Feu follet – the title of Rideal’s latest exhibition and of our co-authored artist’s book – recalls the flickering shapes of European folklore, hovering and blazing with delusive light, scheming to lead the wanderer astray: ignis fatuus, fuochi fatui. Like in Rideal’s earlier project, Splicing Time, flying cloths and non-figurative pictures evoke and record human traces in a richly historical landscape, the Roman Campagna. My own attempts to explore the fascination of Rideal’s mutable forms in a verbal narrative echoed this concern. The textual fragments that accompany Rideal’s images centre on local history, and more specifically on the peculiar region of the Pontine marshes: a vast expanse of foul-smelling swamps, that used to extend for miles, from the Tyrrhenian Sea to the Volscian Mountains.

Sightings of ignis fatuus, I learned, are rarely reported today, perhaps as a result of the conversion of marshes to farmlands. What happened to the mysterious bursts of lightning activity that inspired the title of our book, and that were dear to Emily Dickinson, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, among others? The dreams and fears engendered by the subtle spirits, it appears, are now mostly figured by their absence. My exploration of the past – syncopated Image credit: Liz Rideal, Oblivion’s Mist, B. by Rideal’s images – thus unexpectedly conjured visions of a disquieting future: ruins from a world after the end of man. Progressive time – the featureless, calendrical line across which history, supposedly, marches forward – gave way to the intimate, interlocking temporalities of powerful emotions: nostalgia, regret, forecast, desire.

Feu follet, then, is more than the record of a creative complicity, a collaborative object. As a potentially open-ended process, our joint work encroaches on the layered processes of history itself, inviting complex and fleeting responses to what is read and what is seen. Pairing images with texts, we hope to inspire curiosities that will transcend our efforts, negotiations that will continue to flit around, like the deep-seated human need for pictures and stories itself.

Liz Rideal is an artist, author and Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, with over fifty international solo exhibitions and artworks held in public collections; which include; Tate; V&A; BM; Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada; Museet for Fotokunst, Denmark; Berkeley Art Museum & Yale Centre for British Art, USA. She is the author of Mirror/Mirror: Self-portraits by Women Artists (2001); Insights: Self-portraits (2005); How to Read Painting (2014) and 500 Self-portraits (2018) and co-author, with Kathleen Soriano, of Madam and Eve: women portraying women (2018).

Feu Follet opens on Thursday, 15 November 2018 at The Crypt, St John’s, Waterloo, SE1 8TY, where it can be seen until 9 December 2018. Open Saturdays and Sundays, 14.00 – 18.00, or by appointment. Contact: lizrideal.com/about/contact. Please find the invitation here.

Florian Mussgnug and Liz Rideal, Feu Follet (Slade Press, 2018) – the artist’s book that accompanies the show and is on sale at the exhibition – will be presented at the The Slade School of Fine Art, WC1E 6BT, on Monday, 3 December 2018, 17:00-19:00. The book launch will be marked by a multidisciplinary roundtable which will include contributions by Dr Maria del Pilar Blanco (Oxford) and Prof. Derek Duncan (St Andrews). All welcome.

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Image credit: Liz Rideal, Oblivion’s Mist, B.

L'articolo Will-o’-the-Wisping, in Word and Image sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

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 brief considerations. Effortlessly erudite and playful as usual, the Triestine art critic reminded his peers of the importance of being “tentative” – he used the English word – and not overly didactic (“didascalico”): a term which for Dorfles denoted one of the greatest ills of traditional academia but also of Italyâ€s self-proclaimed and insufficiently self-ironic “new” avant-garde. Renato Barilli and Angelo Guglielmiâ€s position papers about the alleged death of the novel, quipped Dorfles, were “undoubtedly brilliant”, but also rather predictable, especially since they described the need for a radically different literature in terms of a new canon: Raymond Roussel, Carlo Emilio Gadda, Günter Grass, Alberto Arbasino, Adriano Spatola, and so on. Inevitably, this entailed new exclusions, as Dorfles explained, citing the cases of Uwe Johnson and Arno Schmidt: two influential German experimental writers, whose significance had not been acknowledged by the members of Gruppo 63. Much more importantly, the real delight of radical, speculative inquiry, for Dorfles, consisted in rejecting the very idea of a single, aesthetic model – any model – in favour of open-ended, inventive and endlessly transformative creative-critical trajectories. Why would we lament, or indeed celebrate, the “death of the novel”, asks Dorfles, when some of the most interesting artists and thinkers of the present – he gives the example of Louis Mumford – were happy to combine the rhetorical and imaginative wealth of literary tradition with the urgency and excitement of political writing? And, incidentally, why not pursue the force of creative invention across artistic media, including painting, sculpture, performance and music?

For Dorfles – who had recently published his sixth, influential volume on contemporary art and society, Nuovi riti, nuovi miti (1965) and was working on L’estetica del mito (1967) – mythopoeia, the invention and re-invention of myth, was perhaps the most important way of framing his peculiar practice of open-ended, creative and speculative inquiry. The role of the critic and intellectual, he emphasized in 1965, consisted in “extending not only to the novel but to all the arts the challenge of a renewed mythopoeia. This could be much more effective than trying to fret over bunched-up categorizations (“estendere non soltanto al romanzo ma a tutte le arti, il problema di una rinnovata mitopoiesi. Il che potrebbe essere molto più efficace che cercare di spulciare delle categorizzazioni estremamente parcellari”).

Dorfles passed away on 2 March 2018, and many of the numerous obituaries that have appeared evoke the image of a man who became a myth during his own, more than centennial lifetime. Born a citizen of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Dorfles counted among his personal friends many of the greatest artists and thinkers of modern Italy: Italo Svevo, Umberto Saba, Arturo Toscanini, Dino Buzzati, Eugenio Montale, Lucio Fontana, are only a few names on a long, vertiginous list. Dorfles†achievements, similarly, have gained mythical proportions, as he lived long enough to see several of his most original and eccentric positions embraced by subsequent generations, who celebrated him for his extraordinary prescience. His “discovery” of Kitsch, long before Postmodernism; his fascination with the Baroque; his enthusiastic attention to every new and innovative artistic movement, over the course of nearly eleven decades, and so on. It is easy, and all too tempting to see Dorfles, from the dubious vantage point of our own, troubled century, as an ideal embodiment of the Twentieth Century, which he witnessed almost in its entirety. But maybe a sincere homage to Dorfles should avoid such facile etiquettes, and simply acknowledge the sheer vital force of an artist and intellectual who, like myth itself, never tired of re-inventing himself, and whose sense of history was always, enthusiastically, projected into the future.

L'articolo Gillo Dorfles (1910-2018): The Freedom of Mythopoeia sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

Istogrammi dâ€architettura

Utopie Radicali at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, stands out because of its attention to less widely known collectives such as UFO, 9999 and Zziggurat, and to creative artists like Remo Buti and Gianni Pettena, whose works are presented alongside Superstudio and Archizoom as vital expressions of the creative turmoil of the Long Sixties. Connoisseurs of Radical Architecture will relish the diversity of exhibits, which include Lapo Binazziâ€s iconic dollar-sign table lamp (1969), Archizoomâ€s delightfully kitschy Dream Beds (1967) and Zzigguratâ€s enigmatically post-apocalyptic Archeologia del futuro (1978), among others. Neophytes in search of more general information, by contrast, are likely to be baffled by the sophisticated thematic display, which samples and combines works of different periods, but reveals little about their original context or the artists†intentions and beliefs.

Compared to its Roman precursor, the Florentine retrospective has an intimate, almost nostalgic atmosphere. Florence, as Archizoomâ€s Andrea Branzi has remarked, is a provincial city defined by its glorious past, where even the most playful and mischievous of young radicals stands in awe of her illustrious ancestors. It is not surprising, then, that Utopie Radicali appeals to the complicity of like-minded audiences, and depicts Radical Architecture as a quintessentially Florentine achievement, inseparable from the city itself, just like the masterpieces by Jacopo da Pontormo, Agnolo Bronzino and Alessandro Allori also currently on show at Plazzo Strozzi. For the curators of Utopie Radicali, Florentine counterculture is intimately situated and converses with tradition, similarly to the Urboeffimeri on display in the museumâ€s Sixteenth Century courtyard: huge inflatable bags, that were glamorously paraded around Florence in 1968 by the members of the anarchist collective UFO, and that continue to speak subtly – but only to those in the know –  of an exciting and perhaps better past.

L'articolo ‘Utopie radicali’, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

A famous Indian folk tale tells the story of six men in a dark room, groping an elephant to learn what it is really like. Each one touches a different part and when they compare notes, they are in complete disagreement. The story remains instructive. Throughout the Twentieth and into the Twenty-First Century many significant artists have expressed themselves in more than one art form, drawing inspiration from different media. Yet, scholarly approaches to interartistic creativity – like the proverbial blind men of the parable – are often hampered by the sheer scope of their subject matter. Pointing their spotlights into the dark, academics have struggled to capture the intricacy and intellectual excitement of versatile creative invention. Traditional research in the field has centred on the creative exchange between particular media, emphasizing the demands and constraints of disciplinary fields (ekphrasis, adaptation, novelization) rather than the general social and psychological dynamics of interartistic creativity. Only recently, debates have focused on travelling concepts, as defined by Mieke Bal in Travelling Concepts in the Humanities (2002), and on ideas of (un)translatability (cf. Emily Apter’s Against World Literature, 2013). Translation has emerged, beyond its linguistic origins, as a powerful metaphor for cultural and artistic exchange, in a vibrant scholarly field ranging from Michael Cronin’s Translation and Globalization (2003) to Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s Born Translated (2015). Our project acknowledges these influences, but adopts a different perspective on creative practice. Instead of defining the interartistic as an indiscriminate idea or a fixed canon of works, situated between established media and genres, we focus on specific artistic experiences and experiments. A series of workshops, scheduled to take place in London, Birmingham, and Rome in Spring 2016, will highlight the practitioners’ experience with the interartistic and will reflect the variety and diversity of individual approaches and personal theories. Each event will consist of a plenary lecture, followed by a conversation with a renowned Italian artist and by scholarly response in the form of short papers. All discussants will be invited to submit a written version of their contribution, which will be published in the co-edited, peer-reviewed volume Towards a Theory of Inter-Artistic Practice. Theory itself is envisaged, in this context, as a constantly changing, dynamic field of self-reflective investigation, whose defining task consists in questioning academic orthodoxies and common sense. By foregrounding the practitioners’ perspective, we wish to embrace the open-endedness of interartistic creativity itself and echo its critique of normative boundaries, which has been, and continues to be, a driving force of modern art.

L'articolo Elephants in the Dark: Towards a Theory of Interartistic Practice  sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.

L'articolo Postmodernism R.I.P.? sembra essere il primo su Interdisciplinary Italy.