Horses and Other Herbivores. Futurist Traces and Disputed Identities in Contemporary Italian Art 1969-2010

An unusually numerous population of horses, donkeys and zebras has crossed the plains of Italian art in the last fifteen years, coinciding with a widespread (and perplexed) reflection on the characters and specificities of national art. In several ways - this is the thesis of the present essay - the population of herbivores epitomizes the debate over the “current relevance or non-relevance” of the avant-gardist model, and constitutes a sardonic metaphor of the journalistic debate on the Italian “decline,” dealt with extensively by the major national newspapers.

An unusually numerous population of horses, donkeys and zebras has crossed the plains of Italian art in the last fifteen years, coinciding with a widespread (and perplexed) reflection on the characters and specificities of national art. In several ways - this is the thesis of the present essay - the population of herbivores epitomizes the debate over the “current relevance or non-relevance” of the avant-gardist model, and constitutes a sardonic metaphor of the journalistic debate on the Italian “decline,” dealt with extensively by the major national newspapers.

Let’s look at some examples. In recent years, Paola Pivi has impelled a pair of zebras to relocate to the snowy Gran Sasso, and a donkey to lose itself in the waters off Alicudi.

fig. 1. Paola Pivi, Untitled (zebras), 2003, 340x400 cm, photographic print, Courtesy Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano | Macro, Rome, © The Artist (ph: Hugo Glendinning)

fig. 2. Paola Pivi, Untitled (donkey), 2003, 1020x1230 cm, inkjet print on pvc, Courtesy Biennale, Venezia | Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano, © The Artist (ph: Hugo Glendinning)

For the prestigious solo show dedicated to her in 2006 by the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan, she gathered a heterogeneous assemblage of white-coated (or feathered) animals in the large abandoned spaces of the Porta Genova station storerooms, including horses and lamas.

fig. 4. Paola Pivi, Interesting, 2006, white animals performance, Courtesy Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milano (ph: Hugo Glendinning)

In both cases, the artist seems to have been proposing interventions that emphasized the artwork’s lack of necessity: the inversion of habitat is as wasteful as it is senseless. Pomp, quirkiness, hysteria, dreaminess, proximity to the world of fashion and inventiveness in the absence of an historic and social plan are also the characteristics that two curators particularly in vogue in the international sphere, Francesco Bonami and Massimiliano Gioni, indicate as what remains of Italian art, thus implicitly concurring with the strategies of our most influential gallery owner, Milan-based Massimo De Carlo.

fig. 3. ArtBasel 40 (2009), Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan, standת © Michele Dantini

The modernist heroic-political options that had characterized the late 1960s and ‘70s generation of Arte Povera having fallen short, and the citationist options of the early 1980s have rapidly disqualified themselves, the generation that achieved notoriety between the late 1990s and the successive decade comments with irony and detachment on the growing marginalization of Italian culture in the global context, as we can affirm considering the case of Paola Pivi. It is no surprise that a painter like Enzo Cucchi, one of the historic exponents of the Trans-avant-garde, responded to Pivi’s donkey with some irritation, claiming as his own the rustic tenacity of the donkey and its congeniality to the perennially-proclaimed sacred and peasant universes of painting. In a 2005 painting-installation displayed at the Quarter Contemporary Art Center in Florence, Cucchi painted a monumental mule on a fence and fed him the entire repertoire of the history of Italian art: his feed bag is provocatively painted in the tricolors of the Italian flag, expressing a sort of pigheaded Futurist (or, one might say, Lacerbian) pride.

fig. 5. Enzo Cucchi, Untitled, 2005, Quarter, Florence

Tricolor mules

The provocation of Cucchi’s mule, half vernacular and half shrewdly cosmopolitan, is aimed at the international art system. It contests the ideological excesses of post-colonial, sociological and gender agendas - generally neo-conceptual agendas - perceived as anthropologically alien to the Latin artist; agendas who are instead encouraged by the global community and the hegemonic component within it, the Anglo-American. Cucchi is also not the only one to claim an early-20^th-century heritage and express a self-assuredly native attitude, although this enthusiasm and confidence in the resources of national tradition pertain solely to him (and to the artists close to him in terms of biography). Beginning in 2007, Boccioni became the theme of a new series of works by Diego Perrone, a contemporary of Pivi and also linked to De Carlo’s gallery:

fig. 8. Diego Perrone, La mamma di Boccioni in ambulanza e la fusione della campana, 2007, installation, Courtesy Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milan,  © The Artist

the reference to the most celebrated and tragic of the Futurists, who was involved in the creation of an Italian avant-garde that was credible and could compete in the European sphere, in Perrone falls into monumental and self-parodying works, immediately picked up on - with ingenuity and/or malice - by younger artists, in terms of an efficacious identity-establishing connotation on an international level.1

fig. 9. Pietro Roccasalva, Unicuique Suum Fussball, 2010, installation, Courtesy Johnen Galerie, Berlin, © The Artist

There are at least two Futurist compositions that can be considered as engendering the success of the contemporary equestrian motif: Umberto Boccioni’s 1910 Città che sale, today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Carlo Carrà’s 1913 Cavaliere rosso.

fig. 6. Umberto Boccioni, La città che sale, 1910 © The Museum of Modern Art,New York

fig. 7. Carlo Carrà, Il cavaliere rosso, 1910 © Civiche raccolte d’arte, Milan

Both Città che sale and Cavaliere rosso interpret early-20^th-century Italian history in a mythical key, offering a legendary, almost messianic version of it: a grand duty lies before the country as it undergoes a rapid transformation, and the artist (the knight) is the designated interpreter of social and cultural change. To grasp the longevity of the theme, however, we must considere at least two other works from the second half of the century, no less renowned than those mentioned above: Jannis Kounellis’ Cavalli (1969) and Maurizio Cattelan’s Novecento (1997), a stuffed horse displayed at Rivoli Castle in Turin. These two installations launched a heated debate on the legacy of the avant-garde, a debate in which the above-mentioned works by Pivi, Perrone and Cucchi took part in their own way, stating their arguments in different and even disparate ways with stories, titles and figures.

The Earth seen from the Moon (traumas of expatriation)

We could begin at the end: Cattelan’s Novecento is an (anti)-Arte Povera pastiche, or better, a parody of Kounellis’ Cavalli, to which it makes reference, in many ways replacing or repossessing it in the viewer’s memory like an inauspicious, caricatured alter ego.

fig. 10. Maurizio Cattelan, Novecento, 1997, installazione, Courtesy Castello di Rivoli, Turin, © The Artist 

fig. 11. Jannis Kounellis, Cavalli, horses performance, L’Attico, Rome 1969, © The Artist

Novecento, also known as La ballata di Trotsky and stylized in the internationalist sense by this second title, is linked to intergenerational polemics situated and situatable in Italy, polemics to which, we should note, Cattelan dedicated an entire exhibition, the one held at the Rivoli Castle - the temple of Arte Povera - in 1997.2 His accusation against the national neo-avant-gardes of the ‘60s and ‘70s was on that occasion explicit (for example, in the installation Less than ten Items, which invited visitors to go shopping in the museum with banal supermarket shopping carts): movements and works generated by protest impulses were welcomed and eventually neutralized by the market due to their very success. Artists who had been seen as heroes were reduced to puppets, pets, tools.

From the first phase of his career, Cattelan typically referred to Arte Povera rhetoric in acerbic and sentimental terms, mocking the Che Guevara-ism of manifestos like Germano Celant’s 1967 Appunti per una guerrilla and pretending to long for the intransigent faith of artists in their own political and social relevance. For his first exhibition, held at the Fuxia gallery in Verona, Neon in Bologna and the Loggetta in Ravenna in the spring of 1989, Cattelan’s catalogue cover cited a passage from the script of the Pierpaolo Pasolini’s 1967 film La terra vista dalla luna (“The Earth seen from the moon”), which had been developed in the form of a comic.

fig. 12. Maurizio Cattelan, Biologia delle passioni, exhib. cat. Galleria Fuxia, Verona| Galleria Neon, Bologna| Loggetta Lombardesca, Ravenna, May 1989, Essegi, Ravenna 1989

Pasolini’s assertion “semo finiti, semo proprio finiti!” (“we’re finished, we’re really finished!”), chosen by Cattelan as a sort of epigraph, recalls the Italy of the late 1980s, the wearing away of ideologies, the loss of authority and moral rigor on the part of the establishment, the enfeebling of the civil-protest motivations that had characterized the height of the movement. The same catalogue contains, as a sort of appendix, a short text by Alessandro Mendini, an architect and designer who at the time was close to Achille Bonito Oliva: the homage reveals the artist’s close ties to those who had, for the previous decade in Italy, worked towards a declaration of default of modernist tradition, adopted eclectic strategies, displaced languages in ways that current journalism labels as “postmodern.” Cattelan’s hanging horse is to all effects a “view of Italy” – as are many of the artist’s other works, although lacking the affectionate irony of indignation characteristic of the genre in the ‘60s and ‘70s3 -, but we would not be far off the mark if we considered Novecento an allegory of a diminution perceived and developed on in anthropological terms, the cultural trauma of an Italian artist (with Catholic and peasant sub-cultures) hurled onto the global scene. The inferiority complex of the provincial migrant is transferred onto fairy-tale heroes of childhood and adolescence, heroes of the Domestic Small World, home-grown, backyard deities - roosters, donkeys, horses, and later Popes - and invalidates them (“betrays” them, as Bonito Oliva says) in ways that are sometimes funny and corrosive, and other times pathetic, exploring and even savoring their minority downfall.4

fig. 13. Maurizio Cattelan, La nona ora, 1999, © The Artist

 The awareness of a specificity that is perhaps not merely autobiographical but social and geographical acutely and progressively pervades Cattelan’s works, and as it has intensified, so has the appreciation and enthusiasm of increasingly global audiences, from Milan to London to New York: the encounter/clash between cultures - city/country, province/metropolis, South/North, Latin world/Anglo-Saxon world, poverty/capital - has dramatic moments that are remedied by a tightrope-walking balance between self-pity and irony (for the most part without bringing the mainstream model into question).

Horses and horsemen5

Considered a comment on and metaphor of the effervescent international contemporary art scene, approached in terms of “avant-garde”6 and often introduced and discussed in contrast with Richard Serra’s installations using live animals, the twelve horses Jannis Kounellis brought to pasture at L’Attico gallery in January 1969 actually tell a different story: they amplify a conversation among artists and painters that was held in Rome, the privileged interlocutors of which were an artist, Mario Schifano, and an art historian, Maurizio Calvesi, author of perhaps the most influential volume of Futurist studies published in Italy in the second half of the 20^th century, Le due avanguardie.7 Attracted from the beginning of the decade by street signs and fragments of figurative vernacular (as much in the tradition of Boccionian and Lacerbian Futurism as based on Jasper Johns’ example), Kounellis the painter was in search of local narrations, breaks with or regionalistic dislocations of Johns’ formalism. From the second half of the 1960s, he experimented with the technique of installation, multiplying naturalistic references, varying on themes of Eden and of journeys, displaying live animals. In comparison with Pino Pascali, an elective reference to the days of his youth, he draws less frequently on Mediterranean mythical-geographical repertoires, but certainly in the installations immediately prior to Cavalli the sea, flowers, birdsong and the Matisse-like birdcages make up the emotive repertoire of a painter of Mediterranean light and classicalness, albeit in a non-exclusive, fragmented way. Cavalli pays homage to an illustrious national tradition that runs from the early Renaissance to the Futurists Boccioni and Carrà, to De Chirico between the wars and Lucio Fontana’s figurative ceramics: the grand composition with horses and horsemen, the battle scene, the classical-archaic seascape with wild colts.

fig. 14. Lucio Fontana, Battaglia, 1947, painted ceramics, © Fondazione Fontana, Milan

The image chosen and authorized by the artist to document his installation in the press is always the same one, characterized by a central perspective and balanced composition:8 an image that appears to reflect the predilections of a painter of the classical school. At the same time, witnesses to the event - which the artist repeated several times thereafter - never fail to report very vivid memories of it: the irritability of the animals, the sense of danger due to the excessive proximity between animals and people, the all-too-penetrating odor of manure, straw and horses. The installation deals with elements of excess, instability, overkill; it goes along with the accumulations and foreshadows the compressions or conflagrations that would soon consolidate the artist’s activity in terms of political performance and prophecy. It is precisely in this sense that the reference to the horse Boccioni painted in the center of Città che sale gains strength: elusive about its own meaning, the great demonic stallion is an allegory of forces unleashed by the modern city, the intermingling of capitalist industry and new social subjects, and constitutes Boccioni’s in extremis attempt to translate contemporary society into myth, playing on the classical repertoire, de-structuring the equestrian monument. “The poet,” Filippo Tomaso Marinetti wrote in 1909 in Fondazione e Manifesto delfuturismo, introducing the archetypical modernist image of the Italian artist, charismatic and thaumaturgic,9 "must give of himself with ardor, splendor and generosity in order to arouse the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements… There is no beauty except in struggle. No work of art without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece. Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack against unknown forces, meant to bring them down and make them prostrate themselves before man.”

Oxygen, oxygen!

The spring of 1969 saw the opening of large group shows at the Kunstmuseum in Bern (When Attitudes become Form, curator Harald Szeeeman) and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (Op losse Scroeven, curators Wim Beeren and Edy de Wilde), which introduced the contemporary art audience to the conceptual, poverist and Anti-Form generation: Kounellis showed on both occasions. In December 1968, the exhibition 9 at Leo Castelli took place in New York. Then there was the summer exhibition Prospekt ‘69 in Düsseldorf. While the context encouraged a rapid internationalization of orientations and languages, I would nonetheless assert that Cavalli refers to an Italian scene, and it doesn’t matter if it was clearly inspired by Serra’s installation with live animals. As Calvesi saw it in Le due avanguardie, there was a living artist who re-activated the Futurist tradition, ingeniously interweaving it with the New Dada and Pop sensibility of the time, going back to interpret an Italian specificity (if not an artistic first) in a time of raging polemics over the international success of American art: Mario Schifano. “The painting communicates freely with life, interferes in its flow,” Calvesi wrote in his 1966 introduction to Le due avanguardie. “All of this brings painting to the brink of dissolution… At the same time, painting receives new oxygen from it”.10 Having a close rapport with the Roman artists and gallery owners of reference, the critic knew the contemporary situation well. A few months from the exhibition Fuoco, immagine, acqua, terra, which he curated at the L’Attico gallery in Rome, he knew that the experience of the early avant-gardes could not be repeated, as the contexts and social roles had changed. “What fundamentally differentiated the second [avant-garde] from the first is the fact of having a multi-form and in some cases already exhaustive experience of the first; hence the goal of provocation, of surprise, of scandal or of polemic against the presumed established aims of traditional art is or should be absent”.11 But there remains the primary aspiration, the “life”, to cling to, beyond and against “ideological programs or pure-visibilistic yearnings”.12 It is here that Schifano’s work takes on its greatest relevance: in renouncing that part of American Pop that is “fetishistic and provocative, brashly quantitative… the aspect that is most external and, logically, most subject to wear and tear,” and getting in touch with “forms as pure phenomena,” allowing them to manifest themselves in a spontaneous way; in other words, in re-proposing the theme of joie de vivre. And it is also here that Kounellis’ Cavalli met the Roman art scene’s expectations of a European, Italian, Latin response to Pop “provocation,” to the resurgence of interest in “reality”: on the level of “Oxygen, oxygen”, invoked by Schifano in the paintings of a famous series begun in 1965, mentioned by Calvesi in the passage cited above. Schifano had begun painting the series Ossigeno, ossigeno moving away from the modernist formalism of the series of monochromes, concentrating on landscapes (often Italian) approached in a selective and fragmented way, introducing a paradoxical pleinarisme in a New Dada key, professing an interest in the World, narration and natural elements blatantly in contrast with the demands of the international market and the expectations of Ileana Sonnabend, who had for some time wanted to open a gallery in Rome.13

fig. 15. Mario Schifano, Ossigeno, ossigeno, 1965, enamel on canvas © Studio Marconi, Milan

With regard to Schifano, Calvesi speaks of an art of “reportage,” and the definition, although reductive if considered in a documentaristic sense, somehow fits if one thinks in terms of the travel diary, the author’s story, emotion.14 It is important to note that the Ossigeno, ossigeno series was a prelude to the only slightly later Futurismo rivisitato, - which Schifano began working on in 1967 - ready to reintroduce the Italian early-20^th-century avant-garde in a post-Pop key, at the level of existential involvement, of “inebriated” youth, of the rejection of “programs and ideologies”.

fig. 16. Mario Schifano, Futurismo rivisitato, 1967, enamel on canvas © Studio Marconi, Milan

“The foray into the poetics of ‘suspension’ or more generally of so-called disengagement,” Calvesi concluded, indirectly commenting Schifano’s and Pascali’s work or even the less-well-known work of Kounellis, “was in substance the only realistic and productive solution to the [informal] crisis”15.

• 1. On the theme of Italian post-war identity see Nicholas Cullinan, Made in Italy. Fatto a mano, fatto a macchina, già fatto, rifatto, in Gabriele Guercio and Anna Mattirolo (eds), Il confine evanescente. Arte italiana 1960-2010, Electa Mondadori | Maxxi, Milan 2010, pp. 225-257. On the modes and strategies adepte by Cattelan concurrently with his increasing success in the Anglo-American context see Michele Dantini, “Italics” di Francesco Bonami a Palazzo Grassi, in: L'Indice dei libri del mese, 2009, 4, p. 37.
• 2. For anecdotes on arte povera and “Trotskyism” see also Mario Merz in Mirella Bandini, 1972. Arte povera a Torino, Umberto Allemandi, Torino|Londra|Venezia 2002, p. 54.
• 3. On this theme see Michele Dantini, Isole, rotoli, promenades. Temi geografici e di viaggio e "vedute" nell'arte italiana contemporanea, 1959-1971, in Danilo Eccher (ed.), Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin (GAM), New catalogue of the collections. vol. 1, Turin 2010 (publication in progress).
• 4. On the provincial yet simultaneously internationalist characteristics of Cattelan’s work see also Francesco Bonami and Luca Mastrantonio, L’irrazionalpopolare. Da Bocelli ai Suv, Einaudi 2008, p. 72.
• 5. On exchanges and links between Futurists and the Expressionists of the Blaue Reiter, see Michele Dantini, Tournée. Per un saggio sulla fortuna dei futuristi in Germania 1912-1914, in: Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore, Quaderni 1-2, 1996, pp. 449-460.
• 6. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, Phaidon, London 1999, pp. 33, 109; Robert Lumley, Spaces of Arte Povera, in From Zero to Infinity, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London | Walker Art Center, Minneapolis | The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles | Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D. C., 2001-2003, Cantz, Ostfildern 2001, p. 49.
• 7. Maurizio Calvesi, Le due avanguardie, Laterza, Bari 1991 (first edition Le due avanguardie, Lerici, Milan 1966).
• 8. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, op. cit., p. 109.
• 9. See Alighiero Boetti in Mirella Bandini, 1972. Arte povera a Torino, op. cit., p. 30: “In this work [of dates] the difference between an Italian artistic concept, as I and others might have, and that of On Kawara, for example, who also uses dates, is clear…On Kawara has made it something very precise, rigid; for a year he did one painting, one structure; while I have more the idea of the energy that a date can give.” Incidentally, it should be said that the Italian artist Marinetti referred to, with his heroic and prophesying traits, is the antagonist of the technician and the functionary Argan examined in 1963, at the time of the Verucchio Conference on programmed art: the renewal of interest in early-20th-century avant-gardes in the ‘60s generation reflected the growing annoyance with what Calvesi called “programs” and “ideologies”.
• 10. Maurizio Calvesi, Le due avanguardie, op. cit., p. 37.
• 11. ibid., pp. 24-5
• 12. The polemic against Giulio Carlo Argan is a certainly no less important subtext of Le due avanguardie. The author’s firmness is surprising considering that at the time he was actually considered the heir to Argan, although he had been a pupil of Lionello Venturi. “This is why I declared myself in favor of a criticism that follows art, that vigilantly awaits its developments in order to grasp them with all possible speed and timeliness, but with no intention, on any level, of shaping them.” (p. 41). On Argan and American Pop Art from a cold-war cultural perspective see Michele Dantini, Ytalya subjecta». Narrazioni identitarie e critica d’arte 1937-2009, in Gabriele Guercio and Anna Mattirolo (eds.), Il confine evanescente. Arte italiana 1960-2010, op. cit., pp. 272-81 and ff.
• 13. Ex-wife of Leo Castelli, Sonnabend asked Schifano to continue producing monochromes. But the artist preferred to paint “landscapes” and other motifs and to disengage himself from the collaborative relationship. On this episode, the implications of which go well beyond the anecdotal level, see Manuela Gandini, Ileana Sonnabend, Castelvecchi, Rome 2008, pp. 135-9.
• 14. Maurizio Calvesi, Le due avanguardie, op. cit., p. 37
• 15. ibid., p. 25