Italy, ironic material

Bologna,

If we think of Italian art and irony, the imagination of Bruno Munari, the paradoxes of Gino de Dominicis, the irreverence of Manzoni, the challenge to the female stereotypes of Thomas Binga and Mirella Bentivoglio, Gailardi’s commitment, the syntions of Adriano Spatola and Giulia Niccolai, the work with the contradictions of the contradictions of the contradictions of the contradictions of the contradictions of the contradictions of the contradictions of the contradictions, Present of Maurizio Cattelan … The list is long and that payroll of artists who have worked from humor wanted to provide them with the Museum of Modern Art of Bologna the exhibition with which its half century of existence commemorates, under the commission of Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni.

A hundred proposals for seventy authors make up “Facile Ironia. L’Oronia Nell’Arte Italiana tra xx e XXI Secolo ”: They are dated in recent seventy years and their way of relating to irony corresponds, in the approaches of this assembly, to the way in which it was considered since the time of Socrates, when it was understood as the art of questioning, as a tool to offer us a clearer vision of reality, pointing to its anomalies and contradictions. We will contemplate in this Boloñés center humor games, parodies and ingenious jokes, but also pieces in which this irony is revealed as a protective antidote against afflictions.

The tour wants to underline how, after World War II, it is possible to place it as a thread of Italian artistic creation, as a recurring aesthetic strategy and criticism capable of referring to deep meanings without expressing them openly; as a device to unmask false certainties and propose new representations. The reasons that sarcasm found fertile terrain in that country when questioning established paradigms can be diverse, but it is likely that the weight of the Italian artistic tradition -with surrealism and metaphysical painting as direct precedents -, a society in principle under the influence of its fascist past, the success of the success of the success of the success of the success, Commedia All’italiana and of the popular Cinepanettonior the most recent boom in Berlusconi and with him of an aggressive consumption society; There are many institutions that can be the potential object of ironic review (also the Church).

The title of the exhibition, ironic in itself, refers to the complexity of this concept despite its apparent simplicity: it allows us to question the nature of language and its common places, as well as the ways in which they influence our way of interpreting the world that surrounds us. The tour is articulated around great themes that help illustrate different variants of irony and its transhistoric character: its paradoxical side and its relationship with the game, its consideration as a practice of the nonsense, its options as a feminist weapon in criticism of the Italian social order and its role in political mobilization and as a form of institutional reprobation. In addition, a touch of black humor plans in the museum spaces, traveling several of the sections: an energy that seems opposed to joy, leading us to face the contradictions of the existence of a cynical and irreverent way.

The Mozzarella in Carrozza Gino de Dominicis welcomes the visitor, translating from a personal perspective the well -known Italian dish and displaying the first linguistic short circuit of the exhibition: the paradox. As a simultaneous investment of common sense, it underlies the mechanism of the ironic process: without a paradox, there would be no iron and the adoption of a paradoxical attitude has allowed art to develop a language contrary to the dominant postulates, experiment with new aesthetic codes, propose critical visions and expose social and existential contradictions.

This Mozzarella in Carrozzathat we can interpret as emblem of that attitude, it is exhibited in a public museum for the first time in fifteen years. A large black carriage transports a royal mozzarella in its leather seats, and its symbolism is reinforced by the bicolor scheme of the exhibition space, which makes the black band that runs the lower part of the wall seems the chromatic base of the work, reaching the same height as the cheese. Share room with Towed it Marisa Merz, a video recently found in the artist’s archive in which we see Merz opening a box of peas and, instead of cooking them, counting them patiently: a deliberately absurd and paradoxical action in the surroundings of a kitchen. Also with less known, supposedly “minor” pieces, or with creations of artists who have remained on the sidelines: throughout the entire exhibition, and as part of their speech, we are invited to look beyond what is assumed by the majority.

We will see, among other compositions, surreal images of Giorgio de Chirico, conceptual works of Piero Manzoni, false sculptures of Pascali pine or facilities of Maurizio Cattelan, Roberto Tumoghi and Lara Favaretto.

The second chapter of this project recalls that the game, in art, appears as a liberating gesture that stimulates imagination, disrupts common norms and modifies formulas and habits. It deconstructs the rigidity of everyday reality, so creators have often inspired the world of childhood and its playful interactions, revealing the inconsistency of the adult universe and its contradictions: in various ways and with different practices, art has challenged its principles, production processes and cultural habits.

Over the centuries, the game has also become a tool to redefine the rules of artistic creation itself, and therefore the limits of the work of art. The traditional media, in the twentieth century, were taken by assault and an oil on canvas became a sample of oils on fabric, while the sculpture was reduced to a light object with an imaginary appearance.

There are no lack in this section of Alberto Savinio and Enrique Baj, Travel sculptures From Bruno Munari and research by more recent authors such as Richard Baruzzi, Valerio Nicolai, Guend Alina Cerruti and Federico Tosi.

View of the Facile Ironia sample. L'Oronia Nell'Arte Italiana tra xx e XXI Secolo. Photography: Carlo Favero

The third episode is for feminist social criticism. Carla Lonzi said that laughter has the “vivifying power of what is not said” and that the truth is affirmed through it, and in Light to Feminist Life Sarah Ahmed defended that “laughing at something can be a way to make it more real, bring it to light and, at the same time, reduce the power or control that thing has over you.” Those are the causes of laughing and humor have become an instrument, in the struggle for women’s rights, to demystify cultural prejudices and stereotypes associated with them, reimagining them. The feminist artists wanted to make fun of the archaic clichés attributed to them and subvert their meaning, making their production a political space to claim one’s identity and the body itself.

In the exposure space, the blue color collides with the pink tones of the tapestry paper of a Binga Tomaso installation: that ironic pattern on the classic gender chromatic coding (blue for men, pink for women).

The game, the absurd and the paradox are used to criticize cultural and political institutions in another group of works, in which art and irony converge in militant practices that challenge authority, sometimes without directly attacking it, but through a creative and provocative deconstruction. Its objectives are strict cultural and political paradigms that reveal the need for new forms of self -representation developed from an alternative language to the dominant. Textual criticism alone is not enough, so some authors, from Pistoletto to Pablo Echaurren, preferred to enter loudly in the public space, which becomes the scene of satires and teasing. The individual space blurs, from its hand, and melts in a collective agency in which the crowd makes its political role and rights value.

Other criticisms are directed to the art system, complicated despite their theoretical freedom: with their unwritten laws, ceremonies, rituals and specific power mechanisms among their various actors (artists, collectors, gallery owners, commissioners). However, there are creators (Italo Zuffi, Piero Golia, Los Mattes) who decide to escape these processes, and the economic interests that can determine them, and reveal their internal mechanisms. Or rather, start making fun of them. The artist uses forms of play, double verbal senses and idioms to avoid the rules of the museum institution exposing their internal contradictions: irony thus becomes a device to shed light on the marginalization of women in art, about the precariousness of this market in general and about the pressures that force the authors to be continuously “in the avant -garde.” The green and the magenta of the room evoke the traditional tones of the museum walls until the end of the 19th century, a chromatic scheme that was obsolete with the irruption of the white cube, only supposedly neutral.

The tour closes with the nonsense. In the seventies and eighty, several Italian poets began to explore the phonetics from the playful and liberating potential of the word. Those experiments, in which Arrigo Lora Totino, Giulia Niccolai, Adriano Spatola and Patrizia Vicinelli embarked, came to insist on the drifts of the loss of the sense of language and speech.

The nonsense, in the form of visual or sound poetry, reveals the often arbitrary nature of the system of signs and signifiers to which we conventionally adhere in spoken language. The meaning of words would be, in reality, the fruit of a social construction developed over centuries to which human beings have been subjected, since there is no real natural relationship between a word and its real meaning. Abandoning the scope of language is to concentrate on phonemes, babble, involuntary movements, in the movement of teeth and lips at the time of enunciation: through the nonsense it is possible to rediscover the total act of speaking, finally freed from the narrow reins, from this approach, of the meaning.

The listening structure of the Room Delle Ciminiere has taken the form of a ivory tower that does not contain madness, but celebrates it. Inside it has been covered with thick layers of wool, which suggests the atmosphere of a rudimentary recording study, not very different from the environment in which the first recorded sounds occurred.