Postwar Italian Art History Today

Untying 'the Knot'

Sharon Hecker, Marin Sullivan, Sharon Hecker, Marin Sullivan

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501330070
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Arte europeo

Postwar Italian Art History Today brings fresh critical consideration to the parameters and impact of Italian art and visual culture studies of the past several decades. Taking its cue from the thirty-year anniversary of curator Germano Celant's landmark exhibition at PS1 in New York – The Knot – this volume presents innovative case studies and emphasizes new methodologies deployed in the study of postwar Italian art as a means to evaluate the current state of the field. Included are fifteen essays that each examine, from a different viewpoint, the issues, concerns, and questions driving postwar Italian art history. The editors and contributors call for a systematic reconsideration of the artistic origins of postwar Italian art, the terminology that is used to describe the work produced, and key personalities and institutions that promoted and supported the development and marketing of this art in Italy and abroad.

1

“Yes, but are you Italian?” Considering the Legacy of Italianità in Postwar and Contemporary Italian Art

Laura Petican

Introduction

When in 1985 Germano Celant pondered the legacy of Arte Povera as an anthology of “uncertain and changing signs,”¹ the metaphor of the knot provided an image of cultural entanglement, crossed references, discontinuities, and contradictions. The artists associated with this group, based in “a strange and senseless geography,”² he claimed, were paradoxically bound by the fragmentary postwar climate yet unified in a collective vision for the present. This “Knot Art” for Celant, the “multi-aspect vision”³ that characterized postwar Italian art, however, has been subsequently viewed by figures such as Italian curator and writer Francesco Bonami as a unified aesthetic identity rooted in and determined by the national context, from past to present. As characterized in Bonami’s 2008 exhibition catalog Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, the relationship between past and present explored in Italian art made between 1968 and 2008 is continuous and coherent;⁴ this enduring relationship, this italianità or Italianness is perhaps a more identifiable image of the knot that has yet to be unraveled. The legacy of Celant’s knot may more accurately propose a trajectory of Italian art history that is both continuous and fragmented, local and universal, and inherently entangled.

Indeed, the question, “Yes, but are you Italian?” posed to me following the presentation of a paper on contemporary Italian artists and fashion a couple of years ago,⁵ brought to mind the notion of Italianness and what it meant to art historiography. I wondered whether the nationalism and cultural specificity that seemed so irrelevant to a generation of postwar artists exploring the “degree zero”⁶ of aesthetic experience was now re-emerging, giving meaning to a subsequent generation whose aesthetic concerns seem centered within careers that are, in many respects, international in scope. This question from an undoubtedly well-intentioned conference delegate regarding relative authority over the subject matter related to my own ethnicity provoked a broader consideration of the ways we practice art history and how culture gets made. That is, for contemporary Italian artists, does being Italian matter? Does it matter for art history? Is an Italian art history possible?

These questions arise in the context of the increasing prominence of Italian art, gastronomy, industrial design, and fashion on the international cultural scene over the latter part of the twentieth century. Celant’s “knot,” in this sense, can be seen to refer to an image of integrated cultural and social conditions that were intertwined, relative, and inherently interdisciplinary. In the mid-1980s, this alluded to an era steeped in the residue of post-World War II disorientation and disillusionment, assuaged by burgeoning capitalism and realized in familiar modes of cultural production in the form of painting’s return via the Transavanguardia⁷ and the rise of Italian cultural identity through popular consumption of mass-produced goods (fashion, food, etc.). While a linear trajectory of progressive advance may have characterized the evolution of Italian art and culture at one point, the 1980s saw a different view with the rising interdependence of globalized communication, culture, and economics. From this perspective, one may observe that an account of postwar Italian art history cannot be one confined to the fine arts; rather, the “knot” includes a totality of cultural matter.

From this inclusive and historicist perspective, this essay is concerned with the work of contemporary Italian cultural producers—both fine artists and practitioners—and includes analysis of art, fashion, and exhibition practice, in light of notions of Italianness, national identity, and the role of the past. It considers these as part of a broadly European, however, shifting, cultural dynamic, and their effect on the significance and viability of italianità in discussions of postwar Italian art history. Along with analysis of works by Vanessa Beecroft (b. 1969), Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960), and Francesco Vezzoli (b. 1971), I consider the exhibition Missoni Art Colour, recently held at the Fashion and Textiles Museum in London,⁸ and what may be understood as mixed messages regarding the relative importance of communicating a national, homegrown aesthetic centered in notions of inherited cultural legacy. These examples are chosen because the artists are Italian-born, yet maintain careers that are international in scope; Beecroft, for example, has a British father, grew up in the United Kingdom, and presently resides in Los Angeles. Their association, therefore, with the notion of italianità presents a compelling entry point for a consideration of the study of Italian art history. Missoni Art Colour similarly situates an Italian cultural producer within a national context, but aspects of its curation speak to a broader scope of influence and exchange.

While it may be seen that artworks by the above-mentioned artists evince a distinct relationship with the past by way of what I have termed “baroque-centric” traits,⁹ it may also be observed that due to their use of fashion, they participate in a more fluid cultural space where disciplines overlap and perceived influences become less identifiable. That is, the notable motifs—geometric patterning, vibrant palettes, for example—are less associated with a national context than with a general zeitgeist of a broader European context. The works may be distinctly Italian to some degree, but the materials they use—the fashion garments, materials, and patterning—suggest a wider network of source material. What I am suggesting, for example, is that in the case of the Italian fashion house Missoni, the trademark aesthetic and technique for which it is known—multicolored striped and zigzagged knitwear—stemmed not from an indigenous aesthetic sensibility, but from consequences of circumstance and the influences of a broad, European postmodern aesthetic rooted in experimentation, vitality, and an appeal to the senses. The intersections of fashion and art that underpinned the arrival of Op art and Missoni on the international cultural scene in the mid-twentieth century mark this dynamic. With garments dating back to the house’s beginnings in 1953 presented alongside master artworks of the twentieth century, Missoni Art Colour re-articulated aspects of the nationalistic and hermetic “Made in Italy”¹⁰ merchandising initiative of the 1980s which took national identity as a methodology with which to promote an indigenous form of cultural production across fashion, food, furniture, and automobiles. Within this context, Missoni has become emblematic of Italian cultural identity, while characteristic of the hybrid cultural context within which it thrives. It is this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary cultural exchange firmly established on both sides of the art/fashion debate that provides the framework for this study of Italian art history today.

With this in mind, I suggest that the figure of the Gordian knot—in Celant’s vision, an aesthetic identity—bound and yet unknowable, is a reasonable metaphor for the familiar and nebulous realm of postwar Italian art and culture. Its frequency of self-reflexive cultural references, at once universal and local, evolving and yet constant, has traveled forth with Arte Povera’s heirs and the industri...