The unarchivable

1970 was the year Dario Fo formed his La Comune theatre group in Milan, divorce became legal in Italy and Colonel Gheddafi nationalised the Libyan oil companies, once again at the heart of the geopolitical conflict in the Mediterranean. It also marks the starting point of a critical rewriting of the 1970s’ story, developed by Marco Scotini via 200 works by 60 artists, drawn from the leading Italian collections and produced before 1979, the year the Thatcher era began and neo-liberalism started its ascent.

The general intellect’s forms of self-representation and self-determination, such as Ugo La Pietra’s Il desiderio dell'oggetto (1973) which delegates work on the city to its inhabitants, Franco Vaccari’s Photomatic d'Italia (1972–1973) and a bird’s eye view of thousands of young people in a sit-in protest in Piazzale Loreto by Uliano Lucas (1970), provide an introduction to the social and multidisciplinary “overspill” of languages, time concepts and the social performances of the 1970s, which cannot be archived because not classifiable under the aesthetic categories and so potentially responsive at a later date.

As Vaccari freed the passport photo from its function as a tool of recognition and identification, transforming it into a means of producing a spatial experience and of (self)representation of the multitude, so too the exhibition frees the archives from their taxonomic function and turns them into a terrain that spawns the political potential of the unarchivable, conceptually delineated by Gino De Dominicis’ recurrent presentification, starting from Tentativo di Volo (1970). Not surprisingly, the section devoted to archives in terms of the concept and practice of “shifting” visions and interpretations opens with the impossible and all-encompassing collection of Insicuro noncurante by Alighiero Boetti, who drew up an encyclopaedic list of the world’s 1000 longest rivers (1965–1975).

With his invitation to move past the Secondo principio della Termodinamica (1972 – Second law of thermodynamics), De Dominicis confirmed the eternal human condition as an isolated and perfect system, which at the end of its cyclical transformation returns to its starting condition. By no coincidence, the exhibition ends with an invisible “statue” by De Dominicis which neutralises the very pertinence of existential preaching, because “the ghostly noema ‘is present’, the subject is certain and the question of existence not even or no longer posed” (Herman Parret, 2006).

Michele Zaza was compressing space and time, extending the human presence until it became simultaneous and immaterial because the years of the human soul “are all simultaneous because they are immobile” (1972) and, for the design of the “Antilogica” exhibition, Michelangelo Pistoletto replaced the iron-bridge work with his drawing because “it is suspended but well anchored on either side of both the obstacle and the unknown” (1978). That is when the dynamics of the cyclical return to the starting point, i.e. to today’s existential and time conditions, was triggered.

The space given over to zero-degree representation, the desire for the absolute and the liberation of the means of expression is the space of measuring time, like the 13 photographs immortalising Franco Vimercati’s time succession and Michele Zaza’s sequences, and measuring the body, as in the “intimate measurements” of Icarus, man being the effect of all the determining causes and the cause of all the determining effects (Salvo, 1971).

Ugo Mulas’ Verifiche, Giulio Paolini’s Doublure, Franco Vimercati’s blank canvases, Giovanni Anselmo’s Tutto and the homage to Ugo Mulas’ rejection of Duchamp’s work all steer us towards Mostro. Un esposizione di oggetti non fatti non scelti non presentati da Emilio Prini (1971), the work which is actually the entrance to the exhibition after the rite of passage through the door of the Toselli gallery, which the artist had closed for a month as a form of necessary subtraction. The addition translates into the social mass and recursive multiplication of immigrants and Turin’s workers as moulds of the first matrix of the Fibonacci succession, in the Iconografie of the idea of the martyrs of Luciano Fabro’s table and in the images of ideological violence in Linguaggio è guerra by Fabio Mauri (1975), set midway between the film-catalogue on Cesare Lombroso and the erotic film Essence d’absinthe by Gianikian and Ricci Lucchi, in the Filmare il male section, a homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

The back of a De Dominicis postcard invites us to the “Quando non si parla più di immortalità del corpo (Ingresso riservato agli animali)” exhibition (Galleria De Domizio, 1975) and to see the non-visible as a possible redefinition of legislative, space and time, cognitive, behavioural and linguistic structures via Gianni Colombo’s Bariestesie (1974–1975), a kinesthetic reaction to the person-spectator and the “Rivelatore di pause” or “Pausofono”, patented by Vincenzo Agnetti, which allows you to also listen to the negative of sounds, the length of the pauses replaced with a fixed sound (1970). In the adjacent space, the anti-Penelopes challenge the avant-garde norm of the male monopoly of art history as a process via the works of Maria Merz, Irma Blank and Maria Lai, to the degree of dis-identifying the genres of Marcella Campagnano and Lisetta Carmi, of which Dadamaino’s indecipherable graphemes constitute the political heart.

“Beauty is not opposed to revolution” stated Luigi Nono in the prelude to the opera Al gran sole carico d’amore dedicated to the Paris Commune and presented at La Scala in 1975. In the era of the third industrial revolution, in which Vaccari’s passport photos “evolved” into the suspects and guilty identikits of the Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante and today into the forms of ID and portrayal of the masses of migrants crossing the Mediterranean, it is especially important to ask ourselves about the technical-symbolical structure of value production in revolutionary cultural processes. Similarly, it is significant that this path of critical processing of the past and of our relationship with it should be the inaugural event of the FM Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea at the Frigoriferi Milanesi, a symbol of Milan’s entrepreneurial spirit and a place that cares for and conserves precious things, while the capitalisation processes of the collective memory that protect it, but at the same time play a primary role in reinforcing cultural identities based on pre-political territorial belonging, acquire growing institutional centrality.

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