lismore castle arts

LISMORE CASTLE ARTS PUBLIC TALKS SERIES
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 14TH 2.30PM
Cultural Revolution/Culture Clash: Arte Povera as “Guerrilla War”
Nicholas Cullinan
Nicholas Cullinan is Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, London and is currently completing a Ph.D. on Arte Povera at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has recently worked on the exhibition Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia and Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. Forthcoming projects include Sold Out, an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2009 and a monograph on Cy Twombly for Phaidon."

Cultural Revolution/Culture Clash: Arte Povera as “Guerrilla War”

In 1967, the critic Germano Celant issued his overtly politicized manifesto ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War’, which launched the group in a blaze of revolutionary and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Celant’s text was consonant with the Italian political situation. By 1968, his metaphorical ‘guerrilla war’ was appropriated by dissenting university students, who identified themselves with political heroes such as Fidel Castro, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, and also espoused the guerrilla tactics of General Nguyen Giap, predicting that: “The university will be our Vietnam”.
The language of guerrilla war echoed through Celant’s text, ricocheted through the universities and was also inscribed upon Mario Merz’s Giap’s Igloo of 1968. Merz scrawled the Vietcong General’s statement on guerrilla tactics in neon across a primitive hemispherical structure covered in defensive sandbags, imbuing it with revolutionary intent. What are we to make of the nexus between the simultaneously aggressive and defensive aesthetic of Merz’s work, Celant’s rhetoric and Giap’s strategy? Why the alignment with guerrilla war as analogue for cultural rivalry, peasant resistance as a model for Arte Povera’s renunciation of consumerism, and Vietnam as a metaphor for the university protests? In the late 1960s in Italy, invoking the ideology of guerrilla warfare acted not only as a reference to, and condemnation of, American troops in Vietnam, but was also deployed as a charged metaphor for the struggle against burgeoning American economic and cultural domination.
This characterisation of Arte Povera reflects Italy’s struggle to reconcile and adapt to the transition from a relatively impoverished, and predominantly agricultural country ravaged by the Second World War, to the rapid industrialisation propelled by the Marshall Plan-backed miracolo italiano or ‘economic miracle’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Within this framework, Arte Povera’s deliberate positioning as an oppositional and antagonistic ‘other’ to the technological imperatives of American culture, and its artisanal and proletarian impulse – from Alighiero Boetti eastern exoticism and shamanistic persona, Jannis Kounellis’ recourse to remnants and fragments of the archaic, Giuseppe Penone’s recuperation of what Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lamented as Italy’s lost agrarian culture, to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s street theatre collective, Lo Zoo, which explored themes of madness and deviancy – acquires a more politicized meaning. As Celant recalled, the aim of Arte Povera was to: ‘corrode, cut open, and fragment – to decompose the imposed cultural regime.’