New Life in Italy
Why limit your project to the years between 1960 and 1975? In what way was this an important moment for Italian art? 1960 corresponded to a new generation of artists who began to exhibit in Roman galleries. I’m thinking particularly of Franco Angeli, Giosetta Fioroni, Jannis Kounellis. 1975 was the year of the death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose birth centenary is also being celebrated this year. The early 1960s were marked by the miracolo economico, a very active consumer society, the influence of the media and of the Cinecittà movie studios. It was a very rich period, especially in Rome. The end of the decade in the country was characterised by deep political instability. There was the terrible attack in Milan, in piazza Fontana (December 1969), and then attempts at a coup. Italian society first experienced strong upward mobility, with the rural southern populations coming to work in the north of Italy, especially in the factories in Turin, and then in the mid-1960s, an economic decline began. As for the early 1970s, it sounded the death knell of illusions. Art took on a more conceptual, feminist form, and Pasolini’s death symbolically sealed a tense political situation.The exhibition is not chronological, but thematic. Those fifteen years were undoubtedly the most thriving period for Italian art in the second half of the twentieth century.
BEYOND ARTE POVERA
Can you talk about the three themes that structure the exhibition circuit? Naturally, they are linked to the evolution of Italian art, but also to the very particular architecture of the Mamac. The exhibition is organised around three major themes (society, nature, the body). They are considered in a porous and transversal way in order to show the circulation of artists, forms and ideas between visual, ecological and corporeal issues. This thematic organisation is a response to the architectural constraints of the museum. The visitor is first welcomed by extracts of films by Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini, which show different aspects of this Italian society in the early 1960s, before discovering the first theme about the society of the image, whether in advertising, film, or television. The representation of the image of the woman, whether anonymous or a movie star, is shown with the works of Giosetta Fioroni, Cesare Tacchi and Fabio Mauri. But there is also the question of gender with the work of Lisetta Carmi, who photographed the transsexual community of Genoa. So many incredibly innovative images that echo Pasolini’s documentary Comici d’amore (1964), in which the filmmaker investigated love and sexuality throughout Italy, a country where religion and patriarchy still play a very important role. The second part deals with the reconstruction of nature. I have brought together artists who created with nature, with raw materials (water, earth, wood), and others who made films in interaction with the sun, the wind… all as a reaction to a society that was undergoing economic and industrial growth. It was an opportunity for me to go beyond the category of Arte Povera, probably the best-known thing about Italian art from the period, and to show that other artists also took part in this adventure. This section includes installations by Pino Pascali, Mario Merz, films by Laura Grisi, Marinella Pirelli and Luca Maria Patella. The challenge was to show artists that are not known in France, beyond Giuseppe Penone or Michelangelo Pistoletto.
The third part addresses the question of the body through its memory. The idea was
to display the trace of the gesture, the imprint, and not the spectacular dimension of the body, as body art did during the same period. To show how the drawings of Irma Blank or the paintings of Giorgio Griffa are the result of a gesture that is almost at the point of exhaustion, that the sculptures of Marisa Merz and Paolo Icaro carry the measurements of the artist’s body, that the body is what is at stake in the performative work of Eliseo Mattiacci, Gino De Dominicis and Fabio Mauri. I chose the title Vita Nuova, new life…
… which is the title of a text by Dante. Yes, it is a very important text in Italian literature because it was the first to be written in Italian ( lingua volgare). By referring to Dante, and to this new way of writing, I wanted to show how a new generation of artists, women and men, born between the 1920s and 1940s, profoundly renewed creation in Italy, going beyond what is usually known of it, that is, Arte Povera.
There are 56 artists, many of whom I don’t know. I have the feeling that this scene ultimately made few inroads outside of the peninsula. It’s hard to generalise. If we think of Laura Grisi, she was exhibited a lot in the United States from the mid-1960s, then by Leo Castelli from the 1970s. Many artists also lived in the United States (Piero Gilardi, Paolo Icaro, Mario Schifano) and were in contact with the American art scene of the time. These artists were present for a while, then forgotten by history. Except those who were rediscovered thanks to the Arte Povera label. We can criticise the work of Germano Celant, but we have to admit that he was able to give this international dimension to part of Italian art. The point of such an exhibition is to be able to show artists who are unknown in France, and even ones who have been totally forgotten in Italy. I am thinking, for example, of the painter
Titina Maselli, who was close to Gilles Aillaud and who also worked on stage design in France, notably for Bernard Sobel.
The works I’ve seen seem to me to be very sexual, in the loving sense of the term, perhaps more than what was being done in France at the same time. Incidentally, this is the subject of Dante’s text. (Laughter) Well, Vita Nuova, which is an ode to love, is a text from the thirteenth century! They didn’t love in the same way in the thirteenth century as in the twentieth century. The whole exhibition certainly has a lot to do with the body, but not only.
… also with the glamorous side, and Cinecittà? Especially in the first part, where I show the links with the cinema.
ANOTHER BOND
I also watched the little film by Ugo Nespolo, Buongiorno Michelangelo (1968-69), where we see Pistoletto pushing a ball in the street. The atmosphere is very Blow Up, Swinging Sixties and also the myth of Sisyphus, but of course I also thought of that performance where Francis Alÿs rolls a plasticine ball down the street. Many of the works in your exhibition prefigure later productions. And that is a real discovery. Nespolo made a lot of experimental films. This film also shows the artistic friendship, especially in Turin, between Alighiero Boetti, Gilberto Zorio, Nespolo, Pistoletto. I placed it next to a painting by Renato Mambor, Con il cannone di Pascali (1965), which tells another story of friendship between Roman artists. There were essentially two poles at that time, Rome and Turin, with particular synergies between the two; the artists circulated, exhibited together.
Beyond these friendships, there was perhaps another bond between all these people, and that is politics. The north of Italy was revolutionary and leftwing. These were the years when the Communist Party was very powerful. This is reflected in the works. These were the years of Christian Democracy and the Communist Party. Many works echo this political aspect: a tattered map by Luciano Fabro ( Italia del dolore, 1975), a painting by Gianfranco Baruchello depicting the hanging of Mussolini in 1945 ( Nello spazio della violenza, 1973) or the first embroidered map by Boetti, that left for Afghanistan in the early 1970s. This political dimension is also present in the last room of the exhibition with Fabio Mauri’s installation, Intellettuale, a tribute to Pasolini. In May 1975, Mauri asked his childhood friend to take part in a performance during which he projected his own film, The Gospel according to Saint Matthew, onto his body, making him into a Christ- like character. A few months later, Pasolini was killed; his political activism became the subject of this performance.
Do you think that this left-wing political consciousness might have hindered the recognition of these artists outside Italian borders? Probably. Most of these artists produced art that was not neutral, but activist. This political activism is a central theme in the exhibition, and it certainly contributed to the most committed amongst them missing out on a form of recognition in the United States.
There is a geographical and cultural logic in holding this exhibition in Nice. There have previously been several monographic exhibitions in Nice devoted to Italian artists (1). The geographical proximity to Italy and the willingness of the director of the MAMAC, Hélène Guenin, to reread the history of art meant that Nice was an ideal place to hold this exhibition. My hope is that in discovering Vita Nuova, visitors will discover the richness and diversity of this Italian art scene.
Translation: Juliet Powys
1 Giovanni Anselmo, Enrico Baj, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mimmo Rotella, Gilberto Zorio.