Andrea Pinotti's 'Nonumento' explores public art and memory

Andrea Pinotti, professor of Aesthetics at the University of Milan, has published a book titled 'Nonumento' that examines the crisis of the traditional monument and the rise of 'nonumentality' in contemporary public art. The volume analyzes various types of nonumentality and the relationship between public and private spaces. Pinotti argues that monuments, intended as aids to memory, often become machines of oblivion, while nonuments share the function of arresting the entropy of forgetting. The book discusses several case studies, including the statue of Indro Montanelli in Milan's Porta Venezia gardens, which was vandalized by feminist collective Non Una di Meno on March 8, 2019, with pink paint, and later by Rete studenti Milano & Lume, who wrote 'racist rapist' on it. Another example is Maurizio Cattelan's 'L.O.V.E.' (the finger) in Piazza Affari, Milan, whose nail was painted pink, and his giant monolith with an airplane exhibited at Hangar Bicocca. The book also references Christian Boltanski's 1990 work 'La maison manquante' in Berlin, where plaques on a wall commemorate victims of a 1945 bombing, turning absence into art. Pinotti has studied monumental issues for about twenty years.