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Massimo Fagioli has left us
Massimo Fagioli, the psychiatrist of Collective Analysis, who passed away this morning at the age of 85, dedicated his entire life to researching the birth and origins of human thought. Human life has a beginning and an end, he said. Massimo Fagioli, the psychiatrist of Collective Analysis, who passed away this morning at the age of 85 in Rome, dedicated his entire life to researching the birth and origins of human thought. Fagioli was born in Monte Giberto in 1931, in the province of Ascoli Piceno. The author of 23 books, he is best known for "Death Instinct and Knowledge," his theoretical masterpiece, written in 1970. Tens of thousands of copies of his work have been published and translated into many languages. It encompasses the fundamental discoveries of the Theory of Birth, with which the psychiatrist fundamentally revolutionized knowledge of the human mind, beginning with the discovery of the biological origin of the unconscious. On Saturday, February 18, starting at 10:00 a.m., a tribute to Massimo Fagioli will be held at Via Roma Libera 23 in Trastevere, where for forty-one years he held his Analisi collettiva seminars, highly original, one-of-a-kind group psychotherapy sessions, offered free of charge and without distinction to thousands of people. The Left website, the magazine for which the psychiatrist has edited the "Transformation" column since 2006, also dedicates a lengthy tribute to Fagioli. A physician specializing in neuropsychiatry in Modena, Fagioli graduated from the University of Rome with a degree in Medicine and Surgery. He pursued this study out of a need to understand the human psyche, a pursuit he began in his teens, after serving as a boy in the Marche region alongside partisans in the Resistance War, and his father, a field doctor. He arrives in Venice, at the ancient asylum on the island of San Clemente, where he has his first contact with the chronically ill, the white wards, and the electroshock treatments. In the library's old medical records, he discovers that two words prevail in descriptions of the mentally ill: "stulid, emotionless." From the anguished practices of nineteenth-century psychiatry, which sought answers in slides of brain sections, Fagioli then moved to the psychiatric hospital in Padua. Here, the practice of a sophisticated clinic and the approach to serious illnesses using methods that were cutting-edge for the time, including insulin therapy, provided the opportunity to conduct his first experiences of active psychiatry with groups of patients, whom the young doctor was able to take out for walks in the city, "breaking down" the walls of the asylum. In the early 1960s, Fagioli's research into the causes of mental illness shifted to the unconscious, taking him to Binswanger's Bellevue Clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, where he ran the Italian-speaking therapeutic community, living day and night with the patients without mediation. Only after a long personal analysis and about ten years as an analyst with a medical practice of individual therapy, in 1971 he proposed to scientific circles the results of his experiences and his training in the book Death Instinct and Knowledge, written in 1970, published in a new edition by L'asino d'oro in 2010 and subsequently also in German, forty years later, in 2011, by the publisher Stroemfeld (Todestrieb und Erkenntnis). The book contains the foundations of the Theory of Birth, according to which human thought begins at birth with the reaction to light, through the retina, of the newborn's body: discoveries later developed in The Marionette and the Burattino and Theory of Birth and Human Castration, of 1974, published between the end of the same year and 1975. Since 1975 Fagioli has responded to the demand for psychotherapy from hundreds of people and has trained, first at the Institute of Psychiatry of the University of Rome La Sapienza and then in a very large private practice in Trastevere (1980), the seminars of Collective Analysis, a treatment practice for the healing of mental illness, based on the interpretation of dreams, which continues as research on human reality and its evolution. His fourth volume of interviews, Bambino donna e trasformazione dell'uomo, was published in 1979. Fagioli continued to develop and deepen the theoretical foundations of 1970-74 in a series of other writings on psychiatry and through free expressions in the artistic field. In 1997 he directed Il cielo della luna (The Moonlight), followed by Me'lange (1999) and La psichiatria, esiste? (Does Psychiatry Exist?) (2002). The psychiatry and psychotherapy journal Il sogno della farfalla (The Butterfly's Dream), which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in 2012, refers to his theoretical work and practice. In addition to the fundamental volumes on the Theory of Birth (Death Instinct and Knowledge, The Marionette and the Puppet, The Theory of Birth and Human Castration, Child, Woman and the Transformation of Man), his other titles are: Storia di una ricerca (Lezioni 2002), Una vita irrazionale (Lezioni 2006), Das Unbewusste. The Unknowable (Lectures 2003), Disappearance Fantasy (Lectures 2007), Left 2006, Left 2007, New Thought (Lectures 2004), Left 2008, The Man in the Courtyard (Lectures 2005), Left 2009, Seventh Year (Lectures 2008), Left 2010, Religion, Reason and Freedom (Lectures 2009), Left 2011, The Idea of Human Birth (Lectures 2010) and Left 2012
Women and Art - Tracey Emin
1963 in London, England: lives and works in London. More legends have probably sprung up around Tracey Emin than around any other artist who emerged on the scene in the 1990s under the Young British Art label. Stories of her school dropout, precarious jobs, wild sex life, and all the attendant traumas—such as losing her virginity at 13 in what was effectively a rape—appeared everywhere, not just in art magazines. Readers and viewers were informed of stillbirths, alcohol abuse, and scandalous television appearances. These tales of lust and pain were fueled by Tracey Emin's own art, a merciless exploitation of her own biography, whose seemingly exhibitionistic immediacy can be shocking. The viewer becomes an unwitting voyeur who can satisfy their desire for the sensational in a way otherwise only afforded by the mass media; But Tracey Emin can also provide something that the mass media cannot, as a closer examination of her art reveals a poetic and precisely defined world, evidently authentic, capable of projecting a person into their own life and problems. The individual and the universal, the intimate and the public, are continually intertwined in Tracey Emin's work. Within this force field, the artist manages to engage in a compelling discourse on emotions and desires that encourages the viewer and their aspirations to return to the otherwise arid, academic, and "reified" world of art. It is precisely here that the political aspect of Tracey Emin's art lies. The way in which certain events in her biography are connected to the experience, memory, and current concerns of the community is revealed in Everyone I Have Ever Slept With From 1963-1995. Tracey Emin covered the inside walls of a small igloo tent with colorful cut-out letters that spelled out the names of those who had shared her bed over the years.
Women and art - Frida Kahlo
Frida Kahlo 1907 - 1954 in Coyocán, Mexico Frida Kahlo succeeded in creating a universally understandable visual language that combines naive art, realism, and surrealism. The oeuvre of this internationally renowned Mexican artist, born in 1907, includes over 200 paintings, mostly small-format self-portraits. These, like her still lifes and animal portraits, reveal remarkable expressive power and scrupulous attention to detail. Her works are often a harrowing testimony to her physical and mental suffering and reveal a disconcerting immediacy that makes them unforgettable. As a child, Frida Kahlo was bedridden for nine months due to polio, which left her with a severe foot deformity. At 18, she was involved in a car accident. The bus she was riding on collided with a tram, and Kahlo was impaled by a metal pole, fracturing her spine, pelvis, and legs. She remained hospitalized for a month and was then forced to wear a cast for another nine months. During her time in the hospital, Kahlo began to draw and paint—first the accident, then herself. Her first self-portrait, dating back to 1926, depicts her in a heroic pose. Many others followed, of which she later said she painted herself because, spending so much time alone, it was the subject she knew best. Her life was a constant struggle against death, a cruel fate to which she never resigned herself, but which was a hard test for her. Although Frida Kahlo was in contact with the Parisian surrealists (especially André Breton ) and although many critics considered her a surrealist, she stated, "I didn't know I was a surrealist until André Breton came to Mexico and told me." However, she never accepted this definition. "I never painted dreams. What I portrayed was my reality." Her paintings are internal images of external reality. Although her art is based on elements of her biography, the viewer can understand and interpret its themes, forms, patterns, and symbols. The irreducible candor and immediacy with which she faces her destiny in works that manage to make her anguish tangible move the viewer. And, despite the difference she speaks of, her images are always linked to broader, more universal motifs. (Ulrike Lehmann)
Women and art - Louise Bourgeois
1911 in Paris – New York, May 31, 2010: she was a French sculptor and artist, she lived in New York A narrow corridor leads to a polygonal room whose pattern-like walls are made of doors. Inside is a dense conglomeration of large red and light blue spools on stands, spiraling objects and colorless glass body fragments, two small suitcases, a kerosene lamp, and two bottles filled with coins; a red ladder leans against the wall, and a teardrop-shaped object dangles from one of the spool holders. In one of the doors is a window behind which the word " private " is written in worn letters. The dense atmosphere of Louise Bourgeois's Red Room ( Child ), 1994, is created by the hauntingly enigmatic logic of found objects and artifacts and the informally intangible structures of the luminous red glass spools. Red Room contains many of the motifs and metaphors explored by Louise Bourgeois for decades: the claustrophobic room evoking a hiding place or the inside of the body, parts of Surrealist objects resembling organs, a ladder too short to allow escape from the room, and spools of thread recalling the artist's childhood. The sign reading " private " suggests that it is a place of personal reminiscence and that working with autobiographical elements represents a central process in the artist's creative work. Louise Bourgeois's work, in which the mastery of a formal sculptural vocabulary is inextricably linked to a complex and codified content, has remained open to the projections of her critics, while simultaneously fostering biographical interpretation through numerous verbal and written statements. Thus, the construction of memory becomes a central motif in her work. Louise Bourgeois's family ran a workshop restoring antique tapestries in the French town of Choisy-le-Roi. Recognizing her talent, her parents entrusted her with drawing missing sections in tapestries and creating repair cartoons. Bourgeois then studied mathematics at the Sorbonne. From the mid-1930s, she attended various art schools, eventually landing at Fernand Léger . She married the American art historian Robert Goldwater and in 1938 moved to New York, where she continued her art studies until 1940 at the Art Students League, after which she began painting. One of her first groups of works was Femmes Maison , female figures whose bodies were partly made of a house, a reference to women's social status and their assignment to the domestic territory. Bourgeois explored the same theme in sculpture. From the mid-1940s, she created the so-called Personages , stele-like figures evoking totemic artifacts from tribal cultures, while in the 1950s she created a series of anthropomorphic sculptures consisting of similar elements mounted on a rod, depicting not only objects reminiscent of Brancusi's sculpture, but also minimalist serial principles like those found in the early works of Carl Andre. In the following years, Louise Bourgeois experimented with unusual materials such as latex, rubber, plaster, and concrete. In the early 1960s, she further developed her domestic theme with Lairs - forms fluid , spiral or labyrinthine that typically open onto an empty interior space. Like Lairs , also Her delicate landscapes follow the principles of an organic, anti-formalist approach. An almost fleshy materiality makes latex works like Double Negative , 1963, resemble visceral landscapes in which the interior seems to have been turned inside out. Mushroom-like spherical forms sprout from fluid bases, making unambiguous identification impossible and suggesting instead the multiple breasts of the Artemis of Ephesus, or phallic forms. Like many of Louise Bourgeois's sexually suggestive forms, these are not clearly "male" or "female." Even Filette (Child), 1968—a large phallus made of tin cans with which Louise Bourgeois was photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in 1982 in a charmingly provocative pose—hypertrophies the phallic shape in addition to the rotund one.
Marina Abramovic, «The Space in Between»
Marina Abramovic, «The Space in Between» Spiritual Journey to Brazil The Images The Serbian artist traveled to the South American country to explore the relationship between creativity and spirituality, an emotional journey filled with surprising encounters and revelations. I'm in Abadiânia. This is my room. This is the bed where I'll sleep for a while. I came to Brazil in search of "places of power" and people with a certain kind of energy. By "places of power," I mean waterfalls, trees, landscapes, rivers, plants, birds, insects. Where the sky is vast and full of clouds. Where when the rain suddenly comes, it immediately stops. Where you can breathe deeply. And when I say people with a certain kind of energy, I'm referring to those who have actually learned to draw energy from both within and without, to transform that energy and develop it in those who cannot do so. During her trip to Brazil, Marina Abramovic kept a diary in which she detailed her experiences. The artist's impressions of Abadiânia, where she met the medium João de Deus, reveal a profound process of discovery.
Women and Art - Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft 1969 Genoa, Italy: lives and works in New York (NY), USA Vanessa Beecroft "paints" three-dimensional group and individual portraits, featuring real girls and women. They occupy a specific space for a specific period of time; they are dressed, usually scantily, by the artist; they often wear wigs and never come into contact with the audience. The result is a strangely cold, mysterious atmosphere, which makes the viewer feel as out of place as the girls themselves, who barely move and seem simply waiting for something. "I'm interested in the relationship between human figures as real women and their function as artworks and images," the artist explains. Vanessa Beecroft 's art is difficult to classify. Are they performances or " living sculptures ," like those of the English Gilbert & George, or a modern form of portraiture, or psychological still lifes composed with living subjects? The question remains open. In one of her first exhibitions, in Cologne in 1994, Vanessa Beecroft presented 30 girls in a showroom to which the public had no access. The event was visible only through a rectangular window that gave the impression of peering through a peephole. The girls all had similar, non-athletic figures and wore black shoes and knee-highs, gray underwear, and black or gray T-shirts. Their uniform clothing created a striking visual composition in the space and was complemented by yellow wigs, some with braids, some without. Some girls were seated, seemingly sulking, others were leaning against the walls, still others were pacing slowly back and forth. None of them seemed to really expect anything to happen—instead of an action-packed lapse of time, there was only a dull duration. The title of the work was telling: A Blonde Dream . The event, conceived to be held in a gallery in Germany, explicitly alluded to the cliché of "Aryan beauty" widespread during the Third Reich.
Women and Art - Ghada Amer
Ghada Amer 1963 in Cairo, Egypt; lives in Paris, France and New York (NY) USA Ghada Amer doesn't create her paintings with paintbrushes and colors, but with needle and thread, which she uses to create dense surfaces reminiscent of the paintings of Brice Marden , Alberto Giacometti , and Cy Twombly . Yet despite their superficial material similarity, the images actually depict lascivious, perhaps even pornographic, female figures, which gradually reveal themselves as the viewer studies the intricate, carefully constructed, and powerfully dramatic surface. An immaterial phenomenon that suddenly takes on a physical presence. The figures multiply on the canvas, doubling, tripling, quadrupling; legs spread, the triangles of their pubic hair depicted in rainbow colors, as if a "typically feminine" pastime were literally playing with itself. An endless chain of women masturbating, veiled in a mass of cotton and long dangling threads, attempting to avoid the viewer's prying and curious gaze. Born in Egypt, Amer studied painting and sculpture in France and chose to settle in Paris. Her work denounces the Western vision of women, reduced to sexual objects. Gradually, subtly, and insidiously, the artist challenges conventional images of men and women. The effectiveness of her works depends in part on their ambivalence: looking at them, one wonders whether they are intended for voyeuristic pleasure or simply to frustrate the viewer's expectations. The artist's first works, created in the early 1990s, were inspired by the dress patterns included in women's magazines. Her interest lay in their a priori role model, the stereotype we unconsciously take for granted. The unconscious is notoriously obscure: how can we represent its workings? This is a question to which the Arab-French artist provides a striking answer, producing serial pornographic scenes that challenge the dominant male logic by opposing it with his own reflection. Her imagery (artistic repertoire) satisfies the criteria of transparency and immediacy achieved through effective psychoanalysis.
Women and Art - Marina Abramovic
Marina Abramovic 1946 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia: lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands When Marina Abramovic and her partner Ulay arrived in the Chinese city of Er Lag Shan on June 27, 1988, they had traveled 2,000 kilometers—the entire length of the Great Wall —in 90 days for this meeting at the edge of the world. It was also their last collaborative work as artists and as a couple. With this performance, titled The Lovers , Abramovic and Ulay transformed the personal experience of the end of their shared journey into a simple performance staged in a real geographical location. They had walked toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall only to separate again, forever. Interpreted as a geometry of love, the painful separation of their biographies appears as an inevitable result of a law of life. Since 1976, Abramovic and Ulay had collaborated on works in which their symbolic relationship was assumed as the basis of existential experiences: in the performance Breaking In/Breaking Out (1977), with their nostrils blocked by cigarette butts, they exchanged breath until they ran out of oxygen; in Interruption Space (1977), they took a run-up to repeatedly crash into a wall until they were exhausted; in Light/Dark (1977), they slapped each other until one of them stopped. The aim of these exercises was to subject the body to extreme physical states and test its limits. The audience's reaction was a key component of this physical self-experience, whether in the form of mental attention or concrete intervention, as in the case of the performance Incision (1978), during which Abramovic was attacked by a spectator. For the Nightsea Crossing performance series, 1981–86, however, the participants were carefully selected. Marina Abramovic was primarily interested in the intersection of political and individual history, so she and Ulay used their shared birthday as the occasion for a performance— Communist Body—Fascist Body . On November 30, 1979, they invited some friends to their apartment to celebrate; the guests found Abramovic and Ulay lying on a mattress, sleeping or pretending to be asleep, with two tables set beside them, set with dishes, champagne, and caviar from their respective countries of origin. The performance illustrated the details of two biographies unwittingly marked by a dictatorship: Marina's birth certificate bore an official stamp with a red star, Ulay's with a swastika.
INVESTING IN CONTEMPORARY ART - How to orient yourself when purchasing
How to orient yourself in purchasing To purchase a work of art it is essential to follow a few simple rules: Knowing the history of art ; Visit the most significant contemporary art museums and exhibitions; Visiting trendy galleries Read specialized magazines; Follow the auction catalogues proposed periodically carefully While these are general guidelines, it's clear that before venturing into the art market, you need to carefully establish a budget and base your choices on it. The amount allocated to art should never exceed 20% of your assets, and it's not necessarily necessary to have huge sums of money; contrary to popular belief, you can make excellent purchases starting from €2,000-3,000. A very common mistake is to be drawn solely to the artist's name. Every purchase must take quality into account and be fully aware of the artist's creative journey, since each painter expressed their best talents in a relatively limited period of their life. If they were successful, they behaved like replicants, endlessly repeating the same work. It's also important to understand that the same artist has a virtually limitless range of prices. In short, to make a good purchase, you need to be familiar with prices, have specific knowledge of the artist you're interested in, and, above all, buy from reputable sources. In summary, to make a good purchase you need to: Ensure the authenticity of the works ; Choose the artist based on your budget ; Know, at least in broad terms, the history of art ; Carefully analyze the artist's creative process ; Attend exhibitions, museums and specialized galleries ; Be careful with the subjects; Check auction prices carefully; Don't be fooled by the artist's high-sounding name ; Don't overlook artists who are considered minor or emerging young artists.