From a leading art historian, a provocative exploration of the
intersection of art, politics, and history in 1960s Italy
Flashback, Eclipse is a groundbreaking study of 1960s Italian art and
its troubled but also resourceful relation to the history and politics
of the first part of the twentieth century and the aftermath of World
War II. Most analyses have treated the 1960s in Italy as the decade of
"presentism" par excellence, a political decade but one liberated from
history. Romy Golan, however, makes the counterargument that 1960s
Italian artists did not forget Italian and European history but rather
reimagined it in oblique form. Her book identifies and explores this
imaginary through two forms of nonlinear and decidedly nonpresentist
forms of temporality--the flashback and the eclipse. In view of the
photographic and filmic nature of these two concepts, the book's
analysis is largely mediated by black-and-white images culled from art,
design, and architecture magazines, photo books, film stills, and
exhibition documentation.
The book begins in Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto's Mirror
Paintings; moves on to Campo urbano, a one-day event in the city of
Como; and ends with the Vitalità del Negativo exhibition in Rome. What
is being recalled and at other moments occluded are not only episodes of
Italian nationalism and Fascism but also various liberatory moments of
political and cultural resistance. The book's main protagonists are, in
order of appearance, artists Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giosetta
Fioroni, photographer Ugo Mulas, Ettore Sottsass (as critic rather than
designer), graphic designer Bruno Munari, curators Luciano Caramel and
Achille Bonito Oliva, architect Piero Sartogo, Carla Lonzi (as artist as
much as critic), filmmakers Michelangelo Antonioni and Bernardo
Bertolucci, and, in flashback among the departed, painter Felice
Casorati, writer Massimo Bontempelli, art historian Aby Warburg,
architect Giuseppe Terragni, and Renaissance
friar-philosopher-mathematician Giordano Bruno (as patron saint of the
sixty-eighters).
