Page 17 - Studio International - November 1972

pure concept. All the recent events of the art
THE SIXTIES Many art objects of the last decade have had world oscillate between these two poles : art and
very little to do with art and a great deal to do aesthetics. One of the principal results it seems
IN ITALY with the data of aesthetic experience. And many to have led to is the consciousness that these two
aesthetic experiences have found their origins areas are distinct, in need of further definition,
not in art, but rather in other fields of activity and also in some way in conflict one with the
and their relative sociological and technological other.
Tommaso Trini data. Further proof of this is to be found in To continue to confuse artistic considerations
recent attempts to eliminate the tangible that belong to the art object as such with
presence of the art object totally and to aesthetic considerations that belong to the
substitute it, in some cases with pure activities of interpretation and judgement is no
developmental experience, and in others with longer useful nor perhaps even possible.
This is true no matter whether we want to
discuss Piero Manzoni or an artist of the more
recent generation, such as Mario Merz. At the
beginnings of the 6os, Manzoni reacted against
the extra-aesthetic preoccupations of the
Informel period and brought them back into the
context dart. And when he put his shit, his
breath, and his blood into this context he was
declaring tabula rasa not only with respect to art
but also with respect to the aesthetic experience
to which Informel pictorial existentialism had
given precedence in the preceding decade. And
when he opposed himself to the use of colour
he gave us another possible definition of art —
measure. His Achromes, and above all his Lines,
go beyond the aesthetic residuum that we can
find in his neo-dada 'gestures' and they raise
questions about the very function of art.
Analogously, towards the end of the 6os, Merz
had combined a first stage of aesthetic experience
with a second stage of an order that defines his
objects on the level of art alone. We have seen
him use a mathematical law, 'Fibonacci's
series', to regulate all of his objects,
environments and actions.
Generally speaking, for these artists the value
of aesthetic experience is to be bestowed on
everything that has preceded them or that
reaches them through the reflection of the work
of art, and this is particularly true for all of the
things that they do not recognize as having
contributed to an examination of the identity of
art.
The moment at which neo-dada went
beyond the bounds of tradition is also the
moment at which the very concept of an
avant garde became alien to the greater part of
the new artists; it was generally relegated to
dealing only with events that were already a
matter of history. It is no accident that the
major critical contributions of the Italian art
world of the 6os have come from the study of
the historical avant gardes — from their
rediscovery and re-interpretation. The work
done by Arturo Schwarz on Dada and on
Duchamp in particular, by Maurizio Calvesi on
Futurism, by Maurizio Fagiolo on Balla and by
Filiberto Menna on Prampolini and the ideology
of this century's avant gardes as a 'prophecy of
an aesthetic society' — all of these studies, along
with the re-examination of 193os Lombard
abstraction, have contributed to the creation of
new bases for the discussion of all the more
recent tendencies as well. Moreover, they have
Michelangelo Pistoletto Plagiarism 1971 (in collaboration with Vettor Pisani) definitely dealt with the notion of the avant
Galleria Sperone, Turin
165