Lorenzo Bruni - 66|16. Ieri Oggi Domani Eccetera ...

1966 and the year this book was published, 2016, are two dates separated by fifty years of events and social, political, and scientific upheavals. For the “inhabitants” of the 1960s to reach and go beyond 2001 was a distant target, one full of promise and anxiety, as can be seen in the literature and films of the period. The project for the exhibition and book 66/16 traces out a link between the hopes of the artistic debate underway in 1966 and thoughts about these from the vantage point of 2016. This dialogue has been made evident from the point of view of seven international artists from seven different countries: Marinus Boezem, Simone Forti, David Medalla, Maurizio Mochetti, Maurizio Nannucci, Malick Sidibé, and Michael Snow. These artists have all contributed a personal analysis and reformulation of the role of art in creating a new and active dialogue with society halfway through the 1960s, one that the American critic, Lucy Lippard, “registered” at the time with the term “the dematerialization of the art object”. With this approach these artists aimed at favouring the conceptual aspect of the work with respect to a formal one. In the following decades, they found themselves increasingly confronted by a society of images operating on a global scale, to the point of the dematerialized reality of today’s digital communications. They have tackled this by creating a continuous crossover between the various art languages, something that has allowed them, not to reject traditional expressive techniques, but to renew them with respect to new contemporary needs by thinking about the concept of cultural tradition. By contextualising their careers, the 66/16 project allows us to raise the basic questions of what we mean today by “new media”, how we can formulate in the future the concept of art history, and how we can objectively evaluate what turns an aesthetic, political, or philosophical gesture into a work of art. The starting point was to create a dialogue between two works created by these artists in 1966 and 2016, in this way to touch on important questions about perceptions of passing time, the debate with history, what we mean today by planning for a collective future, and our responsibilities for transmitting knowledge. All these points have been concretised in a special project by the artist Jonathan Monk, who has been working since the 1990s, titled Ieri, oggi, domani eccetera..., Yesterday, today, tomorrow etcetera...

Lorenzo Bruni