Body to body. Poetics from the 20th century to the Contemporary

Wednesday 17 June at 5.30p.m
Giorgio Verzotti

The Body in art, from the representation to the real space-time

Starting from the eighteenth century Enlightenment passing through the Romanticism, the first avant-gardes of the late nineteenth century and then the historical avant-gardes, the conference opens with a synthetic examination of the modalities of representation of the body in some of the most significant epochs of modernity. An immense repertoire from which will be extracted a few “cases” that signal, from a high, the continuity with the tradition, which celebrates the “glorious body” of the Hero, the Monarch, the Powerful, often embodied in the remains of the Commissioner, and on the other the moments of rupture of the avant-garde artists, and then of the neo-avant-garde, which thematize the instance of the powerless, the Antihero, the alienated subject. With the neo-avant-gardes of the second half of the 20th century, the real body of the artist or his partners burst onto the scene, engaged in real space and time actions, often provocative and aimed at emotional shock, experienced and communicated as a disalienable practice.
The conference offers a wide excursus that begins with a painting by David and ends with the beginnings of Body Art, in the late sixties.

Giorgio Verzotti, art critic and curator, is artistic director of Arte Fiera in Bologna. He has been chief curator at Castello di Rivoli and Mart. Museum of modern and contemporary art in Trento and Rovereto. He collaborates with the magazine Artforum and is a professor at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart and NABA. New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.

The cycle will continue in July and September.

Wednesday 8 July at 5.30p.m
Andrew Benjamin

‘Human all too Human’: Antony Gormley’s Human

Since ancient Greece the sculpture has always been interested in the representation of the human body. It has been returned in both ideal and particular form, yet the possibility of creating an “ideal model” has always been an essential part of the history of sculpture. Even the Laocoön, always considered the most authentic expression of pain, was built with a sense of ideality. The conference intends to contextualize Antony Gormley’s Human project within the history of the sculpted body and demonstrate that the artist’s work in his reworking of the body is also a deconstruction of any form of idealization of it. Andrew Benjamin is Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Thought at Monash University in Melbourne and is Distinguished Anniversary Professor of Philosophy and Humanities at Kingston University in London. Recent publications include:  Art’s Philosophical Work. Rowman and Littlefield International (2015), Towards A Relational Ontology. Philosophy’s Other Possibility (2015); Working with Walter Benjamin. Recovering a Political Philosophy (2013).

In collaboration with British Institute Florence