Alberto Burri's Sacchi

Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri’s Sacchi*

JAIMEY HAMILTON

Burri is in this excavation, in this open wound that reveals the unique possibility of suturing. . . . [His] material is . . . an intermediary of a corruptibility, but also a germinating action, one that in his individual choice is realized as necessary for creative liberation, of the total conscience of the self. —Toni Toniato, “Burri,” 1958

The Excesses of Silence

“Form and Space! Form and Space! The end. There is nothing else. Form and Space!”1 This intractable statement was made by Italian artist Alberto Burri in an effort to sum up the logic of his lifelong aesthetic ambitions in a rare interview at the end of his life in 1994. It was not a new mantra, but one that he had been repeating for decades. To his friend and interlocutor Stefano Zorzi, he once again reiterated vehemently that despite the sometimes shocking diversity and associational content of the material and processes he employed throughout his career, his artistic project had been a fundamentally formalist one: to achieve harmony and balance through the purest material expression of form and space. But the exclamatory nature of his statement (“Form and Space!”), as he looked back at a career of unusual materials and processes, hints that this mantra was more than just a positive afﬁrmation of his passion for modernist painting tenets. It was also a deﬁant negation of any social or psychological meaning that had been or could be read into his artwork and method (“There is nothing else”). He insisted, for example, that there were no intentional metaphors in his stitching

* This article derives from the ﬁrst chapter of my dissertation, Strategies of Excess: The Postwar Assemblages of Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, and Arman (Boston University, 2006). For all their support and constructive criticism, my deepest thanks to Caroline Jones, Yve-Alain Bois, Leah Dickerman, Mari Dumett, John X. Christ, Emily Gephardt, Maria Sensi, the Fondazione Burri, and all of the partic- ipants and organizers of the 2005 CAA panel “Colonization of Everydayness: Cold War Histories.” 1. Burri quoted in Stefano Zorzi, Parola di Burri (Turin: Allemandi, 1995), p. 99.

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Alberto Burri. Sacco 5P. 1953. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.

of old burlap sacks in the Sacchi series of the 1950s; his torching of wood, iron, or plastic in the 1960s; or his eventual incising of Celotex in the 1980s and ’90s. Articulated in the context of this ﬁnal interview, the statement can be read as a last-ditch attempt at interdicting the inquisitive and, to Burri’s mind, hyperimagi- native art critics and writers who had plagued him since the very earliest reception of his Sacchi in the 1950s. In fact, Burri’s insistence on formalism contradicts the semiotic richness of the Sacchi, which revolves quite clearly around the materiality of the burlap sacks that the artist tore into and reassembled with thread. From 1949 to 1960, Burri made hundreds of Sacchi with stitched scraps riddled with holes that seemed to readily elicit associations with the body. There were, of course, critics who related the sacks to the ascetic robes of the Franciscan order founded in the countryside near Burri’s hometown and those who even hinted that the holes in the canvases referenced stigmata.2 But these religious readings were trumped by the more

2. These readings have been broached by Guilio Carlo Argan in L’Espresso (1956); James Byrnes in

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widely accepted notion that the Sacchi were powerful allusions to the traumatized existential body of the postwar moment. Upon seeing Burri’s show at Galleria dell’Obelisco in Rome in 1952 (the first to include the Sacchi), Lorenza Trucchi commented that Burri’s paintings acted as “membranes” upon which “sensuality and nihilism are fused to the point of becoming a confusion of sensations, con- flicts, [and] nightmares.”3 Trucchi implied that the surface of the canvas acted as a skin of traumatic memory that was surely related to the recently ended war. Others were more explicit about the war references. Francesco Arcangeli, a well- respected Italian art writer, for instance, wrote about Burri’s Sacchi in his 1957 treatise on the state of Italian art, “Una Situazione non improbabile,” in which he argued that the “current situation of figurative art had coincided, once again, with the triggering of world war, prolonged, this time, by the new menace of the atomic bomb.” He argued that Burri “utilized violence” as a way to acknowledge and remind his audience of humanity’s recent irresponsible actions, adding: “In this cloth, nature seems symbolically allusive, but in reality it is concretely present like a sinister morgue, where things are still moving, generating, with blood still flowing, tearing themselves apart.”4 Trucchi and Arcangeli represent two critics among many who emphasized a reading of the Sacchi’s surfaces as a war-torn body with which European civiliza- tion had to grapple. Such early interpretations were prevalent and made all the more tempting by the fact that Burri was trained as a doctor and had actually been a medic during the war. American art critic Fairfield Porter bluntly stated the connection: “Alberto Burri was a surgeon in the Italian army who was captured by the Americans and shipped to a POW camp in Texas where he started painting and constructing abstractions out of pieces of burlap stitched together with a surgeon’s stitch.”5 While Porter took liberties in this succinct biographical explanation of Burri’s art (the artist didn’t start making the Sacchi in the camp, but about three years later), it is hard to deny the Sacchi’s powerful invocation of both the real flesh wounds of soldiers and the larger historical and psychological trauma of the Holocaust and atomic annihilation. So why would Burri, even as his health failed toward the end of his life, continue to resist allusions that were discussed so freely in the postwar moment—allusions that seemed so clearly called for? Part of the answer, I would like to propose, is that there seemed to be a power in the contradictory process of acting out the wounds of war through his painting while at the same time silencing that trauma through his rhetoric. This was a strategy Burri came upon

The Collages of Alberto Burri (Colorado Springs: Fine Arts Center, 1955); and Cesare Brandi in “Burri ad Assisi,” Qui Arte Contemporanea 15 (September 1975), pp. 29–32, reprinted in Scritti sull’arte contemporanea (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1976), pp. 362–63. 3. Lorenza Trucchi, “Dal casto omiccioli all’alchimia di Burri,” Il Momento (January 18, 1952), n.p. 4. Francesco Arcangeli, “Una Situazione non improbabile,” Paragone 8, no. 35 (January 1957), pp. 14, 42. 5. Fairﬁeld Porter, “Alberto Burri,” Art News 52, no. 8 (December 1953), p. 41.

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as early as 1955 in his statement “Words Are No Help,” on the occasion of his first major international group show, the Museum of Modern Art’s The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors: Words are no help to me when I try to speak about my painting. It is an irreducible presence that refuses to be converted into any other form of expression. . . . My painting is a reality which is part of myself, a reality which I cannot reveal in words. . . . I can only say this: painting for me is a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilantly guarded so as to draw from it the power to paint more.6 The problem was that in his very denial of the explanatory power of language, Burri had already said too much. The loaded phrases he used to describe his practice (“freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilantly guarded”) were, and still are, irresistibly provocative. The notion that his painting was both an irreducible presence and part of himself is a tantalizing contradiction. The tau- tology of his statement, in which the practice of painting fuels “the power to paint more,” invites serious reﬂection. All of this suggests that Burri’s “silence” was by no means empty. As historian Maurizio Calvesi has rightly insinuated, it is “the silence of Burri that truly complements his pictures; it is the condition of their existence. . . . His silence is a dense message of preemptory information.”7 This distance between the semiotic resonances of the material and Burri’s refusal to talk about them (even while he hints at what he wants to avoid) seems to reveal an interesting and important moment of anxiety in postwar Italian modernist discourse. What might this paradoxical movement between revelation and denial tell us about what was at stake for Burri as an artist? How does it ani- mate his relationship with the artistic language of modernism in the postwar moment? Indeed, the “wounds” of Burri’s Sacchi could indicate more than the bodies of soldiers he encountered when he was a war medic. Perhaps the obvious metaphor of the suture stitch that constantly crops up in Sacchi literature, usually read as simply biographical, needs to be pressed further. The fact that it served as a recurring motif in the justiﬁcation of Burri’s work is exactly what needs to be explained. What I will propose is this: if the stitch correlated the activity of painting with the doctor’s healing touch, as so many critics have pointed out, then perhaps this correlation also functioned as a subjective performative strategy in which Burri’s struggle over the materiality of the burlap was part of a larger psy- chosocial suturing of the wounds of modernist painting, which was seen to be in serious crisis.

6. Alberto Burri, “Words Are No Help,” The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, ed. Andrew Carduff Ritchie (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 82. 7. Maurizio Calvesi, Burri, trans. Robert Wolf (New York: Abrams, [1971] 1974), reprinted in Zorzi, Parola di Burri, p. 85.

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The Wounds of the Sacchi

Burri first used burlap sacks as canvas support for his still-life and landscape paintings while he was a prisoner of war. Captured by the Allies in 1942 and kept at Hereford, Texas, for three years, until the spring of 1946, he started painting with the encouragement of the local YMCA volunteers visiting the camp.8 For canvas, he began using discarded burlap sacks, once containing sugar or flour, which he retrieved from the mess tent. When he returned to Italy and took up painting as his new profession, he continued to use the sacks he had brought back with him from Texas as canvas and sought out a new supply from his local grain miller. It was in the Art Informel–infused atmosphere of postwar Rome that Burri began making the Sacchi consistently. Informel, with its French pedigree but loose international, existentialist language, was already well-established in Italy, where the effort to align itself with the Parisian vanguard was active. Proposed in the early 1950s by the French critic Michel Tapié, Informel became a sweeping idea that Tapié broadly defined as an international trend that included the New York School, the Japanese Gutai group, and later even South American abstraction. But, importantly, Tapié implicitly argued that Informel was dominated by a European, and primarily French, avant-garde. Laden with calls to rejuvenate the avant-garde by actively wrestling with the war-torn present, Informel was an existentialist vision of an uncertain moment in which the artist’s action with and against artistic material expressed a dialectical tension between the subject and the world. Though the artists that Tapié championed (Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux, and Jean Dubuffet, among others) had already been exhibiting for a number of years, the critic brought them together in his catalog for Les Signifiants de l’Informel, held at the New York–affiliated Studio Facchetti in 1951. Two other major exhibitions, Tapié’s Véhémences Confrontées (1951) at the Galerie Nina Dausset and his Un Art Autre (1952) at Studio Facchetti, which included Italian, American, and French artists, set the tone for the international proliferation of Informel. If the term now seems hard to pin down stylistically, at the time it summoned an ideological vortex of postwar angst that frenetically established Paris as the center of a renewed international artistic moral authority in the atomic age. As an aesthetic, Informel was defined not so much as a negation of form or structure but as a rejection of the premeditated idea that constrained earlier modern painting. Specifically, Tapié complained that the classical structures of Paul Cézanne, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso, among others, were beset by “inertia, fed by habits of intellectual comfort acquired from honorably congealed mannerisms [that] had profoundly ossified the true spirit of artistic creativity and the taste for the risk of a creative ethic in the possible devotee.”9

8. The following early events of Burri’s biography are all recounted in Zorzi, Parola di Burri, pp. 12–25. 9. Michel Tapié, statement of 1953, collected in Observations, trans. and ed. Paul and Esther Jenkins (New York: George Wittenborn, 1956), p. 23.

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He proposed that the art of the moment instead needed to be “governed by other rules” of exploratory spontaneity, even if it came to the same conclusions.10 Indeed, the aesthetic readily engaged in the trope that the artist’s direct performative gesture on the material world would constitute an instant immersion in contemporary reality.11 Burri’s relationship to this discourse was informed by a distinctly Italian inflec- tion in which critics ambivalently invested in Tapié’s Informel internationalism as a way of reformulating a new, non-Fascist modernism in Italy. In “National Style and the Agenda for Abstract Painting in Post-war Italy,” Marcia Vetrocq elaborates on the paradox of claiming a national artistic movement through a back-door affiliation with an international one.12 Her fundamental point is this: art critics and artists alike attempted to re-establish the specifically Italian vitality of the international renewal of abstraction in its gestural form, while at the same time attempting to avoid the morass of Italy’s own recent cultural history (especially as it related to Futurism). In Rome, this strategy was most explicit in the Arte Club. Initiated in 1945 by Enrico Prampolini, the Arte Club reconnected Italian art to current international practices of abstraction by funding trips to Paris and organizing annual exhibitions of Italian artists working in the Informel idiom. Prampolini also advanced his own concept of polimaterismo (polymaterialism) as early as 1944: Polymaterial art is a free artistic concept that rebels against . . . the function of the visual illusionism of pictorial means. . . . To make the most unthinkable materials rise to a sensitive, emotive, artistic value constitutes the most uncompromising critical assertion against the nostalgic, romantic, and bourgeois palette.13 Prampolini’s manifesto and art club worked on many levels to provide connections

10. Tapié, “The Necessity of an autre esthetic” (1953), Observations, p. 22. 11. For more on the history of Tapié’s usage of these terms, see Simon Groom, An Art Autre: Michel Tapié and the Informel Adventure in France, Japan, and Italy (Ph.D. diss., Courtauld Institute of Art, 1999), pp. 20–28. Regarding the internationalization and codification of the term and discourse, see J. E. Cirlot, Informalismo (Barcelona: Omega, 1959); Enrico Crispolti, Ricerche dopo l’Informale (Rome: Officina, 1968); Renato Barilli and Franco Solmi, L’Informale in Italia (Milan: Mazzotta, 1983); Maurizio Calvesi and D. Durbé, L’Informale in Italia fino al 1957 (Livorno: Palazzo Communale in Livorno, 1963); Roberto Pasini, L'informale: Stati Uniti, Europa, Italia, Arte contemporanea, series 5 (Bologna: ClueB, 1995); Dore Ashton, ed., A Rebours: La Rebelión Informalista, 1939–1968 (Las Palmas: Centre Atlantico de Arte Moderno, 1999); and Susanne Anna, ed., Die Informellen von Pollock bis Schumacher (Bonn: Verlag, 1999). 12. This very complicated political agenda is represented more fully in a few excellent articles, includ- ing Marcia E. Vetrocq, “National Style and the Agenda for Abstract Painting in Post-War Italy,” in Art History 12, no. 4 (December 1989), pp. 448–71; Germano Celant, “In Total Freedom: Italian Art, 1943–1968” and Marcia Vetrocq, “Painting and Beyond: Recovery and Regeneration, 1943–1952,” both in The Italian Metamorphoses, 1943–68, ed. Germano Celant (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1995), pp. 2–31; Lucio Caramel, ed., Arte in Italia, 1945–1960 (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1994); and Carolyn Christov- Bakargiev, “Alberto Burri: The Surface at Risk,” in Burri: Opere, 1944–95, eds. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Maria Grazia Tolomeo (Rome: Electa, 1996), pp. 110–25. 13. Enrico Prampolini, “Arte Polimaterica,” originally published in Anticipiazioni (1944), reprinted in The Italian Metamorphosis, and also collected in Enrico Prampolini, Prampolini: dal futurismo all’informale (Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992). Prampolini was a younger Futurist who quickly picked up on Boccioni’s own manifestos, which called for “plurimaterialism.”

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between the Italian avant-garde (however tainted), collage as an international avant-garde practice, and the then somewhat hackneyed avant-garde reaction against bourgeois taste. Even more importantly, it elucidated the new artistic possi- bilities attentive to emotion and spontaneity through “unthinkable” materials in line with the development of Informel. Within a matter of three years after coming back from the U.S., Burri established himself within this discourse and started experimenting seriously with a wide range of materials. As Burri was introduced into the Arte Club and the whole European painting scene, he quickly absorbed the lessons of organic abstraction. He went to Paris for a month in the winter of 1948–49, visiting Joan Miró’s studio and the galleries of Denise René and René Drouin, the two major venues for the Informel painters and their champion, Tapié. There, it is likely that he saw Dubuffet’s experiments with tar, which had been shown a few years earlier in the controversial 1946 Mirobolus, Macadam et Cie show.14 Moreover, through his growing friendship with Cahiers d’Art critic Christian Zervos, Burri was made aware of Picasso’s and Kurt Schwitters’s collages.15 His rapidly accumulating knowledge of modern art was put to direct use in his own evolving experiments with tar in the late 1940s. He exhibited these works in Rome at Galleria Margherita, in 1947 and 1948, and at the Arte Club in 1949 and 1951. Soon, under the mentoring of Informel sculptor Ettore Colla, he joined the Roman Gruppo Origine. By 1954, Burri had become an established part of the Informel scene. International acknowledgment came that same year with his inclusion in Tapié’s essay “Devenir d’un art autre.”16 As Burri worked consistently on the Sacchi, the Italian Informel critics began to connect them more vigorously to the existential traumatic present and to French Informel artists such as Wols and Jean Fautrier. The works of these better- known Frenchmen were already seen to be operating in terms of the loaded metaphor of the existential body. Much was made of Fautrier’s “Otage” series of 1943–45, for instance, whose ﬂattened, decapitated heads constructed from a build-up of paint, paste, and powdered pigment were purportedly based on his memories of the screams of prisoners tortured by Nazis in the German-occupied French forest during the war.17 Enrico Crispolti, Italy’s premier Informel critic, wrote a short essay for an exhibition of the Sacchi in 1957 that asserted Burri’s relationship to these postwar European painters.18 What Wols and Fautrier shared

14. Guiliano Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon (Milan: Charta, 1999), p. 128. Burri did not receive one of Prampolini’s travel grants, so his friend and mentor, artist Ettore Colla, gave him the money to go to Paris. Though Prampolini gave him some of his first real exposure as an artist, Burri claimed to dislike Prampolini and his artistic agenda. See Burri, quoted in Zorzi, Parola di Burri, p. 28. 15. Zorzi, Parola di Burri, p. 29. 16. Michel Tapié, “Devenir d’un art autre,” US Lines Paris Review (July 1954), p. 63. 17. Francis Ponge, for one, states, “It is a matter here of tortured bodies and faces, deformed, trun- cated, disfigured by bullets,” in “Note sur les otages, Pietures de Fautrier,” published in 1946 by Editions Seghers, Paris, reprinted in Jean Fautrier, 1898–1964 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 170. 18. Enrico Crispolti, “Nota su Alberto Burri,” in Notiziario: La Medusa studio d’arte contemporanea, 16 (May 1958), n.p. See also Crispolti, Un Saggio e tre note (Milano: Scheiwiller, 1961). In these essays, he

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with Burri, Crispolti argued, was an awareness of the decline of humanism exposed by the war. And what they all depicted in their work was the “courageous verification” of European culture in the throes of chaos. He went on to note that Burri’s material, “wholly corrosive, unraveling, has an organic vitality, an alluring sensation; it is, however, clearly a synthesis of a precarious situation.”19 In Sartrean language, Crispolti further argued that Burri’s emphasis on the materiality of his work expressed a direct struggle with the moral implications of the war and effec- tively “claimed responsibility” for its destructive potential, the horrible weapons it had unleashed, and the Fascist ideologies that had fueled it. Writing in 1958 in Evento delle Arti, Toni Toniato clarified the artist’s repara- tive response, here focusing on the stitching gesture: “Burri is in this excavation, in this open wound that reveals the unique possibility of suturing. . . . [His] material is . . . an intermediary of a corruptibility, but also a germinating action, one that in his individual choice is realized as necessary for creative liberation, of the total conscience of the self.”20 For both Crispolti and Toniato, the excavation of the wound—the actual activity of opening painting up and exposing its visceral belly, of feeling inside and “verifying” its existence—was a way to make painting “matter” to the human world again. It was humble, real, and tangible—not too deeply steeped in arcane art theory. Indeed, Burri’s paintings seem to treat the canvas with its layers of paint and burlap as a thickness of flesh to be “excavated” in Toniato’s sense. The “interior” of Sacco 5P (1953), for example, is built up with red paint and plastic—a new medium with which the artist was experimenting. Burri applied the plastic in liq- uid form, which dried in viscous globs evocative of coagulating blood. Over this, Burri added a burlap “skin.” Finally, he torched and tore the material, creating holes. As Burri built up and excavated layers, he focused on the relationship between interior “wound” and outer “skin.” In 1954, Milton Gendel elaborated on this process in the Art News article “Burri Makes a Picture”: The plastic blobs on the protuberances had become tacky and it was time to proceed to their slabbramento, a term often used in the sense of ‘opening a wound.’ With a palette knife incisions were made in the blobs along the curving ridge of the swellings, and the edges of the plastic were retracted and secured with straight pins. The ring . . . also reminiscent of organic processes, looked like proud flesh.21

In Sacco S3, from 1953, we can see this kind of exhibition (even exhibitionism?) of

extensively connects Burri to the international art scene and the artists Wols, Dubuffet, and Fautrier, as well as establishing the differences between European existentialism and American Action Painting. 19. Crispolti, “Nota su Alberto Burri,” n.p. 20. Toni Toniato, “Burri,” Evento delle arti 2 (1958), pp. 28–29. 21. Milton Gendel, “Burri Makes a Picture,” Art News 53, no. 8 (December 1954), pp. 28–31, 67–69.

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the wound’s “proud ﬂesh.” In this painting, a long passage of red plastic is left exposed while the three loose and poorly positioned stitches do not, in fact, hold anything together; the suture seems manifestly bound to fail. The red gashes were blatantly left exposed, and the sewing occurs on other areas of the composition. In many Sacchi, Burri actually sewed around the wound, sometimes even in deco- rative arabesques that meander across the surface of the burlap, but never across its abscesses. The pathetic insufﬁciency of Burri’s stitches, loops of thread that should close the wound, become evidence instead of the wound’s freshness. Stitches are placed in the wound’s context but refuse to sew it up, accentuating the need for reparation, rather than suggesting its happy conclusion. This discussion of Burri’s stitching as alluding to an existential postwar crisis not yet healed correlated with an ongoing discussion about how to repair faith in avant-garde ideals. Tapié and Gruppo Origine both used the language of the wound as a foundation on which to re-launch modernism. The way to remedy this failure and inertia of the avant-garde, Tapié proposed, was to capture a “cubist rigor, ultimate testimony of the classic structure, laid bare in a totally

Burri. Sacco S3. 1953. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.

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flayed state.”22 Here, the significance of the “wound” acts as a sign of the deflated metaphysics of modernism that needed to be excavated in order for art to really do the work of “absolute revelation.”23 Rife with images of flesh, Tapié’s argument coalesced with other Italian and French critics around a growing consensus that the avant-garde, mainly because of its failure to prevent the war and Fascism, was ruptured.24 This language then allowed him to suggest that reparation could only hap- pen through the authentic gesture of revelation and acknowledgment. Gruppo Origine, with which Burri was aligned in the early 1950s, subscribed to this idea.25 “Painting,” the group claimed in its manifesto of 1950, had to be more than “non- figurative.” It had to be “decisively founded on the spiritual meaning of ‘the moment of departure’ and on its humane re-proposal within the conscience of the artist.”26 This could only be done, they claimed, through “originary action,” expressing one’s will over inchoate material substances. The title of the group itself indicated its optimism for the rebirth of abstraction out of this attention to simple and direct gesture. Burri was decidedly affirming this discourse with his slabbramento technique. Yet, typically, he rejected its rhetoric, claiming instead that his affiliation with Gruppo Origine had more to do with his personal ties to Colla than with any artistic agenda.27 Even as Burri tried to resist the co-option of the Sacchi into this discourse of flesh, he continued making paintings in a way that invited these types of readings, indicating that his active creation—his employ- ment of the Sacchi as a way to figure existential loss—was intimately tied to the perceived legitimacy of the Informel discourse in the early to mid-1950s. However

22. Ibid., p. 25. 23. Ibid. 24. Serge Guilbaut, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster all make convincing arguments about the perceived failure of the historical avant-garde in the eyes of postwar artists and critics. Serge Guilbaut, Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945–1964 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, The Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); and Hal Foster, Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Though Guilbaut never explicitly describes which “modernism” needed to be reconstructed, he provides the historical context for this same sense of rediscovery and reparation happening in Paris. The concept of modern art upon which Tapié proposed his Informel departure was typical of most other European art critics at the time. Though by no means monolithic, it was largely Francophile, and there was rarely a distinction made between the “art for art’s sake” modernism of Impressionist painters, the aesthetic avant-gardism of the Cubist revolution, the political rad- icalism of Dada and Constructivism, the utopianism of De Stijl, and the anarchism of Futurist art. In Italian literature, this is evident in Cesare Brandi’s “L’arte d’oggi” (1951), reprinted in Scritti sull’arte contemporaneo II (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1979), pp. 126–65. Brandi mentions all of these modern art movements in the context of postwar abstraction, emphasizing the need to understand and overcome the “last avant-garde” in order to be successful in the present epoch. See also Francesco Arcangeli, Arte e vita: pagine di gallerie 1941–1973 (Bologna: Accademia Clementina: M. Boni, 1994); Arcangeli, Dal Romanticismo all’Informale (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1977); and Guilio Argan, “Salvezza e caduta nell’arte moderna,” in Studi e note II (Milan: Il Saggiotore, 1964). 25. Zorzi, Parola di Burri, p. 28. 26. Mario Ballocco, “Origine,” originally appeared in the catalog Origine: Ballocco-Burri-Capogrossi- Colla (Rome: Foundazione Origine, 1951), anthologized in Caramel, ed., Arte in Italia: 1945–1960, n.p. 27. Zorzi, Parola di Burri, p. 28.

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much he denied it, he was a performative subject of this discourse, actively articu- lating the new function of, and indeed, the necessity of, the modern artist through his peculiar operations. In fact, his actions define this sense of moral artistic authority and a cen- tered, unified modernist self. Indeed, the way Burri created his canvases suggest that the body of the painting was a complicated “patient,” a part of the artist, but also separate from him—a representation of the chaos of subjectivity that the artist had to constantly engage in order to control. In “Burri Makes a Picture,” Gendel describes this struggle: [Burri] rejects the usual formal relationship between painter and painting, where the canvas remains fixed and the painter moves around. With Burri, both he and the canvas are in movement. The canvas is laid on the floor, dragged across the room, propped in a corner or hung on the wall. It is attacked from the front and the rear.28 The article, true to the formula established by the “ . . . Paints a Picture” series, ver- bally conveys, from blank canvas to completed work, Burri grappling with, and eventually overcoming, the amorphous mass of burlap to achieve a finished picture.29 Josephine Powell’s accompanying photographs, although less dramatic than Gendel’s narrative, also show the close and unconventional way Burri used his canvases and material. In many of the photos, Burri works from the front and back of the canvas to stitch through and to torch its surface. In others, he crouches close to it as if it were a person. Often, he was pictured through the canvas’s holes. The most famous of these is a 1961 cover for L’illustrazione Italiana, in which Burri’s head and his torch are seen through the large opening of the material he has just seared. The hole becomes an eye, animating the canvas, making it not just “the scene for an existential encounter between the artist and the world” but also the gaze of the other through which the self is constituted.30 These images and descriptions of Burri’s practice situate his work within the larger convention of postwar painting as a struggle between self and other, in which subjectivity was articulated through an ambivalent encounter with the abject remainder of a socially constituted identity.31 What both Gendel’s text and the images of Burri at work reveal is the way that Burri struggled to define himself as the heroic modern artist. Yet in this struggle, his activities of penetration, excavation, and salving of that other were strangely

28. Gendel, “Burri Makes a Picture,” p. 67. 29. Initiated in 1949 and running until 1966, the “. . . Paints a Picture” series highlighted many of the Abstract Expressionists in the U.S. and Informel artists in Europe and participated heavily in con- ventionalizing abstract painting in the 1950s as an existential activity. For a critique of the romanti- cization of the modern artist in the studio, culminating with the Abstract Expressionists, see Caroline A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), especially chapters 1 and 2. 30. Maurizio Calvesi, “Informel and Abstraction,” in Italian Art in the 20th Century, ed. Emily Braun (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1989), p. 289. 31. Gendel, “Burri Makes a Picture,” p. 69. “Being seen by the other” enters into existential discourse

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conflated. In Powell’s photographs, for instance, Burri seems to be tentatively tearing at the burlap with the intention of not scarring its surface more than he must—a cut ultimately made for the greater good of the “patient.” It is as though the diminishing distance between exacerbation and alleviation paralleled the relationship between revelation and silence mentioned earlier. The cut, the pain, and the acknowledgment worked in tandem with the stitch, the healing process, and the newly constituted self. This is how the dialectical relationship materialized in Burri’s practice becomes a larger historical and discursive process of suture. I use the term “suture” here strategically to describe the way in which rupture motivates subjective coherence. Most commonly associated with film theory, and Jacques-Alain Miller in particular, “suture” describes the film-viewing subject’s inter- pellation by dominant discourses. (In Miller’s terms, “suture names the relation of the subject to the chain of its discourse.”)32 As in the filmic splice, the very materiality of the cut in Burri’s canvas exposes the subject-in-process to the experience of incoherence in order to justify the visual resolution and cultural solution for that loss. Specifically, the Sacchi become sites of performative “wounds” that ultimately stage a recovery of modernist subjectivity. Historical trauma was displaced and aestheticized, made into a performance in which the artist was ultimately represented as triumphant. Indeed, Tapié’s poetically inclined metaphors imply exactly this kind of dynamic. In the same essay in which he imagined the fleshy, flayed wounds of Informel, he also indicated that they acted as wombs from which the artist could emerge from his war-weary stupor: Those who have been able to condition new forms, lucidly or uncon- sciously, have conceived them out of space, as though space were a womb, a place of departure, for which discovery, ambiguity, and contradiction make a veritable magic AUTRE borne of AUTRE structures.33 The act of painting is imagined as a metaphoric birth out of the other’s

through Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1941), in which the other’s look constitutes the subject at the same time that the subject constitutes the other. The constitution of the self through the displacement or denial of loss is particularly fundamental to Jacques Lacan’s postwar theories of subjectivity. See also Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in 20th Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 292–93. 32. Suture is described by Jacques-Alain Miller in “Suture (elements of the logic of the signifier),” Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–78), pp. 24–34, originally published in French as “La Suture,” Cahiers pour l’analyse 1 (1966), pp. 39–51. See also Jean-Pierre Oudart in “Cinema and Suture,” Screen 18, no. 4 (Winter 1977–78), pp. 35–47; Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of I” (first delivered in 1949) and “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious” (first delivered in 1957–58), collected in Écrits, A Selection (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 293–325. Other, later film theorists who elaborate on Lacan’s theory of subjectivity via Miller’s concept of “suture” include Stephen Heath, Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 53, and Kaja Silverman, Subject of Semiotics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), pp. 215–21. 33. Michel Tapié, Observations, p. 16.

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womb/eye/wound. (Not coincidently, Tapié’s “place of departure” is related to the “moment of departure” elaborated in the Gruppo Origine manifesto I noted earlier.) In the highly individualistic masculinist performative aesthetics of Informel, in which each painter must ﬁgure and encounter that loss in order to overcome it, the threat of the wound necessarily manifested itself explicitly on this subjective level.

Fleshy Grids

If it was through Burri’s continual figuration of the wound that most critics addressed the failure of modern ideals, it was through his attempt to compose its excessiveness that they found modernism’s rejuvenation. One of the most dominant and prolific Italian postwar critics, Cesare Brandi, led the way by representing Burri as the triumphant Italian in a long line of modernist abstractionists striving to achieve a transcendental viewing experience.34 For the artist’s first major monograph, published in 1963, Brandi began by acknowledging the wounds of the Sacchi and the many things they had come to represent. In his introduction he laid out the cultural context of Burri’s work in rather bleak terms: “Either the cold war will go on endlessly, or our whole world will crumble in atomic deflagrations.”35 But he also argued that Burri’s visualization of loss was subordinate to visual harmony. Brandi stated: “We wish to emphasize the fact that the existential knot, although it serves to establish a direct contact with the spectator, will be dissolved in a moment, through the painting’s Apollonian hypostasis.”36 That is, if Burri’s paintings retained any visceral charge or dramatically conveyed violence, they did so only in order to make the effect of formal artistic control in the face of it that much more compelling. To support his argument, Brandi tended to favor the more subdued Sacchi. In his catalog, pieces such as Grande Sacco BS (1956), with its pliable fabric stretched slightly off-kilter and rumpled edges that occasionally get caught in the stitches, supply the appropriate tension for an otherwise calm geometric grid. Brandi then compared Burri’s art to Picasso’s and Mondrian’s neo-plastic dynamics, claiming that the vari- ous gradations of burlap against the canvas ground complemented each other. The composed rectangular swaths, he argued, revealed the painting’s “self-evident formal justifications” and “plastic dignity.”37 Burri was much more comfortable with this reading (though he continued his official silence) and it is the one that has per- sisted in the literature.38 Brandi’s emphasis on Burri’s grid, as it related to Picasso’s and Mondrian’s grids, performed a vital role in the discursive suturing of modernism precisely

34. See Cesare Brandi, “L’arte d’oggi” (1951), for a taste of his earlier writing in comparison with the later Burri, trans. Martha Hadzi (Rome: Editalia, 1963), n.p. 35. Ibid., p. 10. 36. Ibid., p. 31. 37. Ibid., pp. 30, 34. 38. Many of the Italian monographs on Burri follow a phenomenologically inﬂected formalism that

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Burri. Grande Sacco BS. 1956. Courtesy of Fondazione Burri.

because of its capacity to hide the function of the wound within the reafﬁrmation of modernist metaphysics. This is the “peculiar power of the grid,” which Rosalind Krauss elucidates in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths: “[The grid’s] extraordinary long life in the specialized space of modern art arises from its potential to preside over this shame [of matter]: to mask and to reveal it at one and the same time.”39 In Burri’s case, even if the materiality of the wound is seen, it does not need to be accounted for because the grid disguises its content in plain view (a characteristic that also enables it to be appropriated endlessly as if it were a brand-new structure): Perhaps it is because of this sense of a beginning, a fresh start, a ground zero, that artist after artist has taken up the grid as the medium within which to work, always taking it up as though he were just discovering it, as though the origin he had found by peeling back layer after layer of representation to come at last to this schematized reduction, the graph-paper ground, were his origin, and his ﬁnding it an act of originality.40

pays tribute to the history of Informel literature in Italy while eventually proposing the stately univer- sality of Burri’s oeuvre. This line of argument is best and most recently represented in Seraﬁni, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon. 39. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, [1986] 1994), p. 12. 40. Ibid., p. 158.

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While Krauss rightly suggests that there is an unconscious logic of repression in each artist’s adoption and repetition of the grid, I would argue that there is also, especially by the time Burri appropriates it, an unconscious logic of associa- tion that compels him to adapt the grid as a part of his artistic process. The modernist grid’s fecundity, and its usefulness for Burri, lies precisely in its mythos of new beginnings as it was paradoxically linked with the long-standing tradition of modernism—a way to further articulate its ongoing “birth.” Burri’s use of the grid to overcome the wound served to highlight his continued transhistorical struggle (and imminent triumph) over Cézanne’s (or Picasso’s, or Schwitters’s, or Mondrian’s, or Malevich’s) formal problem. The hundreds of Sacchi that Burri completed in a ten-year period also signify this compulsion to recall the mythical modernist “I.” Each Sacco represents a “birth” or origin that had to be achieved through the traumatic womb/wound, but also then through forcible structuring. Recall that this repetitious and com- pulsive act of making is referenced by Burri himself: “Painting for me is a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilantly guarded so as to draw from it the power to paint more.” In his vigilance, whether tearing or burning and then, just as importantly, sewing and gridding, he “guards” the ideal artistic authority of modernism through the self-justification of the process—hence the necessary tau- tology of his statement. The act of repetition at the heart of this process is based, Sigmund Freud claimed, on a particular state of anxiety caused by “expecting danger or preparing for it,” even though one cannot consciously describe what that danger is. “[The patient] is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of . . . remembering it as something belonging to the past.”41 I am not arguing here that Burri’s compulsion is necessarily related to a personal traumatic event that happened on the battlefield. Instead I am arguing that his practice—part of a larger discursive reclamation of the avant-garde in the postwar period—enacts a traumatic relationship to the failed ideological goals of modernism. Especially in Italy, the entanglement of modernism with Fascism and the war became a contemporary experience that Burri, other artists, and certainly contemporary critics felt compelled to repeat in an effort to overcome. In other words, Burri’s assembled, visceral burlap disrupted and exposed the failures of modernism, only in order to establish a new place for its ideals in the postwar world. Burri’s process of suture (not quite sewing up the wounds as a way to both actively engage and overcome them) stated and restated its trauma in the very moment of containment, which is one reason why Burri’s fleshy grids can be read as both a ravaging debasement of Mondrian and a reaffirmation of the Dutch artist’s Apollonian control. Moreover, for Toniato, Crispolti, Brandi, and other Italian critics of the 1950s, the material struggle of Burri’s performative sutures provided a way of addressing Italy’s estrangement from Franco-European culture

41. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: Liveright Pub. Corp., 1961), pp. 6, 12.

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during the war while simultaneously opening a path toward its recovery. These immediate postwar interpretations of traumatic wounds and sutures undeniably overnarrate the torn surfaces of Burri’s burlap. But this only marks them more clearly as performative historical maneuvers caught up in the larger goal of suturing Italian national pride.

America’s Accursed Share

But are Burri’s sutures and their accompanying critical discourse only about coming to terms with the past? Why go to such rhetorical excesses and performative extremes? What else was at stake here? The glaring, almost deafening, silence around the sources of Burri’s materials is perhaps the greatest indication that a traumatic geopolitical present was also driving the performative aesthetics of Italian Informel. All of the effort of trying to signify burlap, string, paint, and plastic as wound and then as grid left the materials’ simple existence, the very fact of their being there in Italy and available for Burri’s use, unexplained. No one cared to clarify that the sacks, before they were flesh or grids, were commodity objects (and transporters of other commodity products) shipped into Italy by the United States. No one followed up on Gendel’s curious claim that the plastic Burri used—a fairly new material at the time—was developed in the U.S. with the original purpose of sealing airplanes and jeeps in storage to be shipped overseas for military campaigns.42 No one commented on the mix of different fabrics that indicated an Italy on the verge of transforming itself from an agrarian state to a new consumer economy (linen, cotton, and upholstery were used almost as frequently as burlap). The suppression of these simple facts, while the violence of the wound was directly addressed, indicates some of the larger cultural forces driving Informel’s rescue of modernism. I would even argue that the focus on war wounds and avant-garde rupture functioned to silence the even greater, more present “wound” signified in the burlap’s relationship to postwar American commerce. While Burri hid many of the sacks’ trade stamps by placing them on the reverse side or under paint, or simply tearing them out, more than a few of the sacks explicitly expose their original markings. Some of the earliest were saved from the mess tents of the U.S. POW camp and used in food-aid packaging that were widely disseminated throughout Italy just after the war. SZ1 (1949), for instance, the very first Sacco, prominently paraded a star-spangled United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration sack. (The UNRRA was a recovery program predominately funded by the U.S., initiated before the Marshall Plan, which eventually took its place.) Burri cut and reconfigured the sack and then painted over segments of it so that it fragmented the American flag. The materialization of America’s gift to Italy is reconfigured within a mod-

42. Gendel, “Burri Makes a Picture,” p. 68.

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Burri. SZ1. 1949. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.

ernist collage with isolated abstract areas à la Miró. At the same time, Burri left a clear indication of the giver, “dagli America,” and receiver, “Europea.” A further instance of suture, this work highlights the contrast between postwar Italy and the mythic excesses of postwar America, all the while denying this reference by emphasizing formal relationships. The political and economic sting that any postwar Italian viewer of SZI would have surely felt, even if not consciously acknowledged, has its roots in both Italy’s recent economic struggles and the perceived meteoric rise of American economic dominance. Maurizio Calvesi, a prominent critic and art historian at the University of Rome, has been the only person to broach this subject of the burlap’s geopolitical signiﬁcance. In his 1971 monograph on Burri he states: The image of Italy embodied in Burri’s sacks and plastics is not the neo- industrial Italy of Fontana or the naturalistically nostalgic Italy of

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Morlotti. It is in its own way, a political Italy . . . [although] Burri stood aloof from political activity. His Italy is a solitary, angry nation—conquered, reduced to the status of a colony, relegated to the Third World.43 Calvesi’s rearticulation of Burri’s burlap, not as a metaphor for the wounds of humanity but as an embodiment of an impoverished Italy controlled by the cultural and economic neo-imperialism of the U.S. Marshall Plan, gives greater poignancy to the near-obsessional way in which Burri and other Italian artists and critics attempted to recover the European avant-garde. Burri’s art, Calvesi argued, was implicitly about celebrating poverty as an indigent response to American paternalism, a “protest against the outrage of wealth.”44 The very existence of imported food-aid sacks indicated Italy’s newly “conquered” status—a self-perceived “third-world colony” reduced to accepting food handouts. This is especially palpable when considering that agricultural self-sufficiency had been the major agenda of Mussolini’s “Battle for Wheat” program, which subsidized Italy’s agrarian growth of the 1920s and ’30s.45 The Fascist program was doomed from the start—by arid land, by drought, by famine, and finally by war. After the war, as the U.S. and other Allied powers—mainly through the International Monetary Fund (IMF)—encouraged Italy to abandon any lingering notion of self-sufficiency for an import-export economy, rural industries and agriculture were replaced by heavy machine production for export.46 By 1945, the retail price of food in Rome was thirty-three times its prewar price.47 In this new economy, sacks of wheat and beans were imported from the U.S. and Canada—proof of which is stamped clearly on Grande Sacco BS, which has a wheat sack, torn through the middle, bearing the imprint of the U.S., and Sacco e Verde (1956), which uses a “Navy Beans” label tucked into the right-hand corner of the canvas. Incorporated with more subtlety than in SZ1, the wheat and navy bean sacks conform to the fleshy geometric grids of Burri’s increasingly large structures, but they nevertheless indicate the changing economic climate. If the Sacchi verify Italy’s dire poverty, they also confirm an excess of American wealth accrued through overproduction, a manifestation of what Georges Bataille called the “accursed share” of modern capitalism. Written in 1949, Bataille’s book of the same name offered a thinly veiled meditation on his

43. Calvesi, Burri, trans., Robert Wolf (New York: Abrams, [1971] 1974), p. 13. Just before this statement he indicates that the perpetrator of this situation is the United States. He says, “America had begun to invade the inviolable precincts of art (or, to tell the truth, the art market), bent on an expan- sionist and anti-European policy based on its own Pop art moment” (p. 13). 44. Ibid., p. 20. 45. Edward Tannenbaum, Fascism in Italy: Society and Culture, 1922–1945 (London: Basic Books, 1972); Giuseppe Tassinari, Ten Years of Integral Land-Reclamation Under the Mussolini Act (Faenza: State for Integral Land Reclamation, 1939). 46. John Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, 1945–1960 (Edinburgh: Keele University Press, 1997), p. 57. 47. John Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945–1948 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 45.

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fears about capitalist economic excess, especially the way it was being channeled into growing nuclear arsenals. Grappling to ﬁnd a plausible alternative, he used the U.S. Marshall Plan as a more positive example of expenditure: Mankind will move peacefully toward a general resolution of its prob- lems only if this threat causes the U.S. to assign a large share of the excess—deliberately and without return—to raising the global standard of living, economic activity thus giving the surplus energy produced an outlet other than war.48 The Marshall Plan, cobbled together by the U.S., Canada, and a still- rationed Britain, was indeed a generous aid program, one aimed at nothing less than the full economic and political recovery of Europe and Asia. But its agenda, as the material history of the sacks evidences, was also a tool for gaining economic power and political containment.49 One of the most fascinating, and not as frequently acknowledged, motivations of the Marshall Plan’s food aid program was

48. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, [1949] 1989), p. 187. 49. The annual cost of the Marshall Plan was $5 billion on a GNP of $230 billion—a relatively small

Burri. Sacco e Verde. 1956. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.

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simply to get rid of a vast surplus of agricultural production without harming U.S. market prices. The American economy was overburdened with the overproduction of cotton, tobacco, dairy products, and other commodities rotting in warehouses. Economic experts saw that the only way for capitalism to succeed more globally (even without a Communist threat) was to give its products away ﬁrst, creating demand that would eventually support their sale.50 Over three mil- lion metric tons of grain were sent to Europe in 1955 alone. In providing food aid to Italy, the U.S. could get rid of the excess production of its rapidly expanding economy and, at the same time, create new markets for its goods, which in turn stabilized the exchange value of the commodities. Thus the function of America’s accursed share—both money and food in the form of a generous gift to the losers of World War II—actually played a large part in creating new international distrib- utions of the food and, eventually, branded items that formed a new basis of everyday life in Italy and across Europe. Burri’s Sacchi materialized the way in which postwar economic institutions were already shaping an emerging global capitalist economy, the excesses of which were used to develop and expand the geographic territory of its operations.

price to pay for stabilizing the world economy. See Killick, The United States and European Reconstruction, p. 92; H. Stuart Hughes, The United States and Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); and Caglar Keyder, “The American Recovery of Southern Europe: Aid and Hegemony,” in Semiperipheral Development: The Politics of Southern Europe in the Twentieth Century, ed. Giovanni Arrighi (London: Sage, 1985), pp. 135–48. 50. Mitchell Wallerstein, Food for War and Food for Peace (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), p. 54. See also Vernon W. Ruttan, ed., Why Food Aid? (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

Burri. Sacco. 1955. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.

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But the sacks do more than simply display America’s ostentatious generosity and calculated orchestration of international markets. They address additional tensions between the past and the present in their juxtaposition of imported sacks and Italian materials. Sacco (1955), covered with burlap on the top left and the remains of furniture upholstery on the right, is a case in point. For centuries, Italy had produced some of the most luxurious silk and linen bro- cade in Europe. Textile production had also been valorized by the Fascist regime as an “indigenous” industry, but it eventually met the same end as the agricultural programs after the war.51 Burlap, by contrast, since its invention in India in the eighteenth century, was one of the lowliest and cheapest textiles in the world, designed specifically for the purpose of shipping commercial agricultural products overseas.52 By the twentieth century, tons of bolts were bought on the commodities market, fashioned into sacks, stamped, filled, and sent back out. The burlap, as a new meta-commodity—a potent materialization of circulat- ing capital between producers and buyers and beneficiaries around the world—replaced an older tradition of linen and silk trade in Italy. In Sacco, the Italian fabric, ravaged by years of wear and tear during the war, seems as exhausted, if not more so, as the burlap that traveled half the world to reach the streets of Rome. The scraps of once-valuable fabric were now available to be picked up off the street. What becomes evident in all of this is that Burri con- structs not oppositions but equivalences between the fabrics. The burlap and the finer materials are sewn into the same plane. The visibly devalued nature of all of the materials that constitute Burri’s Sacchi subtly indicates the critique of American colonization identified by Calvesi. In Bataille’s theory, the accursed share is only the excess of production, the leftover wealth produced by the system, its gift to the rest of the world. Trash, on the other hand, is the excess that falls out after consumption. If the sacks filled with food were read at first as signifiers of abundance or generosity, their ragged and ravaged state suggests the way that foreign capital pervaded the everyday life of postwar Italy, literally littering its streets. Burri’s sacks are the leftovers of America’s leftovers—the objects that seemingly no one could consume, an even more abject other than the wounds of modernism—which Burri had to struggle to overcome. The Sacchi made this visible, even as they were discursively silenced by Burri’s suturing performances and the Informel readings. They became the most unmentionable, and yet completely visible, of the excessive wounds the Sacchi attempted to contain with their grids.

51. Laboratorio Tela Umbra, a well-known textile factory located in Burri’s hometown of Città di Castello, was established at the beginning of the twentieth century and abandoned after the war. Alvaro Tacchini, Artigianato e industria a Città di Castello tra ottocento e novecento (Città di Castello: Petruzzi, 1988) and Anna Bento Bull and Paul Corner, From Peasant to Entrepreneur: Survival of the Family Economy in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 1993). 52. George Chacko, International Trade Aspects of Indian Burlap: An Economic Study (New York: Bookman Associates, 1961). Its ﬁrst large-scale production was commissioned by Britain’s imperial East India Company in 1793.

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“The Operation Is Over!”

In his monograph on Burri, Brandi recounted a statement by Burri that he once overheard: “But the operation is over!”53 Yet another deflection of the sym- bolic and contextual readings of his work, the statement is curious for an artist who consistently dismissed any such medical metaphors within his work. How can Burri declare the “wound” readings ludicrous, but then invoke the same language and declare the operation complete? This, I have been arguing, is the type of oscillation between loss and recovery evident throughout Burri’s performative art and statements. As with Burri’s other words and actions, it produced a silence that speaks volumes about his anxieties. His strategy of exposition and denial can now be read as a multifunctional, albeit unfinished, suturing operation related to the postwar situation that Benjamin Buchloh aptly describes as caught between “what appeared in retrospect as the once solid foundations of modernism in the European culture of the nation states” and the “ever-intensified American enforcement of a global culture industry,” a “perpetual oscillation and conversion between a progressive opposition and a reactionary affirmation of traditional con- cepts of identity.”54 Indeed, his wounds actually seemed to keep opening up and infecting others—the war wounds bled into a wounded modernism, which bled again into a wounded Italy faced with America’s cultural dominance. Ultimately, the polyvalence and open-ended nature of Burri’s particular discursive suture, continually figured and gridded, indicates that the old wounds of modernism, the crisis of Italian nationalism, and Burri’s dramatic attempts to recover a modernist subjectivity were at their most acute precisely because they were caught up in the growing pains of postwar international capitalism. Burri’s images of an absolute beginning were about miraculously salvaging grids amid the trash, about remaking modern art out of capitalism’s accursed share. But the material and its wounds, no matter how much they were aestheticized by a modernist formal logic, always seemed to resurface. The Sacchi, by the very virtue of their participation in a fraught historical moment, could never contain their own excesses. The operation was never over.

53. Brandi, Burri, p. 39. 54. Buchloh, The Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, pp. xviii-xix.

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