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'When Attitudes became Form'
Arte Povera and the dematerialisation of the art object


By Robert Brown

'OBJET CACHE TOI' (OBJECT HIDE YOURSELF!) were the words that Mario Merz appended in neon light to one of his first installations in 1968. Illuminating one of the artist's first 'igloos'-portable makeshift shelters that Merz made to invoke a sense of modern man as a lost nomad wandering in the wasteland of his culture-these words were taken from the walls of the Sorbonne in Paris.

They were part of the radical anti-establishment graffiti that accompanied the student uprising of 1968 and appealed to Merz as a curious catch-phrase that signified both the utopianism and anti-materialist mood of his age.

As a command,the phrase 'Objet cache toi!' echoed the growing tendency among an international avant-garde in the late 1960s towards the creation of work that dematerialized the art-object and dissolved it into what was called an 'open work' interrelated with the world around it.

It was also a cry of protest: a rant against the object-obsession of materialist culture and of its need to categorise and objectify everything, particularly in the ever-increasingly materialistic money-making art world of the 1960s then dominated by Pop Art and American Minimalism.

'I am against the world of Andy Warhol and of the epigoni of today' Jannis Kounellis declared,'I am against the condition of paralyzation to which the post war has reduced us; by contrast I search among the fragments (emotional and formal) for the scatterings of history. I search dramatically for unity, although it is unattainable, although it is Utopian, although it is impossible and for all these reasons dramatic'.

Using fragments and scraps and ordinary objects taken from everyday life, Kounellis and Merz infused this apparent detritus with a strange archaic poetry that spoke of an ancient, non-materialistic, nonobject-based but nonetheless united past in which man was not divorced from his environment but an integral part of its cohesive whole.

Merz's Iguana, an important early work from 1971, is an ancient and mythic beast weaving an organic numerical trail in the form of the Fibonacci sequence of numbers up the gallery wall. In doing so, like some shamanic apparition it transforms this regimented and objectifying space into a less definable arena of magic and mystery.

Kounellis' untitled work of 1974 incorporating a cello, a blank canvas and an oil lamp is likewise also an expression of innate creative potential using its isolated elements to weave a sense of a forgotten poetry that unites these differing fields of creativity. Invoking music and painting and the light of creative energy burning silently together in a quiet and meditative unity, the 'objecthood' of each element in this work is broken down by its associative link with the other in a way that is ultimately both lyrical and strangely reassuring.

Kounellis and Merz, along with fellow Italian artists such as Pino Pascali, Giulio Paolini, Luciano Fabro, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Penone and Alighiero Boetti form part of a tendency in late 1960s Italian art that has come to be known as 'arte povera'.

Dubbed as such, by the critic Germano Celant in his manifesto-like article Arte Povera-or notes for a Guerilla War of 1967, 'arte povera'-literally meaning 'poor art' in reference to the 'poor' or everyday materials that many of these artists employed-is a vague collective term that somehow fits the very eclectic and shifting nature of these artists' highly varied work.

One of the few constants of arte povera is its attack on the materialist view of the world as sum of specific, autonomous objects and separate entities. Denying such autonomy, the arte povera artists' work, distinguished by its use of ordinary elements and fragments taken from daily life, hints at an holistic understanding of the world as an open-ended, shifting but continuous flux or chain of meaning extending through history, time and space.

Pino Pascali sought to navigate a path through this flux by employing the child's technique of play as a serious scientific method with which to explore and investigate the world. Beginning by filling a Turin Gallery with fake but believable weapons that playfully drew allusions between the arms race, art dealing and children's war gaming, Pascali went even further in his next exhibition.

There he transformed the gallery into a world of fantasy and adventure beyond time and space filling it with faux-sculptures of fantastical mythical beasts such as his Testa di Drago (Dragon's Head) of 1966 which permeated the walls and floor space of the gallery and opened it up into a completely porous domain of the imagination.

Giulio Paolini similarly navigates a path through time and space in his work, which often, as in the case of his Le Tre Grazie (The Three Graces) of 1978, seems to reach both back and forth in time. Centred on the relationship between seeing and representation, Paolini's work explores the nature and possibility of what a work of art is.

Like many of his works Le Tre Grazie is an autonomous sculpture/installation that appears to be looking at itself. The three graces-also a representation of past, present and future-are manifested in plaster, graphic and photographic form establishing a linear passage through the gallery space; a mimetic contemplation on beauty, representation and the meaning of the art object.

Picking up on this Heraclitian notion of time, space and material as a cohesive but constantly shifting flux, Alighiero Boetti sought in his works, or 'objects' as he preferred to call them, to reveal the essentially objectless nature of the world. Like a river - a single but constantly changing entity, into which as Heraclitus famously remarked, a man could never step into the same one twice-the world was for Boetti, a manifestation of a principle he defined as 'ordine e disordine' (order and disorder).

This was a kind of mystical yin and yang like system of interdependence between the whole and the sum of its constantly shifting parts that was inspired in equal measure by Boetti's love of puzzles and his interest in Sufic mysticism. By applying the self-defining tautological technique of 'mettere al mondo il mondo' (putting or bringing the world into the world)-using fragmented or isolated single elements taken from the world to combine and build into a cohesive picture of itself in its entirety-Boetti created an extraordinary range of complex and mimetic works of art.

These self authored and self-defining 'objects' that, paradoxically were also 'open' and 'objectless' works of art, expanded the aesthetic of arte povera to the point where it embraced the whole world.


Robert Brown is Head of Research and Education, Modern, Post-War and Contemporary Art, Christie's London


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