Art, Science, and the Politics of Knowledge

Abstract

war, Italy had turned rapidly into a highly capitalist country, but one with a strong leftist sensibility (hence the quite exceptional stance of the country in the Cold War era) and an important Communist Party—a very “glocalised” one, however, that is, a party that did not blindly follow Moscow’s orders. At the same time, the Italian PC had to make so many compromises that it was soon no longer capable to channel the countercultural and new revolutionary tendencies that emerged in the 60s and further developed in the 70s. Caplan analyzes the position as well as the transformations of Arte Programmata considering this political context, including the way in which the art and technology debate was framed in its relationships to other fields (industry, design, daily life, politics). The book offers, for instance, outstanding new readings of Umberto Eco’s work on the “open work,” the debates on information and cybernetics, and the rapid growth of computer art. This double focus—the internal reflection of freedom versus control in the works and writings themselves, but also in the reactions of the audience and the larger debates that followed; the external comparison with the ideas on freedom versus control in the already very globalized art and science environment—fosters a good understanding of the life and afterlife of Arte Programmata, with for instance a very relevant interpretation of why the group shifted from art to design around 1970 and how this apparent retreat from the art world was the logical prerequisite of a stronger involvement with the political and ideological ambitions of Arte Programmata. Caplan’s book is thus a very welcome contribution to the history of a lesser-known avant-garde and the reflection on the importance of these historical debates for our current thinking on vital notions, such as for instance the “system” as a form of agency and empowerment or as a form of domination. On the one hand, it fills an important historical gap, given that Arte Programmata is quite different from the countercultural 60s as we tend to imagine it, while also underlining the problems of a uniformly structured history that easily tends to become purely global, that is Americanized. On the other hand, it insists on the impossibility of separating art and society—more precisely, art and politics—including politics in the very practical sense of the term, having to do with concrete interventions in the public and individual sphere.