Ugo Mulas. Vitalità del negativo

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.”

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.”

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.