. He urged us repeatedly to be constantly alert and make our own revolution: “Everyone is an artist.” Avoiding, with rare exceptions, the stereotyped judgements and interpretations put forward on one of the most controversial and repeatedly analyzed figures of the 20th century, Heiner Stachelhaus presents a portrait of Joseph Beuys in the round starting from the “anti-images” of his life: the study of natural sciences, involvement with Steiner’s anthroposophy, the aeroplane crash in the Crimea and the experience with Tartars, teaching and the occupation of the Düsseldorf Academy, the 7000 Oaks and the environmentalist battles, the Beuys of private life who drank tap water in glasses of ground crystal, and the Beuys Blockin Darmstadt, the museum-workshop still haunted by the spirit of a man described by Karl Ströher as the only artist capable of expressing the specificity of our era.

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.