Reversing the Eye. Arte Povera and Beyond 1960-75: Photography, film, video

After years of research in artists’ studios as well as in private and public collections, this book depicts a rich period when the Italian artists figured among the most influential interprets of the transformation in the visual languages. The Italian artists of the period appropriated the narrative power of the image to explore the realm of possibilities through books, posters, projections and canvas printings. This fresh perspective on the avant-garde of the 20th century includes a visual immersion in the political and cultural context of the time, referencing cinema, theatre, political events, happenings and press extracts.

This book displays more than 300 works of art by major figures of the Italian scene, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Luigi Ghirri, Jannis Kounellis, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto…

“…to provide an overview of the history of the first ten years of video art would be to recount how different sensibilities came to terms with the presence of time, but, inevitably, only by doing so work by work, almost as if one could gather together in a sort of atlas the innumerable emotions of time that the duration of a few minutes could contain. It would be an endless list: Paolini’s instant; De Dominicis’s eternity; Ontani’s suspended time; the ritualized time of Calzolari; Kounellis’s hieratic time; the primordial time of La Rocca; Claudio Parmiggiani’s empty time; the fold in time of Boetti’s ambidextrous universe; Anselmo’s cosmic time; the divine mathematics allowing Grisi’s time to be measured; Vaccari’s real time; and Chiari’s arrhythmia.”
– Elena Volpato
Extract from the text “‘Art came first’ The origins of video art in Italy”, published in the catalogue.