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Giacinto Di Pietrantonio
In alphabetical order: Giovanni Anselmo, Stefano Arienti, Gianfranco Baruchello, Jacopo Benassi, Alighiero Boetti, Alberto Burri, Maurizio Cattelan, Giuseppe Chiari, Enzo Cucchi, Dadamaino, Nicola De Maria, Luciano Fabro, Flavio Favelli, Pinot Gallizio, Giorgio Griffa, Goldschmied & Chiari, Ketty La Rocca, Piero Manzoni, Mario Merz, Luigi Ontani, Vettor Pisani, Cesare Pietroiusti, Luca Rossi, Salvo. A list of artists that could go on. But what binds them together? What poetics? What needs?
In reality, this is not a question of poetics, or at least not only that. Rather, it has to do with the fact that the paths of study that these artists followed are not linked to the visual arts: here we are talking not about the artistic liceo [high school], art institutes, or academies of fine arts, but about many different paths, apparently far removed from art, such as the classical liceo and law and medicine faculties. Indeed, until even a few years ago it was this these latter that prevailed, including among collectors. Specifically: Anselmo, Fabro, Favelli, and Mauri pursued classical studies; Burri, Dadamaino, De Maria, Merz, and Pietroiusti, medicine; Gallizio, pharmacy; La Rocca, teacher training and radiology; Cattelan, the industrial technical institute, and nursing; Baruchello, Griffa, and Manzoni, law; Boetti, economics; Chiari, mathematics and engineering; Arienti, agriculture; Goldschmied & Chiari, sociology; Rossi, international and diplomatic studies; Ontani and Salvo had their compulsory schooling alone; Vettor Pisani was a surveyor; Enzo Cucchi did not complete his compulsory education because he was expelled from every school in Italy.
All this confirms that art, or at least modern and especially contemporary art, is a free territory, a poetically and linguistically extraterritorial space in which anything can and does happen. Above all, it is a sphere in which it is possible to break the rules of art and other disciplines that are practised in art, establishing new ones. I have been reflecting on the theme of education for years, also through a number of exhibitions: Opera prima, at the ex Opificio Gaslini (1994) and Avviso di garanzia, in the former courthouse (2016), for Fuori uso, in Pescara; La classe non è acqua, set up at the GAMeC in Bergamo (2011). In the first, I set in relation the works of twenty-two artists, created in their childhood and youth, with likewise many mature works from after their true consecration as artists;[1] ; the second was dedicated to students from the Italian academies of fine arts, recommended by their professors, who were also invited to exhibit with them; the third was dedicated to seventy works by well-known artists (Carla Accardi, Stefano Arienti, Joseph Beuys, Allan Kaprow, William Kentridge, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Thomas Schütte, Cindy Sherman and Andy Warhol), faced with an equal number of works created by students from schools of all levels.[2]
The catalogues have their own peculiarities: the cover of Opera prima featuresthe image of Giotto drawing on a rock in the presence of his master Cimabue, an anecdote narrated in Vasari’s Le Vite and depicted on the packaging of Giotto Fila crayons, which every Italian child stores in their memory. On the other hand, the Avviso di garanzia cataloguecontains not only images of the works on display, but also dialogues between teachers, pupils and students of the various academies.
If we wanted tutelary deities for this investigation, we could take the Dioscuri of Italian and international art, the brothers Giorgio and Andrea de Chirico — the latter better known as Alberto Savinio — who were, respectively, trained at the Academy of Fine Arts and in musical and literary studies. Where Giorgio de Chirico was always a painter, Andrea de Chirico only became one in 1926, after having already published novels and musical scores, thus deciding to adopt a pseudonym and produce paintings on paper. Works that his brother Giorgio did not hesitate to define as “very beautiful and altogether impressive”[3] Giorgio Castelfranco added: “This phenomenon is interesting for us art historians; the key is the concept of a Renaissance Bottega. To see someone at work, to be next to someone who is painting, gives the opportunity to learn naturally through sight and memory”.[4]
And Filippo de Pisis, also a literature graduate, was at first only a poet and art critic, until he made his debut in 1920 with drawings and watercolours in the futurist Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s gallery in Rome. In the meantime, he published Ver-vert, defined by Luisa Laureati and Daniela de Angelis in their Filippo de Pisis, la felicità del dipingere as “the lewd diary of a poet who was becoming more and more of a painter”.[5] Such previous experiences and training were practiced artfully, or rather towards art and for art. If we take, for example, Alberto Burri’s degree in medicine, the seams of his works seem to want to sew up the wounds of existence from the postwar period and beyond. Lucio Fontana, on the contrary, had an academic hinterland both by birth (he came from a family of sculptors) and from his training in art schools, in Argentina and in Italy, where, at the Brera Academy, he was a pupil of Adolfo Wildt. Fontana practised an art that is in a sense complementary to Burri’s. Where the former cuts the canvas with a scalpel, the latter sutures it with needle and thread. We are well aware that their poetics and their focuses are distant: space for Fontana and body for Burri. But it goes without saying that the two, the teacher and the autodidact, are somehow looking at each other.
What does all this tell us if not that the ways of art, like the ways of the Lord, are infinite and paved with good and bad intentions, lives and artfully made mischief? As we have seen, the approaches are different and diversely innovative. As a sample and a mirror, we can continue with the example of Giuseppe Chiari, one of the greatest artists of the Fluxus movement, who, having undertaken studies in mathematics, not by chance arrived at visual art by way of music. In fact, it has been known since Pythagoras (the Greek philosopher and mathematician who elaborated the first musical scale) how the relationship of numerical ratios between frequencies reveals the analogies present between mathematics and music in terms of rhythm, proportion, time and intervals. And if there is no doubt that Nicola De Maria’s works refer to the tradition of abstract art, and in many cases to Paul Klee especially, it is above all because we read art with the eyes of art. Otherwise they would seem to us like musical notes, chromatic scores, as the artist suggests, but also an excavation into the depths of our mind and conscience. Pinot Gallizio, on the other hand, contravening science, with Jorn and others created the imaginist Bauhaus and situationism. Teaching studies and work in radiology then permeated the work of Ketty La Rocca, in particular her photos printed on transparent plastic, X-rays of her own body. The artist also used a lot of writing in her practice, becoming a leading figure in the field of visual poetry. Sickness and death are present in the works of many artists, since for some, art is also an attempt to overcome them. One example of this is Cesare Pietroiusti, whose work often starts with non-functional thoughts, which “normal people” would call “sick”. Again in the work of Maurizio Cattelan, who has a background as a nurse, and was thus in daily contact with sick and/or finite life, the path between life and death is central: these are themes that we find in his wounded popes, hanged children and taxidermied animals, up to the double self on the deathbed, which precludes the road to any resurrection other than that of art itself. The feigned naïveté of Salvo and Ontani, then, reopens the discourse inherent to painting up to the memory of art and life, even testing our certainties about knowing how to paint, how to draw, on the slippery conceptual terrain of artistic production. Similarly, Enzo Cucchi’s indiscipline with regard to sign, form and content shows the art of an artist who is intolerant of institutional rules and who feeds on the pre-Pasolinian peasant world. That Pasolini with whom Mauri of Linguaggio è guerra studied and produced reviews of literary, artistic and political critique such as Il Setaccio. Coming from sociology, Sara Goldschmied & Eleonora Chiari then tackle existential themes that speak of activism, feminism, ecology with works/devices of repression [in the psychoanalytic sense], awakening our dormant consciousness, while Luciano Fabro is the example of someone who makes philology and etymology one of the poetic focuses of his work, so much so that he guides it towards a conception of art that becomes art again, even passing via what at first sight may appear as anti-art. In the surveyor Pisani, the theme of the labyrinth of Masonic construction is essential. And if Luca Rossi, starting from diplomatic studies, seems to show little diplomacy with his practice, it is because the use of written and spoken language becomes his weapon to stir the sleeping consciences of his world of reference. He takes social media as the new frontier of our existence, which risks exploding and ending up in the shit, even if that means Piero Manzoni’s Merda d’artista [‘Artist’s Shit’]. In time, escaping from lawyering, this same Manzoni took up the defence of art with works that range, from the aforementioned Merda d’artista to bodies of air, lines of infinity, and magic bases, and even to the eaten, digested and shat-out art that harangues contemporary art’s autodidact critical awareness.
[1] Fuori uso ’94, Opera prima. Vito Acconci, Getulio Alviani, John Armleder, Guillaume Bijl, Max Bill, Enzo Cucchi, Wim Delvoye, Alberto Garutti, Robert Longo, Paul McCarthy, Mario Merz, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Luigi Ontani, Julian Opie, Mimmo Paladino, Alfredo Pirri, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Dimitrij Prigoc, Cindy Sherman, Ettore Spalletti, Haim Steinbach, Constantin Zvezdotchotov, curated by G. Di Pietrantonio, ex Opificio Gaslini, Pescara, July – August 1994. Di Pietrantonio, ex Opificio Gaslini, Pescara, 22 July – 10 August 1994.
[2] La classe non è acqua. Maestri contemporanei VS giovani d’oggi curated by G. Di Pietrantonio, GAMeC, Bergamo, 23 March – 24 July 2011.
[3] From the Alberto Savinio Archive: https://www.albertosavinio.it/en/biography.
[4] Ibid.
[5] L. Laureati, D. de Angelis, Filippo de Pisis. Nel centenario della nascita: la felicità del dipingere, exhibition catalogue (Florence), Galleria Pananti, 1996.
