Ingrams, Catherine; (2022) Resisting Forms: Forms of Resistance: Avant-garde Practice in Italy 1947 - 1958. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Text (Redacted copy) C.V.Ingrams thesis for library no 3rd party material- Oct 2022 .pdf - Other Access restricted to UCL open access staff until 1 December 2025. Download (2MB)

Abstract

This thesis interrogates issues of form through five case studies of artists and groups of artists working in Italy between 1947 and 1958. Concentrating on painting and ceramic production made by Chilean, Cuban, Danish and Italian artists, it tracks a capacious understanding of form, one that challenges the monolithic and transhistorical role that usually attaches to it in art historical discourse. Form is found to have held diverse meanings that were historically specific to different artists, whilst it also registered broader political and psychic undercurrents at work during the postwar and Cold War moment. Beyond a retrieval of a promise of liberatory potential for some artists, form is found to be deployed by others in a more critical approach towards other orthodox trajectories of postwar modernism, in particular in regard to their connection with technology and its relationship to mediations of violence. Rather than a narrative that is shaped by place, the case studies are chosen from different locations within Italy, whilst the chapters are arranged chronologically. Opening with an analysis of the Marxist Formalism in the paintings of Forma, a group working in Rome between 1947 – 1949 (Chapter 1), the discussion then moves to the dystopian vision of Arte Nucleare, working in Milan between 1951 – 1955 (Chapter 2); to the painting, writings and ceramics produced by Asger Jorn and his group, ‘the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus’, based in the Ligurian seaside town of Albisola between 1954 – 1957 (Chapter 3); to the ceramics produced by Roberto Matta at Albisola in 1954 (Chapter 4); and lastly, to the paintings made by Wifredo Lam at Albisola in 1958 (Chapter 5). The theoretical world of the thesis ranges from the political writings of Antonio Gramsci on content and form, and the theory of form described by Henri Focillon, through to texts by writers of the Négritude movement, including Édouard Glissant’s poetics of Relation. A unifying thread that is registered through four chapters of this thesis is the emergence of a ‘creaturely form’ which is analysed through the lens of Foucauldian biopolitics as discussed by the theorist Eric L. Santner and the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

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