Programmare l’arte

Solitary figures caught up in silent dramas. Pared down to the bare essentials, the space is real and metaphysical at the same time, bathed in relentless, limpid light. The scene is nearly always deserted and the atmosphere rife with expectancy. Edward Hopper’s human landscapes are as laconic and haunting as his urban or rural landscapes devoid of human presence and sounds. What man is concealed behind such a piercing vision? In what circumstances were his pictorial dramas generated? A taciturn and introverted artist, Hopper said little about his life. It is largely the diaries and the letters written by his wife Jo during a conjugal symbiosis of over forty years that provide the basis for this monumental biography of one of the great interpreters of the modern American scene, a painter who has left an indelible imprint on posterity both in the visual arts and in cinema. Gail Levin has drawn upon largely unpublished materials to offer a gripping narrative in which the birth of masterpieces alternates with accounts of intimate everyday life lived with Jo in a domestic theatre fraught with attraction and violent conflict, admiration and support, hostility and reconciliation. As the model of his works, intellectual stimulus, an overshadowed artist and his primary champion, Jo Nivison Hopper played a key part in her husband’s success and receives equal prominence in the pages of this book.

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.  

Georgia O’Keeffe (Sun Prairie, 1887 – Santa Fe, 1986) was one of most innovative American artists in the years when painting broke away from realism. The pioneer of a non-objective art that mixes clarity of vision and emotive urgency, she developed a personal approach to abstraction and a compositional method best expressed in her celebrated and intensely sensual flower paintings. The book interweaves the artist’s personal and artistic life against the background of figures of the calibre of Steichen, Strand, Demuth, Dove, Marin and Hartley in a highly representative slice of the artistic expression of the American short century. Born in Wisconsin, O’Keeffe had a childhood marked by financial crises and frequent upheavals. At the age of 20 she was in Chicago, where she continued her studies, began to work as an illustrator and took her first steps in the universe of creativity under the guidance of Arthur Wesley Dow. It was then in New York that she met the older married man who was to become her mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, an acclaimed photographer and gallery owner, who was to leave a deep imprint on her future. They started living together and it was under his wing that she matured as an artist and a muse. They addressed the same subjects, exchanged ideas and influenced one another. Familiarity with photography enabled O’Keeffe to develop a style rooted in realism – albeit of an abstract kind – based on techniques borrowed from photography. She managed to establish herself in the artistic community, something unprecedented for a woman at a time when painting was practically a male preserve. Though loath to accept social and family obligations, which were hard to reconcile with her fierce need for solitude, she agreed to marry Stieglitz in 1924 and reached the peak of her creative blossoming three years later. This is the period of the floral and urban paintings that were to set a trend in 20th-century America. She built up a solid reputation during the long years spent in New York with breaks at their summer house on Lake George. O’Keeffe’s story is also one of suffering accompanied by setbacks in her professional and private life. Success did not make her immune to wounds and she often felt misunderstood by her most faithful champions. Averse to labels, she had a tormented relationship with male critics. When they praised her bold use of colour, she responded with subdued hues. When her broad volutes were interpreted as sexually allusive, she abandoned the subjects most charged with feeling and returned to a realistic repertoire, sometimes “filched” from male colleagues. Fame led, however, to gradual detachment from Stieglitz, who remained faithful to his role of mentor by finding someone new to mould, namely the 20-year-old Dorothy Norman. O’Keeffe spent more and more time in New Mexico, entranced by the bleak desert landscapes strewn with the white skulls of animals, which became a further addition to her already rich store of subjects. She moved definitively to Abiquiu on Stieglitz’s death.

Ando Gilardi is hailed as the most irreverent photographer and academic to come out of Italy in the last century. In this brief essay in the form of a dialogue, Gilardi, author of cult books on photography and a truly eclectic figure, makes a mischievous and amusing foray into the concept of stupidity in the photographic realm, starting out from the fabled laws on this very subject formulated by the economist Carlo M. Cipolla.The text is accompanied by around 30 images of nineteenth century photography on the theme of stupidity taken from the immense photographic archive - Fototeca Storica Nazionale – founded by Gilardi himself.