Tate Modern, London has re-hung one of its wings on level 5 encompassing works revolved around the theme of 'Energy and Process' and by the sounds of critics it is proving to be a great success. What seems to be attracting the most attention apart from Anselm Kiefer is a focus on the 1960s-70s Italian movement, Arte Povera ('poor art') coined by Germano Celant as curator of an exhibition in Genoa in 1967. Although Italy flourished from 1960 with migration from the South slowing down, by 1963 the Socialist Party took over Italy which led to a multitude of problems resulting in the increasing popularity of workers unions, the rising of inflation to account for promised pay rises and eventual economic decline. Student protesting accompagnied this labour protest involving disconcern for Communism, religion, consumerism, traditional family values. Artists from Turin, Milan, Rome and Genoa all formed part of the group, most then being from the poorer half of Italy, bar Rome and used everyday materials to create sculpture, photos, installations, pastiche. It was a focused anti-formal art, leftist based that fulfills process through, '.. the discovery, the exposition, the insurrection of the magic and marvelous value of natural elements...What the artist comes into contact with is not re-elaborated; he does not express a judgement on it, he does not seek a moral or social judgement..he draws from the substance of the natural event..' and from this, 'The first discoveries of this dispossession are the finite and infinite moments of life; the work of art and the work that identifies itself with life; the dimension of life as lasting without end...the explosion of the individual dimension as an aesthetic and feeling communion with nature; unconsciousness as a method of consciousness of the world...for an abandonment of reassuring recognition that is ontinually imposed on him by others and by the social system.'1 Clearly there was a clear retreat back to mother nature for answers and experience due to decreased confidence in socio-political factors and the idealism of consumerism. Arte Povera looked for a more ephemeral mindfulness that lived in the momentary interconnectivity of nature not bound by any didactic control, influence or archetype. Everyday objects in combination with natural elements were popular mediums for 'povera's' expression. Michelangelo Pistoletto's, ' The Venus of the Rags', initiated in 1967, features a copy of Venus classical marble statue facing a huge pile of everyday clothes.Other artists included are Giovanni Anselmo, Lynda Benglis, Anselm Kiefer, Susumu Koshimizu, Ana Mendieta, Marisa Merz, Robert Morris and Michelangelo Pistoletto. Galleries featuring Land art should enhance and stir multitudes of perceptional experience.
Other works by Arte Povera artists have included:
Giovanni Anselmo, 'Untitled, 1968' /'Eating Structure' involves a lettuce squeezed between a large granite block and a smaller granite block, stabilised via copper wire. Once the lettuce deteriorates the wire slackens and the small stone topples. To regain balance fresh 'natural product or lettuce' must be re-added. There's a clear reference to the insertion of nature and it's contribution to balance or bridge the gap between larger forces and the smaller ones.
Alighiero Boetti works with the dichotomy of chance and order, classification, culture and looks 'outside of Western traditions'. He is renowned for a series of embroidered world maps, aided by crafts-workers from Afghanistan and Pakistan. Each country is embroidered as it's national flag but obviously the fact he didn't use embroiderers from each individual country (and of non-Western) raises questions of nationalism, Western control, non- Western regain.The process of 'stitching' also used as a process during a time of global social , economic and political turmoil with Vietnam, Communism and Consumerism is also interesting. "For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." Alighiero e Boetti, 1974 2 Clearly here is how chance and order play a part in this work.
Obviously these works reflect many conceptual ideas well known to the present but context still separates them and provides fresh inspiration, influence and re-interpretation within contemporary gallery space and arrangement under theme and interaction with variable works.
1 Art in Theory 1900-1990 An Anthology of Changing Ideas, Harrison, C. and Wood, P., Oxford, Blackwell Publishing, 1992, pg. 887
2 Quoted in Mappa, Luca Cerizza, Afterall Books, 'Alighiero Boetti', 2008,cited in Wikipedia, viewed 30th May 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alighiero_Boetti
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