Nanni Balestrini, collage, and the aesthetics of operaismo

Abstract

This article analyzes a selection of collages made during the 1960s by Italian artist, writer, editor, and extraparliamentary activist Nanni Balestrini in relation to the dissident Marxist intellectual current of operaismo (workerism). Despite his centrality to both extraparliamentary activism and the cultural landscape in postwar Italy, Balestrini’s artistic practice remains largely unexplored. Comprised of clipped, often provocative, newspaper fragments and aesthetically arranged to exploit the expressive potency of typography, the works remain visibly indebted to the tradition of avant-garde collage. However, they summon these procedures to address the challenges of a radically different historical moment. Sustained visual analysis and salient texts of political theory are utilized to demonstrate how Balestrini’s collages investigate concerns that resonate with those of operaismo, and, in so doing, participate in the unfolding of new understandings of proletarian subjectivity and anticapitalist struggle. The constitutive disjunctures of collage and the medium’s potential to spark fresh connections function crucially in this endeavor to reveal a historically contingent form of revolutionary aesthetics. At the same time, the works chart the theoretical and increasingly activist trajectories of operaismo itself, revealing sympathies for the current’s most militant strands. Considered together, Balestrini’s collages and the theories of operaismo emerge as deeply interconnected, mutually illuminating, and reinforcing one another throughout a period of intense political contestation in Italy.