History of Italian art from 2000 to the present. Part 2: relational art, openings on society

In a relationship, it is evident, there must be at least two subjects. It follows that, especially in an age such as ours, pervaded by pluralism and individualism, one cannot help but understand social relations as a communication between the individual and the collective, where the ego of the former is never fully diluted in the feeling of the latter. All the more so, perhaps, when it comes toart, which remains after all a field of expression where the ego retains ample representation. This is whyrelational art and all that has resulted from it carry with it a paradox, which, however reasonable, remains so: in order to talk about others, one cannot help but mention oneself.

A matrix that Italian artists of the 2000s do not deny, but gradually try to smooth out by widening the field in which their (justified) personalisms manifest themselves. Into this tension fits perfectly Ludovica Carbotta (Turin, 1982), who through a wide variety of mediums, above all installation and sculpture, devotes herself to the research of urban space. With its architecture, the individuals who inhabit it and the way they do it. From the approach used, which she calls fictional site specificity, the artist contaminates real space with that of her mind, generating a third world capable of synthesizing the previous two. Depending on the interpretation, this could be an attempt to dissolve the individual into the collective or, in the opposite sense, an effort to condense the collective into a single. In Don’t Define a Surface (2011), a video that captures a glimpse of a street and what happens there, Carbotta (almost) completely resets the authorial presence to zero, without setting any scene or giving any narrative stimulus. There is only the viewer and his subjectivity. In Monowe, on the contrary, the artist carries out an open project in which through installations and sculptures he goes on to create a city used for the life of a single person. A hypothetical urban environment meant to suggest the existence of an imaginary community of the future, turning into a place so exclusive that it becomes a wonderful prison of social isolation.

Such negative reading is also operated by Paola Pivi (Milan, 1971), who sets up grotesque and ironic situations that in order to question the ordinary try to overcome it, indirectly highlighting its characteristics. In her first major solo show in Milan, at Fondazione Trussardi in 2006, Pivi devised a fairy-tale universe in which banal objects and seemingly ordinary situations come alive to turn into extraordinary events. Like the joyous apocalypse of Untitled (Airplane) (1999) and the fairy-tale Noah’s Ark that Interesting [Interesting], 2006 was meant to recall. Unusual scenarios are also understood by Lara Favaretto (Treviso, 1973), an artist who through sculpture and performance intervenes on the function of the objects that surround us in order to subvert reality. The drunkenness of the upside-down world is realized in semantic reversals that transform car-washing brushes into colorful men(Simple Men, 2008) or anti-monuments-Only If You’re a Magician (2006), for example, where a block of confetti forms a statue destined to decay-that draw from the dimension of celebration, dear to the artist, to exalt the unpredictability of the everyday and at the same time its transience.

If up to here the real references (to current events, history, society) remain suspended, only suggested, Giorgio Andreotta Calò (Venice, 1979) takes a clear step toward a clearer and therefore more socially engaged discourse. His sculpture-installations are charged with individual and collective tension, intercepting a common feeling starting from a more or less known event or circumstance. Per ogni lavoratore morto (2010), consists of a block of unworked marble laid in the center of a church, that of Santa Maria delle Lacrime in Carrara, in memory of those who have fallen at work; Senza titolo (La fine del mondo) of 2017, on the other hand, is a site-specific installation created for the Italian Pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale, which the author conceived as a scaffolding structure capable of reflecting the architecture of the Arsenale thanks to a large body of water prepared for the occasion. A scenic invitation to introspection.

In fact, the work was inspired by the essay by anthropologist Ernesto De Martino La fine del mondo (The End of the World): the author’s last text, left unfinished and published posthumously, which analyzed the concept of cultural apocalypse, in which the very presence of the individual, his being in the world, enters into crisis. What better solution, then, than to involve him in cultural production itself? As does Marinella Senatore (Cava de’ Tirreni, 1977), who has often made use of the public for her works, as she did with the community of ex-miners in Enna(Nui Simu, 2010). In general, Senatore often draws from popular expressions, interpreting or directly calling them out to express their ideal and concrete scope. His works can be defined as fluid site-specific containers: site-specific because they are conceived with the specific environment in which they are developed in mind; fluid because they are based on a potentially infinite inclusion of the elements involved.

Memory and knowledge of the world, as personal and collective experience, is at the center of Marzia Migliora ’s (Alessandria, 1972) reflection. With metaphorical and lyrical style, the artist engages in various modes of expression (video, sound, performance, installation, drawing, photography) that participate in the creation of evocative emotional spaces(Everyman, 2007). Or he descends directly into the concrete, investigating the relations between capitalism and agriculture, or more generally on the subject of labor employment. Paradoxes of Abundance, for example, is a series begun by Migliora in 2015 as a long-term project exploring transformations in systems of food production and consumption. The work of Francesco Vezzoli (Brescia, 1972), one of the Italian artists who has been most able to make a name for himself abroad, is also based on history and shared imaginaries. What made him so popular was in particular his ability to succeed in bringing together elements as far apart as classical art, if not archaeology, with pop and modern iconographies drawn from the world of cinema, music and the star system in general. Thus different artistic and expressive languages intersect, always imbued with irony and provocation, speaking with the force of the contemporary and the depth of the ancient. In 2005 he presented at the 51st Venice Biennale a 5-minute film entitled Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s Caligula, conceived for a hypothetical pornographic remake of Tinto Brass’ film Caligula; while in sculptures such as Belvedere’s Lover’s Self Portrait as Apollo and Antique not Antique: Pedicure, he actualizes classical iconography, generating a glamorous aesthetic charged with nostalgia and decadence.

More direct and with a distinctly political approach is the work of Francesco Arena (Torre Santa Susanna, 1978). The kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro, the death of anarchist Giuseppe Pinelli, and the Piazza Fontana massacre in Milan are just some of the news events that Arena sublimates into works that are often conceptual, not at all didactic, and that aim to return a feeling rather than an account. Like Crater, a sculpture made using 50 cubic meters (75 tons) of Dutch earth, ordered through a structure of metal and wooden poles. Here the amount of earth used corresponds to that missing in a crater dating from a World War II bombing that occurred somewhere in Zeeland (Netherlands). Also reflecting on characters from the past is Giulio Frigo (Arzignano, 1984), who combines his paintings with installation components of various kinds. Often his creations lack precise historical references, but evoke scenarios and situations that lead back to themes such as power and politics Room 22 (Sushi Girl), 2017; other times they linger toward intimate and personal situations(Room 18, 2016), or even fully engage in conceptual and aesthetic reflection(Mimesis2, 2011). Rarely detached from social issues is the practice of Gian Maria Tosatti (Rome, 1980), whose investigations, often open to continuous updates over the long term, focus on issues related to the concept of identity, both on a political and spiritual level. Tosatti prefers the monumental dimension of large site-specific installations conceived for entire buildings or urban areas. In the wake of Relational Art, his practice often involves communities connected to the places where the works take shape. In Il mio cuore è vuoto come uno specchio, Tosatti travels between Catania, Riga, Cape Town, Odessa and Istanbul, intervening from time to time in specific places and in different ways. Each of his works, we can say, is part of an investigation into the crisis of democracy and the consequent disappearance of Western civilization, born in the Athens of Pericles. Hinting at Italian history is the work Tosatti presented for the Italian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022. Storia della Notte e Destino delle Comete (History of Night and Fate of Comets ) was a complex experiential narrative machine that sketched a journey that was at times familiar and at times disorienting, originating in aesthetics and content in the rise and fall of the Italian industrial dream. The goal, in addition to the theatrical involvement of the visitor, was to offer a new awareness and generate concrete reflections on the possible fate of human civilization, poised between the dreams and mistakes of the past and the promises of a future still partly to be written.

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