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Lot Essay
Una mattina mi son' svegliato
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
Una mattina mi son' svegliato
E ho trovato l'invasor
O partigiano porta mi via
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
O partigiano porta mi via
Che mi sento di morire
E se io muoio da partigiano
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
E se io muoio da partigiano
Tu mi devi seppellir
Mi seppellirai lassú in montagna
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
Mi seppellirai lassú in montagna
Sotto l'ombra di un bel fiore
E la gente che passerà
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
E la gente che passerà
E dirà oh che bel fiore
E questo é il fiore del partigiano
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
E questo é il fiore del partigiano
Morto per la libertà.
When Allied forces landed on the shores of Tarento and Bari in the late summer of 1944 they not only brought conflict, civil war and ultimately liberation from the forces of Fascism with them, 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 an impressionable nine years old when the Allied Forces first arrived in his native Bari, grew up playing what he later described as games 'largely based on the war-hero 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 Italians to fully assimilate the aesthetic of American 'Pop' and to transform it into something radically new. As his friend Jannis Kounellis once remarked of one of Pascali's earliest works, his 1964 sculpture 'Homage to Billy Holiday, 'the red on the lips on this 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 Bella Ciao (Canon: Bella Ciao) evokes this 'world formed in childhood' perhaps more strongly than any other of Pascali's works. The centrepiece of the artist's famous series of sculptures known as the Armi (Weapons), its unforgettable title refers to a well-known song of the Italian partisans who, like Pascali's father, at the time of the Allied invasion of Italy, left their homes to organise and fight against the fascists. Made in Rome in 1965 and exhibited at the Gallery Sperone in Turin in January 1966, Pascali's Armi reflect the culmination of the artist's aesthetic of 'play'. Rooted in a spirit of childhood enquiry, this was an essentially playful approach to the making of art which Pascali once described as 'the opposite of technology, as inquiry, the opposite of logic and science' (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 its 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.' (Interview with Carla Lonzi 1967, in Marcatrè Milan, July 1967 republished in Autoritratto. (Bari : De Donato, 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 same macho-heroic games of his youth but this time 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.' Like these toys of his youth, Pascali's 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 real nature of these machines for killing. As with much of his work, the artificiality of the sculpture, their 'fakeness' illustrates that it is never the thing itself that is important but the idea of the thing and, in the case of the Armi 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.' (Pino Pascali in an interview with Carla Lonzi quoted in Arte Povera, London, 1999, 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. Clearly conscious of the controversial nature of what he was doing, especially after his gallery in Rome refused to show the works, Pascali's main intention with the Armi was ultimately neither to clown nor to provoke, though both also served his purpose. The fundamental importance of these ominous, provocative and threatening-looking weapons was not just that they were life-size toys, but also, unlike real weapons, that these clever and playful 'fakes' were harmless. 'I don't seek to provoke' Pascali asserted,'Maybe the cannons made people think of battle, although there's not a great deal of difference between an imaginary marble woman clasping a minotaur and a dummy cannon - of course people are struck by the evocation of peace and war, that's normal; but in the end, those cannons are not real cannons - that's what counts. And if they were real cannons, the point would be that they don't fire.' (Pino Pascali in an interview with Carla Lonzi quoted in Marcatré, Rome, 1967, no. 30-33).
To reinforce the parallel between the child at play, the grown-up artist with his harmless toys and the more sinister 'play' of the 'Masters of War' with their weapons of mass destruction, Pascali made a point of clowning around with his weapons, playing both the Army General and the soldier standing to attention beside his beloved 'Bella Ciao' anti-tank gun at the opening of the exhibition. Dressed up in full camouflaged military regalia, Pascali carried the sense of fun and of occasion to its logical conclusion, playing the 'big kid' to the end. Indeed, when one sees the photographs of Pascali sitting astride or embracing his 'toy' cruise missile, the comparison between the Armi and the fiercely satirical gung-ho clowning in Stanley Kubrick's 1963 film Dr Strangelove become uncannily close.
More than the satirical ramifications provoked by the Armi however, it was their context - filling the confined white space of the Gallery Sperone that ultimately led to them causing a sensation. Going beyond the platitudes raised by Roy 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 actually transformed the 'sacred' gallery space into a modern-day arsenal, an arms depot and/or toy shop. 'I don't believe you have exhibitions in galleries,' Pascali once said, 'you make the galleries, you create that space' and with the Armi Pascali was one of the first European artists to demonstrate this transforming the supposedly impregnable 'white space' of the gallery into something else.
The breaking down of the borders between art work, installation, event and performance that Pascali's exhibition of the Armi signalled had particular importance for the development of much Italian art throughout the rest of the 1960s. The fact that through the La Tartaruga Gallery's refusal to hold the show, this exhibition took place in Turin also had important ramifications for the development of Arte Povera within the city. Before the exhibition Pascali and other progressive Rome-based artists such as Kounellis, had only really been in contact with Michelangelo Pistoletto among the north Italian artists. After this exhibition, this sense of difference or of isolation was completely removed. As Gilberto Zorio recalled 'The exhibition carried me away, it was so fresh and so incredibly virulent'. It was, in particular, the monstrous scale and sombre ambience of this parade of weaponry seeming to dwarf the contrastingly small Gallery Sperone making it look fragile and weak that impressed. This was an effect that was of course instantly reversed when the underlying artificiality and ramshackle assembled-nature of the weapons themselves was perceived. Subverting the sancticty of the gallery space and opening it up into an arena of seeming infinite potential, Pascali, through the playful artifice of his set-design-like approach to sculpture, seemed to have simultaneously pulled the lid off both the pretensions of the art world and the arrogance of the military.
'As far as I'm concerned we're talking about feigned sculptures, and I find the sort of farce which an exhibition represents fascinating. For me these works die; as soon as I mount the exhibition, they're already almost finished. Afterwards they provoke certain reactions in others, and for a short while it gives me the impression of being a sculptor. I think I'm not a sculptor, this is the picture I have of myself; its something that could be a problem, but who knows if it really is a problem, for me it is also amusing. When I made the cannons I said: 'What a great idea to have a cannon in a place reserved for sculptors' to actually be allowed to put them in this place which is treated as sacred and which is so full of pretence...' (Pino Pascali in an interview with Carla Lonzi quoted in Ibid.).
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
Una mattina mi son' svegliato
E ho trovato l'invasor
O partigiano porta mi via
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
O partigiano porta mi via
Che mi sento di morire
E se io muoio da partigiano
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
E se io muoio da partigiano
Tu mi devi seppellir
Mi seppellirai lassú in montagna
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
Mi seppellirai lassú in montagna
Sotto l'ombra di un bel fiore
E la gente che passerà
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
E la gente che passerà
E dirà oh che bel fiore
E questo é il fiore del partigiano
O bella ciao, o bella ciao, o bella ciao ciao ciao
E questo é il fiore del partigiano
Morto per la libertà.
When Allied forces landed on the shores of Tarento and Bari in the late summer of 1944 they not only brought conflict, civil war and ultimately liberation from the forces of Fascism with them, 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 an impressionable nine years old when the Allied Forces first arrived in his native Bari, grew up playing what he later described as games 'largely based on the war-hero 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 Italians to fully assimilate the aesthetic of American 'Pop' and to transform it into something radically new. As his friend Jannis Kounellis once remarked of one of Pascali's earliest works, his 1964 sculpture 'Homage to Billy Holiday, 'the red on the lips on this 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 Bella Ciao (Canon: Bella Ciao) evokes this 'world formed in childhood' perhaps more strongly than any other of Pascali's works. The centrepiece of the artist's famous series of sculptures known as the Armi (Weapons), its unforgettable title refers to a well-known song of the Italian partisans who, like Pascali's father, at the time of the Allied invasion of Italy, left their homes to organise and fight against the fascists. Made in Rome in 1965 and exhibited at the Gallery Sperone in Turin in January 1966, Pascali's Armi reflect the culmination of the artist's aesthetic of 'play'. Rooted in a spirit of childhood enquiry, this was an essentially playful approach to the making of art which Pascali once described as 'the opposite of technology, as inquiry, the opposite of logic and science' (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 its 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.' (Interview with Carla Lonzi 1967, in Marcatrè Milan, July 1967 republished in Autoritratto. (Bari : De Donato, 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 same macho-heroic games of his youth but this time 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.' Like these toys of his youth, Pascali's 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 real nature of these machines for killing. As with much of his work, the artificiality of the sculpture, their 'fakeness' illustrates that it is never the thing itself that is important but the idea of the thing and, in the case of the Armi 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.' (Pino Pascali in an interview with Carla Lonzi quoted in Arte Povera, London, 1999, 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. Clearly conscious of the controversial nature of what he was doing, especially after his gallery in Rome refused to show the works, Pascali's main intention with the Armi was ultimately neither to clown nor to provoke, though both also served his purpose. The fundamental importance of these ominous, provocative and threatening-looking weapons was not just that they were life-size toys, but also, unlike real weapons, that these clever and playful 'fakes' were harmless. 'I don't seek to provoke' Pascali asserted,'Maybe the cannons made people think of battle, although there's not a great deal of difference between an imaginary marble woman clasping a minotaur and a dummy cannon - of course people are struck by the evocation of peace and war, that's normal; but in the end, those cannons are not real cannons - that's what counts. And if they were real cannons, the point would be that they don't fire.' (Pino Pascali in an interview with Carla Lonzi quoted in Marcatré, Rome, 1967, no. 30-33).
To reinforce the parallel between the child at play, the grown-up artist with his harmless toys and the more sinister 'play' of the 'Masters of War' with their weapons of mass destruction, Pascali made a point of clowning around with his weapons, playing both the Army General and the soldier standing to attention beside his beloved 'Bella Ciao' anti-tank gun at the opening of the exhibition. Dressed up in full camouflaged military regalia, Pascali carried the sense of fun and of occasion to its logical conclusion, playing the 'big kid' to the end. Indeed, when one sees the photographs of Pascali sitting astride or embracing his 'toy' cruise missile, the comparison between the Armi and the fiercely satirical gung-ho clowning in Stanley Kubrick's 1963 film Dr Strangelove become uncannily close.
More than the satirical ramifications provoked by the Armi however, it was their context - filling the confined white space of the Gallery Sperone that ultimately led to them causing a sensation. Going beyond the platitudes raised by Roy 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 actually transformed the 'sacred' gallery space into a modern-day arsenal, an arms depot and/or toy shop. 'I don't believe you have exhibitions in galleries,' Pascali once said, 'you make the galleries, you create that space' and with the Armi Pascali was one of the first European artists to demonstrate this transforming the supposedly impregnable 'white space' of the gallery into something else.
The breaking down of the borders between art work, installation, event and performance that Pascali's exhibition of the Armi signalled had particular importance for the development of much Italian art throughout the rest of the 1960s. The fact that through the La Tartaruga Gallery's refusal to hold the show, this exhibition took place in Turin also had important ramifications for the development of Arte Povera within the city. Before the exhibition Pascali and other progressive Rome-based artists such as Kounellis, had only really been in contact with Michelangelo Pistoletto among the north Italian artists. After this exhibition, this sense of difference or of isolation was completely removed. As Gilberto Zorio recalled 'The exhibition carried me away, it was so fresh and so incredibly virulent'. It was, in particular, the monstrous scale and sombre ambience of this parade of weaponry seeming to dwarf the contrastingly small Gallery Sperone making it look fragile and weak that impressed. This was an effect that was of course instantly reversed when the underlying artificiality and ramshackle assembled-nature of the weapons themselves was perceived. Subverting the sancticty of the gallery space and opening it up into an arena of seeming infinite potential, Pascali, through the playful artifice of his set-design-like approach to sculpture, seemed to have simultaneously pulled the lid off both the pretensions of the art world and the arrogance of the military.
'As far as I'm concerned we're talking about feigned sculptures, and I find the sort of farce which an exhibition represents fascinating. For me these works die; as soon as I mount the exhibition, they're already almost finished. Afterwards they provoke certain reactions in others, and for a short while it gives me the impression of being a sculptor. I think I'm not a sculptor, this is the picture I have of myself; its something that could be a problem, but who knows if it really is a problem, for me it is also amusing. When I made the cannons I said: 'What a great idea to have a cannon in a place reserved for sculptors' to actually be allowed to put them in this place which is treated as sacred and which is so full of pretence...' (Pino Pascali in an interview with Carla Lonzi quoted in Ibid.).