Articles by Lara Demori
NARRAZIONI ATLANTICHE E ARTI VISIVE 1949-1972 Sguardi fuori fuoco, politiche espositive, identità italiana, americanismo/antiamericanismo a cura di Lara Conte e Michele Dantini MIMESIS, 2024
Piano B. Arti E Culture Visive, 8(2), 200–223., 2023
The maternal body has a paradoxical status as both natural and exceptional, a sanctioned yet high... more The maternal body has a paradoxical status as both natural and exceptional, a sanctioned yet highly circumscribed form of female embodiment; like the nude, it is both a powerful cultural idea and a bodily state, but one which is unstable and open to multiple meanings (Betterton, 1999, p. 1).
Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 46 , 2023
In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016) published his pivotal... more In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessandria 1932 – Milan 2016) published his pivotal The Open Work, proposing a new awareness of the art object and developing groundbreaking perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetic and a historical point of view. Concurrently, artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino 1933 – Milan 1963) designated his spectator's works of art by applying his signature to their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’ pedestals. In so doing, he forged a new dimension, both problematic and interactive, between the author and the audience. This article adopts Eco’s aesthetics to discuss Manzoni’s Living Sculptures and Magic Bases series, both from 1961. Reading Manzoni through the lens of Eco’s semiological model reveals the paradoxical nature of both series, works that disrupt the canonical opposition between audience activation and passive spectatorial consumption. The adoption of Eco’s theory, therefore, reveals the sarcastic raison d’être of Manzoni’s dystopian yet constructive practice. Manzoni will be also paralleled here with two contemporaneous Latin American artists, Alberto Greco and Oscar Bony, whose works manifest striking similarities but also fundamental differences. Manzoni’s approach will then also be investigated in light of the theories of Guy Debord and Julio Le Parc.
River of Forms: Giuseppe Penone's Drawings (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Press), 2022
"Sublimation. Redefining Materiality in Art after Modernism, " Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 19 (2021): 115-132, 2021
At the turn of the Sixties, Italian artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933-Milan, 1963) made various... more At the turn of the Sixties, Italian artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933-Milan, 1963) made various series of what have been labelled as ›conceptual‹ works. 2 These address and challenge issues of authorship and sovereignty, authenticity and serial reproduction, undermining the traditional role of the artist-maker and categories of value and use-value. Hence, the aim of this essay is to discuss these works, in which the ›abdication of authorial intentions‹ mentioned in the title goes alongside with both an effective and a metaphorical ›sublimation‹ of the art object itself. I argue that Manzoni ironically deals with an assumed evaporation of the matter, which happens to be either effective or conceptual; at the same time, this physical process is paralleled by a dialectic of ennoblement which paradoxically confers to human traces-like breath or feces-the status of works of art. Manzoni indeed plays upon different registers, embodying not only the neo-dada artist who ironically desecrates its own practice, but also giving to that very same artist the faculty of conferring life through his pneuma, to transform the shit in gold through his touch, thus upholding a transcendent ideal of the role of the author as mythical creator.
Doppiozero, 2021
https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/ai-confini-del-mondo-odessa
Antinomie, 2020
https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/12/02/diabeacon-un-museo-sul-fiume-hudson/
Antinomie, 2020
https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/09/23/jannis-kounellis-itaca-per-sempre/
Ithaque est ma mère... more https://antinomie.it/index.php/2020/09/23/jannis-kounellis-itaca-per-sempre/
Ithaque est ma mère, Ithaque est ma jeunesse, Ithaque esta mon viel age. Itaque est ma mort. Jannis Kounellis
Un vecchio barcone si staglia all'orizzonte marino. Sulla poppa distinguiamo la sagoma buia di un uomo immobile. I toni di bianco e nero e il forte contrasto della composizione rendono la direzione del suo sguardo indecifrabile: potrebbe volgerci le spalle, o ammiccare sornionamente allo spettatore. A una prima lettura, la foto ci restituisce una sensazione di solenne immobilità. Dopo un'analisi più attenta, ci accorgiamo della scia bianca che segue la mole dell'imbarcazione e taglia l'oscurità del mare: si tratta di un peschereccio in movimento. Dove è diretto? Lo scatto è di Mimmo Jodice che immortala Jannis Kounellis dal golfo di Napoli per il Manifesto della mostra alla Modern Art Agency del 1969. Come riporta Menna (1979), l'imbarcazione ha da poco lasciato il porto di Mergellina e l'artista "sta dando un ultimo sguardo a Castel dell'Ovo".
Palinsesti 7, 2018
This article explores the shift in tenor and style undertaken by the Milan-based Movimento Arte N... more This article explores the shift in tenor and style undertaken by the Milan-based Movimento Arte Nuclear in between 1951 and 1959. Specifically, it explores the Enrico Baj's anarchic humanism affecting his depiction of the human figure influenced by the postwar trauma of a looming nuclear catastrophe.
Arts 2019, 8(4), 137, 2019
Stemming from Grosfoguel's decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer awa... more Stemming from Grosfoguel's decolonial discourse, and particularly his enquiry on how to steer away from the alternative between Eurocentric universalism and third world fundamentalism in the production of knowledge, this article aims to respond to this query in relation to the field of the art produced by Latin American women artists in the past four decades. It does so by investigating the decolonial approach advanced by third world feminism (particularly scholar Chandra Talpade Mohanty) and by rescuing it from-what I reckon to be-a methodological impasse. It proposes to resolve such an issue by reclaiming transnational feminism as a way out from what I see as a fundamentalist and essentialist tactic. Following from a theoretically and methodological introduction, this essay analyzes the practice of Cuban-born artist Marta María Pérez Bravo, specifically looking at the photographic series Para Concebir (1985-1986); it proposes a decolonial reading of her work, which merges third world feminism's nation-based approach with a transnational outlook, hence giving justice to the migration of goods, ideas, and people that Ella Shohat sees as deeply characterizing the contemporary cultural background. Finally, this article claims that Pérez Bravo's oeuvre offers the visual articulation of a decolonial strategy, concurrently combining global with local concerns.
Doppiozero, 2019
https://www.doppiozero.com/materiali/biennale-contraddizioni-latinoamericane
Alfabeta 2, 2019
https://www.alfabeta2.it/tag/lara-demori/
Alfabeta2, 2019
https://www.alfabeta2.it/2019/05/19/lara-demori-vezzoli/
AWARE Online Magazine, 2019
Conference Presentations by Lara Demori
The Production of the Self: Marisa Merz Study Day and Workshop
23-24 April 2020, Philadelphia Mus... more The Production of the Self: Marisa Merz Study Day and Workshop
23-24 April 2020, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Call for abstracts
Marta María Pérez Bravo was the first artist in post-revolutionary Cuba to investigate the femal... more Marta María Pérez Bravo was the first artist in post-revolutionary Cuba to investigate the female body creating a thick web of cultural, religious and political references. She did so adopting the photographic medium, which bears the legacy of Cuban recent political history: I am referring for example to Alberto Korda who, through photography, conveyed images of the revolution and propagated the canonical portraits of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro among others.
In a similar documentary vein, Pérez Bravo has used photography as a testimonio of her gestation in Para concebir (1985-1986), and of birth, breast-feeding, and child rearing in Recuerdo de nuestro bebé (1986-1987). As observed by scholar Gerardo Mosquera, the photograph No matar, nir ver matar animales (Neither Kill, Nor Watch Animals Being Killed, 1986) from the series Para concebir – where the artist brandishes a knife against her pregnant belly - is perhaps the most well-known Cuban photograph after those of Che Guevara.
This paper aims to investigate the anti-romantic iconography of gestation represented by Marta María Pérez Bravo in the aforementioned series, emphasising her will to render through the narrative of a personal experience and a crude portrayal of the pregnant female body mythical beliefs embedded in the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte. Concurrently, this talk aims to reconnect Pérez Bravo’s practice with the history of Cuban photography of the twentieth century.
The work [of art] is something more than its year of birth, its antecedents or interpretations ma... more The work [of art] is something more than its year of birth, its antecedents or interpretations made of it. And how it is ‘something more’ is usually explained when it comes to a crucial ‘opening’ or ‘ambiguity’ or ‘pluri-signess’ of the work – meaning that the work of art is a matter of communication that asks to be interpreted and then completed and supplemented by the ratio of the user.
U. Eco
In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessadria, 1932 – Milan, 2016) published the pivotal book The Open Work, intellectualising a hermeneutical model that frames a new understanding of the art object and unfolding pioneering perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetical and a historical point of view. Concurrently, artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 – Milan, 1963) declared spectators works of art by placing his signature on their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’ pedestals. In doing so, the artist forged a new, problematic, interactive dimension between the author and its audience.
The aim of this lecture is to adopt Eco’s aesthetic paradigm to discuss Piero Manzoni’s Living Sculptures and Magic Bases (both 1961). The reading of Manzoni’s works through the lenses of Eco’s semiological model unfolds the paradoxical nature that pertains to both series of works, since the effective participation of the audience is undermined by issues of reification of the body and the spectacle. The adoption of Eco’s theory therefore reveals the dystopian – but constructive – sarcastic raison d’ être that affects Manzoni’s practice.
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Articles by Lara Demori
https://antinomie.it/index.php/2021/06/01/bonito-oliva-e-una-nuova-barbarie-riflessioni-sulla-transavanguardia/
Ithaque est ma mère, Ithaque est ma jeunesse, Ithaque esta mon viel age. Itaque est ma mort. Jannis Kounellis
Un vecchio barcone si staglia all'orizzonte marino. Sulla poppa distinguiamo la sagoma buia di un uomo immobile. I toni di bianco e nero e il forte contrasto della composizione rendono la direzione del suo sguardo indecifrabile: potrebbe volgerci le spalle, o ammiccare sornionamente allo spettatore. A una prima lettura, la foto ci restituisce una sensazione di solenne immobilità. Dopo un'analisi più attenta, ci accorgiamo della scia bianca che segue la mole dell'imbarcazione e taglia l'oscurità del mare: si tratta di un peschereccio in movimento. Dove è diretto? Lo scatto è di Mimmo Jodice che immortala Jannis Kounellis dal golfo di Napoli per il Manifesto della mostra alla Modern Art Agency del 1969. Come riporta Menna (1979), l'imbarcazione ha da poco lasciato il porto di Mergellina e l'artista "sta dando un ultimo sguardo a Castel dell'Ovo".
Conference Presentations by Lara Demori
23-24 April 2020, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Call for abstracts
In a similar documentary vein, Pérez Bravo has used photography as a testimonio of her gestation in Para concebir (1985-1986), and of birth, breast-feeding, and child rearing in Recuerdo de nuestro bebé (1986-1987). As observed by scholar Gerardo Mosquera, the photograph No matar, nir ver matar animales (Neither Kill, Nor Watch Animals Being Killed, 1986) from the series Para concebir – where the artist brandishes a knife against her pregnant belly - is perhaps the most well-known Cuban photograph after those of Che Guevara.
This paper aims to investigate the anti-romantic iconography of gestation represented by Marta María Pérez Bravo in the aforementioned series, emphasising her will to render through the narrative of a personal experience and a crude portrayal of the pregnant female body mythical beliefs embedded in the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte. Concurrently, this talk aims to reconnect Pérez Bravo’s practice with the history of Cuban photography of the twentieth century.
U. Eco
In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessadria, 1932 – Milan, 2016) published the pivotal book The Open Work, intellectualising a hermeneutical model that frames a new understanding of the art object and unfolding pioneering perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetical and a historical point of view. Concurrently, artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 – Milan, 1963) declared spectators works of art by placing his signature on their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’ pedestals. In doing so, the artist forged a new, problematic, interactive dimension between the author and its audience.
The aim of this lecture is to adopt Eco’s aesthetic paradigm to discuss Piero Manzoni’s Living Sculptures and Magic Bases (both 1961). The reading of Manzoni’s works through the lenses of Eco’s semiological model unfolds the paradoxical nature that pertains to both series of works, since the effective participation of the audience is undermined by issues of reification of the body and the spectacle. The adoption of Eco’s theory therefore reveals the dystopian – but constructive – sarcastic raison d’ être that affects Manzoni’s practice.
https://antinomie.it/index.php/2021/06/01/bonito-oliva-e-una-nuova-barbarie-riflessioni-sulla-transavanguardia/
Ithaque est ma mère, Ithaque est ma jeunesse, Ithaque esta mon viel age. Itaque est ma mort. Jannis Kounellis
Un vecchio barcone si staglia all'orizzonte marino. Sulla poppa distinguiamo la sagoma buia di un uomo immobile. I toni di bianco e nero e il forte contrasto della composizione rendono la direzione del suo sguardo indecifrabile: potrebbe volgerci le spalle, o ammiccare sornionamente allo spettatore. A una prima lettura, la foto ci restituisce una sensazione di solenne immobilità. Dopo un'analisi più attenta, ci accorgiamo della scia bianca che segue la mole dell'imbarcazione e taglia l'oscurità del mare: si tratta di un peschereccio in movimento. Dove è diretto? Lo scatto è di Mimmo Jodice che immortala Jannis Kounellis dal golfo di Napoli per il Manifesto della mostra alla Modern Art Agency del 1969. Come riporta Menna (1979), l'imbarcazione ha da poco lasciato il porto di Mergellina e l'artista "sta dando un ultimo sguardo a Castel dell'Ovo".
23-24 April 2020, Philadelphia Museum of Art
Call for abstracts
In a similar documentary vein, Pérez Bravo has used photography as a testimonio of her gestation in Para concebir (1985-1986), and of birth, breast-feeding, and child rearing in Recuerdo de nuestro bebé (1986-1987). As observed by scholar Gerardo Mosquera, the photograph No matar, nir ver matar animales (Neither Kill, Nor Watch Animals Being Killed, 1986) from the series Para concebir – where the artist brandishes a knife against her pregnant belly - is perhaps the most well-known Cuban photograph after those of Che Guevara.
This paper aims to investigate the anti-romantic iconography of gestation represented by Marta María Pérez Bravo in the aforementioned series, emphasising her will to render through the narrative of a personal experience and a crude portrayal of the pregnant female body mythical beliefs embedded in the Afro-Cuban religions of Santería and Palo Monte. Concurrently, this talk aims to reconnect Pérez Bravo’s practice with the history of Cuban photography of the twentieth century.
U. Eco
In 1962, semiotician and writer Umberto Eco (Alessadria, 1932 – Milan, 2016) published the pivotal book The Open Work, intellectualising a hermeneutical model that frames a new understanding of the art object and unfolding pioneering perspectives on participatory art from both an aesthetical and a historical point of view. Concurrently, artist Piero Manzoni (Soncino, 1933 – Milan, 1963) declared spectators works of art by placing his signature on their bodies or making them stand on ‘magic’ pedestals. In doing so, the artist forged a new, problematic, interactive dimension between the author and its audience.
The aim of this lecture is to adopt Eco’s aesthetic paradigm to discuss Piero Manzoni’s Living Sculptures and Magic Bases (both 1961). The reading of Manzoni’s works through the lenses of Eco’s semiological model unfolds the paradoxical nature that pertains to both series of works, since the effective participation of the audience is undermined by issues of reification of the body and the spectacle. The adoption of Eco’s theory therefore reveals the dystopian – but constructive – sarcastic raison d’ être that affects Manzoni’s practice.
Both series prompt further reflections: on the one hand, the use of a volatile element such as breath jeopardises both the possibility of preserving the work as well as its authenticity, blurring the boundaries between reproduction and originality; on the other the presence of pneumatic sculptures to be assembled by the buyer increases the audience’s agency and consequently problematizes the role of the artist.
Following on from these premises, this paper aims to discuss the use of the ephemeral trace of the artist - his breath - in relation to ideas of authorship and sovereignty, the role of the public, and the interplay between authenticity and serial reproduction.
Analysing the ground-breaking, but under-studied, exhibition Do corpo à terra, this paper aims to discuss and reflect upon a twofold issue: the significance of an ‘aesthetics of the margins’, its premises and its contradictions, and the apparently troubled reception of Arte Povera in Brazil, starting off from Germano Celant’s conceptualisation of the movement and ultimately shaping a transnational dialogue between diverse artistic practices that questions the geopolitics of power in the circulation of ideas, trends and artists.
The Italian Nuclear artists distanced themselves from Fortunato Depero's 'Manifesto della pittura e plastica nucleare' and from Salvador Dalí's so called 'Nuclear mysticism.' They were aesthetically inspired by the mushroom-shaped cloud of the atomic bomb and prefigured sub-atomic landscapes inhabited by sub-human martian-like figures. This interest was paralleled by their use of painterly media, suggesting an autonomous energy or the hidden life of matter, visible only on an atomic scale. 'Matter,' they stated, 'has more imagination than ourselves.'
While possible connections with contemporary American science-fiction have already been exploited by current criticism, little attention has been given to the Nuclear movement in relation to the national and international cultural and political context. Analysing the last number of the Nuclear review 'Il Gesto' dedicated to 'Interplanetary Art' (1959), this paper aims to reflect the radical shift undertaken by Nuclear artists at the end of the Fifties: a curious and ambivalent attitude gave way to a stridently cynical one. Interestingly, this shift in tenor was coincident with the beginning of the construction of the first nuclear power plants in central and southern Italy.
On these premises this paper aims to analyse the paradoxical early formation of the anthropophagus attitude as the corner stone of Brazilian modern era, particularly emphasising the relation between literature and the visual arts and taking into account three crucial events: Anita Malfatti’s exhibition in 1917, the ‘Semana de Arte Moderna’ in 1922, and the Manifesto Antropofago, dated 1928.
Accordind to these premises, this work-in progress essay raises diverse questions, particularly whether is possible or not to establish connections between artists in different contexts under the fresh perspective of a zero degree art and thus overcoming the fixed polar categories of avant-garde/neo-avantgarde, modernism/postmodernism, etc.
Adopting a comparative approach, this paper proposes a novel understanding of Neo- avantgardes by analyzing both Oiticica’s tension between an ‘anthropophagus’ attitude towards European constructivism and the Anti-Art will of a cultural zero and Manzoni’s conflict between the survival of a lyrical symbolism and the emptiness required by a zero degree art. At the same time it reassesses a ‘south-south’ horizontal axis between marginal regions, surveying their resistance to hegemonic political and cultural models.
In 1961 Manzoni produced a series of ninety sealed cans containing thirty grams of his excrements and sold them at the same pay rate of the gold, thus comparing the human waste to a luxury commodity. Analysing Italian political and cultural context of the time, this talk examines the mockery at stake in this peculiar work of art, its criticism to the idolised role of the artist, and its commentary upon the production of series and multiples dominating the art market.