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Lot Essay
We are grateful to the Archivio Pascali and Sandro Lodolo for their precious assistance in cataloguing this work.
'Within the state of alienation in which he has placed himself, the man of our time can be free, can be himself, only if he plays; and playing is not a way of departing from reality but of entering into it' (Palma Bucarelli writing on Pascali in 1969, reproduced in Arte Povera, C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), London, 1999, p. 265).
When Allied forces landed on the shores of Taranto and Bari in 1944, they not only brought conflict, civil war and ultimately liberation from the forces of Fascism with them, but they also unwittingly began an important process of cultural exchange between Italy and the United States, that was to have a lasting influence on much contemporary Italian art. Accompanying the period of Italy's 'economic miracle' that took place in the immediate Post-War period, Italian artists were the first in Europe to assimilate and respond to the radical developments then taking place in contemporary American art and ultimately to develop them into a new and radically different language. Pino Pascali who was only nine years old when the Allied Forces first arrived in his native Bari, grew up playing, what he described as games 'largely based on the war-heroism representation of the grown-ups (because) our fathers were at war'. As an artist working in Rome in the early 1960s, he was one of the first Italian artists to fully assimilate American 'Pop' art and to transform it into something radically new. One of his first important works, his 1964 sculpture Homage to Billy Holiday, Jannis Kounellis once described as 'a big bulky black woman painted in a shiny black which could be like the kind of advertising used for patent leather shoes on Broadway... something that goes unsaid for Pino is the capacity to evoke... The red on the lips on the big mouth is something I've never seen in Italy... as an image it belongs - and originates - with the trauma of the American landing, the visual traces in the memory of a man - the weapons, the kit, the tents, the lorries and everything... The dream of a world that is the world formed in childhood not as some lyrical event' (Jannis Kounellis, Qui Arte Contemporanea, no. 5, Rome, March, 1969, p. 23).
Cannone semovente (Self-Propelling Canon) is the largest, and perhaps most iconic and imposing of Pascali's famous group of sculptures known as the Armi (Weapons). The Armi are probably Pascali's best-known works. Made in 1965 for an exhibition at the Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone held in Turin in January 1966, they reflect the culmination of Pascali's artistic aesthetic at this time. This was an aesthetic of enquiry, based largely on the concept of 'play' which Pascali once described as 'the opposite of technology, as inquiry, the opposite of logic and science' (P. Pascali, Tecniche e materiali, 1968). 'I try to do what I like to do' he explained, 'ultimately that's the only system that works for me. I don't think a sculptor does hard work; he plays. The way a painter plays, the way anyone who does what he likes plays. Playing games is not just what children do; everything is a game, isn't it? ... childhood games turn into adolescent games, adolescent games turn into the ones in your adult life, but they're still games. At a certain point you're in an office, if it's unpleasant work you'll want a fast car to go out and take a ride in, and that's precisely because you a have a job that you don't like while someone who likes what he's doing plays with the work that he does, that is, he places everything in there, in the work. Not in the sense of playing for its own sake, that's something else, but in the normal sense of man's activities, right? Children play seriously too; it's a learning system, their games are set up to experiment with things, to find out about things and at the same time to go beyond them' (P. Pascali interviewed by Carla Lonzi, 1967, in Marcatre, Milan, July 1967, republished in Autoritratto, Bari, 1969).
In creating his Armi - life-size replicas of what was, in 1965, the latest state-of-the-art weaponry - Pascali was re-enacting the exact same games of his youth within the arena of the adult world. 'The first games I played were based most of all on war' he has recalled, 'My toys were piles of objects found in the house, which represented weapons. For example a bean became a bullet, a broomstick and a box held together with a rubber band became a rifle, a rolled-up piece of paper tied to a stool was a cannon, a saucepan was a helmet, two pieces of wood nailed together were a sabre, three pieces of wood an aeroplane and so on' (ibid.). Like these toys of his youth, the Armi too have been made from found materials in such a painstakingly exact way that they recreate every detail of the exact model of the real weapon on which they are based. This collage-like assembly of found material has subsequently been painted olive green in order to enhance the mimicry.
In this way Pascali has used the tautological mimesis that exists between childhood and adult war games to pose an important question about the nature of these machines of mass destruction. As with much of his work, the artificiality of the sculpture, their 'fakeness' - which in this case also renders them ironically functionless - illustrates that it is not the thing itself that is important but the idea of the thing and, in this case perhaps, the intention behind the thing. 'My things are always beyond, never from within' Pascali once observed, 'Even the cannons, what mattered to me is that they looked like cannons. There was this green paint which covered all the defects and that was the cannon, it wasn't the wood or the iron, I don't think it was important how I'd made them; what mattered was that they looked like cannons' (P. Pascali interviewed by Carla Lonzi, 1967, quoted in Arte Povera, C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), op. cit., p. 264).
The fact that Pascali made these Armi in 1965, at a time when the vast American build-up of troops and weaponry in Vietnam was first beginning to catch public attention, was also no accident. They appeared at just the right time to unnerve and provoke. Indeed when one sees the photographs of Pascali sitting astride and embracing his 'toy' missile or his anti-tank gun, the comparison between the Armi and the sentiments of Stanley Kubrick's 1963 film Dr Strangelove become uncannily close. At the same time, Pascali's naming of one of his guns Bella Ciao after the well-known anti-fascist song, is an ironic gesture that points not only to his childhood memories but also to a uniquely Italian sense of macho gung-ho heroism. It was however, the context of the Armi - their collective presence within the confined white space of the Galleria Sperone - that ultimately led to them causing a sensation. Going beyond the platitudes raised by Lichtenstein's comic-book tanks and machine-gun battles (largely based on the heroic nostalgia surrounding 1940s models) Pascali's up-to-the-minute weapons transformed the gallery space into an arsenal or arms depot. 'I don't believe you have exhibitions in galleries' Pascali once said, 'you make the galleries, you create that space'.
The exhibition only came to take place at the Sperone Gallery because Pascali's gallery in Rome, La Tartaruga, had turned it down. Yet the fact that the Armi were exhibited in Turin was to have important repercussions on the development of Italian art. At the opening Pascali dressed himself up in military regalia wearing camouflage and posed provocatively amongst these fake weapons for the photographers. 'The exhibition carried me away, it was so fresh and so incredibly virulent' Gilberto Zorio remembered in a response that was typical of many of the young artists of Turin at this time. Both Pascali and this exhibition in particular were widely recognised as having a powerful galvanising effect on the fledgling development of the Arte Povera tendencies in the work of many of the artists then living and working in the city. At first the monstrous scale and sombre ambience of this impressive array of weaponry seemed to dwarf the contrastingly small Galleria Sperone, making it look fragile and weak in the context of such a parade of technological power. This effect was of course instantly reversed, when the underlying artificiality and ramshackle assembled-nature of the weapons was perceived. With one elegant gesture, Pascali seemed to have simultaneously pulled the lid off both the pretensions of the art world and the arrogance of the military.
'When I made the cannons I said: "How lovely to place a cannon in a place of sculpture" to succeed in truly placing it in a world that is so sacred, so fake...' (P. Pascali cited by the D'Ars Agency on the occasion of his exhibition at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome, May 1969).
'Within the state of alienation in which he has placed himself, the man of our time can be free, can be himself, only if he plays; and playing is not a way of departing from reality but of entering into it' (Palma Bucarelli writing on Pascali in 1969, reproduced in Arte Povera, C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), London, 1999, p. 265).
When Allied forces landed on the shores of Taranto and Bari in 1944, they not only brought conflict, civil war and ultimately liberation from the forces of Fascism with them, but they also unwittingly began an important process of cultural exchange between Italy and the United States, that was to have a lasting influence on much contemporary Italian art. Accompanying the period of Italy's 'economic miracle' that took place in the immediate Post-War period, Italian artists were the first in Europe to assimilate and respond to the radical developments then taking place in contemporary American art and ultimately to develop them into a new and radically different language. Pino Pascali who was only nine years old when the Allied Forces first arrived in his native Bari, grew up playing, what he described as games 'largely based on the war-heroism representation of the grown-ups (because) our fathers were at war'. As an artist working in Rome in the early 1960s, he was one of the first Italian artists to fully assimilate American 'Pop' art and to transform it into something radically new. One of his first important works, his 1964 sculpture Homage to Billy Holiday, Jannis Kounellis once described as 'a big bulky black woman painted in a shiny black which could be like the kind of advertising used for patent leather shoes on Broadway... something that goes unsaid for Pino is the capacity to evoke... The red on the lips on the big mouth is something I've never seen in Italy... as an image it belongs - and originates - with the trauma of the American landing, the visual traces in the memory of a man - the weapons, the kit, the tents, the lorries and everything... The dream of a world that is the world formed in childhood not as some lyrical event' (Jannis Kounellis, Qui Arte Contemporanea, no. 5, Rome, March, 1969, p. 23).
Cannone semovente (Self-Propelling Canon) is the largest, and perhaps most iconic and imposing of Pascali's famous group of sculptures known as the Armi (Weapons). The Armi are probably Pascali's best-known works. Made in 1965 for an exhibition at the Galleria Gian Enzo Sperone held in Turin in January 1966, they reflect the culmination of Pascali's artistic aesthetic at this time. This was an aesthetic of enquiry, based largely on the concept of 'play' which Pascali once described as 'the opposite of technology, as inquiry, the opposite of logic and science' (P. Pascali, Tecniche e materiali, 1968). 'I try to do what I like to do' he explained, 'ultimately that's the only system that works for me. I don't think a sculptor does hard work; he plays. The way a painter plays, the way anyone who does what he likes plays. Playing games is not just what children do; everything is a game, isn't it? ... childhood games turn into adolescent games, adolescent games turn into the ones in your adult life, but they're still games. At a certain point you're in an office, if it's unpleasant work you'll want a fast car to go out and take a ride in, and that's precisely because you a have a job that you don't like while someone who likes what he's doing plays with the work that he does, that is, he places everything in there, in the work. Not in the sense of playing for its own sake, that's something else, but in the normal sense of man's activities, right? Children play seriously too; it's a learning system, their games are set up to experiment with things, to find out about things and at the same time to go beyond them' (P. Pascali interviewed by Carla Lonzi, 1967, in Marcatre, Milan, July 1967, republished in Autoritratto, Bari, 1969).
In creating his Armi - life-size replicas of what was, in 1965, the latest state-of-the-art weaponry - Pascali was re-enacting the exact same games of his youth within the arena of the adult world. 'The first games I played were based most of all on war' he has recalled, 'My toys were piles of objects found in the house, which represented weapons. For example a bean became a bullet, a broomstick and a box held together with a rubber band became a rifle, a rolled-up piece of paper tied to a stool was a cannon, a saucepan was a helmet, two pieces of wood nailed together were a sabre, three pieces of wood an aeroplane and so on' (ibid.). Like these toys of his youth, the Armi too have been made from found materials in such a painstakingly exact way that they recreate every detail of the exact model of the real weapon on which they are based. This collage-like assembly of found material has subsequently been painted olive green in order to enhance the mimicry.
In this way Pascali has used the tautological mimesis that exists between childhood and adult war games to pose an important question about the nature of these machines of mass destruction. As with much of his work, the artificiality of the sculpture, their 'fakeness' - which in this case also renders them ironically functionless - illustrates that it is not the thing itself that is important but the idea of the thing and, in this case perhaps, the intention behind the thing. 'My things are always beyond, never from within' Pascali once observed, 'Even the cannons, what mattered to me is that they looked like cannons. There was this green paint which covered all the defects and that was the cannon, it wasn't the wood or the iron, I don't think it was important how I'd made them; what mattered was that they looked like cannons' (P. Pascali interviewed by Carla Lonzi, 1967, quoted in Arte Povera, C. Christov-Bakargiev (ed.), op. cit., p. 264).
The fact that Pascali made these Armi in 1965, at a time when the vast American build-up of troops and weaponry in Vietnam was first beginning to catch public attention, was also no accident. They appeared at just the right time to unnerve and provoke. Indeed when one sees the photographs of Pascali sitting astride and embracing his 'toy' missile or his anti-tank gun, the comparison between the Armi and the sentiments of Stanley Kubrick's 1963 film Dr Strangelove become uncannily close. At the same time, Pascali's naming of one of his guns Bella Ciao after the well-known anti-fascist song, is an ironic gesture that points not only to his childhood memories but also to a uniquely Italian sense of macho gung-ho heroism. It was however, the context of the Armi - their collective presence within the confined white space of the Galleria Sperone - that ultimately led to them causing a sensation. Going beyond the platitudes raised by Lichtenstein's comic-book tanks and machine-gun battles (largely based on the heroic nostalgia surrounding 1940s models) Pascali's up-to-the-minute weapons transformed the gallery space into an arsenal or arms depot. 'I don't believe you have exhibitions in galleries' Pascali once said, 'you make the galleries, you create that space'.
The exhibition only came to take place at the Sperone Gallery because Pascali's gallery in Rome, La Tartaruga, had turned it down. Yet the fact that the Armi were exhibited in Turin was to have important repercussions on the development of Italian art. At the opening Pascali dressed himself up in military regalia wearing camouflage and posed provocatively amongst these fake weapons for the photographers. 'The exhibition carried me away, it was so fresh and so incredibly virulent' Gilberto Zorio remembered in a response that was typical of many of the young artists of Turin at this time. Both Pascali and this exhibition in particular were widely recognised as having a powerful galvanising effect on the fledgling development of the Arte Povera tendencies in the work of many of the artists then living and working in the city. At first the monstrous scale and sombre ambience of this impressive array of weaponry seemed to dwarf the contrastingly small Galleria Sperone, making it look fragile and weak in the context of such a parade of technological power. This effect was of course instantly reversed, when the underlying artificiality and ramshackle assembled-nature of the weapons was perceived. With one elegant gesture, Pascali seemed to have simultaneously pulled the lid off both the pretensions of the art world and the arrogance of the military.
'When I made the cannons I said: "How lovely to place a cannon in a place of sculpture" to succeed in truly placing it in a world that is so sacred, so fake...' (P. Pascali cited by the D'Ars Agency on the occasion of his exhibition at the Galleria L'Attico in Rome, May 1969).