Dear Research Diary,

We didn’t have class all week. I found some nice sources on the internet. Firstly, on Flash Art there was Celant’s Notes for a Guerilla War. I still need to read it. There was also the press release for a show based on it at MACBA last year, so fortunately I speak Catalan since I couldn’t find the English version. I’m really going to try to find the “mistakes” that Christov-Bakargiev found in Celant’s interpretation of Grotowski. 

Dear Research Diary,

I have finished reading Towards a Poor Theatre and written the summary for it. I think I want to compare this next to Celant’s Notes for a Guerilla Warfare so I’ll try to see if I can find this online anywhere, or maybe at the BNC! I was also thinking about exploring more in depth the changes and continuities in Celant’s manifestoes. He seems sometimes to be at odds with the artists. At the end I think part of the reason they break away is because they don’t want to be chained to Celant’s thought and essays. Plus all the artists went on to move to the states or just abroad, and “selling out” signed to huge galleries and being paid for their temporal works. I don’t think they felt the way that Celant did in a Szeeman-esque shamanism of the artist. Or even if they initially did, we all know that Manzoni and Pistoletto at least were already big in the art world before being associated with AP. Plus this is over 10 years after the Economic Miracle and there is little that can be done through art to change the world. Once AP splintered apart everyone went on to create material works. 

I’ve been taking notes on Grotowsky’s Towards a Poor Theatre. I can see where Celant drew the inspiration for his own Arte Povera manifesto. There is a lot of spiritual language here, in his theatrical laboratory in Poland, Grotowsky intended to search for the inner innate actor. To achieve this a method was developed of skills to (forget the id?) attain pure acting. Just like the materials of AP. Also a bit Beuys-y. He tries to erase the notion of separation between actor and audience, by having no stage, and incorporating the audience into the architecture. Man – Art relationship was a big concern in AP as well………………….. ~~~~~ 

Dear Research Diary,

Today in class Ilaira Gianni came to speak about her research experience and give us advice on ours. It all seemed very interesting, exploring Bauhaus through theatre, and nostalgia in contemporary art. I have already spoken to her about my project and she has given me some useful information.

I was a little bit disturbed in class because conversation always draws towards the difficulties of writing about contemporary art. Because writing about your own time is more theoretically risky than writing about past eras. I don’t understand why this has come up so many times. I did not choose my topic at random because I thought that writing about contemporary art would be “cool,” in fact Arte Povera is not even that contemporary, it’s 40 years ago not 2.

I picked the topic because I truly believe that I am best prepared and most interested in this topic. In class we have told everyone about the progress in our research but nobody has ever really asked why we chose them. I think if you take into account that I am an Art History major, a Philosphy minor, and an Italian Studies minor, it makes perfect sense to do this topic. I would feel completely unprepared to do a Renaissance, Medieval, or Ancient topic considering I have taken two renaissance classes, no medieval, and one on Ancient Greek art. On the other hand, I have taken Contemporary, Curating, Modern, Methods, and not to mention Modern Italian History, Italian Politics, Italian Cinema, Modern Philosophy. I have been writing reviews of contemporary art shows in Rome for a year and a half. Just because one person said JCU students aren’t qualified to write contemporary  theses, all that means is that they made a generalization about our art histories and made a judgment but didn’t bother to take into account our individual interests and fortes. It might seem hard to believe that a 20 year old student knows a lot about modern and contemporary philosophy, but I love it and I read it for fun, I know absolutely nothing about the bible.

I was very disturbed by this. But I understand why people would be concerned.

Dear Research Diary,

I have been very busy studying for midterms and I haven’t had the chance to write or do much research. I can’t think about my project right now because I need to be thinking about other things for my tests and presentations. 

Dear Research Diary,

I finished reading Christov’s Summary, and overall it has provided a lot of information and opened paths for further research. Now there are chapters dedicated to each individual artist and particular pieces and shows. Most important are the connections between the four cities of Turin, Rome, Genoa, and Milan and how all of the artists found each other working on similar themes.

Overall it seems kind of frantic, unorganized, but it makes as much sense as anything in Italy. It seems that the terrorism of the 1970’s killed off the movement in a way, since the artists started to doubt their validity of art commenting politically. I need to read the texts by Celant. 

Dear Research Diary,

yesterday I took intensive notes for 10 more pages of Christov-Bakargiev’s book. It started to speak more specifically of events held in Genoa, Rome, and Turin. Kounellis and Pascali are the two Roman artists while Celant and Prini come from Genoa an most of the others including Pistoletto, Merz and Melissa Merz, Anselmo, Boetti, etc.. come from Turin. The Economic Miracle, Southern Migration, Industrial expansion of Turin, the FIAT factory are important drives for a changing city of rapidly changing values.

Learned that Rome was very important in the international art world during the 50’s, watched La Dolce Vita which shows this whole ambiance which arose with the Economic Miralce and Roma Capitale. I’m thinking I’ll summarize a chapter out of Eco’s book rather than the rest of Christov’s summary. I need a change of pace and that one is funny and intellectually charged. I think there’s a Fluxus show at Circolo degli Artisti on Tuesday. I’ll see what that’s all about.

Dear research Diary,

I got an e-mail from my thesis advisor saying that I should contact the curators at Galleria L’Attico to ask if I can go through the Archives and conduct some interviews. I’m really feeling uneasy about this because I want to have a clear direction before I start speaking to people who lived it. Galleria L’Attico is where Kounellis held his 12 Cavalli Vivi in 1969. I’m sure the archive will be very helpful, and I already replied suggesting more time and speaking to her about a distinct topic before doing this.

I’ve read more of Eco’s Misreadings and it is rather political but always in a sardonic manner. He approaches Italian society as if he were an anthropologist from the future and is able to expose very questionable matters in a funny way. Sexual Repression in the Po Valley seems particularly useful as the 50’s and 60’s in Italy were seeing great social changes in family, religion, etc…

Dear Research Diary, (Tuesday October 12)

Today I presented in class on the first half of Christov-Bakargiev’s first chapter. I will continue this for next week but I feel as though the more I read the more I notice that I have already read the information. It seems almost pointless apart from the few things I have not come across which then stick out like sore thumbs. I suppose this is how it goes when you read the bibliography on your topic. I am getting a lot of useful information from this chapter but it takes the tediousness of re-reading the basic information and scouring for something new.

Other than this I have been reading Umberto Eco’s Misreadings and they are fun and enlightening. So far I have read the first two chapters which poke fun at intellectualism. Granita the first short story in the series is a sploof of Nobokov’s Lolita in which “Umberto Umberto” is a teenage boy who has a fetish for octogenarians; he adores their “volcanic wrinkles” and fragile bones. I mention this because even though it’s a fun reading, the book mentioned that Arte Povera did have an anti-intellectual current, not against intelligence obviously but against the pretentious attitudes of the art and literary world. This ironic stance to the “intellectual class” as well as the folkloric inclusion and regionalism shares a lot with the general public agenda at the moment. As mentioned, Pasolini’s obsession with the Borgate, regional dialects, and the life of poor people. Also Gramsci’s notion of Italian communism, how each nationality needed to construct its own appropriate form of Marxism, and of course his great despise of the Italian intellectuals who allied themselves with the bourgeoisie.

Dear Research Diary,

Today I was very busy with schoolwork and spent all day in the library reading and writing for these midterms. But I was able to also dedicate some time to reading more of the Survey from Christov’s book. It went into the different movements which had happened directly before AP and influenced it. Spazialismo (Lucio Fontana) Cobra (Asger Jorn) and Yves Klein in particular as well as the Fluxus happenings and Gutai and John Cage. There was also some historical contextualization as she went into the student movements of 68’ for the first time, it’s hardly mentioned in Lista, but of course it is very significant that the movement started at around the same time as all of this revolutionary action, anti-Vietnam war, drug era, etc… Very useful was her explication of the important writers of that time period, among the names are Barthes, Adorno, Lacan, Chomsky. Also important is the heightened attention to theatre as art became more theatrical through the ideas of performance art and the action painting of Pollock. This source is proving to be a very rich one and I need to continue through this, it’s really dense and big, but here I go. 

Dear Research Diary,

Yesterday was a very fun and interesting day. Achille Bonito Oliva curated a show called Invito all’Opera #7 at Galleria Ponte dell Contemporanea as part of the Roma Art 2 Nights. I went to see how his show was since he was such a crucial point in the early development of the Roman scene in AP. Even though now he is an old man and the exhibition was very normal in presentation, there were elements of little pranks in the way he chose to organize everything and his selection of works. I also went to the library today and found Umberto Eco’s Misreadings in the collection, so hopefully I will be able to take a look at some of these stories. It’s a little bit frustrating to be finding all of these things that I should most definitely read, but having no time to do so! Midterms are coming up and I am trying to tread my way through the workload, but hopefully I can dedicate more time to reading these things once that is over after next week. 

Dear Research Diary,

Today was pleasantly productive. I received Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theater in the mail and I am looking forward to starting to read some of the important chapters such as his manifesto for the poor theater. I also decided it would be a good idea to start reading Christov-Bakargiev’s book since it is the most comprehensive work published on AP. So far I have read the preface and a bit of the survey, it’s pretty long and dense but I can finish it easily by Tuesday. So far Some interesting points have been the definition of the 13 AP artists which are neatly listed in parentheses, and the addition of influential texts apart from Towards a Poor Theater Christov includes Pier Paolo Pasolini’s ideal agrarian society and Umberto Eco’s Semiology. Eco is probably particularly connected to Kounellis who did his Alfabeto series before joining AP. Tomorrow I can try to see if the library at school has any of these texts, or if I can find them elsewhere.

Kounellisssssssss

Dear Research Diary,

Today I didn’t do much related to my thesis =(

I looked to see if there were any books about Arte Povera in the Norwegian Institute and there weren’t any!! But I did find Germano Celant’s very useful book called Arte Povera while doing a basic search on the URBS catalog at the Austrian Institute. I couldn’t even find any books on Contemporary Art, so I had to content myself with a book by Mieke Bal and another on portraiture. Everything is useful, Omnia Disce. I ordered a play by Jerzy Grotowski but I think I will never get it because Amazon sent me some strange e-mail but I didn’t read it, so I hope the package was just delayed by the slow Italian postage system.

I still need to choose an article to read and carefully summarize for next Tuesday! What will it be?? I should look at Giovanni Lista’s book and find out with piece by Eco was particularly influential to the movement, or just look if he wrote on the movement himself! 

Today I finished reading Bolker’s 1^st chapter of Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day it shows the importance of writing for developing the thesis. Embarking on a research project takes determination and can end up being a stressful task. It is important to analyze texts critically as you read them and reflect on your own thought critically in order to find loop holes, counter arguments, and inconsistencies. Trying to write a little bit every day on the topic also helps to keep the brain focused and fresh regarding the topic at hand. Writing a research journal may also motivate me to do a little bit of something every day to have something to write about at night.

So far I have read many introductory texts to the movement, but I feel as though I should move deeper into primary sources and theoretical texts. The movement itself is obviously too broad of a topic and I am not very interested in writing in any artist in particular, but I was thinking it would be interesting to assess the roles of the two most important curators, or rather theoretical formers, of the movement; Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva. First I am going to read more about the movement in general closing in on it, and I’ll try to see if this idea can be plausible to write extensively on. In Giovanni Lista’s book I took note of the influences of Umberto Eco and Jerzy Grotowski, so I’ll try to get my hands on the works in connection and read them.