Ipotesi per l’arte nell’età postmoderna: la dimensione autoriale nella critica e nella curatela delle mostre in Italia tra anni settanta e ottanta

In May 1974 Renato Barilli publishes Tra presenza e assenza: due modelli culturali in conflitto, a pioneering study of the cultural trend that had already occurred in the previous ten years but that only afterward would have been "baptized" with the successful definition of "postmodernism"; a few months later Barilli explicitly refers to the theories of Gilles Deleuze while curating at the Studio Marconi in Milan La ripetizione differente, an exhibition that announces a personal interpretation of Italian art in relation to previous and coeval international experiences. Such interpretation finds important verification and development in a series of exhibitions curated by the Bolognese scholar in the following years, meeting up with the contemporary theorizations of the Transavanguardia by Achille Bonito Oliva and of the American Inexpressionism by Germano Celant. These critical proposals, all patently authorial, have contributed to delineate the multiform panorama of Italian art between the second half of the seventies and the first five years of the following decade, putting into light links and fractures on which it is very useful to come back to reflect, both on a theoretical and curatorial level.