In summer 1986 Righeira had everyone dancing with their hitItalians a go go, in a country that had perhaps stopped being that Ytalya subjecta against which Emilio Villa had rightly polemicised. It was becoming – for the last time after the decade from 1968-1977, which had transformed the peninsula into an international political and cultural laboratory – the Italy of the collective intelligence that conquered the world with Valentino, Armani, Moschino, Versace, and so on. But in 1980s, Italian style was not only a matter of fashion or design. It was also, and perhaps above all, that of the last, paradoxical, avantgarde, which managed to take Italy beyond national borders, to the conquest of art markets and galleries proposing a local/global interpretation of the spirit of the times, or rather of postmodernism. In the meantime, prime minister Bettino Craxi revived the myth of Garibaldi, announced the sorpasso (i.e. “overtaking” British GDP) that promoted Italy to the world’s fifth richest country and, at Sigonella (i.e. a standoff with US forces at the military base in Sicily), re-established its autonomy with respect to the American superpower: Italians a go go, indeed. The transavantgarde, and its theory elaborated since the end of the 1970s by ABO – and this is what we’re talking about, here – was shaking up the system of culture, offering itself as a paradoxical way of crossing through the visual memory of our recent past, based on a reinterpretation of the myth of the Genius loci, i.e. of the real or non-existent identity of Italian art. This story was recently reconstructed in a gem of a book by Stefano Chiodi published by Quodlibet, entitled Genius loci. Anatomia di un mito italiano, which rightly takes its cue from the exhibition of the same name organised by Bonito Oliva in Acireale in 1980. In short, if in the 1960s-1970s the language of Italian art had been internationalised, according to a Darwinian logic that was structurally modernist, now – according to the “Neapolitan and part-Roman” critic, in fact born in Cilento – art recovered a fortuitous manual ability and the instinct of the work without a project, starting from a vernacular language ironically rooted in artists’ different regional identities. This meant local versusglobal, we could say, but without forgetting the paradoxical logic that ran through that proposal. It was not, in fact, a matter of an unfortunate return to order as per Sarfatti (as was also indicated at the time) nor of a periodic “implosive” phase after the “explosive” one of the previous decade, as proposed by others. Rather, this was a playful re-proposition of the (im)possible Italian identity. It had nothing to do, then, with the use of the Genius loci in a strapaesana key (i.e. a folkloric attachment to local territory as the source of culture). Instead, this was an anti-authorial re-proposition, in the form of pastiche of the memory of the avantgarde and its stereotypes, without resentment and in a parodic and playful key. An operation to be interpreted within a postmodernism intended as an ironic riposte to mourning for the modernist utopia. This was anticipated, in unsuspected times, by De Chirico, the Pictor optimus, and then, still in a conceptual climate, by Salvo and Ontani, but also in part by Kounellis and Paolini. In a nutshell, the identity rooted in an origin is nothing more than a myth that can be “circumvented” – rather than “deconstructed”, which would perhaps be more interesting – playing with the orientalism of those stereotypes that have always been projected from abroad onto the Belpaese, “let’s play at doing that, let’s dress up as, let’s pretend that, and let’s recover the dialect against a major language that has always and only been the language of power”. Dorazio, an ardent modernist, made a good point when he lamented the return to the Biennale, with Clemente and Paladino, of the dismal tradition of the Avellino crib. This wasn’t a question of tradition, but of betrayal – or rather of the “ideology” of betrayal and therefore “of the traitor”, as the title of a seminal book by ABO in 1976 had it – of those who know that if they can do nothing to change the world, at least they can hide in a game of masks to make themselves elusive: “Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order”, as Michel Foucault already put it. Bonito Oliva’s was probably the most coherent elaboration of an Italian-style postmodernism (a “weak” and thus ideological one, if we take “strong” to mean those elaborations that did not shy from tracing the material origin of that turning point and thus the politically conflictual nature of the transition at the end of the century). In spite of the success in the same years of the myth of the Genius lociin other fields, such as architecture – Chiodi rightly recalls the theories of Christian Norberg-Schulz and the Strada novissimaby Paolo Portoghesi, here – in insisting on the register of scepticism as an escape route from any claim to identity, this style of postmodernism succeeded in gaining international hegemony. Denis Viva is right to point out that this was a skilful reworking, in a local key, of themes that had actually arrived from the outside, particularly from the United States, thus making the entire operation even more paradoxical and intriguing. After all, Italy has always been a country that, less than a nation in the modern sense, resembles an archipelago made up of differences that are irreducible to the unitary principle. It has always been a territory made up of the comuni born in the Middle Ages together with the European network of universities, populated by many languages that also profoundly differ from one another, by cultures and, above all, by forms of domination which – probably, and fortunately – have also inoculated us from any identitarian obsession. This has educated us to “throw together” masks, so much so that Italy’s historic weakness (its failed and belated national unification) could turn out to be a trump card in the contemporary world. At this point, it is interesting to address the recent global success, in the philosophical field and no longer in the artistic one, of so-called Italian Theory. This has very little to do with transavantgarde (since it is not a form of “weak” postmodernism, such as could instead be set in closer connection with Vattimo’s Pensiero debole , effectively the philosophical partner of Italian artistic postmodernism). Rather, it refers to a thought that has always, or at least from Humanism onwards, emerged “outside” of a national horizon and has always been “outside” itself, because it is indissolubly linked – as a reflection on life – to history and politics. Italian Theory – which includes contemporary authors ranging from the feminists of difference to Agamben, Tronti and Negri – is, then, an “impure” and constitutively conflictual thought, as a political and anti-identitarian thought. This is not only because many of its exponents have been exiled and forced to work far from Italian shores, but also because, as had already happened with French Theory– it is a theoretical complex constituted by passing through the United States and the international reception of Italian thought, only to return and be further reinterpreted at home, once it has been (re)seen through the eyes of others. This is, in a nutshell, a thought “from outside”, to cite one of Roberto Esposito’s most important books, which, together with German critical theory and French poststructuralism, becomes one of the most interesting keys capable of reading our time. This is a thought characterised by the “dispatriation” of which Luigi Meneghello spoke, very appropriately cited by Stefano Chiodi, which also seems to be the constitutive trait of contemporary Italian art, especially that of younger artists. An art made by “dispatriates”, who without even the problem of an ironic distancing from identity, as was the case for the previous generations, work “outside” the traditional boundaries of art itself, in the vein of an “impure multiplicity”. A generation – that of forty-or-so year-olds – which marks a discontinuity and determines an originality with respect to the last generations of the previous century, for it recovers a relationship with social and political issues that projects it beyond a postmodernism which now stands definitively behind us. To this we should add that the theoretical framework of reference for artists of the younger generations very often harks back to the area of thought and to the authors we have just mentioned; and, moreover, that it is not rare for these artists to work outside Italy, having their formation in a context increasingly marked by cross-contamination. Without any pretension of being exhaustive – and by way of a quick example of what we are trying to say – we can note that this happens in Francesco Arena, who puts politics and the rethinking of recent Italian history at the centre of his work, in Fiamma Montezemolo, who transforms anthropology into artistic practice and art into anthropology, in Marta Roberti, who indissolubly links her work to the rethinking of the living and therefore to overcoming the Aristotelian division among realms, or, indeed, in the younger Antonio Della Guardia, for whom artistic research becomes a social inquiry into contemporary work, its transformations and its effects on our cognitive and affective apparatus. This is, in a nutshell, an art “on the outside” and “from the outside”, and Italian only in its paradoxical anti-Italianneess. Italians a go go, then, and as the Turin duo of fake Brazilian brothers sang in a “thrown-together” Spanish: “Es muy muy latino amanecer teniendo el ritmo americano”. So much for the Genius loci.
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S. Chiodi, Genius loci. Anatomia di un mito italiano, Quodlibet, 2021.
A. Bonito Oliva, L’ideologia del traditore. Arte, maniera, manierismo[1976], Electa, 2012.
M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge. [1969], Rizzoli, 2009, p. 25.
On Bonito Oliva and the transavantgarde see especially: ABO. Arte e le teorie di turno. Omaggio ad Achille Bonito Oliva, ed. by P. Balmas and A. Capasso, Electa, 2011, as well as A.B.O. Theatron. L’arte o la vita. Art or Life, ed. by A. Viliani, Skira, 2021.
D. Viva, La critica a effetto: rileggendo la trans-avanguardia italiana (1979), Quodlibet, 2020.
On Italian Theory see at least: R. Esposito, Living Thought. The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy,Stanford University Press, 2012; his A Philosophy for Europe. From the Outside,Polity, 2018; D. Gentili, Italian Theory. Dall’operaismo alla biopolitica, il Mulino, 2012. A more recent contribution is that of C. Claverini, La tradizione filosofica italiana. Quattro paradigmi interpretativi, Quodlibet, 2021
S. Chiodi, cit., p. 133.
