The Arte Povera Movement PDF

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The Arte Povera Movement...

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The Arte Povera Movement Arte Povera was first presented under this name in 1967 at the La Bartesca Gallery in Genoa by the Italian art critic Germano Celant, to describe a new generation of Italian artists in its late years. 60s. It chronologically coincided with the concerns and radical optimism of the 1960s, which culminated in the events of May 1968, but especially in Italy continued in the form of terrorism into the 1970s. Arte Povera is chosen with the viewer through fragments of materials, concepts, words, as well as through a nomadism, which allows the avoidance of coherence and the constant shift from the easel panel to the mural or construction in space. Raw, insignificant and cheap materials such as stone, sand, wood, old newspapers, are transformed into aesthetic products with spiritual energy. Arte Povera with a provocative spirit of lifting civilisation, aspires to restore direct contact with natural materials such as clay, coal, stone, glass, fabrics, plants, animals and to foster the exchange between opposite poles of energy. The viewer is asked to redefine his attitude towards them by activating memories and exploiting associations. He becomes a participant in the protest against the standardization and supposed efficiency of modern technological civilisation, capturing the meaning of the elusive and the changeable. Pino Pascali and Giannis Kounellis from Rome and Emilio Prini from Genoa met in the melting pot of Arte Povera Turin with Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giulio Paolini, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Giiano Merz, Gilberto Zorio, to whom Pier Paolo Calzolari and Giuseppe Penone were later added. The founding exhibition of Arte Povera-Im Spazio took place at the La Bartesca Gallery in Genoa in 1967 and was followed until 1971 by a series of group exhibitions in Turin, Bologna, Amalfi and Munich. Felix notes that the work of these artists radically changed the form of Italian art. The turn that was attempted did not have the character of a short-lived stylistic change, it did not mean the enthronement of formal and aesthetic principles, but it placed roadmaps in the direction of a fundamental revision of the very concept of art. Artists born between 1925 and 1940 did not just agree to reject the aesthetic practice of abstract art and consumption-oriented design. Beyond the differences in their theoretical positions they had a common goal. To extend the radius of art to that socio-political area on which the creative process of the sensory and at the same time critical observation and artistic transformation of the world should be based.

Jannis Kounellis (1936-), was born in Piraeus but since 1956 has been living permanently in Rome. In 1960 he began to use objects in his works and to take advantage of the potential of Performance, sometimes accompanying his paintings with music or using the painted tarpaulin as a garment. From 1965 to 1967, he stopped creating to shape his personal theoretical position. He said that art is a powerful means of reintegrating man into society, in a world fragmented by strife and cut off from nature. He turned to installations with coarse materials and basic constructions, metal frames of beds, doors, shelves, to see the voice of things and to reveal the symbolic relationships that continue to exist in the world, despite the apparent disorder. In 1967 he went to Arte Povera, hanging sacks on the walls or smashing them into carts, to hint at its function as a means of measurement and trade in antiquity. As he progressed his installations became more complex, the materials, organic or inorganic more and more representative, wool, wax, wood, coal, gold, lead and the formal and symbolic associations richer. Fire came to signify change, as a means of destruction, purification or enlightenment. The lost spiritual vision and the unwavering attachment to the here and there imply blocked doors or windows that have lead plates instead of glass. Pieces of ancient statue molds, tied together or partially covered with fabric, present the idea of self-restraint at the point where it could all start with the hands of the clock at zero. It all starts with the empty and the artist's purpose is to fill the empty with meaning. Nature is experienced positively in his work, as a possible alternative to a state of fragmentary and inconsistent experiences. He said that the artist is involved in a permanent dialogue with the culture of the past. Its main goal is to detect the tensions and paradoxes of Mediterranean culture in our collective memory. The "Shelves" of the '70s, is a metaphor for history, the place where objects accumulate over time. In 1968 Mario Merz (1925-2003) was found in Arte Povera. After a stint at Art Informel, he began experimenting with Conceptual Art in the mid-1960s. Using neon light, it faded and gave a metaphysical dimension to everyday objects, such as bottles, umbrellas, raincoats and more. In 1968 he composed the first "Igloos", Eskimo huts made of ice, hemispherical structures with a metal frame covered with wax, gates, stones, broken glasses and tree branches. Rosenthal observes that the Igloo is the central image of his plastic and represents the globe and its balance. The spherical form presupposes a skeleton that is extremely important. His constructions present the post-apocalyptic vision of a world that in no case has been completely destroyed. They offer protection while a dynamic energy penetrates them. The Igloos are also a reflection of time and movement, as well as the threatening jungle of civilisation, from which man, the prefecture, must be protected.

His work goes back in time, recalling those tribes that moved to the east of Europe, achieving the merging of the barbarian civilisation with that of Rome. Igloo, apart from a personal point of view, is the tangible model of the utopia of an alternative world with man present as a whole, as a position and opposition, as a reason and a myth. A second central motif in Merz's creation in the 1970s became the core of a series of Happenings, the table, a piece of elevated earth, as he calls it, the primary starting point for shaping types of human social behaviour. Organic and inorganic, natural-prehistoric and industrial-historical materials, fruits, vegetables, wood, stone, metal, neon tubes, plexiglass, form hybrid Installations, impregnated with a genuine ecological spirit, implying the constant interaction of nature and politics and change. The above synthetic elements, having lost the secure attachment to their contexts, cease to be what they were and migrate to its somewhat foggy field. Kuspit points out that the use of candles and old newspapers, the respect for the magical powers and the enigmatic nature of the objects but also the moral dimension of his works. His immersion in prehistory, his effort to give each of his works the stamp of universality and at the same time to overcome the modern fragmentation. In the artistic course of Michelangelo Pistoletto (1933-) Arte Povera was a short episode. From 1947 to 1962, self-portraits dominated his painting. In the next phase known as Mirror Paintings, they were replaced by anonymous male and female figures in a state of calm self-concentration and in a kind of dialogue with the viewer, as in a permanent Happening. This is reinforced by the fact that the surface, usually made of stainless steel, is only partially covered by the life-size form, allowing the rest to mirror the viewer and his environment. In "Aphrodite of Rags" (1967), Pistoletto presented a model of a naked Aphrodite amid a pile of rakes, representing the confusion and heterogeneity of marginalized individuals. It was a modern cut in cultural memory similar to those attempted by Kounellis. Giulio Paolini (1940-) also led Arte Povera from the path of Conceptual Art, with visual interventions mainly in the area of linguistic systems. Presenting a surface divided by a horizontal, a vertical and two diagonal lines illuminates a single stage of painting, analogous to that which would be illuminated by the syntactic analysis of a sentence. In "Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto" (1967), a black-and-white photograph, reversing the title, changes the relationship between the artist and the portraiture artist. It places the viewer in the position of the painter, referring at the same time to the moment when he saw Lotto's work through the camera. In other words, he adds his own time to the time of Lotto and to the time of the spectator. The daily coexistence with the

Roman, Renaissance and Baroque past is for the Italian artist an integral weight, something that is confirmed by his works of the following decades. Giuseppe Penone (1947-) is the artist who justifies Celant's view that the creators of Arte Povera reunited culture and nature in the way described by the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, that is, with the awareness that nature is integral. part of culture. A student of Pistoletto and Anselmo, Penone enriched Arte Povera by shaping his personal experiences of the alpine landscape. The central theme of his creation was the tree, which he considers a model for sculpture and a symbol of energy, with its vertical form, forked branches, water and annual rings, which certify the passage of time. He says that the tree, free from all emotional, formal and cultural significance, sees it as it really is. As a living element in constant evolution, fertility and growth. He used it as a physical force that compensated and reacted to another force, his own. Luciano Fabro (1936-2007) attempted an approach to the world through things themselves and not on the basis of pre-existing formal interpretations, believing that by projecting the spirit on them he could change it. From 1963 to 1966, moving in parallel with Pistoletto, he tried to show the viewer the importance of the surrounding space by using mirror pieces on the painting surface as it is reflected or distorted. His most important contribution to Arte Povera is the series entitled "Golden Italy" (1971). Rendering the boot of the Italian peninsula with glass, lead, gold, fur and other materials, he wanted to make sense of both the rich cultural tradition of his homeland and the post-war boom of wealth. A boot hung upside down from the heel could be seen as a hint at the events of May 1968 or a comment on the hypothetical shift of poor Italian south to north and rich north to south. Gilberto Zorio (1944-) explored the concept of constant change and the unpredictable in the work of art, in the context of Arte Povera, with emphasis on the role of language. In the sculpture entitled "For a purification of words" (1969), the viewer was speaking in front of a vase with a long neck and his words, passing through alcohol, caused the lighting of lights at the other end of the composition. Restany describes Vlasis Kaniaris (1928-2011) as one of the neglected forerunners of Arte Povera. After studying medicine and the Athens School of Fine Arts, Kaniaris spent four years in Rome (1956-1960) and from 1960 most of them in Paris, with long stays in Athens and Berlin. Kaniaris could live and work far from Greece for many years, he was deeply melancholy and felt stateless. It hides something critical, political and expresses this with montages of common and random objects to which it brings changes. All the objects he finds and uses keep their size. Nothing is presented inflated or gigantic like nothing changes in essence, in its material composition. Colour

and size speak for the human measure and are kept constant. The unexpected coexistence of different materials and random findings, one could consider that they have something from Surrealism, the dream or the nightmare. The smiling walker with the wire and plaster head carries as a unique luggage a toothbrush and a toothpaste behind the ear. A suit stands with open arms like a scarecrow on skates. Fontana and Burri showed Kaniaris a new dimension of art. Complex collages and Decollages with plastered paper on canvas or torn and re-painted actually depict Greek walls from the period of occupation with anti-fascist slogans, which although erased, smudged and coated, can still be read by Greeks. In the late '50s, from the corners of the boards with the walls sometimes spring pieces of wood spring that strengthen the role of the material. This is the starting point for new projects in Paris, made of wood, plaster, wire blocks and iron bars. Clothes rigid from the glue, they stand like a fetish in space. The artist attempts an x-ray of the financial and conscious state. It shows how thin the ice is that the people who propose prosperity and the fulfilment of mental needs as a flag. They have heads, brains and breasts made of plaster. Immigrants are presented in the form of empty clothes, empty forms, waiting on the wall. Abroad, things become foreign. Kaniaris is a political artist and realist. A summary of Kaniaris' searches in the '60s and' 70s, can be considered "Urinary" in the old ice cream parlor in Athens in 1980. Dummies of people urinating in front of a wall full of halfextinguished political slogans, with a predominant red reminiscent of blood mixed with pus, others climbing on windows, wandering aimlessly between outstretched clothes, convince of the sincerity of his social critique, of his agony in the face of the misery of modern life and the withering of ideas. Kaniaris sees the wall as a symbol that we lean on, we support, we place our hopes. It is a solid surface that holds the edifice, our whole history. And in this case he thinks that everyone is peeing up. Arte Povera also survived into the 1980s, projecting the object as a means of realizing complex relationships in the world of things and as a compensation for the excessive perfection of the form of plastic and metal utensils....