The New Telemachuses: Young Italian Artists Fifty Years after the Young Italians Exhibition

New York, September 2nd, 1968: the Young Italians exhibition of the works of twelve Italian artists under 40 at the Jewish Museum, which had previously been hosted that same year by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, was ending. It was Alan R. Solomon who had conceived of the event, an art historian and curator who, in 1964, had been the commissioner for the United States Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and was thus responsible for the Italian “invasion” of American Pop Art that had occurred on that occasion. Over half of the American artists who had been invited to show their work in Venice had ties to the New York gallery of Solomon’s friend Leo Castelli, a promoter, along with the gallery owned and run by Ileana Sonnabend, his wife, of American Pop Art, as well as of several emerging Italian talents.

So, it is likely that in 1968, the idea of devoting an exhibition to young Italian art was the result of Solomon’s friendship with Castelli and Sonnabend.(1) Nonetheless, Young Italians did not just aim to support that group of artists from a cultural and art dealing point of view; it also wanted to analyze the common denominators in their works, as well as the American bias that made it so hard to import them to the United States.

In the exhibition catalog, Solomon wrote(2) that the awareness of their ability to produce, distribute, and consume art had led Americans to feel self-sufficient, gradually losing interest in the research that was being done in other countries. Furthermore, the custom of evaluating works based on “National sensibility,” capable of inducing the Americans “to see the world in terms of black and white,” made the “Italian paradox”—i.e. the combination of contradictions such as, for example, a love of modernity but with an eye turned toward the past which Solomon believed underpinned Italian art—something that was difficult for them to understand. According to Solomon the “Italian paradox” was also manifested in two of Italy’s most recent artistic trends: one of them was a response to the modern question of Pop figurativeness, while at the same time upholding the flatness and rectangular shape of the usual painting support; the other, instead, combined the influence of the European Constructivist tradition with modern technology, with Lucio Fontana’s influence, and with the new sculpture being produced in English-speaking countries. In spite of their high quality, Solomon concluded, it was difficult to foresee any developments because of issues within the Italian art system, such as the paucity of successful commercial galleries, the persistent scarcity of collecting, the lack of funds, and the country’s socio-political instability.

The aim of the current show at the Italian Cultural Institute is to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Young Italians exhibition by first modifying its concept: “twelve artists, all under forty. It is not meant to be comprehensive or anthological, but rather to offer some ideas about the new directions among the younger artists,” singling out the two main directions that, albeit apparently in contrast with one another, seem to renew the “Italian paradox” that Solomon spoke about in 1968, but actually underlie a single message. Akin to Young Italians, furthermore, the exhibition aims to ponder the reasons for the scant presence abroad of the art of young Italians. If we read Solomon’s text today we find ourselves wondering whether something in Italy has changed with respect to the difficulties that he determined were the reason for the lack of promotion of young talents, or whether, notwithstanding progress and globalization, the words once uttered by Tancredi in the novel The Leopard, “For things to remain the same, everything must change,” are still true.

Young Italian Art Abroad: An Ever Impossible task?

To understand how and why we have reached today’s impasse vis-à-vis the support of recent Italian contemporary research abroad, we need to briefly go back over the history of Italian art from 1968 onward.

The two most relevant currents that developed in Italy in the postwar period are unquestionably Arte Povera and Trans-avanguardia.

In 1967-1968, when the art historian Germano Celant began promoting the group of young artists whose work he named “Arte Povera,” the world was in the midst of protests: “abandoning the system means revolution,” Celant wrote.(3) With respect to the traditional art criticism which focused on evaluating works and artists ex cathedra, Celant visited the studios of the artists, he befriended them, he did not create a new movement “from the chair,” but rather defined it from below, where the movement was already under way. Acting like their travel companion, he and the artists together experienced the utopian dream of 1968: “The artist went from being exploited, to acting like a warrior, [...] preferring the essentialness of informality, which conversed neither with the social system, nor with the cultural one.”(4) Arte Povera thus broke its ties with the near past and with the intrinsic concepts of State, Country, and Power, in favor of a nomadic art whose goal, as such, was internationalization. And it succeeded in doing so, from the outset projecting its artists beyond the national boundaries, summoned to show their work in numerous events both in Europe and the United States.5  Furthermore, in 1969, Celant published the volume Arte Povera in Italian, British, American, and German editions, and in 1970, he conceived the show Conceptual Art, Arte Povera, Land Art, held at the Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Turin, in order to prove the central role of Italian research in an international context. Even when Celant abandoned the term Arte Povera in 1971 (starting to use it again in the 1980s), he continued to promote the same artists in Italy and abroad, fostering the international success that continues to this day.

A different case is that of Trans-avanguardia, theorized in 1979 by Achille Bonito Oliva. The end of the utopias of 1968, which degenerated into armed struggle and the violent clashes of 1977, produced in Italy a return to all that which until not too long before had been opposed: the concepts of Country, Tradition, Past, and Individuality. This was the context within which Trans-avaguardia was born, a movement that included major exhibitions abroad but fewer in number than those of Arte Povera, and that declared it was against the internationalist utopia of the Arte Povera movement, and instead supported the regional dimension of the genius loci. Unlike Celant, who said he was a travel companion of the artists, Bonito Oliva famously asserted that “La Trans-avanguardia c’est moi,”(6)  underscoring his priority with respect to the artists and attributing himself with the role of deus ex machina of the movement. Bonito Oliva went on, extending this narcissistic cult of individuality to the entire movement: “every artist works by way of individual research [...], driven by a desire that never changes, in the sense that the only thing that changes is its appearance.”7  Like Narcissus, art thus isolates itself in the cult of its appearance and its national borders, convinced of its self-sufficiency in responding to any desire: “the circular and self-sufficient space of art functions according to internal laws regulated by the demiurgic grace of the artist,” who acts according to “a single perspective, that of mental and sensory pleasure.”(8) With these words Bonito Oliva marked the end of the ideological art of the 1960s and foreshadowed the Reagan-era hedonism of the 1980s, as well as the anomy and cult of the individualism of the art that followed.

From the 1980s onwards, the individual replaced the group: Italian art thus became increasingly heterogeneous and hard to define on the basis of specific trends that could also be exported abroad. On the other hand, anomy replaced ideology, and within this total freedom anyone could be an artist: the exponential growth of those who were presumed to be talented made it impossible to know and assess all of them, just as the absence of moments of sharing and dialogue between them hindered the constitution of a common objective. Following the recent economic crisis, moreover, resources have become increasingly scarce in Italy: as an example, this has led to the closing of 26 contemporary art museums, included among those, that joined the AMACI-Associazione dei Musei d’Arte Contemporanea Italiani in 2003.

Pier Luigi Sacco believes that there are no young Italian artists working abroad and supported by the State today because they are crushed by the great artistic powers-that-be, as well as by outsiders capable of exporting their best talents.(9) The truth of the matter is that Italy’s public institutions have shown their reluctance to promote its younger artists in the homeland as well, for fear, perhaps, that few people will be interested in going to see them. This may be because people are less and less attracted to names they are not familiar with, or perhaps owing to the form of xenophilia that causes many to consider support for Italian research “provincial,” hence the preference for foreign artists. This openness toward what is international, no doubt necessary, is however possible, because the institutions of the countries of origin of those foreign artists do not consider it to be provincial to support them in the homeland and abroad. So why not do the same for young Italian artists then?

New Perspectives

Now that we have come to the end of the journey from the Young Italians exhibition to our own day and age, we need to identify the path, if any, that young Italian artists seem to be pointing to in order to get past this impasse.

If we analyze their research, then the way out would appear to be the same one that the psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati(10) attributed to Telemachus. A central character in Homer’s Odyssey, Telemachus, while his father Ulysses is away, witnesses the destruction of his kingdom by the Proci. Though he has never met Ulysses, he gazes at the sea hoping he will return to save Ithaca, his homeland. Telemachus then decides to undertake the dangerous journey to seek news of his father. Only after Telemachus returns to Ithaca does he find Ulysses, and only after recognizing him disguised as a beggar does he help him do away with the Proci. By applying ancient mythology to Italian history, Recalcati states that, after the age of Oedipus, which corresponds to the battle against the Father that took place in 1968 and in 1977, the Father is dissolved and the era of Narcissus is born, whose anomy led to the assertion of total independence, freedom without restrictions or responsibilities, like those of the Proci at Ithaca. “Today we find ourselves in the night of the Proci,” Recalcati remarks; young people thus experience the condition “of the disinherited: no future, the destruction of experience, the loss of desire, slaves to mortal pleasure, unemployment, a state of precariousness.”(11) In short, they are experiencing the same conditions as Telemachus, and like him “they gaze out at the sea waiting for something to return from there. But their wait is not a melancholy paralysis. The new generations are involved—like Telemachus—carrying out the unique action to reconquer their own future, their own legacy,(12) seen as testimony: “This is what inheriting is: discovering that you have become what you have always been, making your own—reconquering—what has always belonged to you.”(13)

In my opinion, young Italian artists today offer proof that what Recalcati theorizes is true. Like Telemachus, they seem to show us the way to emerge from the current critical situation, resisting this condition and invoking a demand for testimony: they do not idealize the Father (institutions and previous art history), nor do they take a stand against him; rather they desire and invoke him, seeking to forge an alliance together with him. Like Telemachus, they are resentful, orphans, abandoned, and like him they are desiderantes: (14) on the one hand, they gaze toward the ‘sea’ (i.e. the Italian context, its art and its history), longing for someone to answer their call in this case related to the need for roots and to be a part of a community and a history; on the other hand, they want to break this link of purely contemplative belonging, perceiving the need for openness, resistance, action and thus for wandering. In line with what Recalcati writes about the new generations, we can see that, in the search for a Father, young Italian artists today do not seem to be invoking either authoritarianism or ideal models; rather, they seek “actions, choices, passions capable of testifying, in fact, to how one can remain in this world with desire and, at the same time, responsibility.”(15)

The goal of the exhibition hosted by the Italian Cultural Institute is to identify the new Telemachuses of Italian art, that is to say, those artists who have made their longing for testimony and responsibility the focus of their work.

The Exhibition at the Italian Cultural Institute

The exhibition stems from conversations and visits to the studios of the artists whose works are on display, the idea being that only by listening to them and following them around as they work can a curator bring to completion the mission underwritten in the etymological root of the description of his or her trade: to curate means “to observe,” but it also means “wisdom,” i.e. responsibility related to observation. In my opinion, the curator must thus be the wise observer of the artists, not a deus ex machina who imposes his or her vision on their work. This explains why each of the works on view at the Italian Cultural Institute has been chosen along with its author, and each author has been asked to write a short descriptive/interpretative text about the work, to be added to the relative caption in the catalogue as well as in the exhibition itself. The readers of the catalogue as well as the visitors to the exhibition can thus achieve an understanding of the works thanks to the “voice” of those who created them.

Although the purpose of the exhibition is to analyze the new Italian art, it is not a comprehensive event aimed at including numerous artists, chosen solely on the grounds of their age, provenance, and CV. Attempting to say everything often means remaining on the surface, and is therefore of no use for the purpose of learning more about the subject. It is of much greater use to make a selection that is capable of shedding light on the unique features and common denominators of the work of young Italian artists today.

Hence, the exhibition includes just twelve artists under the age of 40, who were born and grew up in Italy, and who have already had major solo shows, received awards, been given residencies and/or are already represented by important Italian galleries. Also included are Italian artists who have moved to New York, so as to examine the extent to which Italian culture is present in their work. However, the choice of the twelve artists was especially based on having glimpsed in their work two common tendencies, much like the two “souls” of Telemachus: a nostalgic-invocative one (which encourages Telemachus to ponder the sea) and a practical-active one (which encourages him to take action and cross it).(16) Six of the artists have pondered Italian art history, and then crossed it, inheriting from it manual skill understood to be the reflection and subjectivization of techniques, materials, and sources of the image. Although the remaining six artists do the same, they do so with Italy’s contemporary social, political, environmental, historical and cultural reality, which they ponder and then cross, inheriting from it the insatiable desire to attempt to find alternatives to its most cogent problems.

Depending on the different subjects of contemplation and study, the former group can be referred to as I(n)-Arte [I(n)-Art], the latter one as I(n)-Realtà [I(n)- Reality]. The letter “I” that they have in common harks back to the theme that appears to underlie the works on view: Italy as Image, that is its culture as the origin of creation.

I(n)-Arte

Davide Balliano expresses reality in an organized (geometric) form reminiscent of the Renaissance but aimed at contemplating the void of the decadence of today’s civilization, sublimating it via the attention to technique and the concepts of geometry and proportions gleaned from art history. The preparatory stucco on wood is followed by a graphite and ink drawing, by fields of black plaster, by a layer of stucco that, once it has been sanded, makes the underdrawing visible again, which in the meantime has been filled with scratches and lumps of material. “I’m interested in the anachronism of doing things by hand,” which humanizes what apparently isn’t human, the artist says.(17) In Untitled_0080 (2018) the perfect geometry of the centrifugal trajectories of the blacks and the whites in their extendibility to beyond the edges of the panel indeed refers to the hope that art can restore harmony and rationality to current civilization.

Sublimation is the goal of Antonio Fiorentino’s work as well. In line with Italian tradition, which stretches all the way from the mirabilia of Renaissance studioli to the processes of organic consumption set in motion by Pier Paolo Calzolari, Fiorentino’s research is based on alchemy, on the potential for material to become something other than what it is. Pre-existing materials such as vials and found natural elements are often assembled into sculptures created from scratch, such as the Carrara marble floor in Untitled (2018), which harks back to Michelangelesque sculpture capable of endowing inert material with a soul. The union between such heterogeneous elements eradicates the temporal dimension, elevating the work to a condition of immortality.

Luca Montersastelli instead shows a different relationship with the material. While it is likely that he inherited the use of “poor” materials (concrete and galvanized iron in True Love, 2017) from Arte Povera, he does not turn them into the focus of a metalinguistic analysis: these sculptural forms lose their mechanical-formal value to become the symbols of individuals, who in today’s alienating social environment interconnect in order to build a shared reality. Furthermore, much like Balliano, the fact that the work is “made by hand,” i.e. entailing a manual approach with the material, lies at its core: the effort to leave marks in the final results transforms the sculpture from a monument to a pictorial object that is filled with traces of the past.

The dualism between the manual process and the concept, as well as the experiments conducted with the materials (often industrial ones), also characterizes the research of the two artists who go by the name of Ornaghi & Prestinari. From Giorgio Morandi they inherited an attention to the domestic and mundane dimension that leads them to seek new, symbolic value, to the act of caring for the objects, repairing and rebuilding them, representing them. The aim is to get different materials, as well as art history and the present, to coexist, in order to produce a polysemy that is capable of joining the object with life and the action with the instrument. In Salvia (Sage, 2017), for instance, the reference to Morandi’s bottles and to the chimneys painted by Mario Sironi cohabits with the allusion to an industrial landscape today (this landscape is evoked by the painted iron used for the support) and with the problems of an ecological nature that are related to it.

Serena Vestrucci instead reflects on art’s never-ending ability to overturn what we take for granted, including traditional artistic techniques. In Trucco (in Italian “trucco” means both trick and makeup, 2014-2018) she inverts the status of the painting in relation to that of the canvas: while the canvas has always been considered merely a support for the painting, in Trucco it is the painting that is at the service of the canvas, reminiscent of make-up on our skin. In Vestrucci’s research, the obsession with time (always indicated in the captions to the works), as well as the alternation between the various techniques, evoke a kind of wrestling with materials and ideas that are destined to change, unmasking the illusion of believing in the existence of elements that are taken for granted and permanent.

Eugenia Vanni is radical in her reflection on technique. She brings back ancient fine arts techniques and sublimates them from medium to the object of conceptual analysis. The sole subjects of her works are thus egg tempera on wood (in Ritratto di tela di lino preparata [Portrait of Linen Canvas with Primer], 2017), oil on canvas, fresco, engraving, silverpoint, and the other traditional techniques used in medieval art, especially in Siena, where the artist was born, lives and works. Vanni thus adds to the metalinguistic analysis of art-making, which she borrows from Giulio Paolini, the intrinsic subjectivity in the acknowledgement of her roots.

I(n)-Realtà

Other young Italian artists replace a vocation for manual skill—with the reference to art history that it entails—with a vocation for the construction of a clear-cut realism seen as a concrete commitment to Italy’s political and social situation, currently turbulent, contradictory, and falling apart.

Elena Mazzi studies the relationship between humans and the territory they live in, analyzing the personal and collective identity that stems from it. She wishes to tell the public about the difficulties that afflict the realities examined and, by working with the communities from those places, she causes strategies of survival to emerge. In Colors at the end of the world (2011), for instance, she deals with the cogent issues of immigration in Italy and the xenophobia of Northeastern Italy: through words written in the colors typical of a famous fashion company based in Treviso but using the non-Latin alphabet of the languages spoken by foreigners living in the same city, the work becomes an instrument of consciousness, and offers a strategy for different cultures to live together.

In Italy, the xenophobia against those who speak languages other than Italian is almost a contradiction in terms if we consider how Italian itself has many different dialects. The words written in a non-Latin alphabet in Elena Mazzi’s poster are in fact just as incomprehensible as the sentence in the dialect spoken in a Biellese district of Alta Valle Cervo (a valley in Northwestern Italy) printed on Irene Dionisio’s poster. Dionisio’s research has always focused on the aporias and idiosyncrasies of the economic, social, and political system, on the identity/ individual evolution connected to it, but also on the legacy and the historical and cultural memory it produces. The poster Nüi I Súmma qui (We are here, 2016), along with seven other similar ones, was hung in the public display cases of Piedicavallo in Alta Valle Cervo, and Elena Mazzi’s poster was also hung in a public display area in the city of Treviso: hence, both works bring with them the direct experience with a specific Italian territory and its unique features.

A catharsis from the issue of linguistic differences is offered to us by Domenico Antonio Mancini, who suggests a dictionary of the Italian language, Per una nuova teologia della liberazione 04 (For a New Theology of Freedom 04, 2018), in that language symbolizes a community that is constantly being transformed and the only communication tool that can be used among individuals. In his works, Mancini expresses the need to build an individual political conscience through Italy’s collective memory that is too often blurred by the powers-that-be. The weapons he had built using pages from books ‘shoot’ only culture, that is, the only instrument that is truly revolutionary.

Alongside the social dimension—between parochialism and globalization— and the profound cultural dimension, Italy today is characterized by a deep- rooted domestic-familiar dimension, seen as an affective relationship with the other, but also as a relationship of familiar power. This is the dimension that Silvia Giambrone deals with in her work, convinced that it is the primary dimension in which one is trained to accept the possibility of violence.

The Testiere (Headboards, 2015), a symbol of the most intimate place in our lives, are corroded, the simulacra of relationships that destroy memory and turn it into silence. In her works, the artist always ponders the price to pay for having guaranteed protection on the part of a “familiar” group.

Another dimension that is typical of Italian culture is spirituality, i.e. the ability to see something that is impalpable beyond the tangible reality. This something is what Gian Maria Tosatti seeks to evoke, liaising with the urban space, conceived as the concrete articulation of the human spirit. In particular, the project Sette Stagioni dello Spirito (Seven Seasons of the Spirit, 2013-2016), following Saint Teresa of Ávila, divided the human soul into seven rooms. The artist transfigured those rooms into an equal number of site-specific installations, each of which was conceived for a historical building in Naples, which has often suggested the multiple literary, philosophical, historical, and theological references underlying them. The former Convent of Santa Maria della Fede, for instance, which became a center for activism in Naples in 2014, reminded Tosatti of the years of terrorism in Italy: the fencing mask in 5_I fondamenti della luce – Archeologia (5_The Fundamentals of Light – Archeology, 2015-2016) refers to the figure of a ‘brigatista’ woman and her story (‘brigatista’ is the adjective used to indicate the men and women who were members of the Brigate Rosse [Red Brigades], an Italian terrorist organization in the 1970s).(18)

Linked to the spirituality is the concept of hope that, in an Italy that is economically undergoing a crisis, is also manifested in the impossible dream of a gambling win. In the video The Surface of My Eye is Deeper Than the Ocean (2011), Danilo Correale sheds light on the trick that is inherent to the widespread Italian custom of buying and betting on “scratch cards,” that is, in the so-called ‘economy of hope.’ In his works Correale always engages in a critical analysis of the power structures: he analyzes the fields of economics, politics, the sociology of consumption and their languages in order to identify new spaces of freedom and resistance.

Art as the Horizon of a Culture

Freedom and above all resistance with respect to today’s social, political, and culture system in Italy would appear to be the bywords not only of Correale’s work but of all twelve of the artists exhibited here, in this exhibition.

Moreover, while some of the artists focus their attention on the techniques, materials, and the history of Italian art, and others instead gaze at the country’s social, political, and cultural reality, all twelve artists seem to conceive art as a visualization, or a consolidation in an object/image, of a specific way of experiencing something. Their purpose is not the Oedipal one that underlies Gombrich’s theory, according to which a work of art is valid only if it breaks away from the patterns of the art that preceded it.(19) Nor is their goal hedonistic, a characteristic attributed by Renato Poggioli to avant-garde art, which says that art must provoke a sense of bewilderment by denying rules and common logic.(20) These twelve artists instead conceive the work of art as being that which realizes in the tangible form of the object the epistemological horizon of a specific culture, “culture,” meaning the social group operating within a particular context. They are also aware of the fact that this cultural horizon is not something they received biologically or contemplated from a distance; rather, it must be searched for, akin to what Telemachus does in crossing the sea to seek Ulysses. Giorgio Agamben writes that in order to be contemporary it is not enough to breathe the present; one must thrive on criticism that is capable of making it our own and of placing it in perspective.(21) “There is always some glimmer of hope surviving in every barbarity,” Georges Didi-Huberman echoes:(22)our difficult present is a re-montage of different times, from which the past cannot be banished but must rather be integrated.

In my opinion, legacy, that is, a reflection on the subjective reappropriation of one’s cultural horizon, appears to be the common theme underlying the works of young Italian artists today, addressed to making sure that something comes back from the magmatic sea; that something that Telemachus himself seeks, according to Recalcati, “the transmission of a gift that can humanize life.”(23)