Giorgio Manganelli and Achille Bonito Oliva: clues for a parallel reading between literature and art criticism

Abstract

Giorgio Manganelli and Achille Bonito Oliva draw a productive and luminous theoretical and textual constellation of conceptual intersections, guided by joining the Gruppo 63 which marks the broad orbit of a common operational space - the incipit of an itinerary covered from different locations «through the avant-gardes».   The oblique, cross-eyed and mannerist gaze that nourishes the critical operations of Bonito Oliva - Don Giovanni of Italian art criticism of the last half century - is reflected by the elusiveness and histrionics, the ambiguity and the artifice of the Manganelli’s works. The essay, reflecting on some theoretical nodes that attract the two writers - mannerism, falsehood, metamorphosis, nomadism, to name a few - tries to set up a «parallel reading» that allows the echo of Manganelli's literary research to emerge in the «criticism ad art» by Bonito Oliva.