Vertigo

The MAMbo – The Museum of Modern Art of Bologna is holding its inauguration with Vertigo. The century of off-media art from Futurism to the web an exhibition curated by Germano Celant with Gianfranco Maraniello. The aim of the event is to document the cross-overs and contaminations that took place from historic avant-gardism onwards (from Futurism to Suprematism, from Costructivism to Dadaism, from Neoplasticism to Surrealism) in affirming the demise of the artistic “specific” such as painting and sculpture to make way for a multi-media blend.

The exhibition itinerary features over five hundred works including artists’ books, films, installations, paintings and photographs, which view the history of the Twentieth Century as a period of radical change, invention and innovation. It was precisely the systematic and progressive introduction of new media that fostered a marked contamination of “classical” aesthetics, demolishing the presumed distinction between painting and cinema, sculpture and architecture, theatre and music, design and dance, bringing in linguistic interdisciplinarity and undermining the foundations of the very concept of artistic autonomy and self-identity.

Vertigo contemplates all the forms of the century’s media communication – from radio to the telephone, from photography to cinema, from television to video up to the most recent developments in electronics along an exhibition itinerary that begins from the first historic forays in the field of technology with the audio and poetic experiments by Marinetti and Schwitters, those in visuals and film by Duchamp and Dalì, through Andy Warhol and Pop Art, to Conceptual Art and artists such as Fernand Léger, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Bill Viola, up to the leading representatives of the international scene today.

Artists and art movements who with their research mapped out the crucial stages of appropriation of the new media for artistic purposes are exhibited in a criss-cross itinerary within a highly impressive layout. Created by designer Denis Santachiara, itinerary takes the visitor along a visual journey through the century in which art began to seriously question its traditional forms of expression. Vertigo makes us understand how technological development has influenced the perception of reality, its representation and its very statute and so how the various declinations of the artistic universe have to all intents become “off-media”. We can appreciate and better understand the contributions made by Ed Rusha and Lawrence Weiner towards the evolution of the art book, those of Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman in video and those of Laurie Anderson and Christian Marclay in contemporary music. But this also gives us more awareness of the aesthetic occurrences of the century through the paintings of Magritte and Klee up to the paintings or the photographic work by artists like Enzo Cucchi and Andreas Gursky.

All through the exhibition itinerary, these important artistic manifestations criss-cross with extraordinary objects that show the stages of media evolution (from the antique gramophone to the radio that belonged to Guglielmo Marconi up to the I-pod) and with specific cinema contributions made jointly with the Cinema Archive of Bologna, the twin of MAMbo, in a cooperation project for staging a busy agenda of events and projects around Vertigo for the whole duration of the exhibition.

The catalogue of the exhibition, published by Skira, contains more than 500 reproductions, a rich anthology of artistic texts. In addition to the introductions by curators Germano Celant and Gianfranco Maraniello, there are contributions by Giovanni Accame, Carlo Antonelli, Francesco Bernardelli, Alberto Boatto, Andrea Branzi, Ester Coen, Elio Grazioli, Giovanni Lista, Claudio Marra, Carlo Montanaro, Peppino Ortoleva, Marco Senaldi, Antonio Somaini (with an interview with Stefano Rodotà) and Ugo Volli.

Vertigo
The century of off-media art from Futurism to the web
Kuratoren: Germano Celant, Gianfranco Maraniello

mit Marina Abramovic, Vito Acconci, Josef Albers, Vera Alexandrova, Laurie Anderson, Carl Andre, Guillaume Apollinaire, Stefano Arienti, Arman , Hans Arp, Ay-O, Marco Bagnoli, John Baldessari, Giacomo Balla, Matthew Barney, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Vanessa Beecroft, Mario Bellusi, Joseph Beuys, Dara Birnbaum, Alighiero e Boetti, Louise Bourgeois, Anton Giulio Bragaglia, Arturo Bragaglia, Georges Braque, Brassaï, George Brecht, André Breton, Marcel Broodthaers, Luis Buñuel, Chris Burden, John Cage, Alexander Calder, Peter Campus, Francesco Cangiullo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Mario Castagneri, Enrico Castellani, Marc Chagall, René Claire, Francesco Clemente, Jean Cocteau, Comte de Lautréamont, Philip Corner, Gregory Crewdson, Enzo Cucchi, Tullio D´Albisola, Salvador Dalí, David Dalton, Giorgio De Chirico, Guy Debord, Joseph Delteil, Fortunato Depero, Corrado d´Errico, Jim Dine, Cesar Domela, Stan Douglas, André Du Bouchet, Jean Dubuffet, Marcel Duchamp, Raoul Dufy, Roland Dorgeles, Germaine Dulac, Max Ernst, Paul Elouard, VALIE EXPORT, Luciano Fabro, Luciano Folgore, Lucio Fontana, Sam Francis, Piotr Stepanovich Galadzhev, Giovanni Gerbino, Nicolas Gogol, Natalija Gontscharowa, Dan Graham, Maggiorino Gramaglia, Walter Gropius, Andreas Gursky, Philippe Halsman, Raoul Hausmann, John Heartfield, Florence Henri, Hi Red Center , Thomas Hirschhorn, Hannah Höch, Rebecca Horn, George Hugnet, Pierre Huyghe, Max Jacob, Gualtiero Jacopetti, Joan Jonas, Mike Kelley, Ellsworth Kelly, William Kentridge, André Kertész, Edmund Kesting, Anselm Kiefer, Paul Klee, Yves Klein, Gustav Klucis, Alison Knowles, Joseph Kosuth, Frantisek Kupka, Alexander Kusikov, La Monte Young, Fritz Lang, Mikhail Larionov, Markovich Lazar, Robert Lebel, Fernand Léger, Dudley Murphy, John Lennon, Sol Le Witt, Marcel L´Herbier, Roy Lichtenstein, El Lissitzky, Herbert List, Robert Longo, T. Lux Feininger, George Maciunas, Norman MacLaren, René Magritte, Man Ray, Piero Manzoni, Christian Marclay, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Andre Martel, Arturo Martini, Pino Masnata, Henri Matisse, Paul McCarthy, Steve McQueen, Fausto Melotti, Mario Merz, N.A. Miljutin, Joan Miró, Lucia Moholy, László Moholy-Nagy, Alberto Montacchini, Nelson Morpurgo, Matt Mullican, Bruno Munari, Vik Muniz, Bruce Nauman, Shirin Neshat, Claes Oldenburg, Luigi Ontani, Tony Oursler, Nam June Paik, Giulio Paolini, Benjamin Patterson, Jean Paulhan, Paul Pfeiffer, Francis Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Jacques Prevert, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Albert Renger-Patzsch, Pierre Reverdy, Gerhard Richter, Hans Richter, Alexander Rodtschenko, Franz Roh, James Rosenquist, Mimmo Rotella, Dieter Roth, Olga Rozanova, Thomas Ruff, Walter Ruttmann, David Salle, Lucas Samaras, Alberto Savinio, Mario Schifano, Julian Schnabel, Carolee Schneemann, Gerry Schum, Kurt Schwitters, Paul Sharits, Cindy Sherman, Kubota Shigeko, Michael Snow, Daniel Spoerri, Francois Dufrene, Warwara Stepanowa, Thomas Struth, Leopold Survage, Kawamata Tadashi, Pierre Tal Coat, Antoni Tàpies, Tato , Sam Taylor-Wood, Karel Teige, Jean Tinguely, Grazia Toderi, Tristan Tzara, Günther Uecker, Ben Vautier, Luigi Veronesi, Dziga Vertov, Francesco Vezzoli, Bill Viola, Wolf Vostell, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Robert Watts, William Wegman, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Wanda Wulz, Yang Fudong, Yoko Ono