Description
Syxty Sorriso & Altre Storie book launch on Friday 19 May
Syxty Sorriso & Altre Storie is the archive-book of the 1978-1982 works of performance artist Antonio Syxty, active in Milan in connection with the basement theatre Out Off. From actionist pieces such as W,M o Alcuni Tentativi di Salare il Sale (“W,M or Some Attempts to Salt Salt”, 1978) to the Kennedy: the Assassination cycle of 1980-1981, to ‘fashion works’ such as Ragazze 81 (“Girls 81”, 1981) and Famiglia Horror (“Horror Family”, 1982), Syxty’s live art falsified the codes of television, fashion and tourism to produce some of the most irreverent work of the Italian scene known as ‘New Spectacularity’.
The book presents a non-chronological, non-philological version of Syxty’s archive, in which scripts, drawings, sketches, collages, photographs and textual fragments are assembled following visual, performative and narrative leads rather than documentary reliability. Taking its cue from Syxty’s interest in falsification as a performative and dramaturgical method, the volume presents the artist’s imaginary archive (fake documents, plundered images, performances that never took place) alongside the real, rendering the two historiographically and aesthetically indistinguishable. Alongside 350-odd pages of such materials, the book gathers interviews with the period’s leading theatre and performance critics Oliviero Ponte di Pino and Giuseppe Bartolucci and ’notes from friends’ written by Syxty’s collaborators and performers. The volume closes with critical interventions by the book’s curator Flora Pitrolo, performance theorist Joe Kelleher and postmodern designer and architect Alessandro Mendini.
The Yard Press, 2017. 20 x 30cm, 384 pages, black and white images throughout, paperback.
Limited edition 400 copies
