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Poor Art / Arte Povera: Italian Influences, British Responses

Estorick Collection, London 20 September – 17 December

Gino de Dominicis Works from the Collection of Guntis Brands

Luxembourg & Dayan, London 4 October – 19 January

That ideas have a measurable effect on bodies predecessor doesn’t make his work any less at Luxembourg & Dayan offers a reminder,
and things would have been self-evident to the dispiriting. Yet the ingrained Anglo-Saxon by contrast, that some artists do not translate
generation of Italian artists that grew up amidst mistrust of grandiose statements or metaphys- from their original context, however much
the ruins of the Second World War. Poor Art / Arte ical truths has shaped British responses to the they aspire to timelessness.
Povera at the Estorick Collection considers how legacy of arte povera in more productive ways. Dominicis is typically treated as an outlier
their various responses to the dehumanising ten- Ceal Floyer’s Ladder (2010), for instance, seems in the history of postwar Italian art, best remem-
dencies of fascism, global information networks to riff on Joseph Beuys’s elegiac Scala Napoletana bered now for neoconceptual pranks and
and commodity capitalism influenced the British (1985). The German’s bombastic meditation a determined self mythologisation – he faked
artists who emerged, during the 1970s and 80s, on his own mortality comprises an Italian ladder his own death, had ‘invisible sculptures’ deliv-
into an altogether different reality. tied to two hulking lead boulders, seemingly ered to the houses of collectors, refused to allow
The most enduringly powerful of the works to prevent it rising to heaven; Floyer’s more his work to be photographed – that from today’s
exhibited here – Michelangelo Pistoletto’s prosaic aluminium equivalent is propped perspective seem wearingly indulgent. This
silkscreen-on-stainless-steel mediascape up against the wall and deprived of all but its exhibition presents the artist’s later forays into
Television (1962–83), a version of Mario top and bottom rungs. It reads simultaneously paintings that flaunt the trappings of profun-
Merz’s Cone (c. 1967) – reflect on community as wry comedy – perhaps this is the career ladder dity: cosmic scenes, geometric symbols, quasi-
by implying social function (the original Cone that young artists are advised to climb – and primitivist busts (Dominicis made much
contained a pot of boiling beans that puffed existentialist statement: there are only two of his interest in Sumerian civilisation).
smoke out of its top; Pistoletto’s mirror paintings states, and no path between them. The most intriguing of these paintings
insist that the viewer consider his relationship Arte povera’s commitment to performance invite readings at odds with the awe that the
to the work and the world around him). Inscribed as a political medium – Germano Celant had artist aimed to provoke. Senza titolo (Lady Diana)
in ink onto gridded paper, Alighiero Boetti’s Jerzy Grotowski’s ‘poor theatre’ in mind when (1985) presents a gigantic black-clad ghoul with
Untitled (1968) has the quality of a hurried coining the term – is extended by Roadworks a long, conical proboscis that extrudes from the
hieroglyph. A hermetic system in ideograms (1985), Mona Hatoum’s silent protest against surface of the painting. It’s not clear whether the
humanised by inadvertent smudges and police harassment. The short video of her tiny Lady Di, depicted in powder-blue silhouette
botched lines, it prompts the thought that performance, during which she walks barefoot on the ghostly figure’s upturned index finger,
– like the earliest forms of written notation around Brixton with a pair of Doc Martens laced is to be deposited on the tip of the nose, and
that come down to us – it might have as its to her ankles, not only returns art to the streets thereby to ascend it, or huffed up its nostril like
ultimate purpose something so humdrum but – like Pistoletto’s mirror – records and a prettily shaped bump. Geometric abstractions
as recording the transaction of grain. The incorporates the bemused or sympathetic such as Senza titolo (Regina) (1991), with its clean
oft-cited ‘poetry’ of arte povera consists, here, responses of passersby. The symbolic weight lines and glamorous gold and blues, translate
in adapting mundane forms and functions of ‘poor’ or popular materials informs Tony the democratic intellectualism of Suprematist
to generate the charge we associate with ritual. Cragg’s Runner (1985), a figure in relief composed forms into something more closely resembling
Displayed on an adjacent wall, Gavin Turk’s of plastic objects recovered by the artist while a luxury-brand logo.
Red Senza Titolo (2012) also plays on conditions of mudlarking on the Rhine. If Cragg’s work Dominicis was a capable painter who special-
legibility, reimagining one of Boetti’s colourful speaks to contemporary environmental ised, as this show illustrates, in the production
‘word search’ tapestries as a small monochrome concerns, Richard Long’s ENGLAND 1968 (1968) of works that are both visually seductive and
painting. Where Boetti’s original jumbles up retrieves the Burkean sublime from the alpine suggestively mysterious. But the implication
the letters that make up his own name, forcing summit and relocates it in the Bristol Downs. of esoteric meaning feels like an empty promise,
the viewer to decode it, Turk’s pastiche reads Poor Art / Arte Povera is hampered by and by extension a cause for suspicion. These
GAVINTURK from left to right, on every line. the cramped conditions in which it is staged paintings propose the artist as a semidivine
Small Gold Senza Titolo (2012) repeats the joke, and some hard-to-fathom inclusions: Eric figure who – like a priest, shaman or ideologue
but with the artist’s name written from top Bainbridge’s fur-covered The patination of… – has access to some underlying principle that
to bottom. Instead of elevating human gestures (2015) marries the different modernisms would justify what otherwise reads as wilful
and collaborative labour (Boetti’s tapestries of Barbara Hepworth and Meret Oppenheim, mystification (his lifelong reluctance to discuss
were made in collaboration with Afghan tex- but is only obscurely related to the work his work suggests either that he was jealously
tile workers) to the status of art, Turk tethers of artists like Giulio Paolini. The show never- guarding the portal to revelation or, less
art to its economic function as commodity theless hints at the myriad ways in which generously, that it didn’t exist). Dominicis’s
(in a commercial medium, at a sellable scale) the founding principles of the movement work depends on faith in the artist as genius,
and assertion of individual selfhood. were – and might continue to be – adapted channelling truths into forms that must
That the British artist successfully satirises to suit a different time and place. An exhibi- remain obscure to others. The greatness
the humanitarian pretensions of his Italian tion of paintings by Gino de Dominicis of arte povera is that it doesn’t. Ben Eastham

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