This minimalist "poor art," of modest means and humble materials,suggesting 
humility,  was partly an effect of the postwar economic boom known as "the 
Italian miracle," skittering to a chaotic halt in 1964. 

An exceptionally good show--provocative, poetic, comprehensive and 
unexpectedly timely. It focuses on 14 Italian artists. 
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Art Review

'60s, ITALIAN STYLE

A nation's humbling economic swoon was among the forces that shaped Arte 
povera, now on display in an exceptional show at the Geffen Contemporary.

Los Angeles Times
By Christopher Knight
Times Staff Writer
April 29 2002

War rages. Terrorists conspire. Repression and abuse proliferate. Economies 
shiver. The world is coming apart at the seams.

Today the chaotic tumult of the 1960s seems less remote than it has for some 
time. Internationally, our current social and political landscape offers 
enough recognizable scenery to form an essential context for the art in "Zero 
to Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962-1972," which opened Sunday at the Geffen 
Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art's warehouse facility in Little 
Tokyo. This is an exceptionally good show--provocative, poetic, comprehensive 
and unexpectedly timely. It focuses on 14 Italian artists working mostly in 
Milan, Turin and Rome during an especially charged period.

The show has been trimmed somewhat from its debut last year at Minneapolis' 
Walker Art Center, which organized "Zero to Infinity." The MOCA presentation 
was postponed (it was originally scheduled to open in March). Trimmed or not, 
be grateful that it has arrived. MOCA's exhibition is laid out as 14 solo 
shows, with an introductory gallery that samples work by each artist. The 
salutary effect is to demonstrate both similarities and individual 
differences among these important artists, who never really worked as a 
single, coherent group. Arte povera arrived in sequential waves with an 
expanding number of artists throughout the decade.

The name Arte povera says a lot. (It's pronounced "AR-tay po-VAIR-uh.") Most 
cleanly translated as "poor art," it suggests humility. For sculpture the 
durable elegance of bronze was out, the dull inertia of lead was in. Domestic 
crafts such as knitting and embroidery turn up far more often than the 
courtly medium of oil paint and canvas.

Marketable artistic commodities, such as traditional paintings and 
sculptures, got replaced by ephemeral propositions, including disposable art 
made from cardboard and consumable foodstuffs. The shift was partly an effect 
of the postwar economic boom known as "the Italian miracle," skittering to a 
halt in 1964. But stripping down to non-art basics provides the "zero" of 
"Zero to Infinity."

The term Arte povera isn't just a reference to modest means and humble 
materials, though. It also implies a more fundamental sense of the 
impoverishment of art as it was then known. What good was a painting when the 
world was in collapse? Why bother with figures carved from stone when social 
chaos reigned? Changing the way people were used to thinking was one mandate 
of this art.

Even the latest radical forms of American avant-garde art circa 1962 seem to 
have felt extravagant to these artists. The four sleek, low-slung iron 
troughs in an untitled sculpture by Jannis Kounellis, a Greek expatriate 
working in Rome, pointedly echo the then-new Minimalist abstraction of 
sculptors like Donald Judd. But Kounellis filled his industrial troughs with 
rich loam, then planted them with a tenaciously elegant, ecologically spare 
cactus garden. A high-toned Minimalist sculpture is cheekily transformed into 
a workmanlike planter.

It's important to note that Arte povera was one symptom of the era's larger 
international youth movement. All the artists included in "Zero to Infinity" 
were under 30 in 1962, with the exception of Mario Merz (born 1925) and his 
wife, Marisa (born 1931 and the only woman among the loosely configured 
group). The generation was mostly born during World War II 
and--artistically--their youthfulness collided head-on with Italy's ancient 
past.

Luciano Fabro's six colossal sculptures of feet are emblematic. Like 
fragments of monumental statues that are all that remains from the antique 
reign of some obscure Roman emperor, they are carved from sleek marble and 
deep maroon porphyry, or cast in glass with the density of rock crystal or in 
eternal bronze. The huge, claw-like feet imply mythological origins. Their 
legs rise up to the ceiling, towering overhead but cloaked in dainty silk 
bloomers. A buffoonish aura of Victorian modesty descends on these bird-like 
feet, which suggest a gigantic serving of roast pheasant from some 
pretentious bourgeois chef.

Nearby, Fabro's paper and glass maps of the boot of Italy wrapped in lead 
give blunt form to the weight of history. Another map, fashioned from gilded 
bronze, is strung up by its heel and suspended from a chain overhead, like 
Mussolini lynched by the mob.

The most beautiful map is by Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994). On a commercially 
printed political map of the world, Boetti filled in each country with the 
painted emblem of its modern national flag. This served as the design 
template for a fabric wall hanging, which he had embroidered by traditional 
Afghan and Pakistani weavers. As political demarcations were made into 
aesthetic decisions, Boetti transformed the isolating partitions of national 
boundaries into colorful, luxurious visual abstractions.

Italian Renaissance painting turns up in a sly conundrum by Giulio Paolini. 
This simple work consists of a life-size black-and-white photograph of an 
elegant, face-front portrait painting. Its title, "Young Man Looking at 
Lorenzo Lotto," describes what the long-dead portrait subject did when the 
16th century Venetian artist painted the picture reproduced in the 
photograph. Now, a photograph takes the place of the painting, and we assume 
the position once held by the artist. The photograph "looks" at us.

Paolini's deft work shows how mass reproduction regards the audience as its 
object. Ounce for ounce, this lucid, unassuming facsimile may be the most 
eloquent work in the exhibition.

For Italians, the experience of a world coming apart at the seams is hardly 
new. (Pick a century; any century.) Unsurprisingly, ritual repetition turns 
up as a leitmotif in Arte povera, especially in the Merzes' very different 
sculptures.

When Mario Merz rendered a medieval numerical system in neon tubing, a 
natural pattern of spiral growth got advertised--just the way beer or 
cigarettes might be on a supermarket storefront. When Marisa Merz knitted the 
letters of her daughter's name from nylon thread, she used the material of 
space-age plastic to repeat an ancient domestic task. (Think of Homer's 
famous epic of family and fate, "The Odyssey," with Penelope repeatedly 
knitting and then unraveling her handiwork as she waits for Odysseus to 
return.) Ritual repetition offers the infinity that follows zero.

There is some weak work in the exhibition. The cannon, submachine gun and 
jungle bridge made from steel wool and scrap metal by Pino Pascali 
(1935-1968), who is little known today, is pretty corny. Emilio Prini's 
printed paper declaring, "He confirms his participation in the exhibition" is 
as thin and tedious as Conceptual art gets. Michelangelo Pistoletto's 
sculptures that frame the physical activity of looking at art have long been 
popular, although they've always struck me as gimmicky. But works like these 
are in the minority.

In 1967 the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant, who vigorously 
promoted the artists and coined the term by which they came to be identified, 
published an essay called "Arte Povera: Notes on a Guerrilla War." The idea 
that art could perform a kind of underground combat might now seem unsound, 
not least because art has moved from the margins to center stage.

Yet the notion also recalls the faith of Italian political philosopher 
Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned during the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, 
who argued that social change could best be fostered by capturing the 
culture. That proposition might be arguable, but as "Zero to Infinity" makes 
more than plain, the art produced in its spirit can be thrillingly ambitious.
*
"Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962-1972," Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. 
Central Ave., Little Tokyo, Los Angeles CA (213) 626-6222, through Sept. 22. 
Closed Monday.