*There's curatorese, and then there's Italian curatorese. And then there's Italian curatorese translated into English, and this DOMUS article has really got that stuff going on. I don't think I've ever seen a better example of this kind of eerie semantics.
*I confess to rather liking Arte Povera, because it's so transgressive and hippiefied, and it's made of such abject, cheap materials. When you come across Arte Povera and it works, it's like "Hey, check out that cool Italian dropout making a cruel, sarcastic intervention using nothing but plaster and worn-out shoestrings" – but you'd never guess that by reading this translated article. The critical language here is so top-end and woozy that these stoner artists sound like they had bones made of spun glass.
http://www.domusweb.it/architecture/article.cfm?id=277898&lingua=_eng
(...)
"Carla Lonzi, a regular contributor to Marcatré, pioneered a new form of art criticism in Italy. Instead of the lofty Crocean historicising mode and attendant academic baronies, Lonzi sought to understand work through extended discussions with contemporary artists. Her method of interview was dialogic in the Bakhtinian sense.
"Her purpose to find words, often the artist’s words, which explored a work’s poetics. Her belief in art as a fundamental human activity was total.
"For Celant, Lonzi’s represented an approach that gave absolute priority to artists and their projects while making the critic an indispensable interlocutor. A survey of Celant’s numerous monographs and catalogue essays reveals the key role assigned to what artists have to say about their practice, while as exhibition curator he has consistently sought to give them maximum freedom in the selection, installation and display of work.
"Germano Celant organised a number of group shows under the title Arte Povera – at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa (1967), at the Galleria De’ Foscherari in Bologna (1968), at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna in Turin (1970) – and the three-day event “Arte Povera+Azioni Povere at Amalfi” (1968) in collaboration with Marcello Rumma. He published essays formulating and re-formulating the idea of “arte povera” in tandem with the shows, as well in Flash Art where his “Arte Povera. Appunti per una guerriglia” (Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War) acted as a kind of manifesto to which a range of artists put their names.
"Now they are familiar figures, but many were then exhibiting for the first time. The main nucleus was based in Turin, a city undergoing a cultural renaissance..."
