Arte Povera

Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002 Museum of Contemporary Art, 23 August -10 November.

After the lightweight, possibly amusing but ultimately forgettable trivia of the Sydney Biennale at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a breath of fresh air swept through that institution in the form of the historically significant Arte Povera: Art from Italy 1967-2002. Judith Blackall from the MCA, the curator of the exhibition, has worked at the Prato Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuscany, Italy which has given her firsthand insight into the ongoing movement, its art and theory. Through personal contact and direct knowledge of all the artists and their champion Germano Celant, Blackall brings a depth of considerable understanding to this exhibition. The exhibition is everything the lamentable Biennale wasn't.

Celant's book, Arte Povera of 1969, was one of the first English publications on the fledgling movement. At that stage he cast an international net to include Minimalists such as Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys's performance/installations, Eva Hesse, whose major and significant piece in the ANG is rarely seen, Robert Smithson and a bevy of similar 'earth' artists and conceptualists such as Joseph Kosuth.

Since 1969, with the making of many reputations through the defining of new stylistic boundaries, Celant has weeded out all but the Italian exponents. The English translation of Arte Povera, 'poor art', does not adequately define this movement of still-productive artists thirty-odd years on. It is their use of humble materials that unites them. It seems that the conceptualisation of the work, a paring down to a choice of just two or three contrasting materials, the site specific installation of the work, be it in an architectural context or a natural environment, and its subsequent documentation were new strategies and practices for artists to be undertaking in the early 1960s. No suggestion of painting in its purest form is to be seen anywhere within their works.

One may see this paring down as a minimalist concern and indeed it was but the sensibilities of the Italians' practices were far removed from the Americans who were to claim that movement as their own. The Italians' humanism is what is different. Their choice of materials and their purposeful contrasting of surfaces and textures are loaded with meaning and suggestion whereas the Americans such as Donald Judd stood for purely reductive and geometric exploration. In this exhibition you could smell the huge lump of timber of Penonne's Albero di 11 metri (11 metre tree, 1969 - 1989) that was carved back to expose the core of the towering tree within, and also the caged laurel leaves in his more recent installation. Marisa Merz's bubbling water emanating from its wax violin was its 'music' and even the rich hues in Kounellis' steel and cloth ensemble smells of remnants of fire and dying heat. This is possibly where the late twentieth century passion for alchemy and mystery started.

Then there is the question of elegance. The Italians dominated the 20th century in terms of style and design. In a fine art context this exhibition is so fresh, clean, crafted, elegant and sophisticated without being overly design conscious or sentimental. The contradiction now is that at the time this loose movement was about anti-consumerism and 1960's Utopianism. This can be readily appreciated in the 'mirror' works of Michelangelo Pistoletto. His partially framed and overlapping sections of mirrors casually resting against the wall are realised by walking through, past, and in front of the works. There is an ordinary but beautiful, ephemeral nature to the mirror works whose geometric placement is a reminder of what Frank Stella was to produce as conventional paintings in his later Protractor series. There is nothing too conventional about the beauty and lingering subtleties to be found in all of the works in this exhibition. Except for a touch of a machine aesthetic in the work of Gilberto Zorio, with his stars made of javelins and electric fibre light, nothing is without connections to a universal inner consciousness or the history of Italy itself.

The developing theories and experiences of Post Modernism as applied to the visual arts had its earnest beginnings in these seminal works. One cannot conceive that a younger generation of artists could be tolerated and/or lauded without the ground-breaking work of the Arte Povera artists of Italy.

-Graham Blondel