L'antiretorica espositiva di Ugo La Pietra

Abstract

Towards the end of the Sixties, and throughout the Seventies, art exhibitions took on themselves an important role, as a tool for the artist to express his disagreement towards the institutions. The ‘act of showing' became itself the language of the artist, or rather a new expressive hypotheses generated from the reflection on the relationships between the work of art, the artist's own body, and the space: from self-reflection, to the analysis on the language and on the art system. This is an area of investigation inside which the studies are growing, and where this contribution will place itself, focusing on Ugo La Pietra and on the exhibition Cronografie (1980), who has understood the exhibition as a tool to push the visitor to re-read his own life context, or to reflect on the role of design. The language of La Pietra, defined antirhetorical as his constant questioning of the “high culture”, will be analysed comparing the semiotic approach to the historical one that allows to contextualize the use of rhetorical figures within the design and artistic culture of the Seventies and the Eighties, decades characterized by many artists’ assumption of the role of the 'social agitator'.