ARTEFIERA 2023

On the occasion of ArteFiera 2023, Frittelli arte contemporanea presents the project curated by Raffaella Perna entitled Art, photography and mass-media in the 1960s.

“The 1960s are characterized by a decisive shift in the relationship between art and photography: almost simultaneously, numerous artists, different in age, geographical area, and especially in expressive style and purposes, found themselves united by a massive use of the photographic medium, conceived as an essential tool for a linguistic renewal aimed at surpassing informal poetics and redefining the boundaries of the relationship between the subjectivity of artistic creation and the objectivity of reality. In the 1960s, photography indeed became a widely used medium in the Italian neo-avant-garde: from the first half of the decade, a large number of artists associated with Group 70 and more generally with Visual Poetry and the Mec-Art experience promoted by Pierre Restany resorted to photography - often in the form of photomechanical transfer, collage, and photomontage - to downsize, on the one hand, the emotional and instinctual components of artistic action, and on the other, to engage with the universe of mass-media communication.

In Italy, the experimentation with photomechanical reproduction techniques, besides the purpose of directly capturing reality, was also pursued for its socio-political (potential) value by artists like Mimmo Rotella and Gianni Bertini (both part of Mec-Art), convinced that through the serial design of works, a path could be opened towards a more democratic vision of art and its diffusion outside the established circuits. The persuasive and conditioning power of the mass media did not escape these artists, who, like their colleagues active in the verbo-visual field, Lucia Marcucci, Lamberto Pignotti, Luciano Ori, Ketty La Rocca, Giuseppe Chiari, Tomaso Binga, exhibited a critical view towards the sphere of communication and information, akin to that proposed by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964), a milestone of the era's culture. McLuhan indeed argues the necessity that media should not be investigated for their content, but for the structural mechanisms by which they plan and convey communication: according to the scholar, it is the medium itself, not its content or various uses, that shapes forms of human association and action. The mechanisms of manipulation and deformation of critical spirit in the advertising universe, with its appeals to the elementary impulses of the consumer and its stereotypes, consequently become a recurring theme in the experimentation of artists aiming to demystify mass-media language and the system of values connected to consumer society.

Advertising culture, to use John Berger's words, turns consumption into “a surrogate for democracy. The choice of what one eats (wears or drives) takes on the role of a significant political choice. Advertising helps to mask and compensate for all that is undemocratic in society [...]. Advertising is, ultimately, a kind of philosophical system. It explains everything in its own terms. It interprets the world.” In opposition to this “philosophical system” diverse artistic paths (disorienting, ironic, playful...) unfold, united by the commitment, both political and aesthetic, to deconstruct the functioning of advertising language, a cornerstone of the capitalist system. Reflection on mass media thus becomes, as Umberto Eco stated in 1969: “A universal topic, forcing everyone to become aware of the problem. This is also because it is precisely in the 1960s that socio-cultural conditions typical of an advanced industrial society, like the United States in the previous decade, also occurred in Italy.” From this new political awareness - which, decades later, still proves relevant - stems the photographic work of the artists presented here.”