Zampogna e Schifano 2

The work makes appropriation a test of historical distance: Schifano’s graphic remains recognisable, but the field constructed by Zampogna transforms it from an autonomous authority into an artefact subjected to a new measure. At the inaugural moment of Artmedia, the “sacking” of the twentieth century neither confuses authorship nor pays homage to a model. Zampogna preserves the identity of the borrowed work precisely so that he can intervene in its authority, separating what Schifano produced from the usual conditions of its circulation and subjecting it to a different perceptual regime. The reference to Futurism, already filtered through the appropriated graphic, thus reaches the viewer through a second historical passage.

The broad, dark wooden field isolates and reduces the graphic, changing its presence from a self-contained image into an exposed insert. The strong disparity of scale does not erase Schifano, but makes visible the act by which Zampogna positions him, as if the margin had become the work’s true critical site. Within the sheet, the disproportion between the figurative panel compressed at the top and the vast white area marked by the signature shifts attention from iconography to the authorial status of the appropriated object. Image, name and support no longer coincide: each claims a different form of presence, while the dark surface prevents the central fragment from becoming a celebratory quotation.

In Artmedia, therefore, art history is not a cultural backdrop, but an already signed and recognised material that can be put back into play without losing its provenance. This work clarifies the conflict inherent in that method: to appropriate means altering the weight of an image more than necessarily changing its content. The viewer is left with an unresolved double attribution. Schifano remains legible as the author of the graphic, while Zampogna assumes responsibility for the device that displays and contains it, making its autonomy unstable.