1 Arte Povera

ARTE POVERA: A NARRATION OF MATERIALS, PLACES AND SPACES IN ITALY OF THE 60s AND 70s Under periods of social instability, new ways of making art are born. The experimentation with new materials, the use of the mundane and the scepticism towards technology, as well as the denunciation of a division between art and life, characterised Arte Povera. It was not a movement, but a coexistence of artists who were open to new ideas and who were in an artistic dialogue without limits. Moreover, it was a product of the social conditions of Italy during the 60s and 70s. The mass migration from the poor South to the rich North, the growing industrialisation and urbanisation, the workers’ strikes and the students’ protests, made the creation of new art that would express the new social scenery a necessity. Arte Povera responded as the artistic criticism to the government and the establishment. With the contribution and the intellectual role of the critic Germano Celant, artists like Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis and Luciano Fabro, narrated alternative stories which brought the individual closer to nature (Fineberg, 2000, p.333). In a country where the art of Classical antiquity was, and is still highly appreciated, the existence and the radicalism of Arte Povera is one of the most interesting narratives in the histories of art. Italy in the 1960s was a transformative place. After the Second World War, the Christian Democratic party dominated the political scene for twenty-five years. The state favoured the capital and the Catholic church, and there was a growth in corruption. A big part of society lived under conditions of poverty but the government continued not to pay attention to the severe inequality. As the Christian Democrats were losing part of their power, they were forced to have an alliance with the Socialist party. The radical left and 1 right should be stopped by the establishment and that was the only way to achieve it. In the late 1960s, the situation became critical. People from the south, the poorer part of Italy, migrated to the northern cities as the industry expanded. However, they were largely disaffected (Fineberg, 2000, p. 332). Italy’s economic growth had its roots in the automobile industry. The Fiat motor company was established in Turin. The car, a symbol of modernity, was at the epicentre of Italian life. It was a commodity of the middle class, but it was produced by the automobile workers in the north. However, the latter would not be able to use the object of their production as a commodity, because of their low wages. Moreover, during the 1960s the problem of housing emerged rapidly, as the workers’ salaries were not adequate enough to pay their rents. Strikes were common phenomena. The managers tried to keep the workers occupied far from their residence. A commuter hardly finds the time to organise and resist. Since 1962, factory workers across Turin had the precedent of dissent. This culminated in 1969’s Hot Autumn, when they protested against their bad working conditions at Fiat. Later that year, in December, a bomb exploded in Milan’s Banca Nazionale dell’ Agricoltura (Pinkus, 2001, p. 106). It was the start of a sequence of bombings that would continue in the 1970s. Students had a pivotal role in Italy’s social context of the 60s and 70s, as well. The institution of the university was one of the most archaic. It had not been reformed for many decades, and the rise in numbers of a new wave of students caused malfunctions in the infrastructures. The role of teaching had been taken by local professionals who could spend little time in university, so that students could not have a substantial support for their studies. Exams were subjective because of their oral character, whilst the fees forced those who came from the working class to get one, or two jobs to sustain their studies. In 1967 2 and 1968, there were protests because of the introduction of highest fees and plans to restricted entry to universities. Occupations happened in Turin, Milan and spread to other cities, as well. By February 1968, the police managed to control the situation, but students’ activism led to the Battle of Valle Giulia in Rome, where 4,000 of them clashed with the police. Both sides suffered hundreds of injuries (Libcom, 2008). Under those social conditions, an art manifesto was born. In November 1967, Celant’s Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War, appeared in the magazine Flash Art (Fig. 1). The critic turned against the system and declared that in modern society humans are forced to remain under its command. The artists were the producers of consuming goods for a cultured elite, and they were becoming traders of their products. Even if they were against consumerism, they could not make a rupture with the system if they chose to move inside it. He mentioned Marcel Duchamp as an art outsider, and he argued that the artist had only two choices: to be a servant of the system under its chains or break away and develop freely (Celant, 1967/1989, pp. 189-190). If he would choose the second option, the artist could not be exploited anymore; through Arte Povera, a poor art, one of the present and of the real, the artist would become a guerrilla fighter against the system. The latter distinguished art and life. In Arte Povera, the human and the nature were linked in a dialogue that could liberate from conformity and the metaphysical, and would bring reality to the forefront. The artist would be independent and unlabelled. 3 (Fig. 1) 4 Celant’s text continued with the introduction of artists who made Arte Povera and their innovative approaches. Finally, there was a statement: ‘The guerrilla war… has already begun’ (Celant, 1967/1989, p. 191). In 1969, his book Arte Povera was published. Its English translation is Arte Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art? There, he defined the approach of the artist as one who camouflages and mixes with the environment, is part of nature, not a representative, and one who ‘does not seek a moral or social judgement’ (Celant, 1969, p. 225). The artist observes a plant, a river, the earth, and rediscovers himself. No more placed under a label, the artist is free and experiences the essence of life. Self-interest plays a central part, not as a consequence of alienation, but as denunciation of any cultural control and as disobedience to the system. Art is practiced through materials of nature such as vegetables and animals, minerals and snow. It does not exist through technology and science or being isolated from the natural elements of daily life. Consequently, art is ‘never allusive to alienation’ (Celant, 1969, p. 230). Furthermore, the failure of the modernist utopia in Italy, dictated the action against the system with alternative ways of making art. Michelangelo Pistoletto is an artist, critic, curator and theatrical performer who collaborated with Celant, and put the mirror in the centre of his practice. In his Mirror paintings like Seated Man of 1962 (Fig. 2), Pistoletto is experimenting with the dimension of time and the way it is presented in reality. He placed them not at window height, in the traditional way, but down on the floor. Pistolettto, like an actor, is sitting in front of the work (Pistoletto, 2015). 5 (Fig. 2) He claimed that his aim was: …to carry art to the edges of life…One can bring life to art, as Pollock did, or one can choose to bring art into life but no longer in terms of metaphor (Pistoletto, 1967/2003, p. 875). 6 Pistoletto’s presence is a reminder that art can exist as reality. The objectification of existence is the negation of metaphor, mentioned above. The artist is not a mediator who tries to depict nature, but is a participator of it. In the 1960s, the art world in Italy would try to compare his work with that of the American Pop artists. Although his artworks were exhibited in Turin’s Sperone gallery alongside those of Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg and other artists, Pistoletto’s style was different. An Italian aura was evident. The reaction to the aggressive industrialisation and urbanisation of the country produced that new wave of art which was part of life (Lumley, 2004, pp. 10-11). In the mid-sixties, Pistoletto made the Minus Objects in his studio (Fig. 3). 7 (Fig.3) It was an experimental collection of objects that tried to show the unrepeatable quality of a moment in time, a place, an action. He was clear that he did not want to reflect himself in the pieces, and he claimed that he wanted to liberate the forms from the system. As Celant called for a rupture from the latter, Pistoletto seemed to practice it through his work: The problem is not to change the forms and leave the system intact but rather to take the forms intact out of the system. In order to do this, it is necessary to be absolutely free (Pistoletto, 1967/2003, p. 876). 8 Mario Merz was the oldest artist related to Arte Povera. In 1968 he made his first installations. The Giap’s Igloo (Fig. 4), is a construction made of wire mesh and bags filled with earth. The neon text is a phrase by the North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap. It says: ‘If the enemy masses his forces he loses ground, if he scatters he loses strength’ (Giap cited in Criticos, 1968/2001,p.76) (Fig. 4) The coexistence of the modern materials like neon and the plastic bags with nature’s element, the earth, is significant.

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