A Spiral Towards the Infinite
A key member of the Arte Povera movement, Mario Merz (Milan, 1925-2003) produced sculptures and installations made of everyday materials, both industrial and organic. Envisioning art as a way to oppose the dehumanizing forces of consumerism and industrialization, in 1968 he presented his first “igloo” – a hybrid of sculpture and architecture that sums up the fundamental human need for shelter, nourishment and connection to nature. For the occasion of the solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, which brings together over 30 igloos for the first time, the following pages of L’Officiel Art examine this seminal protagonist of 20th-century art. Alongside an in-depth essay by Eva Fabbris on Merz’s site-specific projects – including Casa Fibonacci at the Serralves Foundation in Porto in 1999 and the neon installation for the Mole Antonelliana in Turin (Il volo dei numeri, 2000) – we have republished an excerpt from a 1981 interview, in which the artist reveals the essence of the igloo: “the ideal organic form […], a synthesis, a complex picture.”
Casa Fibonacci, the book published at the time of the solo show by Mario Merz at the Serralves Foundation in Porto in 1999, includes a text by the artist which poetically outlines the coordinates of the exhibition space. Reading it, we are reminded of a nomad who roams and tries to use his senses, his own words, to name and define the spaces around him, to understand if he can effectively spend time in them. The piece has a two-column layout, where on the left the artist places single words capable of summing up an essential description of the site: “address,” “proximity,” “lights,” “in,” “dimensions,” “directions,” “moon.” To the right, short, evocative and at the same time precise verses correspond to each of these “categories.” For example, beside “lights” we see:
from a blue sky to violet through garden through trees through 1930s dimensions and 1990s works in situ
The Serralves is located in a villa built in the 1930s as a private residence, surrounded by a park with flourishing plants, enhanced by sculptures from the institution’s contemporary art collection. The solo show Merz made there, curated by Vicente Todolí (now curator of the exhibition on Merz’s “Igloos” at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan), revolved around the question: “What is a House?” Taking its cue from the fact that the museum facility was built as a residence, the show was organized as a dynamic space that mixed indoors and outdoors. In the exhibition itinerary, inhabited by large black profiles of dogs on paper and culminating in an igloo in the park with a crow at its top, a neon message asked: “Le case girano intorno a noi o noi giriamo intorno alle case?” [Do we go around houses, or do houses go around us?]. In Merz’s work the house is the evolution of a basic need, an architectural, political and social question. The “Fibonacci house” of the book’s title is an ideal construction suggested by Merz as a possible habitat dimension in expansion, from the one to the many, from the refuge to a universal character. His practice is a continuous investigation of the forms and force of natural processes, in which existence, its precariousness and the needs that spring from it are inscribed as a manifestation of energy that can take on the form of construction. But does the construction necessarily have to contain something?
To describe any type of vital expansion, Merz uses the numbers of the Fibonacci series, one of the most stable recurring features of his output. In this numerical sequence identified at the start of the 1200s each number corresponds to the sum of its two predecessors (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34…). As we know, this series is connected with the golden section and constitutes the basis of the geometric form of the logarithmic spiral, a mathematical version of the proportional perfection found in nature (for example, in the regular and reiterated arrangement of leaves and flowers around the stem of many plants). In Merz’s work the Fibonacci numbers were listed, discussed in writings, painted, and above all drawn with neon, a material that accentuates their symbolic potential related to energy; furthermore, they provide a solid structural and conceptual foundation for many of his works.
For Merz the use of this sequence implies an allusion to the vigor and vitality of growth, its potentially unlimited expansion.
One of the first appearances of the series was in the privacy of the artist’s home: the first five numbers, in neon, were placed over the stove and the sink, below the aluminum foil sculptures of his wife Marisa, in their house in Turin on Via Santa Giulia. Today Il volo dei numeri [The Flight of the Numbers] (2000) is one of its best-known and most vibrant applications: the numerical series in neon glowingly extends along the curve of the cupola of the Mole Antonelliana, lighting up every evening in the center of Turin. This city, the artist’s base in life and work, also hosts another permanent public installation, the large Fontana Igloo [Fountain Igloo] (2002) covered with slabs of marble and porphyry.
The tension between private and public space is accompanied in Merz’s research by the question regarding the meaning of “being together” and of where the collective dimension can be physically located. The igloo, which first appears in his work around 1968 and is interpreted in the widest range of materials and structural compositions, capable of opening and mingling with other items like neon inscriptions, painting, the presence of animal and vegetable elements, is the plastic, theoretical and poetic summation Merz identified in order to continue to discuss these questions. An essential work of architecture, it symbolically embodies both the dimension of construction and that of what already exists in nature, thanks to its form that wraps the Inuit in a miniature celestial dome. “Like a projection of himself, a form of displaced self-portrait, the igloo was fully present and yet vanished just as quickly as it had appeared, like a nomad,” writes Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, regarding the way these works have taken form in different configurations and materials in the widest range of places around the world. “In situ,” says the resonant explorative text on the Serralves: this very specific ability of Merz to listen to the place where his works can “land” (Christov-Bakargiev) or “come to rest” (Germano Celant) was developed in the 1970s.
In that decade the Fibonacci series was the protagonist of many exhibitions and projects, increasingly revealing how the use of those numbers permitted the artist to insert his works in an infinite perspective that regulates the laws of the universe. In 1970 he created a project in the form of a book for the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld – Fibonacci 1202, Mario Merz 1970. Though not implemented until 1981, the spiral at Krefeld is emblematic of the process of appropriation and radical challenging of the status of architecture on Merz’s part. The location – again in this case – was a work of architectural originally made as a residence, designed in rationalist cubical volumes by Mies van der Rohe. In the published drawings we see Merz identify the center of the plan of the house and develop a spiral from that point, in which the radial distance between the concentric curves is regulated by the first five Fibonacci integers. The spiral is superimposed on the rigid form of the architecture, extending beyond it, and clearly seems to be in friction with the modernist forms of Mies: in the last drawings in the book, we see it expand, indifferent to the boundaries of the cadastral map on which it is traced. The spiral has taken the building as its center, but from there it can open out to dimensions that make it inessential. In a text written a posteriori, Merz remarked:
The limit to be reached were the trees and the spaces outside the chalk spiral on the shiny floor was the thing to offer to the house itself the beauty would be conveyed to the biological space and a viewer would be able to believe walking on the shiny floor that he had found the idea of a spiral in proliferation towards the infinite.
Very often, the series of numbers formed by neon tubes is a constituent part of the work, as well as a mathematical entity underpinning the project of “breaking through” the walls of the museum/ dwelling. In a series of works made in 1971 and 1972, the Fibonacci series is a system through which a collective habit can be visually described and made comprehensible. In Senza titolo (una somma reale è una somma di gente) [Untitled (A Real Sum is a Sum of People)] (1972) Merz addresses the relationship between numbers and individuals, examined in contexts linked to the production and consumption of goods, but also the vital act of taking nourishment. The first version of this work is Fibonacci Napoli (Mensa di Fabbrica a S. Giovanni a Teduccio) [Fibonacci Naples (Canteen at a Factory at S. Giovanni a Teduccio)] (1971) in which a photographer made a series of shots showing factory workers sitting down for a meal in the company dining hall. The number of people in each of the photographs, then displayed in sequence, corresponds to a number in the Fibonacci series: the first two images show one worker only; in the third he is joined by a second worker. Then a third arrives, after which there are five, then eight, and so on. Each image has a corresponding neon number next to its frame, to underscore the energy triggered by gathering. Undoubtedly the political aspect of the work is forceful, in terms of the description of the working class as a set of individuals who join together in keeping with a system that can be described, with a potential for continuous expansion. The two subsequent versions, made in a restaurant in Turin and a pub in London, convey more general reflections on the importance of the table as a place of sharing and belonging.
Merz began to concentrate more and more on the table as a place of sharing, though one that is rigid in its immutable character. This object is a piece of furniture, but from a plastic standpoint it is like a painting – a two-dimensional surface – with legs, or in the more animalesque interpretation a painting with paws. In 1973 came It is as possible to have a space with tables for 88 people as it is possible to have a space with tables for no one, built and presented at the John Weber Gallery in New York. Instead of the accumulation of people, Merz represents the space occupied on a table by each person, estimating a standard measurement of 50 cm per guest. The top of the first table is a square of 50 cm on each side, followed by a sequence of other square tables whose sizes increase proportionally: the result is an organic growth of tables, arranged along a spiral path. In the gallery the progression stopped at nine tables – the space couldn’t contain more – bearing the neon numbers from 1 to 34 on their sides.
The fact that the table is simply a top means that the idea of working with the real object is totally acceptable, for Merz, and in fact just as interesting as focusing on its pictorial description: table subjects fill his paintings, real tables take on triangular and spiral forms, shown covered with food, while intersecting and coexisting with the igloos.
From 1975 on, for Merz the exhibition opportunities and chances to work on-site continue to multiply. As a result, the igloo reinforces its identity as a house in transit capable of taking on aspects encountered on a local level; in this moment, Germano Celant writes, “The linguistic capacity of the igloo is maximal, and the interrelationship between the internal and external factors helps to determine its environmental recognizability.” Elements that would become recurring features are called into play, like the bundled sticks (a forest in miniature, but also a countable set that serves to produce energy, being potentially flammable) and old newspapers (information, world, everyday affairs no longer suitable to inject into the economic circuit, but still a material entity), together with items that from case to case illustrate a reaction to the context.
In his contribution for “Ambiente-Arte. Dal Futurismo alla Body Art” – the exhibition curated by Celant at the Venice Biennale in 1976 that indicated Futurism as the origin of environmental art – Merz symbolically conveyed inside the architecture the world of plants as well, through an unexpected pictorial medium and a particular shade of green. On the stripped wall, he paints panels with copper sulfate, an anti-parasitic substance used mostly in vineyards and known as verdigris precisely for its grayish-green hue. Chemistry, pictorial act, representation of the minimum place of social contact, are the ways with which the artist makes his statement on what art is in relation to place. That same year Merz began to produce paintings about animals: prehistoric, nocturnal, predatory creatures. Rhinoceros, geckos, tigers, owls, lizards, dogs transmit their bestial characteristics to the canvas, and then they too, like the powerful numbers of Fibonacci, climb up the walls of buildings and position themselves at will. Sometimes a stuffed crocodile drags with it the string of the numerical series while climbing a wall (Coccodrillo con progressione di Fibonacci, 1990) [Crocodile with Fibonacci series]: as if to say that in the end nature eats up architecture… or at least runs freely rampant over it and across it. The animals become companions of the Fibonacci series and the igloo in their essence as an origin: zoological, mathematical, architectural prehistories become the subjects to investigate in order to find our place in space and time. Albeit temporarily.
Eva Fabbris is a member of the Department of Research and Curating of Fondazione Prada, Milan.
The igloo developed from a sort of knowledge. It appeared in my work when I said to myself that one could make art with more freedom. In the Sixties it was really important to understand that one can have freedom, which could lead to radical change in art in the western world. The igloo is the ideal organic form. It is simultaneously the world and a little house. What interested me in the igloo was the fact that it already existed in the mind before it was made; a coherent idea is not absolute coherence – first, you have to implement it. Then comes the problem of organizing a structure that is as simple as possible. Architecture is sometimes a mathematical construction, sometimes decorative, but it is always a place in which to find shelter, to give man a social dimension. There is no architecture per se, but only architecture that serves some purpose. There is no painting per se, but only painting that is an image. When I made the igloo I acted with the imagination, for the igloo is not only the elementarity of the form, but also a starting point for fantasy. The igloo is a synthesis, a complex picture, given the fact that I thoroughly torment the elementary image of the igloo that I carry inside me. I think the igloo has two aspects, one that is concrete, and one that is more mental in nature.