Macchina e stella

Starting with the emblems bequeathed by Duchamp to the second half of the 20th century, the machine and the star, this volume presents three mini-essays on the theme of inspiration and its intermittencies. Beginning with the works of Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns and Alighiero Boetti, Michele Dantini sheds new light on the metaphor of the artist as ‘machine’, on the disappearance of the creative process as an orderly professional routine that had traditionally characterised the transposition of the ‘idea’ into image. A turning point that is in some ways liberating, but also harbinger of alarming implications, experienced in all their urgency by the ‘informal’ generation: how to protect oneself from the discontinuity of ‘inspiration’, how to confer duration to inner time, if everything is resolved in the unrepeatable exceptionality of the moment? Dantini analyses step by step the 'reinvention' of the artist's craft: the curious adoption of readymades to restore plausibility and vigour to traditional techniques, the indefinite dilation of execution times; the practice of the art of repetition and the creation of satisfying routines thanks to 'automatic', impersonal and even delegable procedures. It is up to the 'miserable spectator' and his acuity to grasp in the works a continuity in transition, to reconstruct the underlying metaphors and 'interpret a routine suddenly revealed to be devoid of recognisable techniques and references'.