Università Roma Tre

The course introduces students to the historical developments and key figures in the visual arts of modernism - from roughly 1850 to 1940 - focusing on such issues as their relationship to technology and new media (photography, cinema), political and social contexts, urban and natural environments, and psychic life. These artistic experiences not only helped to transform the nature of aesthetic experience, opening up new forms of sensibility, but also radically redefined the understanding of individual and collective reality.

The analysis of the different trends and poetics will also provide the basic methodology for the study of the media and languages that characterize art between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, providing the critical tools essential for reading different types of works.

Reference books:

19th Century (1850-1900): Federica Rovati, L'arte dell'Ottocento, Einaudi 2017
20th Century (1900-1940): Federica Rovati, L’arte del primo Novecento, Einaudi 2015. Alternative choice: Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Art since 1900, Thames & Hudson
Essays:
Stephen Kern, Il tempo e lo spazio, Il Mulino 2007: capitoli 4: Il futuro; 5: La velocità; 6: La natura dello spazio, pp. 117-226
Philippe Dubois, L'atto fotografico, Urbino 2009, pp. 25-108
Walter Benjamin, Piccola storia della fotografia, Einaudi
Check the Teams channel for these PDFs

The course analyzes the relationship between art and the environment, starting from the avant-gardes to the second half of the twentieth century in which artistic intervention explodes in installations, often realized in situ or site-specific, in the exhibition space, in nature or in public space. From the relationship between art and the environment, the course will also focus on the exhibition as an installation and immersive space and on the forms of the contemporary art museum, in the dynamics of spectatorship and multimedia and multisensory dimension.
The following topics will be analysed:
- Beyond painting and sculpture. The relationship between art and space in Futurism, Constructivism and Dada;
- Marcel Duchamp's exhibitions and curatorial practice;
- Environment and Happening;
- From Arte Povera to Land Art;
- A new ideology of the exhibition space: exhibitions and galleries between the Sixties and Seventies;
- Site specific and time specific: environmental installations as immersive spaces;
- Forms of the contemporary art museum: from the postmodern turn to the contemporary.

Testi adottati e bibliografia di riferimento

1) D. Riout, L’arte del ventesimo secolo. Protagonisti, temi, correnti, Einaudi, Torino 2002

2) F. Poli. F. Bernardelli, Mettere in scena l’arte contemporanea. Dallo spazio dell’opera allo spazio intorno all’opera, Johan & Levi, Milano 2016

3). Raccolta online delle immagini proiettate a lezione (disponibile a fine del corso)
/ Online gathering of images projected during lectures (available at the end of the course).


Non-attending students add:

4) G. Celant, Ambiente/Arte. Dal Futurismo alla Body Art. Biennale Arte 1976 (1977), La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia 2020