Nottingham Contemporary

On the opening weekend of his solo show here, Nottingham Contemporary presented a reproduction of the Riddler’s jacket by John Newling in the Broadmarsh shopping centre. The jacket – which is covered in question marks like the jacket worn by the iconic “baddy” in Batman - has an epic train of 50 metres long. It formed part of a performance by Newling, which he invited shoppers and passers-by to take part in.

Newling has continually explored what we ‘value’ in our everyday lives – regardless of economic value – throughout his career. For his Broadmarsh performance, individual question marks were cut from the coat and given to passers-by in exchange for a ‘value’ that they believe strongly in. It offered an opportunity for participants to discuss with the artist what they value and, in exchange, what he values. Through this exchange, Newling hoped to provoke an antidote to the relentless invitations to consume and gain a greater understanding of our collective values.

The list of values Newling compiled during the first performance will become a script for this live reading at Nottingham Contemporary.

Featuring Peter Mörtenböck (on the World of Matter project) and Nabil Ahmed (on Radical Meteorology) this discussion departs from the concerns of the current special issue of Third Text, guest-edited by TJ Demos and dedicated to the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism, and postcolonial globalization.

Introduced and chaired by Demos, the discussion will address new aesthetic strategies through which ecological emergencies—including the multifaceted crisis of climate-change - have found resonance and response in artistic practice and more broadly in visual culture.

Live Broadcast Online

18.30 GMT Welcome

18.40 GMT. T.J. Demos will introduce the concerns of the Third Text Special Issue, Contemporary Art & The Politics of Ecology.

TJ Demos is a Reader in the Art History Department at University College London. He writes widely on modern and contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and is the author, most recently, of Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013).

19.00 GMT. Peter Mörtenböck will introduce the collective project and media, art and research platform World of Matter.

Peter Mörtenböck is Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also Professor of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology. His recent books include Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space (2008), Space (Re)Solutions (2011) and OCCUPY (2012).

19.20 GMT Nabil Ahmed's presentation, Radical Meteorology, will introduce his research on politics, ecology, and nature in the Bengal Delta.

Nabil Ahmed is a Bangladeshi artist based in London. His work has appeared on Resonance FM, no.w.here, the Centre for Possible Studies and SAVAC in Toronto. He is co-founder of Call& Response, a sound art collective. He is a member of the Roundtable Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion and Q&A.

Featuring Peter Mörtenböck (on the World of Matter project) and Nabil Ahmed (on Radical Meteorology) this discussion departs from the concerns of the current special issue of Third Text, guest-edited by TJ Demos and dedicated to the intersection of art criticism, politico-ecological theory, environmental activism, and postcolonial globalization.

Introduced and chaired by Demos, the discussion will address new aesthetic strategies through which ecological emergencies—including the multifaceted crisis of climate-change - have found resonance and response in artistic practice and more broadly in visual culture.

Live Broadcast Online

18.30 GMT Welcome

18.40 GMT. T.J. Demos will introduce the concerns of the Third Text Special Issue, Contemporary Art & The Politics of Ecology.

TJ Demos is a Reader in the Art History Department at University College London. He writes widely on modern and contemporary art, politics, and ecology, and is the author, most recently, of Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg Press, 2013); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary during Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013).

19.00 GMT. Peter Mörtenböck will introduce the collective project and media, art and research platform World of Matter.

Peter Mörtenböck is Research Fellow in the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also Professor of Visual Culture at the Vienna University of Technology. His recent books include Networked Cultures: Parallel Architectures and the Politics of Space (2008), Space (Re)Solutions (2011) and OCCUPY (2012).

19.20 GMT Nabil Ahmed's presentation, Radical Meteorology, will introduce his research on politics, ecology, and nature in the Bengal Delta.

Nabil Ahmed is a Bangladeshi artist based in London. His work has appeared on Resonance FM, no.w.here, the Centre for Possible Studies and SAVAC in Toronto. He is co-founder of Call& Response, a sound art collective. He is a member of the Roundtable Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The presentations will be followed by a roundtable discussion and Q&A.

Collaborative Effects: A symposium Q&A (Anna Detheridge, Tommaso Trini, Anna Detheridge, Catharine Rossi, Teresa Kittler, Robert Lumley)

Tommaso Trini

Living Art/Living How

The paradigm of art-as-life continues to pose eternal questions. Alive, why? Living, how? Arguing that Gilardi’s idea of the living art object is more than analogy or metaphor, I will summarize the evolution of the concept of living that he has practiced from the Nature Carpets and Habitable Art exhibition (1966) to his most recent interactive works. Gilardi combines geological and biological forms, the human epic with the storytelling of the Earth. As such, a synthetic resin living-room carpet in is habitable, but so is the gravity of the solar system. He is, moreover, an activist against anthropocentric rule, against the destruction of eco-systems and the breathless pursuit of techno-scientific innovation. His “living art”, therefore, is made up of objects that intrude on other objects. Can these “living objects” speak to mankind without becoming idols or puppets?

Tommaso Trini is an art critic based in Milan who is widely recognized for his involvement in debates surrounding Arte Povera and related artistic movements across Europe. He has followed Gilardi’s work closely from the 1960s to the present, and contributed an essay to the catalogue of the celebrated exhibition for which Gilardi acted as an advisor and facilitator - When Attitudes Become Form (Works – Concepts – Processes – Situations – Information), Kunsthalle Bern, 1969.

Anna Detheridge, Director, Connecting Cultures, Milan

Engaging with the Environment: Italian art and the obsession with social space

The legacy of Italian mainstream art history is an underlying and understated point of reference for many contemporary Italian artists, a continuing influence both contradicted and sublimated. From Gianni Colombo to Piero Gilardi to Alberto Garutti to Lara Favaretto, human interaction in space constitute a very particular perspective which has endured over time. Piero Gilardi's interdisciplinary work influenced by the Italian founder of the antipsychiatry movement Franco Basaglia has had a pioneering theoretical and practical impact long before and quite independent of later practices defined as relational aesthetics.

Art theorist, curator and lecturer Anna Detheridge is the Founding Director of Connecting Cultures, a non–profit arts agency established in Milan in 2001 which is committed to inclusive, action research–based methods of working in the public realm. She was Chief Editor (1987-2003) of the Arts pages of Il Sole 24Ore and exhibitions she has curated include Public Art in Italy (Pistoletto Foundation, Cittadellarte, Biella 2003); INNATURA, X Photography Biennial (Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin 2003) and Village Global (Musée des Beaux Arts, Montreal 2004).

Collaborative Effects: A symposium Q&A (Robert Lumley, Teresa Kittler, Catharine Rossi) Art Outside Art: Piero Post-Povera Art Outside Art: Piero Post-Povera Q&A (Robert Lumley, Teresa Kittler, Catharine Rossi)

Catharine Rossi, Senior Lecturer, Design History, Kingston University

Playing with the Povera: Connections between Art, Architecture and Design in 1970s Italy

Piero Gilardi and the Arte Povera movement took place amidst a wider set of avant-garde practices in art, design and architecture in early 1970s Italy, whose interconnections have not been sufficiently explored. From Riccardo Dalisi’s thesis of tecnica povera, tested out by street children in the playgrounds of Naples, to Enzo Mari’s Autoprogettazione, a project of DIY consciousness raising and Superstudio’s utopian combination of nature and the high-tech, there are clear parallels between the Radical architecture and design of this period and Gilardi’s work. This paper will explore these commonalities and this wider context in order to unlock and understanding this period, and Gilardi, in greater depth.

Catharine Rossi is a Senior Lecturer in Design History at Kingston University, and was previously a Context Lecturer in the Design School at Edinburgh College of Art. She completed her PhD, on the of role craft in post-war Italian design, as the holder of an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award co-supervised by the Royal College of Art and the V&A Museum. She has worked on exhibitions at MoMA and the V&A and, alongside contributing to academic publications such as Journal of Design History, she works as a freelance writer for Crafts and Domus, and maintains the blog thinkingaboutobjects.

Teresa Kittler, PhD Candidate, Art History, UCL

Living Sculpture and the Art of Living

When Piero Gilardi first exhibited his Nature Carpets in 1966 he spoke of these works emphatically as a proposal for an everyday existence. By situating these works within the home, they could become part of a lived experience. I examine Gilardi’s Nature Carpets in relation to the question of lifestyle, particularly in response to a US lifestyle equated with consumerism. While this was one of the principal targets of Germano Celant’s 1967 Manifesto for Arte Povera, Gilardi’s industrially produced nature seems to offer a more ambivalent response to mass-production and the kind of lived experience it could offer. Situated within the context of postwar artistic practice in Italy and the USA, I consider the material, technological and psychic aspects of Gilardi’s Nature Carpets as a dialectical engagement with the question of lifestyle.

Teresa Kittler is an AHRC funded PhD Candidate in the Department of Art History at University College London (UCL). Her thesis, supervised by Professor Briony Fer, explores the concept of 'living' through the work of artists and art critics working in Italy in the mid to late sixties including Marisa Merz, Carla Accardi and Carla Lonzi.

Robert Lumley, Professor of Italian History, UCL

Habitable Art: In and Around Piero Gilardi

building with words translation Italian e inglese house domus Domus table Piacentino swing Marisa interior design Michelangelo minus lying in the grass bombs over Turin lost world found in museum natura morta building-site industrial painting Pinot book-cover seagulls sit-in Gian Enzo wall floor ceiling Fabro parquet cement inflammable Kounellis river-bed Alighiero unstable object in Switzerland Tristan Tzara balla futurista TT DDP Flash guerriglia Fiat asylum Zoo Levi West Coast soft igloo tent Zorio Bosco dei mostri corso Casale church fresco restoration New York Accademia Albertina polyurethane machine plywood Strum landscape arte abitabile

Robert Lumley is Professor of Italian Cultural History at University College, London. He has written extensively on contemporary art and culture in Italy. His publications include Arte Povera (Tate Publications, 2004) and he co-curated (with Francesco Manacorda) the exhibition Marcello Levi, Portrait of a Collector: From Futurism to Arte Povera at the Estorick Gallery in 2006.