Che cosa è contemporaneo nell'arte contemporanea? Il problema della natura tra arte e filosofia

This project intends to investigate the theoretical relationship between contemporary art and philosophy when attempting to grasp the proper of our time through its artistic figuration. In particular, the starting assumption of this work is that the concept of nature represents a particularly fruitful case study for examining such a relationship, since nature constitutes a privileged field of investigation of a rather significant part of artistic production in our time. The first part of this work sets out to analyse what is meant by the term “contemporary art”. There are two perspectives guiding the analysis: on the one hand, an art-historical examination of the periodisation of contemporary art; on the other, a theoretical-conceptual examination of the term ‘contemporary’ (through the analysis of the positions of Heinich, Danto, Osborne, Agamben, Bloch and Hegel) in reference to art. The outcome of the first chapter is to show how art - in every time - needs its present to be able to manifest itself, but that in order to be defined as “contemporary” it must establish a critical confrontation with the very time of its production and reception. Starting from the definition of this problem and the coordinates in which it is placed in art-historical and philosophical reflections, the second part of the work asks whether and to what extent art can offer tools of understanding to philosophically reformulate the question of our relationship with nature. After setting out some of the limits of environmental aesthetics, it is shown how only an examination of the materiality of contemporary works of art allows us to experience the unprecedented naturalness instantiated in and by such works. Taking Arte Sella in Trentino-Alto Adige as case study and through the analysis of Giuliano Mauri’s Cattedrale Vegetale (2001) and Arcangelo Sassolino’s Physis (2021), the outcome of this second part is to bring to light some intrinsic characteristics of the “naturalness” of contemporary art. Decisive among these is to bring to light the deliberate ambiguity between nature and technique that characterises these works. The third and final part of the work sets out to philosophically investigate the naturalness instantiated by contemporary art. The nature that such works instantiate is a nature that is always mediated. They suggest how it is only by critically working on the immediate giveness that is mostly attributed to nature that nature can be revealed before our eyes. In presenting artworks that are constitutively ambiguous, that belong neither only to the natural dimension nor only to the technical dimension, contemporary art has the capacity to become something other than itself, i.e. to become nature by displaying its own specific agency. In this sense, contemporary art concretely highlights an entirely new naturalness and in so doing, opens new possibilities for understanding the question of the natural from a philosophical point of view, marking a possible new direction for a rethinking of the very concept of nature. In particular, contemporary art frees the notion of nature from a conceptualisation in terms of otherness with respect to everything that is considered to be proper to the sphere of the human, and thus also with the dimension of freedom, traditionally opposed to it.