La “fragile idea”: Enzo Mari e la Divulgazione delle esemplificazioni delle ricerche (_Nova Tendencija 3_, Zagabria 1965)

Between 1963 and 1965 the international art movement known as New tendency has gathered the best representatives belonging to the area of art usually defined as “programmed and kinetic art”. After two years of conflicts and divergences, the exhibition Nova tendencija 3, organised in Zagreb in 1965, aimed at fully clarifying the tasks of the movement, as well as its strategy. Within such context, two main interrelated issues have arisen: the relationship between the avant-garde and the audience, and the status of the “gestaltic” object; both issues became explicit in the choice of the theme and of the plan of the exhibition - Divulgation of the exemplifications of the research, - where “research” refers to the “aesthetic research” - as much as in the outcome of the contest aimed at awarding a mass-produced (object-related) exemplification. Within the framework of this event’s organisation, Enzo Mari has definitely played a key role. Both the investigation of Mari’s contribution to Nova tendencija 3, as well as the examination of the award-winning project, - Michel Fadat’s Visual Instrument - allow us to efficiently propose historiographical and methodological analyses, which consider the very core of the historical discourse as marked by a crisis, in order to attempt the establishment of new connections between the formal dimension of objects and the context, along with the reassessment of the problematic and controversial legacy transmitted by the whole New tendency.