The Reversed Canvas and the Eclipse of Painting: recto, verso and newer art media

Michelangelo Antonioni’s film L’Eclisse (1962) opens with the front of a picture frame delineating a modernist sculpture. We then view the reverse of the frame held by a woman about to emerge from a dysfunctional relationship with a man whose sleeve has just been associated with books and a decorative classical obelisk. Later, the same woman is blacked up in a spoof of waning colonial attitudes to perform a pseudo-Kenyan dance. The ecstatic reversals of her body convey nostalgia for tribal connectedness at odds with traditional Western art and contemporary industrial framings. In Opera Aperta (1962) Umberto Eco claimed the erstwhile documentary maker Antonioni as one of the exemplars of a new participatory art in a text often cited as an inspiration for video, installation, performance and other mixed media intent on unframed, interactive creativity.
As part of an ARC funded study of the reversed canvas over several centuries and continents, this paper looks at a relatively sudden, late twentieth-century, reversal of the slow process by which the image of easel painting was identified with the privileged social and aesthetic, Western institution of La Pintura. The reversal entailed the dismemberment of the physical canvas in favour of participatory and interventionist art in which the aesthetic distance imposed by frames was obstructed or eradicated. Reversed canvases often featured in this process as negations of tradition and intensifications of immediacy between the undifferentiated bodies of artists and viewers. At the same time the axial oppositions of recto and verso often rearticulated themselves in living bodies. The paper explores these issues in relation to work by Arte Povera, the Surface-Support Group, International Situationists and recent artists and theorists.

Richard Read is Associate Professor in Art History at The Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Visual art, The University of Western Australia. He has published in major journals on word-image  oppositions, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art and contemporary cinema. His book Art and Its Discontents: the Early Life of Adrian Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002: PA: Penn. State U. Press, 2003) was joint winner in 2003 of the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand best book prize in art history. Other recent publications include 'Intra - extra - verso - recto: Hinchliffe's 
Backs of Paintings', Paul Hinchliffe, exhibition catalogue, Mark Howlett Project 9 (White Gum Valley: Mark Howlett Foundation, 2004), 'Representing Trauma: the Case for Troubling Images' in Remember Me: Socially Constructing Life after Death, ed. Margaret Mitchell (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2007); and 'Anglo-Italian Contrasts in John Ruskin's The Stones of Venice' in Ruskin in Perspective: Contemporary  Essays, ed. Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell (London: Macmillan, 2008). His current research includes book projects on the 'Trope of Contrast in the Art and Literature of the Grand Tour' and 'History of Paintings of the Backs of Paintings' funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant.