Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology - uncopy

politics and the avant-garde
piero gilardi
At the beginning of the 60’s, pop and nouveaux realists looked at “mass-media” as a clarifying
force in human relationships; intuition of the objectivity of the relationship induced by the
technological system seemed to open up new avenues of freedom for the individual; the myth
of a classless society, encouraged by the planning of consumption, lifted the artist out of the
anguish of an ideological debate embroiled in abstractions and frustrations without end.
The explosion of Pop Art with its “naive” vigor gave new-Dada language a fresh and vital
taste; Nouveau Realisme, more timid and intellectually inclined, was interpreted by Restany
as the artistic beginning of a new technological humanism.
Neofigurazione, New Expressionism and Nouveausurrealisme used the iconography of
the mass-media with the old aim of social criticism, an inheritance of abstract art.
It was the moment of a renewed cultural faith in technology. The instruments wielded
by technology had lost all sense of magic and empiricism, and had become part of the social
picture; neocapitalism was waxing stronger and “information” was passing from the infrastructure
to the structure of society.
Artists, together with a fair sprinkling of intellectuals, were convinced that the technological
society, with its own new internal logic, would solve the general problem of associ-