Katabasis, Ezra Pound and Three Maltese Artists

Maltese Modern Art Series: History & Theory Volume 3

In this philosophical and historical work, Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci continues to challenge selected art categories and juxtaposes them with the development of modern art. Here he audaciously treads into the intricate matrix of Ezra Pound’s poetic time-and-concept-leaps of historical narrative layers and imagination to read into visual worlds of three contemporary Maltese artists: Caesar Attard, Anthony Catania, and Ġoxwa Borg.

Journeying down the katabasis path on the holzwege route to the realm of ideas, Schembri Bonaci’s thought re-emerges through the surfaces of diverse compositions, proposing unprecedented interpretations of artworks that have not previously been studied academically.

From the time of Malta’s Mediterranean antiquity and through Medieval intrigue until the unknown of today, the author uncovers new theoretical angles for the study of Maltese art. Most notably, the author introduces Pound’s poetic structure and his definition of certain economic principles including the usura concept which, together with its relationship between art and industry, gives a radically different meaning to the status of Maltese art. Schembri Bonaci’s revisionary quest is also methodological as he exploits poetry’s potential as meaning-creator, both factual and mythic, for an art historical and philosophical thesis. Boundaries are relentlessly crossed to form alternative structures of discursive knowledge, only to bring the constellation of ideas into a tighter-knit formation of relations.