Chair: Dario Boemia
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Piroska Balogh
Anachronism or local cultural transfer? The role of Latin journalism in the publicity of the Hungarian Kingdom between 1750 and 1850
The most prosperous period of Latin journalism is considered the phase between 1600 and 1750 for Europe. From that point of view, it seems to be anachronistic, that the Latin Press played a significant role in the Publicity of the Hungarian Kingdom even after 1750. In my paper, I attempt to reconceptualize the role of that late Latin Journalism. In the investigation, special attention will be given to three popular and significant Latin Journals, namely Ephemerides Vindobonenses (1776–1785), Ephemerides Budenses (1790-1793) and Ephemerides Statistico-Politicae / Posonienses (1804-1838). By their examples I will outline how the traditional aims, roles, readership, editing strategies, knowledge transmission of the Latin Press were transformed by the cultural, scientific and political context of the Enlightenment; focusing on the appearance of new discursive forms of Journalism in the medium of Latin text. To understand the publicity of these Latin journals it is important to take into consideration their connections to the new narratives of national identity and their local specialities as well. It is also important to understand and investigate the intentions behind their choice of language. I think this study is also significant because, although Latin journals were very popular during that period, they were a serious cultural and political factor and an integral part of contemporary publicity, because of their Latin language, they were increasingly excluded from later research. The press history of the period only gives brief descriptions about them, and their more thorough exploration, translation and contextualization are still waiting for.
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Giorgio Di Domenico
La Città di Riga, an Italian peripheral magazine from the 1970s
La Città di Riga (The City of Riga) is one of the most impressive and least-known Italian art magazines of the Seventies. Its only two issues, published in 1976 and 1977, saw the direct involvement of important Italian and international artists, critics, intellectuals, and militants: from Jannis Kounellis to Joseph Beuys, from Giorgio Agamben to Jasmina Tešanović, from Fabio Mauri to Bruce Nauman. The magazine acted at a peripheral level on many fronts: the magazine was printed by a small publishing house based in Pollenza – a village in the countryside of the peripheral region of the Marche – in years when the whole of Italy was still considered to be peripheral to the contemporary art system; additionally, the title of the magazine paid homage to a European city that was important for the cultural history of the twentieth century, but certainly peripheral compared to the great centres of the art world. The paper will present the history and main characteristics of the magazine, focusing on the reasons for its title and how its peripheral nature allowed it to meet the world of underground militancy and forge important political and cultural relationships. Through the magazine, it is hoped that a different image will emerge of Italian art in the late 1970s, a time of profound redefinition in which the peripheries played a decisive role, so much so that an Italian critic coined the term ‘provinciart’, referring to art produced and exhibited in provincial towns.
References
- La Città di Riga, n. 1, Autumn 1976, La Nuova Foglio, Pollenza 1977.
- La Città di Riga, n. 2, Spring 1977, La Nuova Foglio, Pollenza 1977.
- ALLEN G., Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art, The MIT Press, Cambridge 2015.
- BONGARD W., Sulle riviste d’arte, Domus, 562, settembre 1976, p. 54.
- CALVESI M., Avanguardia di massa, Feltrinelli, Milano 1978.
- CASTELNUOVO E., GINZBURG C., Centro e periferia nella storia dell’arte italiana, Officina Libraria, Milano 2019.
- HECKER S., SULLIVAN M.R. (eds.), Postwar Italian Art History Today. Untying ‘the Knot’, Bloomsbury, London 2018.
- LANCIONI D. (ed.), Anni 70. Arte a Roma, exh. cat., Iacobelli, Roma 2013.
- RIVA V., La provinciart, L’Espresso, October 25, 1975.
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Imre Zsolt Lengyel
Attracting attention for autonomous art with the help of nationalism and scare tactics: Publicity strategies of two literary journals in early 20th century Hungary
Recent research on modernism strived to reconcile the notion of autonomy with the insight that artworks and institutions need to become parts of (Latourian) networks lest they disappear without impact. This perspective seems particularly relevant in the case of “little magazines” that struggled not to get stuck at the peripheries of public attention and go bankrupt unnoticedly – but also not to subordinate themselves to heteronomous values. As a case study, I analyse the early publicity strategies of two relatively long-lived Hungarian literary journals to show how they tried to gain central positions for autonomous literariness by exploiting political hopes and fears. Relying on the climate of nationalist liberalism, the editors of Nyugat (West, 1908–1941), a magazine that maintained its independence vis-a-vis both politics and the market, argued that a journal based on an autonomous (rather than engaged or popular) concept of art was indispensable for the causes of modernization and assimilation. Scare tactics served to reinforce this stance, which presumably helped attach to Nyugat supporters having a stake in liberal and inclusive policies: its editors (often misleadingly) depicted criticism even by mainstream representatives of the same political orientation as the attacks of reactionaries and xenophobes endangering the progress and unity of the nation. Methods that were both very similar and antithetical later played a significant role in establishing a rival magazine, Napkelet (East, 1923–1940). In this case, what arguably helped bring conservative sponsors on board was the reasoning that literature independent from political ideologies and entertainment could unify the nation and save it from the dangers of partiality and (“Jewish”) rootlessness – which the journal’s theorist presented as decisive causes of the traumatic revolutions of the previous years.