GRUPPO N

Introduction: Kinetic Art (Group T, Group N) Group 1, Art Program

In 1961, in a world where there were different opinions about abstract art, concrete art, expressionist art and figuration, a few exhibitions were held in Zagreb as meeting among artists of different nationalities, both geographical and artistic, looking for something new.
It was born then the kinetic art, in part due to observations of a psychological nature, includes: "moving objects" (Alexander Calder, Bruno Munari), experiments using "perceptual tricks" (Victor Vasarely, Group T (T as for time), Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi and later Grazia Varisco), Group N (Alberto Biasi , Edoardo Landi, Toni Costa, Ennio Chiggio, Manfredo Massironi), where the movement is given by the displacement of the spectator and "move objects that are left " or better, buying special features (Munari, Mari) due to external intervention.
Among the protagonists of this, it will become a European artistic movement, we have again: Julio Tinguely, Pol Bury, Jean Le Parc, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Kosuth, the Zero group in Düsseldorf and that of GRAV (Groupe de recherche d'art visuel ) who was born in Paris in July 1960.
It is in Rome at the same time, brings together disparate elements of the Group A gestalt approach. The artists who made it up, they intended to carry out operations group producing works that enrich "the alphabet formal knowledge through the rational control ". They were looking for signs that represent the symbols of their lives, with their geometry capable of creating a new language "historical ". There were among them Biggi, Carrino, Frascati, Pace and Uncini.
Since that moment it will be born in Italy the Art Program, term coined by its most valuable member Bruno Munari, who presents with Giorgio Soavi in Milan at Olivetti store in may1962 an exibition called "Art Program" designed to move in Rome and Venice. The Group T, the Group N, Enzo Mari, Munari, Getullio Alviani and the Groupe de recherche d'art visual expose. The catalog is written by Umberto Eco who will explain the purpose. "The artwork may not be unique, Munari said, but efforts should be made with the serial to give more people the opportunity to own a work of art even when played back ".

History of Group N

Group N was born in 1959 in Padua as a loose association called exactly N. In the early '60s, the nine original members become only five: Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi, Manfredo Massironi. The programmatic aspect of the group emerges in the same year, especially with the help of theoretical by Massironi and Biasi.
In the Manifesto of the Group N, Padova, September 1961, we read: "The word-year-old stands a group of "experimental designs" united by the need to look collectively. The Group is confident that the rationalism and tachisme are over, that informal and all expressions are unnecessary subjectivity".
Explicit is the poetic declaration made in 1961 at the XII Prize Lissone: "The word-year-old stands a group of "experimental designs" united by the need to seek together".
The artists in the group recognize new materials and machinery, the expressive means of the "new art" in which there can be no separation between architecture, painting, sculpture and industrial product. The Group N research focuses on visual and kinetic, attached to the psychology of perception, aimed at creating objects and environments that involve the viewer.
It was present in 1962 at the exhibition "Arts Programme", it was already protagonist of this aesthetic experiment that in those years provided new fields of investigation to the visual research, the training in Padua radicalized the concept of teamwork rejecting the principle of authorship. Characterized by a strong ethical policy and regulations and a tendency to self brave, between 1960 and 1965, the group is marked by divisions, shifts, breaks. The five members, from left to do a mental and performing, followed by the production of works with poor material, then kinetic objects, kinetic and programmed and interactive environments, to create works that create a continued instability and provide perceptive, Giulio Carlo Argan writes "image pulse, signs which lead to a constructive and orderly conduct of the imagination".
The history of the Padua group follows the same general pattern of the most important groups of kinetic and programmed art, whose experience draws to a close by 1966, not for ideological reasons, but for issues relating to the requirement and the complexity and difficulty same collective research.
Umbro Apollonio wrote in 1967: "One thing is certain: the Group N appears between the plastic work of a new trend of more responsibly engaged in setting their research in anticipation of a post in the active configuration and Fruit of the world today. It rejects any operation that can not serve in a more or less close, the company, plus it can be used as a decoration applied: thus the fighting as an aesthetic sham. In this connection account shall make clear, however, that the rebellion is not against the aesthetic component as such, because you do not think at all not to research, treatment of transactions that still turn to the field of art and not that of science, though This is exploiting some suggestions. The rejection is that aestheticism, then get busy because the object is more beautiful than meaningful, more impressive, productive now many of those who have adopted the ways of cine visual not provide other products that formally unexceptionable, but pure enjoyment Optical. The problem is rather how to bring the visual structures with precise meanings and then to specific uses. In this respect, the Group N has directed his research on phenomena related to the "Gestaltpsychologie" and [...] there has always been the explicit theme of a space-time just to recover from living human sociality and that we are active and so that our being and life continues into reality, even mail from us, this did not feel as strangers or not this feeling more alien or not taking as it existed prior to our temporality, but representing it as a continuous experimentation".
Volker W. Feierabend instead provides a position of substantial disagreement with a political reading of the matter: "The Italian kinetic art was, indeed, revolutionary artistic expression of intent, but it was not art of the revolution. The attempt to politically charged works kinetics is doomed to fail from the outset, given the explicit content-neutrality of their offer aesthetic and perceptual".
Lucilla Meloni suggests: "the strong ethical tension that runs through the group experience, which was submitted by its members to a continuous self-criticism which indicated limits, difficulties and contradictions, is one of the things that makes it so important to the history of the Paduan group, all 'within which, in the unfolding of this dialectic, ethics and criticism meet.
The thread that links the different experiences marked by the production of kinetic visual objects is the underlying substrate, the same who had held the group while attending the twelfth Lissone award, 1961: "(...) their objects and paintings studies born of experience difficult to categorize, because outside of all persuasions 'Art' (...) refuse the individual as a determining factor in the history of the experience of actively and every perfection that does not spring from a harmless need to ‘regular’ ... reject any religious, moral and political fetishism. They defend an ethic of collective life (?)". Sentences that contain an undeniable and inescapable position to want to be involved in things, in the company, running the risk of interception all its contradictions and idiosyncrasies.
For more information visit the section dedicated to Alberto Biasi, Manfredo Massironi, Edoardo Landi, Toni Costa and Ennio Chiggio, clicking: Alberto Biasi, Manfredo Massironi, Edoardo Landi, Toni Costa and Ennio Chiggio