Costruzione dell’Universo. Artists’ Magazines and Publications After Marcel Duchamp – Donno Emanuele

COSTRUZIONE DELL’UNIVERSO: Artists’ Magazines and Publications after Marcel Duchamp is a research project that gathers artists’ magazines and publications by various artists who were active in the realm of “periodical and irregular” printed matter from the 1950s to the present day, beginning with of the work of the visionary artist Marcel Duchamp. This significant and hitherto overlooked sector of artistic production explores the dimension of the newspaper and magazine as an artistic medium. The selection includes extremely rare, a-periodic, and extraordinary printed items, “sensitive” publications in which the artist first handedly draws and designs the cover, the inner pages, the image sequence, or conceives the overall form of the object as a unique, yet replicable work. The publication in this context is sometimes transformed into an open and collective container, capable of engaging and coordinating multiple artists in the same layout or across different issues. The title “Construction of the Universe” points out to the fundamental and pioneering role of the early 20th-century avant-garde movement, referencing the 1915 Manifesto “Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe”, the notorious artistic manifesto that was initially released as a flyer and resembled newspaper layout. The 1950s (when our research for this book began) saw a significant rise of a utopian perspective in which artists, finally liberated from the existential weight of world conflicts, often envisioned the creation of a new society, free of relics and debris, made of travelling architectures and wide open spaces, new languages, and characterized by a deep longing for emptiness, a thrust toward the brightness of the future and the cosmos.