The Avant-gardes and Folklore

Bologna has often been considered a “political and intellectual workshop”. Such aspect is evident in many documents providing testimony of Galleriad’Arte Moderna’s opening in 1975 and in few works included in its collections. Among the most renowned of which is undoubtedly Renato Guttuso’s Funerali di Togliatti, depicting the huge gathering around the coffin of the historical secretary of the Italian Communist Party. Guttuso himself is the speaking voice in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La Rabbia, who in turn is also a protagonist in the piece Intellettuale by Fabio Mauri held at GAM in 1975. Just a few months later, the great director and poet would die tragically and from his mourning would come intensive elaborations of the writings by the painter Giuseppe Zigaina. Pasolini's film is presented here with a symbolic extract confirming the cultural climate of the era, of an anti-fascism mindful of the partisan struggle and revolutionary appeals that in Bologna gave rise to debates and publications such as Avanguardie e Cultura Popolare. Among the players was also the artist Sebastian Matta and the great art historian Giulio Carlo Argan, who, in referring to Guttuso’s militant choices, commented that the controversy, during that period, between Realism and Formalism could take the form of choices in which «the artist gives up his own artistic and expressive autonomy, because he has already achieved his own moral freedom with the ideological choice».

Street Art NY - BO: Tribute to Francesca Alinovi

«The current avant-garde art, rather than being underground art, is boundary art. Whether because it arises, literally, in the geographic areas situated on the edge of Manhattan, or whether because, even metaphorically, it is placed within an intermediate space between culture and nature, mass and élite, white and black (I allude to skin colour), aggressiveness and irony, trash and exquisite sophistication. These artists are both "black feathers and white faces”, and are the new kids in New York». Francesca Alinovi described with these words the excitement that ran through the Big Apple in the late Seventies and early Eighties. It was an environment where, in spaces such as Fashion Moda and slums like the Bronx, the graffiti of Toxic, Daze, Crash and Futura 2000 was spreading. The subway cars and walls studded with tags are an integral part of the counter-cultural landscape in which iconic drawings by Keith Haring and hyperrealist casts by John Ahearn developed.
In 1984, with the exhibition Arte di Frontiera: New York Graffiti, Bologna celebrated the creative impulse from overseas by importing the styles and forms of expression. At the same time, the city was undergoing a change: in the aftermath of the '77 student demonstrations, the experience of free radio gave voice to the new creative class. Magazines such as "Frigidaire" gathered together ranks of drawers and cartoonists (Andrea Pazienza above all) that would leave an indelible mark on future developments.

Italian Pop Art: everyday life as an object

Italian Pop Art is not a uniform phenomenon. It also involved artists who worked in the sphere of New Dada, of Nuova Figurazione, and décollages. In Rome, as in Milan and Bologna, the Pop art works incorporated the everyday life into a political vision which was more pronounced than that of the protagonists of contemporary English and American Pop Art. There was the rough wood and serial works of Mario Ceroli, posters like the “skin of urban walls”, torn and glued on canvas by Mimmo Rotella, and the painting of the so-called “Scuola di Piazza del Popolo”, which took on the symbols and idioms of the modern life, a subject of social and political tensions. The historian Maurizio Calvesi wrote, in 1970, that «Franco Angeli belongs to the generation of violence and his paintings reflect that» through a style of painting «which denies representation, favours the symbol and enhances its muteness». Mario Schifano appropriated iconic elements from the world of television and advertising, matching them with a peculiar pictorial illusion of speed. Concetto Pozzati explored the same possibilities of painting through neo-surrealist deconstructive strategies. Italian Pop Art embraced the new landscape of the Italian economic boom, the new objects and images of the country’s modernization, the advent of an unprecedented mass culture, but, instead of emphasizing the processes of social transformation, it continued to monitor the new demands with the critical approach that was essential to being an artist in Italy in the Sixties.

Dino Gavina: everyday life as a project

The aestheticization of modern life and the increasing disposable income of households in post-war Italy contributed to forging a new taste and understanding of the influence of the visual landscape in the establishment of new communities. The world of industry and production welcomed the momentum of ideas and forms derived from a design that was conscious of its role. A great leader in this "adventure" was Dino Gavina. MAMbo, with the exhibition presented in 2010, paid tribute to the extraordinary entrepreneur who began in Bologna and branched out with a number of companies, embrace the ideas of some of the major designers of the post-war period (from Breuer to Takahama) and artists involved in broadening the horizons of design (from Fontana to Matta, from Man Ray to Balla), and the protagonists of Kinetic Art. In particular, the encounter with Duchamp led him to found a centre, entitled to the dadaist master, intended as an open cultural laboratory. Industrial production became almost irrelevant face to the need to understand the elaboration itself of these new lines of modernity, taking into account the history of mankind’s cultural products while “designing” its future. Embodying this spirit there also the declarations of poetics and the manifesto statements made by Gavina or the exhortation "to the self-designed" that was gradually achieved with the company Metamobile and the intense relationship with intellectuals and designers such as Enzo Mari.

Kinetic and Programmed Art

Starting in 1959, the new logic of project sharing and the widespread desire to awaken active public participation, enlivened the debates and critical comparisons that were a prelude to the birth of Gruppo N and Gruppo T. The analysis of the work, its being determined in changing conditions, its delineation in a space-environment and in a context increasingly influenced by technology, fostered a climate of research that led to the creation of fluid, dynamic, and unstable devices. Sometimes the perceptive dimension prevailed and, also by virtue of the contemporary research of Gestalt psychology, the artists focused on the optical qualities of their works. In other cases, colour, form, and light relied on the effects of materials and environments that forced the viewer to move in variable spaces, integrating and participating in the creation of the work itself, completing the artistic programming with the unpredictable reactivity of their gait and the way they related to it. It is no coincidence that Umberto Eco, author of the seminal book Opera Aperta (1962), was one of the strongest supporters of these inventors of “cybernetic machines”.
The evolution of the group and individual research directions into a necessary sortie away "from the painting" in favour of the urgency of the "new trends" in contemporary art, was accompanied and documented by numerous publications and events, symptomatic of a collective conscious action for a new aesthetic engineering of forms and relationships.