25 Ways to Hammer a Nail. “Postcrocian” Aesthetics and Everyday Life’s Poetics in Enzo Mari

The essay analyzes the poetics of Enzo Mari in the light of postcrocian aesthetics, in particular Umberto Eco and Luciano Anceschi’ contributes. The field of reflection of the essay, conducted on several levels (both meta-artistic and intra-artistic) is polarized around some expressions and some key words, explications of issues perceived as urgent. First, a rethinking of aesthetic experience on the basis of the results of psychology and the phenomenology of perception. Secondly, a rethinking of the status of the work of art, which becomes “open work” or work “with multiple outcomes”; to characterize the work is a semantic stratification, a multiplicity of meanings that requires an active user, able to enter the work and trace an interpretative path. Thirdly, a rethinking of the aesthetic-social impact of art capable of activating an “aesthetic education”, a new and more conscious experience of the “environment”, be it natural or cultural: artistic objects, as well as those of design, have a transformative power of ordinary space-time, and consequently of the habits that mark it. This creates a very close link between aisthesis, poiein and praxis, between aesthetics, artistic operation and life, in its ethical and social aspect.