Catalogue

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.

With the physique of a boxer and a spirit constantly in turmoil, Lucio Fontana ‘cannot sit still’: shaped by his experiences of the Great War and the two years he spent as a gaucho in the Pampas, he is engaged in a fight to the death on all fronts, even ‘against hunger’, as he himself would write to his father. His father would like his son to return home to Rosario, where a secure, if perhaps uninspiring, family business awaits him; but Lucio, in Milan with no commissions and no money for his studio rent, refuses to give in. It is this life torn between two worlds, Italy and Argentina, and between two ways of conceiving art, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that forces him into constant sacrifice and drives him to rebel, first against his bourgeois and traditionalist family heritage, then against the academic world and an art system hostile to any innovation; all in the name of Abstract Art – but a personal form of abstraction characterised by purity and freedom. From the inspired ‘intuitions’ of a sculptor and ceramist in Milan, Albisola, Paris and Buenos Aires, his tenacity led him to draft the Blanco Manifesto and to become not only the leader of the Spatialist movement, but also a point of reference for a new generation of artists.Paolo Campiglio attempts to unveil the man behind the infamous ‘cuts’, with his daily doubts and struggles, whilst also exploring lesser-known aspects of Fontana’s life: his relationship with his two mothers; his boundless generosity towards the younger colleagues he loved to surround himself with; and his relationship with the love of his life, Teresita Rasini, who would wait for him even when he was believed to be dead. What emerges from these pages is a combative figure, resistant to compromise, yet shining with an innate charm and an overwhelming sense of humour—qualities that led the critic Raffaele Carrieri to remark: ‘In everything he does, the intensity exceeds the normal level’.

10 February 1985: Jean-Michel Basquiat appears on the cover of the New York Times magazine, sitting in his studio in Great Jones Street. His stares idly into the lens while his hand grasps his brush like a weapon. His bare feet, resting on an overturned chair that looks like an animal carcass, are in sharp contrast to the formality of the Armani suit where you can just see the hem of his trousers streaked with paint. He is light years away from his early days when, having removed himself from the bourgeois indifference of his father and his mother’s psychic instability, he chose his path, the underground world of graffiti and new wave music, of clubs, but above all the walls of New York where he gave vent to the “80 per cent of anger” that fed his hunger for success. From the anonymity of SAMO – the label he adopted to brand the skin of a city still hostage to racism and urban decay – Jean-Michel went on, in just a few years, to co-sign paintings with Andy Warhol. Today he is the most famous black artist, the first to become internationally famous, a goal he really wanted to achieve and single-mindedly worked towards. But it quickly became a label he couldn’t shake off, in the gilded cage that the art establishment seemed to have put him in, from which not even his excesses and perhaps his last desperate attempt to escape – a return to his origins, to the African destination on the air ticket found in his pocket at the time of his premature death at 27 – would manage to save him. A contradictory temperament in a time of contradictions, Basquiat personally experienced a whirlwind of stimuli, a maelstrom of emotions that he then poured out onto his canvas and any other support to hand: words, images and sounds were magically recomposed into a new form that makes him one of the greatest visual poets of the 20th century.  

A successful design duo of the 20th century, Ray and Charles Eames worked side by side from 1941, the year they married, until Charles’s death in 1978. Thanks to their perfect complementarity, they mastered a range of creative fields, from architecture to furniture design, from textile prints to photography, and from films to children’s toys. Experimenting with the infinite possibilities of materials and production techniques, they never lost sight of the sole true aim of their work: ‘To produce the best, for the greatest number of people possible, at the lowest price’. With the aim of reaching a mass audience, they also pursued their research in the field of communication through video projections and exhibition installations. Their lectures on design remain valuable testimonies to this day, and their mass-produced pieces form part of the world’s most important museum collections.

An enigmatic, adventurous and elusive figure, Eileen Gray (1878–1976) left an indelible mark on the history of modern decorative art. From the Irish countryside to London and then Paris, she made her mark as a painter, designer and architect, but also as a gallery owner – the latter role undertaken under the convenient pseudonym of Jean Désert. With her lacquered screens and steel-tube furniture, she transcended the boundaries of the arts and created works rich in poetry, proudly asserting her desire to return to placing human beings and their emotions at the centre of plastic and spatial exploration. Villa E-1027, which she built in 1926 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin for Jean Badovici, is considered one of the finest examples of 20th-century architecture.

‘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 book reconstructs the life and artistic career of the photographer Ghitta Carell (1899-1972). A Hungarian Jew, in 1924 she moved to Italy, where she rapidly became one of the country’s most famous portrait photographers. Exhibiting great determination, Carell entered into contact with Italy’s aristocracy and leading intellectual and political circles. She photographed Maria Jose of Savoy and the Royal Family, and the twentieth century art critic and theorist Margherita Sarfatti. Hers were some of the most famous shots of Benito Mussolini, photographs which made her famous and which remain some of the best known images of Il Duce to this day. In 1938 she experienced the nightmare of anti-Semitism and the war, while the post-war period saw her enter a gradual decline. The story of her life and artistic career possesses a much broader reach than classic accounts of the modern period. While often dismissed as the “photographer of power”, or “of the heart”, Carell’s photography is altogether more refined and complex. Her polished work forges a captivating dialogue that melds the tensions and contrasts between avant-garde tendencies and tradition that animated artistic debate in the Fascist period. Her virtuoso figurative oeuvre is infused with distant, at times contrasting echoes, with shades of Renaissance and Baroque portraiture meeting the nascent aesthetic of Hollywood glamour. Her work awaits the critical acknowledgement that the consummate prowess of her art indubitably merits.

The desire to investigate the past is one of the oldest and most enduring feelings of human beings who, ever since they became self-aware, have questioned the soil in search of traces of those who came before them. Contrary to popular belief, excavation is not a Renaissance invention, but has its roots in the earliest Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese empires.From Khaemuaset, son of Ramesses II, to Hesiod, St. Augustine, the Count of Caylus, and Darwin, the evidence left behind over time has been read and interpreted in many different ways. Ancient rulers sought the remains of kings who came before them in order to legitimize their own power; modern scholars analysed and classified the naturalia and artificialia admired in the Wunderkammer; there were also those who carried out research in open defiance of the institutions, such as Isaac La Peyrère, whose scandalous 17th-century text theorized, for the first time since classical times, the presence of a history before Adam. With the evolution of the discipline, scholars managed to free themselves from the yoke of sacred texts and antiquarian practice itself, adopting an increasingly scientific and universal perspective.In this brilliant volume, supported by a rich selection of written and illustrated sources, Alain Schnapp traces a veritable archaeology of archaeology, following the methodological progress of a multifaceted subject that draws on philosophy, geology, paleontology, and historiography to solve the fundamental enigmas of human history.La conquista del passato, first published in 1994, returns after thirty years in a new edition.

The future of the public museum has never seemed more at risk: rather than representing the diverse interests of society as a whole, in most cases it has been reduced to a vehicle for promoting block-buster events and protecting the privileges of private concerns, giving rise to temples of amusement and entertainment that are unable to grasp the actual historic moment in its entirety. Apart, that is, from the odd happy but rare exception. In this short essay, Claire Bishop talks about the experience of three European institutions of contemporary art – the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Museo Nacional Reina Sofía in Madrid and the MSUM in Ljubljana – which have dealt with the challenge of cuts to public funding dictated by austerity measures by making a virtue of necessity and developing brilliant alternatives to the dominant mantra of “bigger and better, and, if possible, also more profitable”. Through enlightened policies regarding the acquisition of new work and the display of their own permanent collection, these museums have turned themselves into places dedicated to experimentation, capable of using their own resources to put together a critical discourse and cast a political eye on the current period in history.In re-opening discussion of a heated international debate, Museologia Radicale outlines a manifesto for a new concept of contemporary, which should be seen as a practice and not merely as periodization, favouring a reinterpretation of the museum’s role as an institution charged with preserving cultural heritage, at the same time providing a critical voice that can interrogate the present and contribute to creating a different future.

“Echoes: origini e rimandi dell’art rock britannico” curated by Francesco Spampinato is an exhibition project that investigates and highlights the convergence between the worlds of visual arts and rock music from the 1960s to the 1980s. The project is divided into three exhibitions that will take place starting on April 17 at the Fondazione Luigi Rovati.The catalogue expands on this reflection through the analysis of hybrid visual projects linked to the music of The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, and Peter Gabriel, entrusted to artists such as Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, Richard Hamilton, Hipgnosis, Roger Dean, and many others. With the aim of reclaiming the role of early British art rock as a unique model for reflection on the mechanisms of pop culture itself, as well as a tool for allegorizing English traditions and culture, the catalogue presents the origins of the contamination between visual art and pop music, namely the birth, around 1967, of that border territory that takes shape between the bastions of high culture and the more enlightened regions of low culture, and which today seems to have spread to all areas of art, communication, and commerce.The catalogue is divided into three chapters, one for each exhibition. The first chapter is dedicated to the Beatles and illustrates the disruptive effect that the four boys from Liverpool had on young people and society in general: the revolution brought about by the Beatles was not limited to music, but profoundly transformed visual culture, consolidating the dynamics of the star system and then transcending them to achieve mythical status. The second chapter is dedicated to Pink Floyd, Yes, and Genesis and traces the psychedelic and surrealist imagery that accompanies the productions of these legendary bands. Finally, the third chapter focuses on Peter Gabriel, the soul of Genesis in their early years and a successful solo artist, in a journey that explores the theme of the fragmentation of the self in artistic research.

The cat – that most elegant, stubborn and artful of creatures – has been a subject favoured by artists of every culture and period since time immemorial. The spectacular stone carving created in Libya 7,000 years ago is possibly the earliest depiction of a cat fight, marking the beginning of a long uninterrupted visual tradition. A profusion of images that is not always matched by unequivocal sentiments for the cat which, while being among the most blessed of domestic animals, has often been a victim of hate and persecution over the centuries. From sacred animal in ancient Egypt to deterrent for rodents in the Babylonian civilization, an ally of man against the fatal bite of the viper, valued for its hunting prowess and immortalized as a good hunting companion, the cat gradually relinquished such practical activities to become the lazy friend of man, who opened the doors of his home to it. The cohabitation did not, however, last long and the relationship went through further ups and downs. At the end of the Middle Ages cats were mainly seen as the maleficent companion of the devil, a view that coincides with the sinister role allocated to it in paintings. It rarely, if ever, appears as protagonist in the work of the great masters but rather as a mere accessory, curled up at the feet of a female figure. It would have to wait for the arrival of Victorian sentimentalism before it could make a come-back, when this radical change in status saw it portrayed in intimate family scenes. This was the best time to be a cat, a golden age both for the affectionate relationship with its human companion and for the central role it played in works of art, where it is finally master of the scene. The greatest zoologist of our time, aware of every feline nuance, writes about history of art through the lens of cat-loving artists. For Pablo Picasso it was a symbol of ruthless violence, depicted as a fierce predator; for Balthus it was the supreme emblem of female sexuality; it was a very popular subject among cartoonists and caricaturists and used by Banksy as a vehicle for political protest.  The cat is an inexhaustible source for visual exploration and flights of fancy.

Described by André Breton as the most intelligent man of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp has never ceased to wield great influence over contemporary art since his death in 1968. From Dada and Surrealism to Futurism and Cubism, his art is interwoven with the great artistic movements of the 20th century without ever being reducible to any one of them. If Picasso insistently presents the figure of the artist as demiurge, Duchamp personifies the contemporary artist through his invention of the ready-made and has been recognized since the 1960s as an undisputable source of inspiration by younger generations of artists. A great deal has been written about his work but far less about his life, which he led outside the current categories, not as an artist or anarchist but as an “anartist”, to use his own neologism. Detachment, elegance, the freedom of indifference and interpenetration of opposites as well as a constant assertion of laziness and physiological disdain for money were for him the original tools of an unprecedented stance with respect to the world and things: “I prefer living and breathing to working.” Duchamp’s frequent, caustic remarks on his life serve as a whole to delineate a personal economics (reduce needs in order to be truly free) and an authentic art of living. According to Henri-Pierre Roché, Duchamp’s finest work was his use of his time. Bernard Marcadé takes this view as his starting point in the deep conviction that detailed examination of the artist’s life will provide the best understanding of his art. By describing the ready-made as a sort of appointment, Duchamp himself suggests the importance of the events of everyday life in the conception of his works. The biographical elements in play – meetings, friendships, secrets, correspondence and love affairs – are not only anecdotal and marginal trimmings of the work but “biographemes” constituting its fundamental components.