Published 01/07/01
Arte Povera
Tate Modern, through 19 August 2001.
Although hardly a 'movement' in the conventional
sense, Arte Povera has stayed in the mind of a whole generation
of artists and curators from the l970s. The curators we know have
succeeded Nick Serota, Rudi Fuchs and Germano Celant. Now
it is Serota's turn to host Celant's baby, Arte Povera (Poor
Artists). Appropriately, this show comes to the Bankside Duomo as
a perfect complementarity the walls, the already patinated
floors, the light, the near contemporaneity of the architecture
Arte Povera comes for final oblations and consummation
at the high altar of 20th century art. Tate Modern itself elevates
the works, the artists, and defines Arte Povera as a precedent
for much that has currency today.
|
Background: Alighiero Boetti, Columns, 1968. Foreground:
Contest between harmony and invention 1969. Front:
Untitled 1967. Back: Little Coloured Sticks
1968.
|
Running from the early l960s to mid-l970s, the Italian selection
includes the 14 main protagonists of Arte Povera. In London
they clearly confirm their influential status in l990s British art.
Among the leaders, it is Jannis Kounellis who still seems most relevant
today, and who still reveals that underlying gravitas and purpose
some others have difficulty in sustaining 30 years later. There
is no need for a time-frame, and perhaps rightly the viewer is left
to form his own connections.
Perceptible historically today are those first rumblings of a pan-European
reaction to American consumerism, which, rightly for Italy, remains
the unofficial custodian for much that can be differentiated as
'Euro-culture' today. Style is here to be parodied and pilloried.
Germano Celant, appropriately himself from outward-looking Genoa,
first coined the name Arte Povera in l967. In a sense Arte Povera
has never quite left us: it offers a specious scepticism and scrutiny
of the perceived 'idea', and the resultant object stays as valid,
even shocking to Tate Modern's new public, as it did then. Less
convincing, however, are the efforts of the accompanying catalogue
to entrap this genie, to crystallise thus in time Arte Povera's
message, and to avoid freeze-drying it all as a curatorial exercise
in vanity better just to rely on Celant's definitions of
the time. The Amalfi festival in October 1968, was the immediate
flashpoint for the group, as defined by Frances Morris, the show's
London curator. (Richard Long was also there.)
|
Pino Pascali, Bristleworms 1968, acrylic and rubber
brushes on metal, six pieces, variable length.
|
Arte Poverahas redefined the never-ending zones of creative responsibility.
Indeed, the full title of the Tate exhibition, Zero to
Infinity: Arte Povera l962-l972 is self-explanatory
in this connectivity, of artists, yet individually, on their own
terms. It might be the antithesis of a movement that was
how it was always urged by Celant to conceive itself. Such divergent
works as Paolo Calzolari's with no other smells than mine
or Marisa Merz's Untitled (Living Sculpture)l966
in aluminium typify this tendency. The works as a whole seem to
fulfil two agendas. The first, essentially Italian, sought to dismantle,
by elegant shock tactics the heavily bourgeois art of the past there,
which craved post-war acceptability. The second, by contrast, had
challenged the new materialism of consumer economics and its internationalised
global reach in an inherently anarchic manner, but with style too.
Today, Arte Povera continues by definition to escape categorisation.
At that time these artists had no concept of posterity. Later, they
learnt to create signature works to gratify, somewhat reluctantly,
the pressing attentions of dealers. If Celant coined the title,
it was Gilberto Zorio who still deserves first mention Jannis
Kounellis' parrot is no longer, it seems, allowed to sit on its
perch. For Kounellis has good-humouredly written a note in charcoal
for all to see: That bastard who murdered my parrot
if I get my hands on him I'll kill him. In l967 it was enough
to carry the simple title, Untitled, l967.
In the past Caroline Tisdall had rightly seen Arte Povera
as, A series of fragments of plaster casts as used by Michelangelo
Pistoletto, by Paolini, and Kounellis fragments of meaning
and fragments of words combined with fragments of material.(In:
Materia: the context of Arte Povera. Italian Art of the Twentieth
Century, Prestel, l989.) If anything more, Arte Povera
was the apotheosis of Minimal Art. Usefully, Achille Bonito Oliva
and Tommaso Trini, in Rome and Milan respectively, cornered the
Italian art gallery network behind Arte Povera. The rest
is history.
The grouping process was external to the artists: curatorial convenience
was served thereby in mounting increasingly international shows.
Studio International played its part, but as Tisdall has
emphasised, the cultural context remained steadfastly Italian. The
plaster cast world of classicism was repeatedly pillaged by Paolini,
it was reflected by Pistoletto, and taken back into Greek mythology
by Kounellis. To fully comprehend Arte Povera we have to
immerse ourselves in that elegant, seductive and emergent consumerism
of post-war Italy; its mechanistic idolatry, the Fiat 600s, the
Vespas and Lambrettas available to all, the tune of 'Volare', the
whiff of espresso and the flash of the counter embellishment. Such
tunes of hope and glory were compromised by boom and slump, but
underpinned by growing pay packets, forcing migration from south
to north, and duly counterbalanced by regional industrialisation,
producing Alfas in the south. As for a whole generation, most of
the artists concerned had grown up in wartime, especially older
ones such as Pino Pascali. There is a Pasolini-like strain of interest
in the Povera 'other' life a concern for its plight.
Fifteen million southern Italians, after all, had migrated to the
north in this period, with the massive social disruption so caused.
|
Mario Merz, Untitled (Living Sculpture 1966, aluminium.
|
Perhaps one must, as Cor Blok pointed out in l982, understand that
with Pop, Op, Minimal, Hyper-realism, Conceptual Art , Arte Povera,
Body Art, Fundamentalism, and other innovations tumbling over each
other's head, practically in the interval between one Documenta
and the next, such controversies lost all significance (as reflected
in his l982 Stedelijk exhibition). Against that avalanche, the fragmentary
episodes of Arte Povera only now increase in historical relevance.
|
|