Vertigo (English Edition)

The exhibition - and the catalogue that goes with it - aims to document the overlapping and contaminations that have occurred since the beginnings of historic avant-garde movements (from Futurism to Suprematism, Constructivism, Dadaism, Neoplasticism and Surrealism) in order to highlight the fall of the artistic specific – painting and sculpture – in favour of an interweaving of multi-media. The show includes more than four hundred works including artist books, films, installations, paintings and photographs presenting the artistic personalities and the movements that have marked the fundamental stages of the appropriation of new media for artistic ends. The gradual and systematic introduction of new media has fostered a critical contamination of the “classic” aesthetic experience, repudiating the presumed separation between painting and film, sculpture and architecture, theatre and music, design and dance, in order to assert a linguistic interdisciplinary line and undermine the basis of the concept of art’s autonomy and self-identity. Vertigo focuses on all forms of media communication – from radio to the telephone, from photography to film, from television to video, and to the most recent digital processing – in an exhibition that begins with the first historic forays into the technological field with the sound and poetic experiments undertaken by Marinetti and Schwitters, and continues through to the visual and film explorations of Duchamp and Dalì, Pop Art and Andy Warhol, Conceptual Art and artists such as Fernand Léger, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Louise Bourgeois, Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Bill Viola, to arrive at an overview of the leading players in today’s contemporary art.