Artworks
were still being installed as I walked around Tate Modern's new
exhibition on Sunday morning. The fresh lettuce had yet to be fixed to
the little granite block in Giovanni Anselmo's 1968 sculpture, though
the lump of stone was in place, suspended overhead by a steel cable.
Pier Paolo Calzolari's wall-hung mattress, attached to a refrigeration
unit, was freezing up nicely, and the blue neon words "Without
other troubles than my own, other rumblings than mine" glowed
impenetrably. Things come and go, but Arte Povera remains an art of
mysteries.
Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-72 also features a beautiful
photograph in which Anselmo is caught running away across an endless
field. The photo, from 1971, is called Entering the Work, as though the
work and the world were synonymous, marked by Anselmo's passage across
its seemingly infinite plane. If he's running away, he's also running
towards something, though his goal is unknowable. This image, it seems
to me, captures the spirit of Arte Povera, its naiveties and
sophistications, its portentous aspirations and its often homely,
beguiling and poetic gestures.
This is the crux of it: an art that leaves you at a loss. It can be a
beautiful feeling, as well as a frustration. Sometimes the show hits you
like Gilberto Zorio's phosphorescent fist, and sometimes it returns you
to nature, like Giuseppe Penone's tree, carved back out of the plank
that concealed it. Sometimes it is just a place to stand and look;
sometimes it is a machine gun.
Arte Povera - "Poor Art" in the literal but misleading
translation - has been described as an art without preconceptions or
limitations, or an art of "extreme individualism and
experimentation". It was an art of disruptions and blurrings - of
the real and fictional, past and present, natural and artificial, the
"artistic" and the non-artistic. It was an art, among other
things, of commonplace or mundane materials and immaterial forces and
energies.
It was not without precedents - Piero Manzoni, Lucio Fontana and
Alberto Burri are somewhere among the Italian forebears - and it
paralleled developments elsewhere in Europe and America. Yet it was a
peculiarly Italian affair, born out of the "economic miracle"
of the 1960s and fuelled by growing political disaffection and mistrust
of consumerism, and an equal mistrust of American hegemony. It was a
collision between Italy's artistic heritage and peasant culture, growing
industrialisation and cultural debates about margin and centre. It was
an art that went to the movies but pretended not to, an art that
rejected painting but always had an eye for it, and an art that depended
on the economic boom but sought to shun it. An art, then, of
contradictions.
The 1960s in Italy were a watershed for culture as much as the
economy, as the catalogue essays here and elsewhere have made clear -
particularly the Guggenheim Museum's The Italian Metamorphosis 1943-68.
The Guggenheim's 1994 show was organised by Germano Celant, and it was
he, as a young Genoese curator, who coined the term Arte Povera in 1967.
He was its architect and impresario, defining the terms and identifying
the artists. This show's curators - Richard Flood of the Walker Art
Gallery in Minneapolis and the Tate's Frances Morris - have spent the
past five years excavating the territory, and this weekend some of the
artists were wandering through, revisiting works which, in some cases,
they had not seen for 30 years.
There are 14 artists in the Tate show. Of them, Michelangelo
Pistoletto and Alighiero Boetti have both been treated to recent
large-scale shows in Britain. But this doesn't mean that Arte Povera is
undergoing a revival as such, because it has never gone away. Walking
through Tate Modern, it is impossible not to think of artists from
around the world whose works have been informed by what at first
appeared a local, northern Italian phenomenon. Make your own list: it
ranges from Sarah Lucas to Miroslaw Balka, from Cildo Meireles to Imi
Knoebel, from Gabriel Orozco to Damien Hirst.
Arte Povera's influence is global and transgenerational. In some ways
the movement has defined the attitude and strategies of the past 30
years of art, however tired, overblown and predictable some of its early
protagonists have since become.
It must also be said that there are works here of great beauty and
poignancy, as well as wonderful, mad, hilarious enigmas. How generous
these artists were with their talents, the freedom they allowed
themselves: Luciano Fabro's giant birds' feet in clear glass, carved
marble and bent steel sheet, emerging from flounced and pleated cloth
legs that climb all the way to the ceiling; his metal cut-outs of the
map of Italy, some of them suspended upside down from ropes, dangling
like Mussolini, humiliated in death; or Pino Pascali's barking-mad 1966
white sculpture, a form that hovers between a kind of bizarre futuristic
animal and the funky elan of 1960s Italian style.
That sculpture has been decapitated, as its title tells us, though
how anyone could read that pointy thing as a head is beyond me. We go
from this to Pascali's cubic metre of compressed earth, a work from the
following year, and then to his rope bridge of wire-wool and his
military weaponry. Where's the continuity? Even looking at just these
two artists, the heterodox, impure and open attitude of Arte Povera is
made clear.
The lesson seems to be that you can do what you want. But, as Boetti
told a young artist in the 1980s, you need to have at least one
signature object (Mario Merz had his igloos and neon numbers, Jannis
Kounellis his burlap coal sacks, and Boetti his embroidered maps) to
keep the show on the road, to keep the collectors happy. This was Arte
Povera's pragmatic side, its most practical lesson.
There is a constant complaint nowadays that you can't tell the
difference between the art and the packing, the mess and the message.
Arte Povera invested everything with meaning and resonance, however
slight some of its gestures. If nothing else, it was an art of promises
- it depended on faith and on a suspension of rules as much as of
disbelief. The work still looks fresh, even if much of it has now
acquired the patina of age and of sanctified art, which is the fate of
all art, even the most dematerialised, the most ephemeral.
This exhibition was never going to be the sort of super-elegant,
sparse and theatrical installation that we have become used to: Zero to
Infinity returns, in fact, to the kind of cluttered display common to
its formative period. Ideas bounce off each other, objects and images
and artists have conversations again. As much as anything else, this
show will help us forget the horrors of Tate Modern's Century City. We
can worry, at last, more about the art, and less about the institution
that houses it.
Yet Arte Povera remains nothing if not demanding. It was an art of
potentials and energies, of transfigurations, labyrinthine and
untranslatable metaphors, experiments with materials, forms, spaces and
language. Arte Povera comes with its own built-in barriers, as well as
the ones the Tate will erect to keep the audience at bay. The complaint
against modern art, of whatever persuasion, has been that almost
infantile demand for meaning; one of the big problems of Arte Povera is
that there is little agreement about what the term means, or meant.
Back to the unfinished installation: the live parrot that previously
sat on the perch in Jannis Kounellis's 1967 work isn't here - nor will
it be, after the complaints when it was shown in the Hayward's 1993
exhibition Gravity and Grace. As a joke, Kounellis has stuck a message
written in charcoal next to the empty perch: "That bastard who
murdered my parrot - if I get my hands on him I'll kill him." I
suppose the note will get the chop too before the show opens.
Kounellis's seminal Arte Povera work - an "installation" of
10 live horses, presented for three days in a commercial gallery in Rome
in 1969 - won't be here either. Some things must remain a memory, and
perhaps that is only right. Yet there's plenty to be grateful for here,
even if the show might raise severe doubts about some of today's
supposedly radical gestures. Another lesson from this rich, poor art.
• Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972 is at Tate Modern, London
SE1 (020-7887 8000), until August 19.
