Thesis title: Rapporti fra arte e idee di natura, attraverso le immagini in movimento. Un percorso di fine Novecento
This work aims to study a segment of 20th-century art history (roughly its third thirty-year period) by choosing, as a key to understanding it, an analysis of the ideas of nature that run through it, focusing the study on the uses that art has made of technologies for the production of moving images.
The first chapter addresses the relationship between film and “nature”. The first part of the chapter deals with films made by artists in which the adoption of a perceptual paradigm, that of the figure/background relationship, is recognised, acknowledging it as fundamental to the human relationship with nature, while at the same time outlining the possibility of questioning it. The second part of the chapter deals with what has been decided to describe as “zero degrees of landscape”, meaning films in which only “landscape” appears, without the human figure.
The second chapter shifts the focus of the research to a series of cases involving the use of video as a medium, beginning with projects in which artists employ film and video in essentially similar ways. The analysis centres on artistic experiences in which video becomes a tool for reflecting on a reversal in the relationship between humans and “nature”. The analysis proceeds by considering artists who use video to construct forms of “otherness” with respect to nature, in relation to which human beings recognise themselves as “natural” entities, and artists (sometimes the same ones) who use video as an “extension” of natural human faculties. The chapter concludes with artists whose works use video as a tool to re-examine the cultural attributes historically associated with the female gender, first and foremost its identification and overlap with “Nature”.
The third chapter analyses the relationship between art and two phenomena that are essential to contemporary history: the first manifestations of the idea of a global “network” and images of the Earth taken by satellites and space missions. These premises outline an idea of interconnection in two different senses: that of all forms of life, including human life, with the ecosystem on a global scale, and that made possible by the global communication network.