VINCENZO AGNETTI (1926-1981)
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's… 顯示更多
VINCENZO AGNETTI (1926-1981)

Assioma in principio era la tesi (Axiom in the Beginning was the Theory)

細節
VINCENZO AGNETTI (1926-1981)
Assioma in principio era la tesi (Axiom in the Beginning was the Theory)

nitro on engraved bakelite
31 ½ x 31 ½in. (80 x 80cm.)
Executed in 1969
來源
Studio Giangaleazzo Visconti, Milan.
Private Collection.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.
展覽
Milan, Studio Giangaleazzo Visconti, Vincenzo Agnetti, 2008, (illustrated, unpaged).
注意事項
Artist's Resale Right ("Droit de Suite"). Artist's Resale Right Regulations 2006 apply to this lot, the buyer agrees to pay us an amount equal to the resale royalty provided for in those Regulations, and we undertake to the buyer to pay such amount to the artist's collection agent.
更多詳情
This work is registered in the Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti, Milan, under no. 0015AB1969021400043, and it is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity.

榮譽呈獻

Alessandro Diotallevi
Alessandro Diotallevi

拍品專文

Vincenzo Agnetti’s Assioma in principio era la tesi (1969) is a work from his series of Assiomi (‘Axioms,’ 1968-1974). These absurd, paradoxical or tautological statements engraved on Bakelite panels sought, through a technique of defamiliarisation that the artist called Azzeramento (‘zeroing’), to entirely recalibrate the viewer’s approach to language and art. Staring starkly from what looks like an anodyne black plaque are the words Assioma in principio era la tesi: the phrase translates as ‘In the beginning was the theory,’ a backwards declaration that has particular relevance to Agnetti’s project. The Milanese conceptualist began his career as a poet before becoming associated with Piero Manzoni’s Azimuth group in the 1960s. The Italian avant-garde, including theorists such as Umberto Eco, were concerned during this period with the idea of ‘alienation’ in modern life. In a consumer culture, perceptual habits become mechanical: machines, disciplines and institutions are assembled in order to make behaviour routine, and genuine experience is stifled. Through his Azzeramento techniques, Agnetti aimed to upset how such systems usually function, exposing their constructed nature and intervening in their passive reception.
Agnetti’s 1967 novel Obsoleto (‘Obsolete’), whose frontispiece was designed by Enrico Castellani, made radically experimental use of textual syntax, logic, punctuation, narrative, content and form. In his seminal 1968 work La macchina drogata (‘The drugged machine’), the artist interfered in the workings of an Olivetti calculator in order to make it type letters, rather than numbers; through this strategy of interrupted process, he returned the viewer to a conscious and deliberate state of awareness, resetting expectations about the calculator’s function. With the Assiomi he sought a similar estrangement. In a state of paradox, the purpose of language is foregrounded for critique and reassessment as an instrument of power. Rather than theorising after the fact, with Assioma in principio era la tesi Agnetti puts theory first, a disorienting semiotic intervention that wryly undermines the fixity of the words he has engraved. Indeed, the work’s undulating surface and two metal eyelets also lend it the appearance of a curtain – no solid monument, but a veil to be swept aside, awakening us to a world of possibilities beyond the illusory systems that we rely on so blindly.

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