Catalogue

This work in praise of the “funny guy” Francis Picabia as the inventor of Pop Art was born out of the posthumous discovery of a set of twelve ink drawings on paper that he produced in 1923. Intended as covers for André Breton’s literary revue Littérature but never published, the drawings are copies of advertisements taken from magazines and department store brochures complete with the name and price of the article concerned. Picabia added his initials to this simple advertising material, perhaps as an ironic comment on his inability to sell himself and perhaps to play down the failure of his show at the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona, which Breton witnessed. They mark a stylistic and thematic turning point with respect to the artist’s previous projects. Picabia was the first to use marketing material as a strategy of artistic subversion, elevating crude advertising to the status of artwork. He thus invented Pop Art and can be seen as a forerunner of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. The author reconstructs the context and circumstances in which the drawings were produced. The period 1922–23 saw the implosion of the Dada movement and its drift into Surrealism, the publication of Littérature as a forum for the artists and writers involved to air their sometimes conflicting views, the friendship and collaboration between Picabia and Breton, and the journey by car to Barcelona for the show at the Galerie Dalmau preceded by a lecture at the Ateneu Barcelonés. This is not a text for specialists and the author, while addressing a little-known and highly specific part of Picabia’s superabundant and kaleidoscopic oeuvre, succeeds in introducing the ordinary reader to the artist’s universe and the context in which he worked. Lebel is no denigrator of American Pop Art. Picabia’s drawings had yet to be rediscovered and were never seen by Warhol and the other Pop artists. There is thus no suggestion that the Americans “stole” the idea from him. The text is accompanied by a previously unpublished material in the shape of a letter from Picabia to Breton dated 1923 and a drawing of the same year that accompanied it.    

The machine and the star, emblems bequeathed by Duchamp to the second half of the 20th century, provide the basis for three short essays on the theme of inspiration and its intermittency, a crucial point for the modernist tradition that is often overlooked by scholars. Michele Dantini seeks to shed new light on the metaphor of the artist as machine and how the first ready-mades (c. 1913) undermined the creative process as an ordered professional routine that had traditionally characterized the transposition of idea into image. Though liberating in some respects, this revolution also had alarming implications experienced in all their urgency by the Art Informel generation. How to find protection against the discontinuity of inspiration? How to endow interior time with duration if everything boils down to the unrepeatable exceptionality of the instant? Ranging from the American movements of the 1950s to Conceptual Art and Arte Povera, Michele Dantini focuses on three fundamental stages, namely Duchamp’s “monster works”, the flags and the rotating devices of Jasper Johns, and the drawings and embroideries of Arrigo Boetti. The reinvention of the artist’s profession is analyzed step by step: the curious adoption of the ready-made in order to restore plausibility and vigour to traditional techniques; the indefinite dilation of the time of execution: the art of repetition and the creation of satisfying routines (series, catalogues and encyclopaedias) through “automatic” procedures that are impersonal and can even be delegated. It is the task of the “wretched viewers” and their perspicacity to identify continuity in transition within the works, to reconstruct the underlying metaphors and “to interpret a routine suddenly swept clean of recognizable points of reference and techniques”.

Known primarily as a visual artist, Mike Kelley was in actual fact an irrepressible, multifaceted figure. In addition to using the most varied means of expression, from drawing to video, performance and installation, he often went beyond the traditional boundaries of the work by incorporating writing in the creative process and producing statements and texts of various kinds. Above all, he broke down the barrier that traditionally exists between the roles of the critic and the artist. It is by focusing on these parallel pathways of action and word and highlighting their powers of reciprocal cross-fertilization that the author addresses questions such as Kelley’s collaboration in the artistic and musical fields, e.g. with Paul McCarthy and as a member of the Destroy All Monsters noise band, his interest in the aesthetic of ufology, his obsession with rag toys, the importance of authority and memory in his art, and what can be regarded as a key turning point in his work and thought, namely the uncanny, Freud’s Unheimliche, to which he devoted an important show. An artist, curator, writer, interviewer, critic, musician active on the alternative scene and many other things, Mike Kelley was one of the most original artists of our time.

I think that the solution to the possible conflict between Busci as architect and as painter lies in this original dialectic, a kind of obstacle course: the redemption, sublimation and evanescence of the pictorial sign as against the harshness of reality.The delicate strokes of a deft calligrapher delineating dark gleams, nocturnal lights, hypnotic monochrome landscapes of obscure foreboding. A dark vision of the urban drama of the world. A sort of de Pisis in reverse, where the gracefully choreographic movements of the entranced artist's brush give way to scenarios of metropolitan apocalypse with monochrome lyrical and theatrical overtones.

In his works Adrian Paci creates stories in pictures that blend the uniqueness of everyday experience with the history of painting, film and literature. He reflects on issues like loss and migration: people abandoning their homelands and embarking on a quest for a personal and geographical alternative. Paci works with photography, sculpture and video, using different techniques and materials which enable him to achieve considerable freedom of expression and style.Against the backdrop of these narratives he often inserts or simply evokes the presence of one or more female figures that do not appear to play a distinct role but rather embody a mystery that the artist chooses not to reveal. But what is the role of the female figure in this fascinating visual era?She sprang a desire to explore this aspect of Paci's work by analysing a selection of works on the theme. The book, which features a new piece by the artist, is the result of a dialogue between Paci and Paola Nicolin: an opportunity to reflect on the visible or invisible presence of a female figure that adds a human element to the narrative. In Paci's art women are often entrusted with the task of preserving memories and traditions, and being the focal point for the interwoven stories that contribute to constructing our constantly shifting identity: the alternation of crisis, alienation, abandonment and return that characterises human existence.

Marco Petrus's work is a dizzying chromatic and compositional swirl soon transmuted into a journey through the buildings of countless cities, to which the trained eye will be able to assign names and precise paternity from one painting to the next. An opportunity for recognition but also surprise, for an unusual view of something known that the artist's mimetic ability is able to recreate on canvas. A walk through Helsinki, Milan, Marseilles and Naples but above all through the nuances and geometrics of an authentic ideal atlas of 20th-century and contemporary architecture.

It was in the 1970s that the Argentinean video maker David Lamelas began producing specific works based on long periods of residence in various European cities. This book is devoted to the “People of Milan” project undertaken in 1970 specifically for a solo show at the Galleria Françoise Lambert in Milan. The continuous flow of a four-minute film minutely documenting the passersby and events on the busy high street of Via Orefici is juxtaposed with eleven photographs, taken at regular intervals over the same period of time. The publication, of a markedly artistic character, presents the famous artist’s “Milanese period” through a combination of images from the video and observations by Lamelas on his Italian experience.

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.

This book is in the first in a series produced in partnership with Miart, the Milan art fair that in 2013 launched a new international outlook, opening up to design and architecture. The book brings together the internationally renowned architect and designer Andrea Branzi, and Alessandro Rabottini, art critic and head curator of the Bergamo Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art, who has long been interested in Branzi’s work. The close dialogue between the two has led to the creation of this artist’s book for Miart 2013, which focuses on the designer in particular.

Andy Warhol superstar traces the artist’s activities “on screen”, from his films and adverts to television appearances.This side of his career was what definitively confirmed his superstar status and led to him being both revered and hated to the point of assassination attempts. The book explores his experiences in this sphere and the figures who accompanied him and came to represent an integral part of the Warhol milieu, first and foremost his muse Edie Sedgwick. Theatre expert Luca Scarlini investigates Warhol’s multiple identities: his phobias, contradictions and aspirations regarding his image and the production of works for the small screen and the big screen, against a backdrop of pop culture and camp, the kitsch-dominated scenario of the 60s and 70s.

Fifty years after the first Arte Programmata (Programmed Art) exhibition in Milan, 1962, the author offers a reflection on what remains of a Neo-avant-garde experiment that sought to combine theory of perception with industrial production. Initiated by Bruno Munari, presented by Umberto Eco, and sponsored by Olivetti, Arte Programmata was not only an Italian movement traceable to the broader world of kinetic art. It was also a real attempt to define the field of art in an industrial and urban society, on the basis of the then brand new concept of “programming”. A concept pivotal to the debate among intellectuals linked to Olivetti, then a forerunner in the field of small electronic processors. After a long period of oblivion and silence, Arte Programmata has now found new favour and aroused renewed critical, historical and market interest. Why is this happening? What makes that school still relevant today? What kind of nostalgic movement or revival is it currently triggering? The author’s adroit analysis passes seamlessly from the 1960s to the present, seeking to establish the reasons for this lasting success. At the same time, it investigates  the possibilities of a utopia linked to the concept of “industrial art”, while considering that definition of “art”:  the real reason for the movement’s transcending the half-century that has passed since its birth.

Do you have to set the Louvre on fire to establish yourself as one of the masters of your time? In order to answer this provocative question, in the 1960s the art critic Pierre Schneider invited eleven celebrated artists of the day, including Giacometti, Miró, Chagall and Steinberg, to accompany him one at a time through the museum’s sumptuous rooms. None of them refused the invitation and the truth that emerged still holds today. Far from torturing artists, the Louvre casts a spell on them that does not fade over time. Neither discouraged nor uplifted but if anything beguiled by the abyss separating them from the giants that live there, artists alone are capable of addressing them and entering into a dialogue between equals. Schneider records their every comment and gesture, even their silences and alternating moods, outlining the direction of their thinking in a few lines. Then, at just the right moment, comes the insidious question. The answers, sometimes scathing and sometimes admiring but never deferential, reveal uncommon acumen and great intimacy also with artists of a very different nature. We thus find Chagall unforeseeably moved by Courbet (“a great poet”) and irritated with Ingres (“too polished”), Giacometti enamoured of the Tintoretto self-portrait (“the most magnificent head in the Louvre”), and Miró onomatopoeically entranced, whistling with admiration at African mosaics. The eye of each glides over the works to plumb their material depths, comment on their “chemistry” and finally decide how they have stood up over time. These fascinating walks are informed by a spirit of reconciliation between old and new that explodes any notion of the museum as a warehouse of obsolete objects with nothing to say to contemporaries. The Louvre appears to its eleven extraordinary guests as a book from which you learn to read, a gymnasium to build up your strength, a school to hone your vision, the ideal cemetery, a time machine that eliminates millennial gaps, a bridge between past and present and above all the place where it is possible to address the greatest things created since the beginning of time.