Azioni povere with Jannis Kounellis

“If you take drama away from form you are left with formalism. Without drama, art becomes merely an industrial affair”. Leading figure of Arte Povera Jannis Kounellis is perhaps the most prolific representative of the movement. His practice, saturated by both ephemeral work as well as the creation of material objects, perfectly exemplified the radical age of Arte Povera in which the work of art existed in rejection of the representative form. Instances of ephemeral participatory works and happenings were provoked by the desire to promote individual subjectivity, to blur the lines between the spectator and the art.

The origins of “Arte Povera” lie within the performative. As Kounellis once said it himself, the term was born in the theatre, “connected with [Jerzy] Grotowski’s idea of a teatro povero.”. Its founder Germano Celant first met Jannis Kounellis as a young curator at the age of 23. The essential idea behind the Teatro Povero was a rejection of all that was deemed unessential within the theatrical practice. Grotowski’s theatre was to be reduced to the bare primary entities, the audience and the performer. Similarly, a group of artists dispersed between the major art hubs in Italy were independently adapting to a similar practice within the visual arts. In September of 1967 Celant published an essay for the exhibition Arte Povera – Im Spazio at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa. His efforts to contextualise the art practice he witnessed during the time lasted in the legacy of his term “Arte Povera” which to this day remains to be one of the most influential European art movements.

Translated the term refers to “poor art”: visual art forms that favoured simple materials, as well as simple gestures. At the time a radical subversion, the artists indirectly and directly rejected the institution, the rich and the traditional forms of art-making. In some ways, the actions of the Arte Povera artist existed in response to the growing commodification of art, represented through the rise of Pop Art in Europe. As an absolute counter movement, Pop Art spoke to the maintenance of capitalistic structures in the economy, enhancing the language of commodification and adapting visual art practices that mirror techniques within mass industrial production. The interventions of Arte Povera artists represented the exact opposite actions: “taking away, eliminating, downgrading things to a minimum, impoverishing signs” in the words of Celant, “to reduce them to their archetypes”.

While material and object are key concepts within the movement, Arte Povera artists were interested in activating the objects through action, presence and participation. It is important to note that the term did not describe a specific art form or a specific group of artists that were organised like a collective. It loosely referred to particular exhibitions and artworks being created at the time, rejecting the normative art terminology such as “Conceptual Art”, “Landscape Art”, “Performance Art” or “Process Art”. Happenings such as Arte povera più azioni povere, a three- day event curated by Celant in 1968 shaped the way the movement was perceived and is remembered as one of its founding moments. Gathered in Amalfi, a group of artists followed the invitation of Marcello and Lia Rumma who asked Celant to curate an event that would redefine the “exhibition-happening”. It is at this moment where the attention within the group shifts from the object toward performative and ephemeral practices. Overall, around twenty artists are included in the event: Carmine Ableo, Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero e Boetti, Anne Marie Sauzeau Boetti, Jan Dibbets, Paolo Icaro, Jannis Kounellis, Richard Long, Gino Marotta, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio.

Throughout his artistic career, Kounellis was able to push the boundaries of visual art practices while taking part in the discovery of a new material culture informed by Arte Povera. His performative oeuvre is characterised by an introduction or participation of the body which reexamined the possibilities of art-making by synthesising the performed with historical and contemporary references. In the acclaimed work Da inventare sul posto (To Invent on the Spot), 1972 for example, the artist fully removed himself as a participant or even author of the work. Framing an abstract painting of his that features loose pink brushstrokes displaying a passage of Igor Stravinsky’s score for La Pulcinella (1920), is a violinist and a ballerina, standing on both ends of the painting. While the violinist plays a short musical sequence, the dancer improvised a choreography “on the spot”. Each iteration of the performance becomes unique.

Another famous performance of Kounellis is the staging at Galleria La Salita in 1973 where Kounellis himself sat behind a large desk covered in white scattered fragments of a seemingly ancient sculpture. Sat on top of the sculpture’s bust next to the artist, is a stuffed black crow, his head turned to the right towards a musician sitting next to the table playing a melody by Mozart on the flute. Kounellis, in the meantime, is covering his face with the mask of Apollo. This stage- like setting is meant to evoke a sense of sacrifice of a fragmented body that can only be resurrected through the presence of the crow, symbol of death. Kounellis noted that the work is not meant to symbolise reincarnation, but moreover the reincarnation of ideas and aims. Here the sourcing of the material and its staging is quite similar to the setting of a theatre stage; each “prop” is chosen carefully as it symbolises an element of the story narrated on stage. The table stands as an emblem for everyday life, the place where everyone assembles each day, where life takes place. Next, the musician playing Mozart as a symbol for enlightenment, juxtaposed with the presence of the history (the antique), Nature (crow as death) as well as mythology (Apollo).