Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art 1351187937, 9781351187930

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
List of Plates
1 Introduction
2 Extramural Exhibitions: Volterra ‘73 and Ambiente come Sociale
3 Redeployment of Sculpture in the City: Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli
4 Riappropriazione Dell’Ambiente: Ugo La Pietra’s and Franco Summa’s Urban Interventions
5 Vox Populi: Franco Vaccari’s and Maurizio Nannucci’s Audience Engagement
6 Conclusion: The Legacy of Arte Ambientale
Index

Citation preview

Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art

Working in 1970s Italy, a group of artists—namely Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari—sought new spaces to create and exhibit art. Looking beyond the gallery, they generated sculptural, conceptual, and participatory interventions called Arte Ambientale (Environmental Art), situated in the city streets. Their experiments emerged at a time of cultural crisis, when fierce domestic terrorism aggravated an already fragile political situation. To confront the malaise, these artists embraced a position of artistic autonomy and social critique, democratically connecting with the city’s inhabitants through direct art practices. Martina Tanga is an independent art historian and curator.

Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies

This series is our home for innovative research in the fields of art and visual studies. It includes monographs and targeted edited collections that provide new insights into visual culture and art practice, theory, and research. Geneses of Postmodern Art Technology as Iconology Paul Crowther Art, Cybernetics and Pedagogy in Post-War Britain Kate Sloan Film and Modern American Art The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting Katherine Manthorne Play and the Artist’s Creative Process The Work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi Elly Thomas Film and Modern American Art The Dialogue between Cinema and Painting Katherine Manthorne Bridging Communities through Socially Engaged Art Edited by Alice Wexler and Vida Sabbaghi Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critiques Robert Mangold, David Novros, and Jo Baer in the 1960s Matthew L. Levy Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art Martina Tanga For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/RoutledgeAdvances-in-Art-and-Visual-Studies/book-series/RAVS

Arte Ambientale, Urban Space, and Participatory Art

Martina Tanga

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Martina Tanga to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Tanga, Martina, author. Title: Arte ambientale, urban space, and participatory art / Martina Tanga. Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge advances in art and visual studies Identifiers: LCCN 2019002508 | ISBN 9780815393733 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781351187954 (ebook : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Site-specific art—Italy. | Interactive art—Italy. Classification: LCC NX456.5.S57 T36 2019 | DDC 709.05/014—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019002508 ISBN: 978-0-815-39373-3 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-18795-4 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

I would like to dedicate this book to Arturo Tanga and Beatrice Annaratone, who were young and beautiful during the 1970s in Italy, before I knew them as my parents, and to my husband, Jonathan, and my two daughters, Olivia and Isabel.

Contents

Acknowledgments List of Figures List of Plates

viii x xiv

1

Introduction

2

Extramural Exhibitions: Volterra ‘73 and Ambiente come Sociale

24

Redeployment of Sculpture in the City: Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli

63

3

4

5

6

1

Riappropriazione Dell’Ambiente: Ugo La Pietra’s and Franco Summa’s Urban Interventions

106

Vox Populi: Franco Vaccari’s and Maurizio Nannucci’s Audience Engagement

142

Conclusion: The Legacy of Arte Ambientale

181

Index

201

Acknowledgments

This book owes a great deal to the insight provided by the living artists and curators who were active in Italy in the 1970s. My most sincere thanks go to these individuals, as they generously lent their time to talk to me and invite me to their studios and archives. In particular, I would like to recognize the artists Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari. For those who unfortunately passed away, I would still like to show my appreciation: to Luisa Somaini, daughter and scholar of the Francesco Somaini archive, and to Simona Santini, manager of the Mauro Staccioli archive. The curators Luciano Caramel and Enrico Crispolti, too, made themselves available to me so that I could better understand the art of the decade. In many ways, Crispolti is as much a protagonist of Arte Ambientale as the artists. His passing as I was in the final stages of editing this manuscript was heartbreaking, as he would not see the completion of this project after having given me so much. This study—first as a dissertation and now as a book—would not have been possible without the support of numerous organizations and individuals. Grants from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences allowed me to conduct research in Italy. While I was there, many people shared with me their vast knowledge: I am grateful to Marcella Beccaria, Marco Buselli, Mario Diacono, Francesco Poli, Maria Theresa Roberto, and especially Stefano Chiodi for guidance during the research stage of my project. Back home, the American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship allowed me to write. Through different stages of this manuscript, I was fortunate to receive feedback and share ideas with patient and enlightened colleagues. At Boston University, I had the incredible moral and intellectual support from the members of the Art History Dissertation Writing Group, encouraging me during the early stages of this project. Once I decided to turn this manuscript in for publication, other trusted scholars unwaveringly championed this brave endeavor. In particular, I would like to name Alexis Boylan, for her continued enthusiasm and feedback, and Sam Adams, who read various chapters and organized opportunities for me to share my work with academics in the Boston area. Likewise, Silvia Bottinelli, Paola Capasso, and Margaret and Elliot Entis deserve my gratitude. Additionally, Kim Sichel has always believed in me and my work. Last but not least, my doctoral advisor, Gregory Williams, has been a constant source of generous encouragement, first when I was his student and later when I became his peer and friend. He has continually pushed me to become a better scholar, teacher, and writer. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my family in Italy and the United States, who has always expressed interest in my progress and confidence in my abilities. I extend

Acknowledgments

ix

the most heartfelt thanks to my sisters—Silvia and Anna Matilde—for their love. My daughters Olivia and Isabel gave me lighthearted moments that put all this into perspective. Above all, I am indebted to my husband, Jonathan, who has sustained me throughout this experience in ways that I cannot adequately put into words. His incisive commentary and sharp editorial skills have been indispensable to this project, but more importantly, so have his patience, kindness, and love.

Figures

1.1

Ugo La Pietra, Segnali di fuoco, 1970, car tires, fire, performance, Zafferana, Italy. 1.2 Maurizio Nannucci, 15 verdi naturali, 1974, color documentary photographs. Published in Progettare Inpiù no. 5/6 (1974): 14–15. 1.3 Ugo La Pietra, Viaggio sul reno, 1974, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 2.1 David Smith Installation, exhibition Sculture nella città, fifth edition of the Festival dei due Mondi exhibition (June 21–July 22), Spoleto, Italy, 1962, curated by Giovanni Carandente. 2.2 Gianni Pettena, Come mai quasi tutti hanno scelto la piazza? Performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 2.3 Ugo La Pietra, Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un altra? Wood, plastic, performance piece, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 2.4 Grazia Varisco, Dilatazione Spazio Temporale di un Percorso, cardboard boxes, performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 2.5 Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy, 1936. 2.6 Valentina Berardinone, Anti-Monumento, wood, paint, performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 2.7 Alik Cavaliere, Bancarella dall’alabastro, performance, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 2.8 Fabio De Sanctis, Untitled, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 2.9 Mauro Staccioli, Intervento sul Piano di Castello, 1973, concrete, 280 × 200 × 200 cm. Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy 1973. 2.10 Franco Mazzucchelli, Gonfiabili, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 2.11 Francesco Somaini, Sfinge di Manhattan: proposta per la costruzione di un centro spettacolo e di studi audiovisivi, 1974, fotomontaggio 80 × 80 cm, Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 2.12 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, December 1974–January 1975, concrete and iron, 240 × 400 × 400 cm, Piazzetta della galleria Manzoni, Liberia Einaudi, Studio Sant Andrea. Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976.

3 9 10

29 31

33

34 35 35 40 40 43 44

49

50

Figures 2.13 Ugo La Pietra, I gradi di libertà, ricupero e reinvenzione, 1975, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 2.14 Franco Summa, Una bianca striscia di carta, 1973, Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 3.1 Mauro Staccioli, Muro, 1978, iron, plaster, and concrete, 800 × 800 × 120 cm, Exhibition Natura come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1978. 3.2 Francesco Somaini, Morte a Venezia, 1978, cube scaffold with large photomontages, 500 × 500 × 500 cm, Exhibition Natura come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1978. 3.3 Francesco Somaini, La caduta del uomo (Fall of Man), 1969, bronze with silver deposits, 91 × 26 × 28 cm. 3.4 Francesco Somaini, Spine verdi, 1972, ink on paper, 25 × 28 cm. 3.5 Francesco Somaini, ROSA (Rapporto Organico SculturaArchitettura), 1973, photomontage, 250 × 500 cm. 3.6 Francesco Somaini, Farfalla della solitudine: scultura-legamento tra due grandi edifice commerciali, 1974, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. 3.7 Francesco Somaini, Carnificazione di un’architettura: Martiro II. Grande edificio per servizi pubblici costituente imagine antropomorfica emergente, 1975–1976, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. 3.8 Francesco Somaini, clockwise: Torri: i simboli minacciosi del potere non cambiano, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; La città e le acque: il canale come simbolo del territorio e della sua necessaria interrelazione con l’urbano, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; La viabilità come mito e come minaccia: un ipotetico ponte stradale valica il Palazzo dei Gonzaga, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; Il gelso: la civiltà contadina abbia il suo monumento, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. 3.9 Francesco Somaini, Il Grande gelso: la civiltà contadina abbia il suo monumento, large photomontage, 1977, 600 × 500 cm, Piazza Sordello, Mantova. 3.10 Francesco Somaini, Morte a Venezia, cube scaffold with four large photomontages, 500 × 500 × 500 cm, XXXIX Biennale di Venezia, Giardini di Castello, 1978. 3.11 Mauro Staccioli, Situazione-Ambiente: Progetto, maquette, 1971–1972, lacquered wood, 25 × 63 × 63 cm. 3.12 Mauro Staccioli, Anticarro (Anti-tank) and Condizione Barriera (Barrier), Galleria Toninelli in Milan, 1972. 3.13 Mauro Staccioli, Barriera, 1972, iron, 200 × 90 × 90 cm, nine elements Piazza dei Priori, Volterra. 3.14 Mauro Staccioli, Untitled (Lancia), 1972, concrete and iron, 460 × 85 × 85 cm, Porta dell’arco, Volterra. 3.15 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, 1973, concrete and iron, 200 × 180 cm, Studio Sant’ Andrea Milano; Performance with the students of the Liceo Artistico di Brera. 3.16 Mauro Staccioli, Condizione città 1973, iron, concrete with two steel cones, 220 × 240 cm, Piazza della Steccata, Parma.

xi

51 52 64

65 72 74 76 76

78

80

81

83 87 89 91 92

94 95

xii

Figures

3.17 Mauro Staccioli, Condizione città, 1974, iron, concrete, and steel, 220 × 240 cm each, Piazza Solferino, Turin. 4.1 Ugo La Pietra, Periferia di Milano, durante la ricerca sui “Gradi di Libertà,” c. 1970, documentary photograph. 4.2 Ugo La Pietra, Il Commutatore, 1970, performance, ink on paper. 4.3 Ugo La Pietra, Gli itinerari preferenziali, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper. 4.4 Ugo La Pietra, Gli itinerari preferenziali, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper. 4.5 Ugo La Pietra, Recupero e reinvenzione, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 4.6 Ugo La Pietra, Verso il centro, 1972, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 4.7 Ugo La Pietra, La conquista dello spazio 1971, photomontage and ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 4.8 Ugo La Pietra, Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività, 1979, dresser, chains, stakes, documentary photograph. 4.9 Ugo La Pietra, Abitare la Città, 1979, performance. 4.10 Franco Summa, Per Incontrarsi, 1973, acrylic paint on wall. 4.11 Franco Summa, Appropriazione e Recupero 1973, documentary photographs, sound installation. 5.1 Unattributed Photographer, Vogliamo parlare, 1977, photograph. 5.2 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973, documentary photograph. 5.3 Franco Vaccari, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, installation photograph, Venice Biennale, 1972. 5.4 Franco Vaccari, Atest, 1968, Artist Book. 5.5 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time no. 1: “Maschere” 1969, performance. 5.6 Franco Vaccari, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, 1972, photo strip detail, Passport. 5.7 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973, documentary photographs. 5.8 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time 1973, Artist Book, detail. 5.9 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time 1973, Artist Book, detail. 5.10 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time 1973, Artist Book, detail. 5.11 Maurizio Nannucci, Scrivere sull’acqua, 1973, performance. 5.12 Maurizio Nannucci, Mèla, Summer 1976, Artist Booklet. 6.1 Francesco Somaini, Stele spaccata sul tema della vita e della morte, 1986, marble, 450 × 180 × 90 cm, Tuoro sul Trasimene, Perugia, Italy. 6.2 Ugo La Pietra, Interno/Esterno 1979, installation photograph. 6.3 Franco Summa, La città della memoria, 1986, Artist Book. 6.4 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in real time no. 20 “Ambiente grigio multiuso” (Grey Multipurpose Environment, Box for Probing Near and Distant Space), 1987, multimedia installation. 6.5 Maurizio Nannucci, Alfabetofonetico, 1967, neon tube light mounted on wall. 6.6 Vittorio Corsini, Romanza, 1990, bronze railing and oak in public garden, Pontassieve, Tuscany. 6.7 Vittorio Corsini, Le Parole Scaldano, 2004 glass, stainless steel, water, lights, words from people in public square, Quarrata, Pistoia.

96 107 113 114 115 118 120 121 122 124 128 130 143 144 147 148 149 152 155 156 157 158 162 168 185 186 188

190 192 195 196

Figures 6.8

Alberto Garutti, Piccolo Museion—In questa piccola stanza saranno esposte opere del Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Bolzano per far sì che i cittadini di questo quartiere le possano vedere, 2001, Quartiere Don Bosco, Bolzano, concrete, glass, lights, and electrical outlets, 320 × 440 × 440 cm.

xiii

197

Plates

1 Franco Vaccari, Viaggio sul Reno, 1974, color photograph and text. 2 Franco Summa, 24 magliette: sentirsi un Arcobaleno adosso, 1975, T-shirts, documentary photographs. 3 Ugo Nespolo, Untitled (Piramide), 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 4 Maurizio Nannucci, Schermature: Intervento sull’illuminazione cittadina, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 5 Francesco Somaini, Monumento ai Marinai d’Italia (Monument to the Sailors of Italy), 1965–1967, bronze, 6.5 × 3.5 × 4 m, Milan. 6 Francesco Somaini, Ingresso per un centro commerciale, 1970, ink on paper, 51 × 73 cm. 7 Franco Summa, Farsi un quadro, 1970, performance, wood, acrylic paint. 8 Franco Summa, Histoire d’O, 1976, acrylic paint on wall, Pescara, Italy. 9 Franco Summa, Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via, 1975, acrylic paint on the granite stairs. 10 Franco Summa, NO, 1974, performance, spray paint, canvas, 400 × 400 cm. 11 Maurizio Nannucci, Parole/mots/word/wörter, 1976, performance, Florence, Italy. 12 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in real time no. 5: “Private Space in Public Space,” 1973, installation photograph. 13 Maurizio Nannucci, Poema idroitinerante, 1966, mixed media. 14 Mauro Staccioli, Celle Sculpture, 1982, concrete, 110 × 110 × 2000 cm, Fattoria di Celle, Pistoia, Italy. 15 Franco Summa, Paesaggio per un anno, 1986, pastel on paper. 16 Maurizio Nannucci, More Than Meets the Eye, 1987, neon tube lights mounted on wall.

1

Introduction

From the north of Italy, artists came, as called, to deliver a response to the socioeconomic downturn afflicting the small Sicilian town of Zafferana. It was September 1970, and they must have felt the summer heat abating and seen the long afternoon shadows retracting across the baroque façade of Santa Maria della Provvidenza, the town’s main church along Via Giuseppe Garibaldi. Energized by the hint of a fresh sea breeze, artists were eager to engage with the inhabitants of Zafferana and to see how they might channel their creative impulses into positive outcomes for this dispirited town. A small village at the confluence of lava streams from Etna’s eastern craters, Zafferana was suffering from a decrease in population and agricultural productivity.1 Southern Italy had always lagged behind Italy’s productive north, but the conditions of disparity, poverty, and economic stagnation had become particularly acute since the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s.2 The town’s inhabitants had historically shown impressive resilience, rebuilding their houses many times after being damaged and even destroyed by the nearby volcano’s violent eruptions. The problems afflicting the town now, however, were different; it was not just about restacking the bricks and mortar but rebuilding the fabric of society. In the face of recent socioeconomic hardship, the municipal administration decided to try something new, an exhibition and a conference titled Interventi nella città e sul paesaggio (Interventions in the City and Landscape), organized by Florentine curator Lara-Vinca Masini and Roman architect, theorist, and historian Paolo Portoghesi. Architects and contemporary artists from across the country were invited to dialogue with the people and spaces of the city as a lived environment and to tackle its socioeconomic realities.3 Among others, artists Getulio Alviani and Ugo La Pietra came from Milan, Maurizio Nannucci from Florence, and Franco Vaccari from Modena.4 Upon arrival, Vaccari recalled that he felt overwhelmed by the deterioration of the city and was motivated to address it through his participation in the exhibition.5 These four artists were interested in the exhibition’s objectives, to engage with the urban environment and its socioeconomic condition. Though they might not have known it at the time, this concern was going to preoccupy them for much of the 1970s and beyond.6 Alviani and La Pietra knew each other, as both came from Italy’s industrial capital, while it is unclear whether they had a preexisting connection with Nannucci or Vaccari; certainly, they had never worked all together. Only La Pietra, of the four, had made artwork prior to 1970 that could be described as an intervention in the urban landscape: a temporary, ephemeral art project sited within the city and meant to engage the public.7

2

Introduction

The exhibition was to follow a typical arrangement, a juried selection of the artwork with a prize given out to the best submission.8 Arriving in Zafferana, La Pietra, Nannucci, Vaccari, and Alviani suspected that the local judges had rigged the prize selection, endorsing local artists for political reasons.9 They also realized, much to their chagrin, that the organizers were marshaling a pleasant and uncritical exhibition intended to boost the local economy and tourist industry rather than address the city’s sociopolitical concerns.10 Feeling betrayed, the four artists rejected these pretenses, as they believed that contemporary architectural or artistic work needed to engage with the real experience of the environment.11 Impulsively, La Pietra, Nannucci, Vaccari, and Alviani decided to protest the exhibition and created their first collaborative urban intervention. Segnali di fuoco (Fire Signals) [Figure 1.1] featured ten car tires—five on each side—arranged along a pedestrian crossing in the city’s main square, Piazza Umberto I Belvedere, which the artists set on fire. From the documentary photographs, we see that dozens of passersby stopped to watch the conflagration and the billowing, dark smoke. Lighting tires in the manner of street protests, with their indelible images of blazing automobiles and shattered glass, the artists signaled an explicit rejection of the political and social situation in which they were invited to work.12 Moreover, associations with the volcano Etna, and the constant feeling of impending danger, must have also resonated with the artists and spectators. Certainly, the work had the air—and smell—of dissension. Using fire and smoke, the artists also evoked an ancient means of visual communication used over long distances, smoke signals, to alert people to danger. In effect, they were ringing the alarm for both the corruption of the exhibition and the venality endemic in the town’s administration, which was at the root of Zafferana’s socioeconomic problems. Ironically, even though this work existed outside the realm of the exhibition, it came closest to the original design of the show: art that engaged with the city and its inhabitants. Establishing a complex, often polemical dialogue with the city and its inhabitants, Segnali di fuoco was an early example of Arte Ambientale (Environmental art). Artists and critics alike started to use the term during the 1970s to define the expansion of aesthetic practices out of museums and galleries and into streets and piazzas.13 This type of site-specific art engaged with the urban environment as a space of social relations.14 Art historian, curator, and critic Enrico Crispolti defined “Arte Ambientale [as] part of an urban context, where there are people, where you have an architectural context. It [was] active in that it hoped to change the space in which it [was] situated.”15 Moreover, the art was intimately tied to its urban site, to its diversity, anthropological patrimony, social actuality, and political contingency.16 Crispolti was one of the leading curators to organize Arte Ambientale exhibitions in Italy’s urban landscape, and his 1976 Venice Biennale exhibition, called Ambiente come Sociale (Environment as Social), solidified the term’s prevalence as he presented urban projects that sought to connect with the experience of the city. Arte Ambientale artists developed an entirely novel way of working both in relation to each other and their subject matter, the city. A number of terms—both art historical and from the sociopolitical context—help bring definition to this practice. Arte Ambientale was closely tied to its sister-term arte nel sociale (art in the social sphere), which not only connoted art being made in the urban space, outside the traditional parameters of the gallery, but also stressed a social and interactive component.17 The term means art made “inside” the social context. Artworks were designed so that audiences

Figure 1.1 Ugo La Pietra, Segnali di fuoco, 1970, car tires, fire, performance, Zafferana, Italy. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

4

Introduction

could interface with them; the experience of art was fundamentally active.18 This trend reflected not only an alteration in the role of viewers but also that of the artists; they were directly participating in the sociopolitical sphere and looking to insert their work within this context. This participation can be directly connected to the activism pervasive in the social sphere at the time. Likewise, another term was operatore culturale (cultural operator), expanding the definition of the artist’s practice to describe the work of the Arte Ambientale artist as active and functional within the broader sociocultural sphere. Their work, therefore, was not limited to a fine art denotation but rather could include a multidisciplinary approach and incorporate architecture, design, performance, theater, literature, and any manifestation of a humanistic expression. Lastly, the expression rete diffusa (diffused network)—associated with the sociopolitical sphere more than the arts—describes how Arte Ambientale artists, despite their geographical dispersal, were bound by ideas, which at times, like Zafferana, brought them together to collaborate on projects, all the while maintaining their distinct practices. While Arte Ambientale drew on Italy’s specific sociopolitical context, commonalities can be cited with other concurrent art tendencies in Europe and the United States that can be broadly categorized as Land Art and Institutional Critique. Like many Land Art undertakings, Arte Ambientale projects were site-specific: conceived and created for that space. Furthermore, they were also temporary, installed for a limited time only, and now exist predominately in documentary form. Additionally, positioned outside, Arte Ambientale artworks inherently critiqued the spaces of aesthetic display of the art establishment, in both museums and galleries in ways that relate to many Institutional Critique initiatives. However, an important distinction must be made: Arte Ambientale defined art that was placed in dialogue with the urban territorio (territory), specifically.19 Enrico Crispolti noted that while Land Art had a romantic quality, in that it was primarily situated in the vast natural landscape, Arte Ambientale was intricately tied to the city.20 Nevertheless, the development of art in the urban environment was not limited to Italy. On the contrary, artists were creating what can be called Environmental Art during the 1970s in major cities in the West. For instance, American artist Gordon Matta-Clark had been making luminous incisions into dilapidated buildings since the late 1960s, drawing attention to questions of urban renewal and gentrification. Indeed, New York City’s shifting landscape was a fertile ground for such interventions, and artists like Charles Simonds created miniature, impermanent constructions in the nooks of already-existing buildings for what he called “Little People.” As early as 1965, Alan Sonfist began Time Landscape on the corner of Houston and La Guardia Place, where he reclaimed a wasteland lot and planted forest plants indigenous to Manhattan, effectively returning the landscape to a pre-urban space. Meanwhile, Richard Serra’s early-1970s work in the Bronx, To Encircle Base Plate Hexagon, Right Angles Inverted, can also be called Environmental Art. Contemporaneously in Europe, the Collectif d’Art Sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) in Paris explored art’s relationship with society by applying sociological methods—such as interrogative survey activities—to reach ordinary inhabitants and spur introspection about their daily lives. In the United Kingdom, artists like Stephan Willats and Graham Stevens were also working directly in the urban sphere. However, recent scholarship on these initiatives in the 1970s, and the even later 1990s practices, notably the genealogy outlined by art historian Miwon Kwon on site-specific art, charts its emergence from the legacies of Minimalism, specifically an art based in an

Introduction

5

experiential understanding of physical attributes of the site, and Institutional Critique, where site also means a network of sociopolitical references. 21 The development of Arte Ambientale in Italy, however, had a different origin, as Minimalism was not as dominant as Kinetic Art or Op Art in the 1960s. Artists laboring under the umbrella term Arte Programmata (Programmed art), which included groups like Gruppo ENNE, based in Padua, and Gruppo T, based in Milan, sought to break down perceptual schemas; blur the boundaries between art, architecture, and design; and conceive of artworks spatially and phenomenologically.22 Building on this legacy, and others, such as the Bauhaus, Art Informel, and Fluxus, Arte Ambientale artists further expanded the frontiers of site specificity outside the gallery and into the urban environment. Their recasting of this shift as Institutional Critique, like their American contemporaries, was the result of understanding the conditions of production and the function of art within the art economies and art institutional sphere.23 In Italy specifically, the spirit of the 1968 social uprisings, the challenge to authoritarianism, and the prevalence of labor movements, both in action and in theory, cannot be underestimated. Arte Ambientale artists aligned themselves with the percolating countercultural sphere, and they viewed the art establishment—the interconnected system of museums and galleries—as insular and unsympathetic to projects that addressed social concerns. These artists all shared the desire to extricate themselves and function on their terms. They thus can be understood as distinct from the anti-political stance that characterized much of the art world’s mainstream galleries and institutions, as well as the artists that were supported within this sphere, like Luigi Ontani and Gino de Dominicis. Instead, Arte Ambientale artists chose to inhabit a peripheral position that challenged the centralized, market-driven nature of Italy’s museums and gallery structure.24 Their site for operating and intervening, therefore, was the city itself. With this move to the urban environment, Arte Ambientale artists sought to mobilize citizens to make them active participants in the experience, and sometimes creation, of their interventions. In their projects, they aimed for democratic relations, whereby power dynamics became lateral rather than hierarchical. Art historian Claire Bishop’s definition of such practices in the 1990s—where the artist is conceived as a producer of situations, the artwork as an ongoing project, and the audience as a participant or coproducer—can be retroactively applied to Arte Ambientale artists from as early as the 1970s.25 In her book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, she argues that artistic practices engaging in social and participatory collaboration occurred in earlier revolutionary moments, such as in 1917 and 1968. Further, she explicitly examines such instances in the UK, the Community Arts Movement, and the Artists Placement Group, within the context of welfare state democracy. There is a kinship between these British initiatives and Arte Ambientale, and this study of Italian practices adds to the scholarship in this field of socially engaged, participatory art interventions. That said, this book’s scope is to examine Arte Ambientale as an Italian phenomenon with predominate roots in Italian sociocultural history.26 While references are made to environmental and urban artworks outside of Italy to emphasize a particular point, there is ample room for future scholars to develop and forge new connections between Arte Ambientale in Italy and similar artwork made at different geographic locations and temporal moments. In Italy, Arte Ambientale was a concentrated and sustained effort throughout the 1970s. This makes Arte Ambientale unique because the country’s specific sociopolitical conditions, as well as a committed artistic drive, resulted in an extensive manifestation

6

Introduction

of urban art interventions throughout the decade. Its strength, therefore, needs to be understood in terms of larger shifts in the culture of art production at this time, specifically an active engagement with the social and urban conditions of everyday life. In Italy, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s was based primarily on economic, and not social, principles, and while it created new employment opportunities, neither the government nor private industries addressed social needs, such as housing, urban planning, and infrastructure.27 By the 1970s, Italy lagged far behind its European counterparts in welfare programs.28 Artists did not remain disconnected from these inequalities and, feeling a sense of urgency, made work that directly addressed Italy’s social issues. They expanded their practice into nontraditional spaces, such as the factory, the school, and urban neighborhoods, and made work directly on-site that interacted with individuals in these locales.29 Moreover, they involved viewers in the creative process, seeking to raise awareness of these exigent social and political problems. Cultural action, in this sense, involved the acquisition of a consciousness of the self and the organization and experience of everyday life.30 Operating within this context, the curators—Luciano Caramel and Enrico Crispolti—and artists—Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari—discussed in this book were part of a network of aesthetic collaboration and exchange at the margins of the art world. This book is the first historical analysis of Arte Ambientale in English and Italian scholarship. There has been no sustained examination of the broader implications of the work of these artists during the 1970s, nor has there been any rigorous attempt to understand the emergence of such practices within Italy’s unstable socioeconomic climate.31 While there has been ample attention to movements such as the post-minimalist group Arte Povera (1967–1972) and postmodern painterly movement Transavanguardia (1978–1989), Arte Ambientale has languished in relative obscurity. This neglect, on the part of scholars, is partially because the study of Arte Ambientale presented certain challenges. These artists were dispersed geographically and did not consider themselves part of a cohesive movement, yet they all shared common ideas about art interventions in urban space. Moreover, Arte Ambientale lacked the prestige of a commanding curator. Perhaps the closest figure to take on this role was Enrico Crispolti, but he never operated with authority as Germano Celant did for Arte Povera or Achille Bonito Oliva did for Transavanguardia. Instead, Crispolti saw himself as a comrade to Arte Ambientale artists and a facilitator to their projects. Lastly, Arte Ambientale artists self-consciously positioned themselves on the margins of the art institution, which has caused them to fall into relative obscurity, because the history of art tends to primarily reach only so far as the history of those artists who participated in the art establishment.32 This study, in recounting the story of Arte Ambientale artists, expands Italian postwar scholarship beyond traditional art historical sites and sources. It raises broad questions about the nature of cultural production and ideology precisely because these subjects operated at on margins of the arts institutional structure yet were at the core of Italy’s cultural crisis during the 1970s. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it explores the broader realms of cultural production and artists’ relationships to art institutions by connecting Arte Ambientale with broader contemporaneous movements in critical theory, such as the leftist philosophical thought of the Autonomia movement and the work of theorists Jürgen Habermas and Henri Lefebvre. Overall,

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it aims to contextualize Italian artistic production in relation to institutional power dynamics, social history, activism, and political struggle.

Rete Diffusa (Diffused Network) Arte Ambientale did not denote an aesthetic “movement” in the traditional sense. In fact, the 1970s saw the rise of pluralistic art practices as a reaction to the clearly defined, collective or group-based art that had been the dominant working model the decade prior. In the 1960s, utopian ideals had spread in Italy, and across most of the Western world, as workers, students, and artists dreamt of realizing a more just and equal world. Anonymous collectivism provided a compelling counterpoint to capitalist individualism, and the Kinetic Art circles, like Gruppo ENNE, founded in 1959, and Gruppo T, founded in 1960, were cases in point.33 Even the later Arte Povera movement, under the careful stewardship of Celant, which had given artistic form to the liberatory foment of the 1968 movement, no longer seemed to hold relevance in the early part of the new decade. Sociopolitical conditions in the country changed dramatically, especially after the December 12 bomb explosion of 1969 in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, killing seventeen and wounding more than eighty people. Indeed, the 1970s in Italy were rife with social malaise, wanton domestic terrorism, and economic instability.34 Reacting to both the 1960s’ collective operative mode and an emphatic definition of an art movement with overarching goals and defined members, Arte Ambientale artists shifted their working practice during the 1970s by claiming independent identities. Without either a collective group dynamic or cachet from a prominent critic, a diffuse network, or rete diffusa, accurately describes the dynamic and pragmatic exchange of information between Arte Ambientale artists as they retained their distinctive aesthetic practices.35 This new interrelational configuration accounted for how artists who often worked independently from each other still found common ground in their initiatives to address social issues, like at Zafferana in 1970. Diffused network paradoxically implies scattering as well as gathering: a lattice of separate elements held together by intersecting threads. Connections between the artists were dispersed but at the same time strong enough that they could be understood as allied. Relationships and power dynamics were lateral rather than hierarchical, putting into action democratic ideals. Instances that brought artists together were temporary and provisional, reflecting the fluid nature of the bonds between them. Furthermore, this diffused network proliferated across disciplines to include architecture and design as well. Extending outward both physically—from the center of the city into the peripheries—and metaphorically—from the figure of the traditional artists to the social activist—this network formed a sprawling web of interconnectedness. These relationships, both to each other and to their audiences, clearly differentiate Arte Ambientale artists from both the 1960s’ collectives and other artists of the 1970s, such as Arte Povera artists or those whose careers were championed by the institutional system where individuality and a prominent studio practice remained central. Collaborations between Arte Ambientale artists abounded, revealing the vitality and breadth of this diffused network. As so many urban interventions were temporary and site-specific, artist-operated magazines and journals were instrumental in circulating these projects.36 La Pietra, for example, published two magazines: IN: argomenti e

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immagini di design (Theories and Images of Design), which began in 1971 and lasted until 1973, and Progettare Inpiù (More Design), which ran for another two years, from 1973 to 1975.37 IN was a bimonthly magazine in which La Pietra consolidated national and international experiments of radical architecture and design.38 He used the latter publications as a tool for research and artistic experimentation. Specifically, he was interested in a psychosociological investigation of how ordinary people experienced the world around them, the objects they used and the city they inhabited.39 In both these publications, La Pietra brought together other artists’ socially engaged, alternative cultural experiments and strengthened the threads of Arte Ambientale’s diffused artist network. Maurizio Nannucci featured one of his projects, 15 verdi naturali (Fifteen Natural Greens), in Progettare Inpiù, publishing black-and-white photographs of his conceptual piece alongside an explanatory text [Figure 1.2].40 This extract was part of a larger work that he created in 1973 called Sessanta verdi naturali (Sixty Natural Greens). Operating like a nineteenth-century naturalist, Nannucci photographically documented the different naturally occurring shades of foliage he encountered during a walk—or passeggiata, so central to Italian urban life—through Milan’s city center. He began at the Duomo and proceeded to Via Dante, Foro Buonaparte (close to Parco Sempione), then Corso Venezia, which is situated at the edge of the Giardini Pubblici Idro Montanelli, and on to Via Borgogna and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, forming a meandering loop through the city and its peripheries. For Progettare Inpiù, Nannucci selected just fifteen examples, organizing the different gradations of green in a tidy grid and naming each plant species: verde galium mollugo, verde erigeron ramosus, verde lupsia galactites, and so on. By collecting the array of tints, Nannucci investigated the semiotics of color in the urban environment, commenting on the variety—or lack thereof—of greenery in the city. Additionally, this “natural” sequence of green contrasted with the synthetic and industrial chromatic scales produced by Milan’s industrial manufacturers. By setting up this dichotomy, Nannucci was making a point of the primacy of naturally occurring colors over their synthetic counterparts. This project was both a performance of sorts and a conceptual documentary piece, and a version of it was disseminated in La Pietra’s journal. Ultimately, publications like Progettare Inpiù were fundamental for Arte Ambientale artists, enabling them to circulate and exhibit their work while circumventing conventional channels. The network of collaboration during the 1970s was vast and frayed at the edges, and at times, these instances could be provisional. For example, during the mid 1970s, La Pietra and Vaccari became members of another art and architecture group called Global Tools, based in Florence. This association took an anti-technological and antimodern position; its members were interested in reviving traditional construction techniques of joinery, carpentry, leather, pottery, weaving, and spinning.41 Their objective was to stimulate the free development of individual creativity through a return to a physical engagement with crafts. This ensemble was made up of a number of individuals and groups from different backgrounds: Archizoom Associati, Remo Buti, Picoardo Daliti, Ugo La Pietra, Passegna, Ettore Sottsass Jr, Superstudio, UFO, and Ziggurat. As members of Global Tools, La Pietra and Vaccari formed a focus group called Gruppo Comunicazione (Communication Group) in 1973. Their work looked to the possibility of unmediated communication between individuals. Expanding on Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “the medium is the message,” they strove to deconstruct modes of dialogue.42 They wanted to eliminate technological mediation—the

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Figure 1.2 Maurizio Nannucci, 15 verdi naturali, 1974, color documentary photographs. Published in Progettare Inpiù no. 5/6 (1974): 14–15. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

deforming “filter” that distorts and disorients reality—and turned to in-person actions to communicate as directly as possible. In 1974, Vaccari and La Pietra realized this idea of an unmediated communicative experience in the project titled Viaggio sul Reno (Voyage on the Rhine River). Joined by Gianni Pettena, from the radical architecture group Superstudio, and designer Guido Arra, they took a French cruise boat and traveled from Düsseldorf to Basel. Purposefully searching for the candor to be found in the mundane, they chose this voyage for what they considered to be its banality.43 Its ordinariness was thought to reduce external stimuli and make them more aware of themselves and their surroundings. Vaccari vividly recounted that the “light fixtures were always on, even in full daylight, but only in the evening do they seem illuminated.”44 Both Vaccari and La Pietra created independent work from this shared expedition by using photographs and documentation of their experiences. Vaccari captured colored photographs of details from the trip [Plate 1]. One shot centers on a dingy yellow deck of the ship where an uninviting swimming pool reflects the drab sky. Pairing these images with text, Vaccari mused over the Chinese saying, “the river is always the same even if the water never is.” The artist realized that the saying, in this case, could

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be inverted, as the pool water on the boat remained the same while the surrounding scenery was in constant flux. All of Vaccari’s images from this experiment are devoid of people but rich in nostalgia. The resulting coolness perhaps reflects the artist’s disappointment of actualizing unmediated communication. Meanwhile, La Pietra’s project, also titled Viaggio sul Reno and dated 1974, comprised of a large photo collage documenting the four artists’ conversations sitting at a table with consecutive views of the riverbank backlighting them [Figure 1.3]. Interestingly, in the lower section of the collage are notes from their conversation, which frame a diagram of the Rhine river, and to the far right, one of Vaccari’s photographs is pasted in at an angle as if it were inserted into a travel photobook journal. Collaboration here extends not only to the experience but also to the creation of the artwork that resulted from it. La Pietra also collaborated with Summa, and in 1975, he took part in Summa’s project titled 24 magliette: sentirsi un arcobaleno adosso (24 T-shirts: To Feel a Rainbow on Oneself) [Plate 2]. In addition to La Pietra, the participants included the critics Crispolti, Pierre Restany, and Tommaso Trini; artists Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gordon

Figure 1.3 Ugo La Pietra, Viaggio sul reno, 1974, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

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Matta-Clark, and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini; and designers Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini.45 The intent was to create a wearable artwork that would move in the city between private and public spheres. The T-shirts were horizontally striped in Summa’s signature color combination, placing warm colors—symbols of materiality— at the bottom and cold colors—symbols of spirituality—at the top. The rainbow effect was meant to stimulate creative possibilities; individuals would dress in this vibrant attire and trace colorful routes on their mundane itineraries.46 To initiate this project and mark the giving of each T-shirt, Summa photographed each participant wearing the rainbow-striped top. While all these examples show strong commonalities between Arte Ambientale artists, drawing them together throughout the decade to collaborate, they each also maintained their independent identities, carrying forward singular and particular interests as well as working methods. And yet, these instances of cooperation legitimize Arte Ambientale as an artistic trend in 1970s Italy and provide evidence for the richness and diversity of their diffused artists’ network.

Participation in the Urban Environment The historical specificity of this diffused network can be linked to precise sociocultural conditions at the time. During this decade, Italy fully awoke to widespread activism that had begun to gain momentum during the 1960s. The general loss of faith in the government gave rise to alternative forms of active participation in public affairs and renewed notions of civic engagement. Many citizens were angry that the country’s social welfare system had not provided them with enough assistance, and they channeled their criticism toward public administration, political parties, and the tecnostrutture (economic and social decision-making structures).47 An important strain was the workerist movement, called the fabbrica diffusa (diffused factory), that expanded outside the workers’ struggle in the factory and into social spheres of cultural production.48 Activist and social theorists like Antonio Negri defined this new politicized, social citizen as the “social worker.” This urban subject comprised not only of industrial workers but also of youths, students, and the under- and unemployed.49 They advocated for a better quality of life, the appropriation of decision-making domains, and the centrality of self-determination. We can draw clear parallels between the artists’ networks and the dissemination of workerist ideas into the broader social landscape of Italy’s 1970s counterculture. Activism dispersed within the fabric of the city and took the form of community centers that addressed broad social issues such as neighborhood infrastructures, healthcare, transportation, and schooling.50 For instance, in the community of Sesto San Giovanni in Milan, inhabitants advocated for self-management to organize neighborhood nursery schools and services. This was one of many such initiatives that emphasized autogestione (self-management) as grassroots activists augmented their concerns to include all aspects of everyday life and better living conditions for the masses. Although their causes were highly fractured and often defined by local circumstances, these activists found common ground in their shared resistance to institutional authority and interest in democracy at a time when the Italian government was foundering. Artists also shifted their aesthetic practice to reflect a deeper concern for social issues and a focus on democracy. They changed their means of production and interaction, finding innovative working methods as well as searching for alternative

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Introduction

modes of dissemination and exhibition. The nonconformist attitude seeping into questions of everyday life inspired artists to search for broader pathways of communication and bottom-up initiatives. Artists’ and civic activists’ embrace of social forms of value defined by alternative, democratic notions of power paralleled those espoused by Autonomia, a heterogeneous movement of theoreticians and militants. Growing out of a workerist tradition that placed the laborer at the center of class struggle, Autonomia was united only in its autonomy from the state, official political parties, trade unions, and any form of political, social, or cultural mediation between what they saw as the interests of the capitalist system and the movement’s adherents.51 Its leading figures—including Franco Berardi (Bifo), Augusto Illuminati, Antonio Negri, Oreste Scalzone, and Franco Piperno—dissented from orthodox Marxism to constitute a political philosophy defined by self-determination in everyday life, which was directed to the needs, desires, and subjectivity of working-class individuals.52 Indeed, Autonomia was not a claim of autonomy from but rather a radical claim of autonomy for; it consisted of workers’ refusal to work and their forging a source of power alternative to the one established and maintained by capitalism.53 Throughout the 1970s, Negri specifically reformulated the relationship between workers and capitalist development in ways that are instructive to understanding the art attitudes of Arte Ambientale.54 In essays like “Worker’s Party Against Work” (1973) and “Towards a Critique of the Material Constitution” (1977), he developed two significant concepts: “refusal to work” and “self-valorization.” The first indicates the workers’ rejection of wage labor to terminate their dependence on the capitalist system and its ability to define them. According to the orthodox Marxian notion of the proletarian left, workers must sell their labor for less than its actual worth, thus reducing the worker to a subservient subject. Instead, Negri proposed that workers take back their labor capacity so that the haute bourgeoisie can no longer make a profit by passively owning their labor. Refusal to work within the system meant that workers would not submit their labor to capitalist modes of exploitation. Negri preached refusal to work and the immediate appropriation of productive wealth by the expropriated. This stance finds parallels in Arte Ambientale artists’ autonomy from the art establishment’s system of promotion and profiteering. Each artist chose varying distances from gallery and museum institutions to safeguard their aesthetic urban interventions. Negri’s second concept, self-valorization, calls for defining one’s subjectivity in one’s own terms as a corrective to exploitation in the factory. Recognizing their innate ability to conceptualize, produce, and organize their own forms of struggle, Negri called on the masses to reject the values imposed on them by capitalist commandment.55 By refusing capitalist mediations of productive and reproductive relations, workers could engage in liberated labor, which would lead to a process of self-emancipation.56 This self-emancipation, at least as Negri viewed it, was at its roots a process of selfexpression and a means of seizing agency over the formation of one’s identity. Thus, Negri advocated a conscious embrace of a self-determined position, circumventing traditional modes of political representation. Taken together, refusal to work and selfvalorization formed a complete renunciation of the capitalist systems of worth and, in its place, conjured a new subjective identity. Likewise, this concept of self-valorization also finds prominence in Arte Ambientale artists’ attitudes in that they defined their work by alternative, democratic notions of worth. Their aesthetic activities were

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positioned outside the enclosed art establishment and engaged in the social context. They sought creative actions that were politically driven to have an impact beyond aesthetic considerations. In so doing, they found value outside the measures of the art establishment and in the impact that they had on ordinary citizens. One of the significant concentrations of this grassroots activism was in the urban environment. Activists and artists, as well as sociologists and academics from other disciplines, took the city as their subject during the 1970s because of the dysfunctional and exploitative way many Italian urban centers had undergone radical changes since 1945. In conjunction with the country’s precipitous industrialization, certain cities swelled to accommodate new sites for manufacturing and huge migratory influxes to fuel the country’s industrial output, but they lacked urban infrastructure and the technical tools to handle rapid real estate development and industrial construction.57 Thus, Italy’s rapid industrialization and modernization led to a disjointed urban reorganization. Gentrification of the city center fueled the housing market, and land speculation enriched the upper-middle classes while impoverishing the lower and working classes. The peripheries around major cities became vast expanses of concrete tower blocks known as quartiere-dormitorio (sleeping neighborhoods), bedroom communities for the working class: a place for inhabitants to reside, not live. Much of these developments were private investments, and the housing market since the 1950s in Italy was completely independent of social needs.58 The separate housing block layout, these districts lacked basic infrastructure such as post offices, schools, shops, and even transportation to the city center, resulting in a pervasive sense of isolation and alienation. By the 1970s, it was clear that there was a deficiency in providing the necessary social housing and urban structures.59 While the government-funded infrastructures, such as INA-Casa (Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni),60 which later turned into IACP and GESCAL, did provide efficient and low-cost housing for the working class after the war, by the 1960s, they were renowned for their corruption and clientelism; they had a policy of giving monetary and fiscal credit to private owners and therefore of incentivizing building speculation.61 Abuse and corruption were at the root of the chaotic processes of urban development, which had a profound effect on the way inhabitants experienced the city.62 Moreover, the lack of a properly functioning welfare system meant that the quality of life in the city, especially for the underprivileged, became increasingly arduous. These changes affected everyone’s experience of the city, including traffic patterns, pollution, and noise; access to green spaces and collective services; a widespread feeling of insecurity.63 Yet many discontented inhabitants were empowered to make changes, extending what had been their struggle in the factory to their local communities, resulting in social movements to reclaim the city. Urban sociology was a nascent field in the country, and writers such as Gianni Alasia, Francesco di Ciacca, Giuliano Della Pergola, and Nella Ginatempo looked to the city with new interest by examining emerging societal conflicts. These authors critically analyzed the social consequences of the building industry, the ravages of land speculation, the role of the government in relation to urban land use, and the extraordinary expansion of northern cities at the expense of the rural south.64 They strove to understand the city as a living organism.65 Informed by Marxism, they drew direct links between the structural organization of urban space and the capitalist division of labor. The urban crisis they saw consisted in what they regarded as the inhabitability of the city and how that directly impacted inhabitants’ quality of life. Socialist Aldo

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Aniasi argued that Italian cities had become unlivable and that their enormous growth made them no longer alla misura dell’uomo (to human scale).66 Artists also responded to the city by living with the same problems identified by these sociologists, choosing to operate within the urban fabric to raise awareness of these issues. They integrated effects of the territorio, the urban economy and geography, and the diritto amministrativo (administrative rights) and urban planning in their work, intervening on-site to address these socioeconomic concerns.67

Operatore Culturale Working within this broader sociocultural sphere and addressing political and social issues, Arte Ambientale artists began to call themselves operatori culturali (cultural operators), instead of artisti (artists), denoting a reformulation of the scope of their work. Rather than laboring in an isolated studio, these individuals felt strongly about practicing within the social and cultural sphere. Crispolti outlined, in his 1977 book Arti visive e partecipazione sociali (Visual Arts and Social Participation), how the designation “artist” was limited to traditional preconceptions of artistic practice tied to medium-specific painting and sculpture. Unfettered by conventional mediums, the artist’s new role was to go beyond traditional confines and think about the work of art as action.68 While Crispolti was an important theorist of this term, he was not the first to use it; rather, it was the artists themselves who sought new terms for self-definition. As early as 1971, Enzo Mari rejected the designation “artist,” as he considered it reactionary, preferring “expert in visual communication”69 La Pietra also chose a different designation, describing himself as an operatore estetico (Aesthetic operator) already in 1972.70 The cultural operator’s practice was dialogical. Artists no longer unilaterally transferred their specific ideas or aesthetic vision to their viewers, but worked together with the public by soliciting varying modes of participation that formed the basis of the artwork. Crispolti thought that the cultural operator’s role was to increase public awareness of their cultural heritage, thus activating their political consciousness.71 This extended the cultural operator’s work to new spaces, what Crispolti termed social territory.72 This sphere included all aspects of the social fabric, going beyond the topographical definition to include neighborhoods, schools, and factories. Crispolti’s original formulation of the artist’s function in the broader social field was in keeping with the Left’s cultural agenda. The term “cultural operator” derived from leftist literature, and it had been used to define the role of an intellectual who performed a cultural function within society. Debates about the role of the intellectual in society were especially pronounced throughout the 1970s.73 In post-1968 Italy, the prominent intellectual’s attitude was one of sacrifice for the workers. Indeed, historian Robert Lumley has described how these public figures wanted to abolish the idea of themselves as an elite caste and become honorary members of the working class, which they sought to serve in a bid for legitimacy.74 With the ultimate goal of working-class hegemony, the term “cultural operator” was rooted in a tradition of enlightenment and acculturation of the working class.75 Thus, while intellectuals were descending from their isolated ivory tower, Crispolti’s ambition for the cultural operators was that they would play a vital role in connecting people with the realm of avant-garde art.

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Further elaborating on the cultural operator’s modus operandi in bridging the gap between artists and audience, as well as accounting for the variety of styles and methods that Arte Ambientale artists used, Crispolti reconceived artists’ use of medium—traditionally determined as painting or sculpture—and media—modes of aesthetic communication—in a 1978 publication titled Extra media: esperienze attuali di comunicazione estetica (Extra Media: Current Experiences in Aesthetic Communication).76 By combining and re-elaborating these two terms, Crispolti identified a different practice that prioritized media over medium. Seen in historical terms, this approach overthrew the notion of the artist as creator—typical of the Romantic and bourgeois conceptions of the artist—in favor of extended plural relationships articulated on multiple levels. In this way, artists were going beyond the confines of objectbound traditional mediums and embracing a flexible practice that was determined by various modes of communication. Crispolti described this as a “progressive use of different media chosen for the individual project, according to the needs of expression without the fetishization of the medium itself. The presupposition is the freedom of . . . choosing a behavior that is adapted to the relationship the individual has to the social.”77 Thus, both the medium and media became contingent and circumstantial, allowing for artistic interventions to be critically effective according to each cultural and social context. Crispolti made explicit that this new operative mode, based on an artistic need for adaptability, was in stark opposition to the type of artwork favored and promoted by market forces.78 Galleries preferred artists to be consistent in their approach to enable a more effective monetization of their output. By embracing this higher degree of flexibility and openness, however, artists were able to evade these commoditizing forces and retain a critical position vis-à-vis their aesthetic agency. But this also came at a cost and meant that artists choosing to operate in this manner made a conscious decision to work on the fringes of the art economy. They did not necessarily make work to advance their careers or even make a living: each of them funded their art practices in different ways—for example, La Pietra worked as a for-profit designer, and Summa was a teacher at the Liceo Artistico in Pescara. It did make one thing clear: their aesthetic projects during the 1970s were intrinsically motivated. This placed Arte Ambientale artists’ work within the broader counterculture sphere that sought self-definition. Embracing this new position of artistic freedom, Crispolti also made the point that the artists’ identity was neither fixed nor absolute. No longer defined by either medium or marketability, artists could now form their professional identity through their socially conscious interventions.79 They extended and amplified their work to form relationships between themselves and their audience, offering them a renewed awareness of reality. This operative mode was unique to Arte Ambientale, which in turn was particular to the aesthetic and social conditions of 1970s Italy. Defying convention, Arte Ambientale artists embraced complete flexibility for the opportunity to have the greatest possible impact. Their motivation to effect change was also inextricably linked to the social circumstances of the decade, specifically to the rise and peak of Italy’s postwar urban social movement. The importance of this drive for change affected values and behaviors, with its demands for a different and better quality of life, the appropriation of decision-making domains, and the centrality of self-determination.80 Their goal was not to completely overhaul the status quo but to make tangible differences in

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people’s lives, where even micro changes could be counted as victories. The decade’s unique circumstances enabled artists to carve out new pathways for expression and experimentation, often making radical choices and ideological commitments in their aesthetic practice.

Chapters As a point of departure, Chapter 2, “Extramural Exhibitions,” provides an overview of Arte Ambientale’s exhibition history and features three shows that took place in decentralized locations that marked a decisive shift in artistic and curatorial attitudes: curator and critic Luciano Caramel’s Campo Urbano, which took place in Como in 1969, and curator and art historian Enrico Crispolti’s Volterra ’73, which occurred in Volterra in 1973, and his Ambiente come Sociale, which occupied the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1976. These exhibits are important entry points to understand the widespread and diverse nature of Arte Ambientale. Expanding beyond the confines of the “white cube” of commercial galleries, these open-air exhibitions reconceptualized art’s commodity status and created a space for direct impact on the town’s inhabitants and society at large. More specifically, the artists considered art through radical participatory interventions that embraced the public in those spaces where everyday life unfolded. Campo Urbano, situated temporally on the cusp of the 1970s, included artists that had already come to the fore in the 1960s, such as Gianni Colombo and Paolo Scheggi, as well as then-prominent Arte Povera figures such as Luciano Fabro and Giulio Paolini. However, it also saw the emergence of artists such as La Pietra, whose art intentionally interacted with the urban space. For Campo Urbano, he showed Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra (So: I Cover One Street and Open Another) [Figure 2.3] where he circumvented the commercial street and created a new passage for the public. In contrast to Campo Urbano, Volterra ’73 showcased only Arte Ambientale artists, dispensing with the established names of the Arte Povera group. The thirty-two artists who participated, including Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, and Nannucci, reconsidered the city in its local and historical contexts. Some explored local traditions, such as the alabaster craft, while others engaged with the town’s rich medieval past. In all, the city was brought to life through the active participation of local inhabitants. In contrast to these exhibitions situated in remote towns, Arte Ambientale received central prominence at the 37th Venice Biennale held in 1976. Crispolti’s Ambiente come Sociale offered artists who had decided to work on the art world’s margins an opportunity to explore their social art practices from within the institution’s center. Crispolti included many of the artists who had participated in Volterra ’73 just a few years before, such as Fabio De Sanctis, Nino Giammarco, Somaini, as well as others such as Riccardo Dalisi, Gruppo Salerno 1975, La Pietra, Summa, and Giuliano Mauri. The remaining chapters of this book focus on specific artists whose practices and careers illuminate the reach and importance of Arte Ambientale throughout the 1970s. These artists—La Pietra, Nannucci, Somaini, Staccioli, Summa, and Vaccari— not only participated in the exhibitions described above but also developed a practice of interventions outside of the exhibition circuit, primarily in the cities and towns where they were based. Moreover, while many artists created one-off, site-specific Arte Ambientale artworks—like Gianni Pettena, who produced just a couple of such

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interventions—these artists were dedicated to the practice and consistently created Arte Ambientale projects throughout the decade.81 To structure the narrative, artists have been paired thematically to reflect the different technical approaches of Arte Ambientale: sculptural, architectural and designed based, and participatory. While there are elements of all three in most Arte Ambientale work and artists during this experimental decade sought to transcend medium specificity, this differentiation teases out productive comparisons between the artists and their output. Chapter 3, “Redeployment of Sculpture in the City,” frames Somaini and Staccioli’s implementation of sculptural forms—paradoxically a traditional medium—within Arte Ambientale. It was inspired by Somaini’s 1973 publication Urgenze nella Città in which he attributed a social and urban function to sculpture: one where the artist’s work is integrated into the realities of the community. Somaini tasked the sculptor with making art that reversed the alienation that resulted from impoverished urban architecture by creating evocative three-dimensional forms. With similar intentions for the redeployment of sculpture, both Somaini and Staccioli explored urban spatial conditions through radically different approaches: Somaini’s forms are soft and fluid, while Staccioli’s work is geometric and hard. For example, Somaini’s photomontages from the mid decade, such as Farfalla della solitudine (Butterfly of Isolation) (1974) [Figure 3.6], explored the integration of his anthropomorphic sculptures, such as Caduta dell’uomo (1967–1969), into the rigid, angular skyscraper forms to heighten the contradiction and disjuncture between the organic and the modern metropolis. In contrast, Staccioli installed temporary yet colossal concrete disks—titled Ruote (Wheels)—with sharp, pointed spikes protruding from their sides in Piazza della Steccata in Parma in 1973 [Figure 3.16]. Central to the discussion of the significance of sculpture in urban space is the discourse of urban renewal and the atmosphere of violence that pervaded the decade and unfolded in the city streets. Chapter 4, “Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente” (Reappropriation of the Environment), is a focused study of La Pietra and Summa, who shared a primary concern with the inhabitability of urban architecture. Like Somaini and Staccioli, La Pietra and Summa understood the modern Italian city—with its austere buildings and dysfunctional infrastructure—as fundamentally alienating to its inhabitants. Through their work, La Pietra and Summa strove to bring awareness of this issue by blurring the distinctions between inside and outside and finding ways to render the city more fit to inhabit. La Pietra’s oeuvre traversed art, architecture, and design, as he was fascinated with the demarcations between public and private spheres and the opportunities to collapse them. He accomplished this by taking his practice into the city, where he worked as both an observer and an interventionist. For example, in 1979, La Pietra created a series of pieces titled Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività (Reconversion Project, Equipment for the Community), in which he fused urban traffic fittings with house furniture, such as constructing a bed’s headboard and frame from traffic poles and a metal chain. Repurposing urban, public, and ostensibly nondecorative items for private consumption drew attention to the way the city was used rather than inhabited. Summa, too, endeavored to build a relationship between people and their environment. In Per incontrarsi (In Order to Meet) [Figure 4.10], made in 1973 with the assistance of his students from the Liceo Artistico in Pescara, he painted on the bridge of the Ponte Risorgimento a sequence of black and blue legs in apparent motion. Summa described the image as a ritual procession, a chance for viewers to have a simulated experience of watching the daily passeggiata.

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Chapter 5, “Vox Populi,” examines the work of two artists, Nannucci and Vaccari, interested in constructing a space where the public’s presence could be manifested both vocally and visually. Nannucci carried out one of his best-known projects, Parole/mots/word/wörter, in 1976, in which he interviewed passersby in the streets of Florence, asking them to utter the first word that came to mind. He transformed the interviews into an installation comprising of slide projections and a sound recording: each pedestrian thus became an integral part of the work, and the word sequence sounded much like a lexicon for the decade, such as “ciao,” “home,” “bread,” “crisis,” and “tension.” Vaccari, a conceptual photographer working with installations and a variety of different media, transcended the public and private spheres by often involving audience activity. Throughout the 1970s, he worked on the series Esposizione in tempo reale (Exhibition in Real Time), stemming from his best-known piece, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, which premiered at the Venice Biennale of 1972. In this work, he installed an automatic photo booth in a corner of an otherwise empty exhibition room. He invited the audience to take a strip of pictures of themselves and affix it to the wall. More than six thousand people participated by having their pictures taken. Thus, both Nannucci and Vaccari were interested in giving Italian citizens a form of representation and a visible identity. The study of Arte Ambientale is particularly relevant today as questions of urban gentrification, the commodification of public space and everyday life and threats to participatory democracy become ever-more exigent. More than half a century later, in Italy and other contexts, democracy continues to be at stake. However, despite the pertinence of these artistic experiments, many have slipped into the dark recesses of our cultural amnesia. Indeed, their diminishment began as early as the 1980s. In a 1979 survey of Italian cultural production in the wake of the 1968 cultural revolution, sociologist Luigi Manconi characterized the period as the “dark years,” in which nothing of lasting cultural significance was produced.82 He maintained that while there was some creative activity in the fields of music, theater, poetry, and publishing, most work was of little consequence. In this book, I challenge Manconi’s assertion and, in the pages that follow, recount how with inventive and unshrinking courage Arte Ambientale artists, committed to democratic values, delved deep into Italy’s social injustices and remained dedicated to improving the lives of ordinary citizens.

Notes 1. Ugo La Pietra, “Arte e Città Zafferana,” L’uomo e l’arte no. 1 (1971): 30. 2. What is referred to as the Italian economic miracle is the period of strong economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the country went from a largely rural to an industrialized economy. This shift, in such a short period of time, affected all aspects of life in Italy, not only economic but also cultural, social, and religious. See, for example, Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003) and Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History (New York: Routledge, 2016). 3. Lara Vinca Masini, “Interventi sulla città e sul paesaggio,” NAC no. 2 (November 1970): 10. 4. The architects included Mario Galvagni, Aldo Rossi, Maurizio Sacripanti, and Vergilio Vercelloni, and the artists included Getulio Alviani, Marina Apollonio, Lanfranco Baldi, Mario Bassi, Sara Campesan, Ugo La Pietra, Marcello Morandini, Paolo Masi, Germano Olivotto, Luciano Ori, Vittorio Tolu, Franco Vaccari, and Gianfranco Zen.

Introduction

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5. Carla Lonzi, “La critica e potere,” NAC no. 3 (December 1970): 8–9. 6. Alviani is an Italian painter born in Udine. He is considered to be an important international Op and Kinetic artist. 7. For example, Ugo La Pietra participated in the 1969 exhibition in Como, Italy, called “Campo Urbano” with a temporary urban intervention titled Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra (So: I Cover One Street and I Make a New One), where he created a makeshift passageway along one of Como’s busiest retail streets. This artwork is discussed in Chapter 2. 8. The exhibition Interventi nella città e sul paesaggio was organized in conjunction with the fourth edition of the literary Brancati Prize, instituted in 1967 in memory of the writer Vitaliano Brancati. However, even the jurying of the prize was steeped in political controversy, which gives context to the heightened tension of the art exhibition. See Alessandra Acocella, “Ceneri Calde, Zafferana Etnea 1970,” in Avanguadia diffusa. Luoghi di sperimentazione artistica in Italia, 1967–1970 (Macerata: Quidlibet Srl, 2016), 193–204. 9. Maurizio Nannucci, telephone interview with the author, July 2, 2012, Rome, Italy. 10. Lara-Vinca Masini, Franco Vaccari, and Vittoriano Viganò, “Critici + artisti + architetti,” NAC no. 3 (December 1970): 8–9. 11. Pietra, “Arte e Città Zafferana,” 30–31. 12. Ugo La Pietra, interview with the author, June 20, 2012, Milan, Italy. 13. Luciano Caramel, “Towards the Seventies (Beyond the Sixties),” in Arte in Italia negli anni ’70: verso i settanta (1968–1970), ed. Luciano Caramel, Elena Di Raddo, and Ada Lombardi (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1996), 25. This has also been the subject of a 2007 doctoral dissertation: Greta Gattazzo, Arte nel Sociale’: un caso di critica militante negli anni Settanta (PhD diss., Università degli studi di Padova, 2007). The notion of integrating the art object with the environment in 1970s Italy can be related to earlier twentiethcentury manifestations, such as artist and architect Frederick Kiesler’s notion of “Correalism,” which considers the “environment as equally as important as the object, if not more so, because the object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment no matter in what space, close or wide apart, open air or indoors.” On this, see Frederick J. Kiesler, “Second Manifesto of Correalism,” Art International 9, no. 2 (March 1965): 16. 14. Alessandra Pioselli, “Arte, politica e territorio: esperienze nella Milano degli anni settanta,” in Milano città d’arte: arte e società 1950–1970, ed. Paolo Campiglio, Marilisa Di Giovanni, Cristiano G. Sangiuliano, and Alessandra Pioselli (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001), 97. 15. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, August 4, 2011, Rome, Italy. Original Italian: “La land art non e’ attiva, è molto romantica. Cioè, la misura della land art non è la città, ma il deserto. L’Arte Ambientale si inserisce in un contesto urbano, la piazza dove c’è la gente, dove hai un contesto architettonico che voi confrontare. C’è una idea attiva. L’Arte Ambientale tende a modificare lo spazio dove è messa.” 16. Enrico Crispolti, preface to Praticare la città: Arte Ambientale, prospettive di ricerca e metodologie d’intervento, Massimo Bignardi and Enrico Crispolti (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2013), xiii. 17. Anty Pansera and Maurizio Vitta, Guida all’arte contemporanea (Casale Monferrato, AL: Marietti, 1986), 192–194. 18. Particularly relevant to this theme was the journal L’uomo e l’arte, and the first edition was dedicated to the subject “arte e società” (Art and Society), which addressed issues such as art’s relationship to institutions, art’s elitism, and the need to connect art to a broader public. See Elena Di Raddo, “In/Out: Riflessioni critiche sulla fuoriuscita dell’arte dell’arte,” in Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017), 11. 19. Adachiara Zevi, Peripezie del dopoguerra nell’arte italiana (Torino: Einaudi, 2006), 432. 20. Crispolti, “Preface,” xiii. 21. Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3. 22. Umberto Eco and Bruno Munari, Arte programmata: arte cinetica: opere moltiplicate: opera aperta (Milano: Officina d’arte grafica A. Lucini, 1962).

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23. Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of the Institution,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143; Johnathon Welchman, Institutional Critique and after (JRP/Ringier, 2006). 24. There were many Italian artists working within the gallery structure practicing Institutional Critique through the medium of Installation art that involved the expansion of the art object into l’ambiente (space), such as Jannis Kounellis, especially with his famous Dodici Cavalli (Twelve Horses) exhibition at L’Attico in Rome in 1969. Other artists include Gianni Colombo, Eliseo Mattiacci, Fabio Mauri, Maurizio Mochetti, Giulio Paolini, Luca Patella, and Vettor Pisani. See Lucilla Meloni, “Praticare lo spazio: environment, azioni e ambienti negli anni Settanta,” in Anni Settanta: La rivoluzione nei linguaggi dell’arte, ed. Cristina Casero and Elena Di Raddo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2015), 140–157. 25. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2014), 2. 26. Italian artists, through critical reportage in magazines and journals, were up to date with contemporaneous artistic movements occurring in the West. For instance, both Christo’s La Valley Curtain project and Richard Serra’s installation at Storm King were written up in Data (Dati Internazionali d’Arte): 7/8 (1973): 42–49 and 9 (1973): 68–70, respectively. Other journals that reported on international Land art and Environmental art include, for example, NAC (Notiziario d’Arte Contemporanea). 27. John Earle, Italy in the 1970s (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1975), 6. 28. Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis, Comparative Welfare State Politics: Development, Opportunities, and Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 76. 29. Giuseppe Rescigno and Andrea Manzi, Arte nel Sociale: testimonianze e documenti di comunicazione estetica (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1992), ix. 30. Robert Lumley, “Challenging Tradition: Social Movements, Cultural Change and the Ecology Question,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin Press, 1990), 119. 31. Recent academic and curatorial interest suggests a newfound enthusiasm for the 1970s. Recent exhibitions on the decade generally include Addio anni 70: arte a Milano 1969– 1980 (Farewell 1970s: Art in Milan 1969–1980) held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (May 30–September 2, 2012), curated by Francesco Bonami and Paola Nicolin and Anni ’70: arte a Roma (The 1970s: Art in Rome) on view at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (December 17, 2013–March 2, 2014) curated by Daniela Lancioni. Bonami and Nicolin. Some Arte Ambientale artists have recently been given institutional retrospectives, such as Ugo La Pietra: Progetto disequilibrante at the Milan Triennale (November 26, 2014–February 15, 2015) and Maurizio Nannucci: Where to Start at the MAXXI in Rome (June 26–October 18, 2015), showing growing interest in their work. The first major exhibition to begin to detail Arte Ambientale was Fuori! Arte e spazio urbano 1968–1976, curated by Silvia Bignami and Alessandra Pioselli at the Museo del Novecento, Milan (April 15, 2011–September 4, 2011). The scholar Elena di Raddo published Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017) on artists working outside the institutional sphere in 1970s Italy. It has taken almost half a century for an academic and institutional interest in Arte Ambientale to come about, for political reasons, and the curator Enrico Crispolti was the first to acknowledge this. See Massimo Bignardi and Enrico Crispolti, Praticare la città: Arte Ambientale, prospettive di ricerca e metodologie d’intervento (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2013), xv. 32. Already with the first survey of Italian art in the 1970s, L’arte negli anni settanta, at the Venice Biennale in 1980, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann, Arte Ambientale artists were not presented as part of protagonists of the 1970s. Bonito Oliva promoted his own gallery-associated artists and exhibitions as primary exemplars of 1970s Italian art, particularly the exhibitions he curated, such as Contemporanea in 1973, which was held in the newly built underground parking garage of Villa Borghese. For an analysis of the exhibition L’arte negli anni settanta, see Francesca Zanella, “Esposizione come testo. La rilettura delgi anni Settanta a Venezia nel 1980,” in Anni Settanta: La rivoluzione nei linguaggi dell’arte, ed. Cristina Casero and Elena Di Raddo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2015), 180–197.

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33. The Gruppo T artists were Giovanni Anceschi (1939), Davide Boriani (1936), Gabriele de Vecchi (1938), Gianni Colombo (1937–1993) and Grazia Varisco (1937). The Gruppo N artists were Alberto Biasi (1937), Ennio Chiggio (1938), Toni Costa (1935), Edoardo Landi (1937), and Manfredo Massironi (1937). For an article on Gruppo N’s aesthetic collaboration as an example of artist collective activity during the 1960s, see Jacopo Galimberti, “The N Group and the Operaisti: Art and Class Struggle in the Italian Economic Boom,” Grey Room, no. 49 (2012): 80–101. 34. John Fraser, Italy, Society in Crisis, Society in Transformation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Vittorfranco S. Pisano, The Red Brigades: A Challenge to Italian Democracy (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1980); Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso Books, 1990). 35. I use the term “network” in relation to the historical context of Italy’s counterculture information exchange. My use of the term does not bear associations to Bruno Latour’s actornetwork theory. Instead, sociologist Alberto Melucci defines social group identity in terms of a network of active relationships and stresses the importance of the emotional involvement of activist. See Movimenti di rivolta: teorie e forme dell’azione collettiva (Milano: ETAS Libri, 1976). 36. Alessandro Mendini, “The Role of Radical Magazines,” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976, ed. Alex Coles (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 9 and Gwen Allen’s, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015) are the first extensive studies of the way magazines functions as an alternative exhibition space for conceptual and radical artistic practices during the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural, artists’ magazines operated similarly in Italy and Europe, although extensive examination of this subject has yet to be undertaken. 37. For an initial study of La Pietra’s editorial work, especially tied to the city of Milan, see Bianca Trevisan, “Ugo La Pietra: La guida alternative alla città di Milano,” in Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017), 287–296. 38. For example, IN: argomenti e immagini di design. Volume 2/3 (March/June 1971) featured the British illustrator Jim Burns and the architectural group Archigram; volume 4 (January/ February 1972) highlighted the art of American artist Rudi Stern; and volume 5 (May/June, 1972) detailed the work of the American collective Ant Farm. 39. Ugo La Pietra, Gillo Dorfles, and Vincenzo Accame, Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 1960–2000 (Milano: Mazzotta, 2001), 61. 40. Maurizio Nannucci, “15 verdi naturali,” Progettare Inpiù no. 5/6 (1974): 14–15. 41. Global Tools was established in January 1973, and the group carried out a series of seminars and workshops on the subject of returning to a primordial type of design that was primitive and handmade. Global Tools was informed by a Marxist ideology and criticized the stultifying effects of alienation on humankind’s creative abilities. See Catherine Rossi, “Between the Nomadic and the Impossible: Radical Architecture and the Cavart Group,” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976, ed. Alex Coles, 48. 42. Ugo La Pietra, Abitare la città: ricerche, interventi, progetti nello spazio urbano dal 1962 al 1982 (Firenze: Alinea, 1983), 148. 43. Accompanying text on Ugo La Pietra’s Viaggio sul reno, 1974 photo collage. 44. Franco Vaccari, Vittorio Fagone, Valerio Dehò, Nicoletta Leonardi, and Chiara Scardoni, Esposizioni in tempo reale = Exhibitions in Real Time (Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2007), 92. 45. Summa was relatively well connected with artists in Europe and America. He was friendly with French critic Pierre Restany, who was a dominant voice in the Nouveau Réalism movement in the 1960s, and with Gordon Matta-Clark, who traveled through Italy in the mid 1970s. 46. Franco Summa, interview with the author, June 26, 2012, Pescara, Italy. 47. Angelo Porro, La Partecipazione politica: problemi e prospettive: atti del convegno della Facoltà di scienze politiche, Trieste, 9–10 maggio 1978 (Trieste: CLUET, 1979), 26. 48. La Fabbrica diffusa: Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale (Milano: Collettivo editoriale Librirossi, 1977), n.p. 49. Michael Ryan, “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri and Jim Fleming, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984), xxix.

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50. Pablo Echaurren and Claudia Salaris, Controcultura in Italia 1966 –1977: viaggio nell’underground (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 159. 51. Patrick Gun Cuninghame, Autonomia a Movement of Refusal: Social Movements and Social Conflict in Italy in the 1970’s (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2002), 2. 52. Patrick Cuninghame, “For an Analysis of Autonomia: An Interview with Sergio Bologna,” Left History 7, no. 2 (2000): 89. 53. Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2008), 12. 54. Only a few scholars, such as Jacopo Galimberti, have connected Negri’s 1970s theories with art. See Galimberti, “The N Group and the Operaisti,” 80–101. This essay looks at the influence Negri had on the collective working model that Gruppo ENNE adopted during the 1960s. 55. Timothy Murphy, “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005), x. 56. Antonio Negri, “Towards a Critique of the Material Constitution,” in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005), 199. 57. It is estimated that between 1955 and 1971 some 9,140,000 Italians were involved in interregional migration. See Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 219. 58. Nella Ginatempo, La casa in Italia: abitazioni e crisi del capitale (Milano: Mazzotta, 1975), 73. Original Italian: “La causa sta nella struttura privatistica del bene-casa, nel fatto che esso è stato usato come bene di investimento, rispondente perciò a certi canoni di convenienza e guadagno privato, e non a esigenze sociali.” 59. Umberto Dragone, “Il decentramento urbano: partecipazione, crisi della città, lotta politica,” in Decentramento urbano e democrazia: Milano, Bologna, Roma, Torino, Pavia, ed. Gabriele Baccalini and Umberto Dragone (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975), 18. 60. Amintore Fanfani, Italy’s prime minister (July 1958–January 1959; July 1960–May 1963), founded INA-Casa in 1949 to provide the efficient and fast construction of housing complexes across the country. The institution was to build self-sufficient neighborhoods with communal spaces made familiar through the presence of buildings with high symbolic and identity-forming content, such as the Piazza, church, and school. IACP (L’Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari [The Independent Institute for Social Housing]) and GESCAL (GEStione CAse per i Lavoratori [Management of Houses for the Workers]). 61. Andreina Daolio, Le lotte per la casa in Italia. Milano, Torino, Roma, Napoli (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1974), 23. Additionally, publicly funded construction dropped from 25% of the total construction in 1951 to 6% by 1968 and just 2% in 1973. See Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944–1985, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 98. 62. For example, much of the real estate in Italy’s major cities was in breach of the existing antiquated regulations. Journalist Giorgio Ruffolo reported that by 1970, one in every six homes in Rome was “abusive”—built without legal permit—and approximately 400,000 people were living in houses that did not officially exist. See Giorgio Ruffolo, Riforme e controriforme (Roma: Laterza, 1975), 34. 63. Dragone, “Il decentramento urbano,” 22. 64. Katherine Coit, “Local Action Not Citizen Participation,” in Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, ed. William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 305. 65. Mario Fazio, Il destino dei centri storico (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1977), 9. 66. Aldo Aniasi, “Prefazione,” in Decentramento urbano e democrazia, 15. 67. Guido Martinotti, Metropoli: la nuova morfologia sociale della città (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 61. 68. Enrico Crispolti, Arti visive e partecipazione sociale (Bari: De Donato, 1977), 17. 69. Enzo Mari, “Atti delle assemblee di Reggio Emilia,” insert in NAC no. 6/7 (June–July 1971): 17–18. 70. Ugo La Pietra, “Dal sistema disequilibrante: Strumenti e metodi per la riappropriazione e l’uso della struttura urbana,” IN: argomenti e immagini di design no. 5 (1972): 38–47.

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71. Crispolti, Arti visive e partecipazione sociale, 13. 72. Ibid., 18. 73. Written from an intellectual stance within the PCI, literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa’s essay “La Cultura” legitimized intellectuals as important figures in the sphere of politics and culture. See Alberto Asor Rosa, “La Cultura,” in Storia d’Italia, Vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi 1975). See also Romano Luperini, Gli intellettuali di sinistra e l’ideologia della ricostruzione nel dopoguerra (Rome: Edizioni di Ideologia, 1971) and Romano Luperini, “Nota sulla politica culturale della sinistra e sugli intelletuali marxisti nel dopoguerra,” in Marxismo e intellettuali (Venice: Marsilio, 1974). 74. Lumley, States of Emergency, 131. 75. David Forgacs, “The Italian Communist Party and Culture,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin Press, 1990), 100. 76. Enrico Crispolti’s notion of “extra media” is a precursor to similar artistic practices emerging in the 1990s, such as Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). As interventionist artists, CAE sought to use “tactical media” strategies: “Tactical media is situational, ephemeral and selfterminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular sociopolitical context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.” See Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (New York: Autonomedia, 2001). 77. Enrico Crispolti, Extra Media: Esperienze Attuali di Comunicazione Estetica (Torino: Studio Forma Editrice, 1978), 9. 78. Ibid., 12. 79. Ibid., 13. 80. Piero Ignazi, “Italy in the 1970s between Self-Expression and Organicism,” in Anna Cento Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio, Speaking Out and Silencing (Leeds: Legenda, 2006), 18. 81. Gianni Pettena participated in the Viaggio Sul Reno with Franco Vaccari and Ugo La Pietra in 1974 but did not produce a significant work from this experience. Pettena’s other Arte Ambientale projects are few, although he was part of the conversations. Specifically of interest, he created Vestirsi di Sedie (Wearable Chairs) in 1971, Some Call Him Pig in 1971, Tumbleweeds Catcher in 1972, and Already Seen Portable Landscapes in 1973. 82. Luigi Manconi, Nuovo, difficile: una proposta bibliografica sulla produzione culturale delle ultime generazioni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), 22 cit in Lumley, States of Emergency, 133.

2

Extramural Exhibitions Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale

Enrico Crispolti, the curator who championed Arte Ambientale during the 1970s, was on a train from Rome to Salerno with another young and ambitions curator, Achille Bonito Oliva. Inquisitively, Oliva turned to Crispolti and asked, “Why do you curate these exhibitions in decentralized locations?”1 He was referring to the exhibitions that Crispolti was organizing in provincial towns across Italy, such as Aquila in Abruzzo, Volterra in Tuscany, and Gubbio in Umbria.2 It would seem logical for such an aspiring curator to want to establish himself in the heart of the country’s art centers: Milan, Rome, and Turin. Crispolti, however, purposefully skirted such sites. Hierarchy and bureaucracy tended to condition the art scene in the major cities, and Crispolti believed that he could not accomplish anything new in this environment. Moreover, he was not looking for institutional acceptance for his curatorial experiments. Instead, as he explained to Oliva, he chose these remote venues because he believed that they offered greater curatorial and artistic freedom. This conversation illustrates the dialectic between the centrality and marginality that dominated curatorial and aesthetic practices throughout the decade and why many Arte Ambientale projects took place on the peripheries. In contrast to Crispolti, Oliva dedicated himself, throughout the 1970s, to mounting major institutional art exhibitions. He made his mark with shows like Vitalità del negativo nell’arte Italiana 1960/1970, held at the historic Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome in 1970, and Contemporanea, situated in the unconventional space of the new parking garage underneath Villa Borghese, also in Rome, in 1973. Despite the latter’s unusual site, these two exhibitions were big-budget productions located in the country’s capital, boasting a high-profile list of established national and international contemporary artists. Oliva’s agenda was the advancement of artists’ careers that fit neatly within categories of aesthetic innovation propelled by the art historical institution.3 Unlike Crispolti, he was not as interested in promoting the work of socially and politically critical artists that sought to engage with non–art world concerns. Oliva was one of a few successful mainstream curators in the 1970s, shrewd yet committed to working within the rules of the art establishment.4 Taking a radically different approach, Crispolti circumvented the institutional art system in search of greater curatorial autonomy. In the wake of the anti-establishment sentiments of 1968, curators and artists working in Arte Ambientale viewed official art centers as oppressively hierarchical and controlled by capital interests.5 Moreover, many of the cultural institutions—art museums included—were still embroiled in the top-down administration that had been established by the fascist regime to control cultural production and display.6 Therefore, to organize exhibitions in Italy’s art

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centers meant contending with institutional figures—curators, officials, politicians— each with their own agendas. Instead, from a peripheral position, Crispolti could garner support for his ideas from left-leaning administrators, scout out the most experimental artists, and promote a new exhibition model based on democratic values and cooperation. By disengaging from the institutional sphere, he developed an alternative form of politically committed curatorial activity. His projects were extramural, taking place outside the walls of the art establishment, both literally and figuratively. The dichotomy between the center of the art world and initiatives at its margins was apparent in exhibition practices affecting geography—between cosmopolitan cities and small towns—and installation—between situating artworks inside and outside. In its most subversive form, those practicing Arte Ambientale sought to get far away from conventional exhibition formats and venues by locating art in the very fabric of everyday life. The economic value systems that determined aesthetic significance within galleries had less of an impact in the city streets or piazzas. More importantly, Arte Ambientale artists, presenting work outside of established institutions, could develop an alternative currency free from the capitalist market. The decision to work externally—and by extension within the broader cultural realm—meant that they could engage directly with citizens and make social issues pertinent to their art interventions. Furthermore, their choice of sites—both old, medieval towns and newer urban peripheries—was a self-conscious move to engage with the history and culture of the country, its lived environment both past and present. This chapter charts a brief history of extramural and decentralized exhibitions to give context to two of Crispolti’s exhibitions: Volterra ’73, in the Tuscan city of Volterra in 1973, and Ambiente come Sociale (Environment as Social), in the Italian Pavilion of the 1976 Venice Biennale, both representative of the trends in Arte Ambientale. Looking back to the 1960s, Giovanni Carandente’s 1962 Festival dei due mondi in Spoleto was one of the first attempts to site artworks in a public space. In 1968, Luciano Caramel instigated the anti-institutional show Campo Urbano in Como, whereby he invited artists to make art on-site and to engage the city’s inhabitants. Learning from both these experiments, Crispolti conceived Volterra ’73 as an opportunity for artists not only to make site-specific art but also to actively engage with the city, its urban landscape, its socioeconomic condition, and its inhabitants in a sustained effort that lasted an entire summer. In contrast, at the 1976 Biennale, Crispolti brought social practices into the institutional context by inviting those artists who had disengaged with the art world to make art in the social sphere. Surprisingly, this offered those artists an opportunity to explore their aesthetic practices from within the institution’s center. Many of the artists who had participated in Crispolti’s previous exhibition, Volterra ’73, such as Mauro Staccioli and Francesco Somaini, were included in the Biennale’s Italian National Pavilion, as were others, such as Riccardo Dalisi, Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, Ugo La Pietra, and Franco Summa. And yet, Crispolti’s exhibition was still extramural to some degree in that he exhibited only documentation of urban-sited Arte Ambientale art within the Biennale galleries rather than the actual artworks. The connection to the outside, the city, and the social, therefore, was stronger than ever, even within the context of the institutional exhibition space. Crispolti’s exhibitions, which engaged directly with the urban context and its attendant social issues, need to be understood within the context of the discourses of decentralization and the rise of the regions in Italian politics. This movement called for a

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redistribution of administrative power from a centralized governing system that was hierarchical to one that was dispersed and lateral. By examining the notion of regionalization, the spaces outside the purview of the center come into focus in a new dimension. The term territorio (territory), in this context, becomes important. Physically, it identifies those spaces on the margins—that is, the peripheries and the countryside. Politically, it points to the landscape and the sharp differences between centralized and decentralized power. In the Italian context, sociologist Filippo Barbano noted, this power disparity revealed the ungovernability of the state and the crisis that resulted from its centralization.7 The process of regionalization, and by extension decentralization, proposed a new organization of power that looked for direct relationships in local territories to address social demands and services. Culturally, territorio also prompted a reevaluation of the concept of beni culturali (cultural heritage). Art historian Andrea Emiliani connected the cultural importance of the regions to the expression of democratic participation on questions of cultural production and the conservation of artifacts. 8 Therefore, the drive toward making and exhibiting art on the peripheries was tied to broader questions of culture and arts administration, which was in turn also intertwined with issues of decentralizing power and regionalization. Both exhibitions, Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale, directly engaged with these sociopolitical issues.

Decentralized Exhibition Spaces Since the late 1960s, a myriad of experimental, low-budget shows took place across the country, as there was a tendency to decentralize aesthetic practices to provincial spaces.9 Making a note of this new trend, the director of La Tartaruga gallery Plinio De Martiis said: “L’Op Art is dead, Pop Art is finished, Body Art is tired. Here, this one now is called ‘Provinciart.’”10 While this new term did not catch on, De Martiis did identify the importance of art occurring in regional areas. This centripetal force to decentralize art exhibiting practices was largely because many museums and cultural organizations at the art world’s center found themselves in a state of crisis. Curators like Crispolti, and others, as well as artists, saw them as elitist and antidemocratic. At this time, art institutions around the world were contending with similar charges as artists in both the United States and Europe developed an aesthetic—now historicized as Institutional Critique—that reflected critically on the exhibition and administrative practices of galleries and museums. But in Italy, the system of cultural production and display had remained substantially unaltered since it had been reimagined by Mussolini. All of the country’s art institutions continued to function with a centralized structure that was intricately tied to the government and its administrative organs. By the 1970s, the lack of an independent directive forced Italian cultural institutions and museums, dependent on governmental structures, into a state of inertia.11 They were not in control of their budgets, and they could not easily make acquisitions, organize themselves as research centers, or design their institutional direction. This gravely limited their cultural role.12 For instance, while the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM, Museum of Modern Art in Rome) had made substantial developments in its quest to spearhead Italy’s cultural discourse during the 1970s, its institutional position remained precarious, caught between attempting to implement independent programs and remaining

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subject to larger bureaucratic administrations as a state museum. The director of the GNAM, Palma Bucarelli, reported to the Ministero della Publica Istruzione (the Ministry of Public Education) and depended on its authority for all of its programming and funding. This difficult relationship can be clearly observed in the polemics surrounding the retrospective exhibition held at the GNAM from February 5 to March 7, 1971, showcasing the work of the neo-avant-garde artist Piero Manzoni and curated by Bucarelli. Although Manzoni was famous for his provocative art in the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s, he was already an institutionalized figure and thus a relatively safe choice for an established museum like the GNAM. However, because of the museum’s profile and state sponsorship, the exhibition caused a public scandal, and the museum was denounced and taken to court.13 The result was that the magistrates severely chastised the institution. The debate surrounding the Manzoni exhibition revealed that the GNAM was anything but autonomous and that it was ultimately subject to government oversight. It was precisely these limited conditions that Crispolti was circumventing by choosing to operate in peripheral towns and outside in urban space. In a 1973 interview, Crispolti spoke candidly about the GNAM. He probed the reasons why the museum waited until 1971 to exhibit Manzoni’s scatological piece—eight years after his death—when it chose to celebrate the work of the Arte Povera artist Pino Pascali in 1968, only a few months after his passing.14 Crispolti believed that this exposed the power relationships between the museum and the art market. In other words, the academic sphere had become interested in Manzoni in the 1970s, only after he had sparked the interest of the international market, while Pascali had already been monetized before his death. Crispolti charged that not only was the GNAM under the government’s thumb but it was also subject to the whims of the art market. In the same interview, Crispolti went on to launch an acerbic attack on Italy’s museum structures in general. He claimed that power flowed from the ministries to the museums.15 He accused the GNAM of not operating “openly” but instead exerting its cultural power in paternalistic and antidemocratic means. He went on to assert that the relationship between the GNAM and other institutions, like the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale, was one of domination, which blocked freedom of expression and a democratic mode of cultural production.16 Thus, in both art and politics, the question of decentralization and the regions was more than merely streamlining Italian public policy; it was about firmly breaking with the country’s authoritarian past and implementing a democratic present. The move away from both traditional art spaces and large metropolises can be contextualized in light of the broader sociohistorical discourse of decentralization. The drive toward the periphery in the art world paralleled the impulse to decentralize the nation’s governmental and administrative structures after the fall of fascism, which resulted in the legal regionalization of the country into twenty distinct entities, in 1970.17 This process was part of the effort to democratize the country and give greater decision-making power to regional administrations—who dealt with issues such as municipal boundaries, urban and rural police forces, health and hospital assistance, local museums and libraries, urban planning, the tourism and hotel industry, and regional transportation networks—rather than let them be beholden to the bureaucracy of Rome.18 The Italian Constitution, written in 1948 under the nation’s fledging democracy, had stipulated the division of the country into twenty regional

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areas, conceived as subgovernmental administrative territories. It was a decisive shift from the historically dominant centralization of Italian governmental power that was solidified under Mussolini.19 However, actualization of the regions did not occur until twenty years later. The new law gave regional governments superior legal status, more money, more civil servants, and, most important, directly elected assemblies.20 The question of decentralization was, and had been, a highly controversial issue. Dominant forces from Confindustria (Confederazione Generale dell’Industria Italiana, or the consortium of Italian capitalist industries), for example, favored a centralized government during the years of the economic boom and into the 1960s.21 Historian Carl Levy argued that Italy’s centralized government coalition between the Democrazia Cristiana (DC, Christian Democratic Party) and the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI, Italian Socialist Party) was hostile to the possibility of robust local authorities.22 Italy’s ruling elite and the country’s entrepreneurial forces were happy to continue with the already-established, highly centralized system of Rome-appointed provincial prefects who mediated between governmental and local interests. Meanwhile, progressive forces favoring Italy’s regionalization came mainly from the Left, which were active since the 1950s but growing stronger in the 1960s and 1970s. These individuals believed this legislation could resolve the inefficiencies of the centralized government by instituting effective local social policies. Many on the Left thought that the regions could have the potential of becoming laboratories for a revised governmental system based on direct participation. Additionally, they considered the centralization of the government as a vestigial link to Italy’s recent fascist past.23 Fear of hierarchical power structures was still present in the 1970s as the DC maintained many fascist structures long after the demise of Mussolini’s government.24 Political scientist Douglas Yates has argued that the redistribution of power through decentralization is a criticism of centralized government, and regional exhibitions were undeniably a reaction to the centralized art establishment practices.25 These art initiatives sought an autonomous configuration in an alternative space and put forward a model that aimed to be inherently democratic: in the lateral relationships between artists and curators by foregrounding direct audience participation in the artworks themselves. Making a direct link between provincial exhibition practices and regionalism, Crispolti wrote in his 1977 publication Arti visive e partecipazione sociale (Visual Arts and Social Participation) that Italy’s regionalization constituted a shift in power from centralized authority to decentralized self-managed spaces.26 He argued that democratization is not only the move from the center to the peripheries but also an activation of the base in these peripheries.27 He went on to maintain that decentralization comes about through participation, triggering the local community and involving its members in cultural events. For Crispolti, participation would lead to political empowerment. Decentralization, therefore, was not only a strategy to seize autonomy but also a way of stimulating citizens customarily removed from the art circuit. And yet many provincial towns had a long history of local cultural events connected to an amateur art scene that often took the form of art exhibitions. They were usually organized around a premio, or prize system, and their goal was to promote local arts and crafts. For example, San Benedetto del Tronto’s biennial had promoted local artists until 1969, when the focus of the exhibition shifted to the neo-avantgarde.28 Indeed, these sites were not deserts of culture but vibrant spaces for art making of all different kinds, some of which were also tied to the promotion of the local tourist economy.

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Curators from the center began exploring the possibilities of these sites as early as the 1960s. An important precursor to Volterra ’73 was Giovanni Carandente’s 1962 Festival dei due mondi in Spoleto, which was one of the first exhibitions to bring sculptures into the urban environment. Carandente, then-assistant director of the GNAM, displayed a hundred modern sculptures by prominent international figures such as David Smith and Alexander Calder, as well as Italian artists such as Marino Marini, throughout the streets, piazzas, and courtyards of Spoleto’s historic center. The pretense for this initiative was to bring tourists to Spoleto, but since Carandente knew about modern art, he sought to site blue chip artists’ work in this urban context to encourage new conceptual relationships between the cultural history— Roman, Medieval, and Renaissance—and the modern aesthetic. Associations between the sculptures and their surroundings, however, were based only on formal qualities. The arrangement of a handful of Smith’s sculptures in the Roman amphitheater, for example, involved steel structures positioned on the steps, forming an abstract composition [Figure 2.1]. Here, the historical setting formed a spectacular backdrop to the sculptures, but there was no attempt to understand them in situ. Instead, the curator and art historian Luciano Caramel wanted to avoid the casual arrangement of abstract sculptures throughout a historic city center in the show Campo Urbano, interventi estetici nella dimensione collettiva urbana (Urban Field,

Figure 2.1 David Smith Installation, exhibition Sculture nella città, fifth edition of the Festival dei due Mondi exhibition (June 21–July 22), Spoleto, Italy, 1962, curated by Giovanni Carandente. Source: Image courtesy of the Ugo Mulas Archive © Ugo Mulas

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Aesthetic Interventions in the Dimensions of the Urban Collective), held in Como in 1969. Caramel challenged existing exhibition models and structures, and he recalled that the idea for the show originated at the 1968 Venice Biennale, when the student protest movement burst onto Piazza San Marco.29 Caramel was sitting at the famous Caffé Florian with the painter Emilio Vedova, and other artists, when he was hit on the head and temporarily concussed. This experience prompted him to rethink the protest movement and art’s role in what was happening.30 For Campo Urbano, he envisioned an event that would trigger a scossa, or jolt, that would incite a reaction both within the art establishment and the broader cultural environment. He conceived a nonviolent disruption to established exhibition norms: a spontaneous protest exhibition. To this end, he did not ask artists to come to Como with pre-planned projects but to let creativity guide their undertakings.31 Lasting only one day—September 21, 1969—the program outlined performances and interactive art projects all over Como, some occurring at the same time, prompting viewers to traverse the city’s streets and actively participate in the art.32 Moreover, Caramel conceived it as an experiment to test the possibility of establishing a real relationship between artists and citizens in those spaces where everyday life unfolds.33 The exhibition temporarily suspended inhabitant’s habitual experience of the town, and it offered them the possibility of seeing it anew. Campo Urbano manifested the idea of the città partecipata (participatory city), where inhabitants became active participants in their environment, which would be important for Arte Ambientale.34 The introduction of art in the urban landscape disrupted the city’s daily routine, and many of the art pieces invited and often necessitated audience participation. In this fashion, both artists and organizers saw the role of art here to be primarily experiential rather than didactic: to create experiences that made people aware of their urban condition.35 Bringing together many artists from different backgrounds, Campo Urbano was an interdisciplinary exhibition. Importantly, Ugo La Pietra participated with one of his first Arte Ambientale projects. In the initial planning stages, Caramel, together with the Como architect Ico Parisi36 and sculptor Giuliano Collina,37 pooled together their artists’ network and sent out invitations to participate in the extemporaneous event.38 Artists from different backgrounds came together in the exhibition: Luciano Fabro and Giulio Paolini were part of the Arte Povera group; Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi and Grazia Varisco were part of the Gruppo T based in Milan; Bruno Munari had a design background and was active in avant-garde circles at this time; Enrico Baj was a painter and had been part of the Arte Nucleare movement in the 1960s; and La Pietra was linked to various radical architecture groups. In this way, Campo Urbano was a nodal point in the inchoate diffused artist network that would make up the art landscape of the 1970s in Italy. Some artists focused on the piazza to emphasize the heart of urban identity. In a politically charged gesture titled Come mai quasi tutti hanno scelto la piazza? (How Come Nearly Everyone Has Chosen the Piazza?) [Figure 2.2], Florentine artist Gianni Pettena hung laundry in the main square.39 The washing line extended from the Duomo’s façade across the piazza to the adjacent buildings. The garments flapped in the wind as they visually obstructed the architectural coherence of the space. The viewer could no longer traverse the open piazza unhindered and was forced to contend with sheets, T-shirts, and underwear. While it is unremarkable to see laundry drying in Italy’s back alleys, Pettena purposely flouted civil etiquette by hanging clothes from

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Figure 2.2 Gianni Pettena, Come mai quasi tutti hanno scelto la piazza? Performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. Source: Image courtesy of the Ugo Mulas Archive © Ugo Mulas

the central square’s majestic architecture. According to the artist, the spaces of power, and consequently repression, are always beautiful, stately, and monumental, whereas those of the repressed are squalid holes of suffering.40 Just as he displaced the washing from the backstreets to the open space, he metaphorically brought Italy’s urban social questions from the periphery to the center.41 Underscoring the spontaneous nature of Campo Urbano, Caramel recalled that Pettena was not one of the artists officially invited to participate in the event. At the time, Caramel did not know of Pettena’s work or the art circles to which he belonged—specifically, the radical architecture groups in Florence called Archizoom and UFO. Caramel remembers, He arrived on his own accord and strung some ropes in the Piazza and hung clothes on the lines. He was not part of the invites. That morning, Pettena went round ringing the doorbells asking local inhabitants for their laundry. I loved it, so I included it in the exhibition.42 Campo Urbano was unconstrained and extemporaneous, and perhaps the application of the term “exhibition” requires consideration. Certainly, Caramel wanted to break rigid aesthetic schemas and put together an event that would cause disruption. This logic is even reflected in the event’s title: Campo Urbano. It derived from Caramel’s friend, architect Attilio Marcolli, who at the time was working within the sphere

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of design on the idea of communicative structures.43 Caramel wanted to think about the urban space as a campo, or a field, in the topological sense.44 This framing of the exhibition also relates to the connotations of the term territorio, an extended field of possibilities beyond the center. The city of Como was to be considered not merely as space but also as a field of relationships and interrelated parts. Given the show’s temporality, dispersive spatial dimensions, and fluid theoretical basis, Campo Urbano may best be described as an art festival or event rather than a formal exhibition. Striving to grasp the multifaceted lived environment of Como, certain artists proposed alternative modes of inhabiting that space. La Pietra’s project, Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra (So: I Cover One Street and I Make a New One), [Figure 2.3] was an attempt to circumvent urban consumerism.45 He constructed a temporary pyramid out of wood and semi-transparent plastic inside the most expensive commercial street in Como, Via Vittorio Emmanuele II. The structure spanned almost 50 feet from the Piazza del Duomo southward toward Via Indipendenza. Only about 7 feet high and 13 feet wide, it offered a relatively cramped corridor inside the alreadynarrow street. La Pietra proposed an alternative route to the conventional pedestrian circulation, one that more closely resembled a furrow than a commercial thruway. Its purpose was to provide a covered passage for citizens to amble while avoiding the sensorial stimulation of advertising and shop window displays. The project was even more provocative because Via Vittorio Emmanuele II was the place where Como’s inhabitants customarily took their passeggiata—a relaxing stroll. It was the struscio, the strip, a place where the customs of seeing and being seen take place. The darkness of the passageway further subverted these ritualized practices. Similarly displacing the usual well-trodden routes, Grazia Varisco, from Milan, created Dilatazione spazio temporale di un percorso (Spatial and Temporal Expansion of a Path) [Figure 2.4], in which she lengthened the street by inserting a circuitous route inside the thruway. Visitors had to snake their way through the cardboard boxes placed in their direction. This intervention took place on perhaps Como’s narrowest street, Via Cinque Giornate, which also begins from Piazza Del Duomo and extends southwestward. With the work, Varisco made the participants aware of their every turn as they made tortuous progress down the street. She wanted to make viewers conscious of “the aroma of coffee, the smell of fish, the closed shutters, the lights of the bar, the scratched walls.”46 In doing so, she expanded the audience’s perceptual experience as they became mindful of their surroundings. In Ugo Mulas’ photographic documentation of the event, we see people, with the Duomo behind them, making their way along the unlit passage no more than 10 feet wide. Shoulder-high packaged boxes brought the citizens in close proximity to each other as they experienced the street in an entirely new way. On a conceptual and aesthetic level, all these experiments taking place in the medieval town’s historic center were opposed to Como’s prominent architectural bastion of modernity, Giuseppe Terragni’s Casa del Fascio [Figure 2.5].47 Completed in 1936 under Mussolini’s regime, the building stood as a clear manifestation of the belief in rationality, progress, and centralized power, and it functioned as the National Fascist Party’s headquarters in the city of Como. Mussolini erected other Case del fascio, also known as Casa littoria, in most municipalities across Italy to serve as local branches of the National Fascist Party. According to historian Emilio Gentile, these buildings—of which Terragni’s Casa del Fascio is a particularly well-known example—were meant to give local inhabitants a sense of the party’s integration into their lives.48 Despite

Figure 2.3 Ugo La Pietra, Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un altra? Wood, plastic, performance piece, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

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Figure 2.4 Grazia Varisco, Dilatazione Spazio Temporale di un Percorso, cardboard boxes, performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. Source: Image courtesy of the Ugo Mulas Archive © Ugo Mulas

its central location, artists participating in Campo Urbano avoided creating works that included Casa del Fascio, even though it is situated near Como’s central piazza. Perhaps the artists saw the building as a symbol of authoritarian repression from the fascist era, because that recent history was seen as the cause of many of the current social problems. Valentina Berardinone’s Anti-Monumento (Anti-Monument), however, sited in Piazza San Fedele, more explicitly engaged in a dialogue with Como’s complicated history [Figure 2.6]. This performance piece began with a large, unwieldy structure hidden under a white sheet with only the words “Alla Vittoria” (To Victory) visibly written at its base. When the cloth fell to reveal the structure, a marching band of Bersaglieri (special corps of the Italian Army) happened to walk past, adding an unplanned sense of ceremony to the event.49 The structure below the sheet was an austere white cube with a melancholic geometrical form slumping over it. The doleful shape seemed to collapse from the disproportionately large plinth, tear-like droplets trickling down its form. The base even appeared to bleed from the inside as red paint hemorrhaged from its flanks. This work referenced both fascism and Como’s medieval past. The tag and the structure’s simple geometrical lines evoked the Casa del Fascio just a few streets away. Yet, its site pointed to Como’s medieval history: Piazza San Fedele is one of the oldest squares in the city—dating to the twelfth century—where sixteenth-century wooden houses encircle the Basilica of San Fedele. With the sculpture, Berardinone wanted to

Figure 2.5 Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy, 1936. Source: Image courtesy of the Author

Figure 2.6 Valentina Berardinone, Anti-Monumento, wood, paint, performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. Source: Image courtesy of the Ugo Mulas Archive © Ugo Mulas

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reverse the idea of a classical monument.50 Formally, it was a critique of the fascist deployment of monumental architecture and statues as a glorification of war. In fact, the slogan “Alla Vittoria” may have come from a longer well-known fascist slogan: “Durare fino alla vittoria, Durare oltre la vittoria, per l’avvenire e la potenza della nazione” (Last until victory, last beyond victory, for the future and the power of the nation).51 But here, the Anti-Monument’s weak and defeated form reveals the pain, suffering, and bloodshed that is the inevitable result of war in the name of patriotism. If the traditional role of a monument is to communicate power within a civil space, Berardinone’s piece plays out the opposite, making the viewer aware of the hidden discourse of urban symbols. Moreover, this work gains relevance in light of Campo Urbano’s agenda as a decentralized protest exhibition critical of fascism’s centralized command over public space and cultural production. Overall, inhabitants seemed to respond positively to the insertion of avant-garde art into their lived urban spaces. Meanwhile, the local, mostly conservative newspapers assailed the event as a demonstration of belated Dada anarchist antics. The most scathing review came from Cesare Rodi in La Provincia, in which he said that the demonstration cost the city too much for a low-quality show that aimed only to be anti-conformist for its own sake.52 Rodi ended his review by writing that “an art like this, believe me, we can all create at home, at a very limited cost. Arte Povera, some define it like this, in the face of the poor!”53 Another fierce attack came from the newspaper L’Ordine, which also critiqued the event’s Dada spirit by commenting that the real Dadaists did not ask public entities to fund their larks.54 The curator Germano Celant, although he too had organized the decentralized exhibition Arte povera più azioni povere, which took place in Amalfi in 1968, was also highly critical of such events in small peripheral towns. In “Arte Turistica” (Tourist Art), published just two months after Caramel’s event, he directly cited Campo Urbano as subservient to the tourist economy and lowering the cultural value of the art exhibitions to what he called “festa delle caldarroste,” a fair-like event.55 Celant went on to say that rarely are these exhibitions of quality because they only offer platforms for visibility and self-promotion. In the article, his solution to the question of decentralizing cultural production was that every small town should be endowed with its own municipally funded museum whose mission would be to exhibit canonical artworks. His essay seems to suggest that these publicly financed museums would bypass corporate interests and provide an unconditioned space to display art. However, what Celant seemed to miss was that this would stall artistic experimentation and bring institutional structure to these peripheral sites. His essay, however, does raise important questions about the relationship between innovation and the financial structures necessary to support it. Despite the local and curatorial detractors, more positive responses came from national newspapers. In La Notte, based in Milan, Antonio Scialoja praised the show’s innovative and experimental nature, even going as far as to say that it was the envy of Milan, Italy’s northern capital of art.56 Another review understood surprisingly well the goal of Campo Urbano. Marisa Rusconi, writing for Avvenire, described the event as a strong critique of the current cultural system and a statement of no confidence in traditional exhibition models.57 She elaborated that the art economy was so infatuated with money that there was little beyond the artwork as an object, which turned spectators into consumers and negated the possibility of communication between the work and the public. Campo Urbano, according to

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Rusconi, was an honest attempt to search for a new environmental dimension for the relationship between art and the public. Surprisingly, the harshest critique came from the organizer himself, Luciano Caramel. By the time the exhibition catalog appeared, delayed because of a lack of funding, Caramel had had time to reflect on Campo Urbano. He now considered the spontaneous event in a different light, and in his summary at the end of the exhibition catalog, he evaluated the artists’ attempts to create a meaningful dialogue with the city. He saw little effort on their part to cooperate with the local administration to produce aesthetic gestures that would have a prolonged impact on the city’s cultural policies.58 On the other hand, he also realized that Como’s administration interpreted the exhibition as a disruptive event rather than one of cultural enrichment.59 The city’s administration was, and historically always had been, conservative.60 It is apparent that there was a complete lack of communication between the artists and the municipality, as Caramel summarized: “it was a dialogue between two deaf people.”61 Understanding the difficulties that the artists faced in mediating with the city and its social spaces, Caramel accepted Campo Urbano as a momentary occurrence that did not have lasting effects. He stated in an article published a few months after the exhibition that, above all, the experiment was “the testimony to a crisis, a transformation so radical that it certainly cannot stand for ‘coherence’ and clarity.”62

Volterra ’73 Learning from Como, Crispolti also considered social issues within the urban context as central to the exhibition he curated, Volterra ’73.63 Like Caramel, he wanted to reconsider the city as a “field of human relations” that could suggest new sources for exchanges and communication on a variety of levels.64 However, he did not envision a daylong event but rather a three-month-long arts residency.65 He invited thirty-two artists to think about the city, openly discuss it, and create works on-site throughout the summer months of 1973. Crispolti wanted to avoid turning this endeavor into an operation of cultural colonization or an invasion of external ideas.66 Instead, through the attentive consideration of the site, he hoped to foster a productive dialogue with the public and civil institutions. For Volterra ’73, the starting point was the city of Volterra itself. The goal was to bring to the forefront Volterra’s socioeconomic problems and to make its inhabitants more aware of them. As a corrective to the antagonistic relationship that resulted between the artists and Como’s local administrators in Campo Urbano, Crispolti, the artists, and other organizers worked closely from the beginning with Volterra’s mayor and administrative staff, as was reflected in the various sources of funding for the exhibition. Crispolti secured resources from local and regional administrative organizations, such as the Amministrazione Provinciale di Pisa and the Regione Toscana. Also listed among the financiers were tourist agencies, such as Ente Provinciale del Turismo di Pisa. Crispolti managed to gather funds from other institutions: The local church, the Curia Vescovile di Volterra; the psychiatric hospital; and both the Consorzio Interprovinciale Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra and the Direzione Sanitaria Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra were all listed among the sponsors. In addition, a large number of private individuals were among the financial backers, such as artists Sergio Borghesi, Marta Trafeli (Mino Trafeli’s wife), and other local inhabitants. It seems that the whole

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city was involved in Volterra ’73. Although it came from multiple sources, Crispolti recalled that he organized the exhibition with little funding and kept the budget to the bare minimum.67 Promoting the city’s involvement as integral to the innovative and democratic exhibition format, Crispolti coordinated a series of public debates with the citizens of Volterra.68 He held the first debate on March 24, 1973, three months before the exhibition was scheduled to open in June. Many of the participating artists were present, such as Francesco Somaini, Agostino Bonalumi, Marcello Guasti, Nicola Carrino, Alik Cavaliere, Ennio Tamburi, Ugo Nespolo, Franco Mazzucchelli, Gianfranco Pradi, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Ignio Balderi, and Mauro Staccioli. From the outset, the organizational attitude was one of gestione collettiva (collective management), whereby all the members involved had an equal role. In this same spirit, Crispolti referred to the artists as operatori (workers) rather than artists, after the term “cultural operator,” defined in the Introduction. This change in terminology denoted a reformulation of the scope of their work. Rather than laboring in an isolated studio, the artists participating in Volterra ’73 felt strongly about practicing within the social sphere. With a robust ideological stance, Crispolti conceived the primary focus of Volterra ’73 as a nexus of artistic agency and engagement with the city’s socioeconomic structures.69 The works that the artists created were in dialogue with local and historical institutions, specifically the psychiatric hospital, the high-security penitentiary, and the local alabaster craft. These elements were the city’s main establishments and gave Volterra its unique cultural identity. They were also in jeopardy, however, as the city underwent modernization. This kind of deep cultural integration set Volterra ’73 radically apart from Campo Urbano. Compared to Volterra’s alabaster craft activity, Como was known for its textile manufacture. At the beginning of the twentieth century, this industry was a vital element of the city’s economy, supporting about 80% of all textile production in Italy.70 However, as industrial manufacturing was slowly replacing manual labor by mid-century—when Italy’s production, especially in the north, shifted to appliance manufacturing—Como’s textile industry, like Volterra’s alabaster activity, found itself in a precarious position.71 None of the artists participating in Campo Urbano attempted to understand this economic reality present in Como. In this sense, their interventions were limited when it came to social issues, as they engaged predominantly with the topography of the urban space. In contrast, Volterra ’73 got to the core of the city and its socioeconomic structures. For example, many artists participating in the exhibition became involved with the alabaster trade. It was the city’s main economic export for over four centuries, remaining mostly unchanged until the economic boom in the 1960s.72 Alabaster was so steeped in local tradition that the president of the Cooperativa Artieri (Artisan Cooperative) emphasized, in a speech given at the Giornata del Commercio Estero (Day of Foreign Trade) on January 30, 1949, how the alabaster trade was passed down from father to son for generations.73 The métier had always been a great source of pride for the local community. Local historian Enrico Fiumi wrote about its profound historical significance: “This industry, born in Volterra with its first civilization, lived throughout the centuries, will continue. Its traditions will continue in time . . . and, like the people of a civilization, cannot die.”74 Up until the 1950s, its economy was thriving, with about a thousand artisans who exported their wares on the international market, mainly to the United Kingdom, United States, Europe, and South Africa.75 Industrial methods of production, however, introduced with the economic boom during the 1960s, transformed alabaster manufacturing. Mechanical and serial

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production churned out goods at a cheaper rate. These new means of handling the stone also led to a reduction in quality. Historian Ilario Luperini recounted that there was a heated debate in Volterra during the 1970s between those artisans who believed in the production of alabaster pieces for a high-market elite and those who were in favor of creating standardized objects for a mass market.76 The steady de-skilling of craftsmen, as well as the loss of artistry in the objects, was at stake. Many modern artisans simply could not compete with the commodity market and turned to make cheap merchandise to survive. For Volterra ’73, both designers and artists worked with local craftsmen over the span of the exhibition to try to understand these changes. Their involvement had two main aims: The first was to bring awareness to the effects of serial production on the lowering of quality of the artisanal trade, the second was to infuse original designs, through the designer/artisan collaboration, into Volterra’s alabaster production.77 For instance, designers and artists Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi, Lorenzo Forges Davanazati, and Corinna Morandi, all based in Milan and Florence, worked closely with local artisans in their studios to create innovative sculptural pieces. This collaboration offered a mutual learning experience as the designers investigated the unique properties of the alabaster stone and the craftsmen considered alternative designs.78 They exhibited their pieces in Volterra’s Sala Giunta in Palazzo Priori during Volterra ’73 so that the whole city could view them. Other artists participating in Volterra ’73 looked to include this unique material in their projects. Milanese conceptual artist Alik Cavaliere engaged with Volterra’s historic craft by operating within the local economy to understand it from the inside. With a Dadaist sensibility reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, he set up a stand selling tourist memorabilia for his project Bancarella dall’alabastro (Alabaster Stand) [Figure 2.7]. Cavaliere inserted himself into the commercial trade to highlight its modern transformations and the difficulties that craftsmen faced in the tourist market.79 He sold a variety of objects, including chessboards and decorative alabaster apples, and dedicated each object to a renowned artist, depending on its specific characteristics. He cited important twentieth-century figures, such as Duchamp, Claes Oldenburg, and Piero Manzoni, as well as some of his contemporaries, such as Francesco Somaini and Franco Mazzucchelli. In this way, Cavaliere linked the art world with the commercial realm and initiated a complex dialogue between high art and craft. His kitschy objects also served as a biting commentary on the dilution of the city’s historic trade. Fabio De Sanctis, from Rome, likewise used the city’s prized white mineral as he swapped various objects spaced around the city for alabaster replicas, connecting architectural structures and socioeconomic conditions. De Sanctis arrested fluidity and movement as he inserted a faucet on the side of the city’s baptistery in the main square and permanently parked a Mercedes by turning its wheels to stone [Figure  2.8].80 These interventions, however, also pointed to the city’s metaphorical petrification and its socioeconomic issues. Youths were leaving to find opportunities elsewhere as the historic center turned into an amusement park for tourists. Drawing further associations with the cheapening of Volterra’s cultural values, De Sanctis used a type of alabaster imported from Spain. This material, primarily used for industrially produced kitsch, was more economical and less prized than the local stone. While alabaster gave Volterra its international reputation, its psychiatric hospital, founded in 1887 by Cavalier Aurelio Caioli, was equally responsible for its recognition in Italy. Since its foundation, the Centro Sociale dell’Ospedale Psichiatrico (Social

Figure 2.7 Alik Cavaliere, Bancarella dall’alabastro, performance, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Alik Cavaliere

Figure 2.8 Fabio De Sanctis, Untitled, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Fabio De Sanctis

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Center and Psychiatric Hospital) had become one of the largest psychiatric hospitals in the country. During the first half of the twentieth century, under the leadership of innovative psychiatrist Luigi Scabia, the institution grew to accommodate patients from many regions: Pisa, Livorno, La Spezia, Savona, Imperia, and Rome. In 1939, it was reported to have had over forty-five hundred patients.81 For the small town of Volterra, whose inhabitants at that time numbered around twenty thousand, this was an astoundingly large presence.82 Furthermore, the psychiatric hospital functioned as a sort of city within a city, involving many of Volterra’s inhabitants in the various positions of maintenance and assistance. In effect, the relationship between the hospital and the city was interdependent: while the institution employed Volterra’s inhabitants, the patients would also often participate in municipal projects by offering manual labor. For instance, in the 1950s, the director of the institute, Umberto Sarteschi, appointed a team of patients and assistant nurses to excavate the recently discovered Roman amphitheater.83 The institution’s openness to the city also extended to Volterra ’73, as artists and critics used it as a meeting space. Given the exhibition’s low budget, artists ate at the canteen with the doctors and nurses, fully immersing them into the city’s most famous institution.84 Despite the institution’s integration into the experience of Volterra, it and psychiatric hospitals throughout Italy were becoming contested spaces during the 1970s. After 1968, when the younger generation challenged the political establishment, psychiatric asylums were seen as backward, authoritarian institutions. They were still run according to the regulations established under laws written in 1904 describing care as primarily custodial.85 The public regarded them as places of confinement and control where there was no attempt to understand mental illness or rehabilitate patients. Franco Basaglia, a psychiatrist and reformer, advocated for the dismantling of psychiatric hospitals and found in Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization (1961) an important theoretical touchstone, bringing Foucault’s critique of state institutions into the Italian critical discourse.86 It was Volterra ’73’s casting of the psychiatric hospital as a repressive entity that situated it within the sociopolitical context of the 1970s, a decade resoundingly focused on Institutional Critique. Artist Ugo Nespolo, based in Turin, worked directly with patients from the Centro Sociale dell’Ospedale Psichiatrico. He wanted to interact with people that lived with the realities of the hospital, to understand their conditions from a human perspective. With help from the patients, he built a tall pyramid facing the austere façade of the hospital [Plate 3]. The work took the form of a large wooden frame covered in posters, primitive-looking figures, and colored flags. Approximately 10 feet tall, it had the appearance of a pirate ship’s mast. Nespolo and the patients proclaimed it to be an autonomous structure that asserted its own rules by embracing a creative agency. Nespolo also conceived another intervention with the patients that would have a larger presence outside the psychiatric hospital. They built and then burnt a large effigy of a pharmacological pill made out of wood and papier-mâché. They placed it just outside the city walls, in front of Porta di Docciola. Nespolo viewed the pill as representing the patients’ only hypothetical freedom, and with it, he challenged the concept of libera uscita (freedom to leave), which stipulated the possibility for inpatients to leave the premises of the psychiatric hospital.87 In actuality, patients were not free, because they were kept under the control of sedating pharmaceuticals. In an interview conducted by RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) television documenting the exhibition, Nespolo discussed with some of the patients the reasons for taking

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medication.88 Many of them did not seem to know why they were taking drugs or what they were for, possibly indicating that they were ignorant of the treatment they were receiving. Nespolo and the patients burned the pill, covered in handwritten drug names, in a public performance metaphorically freeing them from chemical control. Although not as nationally famous, the high-security penitentiary located in the Fortezza Medicea had an equally sizable symbolic presence for Volterrans. The Duke of Florence, Lorenzo il Magnifico, constructed the edifice in the fifteenth century when he conquered the city and imposed Florentine rule over the city’s inhabitants.89 Just as the citizens of Volterra saw Florentine authority as external dominance, the jail today presides over the city as a cipher of that repressive power.90 Mauro Staccioli—a native of Volterra—responded to the institution in his structure Intervento sul piano di castello (Intervention on the plan of the castle) [Figure 2.9], created especially for Volterra ’73. The piece consisted of a large metal pyramid situated in front of the Fortezza Medicea (Medici Fortress); its sharp geometry angled toward the prison and pointed upward as if in defense.91 It is as if the work embodied a sense of resistance, which harkened back to the historical moment when Volterra lost its independence and became annexed to Florence five centuries earlier. Staccioli stated in the exhibition catalog that he wanted to provoke a critical reflection in the city’s inhabitants, his sculptural objects inciting a process of self-recognition.92 Staccioli’s piece engaged with this historical context and exemplified the innate Volterran spirit of defiance and independence. Meanwhile, Maurizio Nannucci believed that an urban intervention could take place only after a careful analysis of the city’s urban space. Gaining an understanding of the interrelated elements comprising the site, Nannucci devised a work that slightly and subtly modified the environment.93 Revitalizing Volterra’s historic center and bringing to the forefront issues of the centro storico, Nannucci replaced the streetlights on two intersecting roads in the main square, Piazza dei Priori [Plate 4].94 For the entire span of the exhibition, instead of the conventional yellow, the streetlights on Via dei Sarti shone a luminescent red, while those on Via Ricciarelli and Via Marchesi beamed a brilliant blue. At the corner where the two streets crossed, between Via dei Sarti and Via Ricciarelli, the lights blended into a subtle violet. This seemingly small act had a profound impact on how people perceived their city. Inhabitants were instantly aware of their surroundings, as they could now see it in a different light. Milanese artist Franco Mazzuchelli confronted the urban environment and its inhabitants by placing Gionfiabili (Inflatables) [Figure 2.10] in Piazza dei Priori for the exhibition’s inauguration on July 15, 1973. These were large air-filled structures made out of plastic. They were either a vibrant yellow or red and, once inflated, they took the shape of tubes or spikes. These air-filled objects were part of a more extensive series of works called A. TO. A, which stood for “Art to Abandon,” so called because Mazzucchelli thought of art as an act of abandoning social convention and cultural restrictions.95 He believed that the participatory gesture of interacting with the artwork could incite a particular type of collective behavior that freed the individual from conformity. In other words, through the act of play, individuals could break free from social conditioning. In Volterra, the giant inflatables took up most of the square and obstructed normal circulation, forcing pedestrians to interact with the objects as they experienced the space in a new way. Children and adults threw themselves onto their surfaces and bounced gleefully. Like in Nannucci’s work, a critical element of playfulness instigated new relationships between the viewers and their lived environment.

Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

Figure 2.9 Mauro Staccioli, Intervento sul Piano di Castello, 1973, concrete, 280 × 200 × 200 cm. Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973.

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Figure 2.10 Franco Mazzucchelli, Gonfiabili, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. Source: Image courtesy of the Franco Mazzuchelli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

Participation from the local community was so crucial to Volterra ’73 that artists, together with the municipality, conducted social research and disseminated surveys to gauge the public’s response. Artists Giorgio Bagnoli, Sergio Borghesi, and Mino Trafeli distributed a questionnaire which began with the phrasing: “The communal committee, the exhibition organizers, and the cultural operators of Volterra ’73 request the active participation of the citizens for the completion of the critical documentation for this event.”96 Subsequently, the survey asked audiences a series of questions: What were the positive aspects of the exhibition? What were the negative ones? Was the event successful in creating a relationship with the artworks? What were the socioeconomic and cultural problems of the city? Mayor Luciano Giustarini endorsed the questionnaire, further establishing the political commitment to the success of Volterra ’73. The results showed that about 70% of the public were favorable, 10% were decidedly averse, and 20% were undecided as to whether the exhibition was effective in calling attention to the socioeconomic and cultural problems of the city. When the organizers gathered at a large assembly at the end of the show on October 6 and 7, 1973, they gave citizens the opportunity to openly evaluate the

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exhibition’s successes and failures. Alberto Bertini, a history teacher at the local high school, voiced his support for Crispolti’s initiatives in that they piqued interest in a large number of individuals usually excluded from the realm of cultural production.97 Indeed, more than eighty thousand people visited the exhibition, both Italians and foreigners. Manuela Crescentini, a student from the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Rome, expressed the desire to broaden the exhibition to include other creative activities, such as music and theater.98 Municipal administrators also offered opinions; for example, Piero Fiumi, a member of the conservative Italian Liberal Party (PLI), charged that the exhibition failed because the public misunderstood most of the artistic interventions and that the artists, according to him, were unsuccessful in creating a dialogue with the city’s inhabitants.99 He specifically aimed his critique at the work of Japanese artist Takahashi, who adorned the Battistero with large colorful abstract forms. Fiumi thought they looked erotic and highly inappropriate. In contrast, Mino Nelli, who belonged to the PCI (Partito Communista Italiano or the Italian Communist Party), praised the city’s strong democratic and anti-fascist foundations, principles that made Volterra ’73 possible. He commended the exhibition for being anti-elitist, unlike other cultural shows that he alleged catered to a specific segment of high society, such as the Rome Quadriennale, the Milan Triennale, and the Venice Biennale. The exhibition certainly highlighted the municipal administration’s political divisions. Mayor Giustarini, an active member of the PCI, supported Crispolti and the artists participating in the exhibition. He allocated 10,000.00 Lire of municipal funds to the scheme, making up most of the total 12,888.36 Lire raised to fund the exhibition.100 In an attempt to revitalize Volterra, Giustarini stated that he hoped Volterra ’73 would move the inhabitants in such a way as to break the attitude of cultural closure typical of medieval cities.101 However, proponents of the PCI, in a statement reported in the local newspaper Il Telegrafo on July 25, 1973, clarified their opposition to this initiative. They criticized the PCI for using the initiative as a propagandistic maneuver and officially disassociated themselves from its organization.102 Overall, the exhibition’s long-term effects on the city are difficult to measure. Newspaper critic Claudia Terenzi praised the exhibition by citing theorist Henri Lefebvre’s “The Urban Revolution” in connection to Volterra ’73, in the way that artists captured the urban multiplicity by making works of art that grew out of their historic structure.103 Moreover, Terenzi claimed that the artworks were successful in igniting a social awareness that had been lacking. Undoubtedly, building this new type of encounter through art was not easy. Indeed, Ugo Nespolo and Nino Giammarco admitted that they were unprepared for the type of relationship they hoped to establish with the psychiatric hospital.104 They also stated, however, that they successfully created a dialogue with both the patients and the institution that could be taken in different directions in the future. Ultimately, the artists and organizers acknowledged that lasting social transformation would require a long-term investment that went beyond the scope of the exhibition.

Ambiente come Sociale at the Venice Biennale Crispolti had the chance to bring many of these Arte Ambientale experiments, occurring on the margins, right to the center of one of Italy’s most prestigious institutions when he curated the exhibition, titled Ambiente come Sociale (Environment as Social), for the Italian Pavilion at the 1976 Venice Biennale.105 Specifically, he showcased

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artists on the periphery of the institutionalized Italian avant-garde. Indeed, Crispolti brought a range of current aesthetic activities into sharp relief as he presented a panoramic view of the operatore culturale (cultural operator), the transformed role of the artist emerging in the early 1970s, that had already participated in Volterra ’73.106 In the exhibition catalog, Crispolti extended this argument further, claiming that the language of the avant-garde had changed; it was no longer the search for a pure form of expression but one that sought relationships.107 Thus, the cultural operator—part of the avant-garde—turned to practices based on communication and interaction. Crispolti stressed that this phenomenon, the linchpin of Arte Ambientale, was unique to the Italian cultural context and the current political debate in Italy focusing on social participation and a push toward decentralization. Crispolti aligned Ambiente come Sociale with the 1976 Biennale theme, Ambiente, Partecipazione, Strutture Culturali (Environment, Participation, and Cultural Structures). The focus on ambiente, or environment, was a savvy choice for the Biennale organizers, led this year by the architect Vittorio Gregotti, as it responded to both the national and the international context.108 Within Italy, it pointed to Arte Ambientale, whereby various artists engaged with spaces beyond the gallery to carry out a direct connection with the urban and social panorama, exemplified by different exhibitions such as Campo Urbano and Volterra ’73. At the same time, the theme extended the Biennale’s institutional reach to a broader territory, thus playing out the tensions between the periphery and the center. Outside of a national discourse, the environment was linked to international trends in Installation and Land Art, and many international pavilions presented art that aligned with the theme. For instance, the participatory artist group Collectif d’Art Sociologique, exhibiting work in the French Pavilion, projected cinematographic footage onto historic buildings in Venice. Richard Long’s work, shown in the British pavilion, also engaged with the environmental theme by installing rocks inside the gallery, as well as photographs of other rock sculptures, such as A Line in Ireland (1974) and A Line in the Himalayas (1975). The American Pavilion chose to show artists who responded to the theme of ambiente, such as Robert Irwin and Jim Roche. Thus, within the Biennale exhibition context, Arte Ambientale was well situated in contemporary avant-garde developments that focused on the broad term of “environment.” The newly appointed Biennale president, Carlo Ripa di Meana, wanted to make sure that the 1976 Biennial addressed broad sociopolitical questions facing the nation at the time. He placed the issue of decentralization center stage, which correlated with the notion of spreading out and activating a base, two concepts crucial to how Arte Ambientale artists operated. The Biennale coordinated a series of colloquia and debates on this theme, which addressed the placement of projects in peripheral sites and the engagement of previously marginalized audiences.109 Through this initiative, the organizers wanted to extend the Biennale’s reach and social responsibility. Their program positioned the institution as a platform where societal issues could combine with aesthetic production in a culturally engaged policy. To tackle this issue, the Biennale assembled a select committee headed by sociologists Giovanni Bechelloni and Franco Rositi to study the question of cultural decentralization. This initiative was the basis for a conference Il decentramento culturale in Italia (Cultural Decentralization in Italy), organized at Mirano, a small city outside of Venice, October 1–3, 1976. The meeting included cultural operators, trade union members, representatives of grassroots associations, and local organizations. One of the main issues raised was

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how to understand the process of decentralization as more than merely moving out from the center.110 Ripa di Meana delivered the closing remarks, in which he emphasized that the Biennale, as an institution, must provide both the stimulus and support for decentralized initiatives.111 In addition to the conference, other decentralized cultural activities took place in Mirano from July through October with the collaboration of the Biennale and Mirano’s Centro per Iniziative Culturali (Center of Cultural Initiatives, or CIC). For instance, the Venetian theatrical group Brigà, working together with local inhabitants, organized a show on the writings of Angelo Beolco—better known as Ruzzante— a playwright and actor who lived in the region in the sixteenth century. His writings, grouped under the name Sprolico, which means speech or prayer in the local dialect, portray peasant life and celebrate the “marginalized” campesini ridiculed by wealthy and powerful Venetians for being simpletons.112 The theme of these individuals’ transformation into modern workers had a timely relevance given the visibility of the workers’ struggles throughout the decade. The play highlighted the importance of dialects and the celebration of local traditions in their contextual setting, themes that were central to the politics of decentralization. The theme of decentralization also needs to be understood within the context of the Biennale’s history because, throughout much of the decade, the institution had undergone an unprecedented transformation. Recognized as the longest-running biennial exhibition in the world, it had recently experienced enormous structural changes that ran parallel to the establishment of the regions in Italy. Among other initiatives, it legitimated a new charter, or Statuto (Statute), in 1973, dissociating its organizational structure from that of the government, which had previously directly appointed its governing body. The old Biennale Statute had been instituted under Mussolini in the 1930s, making the Biennale, well into the 1970s, still substantially a fascist organization with a hierarchical and centralized operative composition. The Biennale’s reformation gave the institution more autonomy, which allowed it to make more democratic decisions in terms of electing leadership.113 After the new Biennale Statute, the 1976 Biennale exhibition was the chance to show the world how changed the Biennale was. Indeed, in the opening paragraphs of the 1976 Venice Biennale official catalog, Ripa di Meana asserted that the institution had been turned from a fossilized to an energized and forward-thinking organization.114 The Biennale was the only major Italian institution to make substantial changes to its organization, and that is perhaps why, in 1976, it was so receptive to Arte Ambientale, which had the honor of being presented at the Italian pavilion. Crispolti’ Ambiente come Sociale surveyed radical national aesthetic developments and presented artworks that directly confronted Italy’s social and political realities. He applied more novel curatorial methods to the display of the exhibition and made the unconventional choice not to house any of the original artworks within the confines of the gallery, presenting projects that had taken place elsewhere geographically, specifically in cities throughout the country. Honoring the authenticity of Arte Ambientale—in which site-specific artwork is inherently site-specific—Crispolti made a conscious decision not to recreate any of the artworks. Instead, documentary photographs and video, texts, pamphlets, and audio recordings of the original works lay sprawled on tables in the gallery space like the products of field research.115 Crispolti thus added another spin to the Biennale’s themes of decentralization and environment and in effect turned them inside out. While the exhibition took place in the Italian Pavilion,

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the actual artworks were not there, replaced by multimedia evidence of their original instantiation in the peripheral urban context. It was, like Volterra ’73, still an extramural exhibition, despite being presented within an institutional setting. Articulated in five sections that intended to provide an overview of these aesthetic experiences, the exhibition offered diverse “hypotheses” of aesthetic interventions within the urban sphere: Hypothesis and Reality of Urban Conflict; Individual Urban Reappropriation; Spontaneous Participation—Political/Poetical Action, Participation with/through the Local Entities; and Hypothesis of Social Relations through the State Entities.116 Crispolti described how the artwork, in the section Hypothesis and Reality of Urban Conflict, revealed the social condition within the city.117 This section showcased in documentary form the sculptural projects of artists like Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli. Somaini had proposed, in his 1972 publication Urgenza nella città (Urgency in the City), a new agency for sculpture in the city.118 His work was critical of the accelerated pace of capitalist construction and consumption. At the Biennale, he exhibited new photomontage images, in actuality architectural proposals, titled Proposta per la costruzione di un centro di spettacolo e di studi audiovisivi: Sfinge di Manhattan (Proposal for the Construction of an Entertainment Center in Manhattan), involving hypothetical buildings whose amorphous shapes aggressively clashed with the modern metropolis [Figure 2.11]. Similarly, Staccioli’s hard-edged pieces clashed both physically and metaphorically with the surrounding landscape. Setting up a palpable tension between the urban environment and the often-aggressive pointed geometric shapes of his works, Staccioli used a formal sculptural vocabulary to create charged confrontations with viewers. He situated his pieces in piazzas and streets as signs of contemporary violence, figuratively referring to the state of alarm pervading Italy at this time.119 Even though Staccioli built them out of heavy-duty construction materials such as iron and concrete, their display was limited by time, and they functioned as ephemeral instruments of critical reflection and perceptual inquiry.120 In the Biennale, Crispolti exhibited documentary photographs of Staccioli’s Scultura-Intervento, installed in Piazza Galleria Manzoni, in Milan, in 1974 [Figure 2.12]. A giant concrete cube with sixteen sharp spikes—four emerging out of each vertical face—sits in the piazza like a medieval torture instrument reinterpreted with a classical sense of balance and proportion. Encounters with this piece played with viewers’ conception of their city and their sense of danger and provocation. Crispolti articulated what he described to be a flexible way of intervening in the urban social sphere in the section titled Individual Urban Reappropriation. Here, he showcased the work of designer and architect Ugo La Pietra, who engaged with the city through conceptual ethnographic projects that sought to uncover latent power relationships. His object of study was Milan’s urban working class, and he documented instances of their creativity in photographs and schematic drawings. La Pietra exhibited recent projects, such as I gradi di libertà (1969–1972), in which he recorded the nonconforming footpaths carved by inhabitants of massive housing complexes, detailing their perambulations in photo collages. For La Pietra, these were instances where inhabitants were reappropriating their lived spaces and choosing to navigate them as they wished, as opposed to how the property developers had conceived. In another project, Recupero e reinvenzione, from 1975, he presented panels that recorded the sheds and shanty homes crafted by Milan’s working class on disused

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Figure 2.11 Francesco Somaini, Sfinge di Manhattan: proposta per la costruzione di un centro spettacolo e di studi audiovisivi, 1974, fotomontaggio 80 × 80 cm, Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

land in the city’s peripheries [Figure 2.13].121 Again, La Pieta was interested in identifying and documenting examples where inhabitants felt empowered to create and live according to their own rules. The collective Gruppo Coordinamento, based in Rome, also undertook similar ethnographic urban studies as art. Founded in 1972 by Carlo Maurizio Benvenuti, Tullio Catalano, and Franco Falasca, the group looked to urban signs, in the form of graffiti and posters, as a form of reappropriating the public space of communication. These artists operated in the sphere of counter-information as they photographed and documented instances where advertisements had been defaced to express subversive messages on urban walls. One such image exhibited at the Biennale showed the expression

Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

Figure 2.12 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, December 1974–January 1975, concrete and iron, 240 × 400 × 400 cm, Piazzetta della galleria Manzoni, Liberia Einaudi, Studio Sant Andrea. Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976.

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Figure 2.13 Ugo La Pietra, I gradi di libertà, ricupero e reinvenzione, 1975, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

“Catholic or Marxist” scrawled on the side of a building with a gathering of young individuals just in front of the graffiti. This work is titled Letteratura (Literature), perhaps indicating the creative and philosophical modes of communication in the urban streets. Crispolti focused on audience participation in the urban context in the third section, titled Spontaneous Participation—Political/Poetical Action. He chose artists who worked in the public arena to create spontaneous actions that sought dialogue with citizens, producing moments of creative freedom alternative to the “conditioning” present in everyday life.122 Specifically, under the category titled Poetical Activity,

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Figure 2.14 Franco Summa, Una bianca striscia di carta, 1973, Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Crispolti spotlit the work of Franco Summa. Based in Pescara, Summa interwove his projects with the urban environment and often collaborated with the local community. Among the work shown in the exhibition was a piece carried out with Pescara’s local art students, titled Una bianca striscia di carta (A White Strip of Paper), from 1973 [Figure 2.14]. The students held large white sheets in Pescara’s main square, forcing inhabitants to walk around them and ultimately aiming to make them aware of the city’s spaces. Summa sought to redesign the city through the use of simple elements—here white sheets of paper—and to transform urban spaces, giving citizens the opportunity to relate to and reconsider the topographical context of social life.123 Similarly involving citizens in the active production of art, the Neapolitan artist Ricardo Dalisi engaged children from working-class neighborhoods in communitybased projects that included mural paintings and craft-based activities. The artist said about his own work that “participatory action in an urban environment is like a survey in the deep layers of the social condition, into the base of creativity, into the symbolic structures of collative language, into the sphere of the relationship between cultural practice and social praxis, between research and politics.”124 Both Summa

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and Dalisi activated the city’s inhabitants in projects through spontaneous collaboration as a way of making them more aware of their lived environment. Fitting under the banner of what Crispolti titled Political Action, the Milanese group Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante, founded in 1976, brought together audience participation and politics in overt ways. Involving artists Tullio Brunone, Nives Cardi, Giovanni Columbu, Ettore Pasculli, Adriana Pulga, and Paolo Rosa, the group showed the project Strategia d’informazione: distorsione della realtà e diffusione del consenso (Strategy of Information: Distortion of Reality and Dissemination of Consent), a dialogical work that analyzed the forces that operate within social structures, such as schools. In the catalog, the group explained that they opened a dialogue with students to decipher the patterns of behavior and thought disseminated in the organization of daily life.125 The work consisted of documents collected during the experiment: photocopies, video, and film. In the last two sections—Participation with/through the Local Entities and Hypothesis of Social Relations through the State Entities—Crispolti focused on instances where artists had collaborated with administrative and institutional structures. He emphasized in the catalog—explicitly making references to the regional electoral outcome on June 15, 1975, and the national parliamentary elections on June 20, 1976— that this was a unique moment, because the country seemed to have finally gained a democratic perspective.126 In both of these elections, the PCI achieved unprecedented visibility.127 Crispolti exhibited documentation of the initiative “Operazione Roma Eterna,” based in the Testaccio neighborhood of Rome. Cultural operators worked closely with the local neighborhood committee, and in one of their most successful projects, they were able to collectively acquire the old slaughterhouse, saving the building from demolition. As a building of architectural importance, designed and built by Gioacchino Erosch in 1888, it was restored and used for community-based projects and meetings.128 But collaboration between cultural operators, local activist groups, and institutional structures was not always practical and successful. Somewhat surprisingly, in the catalog, Crispolti also disclosed his skepticism of the possibility of genuine cooperation between artists and state entities.129 According to him, the new housing project Corviale, on the southwest periphery of Rome, was a perfect example of the pitfalls of such initiatives. Funded by the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari (Autonomous Institute for Working-Class Housing, or IACP), it was built in 1972 by a team of architects coordinated by Mario Fiorentino and including Federico Gorio, Piero Maria Lugli, Giulio Sterbini, and Michele Valori. They designed the project as a response to the popular housing built in Rome’s peripheries during the 1960s, which were purely residential. Corviale, in contrast, was supposed to house a whole system of services alongside the apartments. Artists such as Giuseppe Uccini collaborated on the design and proposed site-specific sculptural projects that would act as spatial enhancers between the local community and the buildings. Uncini’s project, Ombre di 2 cubi (Shadows of Two Cubes), was composed of two solid concrete boxes protruding from the ground at forty-five-degree angles. The sculpture sought to bring a dynamic quality to the space.130 At the 1976 Biennale, Uncini exhibited only the plans for the project, which was never realized. Funds for the construction of Corviale dried up when the IACP went bankrupt in the early 1980s. In addition to these five permanent sections, Crispolti conceived of a more fluid and ephemeral component to his show, which he called Documentazione aperta (Open

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Documentation), held in the last room of the Italian Pavilion. Here, he organized additional programming to create a live forum for open-ended debates and exchanges of information that would bring socio-urban issues into the exhibition space.131 Lasting about ten days each, the topics of discussion connected to the Biennale’s overall theme of decentralization.132 For example, the artist group A/Social presented their work in the psychiatric hospital Frullone in Naples. Additionally, Documentazione aperta highlighted a number of grassroots activities in institutional structures and redevelopments of city centers. Most importantly, this section drew attention to legislation on the public funding of artworks, known as the “legge del 2%” (the law of 2%), which stipulated that 2% of every state-funded building had to be put toward a public art project. The structure of these more temporary displays took the form of documentation, public debates, film screenings, and other types of ephemeral mediums. Crispolti envisioned the gallery space of Ambiente come Sociale as alive with debate. Mirroring the later, more general conference on decentralization in Italy taking place at the behest of Ripa di Meana, Crispolti organized a conference addressing the theme of decentralization specifically in the visual arts. Titled Nuova domanda e nuovi modi di produzione culturale, this discussion, held on July 18 and 19, 1976, in the Italian Pavilion, again directly linked Crispolti’s exhibition with the Biennale’s aim of decentralizing administrative power and diffusing the exhibition of art across multiple locales. This conference was one of three, with another connected to cinematic programming and the other to musical activities. Nearly a hundred participants were present at the meeting, including foreign artists from Denmark, France, Iraq, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, and Venezuela. This brought Crispolti’s curatorial choices of experimental art practices and the Biennale’s new institutional goals into alignment, and it became an opportunity to present this confluence to an international audience. Crispolti’s presentation of Arte Ambientale appears even more radical when seen in comparison to the exhibition, titled Ambiente/arte: dal futurismo alla body art (Environment/Art: From Futurism to Body Art), that Germano Celant curated in the central Biennale pavilion, which, at the time, was right next door. The geographic proximity of the two exhibitions, as well as their shared theme of addressing the environment, invites a comparison. While Crispolti brought social practices into the institutional context by inviting artists who had largely renounced the art world to engage with the social sphere, Celant focused on a diachronic interpretation that charted the history of Environmental Art—but more specifically Installation Art—from the Futurists to the present.133 His argument was, to a certain extent, nationalistic and adhered to the discipline of art history and museum orthodoxy. In other words, Celant’s exhibition inhabited a position of institutional centrality, while Crispolti’s occupied one of marginality. In terms of the selection of artwork for the exhibition, Celant was concerned with those instances when he could identify a breakdown of physical barriers between the object and its surrounding space. He organized the show in two parts: a historical section that reconstructed primary examples of Installation art in the early to mid-twentieth century and a contemporary section that centered on new site-specific Installation art by thirteen contemporary artists. Celant traced a linear trajectory historically, from Futurism to Constructivism and de Stijl. Throughout the show, Celant never missed the opportunity to feature Italian aesthetic developments within an international context. The opening room placed Futurist sketches by Giacomo Balla and Ivo Pannaggi closely alongside a full-scale reconstruction of El Lissitzky’s

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Proun Room from 1923. Advocating for domestic avant-garde artists, but critically those who already had amounted a certain amount of social capital, Celant featured figures such as Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni among Louise Nevelson, Arman, Yves Klein, George Segal, Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneeman, and others. In particular, he placed the work of Fontana adjacent to that of Jackson Pollock, inviting a comparison between Pollock’s large abstract paintings—specifically his Number 31 from 1950 and a Hans Namuth photograph of his working process—and Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale, also created in 1950. This juxtaposition set up a direct comparison between two abstract spatial environments that suggested a national rivalry between the United States and Italy. But more than that, it indicated parity between Pollock, a behemoth in the avant-garde hierarchy, and Fontana, not yet an international heavyweight in the same vein. Including a contemporary component to the otherwise historical exhibition, Celant invited thirteen artists to create site-specific installations. The visitor would have encountered, in order, Blinky Palermo, Daniel Buren, Dan Graham, Joseph Beuys, Sol LeWitt, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Jannis Kounellis, Vito Acconci, Robert Irwin, Maria Norman, Doug Wheeler, and Michael Asher. Although Celant’s curatorial choice to allow artists to use these rooms as a live studio space was new to the Biennale, it connected to a precedent exhibition, Jennifer Licht’s Spaces exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York, from December 30, 1969, to March 1, 1970, which also included artist Michael Asher, as well as Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Franz Erhard Walther, and the Pulsa group.134 Celant’s Ambiente/arte, in a way, further institutionalized this radical medium by establishing it within its historiographic lineage. Consequently, Celant’s exhibition remained confined by the boundaries of traditional exhibition practices. Instead, Crispolti took a curatorial chance on mostly unknown artists who were pushing the boundaries of Environmental Art by renouncing the safety enclosure of the gallery and working outside in urban space. On the whole, Crispolti’s exhibition and those of the entire 1976 Biennale experiment were mostly successful. For the first time in years, artists working on the margins of the Italian art world emerged as the focus of the country’s largest institutional exhibition. Crispolti’s exhibition model promoted fluidity in its style and content that generated an unprecedented participatory engagement with the artworks. Moreover, Ripa di Meana’s leadership brought the Biennale close to the current sociopolitical topics occupying the nation, namely grassroots initiatives and decentralization. On a thematic and organizational level, the 1976 Biennale and Crispolti’s presentation of artists mirrored the broader Italian context, in regard to both the culture at large and the neo-avant-garde in particular. However, due to a shift in the internal organization as well as the national mood, this striking confluence would not endure in the following Biennale.

Conclusion Arte Ambientale’s move into the city, and by extension, into the peripheries and provincial towns, was connected to broader sociopolitical forces of decentralization, regionalism, and the endeavor to activate democratic ideals, extant since the postwar years but reaching greater intensity in the 1970s. There was a strong drive to validate those geographic areas, or territorio, outside the centers and institutions, to

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go beyond concentrated and hierarchical forms of power, still potent vestiges of the fascist regime. But focus on the regions also included questions of cultural values, socioeconomic issues of these small historic centers, and the quality of everyday life in these marginal towns. The goal for decentralization—in both politics and art—was the search for freedom to institute more democratic structures. Embedded in these forces, an adventurous segment of the art world chose to work in these geographically marginal locations, as both a critique of the centralized art establishment and an engagement with cultural values highlighted by the regions. As a curator, Crispolti dedicated himself to implementing an innovative exhibition model that found fruition in provincial cities where he could work with artists unencumbered by the art establishment, which was seen as increasingly hierarchical, commercialized, and embroiled in a still substantially fascist administration. Together with other exhibitions occurring throughout the decade in peripheral cities—like Campo Urbano curated by Luciano Caramel—initiatives like Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale chronologically chart the evolution of Arte Ambientale; aesthetic experimentation first expanded within a traditional interior setting and then spread outside the gallery walls into the urban environment. These group shows were instances where artists, whose artistic practice was quite distinct, had the chance to come together and exhibit under the same common goal of working in decentralized locations. They were all invested in addressing the rapidly transforming urban space, a living network of sociocultural elements threatened by the interrelated forces of commercialization, gentrification, and modernization. The artworks exhibited in these shows engaged not only with the urban landscape but also with the social sphere—the town’s community and its inhabitants. By doing so, they brought awareness to the issues of territorial dislocation and urban commoditization. Moreover, these decentralized exhibitions helped form a lattice of interconnections between Arte Ambientale artists, even though they each retained their aesthetic practice. Relationships abounded because of these exhibitions, not just between curators and artists, or between artists, but also between members of the art world, local administrations, and inhabitants. Indeed, it is because there was the political discourse on decentralization and regionalism that peripheral communities—especially those with a strong PCI base like Volterra—were so receptive to these initiatives and provided funds for and endorsed contemporary art. The decade of the 1970s was rife with disjunctions between periphery and center extant in Italy’s political, economic, and cultural realms. Arte Ambientale capitalized on these contradictions and sought to make artwork that reflected these concerns in spaces where it was possible to connect to ordinary inhabitants. In the chapters that follow specific Arte Ambientale artists will be examined in detail, thematically paired to highlight the way these artists directly engaged with the urban environment and sought audience participation in both the creation and reception of their work.

Notes 1. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, Rome, Italy, August 4, 2011. Original Italian: “Bonito Oliva ha seguito le mie mostre e mi chiese una volta in treno, perché a quel tempo insegnavamo tutte due a Salerno, mi ha detto, ‘perché fai queste mostre in questi luoghi decentrati?’ Gli risposi che questi luoghi voleva dire la massima libertà. La città era condizionata e non si poteva fare niente che non era già scontata.”

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2. Enrico Crispolti’s first exhibition of this type was Alternative attuali: rassegna internazionale: architettura, pittura. scultura d’avanguardia, held in L’Aquila, Abruzzo at the Castello cinquecentesco, during July–August 1962. Following this first exhibition, he curated two other subsequent editions of Alternative attuali, always in L’Aquila: one in the summer of 1965 and the last in 1968. During the 1970s, Crispolti continued this curatorial model in the exhibitions Biennale della ceramica in Gubbio, Umbria, in 1973 and 1975 as well as Volterra ’73 in Volterra, Tuscany, in 1973. 3. During the 1970s, Achille Bonito Oliva promoted primarily conceptual artists, such as Vincenzo Angetti, Eliseo Mattiacci, Fabio Mauri, Maurizio Mochetti, and Vettor Pisani; Arte Povera artists, such as Alighiero Boetti, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis. Mario Merz, Pino Pascali, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Gilberto Zorio; and Kinetic artists, such as Agostino Bonalumi, Enrico Castellani, Gianni Colombo, and Paolo Scheggi in the exhibitions Vitalità del negativo nell’arte Italiana in 1970 and Contemporanea in 1973. These were all artists that exhibited with contemporary art galleries and were accepted by the art establishment with varying degrees of radicality. 4. To a certain extent for Contemporanea, Achille Bonito Oliva also circumvented Rome’s institutional structures and was supported by the newly founded association Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, founded and funded by the galleriest Graziella Lonardi Buontempo. 5. Umbro Apollonio, Mostra mercato d’arte contemporanea (Firenze: Stab. poligrafico fiorentino, 1968), 9. Other curators organizing exhibitions in small peripheral towns include Umbro Apollonio, who organized Lo spazio dell’immagine (Space of the Image), hosted by the town of Foligno, near Perugia in Umbria, in 1967, and Luciano Marucci, Gillo Dorfles, and Filiberto Menna, who co-curated Al di là della pittura (Beyond Painting), in San Benedetto del Tronto, in the Marche region, in 1969. 6. Emilio Gentile, “The Fascist Anthropological Revolution,” in Culture, Censorship and the State in Twentieth-Century Italy, ed. Guido Bonsaver and Robert S. C. Gordon (London: Legenda, 2005). 7. Filippo Barbano, Regioni e domanda sociale (Torino: Stampatori, 1978), 8. 8. Andrea Emiliani, Pier Luigi Cervellati, Lucio Gambi, and Giuseppe Guglielmi, Una politica dei beni culturali (Torino: Einaudi, 1974), 25. Andrea Emiliani further discusses museum’s institutional role in the question of beni culturali in Dal museo al territorio, 1967–1974 (Bologna: Alfa, 1974). 9. Alessandra Acocella details a number of exhibitions that took place in peripheral towns at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, such as Parole sui Muri, curated by Claudio Parmiggiani and Adriano Spatola at Fiumalbo in 1967; Un paese + l’avanguadia artisitca, curated by Sarenco in Anfo in 1968; Al di là della pittura, curated by Gillo Dorfles, Luciano Marucci, and Filiberto Menna at San Benedetto del Tronto in 1969; and Campo Urbano, curated by Luciano Caramel in Como in 1969. Acoscella makes the case that in many of these instances, artists worked together with local administrators and that these decentralized exhibitions need to be seen within the context of the discourse of decentralization in Italy, which establishes the legitimization of the regions in 1970. See Avanguadia diffusa. Luoghi di sperimentazione artistica in Italia, 1967–1970 (Macerata: Quidlibet Srl, 2016). 10. Reprinted in Valerio Riva, “Privinciart,” in L’Espresso (October 26, 1975): 66–72. The Bagno Borbonico was the site of Mario Pieroni’s new gallery, active from 1974 to 1978. Plinio De Martiis made this remark when he was in Pescara for the inauguration of Arte Povera artist Jannis Kounellis’s lead doors, installed in the converted space of the Bagno Borbonico (Bourbon Baths). 11. Giulio Carlo Argan, “Arte, artisti, istituzioni,” in Profili dell’Italia repubblicana, ed. Giulio Carlo Argan, Ottavio Cecchi, and Enrico Ghidetti (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1985), 2–32. 12. Franco Russoli, “Nuove strutture per i musei,” NAC no. 6/7 (1973): 2–3. 13. The controversy was discussed in parliament when Judge Bernardi addressed the minister of education in reference to Bucarelli’s choice to exhibit Manzoni’s cans labeled “Artist’s Shit.” See Mariastella Margozzi, Palma Bucarelli: il museo come avanguardia (Milano: Electa, 2009), 260. 14. Enrico Crispolti interview in “Conservazione, Informazione, Arte e Potere Nella Galleria Pubblica,” Uomo e Arte no. 5/6 (1971): 18.

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15. Ibid., 17. Original Italian: “Il potere circola dal Ministero alla Galleria in una unica collusione di responsabilità e di intenti di fondo, e soltanto di fronte, e veramente in contrapposto, a quell potere sta la libera, democratica, ricerca, di una avanguardia che cerca di difendersi proprio dale manovre di ufficilizzaione (e perciò di ammonizzazione nel sistema) che quell potere continuamente promuove a tutti I livelli.” 16. Ibid. Original Italian: “Un rapporto di potere, di potere culturale che include in iniziativa di suggerire e stabilire dichiarate tendenze (figurazione vecchia e nuova, arte astratta, arte cinetica ecc) in una prospettiva di corporativismo, o se volete di ghetto artsitico e peggio critico, il cui scopo inconfessato ma esplicito non può essere soltanto qullo di irreggimentare e imbrogliare una situazione altrimenti molto ricca, ammortizzarla in ogni sua interna dialettica, per consegnarla all’arcadia degli esercizi accademici, e alla pacifica ed elitaria fruizione del potere. Un preciso disegno del potere contro la libertà di ricerca.” 17. Article 116 of the 1948 Italian Constitution grants home rule and acknowledges regional power in relation to legislation, administration, and finance to Sardinia, Sicily, TrentinoAlto, Adige/Stüdtirol, Aosta Valley, and Friuli-Venezia Giulia. In 1970, under Article 131, Article 132 and Article 133, the other 15 regions were established. The constitutional mandate was carried out almost immediately in the five “special” regions, as they were areas that threatened separatism. The creation of the fifth special region, Friuli-Venezia Giulia was complicated by the Trieste dispute with Yugoslavia and was postponed until 1964. 18. Robert Putnam and Raffaella Nanetti, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 25. 19. The regions in alphabetical order are Abruzzo, Basilicata, Calabria, Campania, EmiliaRomagna, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Lazio, Liguria, Lombardia, Marche, Molise, Piemonte, Puglia, Sardegna, Sicilia, Toscana, Trento-Alto Adige, Umbria, Valle d’Aosta, Veneto. 20. Sidney Tarrow, Peter Katzenstein, and Luigi Graziano, Territorial Politics in Industrial Nations (New York: Praeger, 1978), 29. 21. Ettore Rotelli, Dal regionalismo alla regione (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973), 26. 22. Carl Levy, Italian Regionalism: History, Identity and Politics (Oxford: Berg, 1996), 4. 23. Franco Levi, “Regioni e Pluralismo,” in Le Regioni tra Costituzione e realtà politica (Torino: Edizioni della Fondazione Giovanni Agnelli, 1977), 23. 24. Raffaella Nanetti, Growth and Territorial Policies: The Italian Model of Social Capitalism (London: Pinter Publishers, 1988), 40. 25. Douglas Yates, Neighborhood Democracy: The Politics and Impacts of Decentralization (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1973), 6. 26. Enrico Crispolti, Arti visive e partecipazione sociale (Bari: De Donato, 1977), 9. 27. Ibid., 30. Original Italian: “Il decentramento democratico si invera nella partecipazione. Non puramente amministrativo, non è meramente di servizi elargiti, ma è appunto il segno di un protagonismo politico e culturale di base, in funzione del quale dovranno operare I servizi. La realtà della partecipazione di base, della quale le istituzioni ‘centrali’ dovranno realizzare momenti di sintesi e di interscambio.” 28. It is hard to find a concise historical narrative charting the development of the “prize” exhibition model in Italy because a comprehensive study of such a phenomenon has yet to be undertaken. 29. Luciano Caramel, interview with the author, Como, Italy, May 2, 2013. 30. Luciano Caramel, “Amarcord a Como: trentanni di Campo Urbano,” Arte In (October/ November 1999): 100. 31. Gabriele Malni, “Campo Urbano,” D’Ars Agency no. 46 (1969): n.p. 32. Full list of artists in the exhibition: Edilio Alpini, Enrico Baj, Thereza Bento, Valentina Berardinone, Ermanno Besozzi, Carlo Bonfà, Inse Bonstrat, Davide Boriani, Annarosa Cotta, Giuseppe Chiari, Enrico Collina, Giuliano Collina, Gianni Colombo, Dadamaino, Vincenzo Dazzi, Gabriele De Vecchi, Antonio Dias, Mario Di Salvo, Luciano Fabro, Carlo Ferrario, Giuseppe Giardina, Ugo La Pietra, Renato Maestri, Libico Maraja, Attilio Marcolli, Armando Marrocco, Livio Marzot, Paolo Minoli, Bruno Molli, Bruno Munari, Giulio Paolini, Ico Parisi, Franca Sacchi, Paolo Scheggi, Gianni Emilio Simonetti, Davide Sprengel, Francesco Somaini, Tommaso Trini, Grazia Varisco, Giacomo Veri, Arnaldo Zanfrini. 33. Ibid.

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34. Alessandra Pioselli, “Arte, Politica e Territorio,” in Milano città d’arte: arte e società 1950–1970, ed. Paolo Campiglio, Marilisa Di Giovanni, Cristiano G. Sangiuliano, and Alessandra Pioselli (Alessandria: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001), 124. 35. Luciano Caramel, Campo urbano: Interventi estetici nella dimensione colllettiva urbana. Como, 21 settembre 1969, exh. cat. (Como: C. Nani, 1969), n.p. 36. Ico Parisi (born in Palermo in 1916 and died in Como 1996) was an architect and designer based in Como and in Milan who studied with Giuseppe Terragni. 37. Giuliano Collina (born in 1938) is a painter and sculptor based in Como. He studied with sculptor Marino Marini and graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in 1962. 38. Francesco Somaini participated in Campo Urbano with the architect Ico Parisi to create the artwork Contenitoreumano, no. 1, a metal and polyurethane container meant to be a human pod. Somaini was not satisfied with Campo Urbano, writing in his journal that it was only a transitory event and that the artist thought of himself as a sculptor and not an artist of ephemeral actions. See Fulvio Irace, “Metropolis,” in Somaini: uno scultore per la città: New York 1967–1976, ed. Enrico Crispolti, Luisa Somaini, and Francesco Somaini (Milano: Skira, 2017), 79. 39. Gianni Pettena belonged to the group formed in Florence associated with Radical Architecture. He was loosely linked to groups Archizoom and UFO although he was also an independent artist. 40. Pettena: “la consueta frattura tra lo spazio della repressione, sempre scenografico, aulico e monumentale, e lo spazio dei repressi, che è buco, è dolore, è tana, è sofferenza” in Luciano Caramel, “Campo Urbano’ a Como,” GALA no. 39 (1969). 41. Romy Golan, “Campo Urbano: One Camera, One Day,” Hunter College, New York, April 20, 2012. 42. Professor Luciano Caramel, interview with the author, Como, Italy, May 2, 2013. 43. In 1973 Marcolli published Teoria del campo (Theory of the Field), a highly theoretical volume on design practice through the analysis of gestalt theory, identifying a series of fields of action and our relationship to them—for example, a topological field and a phenomenological field. 44. Professor Luciano Caramel, interview with the author, Como, Italy, May 2, 2013. 45. I will analyze Ugo La Pietra’s artistic practices and urban interventions in Chapter 4 of this book, where I will also investigate the work of one of La Pietra’s contemporaries, Franco Summa. Both La Pietra and Summa, as well as artists Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli, Maurizio Nannucci, and Franco Vaccari, are given special prominence as specific case studies of Arte Ambientale artists. 46. Caramel, Campo urbano, n.p. 47. Golan, “Campo Urbano.” 48. Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 125. 49. Luciano Caramel, interview with the author, Como, Italy, May 2, 2013. 50. Caramel, Campo urbano, n.p. 51. This particular fascist slogan is in Caggiano, near Salerno, but walls throughout the whole of Italy were covered with similar slogans during Mussolini’s reign. For more on fascist slogans, see Ariberto Segàla, I muri del duce (Gardolo, Trento: Arca, 2000). 52. Cesare Rodi, “Si hanno suonato l’intera città ma I Comaschi sono ora tutti dottori,” La Provincia, September 23, 1969. 53. Ibid. Original Italian: “Un’arte cosi, credetelo, siamo capaci tutti di fabbricarla in casa, limitando all’osso I costi. Arte Povera, taluni la definiscono cosí. Alla faccia del povero!” 54. “Fra striscioni, scatoloni, panni, tunnel e bandiere. La Festa Domenicale degli artisti di Campo Urbano,” L’Ordine, September 23, 1969. 55. Germano Celant, “Arte Touristica,” Casabella (November 1969): 7–8. 56. Antonio Scialoja, “‘Campo Urbano’ è costato qualche milione ma . . . per un giorno la città ne ha visto di tutti I colori,” La Notte, September 23, 1969. 57. Marisa Rusconi, “Si miltiplicano le mostre-spettacolo. Potremmo esporre un bel temporale,” Avvenire, October 11, 1969. 58. Caramel, Campo urbano, n.p. 59. Fabio Cani, Gerardo Monizza, and Grazietta Butazzi, Como e la sua storia (Como: Nodo libri, 1993), 355.

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60. Luciano Caramel, interview with the author, Como, Italy, May 2, 2013. 61. Caramel, “Amarcord a Como,” 102. 62. Caramel, “‘Campo Urbano’ a Como.” Original Italian: “La testimonianza di una crisi, di un mutamento tanto radicale quale è quello al quale stiamo assistendo non può certo risaltare per ‘coerenza’ e limpidità.” 63. Full list of artists in the exhibition: Igino Balderi, Giovanni Baratto, Agostino Bonaiumi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele de Vecchi, Lorenzo Forges Davanzati, Corinna Morando, Nicola Carrino, Enrico Cattaneo, Alik Cavaliere, Fabio De Sanctis, Marco Gastini, Rocco Genovese, Nino Giammarco, Marcello Guasti, Licio Isolano, Teodosio Magnoni, Franco Mazzuchelli, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Maurizio Nannucci, Ugo Nespolo, Operazione 24 fogli, Antonio Paradiso, Gianfranco Pardi, Jorge Piqueras, Joaquin Roca-Rey, Loreno Sguanci, Francesco Somaini, Giuseppe Spagnulo, Mauro Staccioli, Ennio Tamburi, Shu Takahashi, Mino Trafeli, Valeriano Tubbiani, and Giuliano Vagni. The only two artists that participated in both Campo urbano and Volterra ’73 were Davide Boriani and Gabriele De Vecchi. 64. Franco Passoni, “Una città ‘Campo di relazioni umane,’” Avanti!, July 29, 1973. 65. Crispolti was also reacting to the exhibition by Pierre Restany, Nouveau Realisme presented in Milan, November 27, 1970, also a daylong art intervention in the city. See Enrico Crispolti, Volterra 73:15, memoria e prospezione (Roma: De Luca editori d’arte, 2015), 7. 66. Enrico Crispolti, Volterra 73: sculture, ambientazioni, visualizzazioni, progettazione per l’alabastro: Volterra, 15 luglio-15 settembre 1973: delibera e dibattiti, documenti di apertura, opere, risposte e riflessioni, dizionario biobibliografica degli operatori, exh. cat. (Firenze: Centro Di, 1974), n.p. The critic Corrado Marsan critiqued Volterra ’73 on exactly this idea of an exhibition that colonized the town, see Crrado Marsan, “Volterra ’73: nella città del Mastio mostra provocatoria che non convince,” La Nazione, Florence, August 9, 1973. 67. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, Rome, Italy, August 4, 2011. Original Italian: “I fondi per Volterra erano pochi, ma bastavano. A quel tempo le cose si facevano in economia.” 68. Crispolti, Volterra ’73, n.p. 69. Enrico Crispolti, “Volterra ’73,” Gala International, attulità e informazione visiva no. 62 (October/November 1973): 40–42. 70. Cani, Monizza, and Butazzi, Como e la sua storia, 260. 71. In Como, over four thousand people lost their jobs during the 1950s and 1960s as the industry started to cater to an elite clientele rather than the Italian masses. See ibid., 349. 72. Marinella Pasquinucci, Maria Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut, and Alessandro Furiesi, A Short History of Volterra (Pisa: Pacini, 2007), 128. 73. Ilario Luperini, Volterra alabastro oggi (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 1990), 11. 74. Enrico Fiumi, La manifattura degli alabastri (Pisa, Nistri-Lischi, 1940), 90. Original Italian: “Questa industria, nata a Volterra con i primi popoli civili che hanno abitato le sue pendici, vissuta nei secoli, nei secoli continuerà. Le sue vicende si ripeteranno nel tempo; potrà forse sminuirsi, ma non morire, come non muore la civiltà di un popolo.” 75. Luperini, Volterra alabastro oggi, 12. 76. Ibid., 65. 77. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, Rome, Italy, August 4, 2011. 78. Luperini, Volterra alabastro oggi, 96. 79. Alik Cavaliere, “Inizio e fine di un esperimento nella scuola d’arte,” Che Fare? no. 6/7 (Spring 1970): 125. 80. It is interesting that De Sanctis chose a Mercedes instead of a car manufactured in Italy, such as a Fiat or an Alfa Romeo. Perhaps this could be seen as a commentary on the posteconomic-miracle presence of German technology in Italy. 81. Ferdinando Pariante, Convegno di studio lo psicologo e le istituzioni psichiatriche nel momento attuale in Italia, Volterra, 4–5 novembre 1972. (Pacini, 1974). 82. ISTAT. 83. Photographer Pier Nello Manoni, interview with the author, Volterra, Italy, August 13, 2012.

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84. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, Rome, Italy, August 4, 2011. 85. Michael Donnelly, Politics of Mental Health in Italy (London: Routledge, 1992). In 1978, the Italian Parliament passed the Basaglia Law, closing public mental hospitals throughout the country. During the 1970s, the politicized mass social movement also focused on psychiatric care. 86. Michel Foucault was “discovered” in Italy during the early 1970s, despite the fact that his 1961 Histoire de la Folie (Madness and Civilization) was translated into Italian by Franco Ferrucci as early as 1963 and published as Storia della follia by Rizzoli in Milan. Pier Aldo Rovatti, “Sarai un malato di mente: una risposta ai detrattori di Foucault,” in Foucault e la “Storia della follia” (1961–2011) (Milano: il Saggiatore, 2011), 24–35. 87. Massimo Masiero, “Manifestazione per uscire dall’isolamento,” Avvenire, July 28, 1973. 88. It is interesting that the RAI actually made this documentary on Volterra ’73. The reason, discussed in the interview with Prof. Enrico Crisplti in Rome on August 4, 2011, is that the director of the RAI Ettore Bernabei (director from 1960–1974) was from Florence and brought with him to the RAI an interest in cultural events occurring in Tuscany. 89. Mayor Marco Buselli, interview with the author, Volterra, Italy, August 8, 2012. 90. Mauro Staccioli, “Volterra—Volterra ’73,” reprinted in Enrico Crispolti, “La scultura, segno contestuale di Mauro Staccioli,” in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, ed. Manuela Crescentini and Enrico Crispolti (Macerata: Coopedit, 1981), 26. 91. Mauro Staccioli, Riflessioni sull’esperienza di Volterra ’73, unpublished manuscript. 92. Crispolti, Volterra ’73, n.p. 93. Ibid. 94. Maurizio Nannucci’s work from the 1970s will be analyzed in detail in Chapter 5, “Vox Populi,” which will study Nannucci’s and Franco Vaccari’s work in relation to audience participation. 95. Crispolti, Volterra ’73, n.p. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Marsan, “Volterra ’73: nella città del Mastio mostra provocatoria che nonconvince.” 102. “Polemica Liberale per Volterra ’73,” Il Telegrafo, July 25, 1973. 103. Claudia Terenzi, “Volterra ’73: ricerca di un intervento,” Paese Sera, October 14, 1973. 104. Crispolti, Volterra ’73, n.p. 105. The exhibition Ambiente come Sociale was officially co-curated by Crispolti and the painter Raffaele de Grada. 106. The figure of the operatore culturale is discussed in the introduction to this book. 107. Ibid., 4. 108. Sara Catenacci, “L’Ambiente come Sociale alla Biennale di Venezia 1976: note da un libro mai realizzato,” in In corso d’opera. Ricerche dei dottorandi di Storia dell’Arte della Sapienza, ed. Michele Nicolaci, Matteo Piccioni, and Lorenzo Riccardi (Rome: Campisano Editore, 2015), 317–323. 109. “Attività del Gruppo permanente di lavoro per i convegni,” reprinted in English in La Biennale di Venezia: Annuario 1978, 437. 110. Ibid., 405. Original Italian: “Si sono posti fin dall’inizio il problema degli interlocutori istituzionali con I quali affrontare il decentramento: mondo sindacale, associazionismo, cooperativismo, quello dei canali attraverso i quali operare se non si vuole intendere il decentramento come banale operazione itinerante a partire da un centro propulsore e se non ci si accontenta di un semplice spostamento orizzontale delle manifestazioni o della valorizzazione di spazi abbandonati.” 111. Ibid., 426. 112. Ibid., 442. 113. For recent scholarship on the Venice Biennale’s institutional transformation, see Vittoria Martini, “Come la Biennale di Venezia ha istituzionalizzato il Sessantotto,” in Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017), 203–208.

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114. Carlo Ripa di Meana, Introduction to Environment, Participation, Cultural Structures: General Catalog (Venezia: Alfieri edizioni d’arte, 1976), 9. 115. Enrico Crispolti, transcription of the meeting Nuova domanda e modi di produzione culturale nel campo delle arti visive, July 18–19, 1976, Griadini della Biennale, Venice, at the Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice. 116. Original Italian of each section title: Ipotesi e realtà di presenza urbane conflittuali (Hypothesis and Reality of Urban Conflict); Riappropriazione urbane individuali (Individual Urban Reappropriation); Partecipazione spontanea—azione poetica/politica (Spontaneous Participation—Political/Poetical Action); Partecipazione in rapporto con/attraverso l’ente locale (Participation with/through the Local Entities); Ipotesi di rapporto sociale attraverso l’ente statale (Hypothesis of Social Relations through the State Entities). 117. Enrico Crispolti, Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976 (Venice: Venice Biennale, 1976), 6. Original Italian: “Un momento di ‘avvertimento’ ideologico che intende proporre al sociale urbano una sollecitazione rivelatoria, rompendo dunque un equilibrio fittizio in una prospettiva problematica diversa: suggerisce cioè emotivamente un diverso ordine di ragioni, una diversa consapevolezza della realtà della condizione sociale urbane.” 118. Francesco Somaini and Enrico Crispolti, Urgenza nella città (Milano: Mazzotta, 1972). 119. Crispolti, Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 6. 120. Mauro Staccioli, “Artist Statement,” in Crispolti, Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 9. 121. This work will be discussed in depth in Chapter 4 of this book. 122. Crispolti, Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 16. 123. Franco Summa, email exchange with the author, September 26, 2013. 124. Ricardo Dalisi, “Untitled,” in Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 18. Original Italian: “L’azione partecipatoria in un ambiente urbano è come un sondaggio negli strati profondi della condizione sociale, verso la creatività di base, verso le strutture simboliche dei linguaggi collettivi, verso quella sfera del rapporto tra pratica culturale e prassi sociale, tra ricerca e politica.” 125. Lavoratorio di Comunicazione Militante, “Strategia d’Informazione: Distorsione della realtà e diffusione del consenso,” in Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 26. 126. Crispolti, Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 32. 127. See introduction in Giacomo Sani, “The Italian Electorate in the Mid-1970s: Beyond Tradition?” in Italy at the Polls: The Parliamentary Elections of 1976, ed. Howard Rae Penniman (Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1977). 128. Since 2002 the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea of Rome has taken over the space for largescale art installations. 129. This was part of the INA-Casa initiative that aimed to achieve public housing in all of Italy after World War II. 130. Crispolti, Ambiente come Sociale la Biennale 1976, 40. 131. Ibid., 44. 132. The programming for “Documentazione aperta” was as follows: 14–25 July: un esperienza nell’ospedale psichiatrico “Frullone” di Napoli: a/social group, Naples; 28 July–8 August: Esperienze di animazione nelle scuole primarie; 10–19 August: La riqualificazione della zona (centro storico) a Milano; 22–31 August: l’Esperienza del Monumento a Franceschi, a Milano; 3–12 September: L’operazione Palazzo di Arcevia: Ipotesi di comunità esistenziale; 15–26 September: L’ecomuseo: l’esperienza del “Cracap” le Creusot, e il lavoro di Carlo Pomi a San Marino di Bentivoglio; 29 September–10 October: I risultati della legge del 2% suo rinnovamento, e problemi della committenza pubblica. 133. Celant’s exhibition Ambiente arte is cited by Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), xxii, as a first important attempt to historicize Installation art as a genre. 134. Artists William Crosby, William Duesing, Paul Fuge, Peter Kindlemann, and David Rumsey made up the Pulsa group.

Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

Plate 1 Franco Vaccari, Viaggio sul Reno, 1974, color photograph and text.

Plates 1–8

Plate 2 Franco Summa, 24 magliette: sentirsi un Arcobaleno adosso, 1975, T-shirts, documentary photographs. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Plate 3 Ugo Nespolo, Untitled (Piramide), 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo Nespolo

Plate 4 Maurizio Nannucci, Schermature: Intervento sull’illuminazione cittadina, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

Plate 5 Francesco Somaini, Monumento ai Marinai d’Italia (Monument to the Sailors of Italy), 1965–1967, bronze, 6.5 × 3.5 × 4 m, Milan. Source: Image courtesy of the Author

Plate 6 Francesco Somaini, Ingresso per un centro commerciale, 1970, ink on paper, 51 × 73 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Plate 7 Franco Summa, Farsi un quadro, 1970, performance, wood, acrylic paint.

Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Plate 8 Franco Summa, Histoire d’O, 1976, acrylic paint on wall, Pescara, Italy.

3

Redeployment of Sculpture in the City Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli

On entering the Giardini of the 1978 Venice Biennale, visitors confronted a 26-foot concrete wall, an artwork titled Muro by sculptor Mauro Staccioli [Figure 3.1]. The arresting barrier was sited on the main throughway, completely obscuring the vista toward the central pavilion. Its blank façade might have intimidated visitors, with its overbearing size and stark fontage. No soon had they made their way around the wall, eager audiences would have encountered another obstacle in the Giardini, Francesco Somaini’s Morte a Venezia [Figure 3.2]. On a huge metal cube scaffold, Somaini mounted four photomontages showing alarming images of Venice. Both artworks demanded the viewer’s attention, because at the very least, they had to bypass them to access the rest of the exhibitions. While Staccioli’s Muro was flat and devoid of imagery, Somaini’s piece was three-dimensional and offered viewers four distinct dystopian vistas of Venice destroyed by urban degradation, rising tides, excessive tourism, and unregulated industrial manufacture. Although formally different, the sculptures of both artists directly addressed the urban, and placed the city at the very center of visitor’s first encounter with the Biennale. By making Arte Ambientale projects at this site, Staccioli and Somaini transplanted the city into the more natural setting of the Biennale gardens, albeit one of cultural display. The sculptures were part of Enrico Crispolti’s exhibition, Natura come Sociale, connected to the Italian Pavilion, where he displayed artwork not inside the galleries but outside in the Giardini.1 Crispolti’s show built on the exhibition he curated two years prior at the Venice Biennale, Ambiente come Sociale (Environment as Social), discussed in Chapter 2. In 1978, Crispolti contextualized the overarching theme of “nature” within ambiente, the urban environment and the social sphere. He exhibited artwork that had a dialectical relationship between nature and culture, because, he explained, “one is either in nature or in the urban environment.”2 In addressing the urban—while positioned among the leafy green trees of the Biennale—both Staccioli and Somaini’s work gained an additional critical layer. Staccioli’s Muro displaced urban construction material—concrete, which was used for lower-income housing blocks—into the verdant space to highlight the jarring contrast between Italian cities’ sprawling peripheries and their almost complete lack of parks and green areas. Likewise, Somaini’s Morte a Venezia repositioned the city of Venice within its gardens. Each image acted like a concentrated historical time lapse, where visitors could visualize what the city could become if capital’s forces of urbanization caused the eventual destruction of the city itself. Yet this dichotomy between art and nature was a more recent development in both Somaini’s work and Staccioli’s work, because like all Arte Ambientale artists, they had

Figure 3.1 Mauro Staccioli, Muro, 1978, iron, plaster, and concrete, 800 × 800 × 120 cm, Exhibition Natura come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1978. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

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Figure 3.2 Francesco Somaini, Morte a Venezia, 1978, cube scaffold with large photomontages, 500 × 500 × 500 cm, Exhibition Natura come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1978. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

been primarily preoccupied with the state of Italian cities since the beginning of the 1970s. They were both concerned with the loss of humanity’s identification with their urban surroundings. Modern architecture, exemplified by such towering geometrical structures as the Torre al Parco (1956) and Torre Uffici Tecnici Comunali (1966), or speculative low-income housing such as in the suburban neighborhoods of Baggio or San Siro, dramatically altered urban landscapes, especially in major cities like Milan.3 These structures did not reflect human beings in either their scale or forms. The result was a sense of dislocation and alienation, which stood in direct contrast to both artists’ ideas of what a city should be, based on humanistic values of community. Arte Ambientale artists worked within the fabric of the city to highlight these imbalances, and this chapter takes Somaini’s and Staccioli’s art practices as case studies, elaborating on concerns of the urban environment, such as territorio, already addressed

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in Crispolti’s Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale. What draws these two artists together is that they both looked to sculpture—the manipulation of tangible materials such as stone or concrete in three-dimensional form—as a means to intervene within the urban landscape. By the 1970s—after artists such as Lucio Fontana in the 1950s and Kinetic art movements like Gruppo N and Gruppo T in the 1960s had broken the mold of traditional three-dimensional sculpture—it might have seemed outdated for artists to continue to focus on the formal qualities of matter. However, Somaini and Staccioli redeployed the traditional medium and breathed fresh life into it by shifting its context, from the autonomous space of the gallery to the urban environment. For them, it was no longer about the production of discrete objects but rather about the creation of forms whose raison d’être was in relation to the surrounding buildings and people. They imagined sculpture in its expanded form, not unlike some of the Land artist of their same generation, such as Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, and Alice Aycock.4 Like them, Staccioli’s and Somaini’s sculptures were a revision of terms: a matter of ceasing to see sculpture as existing in an abstract space and instead embedding it within its site-specific context. However, unlike their American counterparts, Staccioli and Somaini worked explicitly, and perhaps exclusively, on urban questions and thus in the city and its social reality.5 This position was especially radical given the two artists’ respect for sculptural traditions. Somaini and Staccioli were concerned with mass and volume and did not work with ephemeral or improvisatory materials. Unlike, for instance, the artwork of the Arte Povera artists, whose conflictual language and ideological positions filtered through the use of materials and instruments that were outside the sculptural tradition, their material choices could be considered conservative. Somaini consistently used marble and bronze, whereas Staccioli constructed elementary forms out of concrete. In contrast, artists like Ugo La Pietra and Franco Summa (Chapter 4) and Maurizio Nannucci and Franco Vaccari (the focus of Chapter 5) all employed nontraditional art materials and conceptual practices in their Arte Ambientale projects, also situated in the outdoor spaces of the city. Moreover, Somaini and Staccioli also differed from sculptors like Arnaldo Pomodoro and Giancarlo Sangregorio, who were formalists making three-dimensional artworks that they placed in public spaces throughout the decade but without specific attention to site specificity. What was innovative about Somaini and Staccioli was that they reimagined sculpture as having a social function and repositioned it, without relinquishing its traditional tenets, outside, embedded within the social fabric of the city. While Somaini and Staccioli were both committed to the language of Arte Ambientale and critiquing the technocratization of the urban environment, their sculptures looked different. On a formal level, Somaini’s was mostly organic and engaged with the irrational, while Staccioli’s was geometric and rational. Another difference was that Somaini’s output had a robust theoretical drive, and during the 1970s, he decided to render his ideas in the form of photomontages, like Morte a Venezia. Somaini created photomontages primarily because his sculptural projects, as we will see, grew to be too large in scale and ambition to be fully realized. In contrast, Staccioli actualized many sculptures in urban space using his own hands. In other words, Somaini was more theoria; Staccioli was more praxis. This distinction was also made by Crispolti, when, in comparing them, he articulated that Somaini’s urban interventions reaffirmed sculpture in all its conspicuity, permanence, and even monumentality, yet he only realized them as two-dimensional photomontages. Staccioli, on the other

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hand, carried out a sort of guerrilla sculpture in urban space, inserting powerful and evocative forms in dialogue with both places and people.6 By engaging with the context of the urban reality and the sociopolitical context, both Somaini and Staccioli questioned the role of the sculptor, stretching its boundaries. They both practiced sculpture senza confini (without borders), engaging in a dynamic dialogue with public space, its buildings, history, culture, and, most importantly, its inhabitants. A primary vehicle for both these artists was the body, metaphorically evoked in their artwork and the physicality of the viewer. The body figures in Somaini’s bleeding organic-looking buildings and in Staccioli’s aggressive shapes that are directed outward toward the toward the passerby. The artists instrumentalized the body, which seems to get eaten, tossed, and pushed, as a way of reflecting and visualizing the alienating effects of capitalism in the lived environment. Power and aggression were forceful strategies at play here, which they hoped to deploy to instigate a dialogue between people and their environment, and to make evident the contradictions of the lived city.7 Their goal was to empower the viewer—all bodies alike—and galvanize their engagement with the art and their involvement with their own lived spaces.

Urgenza Nella Città: Francesco Somaini During the 1970s, Somaini reconceived his sculptural practice and defined the initial terms for Arte Ambientale. For him, the only justifiable way of making art was to engage with the de facto conditions of urban reality and to see it as a framework for critical interventions.8 Somaini understood the city—that locus of collectivity and human interaction—to be threatened by the thrust of industrialization and technocratization.9 This peril was a backlash to the positive progressivism of the Italian economic miracle of the 1960s, where the urban landscape seemed to grow and sprawl uncontrollably. For Somaini, the city should return to a scale that correlated more closely with human activity and existed in conjunction with the ideals of democracy, which could be traced to the humanist tradition of ancient Greek city-states.10 In his art, Somaini focused on abstract organic forms to counter what he viewed as the alienating geometry of urban construction erected in Italy during the postwar period. His sculptures, typically made out of marble with a unique sand-blasting technique he invented, are masses that appear to be in the process of becoming, made up of curved protrusions and indentations, twisting and turning from an inner, hidden central core. They are innately anthropomorphic, but without resembling any specific part of the human body. While Somaini was an artist tethered to a lithic tradition, he also looked beyond the sculptural object to architecture and urban space. Especially during the 1970s, he planned to enlarge his sculptures to enormous proportions, challenging the ever-increasing size of the urban environment. To envision what that might look like, Somaini turned to photomontage as a tool to experiment with form on an epic scale. Using the energy of colliding images, the artist envisioned how his sculptures his sculptures would act as a disruptive element in the angular cityscape, strategically placed to stir the viewer’s emotion: an organic form next to a skyscraper, in a piazza, or over a road intersection, resulting in a creative juxtaposition. These representations are fraught, revealing the contradictions he saw present in the city: forces of the past and future; antiquity and modernity; nature and technology; organicity and artificiality; stasis and progress; and community and alienation. His photomontages are meant to

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emotionally admonish and activate the viewer so that they would consider the conditions of their lived urban spaces anew. Socialist ideals inspired Somaini, and he was, for a time, an official member of the PSI.11 During the 1970s, however, he sympathized with the communist party leader, Enrico Berlinguer, and voted PCI, but he did not become a party member. Unlike some of his Arte Ambientale contemporaries, Somaini considered art as one thing and the vote another, and he was not interested in aligning his work with party politics.12 Even so, Somaini’s photomontages from the 1970s cannot be understood without a political agenda: critiquing the alienating effects of modernity and capital in the urban environment. The impact of capital on inhabitant’s minds and bodies, in particular, was a recurring theme for the artist. But while Somaini’s artwork took up class issues—the adverse impact of wealthy industrialists on the urban condition for working-class inhabitants—he did not differentiate between people living in the city and those in the country; men and women; or immigrants and non-immigrants. Importantly, Somaini did not seem to acknowledge that in the oppressive city, some bodies are more oppressed than others. Rather, he sought to engage with inhabitants universally. Somaini was born in Lomazzo, about 20 miles north of Milan, on August 6, 1926. He was precocious and knew from a young age that he wanted to be a sculptor.13 As a young man during World War II, he traveled to neutral Switzerland, where he met many émigré artists, such as compatriot Marino Marini and members of the Surrealists Meret Oppenheim and Alberto Giacometti.14 In the immediate postwar years, Somaini toured Europe, absorbing different artistic influences—new and old—with a voracious appetite. In particular, he gravitated toward the contemporary geometric abstraction of the Groupe Espace (Group Space) and the work of André Bloc, who aligned constructivist ideals with urbanism and fused architecture, painting, and sculpture with urban and social contexts.15 At the same time, French Gothic churches like Notre Dame inspired Somaini, as he was interested in instances where sculpture was ensconced into the architecture.16 These two influences would become most evident in Somaini’s 1970s photomontages, where he integrated sculpture, buildings, and the city. Somaini was a few decades older than other Arte Ambientale artists and had a previous career as an Informel artist. In 1955, he joined the movimento d’arte concreta (Concrete art movement, or MAC) in Italy, which foregrounded abstraction and, in particular, geometric non-figuration. While Somaini never adopted their rigid angularity, he did formulate a sculptural language based on curves, torsions, and contrasts between solid and void, mass and weightlessness. During these years, Somaini also developed a particular materiality, and in the series of sculptures exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1960, the surfaces are raw, the forms rugged. They look like lumps of molten matter extruded from industrial machinery, with both smooth and coarse textures. Art critic Renato Barilli noted that in the Art Informel period, Somaini presented antagonisms between humankind and matter, activism and inertia, action and reaction, full and void, and positive and negative, frictions that were already at the core of his sculptural language.17 Somaini’s Art Informel period reached its apex with the commission of Monumento ai Marinai (Monument to the Sailors), a giant bronze sculpture situated in the Parco Vittorio Formentano, installed in 1967 [Plate 5]. This was Somaini’s first public art commission, the opportunity to integrate sculpture into the urban environment.18

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It was, in many ways, a transitional work: it spoke the aesthetic language of Art Informel—with its rough, almost corroded surfaces, emphasizing materiality and corporeality—but it also engaged with the urban space with a charged emotional force, foreshadowing his 1970s preoccupations. Somaini conceived it specifically in relation to its urban context, a new park designed by the architect Luigi Caccia Dominioni. The area was part of the city of Milan’s urban redevelopment project, and Dominioni’s redesign and Somaini’s sculpture were planned to be intricately linked in form and content.19 This collaboration demonstrates that for the artist, sculpture was not like a “meteorite that crashes down into an already existent context.”20 Instead, it soars upward from its existing location. Formally embodying this idea, Monumento ai Marinai rises like a jet of water caught by strong frontal winds or a spray of lava set in mid-air. As a commission, it also speaks to monumentality and tribute, evoking victorious figures like Nike of Samothrace. Wanting the monument to speak to a non–art world audience, Somaini invested in an almost abstract language with a high emotional and sensory charge—a language he believed inhabitants would immediately apprehend.21 Indeed, the affective and dynamic force of Monumento ai Marinai engaged with Milan’s urban landscape. The art critic Alberto Longatti noted in an article in La Provincia from 1978 how the sculpture contrasts with the city’s chaotic traffic and the hive-like buildings where inhabitants lived in jewel-box rooms.22 Longatti advocated for Somaini’s piece by noting that it might awaken alienated citizens out of their reality and force them to become more aware of their environment. After Monumenti ai Marinai, Somaini became wholly invested in sculpture’s role in reversing the disquieting effects of metropolitan alienation. Immediately after the installation of the Milan monument, Somaini traveled to the United States to install three major public art commissions, in Baltimore, Rochester, and Atlanta, where he experienced his fears for the urban fate of Italy, to a heightened level, in cities like New York City.23 In America, Somaini saw towering skyscrapers and endless advertisements. The repeating, uniform buildings did not conform to the specific qualities of the landscape or culture of the territory, but instead were an arrogant celebration of the power of capital—both universal and banal.24 The cost of the expansion was urban gigantism and numb repetition.25 Somaini believed that this environment was devoid of what he called imagini or images.26 By this, he did not mean advertisements in the urban space with the intent to allure inhabitants to purchase, but instead representations—in both two-dimensional or three-dimensional form—that were in some way reflective of what he considered to be a sense of the humanity of the dwellers. Like Somaini, sociologist Alberto Gasparini was concerned with the symbolic image of the city, which he believed to be in crisis under the effects of capital’s selfrepresentation.27 This environment, according to Somaini, determined the social character of the inhabitants. The negative cycle only got worst through a continual draining citizens’ sense of creativity and community, ultimately causing their isolation and addiction to consumerism.28 Worse still, he thought it led to the loss of critical consciousness and the emotional impoverishment of the citizen. And yet, for Somaini, the city—both in its abstraction and in the tangible examples that he experienced in the United States and Italy—was at the heart of his understanding of humanity, as the place for the natural aggregation of communities and the preservation of social memory. At the center of this threat to the city was a new role for sculpture: the

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possibility for the medium to be like a signal, setting in motion an emotional reaction to address and reshape urban spaces, ultimately reversing the numbness which had come to typify the alienated metropolis. As Somaini returned to Italy from the United States, he dramatically shifted his sculptural practice and began to formulate ideas that would, two years later, result in the publication of Urgenze nella città (Urban Urgencies). The book, co-conceived by Crispolti and Somaini, was composed of text by the former and drawings by the latter. Together, curator and artist reconsidered urban space as a field of imaginative intervention, a site where art had the potential for active interaction with its inhabitants. Somaini began conversations about Urban Urgencies with Crispolti in 1969. While the book’s publication was delayed for funding reasons until 1972, the date of the exchanges between Somaini and Crispolti is essential, as it shows that Arte Ambientale was temporally embedded in the sociopolitics of the 1970s.29 The book served as both personal manifesto and documentation of the inception of Italy’s Environmental Art movement, outlining a new role for the artist in the urban sphere. Indeed, Crispolti noted in the forward that, as a critic, he was not to study and comment “a posteriori” but be a comrade in arms.30 Absorbing and interpreting Somaini’s ideas, he defined the artist’s work and set the operative terms for Arte Ambientale. Moreover, the book propelled Crispolti to discover other artists working with this same drive, such as Mauro Staccioli. Somaini titled the book “Urgencies” because there was an immediacy to the intervention he wanted to carry out. He turned to writing and drawing because they were the fastest way that he could materialize his ideas, which he described as a first-aid bandage: “fast emotional resuscitation, temporary, but as effective as mouth-to-mouth breathing, an unexpected blood transfusion . . . a carnal violence to the whole city, a huge slap that runs across the city like a tornado but with permanent consequences.”31 The explicit reference to the city as an anthropomorphized, genderless body in need of immediate triage gives the project a palpitating importance. The effect, Somaini hoped, would be simultaneously traumatic—due to the need to violently shake inhabitants from the metropolitan stupor—and therapeutic—being awakened would restore inhabitants’ sense of humanity. Somaini and Crispolti predicated their ideas in part on the latest publications in the emerging field of urban sociology, which saw industrialization—resulting from aggressive capitalist expansion—as damaging the city’s unique and humane essence.32 A valuable reference point was Lewis Mumford’s 1961 The City in History, which was translated into Italian as La città nella storia in 1967.33 Mumford examined the growth of the modern city and the resulting dehumanizing effects of technology and argued for what he called an “organic city,” emphasizing the importance of culture. Somaini also read Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, also first published in 1961, and translated as Vita e morte delle grandi città only in 1969.34 She critiqued American 1950s urban planning policies, which were responsible for the decline of many city neighborhoods. Jacobs focused on the investment in highways, claiming that they caused isolation and a reduction of people interacting within the urban environment.35 Additionally, other texts that were influential and also recently translated in Italian include Henri Lefebvre’s Il diritto alla città in 1970 and Alexander Mitscherlich’s Il feticcio urbano in 1968.36 Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander’s 1963 work Community and Privacy, which was translated into Italian in 1968 as Spazio di relazione e spazio privato, outlined the catastrophic effect of the city’s exploitation of natural resources and emphasized the need of creating sustainable

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communities. Closer to home, Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della città, published in 1970, directed Somaini to think about the city as having many topographical layers, including social, cultural, and historical layers, which would become the primary subjects for his sculptural interventions.38 Together, mixing Anglophone and Italian architectural history and sociology, these books formed the theoretical foundation for Somaini’s practice as he sought to engage with the multivalent concept of the metropolis.39 Somaini’s charge required a complete reconception of the function of the sculptor: an artist that integrated form, activism, and architecture. His undertaking was no small feat: in Crispolti’s words, the artist was “entrusted with the task of making an active contribution to the rehabilitation of the city’s dimension of community and historical consciousness. Urban sculpture was to make exemplary emotional amends to the city’s present psycho-cultural impoverishment.”40 Sculptures—even in the form of drawings or photomontages—could act as “emotional compensation, and monitory” to the hoarseness of the capitalist metropolis: they were an exorcism, cognitive denudation, through the symbols and images of the profound essence of humankind.41 By engaging with evocative imagery, Somaini sought to recover a sense of individual and collective memory.42 Espousing Carl Jung’s theories of the collective unconscious, the artist understood that we share a primal essence.43 Somaini thought that this—a universal humanism that could take locally inflected set of forms—needed to be reflected in the architecture of the city, its dwellings and workspaces.44 Buildings should embody a memory of the city and its people. This memory was not only historical but also an iconographic stratum of emotions. Thus, the sculptor’s role was to tap into this sense of memory and manifest it within the modern urban context, to awaken a deep human quality that he believed had become suppressed within the modern alienated cityscape. In his own words, What we need in the primary places of the city is a sign system that deals with the very roots of human existence. . . . The sign system must deal with the absolutes; death, sex, rage, and cruelty are to be expressed in huge, enormous, incumbent, and unambiguous symbols to remind us of the central motifs of all our history, of our very being.45 This, for Somaini, would translate to highly evocative forms—grounded in the shape of the body—and with the fusion of art and architecture. Somaini’s interests in the nexus of art and architecture meant that his sculptures became massive, scaled to be lived in as buildings. His idea was sculture abitabili (habitable sculptures).46 In many ways utopian, his designs became not only for the imagination but also of the imagination.47 And yet the drawings were themselves an intervention, a “hypothesis and reality within a conflict-laden urban sphere,” and they indicated at once both critique and the desire for action.48 His designs for evocative sculptures as buildings included, but were not limited to, sculpture for a metropolitan street, a theater entrance, a subway entrance, entrances to a department store and a library, a façade for a cultural center, a façade for a city hall, a multilevel underground plaza, and a sculptural connection for two interrelated skyscrapers. Remarkably, there is a fluidity between the two-dimensional drawings, three-dimensional sculptures, and large-scale urban structures. For instance, in the drawing Ingresso per un centro commerciale (Entrance to a Shopping Mall) [Plate 6], Somaini incorporated renderings from the sculpture La caduta del uomo (The Fall of Man) from 1969 [Figure 3.3],

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Figure 3.3 Francesco Somaini, La caduta del uomo (Fall of Man), 1969, bronze with silver deposits, 91 × 26 × 28 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

but enlarged his ideas to the size of actual buildings. Thus, the drawings in the book Urgenza nella città need to be seen as evolutions and further elaborations of Somaini’s sculptures. They act like a bridge between drawing, sculpture, and architecture, synthesizing form and visualizing its possibilities, a strategy that would intensify in Somaini’s photomontages in the mid 1970s. Like his sculptures, Somaini fashioned his drawings with a charged bodily lexicon, which he applied to a diverse selection of urban structures, such as skyscrapers. As in Ingresso per un centro commerciale, Somaini’s interventions bite and cut into the monolithic structure of the building itself. These additions were not ornaments but wounds, a challenge to the “one-way progressive optimistic ideology” of capitalism.49 In some renditions, Somaini even went so far as to integrate the color red, recalling streams of blood flowing down the exterior of the skyscraper. This use of blood was not feminine, evoking menstruation or labor, but tied to war and victimhood. It was bellicose and exaggerated the violence toward the capitalist city, a theme also present in the Staccioli’s sculptures.50

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Somaini rendered specific drawings to critique consumerism explicitly. Again, looking at Ingresso per centro commerciale as an example, the building has a large aperture where the entrance to the building might be. This portal opens wide, like a whale’s mouth, devouring anyone who enters. The shopping center was at once a place “that nourishes us in the sense that we buy food, but also devours us because consumerism is a plague,” the art historian and artist’s daughter Luisa Somaini recalled of her father’s work.51 Drawings such as this explicitly critiqued American consumerism, as supermarkets were not a ubiquitous phenomenon in Italy at the time. In this way, this drawing may also be read as a counterattack: “one huge single mouth might also be seen as the ‘self-representation’ of devouring consumerism and the capitalist profit motives that inspire it.”52 All of Somaini’s interventions—drawings, photomontages, and physical sculptures— were based on organic form, which countered the angularity of the modern metropolis. As art historian Fluvio Irace noted, the organic implies a deformation of a rigid order; it proposes excess and the uncontrolled as an antidote to the total symmetry.53 A phenomenon of modern architecture, the geometry of buildings was a negative purification of forms. The organic—from the first arch to more recent art deco designs— instead, recalled the soft contours of the human body.54 Somaini was specifically and explicitly referencing sex organs when he evoked the organic. In a page in Lewis Mumford’s La città nella storia, Somaini wrote, The phallus and the vulva dominate the ritual of the village since ancient times: in monumental form they extend into the city always more camouflaged. From the ancient phalluses of Delo and the Etruscans, to the obelisks, to towers, to the even more recent skyscrapers, often beyond function. The walls, the cave, the piazza are extensions of the female symbol, like all the city itself, the house.55 For Somaini, sex was deeply embedded in the Western understanding of culture, and the city was a reflection of that culture. For instance, on a visual level, in Ingresso per centro commerciale, the verticality of the skyscrapers resembles the phallus and the gaping opening the vagina. In this respect, Somaini’s drawings, and later photomontages, can also be compared to American artist Anita Steckel’s work from around the same time. In her drawings, she confronted themes of sexism, urbanism, and history from a feminist perspective. She made literal the phallic nature of skyscrapers in New York Skyline, circa 1971, for instance. Steckel is best known for her Giant Women series (1969–1974), a group of montages portraying enlarged women integrated into New York’s topography. She saw her work as liberating the feminine form within the phallic-looking, controlled, and male-dominated urban space.56 Likewise, Somaini’s project can be viewed as a release of the suppressed body against the forces of capitalism. But while for Steckel, a female artist, the challenge was male patriarchy, for Somaini, a male artist, the critique only went as far as class. In all of Somaini’s drawings for Urban Urgencies, the body—male and female—is placed front and center. It features in the actual redesign of the urban buildings themselves, from bleeding wounds and open mouths to other orifices. The rectangular skyscraper is aggressively reconfigured, making its angularity of geometry familiar on a physiological level once more. Soon after the publication of Urban Urgencies, Somaini began a series of drawings that addressed Milan specifically, with its recent massive territorial expansion and

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inadequate infrastructure. Speculative property developers erected nondescript housing for the working class, rapidly enlarging the city’s peripheries. Fully engaged in the discourses on urban growth, Somaini designed an alternative high-rise building, titled Spine verdi in 1972 [Figure 3.4].57 The design consisted of three skyscrapers sited next to the suburbs of Sesto San Giovanni, Cinisello Balsamo, and Bresso, all areas populated by immigrant working families from the Italian south. Although these buildings might have the basic design of skyscrapers—tall apartment buildings towering toward the sky—they had one crucial particularity: trees covered one of their façades, where a gentle slope, from the ground to the top, constituted a growing forest. The artist arranged the three skyscrapers in a triangle, with the tree-lined exterior facing outward. Unlike the drawings for Urban Urgencies, where Somaini integrated flowing or gaping forms into monolithic cubes, the artist combined real trees, whose forms were inherently organic. In the 1970s, there were few designated green spaces in Milan, as the city was being populated with densely packed urban construction. Somaini’s design was a way of integrating greenery within the urban environment with an alternative scheme. Interestingly, Spine verdi predated a recent Milan skyscraper called “Bosco Verticale.” Inaugurated in 2014, architect Stefano Boeri, with Gianandrea Barreca

Figure 3.4 Francesco Somaini, Spine verdi, 1972, ink on paper, 25 × 28 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

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and Giovanni La Varra, designed two tall towers as luxury apartment buildings in the northwest district of Porta Nuova.58 Together, they hold more than nine hundred trees on terraces, which were designed to filter the air, moderate temperatures in the winter and summer, and attenuate the city noise. The idea of a vertical forest sounds utopian, but this recent construction reveals that Somaini’s radical urban sculptural plans were in many ways prescient. And yet, Somaini aimed to ameliorate working-class housing, while Bosco Verticale, ironically, houses captains of industry. Continuing to explore the same friction between angular and curved forms, Somaini shifted from drawing to photomontage in the mid 1970s. He spliced and reconfigured photographs he took on his travels, especially to New York City at the end of the 1960s, with those of his sculptures, mixing site specificity with forms that spoke to universal themes of humanity. In his city views, he framed unusual angles of the urban topography—skyscrapers in particular—to capture the sense of alienation, disorientation, and confusion that he must have experienced while navigating the urban space. Into these scenes, he montaged photographs of his organic sculptures, creating a jarring juxtaposition emphasizing rigid modern architecture with sinuous shapes. Following Urban Urgencies, the 1970s photomontages advanced Somaini’s critique of the modern metropolis. However, while the drawings could be seen as fantastical— they could hypothetically be about any modern city—the photomontages were undeniably located in New York City. The first photomontage of this type was for the exhibition Dissuasione Manifesta: Operazione 24 fogli, curated by Enrico Crispolti in 1973. Somaini, together with seven other artists, created a photomontage that was printed as a poster and installed in the space of advertisement billboards in many cities across Italy.59 This was the first time Somaini created a photomontage to be displayed within the urban context. This project was decisive for the artist, because he recognized the medium’s potential for immediacy and communication, given that it was to be placed in the same space as advertisement imagery. He created ROSA (Rapporto Organico Scultura-Architettura, or Organic Relationship, Sculpture-Architecture), whereby he juxtaposed a photograph of two skyscrapers—seen from below—and a rose [Figure 3.5]. The bud, at the lower center, creeps, almost apologetically, into the composition. Its unfolding circular petals dramatically contrast with the parallel lines of the buildings that thrust upward. The image is sparseno overlapping forms—and static—no clouds to add texture or movement. In the title, Somaini aptly used a rose as the subject, but more importantly, the acronym ROSA reveals Somaini’s interest in the relationship between organic sculpture and non-organic modern architecture. This theme would occupy Somaini’s future photomontages, but in subsequent iterations, he replaced the rose with his curved creations. Somaini’s first debut of his photomontages was at the Francesco Somaini exhibition in Salzburg, at the Zwerglgarten Pavilion, July–August 1974. He showed works such as Farfalla della solitudine: scultura-legamento tra due grandi edifici commerciali (Butterfly of Solitude: Sculpture-Link between Two Large Commercial Buildings), 1974 [Figure 3.6], where Somaini revisited the sculpture Caduta dell’uomo: caduta in se stesso (Fall of Man, Fall in Himself), created between 1967 and 1969, and integrated it, photographed from below, in between a view, also from below, of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. From this vantage point, the sculpture is gigantic and overshadows both skyscrapers, with the same upward thrust. Yet it also breaks the straight vertical lines with forms that twist and curve. The discord,

Figure 3.5 Francesco Somaini, ROSA (Rapporto Organico Scultura-Architettura), 1973, photomontage, 250 × 500 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

Figure 3.6 Francesco Somaini, Farfalla della solitudine: scultura-legamento tra due grandi edifice commerciali, 1974, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

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rendered in photography, is magnified, as the rounded, soft shapes of Somaini’s sculptures clash more deliberately with the rationalism of the buildings. Like ROSA, there is hardly any urban context, causing the composition to appear seemingly abstract, except for one single street lamp, which edges into the image from the right. The lonely lamp interferes with the composition’s simple geometry while it grounds the picture, anchoring it in a tangible way to street level. A journalist writing at the time in a local newspaper from Brescia noted this dichotomy: “in front of the artificial is the natural; in front of the suffocating immobility of the structures is the liberating movement of the body. Intellect and laws oppress; vitality and eros liberate.”60 In these images, Somaini’s sculptures, inserted within the urban landscape, grow to monumental proportions.61 Size, here, was crucial, since the sculptures, like Somaini’s earlier drawings, were conceived to be functional buildings while still retaining their sculptural form.62 Sculpture thus became a foil for architecture, while photography acted as a necessary translator, a middle ground connecting differences in scale, location, materials, and mediums. Somaini used photography conceptually in that the montages were representations of the idea of sculpture inserted into the urban sphere. In Sfinge di Manhattan: proposta per la costruzione di un centro commerciale e di studi audiovisivi (Manhattan Sphinx: Proposal for the Construction of a Shopping Mall and Audio-Visual Studios), from 1974 [Figure 2.12], Somaini redeployed his marble sculpture, Sfinge di Manhattan, created the same year, in a photomontage. The structure was meant to serve as a media structure: a centro di spettacolo, or entertainment center, serving interdisciplinary purposes.63 This photomontage shows how quickly the artist could move between mediums and materials: from solid bronze to a glass dome in his transition from sculpture to architecture. And yet this fluidity between mediums was possible precisely because the artworks as buildings existed only as a concept. Like Somaini’s drawings, his photomontages are highly sexualized and primarily corporeal. But while in the drawings, the buildings are wounded or bleeding, in the photomontages, Somaini’s sculptures evoke female genitalia. Somaini deployed pudendum—the origins of humanity—perhaps as an antidote to the phallic verticality of the skyscraper, itself a symbol of capitalism and technocratization of everyday life. And yet, as a male artist, he might have also exploited this symbol. This contrast— organic forms versus geometric angularity, and female versus male symbols—served Somaini, because his photomontages operated in archetypal dualities that recall our most basic instinct: the sex drive that ensures human survival.64 Yet Somaini also complicated this gender dichotomy with later photomontages, such as Carnificazione di un’architettura: Martiro II. Grande edificio per servizi pubblici costituente imagine antropomorfica emergente (Embodiment of an Architecture: Martyr II. Large Building for Public Service Constituting Emerging Anthropomorphic Imagery) 1975– 1976 [Figure 3.7], where he integrated the 1974–1975 sculpture Carnificazione di un architettura: Martiro II (Embodiment of an Architecture: Martyr II), whose form recalls the male torso, over and emerging from rising skyscrapers. The curving shape of the sculpture again contrasts with the rigidity of the buildings, bulging inward and outward irregularly. But here, it is the bowed shape of the muscular force that counters the angularity of architecture, not the suppleness of the female body or genitalia Perhaps naively, Somaini seemed to employ, to the same degree, the organic forms of the body—without an awareness of power discrepancies between male and female bodies—to challenge the unyielding architecture of the city.

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Figure 3.7 Francesco Somaini, Carnificazione di un’architettura: Martiro II. Grande edificio per servizi pubblici costituente imagine antropomorfica emergente, 1975–1976, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

New York City, with its concentration of skyscrapers, provided fertile terrain for Somaini to explore his conceptual-sculptural interventions. However, he was based, and making art, in Italy, and continued to be attuned to Italy’s urban challenges, in cities large, like Milan, and small, like Mantua. He was eager to apply his aesthetic strategies to local problems. The opportunity arose in 1977, when the Mayor of Mantua, Gianni Usvardi, invited him to analyze and exhibit in the city. The municipality’s agenda was revitalizing a declining city, and the Mayor declared, “I am sure that the meeting of Somaini with Mantua will provide ‘combustion energy’ to a stimulating debate that engages with actuality.”65 The exhibition, on view from September 11 to October 23, was titled Scultura e condizione urbana 1967–1977: Antologia di scultura, disegni e fotomontaggi (Sculpture and Urban Condition 1967–1977: Anthology of Sculptures, Drawings, and Photomontages), and it was the first time Somaini implemented his practice in a specific urban environment. The exhibition offered Somaini at once a point of reflection on recent work and an opportunity for a new intervention. He installed his past sculptures and photomontages

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in the Palazzo del Te, a historic sixteenth-century building on the southern periphery of Mantua. He included approximately forty sculptures from 1967 to 1977—such as Caduta dell’Uomo (1967–1969) and Thanatos-Athanatos (1968)—paired with drawings from Urban Urgencies and the New York photomontages. Additionally, Somaini created some photomontages specifically in response to the urban environment of Mantua, because he sought to engage with the city’s economic, social, and cultural conditions. He recounted: Walking through Mantua, it became clear to me that I could not use the organic sculpture as an intervention. The city still had a humanism and a social frequency, even though I believe this was in a phase of deterioration. The city was separated from the country and from its ancient agrarian function physically by an anonymous periphery and psychologically from the dream of industrial development of the worst kind. . . . I see a lot of building and urban growth as violence perpetrated against the city and its inhabitants; seeing how the “new” city installs itself in the old and destroys the vestiges of old community structures. There was nothing to do but to turn to photography to capture alarming images that I hope will be useful.66 He was interested in, for example, the area of Porto Catena, which had recently become an unregulated industrial zone.67 The artist engaged with the city also by talking to the inhabitants and asking them about their memories and emotions.68 For this new photomontage series, he coupled photographs of the city with “intrusive” architectural elements, colliding Mantua’s architectural past with a possible—albeit alarming—future [Figure 3.8]. Compared to his previous photomontages, he no longer collaged his sculptures with the urban scene, fictively transforming them into buildings. Instead, he flipped the contrasting elements by thrusting features of modernity into Mantua’s historical setting. For instance, massive elevated highways encroached on Renaissance-era piazzas and skyscrapers dominated two-story eighteenth-century buildings. By overlaying the modern city onto Mantua’s cultural heritage, Somaini’s photomontages were charged with the friction between old and new. The medium of collage, as applied to the urban landscape of Mantua, allowed Somaini to visualize, for instance, how urban speculative construction might appear. The photomontage Torri: i simboli minacciosi del potere non cambiano (Towers: The Threatening Symbols of Power Do not Change) superimposes the Twin Towers of New York above the relatively diminutive aristocratic residential buildings of Mantua’s city center. Like Somaini’s earlier work, Butterfly of Solitude, the skyscrapers are viewed from below and reach vertiginously toward the sky. In place of Somaini’s sculpture Caduta dell’uomo, however, the artist incorporated two-story eighteenthcentury residences, replete with decorative cornices, iron-cast balconies, and windows with shutters. Behind them, the tallest building, at just over 180 feet high, is Torre della Gabbia, built in the thirteenth-century, and it was used as a prison in the sixteenth century by Duke Guglielmo Gonzaga. A suspended iron cage, where prisoners would have been kept on public view, can be seen on the side of the tower. This detail seems to encapsulate the city’s predicament, as Somaini saw it, trapped between its agrarian past and modernized future. Honing in on one of Mantua’s most significant urban challenges, the division between cultural city center and industrial periphery, Somaini created two photomontages: La

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Figure 3.8 Francesco Somaini, clockwise: Torri: i simboli minacciosi del potere non cambiano, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; La città e le acque: il canale come simbolo del territorio e della sua necessaria interrelazione con l’urbano, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; La viabilità come mito e come minaccia: un ipotetico ponte stradale valica il Palazzo dei Gonzaga, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; Il gelso: la civiltà contadina abbia il suo monumento, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. Source: Images courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

città e le acque: il canale come simbolo del territorio e della sua necessaria interrelazione con l’urbano (The City and the Waters: The Canal as a Symbol of the Territory and Its Necessary Interrelation with the City) and La viabilità come mito e come minaccia: un ipotetico ponte stradale valica il Palazzo dei Gonzaga (Traffic as a Myth and as a Threat: A Hypothetical Bridge over the Gonzaga Palace). The latter image represented a highway for automobiles over Piazza Castello, typically used for

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ambling pedestrians. The low architectural arcade contrasts dramatically with the raised freeway, creating a jarring relationship between the experience of traversing the urban environment on foot compared to in a car. Yet myopic urban planners in many picturesque urban centers were building ramps like this one to ease growing traffic congestion and make historic centers quickly accessible from the periphery.69 Meanwhile, La città e le acque focused on water and the irrigation network of the agrarian economy that linked the surrounding landscape with the city, in a way bypassing the urban periphery, which according to Somaini, spread without design or form.70 Together, these photomontages were a visual critique while offering a possible solution: the reconsideration of thruways as metaphorical links to Mantua’s cultural past. The fourth photomontage, Il grande gelso, presented a large mulberry bush at the end of a street in Mantua’s center, which was lined by modern cars. There is little here to recall Mantua’s past, except the oversized mulberry bush that expands in all directions.71 While these four photomontages were exhibited indoors at Palazzo del Te, Somaini created another version, La civilta contadina abbia il suo monumento (The Great Mulberry: Peasant Civilization Has Its Monument), for Mantua’s main square, Piazza Sordello [Figure 3.9]. The site, as opposed to Palazzo del Te, had more

Figure 3.9 Francesco Somaini, Il Grande gelso: la civiltà contadina abbia il suo monumento, large photomontage, 1977, 600 × 500 cm, Piazza Sordello, Mantova. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

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flexibility as it was detached from artistic, commercial, or other systems of power.72 Over 16 feet high and 19 feet wide, Somaini installed the photomontage on a freestanding scaffold structure. Other than ROSA, this was the first time that Somaini inserted artwork directly into an urban context. It is an exemplar of Arte Ambientale: an intervention in the urban space that addresses cultural heritage, political contingency, and social actuality. Indeed, the Gazzetta di Mantova reported that many citizens and tourists responded positively to the work and were even flattered, because they saw their city as the artworks’ protagonist.73 Galvanized by the Mantua urban experiment, Somaini participated a year later at the 1978 Venice Biennale with Morte a Venezia, deploying the same scaffolding structure to support this time four images of a dystopian Venice [Figure 3.2]. This intervention was Somaini’s biggest, and last, urban photomontage. It thematically addressed ecology, sociology, and politics: the survival of the city’s urban reality, specifically its anthropological and cultural patrimony.74 Venice is geographically confined by a lagoon; it cannot be easily developed.75 In each photomontage, Somaini imagined a grim future, which ultimately signaled the death of the city. Like those for Mantua, the photomontages can be paired, addressing two major issues: the effects of industry on a city that lacks space to accommodate it; and the result of a tourist industry that exploits the city for mass consumption [Figure 3.10].76 Critical of the growth of the industrial complex on the nearby mainland in Porto Marghera, Somaini envisioned Venice almost entirely submerged in water, with only the dome of San Marco and the Campanile protruding from the lagoon’s surface. Feverishly debated at the time was the concern of Venice’s sinking, as large amounts of water had been suctioned for industrial use from the subaqueous stratum during the twentieth century.77 In another photomontage, Somaini presented Piazza San Marco filled with enormous tubes as a way to visualize how industrial development was creeping into the heart of the city without considering the preexisting design. Critically addressing the implacable tourist industry, Somaini substituted the Campanile with a mock New York City–style Hilton Hotel. In the fourth photomontage, the Grand Canal was lined with dilapidated houses and buildings, which indicated the risks of abandonment. Venice’s residents were leaving the city to live elsewhere because it did not offer sufficient work opportunities. In all these images, Somaini addresses looming concerns about the city’s future viability. After exhibiting the photomontages at the Venice Biennale, Somaini refocused his work on traditional sculptural materials and away from photomontages that dealt with explicit sociopolitical urban questions. Instead, he developed a series called Antropoammonite, first conceived in 1975 but further developed in the 1980s, where he explored sculpture’s potential for movement and forming an indexical imprint on the terrain. Somaini’s investigations of sculpture’s impact within the urban context reached its pinnacle and most adventurous embodiment with the photomontages of the 1970s. While visually striking and incorporating Somaini’s sculptures, many of them remained theoretical, such as his New York series. He was able to push the medium of photomontage as Arte Ambientale only three times throughout the decade: with ROSA Rapporto Organico Scultura-Architettura, in 1973; La civilta contadina abbia il suo monumento in Mantua, in 1977; and lastly with Morte a Venezia, in 1978. In all three projects, he found an immediacy in communicating his sculptural conceptions to audiences in the

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Figure 3.10 Francesco Somaini, Morte a Venezia, cube scaffold with four large photomontages, 500 × 500 × 500 cm, XXXIX Biennale di Venezia, Giardini di Castello, 1978. Source: Images courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

urban context. Marble or bronze was too static at a time when Somaini needed art to respond to social and urban conditions with expediency and directness. Equally, Somaini’s contribution to Arte Ambientale was the theoretical redefinition of the sculptor. This new role expanded sculpture’s purview to include architecture and design with social activism and to create work that engaged directly with the conditions of the urban reality. Furthermore, Somaini injected a radical objective for his urban, sculptural interventions: reversing the numbing effects of metropolitan alienation. His conversations with Crispolti in Urban Urgencies set the timbre of the development of Arte Ambientale for other artists during the 1970s. Somaini qualified the integration of art—whether sculpture or any other medium—within the context of the urban environment, and that determined the creation of artwork in dialectical relationship with the social, cultural, and political conditions of the city.

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Impermanent Concrete Sculptures: Mauro Staccioli Both Somaini and Mauro Staccioli explored the critical implementation of sculpture; but while Somaini’s grand scale was primarily realized in two-dimensional form, Staccioli’s structures physically intervened in urban reality. For Staccioli, my art, descending into the Piazza, wants to activate a mechanism of provocation and reaction, to act within the contradictions of our times. In this sense, art is also research, an instrument of analysis. It re-proposes the big problem of the relationship between militancy and aesthetic production, the problem of the growth of culture, of mass participation, as an instrument of critique.78 Staccioli’s work tangibly took shape at the very site in which he conceived and located it, with the aim of dialoguing with the inhabitants. Like Somaini, Staccioli understood the modern metropolis as a place of alienation. Staccioli’s work, however, centered on a deep understanding of the historical condition of oppression that resulted from a technological and consumerist society.79 He created sharp and aggressive structures that jolted viewers—their bodies and emotions—into reconsidering their urban environment and reflecting on their material, social, and political conditions. Staccioli’s work has often been likened to American minimalist sculptors—Donald Judd, Robert Morris, or Carl Andre—for his simple, geometric structures.80 There are formal similarities: Staccioli focused on primary shapes, such as the cube, especially during the 1970s, and he also used industrial materials. But he always rejected the Minimalist label, explaining that he was “interested in the content of the work, in what it has to ‘say,’ and not in its forms.”81 Moreover, Staccioli built his sculptures by hand, using concrete—the quintessentially modern construction material—to engage directly with the urban environment, and he saw this choice as integral to the final product, even though the sculptures did not reveal a trace of the artist’s hand. Lastly, he conceived his structures in situ, in response to particular environments, and as functioning within the context of that space. Fundamentally, he was more concerned with the relationships that the works created—between the architectural buildings that surround the pieces and the inhabitants that encounter them—than the forms themselves. For Staccioli, form was therefore functional and malleable, defined in relation to the specific context. More specifically, the urban setting was composed of not just buildings but a field into which the artist intervened.82 Like Somaini, Staccioli considered the city to be layered with different strata: the economic, technical, social, and historical. More importantly, he saw the urban environment as alive with the inhabitants that constituted the space. Therein lay the explicitly political aspect of Staccioli’s work, the quest for participation, which was one of the principal characteristics of Arte Ambientale. His sculptures—aggressive forms encroaching into the viewer’s space—engaged the spectator on a phenomenological level. This engagement, Staccioli hoped, would cause a physical and emotional reaction in the observer, turning them into active participants who may ask themselves questions about the sculpture, like “what is it?” or “why is it pointing at me?” and begin a process of critical reflection. Like Somaini, he thus reconceived the sculptor’s role, choosing to create forms that dialogued with the city and its denizens.83 Staccioli had always balanced his dedication to art with social and political work, more explicitly than Somaini. In an interview in 1979, Staccioli defined himself as a

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“visual operator, militant of the Communist Party faction, and president of a school,” at the time the Liceo Artistico “Tinelli” of Via Hajech.84 Making art was integral to Staccioli’s social and community engagement, and he thus understood sculpture as necessarily public and ecumenical. Staccioli was born in the rural Tuscan town of Volterra in 1937. He grew up among a hardworking peasant and farming community, where the rhythms of nature, harvest, and the land shaped his childhood. As a boy, he recalled drawing water from a well and bringing it to his parents, who were tilling the soil.85 This environment, defined by manual labor, sweat, and toil, defined Staccioli’s relationship to materials, form, and aesthetic commitment. Staccioli was also aware of being surrounded by ancient cultures during these early years. He remembered telling his mother “vado a ruzzà alla buca ‘trusca,’” which translates as “I’m going to play at the Etruscan pit.” This site was what remained of an Etruscan tomb that had been discovered by chance by a campesino (farmer).86 Moreover, during the Second World War, Volterra had been a communist and socialist stronghold for the Resistance.87 Staccioli absorbed this political context, which informed his dedication social change throughout his career. Staccioli began as a painter. While he studied with the communist sculptor Mino Trafeli at the Instituto Statale d’Arte in Volterra, he first made Informel-style paintings in the early 1960s—not too dissimilar in sensibility to Somaini’s sculptures—exploring materiality, figure, and a surrealist-inspired abstraction. Staccioli soon left Volterra for Cagliari, Sardinia, for a teaching position. There the contrast with the urbanized environment—the unregulated building development, the impact of poverty and backwardness of the countryside, and the harsh realities of the mines—influenced Staccioli.88 In Cagliari, he was one of the founding members of a loosely linked art collective, called Gruppo Iniziativa (Action Group), together with artists Gaetano Brundu and Primo Pantoli.89 They opposed bourgeois culture and considered socialist and communist ideals to be a foundation for their artistic expression. Also in Cagliari, Staccioli connected with politically like-minded groups, and during these years, he delved into political theory and literature.90 The writings of Antonio Gramsci, in particular, were essential for Staccioli’s communist outlook: Gramsci’s Letters from Prison provided a pathway for Staccioli to combine art and politics, awareness and action.91 Staccioli adhered to the philosopher’s connection between intellectuals and the people, theory and practice, homo sapiens and homo faber.92 The artist was thus driven to make art that was powerfully political but accessible to everyone. However, these ideas would take a while to mature, as Staccioli stopped making art in the mid 1960s while he moved back to Lodi, on the southeastern outskirts of Milan.93 During this time, he dedicated himself exclusively to politics and was a spokesperson for trade union struggles and student protests. The worker and student movement of 1968 had a particularly profound effect on Staccioli, and marked the return to his art-making practice. He witnessed firsthand the upshot of the students’ and workers’ uprisings, followed by the stifling of their aspirations and the subsequent restoration of the social hierarchies. This foment awakened Staccioli’s motivation as an artist, and reflecting on the protests, he said, “I do not feel I can accept the role of the artist as something that is non-critical, that is above events, like something that is acquiescent to a society of consumption.”94 Yet he was extremely critical of artists’ involvement in 1968; according to him, they were “instrumentalized” by the movement and only produced images of red flags and clenched fists that harkened back to the rhetoric of socialist realism.95 A new aesthetic needed to emerge,

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one that not only was visual but also imagined new social relations. Thus, Staccioli embarked on a journey: critical reflection on the foundations of society, the individual’s role within the city, private property, and exclusion from privileges for most inhabitants.96 Unlike Somaini, who was not directly affected by the 1968 protests or politics, it was in this particular sociopolitical context that Staccioli realized that he had overcome the desire to merely practice politics and began to make politically motivated art, grounded in social realities.97 This shift, however, should not be seen as volte-face, but rather as two sides of the same coin. Making art, for Staccioli, was simply a different form of expression of the same drive.98 He saw art as a creative and symbolic form of expression, no less urgent and direct, and it became his primary vehicle for change. The same year as the student protests, Staccioli moved from Lodi to Milan, and the shock of living in a metropolis was another important force in shifting the content of his sculptures. The artist reported that he “felt the city of Milan, its culture and rhythms, were a great violent machine. The walls, the concrete, the gates, the signs of private property, the totalizing organization of consumption, etc. Also the stimuli from political actuality: the strategy of tension.”99 Similarly to Somaini, what struck Staccioli about Milan was the standardization and the numbing effects it had on its inhabitants. For instance, Staccioli remembered the experience of coming into the Porta Romana train station with the commuting workers and how the newly opened underground “spewed” out enormous masses of commuters.100 The pulse of the city was unrelentingly fast and monotonous, but it was also the lived spaces, the uncontrolled and rapid urban development that engulfed the farm belt around Milan, that affected the artist.101 The artist’s direct experience of Milan led him to deepen his understanding of the relationship between people—all types of workers—and their lived spaces, as he saw all these unsettling effects of the capitalist city as aggression on the inhabitants, on both their bodies and their minds. Like Somaini, Staccioli did not differentiate levels of oppression within the capitalist city in terms of gender or race; his critique of the city was focused on class relations. The result of his research and reflection on the meaning of existence in 1970s urban reality led Staccioli to develop a new lexicon of hooks, blades, and spikes that both reflected urban violence and empowered the subjugated inhabitant.102 Staccioli first gave form to his new visual language with Progetto Minosse (Minos Project), created in 1971 and presented in April 1972, on occasion of the Rassegna San Fidele at the Galleria San Fedele in Milan [Figure 3.11].103 Minos Project was realized as only a maquette of a labyrinth, conceived to be just under 16 feet wide and 7 feet high and crafted out of concrete with iron hooks, which he visualized in drawings and full-scale, free-standing walls with hooks. Minos Project was meant to be a human-sized maze derived from Staccioli’s experience of Milan, specifically the high walls erected to serve the interest of private property, safeguarding the wealth of the privileged few. The artist saw that spaces in the city were not democratically accessible and that the city was spatially segregated—like Sforzesco Castle, for example, which is sited in the city center but with high castle walls to section space. Mirroring urban obstacles that denied people the same rights and opportunities, the labyrinth was a physical representation of an existential condition, trapping participants and making them aware of their impotence. On the walls of the labyrinth, Staccioli meant to affix large meat hooks. Even at this early stage, he wanted these forms to channel a sense of violence, as seen in his accompanying text: “Extreme violence of today: Greece, South America, Viet-Nam,

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Figure 3.11 Mauro Staccioli, Situazione-Ambiente: Progetto, maquette, 1971–1972, lacquered wood, 25 × 63 × 63 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

United States, to our everyday experience in the situation of a city that reflects violence, from the individual and individualistic force of the capitalist, technological, and consumerist world, that have alienating effects.”104 The hooks, in particular, would have had chilling associations closer to home: during World War II, the Nazis/(Italian) Fascists had used hooks to hang human corpses like animal carcasses. Only a few decades since the end of that war, these pegs and the cloistered space would have luridly recalled the Nazi/Fascist torture of partisans.105 Minos Project was the earliest iteration of a body of work titled SituazioneAmbiente (Situation-Environment) where Staccioli conceived the artwork as having a dialectical relationship with its contextual space and visitors. The artwork was not static but served to instigate an encounter with viewers, forcing an activated spectatorship.106 In other words, Situation-Environment was a total environment, a space that encompassed the individual in a “relationship-space-life.”107 After Minos Project, Staccioli created subsequent Situation Environments in public spaces. He analyzed, read, and absorbed the specifics of each site and its relationship to the individuals that inhabited it.108 He did not create a new environment in a white cube—and this is significantly different from Staccioli’s contemporaries, such as Paolo Scheggi and Gianni Colombo, as both worked indoors and created complex kinetic

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spatial milieus—but worked outside and with what was already there, embedded in the urban setting.109 Staccioli’s process involved reducing the surrounding buildings and urban features to primary geometric forms, using both photography and drawing to understand the site’s formal components.110 Additionally like Somaini, Staccioli looked to “signs, profiles, heights, indications, and memories,” the intangible elements that form the historical and emotional strata of any lived space.111 Thus, the historic and human context of the city became part of the sculpture. Staccioli absorbed the city, experiencing it intensely and elaborating concrete forms that expressed the restless and aggressive climate of the “years of lead.”112 Terrorist incidents from both political sides increased at an alarming rate during the 1970s, which ranged from vandalism and arson to abduction and murder.113 Civil liberties were at stake, and an air of violence and danger lingered as never before in the postwar period. Staccioli recounted, “It was a condition that involved everyone. Like shards of broken glass of a window.”114 The artist was attuned to violent experiences in his own daily life, as well as those that were happening in the nation and abroad. He recalled: Acts of violence were accompanying our daily existence.  .  . . I remember, for example, the time I was leaving the Libreria Cortina after a reading of Guido Balla’s poems and when I arrived at Marconi’s, I learned from Tadini of the boy killed in Piazza Cavour, during our poetry reading, he was Varalli, I think. Then there was Berkeley, the Sorbonne, Peking, and New York, the student movement, then the Mexico Olympics, the black people raising their closed fists in a black glove . . . Luther King.115 Staccioli’s sculptures, therefore, manifested the anxiety of a modern society living under siege, a society submerged each day in news of crimes and power plots, struggles and repression, demonstrators and police. As art historian Simona Santini wrote, “Staccioli’s work become the visible expression of a mental condition that gnawed at the citizens, of a clash played out in the streets and squares with truncheons and bars.”116 And yet Staccioli also wanted his sharp spikes and threatening hooks to positively impact viewers. The sculptures did not “find [their] function in acts of beautification, or as self-collected, self-referential form: [they were] presented, instead, as an opportunity for critical reflection, and [their] goal was to set up revitalized relationships between ourselves and the world,” Staccioli remarked.117 Their aggressive forms were the carriers of an urgent message—precise and acute—to take up the struggle. The spikes were pointed directly at the viewers, phenomenologically challenging them, threatening them, and implicating them. Through this process of physically activating the viewers’ body in relation to the sculpture, Staccioli hoped to trigger a thoughtful reflection, like a challenge to be awakened. While Staccioli never meant inhabitants to actually be physically harmed by the sculptures, they could, in fact, be quite dangerous. On a humorous note, apparently, the art historian and critic Lea Vergine tripped on an iron spike and fell to the ground, and critic and philosopher Gillo Dorfles dropped a spike and ended up with a hole in his shoes.118 The same year that Staccioli exhibited Minos Project, 1972, he also had an exhibition at Galleria Toninelli in Milan, where he first met Enrico Crispolti.119 The critic and curator urged Staccioli to work on Arte Ambientale and curated his first solo show. At Toninelli, Staccioli debuted new three-dimensional sculptures that

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were the result of this intense period of artistic reconception. He showed Anticarro (Anti-tank), cubes with spikes that recall war machines elaborated between 1969 and 1972, and Condizione Barriera (Barrier), with concrete cubes that support long, sharp, and either straight or hooked iron bars and with slabs of concrete with a series of iron spikes jutting out, recalling the nailed strips in roadblocks created in 1972.120 In this installation photograph, the Anticarro are in the foreground, and the Condizione Barriera is further back near the window [Figure 3.12]. Staccioli, wearing all black, stands hesitantly in the midst of his sculptures. These violent forms referenced the challenges of overcoming boundaries, especially social ones— between private and public—and conceptual ones—between machine and man, past and present.121 Art critic Mario De Micheli saw the structures as capturing the current experiences of “war, violence, oppression, and the trampling of the dignity of human life.”122 At Toninelli, Staccioli understood that the gallery setting, removed from the urban context of his inspiration, as limiting the impact of the sculptures. He recalled that he was increasingly convinced that his work “was as if suffocated in the gallery, that in a certain sense the sizes and meanings did not match; [he] realized that the sculpture needed to express itself outside, in a public context, in a socially active area, right in the middle of everyday life.”123 Staccioli’s art sought to intervene in society, to shake it out of its passive acceptance of a capitalist evolution that could be different.124 The interaction with the public space, and its inhabitants, needed to be dynamic to modify

Figure 3.12 Mauro Staccioli, Anticarro (Anti-tank) and Condizione Barriera (Barrier), Galleria Toninelli in Milan, 1972. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

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how viewers understood the sculpture and their environment, and ultimately to provoke a discussion on change.125 In the summer of 1972, Staccioli expanded out of the confines of the gallery into the urban environment in the exhibition titled Sculture in città (Sculptures in the City), held in his native town of Volterra.126 Crispolti wrote an essay for the modest exhibition catalog framing Staccioli’s new works in terms of the inchoate movement Arte Ambientale. He was eager to categorize the artist’s work as Arte Ambientale, especially given his recent collaboration on Urban Urgencies with Francesco Somaini. This was Staccioli’s first exhibition in the urban space, and siting it in Volterra had its advantages. The artist had grown up and absorbed the many layers of history embedded in the bricks and mortar of the city. For the show, he created eleven unique sculptures that were peppered throughout the historic center and its environs— each engaging with Volterra’s urban space, cultural patrimony, and sociopolitical contingency—including Porta dell’Arco, Piazza dei Priori, and the Etruscan and medieval walls. The sculptures were temporary interventions, each one configured in relation to the specific site.127 Sculptures in the City defined what Arte Ambientale meant for Staccioli’s art practice, and it informed the rest of his 1970s projects. The deep history of the city—a thriving and important Etruscan town in the eighth century BCE—was at the forefront of Staccioli’s creative impetus. Particularly the old Etruscan walls, symbols of defense against enemy invaders that also defined the city’s identity, became the primary leitmotif. The idea of protection, security, and resistance of urban space and its inhabitants from thousands of years ago informed Staccioli’s thoughts on the present condition of structural violence.128 For Volterra, Staccioli created works with his signature materials, concrete and iron, which recalled modern urban construction. However, here, the sculptures’ materiality assumed a different significance: the concrete was analogous to the earth and the spikes to Volterra’s history of medieval instruments of war. In the catalog essay, Crispolti argued that Staccioli’s forms—reminiscent of the ancient Etruscan defensive barriers—were also a denunciation of the constant ambush and militaristic tension omnipresent in 1970s Italy.129 In Staccioli’s own words, the barriers “parry the violence of the state, the abuse of power, and the systematic desecration of every basic value of democratic freedom.”130 They thus generated two contradictory meanings: aggression against citizens and reactive empowerment against violence. Although Staccioli was not advocating for violence per se, he was challenging inhabitants to abandon a passive stance, to critically react to the conditions of violence that prevaded their everyday existence. Staccioli’s most prominent sculpture in the 1972 exhibition was Barriera (Barrier), installed in Volterra’s central square, Piazza Priori [Figure 3.13]. The installation consisted of nine black pyramids distributed diagonally across space. Staccioli elaborated their horizontal placement across the piazza to counterbalance the impressive height of the surrounding buildings.131 The size of the pyramids was approximately 86 inches, conceived to be just slightly taller than an average person. The space between any two forms was 70 inches wide so that when adults stretched out their arms in between the two forms, they could touch both. Staccioli also wanted the relationship between the pyramids to be dynamic, so while each of their bases was square, he arranged them at an angle to each other and inclined their shape. For Staccioli, the experience of the inhabitants was fundamental. The sculpture was open, allowing visitors to traverse the piazza, and material, so that inhabitants had to contend with its presence. He wanted Barriera to be “a symbol that crossed the

Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

Figure 3.13 Mauro Staccioli, Barriera, 1972, iron, 200 × 90 × 90 cm, nine elements Piazza dei Priori, Volterra.

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square yet could be crossed: intense but at the same time accessible to everyday life and the context itself.”132 The public could walk through the idea, physically coming up against the object/obstacle or “barrier state.”133 Yet Staccioli’s Barriera was also meant to signify a sharp intrusive element. The sculpture recalled urban barricades from World War II.134 They also had more site-specific references. In Piazza Priori, the municipio—the city’s governmental building—and the church—the Diocesi di Volterra—were two powers vying for authority, especially in medieval northern Italy, where the clash between the Guelfi and Ghibellini was a recurrent struggle.135 The artist recalled this historic abuse of power and drew parallels between the past and present. His Barriera served as a disruptive element, taking individuals out of, and then putting them back into, present-day reality.136 Staccioli installed sculptures in Volterra’s center and periphery. Outside the city walls, he sited a singular pointed lance facing Porta all’Arco, Volterra’s west-facing entryway into the city [Figure 3.14]. Porta all’Arco was an ancient Etruscan archway that had been protected by the citizens of Volterra during the Nazi invasion in 1944.137 Civilians placed themselves on the front line to protect its stone architecture;

Figure 3.14 Mauro Staccioli, Untitled (Lancia), 1972, concrete and iron, 460 × 85 × 85 cm, Porta dell’arco, Volterra. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

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the archway thus symbolized independence and freedom from oppressors. Moreover, this site was unique because it was where the medieval fortifications fused with the older Etruscan walls. For Staccioli, this represented a physical connection between two epochs, with the same fears of invasion and the charge to assert independence.138 These efforts were thus universal, and parallels can be drawn to the need to evince the struggle between citizenship rights and oppression in 1970s Milan. For Staccioli, Volterra was the ideal context to bring history and the contemporary moment together through his charged sculptures that engaged with the city’s unique past as well as evoking the current pervasive violence, about which Staccioli felt strongly in the urban context of Milan and latent in countryside towns, like Volterra. Following Sculture in città, Staccioli began working with a limited vocabulary of geometrical forms: concrete circles in the shape of ruote (disks or wheels) and cubi (cubes) with aggressive punte (spikes) protruding outward into space. With these simple shapes, he made and remade a number of pieces exploring sites both inside in the gallery and outside in the city. By deploying elementary forms, Staccioli rendered his sculptures immediately recognizable, giving tangible form to his concept of Situazione-Ambiente.139 Staccioli developed the first prototype of the Ruota (Wheel) for Studio Sant’Andrea in Milan in 1973.140 This wheel measured seventy-eight by seventy inches and was inserted in a small room, little more than 36 feet wide and 9.5 feet high. Staccioli completely stripped the interior of existing architectural details and, over the floorboards, installed a sheet of iron, so that the massive disk would not sit on a natural, wooden material. He also concealed the windows to produce a closed interior space. The artist dramatically spotlit the disk from the side, creating a large, ominous shadow on the back wall.141 With a circular shape, visitors must have had the feeling that the sculpture could move and roll, even crush them.142 The two sharp spikes would have appeared quite menacing. Although Ruota seemed to repel visitors, Staccioli envisioned the gallery space full of people. The artist coordinated performances in the gallery with the students of the Liceo Artistico di Brera. Working with Toni Comello, a social activist, writer, and creator of didactic theater performances for school students, one action portrayed approximately five students lying in a heap, motionless in front of the sculpture, recalling a mound of dead bodies after a massacre. The lifeless-looking limbs reveal associations with the mass killings of the Holocaust or conceivably the mass of bodies after the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombings. In a rare documentary photograph, another action records about ten students lying on the hard metal floor of the gallery with their fists stretched upward [Figure 3.15]. Here again, bodies perform the sculpture’s conceit: the fists were a clear symbol with unmistakable associations of political activism in the 1970s. Staccioli recalled, “When I made these works, there were the Olympics of Mexico. Tommie Smith and John Carlos stood at the medal podium, bowed their heads, and raised black-gloved fists during the playing of the national anthem. This was an event that marked our time.”143 Indeed, the clenched fist was taken up not just by the Olympians but also by resistant fighters like the Black Panthers in the United States. With this performance, Staccioli drew attention to the violence and oppression rife throughout the world—not just in the city of Milan—and, at the same time, those human forces of resistance. Echoing the clenched fist that protruded, with determination, into space, the spike extended with alarming aggression into the viewers’ arena, where the two symbols dramatically coexisted.

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Figure 3.15 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, 1973, concrete and iron, 200 × 180 cm, Studio Sant’ Andrea, Milano; Performance with the students of the Liceo Artistico di Brera. Source: Image courtesy of the Enrico Cattaneo Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

Staccioli reconceived Ruote in the urban context for the 1973 exhibition Sculture contemporanee nello spazio urbano (Contemporary Sculpture in the Urban Space) in Parma, a town in Emilia-Romagna, which is halfway between Bologna and Milan [Figure 3.16].144 The artist did not just relocate the Ruota; he was aware that recasting the object in the urban environment required consideration of the sculpture in relation to its new site.145 For Parma, he made three wheels, increasing the diameter of the disks to over 7 feet tall and almost 8 feet wide. Equally, he lengthened the metallic spike to adhere to the new, larger dimensions. Ruote was surrounded by buildings of different historical urban eras: the seventeenth-century church of Santa Maria della Steccata, eighteenth-century three-story residential buildings, and modern, fascist-era office buildings with shops on the street level. Occupying public space, these temporary structures were paradigms of opposition to the aesthetic notions that guided the ways in which public spaces were conventionally structured.146 The wheels were a disturbing presence in the piazza that signaled an alarm for the condition of danger that enveloped citizens during these years. Staccioli installed them vertically upright, as if mobile, adding to the sense of peril. Transferred from the gallery into the street, Staccioli’s Ruote made more evident the question of violence contextualized within the urban setting and the sculptures’ “cold, dynamic forms—uninhabitable—obliged the passerby to question his usual relation with the space of the city and reflect on his own quotidian reality.”147 This intervention in Piazza della Steccata became known

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Figure 3.16 Mauro Staccioli, Condizione città 1973, iron, concrete with two steel cones, 220 × 240 cm, Piazza della Steccata, Parma. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

worldwide thanks to Edward-Lucie Smith’s illustrated inclusion of it in Art in the Seventies, published in 1980, one of the only Arte Ambientale artists to be figured in an English-speaking survey of the art of that decade, albeit misplaced under the category of “Illusionary art.”148 Staccioli made Ruote out of concrete and iron. His consistent implementation of these same materials related to his background as a laborer and his allegiance to the working class. He had learned to sculpt with these materials from his father, who was a construction builder.149 Staccioli considered working with concrete as paradoxically “intelligent handiwork,” both conceptual and manual. Furthermore, concrete is incredibly malleable, and any form could be created with the right engineering and supportive structure.150 By using the substance, Staccioli inverted its urban functionality. In city construction, it was regarded as a “common material”: an essential element in the urban panorama, perceived and experienced daily, one that at the same time conjured up the cold and raw dimension lived by humankind and a conflictual urban environment.151 While concrete had been elevated by avant-garde Brutalist architects in the 1950s and 1960s, used in buildings such as the Torre Velasca, in Milan (1956), the reality was that there were also many examples of the material’s implementation for commercial working-class high-rise buildings on the periphery of Milan, such as the Ponte Lambro neighborhood. Concrete and iron were, in the artist’s words, “a natural consequence of a critical reflection on what society has used and misused, largely for speculative construction. I mean to say that concrete is the material of

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speculation, abuse, and destruction.”152 Staccioli chose concrete precisely for these associations, reinterpreting and manipulating it—presenting it aggressively within the urban environment. He turned a negative into a positive, to call attention to the urban materiality that constantly, yet unconsciously, surrounded the urban inhabitant. Staccioli re-created and reconfigured Ruote a third time for another outdoor, urban exhibition, Interventi sullo spazio urbano, organized by the Turinese gallerists Franz Paludetto and the art critic Franco Torriani in the spring of 1974 in Piazza Solferino in Turin.153 In the exhibition pamphlet, Torriani underscored the questions, critical stances, and implicit political attitudes that the artists had occupied public space with their art, which was ordinarily rife with an atmosphere of indifference.154 Staccioli also titled his contribution Condizione città (City Condition), and for this iteration, he installed two massive disks, again upright, yet this time parallel to each other [Figure 3.17]. The spikes were facing and looked outward at the same time. The piazza was a space alive with the pedestrian flow of the city. In this documentary photograph, we see a group of youths— possibly students with the platform heals and bell-bottom jeans—traversing the space in groups of three or four. While near the rear, two young men seem to be playfully trying to roll the wheel to no avail. Piazza Solferino is a central square in Turin, relatively long and narrow, and flanked by mid-nineteenth-century bourgeois apartment buildings. It is known for being the site of a bloody battle on June 24, 1859, between the French and the Austrians, which was decisive for Italy’s Risorgimento, or independence. Like many of Staccioli’s

Figure 3.17 Mauro Staccioli, Condizione città, 1974, iron, concrete, and steel 220 × 240 cm each, Piazza Solferino, Turin. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

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sculptures in Volterra ’73, his installation of Ruote in Piazza Solferino functioned like a bridge, connecting historical episodes of violence with the present day. The artist presented Condizione città with a leaflet incorporating newspaper cuttings detailing crime stories in which the state of the city equated to a “daily condition of tyranny, violence . . . and the desire to fight, clash, and respond.”155 The headlines were relatively generic—not specific to Turin, or even to Italy; Staccioli chose them because they could come from any part of the world.156 They read: “A woman dead in the crowd in the attempt to buy sugar,” “Diletta Pagliuca sentenced to death, she should have saved those children,” “Bloody raids of two fascists: child seriously wounded by a revolver,” “Homes evicted by police were occupied by 284 families,” “Chilean patriots torn from concentration camps,” and “Firm reply to the fascists from the bishop of Turin.”157 These titles were, according to Staccioli, the literal manifestations of the violent condition of the city, descriptions of atrocities unique to the modern environment. Each headline spoke to universal themes of brutality, injustice, and abuse of the vulnerable by the powerful. However, these titles also provide an entry point to evaluate some level of diversity in the yet unidentified mass of oppressed inhabitants. For instance, Staccioli chose clippings that identified explicitly female individuals, first as a victim and second as a perpetrator. Children and families as a social nucleus appear to be the most vulnerable subjects in these modern times—or at least the newspaper titles are written to evoke the most sympathy in the reader. In seeking interaction with viewers, Staccioli personally handed out the pamphlets and took time to be present with Ruote in Piazza Solferino to engage in conversations with the public.158 In the documentary photograph, he is perhaps the man with his back to us next to the wheel on the right, talking to a woman with a briefcase and a man behind. Staccioli recollected that one passerby made the following comment: “on the one hand they can come on me, on the other I cannot get close because of the blades.”159 This quote reveals the simple reading of the work that Staccioli had hoped for, a physical response to the sense of alarm, a condition of danger involving everyone.160 The viewer felt both attacked by the sculpture and induced to thinking about his physical relationship to it, the distance that was necessarily created by its aggressive form. Becoming at once aware of the distance now present between the passerby and the sculpture might have promoted this individual, and others experiencing the work, to reflect on their predicament and how their quotidian experience of their lived environment had been modified by the presence of the sculpture. Ruote for Piazza Solferino would be Staccioli’s last iteration of this circular form. The same year, he installed four cubes, stacked two by two in Piazzetta Galleria Manzoni in Milan, titled Sculture-intervento [Figure 2.13], already mentioned in Chapter 2 because of the inclusion of this work at the 1976 Venice Biennale.161 Scultura-Intervento was the artist’s first urban intervention in Milan, then known as the center of the strategia della tensione (Strategy of Tension), where terrorist attacks by right-wing factions throughout the decade hoped to force a military coup. Indeed, in 1974, the Golpe Bianco group took responsibility for a wave of bombs and shootings. Bringing his artwork to the site of the most intense violence, Staccioli mounted a rectangular fort in the middle of the piazzetta, which had become a popular meeting place for Milanese artists.162 The sculpture reflected this environmental condition: “a repelling, hard, violent element for a world that feels the need to fight, defend, and assert itself.”163 Similar in size to Ruote—approximately 7 feet tall and almost 8 feet wide with steel cones protruding 31.5 inches into space—Scultura-Intervento was

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decisively rooted to the ground, almost as if to emphasize the immobility of the pervasive violence within the city of Milan. After the mid 1970s, Staccioli’s site-specific practice would soon bring him to eliminate the iron extrusions and spikes from his sculptures to obtain a higher degree of formal simplicity. Extending and simplifying the cube of Scultura-Intervento, he created Muro, at the 1978 Venice Biennale [Figure 3.1]. Like the urban buildings Muro recalled, its form did not adhere to nature’s bending shapes, like tree branches, but in its clean geometry, it contrasted violently with its organic surroundings. It was an intruder, taking up the space of nature, much like the low-income concrete housing blocks on the periphery of Italy’s major cities were encroaching on the surrounding countryside’s bucolic landscape. Staccioli wanted Muro to interact with not only what could be described as the “natural” element of the Biennale gardens—the scattered trees and soil—but also the visitors, who were forced to walk around it to gain entrance into the rest of the Biennale space. Likewise, Staccioli also considered how viewers exited the Biennale, as they would yet again be confronted by the Muro and its obstruction of the typical view of the sea. While Muro was massive and rooted in place, it also encapsulated an elegance and simplicity that characterized Staccioli’s work after his years of intense political engagement in the 1970s. Toward the end of the decade, he strove for curved forms, slowly taking his distance from an expressly political approach to achieve results more linked to existential rather than political or social conditions.164 At this time, his sculptures became less aggressive, in that they shed the spikes and barriers. The violence of the years of lead motivated his own “years of concrete,” and when these conditions ceased, Staccioli’s work also changed. After Muro, he explored concepts such as balance and perception. He would ultimately make the massive sculptures for which he is best known today in the 1980s and 1990s, like his piece at the Olympic Park in Seoul, Korea, completed in 1988. The socially charged, unabashed confrontation of those politically charged years gave way to curves and simple geometric shapes that were meditations on equilibrium yet always connected to their site-specific context.

Conclusion Francesco Somaini, together with Enrico Crispolti, conceptualized the redeployment of sculpture in the urban context in Urban Urgencies in the early years of the 1970s, which defined the operative terms for Arte Ambientale. Indeed, it was Somaini’s understanding of the city, as fundamentally a place for human beings with multivalent meanings, that was instrumental in laying down the foundations for Arte Ambientale. However, perhaps because Somaini had already matured as an artist with Art Informel in the 1960s, he did not push his materials—mostly marble—to working in the city’s streets and piazzas. Photomontage—as much as it expanded the boundaries of sculptural practice into a conceptual urban art—was ultimately a stand-in for his urban sculptural conceptions. It was Staccioli who thrust sculpture into dialogue with place consistently throughout the decade. He created concrete sculptures in situ, in conversation with the many layers of the city and its inhabitants. Propelled by a desire to effect change, both artists conceived sculptures during the 1970s that were aggressive and challenging, fusing art and architecture through the lens of the body. Somaini first cut and wounded architecture, as if he were attacking a fragile human body. Then, anthropomorphizing sculpture with the body, he gave it power by rendering it gigantic, as if the organic qualities of the flesh could counter

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the angularity of the modern metropolis. Meanwhile, Staccioli evoked the body in the urban space of the inhabitants, his sharp spikes summoning a phenomenological response in the bystander. By addressing the body, both Somaini and Staccioli hoped to reach the emotional center of urban audiences and wake them out of their complacency. This objective of engaging with urban inhabitants and rousing them out of the numbness they feel by dwelling within an all-encompassing city of capital is shared among the Arte Ambientale artists, albeit through different strategies and mediums. In the chapters that follow, artists such as Ugo La Pietra and Franco Summa, who employed nontraditional media and embraced flexible working methods in relation to medium, will be explored. They chose first and foremost the intervention and second the type of materials and methods best suited to their specific projects. No longer beholden to working coherently within the limits of traditional practice, like sculpture, they embraced an art-making practice pliant to freedom of expression. The city, its urban development, and the effects these had on its inhabitants continued to be at the forefront of all of their practices.

Notes 1. The Italian Pavilion at the 1978 Vencie Biennale comprised three different sections, each one separately coordinated by each curator. Luigi Carluccio named his Natura come immagine (Nature as Image), Enrico Crispolti named his section Natura praticata (Nature Applied), and the last section, curated by Lara-Vinca Masini, was called Topologia morfogenesi (Topology and Morphogenesis). 2. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, June 14, 2012, Rome, Italy. 3. Torre del Parco (1956) designed by Ludovico Magistretti. Torre Uffici Tecnici Comunali (1966) designed by Renato Bazzoni, Luigi Fratino, Vittorio Gandolfi, and Aldo Putelli. 4. See Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 30–44. 5. Enrico Crispolti, “A Sculptor with a Natural Commitment to a Dialogue with the Environment,” in Somaini, le gandi opere: realizzazioni, progetti, utopie, ed. Francesco Somaini (Milano: Electa, 1997), 73. 6. Enrico Crispolti, “La scultura, segno contestuale di Mauro Staccioli,” in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, ed. Manuela Crescentini and Enrico Crispolti (Macerata: Coopedit, 1981), 7. 7. Somaini and Staccioli’s implementation of power and aggression could be labeled as decidedly masculine tactics, but I deliberately chose a non-essentialist reading of their work. 8. Crispolti, “A Sculptor with a Natural Commitment to a Dialogue with the Environment,” 74. 9. For more recent scholarship see also John Foot and Robert Lumley, Italian Cityscapes: Culture and Urban Change in Contemporary Italy (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004). 10. Giorgio di Genova, “Somaini: A New Path for Sculpture,” in Henry Martin, Pier Carlo Santini, Giorgio Di Genova, and Francesco Somaini, Somaini: Traces: A Proposal for an Anthropomorphic Urban Landscape (Bologna: Bora, 1982), n.p. 11. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. Luisa recounts how her father told her that he had a brief love affair with Meret Oppenheim and that she introduced him to the Surrealist publication Minotaure. 15. Proponents of Groupe Espace were primarily André Bloc, Silvano Bozzolini, Jean Deyrolle, Emile Gilioli, Jean Leppien, Luc Peire, Edgard Pillet, and Alfred Reth. 16. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 17. Renato Barilli, Francesco Somaini (Milano: Vanessa, Edizioni d’Arte, n.d.), n.p.

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18. The project was selected from a national competition organized by the Associazione Nazionale Mariani d’Italia (National Association of Italian Sailors). 19. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 20. di Genova, “Somaini: A New Path for Sculpture,” n.p. 21. Susanna Zatti, “L’erotico,” in Francesco Somaini—opere 1948–1990, ed. Rossana Bossaglia and Francesco Somaini (Milano: Electa, 1990), 34. 22. Alberto Longatti, “Monumentalismo di Somaini,” La Provincia, December 2, 1978. 23. The first in Baltimore was commissioned by Baltimore Gas & Eclectic and installed in Center Plaza. Titled Energy, or Grande scultura vertical (Large Vertical Sculpture), the work is dated 1958, which is when Somaini first conceived of the sculpture’s form. Likewise, the sculpture installed in Rochester, titled Scultura per un planetario (Sculpture for a Planetarium), was created in 1962. Commissioned and sited in front of the Strasenburgh Planetarium, it also combined polished bronze and rough, twisted metal. Additionally, the sculpture installed in Atlanta, Fenice (Penix) too was created in 1964. It was commissioned by another private entity, the First National Bank of Atlanta, and originally installed on the private grounds of the bank. 24. di Genova, “Somaini: A New Path for Sculpture,” n.p. 25. Francesco Somaini, “Quasi un manifesto. Intervento d’urgenza nella città. Note e appunti vari 1970–1971,” in Somaini: uno scultore per la città: New York 1967–1976, ed. Enrico Crispolti and Luisa Somaini (Milano: Skira, 2017), 17. 26. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 27. Alberto Gasparini, Crisi della città e sua reimmaginazione: effetti simbolici e valori di progettazione nel recupero del centro storico e delle aree urbane (Milano: F. Angeli, 1982). See also Luciano Di Sopra, Lo spazio merce: modelli di sviluppo e produzione dello spazio (Venezia: Marsilio, 1975). See also Maurice Cerasi, Città e periferia. Condizioni e tipi della residenza delle classi subalterne nella città moderna. Analisi di un’area della periferia Milanese (Milano: Clup, 1973). 28. Enrico Crispolti, “Urgenze nella città: la crisi in negative,” in Francesco Somaini, ed. Enrico Crispolti, Francesco Somaini, and Giorgio Verzotti (Bologna: Ed. Bora, 1979), 5. 29. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 30. Enrico Crispolti, “Forward,” in Urban Urgencies, ed. Francesco Somaini and Crispolti Enrico (Milano: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1972), i. 31. Somaini, “Quasi un manifesto. Intervento d’urgenza nella città. Note e appunti vari 1970–1971,” 26. Original Italian: “Proposta di interveto da pronto soccorso: rianimazione emozionale veloce e sommaria, provvisoria, ma efficace come una respirazione bocca a bocca, una trasfusione di sangue inatteso . . . una violenza carnale alla città tutta, un enorme schiaffone che passi su tutta la città come un tornado, ma con una conseguenza immobile e permanente, altrimenti non resta nulla come negli happening.” 32. Crispolti, “Urgenze nella città: la crisi in negative,” 7. 33. Lewis Mumford, La città nella storia (Milano: Etas Kompass, 1967). 34. Jane Jacobs, Vita e morte delle grandi grandi città: saggio sulle metropoli americane (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1969). 35. Fluvio Irace, “Metropolis,” in Somaini: uno scultore per la città: New York 1967–1976, ed. Enrico Crispolti and Luisa Somaini (Milano: Skira, 2017), 70. 36. Henri Lefebvre, Il diritto alla città (Padova: Marsilio, 1970) and Alexander Mitscherlich, Il feticcio urbano (Torino: Giulio Einaudi editore, 1968). 37. Serge Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, Spazio di relazione e spazio privato: verso una nuova architettura umanistica (Milano: Il saggiatore, 1968). 38. Aldo Rossi, L’ architettura della città (Padova: Marsilio, 1970). 39. Irace, “Metropolis,” 73. 40. Enrico Crispolti, “Urban Urgencies: A new Notion of Sculpture,” in Urban Urgencies, ed. Francesco Somaini and Crispolti Enrico (Milano: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1972), 4. 41. Francesco Somaini, Sul destino urbano della scultura, circa 1970–1971. Francesco Somaini Archive. Original Italian: “Il valore della scultura sta nel porsi come risarcimento emotive, monitorio, all’afoni della metropolis capitalistica: è un’esorcizzazione, un denudamento conoscitivo attraverso i simboli e le immagini della profonda essenza dell’uomo.” 42. Crispolti, “Urgenze nella città: la crisi in negative,” 5.

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43. Carl G. Jung, The archetypes and the collective unconscious (London: Routledge, 1991). 44. Somaini, “Quasi un manifesto. Intervento d’urgenza nella città. Note e appunti vari 1970– 1971,” 16. 45. Somaini and Crispolti, Urban Urgencies, 63. 46. Francesco Somaini’s art mentor Andre Bloc had already conceived of similar ideas where sculpture and architecture fused together in the 1950s, albeit in the abstract. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 47. Vittorio Fagone, “Francesco Somaini: sculture e disegni 1958–1973,” in VII Biennale d’arte del metallo: retrospettiva 1958–1972; Francesco Somaini, vincitore “Biennale” 1961; personali Carrino, Roca-Rey, Trafeli; nuove presenze Antico, Ciriacono, ed. Enrico Crispolti (Gubbio: Azienda Autonoma Soggiorno e Turismo, 1973), n.p. Enrico Crispolti is clear not to define Somaini’s sculptures as Expressionist architecture, which is unilateral, utopian. He cites Bruno Taut’s Utopische Briefe, Hermann Finsterlin, and both Hans Luckhardt and Wassili Luckhardt as examples. While he admits that there may be morphological affinities between Somaini’s work and the architectural expressionists, Somaini’s goal is dialectic with reality rather than an exhibition of visionary or spiritualistic effusion. Enrico Crispolti, “Dissent and Agreement: The Other Hypotheses,” in Urban Urgencies, ed. Francesco Somaini and Crispolti Enrico (Milano: Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, 1972), 110. 48. Enrico Crispolti, “Introduction,” in Francesco Somaini, 1967–1977: scultura e condizione urbana: Mantova, Palazzo Te, 11 settembre-23 ottobre 1977, ed. Francesco Somaini (Milano: Electa, 1977), 61. 49. Somaini and Crispolti, Urban Urgencies, 249. 50. Imagery of bleeding buildings was, during the 1970s, popularized in the growing film genre Italian Gothic horror movies, whose main ingredients were sex and violence. See Roberto Curti, Italian Gothic Horror Films, 1970–1979 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2017). For example, a visual comparison between Somaini’s Sculture per grattacieli and the poster for Lucio Fulci’s film Sette note in nero (1977), representing a wall perforated holes and dripping blood seeping out and a trapped woman calling out for help from behind the façade, shows injury and hurt to both the physicality of the building and person. 51. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 52. Somaini and Crispolti, Urban Urgencies, 250. 53. Irace, “Metropolis,” 77. Original Italian: “risarcire la città della propria piena umana vitalita.” 54. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 55. Francesco Somaini quoted in Irace, “Metropolis,” 78. 56. Rachel Middleman, Radical Eroticism: Women, Art, and Sex in the 1960s (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 146–174. 57. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 58. It is unlikely that Stefano Boeri and the other architects involved in “Bosco Verticale” knew of Somaini’s 1972 designs for Spine verdi. 59. The other artists participating in this exhibition were Fernando De Filippi, Umberto Mariani, Ugo Nespolo, Fabrizio Plessi, Sergio Sarri, Valeriano Trubbiani, and Emilio Vedova. 60. Giornale di Brescia, December 2, 1978. Original Italian, “Di fronte all’artificio sta il naturale; di fronte alla soffocante immobilità delle infrastrutture sta il movimento liberatore del corpo. Intelletto e legge opprimono, vitalità ed eros liberano.” 61. An important precedent for Somaini’s photomontages was the avant-garde architect Hans Hollein, who had been active in the United States since the late 1950s. In his photomontage series Transformations, 1963–1968, Hollein distorts the New York skyline by integrating completely alien objects in the context. Hollein was also important to the conceptual photographic work of Ugo La Pietra. 62. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. 63. Ibid. 64. Enrico Crispolti, “Dimostrative provocazioni newyorkesi d’ ‘urgenza’ plastic metropolitan,” in Somaini: uno scultore per la città: New York 1967–1976, ed. Enrico Crispolti, Luisa Somaini, and Francesco Somaini (Milano: Skira, 2017), 41. Original Italian:

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66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78.

79. 80. 81.

Redeployment of Sculpture in the City “prepotentmente organica e primariamente corporea, memorialmente di suggestion archetipica.” Gianni Usvardi, mayor of Mantua, Scultura e condizione urbana 1967–1977: Antologia di scultura, disegni e fotomontaggi, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa, 1977), n.p. Original Italian: “Sono convinto che l’incontro di Somaini con Mantova fornirà ‘energia di combustione’ ad un dibattito serrato e stimolante che supererà I temi della attualità pur così presente nei suoi ‘studi a media utopia’ per dare corpo all’esigenza inconscia dell’uomo modern di darsi una nuova dimensione, un nuovo ambiente.” Somaini, Scultura e condizione urbana 1967–1977, n.p. Original Italian: “Percorrendo la città di Mantova e discutendone mi ero reso conto della impossibilità di usare per un intervento i modi a me consoni della introduzione dell’elemento plastic somanticoorganico. La città aveva ancora un umanissmo aspetto ed una sociale frequentazione anche se, a mio aviso, in fase di deterioramento e consunzione; era peraltro separata dal territorio e dalla sua vecchia funzione contandina geograficamente da una periferia anonima e pesante e psichologicamente dal permanere di un sogno di sviluppo industriale della peggiore specie e con prospettive preoccupanti.  .  . . Ho operato pertanto vedendo molto costruire e progettare di oggi come una violenza perptrata alla città e ai suoi abitanti; osservando come nei centri e nei luoghi nevralgici la nuova città si installa distruggendo le vestigial di vecchie strutture comunitarie complesse per instaurare spesso morte specializzazioni. Non mi restava che avvalermi dei mezzi della fotografia e della manipolazione fotografica, a me consoni da anni, per fare una specie di lucida ed insieme poetica passaggiata e trarne allarmate e allarmanti immagini che io mi auguro di qualche efficacia ed utilità e per I mantovani e per quelle alter città storiche italiane che si trovano in simili situazioni.” Somaini, Scultura e condizione urbana 1967–1977, n.p. Crispolti, “Introduction,” 9. For example, the highway L’Asso Attrezzato, was built in Pescara in 1980s and it traverses urban structures and arrives at the city center not unlike Somaini’s photomontage. Somaini, Scultura e condizione urbana 1967–1977, n.p. Ibid. Ibid. Gazzetta di Mantova, September 12, 1977. Enrico Crispolti, “Sculture rotolanti e fotomontaggi a Venezia 1978,” in Francesco Somaini, ed. Francesco Somaini, Enrico Crispolti, and Giorgio Verzotti (Bologna: Ed. Bora, 1979), 9. Luisa Somaini, interview with the author, July 31, 2017, Milan, Italy. Venice was becoming a city overtaken by tourists while inhabitants were leaving to find opportunities elsewhere. In 1960, Venice had 145,000 inhabitants, while in 1970 the population decreased to 111,000. See www.comune.venezia.it/archivio/4055, accessed June 24, 2018 from Boston, MA. Roberto Peretta, “Francesco Somaini,” Fronte Popolare, July 30, 1978. See also Caroline Fletcher and T. Spencer, Flooding and Environmental Challenges for Venice and Its Lagoon: State of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 29. Mauro Staccioli, “Interview” by Alberto Balo e Giuliano Pati, Quotidiano dei lavoratori, April 24, 1979. Original Italian: “Il mio lavoro, anche scendendo nelle piazza, vuole fare scattare il meccanismo provocazione-reazione, agire dentro le conradizioni di questi principi, ecc. A questo punto si pone in causa anche il concetto di arte come ricerca, come strumento di analisi, si ripropone il grande problema del rapport fra militanza e produzione del rapport fra militanza e produzione artistica, il problema della crescita culturale complessiva, della partecipazione di massa e della approrpiazione degli strumenti critici del sapere.” Mauro Staccioli on Volterra 73 [From the Volterra 73 exhibition catalog], reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, ed. Manuela Crescentini and Enrico Crispolti (Macerata: Coopedit, 1981), 25. Renato Barilli, “Il birillo del mattone,” L’Espresso, May 17, 1987. Mauro Staccioli, interviewed by Tommaso Trini, Flash Art (November 1985): 49.

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82. Mauro Staccioli, “Scolpire provocazioni nel territorio,” Progetto 3, no. 1 (Milan, January 1977), reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, ed. Manuela Crescentini and Enrico Crispolti (Macerata: Coopedit, 1981), 36. 83. Simona Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” in Mauro Staccioli: gli anni di cemento 1968– 1982, ed. Bruno Corà, Mauro Staccioli, Simona Santini, and Andrea Alibrandi (Firenze: Il Ponte, 2012), 37. 84. Alberto Balo e Giuliano Pati, “Mauro Staccioli,” Quotidiano dei lavoratori, April 24, 1979. Original Italian: “Operatore visivo, militante di spicco del Partito comunista, e preside di una scuola.” See also Perazzi, “Prendiamoci il castello.” 85. Mauro Staccioli, cited in Maria Laura Gelmini, “Staccioli: Elements of a Lexicon,” in Mauro Staccioli: Volterra, 1972–2009; luoghi d’esprienza, ed. Marco Bazzini and Mauro Staccioli (Bologna: Damiani, 2009), 35. 86. Ibid. 87. Mauro Staccioli, interview with Manuela Crescentini, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, ed. Manuela Crescentini and Enrico Crispolti (Macerata: Coopedit, 1981), 65. Original Italian: “Avendo fatto una scuola d’arte di carattere prevalentemente professionale, e provendendo direttamente dall’ambiente popolare, I modelli culturali che avevo davnti erano gli operai, i figli degli artigiani, I contadini, gli antifascisti, i meno giovani di me, coloro che avevano fatto la Resistenza. E fare arte è stato inizialmente per me un’idea elementare, un mezzo per realizzare un manifesto, un cartellone, per partecipare conmunque a quest’idea di trasformazione.” 88. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 35. 89. Mauro Staccioli, interview with the author, August 13, 2012, Volterra, Italy. 90. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 35. Staccioli read authors like Berthold Brecht and poems by Nazim Hikmet, for which he made a series of illustrations. 91. Mauro Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man: A Dialgoue on Sculpture” interview by Luca Massimo Barbero, in Mauro Staccioli, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero, Marco Meneguzzo, and Matilde Marzotto Caotorta (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana, 2006), 31. 92. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 35. 93. Mauro Staccioli, interview with Manuela Crescentini, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 65. Staccioli moved to Lodi in 1963. He stopped painting and began making sculptures in 1965 but gave up making art from 1965 to 1969. 94. Mauro Staccioli, cited in Crispolti, “La scultura, segno contestuale di Mauro Staccioli,” 12. 95. Mauro Staccioli, Mauro Staccioli: idea dell’oggetto dell’idea, ed. Francesco Tedeschi (Milano: Galli Thierry, 2000), 84. 96. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 38. 97. Mauro Staccioli, interview with Manuela Crescentini, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 67. Original Italian: “Avevo per questo tutta la carica e l’entusiasmo per fare l’arte con volontà e intenzionalità politica.” 98. Ibid., 65. Original Italian: “La mia formazioen d’artista prende consistenza nel modo di sentire la politica come fatto poetico, non come politica della prassi. Potrei dire che la politica è stata per me lo strumento, ‘povero,’ di colui che non ha altri strumenti, e che ha l’urgenza di dire, di fare delle cose, per pensare un’immagine nuova del mondo.” 99. Mauro Staccioli, interview with Alberto Baio and Giuliano Patti, in Quotidiano dei lavoratori (Rome, April 24, 1979), reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 48. 100. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 24. 101. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 36. 102. Mauro Staccioli, interview with Manuela Crescentini, 64. Original Italian: “Il mio lavoro si definisce nei secondi anni Sessanta. I ganci, le lame, ecc . . ., sono una conseguenza delle ricerche, delle riflessioni sulle ragioni d’essere del segno rispetto ad una volontà precise, quella di parlare dell’uomo urbano e della sua condizione in un momento in cui la società dei consume sembrava vincere, coi suoi modelli, su tutti I fronti, culturali e politici.” 103. Exhibition dates: April 5–15, 1972, Other artists work part of the Rassenga were exhibited over a year long period: November 1971–June 1972. See Rassenga San Fidele 2, 1971/1972, exhibition catalog, Galleria San Fedele, Milan (Milan: Edizioni Centro Culturale San Fedele, 1972).

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104. Ibid. 105. Francsco Tedeschi, “Mauro Staccioli and the Critics,” in Mauro Staccioli: Works 1969– 1999, ed. Mauro Staccioli and Veit Loers (Milano: L’Agrifoglio, 2000), 58. 106. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso Books, 2012). 107. Mauro Staccioli, “Situazione-Ambiente, Progetto Minosse” (Milan, September 1971, from the catalog at the exhibition at San Fedele), 14–15. 108. Mario Perazzi, “Prendiamoci il castello,” Corriere d’Informazione, June 28, 1977. 109. Tedeschi, “Mauro Staccioli and the Critics,” 45. 110. Ibid., 14. 111. Mauro Staccioli, interviewed by Alessandra Pioselli, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli: idea dell’oggetto dell’idea, ed. Francesco Tedeschi (Milano: Galli Thierry, 2000), 111. 112. Staccioli, Mauro Staccioli: gli anni di cemento, 72. 113. Whereas there were only 173 events recorded in 1968, there were over 2500 incidents documented in 1979. See Vittorfranco S. Pisano, The Red Brigades: A Challenge to Italian Democracy (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1980), 2. 114. Mauro Staccioli, interview with the author, August 13, 2012, Volterra, Italy. 115. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 28. 116. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 38. 117. Mauro Staccioli, “Work Notes,” in Mauro Staccioli: Scultura (Milano: Electa, 1990), 11. 118. Perazzi, “Prendiamoci il castello.” 119. Crispolti, “La scultura, segno contestuale di Mauro Staccioli,” 12. 120. Arte Povera artist Pino Pascali had been making war machines and tanks since 1965, although it is unclear whether there was a direct influence, because Pascali was based mainly in Milan at this time. 121. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 22. 122. Mario De Micheli, “Mostre d’arte. Staccioli,” L’Unita, Milan April 19, 1972. See also A. Natali, “Mauro Staccioli,” NAC (May 1972): 21. 123. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 23. 124. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 35. See also Veit Loers, “From Situation to Imagination,” in Mauro Staccioli: Works 1969–1999, ed. Mauro Staccioli and Veit Loers (Milano: L’Agrifoglio, 2000), 20. 125. Mauro Staccioli and Francesca Pola, Space: A Blank Page (Milan: A arte Studio Invernizzi, 2006), 37. 126. Volterra ’72 took place August 9–September 9 1972, in Volterra, Italy. 127. Enrico Crispolti, “A Volterra nel 1972 e in Volterra 73,” reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 22. 128. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 28. 129. Enrico Crispolti, cited in Tedeschi, “Mauro Staccioli and the Critics,” 45. 130. Ibid. 131. Mauro Staccioli, interview with the author, August 13, 2012, Volterra, Italy. 132. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 29. 133. Mauro Staccioli, Volterra ’72, exh. cat., Volterra July 15–September 15 (Florence: Centro Di, 1973), n.p. 134. Franco Porretti, “Cronaca di Volterra, Sculture in Piazza,” La Nazione, August 12, 1972. 135. Maria Laura Glemini, “At the Roots of Sculpting,” in Mauro Staccioli—all’origine del fare, ed. Luca Massimo Barbero and Mauro Staccioli (Mantova: Corraini, 2008), 14. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid. 138. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 27. 139. Mauro Staccioli on Volterra 73, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 25. 140. The solo exhibition was held from January 23 to February 23, 1973 at the gallery Sant’Andrea, curated by Gianfrano Bellora, a leading figure in Milan’s cultural life at the time. Mauro Staccioli did not reject the gallery as a space to show work: He said: “I’ve never excluded or penalized it a priori, I’ve always considered it a space where you can build relationships with sources and with the public; different, obviously, from those you might have in an urban space, but alive and dynamic even so.” See Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 34.

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141. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 34. 142. Ibid., 32. 143. Mauro Staccioli, interview with the author, August 13, 2012, Volterra, Italy. Original Italian: “Quando ho realizzato questi lavori, ci sono state le Olimpiadi del Messico. Tommie Smith e John Carlos sono saliti al podio, chinato la testa e sollevato i pugni con i guanti neri durante l’esecuzione dell’inno nazionale. Questo è stato un evento che ha segnato nostro tempo.” 144. The exhibition Sculture contemporanee nello spazio urbano was organized by the Cultural Activities Department of the Municipality of Parma, the group exhibited, June–July 1973 also included Kengiro Azuma, Iginio Balderi, Giacomo Benevelli, Gianfranco Pardi, Giò Pomodoro, and Carlo Ramous. 145. Staccioli, “Every Deed of Man,” 36. 146. Veit Loers, “From Situation to Imagination,” 19. 147. Mauro Staccioli, “Parma, Sculture contemporanee nello spazio urbano,” June/July 1973, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 23. 148. Edward Lucie-Smith, Art in the Seventies (Oxford: Phaidon, 1980), 51–52. 149. Simona Santini, interview with the author, July 24, 2017, Skype. 150. Santini, “The Years of Concrete,” 37. 151. Ibid. 152. Mauro Staccioli, interview with Manuela Crescentini, reprinted in Mauro Staccioli il segno come scultura, 65. Original Italian: “Il cemento e il ferro sono una conseguenza naturale derivate da una assimilazione critica di ciò che la società ha utilizzato e utilizza in maniera impropria, smisuratamente speculativa. Intendo dire che il cemento è oggetto di speculazione, di prevaricazione, di distruzione suo malgrado.” 153. The exhibition, Interventi sullo spazio urbano, was installed from April 1–30, 1974 in Piazza Solferino, Turin. In addition to Staccioli, the other participating artists were Nicola Carrino, Sergio Putatti, Giuseppe Spagnulo. 154. Tedeschi, “Mauro Staccioli and the Critics,” 46. 155. Mauro Staccioli, quoted in Bruno Corà, “Mauro Staccioli: Gli anni di cemento,” in Mauro Staccioli: gli anni di cemento 1968–1982, 24. 156. Staccioli, Mauro Staccioli: idea dell’oggetto dell’idea, 61. 157. Original Italian: “Una donna morta nella ressa per poter comprare lo zucchero,” “Diletta Pagliuca servizio a morte i bambini che avrebbe dovuto curare,” “Sanguinosa scorreria di due fascisti: grave una bambina ferita a rivoltellate,” “Sgomberate dalla polizia le casa occupate da 284 famiglie, che subito si trasferiscono in altri alloggi,” “Strappare i patrioti cileni dai lager dei golpisti,” “Ferma risposta ai fascisti dell’arcivescovo di Torino.” 158. Simona Santini, interview with the author, July 24, 2017, Skype. 159. Staccioli, Mauro Staccioli: idea dell’oggetto dell’idea, 60. Original Italian: “Da una parte mi possono venire addosso, dall’altra non mi posso avvicinare perchè ci sono le punte.” 160. Ibid. 161. The intervention in Piazzatta Galleria Manzoni was curated by the leftist Libreria Internazionale Einaudi and Studio Sant’Andrea from December 11, 1974, to January 23, 1975. 162. See “Zibaldone artistico letterario storico scientifico,” supplement of Che Fare magazine, no. 2 (April 1973): 164–165. 163. Staccioli, Mauro Staccioli: gli anni di cemento 1968–1982, 105. 164. Ibid., 168.

4

Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente Ugo La Pietra’s and Franco Summa’s Urban Interventions

In a photograph from Ugo La Pietra’s archive, republished in the book Abitare la città in 2011, the artist sits on a bench with two colleagues—Livio Marzot and Giuseppe Spagnulo—observing the construction of high-rise residential buildings in Milan’s periphery [Figure 4.1]. Directly in front of them lies a narrow patch of grass with a few newly planted trees. This seems to be the only green space—and social space—left in this vicinity. Beyond are soaring residential towers in various states of construction. A lattice of scaffolding and massive cranes dominates the horizon. Nothing about this part of the image is at human scale, nor do we see any people; only endless rows of apartment towers. This view exemplifies the state of Milan’s peripheries during the 1970s. La Pietra witnessed the outsized growth of his hometown as its residential outskirts expanded like an oozing dark oil stain. Throughout the peripheries of Italy’s major cities like Rome, Turin, and Naples, grids of high-rises emerged without logical connection to how people lived and what they needed to build a community. These areas served one purpose: shelter for those who could not afford to live in ballooning urban centers. For artists like La Pietra, the city needed to be won back from capitalist and commoditizing forces, and reappropriation became an aesthetic strategy. He worked with local inhabitants or alone to reformulate and recast urban and suburban spaces. Curator Enrico Crispolti highlighted this phenomenon in the section “Individual Urban Reappropriation” at the 1976 Venice Biennale exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, calling attention to the work of La Pietra and Franco Summa as particularly representative of this trend. Their activity ranged from photographic observation to transformative interventions, such as painting marks on a building and mounting performance activities in the streets. Critically, they situated all these aesthetic projects within the fabric of the city, taking up space both physically and figuratively. La Pietra and Summa repurposed the city as both a site of protest and a space of illumination, ultimately hoping to make inhabitants aware of their surroundings and the latent discourses of power in their communities. This chapter takes La Pietra’s and Summa’s art practices as case studies, elaborating on aesthetic interventions in the urban context already addressed in Crispolti’s exhibitions, specifically Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale, and in the work of sculptors such as Somaini and Staccioli. This section, however, will focus on La Pietra’s and Summa’s architectural, painterly, photographic, and conceptual strategies of reappropriating urban space. Delving into these artists’ oeuvre during these years, I examine the intersection of their aesthetic activity and sociopolitical movements concerned with taking back the urban environment.

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Figure 4.1 Ugo La Pietra, Periferia di Milano, durante la ricerca sui “Gradi di Libertà,” c. 1970, documentary photograph. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

La Pietra’s and Summa’s aesthetic interventions, and particularly their reappropriation of the city, prompt the question: for whom are these artists reclaiming the city? Their work, therefore, needs to be understood in relation to Italy’s broader social movements of self-empowerment and occupation, which gained strength throughout the decade.1 Self-managed groups of inhabitants, working on a local level, vocalized what many saw as the Diritto alla città (Right to the City) and sought to make qualitative changes to their own lived spaces.2 Activated by how the country’s urban structures and housing, particularly in and around large metropolitan cities, had been erected with scant consideration for the quality of life of the inhabitants, especially the underprivileged classes, self-empowered residents seized management and control over their urban spaces. The struggle in the neighborhood derived from the struggle in the factory and was part of the lotta sociale (social struggle).3 As sociologist Franco Ferrarotti wrote, the city is an extension of the factory; it is a “social factory.”4 Alienated laborers toiling in industry were just as estranged from the speculative city as they were from the profits of capital. Urban living was an extension of the processes of dispossession to which workers were exposed. Workers and inhabitants advocated for affordable housing, public transportation, and social services. Furthermore, they wanted to protect their neighborhoods and open spaces from land speculation.5 Many believed that

108 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente housing should be regarded as a fundamental right rather than a commodity subject to the contingencies of the market.6 The bene-casa (house as a good) became a leftist symbol of the injustices of the capitalist economy. These urban social movements predominantly had a robust lower-class base, but they also attracted support from the left-leaning general public and from artists. It was not only a class issue: most inhabitants of large cities were implicated in these debates.7 In essence, all aspects of daily life in the city became political. In 1970, for instance, the leftist political journal Lotta Continua launched the slogan “Prendiamoci la città!” (Let’s take the city!), which took the class struggle out of the factory and into the city by organizing housing occupations, rent strikes, and projects to set up self-managed services such as mercati rossi (illegal markets) and health care centers.8 The Department of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan organized an exhibition titled Diritto alla città in 1973, which reported the degradation of old houses and the extreme circumstances of most of the urban population.9 Artists also turned to these concerns, making artwork in the city’s piazzas and streets that directly challenged the structures and organization of the city. For artists working within the urban environment, this meant engaging with “inhabitant’s social territory, the mix of nature and artifice, that is of relations, exchanges, of redevelopment plans, of urban projects, of thought that is a testimony to the present and looks to the future.”10 Expanding into the urban landscape, artists working in Arte Ambientale reclaimed the city and sought to render it livable again. Artists’ reappropriation of the city finds particular resonance in Antonio Negri’s activist theories, both in artists’ refusal to work within traditional art establishments and in their focus on seizing the city as a space in which to make art. In two important texts from the early 1970s, “Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization” and “Workers’ Party Against Work,” Negri used the term “appropriation” to describe an attitude that would counter the social disjunctions resulting from capitalist modes of production.11 Appropriation meant rescuing one’s productive potential by refusing to be identified by capitalist systems of worth.12 For Negri, appropriation involved a new form of class behavior. In this way, labor could shift from an enslaving activity into one that could “emerge as creativity and freedom.”13 Ultimately, through this process of appropriation, productive labor could pass from being an act of submission to capital to one that suppresses capital. Negri’s formulation of a “workerist” position—a strong leftist discourse privileging the worker’s struggles within capitalist modes of production—is particularly useful to frame La Pietra’s and Summa’s endeavors. While there is no evidence of a direct influence, Negri’s analysis of proletarian agency informs a reading of these artists’ practices within this precise historical-political moment. Critically, La Pietra and Summa reclaimed their artistic autonomy by withdrawing their respective practices from the gallery economy. La Pietra made a living by separating his work as an artist from his job as a profitable design consultant. Meanwhile, Summa taught fine art at the Liceo Artistico in Pescara to subsidize artwork and projects that he had no intention of selling. The freedom that they both achieved by pulling out of the art establishment allowed them to produce critical work that addressed what they viewed as the threat to the essential human quality of place resulting from modern transformations of Italian cities. While La Pietra’s and Summa’s aesthetic activity sought to reclaim the city, their backgrounds could not have been more different. La Pietra, trained as an architect,

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had an analytical approach to looking at the contradictions of the built space. His aesthetic sensibility was rigorous and scientific. Summa, by contrast, studied philosophy, and the humanities generally informed his aesthetic practice. His work in particular tapped into a poetic understanding of the city, and his projects often activated memory and culture. Common ground, however, can be found in both La Pietra’s and Summa’s understanding of creativity as an agent for subverting the negative qualities of the urban environment. Their work grappled with the preservation of individual creativity, which the artists equated with the ability to think and behave freely. In an essay from 1972, “La cultura ufficiale: un strumento per la gestione del potere” (The Official Culture: An Instrument for the Management of Power), La Pietra explained his position: “Individual creativity could be a valid means to free oneself from repression, but it is evident that if the culture to which we belong is by nature repressive, the only real possibility of reaching this goal is to overthrow assumptions that are at the base of society itself.”14 For La Pietra, creativity needed to be “won back through a reappropriation process.”15 Likewise, for Summa, creativity was a means of “imagining a different and more satisfying social reality.”16 He saw his work as operating in direct contact with the community. Ultimately, both artists’ activities, often carried out with the participation of individuals, aimed to catalyze a critical awareness and empower citizens to make a difference to their urban environments.

Ugo La Pietra: Analytical Urban Interventions In his artwork, La Pietra explored the spatio-temporal conditions of the urban metropolis. Recognizing the enormous social and structural inequalities of the urban landscape, he analyzed the rhythms of everyday life and the forces that dictate these experiences. In “La città senza morale” (The City Without Morals), a text published in 1974, he explained that “the city, ruled by decisional and operational structures, is by now organized through a range of systems, inside which the relation between the decisional levels of political-economic interventions and the basic social context is expressed by mechanisms of coercion of the social group’s real needs and aspirations.”17 In other words, for La Pietra, the city had become a place of dislocation, where the ordinary citizen felt overwhelmed by modernizing forces. La Pietra developed an art practice based on both urban action and analysis, each informing the other. His interventions caused a physical disruption within the rigid configuration of space. At the same time, he called his careful, objective examination of the urban landscape Gradi di libertà (Degrees of Freedom), and he produced a series of artworks under this title. He researched the way individuals inhabited their environment, identifying the levels of freedom people had within structured and codified spaces. Using photography, film, and drawing, he recorded both his visual observations and his performative interventions. He mounted these fragments into photo collages, adding schematic lines and drawings that highlighted and—to use his word—“decoded,” space.18 Underpinning all of his projects that permeated the urban environment was La Pietra’s theory of the Sistema disequilibrante (Unbalancing System).19 It consisted of what he termed “a provocative design practice that aimed to reveal certain contradictions of the urban space.”20 La Pietra described the Unbalancing System as a critique of a city that had become standardized, where the creativity of humankind had neither the possibility of recovery nor the hope of modifying the organization of culture.21

110 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente He claimed that the “bureaucratic” society had taken exclusive possession of space and that urban planning was the primary means for this acquisition.22 In a 1972 essay published in IN, titled La logica del potere (The Logic of Power), he disclosed details of the mechanisms of what he believed was the current state of a repressive society.23 Specifically, La Pietra implicated politicians and all the governmental bodies that execute the state’s power, as well as the corrupt dealings of the sotto governo, in addition to the confindustria (Confederazione Generale dell’Industria Italiana, or the consortium of Italian capitalist industries). More generally, he defined power as the ability to influence the will and actions of individuals. Discipline, according to La Pietra, is the rigorous obedience of norms governing life in schools, work, the military, religion, and any other hierarchical structure, extending to the minute organization of everyday life. Operating independently of political and urban structures, La Pietra’s theory and art projects highlighted inhabitants’ predetermined behaviors inside codified urban spaces.24 La Pietra himself, however, has suggested that his outsider status made his work precarious, as it could potentially be reabsorbed and exploited by the gruppi dominanti (dominant groups), also sometimes referred to as Il Sistema (The System). Still, the Unbalancing System offered an alternative theoretical tool for analysis external to the system’s logic. La Pietra’s work thus operated in parallel with political activism, and he produced art with both disruptive and revelatory functions. Returning to Negri’s concept of the refusal to work, we can understand La Pietra’s refusal to operate within both the art establishment and the urban logic of capital. From this external position, La Pietra embraced aesthetic operations—whether fully realized projects or just proposals—that could decode, provoke, and break codified spatial organizations.25 Even though La Pietra placed himself on the outside of the system, he claimed that his work was not utopian, unlike perhaps Francesco Somaini’s photomontages, discussed in the previous chapter.26 La Pietra grounded both his theory and practice in the concrete interaction of human behavior in the urban landscape through careful investigation. He kept his focus on the local, the rapidly expanding, unregulated, and unplanned urban periphery of Milan, where he observed, photographed, and filmed small-scale individual projects.27 Each of these interventions “unbalanced” the system and was a momento di rottura (a moment of rupture). Working inside the urban fabric but taking an outsider’s perspective, La Pietra created provocative projects that attempted to unseat the balance of the standardized city.28 The sum of these moments formed the Unbalancing System, and La Pietra suggested that through these actions one could find the codes to unlock the repression around us.29 All of La Pietra’s artworks were multidetermined, indicating the artist’s various sources of influence. La Pietra was born in Bussi sul Tirino, near Pescara, in 1938, and his training was as an architect, graduating from Milan’s Polytechnic in 1964. Throughout his studies, he was interested in radical Austrian architects like Hans Hollein and Walter Pichler, who would go on to have important careers in postmodernist architecture in the 1980s.30 They were known in Italy especially for their influence on the counterculture architects practicing in Florence, such as Archizoom and Superstudio, a circle that La Pietra was tangentially involved with during the 1970s.31 In the mid 1960s, Hollein, Pichler, and Raimund Abraham formed a small group that challenged the modernist paradigm. They created hypothetical buildings that explored the emotional resonances of architecture—its story and history rather than just its function.32 Hollein, in particular, developed a practice that privileged

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the intuitive rather than the geometrical and rational. In addition, drawing was an important medium for Hollein: he used a fluid sketch, instead of the traditional static plan, to conceptualize his ideas. These figures’ influence on La Pietra, already in the late 1960s, led him to reject a functionalist approach and to recognize the importance of expressivity in city buildings. In particular, we can see Hollein’s influence on La Pietra’s drawings, where architectural landscapes attain unique subjective rhythms. Another crucial formative influence, especially for La Pietra’s theoretical grounding, was the Parisian Situationist International (SI) group. Founded in 1957 and lasting as an art movement until 1972, the SI developed from strands of surrealism and was strongly centered in Marxist theory. It sought to question the “spectacle” and the processes underlying the commodification of everyday life.34 At the end of the 1960s, many Italian artists, gravitating toward the countercultural sphere in Milan, absorbed the theories of the SI.35 Having conceived of a cultural strategy able to criticize consumer capitalism, the SI became an almost mythical reference point for many radicals. La Pietra was particularly drawn to the SI’s subversive strategies, such as psychogeography—the study of specific effects of the geographic environment on the emotions and behaviors of individuals—and détournement—the destabilization of appropriated elements from mass culture to expose their ideological nature. Through the Parisian group, he would have also become familiar with Henri Lefebvre’s critique of capitalism and the value of quotidian life.36 Concrete ties between La Pietra and the SI can be seen, for example, in La Pietra’s journal publications, such as Progettare Inpiù. In 1975, for instance, the literary scholar Mirella Bandini wrote “Urbanisme Unitaire: la critica all’urbanistica e al funzionamento teorizzata dall’Internazionale Situazionista” (Unit Urbanism: Critical Urban Planning and Theoretical Operation of the Situationist International), an article in which she introduced the SI theory of Urbanisme Unitaire to an Italian audience.37 Critical of rational and functional urban planning in the service of the bourgeoisie, the theory offered a new approach to architecture and city planning based on the fluidity of experience. La Pietra absorbed, as well as promoted and disseminated, this and other ideas from the SI. Interestingly, his Marxist critique of the metropolis was aligned with those of Francesco Somaini and Mauro Staccioli, whose work is detailed in the previous chapter, albeit coming from an entirely different background. Principally, La Pietra based his urban art activity in the city of Milan, a city known for its automotive production and for manufacturing chemicals, textiles, and heavy machinery. It had been the nation’s first modern city, and throughout the twentieth century, as Milan grew, the prestige of the urban center continued to mark the city’s social geography.38 Gentrification was not a new phenomenon to Milan, but during the 1960s and 1970s, the effects of rapid industrialization meant that the city expanded at an unprecedented speed. According to Marxist geographer David Harvey, this type of rapid urbanization has staggering impacts on a city: an unsettling of capital circulation that shifts the flow of labor and commodities; reorganization of production and the transformation of spatial relations; and geopolitical conflicts between territory-based class alliances.39 La Pietra’s analysis and intervention of these mechanisms at play within Milan were complex, integrated in a theoretical framework and often spanning multiple years. My examination of La Pietra’s projects, in this section, will take a non-chronological approach, first detailing the work that resulted from his keen observations of Milan’s peripheries and its inhabitants and then his performative interventions. Separating

112 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente them into two distinct modes of practice, however, may prove a disservice to the circular way his observations and actions continually informed his art-making activities. La Pietra was, in other words, always engaged in both. This flexible way of working relates to Crispolti’s term Extra media, discussed in Chapter 1, where artists operated in different mediums and media at the same time, depending on the specifics of the project. In this regard, La Pietra’s art practice, during the 1970s was peripatetic, not only because he wandered the city, but also because the materials, activities, theories, and styles of his interventions were never rooted in any one dimension. La Pietra’s analysis derived from intent observations of what he saw was restrictions imposed on inhabitants, the Degrees of Freedom of the built environment. He remarked, “the moral authority that the society of consumption is able to exercise on the citizens does not leave any degree of freedom or [the possibility of] participation in the definition and transformation of the space.”40 Levels of liberty varied, according to La Pietra, being most restricted in the city center and becoming progressively greater in the peripheries, where municipal and social control tended to become less efficient.41 Giving visual form to ordinary citizens’ habitual modes of living in their environment, La Pietra meticulously recoded—through photographs and a process of drawing—the behavior and culture of the urban working class. He wanted to decode, and hence understand, the extent to which individuals could reclaim a sense of autonomy within their prescribed living conditions. He was particularly fascinated when he noticed that inhabitants, in some way, defied set patterns. These could be small, almost indiscernible infractions, such as finding a shortcut through a fence or walking on the grass. But La Pietra interpreted these actions as dissident and highly individual choices, ways to operate outside the structure of Il Sistema.42 To facilitate his observational mode of working, La Pietra invented a device called Il Commutatore, which translates as “the switch,” in 1970 [Figure 4.2]. The gadget consisted of a black wooden A-frame that was hinged so that it could be opened—to varying degrees—and had a footrest at the base of one board, allowing La Pietra to lie on an incline and observe the street view from various angles. Relatively light and easy to carry, it could be transported to any urban location to study the space. In one photograph, we see La Pietra testing his contraption in Via San Giacomo Filippo, in the Covetto neighborhood, south of Milan’s center.43 The image recalls Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of Vitruvian Man circa 1490. But whereas Vetruvius, in De Architectura, described the human figure as the fundamental measure of the classical Greek architectural orders, La Pietra’s device indicates the essential inhumanity of serially produced high-rise housing blocks. As he explained, Day by day we lose the ability to recover the values and meanings of our urban environment. Our eyes only see signals that automatically conform to our behaviors. With this instrument, one is capable of creating a new reading of the urban space. Many times, using the object, I discovered elements that were not obvious. I allowed others to use it too.44 La Pietra thought the Commutatore could help him uncover knowledge of both the superficial and deep structures of the city.45 It allowed him to examine, from different angles, both the topographical space and the more metaphorical substrate, with its attendant relational and semantic content.

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Figure 4.2 Ugo La Pietra, Il Commutatore, 1970, performance, ink on paper. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

Armed with the Commutatore, La Pietra set out to record the degrees of freedom in Milan’s working-class neighborhoods, such as Sesto San Giovanni and Quarto Oggiaro. In a project titled Gli itinerari preferenziali, or sometimes also known as Tracce, from the early 1970s, he undertook an anthropological investigation of these sites, studying how the residents of housing blocks inhabited their spaces. He coalesced his documentation in panels comprising photography and drawing, such as this one, from 1969, where La Pietra noted where residents had created their own tracks through grassy areas to traverse the estate [Figure 4.3]. Here we see four vistas of different working-class housing estates on Milan’s peripheries. Cranes in the second photograph show that these are brand-new constructions, maybe not even fully completed but already inhabited in that residents have trodden meandering pathways around these monolithic buildings. La Pietra arranged the information on the panel in a grid, using a detached, conceptual approach. He organized photographs to the left and his own paper and graphite interpretations to the right. The drawings reveal how La Pietra read—or decoded—such images, only schematically including the details of the buildings and giving priority to the pathways among the grassy terrain. These organically created trails weave around obstacles and across the landscape, their curvilinear form contrasting sharply with the angular architecture surrounding them. The site’s layout, replete with stackable units, articulates the homogeneity of mass consumerism and standardization. But the footpaths refuse to conform. Their tempo is varied and sporadic, revealing how the inhabitants chose to navigate space—to create space—on their own terms. This is a clear example of how La Pietra’s object of study was the temporal pattern of human movement and its interaction with the urban environment. He would revisit the same sites again and again, noting how the pathways created by the inhabitants changed over time. What interested La Pietra was that the residents did not stay confined to designated pathways but carved out their own routes. La Pietra saw in their choice, which might have been motivated by mere convenience, an act of subversion, and he conceptualized this activity as a creative way of reappropriating the urban environment. He

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Figure 4.3 Ugo La Pietra, Gli itinerari preferenziali, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

described such actions as “desperate attempts for a society which no longer succeeds in finding a reason for what it does, why it does it, and where it does it.”46 These instances of independent circulation within the regulated city revealed, according to La Pietra, “an attitude, or better an aspiration, that manifests in urbanized people, which tends to reaffirm the need for the use of space.”47 He believed these alternate routes demonstrated a persistent, creative attitude emanating from an ostensibly confined environment. Residents refused to conform to the cadences dictated by the preestablished spatial organization and continued to inhabit these spaces according to their own measure. Other times, the panels from the Gli itinerari preferenziali were more abstract. In another, also from 1969, La Pietra assembled three photographs and one drawing in a tidy grid [Figure 4.4]. We see in the top left the housing estate seen from afar, with an expansive green field in front, without inhabitants’ tracks. To its right, a close-up of the buildings with a small pathway across the lawn. In another work, La Pietra documented how this exact same trail would expand as it was trodden a few years later. In the lower-right, La Pietra inserted an abstract drawing, in which arrows disperse from

Figure 4.4 Ugo La Pietra, Gli itinerari preferenziali, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

116 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente the center and point toward the margins. Reading the image from above as if it were a map, the movement suggests an escape from the center to the periphery. La Pietra paired this image with one of a girl, who crouches down to fit through the small gap. Behind her stands a backdrop of standardized housing units. La Pietra’s work recasts the girl’s action as more than just an attempt to find a convenient passageway to get from inside the estate to the street. Instead, it becomes evidence of creative behavior, as the young girl seizes the opportunity to escape. If we understand this girl’s action as a form of play, the photographs in Gli Itinerari relate to a broader body of work as artists and architects since the 1950s had looked to the notion of play and the urban environment.48 The work of British architects Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, and their collaboration with photographer Nigel Henderson, offers a particularly apt example. In Urban Re-Identification (1953), the Smithsons collaged photographs taken by Henderson of children playing in London’s working-class neighborhood Bethnal Green. They presented their grid collage at the ninth CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Modern) conference in Aix-en-Provence in 1953 and introduced their concept of urban reidentification. Questioning the modernist functionalism that dominated the discourse of CIAM, the Smithsons looked at the experience of the lived environment; they called for a reconsideration of the relations that existed between the house, the street, and the city.49 Like La Pietra, the Smithsons were concerned with reidentifying inhabitants with their environment, and they focused their attention on forms of play for discussing human relationships and interactions in the urban context.50 Their photographs of children playing in the street offered vivid images of the vital quality of everyday life. La Pietra, also looking at patterns of human behavior, focused on children’s intuitive modes of playfully negotiating their bodies in their environment. For him, this was proof that despite the alienating conditions of their urban environment, inhabitants could still live creatively. Contrary to the postwar urban development, working-class housing in Milan had not always been alienating. The city’s first proletarian housing dated back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, when workers had begun to settle in distinct neighborhoods of the city. These workers’ housing complexes had typically been two stories high and centered on a courtyard that fostered a community environment.51 The architecture of the space was conducive to fostering a sense of solidarity, grounded in the informal life of the quarter, in the neighborly gossip of the courtyards, and in the drinking circles of the osterie (inns).52 Dramatically different from this traditional working-class housing, residences built during the 1960s and 1970s did not promote the same type of community environment. The Gratosoglio neighborhood, one of many built in Milan, had sizable multistory housing blocks. They were serial, anonymous, and isolated. Far removed from the city center, residents had limited access to transportation and essential services like post offices, schools, and grocers.53 As a consequence, the social reality of these new estates lacked the same sense of liveliness engendered by the accommodations of the past. During the 1970s, realizing the stark difference between the two types of housing, many felt nostalgic for these prior forms. The problem was that there was no effective, socially responsible policy to oversee the erection of these working-class estates.54 Building on a large scale, IACP (Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari, Autonomous Institute for Working-Class Housing) and GESCAL (GEStione Case per i Lavoratori, Housing Management for Workers) contracted private property developers to construct shoddy, low-cost housing for the

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working class. Neither the private developers nor the city invested in implementing social services in these new urban zones.55 It was not until 1968 that the municipality responded to the city’s social demands, instituting a program called regolamento istitutivo dei consigli di zona (Institutional Regulations for Neighborhood Councils), which appointed local council administrations in different neighborhoods.56 The program somewhat decentralized administrative power to Milan’s localities. Nonetheless, this type of top-down decentralization was often in conflict with local grassroots initiatives. Though they shared the goal of improving services and living conditions, the two sides hesitated to work together because the residents distrusted any legislative measure. Too many of the administration’s promises had not been delivered, so residents believed that they needed to take responsibility for their living conditions. Drawing on the discourse of self-managed organization, many inhabitants preferred to form comitati di quartiere, spontaneous neighborhood committees.57 Indeed, La Pietra was interested in analyzing activism and the spontaneous creativity in these working-class sites that seemed to directly challenge the conditions set by the housing industry. He documented how the working class made their own homes, modifying the environment according to their own needs within the serial and standardized housing configurations. In a project titled Recupero e reinvenzione (Recovery and Reinvention), 1969–1970, he observed how urban refuse could be recovered and ingeniously used to build expressive structures. La Pietra exhibited this work, along with his theory of the Unbalancing System, at the 1976 Venice Biennale exhibition Ambiente nel sociale, curated by Crispolti. The analysis culminated in a series of photomontages consisting of images of the housing estates alongside bric-a-brac constructions, each approximately 30 inches wide by 30 inches high, indicating how waste could be used anew [Figure 2.14]. In another panel from the series, La Pietra demonstrates how inhabitants, with imaginative aptitude, were capable of adapting refuse material—“waste from our civilization of consumption,” as he described it—to create simple shacks [Figure 4.5].58 La Pietra collaged four different types of cabins, showing the variety in construction aesthetics. Each one is single and unique, its form determined by both the creator’s needs and aesthetic considerations. Believing it was the prototype for these makeshift homes, La Pietra also included a photograph of a postwar country house in the top-right corner of the photomontage. The piece suggests that urban inhabitants yearned for an idyll, and they therefore built country-like sheds in available urban green spaces.59 But this project also engaged with the discourse of the Diritto alla città. Not having sufficient housing, Milan’s underprivileged classes created their own buildings. La Pietra documented this phenomenon, showing how inhabitants produced makeshift dwellings rather than use the low-cost housing that the government and the city provided for them. More than this, his documentation illustrates how citizens actively took back their living spaces, affirming their right to have a home in the city and to be able to participate in the creation of their environment. Indeed, La Pietra saw the territory on which these temporary structures were built as cultivated land temporarily torn from the unstoppable process of speculation. These constructions revealed all the will to build a home according to one’s own measure, to find solutions within determined schemas, reinvent materials and objects and to re-use them in a way that does not belong to any bourgeois model or false counterculture.60

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Figure 4.5 Ugo La Pietra, Recupero e reinvenzione, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

Historian John Foot observed that during the 1970s, there was a renewed intellectual interest in working-class popular culture, particularly because it was in danger of disappearing.61 Intellectuals saw this “low” culture as a weapon in the struggle against dominant power structures. For example, socialist historian Gianni Bosio valorized workers’ canti popolari (popular and partisan songs), such as Bella Ciao, as a form of cultural production that resisted the homogenizing effects of capitalism.62 Additionally, within leftist circles, there was a drive to chart the vernacular objects, rituals, and traditions of fading preindustrial Italy as a means of preserving and recording the origins and varieties of Italian culture.63 Attuned to the cultural and political importance of these shanty houses in Milan’s working-class neighborhoods, La Pietra’s projects can be described as fieldwork.64 He was an outsider in these communities by virtue of

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his class. But like ethnographers, he integrated himself within this environment, taking detailed notes and visual recordings as his means of data collection. With this activity, La Pietra sought to expose the naturalized power structures inherent in the simplest objects, environments, and social relations. Within the broader political discourse around anthropology and material culture, the Other—in this case, the peasant, the indigenous maker, the amateur, the vernacular—may serve as a foil against the alienation of a mass capitalist consumer society. Drawing from these disciplines, La Pietra investigated the creative habits of Milan’s working class and cast himself as a type of conceptual folklorist.65 La Pietra’s documentation of the imaginative dwellings that working-class inhabitants built themselves gains another critical layer when compared to another project that La Pietra undertook during the 1970s. And this is an example of where La Pietra’s analytical practice of observation informed his active art-making projects. In parallel to Recupero e reinvenzione, his artwork Occultamento in 1974 also proposed a new, alternative habitation that equally challenged the standardized working house estates, such as those of Porta Garibaldi, in the northwest, and Porta Ticinese, in the southwest of Milan. These large and cheaply constructed properties were built principally by IACP and GESCAL. La Pietra was especially attuned to this type of construction because of his architectural training. He was critical of the fact that GESCAL housing lacked communal areas; the layout privileged sleeping quarters over common rooms. La Pietra’s proposal minimized or—as per its title—concealed the structures used for sleeping, to maximize what he called spazio vitale, living space.66 While it is not clear whether he submitted this project to GESCAL, he nevertheless critiqued the organization’s planning norms. Perhaps most important, Occultamento proposed a layout that was not fixed and could be modified according to the needs of the inhabitants. The furniture structure, too, was flexible and adaptable, allowing the user “freedom to inhabit [the space] autonomously, only minimally conditioned in the creation of a congenial space adequate to the user’s actual needs.”67 As much as La Pietra was concerned with the urban environs on the periphery, he was just as interested in the center. He conceived of a series of hypothetical interventions in Piazza del Duomo—the city’s main square—that highlighted the tension between the city center and its peripheries. According to La Pietra, the city was based on class hierarchies that in turn were expressed physically in the city’s layout.68 That is, mechanisms of wealth resulted in gentrification and segregation of specific spaces along class lines. Forcefully, the bourgeoisie exclusively occupied the center of Milan while the working classes were ghettoized. An unrealized 1972 work titled Verso il centro di Milano (Toward the Center of Milan) overturned Milan’s sectional configuration to make this imbalance evident [Figure 4.6]. La Pietra planned to project images of the city’s peripheral zones onto large screens erected in the Piazza Duomo during the days of Christmas, temporarily relocating the city’s margins within its center.69 Ironically, the Unione Commercianti (the local association of shop owners mainly comprised the petite bourgeoisie) funded the project, perhaps expecting artists to adorn the streets and valorize the commercial qualities of the space. La Pietra chose to submit a provocative plan that differed from the typical celebratory light shows made popular in the 1960s. Instead, he sought to critically examine the capitalist customs associated with the holiday period. Like his earlier project, Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra, for the exhibition Campo Urbano in 1969, La Pietra’s Verso il centro di Milano revealed the seductive clutches of commodity culture in the

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Figure 4.6 Ugo La Pietra, Verso il centro, 1972, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

historic center of the city. Under normal circumstances, the Milanese would habitually flock to the city center from the suburbs for entertainment, shopping, and dining. But here La Pietra destabilized this trend, so when citizens came to the center, they would be thrown right back to its periphery.70 This dramatic dislocation of site—from center to the margins and vice versa—highlighted Milan’s grossly uneven economic and sociogeographical distribution. Probably finding Verso il centro di Milano gloomy for the festive season, the Unione Commercianti did not select La Pietra’s proposal, and thus this project was never realized. La Pietra’s grandest project under the rubric of the Unbalancing System was La conquista dello spazio (The Conquest of Space), carried out in Piazza Sempione at the center of Milan in 1971 [Figure 4.7]. He painted white lines across the square—at times superimposing the traditional zebra crossing (crosswalk) markings—and rearranged urban stakes, or bollards, and chains to enclose the central area in front of the Triumphal Arch. The work, however, was a multistage project, consisting of schematic drawings of the piazza and photographic documentation. In La Conquista, La Pietra unsettled regular patterns of circulation by arresting movement in the Piazza. He disrupted the laws of motion dominating the space, hindering transit. The new markings—converging into a central point at the center of the square—offered pedestrians a streamlined way of traversing the area. At the same time, the stakes and chains circumscribed the zone, delineating it as separate from ordinary spaces of circulation. In a text written to accompany the project, La Pietra outlined how he wanted to recover the sectioned zone of the piazza for alternative and creative experiences.71 He was critical of how the municipal administration had handled Milan’s urban transformations; the interests of industrialists, corrupt governmental officials, and bureaucrats, rather than those of the citizens, directed the city’s uncontrolled growth.72 The site of a Napoleonic-era Arch of Peace, Piazza Sempione, had by the 1970s become a traffic circle dominated by the unnatural pace of automobiles.73 The piazza’s construction was part of a nineteenth-century program of urban modernization, similar to the Haussmannization of Paris.74 The plan to beautify Milan emphasized topoi, or monuments, creating idyllic vistas of the city.75 Commenting on landmarks such as the Porta Sempione and its piazza, La Pietra wrote that “monumental architecture expresses itself through the definition of a ‘specification,’ which is only a return to

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Figure 4.7 Ugo La Pietra, La conquista dello spazio 1971, photomontage and ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

dictatorial expressions.”76 Indeed, he saw these conspicuous displays of military and monarchic power as antiquated symbols of authority. But more incisively, Conquista attempted to reverse the process of urban alienation rife in Italian cities, reconquering the sense of place, as in the work’s title. La Pietra’s rearrangement of stakes and chains indicated a conscious “reappropriation” of space. Unlike the functional cordoning off of a particular area for road works, La Pietra suggested that this space, isolated from normal traffic, should be considered differently, as a place for creativity rather than commuting77 The work invited inhabitants to pause, giving them space outside their quotidian routine. This was a subversive idea, especially as the city police tended to regard loitering with suspicion.78

122 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente La Pietra continued to work with symbols of municipal control—stakes, urban bollards, and chains—in later projects. Blurring the boundaries between public and private spaces, he created a series of pieces titled Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività (Reconversion Project, Equipment for the Community), in 1979. In this project, he fused urban traffic fittings with house furniture: a bed’s headboard and frame are constructed from traffic poles and decorated with a metal chain; a sofa is assembled with six sturdy posts; and four of the same poles support a large wooden platform, forming a table, and make up the framework for a dresser. Using urban equipment to design indoor furniture meant for private consumption, La Pietra expressed vexation with the way the city was used rather than inhabited.79 These urban furnishings typically constrained and delineated space, signaling areas that were out-of-bounds; by reappropriating and blending the two categories of public and private, La Pietra presented a compromise, suggesting that interior attitudes can influence behaviors on the exterior.80 Exhibiting this work at the Milan Triennial in 1979, La Pietra brought examples of his urban furnishings into the gallery space. He photographed himself using these objects, comfortably resting in a bed and storing chains in his dresser [Figure 4.8]. This display further complicated the conceptual relationship between the public and private as the gallery space is both, and yet neither, at the same time. It is an enclosed

Figure 4.8 Ugo La Pietra, Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività, 1979, dresser, chains, stakes, documentary photograph. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

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space that often contains furniture and artworks; it is accessible to the public but usually for a fee. Like public environments, however, the gallery demands specific decorum and dress. By displacing these hybrid objects from either a private home or the city streets, La Pietra imbued them with a critical purpose in the gallery. Continuing his use of objects typically used in traffic management, La Pietra made a short film titled Interventi pubblici per la città di Milano (Public Interventions for the City of Milan) in the same year.81 Lasting approximately six and a half minutes, the film was set in the city streets. It details La Pietra’s collaborative activity with a local commitato di quartiere (neighborhood committee). Together, they sectioned off various areas by placing hundreds of poles and chains throughout the city. With the noise of automobile traffic in the background, we can hear only fragmented ideas expressing details of the project: for example, “We have surrounded the area with stakes and chains. Then, we proposed . . .”82 Perhaps these incomplete thoughts allowed for open-ended possibilities. The imagery tours the different urban sites, following the trail of sectioned spaces. Four minutes into the film, La Pietra appears and says, “To be everywhere at home.”83 With this, he begins manufacturing the furniture pieces of Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività. The film was intended to play with simple, everyday street furnishings to blur the public’s perceptions on domesticity and civic space.84 In a climactic and humorous ending, La Pietra portrays himself as feeling so comfortable that he lies in the bed of his own making, caressing a woman. Reappropriation here implied seizing both the public and the private realms and making them “homey” again. In the mid 1970s, La Pietra’s aesthetic practices underwent an important shift. He went from studying the behaviors of others to looking at his own everyday rhythms. In Abitare la città (Live the City), from 1976, he blurred the divide between private and public space by enacting domestic activities in the city [Figure 4.9]. For example, he shaved his face in the middle of a busy urban street. For La Pietra, the term abitare—to live—meant to “expand one’s own person and live in harmony with one’s surrounding environment, not only in one’s private space but also in public space.”85 This, he argued, was something that Mediterranean cultures in pre-industrialized cities had always done—when the distinction between indoors and outdoors was less threatening.86 La Pietra coined the phrase Abitare e essere ovunque a casa propria (To Live and Be at Home Everywhere), which he hung as a sign across a street as a personal slogan. This phrase is a modification of Guy Debord’s famous quip on urban alienation: “The spectator feels at home nowhere, for the spectacle is everywhere.”87 La Pietra had absorbed the SI theories, and Debord’s writings in particular, during the 1960s and now explicitly connected his work to their provocative practice. Taking it one step further, La Pietra flipped the sentence: to “live and feel at home everywhere” in the city, inside the spectacle. He advocated what he termed a presa di coscienza—a seizing of consciousness of one’s living environment. More than this, he insisted on reclaiming the sense of comfort within the city by overthrowing spectacle and replacing it with an authentic subjective experience of place. Situated in the heart of Milan’s metropolitan environment, La Pietra’s catchphrase operated as a call to reconsider one’s habitual modes of existence in the urban sphere. In particular, he saw a distinct division between the internal and external in relation to the concept of home: Our house is made to enclose us, to separate us from external reality, to eliminate any involvement with our fellows and with the space that surrounds us, now this

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Figure 4.9 Ugo La Pietra, Abitare la Città, 1979, performance. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

is the place to unconsciously unload all the tensions that accumulate from outside, all the pressures that are imposed upon us during the activities that we carry out related to work and leisure time.88 Ultimately, La Pietra’s incisive analysis of the urban landscape revealed instances that disrupted the standardization of life for Milan’s working class. Countering the mechanized processes of industrialization and cultural homogenization, he deployed and documented reappropriation strategies. Critical to La Pietra’s practice, the dynamic between city and individual was, at its heart, active and highly physical; he understood that one of the most potent aspects of the urban environment is its ability to control the details of everyday existence. From his ephemeral performances to his photographs and drawings, he captured, criticized, and at times redirected human movement to highlight the latent physical reality of this relationship. And while La Pietra’s work is not blindly optimistic, what shines through is the belief that reorientation and redirection, emanating from people’s needs and creativity rather than capitalist demands, is possible in even the most formalized urban spaces.

Franco Summa: Chromatic Activating Space and Inhabitants Like La Pietra, Summa strove, through his urban interventions, to regain a human essence in the rapidly changing urban environment. He, too, chose to position his art

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within the multidimensional fabric of the city, reconnecting the site with the lattice of human relations that make up everyday existence. For Summa, these connections were the foundations of vital communities, and the history of these bonds seeped into the buildings and streets. Each interlocking brick therefore became a metaphor for the connections between the city’s inhabitants. But this sense of social cohesion was crumbling in Pescara’s city center and the neighboring environs when Summa started creating Arte Ambientale. In a critical essay dated 1964 and titled “Casa e la Città” (The Home and the City), Summa made clear that the city no longer expressed the positive socialità, or sociability, of a community.89 What was at stake for Summa, and what underpinned all of his urban projects during the 1970s, was the disappearance of social life in the urban space. In 1975, Summa wrote in another essay, “Creatività urbana” (Urban Creativity), that “the modern city, the city of speculation, which developed in the interests of private gain, is devoid of useful community space for the development of social life.”90 For Summa, the city, ideally alive with neighborly interaction, was becoming a place of isolation and alienation. Summa’s aesthetic practice aimed to reverse this condition by bringing to the city’s inhabitants an awareness of their lived environment. Working with a diverse array of mediums and techniques, including participatory projects and brightly colored painterly interventions directly on buildings, Summa sought to reactivate citizens within their urban living conditions. Art historian Italo Tomassoni described his artwork as, essentially, a project for anti-alienation, in that he created imaginative stimuli that engaged with the location’s history to strengthen the bonds of social life.91 Elaborating on this idea, Tomassoni wrote in an essay titled “La malattia sociale della città” (The Social Disease in the City) that “through history, one can retrieve a great aesthetic potential . . . that can operate as a deliverance from the aggregation of economic and ideological prevarication.”92 Working in the city’s spaces, for Summa, was a way of constructing images on a large scale, so that a colored mark on a wall, a street, or a staircase expanded conceptually with the entire environmental context. The artwork was not an autonomous gesture but rather in dialogue with the whole city or neighborhood around it. As a result, all of Summa’s work in the urban landscape was consciously site-specific, as it responded to the unique historical and social conditions of the determined space. His chromatic markings—elements added in a precise and calibrated context—acted as signs, creatively opening up new meanings in the imagination of those who experienced them. Like Somaini’s notion of signs discussed in Chapter 3, Summa’s creative ciphers and symbols were meant to counter the advertisements that were ordinarily found in the city and that inhabitants “absorbed in [their] usual hypnotic state.”93 Summa’s studies in philosophy and art history informed his understanding of urban spaces. Under the tutelage of Giulio Carlo Argan, an art history professor at La Sapienza in Rome, Summa discovered De Stijl and other crucial twentieth-century art movements, such as Bauhaus design. In 1951, Argan became the first scholar to delve into the sociological and philosophical implications of the Bauhaus movement, which he tackled in his publication Walter Gropius e La Bauhaus.94 Argan’s Marxist reading of the Bauhaus and other European avant-garde movements must have left an impression on Summa. De Stijl, also attracted him, not only for its simplification of colors and reduction of forms to basic geometric shapes in both two-dimensional and three-dimensional experiments, but also for its objective of fusing the arts into a metalanguage. Moreover, we can see a parallel between Summa and De Stijl in their

126 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente creation of a visual language that aimed to communicate universal aesthetic concepts. Through his study of the historical avant-garde, Summa also absorbed lessons from theosophy, suggesting that art could be a conduit for spirituality. But his artistic production departed from these influences in that he applied similar aesthetic principles to concrete sociopolitical issues of his time. Although his interests were anything but parochial, Summa principally worked in his hometown of Pescara.95 The city’s history and character could not be more different from La Pietra’s city, Milan. Located on the Adriaticcoast roughly halfway down the boot of Italy, it is predominantly a tourist city, enticing visitors with its beaches. Historically, it pushed back against modernization during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, maintaining a quaint character until World War II.96 Having lived there since his birth in 1938, Summa witnessed a radical transformation of his hometown during the postwar years. The city had been subjected to heavy Allied bombings during the war because of its strategic position as a railway nexus and harbor. After the war, it needed to be almost entirely rebuilt.97 Urban reconstruction and development was chaotic and entrusted almost exclusively to private construction companies.98 The city grew predominantly in height, sacrificing green spaces as enormous concrete buildings took the place of the palazzine (small apartment houses) and twofloor villini (single-family houses). Almost overnight, a curtain of dwellings hid, and to this day obscures, the sea view from the rest of the city. The invasion of reinforced concrete even threatened the hills. Unruly urban growth continued into the 1970s, as there was a constant need to provide housing for the influx of new residents.99 But according to Summa, those who had an interest in personal gain dominated this expansion.100 In an interview from 2012, he lamented that an elected commission— subject to the caprices and corruption of politics—created Pescara’s 1956 Piano Regolatore Generale (Official Urban Plan).101 One of Summa’s earliest projects in Pescara, and the surrounding towns of Chieti and Francavilla al Mare, was Farsi un quadro (To Make a Picture), from 1970 [Plate 7]. Standing in specific urban locations, he photographed himself holding a wooden frame, painted in glaring red. In some images, Summa’s whole body is visible as he supports the red square; in others, just his two hands and arms appear in the lowerleft corner. Set against the serene blue sky and the pasty urban sprawl, the bright-red frame draws the viewer into the scene. Summa used the device to identify what he saw as urban problems—instances of substandard and thoughtless urban construction. Like La Pietra’s Commutatore, Summa’s frame (one of many) allowed the viewer to perceive the urban space from unique perspectives, apprehending the city through multiple layers of meaning. Humorously, the title of this work can be interpreted in a number of ways. The words translate to “make for yourself a picture.” This is exactly what Summa did to create the work; he used a frame to create an image by isolating a certain section of the landscape. In this way, a traditional pictorial framing device became a vehicle for identifying particular contemporary urban features. Though he also engaged in photography and performance, at a basic level, Summa’s work strongly recalls traditional landscape painting. However, instead of isolating the picturesque, he drew attention to the negative characteristics of the view. Indeed, Farsi un quadro is, in many ways, anti-picturesque. But the title implies another important layer to the work as well: it can also be read idiomatically, in which case it means “to obtain an overview of the situation,” or to essentialize or schematize a certain condition. In fact, the red square

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“frames” the unpleasant characteristics of the urban landscape, which together give a general sense of the uncontrolled, grotesque construction crowding Pescara and the surrounding area. Red, then, is an appropriate color, one that signals a warning, and the work communicates a sense of alarm at the massive urban changes affecting city life. Summa described the project as a decontestualizzazione-contestuale, or a contextual decontextualization, of urban details to identify a specific chaotic, architectural, and environmental situation that comes from building without respect for the social function of the city.102 Writer and poet Renato Minore described the work as a miseen-scène of horrors: from the anonymous constructions that form the backdrop to the drab neo-capitalist landscape.103 The specific urban fragment is spotlit among many; its morphological configuration is isolated as it participates in the general process of corruption of urban designs.104 According to Summa, land speculation and unregulated urban growth contributed to the creation of a city that failed to foster encounters, dialogue, and participation.105 Summa remarked, looking at one of the images, that “here the wall goes into the sea, it’s absurd.”106 The imposing construction encroaches on the landscape’s natural beauty, privatizing and degrading the urban space. Critically, Summa placed great importance on the historical significance of urban space. His interventions involved an in-depth study of the site to understand how the city’s spaces had been transformed through time. He viewed the historical value of a place as integral to establishing its inhabitants’ consciousness of their lived environment. This notion is at the basis of his Histoire d’O, created in 1976 in Pescara’s old port district [Plate 8]. Here he painted a beaming yellow circle on an ocher brick façade of a dilapidated house on Via delle Caserme, one of the more historically important streets in the city because of the former sixteenth-century fortress where the military trained and exercised.107 Summa’s choice of color was relational; he wanted the two variants of yellow—the lemon-colored circle painted on the brownish-yellow bricks—to contrast with, and yet adhere to, one another, connecting the sign with the façade of the building. In a documentary photograph of the work, Summa wears his T-shirt from the project 24 magliette: sentirsi un arcobaleno adosso (24 T-shirts: To Feel a Rainbow on Oneself) from 1975 [Plate 2].108 The same yellow physically ties his shirt to the circle on the building. He described the marking on the building as a form of scrittura urbana, or urban writing.109 Again, referencing pictorial modes, the façade became a large canvas onto which Summa painted. He made the analogy of transcending traditional forms of painting, as Lucio Fontana had done by going beyond the surface of the canvas in his famous Concetti Spaziali experiments in the 1950s.110 Just as Fontana cut through the boundaries of painting in its three-dimensional form, Summa engaged with the building to find its architectural structure and urban configuration. The yellow circle, powerful in its multiple meanings—including infinity, unity, wholeness, origins, and zero—is intimately tied to the specific site. Painted on one of Pescara’s oldest buildings, it denotes what Summa saw as the circular motion of time and the entropic evolution of the city. At the same time, it also indexes the number zero, bringing this notion of temporality back to its inception. These historically important meanings make for a powerful critique of the state of the urban environment. The title of the work, Histoire d’O, is a direct reference to the novel of the same title, published in 1954 by the French author Anne Desclos under the pen name Pauline Réage. The erotic novel details, in lurid fashion, the sexual enslavement

128 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente of a young woman named O. Summa’s title draws a parallel between O’s subjugation and Pescara’s recent urban despoliation, including the contemporaneous construction of a freeway traversing Pescara’s old port and historic center.111 The house onto which Summa painted the bright-yellow circle had been at one time a casa chiusa, or a brothel. Thus, we can see further links from Réage’s novel to Summa’s work, the functionality of the building, and by extension, the rest of Pescara’s urban transformations in the service of accessibility and commodification. Adding to this complex intertwining of historical and literary meanings, Summa also obliquely references the renowned nineteenthcentury Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, who is said to have visited this brothel and referred to it as la dolce casa (the sweet home).112 Born in Pescara, just a block away from Via delle Caserme, at Corso Manthonè 116, the famous poet’s mythology has historically been a strong presence in Pescara, alluding to popular resistance to industrial culture.113 By citing D’Annunzio’s associations with this site, Summa’s work can be read as critical of the modernizing urban forces that the poet and his admirers resisted. For Summa, the city should be first and foremost a place of encounters where inhabitants can meet and dialogue. This idea is most clearly seen in the project Per incontrarsi (In Order to Meet), from 1973 [Figure 4.10]. He conducted the work with his students from the Liceo Artistico on the bridge of the Ponte Risorgimento, the main bridge in the center of the city. On both shoulders of the 240-meter-long structure, Summa and his students painted a sequence of black and blue legs—both male and female—walking. Skirts and trousers indicate gender while the color scheme punctuates the parade with a rhythmic tempo; these schematic half figures appear to be strolling. At times overlapping, the legs march southward on the left and northward on the right, in keeping with the direction of automobile traffic on the bridge. Summa described the image as a ritual procession, and like La Pietra, he examined the way inhabitants circulate and experience the city.114 Again, Summa’s choice of site was highly significant. Ponte Risorgimento is the main connector between the northern and southern areas of Pescara. When Mussolini promoted Pescara to a Capoluogo, the principal city in the region of Abruzzo, he commissioned a monumental stone bridge, Ponte Littorio, in 1933. The sturdy connecting bridge would foster unity between the two separate areas of the city.115 Fascist rhetoric in the form of bronze eagles atop the four columns decorated the bridge. However, Ponte Littorio was destroyed during World War II, and the more austere

Figure 4.10 Franco Summa, Per Incontrarsi, 1973, acrylic paint on wall. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

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Ponte Risorgimento replaced it. The bridge still functions to link Pescara across the river Arno, and facilitating communication was indeed integral to Summa’s project Per incontrarsi. Critical of the isolated nature of automobile travel, each driver segregated from another by a metallic cocoon, the project proposed walking as a preferable alternative because it allowed for spontaneous physical encounters and dialogue. In lieu of an alienating urban space where cars flit by, the work posits a city that can be experienced in the more humane dimensioni del passo (dimensions of the step).116 Adding a participatory element to the piece, in an impromptu event, students who were working with Summa stopped traffic to ask the public about their experience of the city on foot. This communication was representative of the very activity that the work attempted to promote, namely the natural dialogue that can occur only when individuals interact in the city where they live. This notion that a city should be a place to live, rather than simply inhabit, was at the center of Summa’s urban activity. His projects strongly evoke a conception of the city as being open to all, and thus, like the work of La Pietra, they operate in dialogue with the discourse associated with diritto alla città. For instance, Summa reappropriated civic space in the work Una stanza per tutti (A Room for Everyone), created in the small town of Atri, some 20 miles northwest of Pescara, in 1976. The artwork was situated in Atri’s principal piazza, dominated by the large Romanesque cathedral and simple nineteenth-century two-story houses. The space had been turned into a parking lot a few decades prior, and there was no longer any room for the inhabitants of the town to use the area for its intended purpose, a place of meeting and communication. On the pavement made from sanpietrini, beveled stones of black basalt, Summa pasted four hundred silk-screen sheets of moduli-immagini (modular images).117 Arranged in a grid, regular deep-blue squares contained a swirl of warm orange and red in the lower-left corner. The series operated much like a bright tiled floor that one commonly finds in Italian homes. Thus, the ground design functioned as the surface of a virtual room. Townspeople could walk on the checkerboard and become participants in the project. In effect, Summa’s work changed the dynamics of the space, from a public piazza to a private living room, inciting the inhabitants of Atri to treat the space as their own home. Like La Pietra in Riconversione progettuale, Summa blurred the boundaries between public and private spaces. But whereas La Pietra brought the outside in, making indoor furniture out of street and traffic equipment, Summa brought the inside out, furnishing the piazza as a room and fostering communication between the inhabitants of the town.118 Furthermore, this public room was meant to be open to everyone, evoking the ideal of diritto alla città. Summa’s room had no walls, and thus no exclusionary barriers. Transforming it into a living room revived the social use of the piazza and reappropriated it as a space in which one could live.119 In this light, Summa’s work in the city can be seen as an attempt to reclaim it from incongruent processes of modernization. We see this again in Appropriazione e Recupero (Appropriation and Recovery), from 1973, a project that he created as a sitespecific work in the heart of Florence [Figure 4.11].120 He addressed the same concerns that were at the forefront of his work in Pescara—urban congestion and depreciation of the historic center—but taking into account the specificity of the Tuscan capital. In an attempt to recover this site, he literally painted the ground with dotted white lines, indicating the vertices of a triangle in Piazza Santa Croce, Piazza San Marco, and a centro culturale (cultural center) at Via Vigna Nuova. Bearing similarities to La

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Figure 4.11 Franco Summa, Appropriazione e Recupero, 1973, documentary photographs, sound installation. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Pietra’s La conquista dello spazio, Summa appropriated the city’s spaces, taking them over, and directly making markings on the pavement to draw attention to them. But Summa did not claim the space in Florence for an alternative creative use as La Pietra had in his work, but instead delineated it to draw attention to how the site’s modernday problems undermined its historical and aesthetic importance. At the center of Appropriazione e Recupero was the Duomo, Florence’s most imposing structure. More than merely mark the physical location, Summa wanted to investigate the sociocultural changes taking place in Florence. Since the 1950s, tourism and the service sector had dominated the center. Modern commercial enterprises displaced time-honored craft, commoditizing a city renowned for the arts. Moreover, cars had invaded the historic center of the city, inundating it with congestion, traffic, and smog. Their proliferation adversely affected foot traffic and the appreciation of Florence’s architecture and art from a pedestrian vantage point. These factors, according to Summa, negated the historical value and beauty of the city.121 To retrieve the city’s Renaissance splendor, he marked Florence at three specific locations. At Piazza Santa Croce, he traced white lines pointing to a statue of Dante and the church of Santa Croce, where Florence’s famous humanists are buried. In Piazza San Marco, Summa’s lines indicated the entrance of the Convent of San Marco, known above all for its frescoes by Fra Angelico. In a self-managed cultural space at Via della Vigna Nuova, the apex of the third angle, Summa exhibited Stanza significante (Significant Room). For this subproject, he conducted a series of interviews with pedestrians to gauge their knowledge and opinions of their lived environment. In particular, he questioned inhabitants on what they thought of the transformation

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of the city center and whether they believed it had taken into account the city’s historical values, environmental importance, and the significance of the arts. Some of those interviewed did not seem bothered by any of these changes. One man remarked, “Florence is a town of tourists. I cannot pass judgment. I like the historic center as it is.”122 Others were more indignant: “Florence should not be a big museum. It must continue to live. The old neighborhoods are part of the historic center.”123 Another citizen responded to the city’s congestion: the historic center needs peace to be experienced. The cars do nothing but disturb. Restructure the town and bring it back to size, to be functional. If one wants to go to the Uffizi, one should not have to compete with cars and motorcycles that try to overtake you. One should be able to go peacefully and go see what man has created.124 Together, Summa accumulated hours of recordings from anonymous inhabitants. Made public only during the exhibition at Via delle Vigna Nuova, these testimonies conveyed the opinions and viewpoints that often went unheard by politicians and urban planners. Instead, Summa’s project offered the inhabitants a platform to express themselves, one that was external and alternative to urbanized capitalist society. Together with emblematic images on the walls, these voices echoed in the exhibition room, emanating from three different loudspeakers arranged in the room to form a triangle.125 The organization of the exhibition space mirrored the external urban triangle, while the project as a whole reflected the progressive emptying of the symbolic values of the city’s artworks and historical environments. But Appropriazione was an unusual work for Summa; unlike the majority of his interventions, it did not rely on color as the central vehicle of communication. In stark contrast, his use of vibrant hues was never more apparent than in the work Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via (A Rainbow at the End of the Street), created in 1975 [Plate 9]. In a series of eye-catching horizontal planes of vivid tints, Summa painted the steps leading to a seventeenth-century church dedicated to St. Augustine in the small town of Sant’Angelo near Pescara. Employing a rainbow configuration, Summa applied an array of dazzling yellows, greens, reds, and blues. These rich pigments acutely contrasted with the creamy patina of the church’s marble façade. Seen from afar, the staircase formed a kaleidoscope of color set unexpectedly against a baroque church in the middle of a historic town in the hills of Abruzzo. During the 1960s, Sant’Angelo’s municipal administration decided to replace the original seventeenth-century peperino staircase—consistent with the color of the church façade and perfectly integrated with the surrounding architecture—with rectangular black granite slabs. The new staircase was aesthetically disjointed from the adjacent buildings and left an unsightly view leading up to the church. Summa created his project as a response to the inhabitants’ disapproval.126 His piece chromatically reactivated the space.127 The appearance of an artificial rainbow in the middle of the city acted as a trigger for residents to find variety in life and reconsider their daily experience of the street. In an interview, Summa said that he hoped that the work would activate an emotional response in viewers. Moreover, he wanted the staircase to ignite within them poetic fantasies and a renewed sense of creativity.128 Summa created this color combination in the early 1970s and would deploy it as his signature language, similar to the way Yves Klein patented International Klein Blue or

132 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente Daniel Buren used personalized color stripes. But Summa’s particular chromatic construct was meant to symbolize the variety of life.129 His basic color scheme consisted of twelve colors: the three primary (red, yellow, blue), the three secondary (orange, green, purple), and six intermediate colors derived from the combination of a primary with a complementary, organized into a color spectrum divided into twelve areas: yellow; yellow-orange; orange; red-orange; red; red-purple; purple; blue-purple; blue; blue-green; green; and green-yellow.130 Summa arranged his color ladder to slowly progress from yellow to blue.131 In the sequence, he placed warm colors—symbols of materiality—at the bottom and cold colors—symbols of spirituality—at the top.132 Influenced by Johannes Itten’s color theories and by the Bauhaus school, Summa’s color arrangement matches Itten’s Farbkreis, or color wheel.133 However, for Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via, Summa interlaced this chromatic combination into a unique sequence of twenty-four colors. Following Summa’s scale from the bottom up, the tints no longer sequentially follow Itten’s wheel; starting from dark yellow, Summa jumps counterclockwise three colors to dark green, then clockwise four colors to light orange, then counterclockwise again to light green, and clockwise again to dark orange. Summa’s interlocking color staircase reinterpreted Itten’s color succession by reorganizing the sequence, which resulted in a less predictable visual effect. But more important than his attraction to Itten and the Bauhaus, Summa was drawn to the idea that colors influence emotions.134 This theory directly related to the historical avantgarde’s assimilation of theosophical principles, in particular the notion that color had a vibrating, transcendent property that could awaken the dormant spirituality within a spectator. Thus, Summa saw color as an affective language, and he stated, “there is no code, only an emotion that charges the dialogue.”135 The staircase in front of the St. Augustine church in Sant’Angelo was perfect for Summa’s project because it consisted of exactly twenty-four steps; his color scheme, made up of twelve consecutive hues, fit the site precisely. He conceived of the chromatic configuration in conjunction with the church’s façade, guiding the viewers to become spiritually uplifted as their eyes ascended the staircase. As the project involved a number of people and some of his students as volunteers, Summa received permission from the mayor of Sant’Angelo to execute the work. Nevertheless, after only four steps had been painted, he was given a citation to stop working.136 He completed the piece nonetheless, and after disputing the citation, all charges were dropped. This incident highlights how both Summa and La Pietra worked on the border between legal and illegal activity in the city. Importantly, interventions like Un acobaleno in fondo alla via provoked a response and a sense of involvement from the local community. The inhabitants of Sant’Angelo became part of the work simply by climbing the stairs. This type of civic participation was an essential component in all of Summa’s urban projects. The street, in its openness to a plurality of opinions, was the ultimate participatory site. Summa made this paramount in his 1974 project NO [Plate 10]. In Pescara’s center, he placed a large canvas, measuring roughly 13 by 13 square feet, on the ground, handed out aerosol paint cans of different colors, and invited passersby to spray paint the word “no” onto the white sheet. Scattered and often overlapping letters steadily built up the surface of this unusual painting until it formed a fabric of noes, wrought not by the artist himself but by ordinary participants. Summa described the image, resulting from this event, as a historical painting, where the participatory event is not depicted but rather arises from the traces left by

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those who directly witnessed it. Interestingly, the marks are fairly evenly distributed, somewhat resembling an Abstract Expressionist allover painting. This unique project aimed to engender mass participation in the current debate over the referendum on divorce, held on May 12, 1974. Voters needed to decide whether they wanted to repeal a government law passed three years earlier allowing divorce for the first time in Italian history. Those in favor wanted to reinstate legislation prohibiting divorce while those voting no wanted to retain the law and their hard-fought rights. At the time, this was a highly contentious issue as Catholic forces wanted to abolish the law in the name of God. The referendum was defeated by a margin of nearly 20% with voter turnout at 87.7%.138 According to historian Piero Ignazi, the divorce referendum represented a turning point in Italian political history.139 It revealed a secularized society as well as a national detachment from the directives of authorities. The dominant political party, the DC, aligned itself with the Catholic front and seemed to revive the image of a country dominated by its clergy, which was far from the reality. Meanwhile, the opposing PCI mounted a campaign for the defense of the law and managed to attract support even in traditionally conservative constituencies. The losses on the anti-divorce front were due primarily to members of the electorate that did not follow the directives of the DC. Ignazi has argued that the referendum changed the relationship between parties and voters, because for the first time since 1946, the vote was not directly linked to party symbols.140 Importantly, the direct relationship between citizens and voting “freed” the electors from predetermined choices, such as voting solely because of identification with party politics.141 Summa used this situation—the capacity to vote—to heighten levels of critical awareness in the general population.142 The stratification of each individual’s gesture—each no—exemplified the possibility and necessity of coming together while still retaining distinctiveness through chromatic differentiation. While the individuals who participated in the piece wanted to uphold the divorce law—because they all participated with a no—there were plenty of spectators not in favor. Summa recounted that there was palpable tension in the Piazza.143 He remembered how at one point someone told him that a fascist sympathizer—also against divorce—went home to get his pistol.144 But the artist was not deterred and continued with his event in favor of freedom of speech. Placing this notion of freedom at the center of the work, Summa handed out to spectators an excerpt from the Italian philosopher Dino Formaggio’s L’arte publication from 1973; it is a short treatise on aesthetics, in which Formaggio examines the phenomenology of art forms, from prehistoric wall paintings to conceptual art.145 Formaggio begins his book with the following statement: “Art is all that which men call art,” emphasizing the historical and experiential contexts for understanding art.146 Summa printed an excerpt of Formaggio’s book on a mimeograph. Incidentally, this was the same technology that terrorist groups, such as the Red Brigades, used to distribute pamphlets to the general public.147 Thus, this intervention, taking place in a city piazza and using similar methods as the radical Left, has to be seen within the broader context of Italy’s fervent counterculture. Formaggio’s text solidified the idea that the ability to express the negative, to assert oneself, is the capacity to be free. The excerpt that Summa distributed included the following statement: “studies in child psychology have shown the value of ‘no.’ Present from the earliest manifestations, it is an objective affirmation of himself and his freedom. The spirit, the revolution, and art are born from the power of negation and nullification, from nothing to action.”148

134 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente This text was a way of universalizing the issue from the specifics regarding the referendum over the divorce law to freedom of expression and the right of citizens to voice their opinions. Moreover, each no in Summa’s unusual painting can also be read as a single ballot vote, a verification of opinion, and a certification of choice. Throughout the decade, Summa’s activist artworks grappled with a city that he saw as suffering from the modern-day ills of land speculation, gentrification, congestion, and senseless urban planning. His work engaged with the historical context to retrieve Pescara’s essential quality as a lived-in place. Often, Summa’s interventions were minimal and ephemeral, a painted mark on the façade of a building or silkscreened prints pasted on the floor of a piazza. But each project involved careful planning and on-site research. They were calculated to have the most significant visual and emotional impact on inhabitants. The most successful pieces expressed the transformative potential of art in public spaces: its ability to change inhabitants’ behaviors. Summa’s brilliant chromatic language stood in stark contrast to the monochromatic urban landscape, instigating an affective response in the city’s inhabitants, and making them more aware of their lived environment and their rights to it.

Conclusion The reorganization of the Italian urban structure in the 1970s, resulting from the rapid modernization and industrialization of much of the country, brought many cities into a state of crisis. Gentrification and land speculation exacerbated existing inequalities in the distribution of wealth, enriching upper-class landowners and depriving the working class. Social movements emerged to confront these inequalities and to take control of lived spaces. Inhabitants found ways to appropriate the city, seizing it from thoughtless urban construction. In so doing, they expressed a new attitude: diritto alla città—everyone had a right to the city. This notion of appropriation was consonant with Negri’s activist theories, whereby workers sought to take back their means of production from the subservient capitalist system of labor. Likewise, the urban working class took back their city from the capitalist forces at play within the urban environment. Appropriation also became a strategy that Arte Ambientale artists carried out, especially in the work of La Pietra and Summa. Through ephemeral interventions situated directly in the urban space, they addressed the fundamental concern of the livability of the city. They operated in the urban space to reclaim it as a lived environment, valuing creativity, communication, and comfort over rampant materialism. La Pietra’s highly theoretical practice analyzed the language of urban space and the attitudes of individuals who inhabited the city. He revealed instances where creativity was still present in the urban sphere despite what he understood to be a tyranny of standardization and monotony. His interventions infiltrated the urban fabric, causing systemic disruptions. Summa’s chromatic language also created a disturbance in the city. But whereas La Pietra took an analytic, data-driven approach to aesthetic interventions, Summa playfully deployed color to engage with historic values and a deep awareness of place. Reactivating the space, he hoped to awaken inhabitants to a full consciousness of their everyday environment. The revivification of social and communal behaviors, which Summa felt were missing from the urban centers of central and northern Italy, were his ultimate aim.

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Both La Pietra and Summa tried to actively involve citizens in their projects. Key to La Pietra’s and Summa’s mission was the knowledge that investing citizens with responsibility and a voice was necessary to empower them to change their lived environment. This notion of participation, explicitly present in Summa’s NO and more obliquely in La Pietra’s Gli itinerari preferenziali, will be the main concern of Chapter 5, “Vox Popoli,” where I will turn to the participatory projects of Maurizio Nannucci and Franco Vaccari.

Notes 1. According to historian Robert Lumley, the social movements in Italy were more extensive during the 1970s that in any other country. The labor movement spread in to diverse areas of social life, to include questions of housing, social welfare, and women’s and gay rights. See Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso Books, 1990), 273–278. 2. The Italian advocates of Diritto alla città looked to Henri Lefebvre’s 1968 Le Droit à la ville, which was first translated into Italian in 1970: Henri Lefebvre, Diritto alla città, trans. Cesare Bairati (Padova: Marsilio, 1970). 3. Giuliano Della Pergola, La conflittualità urbana: saggi di sociologia critica (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1972), 7. Original Italian: “Non c’è dubbio che il conflitto sociale, in Italia, va estendendosi dalla fabbrica a crescenti parti del territorio. La conflittualità sta diventando sempre più conflittualità urbana.” 4. Franco Ferrarotti, Una sociologia alternativa: dalla sociologia come tecnica del conformismo alla sociologia critica (Bari: De Donato, 1972), 182. 5. Umberto Dragone, “Il decentramento urbano: partecipazione, crisi della città, lotta politica,” in Decentramento urbano e democrazia: Milano, Bologna, Roma, Torino, Pavia, ed. Gabriele Baccalini and Umberto Dragone (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975), 15. 6. Di Ciaccia, La condizione urbana, 25. See also Giuliano Della Pergola, Diritto alla città e lotte urbane: saggi di sociologia critica (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1974), 40–41. 7. Sidney G. Tarrow, Democracy and Disorder: Protest and Politics in Italy, 1965–1975 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 97. 8. Phil Edwards, More Work! Less Pay! Rebellion and Repression in Italy, 1972–7 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2009), 14. 9. Fabio Cani, Gerardo Monizza, and Grazietta Butazzi, Como e la sua storia (Como: Nodo libri, 1993), 349. 10. Massimo Bignardi and Enrico Crispolti, Praticare la città: Arte Ambientale, prospettive di ricerca e metodologie d’intervento (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2013), 3. Original Italian: “L’ambiente al centro della mia attenzione è il territorio sociale dell’uomo, miscela tra natura e artificio, tra idea e gesto, cioè delle relazioni, degli scambi, dei piani di riqualificazione, di quelli urbanistici, del pensiero che, testimoniando il presente, guarda al futuro.” 11. Antonio Negri’s essays “Crisis of the Planner-State: Communism and Revolutionary Organization” from 1971 and “Worker’s Party against Work,” published in 1973, are both reprinted in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s (London: Verso, 2005). 12. Negri, “Worker’s Party against Work,” 76. 13. Ibid., 80. 14. Ugo La Pietra, Laura Alvini, and Vincenzo Ferrari, “La cultura ufficiale: uno strumento per la gestione del potere,” IN: Argomenti e immagini di design no. 7 (1972): 56. Original Italian: “La creatività individuale potrebbe essere un valido mezzo per liberarci dalla repressione, ma è evidente che se la civiltà a cui apparteniamo è per sua natura repressiva, l’unica vera possibilità di raggiungere lo scopo è quella di rovesciare I presupposti che sono alla base della società stessa.” 15. Ugo La Pietra, “Editoriale,” Progettare inpiù: l’uso della città no. 2 (1973): 2. 16. Franco Summa, “Didattica nella città,” Progettare inpiù: l’uso della città no. 2 (1973): 90.

136 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente 17. Ugo La Pietra, “La città senza morale,” reprinted in Marco Menguzzo, Ugo La Pietra: Itinerari, exh. cat. (Milan: Ca’ di Fra’, 2013), n.p. 18. Ugo La Pietra, interviewed by Viviana Siviero, “Ugo La Pietra, an Anthropologist-Explore Art,” Espoarte, April 11, 2013. 19. La Pietra’s Unbalancing System was first propounded in two books: Sistema disequilibrante (Milan: Toselli, 1970) and Sistema disequilibrante II (Genoa: Masnata, 1971). 20. Ugo La Pietra, Abitare la cittá: richerche, interveni, progetti, nello spazio urbano dal 1960 al 2000 (Torino: Umberto Allemandi & C, 2011), 61. 21. Ugo La Pietra, “Il sistema disequilibrante: ipotesi progettuale per un superamento de ‘l’utopia’ come evasione,” IN: Argomenti e immagini di design no. 1 (1971): 24–30. 22. Ugo La Pietra, “I Gradi di Libertà,” Progettare inpiù: l’uso della città no. 2 (1973): 46. 23. Ugo La Pietra, “La logica del potere,” IN: Argomenti e immagini di design no. 7 (1972): 56. 24. La Pietra, Abitare la città, 61. 25. Ugo La Pietra, Gillo Dorfles, and Vincenzo Accame, Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 1960–2000 (Milan: Mazzotta, 2001), 44. 26. La Pietra, “Il sistema disequilibrante,” 24–30. 27. Peter Lang, “The Metropolitan Dreams of Ugo La Pietra,” in Matrix City (Utrecht, Netherlands: IMPAKT Festival, October 2010), 18. 28. La Pietra, “Il sistema disequilibrante,” 24–30. 29. Lang, “The Metropolitan Dreams of Ugo La Pietra,” 18. 30. Paola Antonelli, “MoMA’s ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape’ Revisited,” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976, ed. Alex Coles and Catharine Rossi (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 38. For example, Hollein received international fame after his Haas Haus built in Vienna from 1985 to 1990. 31. For instance, La Pietra was in contact with Gianni Pettena, member of Archizoom and Superstudio, as they both participated in the exhibition Campo Urbano, held in Como in 1969 and curated by Luciano Caramel. 32. Denise Grady, “Walter Pichler, an Artist Who Bucked the Status Quo Dies at 75,” The New York Times, July 28, 2012. 33. Gianni Pettena and Hans Hollein, Hans Hollein, Works 1960–1988 (Milan: Idea Books, 1988), 35. 34. Greil Marcus, “The Long Walk of the Situationist International,” in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 7–10. 35. Alessandro Bertante, Re Nudo: underground e rivoluzione nelle pagine di una rivista (Rimini: NdA Press, 2005), 25. 36. Mirella Bandini published a book on the political aesthetic of the postwar European avant-garde movements: L’estetico, il politico: da Cobra all’Internazionale situazionista, 1948–1957 (Rome: Officina edizioni, 1977). It made available many of these artists’ texts in translation for an Italian audience. Concerning Lefebvre, Bandini directly cites Debord’s contact with Henri Lefebvre and the importance of Lefebvre’s theories on the SI. See Bandini, L’estetico, il politico, 151–155. 37. Mirella Bandini, “Urbanisme Unitaire: la critica all’urbanistica e al funzionamento teorizzata dall’Internazionale Situazionista,” in Progettare inpiù no. 10 (1975): 21. 38. Historian Adrian Lyttleton argued that the social divisions in Milan have always been between center and periphery, contrary to most other major European cities—for example, Paris or London—where the separation is between “West End” and “East End.” See Adrian Lyttleton, “Milan 1880–1922: The City of Industrial Capitalism,” in People and Communities in the Western World 2 (1979): 252. 39. David Harvey, The Urban Experience (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 7. 40. Ugo La Pietra, Recupero e reinvenzione, 1969–1976 (Milan: Edizioni grafica Mariano, 1976), n.p. 41. La Pietra, Abitare la città, 227. 42. Ugo La Pietra, La Riappropriazione dell’ambiente: interventi e analisi 1967–1976 (Ferrara: Edizioni Studioinpiu, 1977), 47. 43. Ibid.

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44. Ibid. Original Italian: “Giorno per giorno perdiamo sempre di più la capacità di ricuperare i valori e i significati all’interno della scena urbana, nella quale il nostro occhio non vede altro che segnali, a cui uniformiamo automaticamente il nostro comportamento. Con questa opera ho cercato di esprimere il tentative di definire strumenti capaci di creare un nuovo atteggiamento di lettura nei confronti dello spazio urbano, per la conoscenza non tanto della ‘forma finita’ ma quando della struttura più profonda. Molte volte, attraverso il suo uso, ho visto cosec he non erano di immediata lettura, molte volte l’ho fatto usare ad altre persone.” 45. Ugo La Pietra, “Dal sistema disequilibrante: Strumenti e metodi per la riappropriazione e l’uso della struttura urbana,” IN: Argomenti e immagini di design no. 5 (May/June 1972): 44. 46. La Pietra, “I Gradi di Libertà,” 47. 47. La Pietra, La Riappropriazione dell’ambiente, 47. 48. In the 1940s, architects and urban planners advocating urban reform used photographs of street play to indict profit-driven urbanization of the modern metropolis for its failure to satisfy the essential biological needs of children. José Luis Sert’s publication Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, Their Analysis, Their Solutions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942) is an emblematic example. In the postwar years, architects—such as the Team 10, which comprised Alison Smithson and Peter Smithson, along with Jaap Bakema, Georges Candilis, Giancarlo De Carlo, Aldo van Eyck, and Shadrach Woods—considered street play as a regenerative social force and used it to signify the attractive qualities of urban space. See Roy Kozlovsky, “Urban Play: Intimate Space and Postwar Subjectivity,” in Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, ed. Vittoria Di Palma, Diana Periton, and Marina Lathouri (London: Routledge, 2009), 195–217. 49. In the text that accompanied the scheme, the Smithsons stated that their “conception is in direct opposition to the arbitrary isolation of the so-called communities of the “Unité” (Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, the most famous of which was constructed in Marseille, France in 1952). Reprinted in Eric Paul Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 234–235. 50. Ben Highmore, “Rough Poetry: ‘Patio and Pavilion’ Revisited,” Oxford Art Journal 29, no. 2 (2006): 270–290. 51. Maurice Cerasi, Città e periferia. Condizioni e tipi della residenza delle classi subalterne nella città moderna. Analisi di un’area della periferia Milanese (Milano: Clup, 1973), 66. 52. Lyttleton, “Milan 1880–1922,” 256. 53. Giancarlo Rovati, “Dal Degrado urbano alla coesione sociale,” in Quartieri in bilico: periferie milanesi a confronto, ed. Laura Bovone and Lucia Ruggerone (Milan: B. Mondadori, 2009), 32. 54. While there were some progressive architects working to provide socially conscious housing by forming self-constituted associations, such as the Movimento Studi d’Architettura (MSA) inaugurated in 1945 in Milan, these organizations lacked the institutional stature and the political power needed to significantly affect the planning policies and design practices of government agencies and private interests involved in shaping the city’s expansion. See Dennis P. Doordan, “Changing Agendas: Architecture and Politics in Contemporary Italy,” Assemblage no. 8 (February 1989): 60–77. 55. In 1962, Mayor Aldo Aniasi conducted the first inquiry into the shortage of social services in fifty-two areas of the city. See Dragone, “Il decentramento urbano,” 54. 56. Ibid. 57. Of all the initiatives to puncture the urban surface during the 1970s, the story of the neighborhood activist group Unione Inquilini (Tenants Union) is the most representative. The Unione Inquilini specifically addressed the housing crisis in Milan, but it was representative of urban activism taking place at local levels across Italy. The struggle was based in Quarto Oggiaro, one of the poorest neighborhoods located northwest of the city. At the time, Quarto Oggiaro housed approximately 65,000 working-class residents in cheap, prefabricated units (prefabbricati) built during the 1960s by the IACP and the GESCAL. Residential services were severely limited; for all the inhabitants, there was only one pharmacy and no nurseries, schools, or healthcare centers. Transportation services

138 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente

58.

59. 60.

61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74.

were unreliable. The inhabitants of Quarto Oggiaro took matters into their own hands and formed the Unione Inquilini to address the pitiful state of their neighborhood and their homes. The story of this prominent grassroots initiative was recorded in Francesco Di Ciaccia’s La condizione urbana: storia dell’Unione Inquilini (The Urban Condition: The Story of the Tenants Union), published in 1974 by Feltrinelli in Milan. Ugo La Pietra, “Le costruzioni alternative,” Progettare inpiù no. 10 (1975): 29. Original Italian: “le costruzioni alternative, in modo spontaneo, improvvisato e spesso senza una precisa consapevolezza, adattandosi alla nostra realtà servendosi di ciò che è ancora possible recuperare, mettendo in luce tutta ‘la miseria’ in cui ci dibattiamo e riscattandola con una grande capacità creative usando I rifiuti della nostra civiltà dei consumi.” Ugo La Pietra, interview with the author, Milan, June 20, 2012. La Pietra, “Le costruzioni alternative,” 29. Original Italian: “Terreni coltivati strappati temporaneamente al processo inarrestabile della speculazione edilizia. In queste costruzioni si rivela tutta la volontà di farsi una casa a propria misura, di trovare soluzioni fuori degli schemi, di reinventare materiali, oggetti rifiutati e di farli rivivere secondo una logica che non appartiene a nessun modello borghese o di falsa controcultura.” John Foot, “Mass Cultures, Popular Cultures and the Working Class in Milan 1950–1970,” Social History 24, no. 3 (1999): 134–157. See Gianni Bosio, L’intellettuale rovesciato: interventi e ricerche sull’emergenza d’interesse verso le forme di espressione e di organizzazione “spontanee” nel mondo popolare e proletario (Milan: Jaca Book, 1998). This publication, first printed in 1975, includes Bosio’s essays, published between 1963 and 1971. Additionally, Bosio was also founded in 1966 with anthropologist Alberto Mario Cirese, the Instituto Ernesto de Martino, whose mission is “per la conoscenza critica e la presenza alternativa del mondo popolare e proletario” (the critical knowledge of the alternative folk and proletarian world). Alison Clarke, “Ettore Sottsass: The Design Ethnologist,” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 69. Other artists working through ethnographic and anthropological strategies include Claudio Costa and Antonio Paradiso. See Sara Fontana, Arte e antropologia in Italia negli anni Settanta (Milan: Postmedia books, 2018). La Pietra, Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 90. Ibid. Ibid. Original Italian: “lasciando però alla possibilità di intervento dell’individuo la libertà di agire autonomamente, minimamente condizionato alla creazione di un spazio congeniale alle sue effettive esigenze.” La Pietra, “Dal sistema disequilibrante,” 38. Original Italian: “É oramai manifesto a chiunque come la configurazione della città si fondi sulla ‘imagine della differenziazione’ . . . e come si vengano a determinare gerarchie (creando tipologie) che esprimono in maniera fisica gli strati di potere e la entità privilegiate.” La Pietra, L’appropriazione dell’ambiente, 39. La Pietra, Abitare la città, 113. Ugo La Pietra, Il sistema disequilibrante (Turin: Galleria LP, 1971), n.p. Original Italian: “il progetto esprime la volontà di individuare attraverso gli elementi residui recuperabili all’interno della maglia organizzata della struttura urbana, spazi disponibili per le attività collettive.” La Pietra, Abitare la città, 112. Original Italian: “Per diversi mesi ho percorso in lungo e in largo la città di Milano rilevando ‘spazi disponibili’ è un primo passo che qualsiasi amministrazione dovrebbe fare, qualsiasi amministrazione che ha interesse a usare e fare usare ogni risorsa dell’ambiente.” Guy Debord, “Situationist Position on Traffic,” International Situationiste no. 3 (December 1959): 36–37. Reprinted in Tom McDonough, The Situationists and the City (London: Verso, 2009), 141. Debord states that the automobile is essentially the principal materialization of a notion of happiness that advanced capitalism tends to spread throughout the whole society. All urbanists make the mistake of considering the automobile as the essential means of transport. “Arco della Pace” (Arch of Peace) was erected in 1807 by Luigi Cagnola and its historic significance was affirmed by Napoleon III and Victor Emmanuel II of Italy’s triumphal entrance on June 8, 1859, after winning the battle of Magenta. For a discussion on the nineteenth-century modernization of Italy’s urban centers on par with Paris’s

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75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93.

94. 95.

96. 97. 98.

139

Améngagement de Paris 1853–1869, see Mario Fazio, Il destino dei centri storici (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1977), 37–49. Lucio Gambi and Maria Cristina Gozzoli, Milano (Rome: Laterza, 1989), 239–244. La Pietra, “Editoriale,” 2. La Pietra, Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 62. Original Italian: “Infatti parlare di sistema disequilibrante, a livello urbano, vuole dire attraverso l’invenzione di ‘elementi segnale’ (svincolati dal sistemi urbani), porre in luce le contraddizioni che esistono tra le necessità reali dei gruppi sociali e l’intervento delle strutture decisionali, garantendo inoltre la definizione di spazi in cui (attraverso il libero comportamento) ritrovare un abito decisionale autonomo. Luoghi che non riducano, ma accrescano la possibilità di scelta da parte degli individui, e ne favoriscano l’intervento diretto nel processo di configurazione ambientale.” Lyttleton, “Milan 1880–1922,” 259. Ugo La Pietra, “Riconversione Progettuale,” in Abitare la città (2011), 162. Ibid. La Pietra made a number of important art films, also known as cinema d’artista, throughout the 1970s, which include: La grande occasione (1973); Il Monumentalismo (1974); La ricerca della mia identità 1974–1975); Recupero e reinvenzione (1976); La riapporpriazione della città (1977); and Interventi pubblici per la città di Milano (1979). Original Italian: “Abbiamo circondato la zona interessata con paletti e catene. Quindi ci proponiamo in un secondo momento di.” Original Italian: “Abitare ed essere ovunque a casa propria.” Lang, “The Metropolitan Dreams of Ugo La Pietra,” 18. Ugo La Pietra, interview with the author, Milan, May 6, 2013. Original Italian: “Abitare vuole dire espandere la propria personalita e di vivere in harmonia con gli oggetti non solo nello spazio privato ma nello spazio pubblico.” Ibid. Guy Debord, Thesis 30, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 2010), n.p. Ugo La Pietra, “La Nostra Casa,” in Progettare inpiù no. 10 (1975): 28. Original Italian: “La nostra casa fatta per chiuderci, per separarci dalla realtà esterna, per escludere qualsiasi partecipazione con i nostri simili e con lo spazio che ci circonda, oramai è il luogo dove scarichiamo inconsciamente tutte le tensioni che accumuliamo all’esterno, tutte le pressioni che ci vengono imposte durante l’attività che svolgiamo legate al tempo di lavoro, al tempo libero.” Franco Summa, “Casa e la città,” 1964, reprinted in Franco Summa, Arte e Città: appunti di Arte Ambientale (Pescara: Centro di Documentazione Arti Visive, 1987), unpaginated. Franco Summa, “Creatività urbana,” 1975, reprinted in Summa, Arte e Città, unpaginated. Original Italian: “la città moderna, la città di speculazione, sviluppatasi nel massimo interesse per il guadagno privato, risulta priva di spazio comunitario utile allo sviluppo di una vita di relazione.” Italo Tomassoni, “La malattia sociale della città,” La città effimera, 1973, reprinted in Franco Summa, Poeticamente abita l’uomo (Milano: Editoriale Modo, 2003), 65. Ibid. Original Italian: “Attraverso la storia si recupera un potenziale estetico attuale inteso non come spontaneità emotiva, ma come negazione critica, cioè come ipotesi di salvezza rispetto alla totalizzazione economica e alla prevaricazione ideologica.” Franco Summa, artist’s statement in Enrico Crispolti, L’Ambiente come Sociale (Venice: Venice Biennale, 1976), 21. Original Italian: “Il segno è un elemento che inserito nel contesto con precisione e calibratura esatta apre nuovi significati mettendo in crisi il messaggio, l’informaione imposta dal potere, continuamente assorbita nella ipnosi dell’abitudine.” Giulio Carlo Argan, Walter Gropius e La Bauhaus (Turin: Einaudi, 1951). The estuary of the Aterno-Pescara River cuts through the center of the city. Originally, Pescara had been the name given to the town to the south of the river, and the town to the north was called Castellmare. Mussolini joined the two municipalities in 1927, forming modern-day Pescara. Cristina Bianchetti, Pescara (Roma: Laterza, 1997), 60. At the end of the World War II, 1,265 buildings had been completely demolished, destroying 69% of the city, and leaving about 2,500 families without a home. See Luigi Lopez, Pescara: dalle origini ai giorni nostri (Pescara: Nova Italica, 1993), 266. Lopez, Pescara, 268.

140 Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104.

105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131.

132.

Pescara ballooned from 88,000 inhabitants in 1961 to 122,000 in 1971. Ibid., 267. Summa, “Casa e la città,” n.p. Franco Summa, “L’esigenza di un ‘piano’,” (1964), reprinted in Summa, Arte e Città, n.p. Franco Summa, “Farsi un quadro,” in Franco Summa and Enrico Crispolti, Franco Summa: Town Art: L’Arte della Città (Rome: Gangemi, 2007), 87. Renato Minore, “Untitled,” originally printed in Modo, January 1978, reprinted in Summa, Poeticamente abita l’uomo, 28. Ibid. Original Italian: “L’anonimia è l’esito non di una fuga dal contesto, ma di un implacabile filtro per cui il frammento è zoomato tra molti, la sua configurazione morfologica isolata per quel tanto di ‘privato’ e di irrepetibile con cui essa partecipa ad un generale processo di corruzione delle forme e dei progetti.” Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Ibid. Original Italian: “Qui il muro va nel mare, è una assurdità.” Lopez, Pescara, 28. This project, 24 magliette: sentirsi un arcobaleno adosso (24 T-shirts: To Feel a Rainbow on Oneself) from 1975, is discussed in the Introduction to this boook. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Ibid. Called Asse attezzato, this monstrous urban construction was built in the 1970s and inaugurated in 1980. The super highway increased urban automobile traffic, rather than reducing it, and spoiled the most historic and idyllic part of Pescara. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Bianchetti, Pescara, 60. Franco Summa, “Per incontrarsi,” in Franco Summa: Town Art, 85. Antonello Alici, “Idee e progetti per la nuova città,” in Le nuove provincie del fascismo: architetture per le città capoluogo, ed. Antonello Alici and Maria Teresa Iovacchini (Pescara: Archivio di Stato di Pescara, 2001), 205. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Franco Summa, “Una stanza per tutti,” in Franco Summa: Town Art, 92. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Ibid. To my knowledge, in the creation of Appropriazione e Recupero, Summa worked independently from the radical architecture groups, such as Superstudio, active in Florence at this time. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Franco Summa, “Appropriazione e recupero,” sound recording heard during interview with the author, June 26, 2012, Pescara, Italy. Ibid. Original Italian: “Firenze non deve essere un grande museo. Deve continuare a vivere. I vecchi quartieri sono parte del centro storico.” Ibid. Original Italian: “Il centro storico necessita tranquillità per essere vissuto. Le automobili non fanno altro che disturbare. Ristrutturare il centro storico e riportarlo alla dimensione, per essere funzionale. Se uno vuole andare a i Uffizi, non ci deve essere una gara con l’automobilistica il motociclista che lo sorpassa . . . ci deve andare tranquillo perché va a divertirsi per vedere ciò che il uomo ha creato.” Franco Summa, “Appropriazione e recupero,” in Franco Summa: Town Art, 82. Franco Summa, “Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via,” in Franco Summa: Town Art, 88. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Ibid. Ibid. Franco Summa, “Segni, simboli miti per abitare il mondo,” in Poeticamente abita l’uomo, ed. Franco Summa (Milan: Editoriale Modo), 13. These color associations relate directly to Kandinsky’s color theory in Concerning the Spiritual in Art, first published in 1911, where yellow was a material and warm color and blue was a spiritual and cool color. Wassily Kandinsky and Michael Sadleir, Concerning the Spiritual in Art (New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 36–41. Summa, “Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via,” 88.

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141

133. Johannes Itten and Faber Birren, The Elements of Color: A Treatise on the Color System of Johannes Itten, Based on His Book the Art of Color (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co, 1970), 29–30. 134. Summa, “Segni, simboli miti per abitare il mondo,” 13. 135. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. Original Italian: “Non c’è codice, solo l’emozione che carica il dialogo.” 136. Ibid. 137. Summa, “Segni, simboli miti per abitare il mondo,” 13. 138. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 351. 139. Piero Ignazi, “Italy in the 1970s between Self-Expression and Organicism,” in Speaking Out and Silencing, ed. Anna Cento Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio (Leeds: Legenda, 2006), 14. 140. Ibid., 15. 141. The typology of vote of exchange, vote of identification and vote of opinion was first proposed by Arturo Parisi and Gianfranco Pasquino, “Relazioni partiti-elettori e tipi di voto,” in Continuità e mutamento elettorale in Italia, ed. A. Parisi and G. Pasquino (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1977), 215–249. 142. Summa, Arte e Città, n.p. 143. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. 144. Ibid. 145. Formaggio’s outlook, as seen already in his first book, Fenomenologia della tecnica artistica (Phenomenology of Artists’ Techniques), published in 1953 by Casa editrice Nuvoletti in Milan, challenged the hegemony of Bendedetto Croce’s idealist philosophy. 146. Dino Formaggio, L’art (Paris: Klincksieck, 1981), 9. Original Italian: “l’arte è tutto ciò che gli uomini chiamano arte.” 147. Franco Summa, interview with the author, Pescara, Italy, June 26, 2012. 148. Formaggio’s excerpt was reprinted in Franco Summa, Pittura Monumentale, unpublished manuscript. Original Italian: “Gli studi di psicologia infantile hanno già messo in evidenzia tutto il valore del ‘no.’ Presente fin dalle primissime manifestazioni del bambino quale frase di affermazione oggettiva di sè e della propria libertà. Lo spirito, la rivoluzione, l’arte nascono da una Potenza di negazione e di nullificazione, dal nulla in atto.”

Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Plate 9 Franco Summa, Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via, 1975, acrylic paint on the granite stairs.

Plates 9–16

Plate 10 Franco Summa, NO, 1974, performance, spray paint, canvas, 400 × 400 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Plate 11 Maurizio Nannucci, Parole/mots/word/wörter, 1976, performance, Florence, Italy. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

Plate 12 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in real time no. 5: “Private Space in Public Space,” 1973, installation photograph.

Plate 13 Maurizio Nannucci, Poema idroitinerante, 1966, mixed media. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

Plate 14 Mauro Staccioli, Celle Sculpture, 1982, concrete, 110 × 110 × 2000 cm, Fattoria di Celle, Pistoia, Italy. Source: Image courtesy of the Mauro Staccioli Archive © Enrico Cattaneo

Plate 15 Franco Summa, Paesaggio per un anno, 1986, pastel on paper. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

Plate 16 Maurizio Nannucci, More Than Meets the Eye, 1987, neon tube lights mounted on wall. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

5

Vox Populi Franco Vaccari’s and Maurizio Nannucci’s Audience Engagement

High above the crowds, a young girl stretches her arms to hold up a banner with the words VOGLIAMO PARLARE (we want to speak) written in all capital letters on a large white poster [Figure 5.1].1 The crosshatched bold characters vibrate with energy and give the sign a sense of urgency. The girl’s expression remains silent yet determined. She looks on, resolved to make her message heard. Indeed, there is much encapsulated in this short and simple phrase: we want to speak. It indicates more than the desire to communicate, the need to be heard. The we constituted a generation of disaffected individuals who felt marginalized by Italy’s political and institutional forces during the 1970s. The girl we see in this photograph was part of the March 16, 1977, protest march, organized to voice indignation over the murder of Francesco Lorusso, a student of the University of Bologna, killed by the carabinieri (the armed police force), an event not uncommon during this violent and politically fraught decade. Lorusso had been active in the leftist circles that congregated around the countercultural political journal Lotta Continua.2 On that particular day, he was one of nearly fifty students who had come to disrupt the assembly of four hundred adherents to the Communione e liberazione (Communion and Liberation) association, a fundamentalist Catholic organization.3 The provost of the school, Carlo Rizzoli, feared the confrontation would become violent and called in the police to maintain order. The police fired at the students, fatally injuring Lorusso on Via Mascarella as he fled the university.4 This incident marked the beginning of five days of civil unrest, beginning in Bologna and then reverberating across the country, spreading to Rome and Milan.5 Clashes in the city saw the students and disaffected individuals on one side and the armed forces sent by the Minister of Internal Affairs, Francesco Cossiga, on the other.6 Compared to other cities in Italy, such disturbances were more infrequent in Bologna, a stronghold of the PCI (Partito Communista Italiano or the Italian Communist Party) and a city that had prided itself on having local governance in touch with the people’s needs.7 Five days after Lorusso’s murder, the PCI, along with the support of the unions and the DC (Democrazia Cristiana or Christian Democratic Party), organized a public demonstration against violence in Piazza Maggiore. However, organizers barred youths from participating, rendering them invisible and mute. We want to speak became the cry from citizens that yearned to be heard. This chapter examines art projects that engaged with civic participation in public spaces as a way of giving a voice to the people. While some artists—such as Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Ugo La Pietra, and Franco Summa—focused on the territorio and the urban landscape, as examined in Chapters 3 and 4, others operated in public space as a place of communication and exchange. However, this was not a

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Figure 5.1 Unattributed Photographer, Vogliamo parlare, 1977, photograph. Source: The Journal Il cerchio di gesso, June, 1977; Image courtesy of the Stefano Chiodi Archive

fixed dichotomy, in that some artists incorporated both subjects in their work, such as Franco Summa’s NO from 1974. While Italy’s piazze have always been the sites of public demonstration and mass confrontation, now Arte Ambientale artists were choosing to make artwork within this sphere in an attempt to forge a direct relationship with the general population and bridge the gap between themselves and the public. Indeed, Enrico Crispolti saw that it was the Cultural Operator’s task to solicit a growth in participation and political and cultural self-consciousness in citizens.8 Exploring the processes of relational dialogue that took place in these spaces, Arte Ambientale artists enticed viewers out of their passive roles as spectators by engaging them in participatory activities. This involvement led to spontaneous, relational, and creative encounters among the public. Two artists typifying this trend were Franco Vaccari and Maurizio Nannucci, who not only located many of their projects in the public arena during the 1970s but relied on public participation for the creation of their art. Their work was representative of participatory projects focused on the general public rather than a defined art audience, often attempting to grasp who and what defined the public.9 Two artworks in particular, Vaccari’s Photomatic d’Italia from 1973—involving photo booths set in different cities across Italy [Figure 5.2]—and Nannucci’s Parole/mots/word/wörter

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Figure 5.2 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973, documentary photograph. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

from 1976—in which the artist interviewed passersby and asked them to utter the first word they thought [Plate 11]—attest to this new attitude. Together, these projects emphasized the existence of ordinary citizens and their ability to engage in a creative process to express themselves. The public’s contribution became the actual substance of the art piece, giving them liberties in terms of content. Thus, they offered participants instances of individual freedom at a moment when its expression was becoming increasingly precarious. In so doing, Vaccari and Nannucci investigated emerging conceptions of citizenship, direct democracy, and the politics of identity formation in the rapidly shifting cultural landscape in Italy after 1968. Public disaffection was pervasive in Italy throughout the 1970s, reaching a climax with the disillusioned youth of the Movement of ’77.10 This group of citizens comprised the proletariato giovanile (proletarian youth), young people in the suburbs of large metropolitan areas.11 Yet the movement’s protagonists were in no way a unified body and consisted of unemployed or underemployed people, student workers, immigrants, and other marginalized figures.12 These were individuals who had suffered the harshest consequences of Italy’s unstable economy during this decade.13 Self-consciously, they positioned themselves against institutional structures and mechanisms of representation, abandoning all types of traditional affiliations, such as trade unions or student organizations. Advocating for self-representation, they viewed autonomy, especially in relation to previous workers movements, as a defining characteristic of their position.14 The importance of a newfound subjectivity produced new concerns; a common phrase

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was “personal is political,” which replaced the idea of the collective transformation so central to the 1968 movement.15 The new issues of the 1970s turned toward material and cultural needs, such as housing for students and immigrants and autonomous space for socialization and cultural expression.16 Activist and leftist theorist Antonio Negri clearly understood the emergence of this new political identity and placed it within the broader context of the evolution of class struggle. He recognized the citizen’s desire for self-sufficiency and their ability to conceptualize, produce, and organize their own forms of struggle, supplanting the needs and values imposed by capitalist demand. He termed this process self-valorization.17 In a 1977 pamphlet titled “Towards a Critique of the Material Constitution: Worker’s Self-Valorization and the Party Hypothesis,” Negri explained that self-valorization could occur only in the space produced by the worker’s refusal to work—the worker’s separation from and subversion of capitalist wage labor. In other words, disaffection from the institutions of work, but also government and authority. This would allow the newly transformed social class to develop its identity and forms of value—its own self-valorization. This liberating work was, at its core, a gesture of self-expression and a means of seizing agency over the formation of one’s identity. This, for Negri, was paramount, as workers could engage in labor that could lead them out of a condition of enslavement toward self-emancipation.18 This attitude—disaffection from both work and government—was reflected in the volatile voting trends during these years. Historically, Italians had shown a steady allegiance to their political party.19 But, in contrast to the previous decades, the 1970s saw a dramatic defeat of the DC, the success of the PCI in 1976, and its steep decline at the end of the decade.20 The unusual political situation was a result of the fact that civic participation was no longer tied to political parties. Instead, a different kind of citizenship evolved, not tethered to the state but to local, alternative forms of communities. Individuals, rebelling against the capitalist system, formed direct participatory democratic practices.21 This new form of participation had the goal of reestablishing the diritto di cittadinanza (right to citizenship), which was inherently connected to diritto alla città discussed in the previous chapters.22 Emphasizing the relationship of the citizen to society and the act of participation in public life, this definition of citizenship intersected with emerging conceptions of self-definition and autonomy. While the notions of self-valorization—the affirmation of one’s own identity separate from capitalist systems of worth—and citizenship—participation within a democratic community—appear to be in opposition, they converged in the social attitude of the Movement of ’77. While he did not directly cite Negri as a theoretical reference point, Crispolti also recognized the potency of these new forms of direct participation, which he articulated as volonta protagonista partecipativa (will for protagonist participation, or better understood as a will for active involvement in autonomous social and civil life), in his seminal publication Arte Visive e Participazione Sociale (Visual Arts and Social Participation), also published in 1977.23 The word protagonist implies an acting out, which can be understood as a performance of the self outside norms or sanctioned behavior. This new attitude took on many forms but was fundamentally about soliciting citizens to an independent and self-aware political consciousness that was channeled toward autogestione (self-management) of civic and social structures. At the core of this endeavor was the notion of a participatory democracy that is decentralized in relation to institutional power.

146 Vox Populi Thus, a resounding parallel can be found between the new type of civic engagement and the art projects of Vaccari and Nannucci. Both were public forums for selfexpression and self-representation, or what Crispolti termed protagonismo creativo (creative protagonism).24 Moreover, Negri’s concept of self-valorization—underlying the new political attitude—is key to understanding the sociopolitical positioning of Vaccari’s photo booths and Nannucci’s Parole. The participants’ contribution in both these projects, their act of creative production, can be viewed as work: a form of creative labor that belongs to the individual participant, completely detached from monetary systems of worth. In the act of participation, labor became an instance of self-expression. Viewed through the lens of self-valorization, Vaccari’s and Nannucci’s art projects were therefore liberatory processes, where the public found value in their own freedom of creative expression.

Franco Vaccari: Photographic Self-Representation Before, Photomatic d’Italia, Franco Vaccari had experimented with the photo booth as a medium in the project Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, just the year prior. It was part of the exhibition Opera o comportamento (Art or Behavior), organized by art critics Renato Barilli and Marco Valsecchi and art historian Francesco Arcangeli, in the Italian Pavilion at the 1972 Venice Biennale. The show focused on art and process and included figures such as Germano Olivotto, Luciano Fabro, and Mario Merz. Putting the process of creation on display in the galleries, Vaccari installed an automatic photo booth and invited visitors to photograph themselves. The artwork evolved slowly, as Biennial goers eventually tacked more than six thousand photo strips to the gallery wall [Figure 5.3]. Vaccari set his experiment within a highly aestheticized, yet contested, environment of the art establishment, especially because the Biennale had been maligned as elitist and antidemocratic.25 Nevertheless, fascinated by visitors’ eager involvement, Vaccari initiated Photomatic d’Italia the following year. This time he asked the general public to give him images they took in approximately one thousand street booths from across the country. The setting for this later project could not have been more different from the first; anyone could take part, not just an audience accustomed to viewing art, and the location for the production of these images was no longer contained within a traditional art setting. Vaccari collected all of the photo strips—both the ones form the Biennale project and those from the street—and published them together as a book titled Exhibition in Real Time in 1973, concluding his photo booth experiments. Both projects, and the resultant book, were concerned with the politics of space and identity formation in Italy in the 1970s. The cloistered booth of the apparatus provided an artificial feeling of safety from the world at large, a shielded and protected space that allowed the participants to express themselves with a relative degree of freedom. Additionally, Vaccari’s photo strips, each separated in their singular frame, offered a new model for understanding social groupings: an accumulation of distinctly individual entities. Each photo strip provided participants with four different opportunities to represent themselves. They could reveal multiple facets of their subjectivity, making each image distinct, independent, and unique. But together, the photo strips formed a new portrayal of individuality. Vaccari was born in Modena, Italy, in 1936, and as a boy, he was already drawn to photographically documenting local inhabitants, capturing their unique personalities. In photographs taken in Modena from 1955 to 1965, assembled in a series titled

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Figure 5.3 Franco Vaccari, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, installation photograph, Venice Biennale, 1972. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

Radici, Vaccari recorded ordinary street scenes, following a European tradition of humanist photographers, such as Robert Doisneau.26 For instance, in the market, Vaccari snapped vendors next to their produce and wares; his subjects looked directly at him with candor and pride. At times, he would follow unknown individuals through the street, recording passersby deep in their thoughts, unaware of the artist’s presence.27 These early photographs reveal that Vaccari has always been interested in the portrayal of everyday subjects and subjectivities, a theme which was foregrounded in Photomatic d’Italia. After graduating from the Polytechnic of Milan with a degree in physics, Vaccari began his art career as a visual poet, exploring the aesthetics of language. During the 1960s, he produced two books that foreshadowed themes present in his later photo booth projects. In 1966, he created Le Tracce, a book documenting urban graffiti, and in 1968, Atest, a work that reads like a quirky instruction manual [Figure 5.4].28 Both belong to the context of visual poetry, interweaving imagery with text.29 Le Tracce presents marks made not by the artist but by anonymous individuals who communicated through alterations in their cityscape. In the same vein, and almost certainly known to Vaccari at this time, was Brassaï’s 1960 book Graffiti, containing photographs of wall drawings expressing political resistance made by French partisans during the Nazi occupation. Similarly, Vaccari’s recordings of wall inscriptions in Le Tracce reveal an intimate expression of unattributed vernacular “poems” of political struggle during the 1960s.30

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Figure 5.4 Franco Vaccari, Atest, 1968, Artist Book. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

Following Le Tracce, Atest was the first of Vaccari’s aesthetic projects that elicited direct audience participation. It is a manual of nonsense tests meant to evaluate the sanity of individuals after a hypothetical nuclear attack.31 It features over a dozen questions ranging from “yes” or “no” prompts to elicitations of performative actions. For example, one question reads, “people that are meticulous, conscientious, precise, fussy, pedantic, and hypercritical are preferable to people that are messy, sloppy, broken, dirty, and clumsy—answer ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”32 Instructions that required a physical response from the reader included “go out onto the balcony and lie facing down. Check the exactness of the trolleybus by counting the beats of your own heart pulse. Try this procedure two times and confront your results.”33 Blended with the absurdity of these tasks, Vaccari inserted a playfulness into his method of prompting readers to actively complete the work. By the end of the 1960s, Vaccari had developed a unique conceptual practice involving audience collaboration and an emphasis on temporality, which he termed “Exhibition in Real Time.” He conceived of his role as an artist in terms of capturing the unfurling of time, space, and action while minimizing his presence. His work therefore shifted to operate within the innumerable possibilities offered by participants’ chosen expressions. He assigned aesthetic value to spontaneous moments of human behavior rather than products made by the artist.34 Vaccari’s first foray into “Exhibition in Real Time” was Maschere, held at the Galleria Civica in Varese in 1969 [Figure 5.5]. He began by distributing posters of the face of George Wallace—the segregationist governor of Alabama—to gallery visitors. Although Vaccari described the picture of Wallace as a “plain face of a common man,”35 Wallace had run in the United States presidential elections in 1968 for the American Independent Party against Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey, mounting his campaign in favor of racial segregation and resistance to social change.36 Though it seems likely that Vaccari knew of Wallace, it is debatable whether the audience in the gallery would have been able to recognize the American politician. After having handed out the placards, Vaccari proceeded to slink through the dimly lit gallery space sporadically shining flashlights and taking pictures. The visitors instinctively covered their faces with the signs—using them as shields to mask their faces—when photographed, resisting Vaccari’s attempt to capture their likeness; only a few visitors peered out from behind the image of Wallace. Vaccari described the participants as surprised by

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Figure 5.5 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time no. 1: “Maschere” 1969, performance. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

the circumstances and noted how they seemed to use the image of Wallace as a means of defense to avoid being photographed.37 This work was an important precursor to the later photo booth projects as both were concerned with individuals’ responses to their photographic representation. In Maschere, the audience was uncomfortable with their participatory role and the camera, and they therefore sought to hide behind the image of a controversial figure. In contrast, involvement in the photo booth projects gave the participants a feeling of freedom that they willingly embraced, often revealing more of themselves than they would otherwise have been comfortable doing. In other words, the juxtaposition of Maschere and the photo booth projects reveals two distinct audience reactions: in the former, the camera and the exhibition constrained and frightened them, whereas in the latter, it liberated them. Vaccari’s definition of “Exhibition in Real Time” had a strong theoretical basis. He was clear to differentiate it from Allen Kaprow’s “Happenings,” a form of collective participation in art production that evolved in New York at the end of the 1950s.38 Happenings aimed at making viewers active instead of passive recipients, and at creating in and around them the conditions of involvement.39 Kaprow, however, was preoccupied with formal procedures and his Happenings. Despite their seemingly open-endedness and fluidity, these events were scripted.40 Moreover, while the

150 Vox Populi participants could introduce chance occurrences within the piece, their contribution did not ultimately alter or modify Kaprow’s original instructions. In contrast, Vaccari’s concept was based on mutual feedback. He premised his projects on a self-sustaining and self-supporting system whereby the participants’ contribution was constitutive of the works themselves.41 This process activated self-awareness, as the participants had the possibility of modifying the course of events “in real time.”42 This gave them a greater degree of agency in their involvement in the production of the artwork. The installation at the Biennale in 1972 was Vaccari’s fourth “Exhibition in Real Time.” On a wall, Vaccari’s poetic instruction to “leave a photographic trace of your passing” gave audiences license to determine both their image and the content of the exhibition. Vaccari, effectively reversed their normal spectatorial role and placed them at the center of the creative process.43 He conceived of this action as “a moment of self-consciousness, proposing a pause in the rigid chain of events.”44 The photo booth must have been an immediately recognizable device to the Biennale goers because they were ubiquitous in Italy.45 For the purposes of providing them with a means of self-representation with a clearly defined visual language, it was the perfect vehicle for Vaccari’s project. Without the eye of the photographer, the subject was free to turn their back on the lens, invent various characters, and pose in whatever manner they chose. The machine is simple enough not to be intimidating but still capable of bringing out the Narcissus in all of us.46 Vaccari was not the first artist to turn to the photo booth as an aesthetic device. In 1929, just four years after its invention, the Surrealists hijacked the “automatic photo” from its mass-market functions.47 In the final issue of the magazine La Revolution Surrealiste, there are sixteen self-portraits of the principal members of the Surrealist movement inaugurating the photo booth portrait as an art medium. The automated mechanism complemented the group’s search for processes that could be a gateway to the subconscious. Indeed, captured with a self-activated lens, the resulting photographs show each artist with eyes closed, appearing to be dreaming or lost in reverie. Later, Andy Warhol experimented with the device’s repetitive and automated process, creating his first portrait by using a photo booth in 1963 for Ethel Scull, a wealthy New York art collector.48 For Warhol, interest in the photo booth and its resultant image was its ubiquity in popular culture and its almost instantaneous expediency in creating a photograph. He transformed twenty-four strips into a silk screen consisting of thirty-six frames of different colors. Warhol continued to use the photo booth throughout the 1960s, with models such as Gerard Malenga, Judith Green, Edie Sedgwick, Edward Villella, and Judith Raskin. But unlike the Surrealists and Warhol, Vaccari was most concerned with the photo booth’s ability to play with notions of identity, intentionally giving the audience room to experiment with their likeness. Increasing the participants’ agency, Vaccari diminished his artistic role. He stated, “I limited myself to just triggering the process, making the first photo strip at the opening of the exhibition.”49 The photo booth’s automation reduced his aesthetic involvement and produced unexpected results. Vaccari explained this effect in terms of the “Technological Unconscious,” detailed in a compilation of his writings, Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico (Photography and Technological Unconscious), published in 1979. The photo booth’s self-activating structure gave it the unique possibility of capturing the reality that might have escaped the artist’s conscious intentions. Vaccari wrote that “You have to see in the instrument the capacity for autonomous action, everything happens as if it were a fragment of unconscious activities.”50 By linking the

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photo booth’s automated capabilities to the unconscious, Vaccari echoed the Surrealists’ initial interest in the device. However, for Vaccari, the photo booth was also a tool for critically deconstructing the surface of reality. Vaccari’s theoretical reference point was Benjamin’s concept of the “Optical Unconscious,” elaborated in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” first translated into Italian in 1966.51 Benjamin recognized that mechanical recording devices, such as cameras, can capture aspects of reality that are not registered by the human eye. For Benjamin, then, the camera was a device that broadened ordinary vision. Reformulating this concept, Vaccari shifted the focus from the human eye to the eye of the camera: the camera as an instrument that can register elements of reality that are “symbolically structured,” independently from the intervention of the human.52 Vaccari went further and saw that the mechanical device could free him from an aesthetic convention. He said that he “saw the opportunity to unhinge [my] visual conditioning, and in doing so, come to see what [I] did not know.”53 The automatic camera therefore had a liberating potential by making apparent the human relationship without the human instrumentalization of images.54 Automated photography was a particularly apt medium, therefore, as it offered at once a sense of detachment and heightened consciousness.55 While the camera did have an undetermined power in the creation of the images, the audiences also exercised a fair amount of charge over their likeness. In an article published in the design journal Domus at the time of the exhibition, the art critic Pierre Restany described the audience’s self-expression as authorial: “the production of photographic votive offerings constituted a kind of reflection of the exhibition on itself, an exhibition that was the objective sum of all the subjects’ presences.”56 The photo booth’s physical structure, private and self-contained, offered participants refuge from the social mores and customs of public environments. Individuals could step inside and shut the curtain—and the world—behind them, however briefly. Inside, they were free to act as they chose and to exercise power over what was recorded from their behavior. Participants left a mark of their active involvement, in much the same way as voters cast their vote. Thus, a critical feature was the device’s resemblance to a voting booth. This parallel was especially relevant given the timely focus on political participation and a renewed understanding of citizenship among Italy’s youth generation. In a way, by participating in this project, individuals practiced a form of direct democracy; each person represented themselves. The photo strips thus mirrored each person’s vote, and the wall where they hung served as an accumulation of ballots. The dialectic between the audience’s creative agency and their civic identities can be further understood within the context of the photo booth’s function in the bureaucratic realm. By the 1930s, European and US governments were using the photo booth snapshot as the standard, official portrait.57 Stripped of all aesthetic ambition, its sole purpose was the rapid identification of the individual. Inserted in passports and identification cards, people had become dependent on the state for an official identity.58 The expressivity in Vaccari’s photo booth prints challenged the undemonstrative photographs used in official governmental identification. Here individuals had the opportunity to represent themselves any way they chose. Some sought explicitly to defy the norm, while others struggled to find alternative means of expression. In a particularly selfconscious act of playful defiance, a young man in Vaccari’s Biennale project obscured his face with his passport [Figure 5.6]. The photo strips show in consecutive frames the

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Figure 5.6 Franco Vaccari, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, 1972, photo strip detail, Passport. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

booklet open at different pages—the first page, the photo identification page, another page, then closed—all the information presented in four consecutive snapshots. As we are denied access to the young man’s face, the inherent meaning of the identification photo is subverted. Such notions of individuality gained timely political importance in the context of 1970s identity politics. Publishing from the late 1960s onward, Italian Autonomia

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theorist Paolo Virno wrote of shifting modes of social groupings emerging in the second half of the twentieth century.59 In particular, in conjunction with Negri, he elaborated on the emergence of a new social subject of the Movement of ’77. The former ideal of the collective had become fractured and splintered, giving way to an accumulation of distinctly individual entities: the multitude. In opposition to the more historical and well-known Enlightenment concept of “the people”—a collective entity converging into one, the multitude was a form of social and political existence of the many, which redefined group identity.60 The multitude eschewed political unity and resisted authority. At its base, Virno wrote, it authorized differentiation and validated the prerogatives of the individual and the local community over central power structures, thus defending pluralistic experiences and direct democracy.61 Critically, Virno grounded the emergence of the multitude in the social unrest of the 1970s, where the social consciousness of the new youth generation materialized in the educated, unstable, and mobile workforce.62 It was at this time that the multitude emerged as a new social identity with a drive that challenged the homogenizing effects of traditional factory labor. At the same time, the economy was readjusting to assimilate this new mobile and versatile labor. In this light, we can see Vaccari’s photo booth project as offering visitors a chance to cast their individuality in a space independent of the production of labor and governmental recognition. At the 1972 Biennale, there was another artwork that dealt explicitly with identification-like portraits. Shown in the German Pavilion, Gerhard Richter’s 48 Portraits of painted historical figures, created between 1971 and 1972, contrasts with Vaccari’s photo strips. Both working in series, albeit in different mediums, this comparison juxtaposes men of accomplishment with unidentified individuals. Richter’s pantheon begins with Mihail Sadoveanu, ends with Rudolf Borchardt, and includes Igor Stravinsky, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, and Albert Einstein— all dead white male European and American intellectuals and figures of authority. He based his portraits on black-and-white photographic images found in various encyclopedias and dictionaries; they are impersonal headshots, much like governmental identification photographs.63 The portraits’ flatness and the lack of expression are striking compared to Vaccari’s unnamed but animated individuals. Besides the visual distinction, this comparison underscores the democratic nature of Vaccari’s project: visual representation was open to all rather than an elite few. By working in series, Vaccari’s photo booth project connects with photo conceptualism prevalent in Europe and the United States at this time.64 Artists—such as Berndt and Hilla Becher or Hans Haake—systematically used photography to catalog, index, and systematize the urban and the everyday. A particularly apt comparison is Douglas Huebler’s Variable Piece #70, in which the artist intended to “photographically document . . . the existence of everyone alive, to produce the most authentic and inclusive representation of the human species that may be assembled.”65 Huebler shot individuals holding up one of eighty randomly selected signs bearing a cliché (e.g., “One person who is as pretty as a picture,” or “One person who may be culturally dislocated”), imbuing the images with irony. Unsurprisingly, the project, begun in 1971, was never completed. This comprehensive catalog impulse is telling; like Vaccari’s projects, it also speaks of a desire to map the contours of civilization, to capture and behold the mass of humanity. However, the key difference is that Vaccari gave citizens the opportunity to represent themselves rather than give them a prefabricated cliché to hide behind. Emphasizing this act of self-representation, art critic Renato Barilli saw Vaccari’s project as the impulse to democratize creativity. In an essay from 1972, Barilli wrote

154 Vox Populi that “the heart of the whole operation lies in clear refutation of the artist’s traditional prerogatives: indeed . . . that there is a potential artist in all of us if we can overcome certain inhibitions.”66 Barilli went further and described the process of self-photography as offering the possibility of liberation. Through it, the subjects could learn to “see themselves with different eyes, to estrange themselves and therefore to reclaim an authentic self.”67 More recently, art historian Nicoletta Leonardi has claimed that Vaccari pondered the crisis of subjectivity as an instrument of emancipation against the totality of the spectacle.68 In other words, against the backdrop of superficial mass-media image production, the photo booth gave participants control of their self-representation. She understood this project and Vaccari’s next urban photo booth piece as public acts of the reappropriation of self-portraiture.69 Taking the argument further, one can draw connections to Negri’s theorization of workers appropriating their labor. Thus, it is possible to comprehend the act of the audience’s self-portrayal in Vaccari’s photo booths as tantamount to reclaiming their potential for self-expression. But complete freedom was not possible in the institutional sphere or in the isolated galleries of the Biennale. As Vaccari said, “the police were turning up periodically to confiscate those photos that had gone a bit too far.”70 By the end of the Venice Biennale exhibition, more than six thousand photo strips were hanging on the walls of the exhibition space—certainly only a fraction of visitors to the Biennale but a sizable number nonetheless.71 Each photo strip attested to the physical presence of those who chose to participate in Vaccari’s experiment, yet he was not content with positioning this operation solely within the confines of the gallery space. He wanted to cast a wider net and include a more varied and diverse population. Straight after the show, he began to work on his next photo booth project, Photomatic d’Italia. Vaccari asked the leading provider of photo booths in Italy for permission to use about one thousand self-service machines installed throughout major cities—such as Rome and Milan—for one year. In Vaccari’s own words, “This proved that the project started in Venice could grow in complete autonomy outside the privileged space of the gallery, spreading over the streets.”72 Now Vaccari reached those audiences that existed beyond the confines of the institutions. Although museums are public spaces, they are not as unrestricted as city streets, and individuals participating in Photomatic d’Italia operated with a more significant amount of freedom. Vaccari’s move from the white cube to the urban context reinstated the photo booth to its habitual sites, in public spaces such as train stations, municipal buildings, and city streets [Figure 5.7]. The site of the creation of the art object, however, was now displaced. By moving his project outside of the gallery space, Vaccari upheld his original critique of the art system: the traditional, self-referential aesthetic criteria of authorship, originality, and economic value. His project now also challenged the institution’s elitism and exclusivity.73 By broadening the scope of the project, Vaccari offered the possibility of self-representation to people who were not part of an elite cultural audience. In fact, Barilli saw the urban photomatic project as the total democratization of artistic activity.74 Anyone on the street could now participate in the making of art; the photo booths were available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. To entice participants, Vaccari designed a humorous advertising poster in search of novice actors for a movie production: For his next Film, Franco Vaccari is looking for new faces, expressive and of all ages. To participate in the selection, photograph yourself in this machine and

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Figure 5.7 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973, documentary photographs. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

insert your photograph in the appropriate box on the outside of the machine, writing your name and address on the back. Or you can send it to Vaccari c.a.p. 411000 c.p. 291 Modena. The advertisement, calling for “expressive” faces, implied a level of theatricality. It is likely that the playfulness of the advertisement contributed to the fact that participants performed for the camera, their creativity teased out by Vaccari’s provocative instructions. Dispersed in different cities, each individual’s moment of self-expression within a photo booth was no longer contained within a specific location. The same devices could be found in affluent city neighborhoods or poor provincial towns. Nevertheless, the standardization of the photo booth ensured that individuals were wrapped in the same mechanical cocoon whether they were on the streets of Milan or inside the Salerno train station. This sense of rootlessness paralleled Virno’s elaboration of the multitude, whereby many shared the sense of “not feeling at home and [. . . placed] this experience at the center of their own social and political praxis.”75 The concept of the multitude was not rooted in the sense of security of the one, the collective, but in the homelessness of the many. Vaccari amassed the Photomatic d’Italia photo strips by emptying the designated collecting box or having them mailed directly to his house. These photographs never had the same public exposure that the Biennale pictures had, but they were published, along with the Biennale images, in the book Exhibition in Real Time. Carefully analyzing all of the photo strips, it is almost impossible to discern the provenance of any individual image. Because the layout of the book does not differentiate between the projects, we can only speculate about whether the different contexts influenced how individuals chose to represent themselves. Only in the documentary photographs of the Biennale installation is it possible to verify those photo strips taken during the exhibition, while others not visible in this documentation could have come from either of Vaccari’s photo booth projects. While this disorder is frustrating for an art historian, perhaps Vaccari’s choice to mix the photo strips in the publication erases the high-low divisions inherent in the two projects. Or perhaps it all goes back to the

156 Vox Populi book’s title, which takes as its namesake Vaccari’s entire conceptual practice. Artists always saw their role as giving rise to situations and allowing those situations to unfold organically without influencing the results.76 The variety of creativity that we see in the book’s photo strips is a testament to the project’s sense of spontaneity. The photos include the mundane, like a small child innocently looking upward, and the peculiarly affirmative, such as a woman sticking her thumbs up [Figure 5.8]. Self-expression takes on many forms in Vaccari’s images as individuals creatively interpret the notion of identity on film. One individual drew a face on four separate pieces of paper, which he held up covering his head; in each strip, he created a different identity. A boy hides behind a mask, and one man goes so far as to fake his death by hanging himself in the photo booth. Two women conveniently use their long hair to hide their faces, creating a mysterious persona, and others take this opportunity to convey a message: one man holds a sign saying “go to Documenta Kassel” in front of his face for four consecutive frames,77 while another seems to impersonate an intellectual adorned with laurel leaves around his head and holds a sign that says: “Apres Auscwitz, die poesi ist kaput smuzig,” perhaps referring to Adorno’s famous quote, “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”78 [Figure 5.9]. The consecutive temporal snapshots became a vehicle in which individuals found inventive ways to communicate. In every photo booth instance, the warm and alive body contrasted with the cold mechanical device. This juxtaposition between body and machine is perhaps most apparent in the images of sexualized behavior [Figure 5.10]. Removed from prying eyes, individuals felt free to expose themselves to various degrees. Topless women confidently bared their naked breasts to the camera, and others proved even more

Figure 5.8 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time, 1973, Artist Book, detail. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

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Figure 5.9 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time, 1973, Artist Book, detail. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

daring. In other photo strips, tender feelings of love and affection were also exhibited; in some images, people stare lovingly into each other’s eyes, and in others, couples kiss and embrace. The booth was a space of disclosure where individuals felt safe enough to divulge their most private selves. In this regard, the photo booth may not have been so different from a church confessional. Given the crisis of the Catholic faith during this time, perhaps participants felt more at ease professing themselves to a mechanical device than to a judging priest.79 In examining the publication’s layout, it is clear that Vaccari was not interested in anthropologically analyzing the images that resulted from this process. But now that Vaccari created an arrangement, however random, it is difficult not to read one in

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Figure 5.10 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time, 1973, Artist Book, detail. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

relation to the other. Barilli, commenting on Vaccari’s photographic organization in the book, wrote, In some cases, Vaccari wanted to reaffirm the quantity, the “great numbers” of photos, their rhythmic setting, by ordering them in series of eight and even sixteen per row, and in equally numerous columns from top to bottom. The result is individual depersonalization in favor of swarming, a bombardment of rapid visions. However, in other cases he adopted an inverse criterion, lingering over individual images.80 Despite the standardization of the photo booth device and its product, the photo strip, what tra n spires from the project and the resulting book is the sizing of individual subjectivity and the creativity involved in that process. Vaccari actively transferred

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agency to the citizens who took part to awaken their political consciousness and what it means to be a protagonist in the society of one’s choosing. Vaccari further explored individual expression and communication through his Exhibition in Real Time series, in a work he created for the Trigon Biennial in Graz, Austria, in 1973.81 He produced this work just after the Venice Biennale photo booth project and called it Exhibition in Real Time no. 5: “Private Space in Public Space” [Plate 12]. Curators Umbro Apollonio and Gillo Dorfles organized the show and gave Vaccari a room in which to install his piece. Within this room, he built two enclosed chambers completely isolated from the rest of the space, except for an audiovisual link connecting them. Each chamber contained microphones linked to speakers and video cameras synched to monitors. Participants could enter one of the two rooms and be in communication with another person in the other room. They could see and hear each other perfectly, while the general public outside was not privy to anything happening inside the rooms. Like his project at the Venice Biennale, Vaccari inserted a private space inside the public realm of the gallery, breaking up the continuity of the environment. But while the experience at the Biennale was mostly solitary, here the participants could engage in a dialogue with another human being, whether a friend, lover or a complete stranger. At the entrance of each interior room was written Geheime kommunikation (Secret Communication), the subtitle of the work, emphasizing the intimate communication that could take place between these two rooms. In fact, Vaccari commented, “even love affairs developed inside there.”82 This space became a haven for individuals to divulge private information or to engage in small talk. Confidential messages could be shared, and people, whatever their background, could meet on equal grounds. Furthermore, Exhibition in Real Time no. 5 allowed Vaccari to orchestrate a “secret” dialogue within the public sphere. The political and historical relevance of this work lay in spatializing the flow of communication of desires, fears, and pleasures of individuals. The public space and, by extension, the audience was no longer considered as a single collective body but as a diverse ensemble of individuals.83 With the insertion of this diversification of modes of interaction, communication between the participants became more complex. More dynamic than in the Biennale project, Vaccari transformed the interactive process from an individualized, expository, one-way mode of communication to a one-to-one process of continual interaction. In all, Vaccari has explored the politics of audience participation in forty Exhibitions in Real Time projects to date. During the 1970s, the general public stepped into the very center of his aesthetic projects, filling the work with their content. He gave individuals a platform to experiment with their representation and portray their identities with creative freedom. Parallel to the emerging phenomenon of the multitude, Vaccari’s experiments highlighted the increasingly individualized modes of social identification in Italy. Vaccari’s art seen through this lens was a commentary on the broader social forces shaping the country in the 1970s—a wave of unique but often ignored identities crashing to the shore in real time.

Maurizio Nannucci: Communication and Self-expression In 1976, Maurizio Nannucci lingered in Florence’s streets, stopping passersby and asking them to utter a single word. He recorded each pronouncement on tape and concatenated them in a sequence of seemingly unrelated terms from a variety of different

160 Vox Populi individuals. The recording, along with photographic documentation of Nannucci’s interview with the pedestrians, comprised the installation titled Parole/mots/word/ wörter.84 Each participant became an integral part of the work, giving the public of Florence a rostrum from which to speak. Vernacular expressions, plucked from the continuum of everyday life, became a register of individuality. Like Vaccari’s photo booth projects, Nannucci’s Parole depended on direct audience participation. The public, not the artist, chose the words that constituted the final piece, and it is their voice that we can now hear when we experience the artwork. Similar to the individual photo strips in Vaccari’s work, each word constitutes a singular unit of meaning. At the same time, taken together, they allow a richer, more contextualized reading. The vocals are a specific lexicon for that particular moment in time and echo the cries of the multitude to both speak and be heard. Based in Florence—where he was born in 1939—Nannucci’s work explored the relationships between art, language, and society. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and studied painting at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin in the early 1960s. It was there that he attended lectures by Max Bense and Eugen Gomringer, who were looking at structural linguistic phenomena and their association with aesthetics.85 In Berlin, he also befriended Stuttgart’s Concrete Poetry artists. These two early experiences lay the foundations of Nannucci’s aesthetic practice, which examines processes of communication. For instance, in a 1966 artwork from his early career, titled Poema idroitinerante (Hydro-Itinerant Poem), he placed ten bright-red plastic balls in water in an equally red cubic container [Plate 13]. The structure of the work closely resembles a painterly frame, yet the work’s materiality gives it a sculptural quality. Each of the balls, buoyed in the liquid, has a black letter inscribed on its surface. Read sequentially, the balls could twice spell out the word rosso (red). However, because they are suspended in water, they jumble according to a chance configuration. In one photographic image, the configuration is “r-o-r,” “o-s” and a few stranded “s” balls. Nannucci inserted fluidity in the syntax, allowing the letters to drift at will. The playfulness of this work demonstrates Nannucci’s early interest in operating both within traditional and nontraditional linguistic structures. While Nannucci was making conceptually based, linguistic visual artworks, he was also involved with sound poetry and experimental music, which is critical to understanding the artist’s focus on the dissolution of syntax in his later 1970s projects. Nannucci worked with the experimental musician Pietro Grossi, who in 1963 set up the Studio di Fonologia Musicale (Musical Phonology Studio), called S 2F M, to produce electronic music and computer art.86 Undoubtedly influential to Nannucci, Grossi had innovative ideas about modern composing; electro-acoustic instruments could open up traditional processes of creating music, from a temporally finite score to an infinite work, or as Grossi termed it, “Unending Music.”87 In addition to musicians, his studio attracted experimental artists, including Nannucci, Giuseppe Chiari, Vittorio Gelmetti, Auro Lecci, and Paolo Masi, blurring the lines between experimental music and the visual arts.88 At the S 2F M studio throughout the 1960s, Nannucci played with creating sounds based on the human voice. These investigations took the form of sound poems, sound installations, and audio works.89 It is incredibly hard to find any of Nannucci’s sound art from this time as many artists, according to musician Albert Mayr, were rejecting the concept of intellectual property and, at the studio, presented works collaboratively under the aegis of the S 2F M label.90 This collaboration

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continued to influence his aesthetic practice and perhaps explains his de-emphasized role in Parole.91 Nannucci’s connection to Grossi’s studio also brought him into contact with Italian and international artists involved with the Fluxus movement. He was part of the l’Associazione Vita Musicale Contemporanea (Association of Contemporary Musical Life) in Florence, founded by Grossi in 1960, which became a meeting place for artists like Nam Jun Paik, Charlotte Moorman, and George Maciunas; Florentine artists directly involved with the Fluxus movement, such as Sylvano Bussotti and Giuseppe Chiari; and other internationally renowned musicians, such as John Cage.92 The Fluxus group had permeated into the Italian neo-avant-garde scene by the mid 1960s through the contacts Ben Vautier made with Milanese artists, such as Gianni-Emilio Simonetti.93 According to art critic and collector Mario Diacono, a friend of Nannucci and Vautier and one of the first to buy Maciunas’s Fluxkit, as early as 1964, “Fluxus was, for certain artists during the 1960s, more so than Pop art, the aesthetic intellectual reference point. This was because Fluxus was tied to the word and events, more than painting or sculpture. This was an important stimulus in Italy.”94 Their philosophy of blending art and life, their focus on events rather than object-based practices, and their insistence on the importance of direct communication with viewers all formed a critical foundation for Nannucci’s work. His involvement with Fluxus culminated with the exhibition at the Zona Archives (a self-managed artist space that he founded in Florence in 1974), which he organized and titled Fluxus Anthology: A Collection of Music and Sound Events in 1989. During the 1970s, influenced by Fluxus philosophy, Nannucci took his artistic practice outside conventional gallery and exhibition spaces. He found particular freedom in both this mode of working and his choice of subject matter. His literal yet ambiguous use of language allowed him to operate fluidly in different mediums and aesthetic fields. He rejected the boundaries of a centralized practice, preferring peripheral zones where the edges between disciplines were frayed and could filter into each other. Looking back on these early years, he said, “there is a big difference between having to stay inside clearly defined limits and being able to slip through barriers. I want to see what’s there outside the spatial and intellectual exclusion zones.”95 Blending linguistics and performance through a conceptual art approach, Nannucci explored the fleeting use of language in a piece from 1973 titled Scrivere sull’acqua (Writing on Water) [Figure 5.11].96 In this work, the artist wrote on water with his index finger, inscribing the words creare l’artista creativo (to create the creative artist) on the surface of the Arno River, which carrying through the center of Florence.97 The river absorbed these marks, erasing them while bringing the ripples downstream. We see the ephemerality of Nannucci’s gesture in the photographic documentation of the act, captured in consecutive shots. The surviving images show only the action of writing and the immediate trace of the letters’ contours. As a precedent to Parole, the river’s current parallels the stream of people Nannucci interviewed. Both works are concerned with a continuum of fluidly moving language that is always in the process of forming and unforming. Similar to Scrivere sull’acqua, Nannucci saw Parole as a linguistic event that manifested the original, vital human faculty of self-expression.98 The work consisted of pronouncements taken from the public’s stream of consciousness that were not often given a forum in aesthetic representations. He documented these words, unmediated,

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Figure 5.11 Maurizio Nannucci, Scrivere sull’acqua, 1973, performance. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

and artistically reframed them. Through this process of dialogue, he brought a mass of distinct voices into a dissonant unity. He described the making of Parole as a direct engagement with individuals. He stated: I would stop passers-by randomly and ask them to pick a single word that came into their head. I would then record that word on a tape recorder and have the respective actors photographed. The person’s identity, with his/her thoughts and linguistic expression, is a powerful element in this process, wherein the individual, personal word, deriving from the Latin “personare,” “to sound through,” becomes superimposed by a collectively interwoven phonetic texture.99 Singular words therefore existed as distinct units within the narrative. Like distinct beads on a thread, they formed a fragmented yet connected record.

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Extracted from the dialogue that took place between Nannucci and each participant, the audio recording lists words sequentially in the order they occurred, beginning with Good-day, ciao, violin, Florence, Rome, good-bye, home, book, press, city, death, soccer, love, love, tree, window, soccer, flower, America, Venice, money, soccer, home, oh, Modena, rugby, bed, chocolate, building, America, Columbus, Stefano, two, Maurizio, bread, wine, woman, she, home. Divided by a comma, each word exists in its singularity. Together, they form a sequence of seemingly unrelated places, names, emotions, and objects. However, they are all part of the substance of everyday life. Love, home, and tree are words that children learn to pronounce at a young age to describe the world around them. These rudimentary terms are the expressions of being. Working with words inevitably means working with meanings. The individual terms in Parole can be understood as coded messages in a complex semantic field.100 Each word is caught in a linguistic lattice, and although they at first appear random and basic, they cannot be thought of as independent from the individuals who spoke them. For instance, the creation of Parole took place over several days and in different locations throughout Florence. Nannucci interviewed passersby in the city’s historic center; significant sites such as Piazza Santa Croce, Piazza della Signoria, Florence’s main square; and on the city’s periphery, outside the Casa del Popolo.101 He noted that there was a spatial correlation between the words that people said and their geographical location—the effects of priming. For example, at the Uffizi, he noted that more passersby tended to think of the word “David” or “Michelangelo,” and outside the Casa del Popolo, some individuals thought of “Communista” (Communist).102 This unconscious correlation ties individuals to their surroundings and triangulates identification with a particular site. Moreover, it also speaks to the difference between the cultured city center and the more political peripheries on its margins inhabited prevalently by the working class. Thus, words and spatial location here are dynamically held together within a web of meanings. For the audience, the sequence of spoken words forms a listening field of cultural politics where sound and space interact in the sociality of the built environment. Nannucci also noticed that the way individuals responded to his prompt depended on the mode of posing the question. He recalled, “there had to be a component of tension and urgency.”103 He was acutely aware that the way the public reacted to him was conditioned by the type of participation he was able to stimulate. He approached the public with a team of audio recording professionals from RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) who all stood next to a van with the television insignia marked. This entourage gave him the necessary credibility to address the public and solicit their participation in his project. Nannucci placed rigid parameters on the execution and presentation of the work. He strictly limited the reply to one word, and unlike Vaccari’s book Exhibition in Real Time, he respected the order in which the interview took place when he came to assemble and edit the recording. He introduced himself and the project sponsored by RAI, creating a dialogue between himself and the participants. However, this twopart exchange does not appear in the final work, as only the audience’s participation makes up the flow of distinct words in the recording. Nannucci edited out his introductory phrasing; thus, in effect, Parole is only a fragment of the whole conversation. Perhaps this is because his own words were formulaic or possibly because he wanted

164 Vox Populi to minimize the visibility of his intervention. With over ten hours of actual recording that needed to be compiled, Nannucci noted that some individuals did not immediately understand what he asked of them, and when they did, they often changed their minds and wanted to substitute their original word for another.104 In the final edit, Nannucci selected the scrolling list as close as possible to the first spoken word, intervening as minimally as he could.105 The only extemporaneous decision that Nannucci made was when to end the experiment. This choice was to a certain extent arbitrary, as it could have lasted indefinitely, like Grossi’s Unending Music. However, when at one point someone said the word merda (shit) Nannucci thought it was an apt time to end the Parole’s inventory.106 In total, there are 453 words recorded in Nannucci’s Parole, but without the repetitions, the list is 364. This total is a relatively small number compared to the words available in the Italian language.107 The words cited include descriptors of place, such as palazzo (building); animal names, such as ippopotamo (hippopotamus); and food, such as pane (bread). Most of the words are commonly spoken terms. Their ordinariness is striking; yet, understood together they paint a vivid picture of the materiality of everyday life. It is not surprising to see a number of expletives in Nannucci’s recordings, such as cazzo (cock), fica (pussy), fottere (fuck), and vaffanculo (fuck off); maybe the participants did not have patience with Nannucci’s experiment, or maybe they were trying to be subversive or scatologically humorous. A few individuals took Nannucci’s inquiry as a game and replied with well-known tongue twisters; for example, disarcivescoviscontantinopolizzare, which means to step down from the position of Archbishop of Constantinople. The whole phrase is se l’arcivescovo di Costantinopoli si dovesse disarcivescoviscontantinopolizzare, vi disarcivescoviscontantinopolizzereste voi per lui? (This frivolous phrase translates to, if the Archbishop of Constantinople would step down, would you become the archbishop of Constantinople for him?) Replying to Nannucci’s prompt with this word, the participant demonstrated bravura in the ability to pronounce a challenging phrase seamlessly. But the sentence is empty of content, negating the purpose of the dialogue. This individual refused to engage meaningfully and spiritedly deflected what Nannucci asked. Another individual pronounced the word prisencolinensinainciusol, which is also the title of a song composed by Adriano Celentano in 1972. Celentano had made his recording debut as a pop singer in the early 1960s, and together with other audacious rock ’n’ roll singers, like Mina, he challenged the old guard of melodic singers with loud lyrics and inelegant body movements.108 The song “Prisencolinensinainciusol” was immensely popular throughout the 1970s and became a number one hit in Italy, France, West Germany, and Belgium. The lyrics are deliberately meant to sound like an American pop song to an Italian audience, but in fact all the words are gibberish.109 In a RAI video’s prelude, set in a classroom, a student asks what the meaning of the song’s title is. Celentano replies that the words are not supposed to mean anything. In fact, the song is about the incommunicability of language and popular music’s ability to communicate meaninglessness. It is fitting that an individual would cite “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” when Nannucci’s Parole is concerned with the semantics of identification for a generation that renounced traditional notions of categorization. In addition to conventional and playful vernacular terms, some words related to the political climate in general: Communismo (communism) is stated four times, as well as marxismo (Marxism), Gramsci (Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist philosopher), partigiani (partisans), and socialista (socialist)—all terms from the Left. Words

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that might characterize the highly politicized moment include contestatore (protester), crisi (crisis), and tensione (tension). Overall, the occurrence of these words amounts to about 5% of Parole, which is relatively substantial considering all the possible words one could choose. The inclusion of these expressions demonstrates how present the social and political situation was in the minds of the general public and how essential terms are in processes of political identification. Many of the underlying concepts present in Parole have parallels in the critical theory of Jürgen Habermas, the German sociologist and philosopher writing from the 1960s onward, who considered the notion of identity formation as a process in flux based on shifting modes of communication. In 1974, Habermas published an essay titled “On Social Identity” in the journal TELOS, in which he posited that identity develops through speech at the level of communicative action, which fosters the autonomous realization of the self through interpersonal interaction.110 In other words, language forms the individual, and in turn, the individual is formed through the enactment of speech. Identity can be seen, then, as embedded in social experience and symbolic communication. Habermas further argued that history could shape a new form of identity—one that is bound to neither a specific territory nor state authority. This new entity, which he termed “collective identity,” is based on individual participation in a communicative process. Habermas wrote, “the individual is no longer confronted by collective identity as a traditional authority, as fixed objectivity on the basis of which self-identity can be built. Rather, individuals are the participants in shaping the collective will underlying the design of a common identity.”111 For Habermas, this new form of identity, with communication as the basic link among individuals, emanates from the base. It is not a fixed structure to which individuals adhere. Rather, through dialogue and communication, individual self-identity flows from society’s core. While Nannucci had not read Habermas’s essay “On Social Identity” when he conceptualized Parole, he was familiar with the philosopher’s theories on communication.112 Whether or not Habermas influenced Nannucci, the notion of collective identity can inform the reading of Parole as a platform for individuals’ participation in a communicative process that results in the formation of an autonomous social identity. While Virno’s multitude stood against a post-Fordist economy, Habermas’s collective identity resisted the alienating advancements of media technologies. Placing paramount importance on individuality, Habermas argued that authentic processes of communication are constantly under threat of being absorbed by systems of coercion, the media, and governmental administration.113 “On Social Identity” was a call to resist the dominant forces of identity construction. He states in the essay that individuals have to “choose between violence and grassroots communication.”114 Continuing the interlocked interpretation of Nannucci’s project and Habermas’s understanding of the importance of communication, we can view Parole as pacifist activism. This is especially fitting when we consider Nannucci’s use of sound, which is by definition relational, because it emanates and passes between listening bodies.115 It inevitably binds individuals together through its immaterial permeability. The way Parole tapped into a continuum of everyday life also echoes the Fluxus aesthetic. In its list form, Parole reads and sounds much like Fluxus’s “event scores” developed by artists like Yoko Ono, George Brecht, and La Monte Young. More significantly, Parole shares Fluxus’s conceptual rigor and attentiveness to seemingly insignificant phenomena. Fluxus made the ordinary special by creating multiple pathways

166 Vox Populi toward ontological knowledge and situating people within their corporeal, sensory world.116 Likewise, Nannucci plucked terms out of a stream of consciousness that, in their isolated configuration, allow us to understand a specific historical moment in time. It is as if the words themselves create a window through which we observe the attitudes and customs of Florence’s inhabitants. Nannucci was not the only artist during the 1970s to use sound art to incite the general public and make them more aware of their environment. Perhaps known to Nannucci at this time, American artist Max Neuhaus produced Sound Walks in 1966, taking the audience outside the usual concert hall environment to experience the acoustics of everyday life. The work began as Neuhaus asked the participants to convene outside; he then stamped their hand with the word “LISTEN” and led the group through the streets of New York. The piece forced the audience to concentrate on hearing the self-generated noises of the city. The group would then return to their point of departure, thus refocusing their auditory perspective.117 Both Sound Walks and Parole are located within the city, and their urban context forms an inherent component of the works. In Sound Walks, the city’s sounds become the protagonists of the piece, while in Parole, the city and its spaces inform the audience’s response to Nannucci’s prompt. The ambient noise in Nannucci’s work can be heard in the background, contextualizing the responses within the urban setting. Like Nannucci, the Austrian artist Valie Export also explored speech acts and modes of communication at this time. Export used the human voice in her project Tonfilm from 1969. This work was part of her “Expanded Cinema” series that investigated the cinematic experience in performative events that activated, in addition to sight and hearing, the senses of touch, smell, and taste. The idea for Tonfilm was to technologically manipulate the human voice by surgically inserting a photo eclectic amplifier in the glottis and connecting it with a light-sensitive resistor on the ear. Depending on the intensity of the light outside, more or less current flowed to the amplifier, making the individual’s voice sound louder or quieter. Export explained that this “life-soundfilm” operated in such a way that people yelled terribly at midday, started losing their voices toward evening, and fell utterly mute at night.118 The experiment focused on the individual’s ability to convey sound and socialize through communication. But Export’s work also conjures up an image of humanity screaming itself senseless. The work encapsulates her critique of a society under state control, whereby even the ability to communicate is regulated. The parallel between this work and Nannucci’s raises questions about freedom and restraint in the participants’ ability to take part in Parole. How free were these individuals, and to what extent were external influences coercing their expression? Aside from art-related parallels, Parole can also be understood in the context of the emerging importance of militant workers’ use of oral histories during the 1970s. The genre became a primary vehicle to capture fleeting memories for posterity and to serve as a basis for reflecting on the nature of subjectivities and experiences. For example, Alessandro Portelli’s essay “Sulla specificità della storia orale” (On the Specificity of the Oral Story), published in 1979, explored the oral histories of workers in the industrial town of Terni, located in the southern portion of Umbria, in central Italy.119 In fact, the documentation of individuals’ experiences was a way of legitimizing their struggles and undertakings.120 Parole is, in fact, an oral history where each individual who participated is validated through their spoken contribution.

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Nannucci’s interest in forms of communication in general, and his focus on la parola parlata (the spoken word) in particular, echoes a broader countercultural shift toward escaping traditional linguistic schemes in written forms of expression. An important precedent was, of course, Futurist poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Parole in libertà, whose words extended across the page, defying grammatical and syntactical norms, as early as 1912. However, in the 1970s, written channels of communication—in official newspapers and underground journals—had become a contested space as the new generation, particularly those tied to the Movement of ’77, questioned the authenticity and agenda behind disseminated information.121 In 1976, the publication A/ Traverso affirmed that the territory of information (information as the absorption of the techno-scientific work in the processes of production) becomes a terrain on which one struggles for power between the working classes and the capitalist state. And so the language, writing, and intervention in the circuit of information becomes a practice on which the material fabric of the class relations are redefined.122 Alongside A/Traverso, a plethora of alternative newspapers and magazines formed the emerging sphere of controinformazione (counter-information), such as Bi/Lot, L’erba v oglio, Lotta Continua, SUSSURRI e GRIDA, and Wow, among others.123 Aware of Habermas’s theories of the manipulation of information technologies in post-Fordist labor production, the publishers of these journals were fully conscious of the shifts in class and power relations. Thus, they forged alternative networks of information exchange as a form of resistance.124 In addition to their unorthodox content, these periodicals experimented with style and formal devices of expression. For example, their pagination and layout abolished convention, forcing a dynamic and activated mode of reading. Their layout was a combination of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal texts, which used synchronous typefaces and handwriting.125 Nannucci participated in the production of the alternative press by intermittently publishing an art pamphlet titled Mèla, from 1976 to 1981. Like La Pietra’s two magazines, IN: argomenti e immagini di design and Progettare Inpiù, discussed in Chapters 1 and 4, Mèla, connected the sphere of controinformazione within the arts. Nannucci asked a number of Italian and international artists to each contribute material to fill one page of the thirty-two-page edition. Each pamphlet was printed on one large piece of paper that was then collapsed into one single booklet—with material printed on the front and back. Although his design was sparse compared to publications such as A/Traverso, Nannucci’s accordion-like format and non-linear organization were in line with other controinformazione periodicals. In the edition published during the summer of 1976, Sol LeWitt contributed cutouts of aerial maps of Florence on the first two pages; the Italian conceptual artist Giulio Paolini produced a diagrammatic drawing titled Mèla on page 6; the Milanese artist Gianni-Emilio Simonetti submitted an article titled La lingua batte dove il desiderio duole (Language prevails where desire dwindles); the Canadian group General Idea published its piece “. . . Our”; and Nannucci published a photograph of Parole, which is visible at the bottom of the page when the entire booklet is opened out flat [Figure 5.12].126 On the next sheet, we see contributions from the Florentine Fluxus artist Giuseppe Chiari, the American mail artist Ray Johnson, and others. This ensemble

Figure 5.12 Maurizio Nannucci, Mèla, Summer 1976, Artist Booklet. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

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shows the extent to which Nannucci sought national and international connections. Further, Mèla was a primary vehicle for the dispersion and dissemination of aesthetic ideas to a broad community of artists. Finding a democratic platform for the circulation of art was critical to Nannucci, and this aspect of his work extended from Mèla to other projects throughout the decade. In 1974, he founded with Paolo Masi, Mario Mariotti, Giuseppe Chiari, his brother Massimo Nannucci, Alberto Moretti, Alberto Mayr, and Gianni Pettena—an ensemble of artists, architects, and musicians who were living and working in Florence—the nonprofit organization Zona in the working-class neighborhood of San Nicolo. Since its inception, Zona promoted and connected information, exhibitions, and documentation in different media and avant-garde practices in the international art context.127 In keeping with the pervasive mood of the decade, Nannucci stated, having abandoned 1968-inspired utopias, there was a move toward transparent, independent operations run by the artists themselves. . . . Artists aimed to eliminate the traditional qualitative parameters of art and adopt new forms of anticonformist behavior that would transform the artist’s role in society.128 The organization did not celebrate the work or achievements of a particular artist, and in this respect, it functioned antithetically to most commercial galleries, which focused on promoting personalities to sell artworks. Instead, Zona explored reciprocal communication among artists and used that dialogue as a base for aesthetic investigations.129 Tapping into an international network, Zona cultivated connections with different disciplines and personalities in emerging contemporary fields. This connectivity was the driving force behind its creation, conceived as a “non-hierarchical [organization] led by democratic ideals such as that art production should be heterogeneous, contradictory, varied and articulate, diffuse and noisy, and non-identifiable in traditional terms, values, and expectations.”130 Zona maintained an autonomous and autogestito (self-managed) status. It positioned itself as a meeting place between international and local art initiatives and, most importantly, defined the possibility of art production divorced from economic values.131 Artists such as Bill Viola, Joseph Kosuth, James Lee Byars, and Giuseppe Chiari were among those who passed through Zona. For example, Viola, who at the time worked with Art/Tapes/22, had his first European show at Zona, titled Vapore, in 1975. Overall, Nannucci described the function and work of Zona as an “agile structure”—not fixed but malleable to different parameters and circumstances.132 Nannucci has said that forming Zona was difficult because in Italy there was an absence of alternative art spaces, as most were publicly financed.133 In fact, in Florence at the time there was a sort of institutional vacuum, and scant attention was paid to promoting contemporary art. The Academia delle Belle Arti remained a conservative institution that did not actively support local artists. Furthermore, there was a dearth of systematic planning on the part of cultural authorities and institutions.134 In 1973, the Tuscan painter Carlo Cioni published an article in the prominent journal NAC (Notiziario d’Arte Contemporanea) that analyzed the state of the visual arts in Tuscany. Artists in the report, as well as cultural operators, voiced their bitter disappointment over their aspirations and of being frustrated by the sociopolitical

170 Vox Populi context of their region. They made harsh accusations directed toward public authorities, critics, galleries, collectors, and the media—especially the right-wing newspaper La Nazione—for their open support of the art market. They leveled criticism against a “pre-Macchiaioli market”—the appreciation of artwork only up to the Macchiaoli movement of the second half of the nineteenth century—and the authorities’ united efforts to embalm Florence and keep it a stronghold of traditionalism.135 Nannucci, who participated in the report, stated: “What is happening in Tuscany is only a reflection of what is happening in Italy. The problem is the lack of evolution of politicalcultural structures. The link to the past is the only one that gives the situation a firm structure, but it is not enough.”136 Zona attempted to fill this need to support and promote contemporary art. The inaugural exhibition, in 1975, was called Per conoscenza (For Information) and exhibited local Florentine conceptual artists. Additionally, from the beginning, Zona’s exhibitions constituted an alternative archive of artists’ materials. It was integral to the organization’s mission to catalog artist’s work in order to create an independent network and archive of different groups and individual artists.137 One of the first events centered on the accumulation of alternative archival material was the Small Press Scene exhibition in 1975. The show presented over 250 small-press magazines dedicated to experimental visual art, concrete poetry, architecture, and new music from the 1960s produced and distributed by artists, small bookshops, and a few collectors.138 Curated by Nannucci, it was the first of its kind to be devoted to this medium, gathering together titles such as Ana Excetra, Ant Farm, Approaches, Archigram, Art and Language, Art Rite, Asa, Axe, Azimuth, Corcle Press/Simon Cutts, Exempla, Fluxus, The Fox, Futura, Geiger, Giorno Poetry, and Systems, to name a few. In its original form, Zona carried out its activities until 1984, when it was transformed into Zona Archives and Outside Events Productions and Publications. In 1985, its members decided to end their operations as a group and to close down their space on via San Niccolò. They transformed the initiative into a growing archive, out of which came a rich collection of publications from the small press, including artists’ books with over twenty-five hundred examples of audio-art and sound poetry and an important collection of concrete and visual poetry. Books, posters, invitations, and remarkable photographic documentation put together by Luciana Majoni, Gianni Melotti, and Nannucci are just some examples from this project.139 The demise of Zona marked the beginning of a new period for Nannucci that saw him continue his work with language but transition from ephemeral to more permanent installations. Indeed, it was Nannucci’s aesthetic practice during the 1970s that was his most experimental, innovative, and focused on public intercourse. Throughout the decade, he engaged in both self-managed collaborative practices and independent aesthetic work. Alternative means of communication link these two spheres. His most important work of the period, Parole, drew on linguistic expression to formulate an idiolect for a complex and fraught social moment. Direct dialogue with ordinary citizens encapsulated the semantics of everyday life, capturing words that range from the most banal to the most original, conciliatory and provocative, serious and playful. Taking place in the public space, Parole incorporated the sounds of communication to establish an inherently relational connection. Critically, Nannucci opened up the aesthetic framework of the piece and made space for the voice of the people. Participating in the project, ordinary citizens had the chance to determine their form of selfexpression and, in this act, validate their own identity.

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Conclusion The second half of the 1970s in Italy evinced both a waning of the prior decade’s collective spirit and a waxing of individual involvement in the politics of daily life. Striving for political recognition, many people were committed to direct representation. The new social subject that emerged during the 1970s had lost faith in sociogovernmental structures and looked to alternative, autonomous means of effecting change. As the bonds of social cohesion seemed less and less able to shift the gears of power, especially in light of acts of violence at the hands of prominent paramilitary organizations, individuals moved toward a position of self-empowerment. New notions of citizenship materialized, demanding direct democracy and equality for all—beginning at the level of the individual. Vaccari’s Photomatic d’Italia and Nannucci’s Parole gave aesthetic representation to this new force. Citizens directly engaged in the creation of the works, with only minimal mediation of the artist. It was essential to both Vaccari and Nannucci to respect the participant’s contribution, without altering or filtering it. Furthermore, each word or photo strip was organized laterally, without the hierarchical order that many Italians viewed as antidemocratic and pervasive in their post-Fordist culture. Each participant—randomly selected from the general public—was given the same opportunity to create and to be heard or seen. Soliciting members of the general public to actively participate in their work, Vaccari and Nannucci offered a platform for Vox Populi—the opportunity to photographically represent and vocally express themselves. Self-expression and creativity came directly from ordinary citizens, without adulteration by the artists. Vaccari and Nannucci set up only the framework and parameters for the aesthetic experiments to take place. This generated a level of risk for the artists, who had to forgo authorship over the aesthetic content of the work. They allowed the public to represent themselves, but by attaching their names to the works, they, too, fell in with the audience. In the final presentation of the pieces, the audience’s participatory contribution was presented as faithfully as possible. While both artistic results have undergone an editing process—Vaccari jumbled the photo strips in the book Photomatic d’Italia so that one could not determine each photograph’s origins, and Nannucci edited out everything but single words—each expressive unit was reported in high fidelity. During the 1970s, notions of individuality and public identity emerged as integral to the counterculture movements. Acts of audience participation in these aesthetic projects emphasized the existence and value of the public, giving them the tools to express themselves. Again, we can turn to Negri, who conceptualized class struggle during this decade as a process of self-valorization. For Negri, and we can make the same argument for Vaccari and Nannucci, the recognition of selfsufficiency of the masses and their ability to conceptualize, produce, and organize their forms of struggle supplanted the needs and values imposed on them by capitalist command. Negri saw the productive forces of post-Fordism in positive terms for the worker—a way of reclaiming the individual’s soul. By refusing capitalist mediations of productive and reproductive relations, workers could engage in liberated labor, a process of self-emancipation. This self-emancipation was at its root a process of self-expression and a means of seizing agency over the formation of one’s identity.

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Notes 1. This image, by an unattributed photographer—was published on the back cover of the inaugural edition of the magazine Il cerchio di gesso, founded in Bologna in June 1977, with the aim of understanding the Movement of ’77. The magazine was conceived by a group of intellectuals including Gianni Scalia, Pietro Bonfiglioli, Federico Stame and Roberto Roversi—coming from different political and cultural experiences but united by an attitude critical of the politics of historical compromise and national unity—immediately following the murder of Francesco Lorusso and the civil upheaval. The title of the magazine derived from the sign that the investigators traced, after a shooting, around the holes produced by the bullets that killed Lorusso. The front cover stated clearly that “power becomes absolute if there is no opposition.” Original Italian: “Attorno ai fori, secondo il rito, un cerchio di gesso bianco calcola il number di pallottole. Dovrebbe essere semplice da capire: il potere diventa assoluto se manca l’opposizione al potere, se l’opposizione si fa parte del potere o si compromette col potere, se il potere si produce e reproduce con il concenso dell’opposizione . . . Dentro il cerchio. Fuori del cerchio.” 2. Lotta Continua was an Italian anti-capitalist organization linked to the Autonomia movement. It was founded in 1969 in Turin and active until the late 1970s. The movement also produced a newspaper that was published until 1982. 3. Marco Grispigni, Il Settantasette: un manuale per capire, un saggio per riflettere (Milano: Il saggiatore, 1997), 42. 4. Nanni Balestrini, L’orda d’oro: 1968–1977: la grande ondata rivoluzionaria e creativa, politica ed esistenziale (Milano: SugarCo Edizioni, 1988), 548. 5. For example, the day after Lorusso’s murder, on March 12, 1977, in Rome, there was a large protest march against government repression. 6. Massimo Veneziani, Controinformazione: stampa alternativa e giornalismo d’inchiesta dagli anni Sessanta a oggi (Roma: Castelvecchi, 2006), 88. 7. Bologna, during the 1960s and 1970s, was a city with many more social programs than other cities in Italy. For example, it had a socially conscious housing renewal program. See Thomas Angotti, “Central City Renewal without People Removal: The Case of Bologna,” in Housing in Italy: Urban Development and Political Change (New York: Praeger, 1977), 71–83. 8. Enrico Crispolti, Arte Visive e Participazione Sociale 1. Da Volterra ’73 alla Biennale 1976 (Bari: De Donati, 1977), 15. 9. In Italian postwar art, participatory practices have a specific history, stemming from Optical art experiments in the 1960s. Gruppo N and Gruppo T were important precedents for the development of participatory art during the 1970s. In both movements, the optical nature of the artworks—art that exploits the illusions or optical effects of perceptual processes—was closely connected with the idea of active viewer collaboration. These pieces required an embodied phenomenological experience to apprehend them. As a result, the audience’s involvement redistributed the responsibility in the aesthetic process; the artist’s role became intermediary in relation to the open-ended “propositions” presented in the work and the spectator’s personal “engagement.” Of course, the Italian Futurist movement is another crucial precedent for audience participation. The Futurists’ scandalous events and performances were direct in activating their audiences in order to shake them out of a purely contemplative and passive state. See Michael Kirby and Victoria Nes Kirby, Futurist Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1986) and Christine Poggi, “Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd,” in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 35–64. 10. In an attempt to understand the shifting cultural terrain in Italy during the 1970s, leading Communist Party intellectual Alberto Asor Rosa published Le due società: ipotesi sulla crisi Italiana (The Two Societies: Hypothesis on the Italian Crisis) in 1977. He saw a definitive split in Italian leftist culture: between the traditional organized working class— which he termed the “first society”—and a new group broadly composed of disaffected and marginalized youth—labeled the “second society.” Asor Rosa’s could neither understand nor endorse the latter group’s attitudes and demands. Indeed, he described a world

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12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

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in which the historical working-class Left was, in fact, called on to defend the republic against incipient chaos. Grispigni, Il Settantasette, 13. Original Italian: “Quei giovani delle periferie delle grandi aree metropolitane che vivono con maggior radicalità gli effetti della crisi economica. Nei loro comportamenti emerge la riaffermazione dei propri desideri, l’attenzione non più alle cosiddette esigenze primarie (lavoro, casa), ma alla soddisfazione delle aspirazioni piu complessive dell’individuo. Si chiede una vita che valga la pena di essere vissuta, qui e ora: nessuna richiesta di lavoro, ma quella di sussidi, di salari; nessuna etica dei sacrifici, ma al contrario, l’affermazione del diritto al lusso, tanto più in un momento di crisi economica nel quale le distinzioni di classe sembrano riaffermarsi e nel quale quindi tale diritto appare come la richiesta massimamente inconciliabile con la società adulta.” Andrea Hajek, Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe: The Case of Italy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 59. Historian Andrea Hajek contends that the economic crisis of 1973 produced a particularly desperate situation for Italian youth. The rise in oil prices and increasing rates of unemployment meant that young people faced much bleaker prospects than the generation of 1968, which had continued to enjoy the benefits of the economic boom of the 1950s. Hajek, Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe, 57. Maria Luisa Boccia, “Il patriarca, la donna, il giovane. La Stagione dei movimenti nella crisi Italiana,” in L’Italia Repubblicana Nella Crisi Degli Anni Settanta (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2006), 268. Grispigni, Il Settantasette, 15. Original Italian: “Al centro della scena non c’è più l’idea della trasformazione collettiva dell’ordine delle cose presenti, alla quale tutto va subordinato, ma la propria soggettività.” Hajek, Negotiating Memories of Protest in Western Europe, 59. Timothy Murphy, “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005), x. Antonio Negri, “Towards a Critique of the Material Constitution,” in Negri, Books for Burning, 199. Giuseppe Di Palma, Political Syncretism in Italy: Historical Coalition Strategies and the Present Crisis (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California, 1978), 4. Between 1972 and 1979, there were six major electoral consultations: three parliamentary elections (1972, 1976, and 1979) and three national referenda on the controversial law allowing divorce (1974), on the public financing of political parties, and on the law on public order (June 1978) and local (municipal, provincial, and regional) elections affecting almost the entire nation (June 1975). In a 1979 study, Arturo Parisi and Gianfranco Pasquino accounted for these shifts in voter behavior by looking at qualitative changes in Italy’s social and cultural fabric. Critically, they identified a decline in the vote of appartenenza— those who vote as an act of affirmation of their subjective identification with a political force. Appartenenza, the authors elaborate, is the sum of social embeddedness and party identification. They explain that the dramatic decrease in appartenenza was largely because of the crisis of the Catholic subculture, which was the foundation for the DC, and the emergence of the post-1968 youth generation that formed the Movement of ’77. They saw the youth vote as distinct and in conflict with the dominant trends. Their voting behavior, in contrast to appartenenza, was characterized by its lack of stability. Marked by its transient quality, it was not tied to a single party or political arena. See Arturo Parisi and Gianfranco Pasquino, “Changes in Italian Electoral Behavior: The Relationships between Parties and Voters,” West European Politics 2, no. 3 (1979): 6–30. For example, in the mid 1970s, the Collettivo Autonomo Studentesco (Autonomous Student Collective) created a national network of students in secondary schools and their parents that demanded and practiced direct participation in decision-making, which had previously been regulated by institutionalized representative bodies. See Patrick Gun Cuninghame, Autonomia a Movement of Refusal: Social Movements and Social Conflict in Italy in the 1970’s (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2002), 179. See also Leonardo Tomasetta, Partecipazione e autogestione: dentro e contra il sistema (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1972), 183–223.

174 Vox Populi 22. Angelo Porro, La Partecipazione politica: problemi e prospettive: atti del convegno della Facoltà di scienze politiche, Trieste, 9–10 maggio 1978 (Trieste: CLUET, 1979), 28. Original Italian: “la partecipazione ha esattamente lo scopo di restituire la formazione della volontà politica alle sedi specificamente popolari, nel tentative, appunto, di recuperare I fini etico-politici originari.” 23. Crispolti, Arte Visive e Participazione Sociale, 8–9. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. A brief account of the Venice Biennale as an antidemocratic institution is discussed in Chapter 2, “Extramural Exhibitions: Volterra ’73 and Ambiente come Sociale.” See also Vittoria Martini, “Come la Biennale di Venezia ha istituzionalizzato il Sessantotto,” in Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017), 203–208. 26. Luca Panaro, L’occultamento dell’Autore: La ricerca artistica di Franco Vaccari (Carpi: Edizioni APM, 2007), 19. 27. Vaccari’s sequential photographs of strangers in the street predate Duane Michals’s wellknown sequences, particularly “Chance Meeting,” published in Michals’s book Sequences, in 1970. 28. Tracce was published by the Sampietro in Bologna in 1966, and Atest was published by Geiger also in Bologna. These are two independent art publishers active at the time. 29. They were included in a series of visual poetry group exhibitions called Proletarismo e dittatura della poesia (Proletarism and Dictatorship of Poetry) organized by Gianfranco Bellora at the Studio Santandrea in Milan in 1971. 30. Franco Vaccari, “Tracce,” in Poesia Sotteranea, Poesia Trovata, Exhibition flyer in the Archivio Biomonografico, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome. 31. Franco Vaccari, “Introduction,” in Atest (Bologna: Geiger, 1968), unpaginated. 32. Franco Vaccari, Atest (Bologna: Geiger, 1968), unpaginated. Original Italian: “Le persone meticolose, coscienziose, precise, pignole, pedanti, puntigliose, ipercritiche, sono preferibili alle persone disordinate, sciatte, scomposte, sudici, maldestre? Sì/No.” 33. Ibid. Original Italian: “Uscite sul balcone e sdraiatevi a faccia in giù Controllate l’esattezza dei passaggi dei filobus contando il tempo con I battiti del vostro polso. Quali ipotesi si fanno in questa misurazione? Provate due procedimenti e confrontate i risultati.” 34. Reno Chini, “Lascia una traccia contemplative della tua mostr-a-zione,” in Photo 13, no. 9 (September 1973): n.p. 35. Franco Vaccari, 3 esposizioni in tempo reale: (1969–1971) = 3 Exhibitions in actual time (1972), 5. 36. Kenneth F. Warren, Encyclopedia of U.S. Campaigns, Elections, and Electoral Behavior (Los Angeles: Sage, 2008), 30. 37. Vaccari, 3 esposizioni in tempo reale, 5. 38. Before his elaboration of “Exhibition in Real Time,” Vaccari created a number of happenings, events much closer to Kaprow’s definition: for example, La cattura del vento (the capture of wind) at the second edition of the exhibition Parole sui muri held at Fiumalbo in August 1968. See Alessandra Acocella, “Immagini come poesie, Fiumalbo 1967–1968,” in Avanguadia diffusa. Luoghi di sperimentazione artistica in Italia, 1967–1970 (Macerata: Quidlibet Srl, 2016), 13–50. 39. Frank Popper, Art: Action and Participation (Paris: Chêne, 1975), 23. 40. Alex Potts, “Writing the Happening: The Aesthetics of Nonart,” in Allan Kaprow: Art As Life, ed. Allan Kaprow, Eva Meyer-Hermann, Andrew Perchuk, and Stephanie Rosenthal (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), 25. 41. Franco Vaccari, interview with the author, Modena, Italy, June 21, 2012. 42. Franco Vaccari and Roberta Valtorta, Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico (Torino: Einaudi, 2011), 69. 43. Julia Pentz, “The Author-Beholder Dichotomy: Franco Vaccari’s Exhibitions in Real Time,” in The Monitor: Journal of International Studies 15, no. 1 (2009): 47. 44. Franco Vaccari, Vittorio Fagone, Valerio Dehò, Nicoletta Leonardi, and Chiara Scardoni, Franco Vaccari: esposizioni in tempo reale = Exhibitions in Real Time (Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2007), 73.

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45. Anatol Josepho, a Siberian immigrant to the United States, patented the photo booth in 1925 and opened the first Photomaton studio on Broadway between 51st Street and 52nd Street in New York City. Cheap and available to everybody, the photo booth quickly replaced the formal studio. For a history of the photo booth, see Näkki Goranin, American Photo Booth (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2008). 46. Luca Molinari, “Photomatic Italia ’70,” in Franco Vaccari: photomatic e altre storie (Milano: Electa, 2006), 110. 47. Raynal Pellicer, Photo Booth: The Art of the Automatic Portrait (New York: Abrams, 2010), 10. 48. Ibid., 104. 49. Pentz, “The Author-Beholder Dichotomy,” 49. 50. Vaccari, Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, 3–6. Original Italian: “bisogna vedere nello strumento una capacita di azione autonoma; tutto avviene come se la macchina fosse un frammento di inconscio in attivita.” 51. First published in Italian: Walter Benjamin, L’opera d’arte nell’epoca della sua riproducibilità tecnica: arte e societa di massa (Einaudi: Torino, 1966). Vaccari cites Benjamin in Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, 16–19. 52. Vaccari, Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, 18. Original Italian: “Quello che invece noi proproniamo è l’abbandono del continuo e implicito riferimento all’uomo per sostenere una radicale spostamento del punto di osservazione verso lo strumento, che deve essere visto come dotato di un’autonoma capacità di organizzare dell’immagine in forma, che sono già strutturate simbolicamente, independentemente all’intervento del soggetto.” 53. Vaccari, “Introduction to the 1979 Edition,” in Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, xxvii. Original Italian: “Avevo visto la possibilità di scardinare i miei condizionamenti visivi e arrivare cosí a vedere quello che non sapevo.” 54. Vaccari, “Fotografia e arte,” in Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, 45. 55. Franco Vaccari, “Reazioni all’invasione del campo d’attenzione,” in Fotografia e inconscio tecnologico, 70. 56. Pierre Restany, “I limiti del comportamento,” Domus no. 514 (September 1972): 51–56. 57. Pellicer, Photo Booth, 81. Historian Martin Lloyd argues that it was, in fact, in response to World War I that suddenly countries demanded a photograph be fixed to a passport. Martin Lloyd, The Passport: The History of Man’s Most Travelled Document (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2003), 103. 58. Sociologist John Torpey argued that over the past few centuries, governments used the passport and other forms of documentation to control the movement and identification of citizens, and in doing so, they have strengthened the legitimacy of their own sovereignty. By implementing passport controls on their borders, states have expropriated from individuals the freedom to move across international boundaries and to render them dependent on the state system for the authorization to do so. See John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For a study on the role photographic identity documentation played in the development of US immigration policy and the regulation of immigrants between 1875 and 1930, see Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America Photography and the Development of US Immigration Policy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009). 59. During the 1970s, Virno published in the magazine Metropolitan, of which he was a cofounder with Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno. 60. Virno looks to a historical definition of Hobbes’s “people” and Spinoza’s “multitudo,” models of conceiving a social entity emerging out of the Enlightenment. Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles: Semiotext, 2004), 22–25. 61. Ibid., 43. 62. Ibid., 98–99. 63. Robert Storr, Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002), 61. 64. David Campany, Art and Photography (London: Phaidon, 2003). 65. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–1969: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 122.

176 Vox Populi 66. Renato Barilli, “Exhibition in Real Time,” reprinted in Vaccari, Franco Vaccari: esposizione in tempo reale . . . Exhibition in Real Time (2007), 70–71. 67. Franco Vaccari and Renato Barilli, Franco Vaccari: opere: 1966–1986 (Modena: Ed. Cooptip, 1987), 10. 68. Nicoletta Leonardi, “Photography and the Representation of Subjectivity in Franco Vaccari’s Exhibition in Real Time,” in Franco Vaccari: esposizioni in tempo reale, 25. 69. Ibid., 28. 70. Daniela Palazzi, “Il cieco torna subito,” in Arte e Critica no. 45 (2006): 40. 71. Franco Vaccari, “1972, Lascia su queste pareti una traccia fotografica del tuo passaggio: Esposizione in tempo reale n. 4,” in Franco Vaccari: fotografie 1955/1975 (Milan, Italy: Baldini Castoldi Dalai, 2007), 125. 72. Vaccari, Esposizioni in tempo reale = Exhibitions in Real Time, 73. 73. A study carried out by Paul DiMaggio in the late 1970s found that, in general, visitors to art museums were educated, wealthy professionals. While this study was carried out by analyzing American cultural intitutions, the general results may be applicable to the Italian context. See Paul J. Di Maggio, Michael Useem, and Paula Brown, Audience Studies in the Performing Arts and Museums: A Critical Review (Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 1978). 74. Renato Barilli, “Introduction,” in Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time (Pollenza: Nuova Folgio Editrice, 1973), unpaginated. 75. Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 35. 76. Vaccari, interview with the author, Modena, Italy, June 21, 2012. 77. By looking closely at this photo strip, one can just about make up pinholes at the corners, evidence that it was tacked to the wall of the gallery at the Venice Biennale. This would have put the two exhibitions in dialogue with one another. 78. Theodor W. Adorno, “Culture, Criticism, and Society,” printed in Prisms, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen and Samuel Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981). 79. During the 1970s, the Catholic Church was in crisis because it had misjudged the speed at which Italy was changing. In 1970, the Italian government legalized divorce, and in the 1974 referendum, which called for a repeal of the law, 59% of the voters wanted to retain the right to divorce. Despite the Church’s powerful influence, this was a strong indication of the secularization of Italy. See Franco Garelli, Religione e chiesa in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991). 80. Barilli, “Introduction,” n.p. 81. The Trigon Biennial began in 1963 and ran until 1995. Taking place in Graz, Austria, and organized by the Neue Galerie Graz, these exhibitions brought together artists from Italy, (former) Yugoslavia, and Austria and encouraged exchange between them. 82. “When Franco Met Cesare: A conversation between Franco Vaccari and Cesare Pietroiusti,” Nero Magazine 22 (Winter 2010): 46–50. 83. Leonardi, “Between Public and Pivate, Process, Spectacle and Participation in the Work of Franco Vaccari,” in Franco Vaccari, Franco Vaccari: fuori schema: 1966–2001: film, video, videoinstallazioni, esposizioni in tempo reale, web (Milano: Artshow, 2001), 32. 84. Nannucci’s Parole was presented as an installation: the words were sounded on a speaker, and they were written on a wall of the gallery, alongside the projection of photographs from the event. It was presented in this way in the exhibition Fuori! Arte e spazio urbano 1968–1976 held at the Museo del Novecento, Milano, April 15, 2011–September 4, 2011, curated by Silvia Bignami e Alessandra Pioselli. 85. Maurizio Nannucci, “Neon in Italian Art,” Neon: la materia luminosa dell’arte, ed. David Rosenberg and Bartolomeo Pietromarchi (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2012), 38. 86. Grossi’s studio S 2F M was set up in his own home at Via Capodimondo 13, Florence. 87. Francesco Giomi, L’istante zero: conversazioni e riflessioni con Pietro Grossi (Firenze: SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999), 37, 63–64. In his studio, Grossi experimented with sounds created by different acoustic properties and electronically generated sounds, specifically sinusoidal oscillators—electronic devices that generate sound waves in various frequencies—white noise generators, sound filters, frequency meters, and some tape recorders.

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88. The contemporary art exhibition Ipotesi linguistiche intersoggettive (Intersubjective Linguistic Hypothesis), held at the Castello Svevo in Termoli in 1967 and organized by Giulio Carlo Argan, Laravinca Masini, Pietro Grossi, Enore Zaffiri, and Arrigo Lora Totino, included a Musica programmata (Programmed music) section where new sounds intersected with experimental artistic forms. The exhibition’s theme was Struttura (Structure), and its main aesthetic focus was Arte Programmata (Programmed art), with an extended section that focused on music elaborated in light of new electronic media that expanded the techno-scientific horizon. See Ipotesi linguistiche intersoggettive (Edizioni Centro Proposte, 1967), n.p. Original Italian: “Questa mostra si pone come esempio di Operazione abbinata, intersoggettiva, a livello scio-tecnologico, come testmonianza attiva di una stessa ‘area’ artistico-culturale sia per i fatti ottico-percettivi e visulai che per i fatti sonori, e per le manifestazioni che si definiscono di ‘poesia concreta,’ nell’ambito di una Ipotesi si ‘spazio estetico totale,’ di una visione del mondo, cioè, elaborata su parametric reinventati alla luce dei nuovi mezzi offerti all’esperienza artistica (i nuovi mezzi elettronici che ampliano l’orizzonte sonoro; le machine e i mezzi tecnicoscientifici che permettono di elaborare ‘oggetti’ come elementi-base di una nuova morfologia linguistico-letteraria).” 89. Katalin Mollek Burmeister, “Encounters,” in Maurizio Nannucci: something happened (Pistoia: Gli ori, 2009), 11. 90. Albert Mayr, “1963–1993: Trent’anni di musica eletronica a Firenze,” unpublished paper cited in Francesco Giomi, “The Work of Italian Artist Pietro Grossi: From Early Electronic Music to Computer Art,” Leonardo 28 (1995): 35–39. 91. One piece, however, authored solely by Nannucci, serves as an example of the type of work he was making at the studio: Titled 4 + 4 and created in 1966, it is a visual score showing a series of four geometrical structures, in repetition, descending the page, one slightly bigger than the other. Next to these arranged shapes, Nannucci has noted corresponding computer frequencies. This work was exhibited in the Musica programmata (Programmed music) section at the Ipotesi linguistiche intersoggettive exhibition held at the Castello Svevo in Termoli in 1967. 92. Lucilla Saccà, La parola come immagine e come segno: Firenze, storia di una rivoluzione colta, 1960–1980 (Ospedaletto, Pisa: Pacini, 1999), 11. L’Associazione Vita Musciale Contemporanea was active from 1961 to 1967. For more information on the L’Associazione Vita Musciale Contemporanea, see Francesco Giomi, Marco Ligabue, and Pietro Grossi, L’istante zero: conversazioni e riflessioni con Pietro Grossi (Bottai, Impruneta: SISMEL edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999). Giuseppe Chiari had been involved with the Fluxus group since 1964 as he participated in Fluxus Festival held in Den Haag in November 1964. Sylvano Bussotti took part as early as 1960 in the Cologne Contre Festival held at the Alelier Baumeister in June 1960. 93. An early and important event of Fluxus work in Italy was Les mots et les choses: Concert Fluxus art total, held April 26–28, 1967. It involved three days of actions and music concerts organized by Vautier and held at the Galleria II Punto, La Sala delle Colonne del Teatro Gobetti, and in the city streets. The events included a number of Italian artists, such as Ugo Nespolo, Plinio Martelli, Mario Ferrero, René Pietropaoli, and of course Gianni-Emilio Simonetti. See Germano Celant, Identité italienne: l’art en Italie depuis 1959 (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, 1981), 189. 94. Mario Diacono, interview with the author, Boston, MA, August 16, 2014. Original Italian: “Fluxus e stata nei anni sessanta, per certi artisti, ancora più della Pop Art, il movimento estetico intellettuale di riferimento di quel periodo, perché Fluxus era molto più legato alla parola che non alla pittura o la scultura, cioè era legato a l’evento e alla parola. Questo ha costituito, in quei anni li, uno stimolo importantissimo in Italia. Perché Fluxys, anche essendo Americano, aveva una grossa presenza in Europa, a Düsseldorf, quindi cera un rapporto più diretto, che alla Pop Art.” 95. Maurizio Nannucci, interviewed with Gabriele Detter, “Where to Start From,” in Maurizio Nannucci: Where to Start, ed. Maurizio Nannucci and Gabriele Detterer (Munich: European Patent Office, 1999), n.p.

178 Vox Populi 96. Scrivere sull’acqua was first exhibited in the form of photographic documentation at the 1974 exhibition Contemporanea, held in a Roman car park and organized by the curator Achille Bonito Oliva. 97. Barbara Wörwag, “Durch Geheimnisse, Botschaften und Zeichen,” in You Can Imagine the Opposite, ed. Maurizio Nannucci (München: Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1991), 11. 98. Ibid., 9. 99. Gabriele Detterer, “Maurizio Nannucci: There Is Another Way of Looking at Things,” in Maurizio Nannucci There Is Another Way of Looking at Things, exh.cat (Cinisello Balsamo, Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2012), 142. 100. Wörwag, “Durch Geheimnisse, Botschaften und Zeichen,” 38. 101. Maurizio Nannucci, interview with the author, Florence, Italy, May 8, 2013. 102. Ibid. 103. Maurizio Nannucci, interview with F. Salvadori, Internationaal Cultureel Centrum (Antwerpen: Ministerie van Nederlandse Cultuur, 1977), n.p. 104. Maurizio Nannucci, interview with the author, Florence, Italy, May 8, 2013. 105. Ibid. 106. Ibid. 107. The De Mauro dictionary, the most comprehensive in the Italian language, lists approximately 250,000 official words. 108. Paolo Prato, “Virtuosity and Populism: The Everlasting Appeal of Mina and Celentano,” in Made in Italy: Studies in Popular Music, ed. Franco Fabbri and Goffredo Plastino (New York: Routledge, 2013), 162–171. 109. Rob Kroes, Robert W. Rydell, D. F. J. Bosscher, and John F. Sears, Cultural Transmissions and Receptions: American Mass Culture in Europe (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1993), 147. 110. James E. Côté and Charles Levine, Identity Formation, Agency, and Culture: A Social Psychological Synthesis (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates, 2002), 39. 111. Jürgen Habermas, “On Social Identity,” TELOS (Spring 1974): 99. 112. Maurizio Nannucci, interview with the author, Florence, Italy, May 8, 2013. 113. Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action. Vol. 2 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984), 261–282. 114. Habermas, “On Social Identity,” 102. 115. Brandon LaBelle, Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art (New York: Continuum International, 2006), xi. 116. Hannah Higgins, Fluxus Experience (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), 38. 117. Cosima Rainer, See This Sound: Versprechungen von Bild und Ton = Promises in Sound and Vision (Köln: König, 2009), 152. 118. Ibid., 87. 119. Alessandro Portelli, “Sulla specificità della storia orale,” Primo Maggio 13 (1979): 54–60. Reprinted as “The Peculiarities of Oral History,” in History Workshop, no. 12 (1981): 96–107. Another important account of oral history of the “Hot Autumn” is Gabriele Polo, Tamburi di Mirafiori (Turin: CRIC, 1989). Polo collected the accounts of eleven militant workers active in FIAT automobile company. 120. Lumley, States of Emergency, 274. 121. Grispigni, Il Settantasette, 72. The importance of this counterculture sphere of communication arose when it became apparent that the official newspapers were distorting the reportage of current domestic events, especially those relating to terrorist violence. For example, in detailing the Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan on December 12, 1969, the national newspaper Corriere della Sera was quick to blame the anarchists and the Left for the terrorism. Meanwhile, the underground leftist newspaper Lotta Continua told a different story: the bombs had in fact been planted by the neo-fascist group Ordine Nuovo. Information from eyewitness accounts became invaluable, as there was a growing distrust of the objectivity of journalists’ reports. See Lumley, States of Emergency, 123.

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122. Reprinted in Grispigni, Il Settantasette, 72. Original Italian: “Il terreno dell’informazione (e dell’informazione come sussunzione del lavoro tecnico-scientifico nel processo produttivo) diventa il terreno su cui si combatte la lotta per il potere dra classe operaia e stato capitalistico, e che quindi il linguaggio, la scrittura, l’intervento nel circuito infomrativo diventano pratiche su cui si ridefinisce il tessuto materiale dei rapporti di classe, e non la loro mera rappresentazione simbolica.” 123. In the counter-information newspaper Manifesto, as early as 1971, Umberto Eco, writing under the pseudonym Dedalus, provides one of the earliest definitions of controinformazione: “it is not about saying different information from the newspapers, but about showing how the newspapers or television distorts information, and how, reading between the lines, one could understand the information differently. On the one hand, counterreformation challenges the way information is distributed, and on the other, it develops new information. Dedalus, “Cerchiamo di usare anche Toro Seduto,” Manifesto, May 23, 1971. Original Italian: “Controinformazione non significa dire al telegiornale cose diverse, ma andare dove la gente guarda il telegiornale e intervenire facendo notare come esso distorce le informazioni e come, interpretandolo tra le righe, si potrebbe cavarne informazione diversa. Il vantaggio della controinformazione consiste allora nel cogliere il pubblico in un momento in cui è già sensibilizzato da qualcuno che parla, o scrive, e sulla base di quella attenzione già risvegliata indurlo a considerare le cose in modo diverso. In tal modo da un lato si critica il modo in cui l’informazione è data e dall’altro si aggiunge nuova informazione.” 124. The Parisian group the Lettrist International—a precursor to SI—published a weekly newsletter from June 22, 1954, to May 22, 1957, which is an important forerunner for the confluence of counter-information and aesthetic practices. 125. Veneziani, Controinformazione: stampa alternativa e giornalismo d’inchiesta dagli anni Sessanta a oggi, 90. 126. The full list of artists’ contributions to Mèla, summer 1976 follows: pages 1–2. Sol LeWitt “Area of Florence”; 3. Terry Fox “April 12”; 4. Emmett Williams “I therefore I am”; 5. James Lee Byars “Read th fi to in ph and it knocks you down”; 6. Giulio Paolini “Mela”; 7–8. Gianni Emilio Simonetti “la lingua batte dove il desiderio duole”; 9. General Idea “. . . Our . . .”; 10. Milan Grygar “partitura lineare”; 11. Milan Knizak “A Purge”; 12. Maurizio Nannucci “Parole”; 13. Philip Glass “1 + 1 for one player and amplified table top”; 14. Antoio Dias “Contro l’allineamento come strategia della permanenza”; 15. Luca Patella “promessa”; 16–17. Jochen Gerz “Vécu 12/2/74 non vécu”; 18. Adriano Spatola “la Repubblica’”; 19. Giorgio Griffa “Disegno”; 20. Robert Filious “le poipodrome ambulant”; 21. Giuseppe Chiari “una mattina ci sveglieremo”; 22. Gianfranco Barucello “se stai a sentire”; 23. Claudio Cintoli “Chi non mistica non mastica”; 24. Robert Lax “the white town”; 25. Ray Johnson “Aerogramme”; 26. Paul Armand “Gette “Prunus Spinosa 1”; 27. Endre Tot “Very special gladnesses”; 28. Marco Gastini “Alfabeto”; 29. Glaudio Parmiggiani “homo sapiens”; 30. Ken Friedman “Five events.” 127. ZONA archives Mission Statement in Angela Vettese, Continuità: magnete: presenze artistiche straniere in Toscana nella seconda metà del 20. secolo (Pistoia: Maschietto, 2002), 126. 128. Maurizio Nannucci, Zona, Nonprofit Art Space and Zona Archives in Florence in Gabriele Detterer and Maurizio Nannucci, Artist-Run Spaces: Nonprofit Collective Organizations in the 1960s & 1970s (Zürich: Jrp Ringier, 2012), 256. 129. Ibid., 267. 130. Ibid., 257. 131. Daniela Voso, “Esperienze colletive Italiane negli anni settanta: Una storia da recuperare,” Arte e memoria dell’arte (Pistoia: Gli Ori, 2011), 74. 132. Judith A. Hoffberg, “Profile, Maurizio Nannucci and Zona, Florence,” Umbrella 6, no. 5 (1983): 143. 133. Ibid. 134. Chiara d’Afflitto, “The Voices of the Exhibition,” in Continuità: magnete: presenze artistiche straniere in Toscana nella seconda metà del 20. secolo, ed. Angela Vettese (Pistoia: Maschietto, 2002), 15.

180 Vox Populi 135. Ibid., 16. 136. Maurizio Nannucci, “5 Domande e 40 Risposte,” NAC (Notiziario d’Arte Contemporanea, no. 1 (January 1973): 27. 137. Hoffberg, “Profile, Maurizio Nannucci and Zona, Florence,” 143. 138. Ibid. 139. Daniel Soutif, “A Tuscan Season,” in Continuità: magnete: presenze artistiche straniere in Toscana nella seconda metà del 20. secolo, ed. Angela Vattese (Pistoia: Maschietto, 2002), 32.

6

Conclusion The Legacy of Arte Ambientale

The 1970s climate of destabilization pervasive in Italian institutions, government, and traditional cultural mechanisms, combined with issues of city expansion and commoditization of everyday life, provided the conditions for experimental artistic practices in the urban environment. Indeed, the sociopolitical uncertainty of the decade did not thwart Arte Ambientale artists but instead spurred them on to find new aesthetic directions, as they needed to be more resourceful and imaginative in their work. Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari reimagined the boundaries of art making by deploying new and old forms into the heart of the city in ways that engaged with their publics. Taking the shape of urban interventions and aesthetic fieldwork, they operated with a new degree of autonomy and freedom, often disengaged from the traditional systems of museums and galleries. These artists made projects that were concerned with the urban environment as a space of social relations and experiences. The works were created dynamically with the architectural, cultural, and historical dimensions of the site, such as Mauro Staccioli’s 1974 Scultura-Intervento (Sculpture Intervention) in Piazza Solferino, Ugo La Pietra’s 1976 Abitare la città (Living the City) in Milan, Franco Summa’s 1976 Histoire d’O (History O) in Pescara, Franco Vaccari’s 1973 Photomatic d’Italia, or Maurizio Nannucci’s 1976 Parole (Words) in Florence. Moreover, their interactive component instigated a direct dialogue with the city’s inhabitants. While deploying a wide array of methods and materials—from more traditional sculpture and painting to more innovative documentary and performative actions—these artists’ pluralistic art methods aligned with the goal of engaging directly with audiences and activating the urban base population. The works that Arte Ambientale artists produced were active as they attempted to modify the social reality and political contingency of the space. A rete diffusa (disseminated network) linked Arte Ambientale artists as they forged connections with one another and created an autonomous sphere for the dissemination of their work. Within this network, artists exchanged information on projects that were both ephemeral and geographically dispersed. Here, the role of alternative exhibitions organized by daring curators, such as Luciano Caramel’s Campo Urbano (1969) and Enrico Crispolti’s Volterra ’73 (1973) and Ambiente come Sociale (1976), was key. Artists’ self-published journals and magazines were also integral to the consolidation of this extended circuit. During the decade, artists sometimes collaborated with one another, but always as independent agents to maintain their aesthetic individuality, as exemplified by La Pietra and Vaccari’s joint project from 1974, Viaggio sul reno.

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Leftist theories, particularly those of the Autonomia movement, connect this sphere of aesthetic activity to the broader context of politically fraught, intellectual output concurrent at the time. In a series of essays, Antonio Negri delineated two fundamental concepts: refusal to work and self-valorization. These ideas resonated in the greater sociopolitical climate and the spirit underlying Negri’s workerist polemics can be seen in the cultural operator, a new identity for the artist-activist working in the urban spaces of Italy’s cities. In particular, La Pietra, Nannucci, Somaini, Staccioli, Summa, and Vaccari adopted an attitude akin to Negri’s refusal to work, using it to reclaim their aesthetic autonomy. They rejected the commoditized art market’s system of worth and instead located value in the sociocultural sphere. From this position, their work gained critical agency. These artists’ aesthetic production also intersected with Negri’s other concept, self-valorization. Their focus became working with ordinary citizens, making them more aware of their everyday living conditions through immersive and interactive aesthetic experiences. By engaging the public in these participatory activities, these artists ushered the masses into a creative process of self-expression and in turn, self-definition. Thus, their projects instantiated self-valorization as art; by participating in the work initiated by the cultural operator, individuals discovered greater value in their imaginative capabilities. In my final remarks, I want to engage with the legacy of Arte Ambientale after the 1970s. La Pietra, Nannucci, Somaini, Staccioli, Summa, and Vaccari all continued making work, but the new decade saw a political, social, and cultural sea change, which is reflected in both of these artists’ practice and in Arte Ambientale more broadly. The dispersed and anti-institutional movement was institutionalized through the creation of private collections, such as such as Giuliano Gori’s Fattoria di Calle near Florence, that focused on artworks sited in the environment.1 Also, the artists that this book has focused on developed new preoccupations, which mirrored the general change in mood that came to mark the 1980s: a conspicuous retreat from the overt politicization of everyday life and a renewed interest in the private sphere. An examination of key projects from these years highlights the particularities of their work during the 1970s and the uniqueness of their contribution to the aesthetic practices of Arte Ambientale during that decade.

A Shift Toward the Private Contrary to the civic and social nature of 1970s, the term riflusso (reflux, or flow back) aptly describes the withdrawal from public activity to private life after 1978.2 As the decade drew to an end, individuals flowed out of the piazzas and streets and into the domain of their private homes. Activists’ motivations for self-management and self-organization wizened as the drive to effect change in the public sphere dwindled. Workers gave up the struggles for the “social factory” and settled for the accomplishments they had achieved throughout the decade. Artists also ceased their aesthetic interventions in the urban environment. The domestic, rather than the communal and civil, dominated the last years of the 1970s and the decade that followed. The disintegration of the social movements was partly a result of the government’s severe countermobilization and repression at the end of the 1970s, which extinguished most para-institutional activity.3 The state viewed all radical undertakings with suspicion and did not distinguish between the pacifist movements of the New Left and small violent terrorist groups. For instance, in 1979, the Padua Judge Piero Calogero

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declared that Autonomia was part of a larger organization that included the Red Brigades, and claimed that they aimed to subvert the democratic state.4 In an effort to crack down on all terrorist activity, the government arrested on April 7, 1979, on the basis of Calogero’s unsubstantiated assertions, many of the Autonomia’s intellectuals, including Negri and Paolo Virno, as well as Oreste Scalzone and Franco Piperno, under “special laws” recently passed to fight paramilitary activity.5 This marked the end of Autonomia as a social movement, along with many other counter-political initiatives.6 The new political formula of the Pentapartito and the influence of three figures in particular—Bettino Craxi, Giulio Andreotti, and Arnaldo Forlani—ushered Italy into a period of political stability, economic growth, and hedonistic consumerism. But while the country’s new outlook was sanguine, it came at the expense of a disavowal of the social problems at the heart of 1970s activism. Craxi promoted the introduction of Thatcherite reforms, while Andreotti was instrumental in leading various right-wing coalition governments.7 The New Left suffered considerable defeats as the country became more conservative. Critically, the 1980s saw the rise of the middle class as the country’s tertiary economy continued to gain traction and the decline of the working class—and their sociopolitical concerns—with the slow deterioration of industrial production.8 In the visual arts, riflusso coincided with a clear break from the past and a definitive end to the preceding decade’s militant criticism and occupation of public space.9 Investigations of the environment became institutionalized and privatized. For instance, the collector Giuliano Gori, who had made his fortune from the textile industry, established an open-air museum in 1982 on the grounds of the Fattoria di Calle in Santomato di Pistoia, an estate built in the seventeenth century by Cardinal Carlo Agostino Fabroni.10 On his expansive, 60-acre estate—which had been designed in 1840 by architect Giovanni Gambini—Gori commissioned Italian and international artists to create site-specific artwork. By the time the site opened as a free-admission museum, there were ten original sculptures by artists: Alice Aycock, Danni Karavan, Fausto Melotti, Robert Morris, Dennis Oppenheim, Anne Poirier and Patrick Poirier, Ulrich Ruckriem, Richard Serra, Mauro Staccioli, and George Trakas. Gori had invited each of these artists to create structures that were site-specific and responsive to both the natural landscape and the cultural topography of a romantic garden estate. Gori used the term “Arte Ambientale” to define this type of artwork in dialogue with the environment, but here it radically departed from its 1970s meaning. At Fattoria di Calle, the artworks were permanent rather than temporary, sited in nature rather than in the urban, and located on a private estate rather than in the democratically accessible space of the city. This was a far cry from the guerilla-like tactics and provisional artworks of the Arte Ambientale artists from the previous decade. Moreover, the viewing public at the Fattoria di Celle was mostly an elite art world audience. While nearly all sculptures did respond to site-specific elements—such as Robert Morris’s Labyrinth in 1982, a maze structure made of trani and sepentina stone arranged horizontally in green stripes that refer to typical Romanesque Tuscan churches—they were not charged with the same political urgency as the 1970s Arte Ambientale artworks. Additionally, in a recent 2009 publication on the history of Fattoria di Calle, titled Arte ambientale fattoria di Celle collezione Gori, Enrico Crispolti’s definition of Arte Ambientale is not mentioned. The only Italian art critics to write in the catalog are Renato Barilli and Pierre Restany, and neither contextualize

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the Gori collection in terms of the 1970s. Somewhat anachronistically, American art historian Robert Hobbs grounds Arte Ambientale in 1960s American Minimalism, such as Robert Morris’s installation at the Green Gallery in 1964. This is to say that the Italian legacy of the 1970s Arte Ambientale appears, in this recent publication on Arte Ambientale, to be entirely absent. The only Arte Ambientale artist working in the Italian context to be included in Gori’s collection was Mauro Staccioli, who created the sculpture titled simply Scultura Celle (Celle Sculpture) in 1982 [Plate 14]. It is a gigantic concrete triangle near the park’s main pathway, hidden by the huge old Holm Oak trees and the thick underbrush. Staccioli’s concrete structure rises up from the ground following the contours of the terrain, and at its highest point, it reaches eight meters above the ground. In an optical illusion, the form appears to be sinking and soaring at once. From a specific perspective, the sculpture looks like a wall, recalling Staccioli’s 1978 Venice Biennale Muro. From other views, it resembles a pyramid. Celle Sculpture is reflective of Staccioli’s new concern with balance and form, rather than antagonistic and violent friction, in his sculptures. The artist continued to create Arte Ambientale artworks throughout his career, but with a different agenda. After his 1978 Muro, Staccioli became less interested in interventions signifying violence and obstruction like the Barriera sculptures from the 1970s. The artist, instead, turned to investigate how sculptures could formally respond to a specific site while striving for a sense of precarious balance. For instance, Staccioli’s Scultura-Intervento (Sculpture Intervention) at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, installed in 1984, is a huge concrete slab—always Staccioli’s preferred material—which juts out from the Rand Theater onto a staircase, tilting as if ready to topple down. Like in his previous work from the 1970s, Staccioli conceived of the sculpture’s shape in relation to its site; here Staccioli embraced the dramatic, steep staircase and the boxy, modernist concrete theater building. Additionally, the precarious positioning of the work recalls the 1973– 1974 Ruote. However, Staccioli dispensed with the menacing iron prongs, and so too with the charged aggressiveness that was so potently embodied in his 1970s work. Somaini, like Staccioli, continued to make sculptures using traditional materials such as marble. Themes of humanity—life, death, and sex—continued to feature prominently in his work. After the 1970s, Somaini’s compositions also retained their fluid, organic quality but became more figurative, with more precise renderings of the human body meshed into his sculptures’ soft ripples and folds. Additionally, monumental commissions during the 1980s and 1990s took up much of the artist’s efforts.11 For instance, the enormous work Stele spaccata sul tema della vita e della morte (Stele split on the theme of life and death), 1986, installed in Tuoro sul Trasimene, near Perugia, rose up in the park landscape much like the photographs of his sculptures in his 1970s photomontages [Figure 6.1]. Somaini created this piece for the exhibition of Campo del sole at Tuoro, organized by Enrico Crispolti, which explored the monolith or tablet as a theme in contemporary art. Indeed, “stele” in Italian means a stone or marble slab fixed vertically in the ground, with inscriptions and decorations, usually a funeral or memorial monument, or even a votive object. Somaini broke the rigorous wholeness of the monolith by creating a sculpture with two parts, each carved using his signature sand jet technique. He whittled the larger stone block inward, creating a negative impression, which represented death, while the other smaller one read like a positive imprint with a protruding female figure emerging from the molten-looking stone, which represented life. Visible were the left

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Figure 6.1 Francesco Somaini, Stele spaccata sul tema della vita e della morte, 1986, marble, 450 × 180 × 90 cm, Tuoro sul Trasimene, Perugia, Italy. Source: Image courtesy of the Francesco Somaini Archive

arm, breasts, and torso, appearing from the undulations that stir and quiver on the surface of the sculpture. Like his earlier Arte Ambientale work, this sculpture explicitly related to the site, although it was not urban. The motif of life and death directly referenced the bloody Battle of Lake Trasimene, which took place at the site on June 24, 217 BCE, between the Carthaginans under Hannibal and the Romans under Gaius Flaminius during the Second Punic War. Further, the sculpture itself was locally produced at the workshop of Fratelli Borgia. Stele spaccata again set Somaini on the path of exploring large public commissions. Although they were concerned with site specificity, they did not address the challenges of the urban environment as explicitly as his 1970s photomontages. During the subsequent decades, La Pietra, similarly to Somaini, continued many of the themes that he addressed in the 1970s, like his aesthetic investigation of merging the public and private spheres. But rather than bringing his art into the street, he looked to bring the urban inside. The same year, 1979, he made use of stakes, chains, and bollards to create household furniture in the work Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività (Reconversion Project, Equipment for the Community),

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discussed in Chapter 4, La Pietra vividly brought the street into the living room in Interno/Esterno (Internal/External) [Figure 6.2], fusing inside and outside within the same physical space. Both artworks were presented together in the exhibition Spazio Reale—Spazio Virtuale (Real Space—Virtual Space) at the Milan Triennial in 1979. For Interno/Esterno, La Pietra constructed a room within the gallery that was approximately 13 feet wide and 19 feet deep. This internal space had the appurtenances of a living room: floral wallpaper and brown-carpeted floors. From the front, splayed double-doors gave way to a wall-sized photograph of a street view mounted on the back wall. Tramlines on the ground connected the real internal space with the represented space outside. La Pietra set up a camera on a tripod and studio lights just outside the room so that visitors could have their photograph taken, in a way that recalled the nineteenth-century photographic studios of Nadar.12 Creating a stage-like effect, individuals could pose—either by sitting in the provided chair or by standing—with their backs to the street, facing the simulated domestic interior. Thus, the photographic subjects appeared to be coming home—moving out of the public and into the private sphere, epitomizing the riflusso at this time. Moreover, this work marked a pivotal shift for La Pietra, as the focus of his work transitioned from public and urban to private and interior spaces.

Figure 6.2 Ugo La Pietra, Interno/Esterno, 1979, installation photograph. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra

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For example, during the 1980s, La Pietra turned to how mechanisms of communication influence human memory. A surge of television and media consumption swept Italy at this time, and a rise in privately owned networks flooded the country with American programs and advertisements.13 More than ever before, Italians watched television in the comfort of their own homes, establishing a television culture.14 In 1982, La Pietra fashioned various domestic spaces with conspicuous television sets dominating each room, titled Casa Telematica. For the living room, for example, the furniture arrangement resembled a factory line, or an airplane fuselage, where passengers remain glued to their screen, oblivious to their surroundings. La Pietra was concerned that by consuming too much television, Italians would lose what he termed was their memoria tridimensionale (three-dimensional memory), a rich, multidimensional archive of personal and cultural history, and that they would be left with only memoria bidimensionale (two-dimensional memory).15 The problems, as La Pietra saw it, were that individuals received flattened information emitted by the television, or what he called “instruments of technology,” and that they stored this predigested data unaltered in their memory. For La Pietra, the compression and simplification of information meant that all events, myths, and models of the past and present were placed at the same level of perception.16 Thus, La Pietra pivoted from the urban alienation, which had preoccupied his work in the 1970s, to informational and memorial alienation that characterized much of his work in the 1980s. This move from urban rhythms to disrupted mental states mirrors the more significant social shifts from the public to the private sphere across these two decades. Like La Pietra, Franco Summa also rotated inward during the 1980s and became captivated by memory traces of urban space rather than the physical city. Summa maintained his interest in the urban, but instead of looking outward to social realities, explored the city in terms of an imaginary landscape. He stopped making ephemeral interventions and began drawing and creating photo collages portraying scenes of the urban sphere interlaced with a pastiche of mystical references. His aesthetic explorations resulted in two books: La città della memoria (The City of Memory) and Paesaggi per un anno (Landscapes for a Year), both published in 1986.17 As imagined by Summa, these two books portray the mythical city as fluid, personal, and introspective. In La città della memoria, Summa combined photographs of the real city with his drawings, as well as images from books and literature, through a multistage process involving photographs, graphite, acrylic, and photocopy. In this work, central is the idea of the city, a metaphysical entity, which is nonetheless shaped and molded by the impact of humankind through time.18 No longer rooted to the real, Summa’s images became ungrounded, and they incorporated boundless symbols and references that constituted a collective unconscious of urban memory, in its most diverse anthropological and historical-cultural levels.19 Fantastical associations—in black and white— brought together disparate images that are not organized sequentially or cumulatively. In one page, the artist paired a photograph of modern working-class houses to the left with Caio Cestio’s pyramids in Rome and a drawing of the reconstruction of the Appian Way from Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Antichita Romane (1756) to the right [Figure 6.3]. In the lower-left section, broken columns lie on the ground, together with a large sphere, on a terrain that has been rendered unstable through Summa’s brushstrokes. At the rear, in this precarious and temporally fluid scene, inhabitants of the estate are just barely visible. They seem to stand, aimlessly, looking around at this wondrous landscape. By incorporating contemporary photographs with drawings of

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Figure 6.3 Franco Summa, La città della memoria, 1986, Artist Book. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Summa

ancient Roman buildings and fantastical details, Summa brought his own historical time, his own lived reality of the city, together with bygone eras and imagined notions of the city that never existed. The intertextual fluidity suggests that time is elliptical and progress is moot. The laws of entropy show congenital disorder in the ultimate crumbling of buildings to which humanity is a witness. Elsewhere in the book, the image of the tower of Babel figures several times as a symbol of the scattering and disintegration of a chimerical epoch of unified humanity. While La città della memoria makes a myriad of external literary and philosophical references, Paesaggi per un anno looks inward, to Summa’s private experience of the urban landscape [Plate 15]. It is a pictorial diary completed over the course of one year, and it was never officially published as a book.20 On an ordinary agenda, Summa created 182 separate pastel drawings of imaginary urban landscapes. Quaint gable-roofed houses stand in green, purple, and red settings. Some homes are long and curved, while others are stacked; some face each other as if in dialogue, while others appear without windows or doors. Some pages portray abstract scenes dominated by square and triangle geometrical forms, while others are more literal, like a charming neighborhood with small homes arranged in a spiral emanating outward from a central campfire interspersed with verdant trees. In all the drawings, the ground appears to fluctuate. Summa’s visual vocabulary recalls the strong, black iconography of the avant-garde, in particular, the Die Brücke artists—Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in particular—and Kazimir

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Malevich’s early Cubist work. Situating Summa’s work in the 1980s, however, his gestural mark is also similar to his Transavanguardia contemporaries, specifically the work of Sandro Chia. In each of these pages, Summa’s bold markings also recall childlike renditions of home, all affectively charged and elementary in form. Like La Pietra’s shift to the private experiences of memory and domestic spaces, Summa focuses on the private house as an archetype, the foundational unit of the city. While Summa’s work centered on themes that emerged from his personal memory, Vaccari’s projects—still using the processes of feedback and audience participation— looked to interiority and disorientation. Like La Pietra and Summa, Vaccari also moved his projects inside, to the spaces of the gallery rather than the street. The artist’s series Exhibitions in real time continued to engage with participants’ individuality, but it no longer granted them their own means of expression. Instead, Vaccari created environments that would result in unsettling and destabilizing experiences. Invited by the curator of the Italian Pavilion, Vittorio Fagone, at the 39th Venice Biennale in 1980, Vaccari exhibited Exhibition in Real Time no. 19 Codemondo (World-Tails). This project asked audiences to enter a dark room where they would see enlarged anamorphic images of anteaters in yellow and blue projected on the walls and ceiling. In addition to this freakish visual environment, Vaccari added a strange acoustic element. In line to enter the space, Vaccari recorded the visitors’ voices—without their knowledge—and then transmitted it into the room with an approximately fifteen-second delay. Once in the room, the participants encountered their voice like a strange haunting echo.21 Compared to the photo booth projects from the 1970s, participants were not in control of their representation. In some ways, this project has more in common with Maschere (1969), in which Vaccari suddenly appeared and photographed the audience as they reflexively covered their faces with the poster of George Wallace. Both pieces rely on audience participation for the construction of the work and for elements of surprise and discomfort, and both place full authorial control in the hands of the artist. During the 1980s, Vaccari slowed down his artistic output and created only two— compared to the previous decade’s eighteen—Exhibition in Real Time projects. Following Codamondo, he made Exhibition in Real Time no. 20 “Ambiente grigio multiuso” (Grey Multipurpose Environment, Box for Probing Near and Distant Space) in 1987 at the Galleria Civica in Modena [Figure 6.4]. Here again Vaccari built an enclosed environment within the gallery space. However, he did not maximize disorientation but rather used scientific technology to expand visitors’ understanding of space. From the outside, the gray box looked like a bunker, isolated and completely removed from its surroundings, except for a tiny slit on one of the corners. But once inside, visitors were encouraged to broaden their awareness of space. Vaccari provided visitors with one laser beam each, so that they could measure the dimensions of the room, and a Geiger counter—an instrument used for measuring ionizing radiation—so that the participant could apprehend what Vaccari called the “cosmic dimensions” of the space.22 Vaccari also transformed the entire box into a pinhole camera by creating a small hole in one side. Light from the outside passed through this single point and projected an inverted image on the opposite wall. The outside could enter in, albeit upside down. Meanwhile, inside, participants could see out through a two-way mirror, but individuals outside could not see in. Last, a bed lay in a corner for visitors who wanted to rest. There is no feedback in this work, as the participants, once inside this cocoon, were completely isolated. There was also no social engagement, so fundamental to Vaccari’s work in the 1970s. Instead, Ambiente grigio multiuso offered them a complete retreat into a private space.

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Figure 6.4 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in real time no. 20 “Ambiente grigio multiuso” (Grey Multipurpose Environment, Box for Probing Near and Distant Space), 1987, multimedia installation. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Franco Vaccari

In contrast to La Pietra, Summa, and Vaccari, who all shifted their aesthetic concerns from outside to inside, from public to private, and from the real to the imaginary, Nannucci maintained a more open and social approach to art into the 1980s. His organization, Zona, continued to operate until 1985, maintaining an independent program of exhibitions and publications. Nannucci also kept up his work on language and space; however, after the 1970s, he too ceased making art that engaged with the urban environment. He would later return to making art in the public sphere in the 1990s, albeit with big-budget pieces that bore little resemblance to his previous work. After the 1970s, light, color, and other visual elements took precedence over sound, so integral to Parole from 1976. During the 1980s, Nannucci’s work gained critical notoriety as he began to exhibit within the gallery system.23 During these years and for the remainder of his career, his art practice was dominated by his return to working with neon, as both a

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communicative and sculptural medium, comparable to the work of Jenny Holzer and Bruce Nauman. Nannucci had experimented with it as early as 1967, in the work titled Alfabetofonetico in which he used neon to spell out all the letters in the Italian alphabet phonetically: A remains a, B is written out as bi, C becomes ci, E is e, F is effe, and so on, in fluorescent blue [Figure 6.5]. But in the 1970s, he abandoned neon entirely, as he did not create a single work that used this material. He took it up again only in 1979, in This Side is Red, Blue, Green, Yellow. On each of the four walls of the room, he inserted the following clauses: “this side is red; this side is blue; this side is green; this side is yellow.” Each clause corresponded to its neon color, covering the entire length of the wall from floor to ceiling. As with Parole, language, humor, and playfulness are present in this piece. But the interaction with the public and the sense of sociopolitical immediacy are gone. Nannucci’s strategy of space-word relations in neon would be a formula that he would return to throughout the 1980s. Just as he exhibited in more traditional art settings, so too did the construction and presentation of his work become more conventional. Although site-specific, each piece was prefabricated and conceived prior to installation, as opposed to works like Parole, in which the substance of the work was spontaneous and cocreated with the audience. In 1987, Nannucci made More than meets the eye, a piece that inhabited two gallery rooms in the Museum of Bolzano in Italy, filling one with red light and the other with blue [Plate 16]. On the wall of the red gallery, in bold red neon and all capitals, reads: “MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE.” Beyond the literal reading, the phrase refers to art in general, that there is more to art than optics. Yet, the bright luminescence draws the viewer in precisely through its visual pull, creating a humorous tension in the work. Nannucci’s neon light pieces are both conceptual and physical, and viewers engage with them both cognitively and phenomenologically. However, the neon phrases lack the dynamism of his earlier interactive work. The artist is present only by proxy of the artwork itself, and like more traditional aesthetic encounters, the viewer passively experiences rather than actively creates the work. Throughout the 1980s and the decades that followed, all six of these artists maintained many of their interests: Somaini’s investigations of monumental sculpture; Staccioli’s elaboration of site-specific sculpture; La Pietra’s emphasis on mechanisms that threaten human creativity and freedom; Summa’s focus on the historical and cultural significance of the city and his use of color as a means of aesthetic communication; Vaccari’s continual creation of projects that depend on audience participation; and Nannucci’s interest in semiotics and language. Even so, they all abandoned the fundamental aspects of their work that was so particular to Arte Ambientale in the 1970s. Enrico Crispolti’s interests also shifted after the 1970s. Perhaps he was already becoming frustrated at the 1978 Venice Biennale exhibition when his Arte Ambientale program for the Italian pavilion was sandwiched between two starkly different curatorial visions, those of Luigi Carluccio and Lara-Vinca Masini. Crispolti’s promotion of social issues in the section Natura come Sociale, therefore, became intermixed with other art world concerns, such as figuration and metaphysics. Looking toward the 1980s, Crispolti became invested in earlier twentieth-century art movements and progressively less involved in the urban environment and related sociopolitical questions. Much of his attention during the 1980s was taken up with Futurist artists. He was one of the leading scholars to examine the work of these artists that had, after the fall of fascism, been neglected mostly because of their association with the politics of the

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Figure 6.5 Maurizio Nannucci, Alfabetofonetico, 1967, neon tube light mounted on wall. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci

regime. Crispolti dedicated himself extensively to organizing exhibitions and writing about prominent and lesser-known Futurist artists, examining their work from a multitude of different angles, from technology, architecture, ceramics, fashion, and more. For instance, he curated exhibitions like Ricostruzione Futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) at the Museo Civico d’Arte Antica e Palazzo Madama, Turin, June–October 1980; La ceramica futurista da Balla a Tullio d’Albisola (Futurist Ceramics from Balla to Tullio d’Albisola) held at the Sale di Villa Gavotti, Albisola Superiore, May–July 1982; Attraverso l’architettura futurista (Through Futurist Architecture) shown at Galleria Fonte d’Abisso, Modena, 1984; and Futurismi Postali: Balla, Depero e la comunicazione postale futurista (Postal Futurism, Balla, Depero, and the Futurist Postal Communication) installed at the Palazzo Alberti, Florence, 1986. Additionally, Crispolti published many volumes, such as La macchina: mito futurista24 and Storia e critica del futurismo,25 and researched secondary figures associated with Futurism, such as Fillìa, nom d’artiste for Luigi Colombo.26 Crispolti was still active in contemporary art circles, although his dedication to Arte Ambientale artists, and their work after the 1970s, waned. Instead, he organized exhibitions for artists working in traditional media, such as painters, and he supported the

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work of artists like the neorealist Fulvio Muzi, abstract artists Angiolo Mantovanelli and Roberto Donatelli, and the post-Cubist-inspired painter Bruno Cassinari, by developing exhibitions for these individuals.27 He also supported sculptors, planning exhibitions like In materia: immagini dei sei scultori: Birotti, Ciconte, Corsucci, Gianmaria, Giardini, Tito (In Material: Images of Six Sculptors: Birotti, Ciconte, Corsucci, Gianmaria, Giardini, Tito) at Sala 1 in Rome and wrote of the work of Luigi Vollaro and the primitive sculpture of Federico Gismondi.28 These artists, at the time, were under-recognized, and Crispolti showed interest in their work at a time when other curators and critics had overlooked them. Crispolti exhibited interest in their work when other in both museums and galleries. This indicates that Crispolti not only embraced artists working with conventional materials but also chose to display their work in long-established art settings. However, Crispolti did not abandon Arte Ambientale entirely, and he did continue to work with Somaini, for instance. Crispolti organized his exhibition in 1988 at the Civica Galleria d’arte moderna in Gallarate29 Crispolti also continued to have connections to Gubbio—where he had curated a number of Arte Ambientale exhibitions during the 1970s—organizing another show in 1988, Traccia corporea: intenzioni progettuali per Gubbio attraverso il cemento: Mirella Bentivoglio, Nicola Carrino, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli (Bodily Trace: Concrete Design Intentions for Gubbio: Mirella Bentivoglio, Nicola Carrino, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli), held at the Palazzo dei Consoli, but this appears to be the only exhibition of this type after the intense Arte Ambientale activity of the previous decade.30

Art in Urban Space in the 1990s The 1990s, however, ushered in yet another shift, and the legacy of the 1970s urban experiments begin to reemerge, albeit under radically different conditions. In the decade after the conservative, private, and neo-corporate initiatives of the 1980s, there was a reopening toward the public sphere, prompting a reevaluation of the domain outside of the personal and a renewed interest in the political.31 The welfare state became topical again, after significant attempts to privatize much of the country’s infrastructure proved to be problematic, and the center-left rekindled alliances with organized labor forces.32 For the first time in Italian history, there was also a sustained attempt to crack down on corruption that had been endemic to the nation since Mussolini, which was known as the mani pulite (clean hands) initiative. In the 1990s, artists created interventions, deploying strategies of participation directly in the city, that recalled those of Arte Ambientale in the 1970s. They were operations that registered the desire for a return to examining the social reality of the urban environment. There was also a renewed interest in decentralizing art and exhibiting it outside the private sphere of art institutions.33 Yet, if the practice in the 1970s consisted of radical choices—inside or outside the art system—in the 1990s, the model was less black and white, and conformed to a more heterogeneous and fluid context. According to art historian Alessandra Pioselli, artists did not have to abide by absolute distinctions—for or against, conform or rebel, complacency or critique—but could instead operate within confines that now seemed more porous.34 Exhibitions and collaborations among artists and other urban professionals were vital indicators of the renewed interest in working in the public sphere and engaging with questions of the lived environment. For instance, the group Associazione

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Arte Continua (Association Art Continues)—based in San Gimignano, Tuscany, and founded in 1994 by Mario Cristiani, Lorenzo Fiaschi, Luciano Pistoi, and Maurizio Sigillo—curated recurring shows in different towns throughout the region, titled Arte all’Arte, from 1996 to 2006. These decentralized exhibitions activated urban spaces between Montalcino and San Gimignano to promote the diffusion of contemporary art in local contexts, which recalled Enrico Crispolti’s exhibitions in Volterra and Gubbio throughout the 1970s. Different curatorial voices organized each Arte all’Arte edition, calling on contemporary artists to create site-specific artwork that engaged with the local territory and involved its inhabitants.35 For instance, art critic Angela Vattese produced the 1998 show, whose theme was “Art, Architecture, and Landscape.” She worked with local administrations in the towns of Casole d’Elsa, Colle Val d’Elsa, Montalcino, Poggibonsi, Volterra, Siena, and Pisa and invited both Italian and international artists, such as Louise Bourgeois, Eyse Erkman, Ilya Kabakov, Olaf Metzel, Mimmo Paladino, and Bert Theis. Moreover, throughout the decade, there was a renewed sense of social practice, such as the feminist group La Casina, composed of artists Antonella Ortelli, Silvia Truppi, and Carla Vendrami, who since 1991 worked with the Prison of San Vittore in Milan to create a safe and flexible space for creativity and self-empowerment among the female prison population. Artists were also keen to work together, and this reasserted a sense of connectivity, but not necessarily collectivism. For instance, this was strongly manifested with the founding of the Oreste Network, which was presented in the Italian pavilion of the 1999 Venice Biennale. According to the exhibition pamphlet, Oreste included varied Italian artists who have been working together since 1997 with the aim of “spaces of freedom and action for ideas, inventions, projects,” much the same way as the Arte Ambientale artists formed a loose network during the 1970s.36 Likewise, interest in the urban space continued into the twenty-first century, with projects like the Isola Art Center in Milan, which involved artists Bert Theis, Stefano Boccalini, and Gruppo A12, among others. Since 2003, they brought together urban planners and activist collectives to conserve the identity of the city.37 From these initiatives, two artists can be identified as carrying out artistic practices that directly relate to 1970s Arte Ambientale work. Since the 1990s, Vittorio Corsini, who was born in 1956 and is based in Florence, has been working in the urban environment, directly engaging with questions of communication and interaction in public space. One of his earliest interventions was Romanza (feminine noun of Romance) in Pontassieve, near Florence, in 1990, where he installed a curved bronze fence next to an oak tree in an unremarkable urban public garden [Figure 6.6]. Inserting the fence as a piece of urban furniture transformed the space, and suddenly created a vista by which to stop and observe the tree and park.38 Continuing to work outside in the city, Corsini’s 2004 Le parole scaldano, created in Quarrata, near Pistoria, was a glass house in the recently renovated city square [Figure 6.7]. Corsini meant to break down the barriers between private and public and create an open and accessible environment where viewers and participants could be present, just as they might be at home.39 The project was about reclaiming public space and inhabiting it as if one would the private realm. In this regard, Le parole scaldano seems to echo many of Ugo La Pietra’s projects from the 1970s, by bringing normal indoor behaviors outside into the street. The glass house had two benches inside for participants to sit, and it was accessed by a bridge over a shallow pool, creating a distinction between the rest of the piazza and this secluded yet public space.

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Figure 6.6 Vittorio Corsini, Romanza, 1990, bronze railing and oak in public garden, Pontassieve, Tuscany. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Vittorio Corsini

Inside, the artist rendered a tranquil setting, where one could hear the trickling of the water, enjoy the warm sun coming in through the glass, and make space for individuals to converse with one another. On the walls were sentences that the inhabitants of the town gave to the artist anonymously. These words formed a permeable fence between the outside and inside, and they reported the hopes, dreams, and desires of the inhabitants, much like Nannucci’s Parole. Many of the themes at the forefront of the Arte Ambientale works of the 1970s are present in Corsini’s work in the 1990s and beyond, such as the socialization of inhabitants in their lived, urban spaces, as well as the use of participation for the creation of the piece by ordinary citizens. Also since the 1990s, Alberto Garutti, who was born in 1948 in Galbiate, Lombardy, has investigated public space and the role of art in forming relationships with inhabitants. Garutti has said, “I believe that the dialogue with the spectator, always at the base of my work, has an even greater role today, in a moment when art returns to public space, in close relationship with the reality of life, with architecture, and with a public that is not restricted by the art world.”40 For the 2000 edition of Arte all’Arte in Colle di Val d’Elsa, organized by Roberto Pinto and Gilda Williams, Garutti worked

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Figure 6.7 Vittorio Corsini, Le Parole Scaldano, 2004 glass, stainless steel, water, lights, words from people in public square, Quarrata, Pistoia. Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Vittorio Corsini

with inhabitants to restore a building to use for house meetings and practice sessions for the local Vincenzo Bellini choir, one of the town’s most symbolically important institutions.41 The project emerged from Garutti’s relationship with the citizens of Colle Val d’Elsa and from the desire to produce an artwork that would be useful to the community. By using the entire budget made available to the artist by the exhibition organizers, the project took on the character of a gift from the artist to the citizenry and enabled the return of music to the townspeople. At the same time, like many of the 1970s Arte Ambientale projects, Garutti’s intervention also engaged with urban decay and requalification, and with community organizing and participation. Working in the urban environment is part of Garutti’s practice, and just after the Vincenzo Bellini choir project, he initiated Piccolo museo per gli abitanti del quartiere Don Bosco (Small Museum for the Inhabitants of the Don Bosco Neighborhood) in Bolzano, 2000–2003 [Figure 6.8]. Also called Piccolo Museion, the project aimed to make artwork accessible to a working-class neighborhood by displaying one work from the collection of Museion—the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bolzano—inside a concrete and glass cube in a three-month cycle. While one could not enter the Piccolo Museion, the two walls of glass gave inhabitants unprivileged

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Figure 6.8 Alberto Garutti, Piccolo Museion—In questa piccola stanza saranno esposte opere del Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Bolzano per far sì che i cittadini di questo quartiere le possano vedere, 2001, Quartiere Don Bosco, Bolzano, concrete, glass, lights, and electrical outlets, 320 × 440 × 440 cm. Source: Image courtesy of the Museion, Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bolzano © Alberto Garutti

access to contemporary art outside the confines of the museum and in their own lived space. Again, the theme of decentralizing the art from its traditional spaces of display was key to Garutti’s strategy, as it was with the Arte Ambientale artists in the 1970s. Similarly to Vaccari’s 1973 Photomatic d’Italia, Garutti, by shifting the location of the display of art, questioned the art world system from the outside.42 However, Garutti fluidly navigated both internal structures of the art institutional sphere and the spaces outside in the community. Working in tandem with the art museum, Garutti here formed a partnership to question the boundaries of power, accessibility, and audiences of the art museum. As Pioselli mentioned, the practices during the 1990s that recalled earlier Arte Ambientale interventions were not so clearly defined in terms of blackand-white opposition, as art museums and galleries have evolved since the 1970s to work more closely with artists to query the economies and systems of production and display of art. While the 1990s projects bear direct similarities to 1970s Arte Ambientale, none of the artists who produced them cite their historical counterparts as precedents or influences. What is surprising is how absent the activities of 1970s Italy are in the

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conceptual framework of artists working two decades later. Instead, the new generation of Italian artists tended to look abroad for inspiration. For instance, artist Cesare Pietroiusti mentions Suzanne Lacy’s 1995 “Mapping the Terrain—A New Genre of Public Art” as an important reference point.43 Likewise, in the 2004 publication Io arte, noi città. Natura e cultura dello spazio urbano, the curator Daniela Fonti traces a history of Arte Ambientale in Italy by overstepping the decade of the 1970s completely, mentioning work by Mirko Basaldella in the 1950s and Pietro Consagra in the 1980s.44 The exhibitions that Enrico Crispolti organized, and the projects by the Arte Ambientale artists covered in this book, are omitted. This exclusion demonstrates that 1970s Arte Ambientale is a history that needs to be recovered so that it can have a bearing on how we understand more recent interventions in the urban environment. A detailed study of 1990s environmental practices, and how they relate to the legacies of 1970s Arte Ambientale, would be fertile ground for this book’s sequel. Much scholarship is needed on the Italian urban art topography of the 1990s, and these few examples are just the beginning. Further, an examination of the relationship between Arte Ambientale and Environmental Art or Land Art in urban and non-urban settings in Europe, America, and other sites is another topic in which scholarship could burgeon. What seems paramount for this book, however, is for this history of 1970s Arte Ambientale to be written into any future art historical account, as it served as a foundation, a vital substrate, to all the experiments that came later. Although to this day the radical urban and participatory interventions of Arte Ambientale artists in the 1970s are still largely ignored, their position on the margins is what allowed them to be so subversive. Ultimately, what they relinquished in the 1970s was fame and fortune that came with institutional recognition, not in fact their position in the neo-avant-garde. In effect, they did not flee the center but rather brought it with them to the margins.

Notes 1. Also during the 1980s and 1990s in Tuscany, a number of artists established sculpture gardens, such as Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in 1978, Daniel Spoerri in 1991, Kurt Metzler in 1995, and Paul Fuchs in 1996. 2. Paul Ginsborg uses the term to describe a decline in collective action. See Ginsborg, “Family, Culture and Politics in Contemporary Italy,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin Press, 1990), 42. 3. Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, with an inter-ministerial decree, appointed General Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa on August 9, 1978, to lead a Nucleo speciale di polizia giudiziaria (Special Judicial Police Unit) with the specific task of fighting terrorist activity. See Erica Chenoweth, “Italy and the Red Brigades: The Success of Repentance Policy in Counterterrorism,” in Countering Terrorism and Insurgency in the twenty-first century: International Perspectives, ed. James J. F. Forest (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2007), 358–359. 4. Giorgio Bocca, Il caso 7 Aprile: Toni Negri e la grande inquisizione (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1980). 5. After serving time in prison, Negri was exiled to Paris in 1984, along with many of his colleagues. Thanks to Negri’s preexisting connections in Paris, he was able to find work as a university lecturer and continue his political activity by collaborating with French left intellectuals in journals such as Futur Anterieur. 6. Patrick Gun Cuninghame, Autonomia a Movement of Refusal: Social Movements and Social Conflict in Italy in the 1970’s (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2002), 10. 7. Bettino Craxi, leader of the Partito Socialist Italiano (nominally socialist but in reality rather conservative) was prime minister of Italy 4 August 1983–17 April 1987. He skillfully

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

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outmaneuvered the PCI and became the DC’s closest ally in the 1980s. Giulio Andreotti, leading figure of the DC, was prime minister of Italy three times: 17 February 1972–7 July 1973; 29 July 1976–4 August 1979; and 22 July 1989–28 June 1992. In the mid 1990s he was tried and eventually acquitted for long suspected links with the Mafia. Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 410–412. Moreover, Anglophone postmodern text by Fredric Jameson, Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, and Douglas Crimp were not translated into Italian until the 1990s, at best. As an influence, these texts were completely absent from the Italian context. Christian Caliandro, La trasformazione delle immagini: l’inizio del postmoderno tra arte, cinema e teoria, 1977– 1983 (Milano: Electa, 2008), 22–23. Silvia Bottinelli, Il Rapporto tra arte e paesaggio nell’Arte Ambientale in Toscana (Universita degli studi di Pisa, 1999/2000). See especially chapter three, “Le motivazioni della committenza e del collezionismo di Arte Ambientale in Toscana,” 100–156. Louisa Somaini, “Cronaca di opera e giorni,” in Somaini: le grandi opere: realizzazioni progetti utopie, ed. Enrico Crispolti, and Luisa Somaini (Milano: Electa, 1997), 333. Artist Davide Mosconi would have taken visitors’ photographs. Up until 1976 the state-run company RAI Italia had the monopoly over program broadcasting. After this date, privately owned television companies could also broadcast programming. See Christopher Wagstaff, “The Media,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Rebecca J. West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 294–295. Aldo Grasso, “La TV negli anni settanta,” in L’Italia repubblicana nella crisi degli anni settanta, ed. Fiamma Lussana and Giacomo Marramao (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2003), 59–60. Ugo La Pietra, Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 1960–2000 (Milano: Mazzotta, 2001), 129. Ugo La Pietra, “Memoria tridimensionale, memoria bidimensionale,” in Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 130. Franco Summa, La città della memoria (Mazzotta: Milan, 1986) and Franco Summa, Paesaggi per un anno, unpublished. Ibid., n.p. Original Italian: “La città è, appunto, il luogo, a un tempo fisico e metafisico, in cui forme, immagini, concetti, simboli vengono visti vivere e relazionarsi nel fluire del tempo storico, giacché l’uomo ha sempre tradotto in segni le proprie idee, facendole diventare codici, poesie, pitture, pareti, colone, statue, giardini.” Enrico Crispolti, “Appunti di un lettore,” in La città della memoria, n.p. Certain pages of Paesaggi per un anno were reproduced in Summa, Poeticamente abita l’uomo (Milano: Editoriale Modo, 2003), 72–73. I also was able to see the work when I visited Summa in Pescara, June 26, 2012. Franco Vaccari, Esposizioni in tempo reale = Exhibitions in Real Time, ed. Vittorio Fagone, Valerio Dehò, Nicoletta Leonardi, and Chiara Scardoni (Bologna: Damiani, 2007), 146. Ibid., 154. For instance, in 1981, Nannucci had his first one-man show, Who’s Afraid of Blue, Red, and Yellow, curated by Simon Cutts, at the Coracle Gallery in London. He had his first mid-career museum retrospective in 1982 at the De Vleeshal Museum in Middelburg, the Netherlands, titled To Cut a Long Story Short. Enrico Crispolti, La macchina: mito futurista (Roma: Editalia, 1986). Enrico Crispolti, Storia e critica del futurismo (Roma: Laterza, 1986). Enrico Crispolti, Fillia: fra immaginario meccanico e primordio cosmico (Milano: Mazzotta, 1988). Fulvio Mazi dal 1932 a oggi: cinquant’anni di pittura, Castello Cinquecentesco, L’Aquila, July 15–September 30, 1982; Angiolo Mantovanelli: pittore a l’Aquila, Museo Nazionale d’Abruzzo, November 20–December 12, 1982; Roberto Donatelli, tra visionarietà ed erotismo, Pinacoteca e Musei Comunali, Macerata, April–May, 1984; Bruno Cassinari: opere recenti; mostra personale. Galleria Andre, Rome, 1989. Enrico Crispolti and Tito Amodei, In materia: immagini di sei scultori: Birotti, Ciconte, Corsucci, Gianmaria, Giardini, Tito (Roma: Sala 1, May–June 1984); Enrico Crispolti, Luigi Vollaro: sculture (Salerno: EDI. SAL Edizioni, 1984); and Enrico Crispolti and Antonio Gasbarrini, Federico Gismondi: la piccola scultura (L’Aquila: Angelus Novus Edizioni, 1988).

200

Conclusion

29. Enrico Crispolti and Francesco Somaini, Francesco Somaini: mostra antologica 1955– 1988: Comune di Gallarate, Civica Galleria d’arte moderna, dal 9 ottobre al 5 novembre 1988 (Bologna: Bora, 1988). 30. Enrico Crispolti and Mirella Bentivoglio, Traccia corporea: intenzioni progettuali per Gubbio attraverso il cemento: Mirella Bentivoglio, Nicola Carrino, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli: Palazzo dei Consoli, sala dell’Arengo (Cortona: Etruria, 1988). 31. Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes, “Between Crisis and Transition: Italian Politics in the 1990s,” in Crisis and Transition in Italian Politics, ed. Martin Bull and Martin Rhodes (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2014), 1–13 and Martin Bull and James L. Newell, Italian Politics: Adjustment under Duress (Oxford: Polity Press, 2008). 32. Marco Simoni, “Labor and Welfare Reforms: The Short Life of Labor Unity,” in Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe, ed. Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe A. Veltri (London: Routledge, 2010), 229–243. 33. Antonella Massa, I parchi museo di scultura contemporanea (Florence: Loggia de’Lanzi, 1995), 13. 34. Alessandra Pioselli, “Arte e scena urbana: modelli di intervento e politiche culturali pubbliche in Italia tra il 1968 e il 1981,” in L’arte pubblica nello spazio urbano: Committenti, artisti, fruitori, ed. Carlo Birrozzi and Marina Pugliese (Bruno Mondatori: Milan, 2007), 35. 35. Florian Matzner, “Parlando di arte contemporanea nello spazio pubblico,” in Arte all’Arte: IV edizione, 1999, Associazione Arte continua (San Gimignano, Italy), Florian Matzner, and Angela Vettese (Prato: Artout/Gli ori, 2001), 207. 36. Oreste alla Biennale, exhibition pamphlet, XXXVIII Venice Biennale, 1999, unpaginated. Accessed online: https://issuu.com/noresize/docs/palinsesto, on May 5, 2018, from Wayland, MA. 37. Marco Scotini, “Tensioni urbane: pratiche artistiche e nuovo protagonismo sociale,” in Cittàzioni: un caso di ‘public art’ a Milano, ed. Mimmo Di Marzio (Cinisello Balsamo, Milano: Silvana Editoriale, 2003), 60. 38. Vittorio Corsini, “Lo sguardo del caimano,” in Io arte, noi città. Natura e cultura dello spazio urbano, ed. Patrizia Ferri, Daniela Fonti, and Manuela Crescentini (Gangemi Editore: Roma, 2004), 130. 39. Ibid., 131. 40. Alberto Garutti, “Sull’incontro,” in Io arte, noi città, 41. Original Italian: “Credo che il dialogo con lo spettatore, da sempre alla base dell’esistenza dell’opera stessa, venga ad assumere un ruolo ancora più importante adesso, in un momento in cui l’arte ritorna a vivere nello spazio pubblico, in stretto legame con la realtà della vita, quindi con l’architettura, I contesti pubblici, i media e soprattuto un pubblico che non è più quello selezionato del ristretto sistema artistico.” 41. Roberto Pinto and Gilda Williams, Arte all’arte ’00: arte, architettura, paesaggio: V edizione (Prato: Gli ori, 2001), 69. 42. Stefano Boeri, Alberto Garutti, and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Tre tentativi per un catalogo ragionato dell’opera di Alberto Garutti (Milano: Kaleidoscope Press, 2010), 13. 43. Cesare Pietroiusti, “Arte e ideologia della sfera pubblica. Alcune note critiche e una proposta,” in Io arte, noi città, 45. 44. Daniela Fonti, “Dalla ‘sintesi delle arti’ all’Arte Ambientale: per una specificità Italiana,” in Io arte, noi città, 141–149.

Index

Note: Italicized page numbers indicate a figure on the corresponding page. Alabaster 16, 38–39 Alviani, Getulio 1–2 Ambiente come Sociale (Environnent as Social) exhibition (1976) 2, 45–55, 49, 50, 51, 52 appropriation, defined 108 Argan, Giulio Carlo 125 Arte Ambientale (environmental art): defined 2; history of 1–7, 3, 54; legacy of 181–182; operatore estetic 14–16; rete diffusa 4, 7–11, 9, 10; urban environment 11–14, 193–198, 195, 196, 197; withdrawal to private life 182–193, 185, 186, 188, 190, 192 arte nel sociale (art in the social sphere) 2 Arte Povera 6, 7, 16, 27, 30, 36, 66 Associazione Arte Continua (Association Art Continues) 193–194 A/Traverso 167 audience engagement: introduction to 51–52, 142–146, 143, 144; Nannucci, Maurizio 142–146, 143, 144, 159–170, 162, 168; summary of 171; Vaccari, Franco 142–159, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156–157, 158 autogestione (self-management) 11, 145, 182 Autonomia movement 6, 12, 182 autonomy 12, 24–25, 28, 47, 108, 112, 144–145, 154, 181–182 avant-garde 14, 27, 30, 36, 46, 55, 95, 125–126, 161, 169, 188, 198 Bagnoli, Giorgio 44 Bandini, Mirella 111 Barilli, Renato 68, 153–154 Bauhaus movement 5, 125, 132 beni culturali (cultural heritage) 26 Benvenuti, Carlo Maurizio 49 Beolco, Angelo 47 Berardinone, Valentina 34, 35 Berlinguer, Enrico 68 Bertini, Alberto 45

Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship 5 Bloc, André 68 Borghesi, Sergio 44 Bosio, Gianni 118 Bucarelli, Palma 27 Caioli, Cavalier Aurelio 39 Calder, Alexander 29 Calogero, Piero 182–183 Campo Urbano exhibition 25, 30–37, 46 capitalism 12, 67, 72, 73, 77, 111, 118, 145 Caramel, Luciano viii, 6, 16, 25, 29–37, 56, 181 Carandente, Giovanni 25, 29 Catalano, Tullio 49 Cavaliere, Alik 39, 40 Celant, Germano 6, 7, 36, 54–55 Celentano, Adriano 164 Centro Sociale dell’Ospedale Psichiatrico 39, 41 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Modern) 116 città partecipata (participatory city) 30 civic engagement 11, 146 civic participation 132, 142, 145 Collectif d’Art Sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) 4, 46 communism 68, 85, 108, 164 conceptual-sculptural interventions 78 constructivism 54, 68 controinformazione periodicals 167 Cooperativa Artieri (Artisan Cooperative) 38 Corsini, Vittorio: Le parole scaldano 194–195, 196; Romanza 194, 195 Cossiga, Francesco 142 countercultural sphere 5, 111, 143, 167 craft 8, 16, 28, 38–39, 52, 130 Crescentini, Manuela 45 Crispolti, Enrico: Ambiente come natura 63; Ambiente come Sociale 16, 45–55, 106,

202

Index

117; Arte Ambientale (defined) 2–4, 183; Arti visive e partecipazione sociale 14, 28, 145–146; curatorial role 24–27, 55, 66, 88, 90, 191–193, 194, 198; Dissuasione Manifesta: Operazione 24; Extra media 15, 112; fogli 75; Operatore culturale 14–16, 143; Summa 10; Urgenza nella città 70–71, 83, 98; Volterra 16, 37–45, 73 curatorial autonomy 24–25 Dalisi, Ricardo 52–53 D’Annunzio, Gabriele 128 decentralization 25–28, 46–47, 54–56, 117 decentralized exhibition spaces 26–37, 29, 31, 33–34, 35, 56–57 decontestualizzazione-contestuale (contextual decontextualization) 127 Democrazia Cristiana (DC) 28, 133, 142, 173, 176, 199 De Sanctis, Fabio 39, 40 De Stijl 125–126 détournement 111 diritto alla città (right to the city) 70, 107–108, 117, 129, 134, 145 diritto amministrativo (administrative rights) 14 diritto di cittadinanza (right to citizenship) 145 divorce referendum 133 Duchamp, Marcel 39 economic miracle/economic boom (miracolo economico) 1, 6, 18, 21, 28, 38, 60, 67, 173 environmental art see Arte Ambientale Erosch, Gioacchino 53 experimental music 160 Extra media 15, 112 extramural exhibitions: Campo Urbano show 25, 30–37; decentralized exhibition spaces 26–37, 29, 31, 33–34, 35, 56–57; introduction to 24–26; Venice Biennale exhibition 45–55, 49, 50, 51, 52; Volterra ’73 exhibition 37–45, 40, 43, 44 fabbrica diffusa (diffused factory) 11 Falasca, Franco 49 fascism 24, 27–28, 32, 34, 36, 47, 56–57, 87, 128 femininist 73, 194 Ferrarotti, Franco 107 Fiumi, Enrico 38 Fiumi, Piero 45 Fluxus group 5, 161, 165, 167, 170 Foot, John 118 Formaggio, Dino 133 Foucault, Michel: Madness and Civilization 41 Futurism 54, 167, 191–192

Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (GNAM) 26–27, 29 Garutti, Alberto: Piccolo Museion 196–197, 197 Gasparini, Alberto 69 Gentile, Emilio 32 gentrification 4, 13, 18, 56, 111, 119, 134 GESCAL (GEStione Case per i Lavoratori, Housing Management for Workers) 13, 116–117, 119 gestione collettiva (collective management) 38 Giammarco, Nino 16, 45 Giustarini, Luciano 44, 45 Gori, Giuliano 183 graffiti 49, 147 Gramsci, Antonio 85, 164 grassroots activism 13, 46, 54, 55, 117, 138, 176 Gregotti, Vittorio 46 Grossi, Pietro 160–161, 164 Groupe Espace (Group Space) 68 Gruppo Comunicazione (Communication Group) 8 Gruppo Coordinamento 49 Gruppo ENNE 5, 7, 22, 66 Gruppo T 5, 7, 21, 66 Habermas, Jürgen 6, 167, 178; “On Social Identity” 165 Harvey, David 111 Hobbs, Robert 184 Hollein, Hans 110–111 Holocaust 93 Huebler, Douglas 153 IACP (Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari, Autonomous Institute for Working-Class Housing) 13, 22, 53, 116–117, 119, 137 impermanent concrete sculptures 84–98, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96 INA-Casa (Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni) 13 industrialization 13, 67, 70, 111, 124, 134 Institutional Critique 4–5, 26, 41 Interventi nella città e sul paesaggio (Interventions in the City and Landscape) 1–2 Irace, Fluvio 73 Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari 53 Italian Constitution 27–28 Italian Liberal Party (PLI) 45 Jacobs, Jane: Death and Life of Great American Cities, The 70 Jung, Carl 71 Kaprow, Allen 148–150 Kinetic Art 5, 7, 19, 57, 66, 87 Kwon, Miwon 4–5

Index Laboratorio di Comunicazione Militante 53 Land Art 4–5, 46, 66 La Pietra, Ugo: Abitare e essere ovunque a casa propria (To Live and Be at Home Everywhere) 123–124; Abitare la città (Live the City) 123–124, 124; Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un altra? 16, 32, 33; Commutatore 112–113, 113; extramural exhibitions 32, 33; Gli itinerari preferenziali 113–116, 114, 115, 135; I gradi di libertà 48, 51; IN: argomenti e immagini di design (Theories and Images of Design) magazine 7–8; Interno/Esterno (Internal/External) 187, 187; Interventi pubblici per la città di Milano (Public Interventions for the City of Milan) 123; La conquista dello spazio (The Conquest of Space) 120–121, 121; Progettare Inpiù (More Design) magazine 8; Recupero e reinvenzione (Recovery and Reinvention) 117, 118; Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività (Reconversion Project, Equipment for the Community) 17, 122, 122–123; Segnali di fuoco 2, 3; themes of 1–2, 10, 10, 17, 185–189; urban interventions 106–107, 107, 109–124, 113, 114, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 129; Verso il centro di Milano 119–120, 120; Viaggio sul Reno 9, 10, 10, 181 Lefebvre, Henri 6, 45, 70, 100, 111, 135, 136 Leonardi, Nicoletta 21, 154, 174, 176, 199 libera uscita (freedom to leave) 41 Lorusso, Francesco 142 Lotta Continua 108, 142, 167, 172, 178, 179 lotta sociale (social struggle) 107 Luperini, Ilario 39 Magnifico, Lorenzo il 42 mani pulite (clean hands) initiative 193 Manzoni, Piero 27, 39, 55, 57 Marcolli, Attilio 31–32 Mari, Enzo 14, 22 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 167 Martiis, Plinio de 26 Marxism 12, 13, 22, 111, 125, 164 Masini, Lara-Vinca 1–2, 191 Matta-Clark, Gordon 4, 11 Mazzuchelli, Franco 42, 44 McLuhan, Marshall 8 Milan Triennale 27, 45 Minimalism 4–5, 184 Minore, Renato 127 Mitscherlich, Alexander 70 movimento d’arte concreta (Concrete art movement) 68 Mulas, Ugo 29, 31, 32, 34, 35 Mumford, Lewis 73; City in History, The 70 Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) 55

203

Namuth, Hans 55 Nannucci, Maurizio: Alfabetofonetico 191; audience engagement 142–146, 143, 144, 146, 159–170, 162, 168; Mèla 167–168, 168; More than meets the eye 191; Parole/ mots/word/wörter 18, 143, 143–144, 144, 160–170, 162, 168, 181; Poema idroitinerante (Hydro-Itinerant Poem) 160; Schermature: Intervento sull’illuminazione cittadina 42; Scrivere sull’acqua 161–162, 162; themes of 1, 8, 9, 42, 66, 190–191; This Side is Red, Blue, Green, Yellow 191 National Fascist Party 32 Negri, Antonio 11–12, 108, 110, 134, 145–146, 153–154, 171, 182–183; see also refusal to work; self-valorization neo-avant-garde 27, 55, 161, 198 Nespolo, Ugo 38, 41–42, 45, 65 Neuhaus, Max 166 New Left 182–183 Oliva, Achille Bonito 6, 24 Op Art 5, 26 operatore culturale (cultural operator) 4, 14–16, 38, 44, 46, 53, 143, 169, 182 operatore estetico (aesthetic operator) 14–16 operatori (workers) 38 Paludetto, Franz 96 para-institutional activity 182 participation 4, 11–14, 16, 26, 28, 30, 44, 46, 48, 51–56, 84, 109, 112, 127, 132, 133, 135, 142–146, 148–149, 151, 159–160, 163, 165, 171, 189, 191, 193, 195 Pascali, Pino 27 PCI (Partito Communista Italiano) 45, 53, 56, 68, 133, 142, 145 Pettena, Gianni 9, 16, 30–31, 31, 169 photo collages 10, 48, 109, 187 photomontage 17, 48, 63, 66–68, 71–73, 75–82, 98, 110, 117, 184, 185 piazza 2, 7, 17, 25, 29, 30–34, 42, 48, 67, 73, 79, 80–84, 88, 90, 93–95, 96, 97, 108, 119, 120, 129, 130, 133, 142, 163, 181–182, 194 Pollock, Jackson 55 Portoghesi, Paolo 1 proletarian housing (working class housing) 53, 75, 113, 116–119 proletariato giovanile (proletarian youth) 144 quartiere-dormitorio (sleeping neighborhoods) 13 radical architecture (architettura radicale) 8, 9, 30, 31 RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana) television 41, 163–164

204

Index

refusal to work (Negri) 12, 108, 110, 145, 182 regionalism 28, 55–56 regolamento istitutivo dei consigli di zona (Institutional Regulations for Neighborhood Councils) 117 Restany, Pierre 10, 151, 183 rete diffusa (diffused network) 4, 7–11, 9, 10, 181 Richter, Gerhard 153 riflusso (reflux) 182–183, 186 Ripa di Meana, Carlo 46–47, 54, 55 Rizzoli, Carlo 142 Rositi, Franco 46–47 Rossi, Aldo: L’architettura della città 71 Rusconi, Marisa 36 Santini, Simona 88 Sarteschi, Umberto 41 Scabia, Luigi 41 Scialoja, Antonio 36 scultura senza confini (sculpture without borders) 127; impermanent concrete sculptures 84–98, 87, 89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 96; introduction to 63–67, 64–65; Urgenze nella città 17, 67–83, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81 sculture abitabili (habitable sculptures) 71 self-definition 14, 15, 145, 182 self-representation 144, 146–159 self-valorization (Negri) 12, 145, 146, 171, 182 Serra, Richard 4 Simonds, Charles 4 Situationist International (SI) group 111 Smith, David 29, 29 social identity 153, 159, 165 social movements 13, 15, 107–108, 134, 182–183 social practices 25, 54, 194 sociopolitical art 106–107 Somaini, Francesco 67–68, 184–185; Antropoammonite 82; Carnificazione di un'architettura 77, 78; Farfalla della solitudine 17, 75, 76; Il grande gelso 81, 82; Ingresso per un centro commerciale 68, 71–72; La caduta del uomo (The Fall of Man) 71, 72; Monumento ai Marinai 68–69; Morte a Venezia 63, 65, 66, 82, 83; ROSA (Rapporto Organico SculturaArchitettura) (Organic Relationship, Sculpture-Architecture) 75–77, 76, 82; Sfinge di Manhattan 48, 49, 77; Spine Verdi 74, 74; Stele spaccata sul tema della vita e della morte 184, 185; Torri: i simboli minacciosi del potere non cambiano (Towers: The Threatening Symbols of Power Do not Change) 79, 80; Urgenze

nella città (Urban Urgencies) 67–83, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 81, 90, 98; see also scultura senza confini Sonfist, Alan 4 sound poetry 160, 170 Staccioli, Mauro 42–43, 147; Anticarro 89, 89; Barriera (Barrier) 90–92, 91; Celle Sculpture 184; Condizione città 95, 96, 97, 96; Intervento sul Piano di Castello 42, 43; Muro 63, 64, 98, 184; Progetto Minosse (Minos Project) 86–87; Ruota (Wheel) 93–94; Scultura-Intervento 48, 50, 94, 97, 181, 184; Sculture in città (Sculptures in the City) 90; Situazione ambiente 87, 87, 93; see also scultura senza confini strategia della tensione (Strategy of Tension) 86, 97 Summa, Franco: Appropriazione e Recupero (Appropriation and Recovery) 129–130, 130; Città della memoria 187, 188, 188; collective unconscious of urban memory 187; Farsi un quadro (To Make a Picture) 126–127; Histoire d’O 126–127; La città della memoria (The City of Memory) 187–188, 188; NO 165; Paesaggio per un anno (Landscapes for a Year) 148, 187–188; Per incontrarsi (In Order to Meet) 17, 128–129, 129; scrittura urbana (urban writing) 127; themes of 15, 17, 52, 63, 69–70, 189; Una bianca striscia di carta 52, 52; Un arcobaleno in fondo alla via (A Rainbow at the End of the Street) 131–132, 164; Una stanza per tutti (A Room for Everyone) 129; urban interventions 107–109 Superstudio, group 8, 9, 110 Surrealism 68, 85, 111, 150–151 technocratization 66–67, 77 tecnostrutture 11 Terenzi, Claudia 45 Terragni, Giuseppe 32, 35 territorio (territory) 4, 14, 26, 32, 55, 65–66, 80, 142 Tomassoni, Italo 125 Trafeli, Mino 44 Transavanguardia 6, 189 Unione Commercianti 119, 120 urban environment: Arte Ambientale and 11–14, 193–198, 195, 196, 197; introduction to 42, 106–109, 107; La Pietra, Ugo 106–107, 107, 109–124, 113, 114, 115, 118, 121, 122, 124, 129; Summa, Franco 124–134, 130, 218; summary 134–135 urbanism 68, 73, 111 Urbanism Unitaire 111

Index urban planning 6, 14, 27, 70, 81, 110–111, 131, 134, 194 urban sociology 13, 70 Vaccari, Franco: Ambiente grigio multiuso 189–190, 190; Atest 148, 148; audience engagement 142–159, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156–157, 158; “Exhibition in Real Time” 148–150, 149, 155–159, 156–157, 158; Le Tracce 147; Maschere 148–150, 149; Photomatic d’Italia 143–159, 144, 147, 148, 149, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 171, 181, 197; themes of 1–2, 6, 8, 9–10, 16, 18, 62, 189; Viaggio sul Reno 9, 10, 181 Vattese, Angela 194 Venice Biennale exhibition (1976 Ambiente come sociale): extramural exhibitions 45–55, 49, 50, 51, 52; Franco Vaccari

205

146, 147, 150, 151, 153–155, 159, 189; introduction to 2, 16–18, 25, 27, 30; Somaini and Staccioli 63, 64, 65, 68, 82, 83, 97, 184; Ugo La Pietra 106, 117 Virno, Paolo 153, 155, 165 visual poetry (poesia visiva) 147, 170 Volterra ’73 exhibition 37–45, 40, 43, 44 Warhol, Andy 150 worker and student movement (1968) 5, 7, 14, 18, 24–25, 27, 41, 85–86, 144–145, 169 working class 12, 13, 14, 48, 52, 53, 68, 74–75, 95, 112–113, 116–119, 124, 134, 163, 167, 169, 183, 187, 196 World Trade Center 75 Yates, Douglas 28 Zona organization 169–170