Arte Povera

Over the twentieth century, Italy has repeatedly tried to offer a new look at the creative process. Starting from the birth of the Italian avant-garde, first proposed as the first manifesto of futurism, Filippo Tomaso Marinetti in 1909, continuing with the activities of Giorgio de Chirico , who took a diametrically opposite position to the emerging modernist trend with his “metaphysical painting”. ^[2] Avanagard, which appeared in Italy, was a reaction to the industrial breakthrough and encouraged artists to find new artistic methods to express the changed attitude. The anti-avant-garde movement, whose representatives were anti-technological, started with Giorgio de Chirico and was picked up by other figures of post-war art in Italy, such as Alberto Burri , Piero Manzoni , Lucio Fontana . It was the work of these artists later reflected in the work of artists Arte Povera ^[3] . The Arte Povera movement originated in Italy in the early 1960s . The prerequisites for its occurrence is the fact of a sharp economic recovery in Italy in the 1950-1960s, caused by the development of industry. Together with the economical upsurge comes the development and adoption of consumer culture. The main representatives of the current are Michelangelo Pistoletto, Giuseppe Penone, Mario Merz and others ^[4] . Artists of arte povera considered themselves political artists who believed in the serious social role of art. At the same time, their works referred to the historical past of Italy - a country that for many centuries has shown the world of art geniuses.

The organizer of the Arte Povera exhibition at the City Museum in Turin in 1970 , the editor of the book “Arte Povera: Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art?” ( 1969 ), Chelant hoped that the use of “poor” materials and the rejection of traditional ideas about art as “products” "For collecting and collecting, will undermine the commercialism that has filled the world of art. The first arte povera exhibition entitled “Arte Povera e IM Spazio” took place in Genoa at the La Bertesca Gallery in 1967 and was organized by Germano Celant . The exhibition was accompanied by text that was soon supplemented and published in Flash Art under the title “Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War”. These events marked the beginning of the arte of faith, a movement whose centers were in Turin and Rome. It should be noted that the movement of arte faith did not become a short-term local phenomenon:

“The complexity and multilevelness of creative gestures and the conceptualist rethinking of Arte Povera’s artistic processes do not allow us to interpret this direction as exclusively reactionary. One of the reasons is the ability of the representatives of the movement to combine a critical rethinking of the present country with a romanticizing view of the past of Italy ” ^[3] .

The movement lasted from 1960-1979. Today, the works of arte-faith artists are in leading museums in the world, from which representatives of this movement so wanted to escape.

Representatives of this movement saw their main task as the struggle against capitalism, “beautiful art”. In this regard, in their works, artists used newspaper scraps, garbage, tobacco leaves, rags - all this was a reality that surrounded them and which they wanted to express. The desire of artists of arte povera to throw art from its pedestal led to the expansion of forms and materials: the most banal and familiar things could be integrated into the artistic context. As a result, the range of materials and resources used has expanded dramatically. The desire to push the boundaries of art and life has also led to process-based approaches. Temporary installations and actions directed only at the moment are characteristic of the art of arte povera of the late 1960s. In works of later years, radical methods became familiar, and traditional forms were again used in the works of artists arte faith.

Thus, Mario Merz , Michelangelo Pistoletto , Mario Ceroli, Giulio Paolini , Giannis Kunellis, creating their installations, sought to identify the poetics of simple things, thereby elevating them above the "beautiful art". They tried to express their interaction with everyday life. Specially exhibiting in the halls of art museums, they emphasized the contrast between the exposition space and everyday semantics, thereby allowing simple things to reveal themselves and express their emotional aura.

The works are not devoid of symbolic meaning, however, we note that this meaning is free and has a large associative field, not having the meaning of something specific. So, many works of Yannis Kunellis gravitate towards this, in which the art space and its atmosphere are created by an unobtrusive combination of things that a person can see in his daily life: these are combinations of things picked up in a landfill, charcoal bags, gypsum of antique statues and gas burner fire ^[5] . So an example is the object of Luciano Febri , named “Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a platter” and representing a large glass bowl on a white tablecloth filled with glass fragments.

It is worth noting that many of the works of arte faith artists create the impression of autonomy and self-sufficiency in their artistic gesture. Autonomy should be understood as the ability of a work to live its own life: materials used by artists, such as concrete, (Anselmo, Zorio), industrial products (Kunellis, Mario Merz), mirrors (Pistoletto, Fabro) send us to both industrial production objects and to artisanal methods of work ^[3] . With their works, representatives of the current arte povera, which arose about fifty years ago, made a creative revolution in which they once again affirmed the freedom of the language of art from belonging to any strict system, laying the foundations for a new aesthetic that stated that art is among us.

A similar view of the world was taken by “situationists” in France. Their main idea was the idea that the era of the New History with its totalitarianism, emerging and ruling ideologies, market democracies, mass communications cannot coexist next to such things as a “masterpiece”, “picture”, “museum”. These things are present in the surrounding world, but the main paradox is the fact that they exist only as a market mechanism ^[1] . The theoretical basis of the course of "situationalists" was Guy Debord. Adherents of this direction define culture as “alienated” ^[1] . Debor and the other participants understood this alienation as

“... the total entertainment of a rich and developed society with its tools for influencing people. Hence the call "to intervene in the spectacle and destroy it" ^[6] .

It is with the help of such venues for "shows" as theaters, museums and magazines that power, according to the adherents of this movement, exercises control over people. Therefore, it is necessary to overthrow the culture and return to the primary elements of life. Germano Chelant calls them “attributes” and distinguishes the following: copper, earth, water, rivers, land, snow, fire, grass, air, stone, electricity, sky, gravity, etc. ^[6] . In this idea, the main idea is that there are artistic things around us, and there are no non-artistic things around us. Items such as an easel, a tube of paint, a palette, a set of brushes that surround the artist in our usual image, become symbols of deception.

“Having cleared art of harmful viruses, we will be left face to face with the pure elements of the Universe and the elementary things of our environment” ^[7] .

The heyday of Arte Povera fell on 1967 - 1972 , but its influence on subsequent artistic movements was significant and lasting. Already in the late 1960s, the arte povera movement was perceived not only as a national artistic trend, but in a general international context . At this time, thanks to the possibilities of medial exchange, international parallels became more noticeable than national differences. The works of arte povera artists were exhibited at legendary exhibitions such as Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form (Kunsthalle Bern, 1969; Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1969) and Op Losse Schroeven (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1969) , along with works of conceptual art , land art and minimalism .

In 1966, Piero Dzhlardi, Gianni Piacentino, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Giovanni Anselmo organize an exhibition in the gallery of Sperone, in Turin, under the name "Art Arte Abitabile inhabited". This exhibition aims to give an answer to American, minimal Art - and especially the work of Don Judd and LEWITT Ground - exhibited two months earlier at the Jewish Museum, New York, with a Primatury Structures demonstration. The Italians retain the great visual simplicity of their works, but reject coldness and neutrality in favor of a subjective sensitivity factor. This demonstration spawns the direction of Arte Povera ^[8] .

In the early 1970s, it became clear that the hopes of arte artists for social and aesthetic changes in everyday life through art did not materialize. Moreover, the art market has been able to integrate these open forms of art.

A large collection of works by arte povera artists outside Italy is in the Liechtenstein Museum of Art.

In St. Petersburg, in 2018, the exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative breakthrough. " Exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative Breakthrough ”takes place as part of the Hermitage 20/21 project. It featured more than fifty works by Italian artists of the second half of the twentieth century. The works were provided by the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Modern Art (Rivoli-Turin, Italy), with the participation of the GAM Gallery of Modern Art (Turin, Italy), as well as through the mediation of Villaggio Globale International and support from Lavazza (Italy). ^[3]

• Alighiero Boetti
• Piero gilardi
• Pier-paolo calzolari
• Rossella cosentino
• Yannis Kunellis
• Mario Merz
• Marisa merz
• Giulio Paolini
• Pinot pascals
• Giuseppe Penone
• Michelangelo Pistoletto
• Emilio prini
• Salvo (Salvatore Mangione)
• Mario Ceroli
• Gilberto Zorio
• Giovanni Anselmo
• Luciano Fabro

• 2018 - exhibition “Arte Povera. Creative breakthrough ”, State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg

• Russian poor

•   Wikimedia Commons has media related to Arte Povera
• Poor art in the Art Alphabet
• Arte Povera on the Artcyclopedia website
• Works by arte povera artists and traffic information on the Goetz Collection website (inaccessible link) (eng.)
• Tate Glossary
• http://www.museum.ru/N69928

• Kunellis. Articles. Texts. Photos. (To the exhibition of Kunellis at the Central House of Artists. Moscow. 1991) (translation from French). Roma, 1991

• Station without stopping. Russian avant-garde 1910-1920s. / O.A. Yushkova. - Moscow: Galart, 2008 .-- 224 p.

• Contemporary art and how to stop being afraid of it / Sergey Gushchin, Alexander Schurenkov.   - Moscow: AST Publishing House, 2018 .-- 240 p. : ill. - (History and science of Runet. Lectures).

• Flying over the abyss. Art, culture, picture of the world. 1930-1990. - M .: Art — XXI century, 2009.— 464 p., Ill.

• Guide to art. / Ed. Jan Chilversa, per. from English . - M .: Rainbow, 2004 .-- 688 p. - ISBN 5-05-005088-X .
• Bychkova L. Arte Povera . // Lexicon of nonclassics. Artistic and aesthetic culture of the 20th century. / Ed. V.V. Bychkova. - M.: ROSSPEN, 2003 .-- 607 p.
• Celant G. Arte Povera. NY, 1969