Arte Povera

Arte Povera (from the Italian: "poor art") is an artistic movement Italian, who, departing from Turin and Rome, appeared on the international scene in the 1960s.

Introduction

Arte Povera is an "attitude" (rather than a movement, a term that the artists of Arte Povera reject) preached by Italian artists since 1967. The artists of Arte Povera is behavior which is to challenge the cultural industry and the wider consumer society, in a strategically thought on the model of the guerrillas.

The refusal of identification is manifested by an artistic activity that also focuses on process, ie the creative act to the detriment of the finished article. Process is mainly to make meaningful insignificant objects (such as the famous urinal immortalized by Marcel Duchamp as the Fontaine).

Arte Povera use products low (hence its name): sand, cloth, earth, wood, tar, rope, burlap, clothing worn, etc.. and positions them as elements of artistic compositions.

In condemning both the identity of the object, Arte Povera claims resist any attempt to appropriate. This art is meant basically nomadic, elusive.

History

The term Arte Povera was used for the first time in September 1967 by Germano Celant to label an exhibition in Genoa. She borrows the term "poor" in a theater experimental; here we must understand that poverty as a volunteer detachment of acquired culture. The artist Giulio Paolini had already spoken of a "loss of the art", probably referring to a poetic close to minimalism, but Giovanni Lista has stressed the special significance of this term in the Italian culture long nourished Catholicism by Saint Francis of Assis

In 1972 Germano Celant abandons the term he now regards as "a repetitive cliche," which was selected by him "because it means nothing." However in 1984 and 1985, Germano Celant does reappear at various exhibitions that will confirm the historic significance of the Arte Povera and that will definitely set to 12 the number of stamped Arte Povera artists (Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero e Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Gilberto Zorio).

The founding texts of G. Celant in the 1960s are not explicit about the conceptual focus of the group or plastic.

Materials "poor"?

It was often suggested that he was using poor materials such as trash or natural elements. But many works refute this interpretation by incorporating more sophisticated materials such as neon. The frequent reference to nature is rather considered as an example of fulcrum anti-history from which it is possible to criticize this. Thus, the artists of Arte Povera participate fully in the reflection on the dialectic between nature and culture.

Size of spiritual or political?

It was also seen in the use of the word Poor reference to Christian asceticism and renunciation Franciscan as found in works of Arte Povera spiritual materialism, a revelation of the mystery of existence in the most mundane objects the most trivial, most newspapers.

The term "Poor was also interpreted in a political sense because the Arte Povera artists have adopted radical positions and marginal ones in the mentality of the protest movements of 1968.

Position

The actors of Arte Povera, refuse to be locked into a definition and reject the description of motion, for its preferred that attitude. Being an Arte Povera artist, is behavior which is to challenge the cultural industry and the wider consumer society, in a strategically thought along the lines of guerrilla warfare.

In this sense, Arte Povera is a socially committed stance on the revolutionary mode.

The refusal and the identification and political stance is manifested in an artistic activity that emphasizes the process of creating a gesture to the object itself.

Arte Povera is an art that seeks elusive, since it resists any attempt to appropriate condemning the identity of the object. It participates fully in the utopia of protest in the late 1960s and boasts its own way a tendency of contemporary Italian art in the face of market dominance of American art.

Art Market

Long, the works of Arte Povera escaped the logic of the market. Indeed, refusing to consider the artwork as a product, the authors did not hesitate to create ephemeral works, or they use materials deemed "poor" as the earth, fabric, plants, etc.. But the adventure was cut short before the mid-1970s, many artists of the group while taking individual steps.

The Arte Povera is not an art easily accessible: the conservation of some components requires careful attention, others who come in the form of facilities, can obviously take place in interiors adapted.

However, major U.S. institutions and collectors are beginning to pay close attention to this current after long put aside. [Citation needed]

Although apparently at the conceptual art practiced in other countries - the United States, it resulted including pop and minimalist experiments, the happening and underground cinema - the Arte Povera itself produced works of an indisputable individuality.

In the first exhibition in Arte Povera spazio d 'Arte Povera, which took place at the Galerie La Bertesca in Genoa in 1967, followed several other events, both in Europe and the United States.

The Arte Povera through Giovanni Anselmo

Giovanni Anselmo is very discreet about his career before entering the arts. Since 1966, he created sculptures from natural materials like stone, wood, iron, or vegetable matter.

Anselmo repositions the materials to try to give them back their original qualities: power, energy, eternity, based on the laws of physics like gravity, severity and their possible transformations (granite and lettuce, rails and railway vegetable sponge for example).

In 1970, Anselmo matter by replacing the word, which approximates the point of view of means of Conceptual Art. However, his purpose is different since it does not speculate on the relationship of sign language to its referent.

Anselmo will instead manifest a tension between the virtual and the real example in Infinito, 1971 where the artists' projects the word infinito on a wall where it can be read, to read the writing infinito must go to a point at infinity ".