ABSTRACT
This chapter distinguishes two periods within the chronological arc covered, 1978-86. Between the mid-Seventies and the first years of the Eighties, semiotics came to the fore in Italy as a discipline that promised to bring an analytic dimension to art, an approach of decomposition, of subdividing the whole into parts. In Tango Glaciale, a cult spectacle of postmodern theater, the image bank was metropolitan, that of the mass media: cinema, comic books, advertising, rock music, dark glasses and trench coats of Hollywood gangsters. The anthropological perspective has given theoretical legitimacy to the way artistic practice has left behind the orbit of the text in preference to context, even beyond the spectacle. This tendency was flanked by the postmodern exaltation of the aesthetics of social behavior, of the diffuse artwork, and the irrelevance of the author. The distance and mutual autonomy of author and spectator have been lost, in favor of a hypothetical communion with no distinction among roles.
