Fabrizio Clerici, "Un Istante Dopo (An Instant After)" (1978). Oil on table, 41 x 61 in.

Photo by Paolo Bressano

Michelangelo Pistoletto, performance view of "Le Trombe del giudizio (The trumpets of justice)," Rome (1968). (Pictured: Michelangelo Pistoletto and Maria Poppi)

February 2009 Reviews

Tetsumi Kudo

Giorgio Morandi

White Columns Annual

Ari Marcopoulos

Lisa Sanditz

Omer Fast

Sarah Lucas

Jost Münster

Charline Von Heyl

Hannah Villiger

Vik Muniz

Jannis Kounellis Maurizio Cattelan Vanessa Beecroft Fabrizio Clerici Luciano Fabro Luigi Ontani Shaq's Big Debut In the Right Circles

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It was a Venetian — a printer named Aldus Manutius — who first pitched his text at a brash angle, differentiating it from upright Roman letters. Ever since, to italicize means to set apart, to distinguish. The kinetic bent of that formatting bears the name not of Venice, however, but of the entire peninsula. And it was in the name of Italy’s contemporary art at large that this exhibition’s curator, Francesco Bonami, set apart 200 objects by more than 100 artists — most of the work being drawn from the collection of François Pinault — in the canal-lapped Palazzo Grassi.

Even before its unveiling, the exhibition stirred up polemics that rippled far beyond the lagoon. Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva, the respective founders of the artworld enterprises arte povera and the Transavanguardia, huffed over the show’s omissions, while Jannis Kounellis and other high-profile artists refused to lend their work to its errant parameters. Kounellis cited "ideological" differences, and pursued legal means to keep his Scarpette d’oro (1971) out of the show — a case unprecedented in Italy. Others complained that not enough space had been dedicated to historically important artists. But it was, conversely, the show’s generous breadth that rankled. The artist Salvo, related only tangentially to arte povera, was represented through an entire room of his wry, conceptual Lapidi (Tombstones), in addition to a painting and a photographed self-portrait as Raphael. Three canvases by Fabrizio Clerici alone added up to the amount of space devoted to all the painters of the Transavanguardia. In its sprawling dimensions, eschewal of chronological procession, and mixing of media, "Italics" refuses to let any (formal, ideological, or art-historical) sum eclipse the multiplicity of its parts.

The exhibition catalogue’s meticulous time line of historical events is at odds with the show’s breezy groupings, a fact that seems not so much reconstructive as provocatively — and perhaps productively — arbitrary. Carol Rama may be, like Vanessa Beecroft, a notable female artist, but her Presagio di Birnam (1970), an autobiographical assemblage of deflated tire tubes, shares little with the latter’s watercolor evocations of eating disorders in The Book of Food (1993), beside which it stands. Still, the exhibition does not dispense entirely with precedent and genealogy. The "tradition" conjured up in its title is on hand not only in a latter-day canvas by Giorgio de Chirico, but in the works of several artists who follow in the vein of Metaphysical painting, among them the aforementioned Clerici. Even Nanni Ballestrini’s Yes to Worker Violence (1972), with its ordered cacophony of boldface slogans, owes as much to the legacy of Futurism as to a 1970s semiotic mutiny.

The more iconoclastic inclusions of the show appeared somewhat strained and constrained, however. Luigi Ontani — almost unknown outside Italy, despite his groundbreaking, performative polyvalence since the 1960s — was represented by a single photograph. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s contribution was Trumpets of Justice (1968), outsize instruments that were once blared in public places: in the exhibition’s galleries, the obstreperous use value of these objects — their material and social history — appeared siphoned off, sanitized. This is perhaps a risk in any attempted museum survey of art practices from the 1960s and ’70s, when, more often than not, artists expressly rejected the gallery system’s commercial and spatial dimensions. Still, to have corralled most of the "political" works into one room — presumably the mother lode of the exhibition’s titular (and somewhat reified) "revolution" — implies that the remaining works are somehow untainted by ideology.

The refusal of an organizing aegis in "Italics" has incited a certain anxiety in Italy, one that the curator anticipated, even invited. In the exhibition catalogue and various press releases, he compared Italy’s curatorial barons to the crippling dominion of the Mafia and the Vatican. Of course, every exhibition has a slant, as it were, italicized or not. Even as Bonami skirted certain paradigms, he adumbrated his own. To some extent, the exhibition’s (lack of) premise — and the scandal that has ensued — have come to eclipse the works it brings together. Yet the polemical tempest might productively echo beyond the teapot of the Italian artworld: Is it the task of a major exhibition simply to recapitulate prevalent art-historical narratives? Do artists have a right to withdraw their works from a show solely on the grounds of intellectual differences?