Milli Graffi (Milano 1940-2020) ha partecipato, negli anni Settanta, ai maggiori festival europei di poesia sonora; tra le composizioni pubblicate: Salnitro, Farfalla ronzar, Tralci. Considera la poesia come un appassionato corpo a corpo col senso che scaturisce dalla manipolazione del linguaggio. Pubblica Mille graffi e venti poesie, introduzione di Guido Guglielmi, geiger 1979; Fragili film, Milano 1987; L’amore meccanico, anterem 1994, embargo voice, Bibliopolis 2006. Come critico militante: studi su Balestrini, Spatola, Porta, Niccolai, Sanguineti, Tom Raworth, Beltrametti, Castaldi, Rosmarie Waldrop, Barbara Guest. Di Lewis Carroll traduce Alice nel paese delle meraviglie, Attraverso lo specchio, Garzanti 1989, e La caccia allo Snualo, Studio Tesi, 1985. Ha pubblicato un romanzo breve, Centimetri due, edizioni d’if, 2004. Dal 1996 nel comitato direttivo della rivista “il verri”.
Esce ora il numero 1 della rivista d’assemblaggio <<Asemica>>.
Dedicato alla scrittura asemantica, questo aperiodico si prefigge di diventare una delle voci di questo (anti)linguaggio segnico attraverso le opere degli artisti invitati.
Nel primo numero Francesco Aprile, Julien Blaine, Antonino Bove, Cristiano Caggiula, Giuseppe Calandriello, Federico Federici, Giovanni Fontana, Marco Giovenale, Lamberto Pignotti e William Xerra.
A corredo del tutto, un fascicolo redazionale col testo critico di Cecilia Bello Minciacchi – “Verso la scrittura asemica” -, schede degli autori e foto delle opere.
L’edizione limitatissima è di 40 esemplari, con multipli e pezzi unici numerati e firmati.
Le richieste vanno indirizzate a giuseppecalandriello @ hotmail.com
Notte senza fine – Trent’anni Fuori Orario, in occasione dei festeggiamenti per il trentennale del programma televisivo di Enrico Ghezzi nato a fine 1989.
Programma:
1. QUATTRO MOMENTI SU TUTTO IL NULLA di Carmelo Bene
(Italia, 2001, 108’)
Cinema, Teatro, TV, parole, opere, pensieri, letture, rushes, in questi trent’anni Fuori Orario ha programmato Carmelo Bene in ogni forma, formato e materiale in accordo con lui sul fatto che Bene non abbia fatto opere d’arte ma sia stato un’opera d’arte. I Quattro momenti su tutto il nulla, girati e andati in onda nel 2001 pochi mesi prima della morte, sono un film testamento in quattro parti (Il linguaggio, La Conoscenza, / Coscienza, L’Eros, L’Arte). CB, solo di fronte alla camera, ripete il suo pensiero, la sua visione, il suo genio, lo stesso che risplende nei girati dell’Otello televisivo girato nel ’79 presso gli studi RAI di Torino, uno dei rari momenti in cui è possibile vedere Bene al lavoro.
2. UN AMLETO DI MENO di Carmelo Bene
(Italia, 1972, col., 64’)
3. CARMELO BENE E I CANTI DI LEOPARDI
Ripresa in diretta della lettura dei Canti da Villa leopardi a Recanati, trasmesso il 12 settembre 1985 da RAI3
IL BENE DI FUORI ORARIO Carmelo Bene…. “per prima cosa penso a vivere, poi vivo, la stessa cosa continua. Improvviso partendo da qualcosa di molto elaborato. Cerco di non scadere nel compiacimento. E’ l’unica libertà assoluta. Altrimenti c’è il delirio… I miti italiani non mi riguardano. La Vergine e i Vangeli li lascio a Pasolini” (intervista a Carmelo Bene di Jean Narboni 1968)
Da venerdì 18 marzo Fuori Orario cose (mai) viste dedica un ciclo all’opera di Carmelo Bene
FRANCIS BACON The First Pope Gagosian – Davies Street, London March 15–April 23, 2022
Gagosian is pleased to announce the exhibition of Francis Bacon’s first treatment of the papal image—a subject that would preoccupy the artist on and off for at least two decades. Executed circa 1946, this highly important picture in Bacon’s oeuvre has never before been exhibited publicly. The canvas entered a private collection in 1967 and was only rediscovered during the compilation of the artist’s catalogue raisonné by Martin Harrison, which was published in 2016. The painting will be on view in Gagosian’s Davies Street gallery from March 15 to April 23, 2022.
Scholar, art historian, and Gagosian director Richard Calvocoressi commented, “It is particularly exciting that this important early Bacon has reemerged now, while three of the artist’s reinterpretations of the Pope theme—from 1949, 1951, and 1965—are on display in London, in the Royal Academy’s current exhibition, Francis Bacon: Man and Beast.”
‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator’ (c. 1946) (the title is placed between quotation marks in the Bacon catalogue raisonné because the artist did not give it one) was painted in Monte Carlo, Monaco, where Bacon lived for much of the time from 1946 until 1950. Having survived the London Blitz and wartime austerity, he was susceptible to the Mediterranean climate, the good food, and the temptations of the casino. In Monte Carlo he completed only a handful of paintings, of which this is one. On October 19, 1946, he wrote to Duncan MacDonald, a director of the Lefevre Gallery in London: “I am working on three studies of Velasquez’s portrait of Innocent II [sic]. I have almost finished one. I find them exciting to do.”
A couple of months later, starved of the stimulating company of sympathetic fellow artists, Bacon wrote to his friend Graham Sutherland, hoping to persuade him and his wife Kathy to join him in Monte Carlo for the winter. “I don’t know how the copy of the Velasquez will turn out,” he added. “I have practically finished one I think. . . . it is thrilling to paint from a picture which really excites you.”
In 1946 Bacon would have known Velázquez’s full-length Portrait of Innocent X (Galleria Doria Pamphilj, Rome) only in black-and-white reproduction. From the following year he could have seen the half-length version at Apsley House, London, when a selection of the Duke of Wellington’s collection went on show, although the house itself did not open to the public until 1952. However, a number of Bacon’s radical reinterpretations of images of enthroned Popes in the 1950s were based not on Velázquez’s portraits of Innocent X but on photographs of a living Pope, Pius XII—a controversial pontiff owing to his alleged failure to publicly condemn Nazism and the Holocaust. In Bacon’s paintings he can be identified by, among other details, his metal frame spectacles.
Another source for the picture was Bacon’s fascination with press and propaganda photos of Fascist dictators and their henchmen. ‘Landscape with Pope/Dictator’ is one of a very small number of his paintings in which the attributes of a Catholic clergyman—for example, the traditional cap known as a biretta—are combined with the secular garb of the political leader, such as a suit or uniform, shirt, and tie. The microphone appears in other works of this period. Pius XII was sometimes photographed speaking in front of microphones, although entirely without the atmosphere of suggestibility, mass hysteria, and violence implied by the shouting or screaming mouth and strutting stance of the dictator.
The columns in the background of Bacon’s picture seem to have been based on a photograph of a neoclassical colonnade such as those found in public buildings by Albert Speer and other Nazi architects.
The fusion of human and animal in the Pope/Dictator’s blurred face and wide-open mouth with prominent teeth—a theme of the current Bacon exhibition at the Royal Academy, London—suggests that Bacon was already looking at photographs of monkeys and chimpanzees. Another arresting feature is the bank of delicately painted pink and green flowers, probably cyclamen, beneath the podium, which also evokes a crowd of waving or saluting hands. The predominant tonality of blue-violet anticipates the later series of Popes from 1951 and 1953.
Francis Bacon: Man and Beast is on view at the Royal Academy, London, through April 17, 2022.
SOLVENTI #2 è dedicato a Ferruccio De Filippi, agli anni della sua arte fra il 1970 e il 1974. È il risultato di conversazioni più o meno su: tempo archeologico, disseminazioni di calchi e nomi, posizione statica del corpo, simulacro, la lettura come atto non lineare, e qualcos’altro che riguarda la pittura, anche se non c’è la pittura.
Il volume si è composto a partire dalle foto di Mariella Bolzoni, che ha seguito da vicino la ricerca di Ferruccio, essendo complice più che testimone. Fondamentale è stata la cura sapiente del laboratorio Fotogramma24 (Bugionovi & Co.).
SOLVENTI è un progetto basato sulla collaborazione con Claudia Damiani e le edizioni Cambiaunavirgola – Spazioetico.
Il libro raccoglie documenti relativi alle opere realizzate da Ferruccio De Filippi nel periodo compreso tra il 1970 e il 1974, durante il quale la ricerca dell’artista si è sviluppata prevalentemente in dialogo con Gian Tomaso Liverani e la sua galleria La Salita. Fondamentale in quegli anni è l’incontro con Mario Diacono, al quale, dieci anni dopo, si deve la definizione della pittura di De Filippi come “reliquia del Linguaggio” e “risposta ‘politica’ alla messa in assenza del Linguaggio”.
Non sono ancora, quelli, gli anni della «pittura», e il Linguaggio (Diacono mette le virgolette alla pittura e la maiuscola al linguaggio) si esprime in modi e tecniche che vanno dalla fotografia al comportamento, in particolare attraverso l’uso ricorrente di testi di antropologia e mitografia all’interno dell’opera, non quindi come pura ispirazione, ma come vero e proprio fiato dell’opera.
The flicker effect was identified by the famously independent-minded scientist W. Grey Walter in his best- selling 1953 book The Living Brain.
Grey Walter – who was soon to become the father of Artificial Intelligence – discovered that by using high-powered stroboscopes and experimenting with trigger feedback techniques where the flash was set to fire in synchronization with the brain’s rhythms, the brain is, “transformed temporarily to a different sort of brain.” Walter found that time itself could become lost or disturbed. As he observed of one subject:
“[He had] the sense of having been pushed sideways in time by flicker. Yesterday was no longer behind, and tomorrow was no longer ahead..”
Stroboscopic light, or light flashing on the eye between 8 and 13 flashes per second, induces alpha wave activity in the brain – a state normally associated with dreaming and creativity. Subjects often report seeing shapes and colours, some have full-blown hallucinations, others mystical experiences. Approximately one in 4,000 people will have an epileptic seizure.
In 1997, ten million Japanese schoolchildren, and some adults, tuned into the animé cartoon Pokemon to see a “flashing explosion with high frequency red and blue flicker stimulation” hit the screen and persist. What happened next sparked international headlines. Some viewers went into a trance-like state, as if hypnotized. Others experienced altered vision and shortness of breath. Some passed out, others had seizures. Hospitals all over Japan received admissions, though nobody was permanently damaged.
