Images of Class. Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso, 2022) explores the work of artists, architects and designers who participated in two social movements, Operaismo (aka Workerism) and Autonomia, active in Italy between the early 1960s and the early 1980s. Based on extensive archival research, the book aims to demonstrate how the politics of both the Operaismo and Autonomia movements also developed as a complex cultural trend involving an aesthetic discourse, an iconography, an epistemology and a theory of culture.
Its author, Jacopo Galimberti, will present the book, which will be followed by a discussion with Malcolm Bull and Marina Vishmidt on the main theses of the volume, as well as its implications for a crucial issue of the present time: the virtual absence of the notion of “social class” from the art-historical discourse on contemporary art. The discussion will be moderated by Klara Kemp-Welch.
Jacopo Galimberti is an art historian and assistant professor (with tenure track) at IUAV (Venice). His articles have appeared in journals such as Art History, The Art Bulletin, The Oxford Art Journal and Grey Room. He is the author of Images of Class: Operaismo, Autonomia and the Visual Arts (1962-1988) (Verso Books, 2022), Individuals against Individualism. Western European Art Collectives (1956–1969) (Liverpool University Press, 2017), Détournement & Kitsch. Die Postkarten von Hans Peter Zimmer/Les cartes postales de Hans Peter Zimmer (Les Presses Universitaires de Nanterre, 2021), and of Lucio Fontana e l’artventure parigina (Scalendi, 2014) (written with Silvia Bignami). He is one of the editors of Art, Global Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Manchester, 2020).
Malcolm Bull is Professor Emeritus of Art and the History of Ideas at Oxford and the author of On Mercy (Princeton, 2019), Inventing Falsehood, Making Truth (Princeton, 2013), Anti-Nietzsche (Verso, 2011), The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art (OUP/Penguin, 2005), Seeing Things Hidden: Apocalypse, Vision, and Totality (Verso, 2000). He is working on a collection of essays about modernism and capitalism.
Marina Vishmidt is a writer and editor. She teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Artforum, Afterall, Journal of Cultural Economy, e-flux journal, Australian Feminist Studies, Mousse, and Radical Philosophy, among others, as well as a number of edited volumes. She is the co-author of Reproducing Autonomy (with Kerstin Stakemeier) (Mute, 2016), and the author of Speculation as a Mode of Production: Forms of Value Subjectivity in Art and Capital (Brill 2018 / Haymarket 2019). She is a member of the Marxism in Culture collective and is on the board of the New Perspectives on the Critical Theory of Society series (Bloomsbury Academic). In 2022, she was the Rudolph Arnheim Visiting Professor in Art History at the Humboldt University in Berlin and will take up a fellowship at the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies, 2023-24. Her research has been funded by the DAAD, the European Social Research Council and the Swedish Research Council.
Organised by Sarah Wilson (The Courtauld).
