VINCENZO AGNETTI: «ONE WORD IS MUCH LIKE ANOTHER BUT THEY ALL TEND TOWARDS AMBIGUITY» Ilaria Bernardi
Vincenzo Agnetti’s work was not only able to immediately grasp early 1960s motions to eliminate painting, but it anticipated subsequent international conceptual research too. Born in Milan in 1926, Agnetti graduated from the Brera Academy of Fine Arts to then attend the Piccolo Teatro in Milan. At the end of the 1950s, he approached informel painting and poetry, but, realising the limits of the image and word, he chose to devote himself exclusively to the germinal moment of the works, restricting his activity to dialogue with the members of the Milanese group Azimuth and writing theoretical texts in their journal. Increasingly convinced of the inadequacy of painting, in 1962 he abandoned any direct relationship with artistic operations and, after moving to Argentina, came to formulate the concept of ‘liquidationism’ or ‘arte no’: he totally rejected painting to replace it with the written word in countless little notebooks, never reread or reorganised, but left in the state of pure intuition, precisely as he had sketched them out. So he undertook a profound reflection on language. This led him to draw up Obsoleto (Obsolete) between 1963 and 1965, an ‘anti-novel’ in which he deconstructs the postulates of common sense to unmask the relativity of all linguistic conventions and at the same time recover what is lost, obliterated, missing. In 1967 he came back to Italy, to embark upon a personal artistic journey made of works and equally as fundamental writings in accompaniment. However, his main interest continued to be language. From the permutable tables of the Principia (Principia, 1967), to the Macchina drogata (Drugged Machine, 1968), from the Feltri (Felts, starting from 1968) to the Assiomi (Axioms, 1968-74), from the Libri dimenticati a memoria (Books Forgotten by Heart, starting from 1969) to the Brevetto di NEG e NEG (Patent for NEG and NEG, 1970), from the Progetto per un Amleto politico (Project for a Political Hamlet, 1973) to Dopo le grandi manovre (After the Great Manoeuvres, starting from 1978) up to the work Il Lucernario (The Skylight) from 1981, left unfinished owing to his untimely death, Agnetti continued to ceaselessly demonstrate how «one word is much like the other but they all tend towards ambiguity». Through paradoxes, contradictions and tautologies, in every one of his works he exposes the deceit intrinsic to language, technology and the modern tools of communication that always convey a power. He tries in all manner of ways to release language from the alienating use made of it by modern society. Therein, he goes beyond sense in search of a universally understandable language (numbers), so as to make the polysemy intrinsic to the word into unity, and to render the spectator an integral part of that process. Unlike US conceptual artists due to his attention to handling the materials, Agnetti can instead be placed in a cultural context comprising such works as The Open Work (1963) by Umberto Eco, The Medium is the Message (1967) by Marshall McLuhan, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) by Guy Debord and the contemporary writings of Raymond Queneau, George Perec and Italo Calvino. These were seen as the most fitting examples, respectively, of an analogous opening of the work to the spectator, a reflection on how technology reduces the medium into the message and how the society of spectacle manages to influence the masses, as well as an investigation on the potentiality of language performed by creating new linguistic-narrative structures based on mathematical logics. Always on the cusp between art, writing, poetry, theatre and technology, Agnetti unveils the extensions and contradictions intrinsic to linguistic expression. These he resolves in a paradoxical unity that can be interpreted in multiple ways, through apparently senseless associations in which analytical rigour together with restless poeticity conclude research that aims to replace the object with language, presence with absence, the progressive passing of time with forgetting by heart. The works by Agnetti on display in this exhibition, covering a time span from 1967 to 1981, lead us along this path of research. In the notes published hereafter, each work is analysed in a commentary aimed at shedding light on its intrinsic meanings, where possible using passages taken from the artist’s writings1. The order of the notes is dictated by the year of the works’ creation and, for pieces from the same year, by iconographic and/or conceptual similarities between them. Instead, when the works belong to a series (e.g. Axioms and Felts), the first piece is always followed by the commentaries on all the other works in the series, even when they were made in subsequent years to other works not from the cycle, which as a result are analysed afterwards. The intention of the catalogue of the works is indeed to retrace the artist’s research through his works, while identifying the threads running through them, the analogies and the developments that make them part of a single opera omnia. 1. In the notes to the works, the declarations by Vincenzo Agnetti quoted in inverted commas are taken from some of his writings, published in volumes and journals (see bibliography) and/or preserved and re-elaborated by the Agnetti Archive. 23