Franco Vaccari, an Italian conceptual artist whose experiments with photography expanded the medium’s possibilities, has died at 89. His death was announced by his gallery, the Bologna-based P420, which did not specify a cause.
Vaccari died just four months before his work was due to be surveyed in a retrospective held at Museion in Bolzano, Italy. Opening in March, the exhibition was being staged to mark what would’ve been Vaccari’s 90th birthday and is due to explore how the artist brought his work beyond art spaces, into the eye of the general public.
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He often relied on viewer participation for the completion of his pieces, which he typically called “esposizioni in tempo reale,” or “exhibitions in real time.” The most famous of them, a work called Esposizione in tempo reale n. 4. Lascia sulle pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio, figured in the 1972 Venice Biennale and was mostly composed of a photobooth known as a Photomatic. Vaccari sat for the first picture, then asked his viewers to follow suit and forfeit their picture, which then was exhibited for others to see.
Following the success of that piece, Vaccari produced Photomatic d’Italia (1972–74), for which he asked visitors to some 1,000 Photomatic booths across Italy to perform a similar gesture, making for what he called a “private space immersed in public space.” Some 40,000 self-portraits resulted. Later on, Vaccari would state that pieces such as this one revealed photography’s inner workings “through techniques that were capable of short-circuiting the cumbersome presence of the ego.”
Born in Modena in 1936, Vaccari would go on to become one of the most famous Italian artists, figuring in two more editions of the Venice Biennale after the 1972 show.
He staged his first “exhibition in real time” in 1969 with Esposizione in tempo reale n. 1: Maschere, for which he provided viewers with masks of George Wallace, the Alabama Governor who infamously advocated for segregation. Vaccari then asked viewers to wear those masks in a darkened room before periodically shining a flashlight at some of the attendees.
His art of the 1970s situated him more firmly within the Conceptualist movement. In 1972, he made 700 Km di esposizione Modena-Graz, for which he photographed a range of sights seen on the way from Modena to Graz, Austria, where he was to have a show. The piece translated Conceptualist techniques flowing in from the US—Ed Ruscha had photographed every gas station on the Sunset Strip in 1966—for an Italian audience.
Though Vaccari remained under-recognized outside Italy, his fans included some well-known curators. Okwui Enwezor included Vaccari’s work in his 2008 Gwangju Biennale, and Hans Ulrich Obrist featured a piece by the artist in a show co-organized with Christian Boltanski for the Monnaie de Paris in 2015.
Later works by Vaccari showed an interest in how information is communicated. Continuing an interest in bar codes that went back decades, Vaccari began making pieces about QR codes in his final years. One 2020 piece, E’ BELLO ESSERE ITALIANI!, takes the form of a QR code viewable online. Notably, it does not link out to a URL. Instead, scanning it with one’s phone reveals a long list of famous Italians, from Dante Alighieri to Gianna Versace. That text concludes “É BELLO ESSERE ITALIANI !,” or “IT’S BEAUTIFUL TO BE ITALIAN!”
