Catalogue

For at least a decade now, the Western art system has found itself faced in the international arena with new players who appear to want to play according to rules of their own making. The first inklings of change came in the 1980s, when art became a financial opportunity of global potential. Thanks to the use of more accessible languages, postmodern art appealed to increasingly vast audiences, prospering as it expanded onto new terrain: the soaring art market paved the way for the artwork becoming a status symbol, and a broadening of horizons to include countries like China, Russia and India, in search of recognition on the Western stage. The euphoria of that period, however, was soon dampened by the current climate of uncertainty, caused by the break-up of the old system and the declassing of its constituent parts – the intellectual component (the critics, who lent legitimacy to artistic practices) and the institutional component (the museums, which conserved the works for posterity). The current measure of success is the speculative spirit – in all senses – of the new players, who, with the ease of those used to wielding hefty amounts of capital, lay down the law in the closed circuit of gallery-collector-auction house-museum. Even artists, previously the system’s driving force, risk being reduced to the status of mere cogs in the machine. Well aware of the setting they operate in, they have acquiesced to the impoverishment brought about by globalisation: while in the past they sought to innovate, now they stick firmly to linguistic standards that are instantly recognisable in all corners of the globe. In this short work of global scope, which surveys the past in order to have insight into the complex transformations under way in the present, Marco Meneguzzo identifies the dividing line between before and after, namely between art as exclusive and elitist and art as a popular, globalised phenomenon, envisaging a future that wavers between a soft process of change in the art system and the conception of art itself, and a more apocalyptic scenario.

Begun in 2006 and closed down by the authorities three years later, the blog of the artist and architect Ai Weiwei came to attention at the international level as one of the most courageous cultural and political acts in contemporary China. An implacable critic of the ruling class in the tradition of the “public intellectuals” of the 20th century, Ai took up in his writings the demands for pluralism stifled in bloodshed in Tiananmen Square in 1989, using the Internet to protest against the material and moral consequences – concealed by the regime’s propaganda – of the Chinese model of development: the lack of political rights, the savage exploitation of labour, the destruction of the environment and historical memory, the violent repression of minorities, the arrogance and impunity of the rich and powerful, and the rigid control over public opinion. Defying censorship, Ai Weiwei created an unprecedented form of civil and cultural resistance. His posts alternate criticism and protest, discuss the latest artistic developments, mercilessly expose official hypocrisy and use humour and polemical verve to lay bare the lies, cynicism and resignation inculcated by an establishment that combines paternalism and harsh repression to keep its citizens in a state of eternal infancy in which the rituals of consumerism have replaced the permanent mobilization of Mao’s era. Now translated into Italian, Ai Weiwei’s blog also constitutes proof of the power of art as a tool of resistance and regeneration. Renewing the impulse of the modern avant-garde, his digital diary becomes a means of collective mobilization, a “social sculpture” that transcends the boundaries of traditional creativity to raise urgent questions about the role and responsibility of the artist, the spectator and indeed all of us. A living sculpture, an agent of transformation of the world thanks to which the dimension of the multitude that characterizes our social field can acquire self-awareness and discover its strength, finding the essential value of truth once again and with it the possibility of a different time and space in keeping with the needs of more complete and freer human beings.

Island: the word conjures up isolated places we nonetheless seek to reach, touching the realm of the real and the imaginary, the concrete and the abstract. It inspires a myriad of artistic, cultural, linguistic, philosophical and musical reflections, a flow of sensations and stimuli that spring and spread from an idea and a place. Remo Salvadori is our guide to this infinite world, drawing on a project he carried out on Isola Comacina, an island that the King of Belgium gifted to Italy in 1920, and which was then entrusted to the Brera Academy to create a place for artistic and cultural events. The Academy’s project for developing Isola Comacina was guided by the atmospheric photographs of the island taken by Paola di Bello. Remo Salvadori, artist and lecturer, worked for two consecutive years with Academy students on the concept of island, as a destination and meeting place, gathering the works of 80 young artists. He then set about involving more than 50 writers, asking them to contribute a piece of writing about the idea of island. The result is a unique publication that alternates text and images, combining an educational programme with artistic projects, and bringing together poetry and conceptual developments, reflections and visual pleasure. The contributors include Alfredo Albiani, Flavio Ambrosini, Stefano Andi, Haim Baharier, Susanna Janina Baumgartner, Marco Biraghi, Sofia Boffardi, Roberto Borghi, Enric Bou, Giovanni Bruno e Francesca Varalli, Angelo Capasso, Letizia Cariello, Alessandro Carrera, Laura Cherubini, Antonella Commellato, Francesco Correggia, Bettina Della Casa, Paola Di Bello, Alessandro Di Pietro, Roberto Favaro, Rachele Ferrario, Massimo Venturi Ferriolo, Giuliano Fuortes, Romano Gasparotti, Daniele Geminiani, Giovanni Iovane, Gérard-Georges Lemarie, Sandro Levi, Elisabetta Longari, Giorgio Magni, Marco Magni, Olivia Mair Cacciari, Daniele Nani, Giovanni Ozzola, Loredana Parmesani, Gianluca Poldi, Isabella Puliafito, Elena Quarestani, Roberto Rossi Roberti, Carla Sanguineti, Monica Scaccabarozzi, Cesare Serratto, Tetsuro Shimizu, Pier Luigi Tazzi, Ida Terracciano, Roberto Tresoldi, Francesca Valli and Luca Vitone.

In an era when questions are frequently raised about the rationale of certain visual representations and their real value, Stefano Pirovano responds by clarifying the nature of the link between the material component of the work and the elements invisible to the eye. The artwork has in fact expanded so far beyond its boundaries that it can no longer be confined solely to the physical dimension. It must have an accompanying narrative and information that introduces the public to the mystery of its image. According to the author, this is the approach taken by the most significant artists of the last few years. In this perspective, Forma e informazione presents an overview of the present-day panorama on the premise that abstraction is to be understood as the primordial driving force of the artwork. In order to elucidate the dialectic between object and information that animates contemporary abstraction, the author addresses a series of artists and particularly emblematic works. These include Carol Bove and Goshka Macuga, who develop relations between objects and knowledge, Cory Arcangel, Peter Coffin and Tomas Saraceno, with their forays into the technological culture, and Wade Guyton, Josh Smith and Beatriz Milhazes, whose images on canvas are generated by digital processes. The book alternates theoretical investigations, precise descriptions of works and statements by the artists involved. There are also numerous incursions into other fields, from design and architecture to physics, the neurosciences, philosophy and literature. Reference is made to scientists like Vilayanur Ramachandran and Brian Greene as well as writers like Orhan Pamuk, Sergei Nosov, Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis and Patrick McGrath, whose works are rife with mentions of contemporary art and offer effective interpretive stimuli. One final point: in its constant interweaving of creativity, theory and context, the book is not designed to arrive at any set destination but rather to present, also to the general reader, the riches of a territory with many still unexplored places.

Environmental emergencies, genetics, biodiversity and artificial nature: these themes are increasingly addressed and developed by artists in works that alternate investigation, protest, planning and utopia. Different issues and approaches with a common origin: the conviction that no aesthetic appraisal can be divorced from ethical responsibility with respect to scientific and technological research and knowledge of its effects on the natural and behavioural landscape that surrounds us. The scientific analysis of nature has enabled artists to enter into the dynamics of the environment we inhabit, make it their own and attain a position of greater awareness, abandoning the contemplation of nature that distinguished artistic production up to and indeed beyond the end of the 19th century. With the effectiveness and concision of contemporary visual language, artists today not only interpret problems that affect many but also tangibly present intangible scenarios otherwise known only to specialists. The book unfolds like an exhibition made up of a series of thematic stages, visual chapters that use a broad selection of images to combine investigation of the present and prefiguration of the future. Every chapter is enriched with a short anthology of first-hand evidence and writings by key figures juxtaposed with the views of scientists, writers, ethologists and art historians.

The 'analytical line' that emerged in artistic debate in the sixties led to a significant change in the role of photography, the consequences of which are still felt today. In those pivotal years, photography was emancipated from technical virtuosity for its own sake, and opened up to new conceptual practices. Finally legitimsed as art, it became the object of intense theoretical and linguistic analysis. Marinella Paderni starts out from this historical premise to document the work of artists who, from the mid nineties to the present, have metaphorically taken up the legacies of that conceptual season, forging continuity between the avant-garde movements of that period and today's currents in photography. Her analysis examines theoretical debates on the 'reinvention of the medium' and outlines the last two generations of contemporary Italian photography: a scenario that bears witness to the emergence of original visual practices and a multifaceted reflection on photographic language in the era of the dematerialisation of reality.

Contemporary art has made its way into numerous productive universes over the last few decades and art enterprises modelled on their ethical counterparts have sprung up all over Europe. The Dutch industrialist Akzo Nobel has created a foundation that hosts artists in residence. The French bank Neuflize OBC and the Belgian group Lhoist, a world producer of lime, commission works from contemporary photographers. The Italian TESECO group, specialized in the environmental treatment of waste, has created a workshop of contemporary art. The Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin was born as a joint venture between the Deutsche Bank and the Guggenheim Foundation. This interest in art is not, however, confined to major corporations but also affects small and medium-sized firms, and seldom takes the form of one-off sponsorships designed solely to bolster company image. Unlike the American model, which is more oriented towards consumption, the European appears to see art as an investment whose profit is to be found in the contribution made to the development of a sense of collective responsibility as regards the social environment and the assertion of cultural identity. This is an alliance that in turn works to the benefit of art, especially the art of today. Deeply convinced of this, Lisbonne and Zürcher start from the French model but work on the European scale to identify, country by country, sound entrepreneurial strategies and methods in support of projects, the commissioning of artworks and the creation of company collections and foundations. The authors highlight the ability of art, within corporate structures, to facilitate the expression of identity and convey cultural values capable of enriching the everyday life of personnel. As Pier Luigi Sacco points out in his preface, it is for all these reasons that contemporary art is not losing its appeal with the economic crisis but proves on the contrary capable in such circumstances of offering a salutary change of viewpoint, a way of looking at the facts of life through new eyes. Nor is it forgotten that “the art market, unlike the financial markets, handles works whose significance is not confined to the return they promise and that can indeed be regarded during a period of slump first of all as fraught with meaning, as opportunities to understand the world in which we live and even ourselves to some extent”.

In an age where ideologies and schools of thought have lost the capacity to forge strong cultural models, where national identities are gradually dissolving into a global context, and the distinctive characteristics of individual aesthetic languages faded out some time ago in favour of contamination, it is legitimate to ask whether we can still consider the contemporary period in terms of one single medium - in this case sculpture - within the boundaries of a specific national context. With these questions in mind, Alessandra Galasso explores the roots of contemporary sculpture in its many facets and declinations, traces its origines and presents the most recent work of the Italian artists engaged in this expressive genre. Her analysis commences from a historical perspective, embracing the entire sculpture tradition of the 20th century, and the radical changes that characterised it, then looks to the italian art panorama of the last decade, identifying original visual strategies and new interpretations of our complex reality. The thirty artists presented in Laboratorio italia - young italian sculptors, all share the awareness of combining old identities with new multicultural contexts, the practice of recovering traditional aesthetic canons with the desire to reinvent them from a new angle, and new materials. All the artists blend experimentation and tradition in their own ways, and combine their own personal stories with the Zeitgeist.

This volume is a double portrait of painters Zoran Mušič and Ida Barbarigo, depicting them from their first meeting in Trieste in spring 1944 until Mušič’s death in 2005. He was a Slovenian, born on the fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to a family of vintners, in a town whose name means a small hill. In 1944 he was over 30 and had already been to Venice and met Ida’s father, the painter Guido Cadorin (famous for the panels in the “Room of Pure Dreams” at D’Annunzio’s Vittoriale) by whom he was immediately fascinated. Ida was 20, she had always painted, and was enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts. She was descended from the Cadorin, originally from Cadore, who owned one of the oldest sculpture workshops in Venice. Zoran’s exhibition in Trieste left her unimpressed and she was not at all attracted to the reserved young artist with kind eyes. But their lives, whose most significant moments are described on these pages, were destined to be forever intertwined: from their first meeting in Trieste to Mušič’s deportation to Dachau; from his return to Venice in a state of exhaustion, to his courting and then marrying Ida in 1949; from the early years of married life in Venice, a crossroads for many artists – Arturo Martini, Virgilio Guidi, de Chirico, De Pisis, Campigli – to the Paris period and the friendships, acquaintances, and relations with the Galerie de France.   Two lives devoted to painting and narrated in this book through a hundred unpublished photographs from the period.

Dominique Laugé is a well-known photographer in the advertising world. L’occhio incantato presents his latest production, his photographic quest in the ever-changing natural environment in search of lights and shadows that bring to life sea surfaces, glaciers, volcanic ashes, autumnal woods, flowery meadows. His works immediately remind of another famous photographer, Ansel Adams, but for Dominique Laugé the commitment is not limited to the photographic technique and the subjects to be portrayed, but spans to the medium to print his work on, the paper. For this series of pictures, Laugé selected a hand-made paper, produced in Sicily, especially fine-tuned so as to enhance the photos’ light and contrast; in the book, within the limits of industrial production, the publisher has paid particular attention to the paper so as to reproduce the same sensations given by original artworks.

«Il concetto di classico è migrato altrove, fra i libri, dove sopravvive, a dire il vero, egregiamente e dove prospera secondo gli umori delle diverse epoche. Quando si è molto romantici torna forse meno utile, poiché gran parte delle energie letterarie, esistenziali e politiche sono rivolte all’azione. Quando si è più inclini alle incertezze prende vigore maggiore. E la nostra è un’epoca poco certa dove il conforto dei classici torna utile. È questo il percorso che Ginzberg offre di sabato sulle pagine frugali del Foglio a chi ha voglia di riflettere. Parte egli da un dettaglio della cronaca recente e tenta con abilità da retore dell’epoca imperiale di trovare non la citazione (lo fanno in molti con un buon dizionario) ma il modello classico che su quel dato contingente getta la luce del pensiero di sempre, o meglio d’una certezza che la sanzione della storia ha dato all’opera di riferimento. E a un tratto la nostra quotidianità, che spesso reputiamo in modo non del tutto illegittimo essere fra le più sciocche della storia dell’umanità, ebbene questa quotidianità replicata ossessivamente dalla carta e dall’etere entra in un epos carico di echi. Prende dignità di storia per il fatto solo di poter essere paragonata a ciò che storia è diventato, e quindi classico.» (Dalla prefazione di Philippe Daverio)

Throught time, only few books have been devoted to Rome, as artists have always been in awe of the Ethernal City. As many other photographers, Mimmo Jodice waited many years before facing such a project, but his most recent works, especially the one on the myth of the Mediterranean, can be regarded as preparatory to the myth of Rome. Jodice’s eye spans from the ruins of the Ancient Rome to the Renaissance, Baroque and modern architectures, guiding us in a long journey through time and history. The book is a project commissioned by the publisher to Mimmo Jodice and is an independent publication with no connection to any exhibition or event. The volume includes texts by Richard Burdett, Centennial Professor in Architecture and Urbanism at the London School of Economics and currently chief adviser on architecture and urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics, and Cornelia Lauf, art historian and curator currently teaching at the faculty of Arts and Design at IUAV in Venice.