This is a presentation report that I did for my Art of Europe: 1960s to 1990s class last semester. It’s one of the few papers I wrote in the last few months that is appropriate to share here — a lot of my assignments were more exercise than essay.
The Grand Subversion: Gruppo 63 and the Italian Women’s Movement
A rupture in artistic, political or social practice cannot emerge independent of the artistic, political or social conditions that precede it. The inevitable influence pervades not only the creative aims of rising groups but touches its methodology as well. The philosophical concerns of Gruppo 63, an Italian literary movement, laid the groundwork that allowed for the Italian women’s movement to emerge with its own voice.
Impetus
My interest in Gruppo 63 was born out of the relationship between the literary group and Arte Povera as outlined by Francesco Bonami. In his article, “Now We Begin,” Bonami identifies Gruppo 63 as an association “who opposed the dominant currents of Italian literature: neorealism, hermeticism, and historicism. Like Arte Povera, Gruppo 63 was an avant-garde” (112). Searching through academic journals, I came across Lucia Re’s article about gender and sexuality in the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde. I decided to start my research from there, thinking that Gruppo 63 itself perhaps addressed issues of gender and sexuality, which I thought to be a progressive trajectory for a male-dominated group.
Lucia Re’s “Language, Gender and Sexuality in the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde
Re’s article provides an extensive overview of Gruppo 63’s social, political, cultural and artistic aims. She makes clear that Gruppo 63 did not have any explicit interest in discussing gender and sexuality despite its commitment to deconstructing myths and language (137), and that their membership remained largely male up until their last meeting in 1967 (136). Re provides convincing evidence of the parallels between Gruppo 63 and the Italian women’s movement, including personal associations, political aims and methodological approaches. But if Gruppo 63’s establishment is “justly celebrated as perhaps the first moment when contemporary Italian culture became self-conscious of its own modernity,” (Moliterno 376) the same cannot be said of the women’s movement in Italy. Women didn’t need Gruppo 63 to exist in order to establish a voice against cultural expectations established by a patriarchy that didn’t acknowledge the autonomy of women, though it was convenient that Gruppo 63 articulated a philosophy that women could relate to and adopt from their unique perspective. I feel certain that even in the absence of Gruppo 63, women would have gotten there on their own.
Gruppo 63
Re defines the beginnings of Gruppo 63 as occurring at three loosely related points. She notes the publication of Il verri in 1956, which she identifies as a starting point for the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde; the publication of the anthology I novissimi in 1961, which was edited by Alfredo Giuliani and included works by authors who would later form the core group of Gruppo 63; and the first meeting in October 1963 in Palermo, whose attendees read their texts, gave lectures and performed stage works (135). The “core group” identified by Re in her article is Giuliani, Nanni Balestrini, Elio Pagliarani, Antonio Porta and Edoardo Sanguineti. Other publications cite other authors as core members, adding Enrico Filippini and Angelo Guglielmi (Bonami 112) and Luciano Aneschi and Renato Barilli (Italian Literature). There is a dispute about the membership of Umberto Eco. Bonami says the core of Gruppo 63 was “later joined by Umberto Eco” (112), the Encyclopædia Brittanica lists him as an originating member (Italian Literature), and Re identifies Eco as a Neo-Avant-Garde theorist but doesn’t place him explicitly as a member of Gruppo 63 (148). I will discuss Umberto Eco at greater length later on.
Re finds Gruppo 63’s exclusion of gender issues as a subject of critique to be a troubling omission by a group so committed to deconstructing the myths fed by dominant cultural institutions (137). Gruppo 63 instead responded to the growing industrialization of publishing and the ideology of language that was becoming increasingly pervasive in contemporary Italian culture. By deconstructing and restructuring the language of institutions, Gruppo 63 contributed to:
a radical renewal of the substance and form of listerary language [and] challenged the values of contemporary society, particularly the consumerism that was spread through the mass media. They expressly criticized the education and communication channels of middle-class and capitalist society, and they proposed a new approach to understanding and interpreting the industrial society they rejected. They proposed aesthetic values extolling “l’immaginazione al potere,” meaning the primacy of the imagination. (Gruppo 63)
Re identifies two ways in which Gruppo 63 achieved this primacy of imagination. First, members of Gruppo 63 used bricolage, collage and pastiche to expose the alienation of language (144). Second, they contrasted the myths of the bourgeois with the alternative myth of poetry (144).
What fascinates me most about Gruppo 63 is the way they authoritatively confronted industry and institution by adopting their tools and models—the same way the women’s movement did with Gruppo 63. What makes Gruppo 63 successful in this confrontation is its awareness of the paradox. Pagliarani, in a preface of the anthology Manuale di poesia sperimentale, wrote that “‘the paradox of poetry today consists in its having to contest an instrument by availing itself—and there is no way around it—of that very same instrument’” (144). All it takes to justify one’s participation is to acknowledge the action. Gruppo 63 was cognizant of its inability to make significant structural changes in Italy, which is perhaps why they agreed to participate in the institutions they were trying to subvert—they knew they couldn’t demolish the entire composition of their society and start from scratch. Effort was substantial action. The self-reflexivity of Gruppo 63 establishes them as a realist group with a touch of idealism—not the other way around.
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies
Roland Barthes’s Mythologies is cited as one of the primary influences on Gruppo 63’s philosophy of subversion (Re 137). Barthes is regarded as the structuralist (Culler 1), and was concerned with the ways that people understand the world around them. His 1957 essay Mythologies “stands at the beginning of a tradition of demystification, which he hoped would have political results. Analyzing myths, he argued in 1953, ‘is the only effective way for an intellectual to take political action’” (29). The interest of Gruppo 63 in the deconstruction of myths is clear. Myths are created by the combination of language and imagery—the relationships between the components produce meanings that vary in representational accuracy. Barthes’s theory of second-order cultural meaning explains much of what Gruppo 63 was concerned about: What were the institutions of contemporary Italian life telling its people?
Advertising in 1960s Italy
Advertising in 1960s Italy saw a shift in dialogue between the image and the consumer. No longer were advertisements speaking exclusively to men—now women were being acknowledged as decision-makers and buyers. The only problem was that advertising still dictated particular roles and images to women. In the Barilla spaghetti (Arvidsson 91) and Camay ads (104), women are expected to cook (presumably for their husbands and sons) and maintain a certain standard of beauty (for the pleasure of men). While marketing professionals tend to see this shift as progressive for women (105)—as if merely acknowledging existence is helpful—all they were doing was causing women’s groups like DEMAU and Rivolta Femminile to collect ample ammunition to rail against.
Carla Lonzi and the Rivolta Femminile
Carla Lonzi stands as one of the earliest Italian feminist writers in the 1960s. An art critic and poet affiliated with members of Gruppo 63, it is with Lonzi that Re makes the strongest connections between Gruppo 63 and the Italian women’s movement (152). Re cites that Lonzi’s “experience of being and feeling—even as a highly emancipated woman – always subordinate in a cultural scene that was essentially masculine was … important for the conceptualization of her feminism (152-53). Lonzi was perhaps most progressive in her recognition of the “illusion of gender-neutrality” (153), a recognition that is closely tied to the image of women presented in advertising. Institutions liked to believe that a passive public was placated by their vision of “gender-neutrality.” But women like Lonzi, who founded Rivolta Femminile in 1970, knew better, and called for complete “deculturalization”—a notion far more radical than the mere subversion of institution that Eco and Gruppo 63 advocated. While Re hails Lonzi as a powerful figure in the growing women’s movement, Sonia Previato believes that Lonzi’s arguments were too radical for Rivolta Femminile to hold ground. With regards to Lonzi’s belief that “divorce is a graft on marriage from which the institution comes out strengthened” (Previato), Previato remarks, “obviously this extreme position prevented the theories of the group from gaining supremacy within the Italian feminist movement” (Previato). But Lonzi insisted that any institution existing within a patriarchy had an agenda to preserve its hegemony by keeping women in subordinate positions.
Radical figures always evoke polarized reactions, so it’s no surprise that Re and Previato paint Lonzi’s efforts in two very different lights. In both cases, however, Lonzi has made enough of a point to create awareness and inspire reaction, an achievement that parallels the aim of Gruppo 63 and their effort to get attention to further their cause.
Mirella Bentivoglio and Lucia Marcucci
Mirella Bentivoglio and Lucia Marcucci are two visual and concrete poets cited by Re as women who contributed to the women’s movement in Italy, whose works are “examples of politically informed, feminist experimental aesthetic practices by women which promote the reader’s ‘activism’” (150). In looking at a selection of their work from Frittelli arte contemporanea (Lucia Marcucci) and National Museum of Women in the Arts (The Book as Art), it’s obvious that their use of collage, text and book imagery were taking issues arisen from Gruppo 63 and the women’s movement to task, including the industrialization of publishing and the juxtaposition and rearrangement of text and images to create new meanings. Although both women deliver work that relates specifically to women’s issues, Marcucci is perhaps more explicit in her examination of women’s roles and bodies. In Dei gratia from 1975, Marcucci imprints her torso on paper, leaving traces of her chin, breasts, and stomach, placing an enlarged image of a coin over her genitals (Lucia Marcucci). Dei gratia— “by the grace of God” —is imprinted on the coin. The relationship between the title, the currency and the body indicates careful selection and evokes a powerful response, one that calls to light the difficulty of women represented in media—the buying by and selling of women for profit.
Umberto Eco
According to conflicting statements by Re, Encyclopædia Brittanica and Bonami, Umberto Eco’s membership in Gruppo 63 is not confirmed. Re discusses Eco within the context of his 1962 essay, “Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realtà,” wherein Eco argues that “the language of the text is the true content (and hence the politics) of the work” (147). Eco:
promoted a radically new relationship between reader and text.… In essence, the dismantling of traditional syntax and forms prevented the reader from “passively” receiving the text’s message, while the new and unexpected textual configurations … required the reader to be actively involved in the (re)construction of the text, and exposed the reader to a kind of text which was open to a multiplicity of individual readings. (148)
While I normally wouldn’t advocate a concerted effort to make text more difficult to read for the sake of a having a challenging piece of writing, in the case of language evaluation and deconstruction, the promotion of active reading is a solution that points toward actual effect. It was Eco who pioneered the notion of revolution from the root—the social and political problems were linguistic ones (147), and they had to be fixed at their roots.
Antonio Gramsci
As a Marxist cultural philosopher imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime, Antonio Gramsci was a pioneer in the thinking that led to the development of a group like Gruppo 63. By establishing the notion of hegemony as a “set of ideas by means of which dominant groups strive to secure the consent of subordinate groups to their leadership” (Stillo), Gramsci articulated many of the social and political conditions of Italy that only worsened by the time Gruppo 63 was formed. While Gramsci identified two ways of subverting dominant hegemony—war of maneuver and war of position (Stillo) —Gruppo 63 established a much more specific process that asserted all social and political issues to be linguistic ones (Re 147). Gruppo 63 found political value in what they were doing, but their mode of attack was essentially aesthetic as a way of imposing alienation and new thinking toward the contemporary conventions of mass media.
Limitations
One of the main difficulties I had in researching Gruppo 63 and the women writers who came after it was finding English translations of original works. While Re makes a convincing argument in her article about the parallels between Gruppo 63 and the Italian women’s movement, I would have preferred to access the original texts in order to make my own assessment. I’m apt to believe that translations are not readily available since Gruppo 63 deconstructed syntax and format, something that must be impossible to accurately translate. I get the impression that a meaningful understanding of Gruppo 63 work requires an advanced knowledge and understanding of intricacies of the Italian language.
I am particularly interested in texts by Carla Lonzi, whose early work appears to be extremely radical even by today’s standards. Re calls Lonzi’s 1969 book Autoritratto “a pioneering, feminist avant-garde ‘open work’ of creative art criticism” (Re 152), which is a rather incomprehensible claim without having read the original work. I’d be interested in comparing the format and style of her posthumously published poetry, along with her early feminist works, to writngs of Gruppo 63’s members.
Bibliography
Arvidsson, Adam. Marketing Modernity: Italian Advertising from Fascism to Postmodernity.
New York: Routledge, 2003.
Bonami, Francesco. “Now We Begin.” Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972. Tate Modern:
Walker Art Center, 2001. 109-27.
“The Book as Art.” National Museum of Women in the Arts. 6 Oct. 2008
<http://www.nmwa.org/exhibition/detail.asp?exhibitid=167>.
Culler, Jonathan. Barthes: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
“Gruppo 63.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 14 Oct. 2008
<http://search.eb.com/eb/article-9126222>.
“Italian literature.” Encyclopædia Britannica. 2008. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 14 Oct.
2008 <http://search.eb.com/eb/article-215786>.
“Lucia Marcucci.” Frittelli | Arte contemporanea. 5 Oct. 2008
<http://www.frittelliarte.it/it/artisti_det.php?id=10#>.
“Mirella Bentivoglio.” Clara Database of Women Artists. National Museum of Women in the
Arts. 5 Oct. 2008 <http://www.nmwa.org/clara/search_artist_detail.asp?artist_id=17783>.
Moliterno, Gino. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture. CRC Press, 2000.
Previato, Sonia. “From the rice fields to the modern day call centers – Marxism vs. Feminism.
Part two.” In Defence of Marxism. 10 Oct. 2002. 6 Oct. 2008
<http://www.marxist.com/marxism-feminism-womens-day111002.htm>.
Re, Lucia. “Language, Gender and Sexuality in the Italian Neo-Avant-Garde.” MLA 119 (2004):
135-73. Project MUSE. OCAD, Toronto. 28 Sept. 2008. Keyword: Gruppo 63.
Stillo, Monica. “Antonio Gramsci.” Media/Gender/Identity Resources. University of Leeds. 11
Oct. 2008 <http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm>.
