Guerrilla Action
Often regarded by the critics as “guerrilla warfare against the rich,” Arte Povera—despite it’s exceedingly minimalistic approach—rose in Italy to become one of the greatest contributors to art in the 20th Century and the most influential movement to arise in Europe in the 1960s. The term was initially infused with a heavy political undertone by Italian art critic Germano Celant in his manifesto “Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia”, or Arte Povera: notes for a guerrilla war. This invoked revolutionary rhetoric against consumerism and criticizing such related topics as capitalism and class struggle, while also questioning the superficial value of art.
This so proposed metaphor for “guerrilla war” would transcend the realm of art and go on to be appropriated by dissenting young minds who aligned their beliefs with such political heroes as Fidel Castro, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and Che Guevara and the actual guerrilla tactics of General Nguyen Giap. Thus, in an attempt to dismantle the barricades between art and life, politics and aestheticsm. It protested the the presence of the United States in Vietnam, Celant, unwillingly unravelled a growing dissent which translated into the terrorist acts, bombings, and assassination of the early 1970s. It was not until Celant relinquished the political dimension of the term, which plainly translates to poor art, was Arte Povera able to expand and become a true art form.
Echoing the minimalistic nature of Pop Art, Art Povera artists used otherwise mundane, commonplace objects to transform them into powerful statements such as Giovanni Anselmo’s Torsion. Though, this group chose materials more specifically to support their protest and contest industrialization and imperialism. Such is the case of Mario Merz’s Giap Igloo – If the Enemy Masses His Forces, He Loses Ground; If He Scatters, He Loses Strength in which he juxtaposes organic and artificial materials to illustrate the dystopian relationship between nature and modern society. Like these, many of the art pieces in this exhibition, display the growing dissent towards the modernization and industrialization posed by “modern society.” The success of these pieces thus relied in the on the engagement of the audience just as much as that of the artist.