Content area
Full Text
MAMbo Bologna 24 September to 26 December
'Nature', Alighiero Boetti remarked in the 19905, 'is a blind, stubborn force that races for this fundamental purpose alone - life and existence/ At the height of Italy's economic miracle, in the mid 19605, the artists grouped under the heading of Arte Povera (a core that settled at 13 individual practitioners by 1970) turned with outstanding mobility of means towards nature, the artisanal and the organic as a counter position to the perceived hastening proximity of visual art to science, rationality, mass-media and industrial production.
Although primarily reflecting the practices of artists based in Turin and Rome, the earliest exhibitions of the tendency labelled by the critic Germano Celant took place in neither of these cities. Both happened in commercial galleries, the first in September 1967 in Genoa and the second in Bologna, the city known as 'La Rossa' for its postwar political domination by the Communist Party. When, shortly before that show opened in late February 1968, Celant developed his definition of Arte Povera with revolutionary terminology, the chosen venue must have seemed highly appropriate. With the Vietnam War polarising left and right, Celant expressed an insistence on ideological dissent and claimed that the artist 'now becomes a guerrilla warrior', erasing the separation of art and life and identifying solely with himself.
In fact the birth of the brand established a long-lasting dilemma. Having purportedly set out to contest prevailing cultural, philosophical and political systems with stylistic inconsistency and the surprise tactics of the guerrilla, the first manifestations attributed to 'the free self- projection of human activity ... concerned with contingency, events, ahistoricism, the present' occurred in conventional bourgeois settings. And so it largely continued to blur into ambiguity the anti-establishment spontaneity that Celant had aspired towards (with two notable exceptions, the 'Deposito d'Arte Presente' in Turin in 1968, and the 'Arte Povera & Azioni Povere' exhibition in Amalfi in 1968-69). Now, 'Arte Povera 2011', a cycle of eight major exhibitions, confirms Arte Povera as a national institution.
The first instalment returns the limelight to Bologna and related shows quickly follow in mostly public museums in Turin and Milan, Bergamo, Rome, Naples and Bari. Thus the 'revolutionary way of existence [that] turns into the Reign of Terror'...