Seller / Publisher / Artist with Franco Vaccari
One of our favourite exhibition spaces in Venice, A Plus A gallery, and one of our favourite publishing houses, Automatic Books, have joined their forces in organizing a series of conferences about artists’ books. The cycle of encounters, titled “The seller, the publisher and the artist”, inaugurated a few weeks ago with a conference by Cornelia Lauf, one of the founders Three Star Books publishing house, while this weekend we have had the chance to assist to a talk by Franco Vaccari.
Franco Vaccari, born in Modena in 1936, is an Italian conceptual artist mostly known by his Photomatic “Esposizioni in tempo reale” installation at Venice Biennale in 1972. Mostly working with photography, Mr. Vaccari has made numerous artists’ books during his life and has kindly introduced them to us this saturday. After his studies in physics, Mr. Vaccari has entered the world of art in the mid-sixties, a period when pop art was starting to explode internationally. Hence, the first book he made was called “Pop esie”, collecting a series of casual short poems composed from journal clippings. He gradually started working with photography, building his opus through the idea of breaking down any mental preconceptions he might have. From there on Vaccari has continued constructing situations that put the viewer in an active position, involving their actions, reactions and reflections through the installations he created. That is how Photomatic “Esposizioni in tempo reale” came about, putting a photographic machine inside the show where every visitor could take a personal snapshot. The shots were collected in a book, titled, again, “Esposizione in tempo reale”, becoming an absolute rarity nowadays.
Mr. Vaccari, a kind gentleman and still a passionate artist, was extremely moved by the fact that his talk was attended by a full room of young creatives interested in artists’ books, saying that he can usually count the attendants on the fingers of one hand. Well, we must admit, so were we. Hopefully, this event is another demonstration that both books as well as art will never go out of style.
