Blogposts on Modernism, Postmodernism, The Digital Age
Understanding interartistic and intermedial pratice in historical context
History
Sketches of a Dialogue: The Correspondence Between Arnaldo Pomodoro and Francesco Leonetti
The correspondence between sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro and writer Francesco Leonetti, only recently analysed, has proven to be a significant source for reconstructing not only Leonetti’s biography but also some of the principles guiding his literary...
“Poi, come s’uno schermo”: Modernist Poetry and Cinema
Adorno, Kracauer, Ortega y Gasset: these are just a few of the thinkers who, at the turn of the 20th Century, expressed critical views on cinema and the way it affects its audience. Most poets...
Sanguineti’s ‘Il Giuoco dell’Oca’: The Novel as an Ecfrastic Board
Edoardo Sanguineti’s second novel Il Giuoco dell’Oca was written between 1963 – the year of the publication of Capriccio italiano – and 1967, and it was conceived as the ideal second step (“stazione”) of a...
Angiolo Mazzoni Meets F. T. Marinetti: the Italian System of the Arts...
In his lengthy 1960s correspondence with architectural historian Bruno Zevi, from Bogotà architect Angiolo Mazzoni lamented that, unlike many of his colleagues who worked under Mussolini, not only he had to move to Colombia but...
Ornament as Crime: Carlo Emilio Gadda’s Sociology of Fashion
In Carlo Emilio Gadda’s modernist works, dress never constitutes a merely instrumental element of narrative. Rather, it serves to reflect the social habitus of a character, or its very habits of being. In her Atlas...
‘Poesia Visiva: Use a Concrete Mixer.’ The Vanguard Intermediate Poetry in the...
In 1972, the Dutch visual poet Herman Damen published an outstanding critical text illustrating the daring and multifaceted expressions of neo-avant-garde experimental poetry as follows: ‘a living poesia visiva uses all available information and participation...
‘Tre per un topo’: A Journey into Toti Scialoja’s First Illustrated Book
Artist Toti Scialoja (1914-1998) was a man of many talents: while a poet, first and and foremost, he quit writing after a negative review and for years devoted himself to painting and set design. He...
Stripsody: Transforming Comics into Vanguard Art
Take the language of comic strips and give it to one of the most charismatic avant-garde singers. Pair her with an abstract painter who doubles in graphic design. Wrap up by putting a comic-loving semiologist...
Advertising Olivetti: The Male Chauvinist Pig Wants You
There is a photograph, taken around 1920, of the Olivetti manager Domenico Burzio. Olivetti was the first Italian company to make a typewriter, and it went on, after World War II, to embody the spirit...
Writing in Images: Interartistic Encounters and the Genesis of Creative Writing in...
Cultural history is full of examples of the fascinating interactions between art and literature. The verbal representation of an image known as ‘ekphrasis’, famously seen in Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles or John...
Curating New Media Art in Italy in the 1980s: The Uneasiness of...
In 1986, the Venice Biennale gave much attention to a renewed interest in the relationship between art and science: a thematic umbrella under which the latest developments in the field of communication technology were featured....
Re-Shaping Space, Re-Making Theatre: The Case of Teatro Valle Occupato Between Activism...
In June 2011, a group of artists who identified themselves as ‘lavoratori e lavoratrici dello spettacolo’, occupied an historic theatre in Rome – the Teatro Valle – with the aim to prevent its privatisation or...
Staged Narratives, Narrative Stages: The Entanglement of Theatre and Narrative in Italian...
Once upon a time there was the storyteller – the aedo, the bard, the cantastorie. He – or she – was a performer and a magician, an author, an actor, a shaman, repeating the stories...
Massini’s Lehman Trilogy: An Epic Theatrical Poem in Cinematic Cut
The Lehman Trilogy by Stefano Massini (Firenze, 1975) presents a new form of writing which combines the metrical structure of a highly poetic and rhythmic prose as in a ballad, with theatrical/cinematic direct speech and...
Interdisciplinarity and Collaborative Writing in the Humanities: Lara Saint Paul and the...
Why is collaborative writing regarded with distrust in the Humanities, while in the Sciences articles by multiple authors are standard practice? A possible answer can be found in an essay by Donald Pease that explores...
Modernist Art during the Catastrophe: The Italian Premiere of Bartók’s Ballet ‘The...
‘How dangerously blurring would it be […] if the Nazi heart had the cheek or the hypocrisy even to beat for Franz Marc or, in another field, for Bartók […]. The fact that it is unfortunately...
Gianni Toti’s Poetronics in Augmented Reality
Gianni Toti (Rome, 24Â June 1924 – 8Â January 2007) was the Italian poet, author, journalist, photographer and filmmaker who created ‘Poetronica’, a fusion of poetry and electronics. The poet demonstrated the potential of electronic language by...
Gillo Dorfles (1910-2018): The Freedom of Mythopoeia
by Florian Mussgnug When the members of Gruppo 63 assembled for the third time, in 1965, to discuss the fate of the experimental novel, Gillo Dorfles agreed to open the debate with a series of...
REWINDItalia. Early Video Art in Italy
In the 70s and 80s, Italy was a fertile ground for the experimentation of video as art practice. At the time, the most relevant Italian video art centres – which included art/tapes/22, Centro Video Arte...
The Cinematic Mode in Fiction
Cinema has influenced modern and contemporary culture in many ways, for example by contributing to reshaping language, reinforcing or dismantling sexual biases, addressing politics and family order, fostering fashion trends, and triggering new aspirations or...
Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’. Collective Writing in...
Co-authorship in fiction is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that entails different types of collaboration. In my opinion, it can be seen as a planned and deliberate collaboration between two (or more) authors leading to...
Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’. Wu Ming and...
In the 21st century social media has created great opportunities for collaborative writing (Rettberg 2013 and 2014). Collaboration and interactivity have become common and ordinary practices on the web. Communities of users around the globe...
Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’: Gruppo 70
In 1962, the journal Questo e altro, in a position article, questioned the traditional boundaries of literature: Quali sono oggi i confini della letteratura, tra l’arcadia e il proclama, il laboratorio e la denuncia, il...
Collaborative Artistic Theory and Practice. ‘Le ragioni dei gruppi’: Polystyrene Moon Above...
[translated by Georgia Wall] In the catalogue accompanying the 1990 exhibition Roma anni ’60. Al di là della pittura, the founder of Rome’s Tartaruga Gallery, Plinio De Martiis, declares, ‘if you went to certain galleries,...
The Personal Is (Still) Political. Towards an Aesthetical Historiography of the 1977...
This year marks the 40th anniversary of the 1977 student movement in Italy. Unlike 1968, the events of 1977 continue to linger in a grey zone suspended between personal testimony and historical analysis, between militant...
Dealing with Difficult Heritage: Interdisciplinarity and the Afterlife of Fascist Architecture in...
The definition of difficult heritage I use here is indebted to Sharon Macdonald’s important study of the heritage of Nazi Germany, according to which difficult heritage is ‘a past that is recognised as meaningful in...
Dario Fo: Crossing Borders
Dario Fo (1926-2016) absorbed a wide range of arts into the field of theatre. Trained as a painter and architect, he entered the world of theatre and radio broadcasting in 1951. He wrote, acted, directed,...
Interdisciplinary Futurism at Tate Modern
Monday 13 February, 12-2 pm, a Tate Modern Workshop at Tate Exchange Join us in London, at Tate Modern, on Monday 13 February for an interactive workshop on Italian Futurism. The event is part of...
(Re)constructing Futurist Rome
A work by Mario Schifano shown at the recent exhibition Roma Pop City 60-67 at Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MACRO) is a creative remaking of a famous photograph portraying five members of the Futurist...
Cthulhu by Komplex: Augmented Reality as Intermedia Fiction and Surfacing Media
(translated by Kate Willman) Augmented Reality (AR) is a medium based on geolocation, computer vision, the use of specific apps (Aurasma, Blipper) and a mobile device (smartphone, tablet). In the last few years, it has...
Interartistic Exchange in Luigi Russolo’s La Musica
If one were to choose an iconic piece of Futurist painting that best encapsulates the potentialities of interartistic exchange, Luigi Russolo’s La musica would be hard to beat. The painting is part of the permanent...
Bellissima: Between Metacinema and Intermediality
(translated by Kate Willman) Before Luchino Visconti’s film Bellissima, before directing the actors on the set, shooting, editing and cutting for censorship, all of which took place between June and December 1951, there was the...
Futurist Women: Florence, Feminism and the New Sciences
My launch of Futurist Women: Florence, Futurism and the New Sciences (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015 – 2016) was held in Senate House, London, on 7 June 2016, with Katia Pizzi as chair and Simona Storchi as...
Contaminating the Opera Genre: ‘Lo Specchio Magico’ (Urban Art Dance Opera)
“Le storie sono sempre convergenze di diverse nature” (“Stories are always convergences of different natures”), stated Aldo Nove illustrating the idea behind Fabio Vacchi’s opera Lo Specchio Magico (Urban Art Dance Opera), which premiered at...
Il valore aggiunto dell’arte. Feminist Remediations of Memory in the Graphic Novel
Memory is continuously shaped in the present, and increasingly so through the use of new media. Indeed, the proliferation of new media technologies, products and aesthetics is inextricably linked to changing ways of remembering. Digital...
Narrating Images: The Novel in the Time of Multimedia Convergence [PAPER]
There is a famed and frequently quoted passage in Epic and Novel in which the Russian critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, uses the terms «novel-ise» and «novel-isation» in order to refer to the overpowering embrace that the...
Pasolini’s Intermediality: Translating Auerbach’s Literary Theory into Film Practice
Throughout his career, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) experimented across a variety of artistic media, including poetry, fiction, cinema, drama, and painting. Yet it is in his early cinema – the so-called “national-popular phase”, including Accattone...
Modernism and the Politics of Transdisciplinarity in 1930s Italy
In the opening article of the architectural magazine Quadrante, edited by the writer Massimo Bontempelli and the art critic, curator and collector Pier Maria Bardi and published in Milan between 1933 and 1936, Bontempelli provocatively...
21st Century Autofiction
Autofiction – blurring the lines between an author’s real-life experiences and invention – is an example of a frequently intermedial and interartistic practice that has particularly flourished in recent years. It has experienced a surge...
Does Nobody Take Photos at the Cinema? Between Re-Location and Re-Relocation of...
In the last few weeks, I’ve seen some films. Some on the television and computer. Others on the big screen, in different cinemas, in different cities. One afternoon, in a seat near the back of...
Convergence in the Digital Age: Utopia or Dystopia?
The idea of the digital age has to be fundamental to any meaningful discussion of contemporary interartistic and intermedial practice. However, it is not without its problems: Should we only talk about artistic practices with...
Postmodernism R.I.P.?
Art is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. This is why critical debates about contemporary culture matter, not only to specialists. This is why we are fascinated by “-isms”, by new names for our...
Modernism / Modernisms
The essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939) which opens Clement Greenberg’s volume Art and Culture (1961) remains one of the most influential discussions of modernism and its relationship with popular culture. Greenberg’s championing of avant-garde movements...