On the occasion of the centenary of the birth of Vincenzo Agnetti (1926–1981) Osart Gallery presents Principia. Organised in collaboration with Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti, the exhibition focuses on the artist’s early years of production, when he sowed the seeds of the investigation into language that he would carry forward until the end of his life.

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Principia (1967) is considered by Agnetti his very first artwork. With it, he opened the phase in which he focused on artistic production. After a period of activity as an art critic, during which he was involved with the magazine Azimuth, and having returned from Argentina and from the years of “arte no”, during which he devoted himself to writing, in 1967 he settled permanently back in Italy. Principia marked a genuine moment of renewal; it is the title of a permutable logic device — as described by the artist —, and an (il)logical apparatus from which the gallery’s exhibition route ideally begins. It consists of a large wooden panel fitted with a rail that allows a second board to be superimposed: numerous words are stamped onto both surfaces, and their combinations change according to the action of whoever moves the cursor. Agnetti explains in his Rammentatore that the interchangeability of the juxtapositions demonstrates that “one word is as good as another, but all of them tend towards ambiguity.” Even in the final pages of his first novel, Obsoleto, published by Scheiwiller in 1968 as the first book of the series Denarratori, with a cover designed by Enrico Castellani, words tend to disappear and blur: Agnetti renders the last pages of the volume unreadable through manual intervention on the lead type.

Principia is based on possible interaction through the movement of the cursor. Its prototypes, Protopermutabile (1966) and the Permutabili, are based on wooden panels onto which still wooden strips are superimposed, demonstrating that everything, in the end, is equivalent and loses meaning. A similar work, made up of numbers and words, would later be presented again in all its pseudoscientific complexity at the end of the volume of Tesi, initially self-published in 1968 and then, with Prearo, in 1972. That year, a sort of permutable logic device was produced in a limited edition to accompany the volume.

The relationship between numbers and words, moreover, lies at the heart of Macchina drogata (1968), an Olivetti Divisumma 14 calculator whose numbers are replaced by letters: the calculator is a producer of autonomous works, a dysfunctional machine, an artwork in itself and a partly unpredictable author. On the first occasion on which Agnetti exhibited the Macchina drogata, visitors had the opportunity to print their own combinations of words within an evocative stage setting. What was thus produced, even though apparently meaningless, was described as a “support for intonation”, with a clear reference to the poetics of behavior that were pervading Italian artistic practice at the time: the public acted directly, becoming performer and author. The receipts issued directly from the Macchina drogata are part of Il deserto, in which they are juxtaposed with an image of the artist alongside Apocalisse, a work derived from the letter combinations produced by the device, as are Oltre il linguaggio [Beyond Language] and the Entropie.

The Macchina drogata is also the first work of Teatro statico [Static Theatre], a recurring notion in Agnetti’s work in the years that followed, aimed precisely at analysing the value of the gesture — only apparently insignificant — in relation to the word. The four canvases of Continua, too, on which are printed four critical texts published by Agnetti in the magazine “Domus” and titled Copia

dal vero numero primo [Copy from life first number] aim to make critical writing an artistic operation in its own right. The act of portraiture, suggested by the title, now concerns nothing other than the word itself, in a short circuit whereby the critical act and the artistic act seamlessly chase one another.

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Text by Sara Molho

Cover image: Vincenzo Agnetti, Principia, 1967 | Courtesy Osart Gallery | Ph. Bruno Bani

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