Weak Art / Weak Thought

Abstract

This article examines the emergence and development of Arte debole (Weak Art), a movement founded in Turin in 1986 in the wake of Il pensiero debole (Weak Thought), the collection of essays edited three years earlier by Gianni Vattimo and Pier Aldo Rovatti.

From its first exhibition to the group's dissolution a decade later, the article investigates the operative strategies and theoretical premises of Arte debole, focusing on its programmatically inauthentic use of materials and on the centrality of the concepts of ornament, monument, and surface.

Gian Carlo Pagliasso, the group's principal theorist, graduated in philosophy from the University of Turin under the supervision of Gianni Vattimo. The central section of the article explores the relationship between Arte debole and Vattimo's thought, with particular attention to Il pensiero debole and La fine della modernità (The End of Modernity), while also drawing on the extensive course materials prepared for Vattimo's aesthetics course on Art and Utopia, which Pagliasso has kept since his years at the University of Turin.

Even at this early stage, prior to the formulation of Weak Thought, it is possible to identify retrospectively some of the key premises that Pagliasso and his group would later translate into artistic practice. Although Vattimo was familiar with Arte debole, he never regarded himself as its mentor: the teacher–student relationship between the two was at once direct and indirect.