Vitalità Del Negativo/ Negativo Della Vitalità *
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Vitalità del negativo/ Negativo della vitalità * ROMY GOLAN Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/70 , an exhibition that occupied the ground floor of the monumental Palazzo delle Esposizioni from November 30, 1970, to January 31, 1971, revived an ideologically loaded site in Rome under the mantle of contemporary art. Curated by Achille Bonito Oliva, it featured thirty-four Italian artists from a wide range of schools and mediums: painters from the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo (the Roman school of Pop); members of the ’60s Milanese group Azimut; kinetic environments by Padua’s Gruppo N and Milan’s Gruppo T; artists from Arte Povera; and other, more idiosyncratic installation artists. “Rome Like New York,” announced the capital’s official daily, Il Messaggero , quoting the French correspondent of Le Monde , who had claimed in his review that this was the largest exhibition of its type ever to have been organized in Europe. 1 “The capital has never hosted a similar event,” wrote the art historian and critic Filiberto Menna in Naples’s Il Mattino in what would turn out to be one of the few positive reviews of the exhibition. And yet even he concluded: “Bonito Oliva does nothing to clarify the theme of his exhibition. He should have elucidated what is, after all, specifically Italian about it. In this regard he failed. We don’t know what critical discourse subtends it.” 2 Another critic wrote, The meaning of “the negative in art” remains a mystery for the Romans, who began to speculate after seeing posters plastered all over town by November in an unusually ambitious publicity cam - paign. Some thought it was going to be a photography exhibition in view of the most obvious meaning of “negative.” Some put forward a more sophisticated interpretation: this would be an exhibit of the more irreverent, perverse, satanic side of art. Now that it is visible one needs to register an absolutely peculiar fact: it has managed to arouse the Roman’s curiosity. 3 * I would like to thank Kevin Lotery and Claire Grace for inviting me to their conference, and Achille Bonito Oliva and Piero Sartogo for agreeing to be interviewed on this topic. This article is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, Flashbacks and Eclipses in Italian Art of the 1960s. 1. Costanzo Costantini, “Roma come New York,” Il Messaggero , January 4, 1971, p. 3. 2. Filiberto Menna, “L’arte italiana negli anni sessanta,” Il Mattino , January 5, 1971. 3. Armando Stefani, “Il pomicio dell’avanguardia,” Men , January 18, 1971, pp. 10–11. OCTOBER 150, Fall 2014, pp. 113 –132. © 2014 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 114 OCTOBER Achille Bonito Oliva is known in the Anglo-American art world primarily for his later work, as a champion of transavanguardia and as a protagonist of ’80s postmod - ernism. With Vitalità, Bonito Oliva, active until then as a poet and critic, was trying out what he would later call his scrittura espositiva : “I have always thought that the critic should practice not only an essayistic writing but also an ‘exhibitional writing,’ that is, a way of laying out the critical thinking through an exhibition, in scale with architecture and the social body.” 4 Partly sponsored by the private Incontri Vitalità del negativo. Façade of Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1970. Photograph by Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. Internazionali d’Arte—a controversial novelty in Italy, where culture was very much an affair of the state— Vitalità thus introduced Bonito Oliva to the greater public as an independent protagonist of contemporary art who saw his role as one of auteur- curator. 5 The role of his collaborator, the architect Piero Sartogo, was also recast: 4. Interview with the author, Rome, May 27, 2013. 5. For a general account of Vitalità , see the catalogue of the exhibition made in homage to its pro - moter and sponsor Graziella Lonardi Bontempo, the founder of the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte: Luca Massimo Barbero and Francesca Pola, eds., A Roma questa era la nostra avanguardia (Rome: Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, 2010); and Luigia Lonardelli, Dalla sperimentazione alla crisi: gli incontri Internazionali d’Arte a Roma, 1970–1981 (Milan: Doppiozero, 2014). Vitalità del negativo 115 Sartogo consistently avoided the term allestimento —commonly used to describe an architect’s work as exhibition designer—to describe his contribution. He insisted instead on calling it coordinamento dell’immagine , thus projecting himself as a strong- minded interpreter of what he called “an exhibition’s thesis.” 6 Vitalità took place at a particularly unstable political juncture. The secondo biennio rosso —the red or revolutionary years of 1968–69 —was giving way to the autunno caldo , or hot autumn, a radicalization of the student and worker move - ments. Confrontation between protesters and the police became increasingly violent. When a bombing in Milan’s Piazza Fontana killed seventeen people and injured eighty-eight on December 12, 1969, Italy fell into a decade of turmoil. 7 The bombing, at first attributed to anarchists, was eventually exposed as a neofas - cist plot with connections to the upper echelons of the Christian Democrat government. 8 From that point onward the neofascists applied a “ strategia della ten - sione ,” generating fear, propaganda, and disinformation, to convince the public that order had to be restored, by force if necessary. Two violent events bracketed the exhibition itself: On December 7, 1970, one week after Vitalità ’s opening, and one week before the first anniversary of the Piazza Fontana bombing, members of the neofascist Fronte Nazionale (founded in 1968) staged an abortive coup d’état in Rome known as the golpe borghese . And on January 21, 1971, ten days before Vitalità closed, firebombs destroyed a number of trucks on the Pirelli tire-testing track in the Lainate neighborhood of Milan, the first action signed by the leftist Red Brigades. This climate of uncertainty was registered by Vitalità before one even entered the exhibition by the ambiguous inside/outside dynamic of its build - ing’s façade. While its upbeat banner (and poster) featured a Pop photographic negative of the familiar silhouette of Michelangelo’s David , rows of closed-circuit TV monitors at street level lent by the firm Brion Vega showed the visitors walking through the exhibition to the passersby along Via Nazionale, signaling that the outside world was but a sideshow to the rather ominous scenario unfolding inside. Bonito Oliva’s exhibition should be understood as a turning away from the leftist militant activism of 1968 toward a politically ambiguous reflection on Fascism. 9 At the same time, Bonito Oliva was strategically distancing himself from Arte Povera’s most vocal spokesman, Germano Celant. The latter was conspicu - 6. Piero Sartogo in an interview with Stefano Chiodi and myself, Rome, October 17, 2008. On the involvement of architects in exhibition design in Italy, see the special issue “Architettura delle mostre,” Casabella-Costruzioni 159–160 (March–April 1941); and Anna Chiara Cimoli, Musei effimeri: allestimenti di mostre in Italia, 1949–1963 (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 2007). 7. See Guido Crainz, Il paese mancato: Dal miracolo economico agli anni ottanta (Rome: Donzelli, 2003); and Guido Panvini, Ordine nero, guerriglia rossa: La violenza politica nell’Italia degli anni sessanta e set - tanta (1966–1975) (Turin: Einaudi, 2009). 8. To this day, after endless investigations and countless trials, no perpetrators have been brought to justice. 9. Used by the syndicalist Trentin Bruno, the term biennio rosso makes reference to the years 1919– 20, when Europe was swept by a wave of revolutionary agitation. I would like to thank Stefano Chiodi, Gabriele Guercio, and Maddalena Carli for their conversations with me about art and politics in Italy during this complicated period. 116 OCTOBER ously absent from the roster of Italian critics whose texts from the ’60s were anthologized in the catalogue, and Arte Povera artists played only a minor role in the exhibition. 10 In promoting Arte Povera, especially in the years 1967–68, Celant succeeded in placing Italian postwar art on the international map. Aligned with developments taking place simultaneously in the United States, Germany, the Netherlands, and England, Arte Povera was valued for its process-oriented art and praised for its imperative of dissolving sculpture into performance. Bonito Oliva professed different views. Vitalità purported to be a survey of the past ten years of Italian art, but in his catalogue essay, Bonito Oliva offered his own opaque lucubration on the avant-garde’s failure to collapse art into life in the face of an encroaching capitalist system, and on the promise that art instead might serve as a free zone removed from a “false” world. What remained obscure in the catalogue was clarified in a lecture Bonito Oliva delivered at the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte one year after the exhibition’s closing . In this paper, entitled “La citazione deviata: L’ideologia” (Diverted citation: ideology), Bonito Oliva articulated his preference for an art of representation rather than of presentation (read: Arte Povera), and for artists with “an allegorical impulse” who followed what he called “the way of strabismo ”—the Italian word for cross-eyed—by moving laterally and looking sideways and backward rather than forward. 11 What Bonito Oliva achieved in Vitalità was a translation of Italy’s art of the ’60s—Pop, monochrome, kinetic, as well as Arte Povera, movements generally assumed by art historians to be “presen - tist” in attitude, into his own scenario, a narrative that instead favored two nonlinear forms of temporality: the flashback and the eclipse. Bonito Oliva’s first move was to counter the cohabitation and cross-pollination of artworks urged by Celant. Arte Povera artists were often presented in a single shared space.