Silences where things abandon themselves (original) (raw)

"Vincenzo Agnetti and the Poetics of Zeroing"

Art and Documentation-Sztuka i Dokumentacja, 10: 39-44., 2014

Milanese artist Vincenzo Agnetti [1926-1981], who was particularly concerned with how overwhelming sensorial stimuli cause perceptual habits to become mechanical, thereby estranging perceptions and emotions. As a countermeasure, Agnetti produced a body of work aimed at upsetting the expectations of the viewer about how both language and technology function. Through the modification of machines, the use of paradoxes, tautologies and contradictions, and the alteration of artistic techniques, Agnetti revealed not only how machines are constructed to routinize behavior, but also how disciplines and institutions shape and interfere with genuine experiences and actual life conditions. I analyze how two works by Agnetti, La macchina drogata (1968) and NEG (1970), illustrate his anxiety about alienation by interrupting the regular functioning of technology. I also examine how this strategy questions the ideological bases of industrial design, and I elaborate on the relation between Agnetti’s concern with alienation, and the analyses of estrangement by Eco and the Italian critic Gillo Dorfles. While I am not suggesting that Agnetti “materialized” or “illustrated” the theories of Eco and Dorfles, whose work he most certainly knew but never explicitly quoted, striking coincidences exist between their thought and Agnetti’s diagnosis of contemporary alienation. Such similarities testify to a common disquiet in the Milanese artistic and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, revealing increasing skepticism about unbridled industrial development.

Italian Poetry Review XVIII 2023

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Aesthetics of silence. Susan Sontag

Every era has to reinvent the project of "spirituality" for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.)

Review: Donato Creti: Melancholy and Perfection, ed. Eugenio Riccòmini and Carla Bernardini, in cooperation with Keith Christiansen (Milan: Olivares, 1998; and exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)

Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1999

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A Gaping Wound Mourning in Italian Poetry, edited by Adele Bardazzi, Francesco Giusti, and Emanuela Tandello (Legenda, 2022)

Poetry has always maintained a particular relationship with mourning and its rituals, but what is it that lyric discourse has to offer in coping with death, grief, and bereavement? On the other hand, how does mourning become a central creative force in lyric poetry? How does this affect the nature of its discourse and the desires it performs? Focusing on poems by Giacomo Leopardi, Guido Gozzano, Giorgio Caproni, Giorgio Bassani, Amelia Rosselli, Antonella Anedda, and Vivian Lamarque, the essays collected in this volume explore how poetry dwells on the boundaries between high lyric and vernacular forms, the personal and the political, the local and the national, the individual and the collective, one’s own story and public history, the masculine and the feminine, individual expression and shared language. The Italian poetic tradition finds two crucial milestones in two collections of poems devoted to the lost beloved, Dante’s Vita Nova and Petrarch’s Canzoniere, and its modern and contemporary ramifications have much to offer for reflection on the ethics and poetics of mourning. CONTENTS: Introduction: Why Mourning in Poetry? ADELE BARDAZZI, FRANCESCO GIUSTI, EMANUELA TANDELLO 1. The Loss of Poetry: Leopardi’s ‘Coro di morti’ EMANUELA TANDELLO 2. Carlotta’s Ghost FABIO CAMILLETTI 3. Mourning Over Her Image: The Re-enactment of Lyric Gestures in Giorgio Caproni’s ‘Versi livornesi’ FRANCESCO GIUSTI 4. Giorgio Bassani, The Poet-Ghost, and the Memorial Duty of the Survivor MARTINA PIPERNO 5. The Space of Mourning: Elettra’s mise en abyme MARZIA D’AMICO 6. Mourning in Translation: The Sardinian Poetry of Antonella Anedda ADELE BARDAZZI 7. Madre d’inverno by Vivian Lamarque VILMA DE GASPERIN More info can be found at this link: http://www.mhra.org.uk/publications/ip-54