Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988)Ìý(Verso, 2022) explores the work of artists, architects and designers who participated in two social movements, Operaismo (aka Workerism) and Autonomia, active in Italy between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Based on extensive archival research, the book aims to demonstrate how the politics of both the Operaismo and Autonomia movements also developed as a complex cultural trend involving an aesthetic discourse, an iconography, an epistemology and a theory of culture.
Its author,ÌýJacopo Galimberti, will present the book, which will be followed by a discussion with Malcolm Bull and Marina Vishmidt on the main theses of the volume, as well as its implications for a crucial issue of the present time: the virtual absence of the notion of “social class” from the art-historical discourse on contemporary art. The discussion will be moderated by Klara Kemp-Welch.Ìý
JacopoÌýGalimbertiÌýis an art historian and assistant professor (with tenure track) at IUAV (Venice). His articles have appeared in journals such asÌýArt History,ÌýThe Art Bulletin,ÌýThe Oxford Art JournalÌýandÌýGrey Room. He is the author ofÌýImages of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988)Ìý(Verso Books, 2022),ÌýIndividuals against Individualism. Western European Art Collectives (1956–1969)Ìý(Liverpool University Press, 2017),ÌýDétournement & Kitsch.ÌýDie Postkarten von Hans Peter Zimmer/Les cartes postales de Hans Peter ZimmerÌý(Les Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, 2021), and ofÌýLucio Fontana e l’artventure pariginaÌý(Scalendi, 2014)Ìý(written with Silvia Bignami). He is one of the editors ofÌýArt, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural RevolutionÌý(Manchester, 2020).
Malcolm BullÌýisÌýProfessor Emeritus of Art and the History of Ideas at Oxford and the author ofÌýOn MercyÌý(Princeton, 2019),ÌýInventing Falsehood, Making TruthÌý(Princeton, 2013),ÌýAnti-NietzscheÌý(Verso, 2011),ÌýThe Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance ArtÌý(OUP/Penguin, 2005),ÌýSeeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and TotalityÌý(Verso, 2000). He is working on a collection of essays about modernism and capitalism.
Marina VishmidtÌýis a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared inÌýSouth Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies,ÌýMousse, andÌýRadical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author ofÌýReproducing AutonomyÌý(with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author ofÌýSpeculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art andÌýCapitalÌý(Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). In 2022, she was the Rudolph Arnheim Visiting Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and will take up a fellowship at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies, 2023-24.ÌýHer research has been funded by the DAAD, the European Social Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.
Organised byÌýSarah Wilson (The Courtauld).Ìý
