Abstract Art, Ethics and Interpretation: The case of Mario Radice

NOTES

• This is the argument of B. R. Tilghman in “Picture Space and Moral Space,” British Journal of Aesthetics 28.4 (Autumn 1988): 317–326.
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• Johnathan Vickery, “Art and the Ethical: Modernism and the Problem of Minimalism,” Art and Thought, ed. Dana Arnold and Margaret Iversen (Maiden: Blackwell, 2003) 112.
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• ibid 115.
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• Anna C. Chave, “Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power,” Arts Magazine 64.5 (January 1990): 58.
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• As the artist's daughter has recently explained, it was only by manually removing the texts from these photographs that Radice was able to have images of his lost works published and exhibited after the war. Barbara Radice, “A 20th Century Artist,” Domus 855 (January 2003): 23.
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• Luciano Caramel, Mario Radice: Catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 2002) 123.
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• Benito Mussolini, Popolo d'Italia, 2 January 1934.
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• Benito Mussolini in collaboration with Giovanni Gentile, “Foundations and Doctrine of Fascism,” (1932), A Primer of Italian Fascism, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Schnapp (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2000) 53.
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• ibid 63.
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• Luciano Caramel, “II metro della polidimensionalità,” Mario Radice: Catalogo generale (Milan: Electa, 2002) 16–24.
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• Giuseppe Terragni, “Building the Casa del Fascio in Como,” (1936) Giuseppe Terragni: Transformations, Decompositions, Critiques, ed. Peter Eisenman (New York: Monacelli P, 2003) 269.
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• Carlo Belli, Kn, (1935; Milan:Vanni Scheiwiller, 1972) 208, 217.
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• As Caramel concludes in a broader discussion of Italian art and architecture in this period, “Terragni and the abstract artists… believed, at least initially, that Mussolini would realise their ideal of a new Italy of rationality and order. Even with the abstractionists, therefore, formal order was equated with the political order of fascism.” Luciano Caramel, “Abstract Art of the Thirties,” Italian Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1900–1988 (Munich: Prestel- Verlag, 1989) 190.
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• Mario Radice, “Le Decorazioni,” Quadrante 35/36 (October 1936): 33.
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• Mussolini and Gentile, “Foundations and Doctrine” 47.
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• Mario Sironi et al., “Manifesto of Mural Painting,” (1933) Art in Theory: 1900–1990, ed. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993) 409.
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• Gino Severini, “Idolatria dell'arte e decadenza del quadro,” (1927) Storia moderna dell'arte in Italia: Manifesti, polemiche, documenti. Dal Novecento ai dibattiti sulla figura e sul monumentale 1925–1945 (vol. 3, bk. 1), ed. Paola Barocchi (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1990) 21.
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• Gino Ghiringelli, “Pitture murali nel Palazzo della Triennale,” (1933) Il Novecento Italiano, ed. Rossana Bossaglia (1979; Milan: Charta, 1995) 157–9.
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• Terragni, “Building the Casa del Fascio” 271.
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• Radice,”Le Decorazioni” 33.
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• Giuseppe Terragni, letter to P. M. Bardi, August 14, 1936, quoted in Alberto Longatti, “Gli uomini, i fatti, i luoghi, le idée,” Mario Radice: 1898–1987 retrospettiva, exh. cat., (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2002) 38.
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• Terragni, “Building the Casa del Fascio” 262.
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• ibid.
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• ibid 262–3.
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• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:Vintage, 1979) 187.
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• Terragni, “Building the Casa del Fascio”, 266.
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• ibid 269.
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• Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) 121.
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• Giuseppe Pagano, “Tre anni di architettura in Italia,” Casabella 110 (1937): 2–5. Quoted in Sergio Poretti, La Casa del Fascio di Como (Rome: Carocci, 1998) 111, n. 23.
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• Eisenman, Decompositions 37.
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• Luciano Caramel,”Terragni e gli astrattisti comaschi,” Quadrante Lariano 1.3 (May-June 1968): 51.
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• Umberto Eco, “The Open Work in the Visual Arts,” (1962) The Open Work (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989) 84–104.
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• Umberto Eco, “Openness, Information, Communication,” (1962) The Open Work 83.
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• The key texts are Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1992) and Hans Robert Jauss Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1982).
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• Caramel's 1968 essay was presumably based on photographic images of Radice's panels from which the texts by Mussolini had been removed.
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• Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1959) 734. I would like to thank Julian Stallabrass for bringing this text to my attention.
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• In making this argument I am following D. N. Rodowick's theory of interpretation where “the productivity of meaning is accounted for not only according to the formal dynamics of the aesthetic text, but also in the intertextual relations between the text and critical practices, theory, pedagogy and other discourses of production or reception…” See The Crisis of Political Modernism: Criticism and Ideology in Contemporary Film Theory (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1988) 35.
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• Diane Ghirardo, “Terragni, Conventions, and the Critics,” Critical Architecture and Contemporary Culture, eds. William J. Lillyman, Marilyn F. Moriarty and David J. Neuman (New York: Oxford UP, 1994) 91–103.
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