Pluralism as Revisionism: Annitrenta at Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1982

Denis Viva’s “Pluralism as Revisionism: Annitrenta at Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1982” will contextualize the controversial Annitrenta exhibition of Italian art of the Fascist era. This exhibition was mounted during the so-called “riflusso” (a tendency toward individualism and disengagement prevalent in Italian society during the Eighties). Seen as an attempt to legitimize this tendency, Annitrenta was fiercely criticized by its detractors as a regressive revision of Italian history. Viva analyzes the exhibition’s most divisive aspect: its avoidance of postwar strategies to distance Fascist art, neither adopting a “neutral” formalist approach (as Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti did in his Arte moderna in Italia in 1967), nor a Marxist-critical one (as a conference titled Arte e Fascismo in Italia e in Germania tried to do in 1973). The exhibition’s curator, Renato Barilli, introduced a perturbing double-edged method: on the one hand, he revisited the arts of the Ventennio through the de-ideologized mapping of the Thirties, presenting an “ethnographic” exhibition which aimed at documenting the painting, design, fashion, music and atmosphere of that decade, while on the other he legitimized his methodology by invoking the concept of pluralism, which promised an inclusive, detached approach to the Fascist period. Viva links this call for heterogeneity and non-hierarchical history to the Italian politics of pluralism in the Eighties as a way to address fragmentation, social conflicts and political radicalisms. Reconstructing the peculiar approach and polemical reception of Annitrenta, Viva tries to understand how its attempt to overcome the divisions concerning the memory of Fascist past has in turn become a divisive spectacularization.