Marshall Plan Modernism: Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia 9780822373681

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MARSHALL PLAN MODERNISM

JALEH MANSOOR

MARSHALL PLAN MODERNISM ITALIAN POSTWAR ABSTRACTION AND THE BEGINNINGS OF AUTONOMIA

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2016

© 2016 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Interior design by Mindy Basinger Hill; cover design by Heather Hensley Typeset in Minion Pro by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mansoor, Jaleh, [date] author. Title: Marshall Plan modernism : Italian postwar abstraction and the beginnings of autonomia / Jaleh Mansoor. Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed. Identifiers: LCCN 2016019790 (print) | LCCN 2016018394 (ebook) ISBN 9780822362456 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 9780822362609 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 9780822373681 (e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Art, Italian—20th century. | Modernism (Art)—Italy. | Art, Abstract—Italy. Classification: LCC N6918 (print) | LCC N6918 .M288 2016 (ebook) | DDC 700.94509/04—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016019790 Cover Art: Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, © 2016 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome

This book was made possible by a collaborative grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

vii

I N T R O D U C T I O N  Labor, (Workers’) Autonomy, (Art) Work

1

O N E  The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory

39

T W O  Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture

69

T H R E E  Alberto Burri’s Plastics and the

93

Political Aesthetics of Opacity F O U R  “We Want to Organicize Disintegration”

119

C O N C L U S I O N  “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike”

167

or From Autonomy to Strike Notes

207

Bibliography

249

Index

265

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is for Donna Mansoor, whose countless hours of support form its matrix, in gratitude for crossing the distance and too many geopolitical borders; it is also for Rosalind Krauss, who gave it its title. This project has incurred a debt of gratitude to many friends and colleagues: Rosalia Pasqualino di Marineo at the Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni in Milan; to Julia Bryan-Wilson, Jeanine Oleson, Elizabeth McIntosh, Jeff Derksen, Maud Lavin, Sabine Bitter, and Kerstin Stakemeier for inviting me to share aspects of the project in various places and time zones, and for sharing in generous criticism; to Benjamin Buchloh, Catherine de Zegher, Judith Rodenbeck, Hannah Feldman, Rachel Haidu, Adam Lehner and coeditors of Communities of Sense, you will find your imprint throughout; and to Ken Wissoker for his capacious support. I’m grateful to Louis Georges-Schwartz who plodded through an early draft of the manuscript, and to Jen Scappettone and Gopal Balakrishnan. Many thanks to Cali Buckley, Jade Brooks, and Sara Leone at Duke University Press, and to Andrew Ascherl and Andrea Tuele. Since 2011, I’ve had the pleasure and fortune to work with Scott Watson, Charlotte Townsend-Gault, Manuel Piña, and the department of Art, Art History, and Critical Curatorial Studies at the University of British Columbia. I’m especially lucky to have had the challenging engagement of Vanessa Parent, Robin Simpson, Jessica Law, Ali Ahadi, and April Thompson in seminars I’ve taught at UBC. I owe a lot to T’ai Smith, fellow traveler across this project’s numerous lives, to Mitch Inclàn for Objects Food Rooms, and to Minu Mansoor-McKee, especially for your patience and your celestial humor.

INTRODUCTION LABOR, (WORKERS’) AUTONOMY, (ART) WORK

[Operaismo] emerged at the exact moment of transition when the greatness of the century turned on itself, moving from a permanent state of exception to a new “normal” epochless time. Mario Tronti, “Memoir” (2012) At Bretton Woods, the foundations of a new world monetary system had been established; at Hiroshima and Nagasaki new means of violence had demonstrated what the military underpinnings of the new world order would be; and at San Francisco new norms and rules for the legitimization of state-making and war-making had been laid out at the UN Charter. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (1994) Slashing [the painting] was equivalent, fundamentally, to finishing it. It meant that I had at last planted my foot on solid ground. Alberto Moravia, Boredom (1960) We want to organicize disintegration. Piero Manzoni, Guido Biasi, Mario Corlucci, Ettore Sordini, and Angelo Verga, “For an Organic Painting” (1957)

Painting and Violence In 1949, Lucio Fontana picked up for the first time the “already dead” practice of painting in order to proclaim its irrelevance anew.1 This was also the year abstract painting made the cover of Life, “represented” by the work of Jackson Pollock. Already, the Life magazine cover signals the rapid assimilation

of the prewar European avant-garde into a culture industry funded by the ascendency of American capital, exported to an international, rapidly globalizing world.2 In this dialectical relationship, where expressive painterly gestures were quickly absorbed by official culture and while other acts, such as those intentionally incorporating technological reproduction matrices into the logic of the work (Dada) had to declare their own incapability of pushing past capture, historical conditions seemed to permit very few convincing aesthetic tactics. Shifting the onus of a heretofore historically unknown proportion of statesanctioned violence away from Europe and onto the United States, Fontana declared painting impossible in response to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sealing the deal, he demonstrated his conviction by violently puncturing a piece of paper, leaving a spiral-shaped constellation of holes. Having practiced ceramics and sculpture for three decades, he turned thereafter to canvas and metal surfaces, and to the discipline of painting, inaugurating almost twenty years of experimentation with ways to lacerate monochromatic surfaces (see figs. I.1 and I.2; pl. 1). Throughout those next two decades, Fontana maintained the tension of his initial inaugurating claim; in 1962 he said: “Trous? Les Trous n’existent pas [Holes? Holes don’t exist].”3 In Italy during the years immediately following World War II, Fontana was not alone in his search for gestures of impossibility that would be adequate to the contradictions characterizing the miracolo italiano—the years of reconstruction and recapitalization of Italy made possible by Bretton Woods and, through Italy, much of Europe—yet also faithful to the as yet unexplored radicalism and unrealized potential of the historical avant-garde. This book argues that the tension between loss and recovery signaled by the monochrome, one of the historical avant-garde’s most at once rigorously terse yet optimistic tropes, informs this gesture’s singular violence: rage at a field of received cultural appearances structuring a new era of culturally mediated struggle operating within and beneath the putative miracle of capitalism’s historical golden age, an era in which Italy came to act as a crucible for the next round of capitalist expansion. “Tension” here is a euphemism for a double movement describing the historical horizon against which Fontana and others were working, one of economic growth associated with “Americanization” (due to American economic aid) and symbolized through the cultural ubiquity of both television and Jackson Pollock on the one hand, and on the other hand, growing social 2 Introduction

FIGURE I.1. Ugo Mulas, photograph of Lucio Fontana, 1963. © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved.

FIGURE I.2. Ugo Mulas, photograph of Lucio Fontana, 1965. © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved.

antagonism signaling an incipient civil war between labor and capital resulting from that rapid, sudden, and “miraculous” growth. But “tension” also describes the relationship between a political economic order in volatile transition and a cultural order nested within and against that political-economic horizon, at once mediating that horizon and resisting it. It describes the way artists in Italy situated the work of art as at once a repository of historical symptoms and as a form of resistance (indeed terror) against the very historical conditions it symptomatizes. A double movement within a double movement, then. Returning to Fontana’s defaced monochromatic painting, I note the way it imagines anew the relationship between the field of the historical real and of the aesthetic act. The gesture’s contingency on the support on which it acts, a circular relationship in which cause and consequence cross, effectively challenges the traditional binary of passive and active, figure and ground; above all, it calls bluff to the anodyne and passive (what is gravity? what is nuclear annihilation?) abstract expressionist gesture. Hegemonic by 1950 in both Introduction 3

the states and Europe, this gesture came to be associated above all with Pollock. It came to connote the international triumph of the American “petitbourgeoisie.”4 The cut signaled instead a roiling and resistant cultural undercurrent that would burst onto the street, beginning with the Piazza Statuto riots in Turin, in 1962. In July 1962, at the same time that Fiat was in the midst of union mediated negotiations with labor over wages and benefits, workers stormed the offices of the Italian Union of Labour (UIL).5 Many of the rioters were members of that union and worked for Fiat. They accused the UIL of betraying their interests by having signed a separate contract with management. The autonomous workers’ movement retroactively said of the event, “Piazza Statuto was our founding Congress.”6 It signaled a latent historical movement and prefigured a type of action that in turn would reconfigure the meaning of autonomy—both political and aesthetic autonomy, in mutual entwinement. This book tells the story of that undercurrent. The gap between history, theory, and practice is nonetheless imagined radically otherwise from Theodor Adorno’s prohibitive, if also negatively generative, claim. If in 1949 Fontana echoed Adorno’s statement about the impossibility of lyric poetry after the Holocaust by declaring painting impossible as a consequence of the nuclear bomb, he nonetheless began to practice the medium. This stands in contradistinction to Adorno’s ultimately passive and ineffectual negative dialectic. Adorno was not a poet, however much he understood his statement to goad the literary explorations of others. Less preoccupied with mere endgames, Fontana got his hands dirty in a medium he had never previously practiced, declaring its foreclosure only to begin doing it for the first time. What did in fact actually issue from this declaration of impossibility was a new expressive genus (if not genre) born of cuts over the support, slashes, and holes, implicating the once passive surface in myriad surprising ways. Far from a nihilistic vacuity, these punctures activated the ground on which they were enacted, involuting figure-ground relations to reveal the surface’s enactment of the gesture. They affirmed the presence of the heretofore occluded (or absorbed, via the grid and the monochrome) material ground of painting, thereby imagining otherwise many of the stakes of the historical avant-garde.

4 Introduction

Double Movement: On the Entwinement of Capital and Culture The historical passage traced in this book tracks parallel with capital’s golden age, its era of greatest growth and historically high profit rates, undergirding and underwritten by vertical organization and new forms of state integration mapped onto a world order. The years of the Marshall Plan (1948–1952), foundation of the Bretton Woods program (1947–1973) happen also to be the years of an eruption of painterly innovation, even though that moment has no proper ism. Fontana is of course best known for perforating or slitting his canvases, thereby destroying the actual picture plane that had been the unquestioned ground of centuries of painting. Burri is best known for his roughly sewntogether sacks, which were frequently analogized to bloodstained bandages by postwar critics (although I focus on his lesser-known work in plastics, which he melted and reformed with a blowtorch). Manzoni is best known for the rigorously neutral white works he called Achromes as well as his more provocative, Dada-like gestures, such as canning his own shit or signing the bodies of colleagues and models as “living sculptures.” I refuse metaphorical readings of this violence that might analogize it with traumatic memories of World War II’s death and destruction. Instead, I locate the motivation for these operations in both the history of the medium of painting—in particular its radical curtailment in the most extreme versions of abstract art that emerged in Russia just after World War I (notably with Kasimir Malevich and Alexander Rodchenko)—and in the social, political, and economic history of postwar Italy, especially as the latter was shaped by the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan is understood in its broadest sense as the reestablishment of global capitalist relations under an American hegemon after the interval of Italian fascism. This double movement, striated by capital’s progress and the forms of antagonism it engenders, within which is embedded a second-order double movement that at once mediates and confronts, might be productively differentiated or periodized by mapping those equally contradictory movements against one another. Capital’s new era of integration, and US world making, might be understood against the oeuvres of the artists this study considers, just as the shockingly singular works of cultural production explored here Introduction 5

have much to tell us about the struggles specific to those years, an analytic circle as virtuous for the historical picture it can deliver as it is vicious in the way it seemingly defers an explanation of cause. Turning to the symptoms, then, in 1956 Alberto Burri began his experiments with plastic, a material infrequently used in sculpture or painting up to that point yet whose manufacture was burgeoning in the newly amped-up production of northern factories, financed by American dollars against the specter of communism. Referencing its own industrial production, this unlikely use of plastic within the parameters of the art work acted as an index of the culture of the miracolo italiano. Burri’s interest in the irrecoverable base materiality of plastic motivated his investigation into a set of violent procedures, such as burning and exploding, forged at once as a critical analysis of the new material horizon of everyday life, a practice-based and materialist collusion with Lucio Fontana’s procedural violence, and, not least of all, a crucial dialogue with the American artist Robert Rauschenberg. Not coincidentally, Rauschenberg had moved to Rome and was living mere steps from Burri’s studio on the Spanish Steps. Alongside his own exploration of aggressively violent forms of mark making, Burri’s aleatory tactics—attributed exclusively in the existing narratives to Rauschenberg and other American artists, strategies such as “chance”—became a fraught part of the dynamic of exchange between American and Italian artistic practices. We might cast this charged engagement as a kind of symptom of the real movement of capital subtending international relations, however occluded by the ideology of liberal democracy and “freedom.” In the dialogic tension that emerges between Burri and Rauschenberg’s practices in Rome around 1953, “chance,” the “readymade,” and related forms recovered from the history of Dada and surrealism took on urgent meaning in the emergent debate about the meaning of autonomy and autochthony in art against the backdrop of reconstruction culture during the Cold War.

Cold War, or Culture as War by “Other Means” This book rests on an understanding of the Cold War as one episode in the larger history of capitalism, one that delivers us to the present in a particular way and that, as a moment in a larger story rather than a discrete narrative, situates the cultural production that falls within its temporal boundaries. Far from a concluded narrative about simply opposed ideologies and equally far 6 Introduction

from a claim that the western bloc, and therefore capitalism, finally and conclusively “won,” I situate the Cold War—borrowing Georges Bataille’s use of nineteenth-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz’s phrase “diplomacy might be thought of as war by other means”—as a moment when the economy explicitly acted as the continuation of war by other means.7 During 1947– 1973, the Bretton Woods arrangement became a system of international financial aid—to be distinguished from the standard practice of alienating capital through debt in order to facilitate its growth8—that deployed dollars to ward off the threat of communism without immediate interest or guaranteed returns, a process reflecting a motivation closer to warfare than to the standard practices of making “barren money” reproduce capital through isolated investments and predetermined forms of return. “A conflict is not necessarily military; one can envisage a vast economic competition, which for the competitor with the initiative, would cost sacrifices comparable to those of war and which, from a budget on the same scale as war budgets, would involve expenditures that would not be compensated by any hope of capitalist profit.”9 Bataille’s characterization of the Marshall Plan as a form of “war by other means” corroborates that of economic historian Giovanni Arrighi, who notes that “war making and state making were becoming an increasingly roundabout business which involved an ever growing number, range, and variety of seemingly unrelated activities.” Bretton Woods was one such policy that encompassed a range of unrelated and often internally contradictory strategies, a system of gifts and low-interest loans that behaved less like a classical capitalist investment and more like a form of total integration of state and capital within US interests. “In the world monetary system established at Bretton Woods, in contrast, the ‘production’ of world money was taken over by a network of governmental organizations motivated primarily by considerations of welfare, security, and power—in principle the IMF and the World Bank, in practice the US Federal Reserve System acting in concert with the central banks of the closest and most important US allies. World money thus became a by-product of state making activities.”10

The Vicious and Virtuous Cycle, Cumulative Causation My account therefore relies on Arrighi’s work The Long Twentieth Century, in which the development of capital and the consolidation of the state as a domiIntroduction 7

nant world power are mutually entwined, each reliant on the other in a “process of circular and cumulative causation . . . a virtual and vicious circle” mediated by political and cultural struggles. Locating the Cold War as an intersection where the United States was reaching political ascendency while capital was beginning another cycle of accumulation displaces the narrative of culture’s reticulation to national identity and places it instead in a complex field of hegemony formation and dissolution. But situating cultural production made within and against the dominant hegemonic order in the aftermath of World War II, in the period when the United States came to be the nation-state that was coterminous with political hegemony during an era marked by previously unknown affluence in the part of the world protected by US “exceptionalism,” entails a specific understanding of the Cold War as another chapter in the much larger history of capital, itself historically and structurally parallel with art as we have come to understand it. As I will show, culture form may either serve prevailing interests or dialectically hold out the possibility and potential of futures yet to come or ways of understanding historical contradiction beneath hegemony. Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni’s work, at once timely and oddly out of step with what would become the official art of the period (all of which is American), insists that there are other horizons inscribed in historical and cultural memory that may have yet to fully resurface. This claim may initially sound like the umpteenth attempt at rehabilitating a wishful messianism against the catastrophe of history, so often evoked in the humanities through reference to Walter Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” I am claiming, by contrast, that cultural forms, far from projecting what should be, hold out the proof of another movement, another world, roiling within and beneath the appearances that configure hegemonic order. Indeed, recent economic developments that have gone under the rubric of crisis suggest that there is a world, a history, beneath and against capital and state formation. The cultural historian can only search for and perhaps sometimes locate the symptoms of movement in the field of the real, structured by contradiction, within which a sense of striving toward another world, and a sense of what that world might be, may emerge. To that end, I will attempt to explain both what I mean by “culture” in this book and what role it may play within and against capital.

8 Introduction

Form and Violence The formal tactics enacted by the painting that I explore—cutting, burning, exploding, exceeding limits of mark making and of the relation between support and surface—have not been employed in the practice of painting before or after 1949–1973 or elsewhere than in Italy. This suggests form as a sedimented content, a mode of expression against both the ideology of free expression issuing from American painting in the late forties and the model of painting inscribing it within the limits of the commodity also issuing from the United States in the early sixties, both all too well known to Europeans and Italians, as I have demonstrated. Neither expressive in some naïve unmediated sense nor passively giving in to the total expropriation of expression required by advanced capital, Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni worked out forms of negative articulation as the only way to find a vehicle of expression outside its appropriation and expropriation. But these tactics also exceed expression, negative or otherwise, in the limited sense. They supersede individual interests, articulating instead what Louis Althusser called “the last instance” of the economic real coming to find a way of expressing itself in culture.11 In other words, it is the violent expenditure of accumulation made manifest in war of a new scale, the atom bomb, and the ensuing continuation of that war in the excess of expenditure, that finds its way into Fontana’s slashes, just as the descent of productivism at great social, political, and cultural cost found its way into Manzoni’s best known work, Merda d’Artista (1962), cans labeled with the weight of their contents (artist’s shit), expressing (allegorical, cultural) immiseration at the same time that Warhol’s celebrated Campbell’s Soup (1962) paintings were made. Following Fredric Jameson’s claim that “we can think abstractly about the world only to the extent that the world itself has already become abstract,”12 which in turn relies on a definition of abstraction put forth by Marx in Grundrisse that “individuals are now ruled by abstraction,”13 I draw on a definition of culture as that which becomes a vehicle to mediate “the horizon of the mode of production by showing the form contradiction takes on this [cultural] level, and the relationship of the cultural object to it. . . . We will therefore suggest that this new and ultimate object may be designated as cultural revolution, as that moment in which the coexistence of various modes of production becomes visibly antagonistic, their contradiction moving to the very Introduction 9

center of political, social, and historical life.”14 To the description of culture as an etiology through which to make some kind of prognosis about the state of capital at a particular historical and geopolitical conjuncture, one structured primarily as “war by other means,” I would only add: while the object makes manifest the contradictions in the mode of production, and the expansive reproduction of capital, it also stands in excess to the very archive of symptoms it provides, an excess sometimes spilling over into symbolic protest: civil war by other means. But this merely echoes the degree to which aesthetic abstraction is only a mediation of abstraction at the level of the real, the “real abstraction” wrecked by capital that Marx elaborates in Grundrisse and against which he brackets off “aesthetic abstraction.”15 Already Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni’s shared cultural orientations (to the monochrome on the one hand and the readymade on the other) are indicative of the profound changes in the significance of the nation-state and national identity that were wrought in and after World War II. All three artists developed idioms that were indebted to the international avant-garde and to international modernism. If there were ever a time when national painting, the reactionary and figurative work of former futurists, would seem to express cultural resistance to the culturally colonial presence of the United States, the fifties and sixties would have been it. In the cacophony of references each artist listed, notably in the journals and galleries they ran (Il Gesto and Azimut), neither futurism nor the “rappel a l’ordre” (return to convention) that came after it were mentioned. Instead, the Duchampian readymade, international abstraction, French art informel, and American abstract expressionist painting were cited. The notable absence of futurism silently registers the obsolescence of the national state. This shift to internationalism, enforced by the real movement of capital on the one hand and formalized at the level of policy by the Marshall Plan on the other, already figures in the only artistic constellation that held any coherence for the Italian artists of the fifties and sixties. A shared preoccupation with the monochrome and the readymade, heretofore incompatible yet equally reflective of the interests of the avant-garde (in both its utopian and revolutionary modes) come to be collapsed, in a hybrid form that was already the sign of capital’s expansionist drive, with Milan as its miraculous epicenter. Following these artists’ cue, then, this book does not address Italian futurism.

10 Introduction

Recursion and Historicity The displacement of Italian futurism by a new round of reception of the international avant-garde (the readymade and Dada) and modernism (the grid and the monochrome), itself a complex conjuncture I explore throughout this book, poses anew the perennial problem of repetition so often codified in the history of art by the term “neo-avant-garde.” The standard argument about the neo-avant-garde, which Peter Burger, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster, among others, have offered is that the first instantiation of each trope responded to historical conditions in a compelling way, while each trope’s reinstantiation after the war became a mere passive rehearsal symptomatizing the total administration of life within capital and spectacle, foreclosing any gesture of historical engagement. If my argument in this book makes any headway out of the aporia that dismisses the monochrome, the grid, and the readymade after World War II as so much passive repetition, it will do so through recourse to the recursive, yet no less dynamic, movement of history itself. My hope is that if this book makes any intervention at all, it moves past the received impasse of the Marxian prognosis of history as first tragedy and then farce. Tragedy and farce are coeval in the formation of continuity and rupture, both synchronically and diachronically, in each round of historical struggle.16 My reliance on an examination of the larger and equally cyclical development of capital across modernity would claim that repetition is itself already the index of history’s real movement. In retrospect, this is not repetition at all but part of the recursion of form as it mediates equally recursive historical developments, a relationship of cultural mediation that may be described as cycles nested in cycles. Arrighi’s account of the historical development of capital through the dynamic of recursive cycles of accumulation, characterized by cumulative and contradictory motivation—mostly between state and market—that spurs its development on, and in which each historical cycle revisits aspects of former cycles, picking up some and rejecting others in the growing expansion of the capitalist world system, provides the strongest model available for thinking the entwined trajectory of culture. Arrighi calls these systemic cycles of accumulation. And while the fourth, “American” cycle concerns this book, the model of history he offers, in which empirical observation across “the long duree,” reveals striking patterns that have much to tell us about repetition—or Introduction 11

recursion—more generally. It offers much by way of explanation of the repetition of formal tropes as they resurface throughout the twentieth century to take up problems of historical relevance as those problems themselves recur, and in which some facets surface while others recede. For instance, while the monochrome is indelibly associated with the Soviet avant-garde, inaugurated by Aleksandr Rodchenko to mark the end of easel painting, its postwar recrudescence signals a “pattern of recurrence and evolution which are reproduced in the next phase of financial expansion and systemic restructuring” that is particular to the period of affluence 1949–1963. If it articulated a rupture and a new beginning in 1921, indicative at once of the start of a new economy to which the soviets of 1917 aspired and of a confrontation with the problem of production, one therefore caught between the radicalism of the revolution and a regression to capitalism via the New Economic Policy’s productivist mandate, in 1949 it was again the sign of another round of acceleration in the production sector, the moment in the cycle when capital is channeled toward expansion routed through the manufacture of commodities. But this time advances in the industrial sector were enforced exclusively from above, in contradistinction to the revolutionary self-determination of the soviets in the twenties. Bataille, quoting the French economist Francois Perroux’s description of the Marshall Plan, called this period of seismic transformation a “revolution from above.” Perroux’s characterization is foundational to Bataille’s analysis of the Marshall Plan, while dovetailing with Arrighi’s. I address this pattern of recurrence in chapter 1, on the monochrome. The model of history (of capitalism and modernity) on which I lean thus traces the degree to which cycles of recursion are neither parts subordinated to a given totality nor autonomous cases of a given condition. They are interdependent occurrences that are constituted by and in turn constitute one another, in a larger trajectory of aesthetic responses that are reticulated, nested within, an equally dynamic capitalist development. This development, in turn, like the aesthetic responses nested within it, is the result of a “process of circular and cumulative causation, a virtuous and vicious cycle.”17 And this process is that of capital self-reproduction. Capital’s capacity to expand is not bound of necessity to either circulation or to (commodity) production alone but to the imbrication of the two. Arrighi notes Marx’s formula for how capital selfreproduces. Money (M) is invested in the production of commodities wherein value accrue through labor. Commodities (C) are then brought to market in 12 Introduction

exchange for a larger sum of money (M). M has become M’ in a cycle, with (’) expression the swelling of sum. Again, the pivot in this increase of money, in this production of surplus value, is labor. This journey, or expansive cycle, can be extrapolated to describe not only isolated capitalist investments but also a recurrent pattern of capitalist expansion over the globe and over time to form a world system. A determinative aspect of this system is the undulation of epochs between material expansion in commodity production. The “MC” phases of capital accumulation in which commodity production generates surplus, together with that of (liquid) financial rebirth (CM’), describing a “double movement forward and backward at the same time.” Notable here is that transformative expansion does not proceed in a linear fashion, that is, through a series of simple forward movements in the course of which old organizational forms are superseded once and for all by new ones. Rather each forward movement has been based on a revival of previously superseded organizational forms. Thus, whereas the Genoese cycle of accumulation was based on the supersession of Venetian state monopoly capitalism by the alliance of Genoese cosmopolitan finance capitalism with Iberian territorialism, this alliance was itself superseded at a later time by the revival of state monopoly (Dutch) capitalism in a new enlarged form.18 This passage gives a crystalline description of the revival of forms that forge a relation to historicity because of, and not despite, recursion. It is through established historical forms that progress turns away from and returns toward the past, marking and remarking the degree to which change does occur. To this dialectic of capital and statecraft we might add culture, as it provides a metric for both. More important, I argue that art is part of the crisis of accumulation—channeled into warding off communism on the one hand and contributing to the American hegemony on the other—that opened onto capital’s great triumph between 1949 and 1973. Here, in another doubled configuration within the state-to-market dynamic, art functioned at once as propaganda crossing the Atlantic for the myth of American freedom from ideology and, in counter-formation, as an arena of violent expenditure of and of negative luxuriance in defiance against the productive ethos of American culture. That culture merely appeared liberatory, while masking the productivist drive that pressed Italy into service, a contradiction that textured much of the American Introduction 13

art that came to dominate the era, a tension many came to recognize in retrospect. Here is Leo Steinberg in 1972, when the era had drawn to a close, making the stakes retroactively visible, a stakes already mediated by art: “American art has always been about adapting art as transcendental experience, with its hint of elitism and ‘snob appeal, with pleasure, wickedness, finesse’ to native values such as work and productivity.”19 Steinberg’s statement is situated in the context of his discussion of Johns’s and Rauschenberg’s work—of the victors of the dominant narrative—but nonetheless acknowledges, some thirty years after the fact, at the moment when the period in question is drawing to a close, the dynamic at the heart of this book: a violent luxuriance struggling against the aesthetic management of domination, the ideological disavowal of colonialism by other means.

“Miracolo” and/or Violence Burri confronted the history of aesthetic modernism through the tension of violent excess against the results of capitalist growth, the proliferation of industrial materials born of the exponential rise of factory production in the North resulting from the miracolo italiano. Modernism’s primary paradigms recur: the monochrome, the readymade, chance operations. Big Red P n 18 (pl. 7), for instance, presents aggressive color and lurid texture. Concretely evidencing a scene of violence, it acts on a forensic register, suggesting only the physical involved in its production. Vulgar and coarse, yet exasperatingly indeterminate, the object’s origin in a manifestly failed industrial matrix marks it as an anti-readymade, turning modernism and the avant-garde inside out, thereby pointing to a trajectory of radical and negative materialism.20 In the specific context of the Marshall Plan, then, art was a second-order terrain of struggle. Fontana’s and Burri’s gestures express at once a calamitous surfeit in which “it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems.”21 Fontana’s and Burri’s violence and, later, Manzoni’s engagement with the labor-to-capital relation on the factory floor—at the very moment of this relation’s collapse—are finally neither easily reflective à la social art history nor autonomous in the merely formalist sense. Again, form—understood as sedimented content— has much to say about the subterranean relation of capital to the world of appearances in each moment across 1949–1973: first as hot (and destructive 14 Introduction

money), then as a refusal of productivism, and finally as an exploration of the failed wage relation; an unmanageable surplus roils to the surface, art its only conduit until the era of riots that begin in the seventies.

From Solid State to Liquid Capital In his work Living Sculpture (1961) Manzoni signed “Manzoni, 1961” above the small of a studio model’s back (see fig. 4.6). The model—a scenario of exploitive voluntarism that trumps the conventionalization of voluntarist exploitation in many later art practices of the seventies to the present that involve actions and live bodies—is, needless to say, naked. However, the signature formalizes her as a product of the artist’s refashioning. The signature produces her as a nude, an object belonging to a genre of obsolete historical representation. By making an explicit reference to the expansive history of classicism in Italy, in a scenario questioning property, agency, and relations of dependency, Manzoni evokes the historical passage from an older form of authority associated with the paternal order of the nation-state—one that had resurfaced in the fascist art of the twenties, with its emphasis on the myths of Italianità, Romanità, and antichità—to the order of the commodity. The studio model is as much a memory of classical statuary as she is a canvas as a product for sale once branded by the artist’s signature. She is a mannequin. The signature, a primary trope explored in the work, has contributed to an unfortunate misunderstanding of Manzoni’s project, in no small part due to the dominance of poststructuralism in art history of the past forty years. Those who wish to position Manzoni as an avatar of “conceptual art” (Marcel Broodthaers, one of the pantheon of art history’s heroes of the student uprisings of May ’68 in France and Belgium, for one, held him in reverence) might argue that Living Sculpture enacts a critique of the discursive structures that determine the work, as well as of the erasure that they enact on the body. While Living Sculpture certainly achieves this much, it also asks many more difficult questions about agency (the artist’s and the model’s), labor, and the move to dematerialized artistic practice celebrated by Lucy Lippard, among others, as somehow emancipatory rather than affirmative, if unconsciously so, in 1966. This book, then, is an attempt to recover the historical struggle played out between on the one hand the trajectory of actual violence binding capital to the state and to its attendant affirmative cultural expressions and on the Introduction 15

other hand forms of counter-violence, restricted, as merely symbolic agency, against this real violence, until that moment in the late sixties and throughout the seventies when it erupted onto the street. This confrontation describes the conjuncture that made possible the century’s last gasp of interesting, indeed formally original, painting at the very moment that the medium would finally cede relevance to other media and practices. As such, this confrontation understands the work of art as a form of warfare by other means, an expression used by Bataille and others to describe the Marshall Plan: warfare waged via dollars.

Prefiguration, or Mediation and Movement If form is content, the expression of the final determination surfacing through layers of social mediation, repression, and displacement, it is also a place to prefigure forms of direct action, forms of violence, that the hegemonic order may conceptualize and categorize as “terror” in its self-preserving interest, even and especially when those cultural forms actualize the meaning of “freedom”—from the prevailing ideological and economic order. This account of historical movement, insofar as it traces that movement through the symptoms embedded in the cultural form of painting, locates different moments in the unfolding drama of capital between 1949 and 1973 in each of the oeuvres presented here. Each oeuvre symptomatizes moments along this development, from its genesis in war, World War II, to its fading out in the strikes, arrests, and insurrection of the 1970s. If in 1949 Fontana signaled the homology between luxury and the violence of expenditure as a cultural expression of crisis born of overaccumulation on the one hand and on the other as rebellion against the neocolonial managerialism of American interest posing as liberation in the process of world hegemony formation, by 1953 Burri moves through the then productivist ethos of reconstruction, exploding it literally at every turn, culminating in Manzoni’s prescient articulation of the inevitable rupture between labor and capital under the pressure of immiseration, a rupture that also marks and is marked by the end of the period of the Bretton Woods agreement and the beginning of the end of historically high profit rates. It ends with the end of those historic rates of profit, the end of the absolute hegemony of the United States, and significantly the final end of some of the 16 Introduction

more compelling bids for painting’s relevance: 1973. The years between Manzoni’s death in 1962 and the year 1973 are those of the elaboration of Arte Povera in Italian art, in which the critique of colonial capital, or capitalism as neocolonialism under the American flag, is made most explicit. The end of those historically high profits coincides with the end of the medium’s importance, marking a moment when history seems to part ways with the historically invested medium of painting. The year, 1973, that bookends the limit of this book also casts a shadow stretching to 1977, the year when labor’s rebellion against capital, manifesting itself in violent insurrection and strikes, from the Piazza Statuto riots in Turin in July 1962 through to what came to be called the Hot Autumn of 1969 when labor resistance peaked in the Industrial North, and culminates in the arrest of numerous cultural and intellectual figures, among whom was the novelist Nanni Balestrini (whose work stands parallel to and in affinity with Arte Povera) alongside the political theorist Antonio Negri. This moment of state authority is the subject of the conclusion to this book.

Reversals Along with tracing the singular gestures of artists whose work symptomatized both the specificity of capital at that historical moment and the desire for its collapse as it was configured, this book might be understood to be attempting to tell the inverse story: it is a story not only about art but about the unfolding of capital itself, as a way of reconfiguring a picture of the world between 1949 and 1973. Each, capital’s unfolding and its cultural mediation, acts as a vehicle through which to understand the other. Manzoni’s work pinpoints important paradigmatic shifts occurring in the political and social field that have yet to be fully explored in discourses of political economy, where they would seem to properly belong. But in keeping with any honest understanding of abstraction, it may be that the only way to understand the real abstraction brought to bear by capital in midcentury are forms of abstraction that make its effects brutally concrete. In other words, Fontana’s slashes have much to tell us about what Arrighi, after Braudel, locates as the register of capital above the market, where aggressive capital seeks to ward off a crisis of overaccumulation by colonizing new territories, looking for new places of investment and expansion: “we have ventured to the top-floor of the anti-market where great predators roam and the law of Introduction 17

the jungle operates”22 in the intersection of capital and statecraft. Here, politics provisionally facilitates capital’s new directions, choreographing alternate forms of interstate aggression, marking the end of one cycle of accumulation as it tips toward another. Burri’s work engaged the phase of development and growth throughout the fifties and sixties by using the ultimate new material born of factory production, the stuff of the miracolo, generative of surplus value and of unassimilable waste: plastic. Manzoni marks the moment where the “hidden abode of production” resurfaces, convulsing forth in an insurrectionary moment against capital, when the labor to capital relation violently changes. After all, almost all of Manzoni’s oeuvre operates as a metonymy for change on the factory floor and in the relationship between workers and the PCI, articulating the last moment when it might have been situated as a site of change rather than full-blown antagonism. The latter would be the special province of Arte Povera. Piero Manzoni volatilized the material surface of painting and then pushed his research toward practices that no longer relied on the frame, in a northern Italian cultural context, in which the myth of “economic recovery” was about to also explode the frame of the factory, the union, and the party. Crossing formal limits immanent to the medium occurred against, and in relation to, a historical backdrop against which political formations were also about to cross the formal limits immanent to party and state, as though in parallax. We need, then, to rewind, to tell the story of the PCI that was the predominant frame and was about to collapse under its own weigh. Manzoni’s trajectory is intimately entwined with the contradictions internal to labor, class, and organization of class interests in the late fifties and early sixties, a knot requiring a look at the crisis between class and party.

A Story of Frames within Frames: The Italian Communist Party One event in particular set the basic economic, and thereby social, cultural, and political coordinates that both upheld and later caused the failure of the Italian Communist Party (PCI): the Economic Recovery Act, which was drafted by George Marshall and signed into policy in the summer of 1947 with the explicit goal of resuscitating Italy for the purposes of US markets and investments.23 Western Europe’s recovery radiated out, paradoxically, from the site of its greatest devastation, northern Italy. The stage of traumatic loss, then, 18 Introduction

would double as the place for Italy’s and Europe’s reintegration into global capitalism organized around the US dollar. The larger program within which the Marshall Plan was forged, known as the Bretton Woods agreement, was premised on the reticulation of the economy to the American dollar.24 It was to be set as the universal standard.25 Intended to deflect the possibility of communism, the Marshall Plan contributed to a new stage of capitalism in Europe, and eventually globally.26 This form of capitalist—coded American—retaliation against state-planned communism entailed mobilizing capital in contrary forms, as gifts and dispersed loans to western Europe that, as economists have noted, seemed on the face of it to contradict the properly capitalist logic of investment oriented toward expansion and monetary growth (what Marx called “breeding barren money” through debt). In addition to staving off the “threat” of communism, the Marshall Plan acted doubly to boost American economic interests by setting up export markets. It contributed to America’s own economic boom. Milan, the city to profit most, rebuilt itself—quite literally—in the image of New York, the only Italian city of skyscrapers. Italy’s Economic Miracle resulted from rapidly developed industry in the North, creating an economic and cultural disparity with the rural South. The Marshall Plan–sponsored miracolo italiano demanded a mass exodus from the poor South to the newly industrializing North, supplying pools of cheap labor to stoke the industrial machinery and leaving millions not only deracinated but barely accounted for in the new economy. From 1949 to 1973, Italy transformed from an agrarian society into one undergirded by the most advanced industrial growth, of forms of capitalist acceleration competitive with Germany, France, and England in many economic sectors. While exodus enabled the miracle, the miracle did not enable an improved everyday life. To the contrary, as the violent strikes of the mid1950s and the even more violent insurrections and arrests of the late sixties and seventies that preoccupy the final part of this book demonstrate, the winner in the miracle was ultimately a newly restructured capitalism capable of moving into the Global South, for which Italy, as Antonio Negri has argued, was the prefigurative crucible.27 The Economic Recovery Act, this particular strand of Cold War history, pressed into service an Italy that, unlike France the century before or England the century before that, was only just entering industrial modernity. Italy, the Introduction 19

site of high culture from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, suddenly found itself at once the center of, yet displaced by, a set of global relationships that textured everyday life in a singular way. That is, everyday life was caught up in a double spiral of uneven development: both belated in the introduction to modernity and in advance of the accelerations and changes that would soon come to be associated with globalization, the economic restructuring of the seventies that is often called “post-Fordism” or “globalization.” Theorized later by Negri, Michael Hardt, and others, Italy at this curious historical conjuncture, structured by belatedness and advances in capital, was a “kind of laboratory for experiments in new forms of political thinking, albeit one whose exceptionality comes to a close as Italy ‘converges’ with other countries . . . through the economic realm and the Americanization of social and cultural fields.”28 The Economic Miracle was accompanied by the sudden hegemony of American artists,29 a deionization of culture that reached its apotheosis in 1964 when (thanks to the CIA) the Venice Prize was awarded to Robert Rauschenberg. This irony was predicated also on the absence of any such American avantgarde prior to the war. What emerges, then, is another helix of entwined relation, a vicious and virtuous movement wherein cultural and economic unease informed and reflected one another. The Piazza Statuto riots of 1962, located between Jackson Pollock’s less-than-spectacular European premier at the 1950 Venice Biennale at the start of our timeline, and with Rauschenberg’s CIAassisted30 triumph as the first American to win the Venice Prize at the 1964 Bienniale, texture the field in a way that compels us to ask after the relationship of culture and political economy anew, as each reaches after an occluded historical movement that subtends both vaguely propagandistic exhibitions.

Belated Acceleration: From Production to Sabotage Broadly speaking, Italians at the time were well aware of the belatedness of their modernization. As Mario Tronti says, “it was only with the late 50s and early 60s that modern capitalism really took off in Italy, and the ancient little world of civil society, embedded in the memory of the nineteenth century, finally came to an end. . . . The whole of Italian history up to that point has been a minor history of the twentieth century.”31 For Tronti, it was only at this moment that Italy joined the rest of the modernized world. “In forced concen20 Introduction

tration of industrial labor in Italy in the 1950s and 1960s, the needs of breakneck capitalist development created an unprecedented crucible of historical experiences, daily needs, union dissatisfaction and political demands.” With this accelerated concentration of development, “the fact is that the whole history of the first half of the Twentieth Century converged on the figure of the mass worker.” As a result of the Italian economy’s accelerated transition, “the northern Italian workers’ struggles of the early 60s were closer to those of New Deal America than to those of the southern Italian workers of the 50s.”32 Belatedness was also a form of acceleration that concentrated and clarified the nature of neoliberal capitalism. Setting the tenor for cross-cultural exchanges and accelerating them, the Marshall Plan thus became the hidden frame of postwar European culture, a matrix that resonated far past the immediate postwar era and into the 1960s and after.33 In Tronti’s formulation, “the old ruling class, the wartime generation, was exhausted. A new elite was pressing forward into the light; a new ruling class for the globalized capitalism that lay in the future.”34 Raniero Panzieri, Mario Tronti, Romano Alquati, and later Antonio Negri (among others, all of whom were associated with the Operaio, or workerist movement) saw the PCI as having aligned itself with the nominally and shortsightedly nationalist interest of growth, in obedience to international capital and ultimately in the interest of American financial planning. Arguing that capital had reached a new state of total integration through recourse to extranationalist expansion, this group charged the PCI with having betrayed the interests of the workers it was intended to support by tipping instead in the direction of nationalist and state interests.35 The legacy of Gramsci, the Italian revolutionary who was formative of the PCI and active up to the Third International of 1926, when he was imprisoned for purported disobedience of the Stalinist line that was then calcifying, is particularly symptomatic in this regard. The numerous, successive inventions and erasures of Gramsci’s own voice in the official party record have been extensively recounted in recent scholarship.36 What stands out in these accounts of the PCI’s “philological stewardship” of Gramsci’s work is the neutralization of his commitments to class struggle through the filter of nationalism after World War II. “Specifically, the immediate post–World War II period provided the party with an opportunity to stake its claim as the main torchbearer of a national and democratic party that was being threatened by the revival of clerical obscurantism, Introduction 21

American interference, and so on. In this context, making Gramsci available for public consumption was a way for the PCI to broaden its appeal as a national (before it was partisan) and cultural (before it was political) force.”37 This postwar manufacture of an “intellectual” rather than a revolutionary Gramsci, dissociated from his previous image as the sole rebellious voice at the moment of Stalinist consolidation within the Communist Party in Moscow, operates as an obverse of the way Italian artists were extricating themselves from the specifically nationalist legacy of futurism to embrace the international avant-garde once again in the form of the monochrome and the readymade. Chapter 1 asks after this relationship. How did the relative disinterest in Italian modernism—futurism—and the passionate embrace of otherwise contradictory modernist and avant-gardist practices, some of which were most explicitly linked to the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, articulate the volatility of Italian politics in relation to the Cold War? How are the nationalisms espoused by the PCI to launder its conciliations to “American interests” negatively reflected, indeed rejected, by the decision on the part of Italian artists to eschew Italian identity? How does the trope of the monochrome act as a kind of transit station negotiating these fraught political vectors? How does the monochrome’s refusal of national culture ramify in and against a political horizon acquiescing to American financial colonization under the false sign of national reconstruction? Chapter 1 explores these problems, and the manipulation of Gramsci’s legacy as a parallel movement, through an exploration of the recovery of the monochrome on the one hand and the readymade on the other, both of which were understood to be incommensurable with one another in their first historical appearance, and neither of which had any grounding in Italian modernism. Returning to a leftist refusal of the PCI’s compromise of class struggle during the period of interest to this book, Tronti explicitly positioned himself against the PCI as it had been theorized by Lenin, characterizing the PCI after the war as an agent of betrayal of workers through its integration of them into a social democratization that supported “capital’s reformism.” “It is not a matter today of using the PCI in a revolutionary direction. It is far too late for this; the goal is again completely negative.”38 Tronti’s negative orientation toward the PCI, in the interest of Italian workers on the one hand and the international communist movement on the other, has won for itself the comparison to a “Copernican revolution,” for its parallactic forward and backward 22 Introduction

strategy. Tronti saw clearly, in an inverse formulation that nonetheless got at the heart of the dialectic, that the PCI had come to support capital’s effort to emancipate itself from workers in the “miracle” brought about by US dollars in the name of Italian reconstruction. But Tronti’s position, moving back to move forward, uncannily suggests an odd yet familiar parallel to the way Italian artists looked to the Soviet model of abstraction for a way out of the morass of Italian painting in confrontation with American art. From the perspective of this book, the “Copernican revolution” rhymes with the “regressive” mobilization of prewar modernism as a form of cultural mediation serving to help international capital run smoothly.

“Economia del Carnefice” Uncannily tracking parallel, in advance, in 1960, Manzoni drafted a text titled “Economia del Carnefice” (The economy of the executioner; see fig. 4.4), an exercise in the perils of double negation, in which the artist charged the PCI, and the communist state, as personified by Stalin, with an economy of butchery in direct mimetic reflection of the equally barbaric capitalist state, tacitly the United States. Both, he argued, shared a productivist machinery expropriating any “organic” nationalism.

From Work to Autonomy: A New Reading of Marx Sabotage and the destruction of the worker’s identity qua worker is one strand in the development of a new (negative) strategy for which Tronti called. This negativity in the interest of cutting the cooperative relation between worker and capital via the party came to crystallize in the Operaio (workerist movement). This movement, under the often mutually conflictual direction of Tronti, Panzieri, Alquati, Negri, and others, came to theorize a concept of autonomy forged within the confines determined by the heightened contradictions of the historical and geopolitical conjuncture, most notably the PCI’s betrayal of workers. The revolutionary tactic then entailed the workers’ finding ways of locating a self-interest within and against the forms of organization, against the party, historically understood to “represent” the worker. Breaking with representation was a striking and bold position and effectively overturned decades of the PCI holding to Gramsci and Togliatti’s positions Introduction 23

as its “founding fathers” in 1921—Togliatti having been present at the 1926 Communist International in Moscow, which sealed the strange and oblique relationship between the Soviet headquarters and Italy.39 This is to say that Tronti’s vision of workers’ autonomy provided a definition of “autonomy” that was far from the much-discussed and much-debated contentious word “autonomy” that we hear so often in aesthetics and art history. It is high time that autonomy come to be differentiated and dissociated from its monopolization by the stale, dead-end, endgame discourse of modernist aesthetics. I attempt to delineate the term “autonomy” against the horizon of autonomous Marxism as it developed through the 1950s, having begun in 1949, when the exploitation of labor began to intensify, and profits began to soar, fueling the miracolo italiano. The year 1953 is commonly located as a moment when a new grade of machinery was introduced into most sectors, from the textile and metal industries to those most invested (with Marshall Plan dollars), the auto industry, centered in the North between Turin and Milan.40 At this time, many began to question the PCI and the Italian Socialist Party and to attempt to find not only descriptions of the working class that would be historically accurate but also new ways to access its autochthonous tendency toward struggle and self-realization. This entailed a radically new conceptualization of labor. Contra the century-long mantra that understood communism to be “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” new readings of Marx in Italy and elsewhere were beginning to suggest that labor itself, work structured under capital—as the extraction of surplus value from bodies reticulated to the hour and measured by a wage—had to be abolished. The collecting of living labor in a commodity was itself already, as Panzieri, Tronti, and Alquati all theorized independently of each other and together, the source of exploitation and the uneven value of human life. This “theorization,” which often evolved out of recording the experience of contemporary struggle in relation to a rereading of Marx, came to sew the matrix for what would be workerism (Operaismo). It saw the proletariat as an agent of change at the level of its difficulty to assimilate, its inherent antagonism: “The roots of the workforce’s potential antagonism lay, therefore, in ‘that very production which is the keystone of the system.’ Particularly decisive had been the part played by the massive socialization and deskilling of labor, which had served to empty work of its intrinsic content as concrete labor, rendering things ‘the same for all.’”41 A passage by Marx to which Panzieri returned, citing it in his “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on a Reading 24 Introduction

of Capital” and mobilizing it against the Leninist emphasis on planning that was so fundamental to the party: Their union into one single productive body and the establishment of a connection between their individual functions are matter foreign and external to them, are not their own act, but the act of capital that brings them and keeps together. Hence the connection existing between their various labours appears to them, ideally, in the shape of a pre-conceived plan of the capitalist, and practically in the shape of the powerful will of another, who subjects their activity to his aims. If, then, the control of the capitalist is in substance twofold by reason of the twofold nature of the process of production itself—which, on the one hand, is a social process for producing use-values, on the other a process for creating surplus-value—in form that control is despotic.42 Concluding that “it is in the sphere of production that capital’s authority manifests itself directly; and it is by despotically imposing proportionality over the various functions of labor that the system’s equilibrium is maintained,”43 Panzieri, and ultimately Operaio, thus reversed the role of labor, from site of emancipation to object to be abolished. Then, with a fresh layer of a decade’s insights into changing conditions, Autonomia emerged. While Marx had stated plainly enough that labor “was the whole secret to the conception,”44 the shared revision around the problem of labor entailed a break from the party. “Autonomy” as such became a new term, although it would not be fully articulated until the midsixties. Autonomous Marxism in Italy had its origins in the workerist movement of the early 1960s, when a far left group was forging a break from the party, the union, and forms of representation in the interest of a direct and spontaneous expression of class struggle. The term “autonomy,” elaborated in a completely different register from the theorization of consciousness, much less aesthetics—as in the conceptual framework of the Frankfurt School, where the term plays a prominent role, or in libertarian and anarchist antistatist terms, which nonetheless also influenced it—and developed in an emergent arena of direct action and new forms of antagonistic praxis in an equally emergent class war, does betray some intellectual debt to the Frankfurt School, above all to Adorno and Georg Lukács. Panzieri, a crucial figure mediating the break between the party and emergent leftist positions in his contributions to Quaderni Rossi, was indebted to Introduction 25

the work of Adorno,45 although he applied this intellectual debt to struggles within the party, in relation to organizing workers’ interests directly. Panzieri ran many of Lukács’s and Rosa Luxemburg’s texts when at Mondo Operaio in 1957–1958. “Autonomy” imported into this context means an understanding of the worker autonomous both from the labor movement as an endpoint affirmative of labor, and from the machinations of capital. Panzieri’s position can thus be understood as a revivification of Lukács’s work in History and Class Consciousness. Indeed, Panzieri was republishing many of Lukács’s writings in Mondo Operaio in the late fifties. The task here was to understand workers as bearers of a special commodity, labor power aka living capital, while simultaneously seeing them as an agent of history independent of any external apparatus tasked to speak for them, an external apparatus such as the party or union in keeping with Lenin’s conception of a representative party steered by sympathetic intellectuals. “The existence of a new working class with needs and behaviors no longer commensurate with those of the traditional labor movement was a theme that ran through nearly all the major essays of Quaderni Rossi.”46 This reversal of the primacy between capital and labor, placing labor first and as agent, figured something of a paradigm shift in the left in Italy and in Europe in the fifties and sixties. “We too have worked with a concept that puts capitalist development first and workers second. This is a mistake. And now we have to turn the problem on its head. And start again from the beginning. And the beginning is the class struggle of the working class.”47 This beginning with the working class would nonetheless be weighed down with the burden of history, the revolutionary period in the USSR ever the reference point. The quoted passage appeared in a 1964 piece by Tronti titled “Lenin in England.” While Negri stated in 1979 that workerism was the result of an attempt to reply to the crisis of the labor movement,48 which resulted from a “prodigious progress made by the Italian economic system, the progress the like of which has never been seen in the economic history of Italy or any other country,”49 it was technically born of the failures of the union (the Italian Union of Labor) in 1962 to stand up for workers’ interests. These failures provoked what came to be known as the Piazza Statuto riots, a series of violent clashes and riots that started when a round of wage bargaining at Fiat’s Turin plant went sour. Workers were furious that the Italian Union of Labor had signed a separate deal with management. Although Operaio technically began in 1962, after this

26 Introduction

botched deal resulted in wildcat strikes, initiating over a decade of strategies and tactics no longer in keeping with traditional class representation, Operaio’s inception might be traced through a series of positions formulated a decade earlier by Panzieri, Tronti, and Alquati. These positions can be traced through a series of periodicals and journals ranging from Mondo Operaio— for which Panzieri, over eighteen months in 1957–1958, was writing fervently and consistently, in a series of texts that would prove to be the matrix of later full-blown Operaio “theory,” in which he repeatedly insisted that the struggle against capitalism must originate autochthonously in the working class, not in Leninist organs structuring the struggle from above—and through his journal Quaderni Rossi, cofounded with Tronti in 1961, and to the subsequent Classe Operaia, begun by Tronti and collaborators, whose first issue appeared in 1963. This book asks after the ways in which painterly processes ensconced in the historical moment, born of the same historical contradictions, manifested many of the same questions about autonomy and agency, in other forms. In this historical moment and geopolitical context, inside and outside the perimeter of “art,” autonomy took its place in the framework of an increasingly totalizing capitalism in which the American cycle of accumulation came to colonize every aspect of everyday life. Here, the wage comes to be understood as a mystified form of socialization, which the worker must break by abolishing the wage form rather than working within it, bringing about a split with the old worker movement centered around unions and mediating organs.50 Instead, sabotage in the workplace, or any tactic that would upset the worker-to-capital relation and interrupt its smooth and insidiously seamless operations, were embraced.51 Now, turning to Manzoni’s series Linea, begun in 1959, when the artist sat at an industrial apparatus and enacted something that might be called drawing, in a habituated state between active and passive, a worker on an assembly line, while a roller fed the paper through. The length of the precut piece of scroll paper determined the extension of the final line, which got rolled up and set into a canister marked with its dimensions and its time of execution. How might Manzoni’s line, produced as if on an assembly line, be understood here? As a mimicry of the total expropriation of consciousness by surplus extraction, or, folded into the autonomous space of art, a form of sabotage?

Introduction 27

Political Autonomy; Aesthetic Entwinement Here, autonomy was predicated on an understanding of capitalism as its own autonomous entity separate from the state, or from the ideology of nationalism, or of “society.” Tronti and others came to theorize capitalism as its own autonomous machinery that nonetheless expanded within and absorbed living labor, zombie-like; as an automaton that could be justified through recourse to any number of false ideologies, and thus required autonomous forms of interruption. In other words, the new usage of the term “autonomy” had nothing to do with idealist categories, much less transcendence, as it had in the aesthetic theory of the utopian left, evolving from the Kantian notion of autonomy.52 For the ultraleft, Italy during the Marshall Plan years and into the sixties came to be understood as a laboratory for capitalism’s development into new markets as it elaborated itself in its rivalry with the Soviet Bloc. The response of a dissident Italian left’s rejection of both the PCI and the US presence prefigures the third position—new forms of autonomous resistance, associated first with Operaia and later with Autonomia. Tracking parallel, the assembly line came to be a signal of the way the drive to economic success, the putative miracolo italiano, was as much the problem as the miraculous solution. It signaled the failure of the party, of Italian communism, of state communism as such. In sum, the rapid and belated passage to industrial modernity on the one hand and the precipitous passage to postindustrial economies on the other caused young dissidents in the PCI to grow disenchanted with its emphasis on progress and productivity and its allegiance to the Central Communist Party in Moscow.53 These young dissidents felt betrayed by the PCI and its entrenchment in prewar discourses that emphasized productivism. They felt that the PCI had ultimately accommodated their enslavement to forces that it was unable to engage critically. As one Fiat worker said about the PCI, it emphasized “the need to save the economy . . . the need to work hard because Italy’s on her knees. . . . We’ve been bombarded by the Americans, but don’t worry because if we produce, if we work hard, we’ll be fine. So the PCI militants inside the factory set themselves the political task of producing to save the national economy and the workers were left without a party.”54 Whether understood in relation to a wage or outside the reticulation of the wage, the “enemy” was American economic reconstruction—of Italy first and 28 Introduction

of Europe at large, or the phenomenon known as the “Economic Miracle” under the auspices of the Marshall Plan. To date, art history—in keeping with standard accounts of the cultural development in Italy, accounts that double and affirm an imperial narrative—has doubly scotomized the specificity of Italian cultural responses to the world-historical event of the Marshall Plan, first by acquiescing to the dominance of American artistic practices, and second, by breaking that narrative only to note the significance of the May 1968 protests in France. What follows in this book disrupts that account. Tracking parallel, Burri, Fontana, and Manzoni responded to this situation by forging antagonistic dialogues with postwar American painting and one another—rather than solely responding to a parent generation whose artistic and political problems and concepts were no longer either germane or appropriate. How, then, after Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni, might we see culture as part of a matrix beneath political narrative, at once symptomatizing a roiling latency and prefiguring the emergence of the new-leftist anticapitalist mobilization and the critique of production conditions that accompanied it? These developments preceded and form an important initial development of the phenomena—political and artistic—whose origins are usually now attributed to “le soixante-huite.” Yet Tronti and others have nuanced the mythological stature of May ’68 somewhat, characterizing it as a cultural transition and a (merely) generational changing of the guard—a cultural struggle wherein the notion of an “alternate subjectivity” was born, rather than a movement of politicized class struggle. In Tronti’s words, the issue in Italy, as opposed to Paris, was not “anti-authoritarianism, but anti-capitalism.” “Operaismo was, at least in Italy, one of the founding premises of 1968,” he has claimed, “but at the same time, it made a substantive criticism of 1968 in advance.” As Tronti would have it, the logic of the student protests of Berkeley and Paris in 1968, which inaugurated much art understood as institutional critique, was merely the logic of a reformist movement that allowed a new administrative class to emerge, along with the new managerial economy that was characteristic of the new economy that was put in place by the restructuring of the 1970s, otherwise known by the term “globalization” and its attendant term “post-Fordism.”55

Introduction 29

Italy’s “May 1968”: The “Creeping May,” 1969–1977 Although one wouldn’t know it from Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi’s ahistorical accounts, Autonomia entailed a critical incorporation and rejection of May ’68 and the student movement in Paris.56 Tronti and Panzieri, with whom Tronti began the journal Quaderni Rossi in 1961, tried to formulate a Marxist praxis suitable to the specificities of Italy throughout the fifties and sixties. This praxis revolved around direct forms of sabotage on the factory floor while also theorizing the conditions for the possibility of dismantling forms of valorization beyond the factory floor. By contrast, accounts of the Anni Piombi (Years of Lead) struggles that Negri provided, which are now dominant in Anglophone accounts,57 placed emphasis on rethinking the potential political role of the unwaged. In other words, where Tronti placed emphasis on breaking chains that resulted in capitalist reification, Negri shifted the problem onto ontological questions about the political subject. Negri’s approach found affinities with leftist thinking in Paris, and with the elaboration of street politics played out around the barricades of the French May. By contrast, Tronti understood May 1968 in Paris to have been a compromise, insofar as it placed less emphasis on a materialist analysis in leftist political struggle and looked to forms of cultural and ideological critique, in part due to a new analysis of the technical composition of barricades and battles on the street in which students played as large a role as workers.58 By 1969, Tronti’s hope was to radicalize the “potential” of the Paris barricades. Nonetheless, Autonomia—as Negri and later others, such as Paolo Virno and Franco Berardi, presented it—incorporated elements of the Situationist International on the one hand and of the Frankfurt School on the other, combining workerist class critique with anarchist praxis. As a theoretical formation, Autonomia departed from Operaio’s emphasis on the factory floor as a site of value production informing the totality of life under capital (and not just on the factory floor), extending to the waged and the unwaged alike. After the Fiat strike in 1962, Operaio expanded the notion of the working class to include the nonwaged, women, immigrants, and students. In short, the difference between Operaio and Autonomia revolved around the centrality of the wage as the point of reference for organization. While Tronti’s position claimed the wage as a point of departure for the waged and unwaged alike, thereby opening the door to Italian feminists of the seventies who posited 30 Introduction

women’s unwaged labor as the matrix of all capitalist valorization, Autonomia saw the struggle as dispersed, as in the hands of a “multitude” unmoored from any central reference point (such as the wage). Autonomia both radicalized and betrayed this insight by moving away from the problem of production and circulation, emphasizing instead cultural politics as forms of power. Looking at the subproletariat, the unwaged, the students, and the growing immigrant population, Autonomia coined the term “multitude” to replace “class” as such. This in turn paved the way for the concept of the “multitude,” which was later elaborated and formalized by the autonomist Negri and his American ally Hardt. The Italian ultraleft’s resistance to liberal democracy’s acquiescence to capital avant la lettre finds its way into the discursive landscape of Anglophone theory in the aftermath of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer, which appeared in 1998, and gained force with Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) around the time of the Genoa antiglobalization protests. Finally, Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, coedited by Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt, began to circumscribe a more adequate history. As Alberto Toscano and Lorenzo Chieso have recently pointed out, “Italian thought confronts us with a parallax view or disjunctive synthesis of national and conjunctural idiosyncrasies, on the one hand, and a series of potent theoretical abstractions that have remarkable capacity for ‘travelling’ on the other.”59

Map of Marshall Plan Modernism Chapter 1 of this book explores the recrudescence of the monochrome as a form through which artists could formalize the collapse of the historical project—at once political and artistic—of revolutionary painting and the need to come to terms with artistic models arriving from the new center of hegemony. As the standard narrative of art history would have it, painting in the revolutionary context collapsed to make way for design on the one hand and political agitprop on the other.60 If the monochrome drove painting to its end in 1921, why did it reappear so prominently on the transatlantic art scene after World War II? Postwar artists, as that same narrative about the neoavant-garde referenced earlier (Burger, Buchloh, Foster) would have it, succumbed to capitalist dogma (disguised as antidogma) through passive repetition. Through this kind of passive repetition, postwar artists participated in Introduction 31

the collusion of aesthetics with capitalism, and neutralized its historical critical charge, replacing it with apolitical affirmation.61 Chapter 1 poses the following questions. What determined, then, the compelling return of the monochrome? What drove the post–World War II recovery of prewar models of experimental thinking with such conviction and passion if it was a mere passive repetition? Was this insistent reappearance just the function of restoration? Or of unrealized potential? Why, or to what degree, could this persistence—far from a passive, much less a neutral, affair—signal an autonomous trajectory?62 Why was this return so frequently conjugated with gestural violence? To what degree was this seeming “recovery” part of a conflictual agonism signaling another motivation, and in turn suggesting an unrecognized relationship of the art work to the economic and social-political field? During the rise of changing social movements such as Operaismo and a proliferation of groups splintering away from the PCI in response to changes in the modes of production and the distribution of capital, to what extent did cultural models mediate those changes? This book traces the complexity of that mediation. In the limited context of the history of painting, what can explain the sudden emergence and just as swift disappearance of violence, and why was this formal strategy specific to Italy? How is abstract painting related to the vanishing conditions of possibility of older forms of social and political mediation, and how does it augur new tactics of sabotage and resistance? Or rather, how could it be understood not to? How could the conditions of “recovery” and “reconstruction,” of capital’s triumph in 1949, not have motivated a new kind of investigation into the status of painting as a medium, one different from the analytical work of revolutionary painting from 1912 through the 1920s, when the horizon appeared utterly open to a utopian communism at best and a communist utopia at least? Finally, how did the monochrome signal a kind of (aesthetic) commons in a devastated wasteland of cultural possibility? Chapter 2 considers Lucio Fontana’s at once glamorous and brutal engagement with the medium, signaling a form of expenditure, an accursed share, in response to the atomic bomb, situating the atomic bomb as an irrecoverable crisis in world-historical terms. To what extent does the painterly surface determine the gesture in ways unexplored by any artist before or after Fontana? Fontana’s act volatilizes the ground; it literally rises up under the impact of a physically enacted pressure. Its texture and tenacity respond to the markmaking tool to suddenly assume value as nonfungible, nonabstractable mat32 Introduction

ter. To what extent does this tactical cut into the plenum of the surface look ahead to the way Fontana mobilized the logic of mediation introduced by television to foreground the problem of materiality in a moment of acceleration of real abstraction, articulated by the television on the one hand and the rapidly hegemonic idiom associated with Pollock on the other? Fontana’s cut marks a dialectical response to Pollock and to the problem of “Americanization.” I would like to take a step back and simply ask how Fontana’s cut functions, how it is elaborated, and what it begins to do in response to the becoming hegemonic of American high culture. Chapter 2 addresses these problems through a close reading of Fontana’s eccentric gesture, made alongside the Television Manifesto of 1953 and his other textual production against the backdrop of the miracolo italiano centered in Milan. Chapter 3 explores Alberto Burri’s use of unorthodox materials, notably plastic, which was produced in northern Italian factories and was suddenly ubiquitous during the reconstruction, to ask the following questions. How does the artist’s choice of material simultaneously resist the expressionism and selfdetermination of Pollock on the one hand and the “aesthetics of indifference,” characteristic of Rauschenberg’s generation, with which Burri would have been familiar given his exposure to that practice, on the other? Plastic comes to be associated with the Marshall Plan in a popular cultural imaginary. It becomes the focal point of cinematic articulations of the Marshall Plan, such as Antonioni’s Red Desert, and of exhibitions for export meant to “represent” the national miracle, such as The New Domestic Landscape at the Museum of Modern Art in 1972, which focused on northern Italian design. Chapter 3 thus begins with an exegesis of Red Plastic (1963), which crystallizes historical change through material practice imminent to artistic problems of modernist “abstraction.” I ask after the specificities of Burri’s practice of burning and exploding a toxic material, and its ramifications in the geopolitical and historical context of Marshall Plan Italy, through a comparison with Rauschenberg’s magisterial Factum I and Factum II. I attempt to argue that Factum I and Factum II dialectically articulate the logic, and specific tenor, of postwar capitalism’s equivalence and interchangeability within a structure of verticalization and integration. In other words, if the work challenges aspects of authorial control, opening onto a liberatory model of mark making that dismantles and horizontalizes easel painting at the level of making, it does so in a way that responds to new forms of centralized integration while preserving a logic of equivalence all the more. Introduction 33

Economists have argued that what explains American ascendency in the immediate postwar era is, in part, new organizational structures that fall loosely under a new “principle of substitution.”63 As Rauschenberg’s most consequential works, Factum I and Factum II draw to the surface the relationship between iterability and equivalence, the absorption of singularity in accelerated market production, they begin to suggest something of the principle of substitution that appears “free” yet demands a second order of organization through the new forms of competition brought to bear by “freedom.”64 Seemingly identical, the numbers added to the titles set Factum I and Factum II into a misleading relationship of model and copy by making the second a mimic of the first, suggesting a sequential order, when in fact Rauschenberg worked on both simultaneously throughout 1957. Far too clever to submit to the model of authenticity around which art had continued to revolve, despite many avant-garde challenges to those classical tenets, the works undermine the notion of both originality and its failure. While the term “factum” simply denotes “fact,” it also connotes the notion of a memorial. Rauschenberg’s memorial recognizes conditions of enforced obsolescence that make original or authentic expression impossible. Yet, I ask, to what degree does Factum I and Factum II, far from forging an idiom that would push back against this new condition, affirm if not embrace it as an accretion of empirical facts? To what extent does this imploded authorship emphasize the drift toward the totality of commodity objecthood and its attendant form of subjective apperception dialectically founded on and foundational to competition: anomie? This line of inquiry is anchored in the fact that Rauschenberg’s studio was just steps away from Burri’s on the Spanish Steps in Rome and that the two were exposed to one another’s work enough to motivate the comparative question of how each deployed materials and forms dialogically, consciously or otherwise—although I do ask after vectors of influence in the chapter. How does Burri’s toxic material and gestural violence ramify within and against this emergent dialogue, against the backdrop of the proliferating production of plastic? Chapter 4 closely reads the work of Piero Manzoni, most explicitly to problematize the issue of production in relation to an increasingly dictatorial international art market on the one hand and a concomitant crisis between labor and capital on the other, a contradiction specific to Italy in the sixties yet responsive to the emergence of pop art, specifically Andy Warhol’s idiom. Likewise, Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit; 1961), offered an analy34 Introduction

sis of the dialectics of art in the frenzied economy of reconstruction Milan: Merda d’artista is precisely that which contemporary artists make: “stuff ” whose value emerges only from the abstractions on its label, or from the artist’s proper name as brand. Manzoni’s own physical refuse is held up as aesthetic totem (in an edition of ninety). I triangulate Manzoni’s work with that of Johns, with whom Manzoni was familiar, owing to the Johns’s reception at the Galleria Naviglio, and about whom Manzoni wrote with vivid interest in his magazine Azimuth. Manzoni never presented “Economia del Carnefice” as a manifesto or among the many single-authored and collaborative texts to which his signature is affixed. This “underground” essay, which I found in the archives in 2002, stands as an accurate symptom of Milan and northern Italy by the time he wrote it in 1960. By the late 1950s, the “Economic Miracle” had achieved the reformatting of everyday life.65 This accomplishment on the part of capital saw its counterpart in increasingly militant workers’ movements. As historian Paul Ginsborg points out in his well-known account of Italy from the immediate aftermath of World War II through the fifties and sixties, There were many reasons for the new militancy in Northern factories. . . . Conditions of near full employment in the North gave workers a selfconfidence they had lacked since the mid 1940s. Secondly, technological changes of the Economic Miracle had transformed the organization of work in the northern factories. In the 1960s mass production took the form of mechanical repetitive work executed at high speed with few breaks throughout a very long working day. The operaio reacted strongly against these conditions. As their confidence grew, they demanded changes in the work rhythms and pay and eventually greater control of the work process as a means of combating alienation.66 Part of the interest of Manzoni’s oeuvre is the tragic quality of his timing. His work operates as a forensic device through which to understand the transitions occurring in the capital-to-labor relationship at a time when workers not only increasingly came to comprehend the betrayal of labor by the party and the need for autonomous forms of resistance, but when capital began to retaliate, first by recourse to the support of the state in whose interest it was for capital to run efficiently, and later by finding cheaper labor elsewhere. Manzoni’s work carves out a dialectical relation to the historical moment. His work is balanced along a fine line between reflection and a form of sabotage within Introduction 35

a false understanding of art as autonomous. If anything, his work is a clear example of the degree to which aesthetic form becomes the sedimentation of “the last instance,” or changes in the economic foundation of value production and circulation. Manzoni’s attention to the remaining gap between artwork and labor through the exploration of task performance, skill, and agency symptomatized the emergent question of worker autonomy, of labor as an autonomous question, against party, union, and program; dialectically, it also demonstrated the degree to which art simply became another thing in the total management of everyday life, losing what thin margin of critical vantage it had historically sought to maintain. In 1960, Manzoni translated the residual trace of his own corporeal presence in an untitled series of thumbprints on paper and on eggs. Here, the thumbprint functions as a substitute for the authorial gesture or author’s mark, yet it refers to two contradictory understandings of that subject’s presence. On the one hand, as indexical trace of the artist’s body, the print points to a unique identity. On the other hand Manzoni presents the enlarged thumbprints in multiply run lithographs. Monumentalized, front and center, they function as a portrait of the subject. At the same time, they are the objectified residues of the maker’s purely externalized body—a body located through forensics posited as bearer of the psychological depth expected of “portraiture.” The thumbprints demonstrate the problematic introduced by the Duchampian readymade in 1915, positing the print as an original and originary yet automatic site of the mark-making process. Each print captures the body in a purely reified mark articulating the extraction of surplus value, the vanishing point of the laboring body in the production of value in a system of general equivalence. This imprint signals, of course, the process of making itself, that which is occluded in the commodity status of an object, negatively, or dialectically, articulating surplus value as the evanescing life of the maker expressed in his or her work, over which she or he may have no possession, binding together an otherwise heterogeneous range of objects, produced artisanally and industrially. Chapter 4 thus asks after the logic of Manzoni’s production, noting the dialectical tension that runs throughout. In his series Linea (1959–1961), hidden lines dramatize the tension between material concretion and ascetic withdrawal of mark making. It radicalizes Fontana’s gesture of simultaneously offering and withholding process and its trace. Does Manzoni demonstrate immiseration as the very structural condition of the possibility of making 36 Introduction

art in the mid-twentieth century in a financial colony of capital? Or does his work take its place as just another Dada gesture? How might this tension be understood in relation to practices crossing the Atlantic, notably Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, uncannily done after Manzoni’s literally “canned” works, in 1962. How do these works forge a conversation between geopolitical sites about new trajectories of international exchange made possible by Marshall Plan–era capital, trajectories that deracinated and rearticulated the very notion of “context” so dear to social art history? The conclusion investigates the generation of art making after Manzoni’s death in 1963, the generation known as Arte Povera, which explicitly engaged with the student element that joined forces in support of the workers’ strikes during the “creeping May” of 1967–1977. Among Italian artists of the post– WWII period, some of the figures associated with Arte Povera, such as Mario Merz, are notable for the way in which they took the legacy of Gramsci and the “organic” intellectual to be a central concern of cultural production. I trace this perceived debt to Gramsci (or the myth of Gramsci, a distinction I discuss), beginning with the recrudescence of the trope of the organic in Manzoni and his comrades’ (Guido Biasi, Mario Colucci, Ettore Sordini, and Angelo Verga) manifesto “For an Organic Painting.” Tracing its continued resonance in the work of Mario Merz, whom I discuss in chapter 1, I conclude the discussion of “the organic” as a trope specific to Italy with a reading of Pino Pascali and Jannis Kounellis’s oevres. How might we understand the sudden fascination with the thematics of “organicism,” a misreading of Gramsci, other than as a situated retort to American aesthetic practices, notably minimalism? The conclusion poses these questions. At the same time, the creeping May and its violent repression of artists, writers (Nanni Balestrini, Toni Negri), and students produced another kind of “picture” of protest, which I organize around an exploration of Pino Pascali’s Canone Bella Ciao, a figurative sculpture made in protest of American involvement in the Vietnam War, and by extension American Imperial power. Pascali’s harassment and death at the hands of Roman police in 1968 augurs in an uncanny way the murders and arrests of the Red Brigades in the 1970s. My analysis of Pascali will allow me to link the problem set elaborated in this book to contemporary political struggles and the current economic crisis. Reading Pascali alongside Negri, and also alongside Balestrini’s textual description of antistate and anticapitalist struggle, I will return to the problem of autonomy, Introduction 37

which has come to be entwined in the antiglobalization movement associated with the thesis of Empire. Having done so, I turn to the social, political, and economic history of postwar Italy. I thus situate my narrative in a genealogy of thinking currently emerging in the Anglophone world in which Italy is cast as a test site for larger shifts in the internal dynamics of capitalism. The conclusion asks after the reverberations in the present of the most radical development of the moment, Italian feminism’s analysis of the hidden condition for the possibility of value production in the obfuscated realm of social reproduction. This paradigm shift in the understanding of the site of revolutionary agency folded negatively beneath visibility and representation informs a reformulation of the general strike. The general strike is, as I discuss, tracing it through contemporary cultural production, most insistently in the work of Claire Fontaine, who has been exploring it over the last decade, the limit of our present. How and why did the period spanning the Bretton Woods plan generate striking form in the rarified space of art practice? How did the cyclical, contradictory relationships between art and capital take on a singular configuration in the equally contradictory political and economic field caught between the global and local, empire and autochthony? How did these polarizations and charges enable formal tactics unique to Italy at this time? This book, if it is to meet its horizon of intention, reopens questions of analytical and interpretive method to pose a way out of the usual impasse between formalist autonomy on the one hand and social reflective history on the other. It asks how culture operates in relation to the real movement of history, as symptom or as arena for struggle marking the passage from symbolic to real, and from real to symbolic. Moving out in concentric circles, or ellipses, from the concrete to the abstract, the particular to the general, or from history to philosophy: What is the relationship between art, capital, and statecraft at the moment of the apotheosis of a hegemon? What is the relationship between form and history? Between art and time? Between art and violence? Walter Benjamin’s assertion that the history of civilization is already the history of barbarism rings anew through Bataille’s analysis of expenditure as warfare by other means during eras of accumulation crises. It is my hope that this book reopens those questions, basic to the Enlightenment discourse from which the discipline of art history issues, but from a historical materialist stance germane to the conflictual historical conjuncture under analysis. 38 Introduction

ONE THE MONOCHROME IN THE NEOCAPITALIST LABORATORY

The a-priori system on which the division of labour in the workshop is regularly carried out, becomes in the division of labour in the society an a-posteriori, nature-imposed necessity, controlling the lawless caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the barometric fluctuation of the market prices. Raniero Panzieri, Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on a Reading of Capital (1964) Big business capitalism was given a chance to demonstrate all its growth potential precisely because of the horrors and glories of the Second World War. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (1994) History or the Real is an absent cause. Totality is not available for representation any more than it is available in the form of some ultimate truth. The whole is kept faith with and represented in its very absence . . . totality is affirmed in the very moment whereby it is denied, and represented in the same language that denies it possible representation. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981)

In 1960 Piero Manzoni wrote a letter to Henk Peeters, the Dutch artist who became an esteemed if distant interlocutor over the following two years until Manzoni’s death, and with whom he formed, along with Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Enrico Castellani, and Otto Piene, the self-avowed constellation the

“International Zero Movement”—based on a handful of shows in Holland in the early sixties—to explain the category he had inaugurated some years before, in 1957: the “achrome” (see pl. 2).1 A permutation of “monochrome,” “achrome” denoted a further reduction of painting to its material support beyond the horizon set by painting between the wars. This entailed stripping it of its last painterly value, color. In the letter, drafted in French, Manzoni tried to locate a shared tendency that was formative of the grouping, a tendency he described as poised against expressionism on the one hand and constructivism and neoplasticism on the other. In another letter in 1962, Manzoni presented a narrative of the achrome’s development, remarking on the trajectory that led to it as overdetermined by modernist and avant-garde “isms” so numerous that they structured a (self-) consciousness in which it was impossible to act.2 But he again cites 1957 as a year when not only did he break ground in his own research but also began to note the “tendency,” as he calls it, circumscribing it only negatively, to monochrome painting crystallized among his friends. The year is curious for being rather late to include Fontana, who had been consistently practicing the same idiom of cut and punctures on a monochromatic field since 1949, and who had been Manzoni’s teacher at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan. But the “isms” Manzoni cites (constructivism, neoplasticism) are striking for having been absent from the litany of isms listed in both artists’ texts and publications over the years. Fontana’s magazine Il Gesto, which ran for four issues from 1955 to 1959, appearing approximately once a year, and Manzoni’s Azimuth both evidence preoccupation with Jackson Pollock’s particular gestural expressionism, with its influence on French art informel, and with its aftermath in Johns’s antigestural exploration of the encaustic matrix. Above all, these publications betray an interest bordering on obsessive with Picabia and Duchamp, particularly in Manzoni’s magazine Azimuth. The inclusion of Duchamp’s work in issue 3 of Il Gesto may indicate his collaboration on that issue, which may have tipped it heavily toward the direction of New York Dada. Caught in a kind of meandering eclecticism absent in both Manzoni’s and Fontana’s actual practice, both magazines explored a broad range of the historical avant-garde and of modernism. Striking is the absence of any reference to constructivism or Italian futurism. The latter comes up only once, in passing, in the fourth issue of Il Gesto, September 1959, in the

40 Chapter One

FIGURE 1.1. Lucio Fontana, cover of Il Gesto, issue 3. Estate of Lucio Fontana, SODRAC (2014).

form of a quote by Umberto Boccioni stating that “a time will come when the frame will no longer inhere,” to accompany a drawing by Fontana.3 The first issue of Il Gesto opens with an image by Max Ernst; the second is dominated by French critic Pierre Restany’s at once breathless and hyperbolic celebration of the originary, “primitive” gesture, in a text titled “The Morality of the Gesture” (Moralité du Geste), to which I return in chapter 2. Much of issue 3 is devoted to Picabia and Duchamp. Both The Large Glass and Picabia’s Mechanomorph abut a reproduction of one of Manzoni’s achromes from 1958,

The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 41

a grid of linen patchwork. Picabia and Duchamp appear heavily in both issues of Azimuth. But neither Kasimir Malevich nor Aleksandr Rodchenko come up, despite being the most obvious point of reference in both artists’ actual production—until Manzoni cites constructivism as the term, along with its continuity in neoplasticism, that had to be superseded, in 1957. To practice one trope while persistently citing the other describes the particular tension structuring the neo-avant-garde, indicative of a broader field of contradiction from the late 1940s through the 1960s, and into the 1970s in Italy. Malevich is, by contrast, a primary reference point for Yves Klein, whose Propositions Monochromes made an impact on both Manzoni and Fontana when he began showing his monochromatic work—notably in Milan.4 It was in 1957 that Klein presented his eleven identically signed and formatted, yet differently priced, blue monochrome paintings at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. Both Fontana and Manzoni attended the opening; Fontana bought a work. The Milan exhibition marked the first time the entire series was presented in one space, two years after Klein’s attempt to short-circuit the exhibition process through juridical ratification. Klein had attempted to acquire a patent for a particular blue ubiquitous throughout the history of western painting, from Giotto to Redon. But the particular positioning, and inversion, of Soviet constructivism in Klein’s narrative seems to have been the real moment of insight for Manzoni, even as he differentiated himself from Klein thereafter. The nuances of the encounter, and how it conducted the complex lines of recovery and influence of prewar monochrome painting—still associated with the revolutionary avant-garde—is the concern of this chapter. In order to work through this terrain of influence and differentiation determining postwar Italian painting, I will briefly turn to Klein’s project, which coalesced in an exhibit in Milan in 1957 becoming influential for Manzoni and Fontana, before returning to the printed matter both artists produced. I will then turn to the ways those materials operated as a vehicle to locate autonomy for each artist’s own practice in the context of a culturally, or rather economically, colonized Italy at the moment of its purported recovery. Here, the role of the readymade is paramount. I will argue that it functions as a silent and hidden structural matrix of art making a decade before what the standard art historical narrative posits historical reception as an object in the recovery of Duchamp’s oeuvre in the United States in the late fifties and early sixties. Duchamp’s slightly earlier significance in Italy is practically institutionalized 42 Chapter One

in Milan in the 1950s, with the opening of the Arturo Schwarz Gallery which was responsible for reproducing and reissuing the readymade objects. Finally, to situate the internationalist concerns of this constellation of painters, I will also explore the cultural endorsements of the Italian Communist Party as it defensively attempted to reconsolidate a national identity at the very moment of its capitulation to capital inflected by American intervention. This chapter pursues the double-helix-like trajectory of politics and culture that converged on the monochrome in the practice of Italian postwar abstraction. The monochrome appears to have risen, phoenix-like, in the crucible of Italy in the 1950s after its development and decline in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, undergirding Fontana’s, Burri’s, and Manzoni’s projects. The monochrome is the one trope that Il Gesto and Azimuth fail to discuss, until it suddenly comes up in 1962 as the term that had to have been superseded—back in 1957. The constructivist monochrome functions, then, as a historical unconscious, a platform over which to test strategies and to carve out autonomy for the set of practices that relied on it most heavily, in practice if not in explanatory language. But this ground was, indeed still is, far from neutral. The historicity of the monochrome, and its sudden recrudescence in Italy, of all places, at the moment when “the century turned on itself,” as Mario Tronti put it—or when capital consolidated itself as never before or since, forming a “revolution from above,” to quote George Bataille—structures the moment in a way that signals the volatile midcentury transitions in advance of the moment’s theorization in political economy as a test site for what Negri would eventually come to call, however problematically, Empire. In keeping with the methodological horizon of this book, I situate transitions in painting as an etiology that tells us as much about changes at the level of political economy as changes at the manifest level of culture itself. Rather than providing a merely ideological deciphering, much less critique, of the capitalist mode of production, the art work could be seen to unscramble seemingly independent strata of a socioeconomic totality; objective forms of value production on the one hand and their subjective mediation on the other. But that “turn,” in the symptoms of capital that are culture, only involved the recovery of the monochrome as it crossed paths with the readymade, the latter having resurfaced as an allegory for the totalizing introjection of capital by the art work. Yves Klein, again, stands at the nexus of the convergence of monochrome The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 43

and readymade. A third aspiration of this chapter, then, is a genealogy of the monochrome and of the readymade, each independent and incompatible at the moment of their inception in the teens and until the fifties, and their mutual introjection in Italy throughout the fifties, situated in a larger complex network of reception and recovery vectoring the moment. I attempt to suggest why this hybrid of monochrome and readymade emerged at the moment and the geopolitical site it did. For the historical development of this unlikely entwinement finds itself woven into and contrasting with a larger movement, forming a cultural kernel that prefigured eventual real resistance to emergent global capital, which official culture was to mask.

Corporate Painting Propositions Monochromes, at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in 1957, turned on paintings’ ability to be repeated serially, in advance of Warhol’s better known Campbell’s Soup at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Propositions Monochromes located an overlooked quality that was more salient to the monochrome than to any other modernist trope, except the readymade, a quality in common that set both the readymade and the monochrome into a mimetic relationship with the products of Fordist techniques, in which skill was diminished in the interest of primary form, seriality, and interchangeability, shored up by elements external to the frame, such as price. Klein’s strategy of serial presentation highlighted his emphatically random approach to pricing, which self-consciously imitated the vagaries, the apparent irrationality, of the market. To illustrate his engagement with the logic of the commodity, Klein attempted to acquire a patent on a color he named IKB, for International Klein Blue, in 1956, in relation to the work first shown in Milan. This act of brand-naming a pigment for the first time in painting’s history can be understood as a response to the international proliferation of brandnamed American products. Klein, unlike his American counterpart, Andy Warhol, never had the “hands-on” experience of working in commercial design or in constructing window displays for department stores. He skipped the many steps that culminated in Warhol’s importation of mass culture into art. Klein preferred to simply insert art into a market with the much more efficient, if brute, economy of a declarative assertion. He asserted, for instance, that the color of the sky along the French Riviera should be patented and that he 44 Chapter One

should hold the patent. Color, then, could be given a brand name and a kind of brand (here, IKB), much as Campbell’s Soup or Coca-Cola are brands rather than names of contents could. Going one step further than Warhol, again in advance of him, Klein fashioned the brand from his own proper name. Finally, he referred to his IKB in English. A brand name in a foreign language (English) operates on the home language (French) in a special way that acknowledges the ceding of a locally specific culture to market-determined international culture. This last strategy is not exclusive to Klein but marks a set of shifts that gained ground in European painterly production in the fifties, again, in anticipation of Warhol and the appellation “pop.” While Klein claimed that he had himself invented the monochrome by mentally signing his name to the sky as early as 1946,5 he paradoxically treated the monochrome as a fabricated template that he manipulated according to the demands of his own particular self-branding.6 With this statement, he was channeling Malevich. Here is Malevich in 1919: “I have ripped through the lampshade of color,” and “I swim in the white, free abyss.” In 1955, when Yves Klein signed his name to the Riviera sky and then attempted to gain an official patent for color under the brand International Klein Blue, he was well aware of Malevich’s assertion to have conquered gravity thirty-five years earlier. It isn’t clear whether he was aware of Duchamp’s attempt to gain a patent under the name of his alter ego, Rose Selavy (1926). But Klein’s use of a patent and a title mimicking the logic of the corporate logo acknowledges the degree to which the readymade had also come to be the basic constituent element of painting. How might we understand the passage from Malevich’s horizon, and Klein’s, a transition in which neither of the dominant narratives of modernism, neither the telos of flatness nor that of autonomy against reification, hold sway? How might we account for transitions imminent to the paradigm yet utterly transparent to the totalizing triumph of capitalism—perversely staked out over the trope associated with the further reaches of anticapitalist aspiration at the opening of the century? A clue into this is, not surprisingly, unremarked aspects of Duchamp’s project. The readymade mediates the transition. Tu M’ of 1918 already signaled the total rationalization of color by the market at the turn of the century. Predating Rodchenko’s Monochrome Triptych of 1921 by three years, Tu M’ presented Duchamp’s previous work as pale indices, as represented shadows of missing artworks. This two-dimensional field functions like a retrospective, or, more properly speaking, an inventory. The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 45

This inventory, in turn, is that of the author’s own labor presented as though completed by another, alienated to the shop floor, turned inside out. In this, Duchamp not only augurs but also enacts what so many voices a half century later would come to see as art’s endgame. My account replaces the logic of endgames with the set of relations imminent to the work of art as it is situated in a field charged by the conditions of historical possibility. Yet, among numerous authors’ laments of a teleological unfolding of modernism in which, testing its limits, it painted itself into a corner, Giorgio Agamben’s description of art’s impasse in relation to the factory floor, which it sought in its vanguard moments to set itself against through reflexivity and limit testing, stands apart: Contemporary art, in its most recent tendencies, has further advanced this process and has by now produced that “reciprocal readymade” Duchamp had been thinking of when he suggested the use of a Rembrandt as an ironing board. The extreme object centeredness of contemporary art, through its holes, stains, slits, and non-pictorial materials, tends to identify the work of art with the non-artistic product. Thus, becoming aware of its shadow, art immediately receives in itself its own negation, and bridging the gap that used to separate it from criticism, itself becomes the logos of art and its shadow, that is, critical reflection on art. In contemporary art, critical judgment lays bare its own split, rendering superfluous its own space.7 Agamben misses the cause, silently enforcing round after round of art’s capitulation to its limits in the name of testing those limits. The exception to these shadowy inversions in Tu M’s representational field is, notably in relation to monochrome painting, a swath of colored papers running the full range of colors, albeit colors already mixed and applied, on display, as abstracted color might appear in, say, a hardware shop in the presentation of paint samples. It is as though color held out a last horizon of differentiation in which to locate a creative self, an agency, in and through the mechanics of commercial capture. Agamben’s prognosis, despite its singular precision and descriptive accuracy, offers no account of why the art object folds over on itself, or how this involution, paradoxically, reflects a similar reversal with the advent of abstraction, which is to say, nineteenth-century capitalism.

46 Chapter One

Subsumption The Duchampian readymade is the object to take on explicitly the law of valorization known as the commodity in the sphere of art.8 Itself a symptom of economic and cultural mediation, the readymade’s trajectory marks phases of subsumption and introduces them to a common arena of ideological struggle: art. Subsumption is the political economic term for this logic, and this practice.9 From the 1861–63 draft of Capital onward, subsumption, for Marx, is the subsumption of the particularities of the labor process under the abstract universality of the valorization process of capital. The abstract universal— value—whose existence is posited by the exchange abstraction acquires a real existence vis-à-vis particular concrete labors, which are subsumed under it.10 If this definition is extrapolated from the Enlightenment language formative of aesthetics as we know it to describe an operation that happens on the factory floor, is there any reason not to reextrapolate it, to see how it works on a seemingly symbolic register, or better, to ask to what extent actual subsumption also manifests in cultural praxis? In the next section, I trace fundamental shifts imminent to modernism’s primary but incommensurable tropes, the monochrome and the readymade, as symptoms of historical subsumption. Technically speaking, Degas’s well-known sculpture The Little Dance of Fourteen was the first industrially produced and market-acquired object to be incorporated into an artwork. Degas purchased a readymade ballerina tutu, a piece of tulle, at Au Printemps to complete the otherwise traditionally and artisanally cast sculpture. This might have precipitated a greater outcry on the part of critics and the salon-going public. But the already made addition is just that—a supplement signaling the encroaching of the world of the commodity on a work that was exploring modernity in other ways. The work still offers, through a representation of the female body in the sculptural matrix of wax, a possibility of viewing entrenched in traditional humanism. Degas remains in a traditional representational logic, if at a crucial threshold. The commodity, outside its symbolization by the figure of the young girl available backstage for a price, was not part of a central problem set for Degas, as it would be for Picabia in 1920, keeping step with Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. By contrast, Duchamp’s “readymade” addressed this problem structurally. Duchamp already understood that the problem of the commodity The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 47

object, although it had not yet reached its apotheosis in his Bicycle Wheel of 1913, hinged on the totality of social relations inscribed in making, that is, on practice and process. He saw the factory transforming production in its own image. This is the definition of real over formal subsumption. This process, moreover, was where art practices and the systems-rationality of the assembly line collided.11 Molly Nesbit has argued that Duchamp’s project might be understood as a function of the newly encroaching problem of line, line dictated by the assembly line.12 Duchamp’s inquiry, Nesbit argues, was fundamentally an investigation of art’s transformation as it entered the contemporary market’s graphic matrix: technologically reproducible commercial illustration. Duchamp’s artistic passage, then, traces line, as it was practiced in an academic register as bearer of contour and guarantor of spatial integrity, to its transformation in relationship to commodity design. If line from the Renaissance on had carried perceptual-cognitive-transcendental aspiration achieved through skill, and if “Art” was the function of the negotiation among the eye, hand, and mind that adjudicated an autonomous space of cognitive and perceptual autonomy, suddenly it became the result of the industrial acceleration of the print matrix. Duchamp understood this problem of design, which was founded on drawing, and its increasing regimentation and discipline in the service of industrial capital in mid-nineteenth-century France. Industrial design had become part of the mandatory French public education system by 1881, absorbing traditional arts and drawing under the plan for a newly industrialized nation-state. Calling this the “language of industry,” Nesbit points out that it became the cognitive framework for the French avant-garde and modernism of the twentieth century in general and that the sudden appearance of the industrially produced object, baptized “readymade” in Duchamp’s practice, was a very specific response to education in the newly modernized French school system. Endless drills in elevation and crosssection, repetitive exercises in drawing objects in the interest of designing more rationalized, clean versions, resulted in, among other things, the drawings for machines, beginning with The Coffee Mill (1913) and The Chocolate Grinder (1911), the entire linear idiom that stands at the origin of the readymade objects on the one hand and the machine drawings of Picabia on the other. The economic militarization of practice could be legitimated as progressive, for it elevated industry through drawing while leveling art through product design. Drawing, in this content, was an elevation, in Nesbit’s terms, 48 Chapter One

for the lowly work of industry, and a way of knocking academic drawing off its pedestal and into the ranks of the petit bourgeoisie. But drawing in this pedagogically enforced register also signaled the becoming-machine-like of art. In 1915, the Duchampian readymade may have been a kind of novelty act, but it in fact stood as the avatar for all art production from then on. The monochrome artists of the fifties working in Milan took up the Duchampian readymade as a way to search for agency against the external constraints of received forms, which included both the readymade and the monochrome, insofar as they had joined ranks in a new economic-cultural landscape of subsumption, understood literally and metaphorically as the managerial control of everyday life on every register of capitalist daily social reproduction. Tracing this horizon of diminishing expressive possibility, line inscribes, literally draws, the disappearance of creative agency outside the instrumentality of value extraction and surplus labor. And here is the transition that gets lost in the discursive shuffle of ideology critique and debates about flatness: that the readymade, which Duchamp called “the passage from the virgin to the bride,” in the title of one of his last paintings before the inauguration of the readymade, doubled as a way to articulate the transition from the semiskilled worker to the mass worker, as well as the gradual, pernicious metaphorical subsumption of the figure of revolutionary totality, namely the monochrome. That these two foundational tropes of modernism, readymade and monochrome, should have collapsed into a single if hybrid entity by 1949 is part of the constellation of signs, an etiology of subsumption on the factory floor, that ramified and resonated everywhere else.

The Dream of Revolutionary Totality; Utopian Form Against this, monochrome spelled anything but contingency. It signaled historical rupture, and collective agency, a limit condition framing the subject’s violent passage from hegemony to revolution in which “the people” would realize themselves in the actualized negation of prevailing order. Malevich referred to his Black Square (1915) as the “royal infant” (see fig. 1.2). For Rodchenko, Pure Red, Pure Yellow and Pure Blue (1921) had meant the “death of painting.” Always dramatized as a symbolic birth or death, the monochrome was in practical terms simply an index of the technical support of easel painting, the frame and stretched canvas, the basic constituent component of The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 49

FIGURE 1.2. Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915. Public Domain World.

painting itself as a quadrilateral object to be mounted on a wall. As such, the monochrome understood as a final work was always a latent possibility in any painting. But the acknowledgment of its limit condition had occurred as a response to historical process, motivated by political collectivity, not as something generic and interchangeable, not ready-made. Pure Red, Pure Blue, Pure Yellow strategically demystified a centuries-old system of pigment on a freestanding canvas stretched over a frame. Reducing the system to so many rationalized concrete qualities, all of which were available outside any institutionalized valorization of skill (a material surface and unmixed color), was a way to suggest universal access. Rendering a mystified cultural process as a transparent process linking basic materials to simple steps doubled as a wish fulfillment of a utopian understanding of labor specific to Bolshevism’s aspiration 50 Chapter One

toward a dictatorship of the proletariat. Yet despite its emancipation of painting from any mystifying excess that might compromise the immediate materialist inclination, Rodchenko’s triptych betrayed a naïve faith in the notion of “pure” color. Given the industrial manufacture of pigment, pure color, already evidenced by Tu M’ in 1918, no longer existed. The transparency to concrete material and concrete process Rodchenko sought was already overwritten by the opacity of the commodity, symptomatic of the New Economic Policy. In other words, despite its aspiration to a transparency of means, which in this instance also meant a transparency of meaning, Rodchenko’s model of revolutionary making masked its own commodity status. The monochrome was a reflection of the economy of the New Economic Policy and the Bolshevik compromise to state communism, which, shifting from an economic to a political form under the aegis of the state and party, deferred actual communism. Monochrome Triptych already signals the compromise of the revolutionary horizon to which it linked, as well as the promise of sensuous immediacy with which painting had been invested. It summarizes the blind spot of economy of the New Economic Policy around the commodity and the passage of Bolshevism into state communism that was to ramify in a particular way around the monochrome once again in the postwar era at the moment of its recovery. At the same time, the model of transparency to which Rodchenko’s work aspired speaks to a changing class composition. It was made to mark rapid proletarianization in the new Soviet Union, the mass laborer produced by rapid industrialization. It also remarks on the shifting ontological status of objects, the rise of commodities, and the factory manufacture of almost all things (including color) previously part of an artisanal form of making, a history of economic transition inscribed in the passage from constructivism to cultural production associated with the Stalinist state. Rodchenko’s monochrome is an idealized image of labor in which the demystification of process articulates self-realization of the laborer in labor. Again, the paradox structured into the paradigm is a form of demystification reliant on acceleration reification (separation, division, specialization, and ultimately immiseration) in the structure of the commodity.13 If the utopian investment in the demystified object, an object made transparent to labor, wishfully overlooked the historical conditions, the development of capital, such that any such transparency would be already impossible, its real tragedy lay in an understanding of labor as a site of the subject’s self-emancipation. The labor theory of value The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 51

posited by Marx first in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and then in Capital twenty-three years thereafter, hinged on the recognition that labor as such—labor whence value is extracted in the making of things to be brought to market, living time remunerated for a wage—functions against the worker’s interests. Duchamp’s articulation of his life’s work as so many shadows, indexical traces of artistic process submitted to the logic of the assembly line, tacitly acknowledges the structural condition of both labor and its products as so much dead time, a kind of zombie economy replacing the utopian aspiration of self-realization through labor, much less artistic labor. Color in Tu M’ is always already ready-made, in keeping with the exchange of the commodity fetish for the transparent aperture onto futurity held forth by historical painting. But the contradiction and crisis posited by Rodchenko’s paradigmatic monochrome bears as much the utopian model of the worker-subject it proposes as on the status of the object. As Marx had already spelled out in Grundrisse, labor under capital is an a priori zero-sum game in which the worker must doubly lose: her life and her (self )-possession. In The Ontology of Fire, Bruno Gulli notes Marx’s recognition of inherent contradiction whereby disciplinary, value-productive labor is assimilated into a democratic social order in Grundrisse. Value-productive labor, labor on which the capitalist process of valorization is founded and on which it remains dependent, while “posited as doubly free is in actual fact doubly negated, negated to the worker as an immediate means of life and negated with respect to the production of surplus value, for capital appropriates it in such a way that it soon appears as capital’s own productive power. In reality this productive power is nothing other than capital’s necessary labor which does not pass over into a freedom of praxis but into the abyss of negation.”14 This “abyss of negation,” for the worker, takes the form of profits for bosses and the reproduction of the system itself over and above lived time. The transitional moment of an emergent worker, self-emancipated through a form of work newly transparent to his own class interest, articulated by Rodchenko’s monochrome, symptomatizes the postrevolutionary struggles of the 1920s, between revolution and a new capitalist state that finally ossified under Stalin’s program of “socialism in one country” after the Third International Congress of 1926. Monochrome Triptych augurs the contradictions inscribed in the New Economic Policy of 1924–1928, in which value production was em52 Chapter One

phasized as a possibility rather than an obstacle to workers’ self-realization. It occluded the recognition that any wage labor, any form of surplus value, inherently dependent on labor ultimately betrayed the worker subject’s interest. But in 1921–1926 (the years of the New Economic Policy leading up to the Third International) work seemed to hold forth a democratization of class through production techniques, thereby opening a utopian place for the worker in keeping with a utopian conception of labor based on deskilling and rationalization.15 Overturning the “universal commodification of labor power on which the central discovery of the labor theory of value was itself dependent”16 was the projected totality toward which the avant-garde tended in its most utopian moments.

Deterritorialization (Corporate Painting, Part 2) and Recontextualization A half century later, Klein’s use of parergonal materials included not only an attempted patent and accompanying brand but concrete store-bought papers that acted as reproductions of original works that never in fact existed. Yves Peintures (1954) was a publication, a luxury edition, in which Klein affixed colored pieces of paper, including titles with dates and city names, as though each were a copy of an existing painting. This strategy, like IKB, is indicative of the way “context” and “content” buckle under historical dictates as new alliances (drawn from legal and juridical operations in place to protect property relations) draw imaginary borders (notably the borders that form property) while erasing physical or historically established boundaries. Manufactured color is set into mimetic inscription of the way capital dismantles and reconfigures all resources in its path, according to the dictates of valorization at the particular moment, or what Marxist geographer David Harvey has called de- and reterritorialization.17 The processes of separation and reconsolidation, or creative destruction, structural to capitalist cycles of accumulation, find their way into the economy of a work at the level of its composition, irrespective of intention or reflection. Klein’s sense of irony matters little; his strategy is honest to the historical conditions of art making by 1954, if not already Duchamp’s Tu M’ of 1918. This horizon, in turn, became the object to be superseded by Manzoni, Fontana, and Burri in their own violent responses to color’s internationalization of readymade conditions of possibility. Contra The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 53

Klein, waxing Hegelian, Fontana asserted: “All things arise out of necessity and exploit the needs of their age. Transformations of the material means of life determine man’s state of mind throughout history. Little by little, a system opposed to another already accepted system replaces it in its essence and all its forms. The conditions of life, society and every individual are also transformed . . . a change in essence and form is therefore necessary. We must surpass painting, what is needed now is an art based on the necessity of new vision.”18 This “new vision” is required by an equally “new,” or accelerated, technoscientistic society organized around production as a function of technological progress. As Fontana continues, he makes a startling concession to the primary problem of abstraction that motivated the historical avant-garde, the problem of the universal commodification of labor and its inscription in the art object: “In this progression, man strives to live on the basis of the total organization of labor. The discoveries of science effect the total organization of life.”19 In this Fontana intuitively foreshadows the analyses made by political economists associated with Operaio, the workerist movement of the fifties and sixties, uncannily looking ahead to the description of the totalization of everyday life, first in rhythm with the factory floor and then, having broken with it, opening onto a post-Fordist era of crisis, tracking parallel with the ultimate failures of the Bretton Woods program. At the very least, Fontana was already conscious of the fact that the hybridity and contradiction of abstract art practices from 1949 to the 1960s, notably in painting, were motivated by the contradiction of a moment transitioning from the authority of the state to that of, first, a newly structured international capitalist world order, a new metricization of value reticulated to the US dollar, that brought about a seemingly new form of totalization (capitalist integration), followed by its equally volatile dissolution. Fontana misses the steps in mediation for how this once revolutionary trope came to be an obstacle, an external constraint, after having been the very sign of revolutionary totality. The collapse of a utopian paradigm and its antithesis, the readymade, is one index of the object’s contingency in a cyclically selfadjusting labor-to-value relationship in which art operates as both research and development and resistance. But it is indicative of Cold War economics, signaling the degree to which cultural mediation was itself part of a new temporality that leveled the numerous contradictions born of time in favor of a

54 Chapter One

far-reaching presentism in which the commodity could appease and mollify losses born of those contradictions.

Miracles in Milan Milan between 1947 and 1968, epicenter of the miracolo italiano, was the city where numerous abstract artists of various geopolitical extraction were either working or showing for the first time, not unlike the Paris of the turn of the century that drew Picasso from Spain and Brancusi from Romania.20 Similarly, Milan was where those who came to dominate the canon, whether French (Klein) or American (Cy Twombly) cut their teeth and got their first shows. The reception of the rising star of American art textured the development of Milan, and broadly Italy, as a center of art. Both the revival of the constructivist monochrome and the citation of Dada were set into tension with the reception of American abstract expressionism coming from above, in the hands of official culture. That official culture, in turn, barely mediated or masked the real movement of capital that enabled it. Turning to historian of capitalism Giovanni Arrighi’s narrative of cycles of accumulation, converging on American ascendance after World War II: Ironically however, the most serious contradiction between the power pursuits of the US government and the transnational expansion of US corporate business developed not where their complementarity was weakest—in East Asia—but where it was strongest—in Western Europe. Here the US government used the Marshall Plan and rearmament as means of integrating into a single market the separate domestic economies of the European states and insisted that US subsidiaries in the emergent common market be treated as European corporations. Thanks to these policies, Western Europe quickly became the most fertile ground for the transnational expansion of US corporations and this expansion, in turn, consolidated further the integration of western Europe within the US regime of rule and accumulation.21

The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 55

Aesthetic Hegemony An Italian audience had been introduced to Pollock’s work in 1948 when Peggy Guggenheim placed six of her paintings, which she had acquired for her private collection, on view at the 1948 Venice Biennale in a presentation that traveled to both Florence and Milan in 1949. His work was included at the Venice Biennale again the following year. In 1950, the American pavilion showed three of his drip paintings as well as four of de Kooning’s black and white paintings and some of Arshile Gorky’s work.22 Rauschenberg had settled in Rome in September 1952 although his work was not exhibited until March 1953 at the Galleria dell’Obelisco.23 This show inaugurated his European reception. And Jasper Johns gained an enthusiastic audience in Italy at the 1958 Venice Biennale. Following quickly on the heels of the reception to Pollock’s work, in distinction to the generation that separated them stateside, the impact of Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s work contributed to an accelerated frenetic cultural rhythm in lockstep with the equally frenetic recomposition of everyday during the economic miracle. This accelerated temporality of international reception offered at once two asynchronous and mutually exclusive models of painting—Pollock’s expressionism and its antitheses in Johns’s understanding of the fact that any authorial gesture could only take place within a predetermined template. In this temporal entanglement, the monochrome was evidently less about the ahistorical and transcendental drama of opticality and flatness, and much more about the tension between partially recovered histories that continued to resonate, at once latent and prefigurative in the sudden and difficult convergence of the readymade and abstract painting. Milan became not only the site of postwar reconstruction and a driving force, an urban capital, for the newly industrialized North, but also a site for the reception of advanced artistic practices. This new industrial capital was fomenting with the sudden and temporally compressed rediscovery of Dada and Duchamp—frequently exhibited at Arturo Schwarz’s gallery in Milan, which devoted itself almost exclusively to the recovery and reproduction of the readymades24—and of American work ranging from abstract expressionism to its insistent critique.25 The rapidity and compression of reception, in turn, reflected northern Italy’s accelerated modernization, as though the breakneck speed of shifts in the cultural sphere measured the temperature of the coun56 Chapter One

try’s economic metabolism, its rate of industrial growth. This plurality of artistic forms floated in an ahistorical time, deracinated from the dialectical connective tissue that stitched avant-garde paradigms to each other through the diachronic unfolding of rupture and continuity, as well as through debates across the cultural field. In the European postwar context, these paradigms were themselves just so many templates, so many ready-made categories for artistic appropriation, even as the machinery of exhibition and reception changed rapidly, affecting the way artworks would be seen. The flooding of artistic practices into the new center of European capital, each a potential aesthetic model, brought with it a sense of thingness, of objects as imported, of “empty shells,” setting the stage for what some artists working in Milan called the “empty semanticity” of modernist painting. While this condition was not theorized until much later, it was a given in studio practice.26 Modernist tropes, notably the monochrome, provided Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni with a language in common with both historical predecessors from the prewar period and American models that were rapidly gaining hegemonic status. The centrality of the readymade, among a general drift of so many historical and contemporary idioms, as though all were rendered equivalent on a market of culture products, then, is overdetermined by both the literal reception of Duchamp’s work in Milan throughout the fifties and sixties, almost a full decade before its equally robust reception in the states, and by the structural condition of subsumption in the value productive industrial sector and its effects in every other sector, resonant through the totality of social relations. Subsumption at this phase of development appears to displace historical motivation as it had operated in the historical avant-garde. This historical condition, seeming to fall outside historical determination as one of the symptoms, paradoxically, of the historical moment, includes the subsumption of art as a marker of history in accelerated capitalist integration, for which it had already served as an index since the teens. The readymade, then, plays a double role:27 at once historical phenomenon and structural condition of culture, in a round of accumulation specific to the fifties and sixties, when it became the very matrix of art making across mediums, contributing to the pressure under which the historical mediums collapsed. No wonder, then, that the pages of Il Gesto, and of Azimuth, emphasize the readymade—but the readymade as just one model among many. It is telling that it should fill the pages while the practice suggested a different preoccupation. The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 57

But in practice, across the years that spanned these artists’ work, the monochrome dominates. It functioned as a way to reimagine, if not actualize at the level of representation, a totality against the fragmentation of so many aleatory references, each no more weighted than the other, coming under the sign of culture already-made. The monochrome as the historical sign of collective totality suggested itself as a common inheritance, a point of connection to the lost potential of the prewar avant-garde, on which Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni elaborated their projects in and against the backdrop of reconstruction culture, internalizing it as a historical matrix upon which so many other objects seemed to come and go. The monochrome acted as the only common artistic language available at that historically shattered moment. The way models drawn from the historical avant-garde operate suggests a historical consciousness alien to mechanistic repetition. Marking a belated modernism, itself the result of a belated modernization, the monochrome signals a historicity at the same moment that its imbrication with the readymade signals the foreclosure of any unmediated continuity with the past. This belated modernization, synonymous with capitalism’s shifting populations of surplus labor from south to north, feeding the rapid urbanization of northern Italy, otherwise came under the sign of national identity, which in turn masked the real movement of universal expansion of capital, impervious to either identity or geopolitics. That the expansionist growth of capital should be coded as particularly American, as reticulated to a particular national identity and its ideology of work freedom against communist domination, forms a contradiction that is structural to the logic of capitalist accumulation in a world system. Turning once again to Giovanni Arrighi, we might return to the relationship between state formation and international markets specific to the period from 1947 through 1973: Throughout the period the idea of a self-regulating market was rejected in principle and in practice by the US government, whose power strategies came instead to be based on radically different premises. One such premise was that world markets could be reestablished and expanded only through their conscious administration by governments and large business organizations. In addition, US action was premised on a clear understanding that this re-establishment and expansion of world markets, as well as the national security and prosperity of The

58 Chapter One

United States, required a massive redistribution of liquidity from the US domestic economy to the rest of the world. This redistribution was initially envisaged by Roosevelt as an extension to the entire world of his domestic New Deal.28 A free world, then, entailed the mapping of the American state onto the world state through, paradoxically, the market, under a sign of a free market that was in fact administered under particular interests. Much has been made of the specific instantiation of those interests in the CIA-assisted win of Rauschenberg at the 1964 Venice Biennale, an art fair convening every other year, organized by nation-state, with each country presenting art at its own pavilion. Prizes are awarded to an artist who effectively represents a nation.29

Defensive National Identity During the same period, 1949–1969, national identity, now disarticulated from the recent fascist past, was mobilized as a way of neutralizing the numerous contradictions structuring Italy’s recovery as it hung in the balance between US financial sponsorship and the shadow of state communism, or “Socialism in One Country” per Stalin’s slogan of 1924, to the East. The embrace of national culture in some contexts was as unlikely as its rejection among painters driving the medium forward. To outline this knot of political-cultural contradiction, some historical reconstruction is necessary. The relationship between the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the PCI is not an especially complicated one. It is, however, clouded by the manipulation and erasure that characterizes the history of the statesponsored Communist Party in the USSR after the midtwenties, after Stalin’s centralization of power, and subsequently the paradoxical delivery of labour to a capitalist world order in the international balance of the Cold War, in that it closely resembles the history of the Communist Party in Moscow; this parallelism, moreover, indicates the proximity, indeed the intimate relationship, between Rome and Moscow during the years of the Comintern (1919–1943). The PCI was founded in 1921 by Antonio Gramsci and Amadeo Bordiga, who precipitated the split from the more popular Italian Socialist Party.30 A half century later, many within the Italian Socialist Party considered the 1921 split between the socialists and the communists a grave mistake, as they attempted

The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 59

to return to the moment of rupture by seeking a third path between Bolshevism and social democracy in which the writing of Rosa Luxemburg played a strong part. But in the end Morandi’s model resembled that of a bolshevization centered around soviet-like councils that, meant to ward off insurrectionary energies, became yet another mechanism to absorb working-class interest in reconstruction against their own interests as a class. Morandi became minister of industry in Alcide de Gasperi’s second cabinet after World War II. From 1921 through 1926, both Bordiga and Gramsci shared steerage of the PCI with a board of four others, including Palmiro Togliatti, who was by many accounts the most eager of the group to curry favor with Soviet leadership. The party understood itself as part of an international organization, part of the Comintern of the Third International. For the PCI 1926 was a fraught year, with factions beginning to split alliances across the PCI and the Comintern. Shortly before the rise to power of Benito Mussolini and the fascists, who imprisoned him, Antonio Gramsci won an internal election against the left led by Bordiga. Bordiga in turn became a matter of contention in relations between Rome and Moscow, a status followed shortly thereafter by Gramsci, while interned. Among the three, Palmiro Togliatti maintained the party by preserving passable relations with the Communist Party of the USSR.31 But were we to momentarily suspend deference to received signposts of political affiliation (right, left, centrist) and examine the terms along which Gramsci and Bordiga established an antagonistic relationship, we might note Gramsci’s insistence on the continuity of revolutionary action against Bordiga’s stance. Revisiting a key text predating Gramsci’s coup in the PCI against Bordiga by one year, in 1925, it becomes evident that Gramsci is calling for revolutionary will against the radical left’s insistence that revolution would be historically inevitable given the objective conditions of capitalist development. Echoing his stance of 1917 in a text titled “The Revolution against Capital,” published in Avanti, in which he argued that uneven development would be an asset for the proletariat (and peasant) revolution, and that contra the insistence of a strictly orthodox reading of Capital, an industrial infrastructure born of a robust middle class was not necessary to a next historical stage, Gramsci insists that struggle is not the result of historical inevitability in an objective register but is the function of collective will. He argues in “Maximalism and Extremism” (1925) against Bordiga’s blind faith in the notion that class struggle will foment automatically from objective conditions inherent to capitalist devel60 Chapter One

opment. For Gramsci, in deference to Lenin, it has to be driven by conscious will and intention. Gramsci charges Bordiga with a form of passivity. The maximalist (Bordiga) is intransigent and not opportunist. But he also believes that it would be pointless to act and struggle day after day; he is only waiting for the great day. The masses—he says—cannot but come to us, because the objective situation is driving them to the revolution. And so let’s wait, without all these stories about tactical maneuvers and like expedients. This for us is maximalism, exactly like that that of the Maximalist Party. The entire pre-revolutionary period presents itself as one of primarily tactical activity, directed at acquiring new allies for the proletariat, breaking up the enemy’s offensive and defensive organizational apparatus, and detecting and exhausting his reserves. Not taking account of this teaching of Lenin’s, or only taking account of it theoretically without putting it in practice, without making it become daily activity, means being a maximalist, that is, speaking grand revolutionary words while being incapable of taking a step along the road of revolution.32 The call for class struggle as consistent unabated action hardly makes of Gramsci a centrist by any standard other than those internecine debates internal to the party in the early 1920s. It does, however, mark a shift from the Gramsci of the teens, who did verge closely on aligning with said “maximalists,” only on the grounds that the Bolsheviks were not radical enough.33 At any rate, by the close of 1926 both Bodega and Gramsci had fallen out of favor with Moscow. It would take Moscow’s defeat to shift Gramsci’s fate in a popular imaginary. With the pendulum of history swinging, the PCI in 1947, at the height of its popularity, situated Gramsci in a different light, publishing both The Prison Notebooks and Letters for the first time in 1949. Given the status of these texts—sketchy, often informal, different from the polemical texts of the teens and early to midtwenties34—it was possible to frame the Notebooks and Letters in any number of ways to suit the present moment, which was one of a rapid reconstruction and “a dramatic passage to modernity” that Gramsci could not have foreseen.35 Some narratives, notably that of Emanuele Saccarelli, have attempted to account for the numerous “erasures and distortions” required for this move on the part of the PCI. “The sudden importance of Antonio Gramsci The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 61

for the party, understood less as a revolutionary figure associated in the Bolshevik movement of the teens and twenties, less as a Leninist that is, and more as a national treasure,” reflects all too transparently the lacunae for which official left culture compensated within the conflicting demands of the Cold War, all of which seemed to obviate, at least for a time, any real resistance. As Steve Wright, historian of Italian workerism, has put it, “for Togliatti the decisive arena for gains in post fascist Italy was not the world of the workshop or field but that of formal politics where accommodation with other social groups was a prerequisite.”36 Togliatti said, “Today the problem facing Italian workers is not that of doing what was done in Russia” and instead called for a resumption of economic growth within a framework of private ownership. He believed that high productivity and high wages would be the spur to economic expansion against untrammeled free market sources. “Whatever Togliatti’s attacks upon liberals like Luigi Einaudi, his own views on development shared more assumptions with such opponents than he realized. The most important of these was the emphasis placed on substantial increase in productivity as the path to Italy’s salvation.”37 Togliatti also refused to discuss the working class as an autonomous force, referencing instead a people, unspecified.38 The PCI had to fulfill a double necessity: on the one hand that of saving face against an all-too-obvious American influence whose primary interest was to defend its interests against the threat of communism, real or imagined, which after all was the originary point of the PCI. And on the other hand, it had to negotiate its history in relation to an obvious acquiescence to the use of Italian labor as a vehicle for economic growth on capitalist terms, and it had to do so in the process of quietly conforming to an emergent order to neutralize an autochthonous revolutionary history. “For a long time, the intellectual Gramsci, therefore, was a recurring and important facet of a complex negotiation between the PCI’s increasingly reformist outlook and its revolutionary origins. Each step taken by the PCI in what now looks like a long march away from its revolutionary beginnings was also accompanied by laborious reinterpretations of Gramsci’s political thought, striving to demonstrate how this great thinker had already anticipated and prefigured each move, particularly in the suitably cryptic notebooks.”39 Both tasks had to be fulfilled while purporting to maintain independence under the sign of national identity. Gramsci consequently came to be associated with “culture” as a phenomenon transcending politics, much less revolutionary politics at the level of the 62 Chapter One

street. Gramsci came to be understood as coiner of the term “hegemony” to denote cultural tendencies—whereas Gramsci himself attributed the term to Lenin—as it made its way into the fairly anodyne interpretive systems of “post-Marxists.” En route, deference was offered to a history of Italian letters imagined as “humanist”: “It was the vehicle through which the PCI could, it imagined, part gracefully with its heritage and ease its collective conscience through such a difficult transition. The PCI was burying Gramsci politically once and for all, but in return it would do its best to intercede for his soul to ascend to that better place where ‘classical’ authors reside.”40 Between imported American culture and the defeated left’s opportunistic use of its own history, and finally the ignominy of Italian futurism associated by then with the fascist regime, Italian painters had another path to carve. The recovery of international modernism proved at once a point of departure and a historical-political matrix to dismantle and reconfigure from within. While I am not suggesting a conscious, much less causal, relationship among cultural forms of recovery of the utopian aspirations of the interwar period, I am noting the dialectical relationship among those forms in the expanded field of what we might call the political unconscious mediated by culture in Italy from the late forties through the sixties. The complicated recovery of Gramsci’s work functions as a prism to understand the primary axis of contradiction structuring Italian culture from 1949 to 1969, from the point when American capital was propping up a soon-to-burgeon automobile industry in the North,41 tacitly supported by the PCI, drawing surplus labor pools from the rural South, to the moment when the violent wildcat strikes at Fiat in Turin and elsewhere in the summer of 1969 finally shattered the picture, opening onto a new chapter in the autonomous Italian Left. But these seismic movements were already prefigured in the violent internal dissolution of painting, a five-hundred-year-old practice that originated in the same “Italian humanist tradition” in which the PCI was eager to categorize Gramsci as cultural prophylactic against political resignation in the face of economic warfare. In this internationalized context that existed on the concrete territory of Italy, the publication of the first edition of the Prison Letters, and the Gramsci that the party sponsored, offers an object lesson in the etiology of the political unconscious vectored by contradiction. Gramsci’s troubled and complicated association with the Bolshevik revolution emblematized an association The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 63

that artists were also accessing through numerous layers of mediation at the same time. Finally Raniero Panzieri emerged as a lone figure who was at once returning to the textual legacy of Gramsci and asking after the fundamental relation between labor and capital, independently of the given models of class organization, examining the structures of the party and the union anew and beginning to work out the notion of possible autonomy. Years later, a tribute to Panzieri in the journal Classe Operaia recognized his singular vision: “Only one [thinker] had chosen the path of his own defeat, because this path of selfdefeat led toward the working class.”42 Panzieri asserted that “only in this way, through the refusal of party specificity [partitarietà] and its self affirmation beyond political alignments can Marxist culture rediscover its true function.”43 Working this position out, Panzieri frequently returned to Gramsci’s writing of the Ordine Nuovo period, when Gramsci insisted that the proletariat itself had to replace both the state and the traditional organization of the labor movement.44 Panzieri was officially kicked out of the Italian Socialist Party in 1959, whereupon he moved to Turin. There he met Alquati and Tronti and, two years later, founded, with Tronti, Quaderni Rossi. Panzieri was also influenced by the group Socialisme ou Barbarie in France and the anarchist antistatism associated with its founder, Cornelius Castoriadis. The element of Leninism with which Panzieri most outspokenly disagreed was planning. Lenin saw planning as the antidote to the fundamental laws of capitalism as chaotic, a way to gain control over the decadence of monopoly capitalism. Panzieri rejected the notion that planning was inimical to capitalism, arguing instead that planning was the logic behind the state consolidation of capitalism and the reciprocal capitalist consolidation of the state. Another term would be the verticalization of which Arrighi speaks in his description of the US cycle of accumulation, the relation between the corporation and the state. Panzieri saw the approach to the planning state as Lenin’s fundamental error, stripping Marxism in the USSR of its critical capacity and reducing it to a “mere apologetic form of thought.”45 I have attempted here to trace the recovery of prewar international avantgardes and modernisms that displaced Italian modernism and futurism in the collective imaginary after WWII. The displacement of Italian national identity, evidenced by the relative silence about futurism, Italy’s dominant contribution to interwar art, found its affirmative dimension in the centrality of the 64 Chapter One

readymade. The ascendance of the readymade signaled a way of mediating a new and actual internationalism founded exclusively on international capital in a new cycle of accumulation reticulated to the dollar. Concomitant with this labor of historical and cultural retrieval, an official culture surfaced, complicitous with a newly integrating capitalist world order, against which it grew in antagonistic friction. The unresolved legacy of Italy’s relation to the cultural avant-garde, itself forged in relation to a revolutionary horizon, runs like a current beneath and through the period. Mario Merz, whose artistic practice began, like Burri’s, in prison, cited Lenin’s foundational What Is to Be Done (1902) obsessively over five years in his series Che Fare, begun in 1968 and running through 1973. Inscribed in neon over a variety of materials and “installations,” the slogan becomes purely nominal, unmotivated by the material support or the formal configuration of the work. Yet the words resonate in the context of the late sixties, when the conventional avenues of labor disputes mediated by unions were giving way under increasing pressure of labor against bosses, culminating in wildcat strikes, riots, and barricades. Merz installed some of his work in factory canteens and spaces exclusive to workers, situating the worker as the ideal viewer. Fibonaci Napoli (Mensa in fabrica, 1970) is one example of a failed attempt to recover the relationship of art to work that is characteristic of the historical avant-garde, of which Rodchenko’s designs for workers’ club (Bolshevik) interiors come to mind as an example. In the context of Arte Povera’s46 critique of the military-industrial complex and its return to literary metaphor—frequently misunderstood as a form of dematerialized conceptual art, a problem to which I return in the conclusion—Merz’s series nonetheless surfaces as an instance of melancholia looking back to lost potential of cultural mediation.47 That that history should revolve around revolutionary Leninism at the very moment when labor was being retheorized in relation to capital is not insignificant. Looking ahead to chapter 4, which addresses the historically reconfigured struggle between labor and capital that shifted the discussion from workers’ rights within labor to a critique of labor, one might situate Piero Manzoni as the artist who most explicitly literalized the issue of embodied disciplinary labor in relation to a globalizing art market. Photographs show Manzoni, who elaborated a mute materialist practice of achromatic folds in which the fabric and gesso placed on it were permitted to coagulate according to a materialist The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 65

chance (1960–1961), seated at a newspaper factory, as if at the end of an assembly line, holding a bottle of ink to a running paper feed and manufacturing an inordinately long “line,” which was subsequently rolled into a cylinder to produce a “work” titled Linea (see figs. 4.1–4.3). Likewise, Merda d’artista (Artist’s Shit; 1961; see fig. 4.5) offered an analysis of the dialectics of art in the frenzied economy of reconstruction Milan: Merda d’artista is precisely that which contemporary artists make: “stuff ” whose value emerges only from the abstractions on its label, or from the artist’s proper name as brand—Manzoni’s own refuse held up as aesthetic totem (in an edition of ninety). While Manzoni’s work has been situated as an early avatar of conceptual Art and a key figure in its favorite political endgame, ideology critique, this book situates the artist’s negative materialism dialectically in relation to the end of any remaining politics of workers’ sovereignty, in a shift toward sabotage and a creeping acknowledgment that workers’ rights simultaneously demanded the end of capital and work as it was measured in capitalism. Manzoni’s practice charts the transitional moment in which the Operaio generation, in Mario Tronti’s words, “put forth, in true Marxist style, the concept of neocapitalism, which we saw as a more advanced—and therefore more productive—terrain of struggle while the other side (the rank and file of the . . . PCI) had an outdated view of the Italian economy, compounded by an equally outdated Soviet Orthodoxy.”48 Shedding this outdated orthodoxy entailed ending a romanticization of labor and acknowledging labor as a form at once of erasure and of colonization of lived life, of subjectivity, and of agency.

Returns The reemergence of the monochrome in 1949 was anything but a neutral repetition. Contrary to the ossified narrative that posits abstraction after World War II as so many instances of farcical and passive repetition, gaining for it the moniker “neo”-avant-garde, the reemergence of the monochrome and riffs on it in 1949 were far from a passive or mechanical reenactment of historically evaporated revolutionary potential; this reemergence articulated better than any other form, cultural or discursive, the economic warfare known as the Marshall Plan that financially structured Cold War dynamics. These artists generated an understanding of painting through productive differences with one another; their projects responded to one another on a syntagmatic 66 Chapter One

field. Their mutual inconsistencies thus developed as contiguous positions in a cultural terrain bound by difference at a moment that was rife with multiple models of what painting was, or could be.49 The monochrome is the very figure of this moment, no less so than it is of the revolutionary foment of 1915–1922, bookmarked by the revolution of 1905 on the one hand and the New Economic Policy and the war economy on the other, by the infamous Black Square (fig. 1.2) and by Pure Red, Pure Yellow, Pure Blue: Monochrome Triptych. Because of the recursion of the Soviet avant-garde’s formal idiom, in addition to the similarities in the rhetoric that each artist set into circulation to accompany his or her object production, the dream of a collective could be reposited as a problem, consciously and unconsciously, at the moment that the universal commodification of labor was intensifying, centralizing, and about to once again break with capital. The monochrome does much to unconsciously mediate micro and macro transitions, all the while marking them as imminent to form. At the same time as the historical recovery of those elements from before the war that retained relevance, Italian artists in the fifties seemed to be well aware that their work could only attain contemporary relevance if it both addressed and resisted dominant forms crossing the Atlantic. The legacy of prewar models came to ramify anew only in the antagonistic dialogue, in painting, between and among Italian and American artists in the fifties. It is as though the monochrome, now further reduced to its basic concrete parameters as achrome, continued to augur, indeed prefigure, the resistant position of Operaismo, at first internal to and finally against the party form in the “unofficial” class war continuing across the rupture of World War II into the Cold War. All three dismantled modernism’s doxa from within, through repetition, indeed because of repetition. Repetition in Burri, Fontana, and Manzoni was no longer a function of mimicry but critically resituated the terms that made the modernist myth possible.50 Burri’s, Manzoni’s, and Fontana’s work, their shared engagement with American artists working in the three decades constitutive of capital’s historical golden age under the umbrella of American statecraft mapped over an expanded world order, as much as their shared preoccupation with the monochrome, offers a way of understanding the moment that certainly differs from the melancholic narrative of “the death of painting.”

The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 67

TWO LUCIO FONTANA AND THE POLITICS OF THE GESTURE

Slashing [the painting] was equivalent, fundamentally, to finishing it. It meant that I had at last planted my foot on solid ground. Alberto Moravia, Boredom (1960) Contemporary art, in its most recent tendencies, has by now produced that “reciprocal readymade” Duchamp was thinking of when he suggested the use of a Rembrandt as an ironing board. The extreme object centeredness of contemporary art, through its holes, stains, slits, and non-pictorial materials, tends to identify the work of art with the non-artistic product. Thus, becoming aware of its shadow, art immediately receives in itself its own negation, and bridging the gap that used to separate it from criticism, itself becomes the logos of art and its shadow. Giorgio Agamben, Man without Content (1994)

On the Historical Impossibility of Painting In 1949, two years after relocating to Milan from Argentina, Lucio Fontana set his life’s work in commercial sculpture and ceramics aside, picking up painting, or what appeared to be painting, at the age of fifty. At the very moment that he began to practice it, he articulated his sudden new-found commitment to the medium with a series of assaults over the surfaces of elegantly executed monochrome canvases. Reversing the order of the traditional gesture and the tools with which to enact it, Fontana turned the paintbrush around and, puncturing the canvas with its opposite end, cast a constellation of holes across a

monochromatic plane (see fig. I.1). Later the palette knife just as suddenly made a single slash, and then any number of cuts, over the surface (see fig. I.2). It was also in 1949 that abstract painting made it into Life, “represented” by the work of Jackson Pollock. Already, this signals the rapid assimilation of the prewar European avant-garde into a culture industry funded by the ascendency of American capital, projected onto a rapidly globalizing world.1 The paradox is that avant-gardism was evidently fully entwined with the culture industry by the time Clement Greenberg’s famous thesis from 1939, “Avantgarde and Kitsch,” became a prescriptive rather than descriptive framework in the understanding of Abstract Expressionism.2 In this dialectical relationship, historical conditions seemed to permit very few meaningful gestures. If, as for Adorno, poetry was impossible after Auschwitz, for Fontana painting was untenable after the detonation of the nuclear bomb.3 Why would Fontana declare dead a practice at the very moment he was about to assume its burden, to assume an identity as a painter: the most empty, obsolete, bankrupt, decrepit occupation after the war? His so-called painterly work appeared from out of the blue, after years of rigorous training and successful practice as a mason and sculptor for small private commissions. In an interview in Metro Alfieri, conducted in 1962 amid dozens of canvases in the studio off of one of the many courtyards of his house on Corso Monforte, Fontana said: “Painting is nothing, nothing at all.”4 Asked to remark on his use of monochromy and his choice of bright, saturated color, he replied that the colored plane presented nothing less than suffocation, limit, and restriction. “It’s necessary to find something else and one will find it. For example, in the United States, there are these guys, I don’t remember their names, but painters. And they do not paint. They never paint. It is a wonderful thing. It is not like the old, who are dead before dying.”5 It seems, then, that, of available positions in relation to the medium, the most exciting for Fontana was to be a not-painter who kind of painted, or unpainted, or a painter who did not paint. Clearly, he assumed the former variation on this oblique angle to “painting.” In the era of the Marshall Plan, the more ideal former position seemed something available only to Americans, or to an Americanized future for Europe. Fontana’s work clearly occupied another space in relation to the death-of-painting rhetoric that was repeated from the very opening of painterly Modernism.6 For Fontana, the end signaled, indeed manifested itself as a set of beginnings. 70 Chapter Two

This drive toward “dematerialization” would appear to look ahead to forms of conceptualist practices postdating minimalism—from the vantage of an American narrative. But in practice, it appears to have been finally a discursive category rather than descriptively “correct,” given the rich materiality of Fontana’s work. Fontana’s obvious allegiance to and investment in the materiality of each of the supports with which he worked, without necessarily thinking in terms of a medium in Greenbergian terms, makes it impossible to chart Fontana in an art-historical graph based on American examples. As I plan to establish here, the range of Fontana’s own practice, his declaration of the impossibility of painting after Nagasaki and Hiroshima, his Television Manifesto (1953), and his insistence on titling his object work Spatial Concepts, suggests that he sought a posttraditional medium capable of addressing a historical conjuncture that had made previous forms obsolete. Recent literature on Fontana in the United States has situated him in relation to the Bataillean economy of expenditure, the operations of the Informe.7 Others have located him in a greater postwar Italian attempt to “modernize,” through technological advancement and an often-regressive drive to identify Italian cultural specificity.8 I would like to attempt a third path, to push past the mere formalism of the former position and the second position’s social art history, which paradoxically misses the radicality of the gesture in relation to reconstruction culture. I would like to rescue Fontana’s work from the formalism of the former position and the reflective social art history of the second position. Both paradoxically miss the radicalism of the gesture in relation to reconstruction culture, itself a crucible for the next phase of global capitalist modernity. I will redress the oversight of both by focusing on the gravity of Fontana’s act through a close reading of his gesture in order to situate it in 1949 in Milan—at the moment when it would be mimetically inscribed in the logic of American progressive democracy, deemed “above” ideology. Reconstruction, understood as a crucible for the next phase of global capitalist modernity, was as much an obstacle as were the ruins of collapsed prewar utopian modernism. Chapter 3 attempts to redress the oversight of both by focusing on the gravity of Fontana’s act, or, put more historically, to situate Fontana’s gesture in 1949 in Milan at the moment when it would be mimetically inscribed in the logic of American productivism. I would like to take a step back and simply ask how Fontana’s cut functions, how it is elaborated, what it begins to do. In order to do this, Fontana’s formal gesture needs to be conjugated with his Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 71

explorations of “new media,” which he grounds in rhetoric symptomatic of the Cold War. As I plan to establish here, the range of Fontana’s own practice suggests that he sought a post-traditional medium capable of responding to the traumatic horizon of world history after World War II and the rapid reconstruction that the Marshall Plan brought in its wake. At the same time, his aspirations toward a post-traditional medium were elaborated negative dialectically in the medium of painting. Concetto Spaziale (1949; pl. 1) is a surface made up of white paper mounted on white canvas. Over it, a constellation of punctures forms a spiral, breaking here and there into smaller clusters. This gesture punctures the field, dividing the even continuum of the plane much as traditional drawing interrupts the visual field without breaking the literal ground. Precisely because it breaks the literal ground, it fails to yield a figure, form, or shape on the surface.9 While the basic task of the mark on the surface may be to break the integrity of the visual field, to cleave it into figure and ground, Fontana’s mark literally, physically, tears the surface without establishing those basic coordinates of perception. A mark indicating negative space, the gesture-as-cutting makes uncertain the distinction of a figure on a ground—the conventional unitary function of a mark over a surface in the history of western form, emphasized by the Renaissance concept of disegno—but opens onto another, multiple operation.10 First, the cut implicates and volatizes its ground. The attack on the surface is evidenced equally in the density of actual voids and, significantly, the areas of stress over the solid surface. Fontana’s act exposes the way any gesture is determined rather than being a projection onto a surface. This formal and procedural insight coincides with the sudden aggressive export of Pollock’s mark as proof of the ascendency not only of American high culture, a high culture framed to transparently represent “pure human expression,” an expressive humanism standing above historically made ideology. This idea about painting was reflective of America’s mythologized political identity as bearer of world freedom during the Cold War. Harold Rosenberg’s foundational text “American Action Painters” (1952) certainly describes the many contradictions of the almost fifteen years between 1945 and 1960 that concern me here. Given that a great portion of the content of Fontana’s own publication, Il Gesto, focused on Pollock’s gesture, its reception, and its meaning in the context of the Cold War, Rosenberg’s writing is crucial for Fontana, whose reading of Pollock it informed. 72 Chapter Two

Action Painting and the Primacy of the Gesture Rosenberg opens his text with the declaration of the primacy of American victory in market-driven terms in order to then paradoxically proclaim the universal expressivity of Pollock’s mark. “Since the war every twentieth-century style in painting is being brought to profusion in the United States: thousands of abstract painters—crowded teaching courses in Modern Art—a scattering of new heroes—ambitions stimulated by new galleries, mass exhibitions, reproductions in popular magazines, festivals, appropriations.” Rosenberg’s language associates this proliferation with postwar economic recovery, with production, even mass production, as such; the latter becomes a metaphor through which to understand painting. Painting, then, as though it were made en masse, on an assembly line, has become an index of sheer economic progress. Rosenberg raises the problem of a rationalized mode of production, a historical moment in which the “masterpiece” falls to the logic of quantity rather than whatever qualities once presided over its practice: Quantitatively, it is true that most of the symphonies in blue and red rectangles, the wandering pelvises and birdbills, the line constructions and plane suspensions, the virginal dissections of flat areas that crowd the art shows are accretions to the “School of Paris” brought into being by the fact that the mode of production of modern masterpieces has now been all too clearly rationalized. There are styles in the present displays which the painter could have acquired by putting a square inch of a Soutine or a Bonnard under a microscope. Quantity and productivity, it seems, results in a kind of sterilization. The way out of this situation, the cultural poverty resulting from the embarrassment of riches, is to embrace the ethos that makes American productivism other to its communist counterpart in the Stalinist Five-Year Plan. And that is to see art as a place for the purified expression of individual freedom from ideology, the freedom of individual self-interest understood as individual self-expression, subtending the economic aggression of American foreign policy of the era. “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyze or “express” an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.”11 This “event,” in turn, entails Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 73

an “encounter” in which “the painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.” For Rosenberg, Pollock’s work materialized this ability to act in complete freedom, free of training, of inscription in ideology, of history itself, an act born of the phenomenological encounter, each time as though the first time.

Il Gesto: Rassegna internazionale delle forme libere Fontana’s Il Gesto opened with text by Pierre Restany, who had been associated first with the Ecole de Jeune Paris and then with the Nouveau Realistes and was a promoter of his own understanding of Pollock, which was not unlike that of Clement Greenberg, albeit holding court on the other side of the Atlantic. Understood in relation to artistic practice, a gesture is simply an act resulting in a mark over a surface. For Restany, however, the gestural mark emerges as the singular space where the object before us opens onto the truth of the subject, or the promise of a subject capable of self-determination within representation: an author. It thus acts as a point of connection between the author and receiver, from subject to subject in an instant of communication. According to Restany’s piece in the first issue of Il Gesto, aesthetic emphasis on the transmission between author and viewer begins with impressionism and gathers momentum in the immediate postwar years, finding its apotheosis in the adulatory faith with which Pollock’s drip is invested, and thereby opening a path anew for European artists. In this piece, Restany claims: “Le Geste est createur d’immediate verite,” or “the gesture is the creator of an immediate truth.”12 He goes on to trace the origin and genealogy of the gesture as a source of immediacy and truth from Joseph Mallord William Turner and Claude Monet through Henri Matisse and Wassily Kandinsky and up to Pollock and, finally, Fontana. This invaluable genealogy falls short only in failing to register the difference between the cut and the drip. The phenomenology of the making, in turn, hinges on a radically different understanding of the connection between form and history. In Europe, through Restany’s, among others’, frame, the Pollockian gesture had reached the pitch of perceived value for providing access to the truth of individuality through the unmediated presence of the gesture. Now, Restany 74 Chapter Two

was eager and energetic to fight against American cultural incursion on his own terms—that is, hyperbolically and in the logic of ascendance over the vicissitudes of historical and geopolitical determinations, over vulnerability and defeat, in strictly formal terms. In the years that followed his participation in Il Gesto, Restany associated himself with a group of French artists interested in American commodity culture. He later coined the term nouveau realisme to attempt to circumscribe the presence of the commodity in everyday life. But in the years of his engagement with Fontana, he was active in Milan, where he met Yves Klein, whose work he came to promote over the next decade and who inspired his elaboration of his own project, a project predicated on a vaguely competitive bid for parity with, rather than resistance to, American cultural models. In short, in the first issue, it seemed that meeting “America” on its own terms was the best path forward. Again, the text celebrates the gesture as a carrier of meaning across historical moments. The second issue, which ran in June 1957, opens with an image of Pollock’s work accompanied by yet another text by Restany, entitled “The Morality of Gesture.” It attempts to trace a genealogy from Turner through Monet and to Kandinsky. Its argument is, rather simply, that “the gesture creates an immediate truth,” echoing, consciously or otherwise, Rosenberg’s notion about the event, or the painter’s contact with the surface as source of immediacy and truth beyond historical, ideological, and geopolitical determination. Issue 3 of Il Gesto (see fig.1.1) marks a significant shift. The influence of Piero Manzoni, a student of Lucio Fontana, is palpable. Suddenly Duchamp and Picabia have replaced Pollock as points of reference, an odd synchronous effect of reception. This might also be described as a kind of cultural uneven development. What becomes apparent, from the triangulation between Pollock’s practice, Fontana’s practice, and the rhetoric symptomatized here by Rosenberg, is the difficulty of remaining both highly attenuated to and distanced from the hegemonic presence of American artistic models. In sum, Fontana’s explicit turn to American painting, and specifically to Pollock, after having invoked the violence of Hiroshima and Nagasaki establishes that violence as foundational to the very possibility of painting in 1949. This violence emerges in manifest defiance of the historical burden of painting as a contemplative practice generated over the longue durée of the European historical process. For his part, although he is talking about Pollock, RosenLucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 75

berg seems to be describing something of the heated aggression of Fontana’s punctures, rather than Pollock’s lyrical drips. Yet the action described doesn’t quite stop at the limit Rosenberg sets in his evocation of “the material in front of ” the artist. He remains oblivious to a problem Fontana has already addressed: in the painter’s struggle, numerous determinations precede the gesture, among them the surface itself. Fontana demonstrates the resistance introduced by determinations anterior to the gesture, negatively.

“Value” and Negation The ground, the other, of the encounter, as it were, offers a reliable passivity, so that the artist may realize himself or herself for the viewer by “doing something” to the surface. Rather than seeing it as a coconstitutive in a necessary but antagonistic relationship (as in the case of Fontana), or at least one of mutual determination in which the artist’s process, one inflected as much by chance as by will, Rosenberg wants to describe the freedom of human agency to transcend ideology and limits through expressive gesture. He projects this as a phenomenological possibility, as though the gesture were free of its concrete material condition of possibility—namely, a surface. For Fontana the surface cannot be taken as a given; it is a historically determined part of European culture—a Europe to which he returns at the moment of its dissolution— but, almost literally, rises under the impact of a physically enacted pressure. Its texture, tenacity, and give, its response to a mark-making tool, suddenly assume an emphasized value (estimation) in the resulting work. No longer participating in the traditional hierarchy, ground comes to the foreground. The surface bears the load of both visual and tactile plenitude demonstrated by Concetto Spaziale (Il Pane; 1950). Negatively, the ground recovers its role as a primary coconstituent of the work only at the moment of its attack. At issue, then, is the status of the gesture, and especially the status of the gesture as a vehicle for agency, articulation, and meaning in the context of having to recover a lost past in the face of cultural onslaught of the imperial victor. And what is the mark maker’s relation to it, to a nonmark? What kind of practice, consistently from 1949 to 1968, does it generate? Fontana accompanied his sudden and contradictory gesture with the inauguration of a publication devoted to the problem of the expressive mark. Appropriately entitled Il Gesto: Rassegna internazionale delle forme libere, or The Gesture: Interna76 Chapter Two

tional Review of Free Forms, the magazine ran from 1955 to 1958, producing roughly one issue a year. Piero Manzoni—a student of Fontana at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera—and the artist Enrico Castellani participated heavily on the second and third issues, drawing the journal into a stronger position of opposition to cultural imperialism. The first issue was ambivalent, exploring the stakes of gestural mark making throughout the history of art, in direct contradiction to Fontana’s otherwise strong belief in the historical determinism of art. This ambivalence echoes the voice of the colonizer, so to speak, internalizing that voice in such a way as to make room for it to be challenged in the subsequent issues. This is to say that its concerns and preoccupations uncannily rhyme, in advance, with those of Rosenberg in American action painting. Yet how does Fontana’s cut—balanced on the limit, at once gesture and nongesture, mark and erasure—open onto authorship or, for that matter, onto the presence of any form of subjectivity capable of transmission? The violence to the support suggests a very different model of articulation that the American abstract expressionism mark. It demonstrates a kind of enunciation situated in a field of determined limits, however passionate the drive to overcome those limits. And following from that question, assuming that the cut could provide access to the authorial subject, what kind of subjectivity would it articulate? Who is the “I” that apparently speaks through the immediacy of the mark? Recasting the question: what kind of subjectivity does it produce? Fontana’s investigation of the significance of the gestural mark to authorship depends once again on another series of questions about the surface. For “ground” in Fontana’s work cannot be described or specified as it had in modernist painting as either a degree zero or an ideated space. Where Alexander Rodchenko’s Pure Red, Pure Yellow, Pure Blue (1921) conveyed a productivist ethos by unmasking the (mechanically understood) constituent components of painting, evidenced in its rationalist reduction of sensuous content— color is rationally reduced to the basic primary colors available universally thanks to industry and standardization—Fontana reinvests the monochrome with secondary and tertiary layers of myth. Now, however, myth comes to be conjugated with mystification. Having traded in myth (content) and transmissibility for pure form, pure form becomes not only another myth, but the medium for the myth of another kind of (mythical) plenitude: the commodity. The violence of the gesture is always in tension with the lush gorgeousness of Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 77

color. Color, however, is neither systematized (as for Rodchenko) nor conveying spirituality (Kandinsky) nor exploring relationships (as for Matisse). Again, starkly monochromatic, the field indulges in a range of color luxuriance that has more to do with competition with newly available objects than with any artistic problem set. Fontana is, in this regard, an avatar for Klein’s more overtly legible conjugation of the commodity and the monochrome. Klein’s Propositions Monochromes and the book Yves: Peintures, confronts us with productions before which it is no longer possible to resort to the mechanism of aesthetic judgments set forth by modernism, and for which the antagonistic polarity of art/ nonart appears totally beside the point, thanks to the centrality of the readymade. Fontana’s practice foreshadows Klein’s more programmatic—or at any rate, packaged—inquiry into myth and value by first exploring the mythical commodity status of color. The bright, saturated colors suggest on the one hand the high-end luxury object and on the other hand the acid-colored knickknack or film poster. In either case, Fontana’s color scheme begs the question of the commodity, the seduction of the luxury object as repository of surplus capital. A cursory glance at the products of industry fuelled by American dollars and rural labour might suggest that the miracolo resulted in shiny colorful objects. While the recovery was primarily fueled by Fiat, fashion and design firms began to crop up all over Milan between 1947 and 1963. Milan at this moment, in light of the speed with which international pre- and postwar models of production were received, marks a shift in the very meaning of value. No longer the exceptional and exemplary object, painting takes reification and the readymade commodity as a point of departure as the contemporary structural condition of painting. Painting’s only fighting chance would be to accept the commodity, to internalize its force and renegotiate its logic from within. Or rather, Fontana presents the degree to which painting and readymade objects related to each other in a kind of mobius strip. Volatizing the surface as a limit marks a material history embedded in form, one that must be overcome through confrontation. This is in direct contrast to the idealist understanding of the humanist gesture or any individual capacity for transcendence. Secondarily, this concedes the degree to which the idea, if not ideology, of modernist painting was always already a fiction, insofar as the practice called “painting” had come to 78 Chapter Two

internalize the readymade, the commodity, and the market forces mythically held to be external to the four corners of the frame.13 It comes as no surprise then that Fontana’s alignment with the position enumerated by Restany was short-lived, if it finally ever cohered at all, ambivalent as it was. Again, the later issues of Il Gesto swerve toward the interests of Manzoni, who was quite clear about his awareness of the materialist determinants of every enunciative act, acknowledging those limits to be the function of economic subsumption, issuing from the factory floor as much as from the limits of enunciation, as I will explore in chapter 4.

Carving Out a Future, Negatively Fontana seems finally to have learned as much from the younger artist and his interest in the readymade as perhaps he had taught him. In an interview in Metro Alfieri in 1962, Fontana associates the end of painting, monochromy, and the readymade with the postwar “Americanization” of Europe. These terms, in turn, suggest both reification and imminence, the field of possibilities outside the reification of art in the present. Finding the monochrome surface “pessimiste,” and associating the surface with “la terre,” Fontana casts the gesture as that which breaks with the atavism and viscosity of materiality to open onto immanence, an example of which is La Fine di Dio (1963; pl. 4). “La future est deja la, c’est present, la future. On ne voit pas la future parce’que il y a trop des morts en circulation.” (The future is already here; it’s present, the future. One doesn’t see the future because there are too many dead in circulation.) Painting is one of these dead in circulation. Furthermore, it stands in for the still circulating yet dead European culture and its replacement by yet another dead form: the commodity. Mourning painting, indulging a tenderness and melancholy for a plenitude no longer possible after the bankruptcy of European culture, Fontana paints “a la Watteau” (that quintessential example of haute peinture always already imbricated in frivolity and cultural decay) on Sundays, reserving the sacred day of the week to pay homage to an extinct entity. “Le Dimanche Fontana peint des nus. Ils sont leger, subtil, plein de fraicheur, un truc après Watteau. Apres il les cache et personne n’a le droit de les voir.” (On Sundays, Fontana paints nudes. They are light, subtle, after Watteau. Then he hides them and no one has the right to see them.)14 After executing a traditional work, figurative, adhering to the genres, Fontana hides it, Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 79

removing it from its proper conclusion in the viewer’s receptive gaze. Having placed “figure” and “ground,” “gesture,” and “surface” under such duress, the only thing clear is that the language with which I am attempting to question Fontana’s cut, the very words that build coordinates and supports for much art-historical discourse—“gesture,” “figure,” “ground,” “painting,” “monochrome,” “medium”—lose currency in confrontation with a Concetto Spaziale (Spatial Concept), as Fontana would name his works. Are they even paintings? Aside from a rectangular shape bound by the four edges of a frame—the four edges he later marked with internally rhyming slashes—the Concetto Spaziale do not adhere to the conditions that delimit the medium of painting, what was contemporaneously, on the other side of the Atlantic, being called its “area of competence.”15 The demonstration of competence, to say nothing of the expertise arising from obedience to a language, a restricted practice slowly and surely carved out through practice, simply did not make sense against a horizon turning from ruins to rapid reconstitution in the image of a foreign set of demands, economic and cultural. Yet this issue of the demonstration of competence is precisely what Rosenberg sees as the strength of American painting. That language was not available to Fontana in 1949. By contrast, painting as a historical entity on the one hand and very real examples of Pollock’s painting that were crossing the Atlantic on the other were all too available. Of course the discourses and institutions that ensured the objects’ initiation into the world of the gallery, the market, and circulation—in short, visibility and value—were sure to locate them instantaneously as painting. Yet these market determinations were extrinsic to the work. Fontana showed his work, the first works to involve holes and puntures from 1949 on, and the Concetto Spaziale, for the first time in a one-man show at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan in May–June 1952. Concetto Spaziale, Attese, the entire series from 1960, is exemplary of the practice over the decade (see pl. 3; pl. 5). Critics debated about whether the work owed its engendering to the French art informel, which owed much to Pollock and his convoluted French reception via Restany, or whether the debt fell more to abstraction “pure and simple,” in the “tradition” of Malevich and Rodchenko.16 Fontana’s own writing, coincidentally, naïvely, or quite deliberately, echoes the tone and texture of Malevich’s. Here is Fontana in the Second Manifesto of Spatialism (1948): “We have broken our shells, our physical crusts, and see 80 Chapter Two

ourselves from above, photographing the earth from flying rockets.” And here Malevich in 1919, in a text titled “Non-objective Art and Suprematism” that accompanied the first Moscow exhibition of his “White on White” work: “At the present moment man’s path lies across space . . . the blue color of the sky has been overcome by the suprematist system, it has been broken through and has entered into the white, which is the true representation of infinity.”17 But the similarity in the language further emphasizes the disparity of their work. Despite mimicry in the concepts evoked, many of the Concetto Spaziale (Plates 1, 3, 4, and 5) stand worlds away from the works of the suprematist— from across the divide of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and across the divide of utopian hope now succumbed to the morbid success of twentieth-century technologies. Repetition was not an option. Above all, there is no more utopia to project. Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale do not, properly speaking, inhere as “abstraction.” The concrete fallout around each of the punctures on the surface, as the material of which it is made pushes up and outward from the impact of the gesture, denies the ideated space of abstraction. Likewise, the physicality of the slash emphasizes materiality in a manner incompatible with the tenor of prewar abstraction. Unlike the exemplars of geometric abstraction, of modernist abstraction at large, the work dramatizes the physicality and corporeality of its production. Both process and materiality overwhelm even the painting’s title, Spatial Concept, with its connotations of something at once transcendent and pedantic. And material process prevails over an understanding of the “medium” as a language, and an area of specialized discourse. On the other hand, even as it presents, almost spectacularly, the movement of the artist’s body in executing a gesture, the gesture does not provide a “payoff ” for the viewer. Only the surface continues to act. The final shock elaborates an impossible space—one not “material,” empirically speaking, but material in the historicist sense. Where is the subject? In other words, with Fontana having rehearsed the fraught relationship between gesture and ground, between the art of expression and its field of possibility, what are we to make of his way of absenting himself? The mark, after all, “received in itself its own negation.”18 A constellation of slashes, or a single slash over the field, was never repeated afterward by other practitioners. It did not become a structure for others; it did not offer a paradigm or vehicle that might be shared. Moreover, its oriLucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 81

gins remain in Fontana’s own struggle. It would seem that, in the absence of an art-historical pedigree, or a list of sources and predecessors from whom to draw such a relatively unlikely act as slicing through one’s canvas, at least the way was well paved in Fontana’s writing. The first holes are dated to three years after Fontana’s involvement in drafting the famous Manifesto Blanco in Buenos Aires in 1946, and after Spatial Manifestos 1 and 2, signed in 1947 and 1948, respectively. Such documents carve a neat linear trajectory to the work at issue here. The texts, as well as the manifestos written in the same years Fontana worked on the Concetto Spaziale pieces, are filled with a conviction that painting has reached its end, that “we must surpass painting, sculpture, poetry.”19 Yet Fontana, unlike the same “painting is dead” rhetoric espoused so many times before in the historical avant-garde, evokes a language of continuity in rupture, as though the only way for artistic expression to occur is for it to rise phoenix-like from the ashes of dead forms. “The work of art is destroyed by time . . . but we do not wish to abolish the art of the past or to stop life: we want painting to come out of its frame.”20 Later he wrote, in his “Manifesto of the Spatialist Movement for Television,” in celebration of the distributive potential of television and new communications media, that even TV would stretch the limits of painting, at once negating and preserving it: “Our artistic expressions multiply the horizon lines to infinity, in infinite dimension; they seek an aesthetics whereby painting is no longer painting.”21 A painting that is no longer a painting yet still is. Through a particular understanding of drawing, Fontana managed to explore a precarious dialectic in mark making that simultaneously signaled the historical conditions determining an artistic mark. He challenged the possibility of painting at the moment when he generated one of its most interesting instantiations, as though he were standing on a particular limit, articulating the limit case of what it would be to be both painting and not-painting.22 Drawing-as-cut: so what does it mean to say that Fontana “draws,” when he draws a sharp instrument over the canvas? Drawing, whose traditional mission is to define a contour and thus provide a body on a flat picture plane, produces no silhouette here and thus bounds no form. It is as though the gesture were an empty and sadistic measure against ground. On the other hand the cut is itself nothing but a kind of perverse contour on a painted field. Because the figure is also the ground, the ground is actualized, able to act against the gesture. I said on a painted field, but it would be clearer to say of a painted field; line is 82 Chapter Two

constituted of the very matter of the field, transforming that field into contour over itself. Yet it is not a fold; it is voided. Once again, suspending presence and withdrawal, mark and absence, materiality and void, Fontana’s gesture enfolds the contradictions in a simultaneity shown to derive from the very fabric of the work and to cancel that work. Here, then, a set of new relationships between cut and drawing, drawing and monochrome, begins to surface. Drawing, after all, stands at the very fundament of the medium of painting, as both its origin and its remainder. As Pamela Lee has confirmed in “Some Kinds of Duration: The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art,” “commonly thought of as the mother of all arts, the common basis for both painting and sculpture alike, drawing has been treated as the ground from which the other arts originate.” Yet, quasi ontologies aside, she continues: “the institutional status of drawing compares unfavorably to the genres it ostensibly gives rise to, perhaps because of this very relation to the other arts, characterized as at once germinal and parasitic.” A foundation at the level of process, drawing cedes its originary status to greater triumphs, other mediums. It absents itself, withdrawing into a “trace or leftover, a clue to a formation left behind. Paradoxically, it is because of its liminal status that drawing tells us a great deal about the other arts.”23 At once “trace” and “origin,” drawing shares in the dual and hybrid quality of Fontana’s holes: productive of the plenitude, the richness, of the surface and simultaneously “empty.” As a demonstration of artistic practice, and the very condition for the possibility of artistic process, moreover, drawing is superseded and effaced by painting and sculpture. Fontana’s act begins to look doubly regressive, at once drawing painting back to its atavistic site, its condition of possibility. And then in that same instance, it marks that space of beginnings as an absence. This notion of possibilities made impossible returns me to the question I posed earlier when I asked after the agency (“the subject”) enunciating itself through the mark-making act of drawing a cut over the surface. For it becomes clear that if the slash operates as a fold onto the outside, the limit condition of painting, it also stands at a limit of enunciation. This link between the gesture, and the act of will, opens onto questions about the very possibility of communication, and of mark making. That possibility, in turn, bears on the very conditions of enunciability, on the grounds of communicability. In a discussion of Maurice Blanchot’s language, a language inaugurative of Foucault’s “thought of the outside,” Foucault says: “Although the formal position of ‘I speak’ does Lucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 83

not raise problems of its own, its meaning opens a potentially unlimited field of questions, in spite of its apparent clarity. ‘I speak’ refers to a supporting discourse that provides it with an object. That discourse, however, is missing; the sovereignty of ‘I speak’ can only reside in the absence of any other language; the discourse about which I speak cannot preexist the nakedness articulated the moment I say ‘I speak’; it disappears the instant I fall silent.”24 The mark, invested throughout modernism yet reaching the apotheosis of its naïveté with the possibility of transparent access to an exceptional, “free,” subjectivity in the rhetoric around Pollock’s work, operates analogously to the functions and assumptions of “I speak,” subtending American notions of democratic freedom. The latter is merely a set of codes for capital, laundered under layers and layers of mediation. Here, the clarity of the speech act, the phrase “I speak,” which I am attempting to cast in relation to the way the mark operates, and its relationship to an expressive subject, is shown to ring with a hollow center, despite its seeming plenitude. And that hollow center derives from its contingency, its dependence on a support, a ground or discourse that could “preexist” the articulation. Yet that preexistent discourse is shown to be a fiction in the volatile act in which “I speak.” At once presence and void, the act, cast like a toss of the dice by the subject, rather than consolidating or centralizing the subject in any communication of interiority, exposes the subject to the outside. “In short, it is no longer discourse and communication of meaning, but a spreading forth of language in its raw state, an unfolding of pure exteriority.”25 The very gesture meant to convey a specificity, a subjectivity, releases onto its conditions of (im)possibility, its ground. “I speak” was meant to distinguish the speaker from the common flow of language. But it, like the gesture, is shown to be a space holder, an interval that any subject could just as easily fill. This gesture, as an empty interval between the subject’s speech act and the greater matrix of language, of the conditions enabling the mark, challenges the hermeticism and reflexivity of the work, the very claims of modernist painting. Foucault concludes: It is a widely held belief that modern literature is characterized by a doubling back that enables it to designate itself; this self-reference allows it both to interiorize to the extreme (to state nothing but itself ) and to manifest itself in the shimmering sign of its own distant

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existence. In fact, the event that gave rise to what we call literature is only superficially an interiorization; it is far more a question of a passage to an outside. While in the past it was a matter of thinking the truth, now “I think” runs counter to “I speak.” [The proposition] I think led to the indubitable certainty of the “I” and its existence; “I speak” on the other hand disperses, effaces that existence and lets only its empty emplacement appear.26 The gesture, the cut, remains constant. It is the thread that begins its course from a vantage seemingly other to painting, begins to redefine painting, and continues on again driving it in a passage to its outside, but from a vantage internal to it. In other words, it is as though a topos immanent to painting somehow folded inside out to take painting to its outer limit, to not-painting. This thread, already operative in painting, realized and volatized as cut, as puncture, through all of Fontana’s (non)painterly endeavors, is the act of drawing. Curiously, Fontana’s drawings have been all but ignored, exhibited for the first time only in 1972 in Rome and Venice, in a show organized by Enrico Crispolti. The reception of his graphic work witnessed two tendencies: first, to see Fontana’s drawing as a tertiary, rejected procedure having nothing to do with his other production in any medium, and second, to privilege his drawing as an authentic originary site, a pure indexical trace of the artist’s interiority in mimicry of Pollock’s work.27 The latter position was espoused in Crispolti’s writing on the Fontana gesture and did much to make a myth of it, in parallel formation to the way Rosenberg popularized the Pollock drip and the Pollock dance (the very mode of heroicism made impossible after Hiroshima, according to Fontana). Traditionally effaced by painting and sculpture, drawing nevertheless observes its own sanctimonious laws. Ingres, remember, was known to repeat the pronouncement “drawing is the probity of Art” as a priest may verbally repeat the value of Communion while performing it in mass.28 However, by the time of modernism, and particularly by 1920, the moment when abstraction had begun to ossify into a set of codes around the question of medium, drawing had already surfaced as a limit case challenging modernism’s very foundations, its belief in the rationality and safety of the very notion of medium. This challenge revolves around drawing’s status as a “cut” into the plenum of a surface. The extreme experiments to which representation was pressed in

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the early twentieth century drove the process of drawing to this conclusion, not unlike the way image making in general increasingly came to be conjugated with mechanical and industrial forms, ranging from photography to the readymade and the monochrome. The cut, then, became another paradigm by which to attempt to come to terms with modern displacements of traditional forms of articulation. By 1912, with Picasso and George Braque’s first collages, drawing became a function of cutting. Furthermore, cubism demonstrated the way contour-ascut worked to generate the possibility of, to guarantee all of, the other terms of representation: figure, ground, light, shadow, in short, the very “conditions of representability.”29 The cut-out elements worked, in other words, not only to define contours but also to elaborate representational systems. Reversing the way drawing had traditionally completed its task positively, as a presence on a ground, in preparation for color at the next stage of the work’s completion, painting, in cubist collage the subtractive contour-as-cut continues to generate the entirety of the picture: effecting the results of modeling, chiaroscuro, even sfumato. Contour-as-cut refuses to exchange the matrix of line for that of color in a separate process but becomes the condition for the totality of the work. Cubism demonsrates the way representation rearticulates absence as a field of relationships, a constellation.30 The cut-out collage element obscures the plane on which it rests only to represent that plane in the form of depiction. “The reconstitution of the master field through its own absence is the master term of the entire condition of collage.”31 And again, the Dada practices of the 1920s radicalize drawing’s enactment as incision. With Three Standard Stoppages (1913), Duchamp made cutting the very matrix of line and contour. Duchamp allowed a meter long piece of string to fall on the ground from a height of 1 meter. He did this three consecutive times. The fallen meter-long lines were traced, and the trace cut. That cut contour, in turn, became a mold with which Duchamp composed any number of drawings that combined the contours of the lines. Yet Three Standard Stoppages responds to cubism’s replacement of drawing with cutting by volatizing the materiality of the ground—gravity, weight, the contingency of the work on physical conditions—rather than leaving it as an obfuscated negative space.32 Contemporaneously, Picabia was elaborating his own version of drawingas-cut in works such as La Jeune Fille (1920) and the works it would generate. In La Jeune Fille, a cut-out hole works as a drawing, defining contour.33 This 86 Chapter Two

contour circumscribes, of course, nothing, a hole in the surface of a piece of paper. A material void, a loss, the work was no longer a drawing, nor was it not a drawing. Rather, drawing is drawn to a limit, exposed to its outside. Picabia made it clear that to not-draw was somehow also to draw: “At this moment, a modernist paradox was made clear: pushed to its limit, to draw would be no longer to draw.”34 The importance of Duchamp’s and Picabia’s work to Fontana is well documented. Flipping through the pages of Fontana’s magazine Il Gesto, the reader repeatedly comes across photographs of Duchamp, such as the 1956 image of him standing in front of the Large Glass in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The same issue, Il Gesto 3, reproduces Picabia’s machine portraits from 1917. Milan emerged as a setting for the simultaneous rediscovery of Dada and Duchamp—frequently exhibited at Arturo Schwarz’s gallery in Milan— and of American work ranging from abstract expressionism to its critique in the work of Johns and Rauschenberg. A multiplicity of artistic forms drift unmoored from the dialectical thread that connected avant-garde paradigms one to the next. In the European postwar context, prewar models became so many readymade categories for artistic appropriation.35 What concerns me here, more than the elaboration of intricate genealogies, is the degree to which drawing’s role as a limit condition was already set in place; or rather, the way its status as always already a liminal operation was made evident, actualized in a number of works throughout the history of the avant-garde. But now, the implications of the readymade specifically for painting become clear. In the postwar era, Manzoni, Ellsworth Kelly, and Cy Twombly all transform the way the incision operates in painting as a limit condition.36 Consider, for instance, Kelly’s “shape,” a figure fully bound by contour, a contour achieving a full cut away from ground. He remarked: “I have worked to free shape and form from its ground so that the shape has a relationship to the space around it; so that it has a clarity and a measure within itself, and so that the shape always finds its own space and demands its own freedom and separateness.”37 The figural is cut free of ground, up to the limit condition where painting would remain painting. On the occasion of a tribute to Piero Manzoni several months after his death, at a special exhibit of his work held at the Galleria Schwarz in 1964, Fontana, by then both teacher and colleague, declared Manzoni’s Linea (1959; see figs. 4.1–4.3) the most influential on his own thinking.38 Having made the requiLucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 87

site speech on Manzoni’s tremendous importance to postwar art, Fontana concluded that Manzoni’s “lines will come to have the greatest implications for the possibility, the futurity of painting.”39 There’s some degree of irony in positing a performance, a not-painting, as a point of reference for painting, a source for the very future of painting. This remark may also strike a false note, a kind of displaced anxiety in relation to Manzoni’s more remarkable manipulation of the monochrome, particularly as Linea seems to participate in one of the more generic and often-repeated practices of the sixties, the articulation of a single indexical trace over a horizontal, scroll-like surface. Recall Robert Rauschenberg’s and John Cage’s Tire Print (1950–1951) or Nam Jun Paik’s Zen for Head (1950). Yet Fontana’s appraisal of another artist, one to whom he took on a kind of mentor role, betrays the drive of his own project. Manzoni’s hidden lines dramatize the tension between material concretion and ascetic withdrawal that specifies Fontana’s gesture, the simultaneous offering and withholding of process and trace. Manzoni’s lines derive from highly controlled material determinations: a marking mechanism arranged over a long roll of paper on an assembly-line-type apparatus. Executed somewhere in the gray interval between active and passive, the resultant “drawing” is rolled up and stashed away in a tin can labeled with the dimensions of the precut piece of paper and its time of execution. We are confronted with—rather than a libidinally motivated line, as in Pollock’s work—a material trace divested of its singularity, its plenitude as a presence on a surface, and its relationship of full transparency to the artist’s body. Visual, tactile, corporeal plenitude is the last concern. The final presentation of line presents and withholds, thereby negatively marking materiality and corporeal inscription (as withdrawn). Manzoni’s line produces the realization of that erasure of process and materiality. The work locates the interval, the infraslim space, between the plenitude of the gesture and its withdrawal into invisibility. The lines’ disappearance evokes the specific experience of an anonymous subject, the worker/ maker whose trace is engulfed by the parameters of the product. We are confronted with an empty frame, in the form of a container. The external trappings of presentation and present ability void the actual gesture, the picture. The lines generate an acknowledgment of the vestigial status of the mark, of drawing, and through it, painting. Vestigial: the trace of not this, but other than this entangled in this, constituting it and constituted of it. Linea absents the 88 Chapter Two

corporeal trace twice: as it folds into the industrial procedure and as it is packaged. In this sense, Manzoni demonstrates immiseration as the very structural condition of the possibility of making art in the mid-twentieth century in a financial colony of capital, understood at that moment to be the United States. I began by quoting a passage from Alberto Moravia’s Boredom, written in northern Italy in 1960. It matters little here that Moravia may have gone to any number of exhibits of Fontana’s work throughout the fifties to see the kind of work that would fascinate him and through which he would later elaborate his own tropes. Nor am I interested in the particular motives, all of them emotional and psychological, to which the author attributes a radical gesture—such as the assault on the protagonist’s own painting, out of the blue one regular day like any other. Moravia’s character flirts with psychosis, and predictably enough his behavior reduces to his struggle with a woman, with sexuality. No, what struck me was the writer’s insistence that such a gesture involved a border, a limit case. For the speaker, it means an end and a beginning folded within the same gesture: “I planted my foot on solid ground.” The year 1949 marked the start of what looks like a second career for Fontana, as he began to spin more and more of the same—holes and slashes—in more elaborate formations, in more exotic colors, on ever more unlikely surfaces, graduating from canvas to copper. Why this passion for the dead? To demonstrate the line along which beginnings and ends, continuity and rupture, meet. The gesture-as-cut similarly enfolds this presence in absence and absence in presence. Fontana’s own particular exploration of the limits of the medium, and the “end of painting” problem that he repeatedly evoked through the elaboration of a new (anti)gestural solution, has been raised in other intellectual contexts under the shared intuition of the impossibility of painting after the war. As a remainder, a trace, the vestige locates an interval inside the visible but not obtainable to view. It is a concept “lodged as a foreign body” between image and idea, presence and absence. Or as it stands realized in the lines by Manzoni marked by Fontana: the trace of not this but other than this, yet entangled in this, constituting it and constituted of it. Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale, Attese (1960; pl. 5) presents at once the gesture, the artist’s mark, the trace linked to the artist through the immediacy of physical cause. The work attests to a corporeal and libidinal investiture. The angle and curve of the cut line, the canvas’s relation to gravity, its taughtLucio Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 89

ness and sag, evidence an instrument plunging in at the top and pulling with greater velocity as it reaches toward the bottom. The cut is evidence of negative agency. Fontana’s act, as it unfolds in time, through the process of its making, remains in the still object. Temporal passage and process play, as though a kind of temporal loop, through the line to its enactment and, in contradistinction to Manzoni’s line, through its visible presentation. Rather than the internally rich and variant eddy and meander of Pollock’s drip, there is nothing. Elsewhere, Fontana thought this problem of withdrawal as “absent sense,” borrowing the term from Blanchot.40 An inscription of silence: Fontana begins with the received notion of presence and the triumph of mark making, only to void it from within. Starting from the cut, he empties the traditional connection to artistic subjectivity that the privileged gesture would imply, a presence transparent to an external manifestation, through a painted object hanging on a wall. This hybrid operation, in turn, introduces the mark on the painterly surface as a multiple site, at once passive and active; authored and anonymous; abstract and material. Fontana indicates that the domain of the libidinal (its roving trace through the graphemic mark) can no longer be perceived as operating outside a preestablished matrix of the field on which it appears. Nor can it offer the guarantees of access to the same subjectivity it once was understood to have. On the other hand Fontana’s negativity yields a remainder, a space excessive to the structure within which he works, a kind of fold or interval between absence and visibility. This space, in its vacancy, remains unqualified. Precisely this emptiness makes Fontana’s work so troubling, and so abstract, despite its aggressive materiality. It is as though Fontana offers his gesture as a place holder, a gap opening onto another kind of practice. What emerged after his taking up notpainting were the postpainterly practices of the next decade that relied less on a medium than on performance. Or, recalling Fontana’s phrase about the “dead long before dying,” and applying it for a moment to painting, it seems that, of available positions in relation to the medium, the most exciting for Fontana was to be a not-painter who kind of painted, or unpainted, or a painter who did not paint. Clearly, he located himself at an oblique angle to “painting.” In the era of the Marshall Plan, the more ideal situation of painting expressively seemed something available only to Americans, or to an Americanized future for Europe,

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suggested by Concetto Spaziale, New York (1962; pl. 6). Fontana’s work clearly occupied another space in relation to the death-of-painting rhetoric that had been repeated from the very beginning of painterly modernism. The end seemed to signal, indeed to manifest itself as, a set of beginnings. “What remains is what resists most. Having retreated from the greatness of works . . . art seems past, showing nothing more than its passage.”41 And this passage, demonstrating a closure, also opens onto, through the very dynamism of its continued trajectory, the suggestion of a future, of imminence. Even as Fontana voids the gesture, demonstrating its impossibility and therefore the impossibility of a modernist painting predicated on the myth of the gesture, he does so from a vantage internal to painting, as a kind of inside-out fold. At the very moment of seeming negation, he generates an interesting solution to painting. Jean-Luc Nancy’s understanding of vestige as the interval, an interstitial step, “the pas, the coming and going of passage,” in the constant dynamism of art recalls the dynamism of Fontana’s own understanding of art and time. Here is Fontana in his Technical Manifesto of Spacialism (1951): “Transformations of the material means of life determine man’s states of mind throughout history. Little by little, a system opposed to another already accepted system replaces it.”42 Fontana constructs a story of a continuous mutation of systems giving structure and meaning to matter. He posits artistic transformation as a procession of paradigm shifts that draw art to a point ready for radical synthesis and transcendence of matter. Nancy’s proposal is not structured in accordance with a Hegelian telos; there is no final moment, transcendent end. There is continual process. Nonetheless, a given form will surface in relation to its need for a given collective as the need for meaning arises in relationship to history, or a “community of sense,” as he terms it.43 “It is the quest, the desire, the will for sense. Where this demand for the idea is displayed, with fierceness and naiveté, art exhausts and consumes itself.”44 At stake, nonetheless, is an understanding of the space where ends and starts, ruptures and continuities, converge in the dynamism of passage. Moreover, Fontana’s production speaks little to the triumphant march of history and time he evokes, working more along the lines of withdrawal, vestige, “pas.” The mark, at once presented and annulled, shares in the economy of the vestige, the gesture that folds back on itself:

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To the extent to which art touches on an extremity, to the extent to which it attains a moment of completion and suspension, but remains at the same time under the definition and under the prescription of the “sensible presentation of an idea” (Hegel), it comes to a stop and freezes as if on the last brilliant sliver (éclat) of the idea, of its pure and somber residue. At the limit, ultimately, there remains nothing more than the idea of art itself, like a pure gesture of presentation folded back on itself.45

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Plate 1. Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1949. Estate of Lucio Fontana, sodrac (2014).

Plate 2. Piero Manzoni, Achrome (with Breadrolls), 1961. Estate of Piero Manzoni, sodrac (2014).

Plate 3. Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, 1960. Estate of Lucio Fontana, sodrac (2014).

Plate 4. Lucio Fontana, La Fine di Dio, 1963. Estate of Lucio Fontana, sodrac (2014).

Plate 5. Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attese, 1960. Estate of Lucio Fontana, sodrac (2014).

Plate 6. Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, New York, 1962. Estate of Lucio Fontana, sodrac (2014).

Plate 7. Alberto Burri, Big Red P n 18, 1964. Estate of Alberto Burri, sodrac (2014).

Plate 8. Claire Fontaine, Ma l’Amor Mio Non Muore, 2012. Courtesy the artist and T293, Napoli/Roma. Photo credit: Maurizio Esposito.

THREE ALBERTO BURRI’S PLASTICS AND THE POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF OPACITY

Despite having names of Greek shepherds (Polystyrene, Polyvinyl, Polyethylene) . . . plastic is in essence of the stuff of alchemy. Roland Barthes, “Plastic” (1957) The opportunities that stemmed from cooperation were nonetheless inseparable from the challenges that stemmed from the competition over cash flows and material resources. The competition continually drove each and every organization integrated in the world market to shift its resources from existing input-output organizations to whatever other combinations promised to yield higher returns as proclaimed by Alfred Marshall’s . . . “principle of substitution.” Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (1994)

The Principle of Substitution: So Much Burnt Plastic In 1958, Alberto Burri began using a new material: polyvinyl acetate. A type of plastic frequently used for binding purposes (in glues, for example, or for bookbinding), this material did not become interchangeable among the others with which Burri experimented but precipitated a specific procedural economy: irrevocable violence. In 1944, during his tenure as a prisoner of war interred in a Texas camp after having been captured during service in the Italian army in North Africa, Burri started to make artworks by painting on and stitching together burlap sacks. This aesthetic decision was motivated by the situation. It was the only avail-

FIGURE 3.1. Alberto Burri, Two Shirts, 1957. Estate of Alberto Burri, SODRAC (2014).

able material support, a substitute for canvas. Subsequently, on his return to Italy, he continued to work with this natural material and to use his previous professional training as a medical doctor to stitch together pieces of the cloth with precision in order to construct objects that seemed to hybridize painting and collage. By 1955, however, opening his practice to this new material, Burri moved from the conjoined act of tearing and stitching made possible by burlap and fabric to irreparable forms of destruction such as burning and exploding. Two Shirts (1957) is exemplary of this period of Burri’s work (see fig. 3.1). In 1956, he inaugurated over a decade of experiments with a variety of plastics, from opaque polyvinyl to transparent cellophane. A particularly lurid work, Big Red P n 18 (1964; see pl. 7), is a topography of aggressive color and texture and a procedural topology moving among the primary terms of modernism such as figuration and abstraction, failing to resolve their tension but nonetheless pushing it in a direction responsive to the historical horizon of economic recovery and its discontents. Burri’s work carved out a difficult position of neither modernist reflexivity nor antimodernist legibility, one that (negatively) expressed the contradictions specific to Italy in the fifties and sixties while remaining mute, opaque, and resistant to the demand for cultural transparency expected of abstract art in the cultural logic of the Marshall Plan. This logic was made evident by the American models of high art aggressively promoted by the United States on Italian “turf ” from 1950—when Pollock presented three paintings at the American pavilion, which he shared with five younger American artists, and 94 Chapter Three

his one-man exhibition that summer at the Museo Corer, a show that traveled to Milan’s Galeria Naviglio—through 1964, when Rauschenberg became the first American to win, for a painting depicting John F. Kennedy, the Lion Prize, the highest award of the Venice Biennale, since Whistler the century before. By the time of this award to Rauschenberg, the Biennale had come to be the index of cultural value in an international and protoglobal arena. The Biennale had also become a cultural vehicle for an American financial program.1 The convergence of capital at its most seamlessly rationalized within statecraft reflecting shifting international relations certainly reached a significant pitch with this award. This junction was not a mere coincidence or a matter of ideological projection or political conspiracy. It was a matter of money.2 In his careful study of the Venice Biennale and its trajectory over the twentieth century, Lawrence Alloway notes the way the apparent centrality of an ideology of national identity was in fact transparent to national budgets: “Each pavilion continued to be nationally administered, of course, but the competitive element of early years had come into the open. . . . Costs [came to] vary with the labor situation in each country and with its distance from Venice, but a minimum budget for the American pavilion in the early 60s would be 30,000,” reaching a high point in 1964.3 To whatever extent Rauschenberg’s 1964 win may have been “rigged,” as some art historians have argued,4 Italy had already become a stage for the reception of new American painting, beginning with Peggy Guggenheim’s establishing a home and a collection showcasing the work of Pollock as early as 1948, and throughout the fifties, at the same time that historically significant European painters such as Matisse, Braque, and Ernst were being rediscovered after the rupture of World War II.5 Alloway notes that the simultaneous reception of newly minted American painters’ work, explicitly associated with “liberation,”6 and the work of better known European painters, who had made significant historical interventions in painting in ways often lost to the immediate postwar moment, colluded to conventionalize modernism, making of it something monumental, heroic, triumphal. The political demand made of culture, that it contribute to stability in peacetime along particular terms of peace (statecraft), required a hegemonic modernism rather than a radical, antagonistic, or experimental modernism, such as that of the interwar period: “Modern art became increasingly the product of giants instead of eccentrics, heroes instead of victims. The reappearance of the great names linked modern art and cultural prestige The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 95

in a way that had not occurred before.”7 Against this, the readymade and the monochrome stood not only as counter-triumphal tropes born of the interwar avant-gardes but as models that quietly conducted the contradictions born of the real movement of capitalist acceleration: the readymade allegorized subsumption, while the monochrome continued to surface as the historical burden of utopian totality against this form of division and reification. Yet it took until the era of Rauschenberg’s win for both to become normative in American practices (with the exception of Johns), while they formed the backbone of Italian painting. But again, it is the wider argument of this book that while isolated incidents may be cited—and cited all too often as exceptions rather than as exemplary—the elaboration of much culture, certainly of official culture, from 1949 through the 1960s was a systemic reflection of an equally systemic American cycle of capitalist accumulation, accomplished over much of Europe in which Italy acted as cornerstone. While the twin shadow cast by the recovery of prewar models of art making on the one hand and international financial relations articulated through cultural platforms during the Cold War on the other determined the conditions in which each artist strove to carve out his or her project, I will make my case through a close reading of Burri’s work alongside Rauschenberg’s. American painting became a foil against which autonomous practices could be elaborated in a variety of instances. While the Venice Biennale became a vehicle for the spectacular enactment of deliberate national and international interests, it was Milan, the seat of the miracolo italiano, that had already become the primary site of reception of American painting. In the words of American art critic Milton Gendel: “Milan is known to be more receptive to contemporary art than Rome, but it came as something of a surprise when all of Twombly’s difficult, American, wall-sized, white paintings were snatched up by the Milanese collectors at Naviglio’s recent exhibition of works. This was the latest indication of a growing trend toward including advanced examples of international art in private and public exhibitions. In fact, nothing like it has been seen since Whistler won the first prize at the Venice Biennale.”8 Tracking parallel with Cy Twombly’s early reception in Italy preceding his success in the United States, Rauschenberg’s work was an early sensation in Italy. Rauschenberg lived in Rome for about six months, from September 1952 to March 1953—steps away from Burri’s studio near the Spanish Steps. 96 Chapter Three

While both artists replaced oil on canvas with manipulated found materials, Burri’s material and procedural approach to collage was explicitly antithetical to Rauschenberg’s. Rauschenberg developed an idiom that would later open onto theories of the “postmodern,” cited as an exemplary instance of “the flatbed picture plane,” Leo Steinberg’s forceful description of a paradigmatic change in painting in which the painterly surface acts as a repository of dedifferentiated data; Burri elaborated a model of picture making insistent on a historicist praxis in which violent material rupture could articulate, but not claim to reflect, equally violent transition in the social order, brought to bear by seismic shifts at the source of economic, and therefore cultural, value. In Steinberg’s reading, Rauschenberg replaces the metaphor of the window that once undergirded painting with that of the data bank, the emergent cyberneticist model, in which the culture of consumption accretes and becomes a self-citing feedback mechanism. Indeed some Italian critics, Germano Celant for instance, retroactively mistook Rauschenberg for an avatar of pop. Beyond the dissolution of any last remainder of visual transparency enabled by the frame, the metaphorical window, each corpus develops a different understanding of what that dissolution may have meant, one accepting a new kind of transparency (to capital), the other a negation of both the historical model of the picture and its replacement by so much consumer culture data and detritus. This unconscious or conscious negation of the picture plane is born of the different relationship each had to the situation—the geopolitical and historical determination—in which he found himself. As I attempt to demonstrate here, the cultural logic of Rauschenberg’s practice is also that of a new regime of value put in place during the Marshall Plan era, a regime that Burri violently resisted.

The New Domestic Landscape A photograph of Burri, taken in 1969 by Aurelio Amendable in Pistoia, shows the artist physically engaged with a sheet of translucent plastic resembling what came to be known after World War II as Saran wrap: thin and easily manipulable sheets of polyvinylidene chloride discovered by the Dow Chemical Company in 1933 and broadly marketed for domestic usage a decade later. Burri began working with this material after he had exhausted a much thicker red opaque plastic. In the photograph, this material is acting as both a surface The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 97

and an environment. One of the two oval openings is roughly Burri’s height. The image suggests that the artist worked in a vertical register, unlike Pollock and also unlike Rauschenberg, who made the indeterminacy between horizontal and vertical planes of spatial orientation part of their very idiom, such as in Bed (1955), where the quilt denotes flatness parallel to the ground while the drips denote obedience to gravity. At this level of orientation, the work remains within a traditional anthropocentric framework, trapped in the grand claims of humanism with which painting was traditionally associated. But to the extent that the vertical plane of polyvinylidene chloride forms an architectural aperture, this would-be structure seems to ooze or collapse into something more like a cocoon or chrysalis. Is this what postwar reconstruction entailed? Liquefaction of cultural and historical expressions of perceptual access? Rebirth from a womb of plastic? Again, the work both invites and resists interpretation. Again, are we looking at a scene of disintegration? Or does this suggest a weird rebirth, a kind of anorganic vitalism prefiguring the cyborg? Or is this Burri’s painterly repurposing of a product specific to his generation, discovered accidentally by a chemical manufacturer and soon to take over the world, and therefore a way for the artist to carve out timeliness? Nonetheless, neither reflexively nor referentially, Burri initiates a means through which to articulate a long-standing history—both that of painting and that of painting as vehicle of history—that at once is disintegrating and is quickly absorbed into the seamless tautology of consumerism. The lynchpin is the choice of materials. Forging compositionality through symbiosis, something not new to the history of art (Schwitters’s environments come to mind, among other examples), Burri selected this material that had become suddenly ubiquitous during reconstruction and was soon to be a significant part of Italy’s own manufacturing sector. Italian plastics production not only was a part of the industrial belt in the North by the mid-1950s, alongside automobile manufacturing, but by the 1960s had come to ramify in Italy’s cultural sector in design products exported as part of the miracolo italiano. The Milanese design firm Kartell, for instance, which started as a company making car accessories in 1949, had transformed into a furniture manufacturer by 1963, gaining world renown for its pioneering use of plastic. The marriage between high-end design and this new material was both institutionalized and celebrated in design exhibitions worldwide, including the paradigmatic “Italy: The New Do-

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mestic Landscape” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1972, funded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Trade and numerous companies, including both Fiat and Olivetti.9 Well-known company names such as Arsenide, Boffi, Citroën, Kartell, and Pirelli are listed in the catalogue as “collaborators” in the exhibition.10 A feature of the show was Alberto Rosselli and Isae Hosoe’s mobile plastic houses, begun in the mid-1960s, while Rosselli was professor of industrial design at the Architectural School of the Politecnico, and funded by Fiat. In 1971 Giancarlo and Luigi Bicocchi and Roberto Monsani designed and fabricated interiors in plastic, including a kitchen, beds, shelving, ceilings, and walls.11 Burri manipulated various plastic composites through many methods of banal profanation, burning and exploding the slick manufactured substance. His decision to experiment with one destructive process after the other, from ripping to exploding, responds fairly starkly to the sudden eruption of an accelerated, world-market-oriented productivism dependent on both cheap labor and the laborer’s capacity to purchase everyday goods, which in turn unleashed the violent restructuring of everyday life to the tune of a newly accelerated commodity logic. Ruggero Cominotti, economist and director of Soris, a company established by Olivetti to conduct marketing surveys, writing for the exhibition catalogue for “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,” conceded as much but went a step further in noting the ways product manufacture interpellated a new form of subjectivity: In a market with several producers, a steady influx of new products, and an abundance of many similar wares successively offered to the bewildered consumer, a company carries out its programs through innovation and the condition basic to management—diversification. . . . Design becomes important to the extent that it is the principal instrument for renewing not only the outward form but also the functions of the products, and for establishing relations with users. Anyone who can read the signs can see in the products of the respective firms how each of them intends to contribute to changing the physical and human environment, and the pace with which it is prepared to improve this environment by means of products that offer a harmonious balance between function and appearance and winning consumer acceptance.

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That consumer acceptance rather than consumer desire or need should be addressed reflects something of the anxiety of compulsory consumerism that marked the era. Cominotti then notes that this consumer-oriented programmatism “encourages the urbanization of the masses expelled from agriculture,” going so far as to say that “the modern state has control to coerce and control the individual citizen and wields [the] influence of the economy to play a dominant role in society,” as though conceding a state-market collusion.12 Against this backdrop, in which industrially produced consumer goods assisted in shepherding the backward agricultural worker’s metamorphosis into the urban consumer, either proletariat or petit-bourgeois, much of the American culture being imported, irrespective of the artists’ intentions, was officially celebrated in the name of liberal democracy, transparency, and free trade. With his Plastiche, Burri reflected a set of conditions, a new everyday material landscape, and expressively raged against it, in manifest resistance to Marshall Plan imperialism, disclosing by abstraction the ghosts that haunted the process of European reconstruction.13 Combustione (1958) is made of acrylic and polyvinyl acetate and glue on cellophane. It offers no mere metaphorical image of an Italian phoenix rising from the ashes. It does not resemble anything outside of itself. It is at once an abject and insolent object, a thing. The clear quality of the plastic could function as a last nod to painting as a window onto a world, that metaphor of old master painting. Here the toxic and not-quite-transparent stuff produced by the miracolo italiano constitutes the window, replacing the transparency of the picture plane. Burri’s assault on the surface reminds us of its objecthood and, moreover, the vulnerability of the very materials of which economic miracles are made. The work is, quite literally, “a mess,” the squalid aftereffect of violence. Far from triumphant, the flecks of charred material stain the surface a pathetic brown. At the same time, the work “is transparent” to the process by which it was made. For the droops are contingent. Debris collects in and around an oval shape, suggesting the site of the explosion. There is nothing to glorify, certainly not Italian national pride. The pathos of the piece articulates a sense that the remains, traces, and vestiges do not necessarily redeem loss. Far from redemptive, the desublimatory act of which the work is an index evokes Benjamin’s “Angelus Novus,” the angel of history, blown forward by the winds of progress yet looking back to see nothing but the piling up of disaster as “wreckage upon wreck100 Chapter Three

age.” The angel would like to “awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise. . . . What we call progress is this storm.”14

Real Abstraction versus Aesthetic Categories Categorically abstract according to the discourse of “art,” Red Plastic’s surface is finally a concrete scene of contravention, of transgression. The surface resembles a skin, albeit inhuman, an immolated alien tissue marked by drooping dips and welling up into braids of scar like thickness. But the word “resemblance” suggests a mimetic logic, one that the work ultimately refuses. Here, skin need not denote nor even evoke the human or animal. Red Plastic resists association with the bioorganic. Brazenly synthetic, its industrial quality contributes simultaneously to a sense of vulgarity and a failure of any sense of identification or empathy. What ekphrasis could import to the prison-house of language this red membrane as anything but a perverse skin? Already, my description here constitutes an egregious abuse of language; an anthropocentric projection onto a work that rejects anthropocentrism through its entrenchment in abstraction or, folding the terms as the object suggests we do, an irreducible concretion. The term “abstraction” carries the lugubrious weight of prohibition: against figuration, representation, and metaphor. On the one hand the object does not conjugate with modernist forms of abstraction; it does not offer a logic that could be other to its basic material conditions. On the other hand it does not obey the received parameters of abstraction any more than it does figuration. It is a monstration, a monstrous demonstration, untamed by mediation and representation. As such, it complicates the abstraction/figuration paradigm, or rather, the ideology of abstraction versus referential pictorial communication that continued to diagram the twentieth century, a map in which materialist abstraction was scotomized.15 Plastiche carves out a third path, rejecting figuration and with it its associated modes of representation, including a reductive notion of metaphor. Plastiche doubly rejects prewar models of abstraction, associated by 1945 with naïve utopias founded on failed notions of universality. Burri’s practice, like that of his peers Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni, demonstrates the degree to which the economic reconstruction of Europe under the regime instituted The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 101

by the Marshall Plan materialized the worst elements of the values of both abstraction and figuration, and the evacuation of the particular—a brilliant, seemingly sacrificial strategy by which to subjugate the other under the rubric of universality, a universality become code for rampant capital.16 What language could clarify the consequential opacity of plastic, in the context of postwar Italian art and postwar Italy, a heretofore rarely seen material, now colonizing everyday life at the level of both production and consumption, revealing the tautology of subsumption as it ramifies on and beyond the factory floor? Critics in Burri’s day certainly had trouble finding appropriate terms and often tended toward the hyperbolic. The first critic to take Burri seriously, James Johnson Sweeny, writing in 1955, rhapsodized, “Beauty is unleashed from the wound, because Burri transforms rags into a metaphor for bleeding human flesh . . . [and] heals the wounds with the same evocative ability.”17 And here is the critic Toni Toniato in 1958: “Burri is in this excavation, in this open wound that reveals the unique possibility of suturing.”18 Art historian and critic Enrico Crispolti wrote that Burri’s work had an “organic vitality.”19 These terms make biography the interpretive matrix, effectively supplanting material and process. All three of these voices insist on redemption, productivity, recovery: healed wounds, organic vitality, suturing. Any acknowledgment of the undertow of unrest running contrary to the myth of seamless recovery seems to have had no available critical language, and to have been articulated only in the mute art object or in the roiling environment of workerist protest against exploitive productivism. Yet, despite the inaccessibility of terms with which to describe the cultural field as an etiology of acceleration in capital, and a rapidly reconfiguring symbiosis between this acceleration and Italy’s role as a satellite of American global interests, critics such as Maurizio Calvesi, Paolo Gilardi, and Celant nonetheless intuited the entwinement of this double movement (state and market) with an equally rapidly rising tide of American art, against which they posited their homegrown favorites as exemplars of humanist principles. Sadly, this did much to contribute to the air of premature obsolescence and irrelevance around many post–World War II Italian art practices. While problematically categorizing Burri as an existentialist, Calvesi shared Steinberg’s conviction that Rauschenberg articulated a specifically American ethos. Both critics expressed this with the anachronistic term “pop.”20 Celant saw Rauschenberg as addressing “the ambiguity between art and industry, between personal ex102 Chapter Three

pression and mass communication . . . celebrating . . . the objectified, iconic media phantasm . . . and give[ing] way to the iconography of commodity culture and of the industrial and mass media metropolis—in other words, to Pop art.”21 “Pop” became a catchphrase to describe the tendency in American painting to emphasize and celebrate the commodity. As many American critics, foremost among them Steinberg, had noted by 1952, American painting was rapidly accepting, if not openly embracing, an all-consuming world of consumer goods. Still the most trenchant discussion of exemplary iterations of 1950s painting, Steinberg’s essay “Other Criteria,” inaugurates the term “flatbed picture plane” to describe the way the artist’s canvases operated as a surface on which data were entered, objects accumulated, information received. These “data,” in turn, took its place in the circulation of value, in a logic of equivalence. Enormous storehouses of accretion, Rauschenberg’s works marked a shift in psychic address to the viewer. It enacted a new confrontation in which a ceaseless flow of things and information mirrored the mind as a dumping ground. For Steinberg, this change spoke to a specifically American ethos. “American art has always been about adapting art as transcendental experience, with its hint of elitism and ‘snob appeal, with pleasure, wickedness, finesse,’ to native values such as work and productivity.”22 These were the new criteria determining judgments about art made against a horizon along which American markets had gained world dominance. He said: “Avantgarde art, lately Americanized, is for the first time associated with big money. And all this because its occult aims and uncertain future have been successfully translated into homely terms”—have been domesticated.23 When asked how his work differed from the historical avant-garde and Dada, Rauschenberg openly conceded that his work was not about “negativism or nihilism,” suggesting that it might have an affirmative quality.24 However, Red Plastic and the handful of objects made by Burri, Manzoni, and Fontana with which it colludes dismantle the categories on which modernism (and by extension reactionary antimodernism, with its insistence on representation misunderstood as realism) depends. On the one hand the prohibitive asceticism of modernist abstraction inheres in Red Plastic, as does the critique of instrumental transparency characteristic of Dada.25 Chromatically reduced, Burri’s work in plastic results from new industrial “ready-made” materials and chance operations. Having fulfilled those basic criteria of modernism and the avant-garde, Plastic nonetheless also fails the object status of the The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 103

Duchampian readymade. Dissonant, it rejects the possibility of associations, only troubling its placement in a modernist genealogy at the moment that it insinuates itself there: the readymade, the objet trouvé, the monochrome, all now part of a constellation of dead ends.26 By contrast, Burri’s work offers a means through and by which to confront its moment in a way that is other than affirmative.

Monsters and Metaphors Big Red P n 18 is monstrous, but it is not a metaphorical monster; it will not be contained in a stable image or in the logic of mimesis that metaphor demands. Nothing is composed, fabricated, crafted, fashioned. There is no representation, no abstraction, no figuration, and no metaphorical displacement. Monstrosity is a function of an intrinsically inassimilable process: burning. First, Burri simply uses the material in its mute opacity, without the recuperation of art. He does not make an object of plastic. Burning, exploding, are methodologically violent; they not only take their place in a number of postwar strategies that critique authorial composition, they enact—rather than represent—destruction. The transition from generative to destructive chance— uncalculated violence—symptomatizes the radical difference between prewar and postwar practices overlooked by the “neo-avant-garde” argument that offers a narrative of empty repetition. Far from repeating Dada’s and Surrealism’s interest in creative chance, Burri’s engagement with chance signals a differentiation, a break. When the historical avant-garde used chance, it did so passively. Man Ray’s Dust Breeding and Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (1914) come to mind. While both works insist on the object status of the work and on this object’s taking its place in a system of general equivalence and exchange (see the introduction on subsumption and the readymade), both imagine chance as a critique of capitalist production and consumption, drawn from romantic obsolescence, one that the art historians like to think outpaces the instrumentality of capital, placing those objects all the more blithely on the gallery shelf.27 While gravity pulls and dust accumulates, neither blows up in toxic odor to compromise the work’s glamour. This problem of “dust” as a trope of gravity in the historical avant-garde also raises the problem of cubism, where we might locate the origin in the crisis of meaning in which reality is to be 104 Chapter Three

illusionistically delivered in representation. This doubt at the heart of representation is often located at the end of the nineteenth century, which is to say, the beginning of modernism and the death of realism. Rosalind Krauss has sketched the progression of this moment in which realism yielded to modernism and abstraction in rather broad strokes thus: There is no reason on the face of it why those events, the war of 1870, should have given rise to the outcome, the Paris Commune. Between a theory, which is supposed to account for the structure of a given occurrence, and the actual constellation of detail, which makes up that occurrence, there lies a disturbing opacity that nags at any writer who wants to analyze and record an event. And for the art historian, the phenomenon of cubism offers just this kind of resistance. If for the cubists the lines between representing the fullness of the freestanding volumetric object and its resemblance were progressively severed, this was a logical consequence, we are assured, of the superior access which consciousness has to reality, or of the process of picture making, or both. The first position is largely theoretical property. The second begins with Kahnweiler in 1915 but owes its elaboration to postmodern interpretation. If one comes to the paintings of Picasso and Braque armed with these theories, one has the sense of being rudderless in the actual encounter. It is as if a cloud of intellectual dust had gathered on these works, a cloud under which a glimpsed sensuous detail will suddenly disperse, if only in patches.28 Cubism is understood to mark the beginning of abstraction by generating heuristic uncertainty predicated on splitting subjective experience from objective empiricism at the level of perception and cognition. It is also understood to mark the entry of mass culture into the work of art through the material of newspaper.29 Burri returns to this tactic of enfolding historical specificity into the object via the materials that index industrialization’s degree of acceleration at a particular moment, in this case the exponential growth of Milan’s chemical industry. But this return is mediated through the negation of cubist collage. While cubist collage is essentially compositional, the acts of burning and exploding the materials drawn from an updated industrial sector open onto destructive chance. In short, “theoretical property” is precisely what Burri is resisting. He at once revives and reverses the radical logic of cubist collage, while The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 105

Rauschenberg assimilates it, or rather, given historical conditions in which the market and academe converge, conventionalizes it.

Chance Operations: Demystification and Remystification Chance operations symptomatize a larger, shared, problem set for artists in Italy after World War II. Part of a polyvocal conversation around violence and chance, alongside Lucio Fontana’s slashes and Mimmo Rotella’s décollage, Burri’s use of red plastic enters into dialogue with the work of the much younger artist Piero Manzoni, who had begun working with red balloons in 1959. This material and procedural, rather than symbolic, “monstrosity” is a protest against what Burri’s longtime friend the critic Maurizio Calvesi described as “a consumer society and technocracy.” Calvesi described Burri’s project as “a defiance to American paternalism and the Italy of the Sciuscià [de Sica’s Shoeshine, 1946] of a population debased and stopping at nothing to make ends meet . . . a solitary, angry nation—conquered, reduced to the status of colony, relegated to the third world.”30 Calvesi’s statement strikes a note of hypocrisy. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Italy was a colonialist power, occupying Libya, annexing Eritrea and Somalia, and attempting to occupy parts of Ethiopia.31 Calvesi disavows Italy’s fascist empire and reassigns agents of colonization to America, much as his colleague Fontana displaced the burden of guilt for genocide from Europe to America, emphasizing Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the endpoint of humanity and failing to mention the Shoah, which occurred closer to home.32 But Calvesi’s image of Italy as a third world colony makes sense from another perspective. It speaks to a new form of colonization emerging in the aftermath of World War II in which forms of violence were shifting from military occupation to monetization under the rubric of liberation: a miracolo italiano that was not so different from a Five-Year Plan, albeit diffuse and organized under the logic of democratic liberty—the Marshall Plan. Factum I and Factum II enact the procedural connection between iterability and subsumption in manufacture on the factory floor. They rehearse the supersession of previous forms of skilled making by mechanical repetition, auguring the era of eventual digital reproducibility. Factum I and Factum II are seemingly identical. The numbers assigned to each suggest a sequence, a re106 Chapter Three

lationship of original to copy, although the artist worked on both throughout 1957. Yet Factum I and Factum II, too sophisticated to participate in a mythical notion of originality that continued to assure value on the market, despite many avant-gardist challenges to the role “originality” played in value assignation, continued the Dadaist project of further challenging both originality and its impossibility in historically accurate matrices of object production. The two works include industrially produced calendar pages and photographs, both a nod to mechanical reproducibility. At the same time, while the cells of the calendar are morphologically identical, they signify the singular. A day can never repeat. The red, black, and gray paint marks make tenuous the line between identity and difference. The word “factum” denotes a statement of facts offered in a legal context, but its strident announcement of empirical veracity is also overshadowed by the idea of a memorial. But Rauschenberg’s memorial recognizes the absurdity of any such notion of authenticity. It replaces this with a particular understanding of simulacral representation. The logic of production evoked by Factum I and Factum II is not one in which locating the conditions for the possibility of agency, expression, and articulation are at stake. Nor does it evoke a terrain where struggle is a necessary precondition of any form of mark-making. Rather than a world in ruin, a landscape of base material evidencing historical conditions within which agency might be relocated through antagonism, as in Burri’s practice, Rauschenberg’s surface offers an accretion of empirical facts. While these empirical data say much about Rauschenberg’s anxiety around the extent to which he found influence in Burri’s work, it says nothing about the artists’ respective projects or their formal, material, and procedural differences. In the search for representational substance in the all-consuming world of goods that Burri and Rauschenberg shared, Burri’s materialism defies endless accretion and artificial plenitude, the opposite of Rauschenberg’s flatbed picture plane as the site of infinite accumulation.33 Striking, for this discussion, is the way Rauschenberg arrived at an idiom homologous with accelerated industrial manufacture while residing in Italy for six months some steps away from Burri’s studio near the Piazza di Spagna. In 1953, the year he moved to Italy, Rauschenberg had made clear his response to the premises of dominant art practices, notably abstract expressionism, with a striking gesture. Erased de Kooning is constituted of the erasure of a drawing that his friend Willem de Kooning had made and given him. The white matrix The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 107

of the surface as a wasteland, a repository of anything and everything, asserts its primacy over the pompous and ultimately arbitrary mark. While this argument does not hinge on establishing qualitative originality or even temporal primacy, Rauschenberg’s symptomatic defensive posture toward Burri might be worth nothing. Among Roman critics, and more broadly in discourse on art of the 1950s in Italy, many of the breakthroughs of Rauschenberg’s career were seen as derivative of Burri’s work. Rauschenberg acknowledged the importance of Burri’s practice in the early 1990s in a discussion about the 1950s with Walter Hopps.34 Safely canonized, with many a retrospective behind him, Rauschenberg cited his visits to the Italian artist’s studio as crucial for the development of his Combines. And Rauschenberg’s own exploration of base materialism, Dirt Painting (for John Cage) does indeed postdate those influential studio visits. But while Rauschenberg seemed to grasp that Burri’s practice was groundbreaking in its critique of abstract expressionism, authorial genius, presence, and individualism, what may have been lost in Burri’s practice is the other side of the dialectic: the possibility that such an evaluation could carry the burden of history or politics, let alone be grounded on a horizon of world-historical crisis and collective trauma. Burri, by contrast, openly recounted visits that Rauschenberg and Twombly made to his studio.35 Calvesi and Celant have great stakes in claiming that Burri’s practice motivated Rauschenberg’s, not only given the sparring for a mythological originality but also because of the geopolitical circumstances of reconstruction culture.36 However, these two critics’ interests and agendas aside, the work that both artists produced in the early 1950s seems to suggest there may be something to these claims. Burri exhibited his Black Paintings and Mold Series at the Galleria dell’ Obelisco in January 1952. Rauschenberg’s Black Paintings date to late 1952, 1953, and 1954. Both Rauschenberg and Burri exhibited at the Stable Gallery, in New York, Rauschenberg in September and October and Burri in November 1953. Rauschenberg photographed the latter installation.37 Yet Burri was shrewdly aware that the materials of that political and economic matrix were all that were left through which articulation might be possible. I have attempted to demonstrate, through a reading of Factum I and Factum II, that although Rauschenberg would seem to have developed a radically decentered model of practice through chance operations, accretion, and repetition, his idiom quickly calcified as myth, thereby papering over the stakes in the way it communicated at a particular historical conjuncture. In 108 Chapter Three

other words, while it was supposedly about freedom from categories inscribed by history, it in fact elaborated a particular historical position that was very much part of the hegemony of American ascendency, coded as “freedom from ideology.” This rhetoric of freedom participates in the logic and economy of myth. In the text “Myth Today,” Barthes defines myth as a type of speech and a form of message conveyance.38 This “type” or “form” of communication is described by a second degree or second order of signification that occludes the first, on which it is founded. “Mythical speech is made of a material that has already been worked on so as to make it suitable for communication: it is because all of the materials of myth (whether it be pictorial or written) presuppose a signifying consciousness, that one can reason about them while discounting their substance.” Here, myth is founded on repetition, a form of iteration that masks a previous production of signification in order to conjure other levels of meaning, in the absence of the need for tracing the steps that constitute that meaning. “The meaning loses its value but keeps its life, from which the form of the myth will draw its nourishment.” Barthes refers to myth as a “stolen language” and a “depoliticized speech.” Barthes’s project was to examine the valence a particular cultural product had for the society in which it was distributed, a valence that was often utterly unrelated to its concrete denotative meaning and nonetheless came to exceed the denotative operation of the sign, resulting in the assumption that its secondary, or connotative, import was a given, natural. Thus, through Barthes’s structuralist language, in which “myth is a type of speech, a system of communication, a message,” Greta Garbo’s well-known face is no longer a physiognomic body-part, or even an object, but rather the representation of ideality, of idea, something that made of her a system of communication of something other than her own immediate acting: a myth. Barthes chose as his own objects of inquiry popular sports, the faces of actresses, advertisements, and other elements of mass culture. Myth as a form, as a particular figure structuring communication, became the condition through which critics reconsidered the many contradictions characterizing Rauschenberg’s reception and its relationship to Italian artists. Myth, or the assignation of specific fictional and symbolic value to contradictory, concrete material determinations, reestablished the value and relevance of abstract painting in the fifties, while simultaneously dissipating the critical functions that abstract painting had served in the interwar years when avantThe Political Aesthetics of Opacity 109

garde practices proliferated. The new particular kind of “value” that was attached to Rauschenberg’s work was a result of its deracination of historicist understanding of painting. Rauschenberg’s Factum I and Factum II, the outcome of a painterly practice divesting painting of its last traces of agency in favor of a cumulative anomie as the “creative” principle making a work possible, crystallize the many contradictions characterizing abstractions: deferral to the commodity on the one hand and to currency on the other. Against this horizon, Calvesi’s characterization of Burri’s work as “defiance of American paternalism” also might be extended to its resistance to the task of figuration, which has asked of it that it be constructive or productive, that it produce, at the very least, a meaning in a recognizable chain of value. At worst, in that chain of value, Burri’s work was described as offering “healing” and “organic vitality.” Defiance against the Marshall Plan, and its insidious forms of financial colonialism disguised as aid, required a demonstrative tactic outside the referential limits of both figuration’s and abstraction’s risky association with decoration and design.39 Material as historical metonomy: all the stuff spreading across Italy and Europe as a result of the Marshall Plan, the burlap sacks flown in containing food and later the flood of plastic and plastic goods and of yet more goods wrapped in this plastic. This response, as I have tried to argue, involves something other than reflection, mimesis, or metaphor understood as a form of copy. Plastiche represents, in the proper sense of representation, nothing, or rather, the failure of signification; the signifier remains in circulation, connoting, among other things, plastic, skin, membrane, organ tissue, and garbage. The base material of which the works are constituted is only ever that material—banal and ubiquitous, encircling the subject as a result of a set of historical and political conditions, emptied of the lyrical potential of metaphor. In other words, Plastiche does not “represent,” as Calvesi suggests, the tsunami of American goods reconstituting everyday life in Italy; instead, Plastiche are the very stuff of the reconstruction, the new fabric of a new world order. They are monstrous matter, alien, inassimilable. However, while it can be contained by neither reference nor form, this materiality begins to insinuate intangible connotations: reconstruction. A contradictory associative succession results: insofar as Burri’s plastics are sometimes diaphanous tissue, they remind the viewer, like ghosts, of the losses disavowed by reconstruction, but they are also haunted by modernism and its failure. At the same time, they are crassly 110 Chapter Three

empirically present. They achieve this in a strictly mute register yet continue to evoke so many associations by the overdeterminations of the significations they refuse.

Monstrosity and Catachresis Burri’s work resists interpretation because it functions as catachresis—as a form of symbolization that principally calls attention to and subverts the process of symbolization. Another name for catachresis is “abuse,” and in the history of rhetoric it has sometimes been described as an “abuse of words.” It is an awkward and illogical figure of speech, and as such, “something monstrous lurks in the most innocent of catachreses: when one speaks of the legs of a table or the face of a mountain, catachresis is already turning into prosopopoeia and one begins to perceive a world of potential ghosts and monsters.”40 Paul de Man here chases the limits and possibilities of rhetoric in constituting phenomena. He notes: Metaphors, tropes, and figural language in general have been a perennial problem and, at times, a recognized source of embarrassment for philosophical discourse and, by extension, for all discursive uses of language. It appears that philosophy either has to give up its own constitutive claims to rigor in order to come to terms with the figurality of its language or that it has to free itself from figuration altogether. And if the latter is considered impossible, philosophy could at least learn to control figuration by keeping it, so to speak, in its place, by delimiting the boundaries of its influence and thus restricting the epistemological damage that it may cause.41 The disruptive potential of figuration thus “stands behind recurrent efforts to map out the distinctions between philosophical, scientific, theological, and poetic discourse”;42 it sabotages discourse every time. Although much of Burri’s most striking and enigmatic work consists of plastic, most of the literature on his work in English focuses exclusively on his use of burlap sacks, arranged by ripping some pieces and stitching others. In fact, none of Burri’s commentators from the 1950s to the present explicitly addresses the plastics. There is one striking exception. Combustione Plastica (1964) graces the cover of one of the more convincing arguments that The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 111

aim to dismantle modernism: Rosalind Krauss’s and Yve-Alain Bois’s Formless: A User’s Guide, which for many American viewers was an introduction to Burri’s work. Occasioned by the exhibit Informe at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1997, which included Burri’s plastics from the center’s collection, this catalogue has become an icon in its own right. Premised on Bataille’s term “informe” to express resistance to structure, form, symbolization, and meaning, Krauss’s and Bois’s use of the concept was of tremendous magnitude because of the way it functioned, on a metalevel, to rethink art and art history from a methodological vantage.43 Because Bataille insisted that the formless is an operation rather than a stable phenomenon, Krauss and Bois argue that the informe allowed the discipline to think outside of the centuries-old paralyzing form-versus-content impasse, dating back at least to Hegel’s response to Kant’s Critique of Judgment, if not to the work of Alexander Baumgarten and other predecessors.44 Although Burri’s Combustione appears on the cover of the celebrated catalogue, Bois devotes only one full paragraph to it in the text. He says: “Demolishing the myth of plastic as an infinitely transposable substance, as an alchemical miracle by burning it, Burri presented it as ‘wholly other.’ ” The “other” to which the author refers is Bataillean base materialism: what resists metaphorical displacement, what is too regressive and low to enter the economy of language or of form.45 Bois argues that by contrast, Burri’s previous and subsequent work succumbed to the “transposed fetishism” of metaphor. The early 1960s thus are said to mark a privileged moment in Burri’s otherwise pitifully metaphorical and therefore representational oeuvre, which Bois calls an “about face.”46 Ironically, this gesture toward what resists metaphorical displacement is itself enabled by a return of the repressed figurality that it aspires to overcome. Bataille tells us that the formless, unable to be itself symbolized, is like a wad of spit or a spider crushed underfoot. Bois’s quick trajectory from adulation to dismissal of Burri’s work is itself a symptom of the same aporia, an aporia on which modernism, the avant-garde, and neo-avant-garde are founded: the repression of and reliance on metaphoric transposition. This aporia is the foundation of the binary between figuration and abstraction and, by extension, between form and content, that the authors seek to overcome. Krauss and Bois thus unwittingly return to the autonomous purity they seek to dismantle. By

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contrast, recall that Burri does not use plastic to compose or produce objects. He damages material. Burri’s work complicates the role of metaphor, repositioning what metaphor means and how it works. The conditions, both artistic and political, in which and with which Burri worked contribute to a third term beyond the suppression of or the use of metaphor. Burri’s base plastic reminds us, in its ineffability, that no material or trace, be it the signifier, the painterly grapheme, or a pile of burned plastic, is free of connotation, even in the most rigorous of disciplines. Plastiche is key here, for far from departing from Burri’s “transposed” metaphors to base materialism, they suggest that neither a purely metaphorical and therefore reflective logic nor the ironic purity—pure in its formalist autonomy—of so-called base materialism adequately saturate the operation that Plastiche sets into motion.47 Metaphor is symbolic, but also procedural. Burri’s materials and procedures enact inappropriate metaphors: catachreses. In other words, they enact desublimation of the monstrous power of the figure as an act of protest. Burri’s process is “monstrous” in this powerful sense: lacerating, immolating, to generate the work, much as language is procedurally monstrous, drawing into conceptualization what cannot be.

Emphasis, Catachresis, and Abstraction Emphasis, or the relationship between things and words, is thus at the core of Burri’s project. However, Burri was interested in things, not words. Unlike his peers Enrico Castellani, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, and Carla Accardi, among others, Burri was not given to manifesto writing, and his name appears only on one drafted in 1951, early in his career, by Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla, and Mario Ballocco titled “Manifesto del gruppo Origine.”48 This text concerns itself with distinguishing between different kinds of “nonfiguration.” It charges prewar abstraction with being a foregone conclusion, tending by 1950 to empty decoration. This claim is not original to this manifesto. It echoes many of the more prominent artists’ texts of the Italian postwar era, from Castellani’s texts in Piero Manzoni’s magazine Azimuth, in which abstraction is called an “empty semanticity,” to Fontana’s “Technical Manifestoes of Spatialism” and “Manifesto of the Spatialist Movement for Television.”49 Castellani called abstraction a “formula”; “a vacuous end in itself.”50 Against

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what they called “this mannerist complacency,” Gruppo Origine hoped to reinvest what they called “nonfiguration” with “the morally most valid starting point.” Strikingly, they did not call for a return to figuration, which was seen as too tainted by fascism. However, what this “moral starting point” might consist of remains an enigma. Burri signed his name to this document, which asserts the possibility of centered subjectivity anchored in the deep recesses of preconscious authenticity, but his work denies those sources of plenitude. As a result, interpretation of Burri’s work, especially his use of enigmatic materials composing works about which the discourse cannot agree (are they painting, collage? abstraction, figuration, antifiguration?) cannot simply lean on the crutch of what he wrote about it. The question of materiality both dominates and complicates a critical discussion of Burri’s production, and it is linked to the question of signification in general—ekphrasis indeed, but writ large. In the artist’s only independent statement on his work, frequently cited in the rather scarce literature, Burri blows up his own claims via a striking abuse of language: “Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting. It is an irreducible presence that refuses to be converted into any other form of expression. It is a presence both imminent and active. This is what it stands for: to exist so as to signify and to exist so as to paint.”51 This passage amounts to one long catachresis that enacts its own self-destruction. Why else use words to establish their inadequacy? Why else convert the purportedly inconvertible, the irreducibly material, and so transparently? And then why else reverse the terms and say that the work, beyond mere convertibility, stands for, indeed signifies, something else? In other words—and indeed, in yet more words—why else impute to works that are ostensibly outside the economy of the signifier the claim that they exist “to signify”? Burri explicitly uses the word “signify.” The work refuses the conversion of the material “into any other form of expression,” yet conversion still happens. Here, it happens in the logic of translation, the substitution first of words for things and then of words about ideas for words about things. Materiality thus evaporates into abstraction at the very moment of this insistence on its irreducible presence in a manifestation of catachresis, the abuse of language, via an aporetic discourse on what cannot be said. But catachresis can also operate in the object-world. The commodities flooding Italy under the Marshall Plan, intended to at once fill the void suf114 Chapter Three

fered by the war and keep communism at bay, share a logic that has the inevitable potential of the signifier to slide into monstrosity. Both are forms of mediation determining value. Abstraction threatens both, and both are vulnerable to infinite regress into meaninglessness and arbitrariness. As Thomas Keenan has argued in Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics, Marx not only recognized the fundamentally abstract nature of the commodity but also theorized its potential slippage into a monstrous condition similar to that of language, a kind of object catachresis.52 The famous example of the commodity par excellence, the table in Capital that “not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities . . . stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will,”53 itself suggests either a lapse in rigor in Marx’s otherwise rigorous explanation or the inevitable slide into prosopopeia of which de Man spoke. Keenan registers Marx’s self-awareness of this condition. Capital’s opening “continues, after a justification hinging on the ‘power of abstraction’ . . . by not quite excusing itself from its own indictment.”54 In other words, Marx warns that the theory of the commodity form falls prey to the nature of the commodity itself: abstraction. And this abstraction, in turn, hinges on catachresis, the awkward metaphor, circular in logic. “The matter at issue is the appearance or self-announcement of something as something else, the rhetorical structure of simile or metaphor.” The first two lines of Capital mention “a monstrous collection of commodities, the single commodity as its elemental form.”55 At first it is unclear what makes the commodity, an inert object, monstrous. Keenan notes that Marx uses the same phrase, “a monstrous collection,” more than once. This repetition evidences “the structural condition of words—they can be reproduced, mindlessly and mechanically reproduced—[a reproduction] which acts as if they were nothing but commodities: to be accumulated, moved and removed to and from contexts, delayed and relayed between texts only to be grafted or inserted into some other text, transferred like property or a mechanical limb, a forearm . . . on a monster.”56 Monstrosity thus is procedural, an operation, rather than a static form or figure. It has to do with a transposition that is of necessity violent. The materiality of the object, its sensuality and use value, its plenitude, is evacuated in exchange and substitution. Through the mediation of currency, structural in The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 115

its very existence, the object becomes nothing but a placeholder for another object in an endless chain of substitutions. It suggests its own “vacancy.” Its singular characteristics are obscured by its relocation. This transposition or “effacement” is the object of Marx’s query. “Here capital meets its structuring question, the question of how exchange, as such, is possible. How can a system—and doing this defines an economic system—put radically different things in relation to one another when they have nothing in common?”57 Things, like words, in the most rigorous of systems are susceptible to irrationality. This irrationality is far from neutral, for in the process of exchange, itself nothing other than a process of abstraction, a trace or vestige of the displaced remains. Abstraction itself is neither metaphor nor catachresis but imposes both. Like metaphor, in the crossing of properties, both the gravity of the word and the solidity of the object are compromised. However, there is a remainder in this operation of reduction and exchange: human labor. This disruption is the point of Burri’s Plastiche. The “Manifesto del gruppo Origine” successfully describes the central aspect of Burri’s plastic work: chromatic reduction. In keeping with the question of a search for the proper register in which to anchor experience, in Burri’s Plastiche, both the early and late iterations, he is working within the rigorous logic of one of modernism’s most prohibitive tropes: the monochrome. Most of his works done in plastic share with both Fontana and Manzoni’s projects a revivification and complication of that modernist trope. Beginning in 1921, when Rodchenko declared the end of painting by presenting Pure Red Color, Pure Yellow Color, Pure Blue Color (1921), the monochrome claimed to demystify a long-standing aristocratic practice appropriated by the bourgeoisie by reducing painting to its basic constituent characteristics in order to make, in Brechtian fashion, its creation available to all. Despite this work’s radicalism, it still evidenced faith in the notion of pure color, which by 1921, however, no longer existed, given the manufacture of industrial pigment. Burri, like Duchamp before him, recognized this and debased color: the red of his Plastiche derives from the industrial manufacture of the plastic rather than from the artistic application of pigment. He eventually drives that reduction further still by using achromatic plastic. In this sense, Plastiche pays perverse homage to the readymade. The material is purchased rather than handcrafted or hand-composed. While burning the surface does mediate the readymade plastic, it does not introduce artisanal skill either. If anything, the contingency and element of chance generative of 116 Chapter Three

the final work recalls Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (1913). Duchamp took three one-meter lengths of string and dropped them from a meter’s height, letting chance and gravity play their own part in the final configuration of the strings on the floor, which he then recorded by using their outlines to carve wooden structures that he called the “stoppages,” thereby fixing chance into static form. But the critical impact of Three Standard Stoppages is the recognition that, contrary to what Gruppo Origine and so many artists had and have to say, the work is determined and limited by parameters outside the artist’s agency, beyond any such human assertion located in the deep recesses of the unconscious. The stoppages, far from standard, result from the vicissitudes and conditions outside the artist’s conscious control. That does not, however, neutralize their susceptibility to associative interpretation.58 As mentioned earlier, the bulk of scholarship on Burri situates his oeuvre as simply metaphoric, reflecting historical conditions, that is, stitching a broken Italy. Suture, Burri’s primary strategy in lieu of mark making, or as a form of mark making, has been understood through the lens of biography as a rerouted application of his primary training as a doctor. He began to paint while a prisoner of war in Texas, but he earned an MD degree from the University of Perugia in 1940, prior to serving in the military. And his most frequent commentators, foremost among them Maurizio Calvesi, see his time in prison as, far from an exemplary experience of wartime, a shortcoming of which to feel ashamed. For Calvesi, having missed the events of July 25, 1943, when Mussolini fell, the German occupation, and the resistance meant that Burri returned “wanting to make good his losses.”59 That origin narrative of loss and recuperation haunts the discussion of Burri’s work; his objects are described as “wounds” and “burns.” Calvesi, who was Burri’s close friend from 1958 on, says that “the rips and stitches came more and more to resemble wounds sewn up in real flesh, and the materials were subject to infinite lacerations and unraveling.” Burri’s medical training thus informed, consciously or otherwise, the descriptive and critical verbal circumscriptions of the work as much, if not more, than the work itself. Thus, “the act of lacerating, cauterizing, opening up the wound, piercing it, stitching it back together with the needle, was integrated in the overall tension of artistic composition.” It was as though Burri continued his medical practice, transposing it, as Bois would have it, onto inanimate recipients of his expertise. Celant, the impresario of postwar Italian art, has argued, as late as 2008, The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 117

that “in the years after the tragedy of World War II, the material he dealt with was in torment. Reflecting on itself, it reflected its wounds.”60 Celant’s comment symptomatizes not only the critic’s own ambivalence, but the continuing, age-old issue of ekphrasis in art history. Celant would like the work to tell a story that reflects a particular narrative of social and historical events—the trauma of Italy during the war and the stitching up of the wounded body politic afterward. The burlap and plastic become so much barely mediated representation of skin burned, cut, and stitched. Yet Celant would also like the work to be self-reflexive, existing in a state of aesthetic autonomy guaranteeing its value as modern art, not “merely” as mirror of Italy in the 1960s.61 Plastiche, however, tells a different story, one that performs the problematic of all forms of figuration and of all ekphrastic impulses in interpretation— a story that both resists and expects ekphrasis. With it, Burri’s work forges a historically specific practice through his willful choice of materials and procedures that trouble the operative paradigms of modernism as well as the post– World War II American challenge to modernism. As such, Burri carves out a seemingly impossible position, one of a double negation that refuses to retrench into modernism while equally rejecting the circulatory logic of interchangeability operative in Factum I and Factum II, works that metonymically stand in for the most advanced American art of the time. While refusing the logic of transposition, transparency, and equivalence characteristic of the work crossing the Atlantic and becoming culturally hegemonic, Burri’s process recognizes the “ghosts,” the disposed of, that haunt the process of European reconstruction.

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FOUR “WE WANT TO ORGANICIZE DISINTEGRATION”

An Ideology is always bourgeois. Mario Tronti, Operaio e Capitale (1966) We want to organicize disintegration. In a disintegrated world, we want to be able to discover and reveal to ourselves the inner structures . . . to highlight each in its most authentic seed. Piero Manzoni, Guido Biasi, Mario Corlucci, Ettore Sordini, and Angelo Verga, “For An Organic Painting” (1957) The canvas will no longer be an arid invention devoid of meaning, the utopia of an aesthetic order . . . the folly of pure idealism without concrete human origin, or an impersonal program whose sole and squalid presence resides in the creation of a manner. Rather, it will be a living flesh, direct and scalding. Piero Manzoni et al., Manifesto Del Albisola Marina (1957)

The words of Piero Manzoni (alongside his collaborators and cosignatories) in 1957 crystallize a crisis of artistic form and content which traverses roughly two decades of art production in Europe in relation to historical economic and cultural restructuring of the period—the golden years of the Economic Miracle, 1949–1970. The problem, salient to the status of the art object during this period, remains constant: the dissonance between available material processes and the historically determined system that had come to undergird

the question of formalization necessary to art. In this case the specific form of capitalist subsumption particular to the miracolo italiano, and the way it impinged on artistic process at the most fundamental granular level, reconfigured the historical burden of (utopian) modernism and the avant-gardes. The latter not only had to be excavated and recovered in any cultural attempt to forge a timely relationship to the present, as I’ve explored in the previous chapters, but were already set into tension with the reception of new models of cultural production coded as American and seen as symptomatic of the processes of subsumption that were newly configuring what it took to make art. The miracolo italiano, which we might understand as part of the American cycle of accumulation—in keeping with this book’s debt to Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century—and its particular texture of contradiction as it was consolidated in Italy, provided the conditions for new ways of thinking about symbolic and actual material resistance. These new forms of ultimately political antagonism were symptomatized first in artistic and cultural struggle with material and form between 1947 and 1961 when sabotage and invisible forms of autonomous agency (artists’ and workers’) at the level of production became a predominant operative trope, just as they would become actualized political operations on and off the factory floor in the civil unrest that was ultimately class war in Italy in the sixties and seventies. Manzoni’s preoccupation with surplus productive “dead” labor was thematically and procedurally consistent throughout his brief project, from his early student paper “The Economy of the Executioner,” in which he addressed the totalizing mania of production shared by Stalinist state communism and American capitalism alike, to the strongest instances of his fully developed practice in works such as Linea (1959–1961; figs. 4.1–4.3), Living Sculpture (1961; see fig. 4.6), Achrome (with Breadrolls) (1959–1961; see pl. 2), and Merda D’Artista (Artist’s Shit) (see fig. 4.5). These works articulate artistic struggle for autonomy within and against the accelerated machinery of official culture.1 In them, Manzoni explicitly defined reification as a function of changes in the matrix of production that inevitably conditioned the possibility of art making and therefore, of authorship. Artistic questions such as gesture, task, mark making, and “autonomy” were understood to be contingent on subsumption on the factory floor. Numerous photographs of Manzoni working as though the studio were indeed a factory might demonstrate his preoccupation with the problem on a purely thematic level—he took his work to a factory in Milan 120 Chapter Four

FIGURE 4.1. Piero Manzoni, Linea, 1961. Estate of Piero Manzoni, SODRAC (2014).

to generate lines that he then put in cans. This engagement moves past thematic appearances—in contrast to that of minimalist artist Robert Morris, as I will show. The problem of subsumption is addressed in Manzoni’s oeuvre procedurally rather than iconographically. At the same time, there is something tragic about his timing; his work turns to problems of surplus production and reification at the very moment when those concerns came to be seen as less relevant than the heterogeneity of an unemployed or subproletarian demographic unaffected by the disciplinary regularity of the factory floor and the “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 121

FIGURE 4.2. Piero Manzoni, Line of 7200 Meters Long (photograph of Manzoni on assembly line). Estate of Piero Manzoni, SODRAC (2014).

FIGURE 4.3. Piero Manzoni, Linea, 1959. Estate of Piero Manzoni, SODRAC (2014).

wage form—a demographic symptomatic of historical changes in production and circulation variously referred to as post-Fordism and globalization and discussed in the rubric of “multitude” by Antonio Negri and others. In this, his practice clearly augured incipient yet radical changes in the way workers, students, and separatist leftists critical of the collusion among vehicles of immiseration on the one hand and state management on the other (the factory, the state, the union, the party) were beginning to reformulate what autonomy (collective and individual) might look like and what forms one might use to approach it both individually and collectively. In 1961, in Living Sculpture (see fig. 4.6), Manzoni wrote “Manzoni, 1961” above the small of a (female) model’s back. Part of his Live Sculpture series of 1961, this gesture staged the body, in part or whole, as the work of art. In an exposure of the authorial apparatus’s ultimate support, the labor of invisible and subordinate others, mostly women, from whom value is extracted and accumulated to enable the author-function, Manzoni channeled a set of strategies that situated the historically established tropes of art (the model, the artist, the nude) in the fabric of mid-twentieth century subsumption to ask whence ultimate agency derived in the situating of the final “work.” In this he was prescient of the generation to come who theorized the embodied source of value in sites of labor not immediately available to view, those “hidden abodes” on and off the factory floor yet determined by the logic of the factory floor. As I will explore, Living Sculpture takes its place in the trajectory of Manzoni’s work at a point after he had fully exhausted his investigation of the way the work of art is a mediated yet symptomatic function of hidden historical totality (Jameson’s evocation of “absent cause”) otherwise inscribed in anonymous labor, notably in Linea. After he had explored the social basis— immiseration—subtending even the art work, which would preserve something of the exceptional character of agency and authorship despite its being also exemplary of the commodity, as argued by Adorno in Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, the degree to which occluded labor becomes the very condition for the possibility of the work became the object of Manzoni’s uncannily prescient analysis. Here, augured by Living Sculpture, gender, too, would become a central theme in the eventual elaboration of Operaismo or Workerism, culminating in ways of thinking about labor as silently and invisibly operative in a larger social totality structuring identity and difference in the service of the capitalist reproduction of class, which is to say, of living “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 123

labor (workers still able to work, as opposed to the dead labor and social conditions forged around the extraction of labor already congealed in the commodity object). In Living Sculpture the human body appears literally. This signals the degree to which Manzoni explicitly rejected metaphor and other such traditional mediations in order to demonstrate reification as a concrete and totalizing social process, roiling under and determining “representation.” If the art “work” is the cultural product sealed by the artist’s signature, a seal denoting the object’s placement as property as much as its discursive legitimacy, ready to begin its journey in a field of equivalence while simultaneously maintaining a “silverlining” of exceptional status gratis the signature (again, the art as exemplary yet exceptional to the commodity form), Manzoni asks after the origin of this contradiction between equivalence and exemption that complicates the art object’s social and market value. Notable here is the extent to which property is shown to precede exchange, to be forged at the level of production itself. In this context, Manzoni acknowledges the condition of the body within the cultural conventions and codes historically determining his condition. He understands this body foremost as a nude, partaking in the institutionalized form of the arranged body. For the first time in Manzoni’s oeuvre, the body is articulated vertically, supported by an anthropomorphic armature—formed. The single instance in which the body appears reveals it as fully expropriated and homogenized in a way that acknowledges at once the historical parameters of art making and the extent to which those parameters had come to be transformed by a subsequent formation of history. The nude is reconstituted by the twentieth-century commodity. In manifest, almost caricatured, quotation of the category of the nude, a woman sits poised on a base, her arm held in a mannered pose. Her face is turned tensely; every hair on her head holds its place in an equally mannered hairdo, while a sheet over her lower torso recalls classical statuary, wherein the depiction of fabric allowed the artists to show off their skill at trompe l’oeil methods. “Manzoni, 1961” is signed above the side of her torso. Obviously, she is naked. But despite the facticity of her literal nakedness, articulated thus in accordance with the formal logic of classicism and bearing an artist’s signature on her skin, she becomes a nude, a cultural template. The contradiction at the level of this status (nude or naked) already belies the

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contradiction of the work of art in capitalism, a set of contradictions already fundamental to the opening of modernism with Manet’s Olympia of 1863. Needless to say, Manzoni is evoking the history of the nude from its classical origins through the twentieth century. The language of the classical pose, mapped onto and internalized by the model’s body, becomes an armature equivalent to this woman’s native skeletal system. It is critical to note, at this juncture, that the human body was also understood as a system, according to the definition of body that Broodthaers had articulated. Broodthaers’s “body” had surfaced as excess/lack vis-à-vis armature. The vertical human body functions as a site of the historically determined entwinement of the two terms, of corporeal excess and lack in relation to code. More fundamentally, given the range of Manzoni’s concerns situated in lockstep with historical time, with the historicity of capital, Living Sculpture demonstrates the role of the female body as the originary site of reification, of the source of accumulation at both the level of living labor and as a fetish object necessary for modernity, which is to say, for the social and cultural reproduction of capital itself. In this Manzoni, consciously or otherwise, portends the insights finally excavated by autonomist Marxists who were attempting to understand the managed antagonism between gender and capitalist value production throughout modernity, in which primitive accumulation enabled by enclosures imposed domestically and abroad enabled capital to establish itself in a way that was cyclically and consistently rehearsed in everyday life. The thesis shared among feminists working in the context and wake of Operaismo (Fortunati, Federici) posits primitive accumulation not only as the historical inception of capitalism, as Marx argues, but as continually necessitated by capital at the level of social reproduction, of everyday life.2 This “everyday life” is fueled by labor naturalized to the female body, a body mercilessly isolated within the confines of the private sphere, an enclosure which doubles as the matrix of compulsory capitalist subjectivity formation on the one hand, and on the other serves as the basis for accumulation in the value productive sphere, a formalized articulation of value predicated on denying the inherent value of women’s work in social reproduction. In her popular and paradigmatic work Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, completed decades into her engagement at a granular level of the street, the home, and the factory over the decades,

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Silvia Federici addresses unwaged labor first and foremost as women’s labor. This suggests the degree to which, in the laboratory of autonomist thinking, the issue of gender coded as feminization was at the forefront of theorizations of a left no longer based on workers’ relationship to reform at the level of the wage. Where Marx analyzed accumulation from the point of view of a waged industrial proletariat, he located the initial act of enclosure and expropriation fundamental to accumulation in the peasantry of the eighteenth century but had overlooked the much earlier sixteenth-century transformation of the body into a work-machine within the larger confines of productive enclosures and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the workforce . . . a set of divisions within the incipient working class.3 “Just as the enclosures expropriated the peasantry from communal land, the witch-hunt expropriated women from their bodies, which were thus “liberated” from any impediment preventing them from functioning as machines for the production of labor. For the threat of the stake erected more formidable barriers around women’s bodies than were ever erected by the fencing off of the commons.”4 Caught among the contradictions of the historical conjuncture, summoned by the classical nude and the modern commodity, the female body of Living Sculpture is punitively captured twice over: as the object of classical aesthetics and again as a modern commodity object. At the same time, the (art) work dialectically exposes the labor it needs to obfuscate in order to be an art work, or a work capable of exceptional value, in a special category of exchange that is predicated on its supposed qualities above exchange, since the artist’s labor is still a quasi-mystical operation. The question here is of how representation—cultural as much as political, for they are shown to be mutually constitutive—enables the process of renaturalization that makes actual labor invisible; of how it dissolves some taboos in order to preserve the dominant functional violence of capital itself, and even, perhaps, of how it comes to be bound up with particular forms of representation at particular moments. How is representation already a form of reification in the late twentieth century under the historicity of real subsumption, in which every object and subject is made by capital to reproduce the capitalist relation? Reflexively, Manzoni’s work, and Living Sculpture in particular, asks how the wage—the representation of value—itself colludes in the erasure of unwaged and unrepresented labor that makes labor appear affirmatively, and

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makes it appear to run smoothly and judiciously under the sign of remuneration in the liberal democracy of the miracolo italiano. These questions, crystallized already in 1961 in an art work of tragicomical prescience, emerged collectively on a massive and enraged scale only after 1959, catching speed in 1961, ironically enough. But already in the fifties, as a student, Manzoni was preoccupied with the problem of labor and, notably, the degree to which state regulation merely enforced the extraction of life from bodies: “Regarding those ‘hanged trade unionists, skilled workers, women and kids forced to work’ etc., they are not a consequence of free economy any more than the planned economy, one can’t help but consider in a very dispassionate way History, from burnings and Medieval tortures to concentration camps and contemporary forced labors.”5 This uncannily augurs the assertion by Operaio’s Romano Alquati in 1964 that the totalizing force of capital had come to be the totalitarian law of postwar Italy, “above all through its technology, its science, the diffusion of its structures of exploitation in social life, through constant capital which embraces all, from priests and police, (both inside and outside the factory) to the Stalinists.”6 The nascent Operaio (workerist movement), spearheaded by Raniero Panzieri, Romano Alquati, and Mario Tronti and forged in the strikes and factory workers’ protests of the fifties—notably the workers’ mobilizations in the North (Milan and Turin) at Fiat and other such industrial powers (discussed at length in the introduction and chapter 1)—began to understand that the factory was not only the locus of violent appropriation and value extraction but the very matrix of the totality of everyday life; that the entire social fabric was organized in accordance with far-reaching subsumption of life on and radiating out from the factory floor. Tronti’s first contribution to Quaderni Rossi, “La Fabbrica e la Societa,” in which he attempted a “Marxian purification of Marxism,” drew on Marx’s discussion in the first volume of Capital of the industrial intensification of the extraction of surplus value through “decomposing and recomposing” the ratio between living and dead labor or between fixed capital and living or variable capital (labor). Rethinking labor, and the laboring body, through a new approach to Marx, Tronti’s essay concluded that labor merely helped capital along; there could be no truly revolutionary politics from the point of view of identification with labor, which only

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led to the assimilation and provisional amelioration of labor to aid capital’s ultimate immiseration of laborers. In a 1961 Quaderni Rossi editorial meeting, Raniero Panzieri saw the situation simply and elegantly: “One could say that the two terms capitalism and development are the same thing.”7 Differentiating “progress” and “modernization,” he saw that the reproduction of the capital-to-labor relation, and the contradictions that follow it, would have to be understood anew if the working class was to have any fighting chance against the new forms of subsumption that were rendering historical forms of anticapitalist organization irrelevant. The emergent movement came to understand the material indivisibility of the labor process and valorization process. Building on Lukács’s discussion of class-consciousness, Tronti said: “It is only within labor that capital can disintegrate the collective worker and integrate the individual worker.”8 Marx had already noted that labor was the final lynchpin of capitalism, “the whole secret of the critical conception.”9 In what follows, I will set parts of Manzoni’s integrated oeuvre into comparison with those of artists equally interested in the problem of factory labor as a metaphor for artistic labor (Warhol and Morris in the United States and Broodthaers in Europe), at the very moment that it was undergoing a crisis prefiguring restructuring. While Robert Morris and Carl Andre were interested in mimicking the iconography of productive labor, not least for a mythological identification with forms of masculinity at a moment when the industrial sector was receding in the United States, but also as a fleeting symbol of political sympathy with remaining workers, and while Warhol deployed the logic of the factory affirmatively as the only way to make art, Manzoni explored the problem critically. I will also explore, further to Manzoni’s own evocation of the camp and gulag as structural to labor under capital rather than merely isolated historical and political exceptions born of World War II (“Medieval tortures to concentration camps and contemporary forced labors”), the figure of the Marquis de Sade, who came to personify for so many in postwar European culture, from Pierre Klossowski, Blanchot, and Foucault to Pasolini and Simone de Beauvoir, something of the logic of disciplined bodies organized under the sign of progress in (capitalist) modernity. Manzoni curiously says in “The Economy of the Executioner”: “I have never supported laisser passer, if it is the flag of what readers define as libertinage, it is the denial of that economic freedom that I declare.”10 I take Manzoni’s production (textual as well as plastic) to be uncannily pre128 Chapter Four

scient of a specific set of analyses that would emerge from the political economic thinking of the radical left a decade later and ramify in the “creeping May,” the street-level student and worker movement of the seventies. I will read Manzoni’s key works as prefigurative explorations of the new theorization of labor as a location of antagonism within and against capital, a force of negative dismantling of the social order rather than a phenomenon to be ameliorated in the interest of assimilating the worker into a productivist ethos. Among other Operaio theorists and writers was Romano Alquati, who— writing first in 1961 for Quaderni Rossi and then for Classe Operaia, among other left journals critical of the party—was part of a project of “Workers’ Inquiries,” in which an intimate engagement with factory workers at Fiat and other major firms, paradoxically made possible by the mediation of unions, became the empirical basis for rethinking the labor-to-capital relation outside the stale Leninist and party forms that no longer made sense, if they ever had at all. The Italian General Confederacy of Labor, a central organ of all trade unions in Italy, allowed Alquati and his comrades into the factories to conduct the workers’ inquiries.11 Alquati’s best known work to emerge from the process inaugurated by the workers’ inquiries was his essay “Struggle at Fiat,” which ran in 1964 in Classe Operaia. But he had begun the project a few years earlier, in 1961, by noting that it was in the most technologically advanced firms that—with the exception of Fiat—the industrial conflicts of 1959–1960 had been most fierce. His attention to “how specific forms of labor are inserted in specific processes of production”12 enabled him to rethink how to find upto-date ways to struggle against those forms. It is notable that Alquati, as a result of the workers’ inquiries process, came to conclude that workers were already creating antagonistic responses and ways to dismantle the smoothness of the machinery from within. Alquati’s identification and location of tactics illegible to management came to constitute his central contribution to the workers’ struggle, culminating in the broadening of the unofficial left’s support of work-floor sabotage in addition to wildcat strikes. But to arrive at this approach to praxis and indeed to redraw the radical left’s political horizon in its breach with the party, Alquati first elaborated what he argued was specific to the historical conjuncture of advanced accelerated value extraction in the 1950s and 1960s in northern Italy. One of these specific points suggested a different sense of “alienation” from the classical 19th century theory of the subjects’ alienation from the social fabric, the one com“We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 129

monly associated with cultural critique. This newly emergent sense of “alienation” entailed locating a way to understand the subjects’ internal division in and through the cognitive and perceptual demands of specialized labor: “Manufacture, therefore, entails a fairly high level of alienation between the worker and his instruments of labour by the intellectual capacities of the material process of production in capital itself.”13 In other words, the contentious question was not simply one of adequate remuneration or compensation packages afforded by the state—clearly intended only to lubricate capital’s need for workers—to abet workers’ needs but was a question of the way work was disarticulating the “human.” Alquati’s understanding of “alienation” located the contradiction whereby the worker could not represent her best interests to herself. While dependent on human effort (as the origin of value), the process of value extraction required capital to maximize its output with a minimum of human input. The source of value doubled back to become too expensive on capitalism’s balance sheet, disturbing the labor-to-capital relationship on which profit was founded. This understanding of labor and the worker was predicated on seeing labor as a homogenous mass entity, an amalgam of potential surplus value extracted by hours of activity on the shop floor, dissociated from a social or even human register. But precisely because capital saw workers as a homogenous entity, a pool of potential value in the form of living labor, its machinations also divided this body from within, separating class internally to obviate the possibility of collective counter-action. Alquati identified this problem in the passage of generations of workers at the firms under the workers’ inquiries investigation. He noted in particular the demographic that drew the most anxiety from PCI functionaries, who castigated this demographic for embodying the very symptoms determined by capital’s decomposition and recomposition of populations. The exodus from the rural South to the North over one decade had changed the texture of the working class irreparably, making it impossible for it to see itself as a class. The passage from the underdeveloped and rural Mezzogiorno (the South), to the North had created a new subject. In Scritti Sulla Fiat et Altri Scritti, Alquati said that “if one was concerned to try to grasp the class situation in the large and dynamic firms, one would notice that these were signs of the first descent into the piazza of a young working class inside an older one, as a growing and homogenous vanguard. We are dealing with those ‘young forces’ who would be talked about at the conference at Fiat.”14 130 Chapter Four

This subject, individual and collective, was pejoratively referred to as canni sciolti, literally “wild or unchained dogs,” a term that designated the loose etiology of the new phenomenon: the “young forces” mentioned by Alquati were seen as disorganized, spontaneous, part of the terrone, a pejorative term for southern and central Italians, and for migrants from the rural south newly proletarianizing between 1949 and 1970. Canni sciolti also came to designate the PCI’s accusation against extraparliamentary communists for not being adequately organized.15 For it was impossible for the PCI to locate its identity in the rapidly shifting demographic. Alquati situated the problem of labor in general, the collective worker, in the everyday life of the individual worker. The homology between individual and collective drew on the way productivist discipline, that is, capital, divides the body politic from itself. Alquati explored the ways this division and separation, reification in a word, occurred in the interstices of processes of production on the factory floor. The action demanded of each individual worker divided him from himself (or herself—the workers’ inquiries included a look at the textile manufacturing sector, where many women worked) at the level of required task performance. This system of labor, in which the worker had only to enact a part, was not only “alienating” or repetitive; it posited the worker as a quasi-conscious agent in her own exploitation at the level of planning, prior to the unfolding of work on an hourly basis. “Today the worker appears as the executor only in the role of ‘fulfilling’ the plan, a role delineated in an abstract, global, generic, but political way. Therefore if workers today are executors, the sense of the word refers only to their political reification.”16 Discipline, then, not only was dull and exhausting but was part of a logic of self-depreciation of the worker in service to the self-reproducing cycles of subsumption. These self-reproducing cycles, forcing the worker into complicity against himself, constituted at once a function and an intensification of the disconnect between a social dimension, and capital’s autonomous drive. A sense of structural and cyclical social and collective immiseration, in turn, contributed to the theorization of workers’ autonomy as forming in an asymmetrical relation to capital’s autonomy. Work itself, then, was a priori the problem. It was mistaken, Tronti held, to picture the working class as a force which defeated capital from the outside, when in fact the commodity labour power constituted “the truly active side of capital, the site of every capitalist dynamic.”17 This view differs from the previous generation’s notion of worker self-management, al“We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 131

though it owes much also to Panzieri. “The collective worker counterposes itself not only to the machine as constant capital, but also to labour-power itself as variable capital.”18 This is to say that the worker, having no external position in relation to capital, could therefore only find a tactical advantage within yet against work itself. Dialectically, this realization entailed the understanding that that very role was the object to be destroyed if the class were to overcome its own enslavement. Rather than making demands, much less expecting to have them met, the worker could only think autonomously. Insofar as she understood her role as so much variable capital to be overcome in order to interrupt the systemic process of immiseration, the worker’s only remaining leverage was her self-interest. Acting as a class, the class could only emancipate itself by abolishing itself. Yet, as the class needed a wage to survive, that abolishing would have to take the form of dismantling itself from within, autonomously. While Tronti was known to cite Marx’s famous letter to Arnold Ruge, in which he said that communism was “a ruthless criticism of all that exists,”19 Quaderni Rossi editor comrade Alberto Asor Rosa asserted: “The only way to understand the system is through conceiving of its destruction.”20 That destruction could be figured only in the forms capital had already imposed on the collective class body, as much as on each individual body. Class war thus entailed the use of silent, invisible forms of dismantling, within the processes of value extraction itself. The violence of immiseration required a form of violence in kind. This, however, required attentiveness to the minute interstices where the (tug of ) war was unfolding between discipline and spontaneity, capital and autonomy, a war whose central problems involved skill, agency/ intention, and anonymity. Manzoni’s index is not personal imprint but the index of procedure in a Duchampian mode. On the other hand, rather than the result of a total chance operation, as in Duchamp’s Stoppages, his lines derive from highly controlled material determinations: a marking mechanism arranged over a long roll of paper on an assembly-line apparatus. Linea at once internalizes the mechanistic logic of the grid on the level of procedure yet emphasizes the artist’s trace negatively, by absenting all material concretion. In Linea, Manzoni sits down in front of a cog apparatus and draws in the nodding state between active and passive, a worker on an assembly chain, while a roll feeds the paper through. Manzoni’s demonstration of passivity as the form of action, of labor required 132 Chapter Four

by the value extraction process on the assembly line, evokes Alquati’s observation: “This fragmentation [of assembly line production] most commonly led to passivity; where resistance did occur, its isolation was such as to render it ‘functional to the system.’ ”21 Regular proximity to the factory floor at Fiat and elsewhere thus afforded Alquati the concrete basis for interrogating social relations salient to value extraction and—since the teens and the inception of the readymade, if not earlier in the context of impressionism—central to the question of art’s capacity in the age of capitalism: autonomy, task performance, and above all the question of skill. These problems, as I discussed in the introduction and chapter 1, were central to the monochrome and the readymade, and no less central to their mutual entwinement. Skill, or its lack of necessity and obsolescence, is the open question posited by Rodchenko’s paradigmatic monochrome and Duchamp’s readymade alike, as antithetical and diametrically opposed as they otherwise seemed to be. Above all, the historical conjuncture of the logic of the readymade on the one hand and on the other, were the monochrome reticulated to a bygone dream of the dictatorship of the proletariat inscribed in the passive activity, the active passivity, of Manzoni’s canned line. Alquati, an unlikely theorist as much of deskilled art as of deskilled labor, argued that the notion of deskilling was “as forced as it is false”;22 was part of the process of decomposing and recomposing labor so as to inject it seamlessly into processes of surplus value extraction that would not only erode the individual and collective worker but render her and him irrelevant to their own lives unless the relation of agency were reversed. Manzoni reintroduces the question of “anonymous toil” that is constitutive of the industrial object. The realization of the erasure of the agency within determinative parameters set by labor nonetheless reconfigures that erasure, folding it over as a place from which to strike. The lines’ foreclosure implies the specific experience of an anonymous subject, the worker/maker whose trace is engulfed by the parameters of the product. The body’s trace is recorded and conceptualized yet held in abeyance, and we are confronted with a frame, here a container, such that the picture itself withdraws. This use of modernist logic nevertheless yields to a frustrated acknowledgment of the body’s alterity: not this, but other than this entangled in this, constituting it and constituted of it. Linea withholds the corporeal trace doubly: by folding into the industrial procedure and again through its packaging. It thus paradoxically shores up the “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 133

corporeal trace, designating its absence as absence, which nevertheless marks it as other. Manzoni’s Linea radicalizes the modernist preoccupation, from Duchamp to Adorno to Cage, with an ascetic presentation/withholding of process and trace, which is to say, of thinking the vanishing conditions of mark making in predetermined systems managing everyday life, organized by and around disciplinary labor. But Linea also posits barely visible forms of autonomous agency. Line in Manzoni’s work appears to be suspended between Pollock’s gestural line—scale and spatial extension are operative terms—and Duchamp’s line in Three Standard Stoppages, produced through the chance operation of letting a meter-long piece of yarn fall and then tracing its configuration to “make” a line. In Linea, the length of the precut piece of paper determines the extension of the final line, which gets rolled up and set in a canister marked with its dimensions and its time of execution. Rather than Duchamp’s dandy-like canned chance,23 we are left with the packaged idea of process, referred to in quantified terms. Fittingly, rather than the libidinally motivated line, as in Pollock’s work, we are confronted with a material trace divested of its spectacularized, emancipatory energy. Unconcerned with visual and physical plenitude, Linea manifestly recognizes mediation and calibration as the only possibility for presenting matter and process, a knot that paradoxically defers it. The armature that presents/withholds negatively marks materiality and corporeal inscription. All making is captured within narrowly disciplinary parameters, at the level of task performance rather than artisanal skill. This absence of skill and emphasis on disciplinary deftness is the very definition of modern factory labor in its postwar “professionalized” version. Triangulating discipline, (lack of ) skill, and empty professionalization, Alquati said: “The fundamental contradiction seems to be precisely that internal to technical productive rationalization, which creates mere executants and then in order to proceed must give them ‘responsibility,’ which systematically separates and counterposes levels and then has to join them all together again in a rigid system that annuls both the individuals and groups that constitute it, posing shops, teams, etc. as minimum technological units. This promotes a professional career and annuls professions.”24 But the observation was twofold. If labor conformed to the mold generated by discipline, it also found ways to turn that discipline against the system. Al-

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quati noted that in determinate circumstances, class relations could appear to take the form of machinery while at other moments carving out a counterdimension within it. This brought Alquati to his foundational disagreement with Lenin. He at once “updated” and inverted the Bolshevik’s understanding of discipline. While Lenin was an advocate of organizational forms, believing that industrial production would impress discipline on an unruly mass, just as the party would collect that disciplined force to use against capital, Alquati saw discipline as that which separated the worker from himself, weakening agency. Yet the invisible resistance within that discipline presented another model of spontaneity within determining systems of control: “The term spontaneity drew attention to the already existing forms of invisible organization produced by workers in the absence of formal class organization [unions] under their control.”25 This spontaneity was what capital feared most, despite the granular hold capital had on individual and collective laboring psyches and bodies through the very structure of task performance itself. As Stephen Wright has summed up the situation before the street war of the seventies: “No matter how restrained in reality, such assertiveness was still more than the functionaries of Italian capital were prepared to concede; for them the path to postwar reconstruction could only pass through the restoration of labor docility.”26 Where did Manzoni’s passionate preoccupation with problems salient to labor, as much as to art, originate? The “Manifesto of Albisola Marina,” which he signed in 1957, signals the first manifest assertion that the canvas can no longer be “the utopia of an aesthetic order or the folly of idealism without concrete human origin, an impersonal program whose sole and squalid presence resides in the creation of matter. Rather it will be a living flesh, direct and scalding.”27 The canvas no longer stands merely as a concrete base, that is, an originary static support. In contrast, it will be “living flesh,” matter understood as active and in process. In his statement for the second issue of Azimuth,28 founded in December 1959 in response to Fontana’s Il Gesto, Manzoni polemicizes against the phenomenon of gesturality and its concomitant understanding of the blank surface as a space of projection, just as he had rejected Fontana’s surface as a liminal crust opening onto an immaterial beyond. He refers to a set of “gymnastics,” no doubt the mythical Pollock dance,29 that had misapprehended the canvas as a “receptacle.” Unlike both these under-

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standings of the surface as inanimate, Manzoni interprets it as already dynamic.30 This emergent understanding of the material surface marks Manzoni’s break with Gruppo Nucleare in 1959, as well as the direction his work took after his departure. It signals the inauguration of a mode of object production in which a succession of modernist strategies accreted and unraveled under their own pressure as they also demonstrated the material processes, organic and industrial, that they had withheld. Rather than repeating each strategy discretely, Manzoni piles them onto a single plane, making of the prewar avant-garde a topography impossible to circumvent. Within, and despite, his accumulation of received paradigms, he paradoxically insists on an art “that wishes always to be ‘other.’” “Every new invention is now at risk of becoming the object of repetition of a purely mercantile character; it is therefore urgent to take vigorous anti form action for an art that wishes always to be ‘other.’ ”31 Recalling Achrome (with Breadrolls), for instance, the terms apparently excluded from modernist painting’s tautological inquiry into its own discourse are revealed as paradoxically internal to, yet exceeding, that formal grammar. Manzoni said that he wanted to “organicize disintegration. In a disintegrated world, we want to be able to discover and reveal to ourselves the inner structures.”32 This manifesto-like assertion suggests that modernism and its analytically elaborated fundamentalist structures (grid, monochrome), understood as disembodied systematicity, nevertheless remains dialectically present in modernism’s unraveling. In “Economia del Carnefice” (The Economics of the Executioner; see fig. 4.4), Manzoni charged the PCI, and the communist state at large, as personified by Stalin, with imposing an economy of butchery in mimetic relation to an equally barbaric capitalist state. According to him, both shared a productivist machinery that expropriated any human activity, any remaining historical processes that might be understood to be “organic.”33 The organic and the autonomous, both posited in relation to history, are elided. “Organic” here suggests a means of self-determination autonomous from the state and capital. Manzoni never presented “Economia del Carnefice” as a manifesto or among the many single-authored and collaborative texts to which his signature is affixed. I introduce this document, located in the archives, only for the way it tacitly supports Manzoni’s practice, not in order to treat it as an object of analysis in its own right. Manzoni was a studio practitioner, not a political 136 Chapter Four

FIGURE 4.4. Piero Manzoni, “Economia del Carnefice,” n.d. (typescript).

and economic theorist. That said, this text is a quiet symptom in the etiology of resistance also symptomatized by his object production. In light of Manzoni’s text, statements by workers collected in the archives of Operaio crystallize the texture of those years: “I have never known ‘fascism’ although my father speaks badly of it. We are like slaves. Work is a burden and I never have enough to live on. That is fascism to me, the boss.” Panzieri had already argued too that the roots of fascism lay in industry.34 There is every reason to assume that Manzoni would have been familiar with Mondo Operaio, although by the time Quaderni Rossi was in circulation, Manzoni was dead. By “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 137

the late 1960s, the miracolo italiano had achieved the reformatting of everyday life, having brought about the processes of industrialization elaborated a century before in England and France. This accomplishment on the part of capital saw its counterpart in increasingly militant workers’ movements. As historian Paul Ginsburg points out in his magisterial account of Italy after World War II: There were many reasons for the new militancy in Northern factories. . . . Conditions of near full employment in the North gave workers a self-confidence they had lacked since the mid 1940s. Secondly, technological changes of the Economic Miracle had transformed the organization of work in the northern factories. In the 1960s mass production took the form of mechanical repetitive work executed at high speed with few breaks throughout a very long working day. The operai reacted strongly against these conditions. As their confidence grew, they demanded changes in the work rhythms and pay and eventually greater control of the work process as a means of combating alienation.35 The ideas Tronti contributed to political economy were threefold: that the state-party dynamic had betrayed the working class and obscured another potential revolutionary entity, a subproletariat; that workers, trapped between the “contradictory extremes,” might find tactical, irrational, intuitive ways of organizing the struggle on their own autonomous terms; that all of society would have to be the object of this dismantling and that to target only the literal sites of production would be to limit the struggle: what was needed was a way to target the very conditions for the possibility of production. In this regard, Tronti’s Worker and Capital might be seen as a rereading of Marx’s Grundrisse, in which production is shown to be part of a larger totality of cycles organized under capitalist interests.36 Tronti coined the term “social factory” and “social capital” to describe this totality: “At the stage of social capital, we are witnessing the putting in place of integration processes on the grandest scale between the state and society, between the political stratum of the bourgeois and the social class of the capitalists, between the institutional cogs of power and the cogs of production regarding profit. At this stage, all labor struggle that limits itself voluntarily to the economic [or social] terrain ends up coinciding with the most reformist politics.”37

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The incommensurable problems of “artistic abstraction” and of “abstraction” somehow came to share a horizon and a common problem set (of organization, autonomy, materiality, and violence). In other words, as Karl Marx put it in the intro to Grundrisse, “the uneven development of material production relative to artistic development [is such that] in general the concept of progress [is] not to be conceived in the usual abstractness, as modern art, etc. This disproportion [is] not as important or so difficult to grasp as [that, e.g., abstractions] within practical social relations themselves.”38 Yet I would argue that Italy, from 1947 (or 1950, when the results of the Marshall Plan came to be felt and articulated in official culture as the Economic Miracle) on, saw the disintegration of categories (culture versus economy, politics versus everyday life, public versus private) in such a way that the very different understandings of the term “abstract” (to describe the capitalist mode of production on the one hand versus art on the other) came to converge at this singular historical moment and geopolitical site. Subsumption, while it was a process of extraction of surplus labor occurring on the factory floor, nonetheless became a problem for artistic production. One way Manzoni signaled both his awareness of and frustration with the indifference and dedifferentiation of advanced industrial acceleration was to emphasize the range of available materials for use that nonetheless could be processed and resolved through the by now readymade paradigm of the monochrome. The artist’s catalogue raissoné (Milan, 1991) replaces conventional categories for classifying “oeuvres,” such as “painting,” “sculpture,” and “relief,” with categories such as “long haired fur fibers without intentional articulation,” “long haired fur fibers (curled),” “artist’s breaths,” “magic basis,” “polystyrenes,” “polystyrenes (without intentional articulation),” and “straw, short haired fur fiber.”39 In the discussion that follows I explore Manzoni’s response to this formalization of production by examining his relationship to process and to materials as two places to interrupt the machinic organization of accumulation. Achrome (with Breadrolls) (1961) rehearses the range of modernist tropes: first, the monochrome, heavy with its historically determined purity and factual self-evidence, and second, the monochrome’s incommensurable counterpart, the grid. This grid hovers in a purely optical space as the axiomatically deduced, central organizing principle that claims to transcend particularity.

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Each, grid and monochrome, vies to lend legibility to the surface. Neither paradigm stands prior to the other; their mutual imbrication frustrates the ability to ascertain the status of the object. On a temporal register, the work casts the grid one discovers in the present armature of its position as historical form. This temporal redoubling of the status of the grid functions as a reminder that the modernist strategy is understood in the achrome as alwaysalready-read, as apprehended through layers of previous interpretation, an object as ubiquitous as the Italian breadroll. The return of a historically instituted support, folded into a work that is self-reflexively mired in the present and that admits to the banality of its objecthood, offering both an afterimage of modernism and its necessary foreclosures. Both modernist grammars, grid and monochrome, share a common place, a shared schema,40 despite their immediate opposition within its scope. Each paradigm effectively eradicates the dyadic relationship between painting’s figure and ground. The breadrolls unravel the monological empiricism of the monochrome as well as the unitary—immaterial—systematicity of the grid by multiplying across the field under the grid’s rigorous spatial control. They cast shadows over the modular squares, surfacing in relief. Here, their material obstinacy is already folded into the logic of both the monochrome and the grid, pushing each into view only to obscure and contaminate its integrity. Unruly in their columns and rows, the rolls appear as both figure and ground, literally welling up as embodied figure and visually withdrawing as support, oscillating along the register of the material. What happens to materiality41 here, lodged in the optically determined field, and what becomes of system? Again, the status of the rolls as body— as the nonmolded—remains opaque. Obviating metaphor and figuration, the mounds suggest disparate possibilities. Are they what the modernist schema excludes: the preindustrial craft object, the readymade that references assembly-line hygiene, the tenacious materiality of dough, or are they anthropomorphic part objects cancerously multiplied within the purity of the modernist surface? The allover kaolin wash renders this question indeterminate as well. For if they embody the excluded, they nevertheless materialize these exclusions from a position internal to that exclusionary field. The contradiction between modernist visuality’s coordinates and its material exiles are enfolded as opposed sets; each term implicates the other in a relationship of reciprocal constitution and negation. 140 Chapter Four

In order to approach Manzoni’s work in relation to the modernist language it so dutifully deploys and so irreverently undoes, one would need to locate the common place on which the modernist visual system and its field of material exclusions could be shown to enfold as a fabric of cohabitant threads. In 1960 and 1961, the years when his series Achrome (with Breadrolls) emerged, Manzoni circumscribed his own practice through the reiteration and permutation of prewar idioms. His material practice makes sense only in simultaneous contiguity with and distinction from modernism’s analytically deduced logic. His work foregrounds the problem reflexively, from the point of view of the artist, and objectively, as concerns an analysis of the object he is expected to deliver with the added value of expressive consciousness within the determinations of a sensuous support that is produced by the accelerated subsumption of labor in manufacturing. His work posits “this self-reflexivity,” that lynchpin of modernism, in terms of labor and of the vanishing possibility of artistic labor in an era of accelerated subsumption in the interest of abstracted value. “Bourgeois society is ruled by equivalence. It makes dissimilar things comparable by reducing them to abstract quantities.”42 Here, Adorno is translating the issue of subsumption back into cultural terms; bourgeois culture mediates the same processes, legitimating them. By contrast the negative dialectical work both internalizes the conditions of possibility of making in any given historical moment and simultaneously resists those conditions. For instance, in 1960, responding to the obsolete myth of artistic genius that US culture hoped to keep alive via the figure of Pollock, even as American capital was undermining the very possibility of the creative individual at the level of production, Manzoni translated the residual trace of corporeal presence into an untitled series of thumbprints on paper and on eggs. Here, the thumbprint functions as a substitute for the authorial gesture or author’s mark yet refers to two contradictory understandings of that subject’s presence. On the one hand the print, as indexical trace of the artist’s body, points to a unique identity. On the other hand Manzoni presents the enlarged thumbprints in multiply run lithographs—infinitely reproducible and indistinguishable. Monumentalized, front and center, they function as a portrait of the subject. At the same time, they are the objectified residues of the maker’s purely externalized body—a body located through forensics rather than posited as bearer of the psychological depth expected of “portraiture.” The thumbprints demonstrate the problematic introduced by the Duchampian readymade in 1915, “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 141

positing the print as an original and originary yet automatic site of the markmaking process. Each print captures the body in a purely reified mark that articulates the extraction of surplus value, the vanishing point of the laboring body in the production of value in a system of general equivalence. This imprint signals, of course, the process of making itself, that which is occluded in the commodity status of an object, negatively articulating surplus value as the evanescing life of the maker not expressed in her work, over which she may have no possession, binding together an otherwise heterogeneous range of objects produced artistically and industrially. Uncannily thinking the problem of “the social factory,” as Tronti would theorize it, the thumbprints investigate the triangulation of identity, mark making, and reification in cultural practices. The sophistication of negative reification becomes the site of art’s value here, in the emergent hegemony known as Americanization and, later, globalization. Manzoni stated, smart-ass-artist-style, that “if the collectors wanted something intimate, truly of the artist’s person, the finger print was the most unique sign of the person who’d imprinted it.”43 American artists Robert Morris and Carl Andre shared Manzoni’s interest in the relationship between making art and laboring in the manufacturing sector in the late industrial moment, as well as in the way specific practices of production informed working-class identity. Minimalists Morris and Andre began conjugating art work with waged labor in the context of the rise of New Left social movements in the sixties in the United States. In 1969 Carl Andre completed a work that would define his practice. Titled 37 Pieces of Work, it consisted of a 1,296-unit square arranged as a grid over a thirty-six-squarefoot area. Tiles of assorted metal—zinc, aluminum, copper, steel, magnesium, lead—constituted this grid. This massive, internally permutable piece came to occupy the entirety of the ground floor of the Guggenheim Museum for Andre’s one-man show there in 1970. In her study Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era, art historian Julia Bryan Wilson notes that Andre referred to these materials as “metals of commerce.”44 She also notes the degree to which the title draws on the status of the word “work” as either verb or noun, suggesting fluidity between labor and piece of art. In what would appear to echo Manzoni’s practices on the assembly line in the late fifties, Andre stated that his own formal idiom of serial structure, often placed in a horizontal register in the real space of the gallery, derived from manual labor in the semiartisanal construction sector related to industry: “My work derives from 142 Chapter Four

working class crafts of bricklaying, tile-setting and stone masonry.”45 Andre himself had worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad before becoming a fulltime artist. While Andre’s empathy with blue-collar work and its concomitant class identification are surely heartfelt, they betray a bourgeois fetishization of the iconography (rather than process) of productive value that occludes the exploitive and disciplinary social relations congealed in the object and refracted over the social field. The commitment to materials, to process, and to the desublimation of sculpture on a formal register do not broach the problem of value or the human dimension inscribed therein through the internally divisive imposition of work that the passive/active canned lines in Linea explore. Part of this idealizing occlusion of the source of surplus value in the vanishing return of human time is due to the fact that Andre engages primarily in a nineteenth-century form of craft labor, the artisanal labor of brick laying and stone-masonry, which situates the historicity of labor evoked by the artist as similar to that understood by the Soviet artists of the historical avant-garde. This is to say that process appears demystified and emancipated in relation to the traditional unique hieratic art work placed in or on the mystified space of the frame or pedestal. Artistic labor as it is understood here locates a historically vanishing place, where the subject may realize himself through technologies and materials that seem to be democratically available. Andre’s idiom, unlike Rodchenko’s Monochrome or the objects inventoried in Duchamp’s Tu M’, is not constituted of material that is available at a hardware store.46 As he says, they are metals of commerce, drawn from an industry that is not only heavily associated with the military industrial complex but also part of a network of successively complex rounds of resource accumulation in the global south. Suspending the complex question of the materials’ source, the logic of interchangeability and iterability in the formal structure of the work mimics the processes of verticalization and integration in the Fordist system of interchangeability that reduced the worker’s role to deskilled task-performance, the two aspects of industrial labor that were identified in the Italian context of Operaio as that which stood at the heart of the worker’s split between selfinterest and the drive to reproduce the system. This logic rehearses the reification at the heart of the extraction of surplus value; the process that makes of living labor a commodity circumvents the actual processes of labor at stake in Andre’s evocation by situating it as a question of ethics. “Andre’s art, with “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 143

its laconic placement of available industrial units—as well as its purchase and installation in a museum—appropriates for itself the mantle of labor, thereby destabilizing a value system that relies on a differentiation between ‘real’ and ‘artistic’ work.”47 The model of ethics evoked here is, of course, that of the work ethic, which would stipulate that each individual receives in proportion to her social contribution, on an equal basis free of historical, much less class, formation. Critic Barbara Rose understood minimalism as an expression of an “ideally leveled, non-stratified democratic society” on the basis of its formal and structural “cleanliness, integrity, efficiency, and simplicity.”48 Short of deploying the term “functional” before efficiency, Rose rehearses the “values” emphasized by the industrial sector in the interest of streamlining process to isolate maximum value extraction. It describes a technologically developed, scientistically progressive rationalism underscoring the instrumentality of industry but also describes the political ideology that would render each person apparently formally equal before the law in order to facilitate the uneven value of human life in the reproduction of capital itself. Ideology understood as an ethics subtends not only the mythological American dream but also the zeitgeist undergirding the American cycle of accumulation. We might call this an iconography of labor, a pseudomorphism that is oblivious to the way the process on the factory floor remakes the laboring subject just as the laboring subject “realizes” herself in an object that both immiserates and alienates her from the fruits of her own labor. The permutational logic suggests something of the analytical efficiency required of industrial labor in addition to repetition, task-performance, and the splitting of the eidetic wholeness of traditional sculpture into serialized fragments. Bryan Wilson associates this economy of efficiency with a democratic functioning of checks and balances within capital that operates in the interest of the worker. She evokes Andre’s allegiance to the union against the degrading and uncivil undercurrent of production and the value form determining it.49 Andre himself was affiliated with the Art Workers Coalition, a group of artists who came together in mutual aid against the more abusive practices of powerful institutions, primarily museums. There’s no small irony in the way artists stateside were beginning to explore unions as sites of self-support against power at the moment when labor in Italy recognized their collusion with power and the betrayal of the worker, as individual and as class. Ulti144 Chapter Four

mately, the project operates consciously or otherwise as affirmative homage to the national metal industry, which was bound up in the Vietnam War, which Andre was protesting, according to available accounts, and the ideology of the American work ethic. The project does so just at the moment of liquidation, of what we may call the end of the value-productive “phase of the American cycle of accumulation,” and the beginning of “financialization.” That said, Andre’s intentions may have been in solidarity with what he believed to be the selfrealization of a working class, just at the historical moment that its use, as far as capital was concerned, was depleted and it no longer served the interests of those benefiting most from the evolution of capitalism. The stated goal of leveling the value of art work with that of disciplined (waged) labor sidesteps the problem of the commodity fetish, from which the reflexive art work attempts, in keeping with its history, to distance itself but in which so much labor is stored (as dead labor). This already complicates what “leveling” might mean in terms of the worker as much as of the artist. The fantasy that they might simply performatively mimic one another does not recognize the structural condition of labor or the historicity of either labor or art. More significantly, this fantasy occludes recognition of the worker as both individual and classed, existing at the intersection of history and changing structures of labor, in the name of empathic identification.50 As Kathi Weeks has argued in her paradigmatic book The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, even the Anglophone left, in the context of the New Left, has come to accept and to naturalize work, disciplinary waged labor, as not only inevitable but even an arena of progressive politics. Weeks explores this development in order to argue that the New Left in North America came to ultimately “depoliticize” labor and, by disarticulating it from other politically invested issues such as identity, removed it from the realm of debate.51 Above all, she asks why the progressive politics of the New Left never interrogated labor from within, but situated it instead as a matter of either governmental reform or of a history obviated by “globalization.” As for the art part of the equation between art and labor that is reified in Andre’s “ethical” practice, the uneven value of lived time is inherent to the commodity. This condition is reflexively intensified (or intensified because it is reflexive) in the work of art precisely because “art” is a historical anomaly in capitalism; it is an exceptional commodity in which the logic of labor, frequently enabling of the artist rather than performed by him, is provisionally “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 145

suspended. That the art work carries these historical contradictions—the political unconscious—with some measure of honesty informs its interest.52 More specifically, the question of the art work’s relationship to the commodity takes on historical density after World War II, when recovered paradigms collided and complicated each other’s historical premises, as I tried to show in chapter 1. Robert Morris addressed labor in the context of performances from within which sculptural objects were generated. Morris, who was involved with the group of experimental modernist dancers that met at Judson Dance Theater in New York between 1962 and 1964, during which time he collaborated with dancer and choreographer Yvonne Rainer and some dancers who were working in the legacy of John Cage, was interested in developing a choreography in which physical movements would not be transparent to emotion, expressive interiority, or academic skill. Problematically, the critique of “transcendentalism,” targeting the ersatz interiority of abstract expressionism, unquestioningly accepted both deskilling and task performance as avant-gardist structural principles and therefore as automatically bound up in emancipatory politics. Engaging only the previous generation of hegemonic art rather than situating it in a historical totality, the American “neo-avant-garde” personified by Cage and Morris did not explore the ways deskilling and task performance ramified in the disciplinary evacuation of the worker subject, rendering her docile as a conduit for capitalist self-reproduction.53 Those questions surfaced forcefully in the Italian neo-avant-garde, by contrast. Morris’s work begins with the problem of a desublimated subjectivity and finds the industrial sector as its solution. In this it is the inverse of Manzoni’s Linea, which begins with the problem of labor to arrive at the question of subjective interiority— affective, cognitive, perceptual—all of which are understood to be the effect of socialization through the process of disciplinary work. In a performance entitled Site (1964), Morris performed the laborious yet compositionally indifferent task of arranging and rearranging three beams, each making an L shape, into various configurations. Approaching the act that would be understood as composition for a traditional artist, Morris treats the situation with responsibility and indifference, dramatizing the absence of inspiration or any other such aestheticist or transcendental mystification. He identifies with the blue-collar laborer in this way of coming to the task. “At

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thirty I had my alienation, my Skilsaw, and my plywood. I was out to rip out the metaphors, especially those that have to do with ‘up’ as well as any other whiff of transcendence. When I sliced into the plywood with my Skilsaw, I could hear, beneath the ear damaging whine, a stark and refreshing ‘no’ reverberate off the four walls: no to transcendence and spiritual values, heroic scale, anguished decisions, historicizing narrative, valuable artifact, intelligent structure, interesting visual experience.”54 It is notable that labor itself came to operate as a metaphor, in a way that idealized it in turn. One reason why this irony may have escaped notice is the absence of any historicizing narrative in which to situate labor. This performance generated the term “primary structure,” which came to qualify the minimalist idiom, institutionalized in part by the exhibition of the same name mounted at the Jewish Museum in 1966. That exhibition, Primary Structures, came to be seen as one of a small handful of paradigmatic shows that shifted the terms of discourse by introducing instantly institutionalized vocabulary.55 The objects, L-Beams, as he finally called them, that Morris moved around in Site were these primary structures. Later performances heightened the centrality of labor as a theme. At the same time, they heightened the sense of a performance or theatrical piece in which labor might be the central drama. Steele Plate Suite (1970) made up of several 2- by 60- by 120-inch plates of steel was placed by laborers, with the help of construction machinery, into the gallery during open exhibit hours, so that visitors might witness the onerous work that installation entailed in homology with the labor of making the plates. This may have also been a way to one-up minimalist artist Richard Serra, who had documented his installation of molten lead for a work titled Castings at the Castelli warehouse the year before. Images documenting the installation of Morris’s other large works include his driving a forklift and assembling configurations of heavy forms in wood and concrete, alongside teams of laborers procured by the institution where the work was being situated. His installation process for the Whitney Museum of Art in 1970 in particular frames Morris as the capable bluecollar worker, at once typified and heroic. The limits explored by Manzoni in Linea—the disciplinary stamp on the laboring body, repetitive movements, cramped spaces, gestures scripted by the narrow parameters of the task—do not seem to apply here.

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Outside the parameters of the (art) work, Morris expressed his solidarity with labor by being involved, as chair of an offshoot of the Art Workers Coalition, in the 1970 Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression. Artists demanded that museums in New York City cease business for one day, May 22, 1970, to protest the Vietnam War. Because the Museum of Modern Art failed to do so, hundreds of artists formed a picket line on its stairs. Morris stated that “matter as matter rather than as symbol is a conscious political position, I think, essentially Marxist.”56 The physical duress imposed by industrial labor and heroicized in this dramatic way by Morris was disappearing at the very moment when he and Andre began evoking its iconography. This moment, 1968–1975, was characterized by two opposing currents: the continued, consistently accelerating integration of labor and capital from 1950 to 1973 on the one hand and, historically and dialectically resulting from this boom era, the beginning of what came to be known as “outsourcing,” wherein the industrial sector moved to the Global South, where labor could be procured more cheaply. The latter coincided historically with the oil crisis of 1973. This echoed, but now on a global scale and in a double movement wherein some labor pools were newly developed while developed pools were abandoned, the seismic shifts in the labor-to-capital relation that Italy had undergone in the previous decade. Progress and expansion, as they developed production facilities and markets in previous European colonies in Asia, where labor power could be purchased more cheaply, came to entail the evacuation of jobs for American workers.57 Such are, as Marx argues, the structural contradictions of capitalism that tend it to crisis. Arrighi summarizes the moment thus: “The coming crisis of the US regime was signaled between 1968 and 1973 in three distinct and closely related spheres. Militarily, the US army got into ever more serious trouble in Vietnam; financially, the US Federal Reserve found it difficult and then impossible to preserve the mode of production and regulation of world money established at Bretton Woods; and ideologically, the US government’s anti-communist crusade began losing legitimacy both at home and abroad. The crisis deteriorated quickly, and by 1973 the US government had retreated on all fronts.”58 Above all, this moment marked the end of historically high profit rates in the United States, and with that the entire state apparatus that relied on those profits as part of payout packages to workers, packages composed of benefits that made the trade of a life disciplined by labor for remuneration appear 148 Chapter Four

always in the workers’ interest, protected by the benevolence of the state.59 Arrighi continues: This sudden reversal of relationships of power in the world system in favor of Third and Second Worlds—the “South” and the “East”—was in itself a highly depressing experience for the bourgeoisie of the west in general and the United States in particular. But the reversal was all the more depressing because of its association with an equally sudden escalation of inter-capitalist competition that reduced real returns to capital to “unreasonable” levels. This association was not accidental. The price of crude oil had already begun to rise prior to the “shock” of 1973. . . . Combined with the preceding pay explosion, the explosion of oil prices forced First World enterprises to compete even more intensely than they already were for the Third World’s supplies of labor and energy.60 Morris’s project, while predicated on the contingent arrangement of primary structures independent of compositional creativity and the concomitant model of privileged authorship implied by the word “composition,” nonetheless suggests an intransigent will to self-determination outside historical, much less political or economic determination. Self-determination independent of historical contradiction is the philosophical cornerstone of capitalist and free market ideology. The first property of labor under capital in an industrial sector is that the maker’s agency is displaced by the totality of the conditions of labor itself. The artist’s identification with the heroic factory worker throughout the 1960s on both sides of the Atlantic during this moment of incipient globalization and financialization is quite striking. But in hindsight, Morris’s gestures are not only moving in their identification with a subject position soon to become purely mythical—the robust worker—but melancholic for an entire era in which it seemed possible to locate an antagonistic class. Morris points at the vanishing worker in much the same way Walter Benjamin in “A Short History of Photography” noted that the flash of the camera illuminates the bourgeoisie class at the moment of its disappearance as a coherent entity. The politicization of artistic labor happened at the very moment that labor itself was changing such that the artist was bound to identify with a vanishing subject position, literally and figuratively. The ultimate irony of Morris’s work is “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 149

less that it is belated and more its manifest contradiction modular logic of his sculpture’s serial recursive structure. In sum, I view the deskilling posited by minimalist artists as part of a logic of democratization of art making, ramified in two ways. First, it articulated a symbolic solidarity with a class just then on the border of disappearance by complete integration with capital, at a moment when the labor-to-value relation was changing, and therefore comes to read as a monument to the melancholic failure of the welfare state rather than as a politics of active engagement. Second, the very logic of recursive form mimicked the formation of techniques and processes that rendered the worker unnecessary. The celebration of the machine is uncanny, haunting, given the way machinery accelerates capitalist immiseration by requiring more from fewer workers to squeeze out more surplus. Machines never liberated labor, in a way that was contrary to the purposes of capitalist machinery. Manzoni, with some degree of Marxian analysis, marks another such moment where representation marks only a threshold of obsolescence. Returning to the Italian context, in which work was understood as a limit to rather than a place within which to carve individual or collective political struggle, the next problem was that of finding forms outside an optimistic reformist allegiance to work itself. “Labor” here refers to value-productive labor and its enabling conditions (unwaged work making the wage relation possible, located by Leopoldina Fortunati and Silvia Federici).61 Work was already understood as such a limit in Manzoni’s practice, in pieces—such as Linea— that demonstrated the saturated degree to which productive labor had evacuated art making, literally and structurally. In all instances of “work” across divides structured by the wage, labor understood within historically determined class formation, rather than as a function of ethical self-determination. And across all practices of rethinking autonomy, from the factory floor to the domestic cell to the studio, autonomous resistance to work was rethought from a vantage internal to it. Sabotage and tactics of refusal, including independent strikes, were not only supported by the extraparliamentary left but increasingly practiced up through the Hot Autumn of 1969 and into the seventies. Tronti and Alquati recognized direct action on the job, the weaponization of forms of disobedience and sabotage, what Tronti called the tactical use of the “irrational elements” in the overly rationalized day. This entailed a turn not only to labor theory but to a scathing view of bourgeois sociology. Alquati went on to explore wildcat strikes as part of the “tactical survey of the terrain of class war.”62 150 Chapter Four

In short, the sixties saw struggle between the PCI and as yet unorganized left groups outside the party system for influence over new forms of antagonism and new historically motivated forms of resistance. While the PCI seems to have encouraged, indeed humored, forms of ultraleft organization (Tronti and Panzieri’s work, for instance) in the sixties, by the seventies it would seek to crush heretical lefts. Tronti’s and the workerists’ primary split from the PCI revolved around its allegiance to the state planning project above the organization of the workers or the ameliorization of everyday life. Tronti and the others were correct in their prognosis. “The Gramscian concept of the historic bloc limited itself to identifying a specific state, a national movement of capitalist development. The second error, a lot more grave, was in the Togliattian vulgarization under the form of the new party that had to identify itself more and more with this bloc, going so far as to merge itself in it until the history of the nation comes to merge with” the party.63 The prognosis was prescient. The alliance between the PCI and the state in the 1970s led to the bloodbath known as Italy’s “creeping May.”64 This chapter thus situates Manzoni’s practice as a prefigurative elaboration of forms of autonomy and withdrawal in relation to deskilling and task performance that described the worker’s place in the totalizing structures of productive labor under the accelerated capitalism of reconstruction culture. Tracking rapidly changing models of both labor and class politics, works like Linea and Merda d’Artista augured changes in political economic discourse— notably a critique of work and an attendant recognition of the autonomy of a subproletarian agency, if not a robust and unified class consciousness. Manzoni’s engagement with pivotal, if interstitial, material problems of labor— skill, agency, autonomy, all configured around task performance in the industrial matrix—surfaced a local, autochthonous culture that was bound up with but unassimilable in American imperial culture. His work was able to confront the problem of artistic value in the age of violently accelerated subsumption on the factory floor in Italy from the point of view of the artist whose practice is as objectively reconstituted as that of workers are, under such totalizing systems rationality, designed to maximize value extraction. While Fontana’s Icaran reverie of shattering and exceeding the shell of material contingency was a mere fantasy set in dialectical relation to the artist’s own base materialist practice (as I explored in chapter 2), it nonetheless spoke “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 151

to the dream of rebirth that motivated the productivist ethos under reconstruction culture. Cultural responses to the political-economic emphasis on production grew more specific as the so-called miracle tipped over into its apotheosis and finally its antithesis, a nightmare. For instance, while Fontana’s cultural rhetoric of the late 1940s and early 1950s assumes the very possibility of abstraction as physical disengagement, as pure space, and while the technological trappings of flight become emblems for this Icarus-like fantasy,65 Broodthaers’s celebration of the jellyfish elaborates a thematic that recedes from an organizational system and slips beneath specific parameters productive of well-ordered form and conceptual clarity. At once repugnant and graceful, the jellyfish differs from fish (or mussels) in that it has neither internal nor external structure, neither skeleton nor shell. Rather, it confronts us with an animate materiality in its “wavering,”66 nonformed presence. In the artistic vocabulary Broodthaers elaborates over twelve years, the jellyfish becomes a metaphor of resistance to reification.67 For Broodthaers the “body” need not be located in an anthropomorphic vise, and it is not understood as a static support anterior to structure, waiting to be specified and realized by form. The corporeal does not act as an ontologically stable base on which form operates. It drops out, “wave, wavering,” yet participates in a process of folding and unfolding through and against an organizing pressure.68 Manzoni’s practice might be located between the two, a rejection of Fontana’s Icaran impositions and Broodthaers’s interest in the intersection of reification, elaborated in the poetics of the jellyfish. In Anglophone art history, Manzoni’s work is often understood through reference to that of Broodthaers, with whom he was associated. Broodthaers’s reception has done much to frame Manzoni’s own practice. In a thorough study of Broodthaers, Manzoni is discussed thus: In Manzoni’s work, personhood, which is marked definitively by the thumbprints as bodily presence fluidly translates into many forms of merchandising dear to capital. The way that the market covers its smell with packaging, Manzoni implies . . . relates to our own shame and excitement over bodily excrescences. Seen another way, the productivity of the marketplace—that which makes surplus profit out of nothing (but advertising)69—echoes that of the artist whose work’s value is similarly something insincere, to borrow Broodthaers’s phrase;

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this insincerity reverberates in the fetishistic packaging Manzoni uses, . . . Manzoni’s organics returns, its critical relationship to the marketplace seemingly dispersed.70 The small but pivotal slip in the otherwise precise description, betrayed by words “nothing (but advertising),” overlooks the singular insight of Manzoni’s project: the way capital totalizes by violently overwriting concealed sources of value, namely surplus value generated by living laboring bodies. Haidu reads that work through Broodthaers’s practice, which limited itself to ideological critique, turning away from concrete material determination, much less the factual problem of subsumption as it determined all artistic production. By turning his attention to language, Broodthaers was able to forestall the problem of object subsumption, addressing it instead in the operations of the sign. Broodthaers’s work operates as evidence of the legacy of May 1968 in the current art-historical narrative because of the fictional museum he constructed after the student occupations in which he participated.71 Far from insincere, Manzoni’s project was to move away from displacement and toward the site of production, “that hidden abode,” as well as the operations of primitive accumulation that enabled the activity in the hidden abode, the equally hidden source of value in “women’s work,” as evidenced by Living Sculpture. As such, far from seeing how packaging related to managed titillation (shame and excitement), which suggests interest in the formation of the psychoanalytic subject, Manzoni was interested in the violence of production itself as a site of value extraction and redundancy. In other words, far from seeing “nothing” dispersed, Manzoni’s work directs us to the heart of the problem of value and equivalence predicated on a horizon of surplus extraction and immiseration. The foregoing exegesis doubly obfuscates the problem of material process and, indeed, that of labor, with which Manzoni was preoccupied. Manzoni’s object production of 1959–1963 stands between Fontana’s violent gestures and Broodthaers’s critique of institutions.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment In Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), a book that articulated the cultural logic of late modernism, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer locate the problem in any unitary logic in search of an absolute, internal resolution. In their

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attempt to investigate the legacy of the Enlightenment for its inheritors, modernism and twentieth-century rationalism, Adorno and Horkheimer analyze the mutual intertwining of logic with the experiential dimension of the subject wedged in everyday contingency. The authors assert the underlying principle “that social freedom is inseparable from Enlightened thought, and yet, if Enlightenment does not accommodate reflection on its recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. Dramatized logic yields to the violence of rationalism and positivism.”72 This “recidivist” element thus derives from the violent neutralization of contradiction, of differences internal to a given set of coordinates. Manzoni’s essay on butchery had echoed this thought process and its conclusions. But it also augured Tronti’s theorization of the totalization of life under late capitalism, beyond the factory or immediate value production. In the chapter “Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,” for instance, rationalism plays itself out in the register of the corporeal. Adorno and Horkheimer locate modernity’s failure, or the locus of the beginning of its dissolution at its very opening, with the figure of the Marquis de Sade. Indeed, a number of postwar writers, Adorno, Horkheimer, Bataille, Blanchot, Klossowski, and Foucault among them, began to rethink modernism and the subsequent skepticism toward it in the wake of the war.73 Here, Sade surfaces as the locus of a knot through which to read the irrationality folded within modernist rationality, the gulag in the modernist grid.74 In the postwar context, the Sadean project is perceived as the elaboration of a total organization principle founded on the consolidation, and therefore neutralization, of physical and material specificity. In Sade’s writing, “deviation” within the corporeal register simply enables the establishment of a rational system. Proceeding through the loop of this circular logic, the anomalous is evoked in order to generate good order. Through a reading of Justine and Juliette, Blanchot interprets Sade’s manipulation of the libidinal/sexual as a drive to pull together a single framework impermeable to the vagaries of those very drives, as well as the vicissitudes of the external world. Blanchot balks at the way “Sade sets himself the gigantic task of drawing up the inventory of anomalies and aberrations. Having done everything, he will be at the mercy of nothing. He is impervious to all attacks. That is the primary reason of his solitude.”75 The internal coherence of a system is achieved via assimilation. Blanchot refers to this task as the rigid enclosure of the Sadean set of sexual orchestra154 Chapter Four

tions, where all differences appear as a permutation of a single form. Sade’s “perfect autonomy with respect to the world” (the exterior) is constructed on the ability to ward off that world by dividing, subdividing, and appropriating antagonistic drives from within. “We can safely state, without unduly modernizing Sade’s thought, that he was one of the first thinkers to have recognized and incorporated into his world view the notion of transcendence,” by casting his rationale into every recess of the self. The postwar reading of Sade emphasizes that strategy, with its transcendence of the exterior consummated through a rigorous internal composure, and casts the Marquis as “the master of the great themes of modern thought and sensibility.”76 Subsumption, again, leaves no room for any such “self ” capable of “creation” outside its own limits, for it seeks to overcome those limits. Crucially, between his use by the surrealists in the 1930s and the interpretations of the postwar avant-gardes, Sade’s reception underwent a dramatic reassessment. The dialectic produced by Sade’s empiricist language and concomitant fascination with “deviant” sexuality was flipped inside out. No longer a counter-model to modern rationality, a vehicle of liberation through a celebratory and irreverent occupation of sexuality,77 he now figured as a precursor to modern forms of disciplinarity, such as the institution, the factory, and the commodity. After World War II, the Sadean system was interpreted as achieving the reverse of what Linea achieved. Seeming to luxuriate in the body, Sade’s writing constructed it as a frame through which to work out a self-sustaining logic. Alongside the monstrosity of Sade’s abstraction stands the horror (and monotony) of an abstraction paradoxically embellished around shit. In The 120 Days of Sodom, the reader is drawn through endless accounts of libertines and their coordinated consumption of fecal matter, a process that perfectly mimes a well-engineered plan for the administration of labor in the interest of the extraction of maximum surplus. The subject, whose body produces the desired product, in this case, shit, must internally arrange himself or herself to ensure the optimum quantity of it at regular intervals, eaten at correspondingly even intervals. The spoof, to the extent that this scenario might be characterized as that rather than an apocalyptic vision of the twentieth century, its factories, its gulags, its total administration of everyday life, is on circuits of production and consumption. In addition, the axis from anal to oral and back again ensures that all subjects involved are interchangeable parts in a closed circuit.78 “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 155

For Blanchot, in 1947, “what is surprising is that Sade suppresses desire and seems to suspect it rather than emphasizing it and raising it to the highest level of importance.” Sade cannot afford desire an active role in his endless permutation of the sexual because it permits an experience of the body-asother and marks the limit at which self-enclosure dissolves. The reason for this, says Blanchot, is that desire denies solitude and leads to a dangerous acknowledgment of the internal and external worlds, of others. Acknowledgment of dissonance arising from within the self dangerously opens onto a permeable relation to the contingency of the field exterior to the subject. Sade, as read by Blanchot, is adamant that the body must serve as instrument by which to coordinate the self and regain order over a porous inside/outside field. To convert the body into a means of transcendence, it must be compressed and mediated through a necessary moment of anesthetization or insensibility, after which it will attain its apogee in systematization. “The subject, having destroyed everything within itself, has accumulated an immense strength. All these mighty libertines are mighty only because they have eliminated in themselves all capacity for sensation. They have made themselves insensitive.”79 Before Blanchot, Adorno and Horkheimer described the libertine’s feat similarly: “All will be overcome when one strives to suppress the excessive sensitivity which is irreconcilable with the maxims of [rationalist] philosophy.”80 The Dialectic of Enlightenment traces the monstrosities of twentiethcentury modernity to the underbelly of the Enlightenment. Here, the Marquis de Sade, contemporaneously with Enlightenment philosophy, crystallizes the contradictory implications of Enlightenment thought by driving it to excess, pushing it to its logical extremes, thereby distilling its internal contradictions and negations. Sade represents the moment in a philosophical unfolding when Kantian thought begins to spill over into its diametrical opposite: anti-Enlightenment thought, expressed here in the figure of Nietzsche. They argue that “Sade makes the scientist the destructive principle,”81 by balancing himself tensely between the autocriticism and empiricism characteristic of the moment, deftly permuting well-ordered modular blocks of logic and rhetoric, while simultaneously filling that formal rigor with a seemingly ecstatic, orgiastic drive. Monstrosity thus hinges on the seamless, structural resolution of heterogeneous terms. Enlightenment “means no more than that, by virtue of thought’s own consistency, it [thought] organizes the individual data of cognition into system. It 156 Chapter Four

makes a certain collective unity the aim of the operations of the understanding. This unity is the system.” To underscore their point, Adorno and Horkheimer quote Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: “ ‘The systemizing of knowledge is its coherence according to one principle.’ ” This, in turn, addresses the problem of neutrality, the empty core echoing within universal rationality—empty in that it is no longer contingent on specific phenomena, the tangled configurations internal to the limits of that organization. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, in Kant, the “homogeneity of the general and the particular is guaranteed by the schematization of pure understanding. The understanding impresses the intelligibility of matter on it as an objective quality, before it enters into the ego. Without such a schematization, no impression would harmonize with a concept, no category with an example; and the unity of thought (let alone system) toward which everything is directed, would not prevail.”82 Defined in this way, reason begins to eclipse the object of perception, achieving the very reverse of its claim to truth. For it hypostatizes its object as already cut to the form of a given template. This, obviously, generates a circular logic wherein a system interpolates all object experience, which then reinforces that very rationale. This appropriation crystallizes in Sade’s heroine Juliette, who enacts her sexual gymnastics and murders voraciously, all the while operating in the elegant, empirical mode of self-reflexivity. Adorno and Horkheimer describe Juliette’s mode of sexuality and the regimentation of the body in the modern, bureaucratized state as tied into a single knot. “The strict regimentation of modern sport has its exact counterpart in the sexual teams of Juliette, the strict regimentation of the libertine society of 120 Journees—reveals an organization of life. . . . These arrangements amount not so much to pleasure as to its regimented pursuit, the schema of an activity.”83 This analysis of systems rationality begins to set the logic for the way the left would part with the party and theorize the need to see the schematization of the totality of life under capitalism, as well as the internal contradictions making resistance possible, crystallized later in political economic language, in the 1960s.84 Having demonstrated the schematization of pure logic constructed around a single, unified principle (and its unwitting link to the material and physical), Adorno and Horkheimer evoke the strictly quarantined, self-generating schema of modernist painting. “Juliette embodies neither unsublimated nor regressive libido, but the pleasure of attacking civilization with “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 157

its own weapons. She favors system. She is a proficient manipulator of the organ of rational thought.”85 Sadean logic, inscribed over an expropriated term, is of dual import to the tension central to Fontana and his system and to Broodthaers and his jellyfish: the problem of system and body. In Sade, however, the problem is resolved through a totalizing structure that generates itself through a set of erasures. The carnal and the systematic, the mutual foundation of one on the other in a contiguous simultaneity, are reorganized as a single self-supporting loop. The corporeal—as both experiential and objectified—is nevertheless revealed as the stuff of Sadean permutation. Thus, despite modernism’s claim to have “liberated” itself under the zoning laws of self-sustained logic, Sade stages the extent to which this purge operates as an internal consolidation. In this sense, Sade enacts a transgression of existent norms only insofar as he reincorporates the results of that transgression into his paradoxically monstrous-as-pristine rationality. This emphasis on authorship, in this case deskilled art making, becomes the double property and burden of the work of art in response to total subsumption of objects. It rehearses, at the level of making: Marx’s elaboration of equivalence in his well-known passages on the commodity in Capital. Measured against time: Commodities which contain equal quantities of labor, or which can be produced in the same time, have therefore the same value. The value of a commodity is related to the value of any other commodity as the labor time necessary for the production of the other. As exchange values, all commodities are merely definite quantities of congealed labor time. This equivalent has no relative form of value in common with other commodities; its value is, rather, expressed relatively in the infinite series of all other physical commodities. The mysterious character of the commodity form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves. Equality in the full sense between different kinds of labor can be arrived at only if we abstract them from their real inequality, if we reduce them to the characteristic they have in common . . . human labor in the abstract.86 This is the stuff of Sadean permutation: the body depleted through labor measured by the clock, a metric that enacts a violent separation and abstraction of 158 Chapter Four

phenomenological experience and material reality. This pivotal passage alerts us to the other understanding of the mark. Nothing could be more generic than the indexical trace of a finger. The fingerprint is as anonymous as the value of labor under capitalism. The indexical trace operates as a corporeal shutter entering into the condition of the sign, which is to say a status irreparably cut off from the concrete condition of its production and reception; the index enacts the dialectical entwinement of system and material.87 In the context of the art work, the index re-performs the process of value extraction violently enacted by capitalist accumulation, in which profits fall and must be compensated for at ever receding horizons of human labor, which is to say, more work for less, if any, recompense. The index articulates the modern vanishing point of the human in the now obsolete genre of the portrait, the sacrosanct medium of humanism since 1510 (Raphael). It enables a rigid, conceptual grid with which to assimilate a foreign object and draw it into cognitive arrangement with minimum disturbance.88 With a minimum of expenditure, the machinery is capable of pressing an entire life into its vestige as a function of work. Presented in a second series, Tables of Assessment, Thumbprints (1961), the thumbprints again fall into line with the grid, which is made to acknowledge its peculiar mimetic inscription in the rationale of industrial production. The print, as both serial and singular, meets the demands of collectors. Materiality both falls out as mute ground and is retroactively assigned an identity. In Manzoni’s work, by contrast, those terms do not circulate in a general equivalence; each implicates the other as incommensurable difference. Manzoni’s work unravels the limits of painting by “working through” and saturating its set of received possibilities in order to locate the site of potential for the artist. All of modernism’s conceivable tropes and their permutations must be explored for the silent relationships among those terms to surface, for potentiality to be realized through a careful and deliberate granular process of negation. This practice attempts a way of making and elaborating culture under the enforced reception of the American culture industry in the era of accelerated production and consumption. To the extent that Sade becomes a framework, or locus, of postwar critical thought, Manzoni channels the terms of the critique through the space of artistic production. His work inhabits the Sadean architecture as a strategy through which to dismantle it and regenerate heterogeneity from a univocal order. After its apparent disavowal within a homogenized flat surface, what “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 159

would corporeality be were it to push through that field? Moreover, how would it emerge without reinvesting and revalidating the representational and figurative ruses, the mythologies, that modernist painting had buried? Blanchot has remarked the impossibility of recovering what has slid under the “brutal abstract exigency” of the universal, the machinery of rationalization organizing every aspect of everyday life within its own tautology. Speaking of everyday contingency, or that which eludes systemic conceptualization, he says: “To approach such a movement, one must contradict oneself. What lags and falls back is also what is most important, for it brings us back to existence in its very spontaneity as it is lived, in the moment when, lived, it escapes every speculative formulation, perhaps all coherence, all regularity.”89 Thus, any attempt to recapture the contingency of material process through figuration erases it again. In figural representation, at this historical junction, the corporeal no longer elaborates itself but becomes coordinated with the economy of image, the new postwar template of spectacle. Blanchot refers to this emergent postwar variant of rational systematicity, spectacle, as “the reign of an enormous tautology.”90 By contrast, Manzoni does not pretend to wrest material presence free of a set of rigid structural determinations—one of which would be the mapped-out pictorial surface, the visual schema. Ironically, some postwar artists came to terms with modernism’s exclusion of the body by absorbing it anew into another purifying tautology. Yves Klein’s Anthropometrie works, for which he had naked female bodies covered in paint impress their silhouettes on a surface, provide a clear example of the body newly effaced through its spectacularized presentation. The Anthropometries staged this process. The staging of the process was explicitly situated as the central organizing drive behind the resultant images. Paradoxically, the tactile and performative dimensions of Klein’s strategy become rechanneled through a scopic, spectacular organization. By contrast, the achromes’ very deployment of a modernist syntax unravels the systematicity of that language from an internal vantage. Manzoni initiates the analytical rigor of modernist painting, the self-reflexive elaboration of its terms, alongside the insistence of a radical—and silent—corporeality. It is present, bordering on the limits of metaphor yet refusing to crystallize as figure. Where Sade proceeds from corporeality and appropriates it to a tautological rationality, Manzoni departs from structure, insisting on the resonances of its own internal contradictions. Where Sade’s sexuality as difference160 Chapter Four

from-norm paradoxically catalogs that difference in order to render it as the same by submitting to the unitary structure of the inventory, Manzoni unpeels systematicity from its repressed terms. Nevertheless, modernism’s systematicity remains, present but unraveled, confronted with its own foreclosures within the very forms that enforced them. This is where Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s imperative that Enlightenment thought acknowledge its recidivist repression of the Other within and Blanchot’s critique of Sade’s sexual equations come in. Still, the term “organicize” occupies a troublesome position, lodged in a fraught history of debates within the Italian left, from Gramsci through the eventual break with the PCI in Manzoni’s day, which his own otherwise unspecialized thoughts on economic history had presaged. It would be naïve, in light of Manzoni’s own politics and the charged nature of the term, to assume he was not addressing the problem of the totality of factory relations in everyday life, relations that were troubling to him. Again, Manzoni’s project is a critical avatar of what, in the affirmative guise, would be called pop within the decade on the other side of the Atlantic. It is equally possible to assign the term “capitalist realism.” No traditional sense of the organic as holistic, natural plenitude develops in Manzoni’s project. There is no ontologically stable base, just a material aggregate acting as feedback in, through, and around “structure.” Recall Achrome (with Breadrolls), in which the rolls emphasize their reactive embodiment only to sink back into the grid, which they themselves constitute by casting shadows over its modular organization. Similarly, the white, unifying wash refuses the unity of the monochrome even as it enacts the monochromatic rationalization. The surfaces of Manzoni’s achromes eddy and settle, as both anterior matrix and interior gesture, as the material of the kaolin and paint shifts from one aggregate state to the next: it appears both liquid and solid. The surface’s visible refusal to obey the monochrome’s demand for a single common denominator corresponds with Manzoni’s assertion that that surface is itself “the living flesh.” This theoretical approach to the white flat plane, in turn, found its way into Manzoni’s practical approach to process. Many of the early achromes in 1958, and later in 1962–1963, come to formation after an (anti)process of virtual neglect. After the surface was coated with disparate materials, such as gesso, kaolin, resin, white paint, and polystyrene, the mixture was left to itself. The components combined, bonded, and deterio“We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 161

rated in ways specific to the caustic potential of the materials. After it had gone through a physical process resulting in a textured distribution of substances, Manzoni declared the white plane a finished work.91 In the series Merda D’Artista (1961; see fig. 4.5) Manzoni explores the vanishing substance of human labor in surplus value. He fills soup-can-like canisters, supposedly with his own shit,92 and labels them with their content, their weight, their date of production, and an assurance of “natural” (i.e., industrial) preservation. Of course, the actual matter and corporeal procedure are secured away from sight, smell, and physical presence. Corporeality as material vestige, as waste antiseptically sealed off, attains a similar elevated status in production/consumption systems. The label factually announces itself in several languages, presumably for the benefit of the global art market. Somatic presence is nevertheless articulated as an irreducible condition of art making, deferred yet salient. Ironically, the cans were actually filled with tomato paste, thus going on the market as both the stuff of the artist’s corporeal creation and the stuff of the greatest Italian national export, the tomato product. Manzoni radicalized Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup in advance, bypassing the brand, replacing it with artist’s authorial name, a new kind of brand name, to literalize a relationship that for Warhol was still mediated by canvas, frame, and paint. Returning to Living Sculpture (see fig. 4.6) the piece with which this chapter opens: Manzoni signs another awkwardly posed woman, her head in a classical three-quarter tilt. He places his name right at the base of her spine, assigning the body “a” structuring principle. The series Live Sculpture of 1961 stages the body, in part or whole, as the work of art. Here, Manzoni issued tickets proclaiming a person, or part of a person’s body—that of friends, collectors, and audience members at the gallery where the event took place—as his work. A purple ticket signified that the occupier of said body or body part also owned it, had acquired the piece. Thus, the collector acquired his or her own body part, often signed by Manzoni, reconfigured through the discursively understood institution of art production and consumption. This strategy recalls Juliette, the proficient manipulator of rational systems who enacts her logic through a seeming carnality. Of and with her body, for instance, Juliette constructs an elaborate accounting system. After having calculated that she has “been had 128 times one way, 128 another”—in perfect numerical symmetry, composing her postures in a refined classical architecture, 256 added up— 162 Chapter Four

FIGURE 4.5. Piero Manzoni, Merda D’Artista (Artist’s Shit), 1960. Estate of Piero Manzoni, SODRAC (2014).

she records her carefully engineered Easter orgy. Signing his classicized nude, Manzoni nevertheless enacts a critique of the discursive structures that determine the work, as well as the erasures they enact on the body—which nevertheless also determine the work in its numbed suspension. The work might be seen to pose a counter-statement to Klein’s Anthropometrie. There, Klein’s “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 163

FIGURE 4.6. Piero Manzoni, Living Sculpture, 1961. Estate of Piero Manzoni, SODRAC (2014).

naked women, freed from enclosure and performing in real space purportedly stand outside those determinations. Yet another system, spectacularized—the reticulation of spectacle—fully encloses them. Counter to Blanchot’s modernist reading, Sade’s eighteenth-century fiction might be situated as a deferred formalization and displacement articulating the process of enclosure stamped over the body at the foundation of the Enlightenment, Sade’s object of critique. In Silvia Federici’s terms, “in this way, the separation of commodity production from the reproduction of labor power also made possible the development of a specifically capitalist use of the wage and of the markets as a means for the accumulation of unpaid labor.”93 The anonymous female body becomes prototype for the encroachment of another permutation of Manzoni’s issuance of authentication slips, of Broodthaers’s receipt of a certificate proclaiming his physical entirety to be a work of 164 Chapter Four

FIGURE 4.7. Piero Manzoni, Declaration of Authenticity No. 071, Estate of Piero Manzoni, SODRAC (2014).

art, titled Declaration of Authenticity No. 071 (see fig. 4.7). Both Manzoni and Broodthaers held a document stating the place and date of certification, much as the canisters containing the lines carried a label denoting their length and time of execution. This packaging fully institutionalizes—fully grids and formalizes—the body, pushing the logic of systems determination. Yet this act also reveals the impossibility of systematicity. Drawing it into perception as a formal work, Manzoni’s gesture fully stages the inability to account for the body’s development and experience prior to formalization, a gesture challenging the notion of the body as ontologically bound ground. Sade, too, had authored a similar game. In a scene in Juliette that takes place at the discreet Chateau of Silling, the objects of the Libertine’s sexual interest are marked with different colors. The purpose of this mark is to direct and then denote each victim’s “deflowering.” The permission to distribute the ribbon is reserved to one of the four “gentlemen.” Because two sites of the female body—the object now in question—can be penetrated, the mark is a dual one. It designates appropriation (to a certain libertine) and localization. Barthes has pointed out that “it is at once an indication of ownership and an act of identification and a fetishist gesture. All of these aims are to be found in the linguistic nature of the mark: as we know it is the basic act of meaning. . . . Ownership, merchandise, and fetish come together in the meaning.”94 Also a fetishist’s gesture, Manzoni’s certificate-of-authenticity work, composed of formal rules setting the limits of the schema, nonetheless stages the body’s failure to comply, as well as the system’s failure to elaborate itself other than with and through its internal refusal, an autonomy predicated on withdrawal. “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 165

Manzoni’s object production does not occupy the space of the self-identical, unified, and tautological—there is no univocal ordering principle. Instead, an agglomeration of paradigms is set into dissonant operation critical of, yet internal to, structural determination. In deploying the schema generative of the modernist monochrome, the grid, and the readymade, alongside the irreducible corporeality of the support, Manzoni complicates the postwar condition of general equivalence characterized by the simultaneous availability of avant-gardist and modernist paradigms. Corporealizing, remarking the material and somatic inscription embedded in that visual armature, he simultaneously rejects any possibility of exit or space exterior to those systems/formalization. Articulating materiality thus, Manzoni develops a corpus that insists that production cannot limit itself to a self-enclosed or self-determined and violently disembodied discursive space. It starts, then, where Sadean logic ends. It presents the dialectical response to the reception of Sade, who, according to postwar intellectual circles, crystallizes a strand of modernism. Manzoni’s work operates on the register of material and corporeal tissue, at the points where structure and system begin to dissolve under their own pressure. Having dismantled the internally institutionalized parameters of disembodied form, Manzoni’s work opens onto the critical work of the subsequent generation of European artists. On Manzoni’s death, Broodthaers said: “Is there a connection between his untimely death and the attitude that he took in the context of art? It is most certain that insisting on this kind of humor was not a very comfortable position to have taken. And if this should be the reason, then our inquiry into artistic events, into all kinds of events, will have to be profound and thorough. In any case Manzoni will be in the history books of the terrible twentieth century.”95

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CONCLUSION “READY-MADE ARTIST AND HUMAN STRIKE,” OR FROM AUTONOMY TO STRIKE

It is time to make known that these days the force of gravity oppresses only fools, fat people, and abstract painters, or rather concrete painters, as many of them like to define themselves, concretely revealing their non abstract ineptitude in art. . . . Philosophers warn governments that the world is about to be blown up, that it is about to explode like an enormous fermenting tomato. “Interplanetary Art Manifesto,” Il Gesto (1959) To exist from outside the system amounts to revolution. . . . Mass production mentality forces him to produce a single object that satisfies the market to the point of saturation. He is not allowed simply to create the object and then to abandon it to its destiny. He has to follow up on it, justify it, introduce it into the channels of distribution, turning himself as artist into a substitute for an assembly line. Germano Celant, “Notes for a Guerrilla War” (1967) What is new is the autonomy of their participation in spite of and because of their exclusion from direct production. Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and Power of Subversion of the Community (1972)

I will try to trace here the ways disparate contemporary cultural (political) tendencies, latent yet persistent, derive from strategies, tactics, and aesthetic gestures forged in battles for autonomy against cultural colonization in Italy

from the end of World War II to the 1970s, the historical period I trace. Because this is an overview by way of conclusion to this book, it will of necessity be cursory; it is a sketch for or against which research to come might argue. I hope it will generate research questions. While those strategies, tactics, and aesthetic forms were motivated by and formulated against a horizon determined by the reintegration of the relationship between the expansion of capital and the postwar international political order from 1949 to the seventies (the Bretton Woods policy collapsed in 1973), they have inhered in—sometimes being absorbed into—the machinery of the art world and thereby been newly reconventionalized, at times flashing forth in direct response to actual events.

Empire and Its Discontents In 2016, the cultural landscape might be described as the belated and deferred legacy of that moment. To recap, I have described an era marked by a historically unknown accumulation of wealth, at the level of both actual profit and the circulation of revenue, and by a global political structure, which some have called “empire,” to manage that wealth. This was articulated culturally by, first, the ascendance of American expressionist painting; followed by the transition to serial structures in both pop and minimalism; and finally dissolving the object in “conceptual,” systems-based, and new-media art. That familiar story of abstract expressionism, pop, and minimalism, and then postminimal and installation art, has been established for some decades, a way of narrativizing the history of capitalism’s golden era under purely aesthetic terms. Strikingly, unmarked, unnoticed strands of culture suddenly reveal themselves to be motivated by a stronger historical undercurrent. Turning now to the art practices that address history, labor, and the putative place of art (if we take seriously the political aspiration of the avant-garde, which I do) in order to formulate the struggle for individual and collective autonomy, I will follow three strands of contemporary culture: art that inscribes itself instrumentally in social justice activism; art practices that are bound up with anticapitalist and antistatist positions that articulate their allegiances through attempts at autonomy; and finally cultural projects that explicitly elaborate on problems raised in the context of Italian workerist feminism: that of locating and describing the uneven value of lived time under capital, as marked, organized, and disciplined by capital along specifically gendered lines. Having scanned 168 Conclusion

art fairs, biennales, and internationals, such as Documentas or Biennials of the past decades as a critic and art historian, among the jittery junkheap of the “new,” I isolate those that offer an etiology of the growing confrontation between state, capital, and labor in a broader cultural field, state capital’s double. The first tendency includes cultural practices that establish social justice in relation to globalization within legal and juridical borders as their referential horizon: Allora and Calzadilla,1 Chiara Fumai, and those who explicitly situate themselves in the legacy of Arte Povera;2 the second includes challenges to the limits of the legal-juridical nexus between market and state posed deliberately in cultural language precisely because of the way “the aesthetic” affords a space of indeterminacy and therefore impunity to law. These cultural practices thereby ask yet again after the status of the cultural in relationship to the historical “real”: Nanni Balestrini and Antonio Negri are both “cultural” practitioners in this sense, drawing historical struggles of the 1970s into the contemporary cultural present. I discuss Thomas Hirschhorn, the most critically celebrated artist of the last decade, in this category.3 The third strand of present cultural practice’s debt to the Italian cultural context of the Marshall Plan that I try to isolate here picks up the investigation of the wage and of the labor-to-capital relationship through an exploration of the general strike. This last discussion will revolve around the work of the collective Claire Fontaine, although the problem of value and the capitalist value form has come up in numerous art practices over the last decade.4 All three have their origin in those cultural genealogies of the last half century that are initially specific to Italy in the postwar period and into the Years of Lead, in the aesthetic-political questions that culminated in Arte Povera on the one hand and the student and worker movement of 1969–1977 (the “creeping May”) on the other.

Arte Povera First, I will look at the generation of artists in Italy in the late sixties who were responding to Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni and carrying on the dialogue with American artists that these three began. Arte Povera (Poor Art) was a movement based in Turin and Rome.5 It was named by critic and art historian Germano Celant in 1967 in an essay that became its manifesto, “Notes for a Guerrilla War.” This text functions as a retort to pop and minimalism while radicalizing the insights of abstract artists of the previous generation, ManConclusion 169

zoni in particular. Celant became a spokesman of sorts for this loosely configured movement, not least for having organized numerous paradigmatic exhibitions, including the three-day performance event in the summer of 1968 called Arte Povera & Azioni Povere at Amalfi, whose aim was to find a way of thinking about art in defiance of what was perceived as the ahistorcist antihumanism of minimalism.6 Celant personifies a cultural bridge between the generations, having produced the first catalogue raisonné of Manzoni’s work in 1974. This close proximity to Manzoni’s work, set into tension with the need to address the contingencies of the contemporary, is transparent enough in “Notes for a Guerrilla War.” This text—Celant’s summation of the aspiration of Arte Povera to return art practice to human agency and desire, while also acknowledging its entrenchment in the historicity of struggle, against “the enormous instrumental and informational possibilities that the system offers”—echoes Manzoni’s (and other’s) manifestos “For an Organic Painting” (1957), “Manifesto of Albisola Marina” (1957), and “Against Style” (1957) and, above all, Manzoni’s practice. Pitched against pop and minimalism (Celant cites both “Pop” and “primary structure”), now understood as barely veiled metaphors for the artist as a “cog in a mechanism” and as deliverer of specialized “fine commercial merchandise,” Arte Povera was “intent upon retrieving the factual significance of the emerging meaning of human life. It’s a question of the identification between man and nature, but with none of the theological purposes of the medieval; the intention, quite to the contrary, is pragmatic, and the goal is liberation rather than any addition of ideas or objects to the world as it is today.”7 Notable is the way Celant echoes the workerist struggle, Alquati’s workers’ inquiries in particular, against disciplinary systems of value production, already mediated artistically for Celant by Manzoni’s project: “Today, society presumes to make prepackaged human beings, ready for consumption . . . turning the self as artist into an assembly line.” Citing Marx against the artistsubject becoming a passive part on a cultural assembly line who is also expected to be tied to a “program,” Celant posits the Arte Povera artist as “a guerrilla fighter, capable of choosing his places of battle and with the advantaged conferred by mobility, surprising and striking rather than the other way around.”8 But alongside its bid for agency against the totalizing order of capitalist production that pulls all of the social and cultural field into its operative logic, Arte Povera also entailed a melancholic dimension that was always 170 Conclusion

looking back at the failed revolutions of the twentieth century. In chapter 1, I briefly discussed Arte Povera’s debt to the well-known and markedly clichéd rhetoric of twentieth-century revolutionary hope through reference to Mario Merz’s decade-long evocation of Lenin’s famous pamphlet entitled “What Is to Be Done?” or “Che Fare?” (written in 1902, published in 1902) which Merz inscribed onto quotidian and domestic objects that signaled obsolescence yet also suggested that narratives of loss may not be always melancholic but might act as a fulcrum of future awakening inscribed in the past. Merz, and much of Arte Povera, operates in an “antimodernist” historicist key, turning to narrative, metaphor, and cultural memory in defiance of the modernist demand on timeliness and futurity. This melancholia, in turn, is one way out of the techno-scientistic, productivist, and progressivist narratives of modernism, which inevitably situate it as affirmative of modernity (e.g., capitalism). In this sense—a mistake as hysterically blind as Arte Povera’s own reduction of minimalism to primary forms, which it took to be transparent to the industrial military complex—Arte Povera has been understood as an instance of regressive antimodernism.9

Revolutionary Temporalities, or From the Mezzogiorno to a “Reign of Terror” Arte Povera’s Roman strain, elaborated in a key both antagonistic and melancholic, confronted the relationship between statecraft, international capital, and the neocolonial forms those took in Italy. Celant’s rhetoric of 1967 continues to be the most accurate lens for looking at the work, having been supplemented but never displaced by the ensuing discourse.10 Celant understood Arte Povera as a form of “guerrilla war” at the very moment that guerrilla warfare was becoming literal in escalating class struggle marked by violence, such that strikes and barricades were giving way to kidnappings and murders.11 Notable here is the way Celant explicitly situates the movement in relation to American art (minimalism signified here by “primary structures” and pop simply referred to as “pop”) along class lines rather than those of national identity: “So on the one hand we have an attitude to be defined as rich since it is osmotically connected to the enormous instrumental and informational possibilities that the system offers; an attitude that mediates the real. And on the other hand we have ‘poor’ research intent upon the identifiConclusion 171

cation of the individual and his actions.” Against the systems-rationality and instrumentality that American art’s seriality suggested to the Italians, Celant emphasized resistant, yet vanishing, human agency in the gestures of Arte Povera artists. This claim to agency outside the deformations of capital, outside of task performance, outside instrumentality, and disciplinary rationality signaled by primary structures, made of them terrorists a priori. “The revolutionary way of existence turns into the Reign of Terror with . . . Kounellis, Paolini, and Pascali (among others) all of whom are artists whose modes of action pose the problem of this recovery of free self-determination.” By 1967 Vietnam had come to operate as a surrogate for Italy on a symbolic register, just as nuclear violence “closing” World War II came to be appropriated in the Italian context—notably, by Fontana—to summarize international conditions. Celant emphasizes the Arte Povera artists’ refusal to negotiate on any shared terms, that “refuses dialogue with both cultural and social systems.”12 Among the works of the twelve who made up the first Arte Povera show, curated by Celant in 1967, Jannis Kounellis’s work most explicitly picked up the question of obsolescence, as a model of aesthetic protest against technological progress. Kounellis based his practice on neither the found object of industrial obsolescence nor premodernist artistic techniques associated with preindustrial modes of production, as was the case in de Chirico’s return to easel painting as a retort to the avant-garde; Kounellis’s project involved situating artistic work in a larger historical matrix to resist what Celant saw as the cultural affirmation of the capitalist state in pop and minimalism. As noted, one of the more productive misreadings of minimalism was the one that reduced it to a reflection of the US military industrial strength in Vietnam.13 Nonetheless, turning away from primary structure, Kounellis located the contradictions marking the miracolo italiano in the medium of painting, understood not as a reflexive practice (medium-specificity) but instead as a vehicle for historical memory. He finds the historical task of painting in history painting, replete with its own conventions of narrative and figuration, conventions displaced by modernism’s mimetic inscription in the rationalizations of modernity. For example, Untitled: Libertà o Morte (Marat et Robespierre) (1969; see fig. C.1) evokes the revolutionary moment in European history, the French Revolution as the signal event of the European Enlightenment, the period when history painting came into its own as a formalized aesthetic practice at once transcen-

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FIGURE C.1. Jannis Kounellis, Untitled: Libertà o Morte (Marat et Robespierre), 1969. Jannis Kounellis, SODRAC (2014).

dental on secular grounds (Kant) and inscribed in history, indeed the very medium of history (Hegel). This work cites Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Death of Marat (1793), whose paradigmatic contribution to painting was the entry of contemporary time into history painting. Nesting the reference explicitly in the entwined history of the medium, Kounellis evokes JacquesLouis David, consummate depicter of the French Revolution, across its many episodes from The Tennis Court Oath to the coronation of Napoleon Bonaparte, and David’s famous Death of Marat is also surfaced in the “muddy” paint. Rather than remaining in the allegorical framework of history painting, the dominant convention up through the late eighteenth century, David used the medium (historically determined as a conduit of historical narrative) to show current events almost journalistically. Marat, a monumental historical if not heroic figure, is presented in the unprecedented configuration of having just become a corpse, in his bathtub, murdered by Charlotte Cordray, claiming to stand for another faction of the Revolution to the left of the Jacobins. Marat is figured starkly against a gray ground, the spatial coordinates of history painting flattening into a direct confrontation with a final and absolute event. David, thus setting a precedent of collapsing contemporaneity into history in a convincing way provided a model for political history painting of the Romantic era, not least Théodore Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) which depicted a shipwreck as relayed in the media, politicizing both reportage through recourse to historicity and history through recourse to the facts of the day, unified only through reference to the political economy of the slave trade. Drawing on the medium and history two hundred years later, Kounellis conjures the “great” revolutions of the historical past, caught somewhere in the dialectic of history and myth in their aggrandizement, so as to make those historical revolutions act as a parameter within which to think the role of painting in the present. As such, Kounelli’s work opens up the question of the meaning of painting to contemporaneity, understood as either a way to reconfigure collective histories caught in contradictory temporalities brought about by uneven development or as a vehicle for the larger logic of (capitalist) abstraction (coded, in Arte Povera, as “a mechanism,” an “assembly line”). Kounellis evokes the radical faction in the French Revolution, that element associated with the “Terror,” thereby echoing Celant’s claim two years earlier that Kounellis and others were part of a “Reign of Terror” alongside Pino Pascali, Merz, Paolini, and others. 174 Conclusion

FIGURE C.2. Jannis Kounellis, 12 Cavalli, 1969. Jannis Kounellis, SODRAC (2014).

This purposive evocation of the longue durée (revolutionary) history of secular European painting is key here in understanding the particular kind of melancholy that Kounellis, and Arte Povera, mobilized. Less a romanticization of the detritus of capitalism, it posited history—and human agency as its motor—as the driving force of the aesthetic, in contradistinction to pop and minimalism’s apparent formal affirmation of the dominant mode of value production. This dialectic locates Kounellis at once as regressive (if not reactionary) and part of a timely struggle, within the Italian left, with a productivist regime that, while associated with the United States, saw America as a symbolization of international capital rather than a rival nation-state. 12 Cavalli (1968; see fig. C.2), another work of Kounellis, which was shown at the Galleria l’Attico, involved the placement of twelve living horses in the space of the gallery for the duration of a standard exhibition, five weeks, during which time the horses’ physical waste accumulated. Working across numerous contradictions to think through the tensions of the moment, not least of which the striking juxtaposition of animals with an art gallery’s reified interior, Kounellis tackled simultaneously the problem of seriality and recursive structure by Conclusion 175

insisting on twelve horses of the same type, noting paradox in “nature,” while also addressing Italy’s imperial historical past in which the symbol of the horse factored heavily in relation to its uneven development in the contemporary. The animals were a particular kind of work horse, signaling Italy’s infamous Mezzogiorno, the rural South, from which the surplus poor were extracted to fuel the need for human labor in the new industrial sector. Operating within the historicist parameters of Untitled: Libertà o Morte, in which the history of art was evoked to frame its current condition, 12 Cavalli recalled Umberto Boccioni’s canonical La città che sale (The City Rises) from 1910. Here, the speed and energy with which Boccioni conjured modernity, however paradoxically, through the classical figure of the horse, is turned inside out. The literal object—a nod to any understanding of minimalism as “literal” for coming out of the frame and off the pedestal—is repeated twelve times only to emphasize the stasis of the creatures’ condition, standing as though on reserve, awaiting any chance of movement. The piece also explored the problem of primary structure from another point of view, noting a formal stasis in relation to the mobile singularity of each horse placed in such an absurd and paradoxical situation. Turning numerous contradictions around, the work afforded a chance to think about sudden and striking economic and historical transition, through one of the most loaded metaphors of western European culture over the longue durée, the horse as a cornerstone of both narrative and monument.

From the Hidden Abode to the Arcane of Reproduction Giulio Paolini’s Senza Titolo from 1962 (see fig. C.3) formally radicalizes, and reduces, Manzoni’s insights. Turning the work around to present its reverse (or verso) forward, only the conditions of preparation of the canvas—the hidden condition of possibility for articulation—show, underscoring the way value hinges on a set of conditions that it overwrites. The work responds to Manzoni’s achromes but also to the problems addressed in his Living Sculpture, where he eschewed metaphor to demonstrate reification as a concrete process, determined by and determining social relations under “representation.” Given that the “work” is the cultural product made exceptional only by the artist’s signature, Manzoni had emphasized the occluded origin of this false equivalence in embodied labor. Remarking historical contradiction, the female body is bearer of both the labor power nec176 Conclusion

FIGURE C.3. Giulio Paolini, Senza Titolo, 1962. Giulio Paolini/SODRAC (2014).

essary to the commodity and, unevenly, the remaining ideologies of classical representation subtending the historical nude. Living Sculpture dialectically exposes the disciplined labor that the work of art at once depends on and obfuscates in order to be an art work, charged with exceptional value paradoxically predicated on a kind of presence that transcends exchange, the artists’ labor being a quasi-mystical operation. Again, Manzoni asks after how representation becomes part of a mythical renaturalization of labor under accelerated capital, a functional violence of capital itself. Radicalizing Manzoni’s attention to the conditions of possibility for the art “work” enabled by actual labor, Paolini also looks ahead to Tronti’s chapter “Social Factory” in Operaio e Capitale (1966), which would attempt an explanation for how capitalism structures a larger field of social relations, beyond the factory floor, in a way that then cycles back to support the efficiency of the process of production, which is to say the violence with which value is pressed from human bodies in lived time. As such, party mediation came to be exposed as a managerial assistance Conclusion 177

to capital rather than a vehicle for workers’ “human” rights. The hidden abode comes to (de)form the much wider social spectrum, which it shapes in its selfinterest, tautologically ensuring the replication of the labor-to-capital system as though it were a natural function of reproduction itself. The Hot Autumn of 1969, commencing with strikes at Fiat and developing into the “creeping May,” which spilled out of production plants and into demographics with no immediate experience of the assembly line (students, the unemployed), motivated a rethinking of the source of capital not only in labor but also in gender.14 Tronti’s text theorized the “social factory” of work in an expanded field, so to speak, looking at the conditions for the possibility of the labor-to-capital system outside the immediate process of production and the commodity itself. This made possible the explicitly feminist argument, forwarded by Fortunati, that social reproduction as a form of accumulation was silently operating behind the wage and enabling it, was the hidden abode beneath the hidden abode, and that capitalism thus was specifically a feminist problem. Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa’s essay “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community,” from 1972, and Fortunati’s The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework, Prostitution, Labor and Capital (1995; extrapolated from work begun in the seventies), formulated the way “women’s work” undergirds capitalist productive labor (value) by being itself unaccounted within that metric. This investigation into the dialectic between waged production and unwaged social reproduction founded on gender binaries are indeed prefigured by artistic practices in Italy centered on the laboring body (Manzoni) and on the hidden structures enabling production (Paolini). The margin of time between Manzoni’s and Paolini’s demonstrations of reification as a function of concealed embodied labor, and the belated political-economic theorization of the same problem much later already begs the question of the work of art in capitalism. The temporal sequence suggests the art work’s relevance as a diagnostic instrument, insofar as it heightens the contradictions set in place by the mode of production at the time. But the explicitly feminist dimension of Operaio would not find its expression in artistic production until much later, to which I will return as I trace the third strand of the Marshall Plan moment’s cultural legacy in the present.

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FIGURE C.4. Pino Pascali, Canone Bella Ciao, 1965.

“Organic” De/recomposition Pino Pascali, the third among Celant’s “Reign of Terror” whose work I address here, took quite seriously the misreading of minimalism as transparently bound up with military industrial complex, charging it with implicit complicity in the Vietnam War, taken as signal of the United States’ interest in restructuring a world reticulated to its economic interests, in stark contradiction to its claims to universal democracy. Canone Bella Ciao (1965; see fig. C.4) takes as its thematic point of departure the folk song “Bella Ciao,” which came to be associated with the anti (German and Italian) fascist resistance during World War II. Excising the z of canzone, Italian for song (ballad), Pascali used it to title a sculpture made of found materials (not metal) depicting a cannon. Pascali cites,15 as part of an interpretive key to his own practice, his memory of his father in World War II. Canone Bella Ciao grafts that history onto the contemporary neocolonial wars, inscribing culture as inevitably issuing from a political and historical unconscious. One Cubic Meter of Earth (1967; see fig. C.5) further polarizes the latent antagonism for which cultural signs became a vehicle in the context of Arte Povera by mobilizing the cube, often the basic unit of the minimalist idiom—notably in Donald Judd’s work and its attendant theory of “specific objects”—while drawing on the clichéd Italian Conclusion 179

FIGURE C.5. Pino Pascali, One Cubic Meter of Earth, 1967.

trope of the organic.16 The latter dovetails with Kounellis’s 12 Cavalli. The horse is Italy’s consummate symbol of cultural identity, from the equestrian monuments of the Renaissance through its paradoxical citation (given the movement’s orientation to a techno-scientistic vision of modernity) in Italian futurism, again, most notably in Boccioni’s canonized work The City Rises (1910). If Kounellis folded that history, as much economic as cultural and political, into a meditation on belated modernity and Italy’s poor rural South, Pascali goes straight to the other hidden matrix of resource extraction: land. Signaling multiple temporalities within uneven development, crossing the historical and art-historical, the work is at once an instantiation of regressive antimodernism and a “progressive” critique of the relentless productivism anchored in the industrial mining sector that enabled both the cultural development of American art and the economic development of the miracolo italiano. Pascali’s earth cube confronts a trope that runs through the entirety of Italy’s fraught twentieth century: the notion of the “organic” bound up with Italy’s Mezzogiorno, the site of the “southern problem.”17 While Manzoni and his cosignatories used the term in the phrase “we want to organicize disintegration” in the manifesto “For an Organic Painting,” the use of the term “organic” can be traced to Gramsci’s mythologized notion of the “organic intellectual.” While Gramsci used the phrase to denote the necessity of overcoming a divide between political theory and revolutionary praxis in his engagement with Bolshevism and the creation of the PCI in the 1920s, after World War II and the PCI’s neutralization of the intellectual Gramsci, the “organic intellectual” seemed a false construct of nationalist ideology. In the context of Operaio, Panzieri voiced skepticism around this Gramscian legacy and its ossification in the party form that was acquiescent to the state on the one hand and the “miracolo” of capitalism at the worker’s expense on the other. As Steve Wright has noted in Storming Heaven, “Panzieri already glimpsed that the much vaunted ‘organic intellectuals’ of Gramscian memory were now in practice organic only to the party machine.”18 But while the historical charge of Gramsci’s words came to be neutralized once it was repurposed by the PCI as a slogan for “Italian” authenticity under the capitalist competitive nationstate, the historical project, or spirit remaining in the term continued to be of interest to some postwar communists eager to think the terms of struggle anew. Piero Paolo Pasolini, poet, filmmaker, and communist theorist of the 1950s–1970s, devoted many essays to the problem of the organic intellectual Conclusion 181

in the tradition of Gramsci, locating it as at once cultural and aesthetic, and as a matter of realizing advances in political economic theory. For Pasolini those two axes, cultural and economic, were inextricably entwined, which is to say, inevitably a function of “organic” thinking, in which the totality suggests itself over analytic fragments.19 Ultimately, however, Pasolini remained allegiant to the party. His trajectory to some extent suggests the accuracy of Panzieri’s generalization: that the Gramscian legacy was by then too bound up with the party to have much meaning for the autonomous class struggle, which was a latent civil war. Pasolini’s text “The PCI to the Young!! (Notes in Verse for a Prose Poem Followed by an ‘Apology,’” castigates the student protesters who clashed with police on the Valle Giulia in Rome in the spring of 1968.20 Pasolini saw the students as part of a betrayal of workers and of the people of the rural Mezzogiorno, whom the students could not possibly understand. Many of the tensions in Pasolini’s textual production revolve around the problem of language, the cultural political codes that by turns enable and prevent revolutionary expression on a mass scale. Mistranslation of the terms of historical struggle and its organization across the rapidly changing political and cultural landscape of Italy was one of the problem sets that Panzieri, Alquati, Tronti, and Negri set themselves to surmounting in the discussion of class (de)composition.21 As I have discussed in the previous chapters, the historical failure of the party ramified doubly for a younger generation, primarily of workers but also of others, including students, who had no choice but to forge new forms. Sergio Bologna, a figure who came to participate in the late Operaio and who wrote an overview of the irrelevance of the traditional left to the postwar workers from the vantage point of 1977, opens his often-cited piece “The Tribe of Moles” with a discussion of the difficulties of language in the wake of historical transformations in production and circulation: The categories of class analysis used by the sociology of the traditional working-class movement and by bourgeois sociology (petty bourgeoisie, middle class, lumpen- or sub-proletariat, lumpenbourgeoisie etc) are used here only in their conventional historical usage. We consider the scientific value of these classifications—in present conditions, and given the assumptions underlying them—to be doubtful to say the least. They have only a conventional value, inasmuch

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as the concepts of capital and class composition are far better suited to define the dynamic of class relations today as relations of power, which is what concerns us.22 Bologna’s attempt to describe the swiftly changing composition of demographics that were once understood under the sign of a unified “class” speaks to a historical condition in which the basic coordinates of intelligibility no longer applied. At the same time, the historical window of opportunity to describe the fast transforming labor-to-capital relationship was being displaced and sidestepped by the language of civil democracy, in which immigration and the nation-state were taking center stage. The convenient term, coined by Negri, was “multitude.”23 But this term effectively cut the question of demographic composition off from the question of the wage, thereby doubly defeating the historical demand for a new class analysis. The inability of the classic communist lexicon to describe, much less politically address, the lived reality of workers—and everyone else in the wider “social factory” constituted by the totalizing acceleration of capital under belated formal subsumption— had been, after all, the operative insight of Alquati’s workers’ inquiries into new workers’ subjectivity. Bologna understood the worker’s inquiries, or the methodology therein, to be part of a continuity of oral history as much as of a scientifically based sociology, which Alquati had held in contempt for its collusion in bourgeois economics. But this question of misrecognition, a function of rapid accelerations in capital that were making generations illegible to one another, was a theme in popular culture as well. Wright notes the comic book character Gasparazzo, who came to be a well-known and beloved fixture of the newspaper Lotta Continua, which was started by both students and workers in 1969 in Turin after the Fiat occupations. Gasparazzo first appeared in 1972 and became enormously popular. “A southern immigrant who loathed wage labor, militant in his outlook but wary of the official labor movement, his private world was full of uncertainties but also permanent rebellion. As such, he quickly became the emblem of the group that most faithfully embodied the best and worst of the new politics.”24 In the years of “permanent conflictuality” (1972–1977), in which tens of thousands of young workers were newly politicized, the liminal figure who nonetheless seized the role of social antagonist had a wide audience. Paolini, Pascali, and Kounellis illuminate Manzoni’s influence on the next

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generation of art making in Italy but also signal the extent to which Arte Povera figures the postmedium condition,25 born of a geopolitical context highly attenuated to shifts that would ramify elsewhere later, shifts caused by the economic restructuring, often referred to as post-Fordism and “globalization,” for which Italy served as crucible.26 As I suggested in chapter 1, one might continue to track the continuity of questions specific to debates in Italy about its cultural specificity in relation to the drift of international economic consolidation of capital in the present. To what extent might we trace the tendency understood as “critical regionalism” back to Arte Povera? This discussion offers the most preliminary sketch for future research. More important, it fills out the history of often-cited sources and models of contemporary practices that are too frequently treated as though they were floating free of the historical circumstances out of which they took form: a history buried within our contemporary conjuncture.

1977: Guilt by Association, the Red Brigades, Nanni Balestrini, and Antonio Negri Another striking aspect of Celant’s rhetoric in “Notes for a Guerrilla War” brings us to the second strand I trace here, which is part of a nascent anticapitalist politics couched in the realization that those politics would have to be, a priori, also an antistatist politics, given the manifest collusion of capitalist integration and state formation (American and Italian) in the post-war period. To the extent that (counter) currents course through culture, motivating practices that are intended to question both the state and the market, these practices are indebted to Italy’s particular history. I am referring to the language Celant uses, the drive in terms such as “guerrilla war” and the “Reign of Terror.” Both phrases happen textually in a manifesto that circulated just three years before what would come to be known as an actual reign of terror came to structure Italian politics. A militant group calling themselves the Brigate Rosse formed in the aftermath of the state crackdown at the Fiat strikes in 1969. Guilty of the kidnapping and murder of Christian Democrat judge Aldo Moro in 1978, they came to stand for and to retroactively inscribe workerism and its offshoot, Autonomia, as motivated by violent extremism. Because of the commonly held horizon of autonomous Marxism, numerous persons devoted to the elaboration and practice of political and economic autonomy came to be 184 Conclusion

held accountable for social violence, and came to galvanize the reactionary interests of the state against class struggle. Those previously associated with workerism, among whom the most notable in the Anglophone world is no doubt Negri, and artists and writers associated with the struggles for autonomy on a parallel register, such as Nanni Balestrini, were being rounded up and imprisoned for potential association with it. In Sylvère Lottringer’s narrative, based as much on the journal he kept on a trip to Rome in the summer of 1979 as on historical accounts of the moment, “on April 7, 1979 . . . most of the intellectual leaders of Autonomia (derived and evolved from Operaio of the previous decade) had been issued with warrants. Hundreds fled into exile; twelve thousand were jailed for up to twenty years, untried, under laws of exception.” Lottringer’s entry of July 16, 1979, notes: “Unlike the Red Army Faction in Germany, mostly comprised of intellectuals, the first brigadists were recruited in the Fiat factory.”27 Both Negri’s and Balestrini’s trajectories, outside the immediate scope of this book, have become foundational points of reference. Balestrini, from Milan, was one of the signatories of “The Interplanetary Art Manifesto,” which first appeared in Fontana’s Il Gesto in 1959. The passage quoted in the epigraph of this conclusion describes the irrelevance of abstract painters concerned with gravity in the shadow of Pollock, and with governments operating under the threat of imminent apocalypse. Balestrini and his cosignatories channel the international cultural politics of the Cold War: “Yet by now it is clear to us that both sides have only worked together on the mad, suicidal ideology of the most murderous destruction.” The text weaves together the problems of ideology and of the conditions for the possibility of painting internationally. Its tortured ambivalence toward new models of painting—“abstract painters, or rather concrete painters, as many like to call themselves, concretely revealing their non abstract ineptitude in art”—which it seeks to supersede inscribes at once the logic of colonization and the drive to autochthony. The words evoke an internalization of and rage against painterly problems suddenly being oriented to international dynamics in the signatories’ collective imagination. “Those who deny the possibility that artistic inducements might derive from nuclear intuitions and discoveries are those same intellectually and physically fat fools who want to limit their use to the destruction of humanity.” Wanting above all to explore and engage the contradictions and antagonisms specific to the moment, to be timely in the face of history, while disarticulating those forms from the arsenal of bosses and govConclusion 185

ernments and with ideologies understood to motivate international relations above human life, the authors urge the reader to “not ask too much of our work, but to ask a lot: they contain our passionate and innovative desire, in the face of sterile rotten abstractionism, to participate in the latest developments of human consciousness.” The signatories tried to anchor the advent of the nuclear era to the cultural longue durée. “The myth, poetry, and mystery of the atom were of greater interest to Lucretius than to the fat and bearded sages of Alexandria.”28 The manifesto voices the tenor of contempt that would come to inform Balestrini’s involvement with workerism within the decade. Balestrini went on to form Gruppo 64 with other writers, including Umberto Eco. But Balestrini’s second novel and first major work from 1971, Vogliamo Tutto (We Want Everything) is a barely fictionalized account of a southern youth who migrates north to work in the industrial belt around Milan, Turin, and Brescia in the fifties and sixties. The plot revolves around the strikes at Fiat in 1969. Vogliamo Tutto finds its horizon of meaning in the workerist theorization of labor as that which must be overcome rather than merely reformed. The demand “We Want Everything” referred to the new autonomous politics that was parting ways with the union and its logic of bargaining. Refusing the negotiations of traditional organized labor, the strikes and barricades that characterized Turin in 1969 opened a new collective political horizon of autonomy: namely that there were no demands, because demands signaled dependence on capital, on bosses, and on the law, which had long ago betrayed workers (beginning with the events in Piazza Statuto in 1962). The classic bargaining strategy was overcome only to the extent that now everything was demanded. The dissolution and abolition of the labor-to-capital relation in general was at stake. Balestrini’s best known book in the English language, The Unseen (1986, translated into English in 2005), is an attempt to sketch the texture of the later years of the “creeping May,” when the student and worker movement reached a pitch that resulted in numerous arrests and many months spent in prisons of various degrees of security.

The Unseen Balestrini develops a textual idiom reflecting heat and speed of street conflict and the impossibility of its translation into the legal and juridical system. The text’s (anti)structure—its suspension of punctuation, which spaces 186 Conclusion

out thought, thus effectuating temporal quickening—expresses the way action exceeds the categorical ideas that structure everyday life in capitalist democracy, the temporality of struggle. The moment-by-moment unfolding of spontaneous resistance, in which not every social interaction is scripted per the dictates of democracy, becomes the protagonist. This in turn hinges on the illegibility of historical conditions, changing demographics, events, the coordinates of class war erupting for which historical forms no longer provided a means to understand much less address. Balestrini is damning of the institutions of civil society and parliamentary democracy merely through description: The investigating judge dourly begins reading the long list of individual charges this one that one charged with et cetera et cetera with having etcetera etcetera . . . and then come the preliminaries and the lawyers with no conviction and as pure formality bring the usual futile objections therefore recess and the courts withdrawal to decide on the defense’s objections and a few minutes and they’re back already and the bell’s rung again to say that of course all the defense’s objections are overruled and the bell’s rung again and the court’s declared in session and the investigating judge declares debate open.29 The Unseen, in addition to its critique of the democratic politics of representation that seem only to facilitate the state-to-capitalist interest against labor on the one hand and the freedoms of the self against the state on the other (or, as Negri would have it, “the multitude”) is notable for the way it articulates the parallelism of labor—as understood in the context of Quaderni Rossi, Classe Operaia, and, by 1972, Lotta Continua—and prison in those years. “Inside the prison there was a state of permanent protest that had its effects on the regulatory structure because the prison is this: it’s a structure that elaborates the regulation of the body to the maximum and so the fact that this regulation is rearranged corresponds to a shift in the balance of power between prisoners and custody.”30 This description, in turn, echoes the tenor of the court proceedings of Antonio Negri’s trial. The hearings evidence the historical unavailability of language to account for the specific yet ubiquitous ways the acceleration of capital reconstituted everyday life, as Bologna had pointed out in “The Tribe of Moles,” which had rendered the lexicon of the traditional left ineffectual. The records include the following exchange. Conclusion 187

NEGRI: The document contains analysis of the current situation that I think I can agree with. In general, the document is characterized by the assumption of the irreversible fact of extremely antagonistic class relationships. It emphasizes the major aspects of mass struggle, which are clarified in the central part of the same document about the four campaigns: concerning the working day and the wage; concerning public expenditure; concerning nuclear power; and against State Terrorism. It is clear that when one is speaking about offensive struggle, one is speaking about the material conditions of exploitation in relation to the new conditions of social production (socialized work; off the books work; women’s work; various methods of extracting more surplus value and therefore more brutal exploitation). All this defines the situation of extreme social antagonism among classes and social groups, for which the conclusion inevitably tends to be made in terms of civil war. Notice the huge and dramatic difference that these theses make in relation to the Brigate Rosse position. JUDGE: I do not quite see this fundamental difference. I cite this lengthy segment for the way it shores up the documentary status of Balestrini’s description, in The Unseen, of the failure of political instrumental language. Negri’s testimony to his intellectual distance from the Brigate Rosse was not comprehensible to the existing political categories and juridical distinctions. Notable here is the earnestness with which Negri answers. His position did indeed criticize passive civil resistance on a mass scale; it did not, however, include support for armed vanguards.31 This rather foundational and fundamental point did not stop the state from imprisoning thousands of workers from the spectrum of backgrounds involved in the dissolution and reconsolidation of class in those years. The disintegration and recomposition of class rendered its nascent, latent, or emergent modes of expression utterly opaque.32 Negri’s positions in the aftermath of the dissolution of workerism were best summarized in the series of seminars he ran in Paris in 1978 at the invitation of Louis Althusser, in which he worked through the previous decades’ struggles through a reading of the second volume of Capital, now collected as Marx beyond Marx.33 Both Workerism’s collapse and Negri’s subsequent turn to the politics of “the Multitude,” instead of that of the relationship between labor and capital as mediated by the wage, has been described by Bologna as follows.

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If Panzieri’s political objective was to produce a shift “in” the workers’ movement, the CGIL [Italian General Confederacy of Labor], the PSI [Italian Socialist Party] (where he had been a member of the Central Committee) and the PCI; on the other hand, the others wanted to create a new movement that could develop in the post-communist era and to experiment with a new way of doing politics with the working class. At this point Toni Negri’s role became central and decisive. More than anyone else, he had the “will” to undertake such a project and he tried hard to convince Panzieri that his path was the right one to take. (The definitive break occurred at the beginning of September 1963 in my room in Milan, in a flat that I shared with other two comrades from the Quaderni Rossi group.) The second strand I attempt to sketch in this conclusion, then, involved cultural retorts to the state’s response to violent struggles that began with reference to conditions on the factory floor and spread like fire to students and the expanded social field. Negri, with Hardt, took the notion of “the Multitude” from Spinoza, using it to designate those unaffiliated with any particular historical class formation or class composition. Turning from a Marxian analysis to one of political cultural international relations during the period of economic restructuring since the 1970s, Negri’s works coauthored with Michael Hardt, culminating in the volumes Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), have addressed Italy’s curious position as satellite of the United States, symbiotically linked to it, during the Cold War. Both books have been enormously popular in the Anglophone world. In his “Introduction: Laboratory,” Michael Hardt sees Italy in the fifties and sixties as a “kind of laboratory for experimentation in new forms of political thinking, albeit one whose exceptionality comes to a close as Italy converges with other countries through the post modernization of the economic realm and the Americanization of social and cultural fields.”34 He and Negri name this phenomenon “Empire.” While the narrative neglects to distinguish between “Americanization” and “globalization,” it does suggest that the American presence in Italy, in the interest of assuring the triumph of capitalism, coded as democracy, in Europe, also set the conditions of possibility for experimental resistant thought, for which Negri, alongside his cohorts now referred to as the Italian autonomists, is an exemplary case. But the lines of filiation, of continuity, between Negri’s reading of

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Marx in the context of workerist praxis and its aftermath and his work in Empire and Multitude may seem difficult to establish. His turn to cultural questions in particular hovers in an indeterminate space between retreat on the one hand and the use of the culture sector to preserve a revolutionary politics over decades of restoration since the dissolution of the Italian far left. In the decade 2000–2009 alone, Negri has surfaced frequently and prominently in the framework of the international exhibit circuit. He participated in Thomas Hirschhorn’s The Bijlmer Spinoza Festival (2009).35 Situated in a suburb of Amsterdam populated predominantly by Muslim Surinamese immigrants, the work functioned as an opportunity to assert its intervention into the ageold aesthetic questions of “universality” of judgement, and of a common sense (sensus communis). To this end, the work attempted to frame a public discussion about democracy at a time of growing tension between local governments and Muslim immigrants. This framework itself, as the title states baldly, was constituted by reference to the legacy of Spinoza, understood as “the philosopher of tolerance and democracy.”36 Hirschhorn asked Negri to run a public seminar and give a lecture based on his book The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics. Negri explored the term “precarity,” tracing it to the shared query of aesthetics and politics, a common question marking contemporaneity. Negri’s choice of terms elaborated the blind spot of the notion of “a multitude,” effectively suspending the real causal matrix of urban tension across Europe, in France and Germany as well as Holland and Italy, namely austerity and the dynamics of political decolonization wedded to economic recolonization. The piece in Amsterdam’s Bijlmer neighborhood echoed Hirschhorn’s work seven years earlier in Kassel, Germany, for Dokumenta 11. This work, entitled The Georges Bataille Monument, consisted of the building of a compound in a Turkish, mostly Muslim, and lower-class immigrant neighborhood of Kassel. This compound was made up of a temporary library housing the works of Georges Bataille, video film and production space, a large papier-mâché sculpture of a tree trunk, and a kebab vendor. A “gypsy cab” service, employing inhabitants of the neighborhood where the work was located, picked up visitors to Dokumenta 11 to bring them to the art work. Partly in response to the low-grade but persistent controversy that followed on the heels of the Kassel project, partly following the course of his work’s growth and ambition, Hirschhorn chose to mediate its Amsterdam iteration through a more explicit thematization of the problem of democracy 190 Conclusion

via a reductive recourse to a Spinozist legacy rather than to the more opaque, complex, and irrational elements of everyday life precipitated because they are repressed by the social, as evoked by Bataille. To this end, having a contemporary theorist of “the multitude” on hand was an opportunity to “curate” the problem set. Negri hosted a series of discussions about models of community and collectivity formation under late capitalism among populations in Europe that were rapidly changing under the vicissitudes of immigration and colonial histories. Noting Negri’s tendency to present work at art institutions, in London at the Serpentine, and the Tate, Alberto Toscano has observed: “In a phenomenon now so common as to pass almost unremarked, Antonio Negri and the “tradition” or “school” of Italian autonomist or post-workerist Marxism have recently made their appearance in all these London venues “eliciting in some the disabused aperçu that revolutionary theory has become yet another domain to be incorporated and ingested by an ever omnivorous curatorial practice.”37 Yet Negri’s participation in questions of aesthetics, from the vantage of his historical trajectory, seems to suggest that at moments of rupture when they are not merely a vehicle of capital and statecraft, some institutions act as conduits for an articulation of autonomy that is all the more political for its seeming autonomy from politics.38

Fire in the Nail Salon In February 2013, at the Queen’s Nails Gallery salon in San Francisco, California, an installation by the art collective Claire Fontaine caught on fire. A wallbased sculptural relief built of matches, an idiom the collective frequently deploys, the work, America Burnt/Unburnt (see fig. C.6) was a reiteration of numerous previous exhibits, with the exception of the fire itself, which destroyed the interior of the gallery. Much media attention turned to the speculation that the mishap might have been premeditated somehow, not least because the title of a Claire Fontaine installation just a few months earlier at the Audain Gallery, at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, had been ironically titled Carelessness Causes Fire. Irony seemed to cross circuits with probable cause, suggesting a thin line between spectacle and terrorism. The installation, made of matches after all, was a form in the shape of the United States as depicted on a world map—an homage to Johns and to a history of pop art. On the other hand, timing and the content of Claire Conclusion 191

FIGURE C.6. Claire Fontaine, America Burnt/Unburnt, Queens Nails, 2014. Courtesy of the artist.

Fontaine’s previous work insinuated a horizon of intention, a model of intention that was in debt to the aleatory necessity, elaborated by the surrealists, in which the unconscious desire, always political, effects the real. Claire Fontaine’s project, founded on the shoulders of the Situationists and the intersection of French and Italian neo-avant-gardes, hinted at an uncanny bursting of art into life, in the most louche and embarrassingly kitsch way possible: a fire! Citing Guy Debord frequently in their work, Claire Fontaine’s gestures, located in the interstice between accident and intention already in the use of the matches, also evoke his often-quoted thesis 91 in The Society of the Spectacle: “The critical position later elaborated by the Situationists has shown that the suppression and the realization of art are inseparable aspects of a single supersession of art.”39

From Readymade to Strike: Lotta Feminista The third strand picks up the way the Italian feminist analysis of labor and value ramifies in contemporary art practice, most explicitly in the work of Claire Fontaine. A collective that founded itself in 2004, partly in the ashes of 192 Conclusion

another radical left collective in Italy and France called Tiqqun,40 Claire Fontaine has come to cast a wide and long shadow over the art world and the most current yet simultaneously paradigmatic expression of its state: the art fair on the one hand and the gray area between discourse and advertising that marks the art world on the other hand. Claire Fontaine refers to itself as “a readymade artist stripped of use-value who intervenes in a world.” What might this mean? They have taken part in numerous art world conventions (Venice, Istanbul, Manifesta) and exhibitions in ways that have generated a sense of scandal and provocation unknown to the art world for some time, and having made some witty objects that function as biting retorts to canonized objects of official contemporary art; their strength lies in their textual production. Wellcirculated texts, notably “Ready made Artist and the Human Strike” offer a lucid history of twentieth-century art on the one hand and of radical politics of the sixties and seventies on the other that recast the cultural matrix of the present. These texts begin by locating in the present and its seeming impasse symptoms of the historical unconscious. “The dispossession that we thus feel with regard to our presumed identity is the same as that, which we feel when facing history, now that we no longer know how to somehow take part in it.”41 It is obvious that they are picking up, for the nth time, the legacy of the Duchampian readymade, and rehearsing the ways skill, originality, creativity, and authorial intention are displaced by the expanded field of capitalist social reproduction, the disciplining management of social life that facilitates the extraction of value, however dispersed in the present global financial order. Rather than collapsing into a nihilistic or melancholic rhetoric, the writers turn to recent (enough) history to suggest the possible continuity of revolutionary time in the present. To do so, Claire Fontaine draws a connection between the seeming passivity of the decade 2000–2009 and a falsified sense of the failure of the revolutionary past in order to suggest that the recovery of revolutionary history is in itself a way to recognize nascent struggles in the present. Claire Fontaine turns to the period marked by the fight for autonomy on the part of the expanded working class of the sixties and seventies in Italy. “The fact that these years of unheard-of collective creative fertility, both in terms of life forms and intellectual production, passed into the history books as ‘the years of lead’ [a literal translation of the Italian expression “gli anni di piombo,” referencing the material of the bullets; translator’s note] tells us a lot about what we are supposed to forget.”42 Conclusion 193

And what we are supposed to forget are the two revolutionary developments of the sixties and seventies in Italy: feminism and forms of independent expression on the part of the working class and those dispossessed by the recomposition of capital; and then that element of the demographic that included both: women. How one locates the problem of “feminization” in relation to the state and to the market, at the center of Claire Fontaine’s concern, takes some philological and exegetical reconstruction. The collective acknowledges Leopoldina Fortunati, Carla Lonzi, and Mariarosa Dalla Costa as the framework for their own writing, which has been frequently disseminated at international art fairs throughout the 2000s. Of course the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben also informs their thinking, as does the collective that formed from among his students, issuing numerous communiqués under the name Tiqqun. But as the collective Claire Fontaine makes clear in “The Ready-Made Artists and the Human Strike,” the vanishing point of their project is the two-faced problem of concealed labor and the specific way the labor-to-capital relationship structures subjectivities, as it de- and recomposes, rendering autonomous resistance newly possible or impossible. Beginning with the rejection of Negri’s notion of a “multitude” and instead turning to the possibility of a negative capacity or political potential yet to form into a historical force, the collective acknowledges a critical transformation in the location of revolutionary agency. This change in locus of anticapitalist struggle forms the most specific symptom of contemporaneity: “The feminist movement triggered this transformation, which dissolved all the old groups that had channeled energies since ’68.”43 Notable here is the way feminism is seen as a category of struggle that can unify the others by dissolving previous categories and redirecting collective drives, much as the wage was seen as a way to centralize the movement around a fundamental structural problem before Negri came up with his curiously vague “multitude.” While they do not indicate the steps taken to the next conclusion, they state flatly that this reorganization of struggle around feminism was bound up with the autonomous strike: “These movements were manifestations of the human strike.” The route from one term to the other may well have been paved for them by the textual framework undergirding their own. Two essays in particular, James and Dalla Costa’s text “The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” (1972) and Leopoldina Fortunati’s book The Arcane of Reproduction (1981) locate the seat of revolutionary struggle in a negative relation to 194 Conclusion

power and to capital. They turn to those whose survival is fully structured and determined by capital but who are nonetheless excluded from it. The contradiction in the labor-to-capital relationship originates in this nonrelationship, mediated negatively and negatively mediating capitalist reproduction. Women and the Subversion of the Community (1972) relies on and radicalizes Tronti’s chapter in Operaio e Capital on the ill-defined “Social Factory” while lending it clarity by circumscribing it thus: “What has been neither clear nor assumed by the organizations of the working class movement is that precisely through the wage has the exploitation of the non-wage laborer been organized. . . . This exploitation has been even more effective because the lack of a wage hid it.” The statement is striking for how it uses a kind of double negative to describe an empirical condition. While James and Dalla Costa preserve the wage, unlike Negri, as the anchoring point of their position, they emphasize the way it structures disenfranchisement from the wage as much as workers’ discipline within the wage. The traditional terms through which to understand exploitation by the wage are turned inside out. Notably, James and Dalla Costa defer to metaphors of vision to articulate hidden conditions of actual labor. “Her role in the cycle of social production remained invisible because only the product of her labor, the laborer, was visible there.”44 This allows James and Dalla Costa to generalize “the housewife” as the condition basic to all those occupying a position of vexed autonomy in relationship to capital yet foundational to its self-reproduction, a position replacing the historical role of an organized class. Their basis for this is the absence of quantification in calculating the value of domestic labor, which allows it to be all the more violently usurped. For domestic labor lives by the clock of waged time without receiving the wage or the social freedoms it buys: “That is, on a world level, it is precisely what is particular to domestic work, not only measured as number of hours and nature of work, but as quality of life and quality of relationships which it generates, that determines a woman’s place wherever she is and to whichever class she belongs.” Dalla Costa and James effectively replace the parameters of solidarity understood through the class relation alone (class consciousness) with the position women fill by being the link between the value-productive domain of the wage on the one hand and on the other the unwaged domain—tasked with facilitating social reproduction. One might call this “maintenance” rather than “creative work,” in the parlance of the American feminist artist Mierle Laderman-Ukeles, who notes Conclusion 195

that task performance seems to be divided into “creative” or “reproductive” depending on the gender of the executor.45 James and Dalla Costa and Fortunati turn those terms around to excavate the relationship between labor and capital from within in order to find the locus of gendered identity, that coercively stable variable around which capital recreates itself daily off the factory floor, producing producers and consumers in addition to or rather than products. These authors nonetheless share a common understanding of what constitutes gender in capital: a relation to market mediation on the one hand and surplus value on the other, in relation to which they are vectored obliquely, at once disciplined and marginalized. This condition then became the point to extrapolate a notion of feminized work, to free struggle from its reticulation exclusively to the wage. All note the way she is the very ground for the daily reproduction of he, who is to appear at the factory door each day ready to sell his labor power to generate surplus value in which he will not partake. “She” is capitalism’s unseen foundation and, as such, the clearest position from which to interrupt it. Finally, Dalla Costa and James mark the shift from patriarchy to capitalist patriarchy in the recomposition of the labor-to-capital relation that accomplished a qualitative and quantitative change in the power dynamic, a transition they describe as being from oppression to exploitation. “The unfree patriarch was transformed into the ‘free’ wage earner, and upon the contradictory experience of the sexes and the generations was built a more profound estrangement and therefore a more subversive relation.” Characteristically, folding the situation inside out, James and Dalla Costa see the very site of capitalist structuring, the place of production of labor power in the sphere that is formative of yet occluded by the wage, as the place from which to launch a counterattack, in a class war that is now organized around the false binary of public and private. That binary is capitalism’s most operative myth, so totalizing and pervasive as to have gone unnoted by Marx. Sylvia Federici, with James, who founded the Wages for Housework movement in the context of workerist feminism and Lotta Feminista, formulated the dynamic, shared by the structural logic of capitalism and its Marxist critique alike, as follows: “No difference is made between commodity production and the production of the workforce. One assembly line produces both. Accordingly, the value of labor power is measured by the value of the commodities (food, clothing, housing) that have to be supplied to the worker, to the man, so that he can renew his life process.”46 196 Conclusion

In The Arcane of Reproduction Fortunati further developed this point. Without necessarily collapsing this work’s analysis into the demand for “wages for housework,” this text nonetheless pushes past the blind spots of much of Operaio theory by noting the necessity of unwaged yet metricized (disciplined by clock time) work to the production of labor power, itself a commodity, albeit the only commodity to have its origin utterly occluded in Marx’s analysis. Feminist Marxologist Maya Gonzalez notes Fortunati’s recourse to a metaphor of optical reversal to articulate the at once dialectical and coconstitutive relationship of visible value and its invisible support mapped along the axis of gender: “This sphere is not simply the opposite of the productive sphere, but rather it conceptually ‘presents itself as a photograph printed back to front, as mirror image of the process of commodity production.’ ” Attentive to the relationship between verso, this “back to front” (hidden abode) and the face of appearances, “the mirror image” or field of representation illuminated by the wage, Fortunati nonetheless drives her critique of existing theories of value production in the direction of a politics rather than a revision of any existing theory of value. This politics, unlike Negri’s, recognizes its foundation on the wage relation. Gonzalez summarizes: “In the context of Marxist-Feminism, the wage-relation—not biologically but structurally—must also involve that half of the working class relegated to the hidden abode of labor-power’s reproduction.”47 This afforded the way to consolidate a coherent “class,” less vague than Negri’s multitude, without displacing the centrality of the wage but acknowledging that its operations were both economic and political and operated directly and indirectly. The wage, then, was not a matter of remuneration in an isolated transaction, or even the rational distribution of resources, but the disciplinary structuring of the social totality to enable total exploitation in any number of places and ways. Claire Fontaine builds its prognosis of the present and its potential for the future around this logic of inverse power relations, picking up on the concrete potential of “the negative” as Fortunai formulated it in her metaphor evoking the relationship of a negative to a photographic image (those captured in a wage relation without being recipients of the wage or part of value productive work). The problem then is not only one of latency but of dependency on an occluded originary matrix. Perhaps sensitive to Fortunati’s logic, art critic and historian Carla Lonzi’s work is an influential link in elaborating the insights of Lotta Feminista and Conclusion 197

Wages for Housework in a broader cultural field, an expanded “social factory” that was reverberating across boundaries in the by then interconnected student and worker movements that extended after the Hot Autumn of 1969 and into the 1970s. In 1971 Lonzi wrote “We Spit on Hegel,” a manifesto-like statement in which she traced women’s subordination back dialectically to the master of dialectics himself. She thereafter founded Rivolta Femminile, with painter Carla Accardi, with whom she ran a publishing house and space for the presentation of art work. Lonzi’s work, while continually resonant in relation to both Arte Povera and its reception and Italian Marxist revisions of Marxian theories of labor and revolutionary praxis, in particular its feminist iteration, has recently been revivified in an Anglophone context as part of Claire Fontaine’s project. On the face of it a bibliographic reference, Lonzi’s work operates as a plinth to Claire Fontaine’s diagnosis of the present, in a corpus of art founded on text as much as object. While “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike” avows its debt to Italian feminism, the collective has emphasized Lonzi’s work on occasion to emphasize her role in forging a bridge to discussions outside the debate on labor, to women across class who are nonetheless bound to the logic of labor described by Fortunati—occluded, unremunerated, foundational to the social reproduction of everyday life in capitalism. In an essay on Lonzi written in 2013, Claire Fontaine emphasizes Lonzi’s attention to the way power is structured through time and task performance: “In the preface to her journal, Lonzi gives her final word on the feminine skill of multitasking: ‘For me, doing one thing has a value because it prevents me from doing two.’ ”48 That statement’s quiddity in articulating the degree to which changes in labor determine social relations outside the immediate space of production rests on two entwined but ultimately autonomous lines of argumentation drawn from workerist Marxism. The de- and recomposition of labor required by the factories in the miracolo italiano, deskilled labor wasn’t the emancipatory thing Lenin promised it would be but a way for capital to extract more value from the working day. Compulsory deskilling and task performance, enforced by the accelerated capitalist mode of production, are understood (contra American artists) as ways that capital organizes and disciplines (and ultimately immiserates) the bearer of labor power: the worker. This analysis on the part of Alquati dovetails with Fortunati’s work, which, like James’s and Dalla Costa’s (although the positions ramify politically very differently and are not to be collapsed), builds on the work of Tronti’s rereading of Lenin and Marx to note 198 Conclusion

that it takes a social system much bigger than the factory floor to facilitate the extraction of value from labor power in order to exchange it in the form of the commodity. Fortunati in particular elaborates on the fact that this indirect relationship to value that Tronti initially locates in the amorphous, flabby, vague category of the “social factory” is located first and foremost in the work of women, which allows capitalism to dialectically generalize all deskilled work as “feminine” in order to find a subject of struggle that does not conform to the historical category of class, shaped by the masculinist parameters of the wage/value. Both arguments are more rigorous than that of Negri’s “multitude,” which falsely “politicizes” the problem by severing it from the problem of value and general equivalence. Both rely on a conceptual reversal of figure and ground (for lack of a better metaphor) as a way to accurately describe the concrete foundations of the daily reproduction of the labor-to-capital relation and therefore of capitalism itself (historically and daily reconstituted). In this sense, Lonzi’s remove from the immediate production process, as bourgeoise, as critic and “intellectual” intent on a feminist dismantling of everyday life, supported Fortunati’s project in a larger Lotta Feminista. What Claire Fontaine frames in its own practice, and in “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications” is the fundamental insights of feminism, elaborated in the context of proletarian struggles in which the traditional understanding of class could no longer inhere. In particular, “ReadyMade Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications” resurfaces the question of the revolutionary subject and of class consciousness in a way that postmodern theories of aporia foreclose it. The part of Claire Fontaine’s oevre to date that is not rooted in textual strategies revolves around the general strike. Over the last decade, Claire Fontaine has staged numerous projects—texts and objects, the latter often consisting of the word “strike” presented in the collective’s idiomatic fluorescent tubing—revolving around the strike. This preoccupation with the strike situates itself in the institutionalized context of the art fair, in large part the result of the Cold War biennial (such as the Venice Biennial) effect that I briefly discussed in chapters 1 and 3. Given the metabolic rate of late capital in general and the velocity of circulation in its cultural arm in particular, “the general strike” has come up in the numerous clearinghouses of cultural production: the bienniale, the art fair, convention-type exhibitions modeled on the world’s fairs of the late nineteenth century, when Paris and London were undergoing rapid modernization, or recomposition of labor Conclusion 199

pools. In “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications,” Claire Fontaine confronts the crisis of democracy reflected in the art “world” with startling frankness by going to the source of value: production. They register the foreclosure of a historical model of value production in which the artist could still lay a claim to autonomy from fully subsumed industrial production at the level of object making. Tracing the present to the charged relationship between value and non/workers (contra Negri, in keeping with Fortunati and others working in the context of Italian feminism) they conclude that at this historical moment, “the only way of assisting creation is to protect those who create nothing and are not even interested in art.” This declaration may strike us as extreme and, of course, as echoing a dictum repeated only too often in the era of endgames that mark much postwar poetics. Circling back to the opening of this book, Claire Fontaine’s statement once again recalls Adorno’s anguished, dialectically motivated proclamation that there could be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz. The latter, however, made the case for why literature had to resist this verdict and concluded with the insistence that it was all the more imperative to practice a form of lyricism to push against cynicism. If anything, this insistence urgently remotivated a lyricism capable of confronting its own historical trajectory, and impasse. If we shift the problem, or rather its historical horizon, to a present characterized by global financial crisis and the promise of recession after recession, can we too claim an equally urgent, if otherwise motivated, sense of necessity? And if so, in what way? And how can that which happens in the market push back against the cynicism of that same market? How might we situate this necessity to continue to find forms of articulation within accelerated systemic control? Above all, when are we to elaborate a way to resist cynicism, given our exhaustion, anomie, and the sheer inability to perceive, much less critically distinguish, meaning among so many cultural bids situated in the homogenous space of many art fairs, so many interventions of all stripes that feel identical to every other in a global exhibitionary order, a kind of enforced redundancy in the drive to produce the new?

Human Strike Claire Fontaine’s implicit conclusion that there can be no art under capitalism fails to echo so many modernist prohibitions. Unlike Adorno’s famous pro200 Conclusion

nouncements that there can be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz, Claire Fontaine’s claim is not that art is impossible due to ethical or existential questions, as though a form of protest were to withhold one’s artistic genius. Rather, the collective notes a much more practical problem, namely that the conditions under which the making of a work is even possible are itself under extreme duress. It is simply not possible to make a work outside the parameters determined by the vicissitudes of market determination at any given moment. The collective reframes the problem by turning its angle of analysis to the point of view of the artist, who is expected to deliver expressive or alert consciousness within the determinations of a support that is itself the index of subsumption, a readymade. Be it canvas, video, digital media, even performance, happenings and participatory events, the laboring bodies of others elsewhere mark the support of the art through the fact of manufacture, which the artist must on some level acknowledge (self-reflexively). They note the contradictions in which the practitioner is to deliver the effect of, if not exceptional artisanal skill, any experience other than instrumental profit-oriented logic, even as she works within a fully saturated field of equivalence enforced by a regime of value in which she cannot produce the exceptional consciousness expected, a model of consciousness that is other, if not fully impervious, to everyday life in rhythm with subsumption on the factory floor. Located in the forced intimacy between human beings and all sorts of vulgar and odious objects, which constitute the daily life of the majority under advanced capitalism, this continuity has produced effects on our subjectivities far more pernicious than those Marx was able to describe. Reification, real subsumption, and alienation say nothing to us of the lack of words afflicting us when faced with our evident familiarity with commodities and their language, as well as our simultaneous incapacity to name the most simple facts of life, such as political events, for a start. Against this the collective poses the term “strike.” “This type of strike that interrupts the total mobilization to which we are all submitted and that allows us to transform ourselves. By its light, the rationality of the behaviors we adopt in our everyday life would appear to be entirely dictated by the acceptance of the economic relationships that regulate them. Each gesture and each constructive activity in which we invest ourselves has a counterpart within the monetary economy or the libidinal economy. The human strike decrees the Conclusion 201

bankruptcy of these two principles and installs other affective and material fluxes.” Outside the culture sector, a general strike is an organized refusal to work on the part of a critical mass of laborers. It is a tactic attendant on and responsive to the specific capitalist form of accumulation, which I have already explored in terms of subsumption, in which lives are reduced to labor measured in clock time and conjugated with currency. Salient to the logic of the strike is the recognition that violent and inhuman conditions for workers who produce value for others are not a matter of ethical social choices but are an inherent function of capitalist means, irrespective of human agency. The general strike has variously emerged and receded as a broadly recognized means of resistance since the mid-nineteenth century; its potential to precipitate capitalism’s inherent tendency to crisis was recently forcefully expressed by antiausterity movements in London in 2011 and in Greece, Italy, and Spain repeatedly over the past years. In North America, the 2011 Walmart strike addressed restructuring from labor’s vantage by organizing non- or postunion workers in interrupting the supply chain rather than production on the factory floor, thereby effectively marking the need for labor to restructure in response to capital’s restructuring, which had rendered organization within the framework of work impossible. A general strike is practical, operational, and disinterested in the convolutions of ideological critique—because it sidesteps the intricacies of ideology for action and experience. It interrupts the availability of labor that is foundational to the production of value, through the very mechanisms that transform lived time into quantifiable profit, and that press, through the process of subsumption, all other areas of life into the service of itself. The logic of the general strike nonetheless depends on the acknowledgment that capitalism defers its collapse by finding ways to mediate the relationship between labor and capital, thereby adjusting the two to one another. Claire Fontaine’s understanding of the problem recognizes the need to shift the terms with which we talk about the readymade from addressing the object (whether we see it as art or not, nominally or not) to addressing the social reproduction of the workersubject who tries to make something (aesthetic or not, critical or not) within a capitalist logic that dispossesses the maker from the made. In light of this, they evoke the Wages for Housework movement, which was associated with the feminist movement organized around the Libreria delle Donne (Women’s 202 Conclusion

Bookstore), a feminist collective in northern Italy in the late 1970s, with which Dalla Costa and James were involved. James and Dalla Costa posited the general strike as an expanded constellation of strategies enacted in areas of everyday social life that are not immediately bound up with value production. By then the factory floor, understood to be the primary place of antagonism, was crumbling as strike after strike at Fiat had led owners to seek cheaper labor in the former colonies or to use the influx of undocumented workers. A matter of historical contingency, Claire Fontaine’s turn to the social relations subtending value production and circulation made the terms of the movement newly timely. As though correcting the aporias of one hundred years of Marxist discourse resulting from blindness to the gendered division of labor that is constitutive of capitalist accumulation, they saw their critique of rationalized value production in gendered terms, giving rise to a startling nexus of texts. They located the differential between private and public life as the ultimate and hidden source of capitalist value (pl. 8). Women as an original form of property and of money not only reinforced the necessity of property ownership for working men but re-enforced the wage relation that delivers the worker to the factory floor at the expense of the nonwaged, the woman in a heterosexual relation silently toiling to make the valued life of the man-worker possible. Italian feminism, based in an analysis of material social reproduction as much as in psychoanalysis, was early to arrive at the insight that the strike could cross social categories that had been historically developed for the express purpose of capitalist reorganization of all life. The Bolognian group Wages for Housework, a collective agitating for a domestic salary, wrote: “If we strike, we won’t leave unfinished products or untransformed raw materials; by interrupting our work we won’t paralyze production, but rather the reproduction of the working class. And this would be a real strike even for those who normally go on strike without us.”49 Divorcing wages from work (calibrated against the clock, that metaphor of rationalization), the feminist collective hoped to disable not only the system of primitive accumulation daily rehearsed in the private sphere making capital possible but also, fundamentally, the logic of quantification subtending general equivalence. This “cultural” inquiry into autonomy—drawn from the historical moment, in which debates once seemingly “local” to the factory floor were erupting into a low-grade civil war and resonating broadly—in turn dismantled and rejected the liberal model of work as a necessary enobling endeavor rather Conclusion 203

than something merely foundational to postwar capitalist expansion under American stewardship. It had become clear to the generation coming to the age when they would supply the factory with workers—or, through its social mediator, the university, would supply managers—that work had nothing to do with choices, with ethics, or individual will, much less self-realization. It was simply part of a system of value in which the human itself was a disposable by-product. But the insight was arrived at, and acted on, first by Italian feminists associated with Wages for Housework. “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications” in turn locates a previously occluded revolutionary agency at once systematically separated and structurally intertwined across a social field. That social field in turn is made up of positions determined primarily by the wage, specifically by how the relationship to the wage is mediated. Labor is expropriated, but not remunerated, in the disciplinary autoproduction of capitalism, irrespective of its own value production. In other words, women’s labor is equally disciplined as value-productive labor (men’s work) yet continuous over twentyfour hours; is seemingly unregulated and unrepresented yet is formative of all those terms: value, regulation, and representation. Without its invisible structural support, there would be no labor-to-capital relationship to speak of, no labor power and thereby no value source; there would be no capitalism. Gonzalez finds the quasi-totalizing relationship between women’s work (e.g., indirectly market mediated, not necessarily value productive but formative of the value relation) and value in Dalla Costa’s dialectical articulation: “As Dalla Costa put it bluntly: ‘there has never been a general strike.’ ”50 The prognosis is all the more blunt for being posited negatively. A strike, a refusal to produce value, has never in fact occurred. Were a general strike to (have) happen(ed), the entire capitalist fabric would come unraveled. The uneven value of human time may be inherent to the commodity, designated in Marx’s terms as living and dead labor, but it is reflexively intensified, or intensified because it is reflective, in the work of art as a historical anomaly in capitalism.51 While the contested space of authorship motivated the question of the subject in language for Foucault (“What Is an Author?” from 1969) and for Barthes (“Death of an Author” from 1967), how might this problem of authorship be a problem specific to capitalist historicity? How might it reopen the question of the hidden abode, the anonymous toil constitutive of the

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material support beneath the author function? Quite literally, who produced the canvas under so many masterpieces of modernism? Finally, drawing the question of authorship back through that of reification at the level of real abstraction, Manzoni’s work asks how the question of real abstraction is also a question of gender in the age of “repressive tolerance.”

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NOTES

Introduction 1. From Fontana’s journal Il Gesto 1 (June 1955), Lucio Fontana Archives, Milan. Fontana’s fascination with atomic age technologies and his horror at its greatest actualizations to date in Nagasaki and Hiroshima appear throughout his published texts, as well as in his correspondence. The opening text of the first issue of Il Gesto questions the validity and viability of traditional media in the atomic age. See also Fontana’s frequent collaborators’ writing on the relationship between painting and history in the atomic era in the same issue. Enrico Baj and Sergio Dangelo, “Manifesto of Nuclear Painting,” reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, 1943–1968, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), 716–717. The Fondazione Lucio Fontana has verified the statement with the author. 2. For the most thorough analysis of Pollock’s idiom as a hard-won synthesis of the European prewar and Mexican avant-gardes, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). 3. Lucio Fontana interview, Metro Alfieri (Milan) 7 (June 1962): 24–27. The interview was conducted by Jacques Kermoal, and published in French. All translations are mine. 4. I owe this prognosis, wherein Pollock’s tremendous global success reflects the global success of the American petit bourgeoisie, to T. J. Clark’s analysis of Pollock’s, and ultimately abstract expressionism’s, reception. See “The Unhappy Consciousness” and “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 299–370 and 371–404, respectively. 5. Nicola Pizzolato, Challenging Global Capitalism: Labor Migration, Radical Struggle, and Urban Change in Detroit and Turin (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 6. Potere Operaio. (1973). Cited in Nicola Pizzolato. Challenging Global Capitalism.

7. Georges Bataille, “The Marshall Plan,” in The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 171. 8. In The Long Twentieth Century, Giovanni Arrighi rehearses Marx’s explanation of the necessity of international debt: “Marx attributed great importance to the role played by national debts . . . in propelling the initial expansion of modern capitalism: National Debt, i.e. the alienation of the state—whether despotic, constitutional, or republican, marked with its stamp the capitalistic era . . . as with the stroke of an enchanter’s wand the public debt endows barren money with the power of breeding and thus turns it into capital without the necessity of its exposing itself to the troubles and risks inseparable from its employment in industry or usury. The state creditors actually give nothing away for the sum lent is transformed into public bonds which can go on functioning as cash would.” Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1996), 13, citing Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1. 9. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 172. 10. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 278. Arrighi notes that Roosevelt’s “one world ideology” was finally made operative by Truman’s doctrine in which two worlds would have to be “irredeemably opposed” and an image of an aggressively expansionist communism propagated in order to justify the expenditure of massive sums of capital with no promise of return in order to posit a free “world which only the United States could organize and empower.” This world system did indeed facilitate capitalist accumulation on the greatest scale known to history, although this did not always and only support American interests in the end. Its ultimate beneficiary was capitalist accumulation on a scale to merit the term “globalization.” 11. Louis Althusser, “Contradiction and Overdetermination,” Marxists Internet Archive. Last accessed March 10, 2016. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive /althusser/1962/overdetermination.htm. 12. Fredric Jameson, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act,” in The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 66. See also Michael Clark, “Imagining the Real: Jameson’s Use of Lacan,” New Orleans Review 11, 1 (spring 1984): 67–72. 13. Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1857), trans. Martin Nicholaus (London: Penguin, 1973), 95. Also available at Marxists Internet Archive. Last accessed March 10, 2016. https:// www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/. 14. Marx, Grundrisse, 95. In this context, the following passage merits lengthy quotation: “The literary or aesthetic act therefore always entertains some active relationship with the Real; yet in order to do so, it cannot simply allow ‘reality’ to persevere inertly in its own being, outside the text at a distance. It must rather draw The Real into its texture. . . . It is a way of doing something to the world to the degree that what we call ‘world’ must inhere within it, as the content it has to take up into itself in order to submit it to the transformations of form. The symbolic act therefore begins by generating 208 Notes to Introduction

and producing its own context in the same moment of emergence in which it takes a step back from it, taking its measure with a view toward its own project of transformation”; 81–82. See also Clark’s essay “Imagining the Real,” 67–72. 15. Introduction to Grundrisse. The understanding of “abstraction” I engage in this book takes a latent tension in the Marxian usage of this term as a point of departure. To what extent is “aesthetic” abstraction the most concrete, which is to say “realistic,” way of articulating abstract social relations that both mask and reproduce the abstract relations (labor) formative of both the commodity and the money form? The problem of “real abstraction” runs through the work of Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Louis Althusser. For an overview, see Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism 20, 2 (April 2008): 273–287. 16. See Jameson, “On Interpretation.” Jameson relies on Althusser’s theory of synchronic structural relations developed out of structuralist linguistics, and specifically the structuralist model of the unconscious posited by Jacques Lacan. That said, the copresence of synchronic and diachronic historicity is not the exclusive property of structuralism and also undergirds the history of the longue durée, operative throughout this book through heavy reliance on Arrighi’s Long Twentieth Century. 17. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 51. 18. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 149. 19. Significantly, this argument resembles that made by T. J. Clark about Pollock’s tremendous global success, and ultimately about abstract expressionism’s popularity. See “The Unhappy Consciousness” and “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea, 299–370 and 371–404, respectively. In the latter chapter, Clark contends that abstract expressionism crystallized an American bourgeoisie’s striving toward a culture it associated with aristocracy, lyricism, and individuality. In light of these aspirations, the paintings of Willem de Kooning, Hans Hoffman, Adolf Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko functioned as “ciphers of plenitude.” As Clark notes, “‘Feeling’ has to be fetishized, made dreadfully (obscenely) exterior if painting is to continue” (397). For Clark, it was Americans who kept the fiction of oil-and-easel painting hopelessly alive when it was no longer relevant or meaningful after the war. While modernist painting’s role had been to register the disenchantment of the world, painting was now subsumed under a new form of enchantment, the commodity form. For Clark, the myth of the end of art declared so frequently by modernists and avant-gardists made possible a space of difference between art and the commodity form. The vulgarity of abstract expressionism points to the arbitrariness of the painterly object and the social world to which it, that object, belongs, “the triumph and disaster of the petty bourgeoisie” (376). Clark and Steinberg converge along these lines. 20. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 15–16. “Materialism” in this context nuances its dialectical and historical valence to mean that which is neither ideal Notes to Introduction 209

nor the “thing in-itself,” relying on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach. In “Materialism,” Bataille defines it, as had Marx, negatively: “Most materialists, even though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist.” Bataille wrests materialism from its role as a stable element in a materialism that would seek to reidealize it (metaphysical philosophy or positivist science). I am also interested in Bataille’s sketch in “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Visions of Excess, of a “materialism, which, whatever its scope in the positive order, is an active principle. For Bataille, “base matter refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machineries [of industrial capitalist reification] resulting from these aspirations, by its incongruity and an overwhelming lack of respect, and permits the intellect to escape the constraints of idealism,” 45–52. While Bataille’s dialectic and negativity offer a contour for the way Burri’s, Manzoni’s, and Fontana’s work operates in relation to the history of modernism and the avantgarde, as well as to contemporaneous American models of art making, it does not account fully for the concrete physicality and the experiments with literal materials in which all three artists reveled. Manzoni’s materiality, like Burri’s and Fontana’s, surfaces internal to structure, as its other. “Materialism” is at once the movement of historicity and marks those instances of resistant negativity. 21. Bataille, Accursed Share, 12. 22. Fernand Braudel cited in Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 25. 23. For “neutral” accounts of the Marshall Plan, see John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and John Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 1945– 1960 (Chicago: Dearborn, 1997). The far-reaching ramifications of the Marshall Plan become more evident as globalization becomes an object of study as the framework of the present. Bataille, “Marshall Plan,” 171. Bataille discusses the work of the French economist Francois Perroux, according to whom the Marshall Plan began a great economic experiment with consequences on a global scale that go beyond the structural reforms advocated by workers’ parties on a national level. Through Perroux’s work, Bataille notes that the modus operandi of the Marshall Plan relied not so much on commodity production as a source of surplus value as on early forms of financialization through international debt management, thereby aligning his analysis avant-la-lettre with Arrighi’s counterintuitive but well-demonstrated insight that “historical capitalism as a world system was thus born of a divorce rather than a marriage with industry”; Long Twentieth Century, 180. As Bataille has argued, money in “liquid” form became the weapon by which the United States could guarantee European dependency, thus preventing its “other,” the Soviet Union, from gaining influence over Europe. In Bataille’s terms, “the American economy is in fact the greatest explosive mass the world has ever known.” Strategic economic exchange provided the means by which to reroute war under the conditions of “absolute schism” between the Soviet Union and the 210 Notes to Introduction

United States. Money would enact that war by other means. Bataille continues: “The conflict that is engaged in the economic sphere opposes the world of industrial development—of nascent accumulation—to that of developed industry,” thus marking the shift from the economics of production to the economics of consumption in the battle for power and sovereignty fought over European, and most notably Italian, soil. 24. Imanuel Wexler, The Marshall Plan Revisited: The European Recovery Program in Economic Perspective, Contributions in Economics and Economic History (London: Praeger, 1983). For an account of the Bretton Woods system, world banking reticulated to the US dollar and its ramifications in international economics, and eventually the restructuring of the 1970s, see Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century. For a recent text that relies heavily on Arrighi and makes a similar point, updating it to address the economic crisis of 2008, see Gopal Balakrishnan, “The Stationary State,” New Left Review 59 (September-October 2009): 5–26. For the best analysis of Italy’s position in the waning of the nation-state in the triumph of the golden age of twentieth-century capitalism from 1947 to 1970, see Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano, introduction to The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, ed. Chiesa and Toscano (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 5. 25. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), makes much of this point, it is discussed at length in political economic terms in Giovanni Arrighi, The Geometry of Empire (London: Verso, 1983), and Long Twentieth Century. 26. John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948. Milan retroactively, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, became the emblem of reconstruction under the auspices of the European Recovery Program, commonly called the Marshall Plan after the US secretary of state who signed it into policy. Although the Marshall Plan officially started in 1947, the United States and other Allied powers had begun in 1945 to attempt to shape the first postwar Italian government. Given Italy’s proximity to the Iron Curtain, the United States was relieved that although Italy’s first prime minister after fascism was Ferrucio Parri, a resistance hero, his government tended toward the right of center. 27. Antonio Negri, “The Italian Difference,” reprinted in Chiesa and Toscano, Italian Difference, 13–24. See also Michael Hardt’s “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–9. In “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” Hardt misses the role of cultural production in forging a new American hegemon in Italy and Europe generally and in attempting to challenge that hegemony from within. 28. Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy.” 29. I use the term “hegemony” as elaborated in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to mean “the supremacy of a social group that manifests itself in two ways, as domination and as intellectual and moral leadership.” Gramsci himself credited Lenin with the term Notes to Introduction 211

“hegemony.” Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (London: Routledge, 2007). Striking in Gramsci’s development of the term is not only the way it accounts for militaristic, political, and economic forms of domination (as in the case of the Marshall Plan, a form of economic warfare) but also the role played by cultural and other symbolic sectors in presenting the dominant group as a carrier of general and universal interest. Antonio Gramsci, Quaderni del Carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana (Turin: Einaudi, 1975), and Selection from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International, 1971). See also Antonio Santucci, Antonio Gramsci (New York: Review Press, 2010). Between the end of World War II and 1973, a number of figures over a broad spectrum known as the Italian “left” debated the centrality of Gramsci’s role in theorizing the possibilities of political action. Gramsci, and the PCI, saw wage earners as the revolutionary subjects of history, in keeping with orthodox Marxism, but by the 1960s this perspective was no longer relevant to actual social and economic conditions. 30. Laurie J. Monahan, “Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945– 1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 369–416. 31. Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” trans. Eleanor Chiari, New Left Review 73 (January-February 2012), 129. 32. Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 127. 33. For a discussion of the way the cross-cultural dialogue played out between France and the United States, see Serge Guilbaut, “On an Exhibition: Tempestuous Transatlantic Culture, 1946–1956,” Art et Societés, June 5, 2008. Sarah K. Rich, “ ‘BeBomb’ at the Museu d’Art Contemporani De Barcelona,” Artforum International 46, 7 (March 2008): 348–352. 34. Mario Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” trans. Eleanor Chiari, New Left Review 73 (January-February 2012), 134. See also Tronti, Operaio e Capitale (1966). Available at Libcom.org. https://libcom.org/library/operai-e-capitale-mario-tronti. 35. Mario Tronti, “Class and Party,” in Operaio e Capitale (1966). 36. See in particular Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky. Saccarelli traces the manipulation of Gramsci’s legacy over several phases. The first would be the Stalinist moment beginning in the thirties, of “erasures and fabrications perpetuated against Gramsci during and after his life by the Italian Communist Party . . . under pressure from Moscow” (36–46); and the second would be the post–World War II moment in which he was recovered and presented as a liberal intellectual, an ornament to the Italian “humanist tradition.” 37. Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky, 36. 38. Tronti, “Class and Party.” 39. Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky. 40. Steve Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” in Storming Heaven 212 Notes to Introduction

(London: Pluto Press, 2002), 47. M. Lichtner, ed., L’organizzazzione del lavoro in Italia (Rome: Riuniti, 1975). On Marshall Plan dollars and the Italian car industry see Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990), 159. 41. Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 48. 42. Raniero Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on a Reading of Capital,” trans. Julian Bees, Zerowork.org. http://zerowork.org/PanzieriPlanning.html, originally in Quaderni Rossi 4 (1964): 257–288, reprinted as chap. 25 in R. Panzieri, La Ripresa del Marxismo Leninismo in Italia (Milan: Sapere, 1975), 329–365. It is crucial to note that Panzieri was not opposed to all forms of planning: “At this point the social regulation of the labour process immediately appears as a type of planning that is different from, or counterposed to, capitalist planning.” Panzieri nonetheless faults Leninist politics with reproducing that which they wish to oppose, namely—capitalist productivism and the subordination of workers to growth: “In Lenin there seems to be a lack of clarity regarding the possibility that capitalist social relations may be present in socialist planning. This lack of clarity would later facilitate the repetition of capitalist forms in the relations of production both at the factory level and at the level of the overall social re/production—all this, behind the ideological screen of the identification of socialism with planning, and of the possibility of socialism in one country only.” 43. Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning.” 44. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress, 1965), cited in Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 39. 45. Steve Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” in Storming Heaven, 21. The seminal, as yet untranslated, texts that trace the affiliation between the notion of autonomy in other Marxian discursive contexts, established foremost in the Frankfurt School, and this notion’s role in the actual struggles within Italian labor that culminated in the civil (class) war of the 1970s, include Franco Berardi, La nefasta utopia di Potere Operaio (Rome: Castelvecchi, 1998). The apotheosis of this position may be found in Sergio Bologna, “The Tribe of Moles” (1977). Reprinted in Lotringer and Marazzi, Autonomia. 46. Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 46. 47. Mario Tronti, “Lenin in England,” in Working Class Autonomy and the Crisis (London: Red Notes, 1979). 48. Antonio Negri, Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale: Intervista Sull’operaismo (Milan: Multhipla Edizioni, 1979). 49. G. De Meo, “Productivity and the Distribution of Income to Factors in Italy 1951– 1963,” Banco Nazionale del Lavoro Quarterly Review 78 (March 1966), cited in Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 32–62. The central term around which this “heretofore” unknown growth was addressed was the problem of the Mezzogiorno, or the uneven economic development between the rural economy of the South and the industrialized and rapidly accelerating auto and metal industries of the North, which creNotes to Introduction 213

ated a labor-to-capital relation of massive displacement and migration of cheap labor from the South to fuel the surplus value extraction of northern industry. 50. Alberto Toscano, “Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri, and the Subject of Antagonism,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, 1 (January 2009): 76–87. Last accessed April 19, 2016. Available at http://cosmosandhistory .org/index.php/journal/article/view/128/240. Toscano notes that Tronti’s (and later Negri’s) position was far from a kind of economic determinism often associated with the PCI and that they advocated for spontaneity and antagonism as a way to affirm individual workers “as singularities.” 51. The theorist of sabotage in the workplace is Romano Alquati. His pivotal text “Organic Composition of Capital and Labor Power at Olivetti” (1961) was reprinted in “Struggle at Fiat” (1964). Translated by Evan Calder Williams. Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. See also Evan Calder Williams, “Invisible Organization: Reading Romano Alquati,” in the same issue. 52. The Enlightenment notion of autonomy, whose origin is often located in Kant, runs through discourse associated with Autonomia. Paolo Virno’s work is notable here and draws on aspects of Frankfurt School theory’s own complex relationship to the problem of autonomy. The genealogy of the term is outside the scope of this study, however. 53. The popular historian Paul Ginsborg’s description of the years between 1946 and 1969 echo the historical transition often associated with urbanization and industrialization a century earlier in France, England, and the United States. Emigration constituted one component, while an exodus from the countryside to centers of industrial production, foremost among these being Milan, constituted another. For instance, “In all, between 1955 and 1971 some 9,140,000 Italians were involved in inter-regional migration.” Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 219. Milan became the stage of the “economic recovery.” 54. Cited in Wright, Storming Heaven, 3. 55. Tronti, “Our Operaismo,” 127, 136, 139. 56. Negri, Semiotext(e): Italy: Autonomia: Post-Political Politics 3 (2007): 62–71. 57. For a thorough account of the way Negri’s position came to “represent Italy” in the most interesting post-1968 discourse in France, see François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: Intersecting Lives, trans. Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). See also Adam Schatz, “Desire Was Everywhere,” London Review of Books, December 16, 2010. Last accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.lrb.co.uk /v32/n24/adam-shatz/desire-was-everywhere. “Antonio Negri, who escaped to France in 1983 after being condemned for his alleged involvement in the Red Brigades, was another. For the next four years, he went by the name Antoine Guattari. ‘Félix paid for everything,’ Negri recalled of his time underground in Paris. ‘He looked after me like 214 Notes to Introduction

a brother.’ ” This reception in France, in turn, did much to emphasize Negri’s position over Tronti and Panzieri’s class-based antistatist position, which in turn contributed to the importance of Deleuze and Guattari’s thinking in Italy in the 1970s in a way that provisionally eclipsed Tronti’s work. 58. Mario Tronti, “Memoir,” trans. Eleanor Chiari, New Left Review 73 (JanuaryFebruary 2012): 118–139. 59. Chiesa and Toscano, introduction, 5. 60. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh’s seminal essay “From Faktura to Factography,” reprinted in October: The First Decade, 1976–1986, ed. Annette Michelson et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 76–113. See also T. J. Clark, “God Is Not Cast Down,” in Farewell to an Idea, 225–297. 61. See Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). While Burger maintains that the postwar avant-garde, or “neoavantgarde,” repeated the strategies of the avant-garde to generate work that no longer held any critical or resistant status, owing to its irrelevance and obsolescence, I am arguing here that Klein’s work differed significantly from his avant-gardist predecessors because of the way it was conditioned by and responded to a different historical context that changed the conditions of possibility for painting. For a response to Burger’s work and a discussion of the necessity of setting postwar art in context, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde,” October 37 (summer 1986): 41–52. Buchloh does suggest the possibility of a productive constructive model of repetition, but he does not elaborate. He also acknowledges that postwar artists inscribed their cognizance of and belatedness in relation to the art of 1910–1925 in their own work. This inscription is the “historical meaning and authority” of postwar art for Buchloh. See also Hal Foster, “What’s So Neo about the Neo-Avantgarde?,” in The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 5–32. 62. Raniero Panzieri and Galvano della Volpe, Marxist writers in the context of Operaismo, were interested in the historical avant-garde as an unfinished project. Panzieri contributed to the postwar Italian reception of Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Vladimir Mayakovski, and Paul Eluard. Galvano Della Volpe, “Settling Accounts with the Russian Formalists,” New Left Review 113 (January-April, 1979): 133–145. 63. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 252. 64. For the authoritative exegesis on Rauschenberg’s oeuvre in its entirety, and Factum I and Factum II specifically, see Branden Joseph, Random Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 65. Piero Manzoni. Economia del Carnefice (1952). In Gioventù Sociale. Student Political Pamphlet. The Economics of The Executioner. Trans. Gianluca Pulsoni. Photocopy in the Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni, Milan. Illustrated in this volume (fig. 4.4). 66. Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy. Notes to Introduction 215

One. The Monochrome in the Neocapitalist Laboratory 1. Given the difficulty of acquiring permissions to reproduce all the art works under discussion, I show here Achrome with Breadrolls—an achrome from 1961, four years after the inception of the term and practice—which exemplifies Manzoni’s exploration of the idiom he initiated, as I discussed in chapter 4. 2. Manzoni to Henk Peeters, November, 1960. Henk Peters, January, 1962. Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni, Milan. 3. Anonymous statement. “Verrà un tempo in cui il quadro non basterà piu,” Il Gesto 4 (September 1959), Archives at the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, Milan. 4. It is highly likely that Klein was aware of Malevich’s, and perhaps Rodchenko’s, work. Michael Seuphor’s Les Premiers Maîtres de l’Art Abstrait, a large historical show organized by Michael Seuphor at Galerie Maeght in 1949, explicitly situated constructivism as the origin of abstraction in painting. The show was accompanied by an extensive catalogue that continues to be cited as a critical reference in both France and Italy, as well as the United States. Michael Seuphor, Les Premiers Maîtres de l’Art Abstrait (1949) (Paris: Maeght, 1950). According to Klein’s fellow artist and friend Arman (b. Fernandez Arman), Klein was aware of the exhibit, and the catalog, and therefore of Malevich’s work. In “The Avant-Garde in a Goldfish Bowl, 1948–68,” Lawrence Alloway describes the difficulty of recovering and accessing both modernism and the avantgardes of the early twentieth century after the rupture brought by the war. “Exhibitions in homage to early modern artists and movements sometimes seemed to have the form of reparations . . . the historicist impulse, however, reached beyond such ironies, and to appreciate reasons for this we need to recall the state of modern art studies in the 1940s. With few exceptions the literature either emanated from artists’ friends or was written at a high level of abstraction. . . . There was an extraordinary shortage of objective information and an almost complete absence of material on non-French styles. Most of the important sources to which we automatically refer today were unavailable because of the war or had yet to be published.” In The Venice Biennale 1895–1968 (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 134. There is an extent to which both Fontana with Il Gesto and Manzoni with Azimut were attempting to negotiate a field of historical rupture and continuity as much as editorialize, much less theorize, a prescriptive direction. The emphasis on the readymade in each, in relation to the systematic practice of mauled and manipulated or reduced single chromatic surfaces, forms the cultural etiology of interest to the inquiry of this book. 5. Yves Klein, in collaboration with Neil Levine and John Archambault, “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto,” reprinted in Yves Klein (New York: Alexander Iolas Gallery, 1962). Klein presented his own triptych in 1960. Titled Monogold, Monopink, Monoblue, the panels could not have reconfigured the avant-garde monochrome more radically or demonstrated a more productive and creative misreading of the constructivist itera216 Notes to Chapter One

tion of the monochrome. Despite Fontana’s and Klein’s awareness of Malevich’s work from the celebrated 0.10 show in 1915 through the White on White work of 1918, it remains unclear whether either artist was cognizant of Rodchenko’s Triptych. Klein most likely saw the well-known catalogue for the exhibition Les Premiers Maîtres de l’Art Abstrait, the large historical show organized by Michael Seuphor at Galerie Maeght in 1949. The exhibition emphasized constructivism as the origin of abstract painting. A catalogue accompanied the show and became a reference in Europe as well as in the United States. Michael Seuphor, Les Premiers Maîtres de l’Art Abstrait. 6. Some of the literature on the postwar monochrome does not insert it into the framework of repetition but, rather blithely, takes many postwar artists at their word when they claim to have “invented” the trope for the first time. Sidra Stitch adopts this point of view in her exhaustive study of Yves Klein: “Monochrome painting emerged as a dominant pictorial form in mid-century. As in America, it became a kind of umbrella that attracted artists diversely engaged in a denunciation of personal expression, a search for primal or sublime evocation, a glorification of formalist purity, and the presentation of a vision that was in diametric opposition to the chaos and complexity of the sociopolitical experience of the postwar years.” Stitch, Yves Klein (Stuttgart: Cantz Verlag, 1995), 72. 7. Giorgio Agamben, “Les Jugements Sur La Poesie,” in Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50. 8. The literature on the readymade is immense. The following bibliography informs this study: William Camfield, “Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain: Aesthetic Object, Icon, or Anti-art,” in The Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp, ed. Thierry de Duve (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” and “Given the Richard Mutt Case,” in Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996); David Joselit, “Between Reification and Regression: Readymades and Words,” in Infinite Regress (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Molly Nesbit, “Readymade Originals,” October 37 (summer 1986), and “The Language of Industry,” in de Duve, Definitively Unfinished Marcel Duchamp. Also by Nesbit, Their Common Sense (London: Black Dog, 2000). See also John Roberts, The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and Deskilling in Art after the Readymade (London: Verso, 2007). 9. Endnotes, Issue No. 2, Misery and the Value Form. (April 2010). http://endnotes .org.uk/issues/2. Endnotes, a collective based in the UK and the US devoted to rethinking the historicity of the labor-to-capital relationship, also points out the use of the concept, if not the term, in Jameson’s theory of postmodernism: “those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity” are colonized, and the individual is submerged in the ubiquitous logic of a capitalist culture. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), 48–49. 10. Jameson, Postmodernism, 48–49. Notes to Chapter One 217

11. Roberts, Intangibility of Form. While Roberts traces the intersection of artisanal craft and industrial production, he does not situate this intersection as formally paradigmatic, nor does he explore the way it ramified in a model of historicity. Roberts does not ask after the intersection of an artistic gesture and its cultural ideological field in relation to phases of capitalist acceleration. 12. See Molly Nesbit, “Readymade Originals,” “Language of Industry,” and Their Common Sense. 13. I have argued elsewhere that Rodchenko’s Monochrome Triptych accompanies the emergence of a utopian subject caught between a revolutionary horizon and its reintegration into capitalist production under state communism. Rodchenko’s monochrome “describes the emergence of a subject-worker. Its contradictions function less as an analog of contradiction in the socio-political field and more as a repository of symptoms of contradiction in techniques and processes of production.” “Opacity, Transparency, Monochrome: Notes on Form and Historicity,” Third Rail 2 (2014), 44. I contrast Rodchenko’s monochrome to Marcel Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (1920), which already recognized the essential opacity of any object in capitalism that reduces the object on the one hand and desire on the other to the dynamics of the commodity fetish. While the art object and the object are fundamentally and categorically different, Duchamp posits the art object in this instance as fundamentally collapsed with all commodity objects as a basic condition of art as of 1920, a function of accelerated capitalist object production drawing all object relations into its logic, that of subsumption. Duchamp signals as much by building a window, metaphor of the transcendental role of painting as a concrete vehicle into transcendental vision, in miniature, such that it is a freestanding thing, substituting leather for clear planes of glass and supplying the collector, in this case the collector and patron of Duchamp Walter Arnsberg, with leather polish so that he may engage in the onanistic act of rubbing the object, an act of fetishistic maintenance of its value. As such, Duchamp enacts Marx’s description of the magical opacity of the commodity fetish: “A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped on the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor. This is the reason why the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. In the same way the light from an object is perceived by us not as the subjective excitation of our optic nerve, but as the objective form of something outside the eye itself. But, in the act of seeing, there is at all events, an actual passage of light from one thing to another, from the external object to the eye. There is a physical relation between physical things. But it is different with commodities. There, the existence of the things qua commodities, and the value relation between

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the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connection with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therein. There it is a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. In order, therefore, to find an analogy, we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious world. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities with the products of men’s hands. This I call the Fetishism which attaches itself to the products of labor, so soon as they are produced as commodities, and which is therefore inseparable from the production of commodities,” 164. See the pages on fetishism in Karl Marx, “The Fetishism of Commodities and the Secret Thereof,” Trans. Ben Fowkes. Capital, vol. 1 (1867), pt. 1, chap. 1, sec. 4 (London: Penguin, 2013). 14. Bruno Gulli, “Between Productive Labor and Lived Labor,” in Labor of Fire: The Ontology of Labor between Economy and Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2005), 67. 15. See Christina Kiaer’s monographic study of Aleksandr Rodchenko’s object production of the 1920s, which she situates as a lens through which to explore the status of the commodity object during the transitional years of the New Economy Policy. Imagine No Possessions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). For accounts of the New Economy Policy years, see R. W. Davies, Soviet Economic Development from Lenin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Also Robert William Davies, Mark Harrison, and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Economic Transformation of the Soviet Union, 1913–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 16. Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 66. 17. For a discussion of the “deterritorialization” or disarticulation and reorganization of space and time in relation to specific historical configurations of capitalist integration, see David Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). See also Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). The paradox (or dialectical involution) here is that while context, defined as the time and place in which a cultural work is produced, continues to inhere as one of social art history’s most basic organizational cornerstones, it also becomes one of its primary questions. What constitutes place in globalization? While agency and authorship have come under interrogation over the last several decades in the wake of poststructuralist theories of determination, context has remained a stable category. To think about “context” and its discontents, I am relying on the work of both Harvey and Arrighi, among others, who have proposed ways of casting historical causality after the complications wrought by globalization, financialization, and concomitant communications networks that have come to reshape what we mean by place. The best known and certainly most popular text in English on the reorganization of the world in the

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interest of global neoimperial domination is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). That thesis might be problematic, however, for the way it displaces forms of capitalist reconsolidation, which is neocolonialism, with issues of constitutionality and the limits of national and international law. My project here is to trace the way these shifts ramify in cultural production, through recourse to the question of work and what it meant to make work in that moment and global situation. Again, labor was being newly theorized in the same cultural climate of crisis (northern Italy, 1947–1970s) as that in which Fontana, Burri, and Manzoni were making art for new international circuits. 18. Lucio Fontana, “Technical Manifesto of Spatialism,” reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), 714. 19. Fontana, “Technical Manifesto of Spatialism,” 715. 20. Miracle in Milan is the title of a 1951 film, directed by Vittorio De Sica, about a group of squatters on the outskirts of Milan who are pushed off their meager territory, at the moment when a provisional sense of community begins to emerge, when it becomes clear that they might be situated on an oil reserve. They are evicted by capitalists, led by a “Mob” who stands in for corporate oil interests; a shot of a Mobile Oil sign underscores the associative reading. The film operates as an allegory of autonomy and poverty in relation to external interests. 21. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1996), 306. 22. Joan M. Marter, Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 2007. 141. See also Donald Wigal, Jackson Pollack: Veiling the Image (New York: Parkstone Press), 2006. 23. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Timeline. http://www.rauschenbergfoun dation.org/artist/chronology/1950-59. See also Martin Hopkinson, book review of Luca Massimo Barbero, Carlo Cardazzo: Una nuova visione dell’arte, Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, November 1, 2008- February 9, 2009. Print Quarterly, vol. 27, no 3. (September 2010), 339–341. 24. Arturo Schwarz’s life’s work in recovering, reproducing, and disseminating the readymade, beginning with his work as a gallery owner in Milan, is collected to some extent in the book The Complete Work of Marcel Duchamp (New York: Abrams, 1969). 25. Arturo Schwarz, Cinquanti Anni di Dada nel Italia (Milan: Galeria Arturo Schwarz, 1966). 26. Thierry de Duve, in Kant after Duchamp, argues that monochromy in the 1950s and 1960s demonstrates the degree to which the readymade and painting had been different facets of a single process during the avant-garde moment. Thierry de Duve, “The Readymade and the Tube of Paint,” “The Monochrome and the Blank Canvas,” and “Given the Richard Mutt Case,” in Kant after Duchamp, 147–90, 199–263, and 89–144, respectively.

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27. This discussion of the readymade is indebted to Rosalind Krauss’s discussion of the grid as both a form that can be dated to the windows of nineteenth-century painting yet also a matrix of contradiction across specific periods of the twentieth century, in “Grids,” in Originality of the Avant-garde and Other Modernism Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 10. Notably, for Krauss, this is an instance of the need to think “etiologically rather than historically.” I insist that the two, etiology and historicity, remain in tension, in keeping with the grid’s particular capacity to hold and present contradiction. 28. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 328. 29. See Laurie J. Monahan’s stunningly convincing argument, “Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945–1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Monahan says: “The Americans’ exhibition in Venice was a marvel of cultural engineering,” arguing this point on the basis of the fact that curator Alan Solomon was hired by the US Information Agency, which was a government entity responsible for propaganda abroad. But while this constitutes “cultural and political expansionism” on ideological grounds, Monahan sidesteps the twin problem that concerns me here: colonization via finance and form; 371. I return to that twin problem set with reference to Rauschenberg in chapter 3, which focuses on Alberto Burri. 30. For a detailed and exhaustive account of the creation of the ICP from the “ashes of the socialist party” in 1920–1921, see John M. Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of the Italian Communist Party (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967). 31. The most practical and accessible account of the history of the ICP may be found in Paul Ginsborg’s popular work A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For an exhaustive account of the antagonistic relationships among positions and individuals during the eventful autumn of 1926, see Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (London: Routledge, 2007). The split with Bordiga and the left precipitated a domino effect of crises that strained the relationship between Moscow and Rome, culminating in a letter Gramsci wrote to the Moscow leadership on October 14, 1926, that placed him on the wrong side of Joseph Stalin, as forewarned by Togliatti. “The new Italian party majority leadership was far from securely aligned to the Russian one. By 1926 only Togliatti stood as a clear exception. As a PCI representative in the Comintern, Togliatti was in close political contact with the Russian majority, particularly Bukharin. Togliatti understood the seriousness of the intra party crisis, unambiguously took the side of the majority, and throughout 1926 served as the principal mechanism of transmission by which it brought political pressure to bear on the Italian leadership.” Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism: The Political Theory and Practice of Opposition (London: Rout-

Notes to Chapter One 221

ledge, 2007), 56. Finally, see Richard Drake, “The Soviet Dimension of Italian Communism,” Journal of Cold War Studies 6, 3 (summer 2004): 115–119. 32. Antonio Gramsci, “Maximalism and Extremism,” L’Unità, July 2, 1925. See Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of the Italian Communist Party. 33. See Gramsci, “Maximalism and Extremism,” July 2, 1925. See Cammett, Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of the Italian Communist Party. 34. See Gramsci, The Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916–1935, ed. David Forgasc, with introduction by Eric Hobsbawm (New York: New York University Press, 2000); Selections from Political Writings, 1910–1920 (with additional texts by Amedeo Bordiga), ed. Quintin Hoare, trans. John Mathews (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Pre-prison Writings, ed. Richard Bellamy, trans. Virginia Cox (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 35. I cite Ginsborg’s terms from History of Contemporary Italy, 1. 36. Steve Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” in Storming Heaven (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 8–9. 37. Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” 9. 38. Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” 74. 39. Emanuele Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism, 43. 40. Saccarelli, Gramsci and Trotsky in the Shadow of Stalinism, 44. By the 1960s, yet another Gramsci began to emerge, often mediated by artists and filmmakers focusing on Italian language and culture. See Pier Paolo Pasolini’s numerous references to Gramsci in his own writing, “Linguistic Diary” (Rinascita, March 6, 1965), and “From the Laboratory” (1965), both reprinted in Heretical Empiricism, trans. Ben Lawton and Louise K. Barnett (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988). Notable here is the extent to which Pasolini focuses on the issue of language and hegemony in Gramsci’s work, effectively moving away from revolutionary politics. Pasolini’s disapproval of revolutionary politics in and against the PCI is well documented. See his “PCI to the Young!” and “What Is Neo Zhadovism and What Isn’t?,” in the same volume. 41. “Although no major study of Marshall Aid in Italy has yet been undertaken, it would appear the funds went in several different directions . . . [and] until 1950 counterpart funds were used mainly to increase Bank of Italy reserves and maintain the stability of the currency. Thereafter two directions seem to have prevailed. One was the increasing use of funds to purchase machinery for state and private industry: Fiat, Finsider, Edison and the thermoelectric companies were among the principal beneficiaries.” Ginsborg, History of Contemporary Italy, 159. 42. “Struggle at Fiat” (1964), cited in Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” 16. 43. Raniero Panzieri, La crisi del movimento operaio: Scritti interventi lettere, 1956– 1960 (Milan: Lampugnani Nigri, 1973). 44. Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” 18.

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45. Raniero Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on the Reading of Capital,” in R. Panzieri, The Labour Process and Class Strategies (London: Stage 1 for the Conference of Socialist Economists, 1976), cited in Wright, “Weathering the 1950s.” 46. Karen Pinkus, “Dematerialization from Arte Povera to Cybermoney through Italian Thought,” diacritics 39, 3 (2009): 65–77. See the same author’s “Italy in the 1960s: Spaces, Places, Trajectories,” in Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972 (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2002), 89–109. 47. See Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-nam: The Politics of Arte Povera,” October 124 (spring 2008): 8–30. Cullinan’s essay positions Merz’s title, along with most of the production loosely grouped under Arte Povera, as protest against the United States’ colonial presence in Vietnam. While this is certainly the case, it would perhaps be equally worthwhile to acknowledge Italy’s own past in relationship to revolutionary struggle at the very moment that such struggle was about to be reconfigured to meet the particular vicissitudes of capitalism in the late Bretton Woods era, in the late 1960s. 48. Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-nam.” 49. See Jameson, Political Unconscious. It is a foundational premise that the unresolved “contents” of history recur in cultural forms whose appearance may seem by turns belated or prefigurative. 50. Briony Fer, in her introduction to The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Modernism, has also addressed the charge of empty repetition leveled at postwar abstraction. She says: “At the moment of Modernism’s disintegration, a whole range of different serial mechanisms became the motor of its undoing at the same time as the means to generate new grounds for art.” Fer focuses on the formal principle of repetition, significantly in the work of Piero Manzoni, whom Fer takes to be exemplary of 1950s art, in order to show modernist painting’s transformation, “even in the process of repeating itself.” The Infinite Line: Remaking Art after Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 3. For Fer, this disintegrating function of repetition is a symptom of postwar painting and not of modernist painting itself. In the United States, Robert Motherwell’s book The Dada Painters and Poets (1951) reintroduced Duchamp and Picabia, while in France an exhibition titled Le Surréalisme en 1947 was mounted at the Galerie Maeght. The show’s accompanying catalogue featured a cover by Marcel Duchamp depicting a foam-rubber breast. The artist Arman, a friend of Klein, claimed that Klein lent him the catalogue in 1947. Robert Motherwell. The Dada Painters and Poets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. Duchamp’s and Picabia’s work would have been equally available in the Milanese context through the Galleria Schwarz. Arturo Schwarz. Cinquant’ Anni da Dada: Dada in Italia 1916–1966. Milan: Galleria Schwarz, 1966. It accompanied an exhibit of Dada work at the Civico Padiglione d’arte Contemporanea in Milan in 1967.

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Two. Fontana and the Politics of the Gesture 1. For the most thorough analysis of Jackson Pollock’s idiom as a hard-won synthesis of the European prewar and Mexican avant-garde sensibilities, see Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993). 2. Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” (1939), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5–22. 3. See Lucio Fontana’s journal Il Gesto 1 (June 1955). Fontana’s fascination with atomic age technologies, and horror with its greatest actualizations to date in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, appears throughout his textual production as well as his correspondence. The opening text of the first issue of Il Gesto questions the validity and viability of traditional media in the atomic age. It is notable that much of the content of the magazine concerned itself with the reception of Pollock. 4. Interview with Fontana, Metro Alfieri 7 (June 1962). The interview was conducted and published in French. All translations are mine. I will pick up Fontana’s tacit link of the end of painting, and the possibility of a beyond painting, with American art elsewhere. 5. I discuss the monochrome as a problem, a trope reformulated through Dada and Duchamp reception, in chapter 1 through a case study of Fontana and Yves Klein. 6. For an overview and analysis of the longevity of the rhetoric of “the end,” see YveAlain Bois, “Paining, the Task of Mourning,” Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 229–244. For a more recent discussion, see Briony Fer, “Poussiere/Peinture: Bataille on Painting,” in On Abstract Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 77–92. Fer discusses Miro’s collages of 1929 as yet another instantiation of the “murder of painting” some ten years after its development in abstraction. 7. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless, a User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). 8. Anthony White, “Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch,” Grey Room 5 (fall 2001): 54–77. 9. For a discussion of the traditional role of drawing, from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, see Adrian Rifkin, Ingres: Then and Now (New York: Routledge, 2000). For a brief overview of the ideological and political ramifications of drawing practices in the mid- to late twentieth century, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Raymond Pettibon: Return to Disorder and Disfiguration,” October 92 (spring 2000): 36–51. 10. A traditional definition of line as that which breaks into and divides the planar surface comes from Heinrich Wölfflin in The Principles of Art History, trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Press, 1950): “Painting, with its all-covering pigments, on principle creates surfaces, and thereby, even when it remains monochrome, is distin224 Notes to Chapter Two

guished from any drawing. Lines are there [in painting] only as the limits of surfaces”; 41–42. 11. Harold Rosenberg, “American Action Painters,” Art News (December 1952), 22. Last accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/record .asp?id=9798. 12. Restany wrote regularly on the value of the gesture as a vehicle of transparency and access to a higher, transcendental subjectivity in Fontana’s Il Gesto. See, for example, “La Moralite du Geste,” Il Gesto 2 (June 1957). Restany also discusses the sacred import of the gesture, with he projects onto Fontana’s work, in Lyrisme et Abstraction (Milan: Edizione Apollinaire, 1960). 13. Where De Duve sees the Duchampian readymade and the blank canvas as strategies occupying the same shadow, the same space in modernism’s blind spot, Agamben argues that painting in its twentieth-century guise internalized the readymade. The blank canvas is always already a readymade. 14. Interview with Fontana, Metro Alfieri 7 (June 1962). 15. I am referencing Clement Greenberg’s famous definition of a medium as “an area of competence.” See “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940), in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 23. 16. Clearly, the contradictions pile, one on the other, in a context where so many historically incompatible yet presently accessible categories presented themselves as unquestionably, simultaneously, available. 17. Kasimir Malevich, “Non-objective Art and Suprematism” (1919), in Art in Theory, 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1992), 290– 291. 18. Giorgio Agamben, Man without Content, trans. Georgia Albert (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 50. 19. Lucio Fontana, “Technical Manifesto of Spatialism” (1951), reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Foundation, 1994), 714–715. 20. Lucio Fontana, “Second Manifesto of Spatialism” (1948), reprinted in Celant, Italian Metamorphosis, 712–713. 21. Lucio Fontana et al., “Manifesto of the Spatialist Movement for Television” (1952), reprinted in Celant, Italian Metamorphosis, 716–717. 22. Fontana’s work has been explored in relation to an economy of radical disbursal. Yve-Alain Bois argues that Fontana’s work may be understood in relation to the Bataillean notion of the informe. While I do not necessarily disagree that Fontana’s work bears some affinity to Bataille’s informe, I would like to take a step back to ask, what Fontana’s relation to painting, a medium he appears, at least superficially, to believe in even as he continually berates it, might be, and to demonstrate the ways he challenges its authority at the level of practice and process. Also, although Fontana’s gesture does Notes to Chapter Two 225

challenge the fixity implicit in traditional drawing (fixture of form, shape, figure over ground, etc.) it does not necessarily open onto the scattered and dissipative entropic economy with which Bois later associates it in the exhibit on the Informe in Paris. See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). 23. Pamela Lee, “Some Kinds of Duration: The Temporality of Drawing as Process Art,” in After Image: Drawing through Process (exhibition catalogue), organized by Cornelia H. Butler for an exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, April–August 1999 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 31. 24. Michel Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside,” in Foucault/ Blanchot (New York: Zone Books, 1987), 10. 25. Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,” 12. 26. Enrico Crispolti, Lucio Fontana: Opere Grafiche (Rome: Instituto Italo-Latino Americano, 1972). 27. Contour’s dual condition as both drawing and as cut is already present in Ingres. For an analysis of the way line functions in Ingres’s painting to sever the contour bound figure, or figural group, from the ground and the other figures that surround it, in an economy challenging the narrative drive of nineteenth-century painting rather than underscoring it, see Susan L. Siegfried, “Ingres’s Reading—The Undoing of Narrative,” in Fingering Ingres (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2001), 4–30. Drawing’s operation as a binding force, then, is already at issue in the work of the mythical draftsman Ingres. The consolidation of representation is already ceding to dispersal: “Disconnection has a density and weight that makes it interesting to the problematic of narrative painting,” as each figure and motif, in carrying its own effect, divides from the surrounding plane; 5. 28. Rosalind Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). 29. One of Krauss’s assertions is that cubist painting demonstrates the way representation elaborates itself through absence and difference. But for her it is the structuralist understanding of language as a system predicated on absence and difference that provides a support for her argument. Collage is shown to work in accordance with the impersonal operations of the sign. Representational systems, discourses, are founded on buried origins, fueled by absence. 30. Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso.” 31. For a discussion of Duchamp’s reintroduction of physicality and corporeality after cubism’s rigorous differential system, see David Joselit, “Mensuration En Abyme: Marcel Duchamp’s Cubism,” in Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), 9–70. 32. George Baker explores the dynamics of drawing-as-cut in Picabia’s work in the first chapter of his monograph on Picabia, “The Holy Drawing: Francis Picabia’s Sac226 Notes to Chapter Two

rificial Economy,” in The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 33. Baker, “Holy Drawing,” 109. For Baker, the limit condition of drawing also dovetails with what he develops as the “libidinalization” of drawing in Picabia’s work. Sexuality and form are shown to be entwined, a condition that orthodox Modernism sought to at once repress and overcome, “The libidinalization of drawing would be precisely a question of form, of procedures as well as of processes”; 79. 34. I have discussed this problematic of reception and influence elsewhere. 35. Of course Pollock also began experimenting with subtracting from the painterly field—oddly in the same years as Fontana, 1948–1949—in works such as Out of the Web (1949). For a discussion of the cut in Pollock’s work, see Briony Fer, “The Cut,” in On Abstract Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 93–107. 36. Ellsworth Kelly quoted in “Dream of the Absolute,” in Dream of the Absolute (Basel: Beyeler Foundation, 1994). 37. By the third issue of Il Gesto in 1958, Manzoni was again writing editorial text and reproducing his work throughout its pages. 38. These remarks were published in Il Gazzetino Padano, February 8, 1963, Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni, Milan. All translations are mine. 39. “Interview with Nancy,” Art Press 281 (July/August 2002). 40. “Interview with Nancy,” 81. 41. Lucio Fontana et al., “The Technical Manifesto of Spatialism,” reprinted in Celant, Italian Metamorphosis, 713–714. 42. Nancy, interview, Parachute 100 (October 1, 2000), 14–32. 43. Nancy, The Muses (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 90. 44. Nancy, The Muses, 90.

Three. The Political Aesthetics of Opacity 1. Lawrence Alloway, From Salon to Goldfish Bowl: 1895–1968 (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1968). 2. Laurie J. Monahan, “Cultural Cartography: American Designs at the 1964 Venice Biennale,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945– 1964, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 371. 3. Lawrence Alloway, “The Avant-Garde in a Goldfish Bowl, 1948–68,” in The Venice Biennale 1895–1968 (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1968), 141. In her essay, Monahan notes that Solomon directed an American exhibit more ambitious than any that had taken place at Venice since the Biennale’s inception in 1895, “indeed a show so large that the Americans were allowed to extend their exhibition beyond the confines of the official exhibition grounds, the Giardini.” Monahan, “Cultural Cartography,” 371. Notes to Chapter Three 227

Although Monahan limits her analysis to ideology, her observation supports Arrighi’s claim that culture becomes a mediating device between finance and state-making, or identity-forming, interests: “The conspicuous consumption of cultural products was integral to a state making process, that is to the reorganization of the [territory] into a system. . . . The anomalous character of the ruling groups meant that they could not rely on the automatic customary allegiance that was available to more traditional kinds of authority. Hence these groups had to win and hold the allegiance by intensifying community self-awareness.” The Long Twentieth Century (London: Verso, 1996), 95. 4. Monahan, “Cultural Cartography,” 371. 5. Alloway makes much of the way European, particularly French, modernist painters were being discovered, as though for the first time, in a cultural atmosphere that made possible a “renewal of contact.” As evidence, he lists the awarding of major prizes to figures associated with the teens and twenties, for new work they were doing after the war: Braque, 1948; Matisse, 1950; Ernst, 1954; Villon, 1956. “It should be remembered that it was the new work of these artists that was being shown, so the prize giving should not be regarded solely as a retrospective gesture. It was one form of belief in the continuity of past and present . . . the reappearance of the great names linked modern art and cultural prestige in a way that had not occurred before.” “Avant-Garde in a Goldfish Bowl,” 137. 6. Alloway remarks on the Bienniale’s task, in the immediate aftermath of the war, to dissociate itself from its interwar fascist period under Mussolini, who supported some instances of modernism in art and architecture. Giovanni Ponti was named commissioner of the Biennial in 1945 by the Venice branch of the Committee of National Liberation. Conspicuously along political lines, although the newly assigned secretary general, Rodolfo Palluchini, was an art historian, he did not study twentieth-century art, the putative subject of the Bienniale. “Avant-garde in a Goldfish Bowl,” 133. Alloway also notes a work in the 1954 Bienniale that spoofed the mixture of triumphal modernism and American influence peculiar to the 1950s: Renato Guttuso’s Roman Boogie Woogie, “a caricature realist attack on the influence of American culture” pulled through abstract international modernism, it depicted teenagers dancing before an enlarged detail of the eponymous Mondrian painting to connote the new atmosphere of international cooperation reticulated to American interests; 136–137. 7. Alloway, “Avant-garde in a Goldfish Bowl,” 137. 8. Milton Gendel, “Art News from Rome,” Art News 57, 9 (January 1959): 52. 9. Emilio Ambasz, Italy: The New Domestic Landscape. Achievements and Problems in Italian Design (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1972). 10. Ambasz, Italy. 11. Of course, plastic has its own history in the margins of the avant-garde. László Moholy-Nagy explored it in the context of the Bauhaus, an institution that set the stage

228 Notes to Chapter Three

for postwar design fetishism. And it turns up in the late work of constructivist Naum Gabo. By the 1960s, it was a favorite of Arman, with his series Poubelles, and of Jean Tinguely. Pierre Restany, Plastics in Arts (Paris, 1974). In the United States, Donald Judd was busy making pristine recursive structures out of a variety of materials, including plastic. Unlike Burri’s use of it, in Judd’s plastic is transposed into luxury objects of sleek design. It elevates the plastic that Burri debases, or rather, presents outside of service to design: base, toxic, ubiquitous, seductive, and repellent in equal measure. 12. Restany, Plastics in Arts, 347. 13. See the introduction. 14. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” trans. Harry Zohn, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 392. 15. Opposing positions in arguments about the necessity of reference, problematically misunderstood as meaning, have, recursively through the history of twentiethcentury aesthetic discourse and practice, suspected one another of unaccountability or even violence. The constellation of debates throughout the 1920s and 1930s between Theodor Adorno, Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht are one such often-cited example. Ironically, another instance is the emergent debate after World War II over Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of “Committed Literature” versus Adorno’s aporetic indictment/expectations of lyric poetry. Rare are the contingent historical moments wherein both the axes of radical activism and those of sensory experimentation and an investigation into the materiality of language approach a relation of proximity. Claude Cahun’s work with Contre Attaque, the anti–Vichy regime collective, comes to mind, as does her book Les Paris sont ouverts. 16. That “universality” became the Trojan horse with which to introduce a merciless form of capitalism to economically and culturally subjugate first Europe and then the world during the Cold War is the premise of Negri’s and Hardt’s Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 17. James John Sweeney, Burri (Rome: Galleria dell’ Obelisco, 1955). Calvesi cites Sweeny as a crucial early advocate. See Maurizio Calvesi, “Alberto Burri,” in Alberto Burri (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Abrams, 1975), 17. 18. Toni Toniato, “Burri,” Evento della Arti 2 (1958): 28–29. 19. Enrico Crispolti, “Nota su Alberto Burri,” Notiziario: La Medusa studio d’arte contamporanea 16 (May 1958): n.p. 20. Germano Celant, “Alberto Burri and Material,” in Calvesi, Alberto Burri, 12. See also Calvesi, “Alberto Burri.” 21. Celant, “Alberto Burri and Material,” 12. 22. Significantly, this argument resembles that made by T. J. Clark about Pollock’s tremendous success and ultimately about abstract expressionism’s popularity. See

Notes to Chapter Three 229

“The Unhappy Consciousness” and “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 299–370 and 371–404, respectively. 23. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with TwentiethCentury Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 56–57. See also Brian O’Doherty, “Rauschenberg and the Vernacular Glance,” Art in America 61, 5 (September-October 1973), 84. Finally, for an exhaustive account of Rauschenberg’s project, see Branden Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). 24. From a 1970 interview with Rauschenberg in Emile de Antonio and Mitch Tuchman, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970 (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 88. 25. While the standard art-historical narratives continue to posit modernist abstraction and Dada as opposed artistic tendencies, Thierry de Duve’s paradigmatic essay “The Monochrome and the White Canvas,” in Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 199–280, discloses their adjacency. 26. For a discussion of the dominance of the monochrome in postwar European art, specifically in the context of Arte Povera, see Rosalind Krauss, “Giovanni Anselmo: Matter and Monochrome,” October 124 (spring 2008): 125–136. Krauss cites my “Marshall Plan Monochrome: The Monochrome as Matrix of Fifties Abstraction” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2007). On the twin tropes of the failure and death of both modernism and avant-gardism, see the usual suspects: Peter Bürger, Theory of the AvantGarde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm Repetition of the Neo-AvantGarde,” October 37 (summer 1986); and Hal Foster, “What’s So Neo about the NeoAvant-Garde?,” in “What’s So Neo about the Neo-Avant-garde?” In The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5–32. While many postwar practices did become inventories, indeed, empty rehearsals, of prewar practice, yet those inventories performed new problem sets in the context of changes in historical circumstances that required tragic repetition. Jaleh Mansoor, “Piero Manzoni: ‘We Want to Organicize Disintegration,’” October 95 (winter 2001): 29–53. See also “‘To the People of New York City’” in Blinky Palermo (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2009), 183–199. 27. See David Joselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp, 1910–1941 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001). See also George Baker, “Introduction: Universal Prostitution,” in The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). 28. Rosalind Krauss, “The Cubist Epoch,” Artforum 9 (February 1971), reprinted in Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 129–130.

230 Notes to Chapter Three

29. Thomas Crow, Modern Art in the Common Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). 30. Calvesi, “Alberto Burri,” 11–13. 31. For an overview of Italian presence in Libya specifically, see Brian McLaren, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005). 32. Fontana had been a supporter of Mussolini. For a brief discussion of Fontana’s membership in the Italian fascist party, see Paolo Campiglio, “La Parola dell ‘Artista,” in Lucio Fontana: Lettere, 1919–1968 (Milan: Skira, 1999), 30. 33. Rosalind Krauss, “Perpetual Inventory” (1997), in Robert Rauschenberg, ed. Branden Joseph (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 93–132. 34. Walter Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg: The Early 1950s (exhibition catalogue) (Houston: Houston Fine Arts Press, 1991). 35. Hopps, Robert Rauschenberg. For Burri’s account, see Cesare Brandi, Burri (Rome: Editalia, 1963). See also Maurizio Calvesi, “Burri e Rauschenberg,” Collage (Rome) 2 (March 1964). 36. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art. Their position foreshadows that of Guilbaut’s thesis. 37. Celant, “Alberto Burri and Material,” 11. 38. Roland Barthes, “Plastic,” in Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Noonday Press, 1972), 97. 39. Historically, figuration symptomized the rise of totalitarian regimes and portended war. The “rappel a l’ordre” of the 1930s was associated with fascism. The German Nazi party required a turn to the figurative. Minister of culture Joseph Goebbels literally outlawed abstraction as degenerate in 1937, hunting modernists and avantgardists from Dada to Bauhaus faculty—those who survived—and driving them out of Europe. As Neil Levi has argued, Goebbels sealed the relationship between an already historically complex exchange between art and ideology. Neil Levi, “Judge for Yourselves: The ‘Degenerate Art Exhibition’ as Political Spectacle,” October 85 (spring 1998): 41–64. This “rappel a l’ordre” painting and sculpture took hold in Italy as well. That said, the relationship between politics and art is somewhat more nuanced in Italian modernism. The seemingly paradoxical alliance between modernist architecture and Italian fascism is well documented. Remo Ceserani, “Italy and Modernity: Peculiarities and Contradictions,” in Italian Modernism: Italian Culture between Decadentism and Avant-Garde, ed. Mario Moroni and Luca Somigli (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004). See also Marla Stone, The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). The Mussolini era saw the proliferation of “rationalist fascist” architecture, emblematized by the work of Gruppo 7.

Notes to Chapter Three 231

40. Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” in Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 42. 41. De Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor,” 34. 42. De Man, “Epistemology of Metaphor,” 34. 43. Georges Bataille, “Formless,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). 44. Hal Foster, Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2003). 45. Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, “The Use-Value of the Formless,” in Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 58. See also Georges Bataille, “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur,” in Stoekl, Visions of Excess. 46. Bois and Krauss, “Use-Value of the Formless,” 58. Besides this summary dismissal due to a perceived acquiescence to metaphor, Bois and Krauss, Formless, devote an entire chapter to saying “No to Joseph Beuys,” ostensibly because of the artist’s reliance on metaphor. 47. Bois and Krauss repurify even the base material by insisting that it could function away from, somewhere free of, the vicissitudes of social context. 48. Alberto Burri, et al. “Manifesto of the Gruppo Origine” (January 1951). Reprinted in Celant, Italian Metamorphosis. 49. Enrico Castellani, “Continuity and Newness,” Azimuth 2 (1960), reprinted in Azimuth & Azimut, ed. Arnoldo Mondadori (Milan: Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, 1984). 50. Castellani, “Continuity and Newness.” 51. Alberto Burri, “Statement,” in The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, ed. Andrew Carnduff Ritchie (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955). Also cited in Celant, “Alberto Burri and Material,” 7. Jaimey Hamilton, “Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri’s Sacchi,” October 124 (spring 2008): 31–52. The rest of the brief text focuses on purely technical issues, such as “the reduction of color” and “graphic nuclei.” Its only substantive statement is that the work must be “anti-decorative” and “founded on . . . human reassertion deep in the consciousness of the artist.” Again, “human reassertion . . . deep in the unconscious” is not defined or qualified. Its evocation nonetheless signals, if not a conservative tendency (the manifesto was written sixteen years before Barthes’s groundbreaking “Death of the Author” [1968], which impacted much postwar art), an unconscious enmeshment with existentialism that Burri’s work does not evidence and in fact resists. Bracketing the influence of existentialism on art criticism, of which the most famous example might be Harold Rosenberg’s “American Action Painters” (published in 1952, a year after the Gruppo Origine text), which plants the individual painter’s struggle for the assertion of human authenticity on American cultural soil, many artists and critics in Europe were wary of the notion of free will or agency in the aftermath of the Shoah, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and World War II. Burri’s colleague Fontana stated that painting was not possible after 232 Notes to Chapter Three

Hiroshima, echoing Adorno’s well-known dictum that lyric poetry was not possible after Auschwitz. Countless artists on both sides of the Atlantic produced self-lacerating work that doubted the possibility of an authentic self capable of expression. Numerous projects symptomized an awareness that the work, the artists’ gestures and strategies, were as determined by factors extrinsic to the subject as were the subject’s desires, themselves mediated. As Benjamin Buchloh has elegantly formulated it, “every painter, European or American, seems to have searched for the proper register in which to anchor the determining conditions of a total dispersal of a centered subjectivity and the discrediting of conscious control. Painting now had to find principles through which it could publicly refute the last residues of a visual hedonism that seduced its viewers either by the virtuosity of the graphic, gestural or chromatic execution or by the enigmatic iconography that pretended to lead to the deepest recesses of the mythical and prelinguistic unconscious.” Benjamin Buchloh, “Hantai, Villegle, and the Dialectics of Painting’s Dispersal,” October 91 (winter 2000): 31. 52. Thomas Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex)Change It: Reading ‘Capital,’ Rhetorically,” in Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 103–133. 53. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowlkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163–164. 54. Keenan, “Point Is to (Ex)Change It,” 131. 55. Keenan, “Point Is to (Ex)Change It,” 103–104. 56. Keenan, “Point Is to (Ex)Change It,” 105. 57. Keenan, “Point Is to (Ex)Change It,” 109. 58. See T. J. Clark’s discussion of the Three Standard Stoppages, “The Unhappy Consciousness,” in Farewell to an Idea, 299–370. Clark maintains that as soon as the index is qualified, is characterized by language, it enters the field of the metaphor. See also Clark, “Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction,” in Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism, 172– 243. 59. Calvesi, “Alberto Burri.” 60. Celant, “Alberto Burri and Material,” 7. 61. Hamilton, “Making Art Matter,” 31–52. The most recent and rigorous exploration of Burri’s practice opens refreshingly with Burri as a modernist who insisted on the autonomy of the work and maintained absolute “denial of the explanatory power of language.” But Hamilton then argues that the more the artist denied the putative symbolism of his work, on which everyone but him agreed, the more firmly he entrenched it in a referential framework. As Hamilton’s thesis has it, “Burri’s struggle over the materiality of the burlap was part of a larger psychosocial suturing of the wounds of modernist painting, which was seen to be in serious crisis.” While I agree with this argument, as far as it goes, by shifting emphasis from the burlap to the plastic, I emphasize the procedural changes brought to bear by Burri’s move from the one to the other, a Notes to Chapter Three 233

process that transitioned from the reparative logic of suture to the irreparable negative drive of burning and exploding. Even in its usage in discourse on cinema, suture joins, links, and connects. Less emphasized in Burri’s work is the procedural violence for which there is no medical reference generative of the work, the acts of tearing, ripping, shredding, and burning. However, Hamilton concludes that “historical trauma was displaced and aestheticized, made into a performance in which the artist was ultimately represented as triumphant” and claims that Burri’s work is part of a “reclamation” of the prewar avant-garde and modernism, which was intricately bound up with fascism in the Italian context. Burri, for her, attempts to repeat in order to overcome, and does. Yet Hamilton moves against the grain of her thesis when she finally points out that Burri’s work (and she refers to the early work made in burlap entitled Sacchi) “materialized the way post-war economic institutions were already shaping an emerging global capitalist economy, the excesses of which were used to develop and expand the geographic territory of its operations.” Hamilton emphasizes that the burlap sacks, before they were understood as flesh, were commodity objects, but she suppresses some of the strongest points she makes about Burri’s practice as an anticolonialist endeavor.

Four. “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” 1. Manzoni, Piero. Economia del Carnefice (1952). In Gioventù Sociale. Student Political Pamphlet. The Economics of The Executioner. Trans. Gianluca Pulsoni. Photocopy in the Archivio Opera Piero Manzoni, Milan. See the illustration of this pamphlet in this book (fig. 4.4). 2. Silvia Federici, Wages against Housework” (1975), in the essay collection Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle, Common Notions (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), cited in Maya Gonzalez, “The Gendered Circuit: Reading The Arcane of Reproduction,” in “Struggle at Fiat” (1964). Translated by Evan Calder Williams. Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. 3. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2004), 63. Federici’s work relies on Engels’s discussion of the witch hunts as a turning point in the arrangement of social resources, above all the female body as a form of commons. See Friedrich Engels. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). (London: Penguin, 2010). Last accessed March 10, 2016. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/. 4. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 184. 5. Manzoni, “Economy of the Executioner.” 6. Romano Alquati, “Struggle at Fiat” (1964), in Classe Operaia 1 (January 1964). Translated by Evan Calder Williams. Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. 234 Notes to Chapter Three

7. Raniero Panzieri, La Ripresa del marxismo-leninismo in Italia. (Milan: Sapere, 1975), cited in Steve Wright, “The Collapse of Workerism,” in Storming Heaven (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 36. 8. Tronti, From Operaio e Capitale (Turin: Einaudi, 1966), cited in Steve Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” in Storming Heaven, 82–88. 9. Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence. (London: Pathfinder Press, 1982). Marxist Internet Archive. Last accessed March 10, 2016. https://www.marxists.org/archive /marx/letters/. 10. Manzoni, “Economy of the Executioner.” 11. Evan Calder Williams, “Invisible Organization: Reading Romano Alquati,” Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. 12. Wright, Storming Heaven, 49. 13. Raniero Panzieri, “Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on a Reading of Capital,” trans. Julian Bees, http://zerowork.org/PanzieriPlanning.html, last accessed March 3, 2016. Originally published in Quaderni Rossi 4 (1964): 257–288, reprinted as chap. 25 in Panzieri, La Ripresa del marxismo-leninismo in Italia, 329–365. 14. Alquati, “Struggle at Fiat.” 15. For an excellent discussion, in the context of Alquati’s involvement with the workers’ inquiries, of this internal inconsistency in the demographics of labor, an inconsistency impossible for the party to understand, much less represent, see Calder Williams, “Invisible Organization.” 16. Calder Williams, “Invisible Organization.” Alquati, Sulla Fiat et Altri Scritti, cited in Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 52. 17. Tronti, From Operaio e Capitale, cited in Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 39. 18. Tronti, From Operaio e Capitale, cited in Wright, “Quaderni Rossi and the Workers’ Inquiry,” 56. 19. Cited in Wright, Storming Heaven, 29. 20. Asor Rosa. “Il Punto di Vista operaio e la cultura socialista.” Quaderni Rossi, No. 2 (1962), 122–123. 21. Wright, Storming Heaven, 54. 22. Alquati, Sulla Fiat et Altri Scritti, cited in Wright, Storming Heaven, 52. 23. I am referencing Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages (1913). 24. Alquati, “Struggle at Fiat” (1964). Translated by Evan Calder Williams. Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. 25. Wright, Storming Heaven, 50. 26. Wright, Storming Heaven, 50. 27. Piero Manzoni et al., “Manifesto of Albisola Marina” (1957), reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1994), 718. 28. Azimuth presents work of the European avant-garde, focusing primarily on Notes to Chapter Four 235

Dada—Duchamp and Schwitters—and on the American neo-avant-garde, in particular Rauschenberg and Johns. 29. The Pollock dance had already been mythologized in the European context by Mathieu’s early presentations of Pollock’s painting in Paris and his concomitant rhetoric of the liberated act. See Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post-war: In Search of Absolutes,” in Paris Post-war: Art and Existentialism 1945–1955, ed. Frances Morris (London: Tate Gallery, 1994), 25–52. 30. Piero Manzoni, “Free Dimension,” Azimuth 2 (1960), reprinted in Azimuth & Azimut, ed. Arnoldo Mondadori (Milan: Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, 1984). 31. “Against Style,” reprinted in Celant, Italian Metamorphosis, 719. 32. Piero Manzoni, “For an Organic Painting” (1957), in Celant, Italian Metamorphosis, 718. 33. The use of the word “organic” appears across the spectrum of Italian leftist thought of the twentieth century. It has been traced back to Gramscian terms, and the terms Amedeo Bordiga had also used prior to being ostracized in 1926 for having confronted Stalin in person in protest of his nation-statism. This discursive “tradition” was nonetheless kept alive by numerous Italian writers and thinkers, among them Pasolini and, above all, Tronti. I maintain that Manzoni’s “We Want to Organicize Disintegration” was part of this. See Riccardo Bellofiore, “Between Panzieri and Negri: Mario Tronti and the Workerism of the 1960s and 1970s,” Lib.com, September 9, 2011, https://libcom.org/library/between-panzieri-negri-mario-tronti-workerism-1960s1970s. Last accessed March 3, 2016. “This workerism was able to propose a new view of the crisis as social crisis against the mechanical view in the tradition of Marxism.” 34. Wright, Storming Heaven, 35. 35. Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943–1988 (London: Penguin, 1990). 36. Grundrisse was not translated into Italian until 1973, although all sources indicate that Tronti, Panzieri, Alquati, and others were working with editions in German and French before 1973. 37. Mario Tronti. Operaio e Capitale. (1966). Workers and Capital. Partially translated, available at https://libcom.org/library/operai-e-capitale-mario-tronti. Last accessed March 3, 2016. 38. Marx, Grundrisse, 109n6. 39. Piero Manzoni Catalogue Raisonné. (Milan: Edizioni di Vanni Scheiwiller, 1991). 40. Rosalind Krauss pinpoints the schematic rationale in modernist painting: she points out that the modernist “system is finite. The reflexive relations of its terms can generate only so many solutions, only so many transcodings. Grid, monochrome, allover, mise-en-abyme. And it is finite in the historical sense as well. For all of its inner dynamism, it is a graph in stasis. Its inner possibilities can be explored, filled out, but its system admits of no evolution. You can simply come to its outer limit and then 236 Notes to Chapter Four

stop”; The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 20. See also “Grids,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 8–22. 41. “Materialism,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 15–16. Rather, Manzoni’s materiality surfaces internal to structure, as its other. In this sense, it may recall Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization, in “Revolution in the Poetic Language,” of the presymbolic, the chora, a bodily trace that seeps through perforations in the symbolic. Kristeva’s semiotic, deriving from the chora, is posited as a prior, anterior mode to structure/the symbolic. I am interested in the contiguity—neither anterior nor interior—of materiality and corporeality in Manzoni. See Manzoni, “For an Organic Painting,” 718. 42. Adorno, Theodor, and Max Horkheimer. The Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1972), 7. 43. Reprinted in Piero Manzoni, ed. Germano Celant (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1998), 198. 44. Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 43. 45. Carl Andre, letter to the editor, Art Forum 11 (April 1973), cited in Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 43. 46. On the relationship between minimalism and the Soviet avant-garde, see Hal Foster, “What’s So Neo about the Neo-Avante-Garde?” In The Duchamp Effect, ed. Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 5–32. 47. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 43. 48. Barbara Rose, “The Politics of Criticism V: The Politics of Art II,” Artforum 7 (January 1969): 44–49, cited in Julia Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 49. 49. Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers, 43. 50. On the disarticulation of class as a central politicized term, see Richard Sennet and Jonathan Cobb, The Hidden Injuries of Class (London: Norton, 1993). See also Richard Sennet, The Culture of the New Capitalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 51. Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 52. Any inquiry into the work of art in relation to the fetish, to the commodity, and to real abstraction might have to critically take up once again Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1937). 53. See Moira Roth’s seminal article “The Aesthetics of Indifference,” Artforum 16, 3 (1977): 46–53. This classic text posits Cage’s legacy as fundamentally affirmative when situated in the historical context of the Cold War. See also “A History of Performance,” Art Journal (December 1997): 73–85. Through the rhetorical frame of a course syllabus, Roth traces the complex history of performance in the United States along a Notes to Chapter Four 237

horizon of depoliticization of the academy and the arts. Finally, see Moira Roth and Jonathan Katz, Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Marcel Duchamp and John Cage (London: Routledge, 1999). For an account of contemporary practitioners who rejected the Cagean approach to emancipation of perceptual subjectivity through forms of deskilling and noncompositional expression, see Jaleh Mansoor, “Agnes Martin: Inscription as Effacement,” in Agnes Martin (New York: Dia Art Foundation, 2011), 154–169. Finally, for a careful exploration of Cagean aesthetics in relation to Frankfurt School aesthetics, see Ian Pepper, “From the ‘Aesthetics of Indifference’ to ‘Negative Aesthetics’: John Cage and Germany 1958–1972,” October (fall 1997): 30–47. 54. Robert Morris, Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994), 263. 55. Kynaston McShine, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors (New York: Jewish Museum, 1966). See also James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics of the Sixties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); James Meyer, ed., Minimalism (London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2000). 56. Quoted in Bryan-Wilson, Art Workers. 57. There is no small irony in the fact that Carl Andre’s father worked at Bethlehem Steel, the mining, shipbuilding, and steel production corporation in Pennsylvania founded in 1904 by Charles M. Schwab and Joseph Wharton and by midcentury the largest steel manufacturer in the world. By the close of the century it no longer had the equipment to complete fellow minimalist Richard Serra’s infamous Torqued Ellipses. Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt in 2003. Richard Serra makes much of having to outsource production of the sculpture—for which Larry Gagosian built his new Chelsea Galleries—to Japanese facilities. See “Interview with Richard Serra,” with interviewers Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997), 11–32. One might locate the rise and fall of the American cycle of accumulation in the long durational narrative of Bethlehem Steel alone. 58. Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (London: Verso, 1996), 301. 59. In the shifting internal distribution of American labor and class composition during the period when industrial-scale shifts in labor pools and in global labor to capital relationships began, see Simon Mohun, “Unproductive Labor in the U.S. Economy 1964–2010,” Review of Radical Political Economics 46, 3 (2014): 355–379. 60. Arrighi, Long Twentieth Century, 322. 61. Leopoldina Fortunati, “Learning to Struggle: My Story between Workerism and Feminism,” in “Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com; and Gonzalez, “Gendered Circuit.” 62. Romano Alquati, “Outline of a Pamphlet on Fiat” (1967) in “Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. 63. Tronti, “Class and Party.” in Workers and Capital. 238 Notes to Chapter Four

64. Tronti’s analysis of the split between the party and the state, such that the party would come to be in service to the state as opposed to the other way around, as once theorized by Lenin, opens onto the Italian ultraleft’s recognition that formal equality and economic parity were not necessarily aligned. This insight into the split between the formally organized notion of identity and the reality of daily material social reproduction came to characterize a number of scholarly, artistic, and political inquiries through the next decade and a half. That genealogy, and the story of the “creeping May,” as well as its relevance to the present, is the focus of this present book’s conclusion. 65. Fontana’s dream of numinous dematerialization resonates with the larger postwar space age fantasy, which in turn replays the collective wish image emblematized by the airplane of the historical (Soviet) avant-garde. 66. Broodthaers, “La Méduse,” from “Pense-Bête.” The last line runs: “Crystal of scorn, of great price at last, gob of spit, wave, wavering.” “Pense-Bête,” in Writings, Interviews, Photographs, trans. Paul Schmidt, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 28–29. 67. Broodthaers was interested in a strand of Marxist thinking associated with Lukács and against Althusser. In Paris in 1969–1970, Broodthaers attended, regularly, Lucien Goldmann’s seminar on Baudelaire. In 1965, Lucien Goldmann wrote of Robbe Grillet and by extension structuralism: “the disappearance of the character is a fait accompli, but he observes that this character is already replaced by another autonomous reality, the reified universe of objects”; quoted in Rachel Haidu, The Absence of Work: Marcel Broodthaers 1964–1972 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 68. Both artists, Manzoni and Broodthaers, took the problem of reification— separation, alienation, and unification for the purposes of the extraction of value understood in monetary terms—as their point of departure. Broodthaers did indeed work with Goldmann, and both were interested in distancing themselves from Althusserian emphases on language and ideology over the phenomenological concerns attendant on a critique of reification. One might trace the primacy of Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach and aspects of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 over the Leninist tradition then being explored in relation to structuralism and psychoanalysis in France—Althusser’s ideology critique model is again the point of reference. 69. Note that the author displaces the true source of profit, “that which makes surplus profit out of nothing,” from labor to advertising. 70. Haidu, Absence of Work, 28–29. 71. For a magisterial study of Marcel Broodthaers’s project, see Haidu, Absence of Work. 72. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum Press, 1999), xiii. Adorno and Horkheimer see the Enlightenment as having bifurcated, setting two diametrically opposed threads into movement. On the one hand the Enlightenment unfurls a tautological empiricism, a scientistic rationality, Notes to Chapter Four 239

that effectively eliminates self-reflexive thought. On the other hand the Enlightenment introduces the notion of the self-reflexive subject. These threads, dissonantly related in their common originary field in Enlightenment thought, distill out to two aspects of modernity and modernism: first, modern positivism, the last remnant of the Enlightenment (91)—rationalized, mechanistic, tautological machine logic; second, modernism—the capacity to work through and against systems rationality. Yet the authors’ biggest mistake happens at this juncture: the failure to see the extent to which the two never developed independently of one another but remained interdependent. In other words, rather than operating as two separate threads, each term locates aspects of itself in the other. Adorno and Horkheimer see this entwinement in operation in early Enlightenment work. “In The Critique of Pure Reason, however, they are expressed in the unclear relation of the transcendental to the empirical ego, and in other unresolved contradictions” (83). But this entanglement is not acknowledged in modernist painting. It problematizes the culture industry and its Enlightenment legacy without registering the extent to which high culture—the space for self-reflexive thought—is also deeply implicated in systems rationality. 73. Adorno/Horkheimer and Pierre Klossowski both produced in-depth extended analyses of Sade’s writing at the close of the war, in 1947. Pierre Klossowski, Sade My Neighbor [Sade Mon Prochain], trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991). In the introduction, Lingis makes the interest in Sade in the postwar intellectual landscape quite clear. Sade’s work, “of unsurpassable monstrosity is, paradoxically, rationalist in construction, even hyper rationalist, and pedagogic in genre. Does his importance for a Europe mourning the devastation of its populations and its rational programs lie in the demonstration Sade undertakes of how a rationalism comprehends and embraces the last limits of evil? In his writing, the form of rationalism itself becomes seduction and contamination” (x). “In the reasons with which we allowed ourselves to be persuaded of those principles, was there not from the first, a clandestine force of seduction at work, by which the terminal power of the absolutely antihuman came to infect irradicably” all our human forces? (xi). Lingis argues that “Sade’s is a project of using the medium of generality, of the generic, to undermine generic man and promote the singular case, the monster” (xiii). On the one hand Sade’s libertinage as monstrosity surfaces in the medium of a rationalist discourse. On the other it marks the medium itself, the rationalist discourse, as inextricably linked, bound to the very fabric of its seeming antithesis: irrationality. 74. Enzo Traverso, Understanding the Nazi Genocide (London: Pluto Press, 1999). See also Traverso, “The Blindness of the Intellectuals,” October 87 (winter 1999): 73–88. 75. Maurice Blanchot, “A la rencontre de Sade,” in Les Temps Modernes 25 (October 1947): 577–612, reprinted as “Sade” in the introduction to Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 37–72. 240 Notes to Chapter Four

76. Blanchot, “A la rencontre de Sade,” reprinted as “Sade,” 63, 70. 77. Georges Bataille’s vision must be differentiated from the prewar Surrealist vision of Sade. See Bataille, “The Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,” in Stoekl, Visions of Excess. He sees an appropriative drive to homogenization in Sade’s particular enactment of a sexuality, itself a cynical analysis of Kant’s subsumption. 78. In “Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,” Bataille notes that the ritual performed along the oral/anal axis is “a process of appropriation characterized by a homogeneity (static equilibrium) of the author of appropriation, and of objects as a final result”; 95. 79. Bataille, “Use Value of D. A. F. de Sade,” 65. 80. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 102. 81. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94. 82. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 81, 82. 83. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 88. 84. It must be noted that Sade, as a figure for both twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and for the totalization of everyday life under capitalist subsumption, was not lost on Italian thinkers and artists of the mid- to late twentieth century. Pier Paolo Pasolini’s entire oeuvre, both filmic and textual, could be understood in light of this twin problem set. More specifically, however, Salo (1975) explores this conjuncture through the allegorical use of Sade to think about German Nazi fascism and symmetrically of German Nazi fascism to think about the legacy of the Enlightenment via Sade. Moreover, Pasolini’s film, Salò’s closing credits include a bibliography listing Blanchot, Foucault, Bataille, and de Beauvoir. 85. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94–95. 86. Marx, “The Commodity,” in Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowlkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 165–166. 87. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Formalism and Historicity, ed. Anne Rorimer (Chicago: Chicago Institute of Art, 1975), 105. Buchloh has formulated the relationship as follows: “The subjective gesture and the objective sign could be described as being at the same time both singular uniqueness and endless variety of the same, organic individuality and mechanical object, personal experience and collective anonymity” (105). 88. Recall the many archival projects to which the fingerprint has been harnessed, above all in law enforcement. 89. Maurice Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” Yale French Studies 73 (1987): 12–20. 90. Blanchot, “Everyday Speech,” 14. 91. Perhaps this recalls “Dust Breeding,” Man Ray’s photograph of The Large Glass after Duchamp had allowed dust to accumulate for some time in layers of varying density, which he then chemically fixed to the glass surface. Manzoni, of course, relinquishes that level of control. 92. Apparently, the cans are filled with tomato paste, the quintessential Italian export product. Perhaps the two are interchangeable. Notes to Chapter Four 241

93. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 75. 94. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 143. 95. Cited in Buchloh, “Formalism and Historicity,” 93. I italicize this phrase for the specific weight Broodthaers places on Manzoni’s work (which I have argued elaborates a critical historical materialism) with reference to the events of the twentieth century.

Conclusion 1. For a discussion of Allora and Calzadilla’s debt to Arte Povera and Italian art of the post–World War II period, see Jaleh Mansoor and Yates McKee, “The Sediment of History: Interview with Allora and Calzadilla,” Parkett 80 (fall 2007): 42–48. This artist collective is notable also for its renown in the international exhibitionary circuit of the last decade. For a discussion of their picking up of the problem of environmentalism, nascent in Arte Povera, see Yates McKee, “Wake, Vestige, Survival: Sustainability and the Politics of the Trace in Allora and Calzadilla’s Land Mark,” October 133 (summer 2010) 20–48. For a genealogy of the social turn in art that locates it in the social political struggles of France and northern Italy from 1968 to 1977, see contributions to Playgrounds (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2014). 2. See T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Demos is eager to locate the conjuncture of contemporary aesthetics and a left antistatist and anticapitalist politics in recent forms of realism in the work of Emily Jacir, Hito Steyerl, and others in a critique of abstraction whose terms echo those of Arte Povera in historical relationship to pop and minimalism, a paradigmatic historical split I discuss here. Other recent books that address the social turn in contemporary art practice include Grant H. Kester, The One and the Many: Contemporary Collaborative Art in a Global Context (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Finally, for a similar discussion in relation to performance, see Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011). 3. See Rachel Haidu, “Precarité, Autorité, Autonomie,” in Community of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 215–237. 4. For a culmination of this tendency in recent practices, see Richart Birkett and Sam Lewitt, . . . and Materials and Money and Crisis Exhibition at Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. The catalog is also entitled . . . and Materials and Money and Crisis (Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2014). 5. For an authoritative book on the movement inclusive of primary documents, see Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera (London: Phaidon Press, 1999). See also Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972 (London: Tate, 2001). Notably, Christov-Bakargiev 242 Notes to Chapter Four

has also curated international art fairs, such as Dockumenta 2012 and the 2016 Istanbul Biennial. 6. Germano Celant, “Notes for a Guerrilla War,” Flash Art 5 (November/December 1967): 3–5. For a thorough study of Arte Povera’s politics and Germano Celant’s involvement with articulating those politics, see Nicholas Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-nam: The Politics of Arte Povera,” October 124 (spring 2008): 8–30. 7. Celant, “Notes for a Guerrilla War.” For Celant’s overview of Italian abstract art during the same period that this book covers, see L’Inferno dell’arte Italiana: Materiali 1946–1964 (Genoa: Edizioni Costa and Nolan, 1990). For a comparative account, see Alberto Boatto, Pop Art (Milan: Editori Laterza, 1998). 8. Celant, “Notes for a Guerrilla War,” 3. 9. See “1967b,” in Art since 1900, ed. Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004). 10. Claire Gilman, “Arte Povera’s Theater: Artifice and Anti-Modernism in Italian Art of the 1960s,” PhD diss., Columbia University, 2006. 11. See Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal”; Sergio Bologna, “Tribe of Moles”; Toni Negri, “Domination and Sabotage”; and Franco Piperno, “The Naked Truth about Moro’s Detention” and “From Terrorism to Guerilla Warfare”; all in Autonomia: Postpolitical Politics, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotexte, 2000). 12. Celant, “Notes for a Guerrilla War,” 3. 13. Cullinan, “From Vietnam to Fiat-Nam,” 8–30. 14. For an overview of the economic, political, and social developments from the “Hot Autumn” of 1969 to 1977, when numerous writers and culture workers were arrested, see Bologna, “The Tribe of Moles” (1977). 15. Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali. Last accessed April 19, 2016. http://www.museo pinopascali.it/. 16. For a discussion of the modernist square’s evolution into minimalism and conceptual art via the cube, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–69: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (winter 1990): 105–143. See also Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” in Complete Writings (Nova Scotia: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005). 17. Jane Schneider, Italy’s “Southern Question”: Orientalism in One Country (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998). See also John Dicki, Darkest Italy: The Nation and Stereotypes of the Mezzogiorno, 1860–1900 (London and New York: MacMillan, 1999). 18. Steve Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” in Storming Heaven (London: Pluto Press, 2002), 17. 19. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “From the Laboratory (Notes en poete for a Marxist Linguistics),” in Heretical Empiricism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 50–78. Pasolini takes up the problem of the Mezzogiorno as symptomatized in local and reNotes to Conclusion 243

gional Italian dialects, their relation to literary language, and the political ramifications of those relationships. In Italian Locations, Noa Steimatsky explores the role of rural and suburban landscape and its relationship to uneven industrial development (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). For a discussion of the PCI’s instrumentalization of Gramsci’s legacy after World War II, see chapter 1 here. 20. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “The PCI to the Young!! (Notes in Verse for a Prose Poem Followed by an ‘Apology’)” in Heretical Empiricism (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988), 150–158. 21. On this term in the context of the class struggles of the 1950s and 1960s in Italy, see Bologna, “Tribe of Moles.” 22. Bologna, “Tribe of Moles.” 23. Antonio Negri derives the term from Spinoza’s Political Treatise to delineate a mass charged with revolutionary potential but devoid of any positive attributions that might assign them a categorical political identity around which to organize, a categorical political identity such as traditional class belonging. For a discussion of Negri’s terminology in relation to the framework of Operaismo as elaborated in Quaderni Rossi, out of which he developed, see Toscano, “Chronicles of Insurrection,” 76. Toscano aims to recover Negri’s history as both theorist and agitator “testing the validity of Marxist categories in light of empirical transformations” against the “seemingly apologetic and impressionistic” works known to the Anglophone world in his works coauthored with Michael Hardt: Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005). Toscano notes a compromise at the core of Negri’s thought, one noted by Steve Wright in Storming Heaven: that to conceptualize a mass demographic beyond the factory floor, Negri paid too high a price of shifting his analytical lens too far off the question of value and onto the social fabric of everyday life under capital, marred by the separations and divisions that make cohesion impossible. Paolo Virno then took the term up in A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). For an excellent analysis of the term, see Warren Montag, “Who’s Afraid of the Multitude? Between the Individual and the State,” South Atlantic Quarterly 104 (fall 2005). Negri’s development of the term in the twenty-first century may be found in his and Hardt’s Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005). For a discussion of how Negri’s thought has ramified in contemporary culture, and indeed how Negri himself has participated in the discursive field of contemporary art, see Alberto Toscano, “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism 20, 2 (April 2008): 273–287 and “The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri,” Third Text 23, 4 (July 2009): 369–382. 24. Wright, “Weathering the 1950s,” 24, 131–132. 25. Rosalind Krauss, A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-medium Condition (London: Thames and Hudson, 2000). 26. I am relying on the work of David Harvey, Beverly Silver, Robert Brenner, Gio244 Notes to Conclusion

vanni Arrighi, and others who have proposed ways of thinking historical causality after the complications wrought by international corporatization and models of sovereignty that are other to the nation-state, and by communications networks attendant on financialization responsive to international corporatization that have come to reshape what we mean by “context.” Concretely, for Harvey, Arrighi, Brenner (Marxist theorists of globalization), and others, the oil crisis of 1973 is a paradigmatic moment in marking not only the end of record-high profit rates in the United States but also the beginning of strategies on the part of corporations (and therefore international law) to keep profits high, strategies that that we now refer to in the unexamined shorthand of “globalization”: the purchase of cheaper labor in the underdeveloped world to cut the cost of living labor to fixed capital to increase profits. This shift has also been understood as one from Fordist to post-Fordist production techniques, that is to say, the corporate emphasis on supply chains over production on the factory floor, in the interest of exacting profits more efficiently (to bear the expense of labor less). “Globalization” has also come to denote new rounds of primitive accumulation exacted by the International Monetary Fund during the new economy of the Thatcher and Reagan years. What David Harvey calls “deterritorialization” and “reterrritorealization”—enforced by the creative destruction and reconsolidation of everyday life under the dictates of advanced capital—already describes the change to a basic cornerstone of context and causality: the location of place. For a discussion of the “deterritorialization” or disarticulation and reorganization of space and time in relation to historically specific configurations of capitalist integration (known as “globalization”), see Harvey, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). See also Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). For another analysis of the problem, see Giovanni Arrighi and Beverly Silver, Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). For an account of world banking reticulated to the US dollar and its relationship to the oil crises of the 1970s, with the ensuing problem of “restructuring” alongside its ramifications in international economics from the 1970s on, see Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century. Gopal Balakrishnan, “Speculations on the Stationary State,” New Left Review 59 (SeptemberOctober 2009), 5–26 relies on Arrighi’s work to address the decline of the nation-state in the face of transnational corporations on the one hand and banking on the other, while updating Arrighi’s model of systemic crisis as structurally inherent to the capitalist state. Also see also Robert Brenner, “Persistent Stagnation, 1973–93,” in The Boom and the Bubble (London: Verso, 2002). The best known and certainly most popular text in English on the organization of the world in the interest of global neoimperial domination is Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). That thesis problematically displaces forms of capitalist reconsolidation, which is neocolonialism, with issues of constitutionality and the limits of national and international law. Notes to Conclusion 245

27. Sylvère Lotringer, “In the Shadow of the Red Brigades,” in Lotringer and Marazzi, Autonomia, v, vii. 28. “Interplanetary Art Manifesto,” Il Gesto 4 (September 1959), reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim, 1995), 723. 29. Nanni Balestrini, The Unseen [Gli invisibili] (1986) (London: Verso, 2011), 7. 30. Balestrini, Unseen, 35. 31. Steve Wright, “The Collapse of Workerism,” in Storming Heaven, 199. 32. On the thematics and tactics of opacity in resistance to the aspirations to communicative transparency founded on the occlusion of class struggle (democracy), see Alexander Galloway, “Black Box, Black Bloc,” in Communization and Its Discontents, ed. Benjamin Noys (Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 2011). On the relationship between May 1968 in France and June 1969–1977 in Italy, see Alexander Galloway, “Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm,” Culture Machine 10 (2009): 131–156. Last accessed March 10, 2016. Available online at http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/issue/view/21. See Tiqqun, This Is Not a Program (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011). Note that Tiqqun describe their politics as being incompatible with that of Negri. This difference emerges in relation to the notion of citizenship as Negri formulates it in Empire (2000). 33. Antonio Negri, Marx after Marx (London: Pluto Press, 1992). 34. Michael Hardt, “Introduction: Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A potential Politics, ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1. See also the collection of essays The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics, ed. Lorenzo Chiesa and Alberto Toscano (Melbourne: re.press, 2009). Writing in 2012 from the vantage of “this” side of the Marshall Plan (and globalization), any study of art practice that does not part from both the obsolete structure of the monographic study and the equally obsolete organization around national identity seems hopelessly parochial. But this problem of “the parochial” issues from the singular place Italy occupied in the hinge from nationalism to globalism. As Alberto Toscano and Lorenzo Chieso have pointed out, “Italian thought confronts us with a parallax view or disjunctive synthesis of national and conjunctural idiosyncrasies, on the one hand, and a series of potent theoretical abstractions that have remarkable capacity for ‘travelling’ on the other.” 35. Although the literature is thick, one of the best analyses to date on Thomas Hirschhorn’s contribution to the social art practices of the early 2000s is Rachel Haidu, “Précarité, Autorité, Autonomie,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Beth Hinderliter, William Kaizen, Vered Maimon, Seth McCormick, and Jaleh Mansoor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). On Negri’s contribution to the 2009 piece Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, see Sven Lütticken, “Text and Other Projects,” Texte Zur Kunst 75. Available online at venlutticken.blogspot.ca/2009/09/texte-zur -kunst-no-75-thomas-hirschhorn.html. 36. Lütticken. “Text and Other Projects.” 246 Notes to Conclusion

37. Alberto Toscano, “The Sensuous Religion of the Multitude: Art and Abstraction in Negri,” Third Text 23, 4 (July 2009), 369. 38. For a discussion of “provisional autonomy,” see Hal Foster, “This Funeral Is for the Wrong Corpse,” in Design and Crime (London: Verso, 2003). See also Alberto Toscano, “Sensuous Religion of the Multitude,” and “The Open Secret of Real Abstraction,” Rethinking Marxism 20, 2 (April 2008): 273–287. 39. Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (1967) (Detroit: Black and Red, 1977). 40. Two “issues” that have been translated and disseminated as short books in English situate themselves historically in relationship to Italy’s “creeping May.” See Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, trans. Alexander R. Galloway and Jason E. Smith (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2010), and This Is Not a Program. Both appeared (in French) in Tiqqun 2 (2001). See also Jason E. Smith, “The Politics of Incivility: Autonomia and Tiqqun,” Minnesota Review 75 (fall 2010): 119–132. 41. Claire Fontaine, “Ready-Made Artist and the Human Strike: A Few Clarifications,” http://www.clairefontaine.ws/pdf/readymade_eng.pdf. Last accessed on March 10, 2016. Available at http://www.clairefontaine.ws/bio.html. 42. Claire Fontaine, “The Readymade Artist and the Human Strike.” 43. Claire Fontaine, “The Readymade Artist and the Human Strike.” 44. Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Women and the Subversion of the Community (London: Falling Water Press, 1972). Last accessed March 10, 2016. Available at http://petroleusepress.com/post/481188354/the-social-relation-of-the-waged-to-the -unwaged. 45. Mierle Laderman-Ukeles, “Maintenance Art: Manifesto!” (1969). Feldman Gallery, New York. Last accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.feldmangallery.com/media /pdfs/Ukeles_ MANIFESTO.pdf. 46. Silvia Federici, “Wages against Housework” (1975), in the collection of essays entitled Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), cited in Maya Gonzalez, “The Gendered Circuit: Reading The Arcane of Reproduction,” in Workers’ Inquiry: Viewpoint 3 (September 2013), viewpointmag.com. 47. Gonzalez, “Gendered Circuit.” 48. Claire Fontaine. “We Are All Clitoridian Women: Notes on Carla Lonzi’s Legacy.” E-Flux 47 (September 2013). Last accessed March 10, 2016. http://www.e-flux.com /journal/we-are-all-clitoridian-women-notes-on-carla-lonzi’s-legacy/. 49. Claire Fontaine. “Ready-Made Artist and Human Strike: A Few Clarifications.” 50. Gonzalez, “Gendered Circuit.” 51. Any inquiry into the work of art in relation to the fetish, the commodity, and to real abstraction might have to critically take up once again the hegemonic essay by Walter Benjamin, “Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1937).

Notes to Conclusion 247

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INDEX

Note: Page numbers followed by f indicate a figure. abstract expressionism, 55, 56, 70, 77, 87, 107, 168; critique of, 108, 146; popularity of, 209n19, 229–230n22; reception of, 207n4 abstraction, 9–10, 17, 33, 35, 43, 46, 54, 66, 80–81, 85, 94, 100–105, 110, 112–116, 139, 152, 174, 209n15, 224n6; aesthetic, 10, 209n15; critique of, 186, 243n2; exchange, 47; Marx on, 9; modernist, 230n25; Nazi outlawing of, 231n39; in painting, 216n4; postwar, 223n49; real, 10, 17, 33, 205, 209n15, 238n52, 248n51; Sade and, 155, 159; Soviet model of, 23 Accardi, Carla, 113, 198 accumulation, 9, 55, 57–58, 96, 107, 139, 143, 148, 159, 165, 168, 178, 202, 211n23; capitalist, 13, 58, 96, 159, 203, 208n10; crisis of, 15, 38; cycles of, 8, 14, 18, 27, 53, 55, 64–65, 120, 144–145, 239n57; female body as the source of, 125; Marx on, 126. See also primitive accumulation

Achromes series (Manzoni), 5, 41, 161– 162, 176 act, 75–76, 100, 146; aesthetic, 5, 208n14; enunciative, 79; Fontana’s gesture as, 12, 71–72, 74, 82–83, 85, 902033h, 84 Adorno, Theodor, 4, 25–26, 123, 134, 141, 154, 156–158, 61, 229n15, 240–241n72; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154; on lyric poetry after the Holocaust, 4, 70, 200–201, 229n15, 233n51 Agamben, Giorgio, 31, 69, 194, 225n13; on art in relation to the factory floor, 46; Homo Sacer, 31 alienation, 35, 129–130, 137, 146, 201, 240n68 Allora and Calzadilla, 169, 243n1 Alloway, Lawrence, 95, 216n4, 228nn5–6 Alquati, Romano, 21, 23–24, 27, 64, 127, 129–131, 133–135, 150, 182–183, 198, 214n51, 237n36; Scritti Sulla Fiat et Altri Scriti, 130; “Struggle at Fiat,” 129, 214n51; workers’ inquiries and, 170, 183, 235n15

Althusser, Louis, 9, 188, 209nn15–16, 240nn67–68 Amendable, Aurelio, 97 America Burnt/Unburnt (Claire Fontaine), 191, 192f Americanization, 2, 20, 33, 79, 142, 189 anarchism, 25, 30, 64 Andre, Carl, 128, 142–146, 48, 239n57; affiliation with Art Workers Coalition, 144; 37 Pieces of Work, 142 antagonism, 3, 5, 18, 24, 107, 120, 125, 129, 151, 179, 185, 188, 203, 214n50 anticapitalism, 29, 37, 45, 128, 168, 184, 194, 243n2 antiglobalization protests, 31, 38 antihumanism, 170, 241n73 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 33; Red Desert, 33 Arcane of Reproduction, The (Fortunati), 178, 194, 197 Arrighi, Giovanni, 1, 7, 11–12, 17, 39, 55, 58, 64, 148–149, 208n8, 208n10, 201n23, 211n24, 220n17, 228n3, 245– 246n26; The Geometry of Empire, 211n25; The Long Twentieth Century, 1, 7, 39, 93, 120, 208n8, 209n16, 211n25 Arsenide firm, 99 art history, 15, 24, 29, 31, 38, 112, 118; Anglophone, 152; social, 14, 37, 71, 249n17 art informel, 10, 40, 80 Art Strike Against Racism, War, and Repression, 148 Art Workers Coalition, 144 Arte Povera, 17–18, 37, 65, 169–172, 174–175, 179, 184, 198, 223n46, 230n26, 243nn1–2, 243n6 Asor Rosa, Alberto, 132 atomic bomb, 9, 32

266 Index

author, 33, 36, 56, 74, 77, 104, 108, 123, 141, 162, 193, 205 authorship, 34, 77, 120, 123, 149, 158, 204–205, 219n17 autochthony,24, 27, 38, 62, 151; in art, 6 autonomous Marxism, 24–25, 184 autonomous workers’ movement, 4 Autonomia, 28, 30–31, 184, 214n52; origins in workerism, 25, 185 autonomy, 4, 23–28, 37, 64, 123, 133, 139, 150–151, 166–168, 184–186, 191, 193, 195, 200, 203, 213n45, 220n20; aesthetic, 4, 118; in art, 6, 42–43, 45, 48, 120, 234n61; capital and, 131–132; Enlightenment notion of, 214n52; formalist, 38, 113; workers’, 24, 36, 131 avant-garde, 10, 14, 53, 87, 103, 112, 120, 168, 172, 210n20, 215n61; American, 20; European, 2, 70; French, 48; historical, 2, 4, 40, 54, 57–58, 65, 82, 103– 104, 143, 215n62, 216n4; history of the, 87; international, 10–11, 22, 64; interwar, 96; Italy’s relation to, 65; monochrome, 217n5; postwar, 165, 215n61; prewar, 58, 136, 207n2, 224n1; revolutionary, 42; Soviet, 12, 43, 67. See also neo-avant-garde Azimuth magazine, 35, 40, 42–43, 57, 113, 135, 216n4, 236n28 Baker, George, 226n32, 227n33 Balestrini, Nanni, 27, 37, 169, 185; Gruppo 64, 186; “The Interplanetary Art Manifesto,” 185–186; The Unseen, 186–188; Vogliamo Tutto (We Want Everything), 186 Ballocco, Mario, 113 Barthes, Roland, 93, 109, 166; on authorship, 204, 233n51; “Myth Today,” 109

Bataille, Georges, 7, 12, 38, 43, 112, 154, 190–191; economy of expenditure, 71; informe, 71, 112, 225n22; on the Marshall Plan, 12, 16, 210–11n23; on materialism, 209–10n20, 237n41; on Sade, 241–242nn77–78; Salò (Pasolini) and, 242n84 Bauhaus, 228n11, 231n39 Baumgarten, Alexander, 112 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 229n15; Italian reception of, 215n62; “A Short History of Photography,” 149; “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 8, 38, 100; “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 238n52, 248n51 Berardi, Franco, 30, 213n45 Biasi, Guido, 1, 37, 119 Bicocchi, Giancarlo and Luigi, 99 Big Red P n 18 (Burri), 14, 94, 104; as anti-readymade, 14 Blanchot, Maurice, 83, 90, 128, 160; on Sade, 154–156, 161, 164–165; Salò (Pasolini) and, 242n84 Boccioni, Umberto, 41, 176; La città che sale (The City Rises), 176, 181 body, 15, 36, 123–126, 130, 132–133, 140– 142, 152, 155–160, 162–166, 187; artist’s, 36, 81, 88, 141; laboring, 127, 147, 178. See also female body Boffi firm, 99 Bois, Yve-Alain, 112, 117, 225–226n22, 232nn46–47 Bologna, Sergio, 182–183, 187–189 Bolshevik revolution, 22, 59, 63 Bordiga, Amadeo, 59–61, 221n30, 236n33 Braque, George, 86, 95, 105, 228n5 Braudel, Fernand, 17 Brecht, Bertolt, 116, 215n62, 229n15

Bretton Woods program, 1–2, 5, 7, 16, 19, 38, 148, 211n24, 223n46; failures of, 54, 168; U.S. interests and, 7 Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (Duchamp), 41, 47, 242n91 Broodthaers, Marcel, 15, 125, 128, 152– 153, 165, 240nn67–68, 240n71; association with Manzoni, 152, 165–166, 242n95; jellyfish, 152, 158 Bryan-Wilson, Julia, 142, 144 Buchloh, Benjamin H. D., 11, 31, 215nn60–61, 233n51, 242n87 Bürger, Peter, 11, 31, 215n61 burning, 6, 9, 33, 94, 99, 104–105, 112, 116, 234n61. See also Burri, Alberto Burri, Alberto, 5–6, 8–10, 14, 16, 18, 29, 33–34, 43, 53, 57–58, 65, 67, 93–108, 110–14, 116–18, 169, 210n20, 220n17, 221n28, 229n11, 233n51, 234n61; Bed, 98; Big Red P n 18, 14, 94, 104; Black Paintings, 108; burlap work, 93–94, 110–11, 118, 2234n61; catachresis in the work of, 111, 114–16; chance in the work of, 6, 14, 103–104, 105–106, 108, 116–17; Combustione, 100, 112; Combustione Plastica, 111; emphasis in the work of, 113; as medical doctor, 94, 117, 234n61; metaphor in the work of, 101–102, 104, 110–13, 117; Mold Series, 108; monstrosity and the work of, 104, 106, 115; plastic in the work of, 5–6, 18, 33, 93–94, 97–100, 102–104, 106, 110–13, 116, 118, 228–229n11, 234n61; Plastiche, 100–101, 110, 113, 116, 118; as prisoner of war, 93, 117; Red Plastic, 33, 101, 103; Saran wrap in the work of, 97; Two Shirts, 94; violence in the work of, 14, 34, 93, 100, 104, 106

Index 267

Cage, John, 88, 108, 134, 146, 238n53 Cahun, Claude, 229n15 Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Federici), 125, 235n3 Calvesi, Maurizio, 102, 106, 108, 110, 117, 229n17 capital, 1, 3, 7–8, 10–13, 15–18, 21, 23, 25, 26, 27, 30–31, 34, 35–38, 43, 52–53, 65, 95, 116, 125, 127–128, 130–132, 135, 138, 144–145, 148, 153, 168, 178, 183, 191, 195, 203, 208n8, 208n10; acceleration of, 183, 187, 199; accumulation of, 13, 148; American, 63, 141; consolidation of, 184; development of, 7, 11; end of, 66; expansionism of, 58, 168; golden age of, 3, 67; industrial, 48, 56; international, 64, 175; real movement of, 6, 8, 19, 55; self-reproduction of, 12, 126; social, 138; violence of, 126,177 capitalism, 6–7, 12, 13, 19–20, 27–28, 32–33, 38–39, 45–46, 55, 58, 64, 66, 120, 125, 128, 130, 133, 145, 151, 154, 158–159, 171, 175, 177, 181, 189, 191, 196, 198–199, 200–202, 204, 208n8, 210– 11nn23–24, 218n13, 223n46, 229n16; contradictions of, 148; as feminist problem, 178; finance, 13; foundation of, 196; golden age of, 2, 168, 211n24; monopoly, 13, 64; as neocolonialism, 17; neoliberal, 21; work of art in, 178 capitalist mode of production, 43, 139, 198 capitalist realism, 161 Capogrossi, Giuseppe, 113 Carelessness Causes Fire (Claire Fontaine), 191 Castellani, Enrico, 39, 77, 113 Castoriadis, Cornelius, 64 catachresis, 111, 114–116. See also Burri, Alberto 268 Index

Celant, Germano, 102, 117–18, 179, 243n7; on Arte Povera, 169–172, 243n6; on Burri, 108; on Kounellis, 174; “Notes for a Guerrilla War,” 167, 169, 184; on Rauschenberg, 97, 102 Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), 112 chance operations, 14, 103, 106–108. See also Burri, Alberto Chiesa, Lorenzo, 211n24, 247n34 Citroën firm, 99 civil war, 3, 10, 182, 188, 203, 213n45 Claire Fontaine, 38, 169, 191–194, 197– 203; America Burnt/Unburnt, 191, 192f; Carelessness Causes Fire, 191; influence of Guy Debord and Situationism on, 192; irony in the work of, 191; “Readymade Artist and the Human Strike,” 193–194, 198–200, 204 Clark, T. J., 207n4, 209n19, 229–230n22, 233n58 class consciousness, 128, 151, 195, 199 class struggle, 21, 22, 25–26, 29, 60–61, 171, 182, 185, 245n21, 247n32 class war, 25, 67, 120, 132, 150, 187, 196, 213n45 Classe Operaia, 27, 64, 129, 187 Clausewitz, Carl von, 7 Cold War, 6–8, 19, 22, 59, 62, 67, 72, 189; biennial effect, 199; cultural politics of the, 185; cultural production of the, 96; economics, 54; as episode of capitalism, 6, 8; Hardt and Negri on, 229n16; John Cage in the context of the, 238n53; Marshall Plan and, 66; rhetoric, 72 Colla, Ettore, 113 collage, 94, 97, 114; cubist, 86, 105, 226n29; Miro and, 224n6 colonialism, 14; financial, 110. See also neocolonialism

color, 86; in Burri’s work, 14, 94, 116, 232n51; in Duchamp’s work, 45–46, 51–52; in Fontana’s work, 70, 77–78, 89; in Klein’s work, 44–45, 53; manufacture of, 51; in Manzoni’s work, 40; in Rodchenko’s work, 50–51, 77, 116. See also International Klein Blue Colucci, Mario, 37 Cominotti, Ruggero, 99–100 commodity, 15, 24, 26, 34, 47–48, 51, 55, 75, 77–79, 103, 110, 115, 123–124, 126, 142, 155, 165, 177–178, 196, 209n15, 219n15, 234n61; art as, 145–146, 209n19, 230n22, 248n51; in Capital, 158–159; culture, 75, 103; fetish, 52, 145, 218n13, 238n52; labor power as, 131, 143, 197–198; limits of, 9; logic of the, 44; monochrome and, 78; painting’s internalization of the, 79; production, 12–13, 197, 210n23; time and the, 204 communism, 22, 24, 32, 51, 131; expansionist, 208n10; extraparliamentary, 131; postwar, 181; state, 19, 23, 28, 51, 59, 120, 136, 218n13; threat of, 6–7, 13, 19, 62, 115 Communist International, 24 Communist Party of the USSR, 22, 28, 59–60 competence, 80, 225n15 conceptual art, 15, 65, 244n16 Concetto Spaziale (Fontana), 72, 76, 80–82; negative space in, 89–90 constructivism, 40, 42–43, 51, 55, 216– 217nn4–5, 228n11. See also Malevich, Kasimir consumerism, 97–100, 103, 106, 196 continuity, 11, 57, 82, 89, 91, 183, 193, 216n4. See also rupture contour, 48, 82–83, 86–87, 210n20, 226n27

Cordray, Charlotte, 174 Corlucci, Mario, 1, 119 corporeality, 36, 81, 88–89, 125, 133, 139, 141, 152, 154, 156, 158–162, 166, 226n31, 238n41 “creeping May,” 37, 129, 151, 169, 178, 186, 240n64, 248n40 crisis, 8, 13, 16–17, 26, 32, 34, 37, 52, 54, 104, 108, 119, 128, 148, 200, 202, 211n24, 220n17, 236n33, 245–246n26 Crispolti, Enrico, 85, 102 cubism, 86, 104–105, 226n29, 226n31 Cullinan, Nicholas, 223n46 cultural mediation, 11, 17, 23, 47, 54, 65 cut, 4, 33, 40, 71, 74, 82–83, 85–86, 89–90; drawing as, 82, 226n27; Fontana’s, 33, 71, 77, 80 cutting, 9, 23, 86; gesture as, 72 Dada, 2, 5, 11, 37, 40, 55–56, 86–87, 103–104, 107, 223n49, 224n5, 230n25, 231n39, 236n38 Dalla Costa, Mariarosa, 167, 178, 194– 196, 198, 203–204 David, Jacques-Louis, 174; The Death of Marat, 174 “death of painting,” 49, 67, 70; as a set of beginnings, 91. See also Fontana, Lucio de Beauvoir, Simone, 128; Salò (Pasolini) and, 242n84 Debord, Guy, 192 debt, 7, 19, 208n8, 210n23 de Duve, Thierry, 220n25, 225n13, 230n25 Degas, Edgar, 47; The Little Dance of Fourteen, 47 de Gasperi, Alcide, 60 de Kooning, Willem, 56, 107, 209n19 della Volpe, Galvano, 215n62 Index 269

de Man, Paul, 111, 115 dematerialization, 15, 65, 71, 240n65 democracy, 190–191, 247n32; capitalist, 187, 189; civil, 183; crisis of, 200; liberal, 6, 31, 100, 127; parliamentary, 187; progressive, 71; social, 59; universal, 179 Demos, T. J., 243n2 De Sica, Vittorio, 106, 220n20; Miracle in Milan, 220n20 deskilling, 24, 53, 133, 143, 146, 150–151, 158, 198–199, 238n53 development (of capital),7–8, 11–12, 18, 21, 26, 28, 51, 57, 60, 62, 128, 151, 181; in Milan, 55; uneven, 20, 60, 75, 139, 174, 176, 181, 213n49, 244n19 Dialectic of Enlightenment (Adorno and Horkheimer), 154, 156, 240n72 direct action, 16, 25, 150 disciplinary labor, 52, 65, 121, 131, 134– 135, 143, 145–148, 168, 177, 195, 197 discipline, 135, 155, 170, 193, 197; of art history, 38; capitalism and, 48, 197, 204; of painting, 2; productivist, 131 drawing, 27, 41, 48–49, 72, 82–83, 85–88, 224n9, 225n22, 227n33; as cut, 82, 83, 85–86, 225n27, 225n32; Fontana’s understanding of, 82. See also Fontana, Lucio: drawings; as ground, 83; Ingres on, 85; and monochrome, 83; as origin and remainder of painting, 83. See also industrial design Duchamp, Marcel, 10, 36, 40–42, 45–49, 52, 56–57, 69, 75, 86–87, 104, 116, 132–134, 141, 193, 218n13, 223n49, 224n5, 225n13, 226n31, 242n91; attempted patent, 45; Bicycle Wheel, 48; Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass), 47, 87, 242n91; The Chocolate Grinder, 48; The Coffee 270 Index

Mill, 48; Fresh Widow, 218n13; Three Standard Stoppages, 86, 104, 117, 132, 236n23, 236n28; Tu M’, 45, 51, 53, 143 Ecole de Jeune Paris, 74 “Economia del Carnefice” (“The Economy of the Executioner”) (Manzoni), 23, 35, 120, 128, 136–137 Eluard, Paul, 215n62 empire, 38, 43, 168, 189 Empire (Hardt and Negri), 31, 38, 189– 190, 211n25, 247n32 enclosure, 125–126, 155, 164–165. See also primitive accumulation encounter, 42, 74, 76 Endnotes collective, 217–218n9 Enlightenment, 154, 156–157, 165, 172, 240–241n72, 241n84; discourse, 38; language, 47; thought, 156, 161, 240n72 Ernst, Max, 41, 95 ethics, 143–144, 204 everyday life, 6, 19–20, 27, 35–36, 49, 54, 75, 99, 102, 110, 125, 127, 131, 134, 138– 139, 151, 156, 160–161, 187, 191, 198–199, 201, 242n84, 245n23, 246n26 excess, 9–10, 14, 51, 125, 156, 234n61 exploding, 6, 9, 16, 33, 94, 99, 104, 105, 234n61 factories, 129, 156, 198; in northern Italy, 6, 33, 35, 138 factory labor, 128, 134 fascism, 5, 114, 137, 211n26, 231–232n39, 234n61, 242n84 fascist art, 15 Federici, Sylvia, 125–126, 150, 165, 196, 235n3; Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, 125

female body, 47, 125, 160, 165, 176, 235n3 feminism, 178, 194, 195, 197, 199. See also Italian feminism feminization, 126, 194, 196 Fer, Briony, 223n49n 224n6 Ferus Gallery (Los Angeles), 44 Fiat firm, 4, 26, 28, 78, 99, 129, 133, 185; strikes at, 30, 63, 127, 178, 183–185, 203 figuration, 94, 101–102, 104, 110–11, 112, 114, 118, 140, 160, 172, 231n39 Fontana, Lucio, 1–6, 8, 10, 14, 16, 29, 40, 54, 101, 103, 11e, 116, 135, 151–152, 158, 169, 172, 210n20, 210n17, 227n35; color in the work of, 78; Concetto Spaziale works, 72, 80, 82, 89; cutting in the work of, 9, 17, 32–33, 36, 71–72, 77, 79, 88–91, 106, 153, 225–226n22; on the death/end of painting, 70, 79, 82, 91, 224n4; on dematerialization, 240n65; drawing-as-cut, 82–83, 85; drawings, 79–80; La Fine di. Dio, 79; Il Gesto and, 40–41, 72, 74, 207n1, 216n4; International Zero Movement, 39–40; Klein’s influence on, 42, 53–54, 78; Malevich’s influence on, 42, 217n5; Manifesto Blanco, 82; Manifesto of Spatialism 1 and 2, 80–81, 113; Manzoni and, 75, 77, 87; materiality and the work of, 71; monochrome and, 43, 57, 77, 79; Mussolini and, 231n32; negativity in the work of, 9, 76, 90; as not-painter, 70, 90; on painting after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 2, 4, 32, 70, 106, 224n3, 233n51; repetition in the work of, 67; Restany and, 75, 79; Rosenberg’s influence on, 72; on surface, 76, 78; Technical Manifesto of Spatialism, 91; Television Manifesto, 33, 71; turn to painting, 1–2, 4, 69, 75 “For an Organic Painting” (Biasi, Co-

lucci, Manzoni, Sordini, and Verga), 1, 37, 119, 170, 181 formalism, 71 Fortunati, Leopoldina, 125, 150, 178, 194, 196–200; The Arcane of Reproduction, 178, 194, 197 Foster, Hal, 11, 31 Foucault, Michel, 83, 84, 128, 154, 204, 242n84 Frankfurt School, 25, 30, 213n45, 214n52, 239n53. See also Adorno, Theodor; Horkheimer, Max Fumai, Chiara, 169 futurism, 10–11, 22, 40, 63–64, 181; nationalist legacy of, 22 Gabo, Naum, 228–229n11 Galleria Apollinaire (Milan), 42, 44 Galleria del Naviglio (Milan), 35, 80, 95, 96 Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome), 56 Galerie Maeght, 216–217nn4–5, 223n49 Gendel, Milton, 96 gender, 123, 125–126, 168, 178, 196–197, 203, 205 gendered division of labor, 203 general strike, 38, 169, 199, 202–204 Gericault, Théodore, 174; Raft of the Medusa, 174 Il Gesto magazine, 10, 40–41, 43, 57, 72, 74–76, 79, 87, 135, 185, 207n1, 216n4, 224n3, 227n37. See also Fontana, Lucio gesture, 1–5, 11, 1r, 17, 32, 36–37, 41, 56, 69, 71–72, 74–85, 88–92, 107, 120, 141, 147, 149, 161, 165–167, 192, 201, 218n11, 223n12, 226n22, 233n51; violence of, 2, 153 Gilardi, Paolo, 102 Ginsborg, Paul, 35, 213n53, 221n30 Index 271

globalization, 20, 29, 123, 142, 145, 149, 169, 184, 189, 208n10, 210n23, 219– 220n17, 245–246n26, 247n34 Goebbels, Joseph, 231n39 Gonzalez, Maya, 197, 204 Gorky, Arshile, 56 Gottlieb, Adolf, 209n19, 230n22 Gramsci, Antonio, 64, 151, 221n30; association with culture, 62. 222n39; hegemony, 62, 211–12n29, 222n39; legacy of, 21–22, 37, 64, 181–182, 212n36, 244n19; organic intellectual, 181–182, 236n33; PCI and 23, 59–63, 161, 181, 212n29; The Prison Notebooks, 211n29 Greenberg, Clement, 70–71, 74, 225n15 grid, 4, 11, 42, 132, 136, 139–140, 142, 154– 155, 159, 161, 165–166, 221n26, 237n40 ground, 3–5, 32, 72, 76–77, 80–82, 86–87, 98, 140, 165, 226n27; body as, 165; figure and, 3, 72, 140, 199, 226n22 Guggenheim, Peggy, 95 Gulli, Bruno, 52 Guttuso, Renato, 228n6 Haidu, Rachel, 153, 240n67 Hardt, Michael, 20, 31, 189, 211n25, 211n27, 220n17, 229n16, 245n23, 245n26; Empire, 31, 38, 189–190, 211n25, 229n16, 245n23, 245n26, 247n32; Multitude, 189–190, 245n23 Harvey, David, 53, 219–220n17, 245– 246n26 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 91, 112, 174 Hiroshima, 1, 2, 71, 81, 85, 106; atomic bombing of, 75, 207n1, 224n3, 233n51. See also atomic bomb; Fontana, Lucio; Nagasaki Hirschhorn, Thomas, 189–190, 247n35;

272 Index

The Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, 190; The Georges Bataille Monument, 190–191 Hoffman, Hans, 209n19, 230n22 Homo Sacer (Agamben), 31 Horkheimer, Max, 154, 156–158, 161, 240–241nn72–73; Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154, 156, 240n72 Hosoe, Isae, 99 Hot Autumn (1969), 17, 150, 178, 198, 244n14 housewife, 195 human strike, 194, 201. See also Claire Fontaine humanism, 47, 72, 78, 98, 102, 159; Italian tradition of, 63, 212n36 identity, 36, 58, 70, 141–142, 145, 159, 193, 228n3, 239n64; cultural, 181; and difference, 107, 123; Italian, 22, 64; worker’s 23, 142. See also national identity ideology, 6, 9, 13–14, 28, 43, 47, 58, 71–74, 76, 78, 101, 109, 119, 144–145, 177, 185–186, 202, 213n42, 221n28, 228n3; art and, 231n35; critique, 30, 49, 66, 153, 202, 240n68; and drawing practices, 224n9; language and, 240n68; national, 95; nationalist, 28, 181; “one world,” 208n10 immiseration, 9, 16, 36, 51, 89, 123, 128, 131–132, 150, 153 imperialism, 77, 100 industrial design, 48, 99 industrialization, 51, 105, 138, 214 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 85, 226n27 intellectual, 26, 166, 185, 199; Gramsci, 21, 62, 181–182, 212n36; organic, 37, 181; production, 193

International Klein Blue (IKB), 44–45, 53 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 7, 246 International Zero Movement, 40 internationalism, 10, 43, 64 Italian Communist Party. See PCI Italian feminism, 30, 38, 125, 168, 178, 192, 194, 196–197, 200, 202–204 Italian General Confederacy of Labor (CGIL), 129, 189 Italian Ministry of Foreign Trade, 99 Italian Socialist Party (PSI), 24, 59, 64, 189 Italian Union of Labor (UIL), 4, 26 “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” exhibition, 33, 99 James, Selma, 178, 194–196, 198, 203 Jameson, Fredric, 9, 39, 123, 209n16, 218n9 Johns, Jasper, 14, 35, 40, 56, 87, 96, 191, 236n28 Judd, Donald, 179, 229n11 Judson Dance Theater, 146 Kandinsky, Wassily, 74, 75, 78 Kant, Immanuel, 28, 156–157, 174, 214n52, 241n77; Critiqueof Judgment, 113; Critique of Pure Reason, 157 Kartell firm, 98–99 Keenan, Thomas, 115 Kelly, Ellsworth, 87 Klein, Yves, 39, 42, 44, 45, 53, 55, 75, 78, 160–161, 164, 215n61, 223n49; Anthropometrie, 160, 164; International Klein Blue (IKB), 44–45, 53; Malevich’s influence on, 42, 216–217nn4–6; Monogold, Monopink, Monoblue, 217n5;

Propositions Monochromes, 42, 44, 78; patent on color, 42, 44–45;Yves Peintures, 53, 78 Klossowski, Pierre, 128, 154, 241n73 Kounellis, Jannis, 37, 172–175, 181, 183; 12 Cavalli, 175, 181; Untitled: Libertà or Morte (Marat et Robespierre), 172, 173f, 174 Krauss, Rosalind, 105, 112, 221n26, 226n29, 230n26, 232nn46–47, 237n40 Kristeva, Julia, 237n41 labor, 4, 19, 21, 24–25, 35–36, 47, 50–54, 62, 65–67, 95, 99, 123–135, 138, 141–151, 155, 158–159, 162, 169, 176–178, 186, 187, 198, 202, 220n17, 239n59, 246n26; artistic, 126, 128, 141–142, 145, 149, 177; capital and, 3, 16, 34, 52, 148; dead, 120, 124, 127, 145; deskilling and, 198; domestic, 195; feminist analysis of, 192; gendered division of, 203; movement, 26, 64, 183; power, 26, 53, 148, 165, 176, 196–199, 204; unwaged, 31, 126; women’s, 31, 123, 126, 204 labor theory of value, 51, 53, 150 labor-to-capital relation, 14, 18, 35, 64, 65, 128–130, 148, 169, 178, 183, 186, 188, 194–196, 198–199, 202, 204, 214n48, 218n9, 239n59, 246n26 Lacan, Jacques, 209n16 Laderman-Ukeles, Mierle, 195 Large Glass, The (Duchamp). See Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even Lee, Pamela, 83 Lenin, Vladimir, 22, 60–61, 63–65, 135, 171, 198, 211n29, 213n42, 239n64; conception of the party, 26, 129, 239n64; Tronti’s reading of, 198–199; What is to Be Done?, 65, 171

Index 273

Leninism, 25, 27, 61, 129, 213n42, 239n64 Levi, Neil, 231n39 Libreria delle Donne (Women’s Bookstore), 202–203 Life magazine, 1 line, 27, 48–49, 73, 83, 86, 88–90, 134, 224n10, 226n27 Lingis, Alphonso, 241n73 Lippard, Lucy, 15 Living Sculpture (Manzoni), 15, 120, 123–126, 153, 162, 164f, 176–177; female body and, 126; signature and, 123; wage and, 126 The Long Twentieth Century (Arrighi), 1, 7, 39, 93, 120, 208n8, 209n16, 211n25 Lonzi, Carla, 194, 197–199; Rivolta Femminile, 198; “We Spit on Hegel,” 198 loss, 2, 18, 117, 171 Lotringer, Sylvère, 30 Lotta Continua newspaper, 183, 187 Lotta Feminista, 196, 197, 199 Lukács, Georg, 25–26, 128, 240n67; History and Class Consciousness, 26 Luxemburg, Rosa, 26, 59 Malevich, Kasimir, 5, 42, 45, 49, 80–81, 216–217nn4–5; Black Square, 49, 50f; “Non-objective Art and Suprematism,” 81; “White on white” work, 81, 217n5 Man Ray, 104, 242n91 “Manifesto of Albisola Marina” (Manzoni et al.), 119, 135, 170 Manzoni, Piero, 1, 8, 10, 14–18, 27, 29, 34–37, 39–43, 53, 57–58, 65–67, 75, 77, 79, 87–90, 101, 103, 106, 113, 116, 119–129, 132–142, 146, 147, 150–154, 159–166, 169–170, 176–178, 181, 183,

274 Index

205, 210n20, 216n1, 220n17, 227n37, 236n33, 237–238n41, 240n68, 242n91, 242n95; Acrhome with Breadrolls, 161–162; Achromes series, 5, 41, 161– 162, 176; break with Gruppo Nucleare, 136; Azimuth magazine, 35, 40, 42–43, 57, 113, 135, 216n4, 236n28; Declaration of Authenticity No. 071, 165; “Economia del Carnefice” (“The Economy of the Executioner”), 23, 35, 120, 128, 136–137; indexicality in the work of, 132; line in the work of, 27, 88–90, 134; Line of 7200 Meters Long, 122f; Linea series, 27, 87, 120–123, 132–134, 146, 147; Live Sculpture series, 123, 162; Living Sculpture, 15, 120, 123–126, 153, 162, 164f, 176–177; “Manifesto of Albisola Marina,” 119, 135, 170; Merda d’Artista, 9, 34–35, 66, 120, 151, 162, 163f; passivity in the work of, 132–133; rejection of metaphor, 124, 140, 146– 147; signature and the work of, 15, 123–124, 163–165; Tables of Assessment, Thumbprints, 159; thumbprints in the work of, 36, 141–142, 152, 159 Marazzi, Christian, 30 mark making, 6, 9, 33, 36, 77, 82–83, 90, 117, 120, 134, 142, 158 Marx, Karl, 12, 19, 115–116, 125, 128, 148, 170, 196, 201, 204, 208n8, 218n13; Capital, 47, 52, 115–116, 127, 138, 158– 159; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 52; Grundrisse, 9–10, 52, 138– 139, 208–209n14; letter to Ruge, 132; new Italian readings of, 24–25, 127, 198; on subsumption, 47; Theses on Feuerbach, 210n20, 240n68 masculinity, 128 mass culture, 44, 105, 109

materialism, 14, 30, 38, 51, 65–66, 79, 101, 107–108, 112–113, 151, 209–10n20, 237n41, 242n95 Matisse, Henri, 74, 78, 95, 228n5 May 1968 uprisings (France), 29–30, 152–153, 247n32 Mayakovski, Vladimir, 215n62 mechanical reproducibility, 107, 115. See also Benjamin, Walter Mechanomorph (Picabia), 41 medium, 5, 17, 32, 57, 71–72, 77, 80, 83, 85, 90, 153, 159, 172, 174, 225n15, 241n73; as language, 81 melancholia, 65, 67, 79, 149–150, 170–171, 175, 193 Merda d’Artista (Manzoni), 9, 34–35, 66, 120, 151, 162, 163f Merz, Mario, 37, 65, 171, 174, 223n46; Che Fare series, 65, 171 Mezzogiorno, 130, 176, 181–182, 213n49, 244n19 militancy, 28, 35, 138, 183–184 minimalism, 37, 71, 121, 142, 144, 147, 150, 168–172, 175–176, 179, 238n46, 239n57, 243n2, 244n16 miracolo italiano (Italian Economic Miracle), 2, 6, 14, 18–20, 24, 28–29, 33, 35, 55, 56, 78, 96, 98, 100, 106, 119–120, 127, 138–139, 152, 172, 181, 198 modernism, 10–11, 4, 22–24, 33, 40, 44–49, 57 modernity, 11, 12, 19–20, 28, 47, 61, 71, 125, 128, 154, 156, 170, 172, 176, 181, 240n72 Moholy-Nagy, László, 228n11 Monahan, Laurie J., 221n28, 227–228n3 Mondo Operaio, 26–27, 37 Monet, Claude, 74–75 monochrome, 2, 1–12, 22, 31–32, 40,

42–47, 49–52, 55–58, 67, 69, 77, 79–80, 83, 88, 96, 104, 116, 133, 136, 161–162, 217nn5–6, 218, 224n5, 224n10, 230n26; as convergence of politics and culture, 31; grid and, 4, 11, 136, 139–140, 166, 237n40; readymade and, 10, 14, 22, 44, 49, 86, 96, 133, 139, 166; reemergence of, 66 monochromy, 70, 79, 220n25 Monsani, Roberto, 99 monstrosity, 101, 104, 110–111, 113, 115, 155–158, 241n73; as procedure, 106. See also Burri, Alberto; Sade, Marquis de “The Morality of the Gesture” (Restany), 41 Morandi, Rodolfo, 60 Moravía, Alberto, 1, 69, 89; Boredom, 1, 69, 89 Morris, Robert, 121, 128, 142, 146–149; Marxism of, 148; Site, 146; Steel Plate Suite, 147 Motherwell, Robert, 223n49 Mulas, Ugo, 3f multitude, 31, 123, 183, 187–191, 194, 197, 199 Multitude (Hardt and Negri), 189–190, 245n23 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 33, 56, 99, 148 Mussolini, Benito, 60, 117, 228n6, 231n32, 232n39 myth,13, 15, 18, 37, 67, 77–79, 85, 91, 102, 108–109, 112, 141, 174, 185, 196, 209n19; as form, 109; repetition and, 109 “Myth Today” (Barthes), 109 Nagasaki, 1, 2, 71, 75, 81, 106, 207n1, 224n3, 233n51 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 91

Index 275

national identity, 8, 10, 4e, 58–59, 62, 64, 95, 171, 247n34 Negri, Antonio, 17, 19–21, 23, 26, 30–31, 37, 43, 123, 169, 182–183, 185, 187– 191, 194–195, 197, 199–200, 214n50, 214–215n57, 220n17, 245n23, 247n32, 247n35; art institutions and, 190– 191; Empire, 31, 38, 189–190, 211n25, 247n32; Multitude, 189–190, 245n23; The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, 190 neo-avant-garde, 11, 31, 42, 104, 112, 146, 192, 215n61, 236n28. See also avantgarde neocolonialism, 47, 220n17, 246n26 neoplasticism, 40, 42 Nesbit, Molly, 48 New Economic Policy, 12, 51–53, 67 New Left, 142, 145 new media, 72 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 156 nonfiguration, 113–114 nouveau realistes, 75 Nouveau Realistes, 74 nude, 15, 79, 123–126, 164, 177 Olivetti firm, 99 Operaismo (workerism), 1, 24, 29, 32, 67, 123, 125, 215n62, 245n23 Ordine Nuovo, 64 originality, 34, 107–108, 193 Paik, Nam Jun, 88 painterly surface, 32, 90, 97. See also surface Palluchini, Rodolfo, 228n6 Panzieri, Raniero, 21, 23–27, 30, 39, 64, 127–128, 132, 137, 151, 181–182, 189, 213n42, 215n57, 215n62, 237n36 276 Index

Paolini, Giulio, 172, 174, 176–178, 183; Senza Titolo, 176–177 Paris Commune, 105 Pascali, Pino, 37, 172, 174, 179, 181, 183; Canone Bella Ciao, 179; One Cubic Meter of Earth, 180f Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 128, 181–182, 222n39, 236n33, 242n84, 244n19; allegiance to PCI, 182; Salò, 242n84 PCI (Italian Communist Party), 18, 21–24, 28, 32, 43, 59–63, 66, 130–131, 136, 151, 161, 181–182, 189, 212n29, 212n36, 214n50, 221n30, 222n39, 244n19 Peeters, Henk, 39 Perroux, François, 12, 210n23 Piazza Statuto riots, 4, 17, 2, 26, 186 Picabia, Francis, 40–42, 47, 48, 75, 86–87, 226–227nn32–33;, La Jeune Fille, 86; Mechanomorph, 41 Picasso, Pablo, 55, 86, 105 picture plane, 5, 82, 97, 100, 103, 107 Piene, Otto, 39 Pirelli firm, 99 Plastiche (Burri), 100–101, 110, 113, 116, 118; as homage to the readymade, 116 political economy, 17, 20, 43, 129, 138, 151, 158, 174, 182, 211n5 Pollock, Jackson, 1, 2, 4, 20, 33, 40, 56, 70, 72–76, 80, 84–85, 88, 90, 94–95, 98, 134, 135, 141, 185, 207n2, 207n4, 209n19, 220n22, 224n1, 224n3, 227n35, 229n22, 236n29 Ponti, Giovanni, 228n6 Pop art, 34, 45, 102–103, 161, 168–172, 175, 191, 243n2; as celebration of the commodity, 103. See also Warhol, Andy post-Fordism, 20, 29, 123, 184 postmodern, 105, 199 poststructuralism, 15, 219–220n17. See also structuralism

“The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community” (Dalla Costa and James), 178, 194 presentism, 55 Primary Structures exhibition, 147 primitive accumulation, 125, 153, 203, 246n26 private sphere, 125, 203 productivism, 9, 12, 13, 16, 23, 28, 71, 73, 77, 99, 129, 131, 136, 152, 171, 175, 181, 213n42; refusal of, 15, 102 proletariat, 24, 60–61, 64, 100, 126; dictatorship of the, 51 property, 15, 53, 115, 124, 203; theoretical, 105; women as, 203 property relations, 53 Propositions Monochromes (Klein), 42, 44, 78; influence on Manzoni and Fontana, 42 public/private binary, 196 Pure Red, Pure Yellow and Pure Blue (Monochrome Triptych) (Rodchenko), 45, 49–52, 67, 77, 116, 217n5, 218n13 Quaderni Rossi, 25–27, 30, 64, 127–129, 132, 138, 187, 189, 245n23 Queen’s Nails Gallery (San Francisco), 191 Rainer, Yvonne, 146 rationalism, 77, 144, 154, 156, 241n73 Rauschenberg, Robert, 6, 14, 33–34, 56, 87, 95–98, 102–103, 107–110, 221n28, 230nn23–24, 236n28; Black Paintings, 108; Burri and, 6, 34, 96–98, 107–108; CIA support of, 20, 59; Dirt Painting, 108; Erased de Kooning, 107–108; Factum I and Factum II, 33, 110, 215n64; Lion Prize (Venice Biennale), 20, 95–96; Tire Print, 87

readymade, 6, 10–11, 14, 22, 36, 42–49, 53–54, 56–58, 64, 69, 78–79, 86–87, 96, 104, 116, 133, 139–141, 166, 193, 210–202, 216n4, 217n8, 220–221nn25– 26, 225n13 “Readymade Artist and the Human Strike” (Claire Fontaine), 194, 198– 200, 204 real, the, 8, 10, 39, 171, 192, 208n14 recursion, 11–13 Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), 37, 184, 188, 215n14; kidnapping of Aldo Moro, 184 Red Desert (Antonioni), 33 Red Plastic (Burri), 3, 101, 103 reification, 30, 45, 51, 78–79, 96, 120–121, 124–126, 131, 142–143, 152, 176, 178, 201, 205, 210n20, 240n68 repetition, 11–12, 31–32, 58, 66–67, 81, 104, 106, 108–109, 115, 136, 144, 215n61, 217n6, 223n49, 231n28 representation, 15, 23, 25, 27, 38, 39, 46–47, 58, 74, 81, 85–86, 101, 103–105, 107, 109–110, 112, 118, 124, 126, 150, 160, 176–177, 187, 197, 204, 226n27, 226n29 reproduction, 10, 12, 38, 49, 52, 123, 125– 126, 128, 143–144, 146, 165, 178, 193, 195–199, 202–203, 209n15, 239n64 Restany, Pierre, 41, 74–75, 79–80, 225n12, 229n11; “The Morality of the Gesture,” 41 Rivolta Femminile, 198 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 5, 12, 42, 49, 51–52, 65, 77–78, 80, 116, 133, 143, 216– 217nn4–5, 218n13, 219n15; Pure Red, Pure Yellow and Pure Blue (Monochrome Triptych), 45, 49–52, 67, 77, 116, 217n5, 218n13 Rose, Barbara, 144 Index 277

Rosselli, Alberto, 99 Rosenberg, Harold, 72–77, 80, 85, 233n51 Rotella, Mimmo, 106 Rothko, Mark, 209n19, 230n22 rupture, 11–12, 16, 49, 57, 59, 82, 89, 91, 97, 191, 216n4. See also continuity sabotage in the workplace, 23, 27, 30, 32, 35, 66, 111, 120, 129, 150, 214n51 Saccarelli, Emanuele, 61, 212n29, 212n36 Sade, Marquis de, 128, 154–161, 165–166, 241n37, 242n84; Juliette, 154, 157–158, 165; Justine, 154; The 120 Days of Sodom, 155, 157 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 229n15 Schwarz, Arturo, 43, 56, 87, 220n23 Schwitters, Kurt, 98, 236n28 Selavy, Rose (see Duchamp, Marcel) self-determination, 12, 33, 74, 136, 149– 150, 172 seriality, 44, 172, 175 Serpentine gallery (London), 191 Serra, Richard, 147, 239n57; Castings, 147 Seuphor, Michael, 216–217nn4–5 signature, 15, 35, 124, 136, 176. See also Manzoni, Piero Situationist International, 30, 192 skill, 36, 44, 48, 50, 106, 116, 124, 132– 134, 146, 151, 193, 198, 201. See also deskilling social factory, 138, 142, 177–178, 183, 195, 198–199 social relations, 48, 57, 139, 143, 176–177, 198, 203, 209n15, 213n42, 218–219n13 Solomon, Alan, 221n28, 227n3 Sordini, Ettore, 1, 37, 119 spontaneity, 25, 131–132, 135, 160, 187, 214n50 Stalin, Joseph, 21, 23, 52, 59, 136, 221n30, 236n33 278 Index

Steinberg, Leo, 14, 97, 102–103, 209n19, 230n22 Stitch, Sidra, 217n6 structuralism, 109, 209n16, 226n29, 240nn67–68 students, 30–31, 37, 123, 178, 182–183, 189, 194 subject, 74, 84, 89, 110, 126, 131, 133, 143–144, 149, 199, 204, 218n13, 233n51; authorial, 77; worker, 52, 146, 202 subsumption, 47–49, 57, 77, 96, 102, 104, 106, 120–121, 123, 127–128, 131, 139, 141, 151, 153, 155, 158, 201–202, 218n13, 241n84; formal, 48, 183; real, 126, 153–155, 201 support, 3, 9, 40, 49, 65, 77, 141, 152, 205 surface, 2, 4, 9, 15,18, 32–33, 50, 69–70, 72, 74–81, 83, 85, 87–91, 97, 100–101, 103, 107–108, 116, 135–136, 139–141, 160–162, 210n20, 217n4, 224–225n10, 242n91. See also painterly surface surplus labor, 49, 58, 63, 139 surplus populations, 148, 176 surplus production, 120–121 surplus value, 13, 18, 24–25, 36, 52–53, 127, 130, 133, 142–143, 153, 162, 187, 196, 210 surrealism, 6, 104, 155, 192, 241n77 Sweeney, James Johnson, 102, 229n17 systems-based art, 168 task-performance, 131, 133–135, 143–144, 146, 151, 172, 196, 198 Tate Modern gallery (London), 191 technological reproduction, 2, 48 Third International, 21, 52–53, 60 Tinguely, Jean, 229n11 Tiqqun, 193–194, 247n32 Togliatti, Palmiro, 23–24, 60, 62, 151, 221n30

Toniato, Toni, 102 Toscano, Alberto, 31, 191, 214n50, 245n23, 247n34 trauma, 5, 18, 72, 108, 118, 234n61 Tronti, Mario, 1, 20–24, 27–30, 43, 64–66, 127–128, 131–132, 138, 142, 150– 151, 154, 177–178, 182, 214n50, 215n57, 236n33, 237n36, 239n64; “La Fabbrica e la Societa,” 127; “Lenin in England,” 26; rereading of Lenin and Marx, 198–199; Worker and Capital (Operaio e Capitale), 119, 138, 177 Turner, Joseph Mallard William, 74–75 Two Shirts (Burri), 94 Twombly, Cy, 55, 87, 96, 108 ultraleft, 28, 150; Italian, 31, 239n64 unions, 27, 65, 129, 135, 144 valorization, 30–31, 47, 50, 52–53, 128 Venice Biennale, 20, 56, 59, 95–96, 221n28 Verga, Angelo, 1, 37, 120 Vietnam War, 37, 145, 148, 179 violence, 2, 5–6, 14–16, 32, 38, 75, 77, 93, 100, 104, 106, 126, 132, 139, 153, 154,

171–172, 177, 185, 229n5; gestural, 14, 32, 34, 77, 234n61; state-sanctioned, 2 Virno, Paolo, 30–31, 214n52, 245n23 wage, 24, 26–28, 30–31, 52, 62, 123, 126, 132, 150, 165, 169, 178, 183, 188, 194– 199, 203–204. See also labor Wages for Housework movement, 196– 198, 202–204 Warhol, Andy, 9, 34, 37, 44–45, 128, 162; Campbell’s Soup, 9, 37, 44, 162 Weeks, Kathi, 145; The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries, 145 Whitney Museum of Art (New York), 147 wildcat strikes, 26, 63, 65, 129, 150 working class, 24, 26–27, 30, 62, 64, 126, 128, 130, 131, 138, 143, 145, 189, 193–195, 197, 203 workers’ inquiries, 129–131, 178, 183, 235n15 world system, 11, 13, 58, 149, 205n10, 210n23 Wright, Steve, 62, 135, 181, 183, 245n23 Years of Lead (Anni Piombi), 30, 169, 193

Index 279