Opening on 4 May at 18.00 at Galleria P420 (Piazza dei Martiri 5/2, Bologna) Lumpenfotografie. Towards a photography without vainglory is a group show on the artists Hans-Peter Feldmann (Düsseldorf, 1941), Peter Piller (Fritzlar, 1968), Alessandra Spranzi (Milan, 1962), Joachim Schmid (Balingen, 1955) and Franco Vaccari (Modena, 1936). Curated by Simone Menegoi, the exhibition brings together authors from different generations who investigate the linguistic codes of photography and its social dimension, making use of the appropriation of images of others and forms of presentation such as the series, the catalogue, the archive.
 
The term comes from Franco Vaccari, Lumpenfotografie (literally “ragged photography”), based on Marx’s famous definition of the Lumpenproletariat.
Marx defined “lumpenproletariat” as a social group formed by the “outcasts of all classes”: an underworld that lives by its wits, utterly lacking in class consciousness. Transforming Marx’s socio-political category into an aesthetic distinction, Vaccari has spoken of “lumpenfotografie” with respect to the work of the German artist Joachim Schmid, who for three decades has gathered, selected and exhibited work that is not, and does not claim to be, “art” photography: pictures from newspapers, amateur snapshots, ID photos, pornography, the illustrations in manuals… A motley and anarchical mass, lacking in the aesthetic awareness (and linguistic self-awareness) typical of “art” photography, and therefore constitutes the photographic counterpart of Marx’s “lumpen”.
Vaccari’s formulation suggested the idea of putting together several artists who have made “lumpenfotografie” the object (and often the very material) of their work: Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Piller, Alessandra Spranzi, Joachim Schmid and Vaccari himself. Among the exhibited works: the small self-produced publications in which Feldmann, already towards the end of the 1960s, presented selections of banal images, organized by subject; some items from the archives of Piller, an impressive collection of the widest range of types of images found in newspapers; a selection from Bilder von der Straße of Schmid, a collection spanning three decades of photographs found by the artist in the street; the prints of the Vendesi series by Spranzi, whose subjects are the technically shoddy images, though at times of unintentional charm, of the objects put up for sale in want-ad magazines; and, finally, some panels from the Fotomatic d’Italia series (1972) by Vaccari, on which the Italian artist has gathered and catalogued the ID photos sent to him by people who wanted to participate in a fictitious casting call.
The approach of these artists to their object of study is far from uniform: it wavers between analytical detachment and irony, between the cold, cataloguing methods of Conceptual Art and a perceptible aesthetic attraction. In any case, in these artists we do not seem to see any haughty intellectual disdain for the images they use or for the anonymous photographers who made the pictures. Along different paths, they all seem to have reached the same conclusions of a countryman of Vaccari, the writer Ermanno Cavazzoni: the back cover of one of his books (which the style would lead us to believe was prepared by the author himself) points to “a serene way of writing, without vainglory”, in the awareness that “even intelligence and its pretensions are part of that universal idiocy that accompanies the human race from birth to death and, perhaps, beyond” (Vite brevi di idioti, 1994).

Curated by Valerio Dehò
 
The exhibition is organized by:
Galleria Michela Rizzo, Venice
Galleria P420, Bologna
Vito Acconci / Acconci Studio, New York
 
Vito Acconci (1940) and Franco Vaccari (1936) are two of the leading exponents of the contemporary avant-gardes, artists whom without ever repeating themselves, without ever following trends, have managed to remain consistent in their experimentation, establishing a personal form of artistic practice without failing to sustain it with appropriate theoretical awareness. They have been brought together for the first time in a major exhibition that traces back through the most important phases of their work, from the start of their careers to the present, generating a comparative overview that respects rightful distances while revealing shared elements of their paths of research. Though the two artists have never been in direct contact, they have developed a parallel albeit diversified line of reasoning that includes visual poetry, performances, photography, film and video. Since the mid-1970s both have experimented with Visual Poetry, taking their distance from the most widespread forms of poetic representation of their time. In that decade, the two artists also focus on direct engagement with the audience. Acconci does this through his famous performances connected with the dimension of the body, almost exclusively in small rooms or cells, reduced spatial zones in which to represent private action. His work takes on the characteristics of risk and suffering, gradually engaging completely in behavioral actions that disconcert his audience. One good example, in this sense, is the performance Seedbed, at the Sonnabend Gallery in New York in 1972, in which the artist masturbated under the gallery floor, where the public could maybe hear what he was doing, without seeing him. That same year Franco Vaccari presented, at the Venice Biennale, “Exhibition in Real Time n.4, leave a Photographic Trace of Your Passage”: in an automatic photo booth installed in his solo room of the pavilion, visitors could take ID photos, and then hang them on the walls, which otherwise bore only the messages, in four languages, encouraging the audience to become part of the work. Towards the middle of the 1970s Acconci stopped doing performances and began to create spatial installations, though continuing to use his voice to create a sense of participation. In the 1980s his interest in space led to the founding of Acconci Studio, a group of architects joining him in interventions proposing projects of an environmental and architectural nature, analyzing the concept of the home and the context. Vaccari has also made certain works that reflect an interest in architecture. In the town of Bregenz, Austria, a museum of modern art was built, topped by the sign “Kunsthaus,” the “house of art”; in 1998 Franco Vaccari was invited there, for the exhibition “Art in the City.” Next to the entrance, he made a construction that was just the opposite of the enormous museum, in terms of materials, size and image. He placed a luminous sign on his small building, “Kunsthäuschen”, the “little house of art.” This exhibition has been produced with the direct collaboration of the artists and Studio Acconci and constitutes a long-distance dialogue between European and American art, a historical verification of theoretical assonances and of artistic opera- tions that still await appropriate historical analysis. The show has been created thanks to the collaboration of Galleria Michela Rizzo of Venice and Galleria p420 of Bologna.