History of Contemporary Art

ETERNAL NETWORK: A MAIL ART ANTHOLOGY is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions of contemporary mail art. The essays of ETERNAL NETWORK were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. Published in 1995 by University of Calgary Press (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), the  edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging  the analog and digital world of art and communication. ETERNAL NETWORK includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of “Umbrella Magazine,” wrote an astute and prophetic review of ETERNAL NETWORK in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.

ETERNAL NETWORK: A MAIL ART ANTHOLOGY is the first university press publication in academia to explore the historical roots, aesthetics and new directions of contemporary mail art. The essays of ETERNAL NETWORK were written and assembled during the early 1990s by mail artist, writer, and curator, Chuck Welch. Published in 1995 by University of Calgary Press (Calgary, Alberta, Canada), the  edition contains forty illustrated chapters surveying an international community whose mailboxes and computers were a proto internet bridging  the analog and digital world of art and communication. ETERNAL NETWORK includes numerous photographs of mailed artifacts, performance events, congresses, stampsheets, posters, collages, artists’ books, visual poetry, computer art, mail art projects, zines, copy art and rubber-stamped images.

The book is divided into six parts: Networking Origins, Open Aesthetics, New Directions, Interconnection of Worlds, Communication Issues and Ethereal Realms. Appendixes include mailing addresses from the 1990s, mail art exhibitions, a listing and location of over 350 underground mail art magazines and a comprehensive record of public and private international mail art archives. The late Judith Hoffberg, founder of Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS) and editor of “Umbrella Magazine,” wrote an astute and prophetic review of ETERNAL NETWORK in March 1995. “Some might think that this is the last gasp of a paper-orientated group of artists, but it is more a testament to the future of alternative art and the role of artists as networker”.

In the 1960s and 1970s Giulio Macchi employed leading figures of Italian contemporary art to design the sets and the titles of some of his most famous Rai broadcasts. Macchi understood the potential of an ‘artistic’ approach to television – that in those years was reflecting on mass society and was opening up to the environmental and spectacular dimension. As such he became the promoter of a new dialogue between artists and the Italian public broadcaster, a relationship that to date has been almost completely unexplored by scholars. This article reconstructs these relationships historically as part of a broader reflection on the way Macchi conceived cultural television programming, as well as the artistic context that enabled this dialogue. The analysis of these artistic projects reveals the unlikely convergence of new forms and dimensions of art and the “spazio schermico” of Italian television, to cite the term by Gianfranco Bettetini in his book Forme scenografiche della televisione (1982), that is still today an essential reference from both a methodological and critical point of view.

The image of the “other” city: Learning from Las Vegas, or on the Necessity of an American Grand Tour -- Las  Vegas  –  the  “other”  city par  excellence  even  in  the  multifaceted  American  urban landscape – had never been a case study for architects and urban planners until 1968, when Scott Brown, Venturi, Izenour and their Yale students organized a study-trip to investigate the city and its dynamics. Through the comparison between different kinds of literature and new archival findings, the paper reconstructs the events behind the Las Vegas Studio, considered as the first step towards the publication in 1972 of Learning from Las Vegas.

Alla metà del Settecento si trasformano radicalmente tutti gli aspetti della vita europea. È su questo piano che si misurano anche i problemi di un ritardo storico, vero o presunto, dell’arte e della cultura in Sardegna. Avvicinatisi al neoclassicismo negli anni della permanenza della corte sabauda, durante l’Ottocento gli artisti isolani da un lato intensificano gli scambi con il “continente”, dall’altro avviano una riscoperta della storia e delle tradizioni locali. La riflessione sulla specificità si approfondisce man mano che si avanza nel Novecento: nella prima metà essa permea l’apertura alle esperienze nazionali e internazionali – postimpressionismo, liberty, secessione e, in architettura, il razionalismo – mentre dal secondo dopoguerra, facendosi discorso di forme, aiuta a rileggere il rinnovamento in direzione dell’astrattismo e dell’informale. Dopo la stagione di ricerca degli anni sessanta e settanta, gli ultimi decenni sono sempre più dominati dall’eclettismo postmoderno, tanto in architettura, quanto nelle arti visive.

THE GEOMETRIAS & GRAPHICA 2015
CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
The lecture deals with the complex nature of James Turrell's artistic work: it's based on a synchronous and innovative use of geometry, sensory perception and art, capable of inducing altered states in the viewer's perception of space and time. The team Imago rerum at IUAV University of Venice has taken about 10 years a collaboration with the American artist to create interactive digital clones of his light works. The purpose is to study in vitro the unique characteristics of his works, in particular his famous and mysterious land-formed work, the Roden Crater Proejct. The lecture explained by such operating methods worked the Venetian team, using the state-of-the-art digital modeling and chrome-luministic simulations to recreate the core of Turrell's works. The lecture ends with a presentation of the interactive model of the Roden Crater project for which it was designed a model of the celestial vault. James Turrells [1] installations and environmental scale designs establish intense co-action with the observer who, overexposed to luminous carefully studied stimuli, modifies his own perception of space. The process of interaction with the work pushes us to accept our own visual capabilities, to ask ourselves with greater insistence if that which we are perceiving actually coincides with phenomenal reality: our eye still functions in a Cartesian manner, but now an interpretative effort is demanded of the sentient capabilities of the observer so as to understand that that which he is seeing is his way of seeing. It deals with an hermeneutical approach to the subject of vision and light – from which the former is derived-, that can only briefly be fit into a well established stylistic trend like that of Light-Environment Art, whose goal is to submerge the spectator in the radiant and shady flow that is generated by light: in this expressive context, the work, " …does not represent nor cause the light, but is physically made of light " [2]. The compositive nature of James Turrell's installations restore that intangible and unique character that is typical of luminous radiation: such works cannot be purchased, displayed in one's living room or, in the traditional sense, in a museum, they occur. They have the characteristics of a happening in which many artists often interact. They are responsible for the production of sounds, noises, and smells that resonate and perceptively envelop the spectator in a fruitive sequence whose goal is to suspend the awareness of self. " This process establishes a relationship between the artist's quest and the environment that becomes the instrument with which to create the piece. This is no longer colour, brush, canvas; but walls, spaces, light, openings that lead to the exterior as

The research aimed at studying and analysing the contemporary art publishing system in Milan during the Thirties, on the basis of a mapping of the specialised book production with a major focus on its forms, mechanisms and leading figures.
The work spanned a preliminary phase designed to identifying the study materials, to defining the research boundaries and fields in a quite unusual historiographical perspective, poised between history of art and publishing, on a ground where the dynamics related to the artistic promotion and its consumption, to the publishing market and to the book production chain are mutually intertwined.
Because of their peculiarities, such as the material profile as well as the target audience, art books prove to be products with distinct features and issues within the publishing industry. In the Thirties, such specificity interact with a crucial debate on the identity of contemporary art, prefiguring a new historical context characterised by the unprecedented development of editorial initiatives aimed at the codification and dissemination of the values of the current figurative culture.
The entire study was based on the systematic mapping of publications issued between 1929 and 1943 – a chronological arc identified as the most congruent for the purposes of the investigation – carried out according to the analysis of coeval sources, such as bibliographic guides and bulletins, book sales catalogues, specialised libraries records. The evaluation and cataloguing of each editions took into account specific parameters selected depending on the nature of art books and more specifically considering the central role of photomechanical reproductions in the production chain. All information was gathered in a database converted into an organised repertory with technical entries and indexes of editorial presences.
The results of this broad census led the research considering the great issues of the productive system, the emerging literary genres, and the reproduction and printing processes of images, making references to theory as well as to texts, printed and archive sources, until broadening the field of investigation to include a comparison with the related Italian and foreign coeval publishing.
The thesis is thus divided into three main parts, introduced by an attempt to define the forms of contemporary art books and by a check of the performance of editorial production. This section shed light on an existing  periodization within the chronological extremes closely intertwined with a wide variety of ongoing dynamics directly affecting the publishing sector, among which the consolidation of a new collecting, the contextual developments in the field of art politics and the technological advances of the graphic industry are just some of the most relevant.
The analysis of the publishing system chiefly looked to define the players, actually the figures personally involved in the production chain, thus outlining for the first time a structured map of publishers, photoengravers, typographers and printers. In fact, among the prerogatives of the sector, one which undoubtedly stands out is the fragmentation of the entrepreneurial figures ascribable to the high specialization standards which illustrated books require and to the creation of which contribute multiple professional profiles and skills. The panorama of the publishers itself revealed a remarkable diversification corresponding to a consistent permeability to the context of the galleries and the art market as well as to the context of magazines, thus making it possible to reconsider places which according to historiography live apart.
Shifting the goal to the publishing production, namely to the books object of the investigation, the work addressed the issues related to the forms of dissemination of new figurative values, in response to the coeval ongoing process aiming at their accomplished definition. In keeping with the mapping, and tapping into a comprehensive overview and a wealth of aspects typical of the product book considered in the research, the perspective aimed at highlighting the emerging genres, such as the book-catalogue, the panorama, the series of artist monographs, while reflecting on their fortune, among gaps, drifts, continuity and innovative elements, also based on a comparison with international models.
Finally, a key part of the work consisted in examining the photomechanical reproduction and printing processes employed in the production of books: a crucial issue inherently belonging to the specificity of art publishing – based on reproductions and their mise en page – that, however, appears largely overlooked by historiography. Mindful of the technical equipment, the processing steps and the graphic results, the research carried out confirmed the value of this investigation line, while shedding light on the role that the technological innovations achieved in the Thirties played not only in determining the materiality and grammar of images, and hence the very reception of art, but the very publishing forms. Significantly new features emerged, in particular, in relation to the colour reproduction and its renovated, quickly booming commercial systems, such as fotocolor, whose first diffusion this work retraced.
The appendix presents the final catalogue of books entries as well as indexes and lists, including the complete listing of publishing series.

«Il tema di questo libro è l’ideale dell’arte assoluta, che ha guidato incessantemente la produzione artistica pur avendola sempre elusa. Questa aspirazione irrealizzabile dell’arte è spesso confusa con l’ossessione di produrre qualcosa di veramente nuovo e originale, anche se, in effetti, il nuovo è spesso soltanto la maschera di un ideale che è ancora alla ricerca del suo posto nel mondo dell’arte».
Hans Belting

Quando, ai primi dell’Ottocento, il processo di autonomia dell’arte giunge a compimento, le opere cominciano a essere ritenute il “luogo” nel quale essa deve trovare la propria ragion d’essere, nonostante la si concepisca come assoluta e mai pienamente realizzabile. Sulla scia del celebre racconto di Balzac Il capolavoro sconosciuto, Belting conia l’immagine del “capolavoro invisibile” per designare e descrivere questo ideale irraggiungibile. Servendosi di tale immagine, l’autore scandaglia e decostruisce alcuni punti nodali delle vicende artistiche occidentali otto-novecentesche, in un racconto nel quale emerge che la corrispondenza tra l’arte come idea e l’opera come suo inveramento ha assunto una connotazione utopica.

Problem Statement: The quality and meaning of life are continuously attached to the presence of elements, objects, things, people and concepts; the absence means denying and depriving the presence, has strengthen this concept, hence has been frequently presented in philosophy and art fields. The concept of absence as an art strategy has been presented at the context of many artworks, especially in the present century. In photographic contexts due to introducing the previous presence of things, ‘absence’ finds a referral function. But the main question here is that, how in the photographic contexts, we might be able to find the existence of historical narratives behind them, through the absence of elements and things?
Research objective: Photographs as the ever-present contexts, whether on private albums or in art/ news studios, even on virtual social spaces, offer a variety of absences with different origins, and [therein] the historical analysis arising from it in these works would lead to a better understanding of the human social context. The research hypothesis here is that photograph as a historical context, when linked to and analyzed by the narratives surrounding it, would present the ‘absence’ as a means of denying the presence of suppressed forces in the social context, that potentially have the power to participate and alter the actions of every day’s life.
Research Method: was done based on the social history of the photographic contexts, as in this approach, behaviors, events and beliefs, besides being part of daily life context, are also important in the process of historical research.
Conclusion: Absence in the picture frame, is able to represent the latent power behind the different social classes; Moreover, the standpoint of elements related to absence within the historical context and its continuation at photograph scale will be discussed and explained the way that photography exploits the absence as a modern concept to represent a different content and various readings.

The chapter is an original research (from Almerini post-degree dissertation) on the 'Cooperativa Beato Angelico',  an experimental art space run by women, mostly artists, in the seventies in Rome, some of whom had exited Rivolta after the break with Carla Lonzi. The essay recounts the story of the space, its origins and explores the artistic practice originated by the artistist involved. Moreover provides a reflexion on the importance of autocoscienza practiced by some of the women in the Cooperativa, introducing a discussion on the need of different research methodologies to historicize women’s group work.

In recent history, and through various mechanisms, the Turkish nation-state has attempted to impose a singular identity, homogenizing citizenship and denying belonging to the country’s minority communities. Through the works of contemporary artists from Turkey—specifically, Şener Özmen’s performative photographs, Jujin’s performance, and Hale Tenger’s sculptural installation and video art—this study aims to probe the homogeneous construction of Turkish citizenship and how Turkey as a nation navigates ethnicity, religiosity, gender, and sexuality. An analysis of these artworks requires an understanding of the ideological concepts central to Turkish national identity, which includes Westernization, citizenship, and secularism. Therefore, because of the complexity of the many agents and conflicting ideologies of power that compete for dominance in the country, it is necessary to offer a brief history of the Turkish nation-state. Following a partial history of contemporary Turkey, I will address a number of works by the artists just noted in relation to the nation’s central ideological concepts. I do so in order to activate debates about normative Turkish national identity. Questions that frame this study include how religion and language spill over into the construction of Turkish identities and whether religious patriarchy differs from the secular in a nation-state oriented toward modernity.

In un suo recente libro 1 , la scrittrice statunitense Siri Hustvedt (1955) ha ricostruito su diversi piani narrativi la vita di Harriet Burden , artista immaginaria il cui talento non venne riconosciuto in vita dal mondo della critica a lei contemporaneo, delineando un labirinto letterario in cui si incrociano frammenti dei suoi diari (rigo-rosamente redatti secondo un assurdo ordine alfabetico) e le te-stimonianze delle persone che la amarono o che ne derisero il la-voro. L'autrice mostra di conoscere in profondità le odierne teorie filosofiche sull'arte e sulla percezione 2 , tessendo una fitta trama piena di rimandi, interni e esterni al testo, a cui il lettore si abban-dona man mano che procede nel racconto. Ma la brillante cultura e intelligenza della Hustvedt non costituiscono la parte più interes-sante del libro: è invece la pietà e l'amore per la complessa e mi-steriosa vita della protagonista che emerge, uno straziante e do-lente ritratto di una vita complicata da una fisicità ingombrante e da un talento mostruoso che il mondo non è in grado di capire, a meno che non si mascheri (come succede nel romanzo) in tre alter -ego/prestanome maschili (Anton Tish, Phineas Eldridge e Rune) a cui vengono attribuite le sue opere, ottenendo così un incredibile successo mass-mediatico. Naturalmente non è possi-bile operare nessuna proiezione psico-biografica tra la vita della protagonista del romanzo della Hustevedt e quella di Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), artista e architetto italiana che ha svolto gran parte della sua attività di disegnatrice/pittrice e progettista negli Stati Uniti, e tuttavia si delinea sullo sfondo un elemento comune, che solo in tempi recenti ha iniziato a sciogliere i suoi nodi critici: il riconoscimento del valore creativo della produzione svolta da una donna in un universo fondamentalmente maschile e In a recent book 1 , the American writer Siri Hustvedt (1955) reconstructed on various narrative levels the life of Harriet Burden, an imaginary artist whose talent was not recognised in life by the critics, sketching a literary labyrinth in which fragments of her diaries (rigorously written following an absurd alphabetical order) are mixed with the recollections of people who loved her or who scorned her work. The author has a good in-depth knowledge of contemporary philosophical theories on art and perception 2 , and weaves a dense plot full of references, both interior and exterior to the text, in which the reader is progressively involved as the tale proceeds. Yet the brilliant culture and intelligence of Siri Hustvedt are not the most interesting part of the book, but rather the compassion and love for the complex and mysterious life of the main character, a heartrending and painful portrait of a life complicated by an awkward body and by a huge talent that the world is not capable of understanding, unless it is masked (as in the novel) in the form of three male alter-ego/frontmen (Anton Tish, Phineas Eldridge and Rune) to whom her work is attributed, thus obtaining an incredible mass-media success. It is obviously not possible to carry out a psycho-biographic projection between the life of Hustvedt's heroine and of Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011), the Italian artist and architect who carried out a great part of her work as a designer, as well as a draughtswoman and painter in the United States, and yet there is a common element to both lurking in the background which only recently has began to be revealed: the recognition of the creative value of a woman's production in an essentially male and chauvinist world, that of contemporary art and architecture. L'opera grafica di Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011) invita l'osservatore ad entrare in un universo di visioni sospese, di luoghi archetipici in cui dominano il riflesso e la liquidità atmosferica. Architetto e docente universitario in USA, Lauretta Vinciarelli dipingeva e disegnava mossa dal desiderio di riattingere, per via figurativa, all'assolata atmosfera romana, dalla quale proveniva, ma anche alla torrida secchezza del deserto del Texas, dove visse a stretto contatto con Donald Judd. The graphic work by Lauretta Vinciarelli (1943-2011) invites the observer to enter a universe of suspended visions, of archetypal places dominated by reflections and atmospheric fluidity. An architect and university professor in the United States, Lauretta Vinciarelli painted and made drawings moved by the wish to figuratively tap into the sunny Roman atmosphere where she came from, but also into the sweltering dryness of the Texas deserts, where she lived with partner and fellow-artist Donald Judd.

The lecture deals with the complex nature of James Turrell’s artistic work: it’s based on a synchronous and innovative use of geometry, sensory perception and art, capable of inducing altered states in the viewer’s perception of space and time. The team Imago rerum at IUAV University of Venice has taken about 10 years a collaboration with the American artist to create interactive digital clones of his light works. The purpose is to study in vitro the unique characteristics of his works, in particular his famous and mysterious land-formed work, the Roden Crater Project. The lecture explained, by such operating methods, how the Venetian team worked, using the state-of-the-art digital modeling and chrome-luministic simulations to re-create the core of Turrell’s works. The essay ends with a presentation of Roden Crater project’s interactive clone for which it was designed a model of the celestial vault. 02.10.2015 MANHA / MORNING ARTIGO 007 / PAPER 007 (Apresentado em Ingles / Presented...

Since the 2010s, an increasing number of artists have contravened the flatness and the hanging standards of the photographic print. Their three-dimensional photographic works are not just framed and hung on the wall, but take possession of the ceilings and the floors of exhibitions spaces. Curators give them wide visibility through exhibitions and frequently label them “photo-objects”, “photo-sculptures” or “photo-installations” lacking any better term. This vague terminology betrays a historiographical vacuum that this presentation aims to address and to partially fill.