.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Untitled is a large and important example from the rare group of Kounellis' first paintings that the artist made in Rome in the early 1960s. These paintings, which incorporate a seemingly arbitrary and autonomous assemblage of letters, words, numbers and signs are known as the artist's 'alphabet paintings' and were made by Kounellis for his first one-man show held at the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome in 1960.
With hindsight it seems both fitting and somewhat prophetic that Kounellis should have announced both his arrival as an artist and the beginning of his artistic journey with such primary elements as those of his 'alphabet pictures'. Using the most basic components of language, (letters, numbers, and simple signs) broken down into their constituent parts and then seemingly reassembled on the canvas as autonomous elements composed according to a new, complex and seemingly unintelligible order, Kounellis was both deconstructing the conventions of language and announcing a new poetry. In choosing to present such simple, universally recognisable, but also dry and emotionless elements as letters or numbers as the components of his painting, Kounellis was evidently reacting against the prevailing tendencies of Abstract Expressionism and the informel where the action, emotion, material, touch and will of the artist is inextricably interwoven with medium and form.
From the outset, in these 'alphabet paintings' it was almost as if Kounellis was attempting to teach of a new way, an alternate direction to that offered at that time by either Pop Art or the Informel. Taking his cue from words that he found on advertising signs in the real world, word's such as 'Olio', 'Paint' and 'Tabacchi', Kounellis had attempted in his very earliest paintings to reintegrate these graphic and literary elements of real life into his painting. In doing so he was echoing the attempt to integrate art and life taken by Americans like Johns and Rauschenberg whose work he had come to know through his friendship with Pino Pascali, though he soon became disenchanted with the immersion of this direction into the 'style' and stasis of Pop Art. 'There is no style', Kounellis firmly asserted, 'What we must try to achieve today is the unity between art and life. The history of Pop art and many other forms of painting removes this unity. Like all industrial and technological things, they place you in a state of detachment from what you're doing' (Interview with Marisa Volpi Marcatrè Rome, May 1968).
The 'alphabet paintings' that Kounellis made after these first 'word' paintings, were pointers to a new direction. They were attempts to go beyond painting itself. As Kounellis remembered, 'They were not pictures as such, all the canvases derived from the measurements of the house in which I lived. They referred to the wall. In fact I used to stretch the canvas or the sheet, right up to the limits of the corners of the wall, the painting ended there... It was like taking off a fresco, since the canvases or sheets had the form and breadth of the walls of the room... The letters or painted signs, they came however, from forms which I prepared out of hard cardboard. They were printed, not calligraphic but structural.' (Jannis Kounellis cited in S. Bann Jannis Kounellis, London, 2003, p. 71).
Similarly, the simple recognisable symbols in these works are entirely self-referential and autonomous non-painterly elements that, belying perhaps a certain rhythm, exist independently from the canvas. With their forms rendered through the impersonal and regularised order of a stencil, they betray nothing of the painterly touch or feeling of the artist's hand, nor are they appropriated images from the language of advertising. They are the fragmented building blocks of an undisclosed language, one that, they suggest, exists elsewhere. Perhaps also, these paintings suggest, they are the seeds of a new poetry, for, it is in this respect that they anticipate much of the future direction of Kounellis' art. As Germano Celant has written, in these works, 'language as autonomous entity able to express itself and expose its own origins is fragmented in order to reveal its basic structure, the alphabet. The letters of which it is composed become signs referring to a linguistic world which expresses itself through its own origins and its own signals. Seeing them and reading them thus becomes a neutral act of verification, revealing a tension in Kounellis's works which questions and scrutinizes public and universal linguistic structure. Here we have a syntax spelled out, almost in an explicit and violent way, that manifests itself on large pages where letters, signals and numbers occupy a space in which they present themselves tautologically.' (G. Celant cited in exh. cat., Arte Povera, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2001 p. 162).
As if to emphasise the inherent artifice of language, both pictorial and literal, Kounellis combined these works with a memorable performance that took place in his studio in Rome in 1960. Anticipating his later integration of works on canvas with living elements of 'reality' such as birds in cages, parrots on perches, candles or naked flames as well as with the performance of dance and music, Kounellis' 1960 performance with these paintings attempted to illustrate a similar integration of the elements of the painting with the space and arena of the real world. Dressing himself in an elaborate costume emulating that worn by Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, Kounellis wrapped himself in a painted sheet also adorned with letters, numbers and signs and, as he later recalled, 'sang his pictures'. Kounellis' adoption of the costume worn by Ball suggests that he was aware of Ball's own work with language at the Cabaret Voltaire, and his attempts with the break-up of language into pure sound, to reveal what he famously described as 'the inner alchemy of the word'. Certainly Ball's deconstructive approach to language is echoed in Kounellis's 'alphabet paintings' with their conscious disruption of all sense of coherent meaning.
At the same time, however, it is possible that this apparent incoherence is not as originless as it may seem. With its arrows, cross-marks, numbers and dotted lines, the elements of a painting like Untitled do form together to suggest some kind of progression, a mysterious sequence or equation - one that hints perhaps at an 'inner alchemy'. This 'hermetic and mysterious writing', as Kounellis has called it, creates 'rhythms' he insists, 'since the space is always rhythmic'. (cited in S. Bann, op. cit., p. 71) And, although Kounellis himself is always keen to deny any Greek influence in his work, often insisting after his move to Rome in 1956 that 'I am a Greek person but an Italian artist', it has been remarked that the forms of some of his alphabet paintings recall the seemingly arbitrary sequence of stenciled stamp marks that appear on shipping crates during their progress from harbour to harbour and ship to shore. With their arrows and direction lines and arbitrary sequence of letters and numbers they certainly echo the kind of mysterious language of progression, direction, motion and travel - a fragmented language of signs and numbers speaking of an outer world that these stamps and marks of the shipping trade conjure in the imagination. This is a language of fragmentary signs and symbols that Kounellis, who grew up in the Greek port of Piraeus, would have seen on a daily basis, a language from an outer world that penetrated the small town of his childhood and inevitably spoke of a wider realm of existence. Whether such symbols consciously or unconsciously prompted the rhythmic structure of his 'alphabet' paintings will perhaps never be known, but it is, nevertheless, the same sense of a wider language of real things existing beyond the shores of the artificial realm of painting that these paintings evoke.
With hindsight it seems both fitting and somewhat prophetic that Kounellis should have announced both his arrival as an artist and the beginning of his artistic journey with such primary elements as those of his 'alphabet pictures'. Using the most basic components of language, (letters, numbers, and simple signs) broken down into their constituent parts and then seemingly reassembled on the canvas as autonomous elements composed according to a new, complex and seemingly unintelligible order, Kounellis was both deconstructing the conventions of language and announcing a new poetry. In choosing to present such simple, universally recognisable, but also dry and emotionless elements as letters or numbers as the components of his painting, Kounellis was evidently reacting against the prevailing tendencies of Abstract Expressionism and the informel where the action, emotion, material, touch and will of the artist is inextricably interwoven with medium and form.
From the outset, in these 'alphabet paintings' it was almost as if Kounellis was attempting to teach of a new way, an alternate direction to that offered at that time by either Pop Art or the Informel. Taking his cue from words that he found on advertising signs in the real world, word's such as 'Olio', 'Paint' and 'Tabacchi', Kounellis had attempted in his very earliest paintings to reintegrate these graphic and literary elements of real life into his painting. In doing so he was echoing the attempt to integrate art and life taken by Americans like Johns and Rauschenberg whose work he had come to know through his friendship with Pino Pascali, though he soon became disenchanted with the immersion of this direction into the 'style' and stasis of Pop Art. 'There is no style', Kounellis firmly asserted, 'What we must try to achieve today is the unity between art and life. The history of Pop art and many other forms of painting removes this unity. Like all industrial and technological things, they place you in a state of detachment from what you're doing' (Interview with Marisa Volpi Marcatrè Rome, May 1968).
The 'alphabet paintings' that Kounellis made after these first 'word' paintings, were pointers to a new direction. They were attempts to go beyond painting itself. As Kounellis remembered, 'They were not pictures as such, all the canvases derived from the measurements of the house in which I lived. They referred to the wall. In fact I used to stretch the canvas or the sheet, right up to the limits of the corners of the wall, the painting ended there... It was like taking off a fresco, since the canvases or sheets had the form and breadth of the walls of the room... The letters or painted signs, they came however, from forms which I prepared out of hard cardboard. They were printed, not calligraphic but structural.' (Jannis Kounellis cited in S. Bann Jannis Kounellis, London, 2003, p. 71).
Similarly, the simple recognisable symbols in these works are entirely self-referential and autonomous non-painterly elements that, belying perhaps a certain rhythm, exist independently from the canvas. With their forms rendered through the impersonal and regularised order of a stencil, they betray nothing of the painterly touch or feeling of the artist's hand, nor are they appropriated images from the language of advertising. They are the fragmented building blocks of an undisclosed language, one that, they suggest, exists elsewhere. Perhaps also, these paintings suggest, they are the seeds of a new poetry, for, it is in this respect that they anticipate much of the future direction of Kounellis' art. As Germano Celant has written, in these works, 'language as autonomous entity able to express itself and expose its own origins is fragmented in order to reveal its basic structure, the alphabet. The letters of which it is composed become signs referring to a linguistic world which expresses itself through its own origins and its own signals. Seeing them and reading them thus becomes a neutral act of verification, revealing a tension in Kounellis's works which questions and scrutinizes public and universal linguistic structure. Here we have a syntax spelled out, almost in an explicit and violent way, that manifests itself on large pages where letters, signals and numbers occupy a space in which they present themselves tautologically.' (G. Celant cited in exh. cat., Arte Povera, Castello di Rivoli, Turin, 2001 p. 162).
As if to emphasise the inherent artifice of language, both pictorial and literal, Kounellis combined these works with a memorable performance that took place in his studio in Rome in 1960. Anticipating his later integration of works on canvas with living elements of 'reality' such as birds in cages, parrots on perches, candles or naked flames as well as with the performance of dance and music, Kounellis' 1960 performance with these paintings attempted to illustrate a similar integration of the elements of the painting with the space and arena of the real world. Dressing himself in an elaborate costume emulating that worn by Hugo Ball at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916, Kounellis wrapped himself in a painted sheet also adorned with letters, numbers and signs and, as he later recalled, 'sang his pictures'. Kounellis' adoption of the costume worn by Ball suggests that he was aware of Ball's own work with language at the Cabaret Voltaire, and his attempts with the break-up of language into pure sound, to reveal what he famously described as 'the inner alchemy of the word'. Certainly Ball's deconstructive approach to language is echoed in Kounellis's 'alphabet paintings' with their conscious disruption of all sense of coherent meaning.
At the same time, however, it is possible that this apparent incoherence is not as originless as it may seem. With its arrows, cross-marks, numbers and dotted lines, the elements of a painting like Untitled do form together to suggest some kind of progression, a mysterious sequence or equation - one that hints perhaps at an 'inner alchemy'. This 'hermetic and mysterious writing', as Kounellis has called it, creates 'rhythms' he insists, 'since the space is always rhythmic'. (cited in S. Bann, op. cit., p. 71) And, although Kounellis himself is always keen to deny any Greek influence in his work, often insisting after his move to Rome in 1956 that 'I am a Greek person but an Italian artist', it has been remarked that the forms of some of his alphabet paintings recall the seemingly arbitrary sequence of stenciled stamp marks that appear on shipping crates during their progress from harbour to harbour and ship to shore. With their arrows and direction lines and arbitrary sequence of letters and numbers they certainly echo the kind of mysterious language of progression, direction, motion and travel - a fragmented language of signs and numbers speaking of an outer world that these stamps and marks of the shipping trade conjure in the imagination. This is a language of fragmentary signs and symbols that Kounellis, who grew up in the Greek port of Piraeus, would have seen on a daily basis, a language from an outer world that penetrated the small town of his childhood and inevitably spoke of a wider realm of existence. Whether such symbols consciously or unconsciously prompted the rhythmic structure of his 'alphabet' paintings will perhaps never be known, but it is, nevertheless, the same sense of a wider language of real things existing beyond the shores of the artificial realm of painting that these paintings evoke.