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 Sound UbuWeb |
Eugenio Miccini | Italy (1925-2007) Concerti di Poesia (1983) While many sound poetry albums may sound like a good idea in theory (especially if you've got a thing for flipped out vocalists) the reality of actually sitting with one is often as enticing as a dry hump with a hair shirt. That however is not the case here, or at least not with the jarringly odd A side (the flip side being a bit of a wash unless you get aroused by the idea of someone holding down the FF button on a cassette deck). Miccini was something like the grand old man of Visual Poetry in Italy during his life; an art practice that involved collapsing together words, figures, signs and symbols. A similar set of aesthetic collisions and elisions is in evidence here, as ancient tinny gramophones underpin increasingly hectic stereo-panned recitation en route to what sounds like armageddon in a clock making factory. -- Mutant Sounds Eugenio Miccini (1925 in Florence – 2007 in Florence) is considered to be one of the fathers of Italian visual poetry. Graduated in Pedagogy, in 1963 he founded together with poets, musicians and painters Gruppo '70, creating the Italian term "poesia visiva" (visual poetry). Visual poetry is an art research characterized by predominance of the image on the typographical text, aimed to obtain compositions where words and images, signs and figures, are integrated without solution of continuity on the semantic plane (Dizionario della lingua italiana Devoto-Oli, Le Monnier). In Italy the Sixties have been rich of activities of Gruppo 70, starting from two meetings organized in Florence in 1963, focusing on "Art and Communication" and in 1964 "Arte and Technology", where discussion touched on interdisciplinary, interactivity, this means those practices in the arts characterized by multicode or mixed-media operations, operations that could be classified as “total poetry”, this means realized with the most wide synesthesia, including in the performances sounds and noise, gestures and actions, various materials, newspaper and reviews, and also parfumes and food. Eugenio Miccini has collaborated as expert of semiotic matter to the Cathedra Strumenti e Tecniche della comunicazione visiva of the University of Florence (Architecture Faculty). He was teaching Contemporary Art History in the fine art academies of Verona e Ravenna. Miccini’s work is included in the Italian Treccani Encyclopedia and was object of doctoral research also at University La Sorbonne of Paris and at the University of Belgrade. He is included in anthologies and school books in Italy, such as Storia dell'Arte Italiana, by Carlo Bertelli, Giuliano Briganti, Antonio Giuliano, Electa - Bruno Mondadori. His works are in many public collections, among them: Biennale di Venezia, Museo della Pilotta of Parma, Museum of Modern Art of New York, Museum BWA of Dublin, and in the public galleries of Céret, Mantova, Bologna, Valencia, Anversa, Varsavia, Tokyo and others. He participated in the most important international exhibitions, such as: Biennale di Venezia (four times), Quadriennale of Rome (as commissar), Stedelijik Museum of Amsterdam, Palazzo Forti of Verona, Palazzo Vecchio of Florence, Museums of Marseille, GAM, Palazzo dei Diamanti of Ferrara. He published more than seventy books, art books and essays. He died in Florence on June 19, 2007. -- Wiki |