Mario Diacono, “Matter—Destructure: Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth,” translated from Italian by Lucinda Byatt, originally published as ­“Materia-destruttura: Richard Serra, Bruce Nauman, Joseph Kosuth,” in Collage 9 (1970): 6-21 (excerpt)

The writer, art critic, visual poet, and art dealer Mario Diacono spent many years in the USA. He was professor of Italian literature at the University of California, Berkeley and at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. In 1985, he opened the Diacono Gallery in Boston. From the late 1960s he published well-documented and theoretically supported texts on American artists in the magazine Collage, such as the following article on Serra, Nauman, and Kosuth: for Diacono they represent three specific paradigms of different level of tautological decrease of experience and radical modifying of the art object. The essentially formal nature of the new works of anti-art makes it improbable from the outset that they can be used in the context of political futurology. More than any other art form, the visual arts are rapidly inscribed in a way of behaving and into an exhaustive public consumption, unlike poetry.