Cahiers d’études italiennes
16 | 2013
Novecento… e dintorni« On ne naît pas… on le devient »Notes on the Index, Continued: Italian Feminism
and the Art of Mirella Bentivoglio and Ketty
La Rocca
Leslie Cozzi

Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cei/1238
DOI: 10.4000/cei.1238
ISSN: 2260-779X
Publisher
UGA Éditions/Université Grenoble Alpes
Printed version
Date of publication: 30 June 2013
Number of pages: 213-234
ISBN: 978-2-84310-245-5
ISSN: 1770-9571
Electronic reference
Leslie Cozzi, “Notes on the Index, Continued: Italian Feminism and the Art of Mirella Bentivoglio and
Ketty La Rocca”, Cahiers d’études italiennes [Online], 16 | 2013, Online since 15 December 2014,
connection on 27 March 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/cei/1238 ; DOI: https://doi.org/
10.4000/cei.1238© ELLUG

Notes on the Index, Continued :Italian Feminism and the Art of Mirella
Bentivoglio and Ketty La Rocca 1

Leslie Cozzi

The University of Virginia, Charlottesville (VA)

The 1960s and 1970s represent a historical watershed, a period when, forthe first time ever, the participation of Italian women in the visual arts
became both extensive and consistent.
In Decostruzioniste ante litteram (2001), Maria Antonietta Trasforini
profiles a cluster of thirty-eight Italian women whose artworks from those
decades incorporated both word and image. Included in this group wereMirella Bentivoglio (1922–) and Ketty La Rocca (1938–1976), the two artists with whom this article is concerned. Though their work differed informat and media, each of these women combined both language andimage. Often, they used language, in particular the linguistic shifter, to confront their own historical erasure from artistic professions. Italian womenartists embedded their own artistic traces in a field of activity traditionallydominated by men, and these declarations of artistic presence harnessed
the spirit of self-consciousness of an emerging feminist movement.
Exhibiting together through the curatorial impetus of Mirella Benti­
voglio, this generation of artists broke the confines of specific media to
combine elements of both poetry and figurative art. Assessing the variety
of practices these women shared, Trasforini describes the basis for thisgroup identification:
Accomunate dalla pratica e non da legami formali o informali di gruppo, queste
artiste operarono in un singolare spazio di sperimentazione e contaminazione di generi
diversi, che sembra anticipare sia la multimedialità degli anni Novanta — come uso

1. I am grateful to all of the participants of the 2010 Gender Studies e il caso italiano conference for theirinvaluable feedback, and I thank the organizers for the opportunity to participate.

Cahiers d’études italiennes, n° 16, 2013, p. 213-234.

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Leslie Cozzidi molti media e tecniche — sia l’azione di decostruzione di testi e linguaggio tipichedel cosiddetto post-moderno. Nell’incontro fra segno pittorico e linguistico ritroviamo i diversi linguaggi della poesia concreta e della poesia visiva, delle scritture
visuali, paramusicali e materiche sino al libro oggetto. 2

Trasforini considers these works examples of post-modernist deconstruction, which attempted to abolish the hierarchy of genres while interrogating the nature of artistic authorship and provoking a critical mode ofviewing and response. The intention of this strategy, Trasforini explains,
was to dismantle essentialist preconceptions, and to stress the socially produced and constructed nature of images, objects, and social phenomena.
Lucia Marcucci’s Il tema romantico della poesia, according to Trasforini,
offers a bomb that is about to explode all existing barriers, be they stylistic
or social (figure 1). Ketty La Rocca’s manipulation of a standard family
photo empties the original image of its bodies, leaving only the blanksocial forms that they once inhabited (figure 2). Trasforini thus stresses thedegree to which they called into question the existence of pre-conceived
social scripts. 3
Although there are some contradictions in Trasforini’s essay, her overview has a lot to recommend it. It offers a rare discussion of this set of artists, and provides insight into their work by examining the social fomentand sociological factors which produced it. Furthermore, her association of the media-based practices of this generation of Italian artists with
the Americans that were their contemporaries or came shortly after themis in many cases entirely appropriate. Compare, for instance, Mirella
Bentivoglio’s Il cuore della consumatrice ubbidiente (1975) (figure 3) with
Kruger’s I shop therefore I am (1987). Both works highlight the consumerism of modern society and its gendered implications. However, as justifiable as it is to evoke the post-modern, deconstructive practices of the 80s
and 90s, I think Trasforini draws this comparison on the basis of a some2. Maria Antonietta Trasforini, Decostruzioniste ante litteram, in L’arte delle donne nell’Italia del Novecento,
edited by Laura Iamurri and Sabrina Spinazzé, Roma, Meltemi, 2001, pp. 181–99, 182.
3. Trasforini presents these works as a forerunner of Cindy Sherman’s photographs, Barbara Kruger’s photo­montages and Jenny Holzer’s Truisms. The latter pieces, which happen to date in Sherman’s case from 1977
and in Kruger’s to the 1980s, are all somewhat erroneously grouped together as representative of the 1990s.
This inaccuracy is compounded, for Trasforini refers to La Rocca and Bentivoglio as predecessors, rather thancontemporaries, of the American artists to whom she refers. Furthermore, Trasforini presumes that the same
intentions can be associated with all of these works, regardless of their date of creation or geographic origin.
This interpretation diminishes the uniqueness and originality of the Italian works, which as a result merely
furnish additional evidence of the validity and general appeal of deconstructionist tendencies already associatedwith other artists. Trasforini’s casual ahistoricism belies the necessity of finding more accurate frameworks forunderstanding these works, as I have tried to do in this article. Ibid., pp. 182–3.

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what limited cross-section of these artists’ vast body of work. It is my intention to examine these works in terms of a more inclusive theoretical framethat is more representative of the art world in which these artists worked.
This approach stresses the artist’s intimate knowledge of the representative
systems they deploy as much as the alienation of identity or the recyclingof inherited scripts. In order to do this, I employ the notion of “indexicality” put forward by the American art historian Rosalind Krauss.
In 1977, Krauss published a two-part article in October magazine entitled “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, now a classic ofcontemporary art historical scholarship. 4 Krauss suggests that despite its
apparent pluralism, a fundamental concern of 1970s art was “playing out
the drama of the shifter” 5. The “shifter”, Krauss explains, is a term for alinguistic sign whose meaning is dependent on the context in which it
is used. It is a word that remains empty until it is fitted with a precise
meaning. Drawing on the work of structural linguists Roman Jakobson
and Emile Benveniste, Krauss points out that common pronouns like “I”
and “you” are shifters whose meaning changes across the space of the conversation or text in which they appear. 6 “I” refers to myself, but only when
I say it. If you use the word “I”, it now refers, in fact, to you. The slippery
logic of the shifter makes it a complicated point of reference. Nonetheless,
it is indispensable to spoken or written discourse. There is another aspect
to particular pronominal shifters in any language, like “I”, “je”, “io”, or“tu”, that Krauss is quick to point out. Since their meaning depends on
the presence of a particular speaker, they also belong to the type of linguistic sign called the “index”. An index, or indexical sign, derives its
meaning from a physical relationship between itself and its referent. They
are “marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing towhich they refer, the object they signify” 7. Thus footprints, tire tracks, andcast shadows are indexical signs, whose existence depends on a physicalcause and effect relationship. So are photographs, where the image is aphysical result of the photomechanical process.
For Krauss, the importance of the shifter and the index lies in “theproblem of naming an individuated self ” 8. In other words, the self is
4. I use Rosalind Krauss’s work as a heuristic tool. I do not intend to suggest that it would have been known
in Italy, or that this represents the only valid interpretive framework.
5. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, in October, 3, Spring 1977, pp. 68–81; 69.
6. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, Coral Gables(FL), University of Miami Press, 1971; Roman Jakobson, Russian Language Project, Cambridge (MS), Harvard
University Press, 1957.
7. Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, op. cit., p. 70.
8. Ibid., p. 72.

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poised awkwardly between two positions, “me” and “you”, dependingon who is doing the talking. This difficulty, Krauss argues, is dramatizedthrough various artistic practices of the 1970s, which she suggests rely on
the pervasiveness of the photograph combined with the explicit termsof the index. And this shift from conventional sign to indexical trace
produces an excess of discourse, as if a surfeit of written information isrequired to compensate for the depleted power of the painted sign. Thus
the flight from the aesthetic conventions of painting or sculpture in favorof other media entailed a fantasy of total self-presence realized througha verbal discourse that continually invoked the subject, albeit a divided
one. Krauss was speaking with regards to an American context, but her
observations could equally be applied to the work of Italian women artists
in the 1970s.
Mirella Bentivoglio is a particularly important figure for this discussion, because she broached the problematic of women and language bothas an artist and as a curator. A highly regarded Visual Poet, Bentivoglio
curated a series of women-only exhibitions in the 1970s and later that led
to the increased acceptance of women artists in Italy. 9 The photographthat Bentivoglio created of herself in the 1970s offers a pithy illustrationof the discourse of the self that featured in many of her works (figure 4).
The image depicts the artist standing within a large foam letter “o”. If you
interpret the figure of the artist as part of the piece, she forms the “i” in the
pronoun “io”. This is not simply a picture of the artist and her work, but a
picture of the artist as a work. This photograph of the artist performing theself, literally composing herself as an “I”, is doubly indexical—Bentivoglio
both occupies the previously ‘empty’ pronoun “I” and photographs thisposition to leave a record of it. It is also a strong declaration of artisticpresence. Though this particular “o” was never exhibited independently,
the manipulation of the letter “o” and its formal equivalents, zeros andeggs, became a hallmark of her practice in the 1970s and after. Works
like Uovo e portauovo, a glass and plexiglass sculpture from 1971, or the
9. Mirella Bentivoglio began her career as a poet and art historian. Her early volumes included two poetry
collections, the first published under her maiden name, and a monograph on Ben Shahn. By the late 1960s,
Bentivoglio abandoned ‘linear’ poetry for the relatively young and experimental field of Visual Poetry. She had
her first solo Visual Poetry exhibition in 1971 at Milan’s Galleria Schwarz. That same year, Mirella organized
her first exhibition of all-women artists at the behest of the Zonta Club International, a now defunct women’sgroup. She would continue to curate for the next four decades. See: Mirella Bertarelli, Giardino, Milano,
Scheiwiller, 1943; Mirella Bentivoglio, Ben Shahn, Roma, De Luca, 1963; Mirella Bentivoglio, Calendario,
Firenze, Nuovedizioni Enrico Vallecchi, 1968; Mirella Bentivoglio, Sub-conscio, Milano, Galleria Schwarz,
1971; Mirella Bentivoglio, Una mostra in progress, Mirella Bentivoglio Personal Papers, Bentivoglio Residence,
Roma; Mirella Bentivoglio, Una Testimonianza di Mirella Bentivoglio: Dieci Collettive al Femminile, Mirella
Bentivoglio Personal Papers, Bentivoglio Residence, Roma.

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artist’s book Zero-seme a decade later both illustrate Bentivoglio’s recurring interest in this visual form, which she used to evoke generation andthe creative power of the unconscious (figure 5). 10 Thus Bentivoglio reinforces the connection with her own œuvre by physically stepping into it.
Interestingly, the photograph also serves as the basis for another work (Io,1979) currently in the collection of the Uffizi, suggesting yet again theimportance of the work as a sort of calling-card or signature. 11
Several of Bentivoglio’s other pieces offer witty reflections on the workof art as the indexical trace of the artist. In Soggettivismo oggettivato (1972),
Bentivoglio objectifies the subjectivity of an artist through a tangle, literally, of lines (figure 6). This mess of scribble unravels itself in a word,
whose bold-face ending highlights the Italian first person pronoun, andrhymes with Bentivoglio’s own name. An earlier tangle, which Bentivoglio
titled Autoritratto emblematico (1971) features a circle around the final
two letters, reinforcing the self-referential nature of the piece (figure 7).
Her 1973 collage La firma this time riffs on the artist’s own name, which
is cut from a 100,000 lira bill (figure 8). However, this time the artist
omits the final two letters of her name, substituting them for the signature“io” at the bottom right of the collage. Discussing this work, Bentivoglio
explained:
Io sono chi ha mutilato il nome, messo la firma al posto dell’opera, messo la banconota dentro il nome, messo il pronome al posto della firma. Io sono l’individuo chepuò esprimere la sua libertà solo attraverso la contradditorietà, e rompe le regole delgioco con un lavoro che sta al gioco. 12

Bentivoglio here explains the series of substitutions she has created interms that are themselves playful. While on the one hand it is a game, it
is also an expression of individual liberty. Yet “Bentivoglio” has been torn
apart. The word “io” is not just a reference to her name, but also an empty
signifier whose meaning depends on its use. Bentivoglio does not occupythat position absolutely. The metonymic substitution of name for work,
banknote for name, and pronoun for signature both connects Bentivoglio
to the work and signals a certain ambivalence towards the role of thecreator with respect to traditional mechanisms of exchange.

10. Mirella Bentivoglio and Gisella Meo, Zero al quadrato zero tagliato (il libro che si legge da due parti),Roma, Self-published, 1981.
11. Autoritratte: “Artiste di capriccioso e destrissimo ingegno”, Catalogo della mostra, edited by Giovanna
Giusti Galardi, Firenze, Polistampa, 2010, p. 112.
12. Mirella Bentivoglio: La poesia fatta pietra, Catalogo della mostra, Macerata, Coopedit Macerata, 1984,
p. 16.

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So what is it that ties the spirit of self-consciousness visible in Benti­
voglio’s work to an emerging feminist movement? For Bentivoglio, theanswer lies in her own involvement in feminism and her activities as a
curator. While her contemporaries often hesitated to ally themselves withthe feminist movement, Bentivoglio has touted the accomplishments of
the 1970s as the “decade della donna”. In particular, she has been a stalwart promoter and organizer of what she calls “le mostre-ghetto”, the allwoman ghetto shows. In the introduction to the 8th Biennale Donna heldin Ferrara in 1998, Bentivoglio wrote:
Le Mostre-Ghetto degli anni Settanta hanno portato frutto. Hanno permesso di far
concentratamente conoscere la qualità del lavoro femminile e hanno attivato scambid’informazione. Forse l’espressione derisoria con cui questo tipo d’esposizioni venne
battezzato si codificherà in segno positivo proprio come le definizioni Impressionismo
e Cubismo, che, nate da ironizzazioni critiche, entrarono a pieno diritto nel nobilitante vocabolario della storia dell’arte. 13

For Bentivoglio, the all-woman shows she has curated since 1971, thesame year she created the Autoritratto emblematico, have been importantarenas in which to demonstrate the capacities of women artists. They havealso been integral to the recognition and repeated participation of womenin the artistic sphere, in particular as a remedy to the personal insecurity
and hesitation that she believed had traditionally excluded women fromartistic careers. If the role of the artist has traditionally been a male prerogative, then the all-woman show was a powerful means by which toquestion this assumption. Bentivoglio herself was a relatively new arrivalon the artistic scene—until 1968, she had been a poet rather than a visual
artist. Just as in her curatorial projects, the artworks she created in thefirst years of her practice offered her self-recognition as an artist, even if
recognition from others was not forthcoming.
Bentivoglio’s works have a jovial wit that is unique amongst her peers.
However, she shares with her contemporaries the predilection for insistently and self-consciously restating her own tenuous position as an artist.
Ketty La Rocca is an important case in point. Though she died prematurely in 1976 at the age of 38, La Rocca’s work prior to her untimely
death offers a constant iteration of the presence of the artist through theindexical trace and the linguistic shifter. And yet very often, the reference
to the artist is veiled as a reference to another.

13. Mirella Bentivoglio, Post scriptum, in Post Scriptum: Artiste in Italia tra linguaggio e immagine negli anni
’60 e ’70, edited by Anna Maria Fioravanti Baraldi, Ferrara, Siaca Arti Grafiche, 1998, pp. 3–9; 4.

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La Rocca’s Libro d’artista (1974) is a relatively straightforward example
of her serial self-reference (figure 9). The work is composed of dozens
of snapshots of the artist’s face in different expressive postures. She isgrimacing, yawning, winking, whistling, smiling, raising one eyebrow indoubt, or raising both eyebrows in shock. The title of the work plays on
the double possibilities of the possessive—it is an artist’s book in that it iscreated by her, and in the most literal sense, it is also composed of her own
image. In the work we witness the reversion to the conditions of photography that Krauss argued governed 1970s art making. Rather than offeringa translation of the artist’s vision of the world through the pictorial sign,
the work offers the artist to the world. And the artist here is repeatedly
captured, with infinite variations, all the better to harness that fantasy of
total self-presence through the use of the photograph.
Shifters and indices often occur simultaneously in La Rocca’s work—attimes in ways that are not immediately obvious, but almost always in waysthat implicate the artist herself. Take for example the set of works Noi
due and Mia sei, respectively from 1967 and 1968 (figures 10 and 11). Bothpaintings mimic the graphic style of road signs and highway markers,
and thus seem at first like geometric abstractions or international pop
art. However, the use of the arrow is particularly interesting. An arrow,
like a pointed finger, is an indexical sign, because its meaning depends
on a physical correspondence between it and the direction it indicates.
La Rocca’s choice of letters is also significant, for both “mia” and “noi”
are first person pronouns, making these seemingly impersonal works ultimately highly personal. In Noi due, the juxtaposition of image and text
makes it seem as if the diverging arrows describe a future split—not in a
freeway, but between “us two”. It is an abstract portrait of a break-up, perhaps, or of the subsequent distance that separates an artist and her work
as it circulates outside the studio. The arrows in Mia sei guide the viewer’seye back and forth from one written “my” to another, thereby containing
the gaze in a rather narcissistic or possessive circuit that repeats “you aremine”. This sense of claustrophobia is reinforced within the image by theway elements are not just juxtaposed, but also superimposed. The word“my” appears below the triangle and above it, as well as on top of the triangle and underneath it, regardless of whether you read the image up anddown or back to front. The work reflects back on itself through its internal
compositional logic, while the use of possessive pronouns and the arrows
that point to them seem to reiterate almost endlessly the artist’s claim toauthorship.

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This is not to suggest that these works are autobiographical. They arecertainly not in any way renditions of any tawdry, intimate details of theartist’s personal life. The index depends on a physical relationship between
an object or person and the deposited trace or physical gesture, not anemotional one. La Rocca’s deadpan road signs simply chart the physicalconnection between the artist and her work, even while testifying to theirseparation. Mia sei also implicates the developing discourse of Italian feminism by offering the reverse (and historical precursor, one might say) of
the rallying cry “Io sono mia”. Through this reference, her self-reflexive
statement of authority over her own work can also be interpreted as a dual
assertion of status as an artist and autonomy from patriarchal control.
La Rocca’s work often borrowed from the linguistic realm to provide
another means of self-presentation, as in Installazione con j (date unknown)(figure 12). The piece consists of a series of letter “j”s—two-dimensional
floor decals and human-height sculptures. “J” is, of course, another first
person reference, this time drawing on the French “je”. La Rocca createdseveral “i”s and “j”s in multiple formats throughout her career, all of which
provided a sort of duplication of the self through a linguistic referent.
Bentivoglio in fact owned one of these images (now in the collection of
the Mart Rovereto), a photograph of La Rocca in bed with one of her“j”s, demonstrating that these letters referred to an actual human being.
This particular installation is interesting, however, in that it is arrayedthroughout the artist’s studio, therefore creating a concrete metaphor forthe artist’s presence. She occupies the space, courtesy of the visual motif
she deploys, whether or not she is actually there. No longer empty shifters,
the “j”s thus function as indexical traces of the artist herself.
While first person pronouns were in many cases integral to La Rocca’s
work, second-person pronouns, and in particular, the English word “you”,
were all but indispensable, as in Senza titolo, a work from 1973 (figure 13).
The use of the word “you” would seem to refer to someone other than theartist, potentially the viewer or the collector of the work. However, for
La Rocca, the word bore a dual meaning, one that implicated both herself
and her interlocutors. As La Rocca explained in her writings, invoking
the inherent contradiction of the shifter, “you also means me” 14. Though
La Rocca never directly invokes Benveniste, there is a clear connection
between her body of work and his suggestion that “‘I’ posits anotherperson, the one who […] becomes my echo to whom I say ‘you’ and
14. Quoted in Vis à vis: Autoritrarsi d’artista, Catalogo della mostra, edited by Saretto Cincinelli, Cristiana
Collu, Maria Perosino, Nuoro, Grafiche Editoriali Solinas, 2002, p. 37.

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who says ‘you’ to me” 15. ‘You’ then provided a dual referent—implicating
someone other than the artist as the recipient of her intended communication, while also obliquely referring back to the artist herself. Thus,
La Rocca examines both her own status as an artist, a designation whose
value depends on legitimation from others, and the fractured nature of
the individual subject, whose self-expression relies on a system of language
it is forced to internalize. In other words, the individual exists within asystem of social relationships. La Rocca created a host of works that joined
the indexical trace—whether it be a photograph or drawn line—with theword “you”. This would become something of La Rocca’s signature style,a repetition of her own personal artistic gesture joined with a recognitionof the governing mechanisms of exchange (figures 14-16). 16
Amongst her best-known works are a series of photos that La Rocca
created in 1971 and 1972 (figure 15). The title of the series, You, comes fromthe text that is scribbled over the images of gesturing hands. La Rocca
believed that the language of hand gestures was a more immediate and lessmediated mode of communication than other types of visual symbols. 17
In so far as they created a link between the gesturer and interpreter thatwas primal and direct, these gestures brought the artist and the viewer
into conversation. La Rocca overlays these gestures with the linguistic
shifter, again implicating both the artist and the viewer in complementary,dialogic positions. Thus the shifter not only establishes identity, it alsosuggests its instability. Furthermore, the presence of not one but multiple
hands throughout La Rocca’s work suggests a division, not only between
artist and viewer, but within the artist herself, as she is like the rest of us a
subject rendered through language.
The slipperiness of identity that the shifter entailed made depictionsof the self problematic in ways that self-portraitists have not traditionallyacknowledged. Ketty La Rocca’s Craniologie (1973), x-rays of the artist’s
skull on to which she superimposes photographs and written text, arememorials to the simultaneous presence and absence of the female artist.
They are indexical self-portraits that, rather than providing a subjective
rendering of the artist’s interior psychology, offer a literal snapshot of the
15. Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, op. cit., p. 225.
16. The significance of the repeated word “you” was something that La Rocca’s contemporaries recognized.
See, for intance, the review of an exhibition held shortly after her death which quotes some lines of poetry by
La Rocca: “[…] il mio unico gesto lì / you, you tenta di inceppare il processo visivo e mentale / e di ridurre il
linguaggio a semplice ‘bit’ d’informazione.” Dario Micacchi, “La promessa di una grande pittura: Retrospettive
di Cintoli, La Rocca e Gnoli alla Biennale di Venezia”, in L’Unità, 7 July 1978.
17. Daniela Palazzoli, “Esploratrice di linguaggi: Ricordo di Ketty La Rocca, artista inquieta e poliedrica”, inCorriere d’informazione, 9 February 1976.

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inside of her head. The juxtaposed photograph of the hand in one of theworks joins two different forms of indexical representation (figure 17). It
also provides a clue to the activity that this artist’s mind has directed—thework of her own hand. These two attributes, the artist’s ‘hand’ and her
signature syllable “you”, replace a palette and maulstick, the traditional
accoutrements of Old Master self-portraiture. In another work, she evenjuxtaposes the x-ray with a Fang mask of the type that inspired Picasso in
the first decade of the 20th century (figure 18). This palimpsest allows her
to raise the question of her own mastery by means of allusion to one of themost celebrated painters in history. However, La Rocca’s is a self-portrait
created in the wake of the exhaustion of the painted sign, in which thephysical record of the x-ray replaces traditional interiority. In these works,
the word “you” is literally superimposed on the artist’s skull, reinforcing
a necessary connection between the use of the word and the artist herself.
So what are we to make of this body of works, littered with both firstand second person pronouns that all somehow lead back to the artist
herself? It points to La Rocca’s stake in her own project, and her desire
to approach the artistic enterprise as a mode of self-documentation. For
La Rocca, any subject presented an opportunity to recreate the self. The
artist explained that even her borrowed motifs needed to be reconstituted“according to my own memories, according to my own way of being, of
feeling, of living” 18. Whereas linguistic shifters could only be used circuitously as a means to articulate the self, the index provided the mostdirect way to objectify her own subjective experience. These works are notmaudlin, yet there is a certain poignancy in the way La Rocca deployed
the index in the Craniologie series. This is because the index is a remnant, aghost. La Rocca, I would wager, played with these associations intentionally, given that the works were created shortly before she succumbed tocancer in 1976. Through them, La Rocca was able to fix her own trace,
remaining inseparable from her work despite her eventual absence.
The repeated insistence on the presence of the artist, garnered throughthe use of the index and the shifter, reflected the spirit of self-consciousness of the emerging feminist movement. In making this claim, I am again
questioning one of Trasforini’s premises. In Decostruzioniste ante litteram,Trasforini suggests that the work of these artists is indicative of what
she calls “a non-encounter with feminism”. She claims that the prevalentcharacteristic of this generation of artists was a pragmatic stance towards

18. Quoted in Lucilla Saccà, Omaggio a Ketty La Rocca, Pisa, Pacini, 2001, p. 17.

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individual liberation, in which overcoming the individual difficulties ofchoosing an artistic career was paramount and collective politics was a
distant consideration. As this discussion has demonstrated, that argument
warrants some revision. Although it is true that some of the thirty-eightartists, including Ketty La Rocca, held the feminist movement at something of a distance, others, like Bentivoglio, operated actively within it.
Furthermore, even if feminism was not a primary personal consideration
to all of these artists—and in fact some rejected the very idea of it—it was
nonetheless an influential and important social reference. Many of these
artists shared a common belief in the necessity of starting with oneself,that is, using one’s own experience as a primary point of reference, which
was a fundamental feminist trope. The research into and about oneselfthat finds such depth and subtlety of expression in La Rocca’s work was
the basis for the practice of autocoscienza as well as the feminist slogan,“the personal is political”.
Furthermore, there is a very important connection between the works
I have discussed and Italian feminist thought from Carla Lonzi to Adriana
Cavarero—which attempted to uncover an autonomous female speaking
subject that had been erased in patriarchal culture. Within all of theseworks, but especially in Ketty La Rocca’s incessantly repeated “you”, there
is a recognition of serving as the other, the echoing “you” of masculine
philosophy, and thus of the problematic nature of female subjectivity. As
Patrizia Magli contended in 1985, women’s relationship to language wasproblematic:
Creature più dedite all’ascolto, le donne oggi si affermano come soggetti del discorso,e, in questo modo, attraverso il duello di parola e ascolto, attraverso la complicità diparola e silenzio, tentano di attraversare tutta l’avventura del linguaggio. Ma insiemea questa cognizione sorge anche un interrogativo: la relazione tra desiderio di essere
e universo della significazione non presuppone forse una predeterminazione? e il
discorso non è forse, da sempre, “masculin-paternel”? 19

The work of Ketty La Rocca and Mirella Bentivoglio sought a way
out of this double bind. Through the use of the index and the shifter,
their works asserted their presence as women artists while at the sametime questioning the integrity of the presumptive male subject and undermining patriarchal discourse.

19. Patrizia Magli, Il segno della differenza, in Le donne e i segni: Scrittura, linguaggio, identità nel segno delladifferenza femminile, edited by Patrizia Magli, Ancona, Lavoro editoriale, 1985, pp. 11–22; 11.

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Figure 1. – Lucia Marcucci, Il tema romantico della poesia, 1974.
Courtesy of the Artist.

Figure 2. – Ketty La Rocca, Pranzo di nozze, 1974.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

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Figure 3. – Mirella Bentivoglio, Il cuore della consumatrice ubbidiente, 1975.
Courtesy of the Artist.

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Leslie Cozzi

Figure 4. – Mirella Bentivoglio, Io, photograph of the artist in the 1970s.
Courtesy of the Artist.

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Figure 5. – Mirella Bentivoglio, Uovo e portauovo, genesi e cultura, 1971.
Courtesy of the Artist.

Figure 6. – Mirella Bentivoglio, Soggettivismo oggettivato, 1972.
Courtesy of the Artist.

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Leslie Cozzi

Figure 7. – Mirella Bentivoglio, Grovigl / io (Autoritratto emblematico), 1971.
Courtesy of the Artist.

Figure 8. – Mirella Bentivoglio, La firma, 1973.
Courtesy of the Artist.

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Figure 9. – Ketty La Rocca, Libro d’artista, 1974.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

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Figure 10. – Ketty La Rocca, Noi due, 1967.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

Figure 11. – Ketty La Rocca, Mia sei, 1968.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

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Italian Feminism and the Art of Mirella Bentivoglio and Ketty La Rocca

Figure 12. – Ketty La Rocca, Installazione con j.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

Figure 13. – Ketty La Rocca, Senza titolo, 1973.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

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Leslie Cozzi

Figure 14. – Ketty La Rocca, You, 1971–1972.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

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Figure 15. – Ketty La Rocca, Original image from In principio erat, 1971.
Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

Figure 16. – Ketty La Rocca, Palimpsest of the original image
and transparent overlay from You, 1975.
Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca.

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Figure 17. – Ketty La Rocca, Craniologia, 1973.

Figure 18. – Ketty La Rocca, Craniologia, 1973.

Courtesy of Michelangelo Vasta / Estate of Ketty La Rocca (fig. 17 & 18).

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