Image/Word. The Commingling between Languages in the Italian Art of the 1990s

Abstract

The aim of this proposal is to explore the phenomena of mingling between artistic and verbal practice in the work of Italian artists of the Nineteen Nineties, examining their original characters compared to the production of the past and their influence on the present. Through videos, installations and performances, Liliana Moro, Maurizio Cattelan, Eva Marisaldi, Cesare Viel, Bernhard Rüdiger and others, open dialogues with literary works or trace words in the exhibition space, enclosing the message of the works in the intersection between text and image. By relying on new media and their transmedia properties, the artists create works that you can read, such as the stories on the walls of the underground by Viel (Passaggi qui dal sottoterra, 1998), or cite, draw inspiration and rework existing literary texts, as in the case of the installation La Casa (1993) by Moro and Rüdiger, inspired by writings by Pier Paolo Pasolini and Peter Handke. In order to analyze these works, I will use an interdisciplinary approach combining Art History and Visual Narrative Studies, with the purpose of analyzing the specific characteristics of commingling of words and images in the artistic production of the Nineties. The focus will be on the processes of citation, reworking, fragmentation and rereading used by artists, taking into account the possibilities of contamination between genres offered by the new media.

Keywords

• words and images
• commingling
• contemporary art
• literature
• nineties