Averroè (Averroes), 1967

Cotton fabric, steel pole, brass ornament Pole h 197 cm, fifteen flags 70 x 100 cm each

1. Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Turin 2. Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur (acquired in 2002, inv. no. S.2002.4) 3. Private collection 4. Collection Giorgio Marconi, Milan 5. Private Collection, London 6. Private collection, Milan 7. Present location unknown

The work has been realized in an unnumbered edition of seven, each of which made up of fifteen different flags. The complete edition involves all the national flags in existence in 1967. The height of the pole and the decoration vary slightly from one edition to another.

A steel pole, crowned by a brass laurel leaf decoration, holds not one but fifteen flags. “The flags I chose are not meaningful in themselves, they are not ‘those’ flags. They are simply more than one flag, so that they are those fifteen flags or fifteen other flags, or perhaps even all the flags except for those fifteen. The choice of the number and type of flag has nothing to do with how they are interpreted, but only with their numerical nature”.1 Averroè is all flags and no flags: the “impossible” flag suspends the chance of having an idea coincide with an absolute image. “A flag that collapses upon itself, that is incapable of soaring in the wind of history because it is too heavy, overladen, because it has surrendered to its merciless destiny as a precarious signal, continually undermined by that eternity towards which it turned the signs of its own identity. All flags in one: a banner that is no doubt glorious, but irreparably vanquished by the passing of time”.2 Being unable to raise the flags in a suitable open space, Paolini imagines arranging them nonchalantly, as if they were waiting to be exhibited: set on the floor so that they lean up against the wall in an upright position, or "abandoned" on a transparent plinth (90 x 90 x 90 cm). When the work was first exhibited for the “Arte Povera” exhibition curated by Germano Celant at the Galleria de’ Foscherari in Bologna in 1968, it was hung on the wall in a flag-holder.

1 The artist in C. Lonzi, Autoritratto, Bari: De Donato Editore, 1969, p. 305. 2 The artist in L’immagine del vuoto. Una linea di ricerca nell’arte in Italia 1958-2006, exh. cat., Lugano/Milan: Museo Cantonale d’Arte and Skira editore, 2006, p. 140.

Exhibition chronology and bibliography cf. M. Disch, Giulio Paolini. Catalogo ragionato 1960-1999, Milan: Skira editore, 2008, vol. 2, pp. 900-901, cat. no. 138.