The third instalment of Arshake’s editorial project Critical Grounds is presenting a new edition of Angelo Trimarco’s La parabola del teorico [The parable of the Theorist] with an introduction by Stefania Zuliani. This essay «keeps its character of militancy intact, its nature of being a paean to critiques and art as an exercise in thought, a practice of knowledge and a means of questioning the status quo» (Zuliani).
Published in 1982 by Rome-based publisher Kappa in the Figure series directed by Filiberto Menna, founder of the magazine with the same title that same year, the essay by Angelo Trimarco – internationally acclaimed critic and theorist – presents a precious and personal image of an era under the Milky Way of methodological polyphony, accessible paths, non-nostalgic thoughts of transformation capable of releasing art and critiques from the fog of an indeterminate landscape lacking in hierarchies. Trimarco firmly rejects the «totalitarianism of methods» as well as every metaphysical temptation to propose a broad-minded consideration filled with references and disciplinary readiness, strict and wittingly partial in his conviction that the work of critiquing is as necessary as it is «interminable».
«Critical Grounds», the Arshake’s publishing project, curated by Christian Caliandro and Antonello Tolve, is born from the desire to network precious and of great cultural interest books in open source electronic format. It is, in fact, a shelf which, together with the re-release of untraceable or forgotten essays, spreads rumors of the international critical scene to offer a wide-ranging look at the culturological contemporary landscape. Alongside this program, «Critical Grounds» also proposes artist books, new authors and new voices of fiction to share with its authors and its readers a wide choice of assumptions, guidelines, designs on the creative area of the near future.
