L’altre costat de l’avantguarda: estètica i dissidència somatopolítica en l’art del segle XX
Activity
The Other Side of the Avant-garde: Somato-political Dissidence and Aesthetics in the Art of the Twentieth Century
Curated by Beatriz Preciado
In 1980, the Italian critic and curator Lea Vergine organised the exhibition L’altra metà dell’avanguardia 1910–1940, which included for the first time, along with the work of around one hundred women, watercolours from the 1930s by the Turin artist Carol Rama, which had been censored in 1945. Decried as pornographic, fetishist and grotesque, Rama’s work had remained hidden for decades. Although the criterion of the selection was that of ‘women artists’, Vergine herself alluded to the complexity of the assembled works. As she noted: ‘Many of the artists were Jewish, others homosexual, while others were not strangers to madness […] regarded as transvestites, deformed or deviant.’ The result is a cartography of dissident practices that goes beyond the masculine-feminine opposition and that, following Michel Foucault, could be called somato-political: ethnic, racial, sexual, bodily and cognitive differences that challenge the normative gaze and stability of the modern subject.
On the occasion of the exhibition of The Passion According to Carol Rama, five contemporary critics have been invited to interrogate the dominant narratives of the history of twentieth century art and its exclusion of somato-political minorities. What happens to the hegemonic narratives of the history of art if we confront them with their other subalterns? What are the relations between the languages of art and other exclusionary political and sexual discourses? Here other narratives are proposed – other stories capable of generating new forms of public visibility.
Participants: Julia Bryan-Wilson, Patricia Falguières, Jack Halberstam, Elisabeth Lebovici and Beatriz Preciado.
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