Description

Examining a diverse body of works alongside key exhibitions and art critical writings, this module aims to give a broad grounding in the developments of the Italian avant-garde throughout the twentieth century. We will consider a range of practices from Futurism to Radical Architecture, Italian New Wave Cinema to Arte Povera and examine these through a number of key issues (including the Italian avant-garde’s relationship to traditional accounts of modernist aesthetics and progressivist politics; questions of the individual versus collective forms of making art and consumer culture) in order to interpret the legacy of the Italian avant-garde within an international context.

Through an examination of the key theoretical debates that surround the historicisation of the avant-garde, we will consider what constituted avant-garde practices and explore their contested status in Italy.

Objectives

By the end of the module, students should have acquired:

• an understanding of the key historical debates and critical interpretations of the avant-garde
• an awareness of the major questions that are raised by the art works produced in Italy throughout the twentieth century
• a broad knowledge of the social context in which the works studied were produced
• the skill to write clearly and concisely about complex ideas
• the skill to articulate their own position on the topics we have discussed in the seminar and locate those opinions within the critical literature that we have read in class

Preliminary Reading

• Robert Lumley, States of emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978, (London: Verso, 1990).
• Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–88 (London: Penguin, 1990).
• Johann Lamoureux, ‘Avant-Garde: A Historiography of a critical Concept’, Amelia Jones, A Companion to Contemporary Art Since 1945, (Malden, Mass.; Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2013), pp.191–211.
• Ben Highmore, ‘Awkward moments: Avant-Gardism and the Dialectics of Everyday life,’ in European avant-garde: new perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann, critical studies 15 (Amsterdam; Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 2000), pp.245–264.
• Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism 1885–1915 (Toronto; Buffalo; London: University of Toronto Press: 2003).
• Lawrence Rainey et.al Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009).
• Hal Foster ‘Prosthetic Gods’ Modernism/Modernity 4, no 2 (April 1997) pp.5–38.
• Anthony White, Between Utopia & Kitsch (Cambridge, Mass.; London: MIT Press c2011).
• Special Issue on Postwar Italian art October, v.124, Spring 2008, pp.169–189.
• Briony Fer, The Infinite Line (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2004), chap.2.