The Flogging of Farfa: when an old futurist struggles with matter.

Behind the successes of a great artist there is always the work of a large group of people who make them possible. It has always been so in the history of art: in the Renaissance there were workshops, even tiny ones, but they always relied on a precise organization of work. Who prepared the media, who prepared the colors, who took care of the day-to-day administration. It is the same today: the works of the stars of contemporary art that can be admired at exhibitions or major events, from the Venice Biennale on down, are often produced within large or small workshops that rely on the work of artisans, workers, and specialized artists who work alongside the great master whose name will remain imprinted on panels and posters. The work is his, but it would never have existed without this support. And it must be remembered. Master potter Giovanni Poggi, who for more than half a century has been assisting artists in his workshop, the now historic Ceramiche San Giorgio in Albissola Marina, repeats this often.

A life spent among clay, kilns, and artists. First as a boy, learning the trade in this strip of the Ligurian coast that has been working its land for centuries to extract its celebrated ceramics. Then as the owner of the workshop he opened in 1958, at the age of twenty-six, together with Eliseo Salino and Mario Pastorino. The fulfillment of a longed-for dream, sought after, pursued by a young and determined potter who had followed the ancient family tradition. And from his workshop, facing the sea, many of the greatest have passed. Lucio Fontana, Pinot Gallizio, Asger Jorn, Wilfredo Lam, Aligi Sassu, Agenore Fabbri. In more recent times Ugo Nespolo and Alik Cavaliere, or a master of contemporary ceramics such as Giorgio Laveri, passing by the multifaceted Vincenzo Marsiglia. Giovanni Poggi has passed ninety years of age but still remembers with freshness what was happening in his workshop. Even today, when one enters Ceramiche di San Giorgio, one admires a place that has remained almost identical to how it must have looked when it was opened: this is evidenced by the photographs hung here and there, or collected in the albums that the “zione,” as he is called by his friends in Albissola Marina, shows to those who enter the workshop and, having the good fortune to meet him, stop to ask him to tell some curiosity about the techniques of working on ceramics, some secret, some anecdote about the artists who worked with him.

A few kilometers away from here, at the Museum of Ceramics in Savona, stored under a display case is a very strange vase that, if he were given the chance to speak, would perhaps have something to protest about the treatment he was given inside Ceramiche San Giorgio at dawn one June morning in 1959. It has an indecipherable shape: one recognizes at the bottom, in the center, an elongated body, higher up the neck curling in on itself, at its side it almost seems to have twins also bent over. They look like a group of drunks supporting each other after lying down two or three cases of cheap wine. Here and there traces of glaze, more substantial on the bottom, or some insistent dripping, on the necks of some of the mouthpieces. Everything else shows with the bare skin of fired clay, the surface is filled with wrinkles, smears, fingerprints, assorted imperfections, it looks like a production scrap, something that came out wrong because of a technical problem. The caption reads Fustigazione - Vaso a cinque imboccature and bears the name of Farfa, pseudonym of Vittorio Osvaldo Tommasini: die-hard futurist and out-of-touch, poet, poster artist, painter and in the latter part of his career also bizarre ceramist, “record poet” as Marinetti called him, or “billionaire of imagination” as he would be nicknamed after the name of his first collection of poems, published in Milan in 1933.

By the 1950s, Farfa was over seventy years old on his way to sunset, but he managed to experience an ephemeral, second youth thanks to Asger Jorn. The Situationist who arrived from Denmark, the founder of the CO.Br.A. group who magnified the spontaneity of the artist’s expression and freedom from the control of reason, who saw the ugly as a reaction to academicism and rationalism, who continually sought to paint as children do, free of preconceptions and formalism. Farfa and Jorn actually met in Albissola. “The Viking and the Futurist,” as per the title of a recent essay by Francesca Bergadano. Separated by thirty years of age but united by a boundless imagination, and above all by the idea that art should be the product of that imagination, and not a calculation. The Danish experimenter met the aging poet who at the time was trying to create works of art using checkers and dominoes. One can well understand that something interesting could only come out of such an encounter. Jorn had recognized in Farfa’s works “the universality of spirit of these paintings, drawings, and collages,” as he would put it, and Farfa would always acknowledge himself indebted to Jorn, because the Dane allowed him to return to exhibiting in meaningful contexts, granted him some notoriety, and earned him the appreciation of several colleagues.

After a merry night, however, one tends not to think in terms of programs, exhibitions, awards, and shit like that. The only thing that matters is to give vent to creativity, to impulse. It is the morning of June 5, 1959, and the two friends, Farfa and Jorn, having spent the previous hours who knows where, swoop into Giovanni Poggi’s workshop who is obviously already at work, puts the Tuscan soil on the lathe and quickly pulls out five vases. Jorn, evidently still in high spirits from the booze, stands next to the pots and Farfa, says something to his friend, and gives under his breath but explicitly the “to you,” the command that sanctions the start of a fencing match. Only here there is no platform, there are no swords, masks and white uniforms, there are no contenders. Or rather: there is only one, and his opponent is a defenseless group of vases freshly fashioned by Giovanni Poggi. Farfa begins to slap the vases, slamming them, whipping them, bending them, banging them against each other until only one comes out of five vases, the result of the struggle the futurist has waged with matter. Poggi looks at the two artists and asks if by any chance a vase is still missing. Farfa and Jorn enthusiastically answer in the affirmative, and the 80-year-old futurist takes the sixth vase, puts it sideways, throws himself on top of it, and begins his duel again. The general ovation sanctions the end of the work, ready for the kiln. Giving an account of the whole process is a long poem by Farfa, written on the spur of the moment: “On June five, fifty-nine / at the San Giorgio in Albissolamare / Poggi vigorously slaps / the five bowls of Tuscan earth / and with svelte skill of torneante / they come out of his legs and hands: / a round vase / a square vase / a triangular vase / an oval vase / a zig-zag vase / and I place them on a plaster plate / Asger Jorn closely approaches them / and he witnesses the great duel / incites me and says under his breath: ’To you’ / Here they are ready for my aggression / With nervous impetus my fingers / of both hands make havoc / they twist they bend they bump firmly / they clench tightly loudly / in a supreme impetus of creation / They look like empty bags of matter / but full are they of tremendous spirit / to support each other / to satisfy my mind fully / They are no longer five detached vessels, but fused together they form one.”

The result is the vase now on display in the Second Twentieth Century section at the Museum of Ceramics in Savona, along with more thoughtful and elaborate works. That’s why Fustigation. If he were to speak, he would probably complain about all the skids he took. But he would be proud to say that it is there, displayed next to the works of Arturo Marini and Agenore Fabbri, along with the creations of Jorn and Enrico Baj, to reiterate that art is also instantaneous creativity, pure feeling, unconditional inner strength, freedom from constraints and constraints. Of course, the Fustigation of Farfa may not be a masterpiece, but it bears witness to the research of a group of colleagues who wanted to rewrite the rules of artistic creation. And its story is still remembered with pleasure here, inside a workshop in Albissola Marina, where the salty scent of the sea mingles with the acrid smell of the earth, where there is still no clear separation between the place of production and the place of sale and the concept of a showroom does not exist, where one enters to buy a saucer or a vase and happens to see an artist dirty with earth passing by looking for a working tool. As it should have been more than 50 years ago.

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