Nomadismo e guerriglia: l’Igloo di Giap di Mario Merz Denis Viva Being a symbol of Arte Povera’s engagement during 1968, Mario Merz’s Igloo di Giap was often discussedas one of the most blatant reference to the guerrilla and the Vietnam War. But how did the Third-worldisttheories or the Italian students’ protests inspire Merz in combining…

Carlo Alfano, o della pittura come (im) possibile necessità Maria De Vivo The enquiry concerning “the terms of painting”, its necessity and the enunciation of the impossibility ofrepresentation, is the thread that binds all the research by Carlo Alfano (1932-1990). This article focuses on some specific moments of an extensive and complex production which is…

Onori all’arte in fieri. Il rifiuto metodico di Francesco Matarrese Gabriele Guercio The essay explores the stance of Francesco Matarrese, an artist who began his career working in the postconceptual area during the early Seventies. In 1978, instead of submitting artworks for an upcoming exhibition in Rome and Naples, Matarrese sent a telegram in which…

Può un’eccellente opera d’arte contemporanea essere ornamentale o decorativa ? Daniela Lancioni Anyone writing about contemporary art may run into the prohibition of a word, imposed by the artist whose work you are attempting to interpret. In the full-blown climate of the conceptual it was passed on by artists who banned the words “painting” or…

Sfavillii escrementizi. Lucio Fontana in <<October>> Jacopo Galimberti Lucio Fontana exhibited his work several times in the USA in the 1960s, but his efforts did not elicit muchenthusiasm among artists and critics. Twenty years following the artist’s death, Yve-Alain Bois, a Frenchart critic and historian who was member of the editorial board of the journal…

Costruzioni interminabili. Psicoanalisi e marxismo nel dibattito critico degli anni Settanta: il contributo di Menna e Trimarco Maria Giovanna Mancini Dedicated to the analysis of Italian critical debate in the 1970s, the essay reconstructs, in particular, the reasoning and outcomes of the theoretical proposals of Filiberto Menna and Angelo Trimarco. Italian criticaldebate in the 1970s…

Sapendo parlare, insegna a tacere. Appunti su una fase critica della critica, 1977 – 1983 Alessandro Del Puppo This article deals with three different interlaced topics: 1) a fairly philological question: the reason why theItalian critic Achille Bonito Oliva used a definition («groups of armed sensitivity») in a 1977 articles, andthe reason of its disappearance…