How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art & Agriculture

by Gianfranco Baruchello, Henry Martin, Henry Martin

Book Overview

Taking the farm he operates outside Rome as his starting point, Baruchello -- one of the outstanding poly-artists to emerge from Italy in the 1960s -- explores the spaces and forces that surround and... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553249657
• ISBN13: 9780553249651
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.26 lbs.

Customer Reviews

How to make farming into art.

The book, based on conversations that took place in 1980 at an Italian farm named Agricola Cornelia, was published in 1984. There is only one voice, that of Gianfranco Baruchello, an artist who also owns the farm. Henry Martin, the co-author, is described as more of a collaborator than a translator and editor. Baruchello tells the story of his life since the period of the late 60s in which he was a leftist radical to his disillusionment with that movement and his purchase and development of a farm in the 1970s as a complex multifaceted work of art. Baruchello's hero is Marcel Duchamp, although he admits that Duchamp would have had very little interest at all in farmwork. Even though edited, the book has a kind of stream-of-consciousness quality. Of special interest are various ruminations on the nature of art. People often ask Baruchello how his work can be art. At times he says that believing it is art is just a matter of faith. He thinks that the problem of whether Agricola Cornelia is art is like the problem of whether Duchamp's ready-mades were art if they had not been shown in public. For him, the essence of art is a certain way of being. This is not to say that there is little of what is traditionally recognized as art here. Although the book has no illustrations in the text, the front page shows one of Baruchello's farm-based paintings. We also learn that he has engaged in a number of other "works," including videos, books, staged events, and collections of artifacts, all of which are related in some way to the farm project. He tells us that he wants to make art out of something that is not art but is still full of "vital interior experience." In one of the most interesting passages he explores various wrong ways in which his project could be made art: putting on a show, making a collaged text, and so forth. None of these ideas seem to be "enough." He asks: how does one deal with experiences so that they survive the fact of having been dealt with? Of course, this very book is a partial answer to that question. Indeed, towards the end, he suggests that the best way to present his work might be as a manual on "how to imagine ... how to take anything at all...and make it become an experience..." That is what art (true art) is always doing. (One is reminded here of John Dewey's aesthetic masterpiece, Art as Experience, in which art in understood in terms of a closer relation to everyday life.) Baruchello also speaks of his art as personal mythopoesis: a contemplative or ritual experience which is also an interior search for power. Although it might seem that he is trying to weaken the definition of art so that it could finally include digging potatoes out of the earth, what he is really trying to do is "recomplicate" the idea of art, and affirm art (and religion) as something with its own dignity in opposition to science. Although he admits that his potatoes may not in themselves be intriguing, he insists that his way of talking about them beg