TRIBUTE: Reversing the Eye-Arte Povera and Beyond 1960-75

Happening in two Paris venues the exhibition “Reversing the Eye” looks into the relationship between a segment of Italy’s avant-gardes of the 1960s and early 1970s, and the mechanically produced image: photography, film and video. As fruitful as it was truly remarkable in the European context of the time, this relationship is partially explicable in terms of the looming omnipresence of the media in Italian society and the avant-gardes’ quest for a critical, not to say political response.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Jeu de Paume Archive

The aim of  the exhibition “Reversing the Eye – Arte Povera and Beyond 1960-75 (Photography, Film, Video)”,  as its full title is,  is not to address all the Italian avant-gardes of the period, but rather to home in on the setting of Arte Povera, as defined by the critic Germano Celant in “Notes for a Guerilla War” (1967). A riposte to American Pop Art and contemporaneous with the activity on the international conceptual scene, Arte Povera was, as Celant put it, a search for a “free form of expression committed to contingency, to events, to the present”, that would bring art and life together. And while photography, film and video are only rarely associated with Arte Povera, they were in fact widely used by members of the movement and so can equally be approached as “poor” media. In addition to its focus on the movement’s leading lights, the exhibition embraces their fellow artists – photographers in particular – as well as others who showed with them or had been major influences. Here four thematic sections are spread across the two venues: “Body” (LE BAL), “Experience”, “Image” and “Theater” (Jeu de Paume). Each of these terms pinpoints a specific questioning of the relationship to time and space (experience), the deconstruction of reality and its representations via images (image), the dimension of theatricality inherent in these media (theater) and the very concept of identity and the role of the author (body).

Body: For the Italian avant-garde of the period, photography, film and video were the preferred tools for distancing and objectifying the artist’s body, and for encouraging and expanding a renewed interest in questions of identity, autobiography and self-portraiture. Part of Giulio Paolini’s work on the figure of the artist was facilitated by the recurrent use of photography, which enabled him, as he put it, “to include in his exploration the gestures and the figure of the artist”. In Giuseppe Penone’s major work, “Svolgere la propria pelle”, photography was the medium for a sculptural narrative centred on his own skin. Video and film became the favoured media for recording an often ephemeral work on the body in performances by Franco Vaccari, Luciano Fabro, Ketty La Rocca and Mario Merz. Following in the footsteps of Piero Manzoni and his self-staging via film and photography, the artist, as both creator and frequently actor of his work, now seemed to be making a comeback through the readily recognisable figures of Alighiero Boetti, Gino De Dominicis and Luigi Ontani. The presence of the artist was complemented by that of the spectator, whose body and movements became an essential component of a more factual, participatory practice. This was particularly the case of the actions at Il Teatro della Mostre in Rome, many of which were recorded in photographs. The presence of the spectator was introduced in 1962 in Michelangelo Pistoletto’s first mirror paintings, which accorded the viewer the same scale, the same plane and often the same degree of reality as the characters represented, thereby abolishing the distance between art and life. This spatial juggling with the viewer’s body was also the mainspring of Giovanni Anselmo’s “Particolare”. Last but not least, several works conjure up a body under pressure and seemingly striving to free itself from the weight of ideology or the sacred in the case of Fabio Mauri; from the necessary appearance of the artist in the case of Emilio Prini; or, on the contrary, paying homage – amicably or ironically – to illustrious peers, as was the case of Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luca Maria Patella and Ugo Mulas.

Experience: In the mid-1960s many artists began using photography, film and later video to establish a more direct, exploratory and experimental connection with the world. This new relationship took on various names, such as action, behaviour, attitude and experience. For the Italian avant-garde artists of the time, experience appeared as an antidote to the traditional oeuvre, a reflection or a symbol of a new relationship with art in which process, at least as important as outcome, helped to redefine artistic practices, making them more in tune with life. From Giovanni Anselmo to Giuseppe Penone, from Marisa Merz and Mario Merz to Laura Grisi, photography and the moving image became the foremost instruments of this new state of mind. Taking extremely diverse forms, these experiences challenged, both physically and metaphysically, the relationship of the human being, often the artist himself, with his surroundings: space, the passage of time, the physical and natural laws that the camera records, functioning simultaneously as an instrument of perception, analysis and measurement of the world. Against a backdrop of political and social turmoil in Italy, marked in the late 1960s by strikes and the student movement, and in the 1970s by political violence, artists intervened in cities. Michelangelo Pistoletto rolled his Newspaper Ball along Turin’s arcades, filmed by Ugo Nespolo; Mario Cresci displayed his photographic scroll in the streets of Rome; Franco Vaccari used the Photomaton to create a collective portrait of Italy; and Michele Zaza’s and Gianni Pettena’s performed disruptive political actions in the public arena. In each case, the aim was to make their practice more accessible and visible and to bring art and society together.

Image: True to his word, in the early 1960s Piero Manzoni began representing his actions and artworks via models taken from advertising and the mainstream press, thus redefining the figure of the artist in the age of the consumer society. A few years later, photography, film and video had acquired a more ambiguous status in the eyes of the artists of the Arte Povera movement: their relationship to the mass image and their technological sophistication rendered them suspect and they had become too closely associated with the cultural industries and mass media. In a word, too “Pop”. However, their presumed neutrality, their ability to objectify reality and to capture the ephemeral, their reproducibility, their simplicity of use and their flagrant banality made them particularly well suited to the regeneration of artistic practices. It was hardly surprising, then, to find artists ranging from Michelangelo Pistoletto to Alighiero Boetti and Emilio Prini adopting them, not only as a tools but also for the purposes of critically assessing their power of reproduction and, more generally, the way they radically transform our perception of the world. Far from the clean slate approach advocated – and sometimes even practised by certain avant-garde artists elsewhere, their Italian contemporaries had a closer, more pacific relationship with tradition. They had no hesitation about raking over the field of ruins art history had become, and making play with repetition, quotation, appropriation or questioning. Photography and the moving image were used to analyse, deconstruct, reconstruct and sometimes extend the tradition, notably with regard to painting and sculpture. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s mirror pictures conjure up not only photography and painting, but also the movement of cinema, just as Fabio Mauri’s screens, which were at the junction of pictorial and sculptural practice, referenced the world of the media. Meanwhile Giulio Paolini ceaselessly analysed, mainly through photography, the theory and practice of painting, while Carlo Alfano was fuelling his own paintings with references to classical iconography and, also via photography, to reality. All these works, through displacement, borrowing and hybridisation, led to a redefinition of practices and media. Between 1968 and his death in 1973, Ugo Mulas, one of the avant-garde artists’ key photographers and an associate of many Arte Povera figures, produced the series Le Verifiche (Verifications), consisting of images accompanied by text, in which Mulas looks into what constitutes the specific character of photography. The product of encounters, critical readings and Mulas’s own practice, “Le Verifiche” highlights the structured aspect of the photographic image and its particular relationship to time, space, language and the human. Exhibited, reproduced and discussed from the early 1970s onwards, “Le Verifiche” played an important role on the Italian photographic scene: Neapolitan photographer Mimmo Jodice saw the series as confirming the validity of his own experiments, aimed at demonstrating the artificial, structured nature of the photographic image, especially in respect of its materiality. With the addition of color, Luigi Ghirri pursued this line of thought by constructing most of his work in the 1970s around the concept of the image of the image, the frame within the frame.

Theater: The second half of the 1960s in Italy saw the emergence, from Turin to Naples and from Rome to Genoa, of new places and new types of exhibitions, as part of the creative process moved from the studio to the gallery and to ephemeral events, which had become “a field of events, a stage for behaviour”, as one critic put it at the time. More than ever, they also called for public participation. Artists, photographers and video makers attempted to put this new exhibition scene into images and translate it into new representations. From Claudio Abate to Ugo Mulas and Paolo Mussat Sartor, a whole generation of photographers emerged in the orbit of Arte Povera, abandoning photojournalism and adapting to the constructional demands of the avant-garde image. No longer a mere document, the photograph, as the sole testimony to an action or a past event, sometimes took on the status of an artwork or an icon. Artists played with it, used it for their own ends, to activate their works and to dramatize or – contrariwise – demystify. Video and film accompanied the creative process, and even became one of its core components. In the early 1970s and the context of the “leaden years” dominated by terrorism and declining faith in social and political action, a new generation of artists in touch with Arte Povera turned to modes of expression that were more allegorical and less rooted in the present. Filtered through this generation’s diverse sensibilities, recourse to historical references, quotations and dismissal of the idea of art as ephemeral action brought a resurrection of the hybrid genre of the “tableau vivant”: an image at the junction of photography, painting and a form of theatricality; a carefully posed photograph mimicking a certain pictorial immobility. Ontani and Salvo appropriated figures linked to Italian history and art; Michele Zaza explored a more narrative path, sometimes mixing image and text; and for several years Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vettor Pisani and Elisabetta Catalano engaged in a singular dialogue involving a rereading of historical motifs and such historic figures of modernity as Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp.

Works by:  Claudio Abate, Carlo Alfano, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Elisabetta Catalano, Mario Cresci, Gino De Dominicis, Plinio De Martiis Luciano Fabro, Giosetta Fioroni, Luigi Ghirri, Luciano Giaccari, Paolo Gioli, Laura Grisi, Marcello Grottesi, Franco Guerzoni, Paolo Icaro, Mimmo Jodice, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Piero Manzoni, Plinio Martelli, Antonio Masotti, Paolo Matteucci, Eliseo Mattiacci, Fabio Mauri, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Ugo Mulas, Paolo Mussat Sartor,  Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Ugo Nespolo, Luigi Ontani, Giulio Paolini – Claudio Parmiggiani, Pino Pascali,  Luca Patella, Giuseppe Penone, Gianni Pettena, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, SALVO (Salvatore Mangione), Gerry Schum, Cesare Tacchi, Franco Vaccari, Michele Zaza, Gilberto Zorio

Photo: Mimmo Jodice, Vera fotografia [True Photography], 1978 Gelatin silver-bromide print on baryta paper, with writing in pen by the artist, 30 x 40 cm, Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve St. Moritz, Cologne, Paris. © Mimmo Jodice

Info: Curators: Quentin Bajac, Diane Dufour & Giuliano Sergio, Associated Curator: Lorenza Bravetta,  Jeu de Paume, 1 place de la Concorde, Paris, France, Duration: 11/10/2022-29/1/2023, Days & Hours: Tue 11:00-21:00, Wed-sun 11:00-19:00, https://jeudepaume.org/ & LE BAL, 6 impasse de la Défense, Paris, France, Duration: 11/10/2022-29/1/2023, Days & Hours: Wed 12”00-20:00, Thu-Sun 12:00-19:00, https://www.le-bal.fr/