Written by an avant-garde musician, this book confirms the typical critical attitude of the musical avant-garde towards classical theories. But it must be immediately said that the book does not deal with Theory of Harmony but only with Harmony. It is about the concept that in the field of music theory and didactics is used as an implicit foundation for so many behaviours and precepts. In these pages we do not analyse the musical mechanisms but the conceptual mechanisms. It examines whether the preceptual discourse in music is meaningful or not, and what contradictions and consequences it entails. The essay, written in the form of thoughts, phrases, aphorisms, often crosses over into existential fields and is undoubtedly the testimony of a situation into which we are ourselves drawn.

“The title is symbolic: the Shiite archer, representing the Asian creator, galloping on the border between the Western and Eastern worlds, his face turned towards the immense East (the Russian multinational empire, Persia, China, Japan, India), with only half an eye observing what comes from the West. The meaning of the metaphor is clear, perhaps arguable, but deliberately provocative: Russian avant-garde art exists in itself; it finds the necessary forms, the creative inspiration, on its own terrain”. Benedikt Livšic's memoirs, which cover a crucial period of artistic development in Russia, are of fundamental importance in the reconstruction of the epic of the expressive revolution of the first two decades of the twentieth century. Introduction by Jean Claude Marcadé.

This book is the English translation of the artist’s writings first published in 1985. In line with the work system adopted by Mario Merz, the transcription of the texts does not maintain a chronological order, but identifies three moments of typological distinction in which different referential identities emerge in the development of the writing.

“Voglio fare subito un libro” (I want to make a book right now) is a collection of published and unpublished texts written by Mario Merz up to 1985, in which the dialogue between the ’forces’ of art and those of literature erupts at times luxuriantly and brilliantly and at times harshly and critically; it is concentrated or dispersed in various topics that flow through the pages like a river in flood. The poetic freedoms that Mario Merz appropriates in the act of writing are interwoven with suggestions and references to his art. An art managed on the basis of inventions: of architectural structures (the progression of tables, spirals or the better-known igloos...), of pictorial constructions (which have developed since the birth of Merz the artist), on the natural cyclical and numerical development of the elements (the application of Fibonacci’s numerical progression), on the use of materials rejected by society (broken glass, old newspapers...), on strategic statements (“Se il nemico si concentra perde terreno, se si disperde perde forza”, “Objet cache-toi”, “Città irreale…”) which are included in his works as axioms and emerge as traces in the reading of this book.” Harald Szeemann

The book is a collection of texts produced by Michelangelo Pistoletto from 1962 to 1989, arranged in chronological order. With an interweaving of materials, this book brings to the surface the most stimulating faculties of that organic whole of artistic and literary work with which Pistoletto elaborates around thirty years of creativity. Un artista in meno grows around the book L'uomo nero (The Bogeyman), reflecting and overturning its structure, in which the canons of closure and opening are self-eliminated by making its two parts converge on a "sign" (the signature), two-thirds from the beginning of the book. Paradoxically transposing the specular circuit of attraction and repulsion onto a circuit of cross-references between the writing and the work of art, in Un artista in meno the photographic images of works live on, like moments alternating with theoretical writing, poetic texts and work notes. It is exemplary how the immediate impact of Minus Objects compares and complements the speculation of Famous Last Words or the historical dilation of the perception of a work with the grammatical simularity of the Rocking Temple...

Pistoletto writes: 'Most of the time the book is closed. Only accidentally does it open, like life. A mirror in a dark room'.

Michelangelo Olivero Pistoletto (Biella, 25 June 1933) is an Italian artist, painter and sculptor, animator and protagonist of the Arte Povera movement. In 1962 he produced the Quadri specchianti (Mirror Paintings), with which he gained widespread recognition by participating in international Pop Art exhibitions. In 1964 he produced the Plexiglass, which opened the season of Conceptual Art. Between 1965 and 1966 he produced the Oggetti in meno (Minus Objects), considered fundamental for the birth of Arte Povera. In the 1990s he founded Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, placing art in an active relationship with the various spheres of the social fabric in order to inspire and produce a responsible transformation of society. In 2003 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. In 2004, the University of Turin awarded him an honorary degree in Political Science and on this occasion the artist announced the birth of the Third Paradise. In 2007 he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in Arts in Jerusalem "for his consistently creative career as an artist, educator and activist, whose tireless intelligence has given rise to premonitory art forms that contribute to a new understanding of the world". In 2013, the Louvre Museum in Paris hosted his solo exhibition and in the same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting in Tokyo. His works can be found in the collections of major modern and contemporary art museums. Official website of the artist: www.pistole

“What is the soul, and to what extent, under what conditions, does psychoanalysis force us to think differently about it? What is language and how can we talk about it? What is the mathematical, physical, biological, socio-historical object, and how does it reveal and at the same time hide itself from the extraordinary enterprise that is modern science? From what and through what can we talk about economics, equality, justice, politics? An unrestrained, gratuitous and compulsory ambition: to clarify the strange fact of knowledge, to explore its current situation, to search for meanings that go beyond it”.

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922) has lived in France since 1945. He co-founded the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie and was its main animator. He has published numerous works on social analysis and political philosophy.

“The aim of this work is to show that there are different rationalities, different ways of being ‘right’, all of them legitimate though different, in the manner in which they account for the data of our senses”. This is how the author introduces his dissertation on the territories of reason, the subject of this volume. Henri Atlan, a doctor and biologist born in Algeria in 1931, currently teaches at the Universities of Paris and Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous studies on cell biology, biophysics and artificial intelligence. His formal theory of self-organisation has inspired fruitful intellectual explorations in various disciplines. In Italy he is known for his essay Tra il cristallo e il fumo, published by hopefulmonster in 1987.