Under this denomination, improper in its very ambiguity, it is agreed to collect a large number of manifestations that propose a concept of art so extensive (parallel to the one that we tend to impose on culture) that everything becomes art because we want nothing it is. The phenomenon, which was revealed in Italy of very considerable proportions in the 1960s (although preceded by previous attempts), is common to the whole world, but with a more precocious and conspicuous constitution in the more industrially advanced countries, from which it quickly rebounded on the others. still paleo-industrial character, determining offshoots that we can consider, in a certain sense, “provincial”. This aesthetic research finds inspiration, and recognizes its own tradition,
According to allcountrylist, there is no lack of profound reasons for this research, which nestle mainly in the dissatisfaction of the oppressed person or, as they say, “alienated” from the technocratic and bureaucratic organization, which has not been matched by the freedoms that nineteenth-century optimism hoped for since the advent of machine, and adequate ethical and social progress; in the decline of traditional values, which have not been replaced by new satisfying values; and in the consequent and growing separation of art from society, where the artist’s activity may appear less than superfluous with respect to the most urgent problems. Hence a need to demystify, demystify, question everything starting from scratch; to refuse commercialization and private collecting (at least in the intentions) and therefore to prefer poor materials and precarious conservation; or even to transpose the aesthetic in the action (instead of in the works): in the unrepeatability of happening, of improvised intervention, of behavioral ostentation, which requires mimic expression, becoming theater in its own way, and which resolutely and merely enters the sphere of volition, therefore of practice and politics. From this, moreover, a shift of the purposes, from the traditional painting and sculpture, to the environment: first of all the city, of which the typical, obsessively repetitive aspects imposed by technology and industry, one seeks, as it is, the personal and collective appropriation. In this regard, you can already see the operations of pop – art (and other currents) when they pin their interest on advertising, on poster design (also décollages of a M. Rotella fall within this line of intentions) or on objects of daily use, traced, parodied, paradoxically enlarged, transferred to materials other than the original ones and their own (“soft” telephones, for example) or distracted from the context habitual to be presented in and of itself as discovered then, then unexpectedly enjoyable in another light, surprised and revealed from unprecedented psychological angles. This last operation (which the photographic lens had been performing for some time and will then frequently perform the cinematography) is largely carried out by many aesthetic researchers, aimed at the so-called recovery of the object: whether they take it without any modification or process it or place it, together with others, in assemblages, or in showcases, which are almost profane reliquaries (as does L. Del Pezzo). Here too we can see, in the background, a not unjustified reaction to the abnormal growth of too many “things” which, as Giacomo Devoto said (but Gasparo Gozzi had already noticed this in the Osservatore Veneto), they besiege us and trivialize us without ever becoming “words”. From the urban field, the research moves on to a much more subtle hypothesis of space strictly related to the person in his relationship with the total reality, aiming at constituting a new aesthetic spatiality, which is not however the commonly understood environment, and which is difficult to discern how much the indication of a physical space ultimately still remains (up to the limit, sometimes, of the “biological container”) and how much it aspires to become, instead, an abstractly humanistic measure (almost an indefinite “ideological container”). Always with the same oscillation, of thoughts and projects, between material spatiality and mental dimension, the problem, which tires researchers and cultural operators a lot, it also focuses on space as a complement to expression, or even as a substitute for it by which it becomes a “scene”: precisely in the sense of the evocative and surreptitious fiction of theater, film, and the mirror image: a space (and a time) that break up and overturn the usual meanings of reality (see the “actions”, the films, the anatomies of literary texts, or of simple words, with the following anagrams and “rebus” by L. Patella). Aesthetic research then goes into many sectors of an elementary technology, giving rise to playful mechanisms (for example: projections of rays that cross a dark room; or breathing walls for electrical devices that rhythmically stir the tiles on their pins and joints) that is, it sets up pseudo-ecological environments, like meadows of plastic grass on which live doves walk; or it creates “primary” structures, with that feeling of reductive primitivism that seems to make a choice, perhaps wanting to oppose the lazy inventory attitude, which records – if not even historicizes – everything that exists simply by the fact that it exists. This is how he proposes amud igloo, or a mound of leaves or debris; but already M. Duchamp, in 1920, had made a “farm dust” and therefore the phenomenon is not nuo vo(just as many “minimal” and “objective” ideas do not appear unprecedented). He also performs symbolic efforts, equally primary: such as tracing concentric circles on the ground, aligning rows of stones, digging sheep tracks, driving wedges and nails into tree trunks (Giuseppe Penone does it) intending to recall with such interventions – of “art poor “or” conceptual “, as it is called – the love for rural nature and the memory of a primitive existence, overwhelmed and erased by progress. Of course it is almost impossible to give even an approximate idea of the almost innumerable manifestations that try, with all kinds of purposes and tools, an alternative to the arts of drawing (and also to literature, to language and writing) under the pressure of the desire for new cultural and social communications. Nor would it be of much use to list the different denominations (most of them in English) that the research receives according to the field to which it is more specifically addreCost commonly used: art – language, body – art, conceptual – art, minimal – art, mec – art, and so on. But we will cite some forerunners and protagonists, including among the first, less arbitrarily than it might appear, F. Lo Savio (1935-1963) whose neo-constructivist purism led him to the extreme simplicity of surfaces and filters that intended to achieve absolute synthesis of matter, space and light. The same neo-gestaltic and visual-kinetic researches (opart) conducted by groups (T. and Mid in Milan, Uno in Rome, N in Padua, etc.) or by independent operators (such as for example G. Alviani, E. Castellani) are included with their use of non-utilitarian technologies, in whose fund, at times, the salvific concept of science and its applications seems to reappear, already affirmed in the years of divisionism, even if it is not an attempt to exorcise them, science and technology, with that ambiguity of behavior and of ends which such operations are pleased with. In addition to the aforementioned P. Pascali and M. Ceroli (also the latter participates, at least partially, in the aims of aesthetic research) we will mention among the most original and inventive P. Manzoni (1933-1963) known for the achromes (“white paintings”) and for the irreverent and mocking proposals, which caused a scandal when they appeared; P. Scheggi (1940-1971); the objects G. Colombo and A. Bonalumi, creators of ambiguous, optically deceptive spatiality (and Bonalumi also of “inflated” plastic objects, similar to Pascali’s toys). M. Pistoletto with his mirror self-images (always in the direction of optical-perceptive deception) and V. Pisani, one of the best-known behaviorists of erotic-surreal tone.
