Greenberg and Tronti: Being Really Outside?

<p>There are two short works that date back to the late 1960s that should be reread and approached today. The extreme encounter that I would like to address as an artist is that between Clement Greenberg, the most famous American art critic, and Mario Tronti, the most radical Italian political philosopher.</p> <p>I thus put two works together on my table: “Recentness of Sculpture” by Greenberg, from the 1967 <em>American Sculpture of the Sixties</em> catalog (with its original silver cover), and “Lotta contro il lavoro!” by Mario Tronti, from his famous book <em>Operai e capitale</em>, published in Turin in 1966. I believe that this encounter at a distance is one of the highest points that can be conceived today in terms of a discussion about art and politics. Both are animated by the same concern: not being able to think about the inconceivable adequately. For Tronti the defeat of the workers, for Greenberg design, middlebrow culture: poison for art. Today, Greenberg’s dissatisfaction appears like a ghost within the smoldering ruins of his modernism. Just as the intransigent “criticism of the present state of things” is what remains outdated in the fortunate topicality of <em>Operai e capitale</em>. They present themselves as two real legacies, two positions about the modern that pose us questions, due to an unprecedented emergency. Never had there been such an organic totality as this, says Tronti. The modern has by now been entirely occupied by capitalism. No empire or church ever reached this level. A world that has become one is not free. In the 1960s, Manfredo Tafuri, a discerning reader of Tronti, started one of the most important oppositions to modernism from this radical “criticism of ideology.”…</p>