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Spreading visual culture: contemporary art through periodicals, archives and illustrations.

The period 1960-1980, when the periodicals go back to a greater professionalization, succeeds and overlaps the previous one. This succession, however, adopted also graphics, medial and semiotic solutions, which had belonged to the first phase. Once a complete historical and critical survey is done, fundamental periodicals such as «Arti Visive» (1952-57), «Azimuth» (1959-60), «Marcatré» (1963-1970) and «Metro» (1960-1970) will be scanned and informatically catalogued. It is in this context that the verbal-visual movement arose, aiming to deconstruct the encoded mass-defined concept of “word” and “image”. In a close comparison with contemporary society, «Lotta Poetica», which will be digitalized by the Normale Unit, undoubtedly occupies an important role, being published in different and discontinuous intervals from 1971 to 1987. The research on the Sixties and Seventies will also take advantage of the essential collaboration with MART (Museo d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto), which will also help the research with unexplored archives of “Poesia Visiva”. The natural cohesion of the research Project will be reflected, besides the organization of regular meetings and conferences, by the on-line common platform (thanks to the Laboratory of Visual Arts at the Scuola Normale Superiore), from which it will be possible to consult the different databases, structured with a particular attention to the individual needs. The work of each Unit will profit from the cooperation with international experts and scholars of the highest level. In a nutshell, some of the objectives of the Project, which aims to combine a rigorous and philological approach with innovative techniques, are: analyze the spread of contemporary culture through magazines; develop a critical-historical reflection on the relationship between “high” and “low” culture; deepen the problematic related to the dialogue between art and society, obtaining new tools for interpreting the contemporary world.

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The Project will develop over a period of three years, combining moments of interaction between the four Units (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, University of Udine, University of Siena, University of Genoa) and autonomous phases, always with the purpose and the awareness of a common research project.

The Project “Spreading the visual culture” aims to study contemporary art as a gathering of various cultural movements and trends: on the one hand the “high” cultural production, represented by the “major” arts and artistic experimentations, reflected by the contemporary periodicals and magazines, on the other hand, often underestimated, the minor arts, from the illustrated newspapers to the figurative books.

The research will bring together different disciplines, from art history to semiotics, from literature to art criticism: the contemporary art will be studied according to an innovative point of view, functional to understand not only the artistic movements, but also the current society. Emblematic in this sense, the discussion developed in the fifties and sixties, when scholars from different sectors (Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, Gillo Dorfles, etc..) elaborated, at the same time, a close critique to of contemporary society, and an advanced interpretation of the first period of the 20th a century, identifying in the late 19th and early 20th centuries the dawn of the modern “image society”.

The Project, starting from a historicization of these contributions, puts them in a more articulated artistic-historical context, combining, as said before, different methodological approaches, being always aware also of other more recent reflections of scholars such as Karl Popper (“Cattiva maestra televisione”, 1994) or Michele Loporcaro (“Cattive notizie: la retorica senza lumi dei mass media italiani”, 2006). Studying contemporary art means also to activate a constant dialogue with the media, which exert a decisive influence on the perception of the contemporary world. Not surprisingly, the “Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation” dedicates its latest exhibition (2 February - 6 May 2012) precisely to “Press Play.

The art and the media”, which, as the introduction explains, “describes the artists' point of view about the contemporary media society, a world saturated with virtual images, in which the reality has apparently come to coincide with its media representation”. The understanding of these forms of art has to start, however, with a conscious historical - philological consideration, analyzing journals and periodicals of various kinds, from the end of the 19th century, when new media burst onto the international scene and the “historical avant-garde” movements are beginning to shine.

Even before the “avant-garde” movements, the challenge to the official system of the arts is carried out by the satirical and humorous periodicals, which publish provocative works of established artists, such as «Lo Spirito Folletto» (published in Milan by Edoardo Sonzogno between 1861 and 1885), which will be catalogued by the Normale Unit, following a specific procedure in order to ensure its figurative and conceptual complete restitution (the search form will include the fields article's author, artist, etc.

 

 

|Objectives | The project (1, 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6) | Hide |
 


 

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 Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa    Universitàdegli Studi di Genova

Universitàdegli Studi di SienaUniversitàdegli Studi di Udine