ARTE POVERA : THE RECOUNT

With affinities to neo-Dada, Nouveau Realisme, Conceptualism, Post-Minimalism, Process art and performance, Italy's Arte Povera encompassed the most vital tendencies of the 1960s and early 70s.
A major exhibition, now in midtour, documents the movement's breadth and energy.

BY MARCIA E. VETROCQ

Arte Povera may be the most talked-about neglected movement, the best-fed underdog, of recent art history. Beyond the borders of its native Italy, Arte Povera commands name recognition without commensurate critical esteem, and its apparent familiarity rests on a fundamentally spotty acquaintance. The key word, "povera"-meaning "poor" in Italian-has settled into the international lexicon of art as a convenient but muzzy catchword for a complex field of expressions variously characterized by impermanence, simplicity, nonchalance, the utilization of nonart materials, and an anticonsumerist and sometimes irony-laced invocation of the natural, the alchemical and the numerological, A handful of its original practitioners-Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Alighiero Boetti-enjoy solid reputations, but that renown is based on a few signature materials or forms (mirrors and rags, neon and igloos, acetylene torches and horses, word grids and embroidered maps) rather than on a comprehension of the artists' creative development in depth or in context.
At home, where Arte Povera is regarded as having been Italy's principal contender in the vanguard of the 1960s and '70s, an air of injury nevertheless persists. It's not difficult to explain why. There is, for starters, the 800-pound gorilla, American art, which sat athwart much of the European art world for roughly two decades and often consigned Continental currents to the periphery. On this matter, Robert Rauschenberg's prizewinning turn at the 1964 Venice Biennale is usually cited as the epiphanic moment in Italy.
There are more purely domestic grievances as well. A paralyzing ambivalence toward the new prevailed in a country steeped in historical treasures and was reflected in a shortage of Italian institutions with the will or the budget to do much to encourage contemporary efforts. A congruent scarcity of committed collectors left most young artists without sustained patronage. Italy's few stout-hearted collectors of emerging art, Giuseppe Panza most conspicuously, were inclined to favor the Americans. (Panza already owned Rauschenberg's Coca-Cola Plan when it was included in the U.S. representation at the Biennale.) With some exceptions-notably Marcello Levi and Laura and Corrado Levi in Turin-only a handful of supportive writers and the artists' early dealers, particularly Gian Enzo Sperone, Margherita Stein and Ileana Sonnabend, acquired Arte Povera works.
Arte Povera did have one absolutely crucial asset, a tireless and ambitious front man, Germano Celant, who would go on to secure a name for himself on both sides of the Atlantic, even if he couldn't quite deliver the same for all the artists he promoted. A budding critic and curator in 1967, Celant baptized the tendency, appropriating for the visual arts the notion of a "poor" (demotic, pared down, immediate, anti-illusionistic) theater advocated by Polish director Jerzy Grotowsky. With a campaign of exhibitions, articles, books, events and conferences, the Povera brand was established for a clutch of initiatives that had been incubating, principally in Turin and Rome, since the early 1960s.
Though Celant was not an official participant, his influence is more or less ubiquitous in the latest and most far-reaching effort yet to boost the stock of Arte Povera. "Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972" was initiated by the Walker Art Center and realized in partnership with Tate Modern, where the exhibition debuted in May 2001. Fourteen artists (more on this later) are presented as the movement's standard-bearers: Giovanni Anselmo, Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. The 11-year baker's decade encompassed in the show's title is neatly bisected by Celant's naming of the movement, an event that consequently and correctly emerges as not so much a launch as a consolidation and even, perhaps, a clipping of wings.
The timing of "Zero to Infinity" is impeccable. Over the last decade or so, artists as various as Gabriel Orozco, Mona Hatoum, Ernesto Neto, Martin Creed and Tom Friedman-along with Italy's own more explicitly Arte Povera-conscious Giuseppe Gabellone, Eva Marisaldi, Perino & Vele, Liliana Moro, Paola Pivi and others-have cultivated a new landscape from which to look back at the pioneering art that mixed diffidence and craft, invention and literalness, the performative and the formal. Correspondences, whether close or attenuated, between works from then and now are revealing.
Pistoletto's Lightbulb Curtain on the Wall (1967), with its vinelike cords and pendant incandescent bulbs, shares the improvised, careless elegance of Felix Gonzalez-Torres's lightbulb works without, of course, having to shoulder the burden of the AIDS era's intimations of transience and mortality. Pairing a progressive sequence of neon Fibonacci numbers with 10 photographs of a multiplying throng in a factory canteen, Mario Merz reassuringly posits an order underlying ostensibly random social behavior. His work is years away, in both technology and spirit, from that of the current numbersmith, Tatsuo Miyajima, and his implacable sequences of ominous LED digits.
Calzolari's assemblages of humming refrigeration units, mattresses and elliptical neon scrawls conjure the threadbare accommodations of the impoverished intellectual and bring to mind-precisely for all the crucial differences-the '90s narcissism and gym-honed cruelty of Matthew Barney's meat lockers and self-lubricating toys. With additional works incorporating light and murmurous audio, as well as an unexpectedly affecting "broken" infinity symbol fabricated of tobacco leaves and neon on slender tin rods, Calzolari is likely to be one of the more compelling rediscoveries of "Zero to Infinity." Another is Marisa Merz (yes, the wife of Mario), whose receipt of a special award at the last Venice Biennale baffled the many insiders to whom she was virtually unknown. She is not the most prolific artist, but the four works included are choice. Woven-wire compositions take the form of a little shoe and the letters that spell out the name of the artist's daughter, Bea. The aluminum curls of Untitled (Living Sculpture), 1966, are suspended overhead in gleaming balls and clusters, conjuring both a canopy of cocoons and an inventory of new engine parts at the ready in a garage.
The exhibition's curators, Richard Flood and Frances Morris, were surely cognizant of their show's many fresh implications; some of them are addressed directly in Francesco Bonami's catalogue essay. Yet the exhibition overall is beset by an archival feeling, which is abetted by the period posters and reliquary vitrines housing pamphlets and first editions. The London presentation was soberly historical, filial, deferential, and it all but treated the works as elderly, even though the artists who made them were not.
Some areas at the Tate were inexplicably illuminated at the low candlepower reserved for the most fragile old-master drawings. Many rooms were crowded, draining the art of energy and poetry. (By all accounts, the objects fared better at the Walker.) Especially hard-hit on this score was the large gallery devoted to more politically engaged works. These included Pistoletto's globe of newspapers in a cage, Pascali's harrowing-looking machines of war assembled from innocuous found objects and Fabro's three-dimensional maps of Italy, one fashioned of mirror and lead, another gilded and hung upside down, cross-referencing the execution of Mussolini and a prosciutto.
For a show whose early starting point of 1962 is but one indication of the organizers' determination to set the record straight, chronology grows rather muddled. The Tate's alternation of thematic and monographic rooms thwarted an awareness of beginnings and developments. Arte Povera's prehistory, for example, is thoroughly chronicled in the catalogue but only selectively represented in the exhibition. There is a fine array of Pistoletto's "Minus Objects" (1965-66), a series of pared-down furnishings and constructions of dubious utility that quite literally range from the sublime (six mirrors lashed together facing inward to create a Cubic Meter of Infinity) to the ridiculous (an enlarged photographic portrait, its center stripped away to leave behind The Ears of Jasper Johns). By comparison, there is just one of Pistoletto's early "mirror paintings," polished sheets of stainless steel with collaged figures on tissue paper that incorporate painting, found imagery and the real-time performance of viewers' reflections. The absence of any rag works by Pistoletto is even more mysterious.
Only Paolini is represented by a significant number of works from 1962-65. His shrewd riffs on the conventions of painting include a grid of colorful posterboard squares (part of a color-sample-obsessed family that embraces works by Marcel Duchamp, Ellsworth Kelly, Jim Dine, Gerhard Richter, Vik Muniz and Peter Wegner), a trio of nested canvases hung facing the wall to expose their stretchers (like a blind inversion of Johns's Three Flags) and a pair of large wooden boards, one with a sheet of exposed photographic paper set in its recessed center like a rare stamp, the other with used painter's tools-escapees from Johns's Savarin can-poised on the top edge.
Together these works set the stage for Paolini's best-known effort, Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto (1967), a true-to-scale reproduction (first realized in photo-emulsion on canvas) of a small frontal portrait from 1505 by the Venetian-born Lotto. Paolini dramatizes the power inequities and underlying artificiality of portraiture via a reversal of attention that animates the 16th-century young man and, by extension, introduces into the equation a 20th-century young man, himself, or you-any viewer-who right now looks at the young man looking at Lorenzo Lotto. Long before the gaze became The Gaze, and before Walter Benjamin became an undergraduate requirement, Paolini calmly laid siege to the authority of the painter and the inviolate meaning of the original.
The ensemble by Paolini and the 1962-64 mirror work by Pistoletto bring home the important point that Arte Povera did not ignite, as is often assumed, in response to American Minimalism. In the early 1960s, painting- particularly the operatic, gestural and subjective kind-was the idol to be toppled. "Zero to Infinity" makes this evident, even though, inexplicably, it includes no paintings by Mario Merz, who, along with Kounellis (here represented by two works on canvas), retained the medium as an element of his evolving practice.
Suggestive new protocols for dissolving painting's traditional limits had already been laid down by Fontana, Burri and Manzoni. One outright tribute to Fontana's pierced canvases, and an acknowledgment of Pistoletto's mirror paintings of the previous year, is Fabro's 1963 Hole. A sheet of glass is silvered with a pattern of repeated gestural strokes, making for a shifting lattice of fragmentary reflections and glimpses through the glass. Manzoni's white "Achromes," too, receive a nod from Fabro in Three Ways of Arranging Sheets (1968). Bed linens are draped, layered and pleated in three grand monochrome compositions that achieve the stately sublimity of religious art.
The ongoing contention with painting extends to Boetti's Mimetic (1966), one of a series that presents camouflage-printed fabric as commercially produced "found" abstractions, as well as to his stitched maps, whose compositions were realized by Afghani embroiderers according to cartographic conventions, geopolitical changes and the designs of national flags. Perhaps his most sweeping statement on painting, Boetti's Nothing to See, Nothing to Hide (1969) is a roughly 10-by-13-foot iron frame that houses 12 panes of glass and leans against the wall like a displaced skylight. Nothing utterly dismisses the Renaissance painting-as-window, cleansing even the residual image field of Duchamp's Large Glass. The work is also a classic instance of Boettian cunning, as the duplicitous title solicits your trust, like a magician who assures you he has nothing up his sleeve.
Likewise operating on a grand scale is Anselmo's Entering the Work (1971), which documents a performance and parodies a sacred cow of postwar painting. Rendered in photo-emulsion on an Ab-Ex-size canvas (it is nearly 13 feet across), the diminutive figure of the artist runs into a horizonless landscape, at once penetrating and being swallowed by the field. The enlarged grain of the image reads as an allover abstraction, while the action and the title allude slyly to Pollock's notorious practice of stepping onto his floor-bound canvases as he worked, and to his often quoted reference to being "in" the painting.
If the underrepresentation of the early years is regrettable, the show's terminus ad quem is downright puzzling. By 1972 the group had lost all but a vestigial cohesiveness. Celant had already called for the abandonment of the term "Arte Povera" in 1971, or for restricting its application to a historical chapter he considered closed. Of the exhibition's approximately 140 objects, only three actually date from 1972. There is one work by Kounellis, the latest of Fabro's eight "Foot" sculptures (towering silk trouser legs from which protrude enormous primordial-looking feet crafted of marble, glass, bronze or porphyry) and the latter's undeniably lovely Penelope (1972/2001), an installation of needles and thread which proposes that the weaving by Odysseus's cleverly procrastinating wife has grown to the wall-size dimensions of a fisherman's net. Stretching the time frame an extra year does allow the catalogue's (sometimes error-marred) chronology to include the Walker's own Mario Merz exhibition of early 1972-which continued an institutional engagement with Arte Povera that reaches back to a 1966 exhibition of Pistoletto's mirrors-as well as the 36th Venice Biennale and Documenta 5, which both saw participation by Arte Povera artists.
In many respects, the afterlife of Arte Povera is as revealing as the tale of its formation. It may help to think of Arte Povera in terms of three official seasons. Celant kicked off the first with a pair of gallery shows in Genoa (September-October 1967) and Bologna (February-March 1968), between which appeared a manifesto of sorts, "Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War," published in the newly launched journal Flash Art. He assumed a tone of '60s-style militancy, speaking broadly of art that exists "as social gestures in and of themselves, as formative and compositive liberations which aim at the identification between man and the world."(1) At this stage the field included Anselmo, Boetti, Fabro, Gilardi, Mario Merz, Kounellis, Paolini, Pascali, Pistoletto, Prini and Zorio as well as Mario Ceroli and Gianni Piacentino.
A three-day exhibition and performance event in Amalfi in early October 1968, "Arte povera + azioni povere," further institutionalized the group name and lured some additional Italians into the tent (Paolo Icaro, Pietro Lista, Gino Marotta and Marisa Merz) along with Jan Dibbets, Richard Long and Ger van Elk. Celant's intention to internationalize the term "Arte Povera" as an all-purpose umbrella for Conceptualism, performance, Land art and Post-Minimalism became clear with the 1969 publication of his first book on the subject. Of the 34 artists he profiled, just 11 were Italian.(2)
Foreign artists, however, never really signed on, and some of the Italians were already growing restive. Gilardi, known for his "Nature Carpets" (stretches of cushy polyurethane molded and painted to emulate topographical specimens), shifted his attention from object-making to writing and, with the political upheavals of 1968, to organizing labor protests and neighborhood cultural associations. Boetti, tired of the group's preoccupation with materials and environments, was increasingly absorbed with making two-dimensional objects. Pascali died after a motorcycle crash in 1968.
Arte Povera's swan song followed in 1971 at the Munich Kunstverein. "Arte Povera: 13 italienische Künstler" (Arte Povera: 13 Italian Artists), organized by Eva Madelung, brought together a nucleus from Celant's existing team plus Gino De Dominicis, Vettor Pisani and Salvo. The Munich catalogue reprinted an essay called "Senza titolo" (Untitled), which had appeared two months earlier in the magazine Domus, wherein Celant retired the rubric he had famously coined.
Nearly 15 years later, he moved to revive the erstwhile guerrilla movement as a historical franchise. Arte Povera's second season coincided with the art world's renewed infatuation with painting and the figure, and with a fresh curiosity about the national roots of cultural expression. Celant published the document-rich book Arte povera=Art povera and organized an exhibition of vintage and newly minted works that appeared in Turin and Madrid before arriving at P.S. 1 in New York in 1985.(3) The once morphing field was fixed as a strictly Italian movement with a dozen players. P.S. 1 director Alanna Heiss introduced the show with a candid disclaimer:
Although presented as a group, these artists, in fact,do not represent one. Their divergent interests and pursuits make them more dissimilar than similar.
[T]here are artists not represented in this exhibition who might be considered by some critics as historically relevant, impossible to omit. To arte povera enthusiasts, the presence of some might be considered tangential. The obvious and primary reason why these artists are included in the exhibition is simply because they were invited to participate by the curator.(4)
Whence this preoccupation with membership lists for a movement that was, after all, characterized by heterogeneity and insubordination? Why such persistence in attaching the term "Arte Povera" to the names of artists rather than to the qualities of particular works? These questions go to the heart of what will- and will not-be accomplished in Arte Povera's third and current season. "Zero to Infinity" is the most comprehensive, and is likely to prove the most influential, of a score of recent shows dedicated to the subject [see sidebar]. The hitch is that the present exhibition largely confirms what was never really in doubt: Arte Povera as named, defined and staffed by Celant is Arte Povera as named, defined and staffed by Celant.
Yet there are other ways to frame the story of Italian art in the 1960s and '70s. A 1989 exhibition at Milan's Padiglione d'arte contemporanea called "Verso 1'arte povera" (Toward Arte Povera) brought together 27 artists plus the performance collective "The Zoo." All had contributed to the Povera scene, though half are now relegated to the status of disappeareds in the official story.(5) Even during Arte Povera's key decade, there were diverging curatorial points of view. Observing that the three-year-old term "Arte Povera" had already been rejected by some of the artists involved, Jean-Christophe Ammann called his 1970 show of Italian art at the Lucerne Kunstmuseum "Process di pensiero visualizzati" (Thought Processes Visualized). The show mingled Arte Povera artists with a few others (Giorgio Griffa, Eliseo Mattiacci, Salvo) to whom the Povera name never adhered.
The Lucerne show emphasized concept over material, which points toward the territory of another indispensable interpreter of Italian art, Achille Bonito Oliva, who has consistently proposed alternative readings and other colleagues for the poveristi.(6) One of the more glaring indicators of the tunnel vision of "Zero to Infinity" is the curators' dismissive characterization of Bonito Oliva as a "curator and critic from southern Italy" whose promotion of the narrative and Neo-Expressionist painters of the Italian Transavanguardia established the unlikely context in which Arte Povera returned, phoenixlike, via the museum extravaganzas of the mid-'80s. Hardly a belated spoiler, Bonito Oliva was an interlocutor of Arte Povera, in print and in deed, virtually from the start; he can be seen seated next to Celant in photos of the crucial Amalfi conference of 1968.(7)
Partisan gaffes aside, "Zero to Infinity" is generally guided by intelligence and conviction, with an air of scholarly purpose that is leavened by affection if not outright humor (though some of the works are irreverently funny). But the exhibition also contributes, however inadvertently, to a problem. Arte Povera has become Italy's very own 800-pound gorilla, an important but nonetheless limited critical construct whose sheer documentary bulk skews our understanding of its participants' long careers, and whose prominence deters us from engaging with the accomplishments of other, less readily accessible Italian artists active during those years and since. The onetime participants in Arte Povera are worthy of consideration outside that single framework, and the broader artistic life of Italy during the 1960s and '70s-unruly and mercurial, self-aware and self-absorbed-awaits a full accounting.

1. The translated text is reprinted in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London, Phaidon, 1999, pp. 194,196.

2. Germano Celant, Arte Povera, New York, Praeger, 1969.The book was published concurrently in Italy and Germany,and the text of the Italian edition was printed in Italian, English and German. Like his book, the first show on the subject curated by Celant for an Italian museum, "Conceptual Art-Arte Povera-Land Art" at Turin's Galleria Civica d'arte moderna (June-July 1970), was international in scope, though it did not impose a single comprehensive style name on all the participants.

3. Germano Celant, Arte povera=Art povera, Milan, Electa, 1985. Each of the three venues hosted a differently titled and somewhat altered version of Celant's show. "Coerenza in coerenza" appeared in Turin at the Mole Antonelliana [June 12-Nov. 14, 1984]; "Del Arte Povera a 1985" was shown in Madrid at the Palacio de Velazquez, Palacio de Cristal, Parque del Retiro [Jan. 24-Apr. 7,1985]; and "The Knot: Arte Povera at P.S. 1" was shown in New York [Oct. 6-Dec. 15,1985]. The chosen 12 included the lineup of "Zero to Infinity" minus Gilardi and Prini.

4. Alanna Heiss, in The Knot: Arte Povera at P.S. 1, New York, P.S. 1 and Turin, Umberto Allemandi, 1985, p. XI.

5. In her documentary history of Arte Povera, Christov-Bakargiev strikes a compromise by including some of these banished artists (Ceroli, Claudio Cintoli, Paolo Icaro, Eliseo Mattiacci, Aldo Mondino, Luca Patella, Piacentino) under the rubric "Parallel Practices." "Zero to Infinity" artist Gilardi is here, too, and not among the 13 artists she considers to be true poveristi.

6. Bonito Oliva was among a dozen writers invited to contribute to La povertà dell'arte (Bologna, De'Foscherari, 1968). The publication was sponsored by the Bolognese gallery which that year hosted the second of Arte Povera's two founding exhibitions. Among Bonita Oliva's curatorial projects involving artists associated with Arte Povera are the exhibitions "Vitalità del negativo nell'arte italiana, 1960-1970" (Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, November 1970-January 1971), "Contemporanea" (Rome, Parcheggio di Villa Borghese, November 1973-February 1974) and "Minimalia," which appeared in Venice and Rome in 1997 and 1998 before opening in New York at P.S. 1 in October 1999 [seeAiA, Jan. '00].

7. Christov-Bakargiev, p. 30.

Arte Povera Resurgent

The recent uptick of interest in Arte Povera registered early and appropriately in Turin with the exhibition "Arte Povera in Collection" at the Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea [Dec. 6, 2000-Mar. 25, 2001]. The show marked the acquisition of 17 Arte Povera works by the Castello di Rivoli and Turin's Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (which co-organized the exhibition). The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Torino funded the purchase from the collection of Turin dealer Margherita Stein, who donated three additional pieces to support the foundation's effort to enhance the holdings of Turin's public institutions.
A few months later, the debut of "Zero to Infinity" at Tate Modern prompted two roughly concurrent shows. The Italian Cultural Institute in London presented "Beyond Infinity. Arte Povera after Arte Povera" [May 31-July 6, 2001], which featured works from the last three decades by the 13 participants in the Tate's show. Rome's Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna mounted "From Zero to Infinity: Variations on the Theme of the London Exhibition" [Apr, 12-June 24, 2001], spotlighting pieces from the museum's permanent collection by selected Arte Povera artists and related figures (Manzoni, Castellani, Lo Savio), along with documents from the archive of a key Roman participant, Fabio Sargentini, director of the L'Attico gallery.
With an eye to the arrival of "Zero to Infinity" in the U.S., Columbia University's Miriam & Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery presented "Arte Povera: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection," organized by Claire Gilman [Oct. 2-Dec. 8, 2001]. Also in New York, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, which has long represented a number of artists associated with Arte Povera, is currently showing a selection of works from the late '60s to the early '90s [Feb. 16-Mar. 16].
Of the individual artists, perhaps none has claimed more attention during this period than Alighiero Boetti. He was the subject of a survey exhibition installed in the Venice Pavilion during the 2001 Venice Biennale. Two shows in New York last year at the Sperone Westwater and Gagosian galleries [see A.i.A., July '01] have been followed by a second show at Sperone Westwater, "Simmetria Asimmetria" [Jan. 10-Mar. 2, 2002], and a small exhibition organized by Kathy Cottong at the Arts Club of Chicago, "Alighiero e Boetti" [Jan. 25-Apr. 6, 2002]. The Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, will present "Alighiero e Boetti" [scheduled to open in June], curated by Paola Morsiani and featuring 35 to 40 works, some from the artist's early career though most from the post-povera years.
Pistoletto's recent exhibitions have been impressively international, with shows at the Neues Kunstmuseum in Lucerne [Oct. 14, 2000-Mar. 4, 2001], the Musee d'Art Contemporain in Lyon [Mar. 8-May 6, 2001] and the Ludwig Museum in Budapest [May 4-July 1, 2001]. Giulio Paolini's receipt of the third Premio Internazionale Koine for career achievement was celebrated with an exhibition in Verona at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea Palazzo Forti [Sept. 15, 2001-Jan. 6, 2002]. He is scheduled to have an exhibition in June at the French Academy in Rome. The brief but influential career of Pino Pascali was surveyed in an exhibition at the Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid called "Pino Pascali: The Reinvention of the Mediterranean Myth" [Oct. 18, 2001-Jan. 7, 2002].
                                                                            - MEV

"Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972" opened at London's Tate Modern [May 31-Aug. 19, 2001] and traveled to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis [Oct. 13,2001-Jan. 13, 2002]. The show opens next month at the L.A. Museum of Contemporary Art [Apr. 28-Sept. 22] and will conclude its itinerary in Washington, D.C., at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden [Oct. 24,2002-Jan. 12,2003]. It is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with essays by the exhibition's curators and other writers.