The body of the word
by Raffaella Perna

Published in Flash Art Italia No. 339, May – June 2018

 “Pop Art did nothing more than emphasize the society around it […]. What did Oldenburg do? He showed people what society was like, so I am showing people its scars”.¹ With these words Ketty La Rocca underlined the distance separating her from the American movement and expressed her dissent from consumer society. She in fact shared the antagonistic spirit of Gruppo 70, which she joined in 1966 through Lelio Missoni – alias Camillo. With this artist, again in 1966, La Rocca published some collages in the section “Il mito ci sommerge” (“Myth is drowning us”) of the second volume of the series I Tris, directed by the Bolognese publisher Enrico Riccardo Sampietro. The work Non commettere sorpassi impuri (Do not commit impure overtakings), which opens the section, is revealing of the ideas and practices that were animating La Rocca’s work at this stage. The photograph of a nude woman taken from an advert stands out against a monochrome background; she is shown in the act of covering her breast with her left hand while she raises her right arm and bends it behind her neck – the classical pose of the temptress, with all its illustrious precedents in the history of western art (from the central figure of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon  to the various versions of Cézanne’s Bathers). As John Berger was to explain a few years later, advertising in fact appropriated the lofty models of the painting tradition to corroborate a representation of femininity compliant with male desires, in which women were not considered as seeing subjects but rather as seen objects.² The images are accompanied by the warning “Do not commit impure overtakings”, in which the seventh commandment is combined with the title of Dino Risi’s film Il sorpasso (1962), where Vittorio Gassman played the cynical swindler Bruno Cortona, a personification of the unscrupulous exuberance and greed of Italy during its economic miracle.

In the ‘50s and’60s our country in fact went through a period of unprecedented development. From 1958 to 1963, the core of the so-called “golden age”, the Gross Domestic Product per capita increased to an average annual rate of 6.3% compared with the average 4.3% of other western European countries.³

The contradictions and imbalances however became more evident around 1964, when Italy found itself facing a government crisis and financial turmoil. As the Florentine visual poets focused their interest on the dark side of modernisation and the economic boom, La Rocca in particular cast a critical eye on the new role of women in capitalist society, condemning the reification of the female body by newspapers and magazines.

In this period, alongside the early signs of sexual freedom due to the spread of contraception and the crisis in the traditional family institution, a new image of the housewife began to emerge which soon became an essential reference point for the production machine and the mass media. Specific magazines, newspaper columns and publicity were dedicated to women, even though their role was largely confined to that of angel of the hearth or seductress. Challenging the stereotyped representations of femininity with irony and nonsense was La Rocca’s intention in her 1964-65 collages, such as Sana come il pane quotidiano, Vergine, Qualcosa di vecchio, Belle e dolci, where the contrast between the words and the media images exposes the falsity of the values of youth, beauty, virginity, submissiveness and sweetness traditionally associated with the female figure in a male chauvinist, Catholic society. In these works, the women are seductive, at the height of their beauty, often surrounded with objects associated with make-up, body care and the home. The confident, happy air they exude is shown up as illusory by the incongruous words and phrases that clash glaringly with the sugar-coated advertising image. For example, in a 1965 collage we read: Sono felice / dopo i piatti / dopo il bucato / dopo i lavori domestici (I am happy/ after the dishes/after the washing/after the housework).

The challenge to male chauvinist culture also dominates the linear poems which the artist published in those years, based on disarticulated syntax, parody of the bureaucratic and technical/scientific jargon, construction of ready-made slogans using methods inspired by the literary experimentations of Gruppo 63 and Florentine technological poetry. In her poetry, La Rocca’s denunciation of sexism in the Catholic Church is corrosive:

Per essersi accompagnata ad un uomo

(For going with a man)

a lei non legittimamente unito da vincolo

(not legally bound to her)

matrimoniale, il pretore decreta:

(in marriage, the magistrate decrees she must:)

1. a) detergere l’etica col nuovo perboratex

 (clean her ethics with new perboratex)

1. b) surgelare nel freezer gli ormoni

(freeze her hormones in the freezer)

1. c) rendersi disponibile all’amplesso legittimo

(be available for legitimate sexual intercourse)

1. d) sentire il palpito del focolare domestico

(feel the attraction of the domestic hearth)

1. f) a vista d’uomo abbassare lo sguardo

(lower her eyes at the sight of a man)

1. g) onorare il padre la madre e il coniuge

(honour her father, mother and spouse)

secondo le leggi dello Stato S.R.C.

(according to the laws of the State of the Holy Roman Church.⁴)

In an Italy where family law was still based on the precepts of the 1942 Code, and where the Vatican still exercised a decisive influence on national politics, La Rocca’s was a stinging criticism of the condition of female subordination.

Having lived for some years, between 1952 and 1956, in a convent boarding school in Spoleto, La Rocca had had a deep experience of the conditioning which shaped women’s behaviour from childhood. This was thanks also to the daily contact with her pupils, who were always so eager to “do what teacher likes and wants”⁵. Although not a militant feminist herself, La Rocca’s work must necessarily be viewed against the background of the new political unrest which was spreading around our country, with the Milanese feminist group DEMAU (Demystification Authoritarianism) founded in 1966 and the Rivolta Femminile (Female Revolt) group in 1970.

Moreover, the fact that La Rocca, unlike other artists of her generation, agreed to take part in various all-women shows during the ‘70s, also outside Italy, should not be underestimated. The artist built up an important understanding with Romana Loda, a most singular gallerist, curator and tireless promotor of female artists’ works. She collaborated with her on various projects, in particular for the all-women shows “Coazione a mostrare” (1974) and “Magma” (1975). There were similar relations between La Rocca and Lucy Lippard and Anne-Marie Sauzeau Boetti, as testified by some letters and by the critical reviews published at the time by those same academics; also with Lea Vergine, who included La Rocca’s work in the book Il corpo come linguaggio (Prearo, Milan, 1974).  This dense network of female contacts contributed considerably to the international fame of La Rocca’s work, and reveals her desire to interact with female curators and art critics who were sensitive to the new feminist ideas and able to understand the extreme difficulty of working in an environment, like Italy’s, which was particularly closed to women.

Works like Signora, lei che ama cucinare (1964-1965) or Bianco Napalm (1967) are worth discussing separately, because in these la Rocca not only denounces the inequality between men and women, but also the inequality between the north and south of the planet, presenting an accusation against the colonialist, hegemonic spirit of western culture with a lucidity which has few rivals in Italian art of the time. Bianco Napalm in particular is a bridge work between the artist’s first stage based on verbal/visual collage and her subsequent experimentations from around 1967. There are two existing versions of the work which differ as regards technique, size and partly also iconography. In the smaller version, the words “bianco” and “napalm” are juxtaposed to the images of a very young, barefoot Vietnamese girl carrying a new-born baby on her shoulders, a soldier holding a weapon, and the portrait of the American cardinal and archbishop Francis Joseph Spellman – a convinced supporter of the American intervention in Vietnam. In the larger version, the portrait of Spellmann disappears in favour of a simplified composition, and the technique changes: instead of the collage on cardboard used in the first version, a plasticised photographic image is attached to a wooden support. The use of poor materials such as paper, scissors and glue, together with the manual technique typical of La Rocca’s early collages, are abandoned here in favour of a shiny surface with all roughness removed, clearly manifesting its artificial nature. The DIY approach of the first collages is softened here, and although in the second version of the work there is still a structure based on the assembly of verbal/visual fragments, the different treatment of the surface and the new spatial conception of the empty and filled areas created by the elimination of the portrait constitute a crucial step in the artist’s shift towards the interpretation of street signs, urban signage and the black PVC Js she worked on between 1967 and 1970.

Around 1971, La Rocca’s work began to move in a different direction. She placed a stronger accent on the body, on facial and hand movements, on handwriting and action, in her search for primal forms of communication she now considered to be more authentic than verbal language. The new decade marked the entry of La Rocca’s art into a phase which she herself defined as “disappointment with the image”⁶, generated by the conviction that images were now obsolete and were being usurped by words. The attention to the body which characterised La Rocca’s work between 1971 and 1976, the year of her death, did not however exclude her interest in media communication, which had matured in her contact with Gruppo 70 and which we find interpreted in new ways in the 1973 work Riduzioni. In this last series the artist composed sequences whose initial element is a photograph – often dating from the early-20^th century – or a film poster, followed by an outline of the initial image traced in handwritten words, with the progressive tapering out of the starting element. By juxtaposing an icon with its graphic “reduction”, i.e. a fading out of the original image leaving only the outline intact, La Rocca rehabilitates the typical images of the age of technical reproducibility “in a personal and therefore authentic sense”⁷ via her individual re-appropriation of photos, expressed through handwriting and conceived in opposition to the visual standardisation produced by mass culture. In this series too, attention to the female condition is crucial. Works like Una madre (a mother), Vestito da sposa (wedding dress) or Un matrimonio (a wedding), completed in 1974, place the accent on traditional family rituals solemnised by photography, as well as on the social roles to which women are historically expected to conform from their early childhood. La Rocca’s awareness of expressing herself in the language of men clearly emerges from her reflections: “It’s not the time for declarations, for women; they have too much to do and they would have to use a language which is not theirs, a language which is as alien to them as it is hostile”⁸. Estrangement from the dominant culture and the quest for a more authentic, non-alienated language, remain the most significant legacies of La Rocca’s work.

1. Ketty La Rocca, recording of a conversation with Verità Monselles, 1974, published in Lucilla Saccà, Ketty La Rocca: i suoi scritti, Martano, Turin 2005, p. 143.
2. John Berger, Ways of Seeing, Penguin, London 1972, Italian translation Questione di sguardi, Il Saggiatore, Milan 1998, p. 49.
3. Ketty La Rocca, in Letteratura, No. 82-83, July/October 1966, now in Lucilla Saccà, Ketty La Rocca: i suoi scritti, op. cit., pp. 27-28.
4. Text of the artist in the Ketty La Rocca Archive of Michelangelo Vasta, undated (c.1962), now in Lucilla Saccà, Ketty La Rocca: i suoi scritti, op. cit., p. 109.
6. Letter to Lucy Lippard, 1975, now in Francesca Gallo and Raffaella Perna (eds.), Ketty La Rocca. Nuovi Studi, Postmedia Books, Milan 2015, p. 156.
7. Ketty La Rocca, catalogue of the exhibition Ketty La Rocca, Galleria Documenta, Turin, Feb. 1975
8. Lucilla Saccà, Ketty La Rocca: i suoi scritti, op. cit., p. 96.