Vincenzo Agnetti and the Poetics of Zeroing

Milanese artist Vincenzo Agnetti [1926-1981], who was particularly concerned with how overwhelming sensorial stimuli cause perceptual habits to become mechanical, thereby estranging perceptions and emotions. As a countermeasure, Agnetti produced a body of work aimed at upsetting the expectations of the viewer about how both language and technology function. Through the modification of machines, the use of paradoxes, tautologies and contradictions, and the alteration of artistic techniques, Agnetti revealed not only how machines are constructed to routinize behavior, but also how disciplines and institutions shape and interfere with genuine experiences and actual life conditions. I analyze how two works by Agnetti, La macchina drogata (1968) and NEG (1970), illustrate his anxiety about alienation by interrupting the regular functioning of technology. I also examine how this strategy questions the ideological bases of industrial design, and I elaborate on the relation between Agnetti’s concern with alienation, and the analyses of estrangement by Eco and the Italian critic Gillo Dorfles. While I am not suggesting that Agnetti “materialized” or “illustrated” the theories of Eco and Dorfles, whose work he most certainly knew but never explicitly quoted, striking coincidences exist between their thought and Agnetti’s diagnosis of contemporary alienation. Such similarities testify to a common disquiet in the Milanese artistic and intellectual milieu of the 1960s and 1970s, revealing increasing skepticism about unbridled industrial development.