Traces of Impossible Gestures. Photography and Behaviour in the 1970s

Abstract

The art critic Tommaso Trini in Nuovo alfabeto per corpo e materia [New Alphabet for Body and Matter], published on "Domus" in January 1969 and later on the catalogue of the exhibition Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form, reflects on how public participation and reactions have become fundamental in the art world and how works of art are created to be ephemeral: "they last just for an exhibition, for the time of an alchemy. Materials evaporate and become an operation, a relationship". Photography then becomes the reagent that "records" not only documents of what happened, but also creates illusions and semblance of impracticable actions, traces of impossible gestures, also related to video art. As Rosalind Krauss writes, if photography has a circumstantial relationship with reality, then those photos give us warnings that we must believe, that we must trust as if by mysticism, all the more so because in that cultural climate there are "creators of worlds" whose behaviour is influenced by the idea of being a medium or a shaman.