After la Dolce Vita by Ricciardi Alessia;

Author:Ricciardi, Alessia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

4

Softness

Postcriticism

The art historian Achille Bonito Oliva helped to establish the international preeminence of a new style of painting in the 1970s when he bestowed the title Transavanguardia on an emerging group of Italian Neo-Expressionist artists. This movement succeeded the Arte Povera of the 1960s, which had emphasized art’s revolutionary potential to resist the pressure of the marketplace. Gaining notoriety in no small measure thanks to its inventor’s practice of “performative criticism,” Transavanguardia placed the critic in the position of no longer being a mediator but rather “a constitutive subject of artistic production,” in Angelo Capasso’s words.1 Bonito Oliva envisioned the critic in the role of a self-publicizing performer of music who, as Hans Belting puts it, “does not use a score but instead writes the score of how artists are to be presented and how they are to be understood.”2 On this view, Bonito Oliva played the part to the hilt in methodically “hunting” for artists who exemplified all the traits he idealized under the rubric at first of the “neoavantgarde” but shortly thereafter of the Transavantgarde.

Indeed, the four or five artists that he identifies as the main practitioners of his school exhibit a striking air de famille. Each is rigorously male, hails from Southern Italy as does Bonito Oliva himself, paints in a style that lends itself to easy description through applying a couple of characteristic qualifiers, and affirms an ideal of representation as “a tireless spectacle.”3 For example, Sandro Chia is preoccupied in his paintings with hedonism and embodies a genius loci that is “substantially Italian.” Francesco Clemente insists on nomadism and on the encounter between the East and the West. Mimmo Paladino epitomizes a certain primitivism and Byzantine quality in his work, while the “Mediterranean artist,” Enzo Cucchi, transforms Gothic verticality into horizontality (TA, 56–67). Trading in reductive simplifications and generalities, Bonito Oliva’s approach to his subjects may be said to reflect a tendency that he himself ascribes in a complimentary tone to Chia’s art, namely that it exemplifies “the inevitable consumerism of the current sensibility” (TA, 69).

He proclaims his disposition at various points to be that of a “Don Juan of knowledge” and a “cynic” who self-consciously cultivates a Mannerist sprezzatura or nonchalance. In keeping with such a temperament, Bonito Oliva applauds what Leopardi would have recognized as the paradigmatic Italian weakness for ostentation and empty spectacles; in the process he establishes the normative definition of postmodern art in Italy (TA, 9). In several treatises written at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, he pronounces the experimentalism of the historical avant-garde to be exhausted. His writings repeatedly articulate his lack of faith in “linguistic Darwinism” or the progressive evolution of artistic languages. Moreover, they presume a historical context in which the utopian promises of ideologically engaged works are no longer tenable. The derivative name Transavantgarde itself is meant to recall “deviously” the original’s connotations of “resistance” and “political commitment,” which the critic declares utterly inadequate to the “present historical context.”4

Bonito Oliva

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