Se la tv è un white cube. Trasmissioni dell’arte nella televisione italiana degli anni Novanta
During the 1990s, artists, critics, animators and tv authors saw the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between their respective areas of expertise. This relationship between art and television, however, took place under the banner of a reciprocal rethinking of the two entities: in some cases the medium conditioned artists to the point of inducing them to define specific operating methods or to transform their own works, in others, on the other hand, it was the transmission of the works themselves that “reinvented the medium”. The performative incursions carried out by the duo Formento Sossella and Arpiani Pagliarini for popular programmes such as Blob, Forum and Uomini e Donne are indicative of a thinning between reality and fiction that is typical of the television world and that, not by chance, also affects a good part of Italian art of the decade. The broadcast on Rai Tre of shows such as Prima Puntata and Arte Video TV in the mid-1990s attests to the unexpected possibility of redefining television as a sort of artistic installation connected to specific exhibition occasions. The activity of Leonardo Carrano for L’Angelo (Fininvest) and the collaboration between Paolo Canevari and Alberto D’Amico in the context of Blobcartoon (Rai Tre) are two interesting cases of semantic shift of the work and the dissolution of its unity within the new visual paradigms. The contribution examines these experiences verifying each time their respective implications.