"ZERO TO INFINITY: ARTE POVERA 1962-1972".

TATE MODERN, LONDON

"Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972," an overdue museum survey devoted to the Italian art phenomenon of the 1960s, attains its full contemporary significance via its transcontinental bounce from Minneapolis to London. Conceived by Richard Flood at the Walker Art Center, the exhibition was cocurated by Francis Morris of Tate Modern, where it first appeared. The great brick pile of the Bankside power station makes an entirely appropriate setting for the show's debut, as it underscores the degree to which we have come to live in an arte povera world.

The origins of that world extend back to that mid-'60s moment of mutual recognition among a group of impatient young Italian artists, almost all sculptors of one kind or another, which in turn coincided with the arrival of a new kind of exhibiting space and a new kind of energetic art entrepreneur. In 1967, Gian Enzo Sperone, a gallery owner of the same generation as his artists, expanded his quarters in Turin into an expansive industrial space, one that possessed none of the jewel-box virtues normally associated with the discreet commerce in the fine arts. By the end of the following year, both Fabio Sargentini in Rome and Italian expatriate Leo Castelli in New York had appropriated large spaces previously given over to functions as far removed as possible from the aesthetic: Sargentini's Galleria L'Attico took over an underground parking garage and debuted with Jannis Kounellis's untitled installation of twelve stately horses stabled for three days around the perimeter of a facility built to serve the mean s of transport that replaced them; while Castelli secured the fringe-Manhattan warehouse where Robert Morris assembled his "anti-form" generation of American sculptors at the end of 1968.

By those gestures, the improvised physical spaces of the artist's studio, carved from the underused precincts of business and manufacture, became the preferred venue for the spectator's encounter with contemporary art. A private space, heretofore reserved for the rigors of work and the intimate company of friends, had gone public. Of the countless galleries and museums recently converted from obsolete structures, often with old fixtures and fittings left intact as tangible remembrances of the past, Bankside's transformation is only the most prominent. At the new Tate, the ceiling hoist that runs the length of the enormous Turbine Hall will always test the formal strength and integrity of any sculpture placed beneath it (thus far they have all been found wanting).

So, it makes sense to return to Italy in the '60s to take stock of the tendency in sculpture that seems to be most diagnostic of the ambience we now find so natural for advanced art. There was, however, a more delicate and reflective side to this body of work, and indeed this is how the Tate installation chose to lead the viewer into it. Dominating the first galleries were several physically slight but visually arresting "tautological" sculptures realized by Luciano Fabro between 1964 and 1967, a kind of geometric drawing suspended in air by means of thin, extruded aluminum, less illustrating than managing to be such basic spatial entities as a wheel, a cross, a pole, and so on. Next in line was Giulio Paolini's reticent, philosophical investigations of the matter of painting as a medium: its support and its palette. Flood and Morris provided an extensive sampling of this lesser-known work, which easily stands comparison with (and reproaches to a degree) the more flamboyant exercises in this vein by jasper J ohns before and Gerhard Richter after.

The show then turned a kind of corner with the abrupt appearance of Pino Pascali's Un metro cubo di terra (One cubic meter of earth), 1967, a dark, compressed mass answering precisely to the description in its title, threateningly suspended from the wall by an invisible support well above the spectator's head. After that came the heavier artillery--literally so in the case of that same artist's Le Armi (Weaponry), 1965, mock ordnance such as cannons and machine guns cobbled together from bits of scrap metal into brutally convincing likenesses of the real things. The charismatic Pascali, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1968, had been the animating spirit behind Sargentini's Roman gallery and a compelling countercultural figure more typical of that era's rock stars. This new role for the artist may represent one of arte povera's distinctive contributions to the visual arts internationally (America would need a Chris Burden or a Gordon Matta-Clark to catch up on this front).

The term povera remains a good one, though it doesn't bear quite the ineffable and untranslatable nuance claimed for it, repeatedly, in the exhibition catalogue. "Poor" will do just as well, if we take it to mean a studied renunciation of inessential packaging and any ostentatious elevation of artistic practice (including strict conceptual rigor) as superior to the common human condition. Too much fetishization of the Italian cognate povero comes up against the fact that the term was taken directly from Jerzy Grotowski's contemporaneous polemics, originally in Polish, on behalf of his conception of a "poor theater."

In only one of the half-dozen catalogue essays is Grotowski even mentioned (and that piece, by P.S. I's Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, is devoted to "Italian Art before Arte Povera"), nor does he figure in the elaborate timeline/chronology featured in both catalogue and installation. Of the hundreds of cultural, political, and art-world points of fact included (with wonderful stills from the radiant Italian cinema of the time), why leave this one out? The strange omission signals not only a historical failing in the exhibition's presentation of its material--particularly in the way that it frames Germano Celant's decisive curatorial intervention in 1967, which created a lasting group identification under his choice of the povero label--it counts as a serious missed opportunity to give a young audience added insight into the shared motivations of these artists and the place of their work in the larger landscape of international art in the '6os.

It was, of course, the case that key figures in the group--Pascali, Kounellis, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Alighiero Boetti, Mario Merz--had gained secure artistic footing before Celant and his rubric came along. But all of them accepted the povero association, and few, if any, decisively rejected it later. It plainly points to something at work in the period that had links across a pan-European counterculture--and to artistically and politically dissident elements in North America as well.

Grotowski's evolving project is nearly as difficult to summarize as the collective output of the fourteen artists in the Walker/Tate exhibition (those mentioned above plus Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Piero Gilardi, Marisa Merz, Giuseppe Penone, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio), but key points of overlap make themselves felt in a tour around the installation. The Polish director and theatrical visionary labored to strip away the machinery of his medium not to expose artifice and liberate his audience from its mystifying effects (that would be Brecht); rather he did so to invest all the instruments and power of dramatic illusion into one primary entity, the rigorously trained and exquisitely sensitized body of the actor, who could henceforth carry an entire edifice of the theater in his person, like a mendicant pilgrim moving from one makeshift shelter to another. Zorio found in the Franciscan cult of poverty and animistic devotion an apt analogy to the arte povera enterprise. The rawness of these artists' materials does not labor to defeat illusion and make peace with a manufactured world (that would be the American Minimalists); rather the Italian effort was to invest inert matter, deprived of all but the minimum of professional finish, with an uncanny semblance of independent lift and movement.

In any conventional survey exhibition like this one, that comprehensive sense of povero--its spirit of nomadism and improvisation-can be discovered only in small, isolated moments, ones that highlight the tendency of the assembled artists to rely on effects of incongruity and paradox to lend their raw materials that aura of life. Anselmo's roughly arrow-shaped block of natural stone (Direzione [Direction], 1967), with a small compass embedded on its surface, "knows" its own absolute orientation. Marisa Merz emerges from the historiographical shadows with skeins of delicate wire, thread, wool, and sheared metal that appear capable of weaving themselves into continuous growth. Penone's Albero di cinque metri (Tree five meters long), 1970, one of a series, appears to present the trunk of a sapling on a horizontal pedestal of the same wood; in astonishing fact, Penone began with the milled plank, then painstakingly followed the pattern of knots in order to recover the sapling buried within, its branches truncate d to conform to the geometry of human requirements.

The ghost of the animate, of ungovernable natural forces, hovers over or pervades work after work. It is unfortunate that another Kounellis installation (untitled, 1967) included in the exhibition, with its living cacti in long steel troughs and a loosely contained pyramid of cotton, leaves out the live parrot that should sit on a wall perch and makes do with an explanatory label instead. When last seen in London, in Jon Thompson's 1993 landmark "Gravity & Grace" exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, the bird was there. Perhaps animal-rights concerns have advanced in the UK to the point that guerilla liberation efforts were feared, but the absence reinforces an unfortunate effect of textbook-style abstraction of a movement that emphasized immediate sensory impact above all things.

Thompson's adventurous and illuminating show reached for its own productive incongruity in interspersing arte povera works (many of the same ones as shown here) among pieces of British and American sculpture from the same period, emphasizing the Castelli/Morris roster. It seems to me that the Tate, though understandably limited to the Italians, missed the most obvious opportunity to invest the entire exhibition with an excitement, born of incongruity, that the conventional white boxes of its galleries can never impart. I would have loved to see "Zero to Infinity" occupy the Turbine Hall itself. That gloomily towering space, utterly out of sympathy with the paradoxical poise and contingency of most of the art, would forcibly have brought back the sense that this art was made to be homeless. The harmony now imagined to exist between advanced art and our relics of the industrial past might, for a moment, have been shattered and the spectator disorientated enough to catch a genuine glimpse of the wayward and imp assioned beginnings of art's journey leading right to the spot where he or she is standing- along with a chance to assess what has been lost or gained along the way.

Thomas Crow, director of the Getty Research Institute, is a contributing editor of Artforum.

"Zero to Infinity Arte Povera 1962-1972" travels to the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Oct. 13, 2001-Jan. 13, 2002; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Mar. 10-Aug. 11 2002; Hirshborn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Oct. 17, 2002-Jan. 12, 2003.