Arte Povera’s radical simplicity

By J.U-S.

IN one room of Hauser & Wirth’s New York gallery, kettles whistle and hum inside a glorious assemblage of rags by Michelangelo Pistoletto. A second room plays host to one of Mario Merz’s igloos, this one small and rusted, with a bright neon strip-light protruding from the top. And in the corner of a third room, there is a pile of potatoes courtesy of Giuseppe Penone (pictured).

These simple, radical, poetic pieces of post-war Italian art are cherished objects from the collection of Ingvild Goetz, who also curated the show. Covering three floors of Hauser & Wirth, the exhibition is one of a trio of shows in New York marking Arte Povera’s 50th anniversary. The Estorick Collection in London has also joined in the celebrations, exploring the Italian art movement’s influence on contemporary British artists.

Arte Povera—which translates as “poor art”—was born in the late 1960s, as Italy’s post-war “economic miracle” gave way to depression and political unrest. Ms Goetz participated in the anti-capitalist demonstrations and Vietnam war protests that swept not only Italy, but France and Germany too. She considers Arte Povera to be part of “her history”. “I liked pop art and minimalism,” she says, “but I realised what really is part of me is what happened in Europe at that time.”

The term was coined in 1967 by Germano Celant, a young art critic. He had brought a diverse group of artists—Alighiero Boetti and Jannis Kounellis among them—together for a show at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa. For “poor”, read unconventional rather than impoverished: what Mr Celant had in mind was the “poor theatre” of the Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, which abandoned costumes and other inessentials to focus on the actor’s relationship with the audience. Arte Povera, declared Mr Celant, was concerned with “taking away, eliminating, downgrading things to a minimum”.

In reaction to what they saw as the slick consumerism of American pop art and the impersonal nature of minimalism, Arte Povera artists sought to close the gap between art and life. Nothing was off limits. In 1969, Mr Kounellis famously installed 12 living horses in the Galleria L’Attico in Rome. Equally real were his installations using coal, coffee or raw wool. Some artists were conceptualists—Mr Boetti, for example, was fascinated by order, classification and chance—while, for others, it was the materials (often ephemeral ones like steam, ice and electricity) that mattered. Mr Merz blended the two. He experimented with materials ranging from steel and glass to bags of earth in the creation of his igloos (see below), while pursuing the esoteric Fibonacci series—the mathematics underpinning spirals and other patterns in nature—in delicate sequences of neon. The result was sculpture that “didn’t look like art”, as Tony Cragg, a British artist with a work at the Estorick, puts it.

In most of these pieces, wry wit rubs shoulders with seriousness. Mr Penone’s potatoes are a fitting example: look closely and you will spot some oddities among them, a result of the artist making plaster casts of his nose, ears and mouth and planting them with young potatoes. Thrilled to find that some potatoes took on the shape of his features, Mr Penone cast them in bronze and embedded them with the real thing. What might look like a Duchampian joke was part of the artist’s relentless investigation of nature in the woodlands behind his Piedmont village.

Mr Celant followed the initial 1967 Genoa show with exhibitions in Bologna and Amalfi; in 1985 he took Arte Povera to New York with an exhibition called “The Knot” at MoMA PS1. He worked hard to bring international artists—from Eva Hesse and Bruce Nauman to Joseph Beuys and Richard Serra—under the Arte Povera umbrella, but it has remained fundamentally Italian. Still an influential figure in the art world, Mr Celant is celebrating the movement’s 50th anniversary with a show at the Lévy Gorvy gallery in November. It will highlight the role of Ileana Sonnabend, a famous gallerist, as a champion of Arte Povera, first in Paris and later in New York.

Daniella Luxembourg applauds Mr Celant’s efforts to take Arte Povera beyond Italy. “Contingencies”, a show at her gallery, will juxtapose Arte Povera with pieces by young New Yorkers, whose work she feels displays both a formal and political affinity. “Art needs translation,” she says. “Arte Povera is a deep cultural phenomenon and he translated it.” Yet she is in no doubt that it is Italian to its core. “There is something extremely well done and classical about Arte Povera, although it uses material that is totally not classical. There is a lot of poetry and theatre that is typical of Italy.”

Forged in the radical politics of its day, Arte Povera was about challenging established ideas and attitudes, politics and materials. As knowledge of it filtered down to young artists in Britain, for example, it encouraged them to experiment with organic materials and unconventional forms. Arte Povera presented the “poetry of objects”, and cleared the ground for the wide range of contemporary art we see today. Fifty years on, as young artists tackle the issues of their day, this autumn’s Arte Povera exhibitions show the subtle possibilities of political art. They were political “in a very Italian way,” says Ms Goetz. “If you don’t want to see the problems in the world you don’t have to.”