Acknowledgments
This book owes a great deal to the insight provided by the living artists and curators who were active in Italy in the 1970s. My most sincere thanks go to these individuals, as they generously lent their time to talk to me and invite me to their studios and archives. In particular, I would like to recognize the artists Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari. For those who unfortunately passed away, I would still like to show my appreciation: to Luisa Somaini, daughter and scholar of the Francesco Somaini archive, and to Simona Santini, manager of the Mauro Staccioli archive. The curators Luciano Caramel and Enrico Crispolti, too, made themselves available to me so that I could better understand the art of the decade. In many ways, Crispolti is as much a protagonist of Arte Ambientale as the artists. His passing as I was in the final stages of editing this manuscript was heartbreaking, as he would not see the completion of this project after having given me so much.
This study—first as a dissertation and now as a book—would not have been possible without the support of numerous organizations and individuals. Grants from Boston University’s College of Arts and Sciences allowed me to conduct research in Italy. While I was there, many people shared with me their vast knowledge: I am grateful to Marcella Beccaria, Marco Buselli, Mario Diacono, Francesco Poli, Maria Theresa Roberto, and especially Stefano Chiodi for guidance during the research stage of my project. Back home, the American Association of University Women Dissertation Fellowship allowed me to write.
Through different stages of this manuscript, I was fortunate to receive feedback and share ideas with patient and enlightened colleagues. At Boston University, I had the incredible moral and intellectual support from the members of the Art History Dissertation Writing Group, encouraging me during the early stages of this project. Once I decided to turn this manuscript in for publication, other trusted scholars unwaveringly championed this brave endeavor. In particular, I would like to name Alexis Boylan, for her continued enthusiasm and feedback, and Sam Adams, who read various chapters and organized opportunities for me to share my work with academics in the Boston area. Likewise, Silvia Bottinelli, Paola Capasso, and Margaret and Elliot Entis deserve my gratitude. Additionally, Kim Sichel has always believed in me and my work. Last but not least, my doctoral advisor, Gregory Williams, has been a constant source of generous encouragement, first when I was his student and later when I became his peer and friend. He has continually pushed me to become a better scholar, teacher, and writer.
Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to my family in Italy and the United States, who has always expressed interest in my progress and confidence in my abilities. I extend
Acknowledgments ix the most heartfelt thanks to my sisters—Silvia and Anna Matilde—for their love. My daughters Olivia and Isabel gave me lighthearted moments that put all this into perspective. Above all, I am indebted to my husband, Jonathan, who has sustained me throughout this experience in ways that I cannot adequately put into words. His incisive commentary and sharp editorial skills have been indispensable to this project, but more importantly, so have his patience, kindness, and love.
1.1 Ugo La Pietra, Segnali di fuoco, 1970, car tires, fire, performance, Zafferana, Italy. 3
1.2 Maurizio Nannucci, 15 verdi naturali, 1974, color documentary photographs. Published in Progettare Inpiù no. 5/6 (1974): 14–15. 9
1.3 Ugo La Pietra, Viaggio sul reno, 1974, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 10
2.1 David Smith Installation, exhibition Sculture nella città, fifth edition of the Festival dei due Mondi exhibition (June 21–July 22), Spoleto, Italy, 1962, curated by Giovanni Carandente. 29
2.2 Gianni Pettena, Come mai quasi tutti hanno scelto la piazza? Performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 31
2.3 Ugo La Pietra, Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un altra? Wood, plastic, performance piece, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 33
2.4 Grazia Varisco, Dilatazione Spazio Temporale di un Percorso, cardboard boxes, performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 34
2.5 Giuseppe Terragni, Casa del Fascio, Como, Italy, 1936. 35
2.6 Valentina Berardinone, Anti-Monumento, wood, paint, performance, 1969. Exhibition Campo Urbano, Como, Italy, 1969. 35
2.7 Alik Cavaliere, Bancarella dall’alabastro, performance, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 40
2.8 Fabio De Sanctis, Untitled, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 40
2.9 Mauro Staccioli, Intervento sul Piano di Castello, 1973, concrete, 280 × 200 × 200 cm. Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy 1973. 43
2.10 Franco Mazzucchelli, Gonfiabili, 1973, Exhibition Volterra ’73, Volterra, Italy, 1973. 44
2.11 Francesco Somaini, Sfinge di Manhattan: proposta per la costruzione di un centro spettacolo e di studi audiovisivi, 1974, fotomontaggio 80 × 80 cm, Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 49
2.12 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, December 1974–January 1975, concrete and iron, 240 × 400 × 400 cm, Piazzetta della galleria Manzoni, Liberia Einaudi, Studio Sant Andrea. Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 50
2.13 Ugo La Pietra, I gradi di libertà, ricupero e reinvenzione, 1975, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 51
2.14 Franco Summa, Una bianca striscia di carta, 1973, Exhibition Ambiente come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1976. 52
3.1 Mauro Staccioli, Muro, 1978, iron, plaster, and concrete, 800 × 800 × 120 cm, Exhibition Natura come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1978. 64
3.2 Francesco Somaini, Morte a Venezia, 1978, cube scaffold with large photomontages, 500 × 500 × 500 cm, Exhibition Natura come Sociale, Venice Biennale, 1978. 65
3.3 Francesco Somaini, La caduta del uomo (Fall of Man), 1969, bronze with silver deposits, 91 × 26 × 28 cm. 72
3.4 Francesco Somaini, Spine verdi, 1972, ink on paper, 25 × 28 cm. 74
3.5 Francesco Somaini, ROSA (Rapporto Organico SculturaArchitettura), 1973, photomontage, 250 × 500 cm. 76
3.6 Francesco Somaini, Farfalla della solitudine: scultura-legamento tra due grandi edifice commerciali, 1974, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm. 76
3.7 Francesco Somaini, Carnificazione di un’architettura: Martiro II. Grande edificio per servizi pubblici costituente imagine antropomorfica emergente, 1975–1976, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm.
3.8 Francesco Somaini, clockwise: Torri: i simboli minacciosi del potere non cambiano, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; La città e le acque: il canale come simbolo del territorio e della sua necessaria interrelazione con l’urbano, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; La viabilità come mito e come minaccia: un ipotetico ponte stradale valica il Palazzo dei Gonzaga, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm; Il gelso: la civiltà contadina abbia il suo monumento, 1977, photomontage, 80 × 80 cm.
78
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3.9 Francesco Somaini, Il Grande gelso: la civiltà contadina abbia il suo monumento, large photomontage, 1977, 600 × 500 cm, Piazza Sordello, Mantova. 81
3.10 Francesco Somaini, Morte a Venezia, cube scaffold with four large photomontages, 500 × 500 × 500 cm, XXXIX Biennale di Venezia, Giardini di Castello, 1978. 83
3.11 Mauro Staccioli, Situazione-Ambiente: Progetto, maquette, 1971–1972, lacquered wood, 25 × 63 × 63 cm. 87
3.12 Mauro Staccioli, Anticarro (Anti-tank) and Condizione Barriera (Barrier), Galleria Toninelli in Milan, 1972. 89
3.13 Mauro Staccioli, Barriera, 1972, iron, 200 × 90 × 90 cm, nine elements Piazza dei Priori, Volterra. 91
3.14 Mauro Staccioli, Untitled (Lancia), 1972, concrete and iron, 460 × 85 × 85 cm, Porta dell’arco, Volterra. 92
3.15 Mauro Staccioli, Scultura-Intervento, 1973, concrete and iron, 200 × 180 cm, Studio Sant’ Andrea Milano; Performance with the students of the Liceo Artistico di Brera. 94
3.16 Mauro Staccioli, Condizione città 1973, iron, concrete with two steel cones, 220 × 240 cm, Piazza della Steccata, Parma. 95
3.17 Mauro Staccioli, Condizione città, 1974, iron, concrete, and steel, 220 × 240 cm each, Piazza Solferino, Turin. 96
4.1 Ugo La Pietra, Periferia di Milano, durante la ricerca sui “Gradi di Libertà,” c. 1970, documentary photograph. 107
4.2 Ugo La Pietra, Il Commutatore, 1970, performance, ink on paper. 113
4.3 Ugo La Pietra, Gli itinerari preferenziali, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper. 114
4.4 Ugo La Pietra, Gli itinerari preferenziali, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper. 115
4.5 Ugo La Pietra, Recupero e reinvenzione, 1969, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 118
4.6 Ugo La Pietra, Verso il centro, 1972, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 120
4.7 Ugo La Pietra, La conquista dello spazio 1971, photomontage and ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm. 121
4.8 Ugo La Pietra, Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività, 1979, dresser, chains, stakes, documentary photograph. 122
4.9 Ugo La Pietra, Abitare la Città, 1979, performance. 124
4.10 Franco Summa, Per Incontrarsi, 1973, acrylic paint on wall. 128
4.11 Franco Summa, Appropriazione e Recupero 1973, documentary photographs, sound installation.
130
5.1 Unattributed Photographer, Vogliamo parlare, 1977, photograph. 143
5.2 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973, documentary photograph. 144
5.3 Franco Vaccari, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, installation photograph, Venice Biennale, 1972. 147
5.4 Franco Vaccari, Atest, 1968, Artist Book. 148
5.5 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time no. 1: “Maschere” 1969, performance. 149
5.6 Franco Vaccari, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, 1972, photo strip detail, Passport. 152
5.7 Franco Vaccari, Photomatic d’Italia, 1973, documentary photographs. 155
5.8 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time 1973, Artist Book, detail. 156
5.9 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time 1973, Artist Book, detail. 157
5.10 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in Real Time 1973, Artist Book, detail. 158
5.11 Maurizio Nannucci, Scrivere sull’acqua, 1973, performance. 162
5.12 Maurizio Nannucci, Mèla, Summer 1976, Artist Booklet. 168
6.1 Francesco Somaini, Stele spaccata sul tema della vita e della morte, 1986, marble, 450 × 180 × 90 cm, Tuoro sul Trasimene, Perugia, Italy. 185
6.2 Ugo La Pietra, Interno/Esterno 1979, installation photograph. 186
6.3 Franco Summa, La città della memoria, 1986, Artist Book. 188
6.4 Franco Vaccari, Exhibition in real time no. 20 “Ambiente grigio multiuso” (Grey Multipurpose Environment, Box for Probing Near and Distant Space), 1987, multimedia installation.
6.5 Maurizio Nannucci, Alfabetofonetico, 1967, neon tube light mounted on wall.
6.6 Vittorio Corsini, Romanza, 1990, bronze railing and oak in public garden, Pontassieve, Tuscany.
190
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6.7 Vittorio Corsini, Le Parole Scaldano, 2004 glass, stainless steel, water, lights, words from people in public square, Quarrata, Pistoia. 196
6.8 Alberto Garutti, Piccolo Museion—In questa piccola stanza saranno esposte opere del Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Bolzano per far sì che i cittadini di questo quartiere le possano vedere, 2001, Quartiere Don Bosco, Bolzano, concrete, glass, lights, and electrical outlets, 320 × 440 × 440 cm. 197
Introduction
From the north of Italy, artists came, as called, to deliver a response to the socioeconomic downturn afflicting the small Sicilian town of Zafferana. It was September 1970, and they must have felt the summer heat abating and seen the long afternoon shadows retracting across the baroque façade of Santa Maria della Provvidenza, the town’s main church along Via Giuseppe Garibaldi. Energized by the hint of a fresh sea breeze, artists were eager to engage with the inhabitants of Zafferana and to see how they might channel their creative impulses into positive outcomes for this dispirited town.
A small village at the confluence of lava streams from Etna’s eastern craters, Zafferana was suffering from a decrease in population and agricultural productivity.1 Southern Italy had always lagged behind Italy’s productive north, but the conditions of disparity, poverty, and economic stagnation had become particularly acute since the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s.2 The town’s inhabitants had historically shown impressive resilience, rebuilding their houses many times after being damaged and even destroyed by the nearby volcano’s violent eruptions. The problems afflicting the town now, however, were different; it was not just about restacking the bricks and mortar but rebuilding the fabric of society. In the face of recent socioeconomic hardship, the municipal administration decided to try something new, an exhibition and a conference titled Interventi nella città e sul paesaggio (Interventions in the City and Landscape), organized by Florentine curator Lara-Vinca Masini and Roman architect, theorist, and historian Paolo Portoghesi. Architects and contemporary artists from across the country were invited to dialogue with the people and spaces of the city as a lived environment and to tackle its socioeconomic realities.3 Among others, artists Getulio Alviani and Ugo La Pietra came from Milan, Maurizio Nannucci from Florence, and Franco Vaccari from Modena.4 Upon arrival, Vaccari recalled that he felt overwhelmed by the deterioration of the city and was motivated to address it through his participation in the exhibition.5
These four artists were interested in the exhibition’s objectives, to engage with the urban environment and its socioeconomic condition. Though they might not have known it at the time, this concern was going to preoccupy them for much of the 1970s and beyond.6 Alviani and La Pietra knew each other, as both came from Italy’s industrial capital, while it is unclear whether they had a preexisting connection with Nannucci or Vaccari; certainly, they had never worked all together. Only La Pietra, of the four, had made artwork prior to 1970 that could be described as an intervention in the urban landscape: a temporary, ephemeral art project sited within the city and meant to engage the public.7
The exhibition was to follow a typical arrangement, a juried selection of the artwork with a prize given out to the best submission.8 Arriving in Zafferana, La Pietra, Nannucci, Vaccari, and Alviani suspected that the local judges had rigged the prize selection, endorsing local artists for political reasons.9 They also realized, much to their chagrin, that the organizers were marshaling a pleasant and uncritical exhibition intended to boost the local economy and tourist industry rather than address the city’s sociopolitical concerns.10 Feeling betrayed, the four artists rejected these pretenses, as they believed that contemporary architectural or artistic work needed to engage with the real experience of the environment.11
Impulsively, La Pietra, Nannucci, Vaccari, and Alviani decided to protest the exhibition and created their first collaborative urban intervention. Segnali di fuoco (Fire Signals) [Figure 1.1] featured ten car tires—five on each side—arranged along a pedestrian crossing in the city’s main square, Piazza Umberto I Belvedere, which the artists set on fire. From the documentary photographs, we see that dozens of passersby stopped to watch the conflagration and the billowing, dark smoke. Lighting tires in the manner of street protests, with their indelible images of blazing automobiles and shattered glass, the artists signaled an explicit rejection of the political and social situation in which they were invited to work.12 Moreover, associations with the volcano Etna, and the constant feeling of impending danger, must have also resonated with the artists and spectators. Certainly, the work had the air—and smell—of dissension. Using fire and smoke, the artists also evoked an ancient means of visual communication used over long distances, smoke signals, to alert people to danger. In effect, they were ringing the alarm for both the corruption of the exhibition and the venality endemic in the town’s administration, which was at the root of Zafferana’s socioeconomic problems. Ironically, even though this work existed outside the realm of the exhibition, it came closest to the original design of the show: art that engaged with the city and its inhabitants.
Establishing a complex, often polemical dialogue with the city and its inhabitants, Segnali di fuoco was an early example of Arte Ambientale (Environmental art). Artists and critics alike started to use the term during the 1970s to define the expansion of aesthetic practices out of museums and galleries and into streets and piazzas.13 This type of site-specific art engaged with the urban environment as a space of social relations.14 Art historian, curator, and critic Enrico Crispolti defined “Arte Ambientale [as] part of an urban context, where there are people, where you have an architectural context. It [was] active in that it hoped to change the space in which it [was] situated.”15 Moreover, the art was intimately tied to its urban site, to its diversity, anthropological patrimony, social actuality, and political contingency.16 Crispolti was one of the leading curators to organize Arte Ambientale exhibitions in Italy’s urban landscape, and his 1976 Venice Biennale exhibition, called Ambiente come Sociale (Environment as Social), solidified the term’s prevalence as he presented urban projects that sought to connect with the experience of the city.
Arte Ambientale artists developed an entirely novel way of working both in relation to each other and their subject matter, the city. A number of terms—both art historical and from the sociopolitical context—help bring definition to this practice. Arte Ambientale was closely tied to its sister-term arte nel sociale (art in the social sphere), which not only connoted art being made in the urban space, outside the traditional parameters of the gallery, but also stressed a social and interactive component.17 The term means art made “inside” the social context. Artworks were designed so that audiences
Figure 1.1 Ugo La Pietra, Segnali di fuoco, 1970, car tires, fire, performance, Zafferana, Italy.
Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra
could interface with them; the experience of art was fundamentally active.18 This trend reflected not only an alteration in the role of viewers but also that of the artists; they were directly participating in the sociopolitical sphere and looking to insert their work within this context. This participation can be directly connected to the activism pervasive in the social sphere at the time. Likewise, another term was operatore culturale (cultural operator), expanding the definition of the artist’s practice to describe the work of the Arte Ambientale artist as active and functional within the broader sociocultural sphere. Their work, therefore, was not limited to a fine art denotation but rather could include a multidisciplinary approach and incorporate architecture, design, performance, theater, literature, and any manifestation of a humanistic expression. Lastly, the expression rete diffusa (diffused network)—associated with the sociopolitical sphere more than the arts—describes how Arte Ambientale artists, despite their geographical dispersal, were bound by ideas, which at times, like Zafferana, brought them together to collaborate on projects, all the while maintaining their distinct practices.
While Arte Ambientale drew on Italy’s specific sociopolitical context, commonalities can be cited with other concurrent art tendencies in Europe and the United States that can be broadly categorized as Land Art and Institutional Critique. Like many Land Art undertakings, Arte Ambientale projects were site-specific: conceived and created for that space. Furthermore, they were also temporary, installed for a limited time only, and now exist predominately in documentary form. Additionally, positioned outside, Arte Ambientale artworks inherently critiqued the spaces of aesthetic display of the art establishment, in both museums and galleries in ways that relate to many Institutional Critique initiatives. However, an important distinction must be made: Arte Ambientale defined art that was placed in dialogue with the urban territorio (territory), specifically.19 Enrico Crispolti noted that while Land Art had a romantic quality, in that it was primarily situated in the vast natural landscape, Arte Ambientale was intricately tied to the city.20
Nevertheless, the development of art in the urban environment was not limited to Italy. On the contrary, artists were creating what can be called Environmental Art during the 1970s in major cities in the West. For instance, American artist Gordon Matta-Clark had been making luminous incisions into dilapidated buildings since the late 1960s, drawing attention to questions of urban renewal and gentrification. Indeed, New York City’s shifting landscape was a fertile ground for such interventions, and artists like Charles Simonds created miniature, impermanent constructions in the nooks of already-existing buildings for what he called “Little People.” As early as 1965, Alan Sonfist began Time Landscape on the corner of Houston and La Guardia Place, where he reclaimed a wasteland lot and planted forest plants indigenous to Manhattan, effectively returning the landscape to a pre-urban space. Meanwhile, Richard Serra’s early-1970s work in the Bronx, To Encircle Base Plate Hexagon, Right Angles Inverted, can also be called Environmental Art. Contemporaneously in Europe, the Collectif d’Art Sociologique (Sociological Art Collective) in Paris explored art’s relationship with society by applying sociological methods—such as interrogative survey activities—to reach ordinary inhabitants and spur introspection about their daily lives. In the United Kingdom, artists like Stephan Willats and Graham Stevens were also working directly in the urban sphere.
However, recent scholarship on these initiatives in the 1970s, and the even later 1990s practices, notably the genealogy outlined by art historian Miwon Kwon on site-specific art, charts its emergence from the legacies of Minimalism, specifically an art based in an
experiential understanding of physical attributes of the site, and Institutional Critique, where site also means a network of sociopolitical references. 21 The development of Arte Ambientale in Italy, however, had a different origin, as Minimalism was not as dominant as Kinetic Art or Op Art in the 1960s. Artists laboring under the umbrella term Arte Programmata (Programmed art), which included groups like Gruppo ENNE, based in Padua, and Gruppo T, based in Milan, sought to break down perceptual schemas; blur the boundaries between art, architecture, and design; and conceive of artworks spatially and phenomenologically.22 Building on this legacy, and others, such as the Bauhaus, Art Informel, and Fluxus, Arte Ambientale artists further expanded the frontiers of site specificity outside the gallery and into the urban environment.
Their recasting of this shift as Institutional Critique, like their American contemporaries, was the result of understanding the conditions of production and the function of art within the art economies and art institutional sphere.23 In Italy specifically, the spirit of the 1968 social uprisings, the challenge to authoritarianism, and the prevalence of labor movements, both in action and in theory, cannot be underestimated. Arte Ambientale artists aligned themselves with the percolating countercultural sphere, and they viewed the art establishment—the interconnected system of museums and galleries—as insular and unsympathetic to projects that addressed social concerns. These artists all shared the desire to extricate themselves and function on their terms. They thus can be understood as distinct from the anti-political stance that characterized much of the art world’s mainstream galleries and institutions, as well as the artists that were supported within this sphere, like Luigi Ontani and Gino de Dominicis. Instead, Arte Ambientale artists chose to inhabit a peripheral position that challenged the centralized, market-driven nature of Italy’s museums and gallery structure.24 Their site for operating and intervening, therefore, was the city itself.
With this move to the urban environment, Arte Ambientale artists sought to mobilize citizens to make them active participants in the experience, and sometimes creation, of their interventions. In their projects, they aimed for democratic relations, whereby power dynamics became lateral rather than hierarchical. Art historian Claire Bishop’s definition of such practices in the 1990s—where the artist is conceived as a producer of situations, the artwork as an ongoing project, and the audience as a participant or coproducer—can be retroactively applied to Arte Ambientale artists from as early as the 1970s.25 In her book, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship, she argues that artistic practices engaging in social and participatory collaboration occurred in earlier revolutionary moments, such as in 1917 and 1968. Further, she explicitly examines such instances in the UK, the Community Arts Movement, and the Artists Placement Group, within the context of welfare state democracy. There is a kinship between these British initiatives and Arte Ambientale, and this study of Italian practices adds to the scholarship in this field of socially engaged, participatory art interventions. That said, this book’s scope is to examine Arte Ambientale as an Italian phenomenon with predominate roots in Italian sociocultural history.26 While references are made to environmental and urban artworks outside of Italy to emphasize a particular point, there is ample room for future scholars to develop and forge new connections between Arte Ambientale in Italy and similar artwork made at different geographic locations and temporal moments.
In Italy, Arte Ambientale was a concentrated and sustained effort throughout the 1970s. This makes Arte Ambientale unique because the country’s specific sociopolitical conditions, as well as a committed artistic drive, resulted in an extensive manifestation
of urban art interventions throughout the decade. Its strength, therefore, needs to be understood in terms of larger shifts in the culture of art production at this time, specifically an active engagement with the social and urban conditions of everyday life. In Italy, the economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s was based primarily on economic, and not social, principles, and while it created new employment opportunities, neither the government nor private industries addressed social needs, such as housing, urban planning, and infrastructure.27 By the 1970s, Italy lagged far behind its European counterparts in welfare programs.28 Artists did not remain disconnected from these inequalities and, feeling a sense of urgency, made work that directly addressed Italy’s social issues. They expanded their practice into nontraditional spaces, such as the factory, the school, and urban neighborhoods, and made work directly on-site that interacted with individuals in these locales.29 Moreover, they involved viewers in the creative process, seeking to raise awareness of these exigent social and political problems. Cultural action, in this sense, involved the acquisition of a consciousness of the self and the organization and experience of everyday life.30 Operating within this context, the curators—Luciano Caramel and Enrico Crispolti—and artists—Ugo La Pietra, Maurizio Nannucci, Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, Franco Summa, and Franco Vaccari—discussed in this book were part of a network of aesthetic collaboration and exchange at the margins of the art world.
This book is the first historical analysis of Arte Ambientale in English and Italian scholarship. There has been no sustained examination of the broader implications of the work of these artists during the 1970s, nor has there been any rigorous attempt to understand the emergence of such practices within Italy’s unstable socioeconomic climate.31 While there has been ample attention to movements such as the post-minimalist group Arte Povera (1967–1972) and postmodern painterly movement Transavanguardia (1978–1989), Arte Ambientale has languished in relative obscurity. This neglect, on the part of scholars, is partially because the study of Arte Ambientale presented certain challenges. These artists were dispersed geographically and did not consider themselves part of a cohesive movement, yet they all shared common ideas about art interventions in urban space. Moreover, Arte Ambientale lacked the prestige of a commanding curator. Perhaps the closest figure to take on this role was Enrico Crispolti, but he never operated with authority as Germano Celant did for Arte Povera or Achille Bonito Oliva did for Transavanguardia. Instead, Crispolti saw himself as a comrade to Arte Ambientale artists and a facilitator to their projects. Lastly, Arte Ambientale artists self-consciously positioned themselves on the margins of the art institution, which has caused them to fall into relative obscurity, because the history of art tends to primarily reach only so far as the history of those artists who participated in the art establishment.32
This study, in recounting the story of Arte Ambientale artists, expands Italian postwar scholarship beyond traditional art historical sites and sources. It raises broad questions about the nature of cultural production and ideology precisely because these subjects operated at on margins of the arts institutional structure yet were at the core of Italy’s cultural crisis during the 1970s. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it explores the broader realms of cultural production and artists’ relationships to art institutions by connecting Arte Ambientale with broader contemporaneous movements in critical theory, such as the leftist philosophical thought of the Autonomia movement and the work of theorists Jürgen Habermas and Henri Lefebvre. Overall,
it aims to contextualize Italian artistic production in relation to institutional power dynamics, social history, activism, and political struggle.
Rete Diffusa (Diffused Network)
Arte Ambientale did not denote an aesthetic “movement” in the traditional sense. In fact, the 1970s saw the rise of pluralistic art practices as a reaction to the clearly defined, collective or group-based art that had been the dominant working model the decade prior. In the 1960s, utopian ideals had spread in Italy, and across most of the Western world, as workers, students, and artists dreamt of realizing a more just and equal world. Anonymous collectivism provided a compelling counterpoint to capitalist individualism, and the Kinetic Art circles, like Gruppo ENNE, founded in 1959, and Gruppo T, founded in 1960, were cases in point.33 Even the later Arte Povera movement, under the careful stewardship of Celant, which had given artistic form to the liberatory foment of the 1968 movement, no longer seemed to hold relevance in the early part of the new decade. Sociopolitical conditions in the country changed dramatically, especially after the December 12 bomb explosion of 1969 in the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura in Milan’s Piazza Fontana, killing seventeen and wounding more than eighty people. Indeed, the 1970s in Italy were rife with social malaise, wanton domestic terrorism, and economic instability.34 Reacting to both the 1960s’ collective operative mode and an emphatic definition of an art movement with overarching goals and defined members, Arte Ambientale artists shifted their working practice during the 1970s by claiming independent identities. Without either a collective group dynamic or cachet from a prominent critic, a diffuse network, or rete diffusa, accurately describes the dynamic and pragmatic exchange of information between Arte Ambientale artists as they retained their distinctive aesthetic practices.35 This new interrelational configuration accounted for how artists who often worked independently from each other still found common ground in their initiatives to address social issues, like at Zafferana in 1970. Diffused network paradoxically implies scattering as well as gathering: a lattice of separate elements held together by intersecting threads. Connections between the artists were dispersed but at the same time strong enough that they could be understood as allied. Relationships and power dynamics were lateral rather than hierarchical, putting into action democratic ideals. Instances that brought artists together were temporary and provisional, reflecting the fluid nature of the bonds between them. Furthermore, this diffused network proliferated across disciplines to include architecture and design as well. Extending outward both physically—from the center of the city into the peripheries—and metaphorically—from the figure of the traditional artists to the social activist—this network formed a sprawling web of interconnectedness. These relationships, both to each other and to their audiences, clearly differentiate Arte Ambientale artists from both the 1960s’ collectives and other artists of the 1970s, such as Arte Povera artists or those whose careers were championed by the institutional system where individuality and a prominent studio practice remained central.
Collaborations between Arte Ambientale artists abounded, revealing the vitality and breadth of this diffused network. As so many urban interventions were temporary and site-specific, artist-operated magazines and journals were instrumental in circulating these projects.36 La Pietra, for example, published two magazines: IN: argomenti e
immagini di design (Theories and Images of Design), which began in 1971 and lasted until 1973, and Progettare Inpiù (More Design), which ran for another two years, from 1973 to 1975.37 IN was a bimonthly magazine in which La Pietra consolidated national and international experiments of radical architecture and design.38 He used the latter publications as a tool for research and artistic experimentation. Specifically, he was interested in a psychosociological investigation of how ordinary people experienced the world around them, the objects they used and the city they inhabited.39 In both these publications, La Pietra brought together other artists’ socially engaged, alternative cultural experiments and strengthened the threads of Arte Ambientale’s diffused artist network.
Maurizio Nannucci featured one of his projects, 15 verdi naturali (Fifteen Natural Greens), in Progettare Inpiù, publishing black-and-white photographs of his conceptual piece alongside an explanatory text [Figure 1.2].40 This extract was part of a larger work that he created in 1973 called Sessanta verdi naturali (Sixty Natural Greens). Operating like a nineteenth-century naturalist, Nannucci photographically documented the different naturally occurring shades of foliage he encountered during a walk—or passeggiata, so central to Italian urban life—through Milan’s city center. He began at the Duomo and proceeded to Via Dante, Foro Buonaparte (close to Parco Sempione), then Corso Venezia, which is situated at the edge of the Giardini Pubblici Idro Montanelli, and on to Via Borgogna and Corso Vittorio Emanuele, forming a meandering loop through the city and its peripheries. For Progettare Inpiù, Nannucci selected just fifteen examples, organizing the different gradations of green in a tidy grid and naming each plant species: verde galium mollugo, verde erigeron ramosus, verde lupsia galactites, and so on. By collecting the array of tints, Nannucci investigated the semiotics of color in the urban environment, commenting on the variety—or lack thereof—of greenery in the city. Additionally, this “natural” sequence of green contrasted with the synthetic and industrial chromatic scales produced by Milan’s industrial manufacturers. By setting up this dichotomy, Nannucci was making a point of the primacy of naturally occurring colors over their synthetic counterparts. This project was both a performance of sorts and a conceptual documentary piece, and a version of it was disseminated in La Pietra’s journal. Ultimately, publications like Progettare Inpiù were fundamental for Arte Ambientale artists, enabling them to circulate and exhibit their work while circumventing conventional channels.
The network of collaboration during the 1970s was vast and frayed at the edges, and at times, these instances could be provisional. For example, during the mid 1970s, La Pietra and Vaccari became members of another art and architecture group called Global Tools, based in Florence. This association took an anti-technological and antimodern position; its members were interested in reviving traditional construction techniques of joinery, carpentry, leather, pottery, weaving, and spinning.41 Their objective was to stimulate the free development of individual creativity through a return to a physical engagement with crafts. This ensemble was made up of a number of individuals and groups from different backgrounds: Archizoom Associati, Remo Buti, Picoardo Daliti, Ugo La Pietra, Passegna, Ettore Sottsass Jr, Superstudio, UFO, and Ziggurat. As members of Global Tools, La Pietra and Vaccari formed a focus group called Gruppo Comunicazione (Communication Group) in 1973. Their work looked to the possibility of unmediated communication between individuals. Expanding on Marshall McLuhan’s concept of “the medium is the message,” they strove to deconstruct modes of dialogue.42 They wanted to eliminate technological mediation—the
Figure 1.2 Maurizio Nannucci, 15 verdi naturali, 1974, color documentary photographs. Published in Progettare Inpiù no. 5/6 (1974): 14–15.
Source: Image courtesy of the Artist © Maurizio Nannucci
deforming “filter” that distorts and disorients reality—and turned to in-person actions to communicate as directly as possible.
In 1974, Vaccari and La Pietra realized this idea of an unmediated communicative experience in the project titled Viaggio sul Reno (Voyage on the Rhine River). Joined by Gianni Pettena, from the radical architecture group Superstudio, and designer Guido Arra, they took a French cruise boat and traveled from Düsseldorf to Basel. Purposefully searching for the candor to be found in the mundane, they chose this voyage for what they considered to be its banality.43 Its ordinariness was thought to reduce external stimuli and make them more aware of themselves and their surroundings. Vaccari vividly recounted that the “light fixtures were always on, even in full daylight, but only in the evening do they seem illuminated.”44 Both Vaccari and La Pietra created independent work from this shared expedition by using photographs and documentation of their experiences. Vaccari captured colored photographs of details from the trip [Plate 1]. One shot centers on a dingy yellow deck of the ship where an uninviting swimming pool reflects the drab sky. Pairing these images with text, Vaccari mused over the Chinese saying, “the river is always the same even if the water never is.” The artist realized that the saying, in this case, could
be inverted, as the pool water on the boat remained the same while the surrounding scenery was in constant flux. All of Vaccari’s images from this experiment are devoid of people but rich in nostalgia. The resulting coolness perhaps reflects the artist’s disappointment of actualizing unmediated communication. Meanwhile, La Pietra’s project, also titled Viaggio sul Reno and dated 1974, comprised of a large photo collage documenting the four artists’ conversations sitting at a table with consecutive views of the riverbank backlighting them [Figure 1.3]. Interestingly, in the lower section of the collage are notes from their conversation, which frame a diagram of the Rhine river, and to the far right, one of Vaccari’s photographs is pasted in at an angle as if it were inserted into a travel photobook journal. Collaboration here extends not only to the experience but also to the creation of the artwork that resulted from it.
La Pietra also collaborated with Summa, and in 1975, he took part in Summa’s project titled 24 magliette: sentirsi un arcobaleno adosso (24 T-shirts: To Feel a Rainbow on Oneself) [Plate 2]. In addition to La Pietra, the participants included the critics Crispolti, Pierre Restany, and Tommaso Trini; artists Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gordon
Source: Image courtesy
Figure 1.3 Ugo La Pietra, Viaggio sul reno, 1974, photomontage, ink on paper, 100 × 100 cm.
of the Artist © Ugo La Pietra
Matta-Clark, and Guglielmo Achille Cavellini; and designers Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini.45 The intent was to create a wearable artwork that would move in the city between private and public spheres. The T-shirts were horizontally striped in Summa’s signature color combination, placing warm colors—symbols of materiality— at the bottom and cold colors—symbols of spirituality—at the top. The rainbow effect was meant to stimulate creative possibilities; individuals would dress in this vibrant attire and trace colorful routes on their mundane itineraries.46 To initiate this project and mark the giving of each T-shirt, Summa photographed each participant wearing the rainbow-striped top.
While all these examples show strong commonalities between Arte Ambientale artists, drawing them together throughout the decade to collaborate, they each also maintained their independent identities, carrying forward singular and particular interests as well as working methods. And yet, these instances of cooperation legitimize Arte Ambientale as an artistic trend in 1970s Italy and provide evidence for the richness and diversity of their diffused artists’ network.
Participation in the Urban Environment
The historical specificity of this diffused network can be linked to precise sociocultural conditions at the time. During this decade, Italy fully awoke to widespread activism that had begun to gain momentum during the 1960s. The general loss of faith in the government gave rise to alternative forms of active participation in public affairs and renewed notions of civic engagement. Many citizens were angry that the country’s social welfare system had not provided them with enough assistance, and they channeled their criticism toward public administration, political parties, and the tecnostrutture (economic and social decision-making structures).47 An important strain was the workerist movement, called the fabbrica diffusa (diffused factory), that expanded outside the workers’ struggle in the factory and into social spheres of cultural production.48 Activist and social theorists like Antonio Negri defined this new politicized, social citizen as the “social worker.” This urban subject comprised not only of industrial workers but also of youths, students, and the under- and unemployed.49 They advocated for a better quality of life, the appropriation of decision-making domains, and the centrality of self-determination.
We can draw clear parallels between the artists’ networks and the dissemination of workerist ideas into the broader social landscape of Italy’s 1970s counterculture. Activism dispersed within the fabric of the city and took the form of community centers that addressed broad social issues such as neighborhood infrastructures, healthcare, transportation, and schooling.50 For instance, in the community of Sesto San Giovanni in Milan, inhabitants advocated for self-management to organize neighborhood nursery schools and services. This was one of many such initiatives that emphasized autogestione (self-management) as grassroots activists augmented their concerns to include all aspects of everyday life and better living conditions for the masses. Although their causes were highly fractured and often defined by local circumstances, these activists found common ground in their shared resistance to institutional authority and interest in democracy at a time when the Italian government was foundering. Artists also shifted their aesthetic practice to reflect a deeper concern for social issues and a focus on democracy. They changed their means of production and interaction, finding innovative working methods as well as searching for alternative
modes of dissemination and exhibition. The nonconformist attitude seeping into questions of everyday life inspired artists to search for broader pathways of communication and bottom-up initiatives.
Artists’ and civic activists’ embrace of social forms of value defined by alternative, democratic notions of power paralleled those espoused by Autonomia, a heterogeneous movement of theoreticians and militants. Growing out of a workerist tradition that placed the laborer at the center of class struggle, Autonomia was united only in its autonomy from the state, official political parties, trade unions, and any form of political, social, or cultural mediation between what they saw as the interests of the capitalist system and the movement’s adherents.51 Its leading figures—including Franco Berardi (Bifo), Augusto Illuminati, Antonio Negri, Oreste Scalzone, and Franco Piperno—dissented from orthodox Marxism to constitute a political philosophy defined by self-determination in everyday life, which was directed to the needs, desires, and subjectivity of working-class individuals.52 Indeed, Autonomia was not a claim of autonomy from but rather a radical claim of autonomy for; it consisted of workers’ refusal to work and their forging a source of power alternative to the one established and maintained by capitalism.53
Throughout the 1970s, Negri specifically reformulated the relationship between workers and capitalist development in ways that are instructive to understanding the art attitudes of Arte Ambientale.54 In essays like “Worker’s Party Against Work” (1973) and “Towards a Critique of the Material Constitution” (1977), he developed two significant concepts: “refusal to work” and “self-valorization.” The first indicates the workers’ rejection of wage labor to terminate their dependence on the capitalist system and its ability to define them. According to the orthodox Marxian notion of the proletarian left, workers must sell their labor for less than its actual worth, thus reducing the worker to a subservient subject. Instead, Negri proposed that workers take back their labor capacity so that the haute bourgeoisie can no longer make a profit by passively owning their labor. Refusal to work within the system meant that workers would not submit their labor to capitalist modes of exploitation. Negri preached refusal to work and the immediate appropriation of productive wealth by the expropriated. This stance finds parallels in Arte Ambientale artists’ autonomy from the art establishment’s system of promotion and profiteering. Each artist chose varying distances from gallery and museum institutions to safeguard their aesthetic urban interventions.
Negri’s second concept, self-valorization, calls for defining one’s subjectivity in one’s own terms as a corrective to exploitation in the factory. Recognizing their innate ability to conceptualize, produce, and organize their own forms of struggle, Negri called on the masses to reject the values imposed on them by capitalist commandment.55 By refusing capitalist mediations of productive and reproductive relations, workers could engage in liberated labor, which would lead to a process of self-emancipation.56 This self-emancipation, at least as Negri viewed it, was at its roots a process of selfexpression and a means of seizing agency over the formation of one’s identity. Thus, Negri advocated a conscious embrace of a self-determined position, circumventing traditional modes of political representation. Taken together, refusal to work and selfvalorization formed a complete renunciation of the capitalist systems of worth and, in its place, conjured a new subjective identity. Likewise, this concept of self-valorization also finds prominence in Arte Ambientale artists’ attitudes in that they defined their work by alternative, democratic notions of worth. Their aesthetic activities were
positioned outside the enclosed art establishment and engaged in the social context. They sought creative actions that were politically driven to have an impact beyond aesthetic considerations. In so doing, they found value outside the measures of the art establishment and in the impact that they had on ordinary citizens.
One of the significant concentrations of this grassroots activism was in the urban environment. Activists and artists, as well as sociologists and academics from other disciplines, took the city as their subject during the 1970s because of the dysfunctional and exploitative way many Italian urban centers had undergone radical changes since 1945. In conjunction with the country’s precipitous industrialization, certain cities swelled to accommodate new sites for manufacturing and huge migratory influxes to fuel the country’s industrial output, but they lacked urban infrastructure and the technical tools to handle rapid real estate development and industrial construction.57 Thus, Italy’s rapid industrialization and modernization led to a disjointed urban reorganization. Gentrification of the city center fueled the housing market, and land speculation enriched the upper-middle classes while impoverishing the lower and working classes. The peripheries around major cities became vast expanses of concrete tower blocks known as quartiere-dormitorio (sleeping neighborhoods), bedroom communities for the working class: a place for inhabitants to reside, not live. Much of these developments were private investments, and the housing market since the 1950s in Italy was completely independent of social needs.58 The separate housing block layout, these districts lacked basic infrastructure such as post offices, schools, shops, and even transportation to the city center, resulting in a pervasive sense of isolation and alienation. By the 1970s, it was clear that there was a deficiency in providing the necessary social housing and urban structures.59
While the government-funded infrastructures, such as INA-Casa (Istituto Nazionale Abitazioni),60 which later turned into IACP and GESCAL, did provide efficient and low-cost housing for the working class after the war, by the 1960s, they were renowned for their corruption and clientelism; they had a policy of giving monetary and fiscal credit to private owners and therefore of incentivizing building speculation.61 Abuse and corruption were at the root of the chaotic processes of urban development, which had a profound effect on the way inhabitants experienced the city.62 Moreover, the lack of a properly functioning welfare system meant that the quality of life in the city, especially for the underprivileged, became increasingly arduous. These changes affected everyone’s experience of the city, including traffic patterns, pollution, and noise; access to green spaces and collective services; a widespread feeling of insecurity.63 Yet many discontented inhabitants were empowered to make changes, extending what had been their struggle in the factory to their local communities, resulting in social movements to reclaim the city.
Urban sociology was a nascent field in the country, and writers such as Gianni Alasia, Francesco di Ciacca, Giuliano Della Pergola, and Nella Ginatempo looked to the city with new interest by examining emerging societal conflicts. These authors critically analyzed the social consequences of the building industry, the ravages of land speculation, the role of the government in relation to urban land use, and the extraordinary expansion of northern cities at the expense of the rural south.64 They strove to understand the city as a living organism.65 Informed by Marxism, they drew direct links between the structural organization of urban space and the capitalist division of labor. The urban crisis they saw consisted in what they regarded as the inhabitability of the city and how that directly impacted inhabitants’ quality of life. Socialist Aldo
Aniasi argued that Italian cities had become unlivable and that their enormous growth made them no longer alla misura dell’uomo (to human scale).66 Artists also responded to the city by living with the same problems identified by these sociologists, choosing to operate within the urban fabric to raise awareness of these issues. They integrated effects of the territorio, the urban economy and geography, and the diritto amministrativo (administrative rights) and urban planning in their work, intervening on-site to address these socioeconomic concerns.67
Operatore Culturale
Working within this broader sociocultural sphere and addressing political and social issues, Arte Ambientale artists began to call themselves operatori culturali (cultural operators), instead of artisti (artists), denoting a reformulation of the scope of their work. Rather than laboring in an isolated studio, these individuals felt strongly about practicing within the social and cultural sphere. Crispolti outlined, in his 1977 book Arti visive e partecipazione sociali (Visual Arts and Social Participation), how the designation “artist” was limited to traditional preconceptions of artistic practice tied to medium-specific painting and sculpture. Unfettered by conventional mediums, the artist’s new role was to go beyond traditional confines and think about the work of art as action.68 While Crispolti was an important theorist of this term, he was not the first to use it; rather, it was the artists themselves who sought new terms for self-definition. As early as 1971, Enzo Mari rejected the designation “artist,” as he considered it reactionary, preferring “expert in visual communication”69 La Pietra also chose a different designation, describing himself as an operatore estetico (Aesthetic operator) already in 1972.70
The cultural operator’s practice was dialogical. Artists no longer unilaterally transferred their specific ideas or aesthetic vision to their viewers, but worked together with the public by soliciting varying modes of participation that formed the basis of the artwork. Crispolti thought that the cultural operator’s role was to increase public awareness of their cultural heritage, thus activating their political consciousness.71 This extended the cultural operator’s work to new spaces, what Crispolti termed social territory.72 This sphere included all aspects of the social fabric, going beyond the topographical definition to include neighborhoods, schools, and factories.
Crispolti’s original formulation of the artist’s function in the broader social field was in keeping with the Left’s cultural agenda. The term “cultural operator” derived from leftist literature, and it had been used to define the role of an intellectual who performed a cultural function within society. Debates about the role of the intellectual in society were especially pronounced throughout the 1970s.73 In post-1968 Italy, the prominent intellectual’s attitude was one of sacrifice for the workers. Indeed, historian Robert Lumley has described how these public figures wanted to abolish the idea of themselves as an elite caste and become honorary members of the working class, which they sought to serve in a bid for legitimacy.74 With the ultimate goal of working-class hegemony, the term “cultural operator” was rooted in a tradition of enlightenment and acculturation of the working class.75 Thus, while intellectuals were descending from their isolated ivory tower, Crispolti’s ambition for the cultural operators was that they would play a vital role in connecting people with the realm of avant-garde art.
Further elaborating on the cultural operator’s modus operandi in bridging the gap between artists and audience, as well as accounting for the variety of styles and methods that Arte Ambientale artists used, Crispolti reconceived artists’ use of medium—traditionally determined as painting or sculpture—and media—modes of aesthetic communication—in a 1978 publication titled Extra media: esperienze attuali di comunicazione estetica (Extra Media: Current Experiences in Aesthetic Communication).76 By combining and re-elaborating these two terms, Crispolti identified a different practice that prioritized media over medium. Seen in historical terms, this approach overthrew the notion of the artist as creator—typical of the Romantic and bourgeois conceptions of the artist—in favor of extended plural relationships articulated on multiple levels. In this way, artists were going beyond the confines of objectbound traditional mediums and embracing a flexible practice that was determined by various modes of communication. Crispolti described this as a “progressive use of different media chosen for the individual project, according to the needs of expression without the fetishization of the medium itself. The presupposition is the freedom of . . . choosing a behavior that is adapted to the relationship the individual has to the social.”77 Thus, both the medium and media became contingent and circumstantial, allowing for artistic interventions to be critically effective according to each cultural and social context.
Crispolti made explicit that this new operative mode, based on an artistic need for adaptability, was in stark opposition to the type of artwork favored and promoted by market forces.78 Galleries preferred artists to be consistent in their approach to enable a more effective monetization of their output. By embracing this higher degree of flexibility and openness, however, artists were able to evade these commoditizing forces and retain a critical position vis-à-vis their aesthetic agency. But this also came at a cost and meant that artists choosing to operate in this manner made a conscious decision to work on the fringes of the art economy. They did not necessarily make work to advance their careers or even make a living: each of them funded their art practices in different ways—for example, La Pietra worked as a for-profit designer, and Summa was a teacher at the Liceo Artistico in Pescara. It did make one thing clear: their aesthetic projects during the 1970s were intrinsically motivated. This placed Arte Ambientale artists’ work within the broader counterculture sphere that sought self-definition. Embracing this new position of artistic freedom, Crispolti also made the point that the artists’ identity was neither fixed nor absolute. No longer defined by either medium or marketability, artists could now form their professional identity through their socially conscious interventions.79 They extended and amplified their work to form relationships between themselves and their audience, offering them a renewed awareness of reality.
This operative mode was unique to Arte Ambientale, which in turn was particular to the aesthetic and social conditions of 1970s Italy. Defying convention, Arte Ambientale artists embraced complete flexibility for the opportunity to have the greatest possible impact. Their motivation to effect change was also inextricably linked to the social circumstances of the decade, specifically to the rise and peak of Italy’s postwar urban social movement. The importance of this drive for change affected values and behaviors, with its demands for a different and better quality of life, the appropriation of decision-making domains, and the centrality of self-determination.80 Their goal was not to completely overhaul the status quo but to make tangible differences in
people’s lives, where even micro changes could be counted as victories. The decade’s unique circumstances enabled artists to carve out new pathways for expression and experimentation, often making radical choices and ideological commitments in their aesthetic practice.
Chapters
As a point of departure, Chapter 2, “Extramural Exhibitions,” provides an overview of Arte Ambientale’s exhibition history and features three shows that took place in decentralized locations that marked a decisive shift in artistic and curatorial attitudes: curator and critic Luciano Caramel’s Campo Urbano, which took place in Como in 1969, and curator and art historian Enrico Crispolti’s Volterra ’73, which occurred in Volterra in 1973, and his Ambiente come Sociale, which occupied the Italian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1976. These exhibits are important entry points to understand the widespread and diverse nature of Arte Ambientale. Expanding beyond the confines of the “white cube” of commercial galleries, these open-air exhibitions reconceptualized art’s commodity status and created a space for direct impact on the town’s inhabitants and society at large. More specifically, the artists considered art through radical participatory interventions that embraced the public in those spaces where everyday life unfolded.
Campo Urbano, situated temporally on the cusp of the 1970s, included artists that had already come to the fore in the 1960s, such as Gianni Colombo and Paolo Scheggi, as well as then-prominent Arte Povera figures such as Luciano Fabro and Giulio Paolini. However, it also saw the emergence of artists such as La Pietra, whose art intentionally interacted with the urban space. For Campo Urbano, he showed Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra (So: I Cover One Street and Open Another) [Figure 2.3] where he circumvented the commercial street and created a new passage for the public. In contrast to Campo Urbano, Volterra ’73 showcased only Arte Ambientale artists, dispensing with the established names of the Arte Povera group. The thirty-two artists who participated, including Francesco Somaini, Mauro Staccioli, and Nannucci, reconsidered the city in its local and historical contexts. Some explored local traditions, such as the alabaster craft, while others engaged with the town’s rich medieval past. In all, the city was brought to life through the active participation of local inhabitants. In contrast to these exhibitions situated in remote towns, Arte Ambientale received central prominence at the 37th Venice Biennale held in 1976. Crispolti’s Ambiente come Sociale offered artists who had decided to work on the art world’s margins an opportunity to explore their social art practices from within the institution’s center. Crispolti included many of the artists who had participated in Volterra ’73 just a few years before, such as Fabio De Sanctis, Nino Giammarco, Somaini, as well as others such as Riccardo Dalisi, Gruppo Salerno 1975, La Pietra, Summa, and Giuliano Mauri.
The remaining chapters of this book focus on specific artists whose practices and careers illuminate the reach and importance of Arte Ambientale throughout the 1970s. These artists—La Pietra, Nannucci, Somaini, Staccioli, Summa, and Vaccari— not only participated in the exhibitions described above but also developed a practice of interventions outside of the exhibition circuit, primarily in the cities and towns where they were based. Moreover, while many artists created one-off, site-specific Arte Ambientale artworks—like Gianni Pettena, who produced just a couple of such
17 interventions—these artists were dedicated to the practice and consistently created Arte Ambientale projects throughout the decade.81 To structure the narrative, artists have been paired thematically to reflect the different technical approaches of Arte Ambientale: sculptural, architectural and designed based, and participatory. While there are elements of all three in most Arte Ambientale work and artists during this experimental decade sought to transcend medium specificity, this differentiation teases out productive comparisons between the artists and their output.
Chapter 3, “Redeployment of Sculpture in the City,” frames Somaini and Staccioli’s implementation of sculptural forms—paradoxically a traditional medium—within Arte Ambientale. It was inspired by Somaini’s 1973 publication Urgenze nella Città in which he attributed a social and urban function to sculpture: one where the artist’s work is integrated into the realities of the community. Somaini tasked the sculptor with making art that reversed the alienation that resulted from impoverished urban architecture by creating evocative three-dimensional forms. With similar intentions for the redeployment of sculpture, both Somaini and Staccioli explored urban spatial conditions through radically different approaches: Somaini’s forms are soft and fluid, while Staccioli’s work is geometric and hard. For example, Somaini’s photomontages from the mid decade, such as Farfalla della solitudine (Butterfly of Isolation) (1974) [Figure 3.6], explored the integration of his anthropomorphic sculptures, such as Caduta dell’uomo (1967–1969), into the rigid, angular skyscraper forms to heighten the contradiction and disjuncture between the organic and the modern metropolis. In contrast, Staccioli installed temporary yet colossal concrete disks—titled Ruote (Wheels)—with sharp, pointed spikes protruding from their sides in Piazza della Steccata in Parma in 1973 [Figure 3.16]. Central to the discussion of the significance of sculpture in urban space is the discourse of urban renewal and the atmosphere of violence that pervaded the decade and unfolded in the city streets.
Chapter 4, “Riappropriazione Dell’ambiente” (Reappropriation of the Environment), is a focused study of La Pietra and Summa, who shared a primary concern with the inhabitability of urban architecture. Like Somaini and Staccioli, La Pietra and Summa understood the modern Italian city—with its austere buildings and dysfunctional infrastructure—as fundamentally alienating to its inhabitants. Through their work, La Pietra and Summa strove to bring awareness of this issue by blurring the distinctions between inside and outside and finding ways to render the city more fit to inhabit. La Pietra’s oeuvre traversed art, architecture, and design, as he was fascinated with the demarcations between public and private spheres and the opportunities to collapse them. He accomplished this by taking his practice into the city, where he worked as both an observer and an interventionist. For example, in 1979, La Pietra created a series of pieces titled Riconversione progettuale, attrezzatura per la collettività (Reconversion Project, Equipment for the Community), in which he fused urban traffic fittings with house furniture, such as constructing a bed’s headboard and frame from traffic poles and a metal chain. Repurposing urban, public, and ostensibly nondecorative items for private consumption drew attention to the way the city was used rather than inhabited. Summa, too, endeavored to build a relationship between people and their environment. In Per incontrarsi (In Order to Meet) [Figure 4.10], made in 1973 with the assistance of his students from the Liceo Artistico in Pescara, he painted on the bridge of the Ponte Risorgimento a sequence of black and blue legs in apparent motion. Summa described the image as a ritual procession, a chance for viewers to have a simulated experience of watching the daily passeggiata.
Chapter 5 , “Vox Populi,” examines the work of two artists, Nannucci and Vaccari, interested in constructing a space where the public’s presence could be manifested both vocally and visually. Nannucci carried out one of his best-known projects, Parole/mots/word/wörter, in 1976, in which he interviewed passersby in the streets of Florence, asking them to utter the first word that came to mind. He transformed the interviews into an installation comprising of slide projections and a sound recording: each pedestrian thus became an integral part of the work, and the word sequence sounded much like a lexicon for the decade, such as “ciao,” “home,” “bread,” “crisis,” and “tension.” Vaccari, a conceptual photographer working with installations and a variety of different media, transcended the public and private spheres by often involving audience activity. Throughout the 1970s, he worked on the series Esposizione in tempo reale (Exhibition in Real Time), stemming from his best-known piece, Leave on the walls a photographic trace of your fleeting visit, which premiered at the Venice Biennale of 1972. In this work, he installed an automatic photo booth in a corner of an otherwise empty exhibition room. He invited the audience to take a strip of pictures of themselves and affix it to the wall. More than six thousand people participated by having their pictures taken. Thus, both Nannucci and Vaccari were interested in giving Italian citizens a form of representation and a visible identity.
The study of Arte Ambientale is particularly relevant today as questions of urban gentrification, the commodification of public space and everyday life and threats to participatory democracy become ever-more exigent. More than half a century later, in Italy and other contexts, democracy continues to be at stake. However, despite the pertinence of these artistic experiments, many have slipped into the dark recesses of our cultural amnesia. Indeed, their diminishment began as early as the 1980s. In a 1979 survey of Italian cultural production in the wake of the 1968 cultural revolution, sociologist Luigi Manconi characterized the period as the “dark years,” in which nothing of lasting cultural significance was produced.82 He maintained that while there was some creative activity in the fields of music, theater, poetry, and publishing, most work was of little consequence. In this book, I challenge Manconi’s assertion and, in the pages that follow, recount how with inventive and unshrinking courage Arte Ambientale artists, committed to democratic values, delved deep into Italy’s social injustices and remained dedicated to improving the lives of ordinary citizens.
Notes
1 Ugo La Pietra, “Arte e Città Zafferana,” L’uomo e l’arte no. 1 (1971): 30.
2. What is referred to as the Italian economic miracle is the period of strong economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s, in which the country went from a largely rural to an industrialized economy. This shift, in such a short period of time, affected all aspects of life in Italy, not only economic but also cultural, social, and religious. See, for example, Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics 1943–1988 (New York, NY: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2003) and Jonathan Dunnage, Twentieth Century Italy: A Social History (New York: Routledge, 2016).
3. Lara Vinca Masini, “Interventi sulla città e sul paesaggio,” NAC no. 2 (November 1970): 10.
4 The architects included Mario Galvagni, Aldo Rossi, Maurizio Sacripanti, and Vergilio Vercelloni, and the artists included Getulio Alviani, Marina Apollonio, Lanfranco Baldi, Mario Bassi, Sara Campesan, Ugo La Pietra, Marcello Morandini, Paolo Masi, Germano Olivotto, Luciano Ori, Vittorio Tolu, Franco Vaccari, and Gianfranco Zen.
5 Carla Lonzi, “La critica e potere,” NAC no. 3 (December 1970): 8–9.
6. Alviani is an Italian painter born in Udine. He is considered to be an important international Op and Kinetic artist.
7 For example, Ugo La Pietra participated in the 1969 exhibition in Como, Italy, called “Campo Urbano” with a temporary urban intervention titled Allora: copro una strada e ne faccio un’altra (So: I Cover One Street and I Make a New One), where he created a makeshift passageway along one of Como’s busiest retail streets. This artwork is discussed in Chapter 2.
8. The exhibition Interventi nella città e sul paesaggio was organized in conjunction with the fourth edition of the literary Brancati Prize, instituted in 1967 in memory of the writer Vitaliano Brancati. However, even the jurying of the prize was steeped in political controversy, which gives context to the heightened tension of the art exhibition. See Alessandra Acocella, “Ceneri Calde, Zafferana Etnea 1970,” in Avanguadia diffusa. Luoghi di sperimentazione artistica in Italia, 1967–1970 (Macerata: Quidlibet Srl, 2016), 193–204.
9 Maurizio Nannucci, telephone interview with the author, July 2, 2012, Rome, Italy.
10. Lara-Vinca Masini, Franco Vaccari, and Vittoriano Viganò, “Critici + artisti + architetti,” NAC no. 3 (December 1970): 8–9.
11 Pietra, “Arte e Città Zafferana,” 30–31.
12. Ugo La Pietra, interview with the author, June 20, 2012, Milan, Italy.
13. Luciano Caramel, “Towards the Seventies (Beyond the Sixties),” in Arte in Italia negli anni ’70: verso i settanta (1968–1970), ed. Luciano Caramel, Elena Di Raddo, and Ada Lombardi (Milano: Edizioni Charta, 1996), 25. This has also been the subject of a 2007 doctoral dissertation: Greta Gattazzo, Arte nel Sociale’: un caso di critica militante negli anni Settanta (PhD diss., Università degli studi di Padova, 2007). The notion of integrating the art object with the environment in 1970s Italy can be related to earlier twentiethcentury manifestations, such as artist and architect Frederick Kiesler’s notion of “Correalism,” which considers the “environment as equally as important as the object, if not more so, because the object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of the environment no matter in what space, close or wide apart, open air or indoors.” On this, see Frederick J. Kiesler, “Second Manifesto of Correalism,” Art International 9, no. 2 (March 1965): 16.
14. Alessandra Pioselli, “Arte, politica e territorio: esperienze nella Milano degli anni settanta,” in Milano città d’arte: arte e società 1950–1970, ed. Paolo Campiglio, Marilisa Di Giovanni, Cristiano G. Sangiuliano, and Alessandra Pioselli (Alessandria, Italy: Edizioni dell’Orso, 2001), 97.
15. Enrico Crispolti, interview with the author, August 4, 2011, Rome, Italy. Original Italian: “La land art non e’ attiva, è molto romantica. Cioè, la misura della land art non è la città, ma il deserto. L’Arte Ambientale si inserisce in un contesto urbano, la piazza dove c’è la gente, dove hai un contesto architettonico che voi confrontare. C’è una idea attiva. L’Arte Ambientale tende a modificare lo spazio dove è messa.”
16 Enrico Crispolti, preface to Praticare la città: Arte Ambientale, prospettive di ricerca e metodologie d’intervento, Massimo Bignardi and Enrico Crispolti (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2013), xiii.
17 Anty Pansera and Maurizio Vitta, Guida all’arte contemporanea (Casale Monferrato, AL: Marietti, 1986), 192–194.
18. Particularly relevant to this theme was the journal L’uomo e l’arte, and the first edition was dedicated to the subject “arte e società” (Art and Society), which addressed issues such as art’s relationship to institutions, art’s elitism, and the need to connect art to a broader public. See Elena Di Raddo, “In/Out: Riflessioni critiche sulla fuoriuscita dell’arte dell’arte,” in Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017), 11.
19. Adachiara Zevi, Peripezie del dopoguerra nell’arte italiana (Torino: Einaudi, 2006), 432.
20 Crispolti, “Preface,” xiii.
21 . Miwon Kwon, One Place after Another Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 3.
22 Umberto Eco and Bruno Munari, Arte programmata: arte cinetica: opere moltiplicate: opera aperta (Milano: Officina d’arte grafica A. Lucini, 1962).
23 Benjamin Buchloh, “Conceptual Art 1962–69: From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of the Institution,” October 55 (Winter 1990): 105–143; Johnathon Welchman, Institutional Critique and after (JRP/Ringier, 2006).
24 There were many Italian artists working within the gallery structure practicing Institutional Critique through the medium of Installation art that involved the expansion of the art object into l’ambiente (space), such as Jannis Kounellis, especially with his famous Dodici Cavalli (Twelve Horses) exhibition at L’Attico in Rome in 1969. Other artists include Gianni Colombo, Eliseo Mattiacci, Fabio Mauri, Maurizio Mochetti, Giulio Paolini, Luca Patella, and Vettor Pisani. See Lucilla Meloni, “Praticare lo spazio: environment, azioni e ambienti negli anni Settanta,” in Anni Settanta: La rivoluzione nei linguaggi dell’arte, ed. Cristina Casero and Elena Di Raddo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2015), 140–157.
25. Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2014), 2.
26. Italian artists, through critical reportage in magazines and journals, were up to date with contemporaneous artistic movements occurring in the West. For instance, both Christo’s La Valley Curtain project and Richard Serra’s installation at Storm King were written up in Data (Dati Internazionali d’Arte): 7/8 (1973): 42–49 and 9 (1973): 68–70, respectively. Other journals that reported on international Land art and Environmental art include, for example, NAC (Notiziario d’Arte Contemporanea).
27. John Earle, Italy in the 1970s (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1975), 6.
28 Kees van Kersbergen and Barbara Vis, Comparative Welfare State Politics: Development, Opportunities, and Reform (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 76.
29. Giuseppe Rescigno and Andrea Manzi, Arte nel Sociale: testimonianze e documenti di comunicazione estetica (Roma: Editori riuniti, 1992), ix.
30. Robert Lumley, “Challenging Tradition: Social Movements, Cultural Change and the Ecology Question,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin Press, 1990), 119.
31. Recent academic and curatorial interest suggests a newfound enthusiasm for the 1970s. Recent exhibitions on the decade generally include Addio anni 70: arte a Milano 1969–1980 (Farewell 1970s: Art in Milan 1969–1980) held at the Palazzo Reale in Milan (May 30–September 2, 2012), curated by Francesco Bonami and Paola Nicolin and Anni ’70: arte a Roma (The 1970s: Art in Rome) on view at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome (December 17, 2013–March 2, 2014) curated by Daniela Lancioni. Bonami and Nicolin. Some Arte Ambientale artists have recently been given institutional retrospectives, such as Ugo La Pietra: Progetto disequilibrante at the Milan Triennale (November 26, 2014–February 15, 2015) and Maurizio Nannucci: Where to Start at the MAXXI in Rome (June 26–October 18, 2015), showing growing interest in their work. The first major exhibition to begin to detail Arte Ambientale was Fuori! Arte e spazio urbano 1968–1976, curated by Silvia Bignami and Alessandra Pioselli at the Museo del Novecento, Milan (April 15, 2011–September 4, 2011). The scholar Elena di Raddo published Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017) on artists working outside the institutional sphere in 1970s Italy. It has taken almost half a century for an academic and institutional interest in Arte Ambientale to come about, for political reasons, and the curator Enrico Crispolti was the first to acknowledge this. See Massimo Bignardi and Enrico Crispolti, Praticare la città: Arte Ambientale, prospettive di ricerca e metodologie d’intervento (Napoli: Liguori Editore, 2013), xv.
32. Already with the first survey of Italian art in the 1970s, L’arte negli anni settanta, at the Venice Biennale in 1980, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva and Harald Szeemann, Arte Ambientale artists were not presented as part of protagonists of the 1970s. Bonito Oliva promoted his own gallery-associated artists and exhibitions as primary exemplars of 1970s Italian art, particularly the exhibitions he curated, such as Contemporanea in 1973, which was held in the newly built underground parking garage of Villa Borghese. For an analysis of the exhibition L’arte negli anni settanta, see Francesca Zanella, “Esposizione come testo. La rilettura delgi anni Settanta a Venezia nel 1980,” in Anni Settanta: La rivoluzione nei linguaggi dell’arte, ed. Cristina Casero and Elena Di Raddo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2015), 180–197.
33 The Gruppo T artists were Giovanni Anceschi (1939), Davide Boriani (1936), Gabriele de Vecchi (1938), Gianni Colombo (1937–1993) and Grazia Varisco (1937). The Gruppo N artists were Alberto Biasi (1937), Ennio Chiggio (1938), Toni Costa (1935), Edoardo Landi (1937), and Manfredo Massironi (1937). For an article on Gruppo N’s aesthetic collaboration as an example of artist collective activity during the 1960s, see Jacopo Galimberti, “The N Group and the Operaisti: Art and Class Struggle in the Italian Economic Boom,” Grey Room, no. 49 (2012): 80–101.
34. John Fraser, Italy, Society in Crisis, Society in Transformation (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981); Vittorfranco S. Pisano, The Red Brigades: A Challenge to Italian Democracy (London: Institute for the Study of Conflict, 1980); Robert Lumley, States of Emergency: Cultures of Revolt in Italy from 1968 to 1978 (London: Verso Books, 1990).
35. I use the term “network” in relation to the historical context of Italy’s counterculture information exchange. My use of the term does not bear associations to Bruno Latour’s actornetwork theory. Instead, sociologist Alberto Melucci defines social group identity in terms of a network of active relationships and stresses the importance of the emotional involvement of activist. See Movimenti di rivolta: teorie e forme dell’azione collettiva (Milano: ETAS Libri, 1976).
36 Alessandro Mendini, “The Role of Radical Magazines,” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976, ed. Alex Coles (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013), 9 and Gwen Allen’s, Artists’ Magazines: An Alternative Space for Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015) are the first extensive studies of the way magazines functions as an alternative exhibition space for conceptual and radical artistic practices during the 1960s and 1970s. Countercultural, artists’ magazines operated similarly in Italy and Europe, although extensive examination of this subject has yet to be undertaken.
37. For an initial study of La Pietra’s editorial work, especially tied to the city of Milan, see Bianca Trevisan, “Ugo La Pietra: La guida alternative alla città di Milano,” in Arte fuori dall’arte, incontri e scambi fra arti visive e società negli anni Settanta, ed. Cristina Casero, Elena Di Raddo, and Francesca Gallo (Milan: Postmedia Srl, 2017), 287–296.
38. For example, IN: argomenti e immagini di design. Volume 2/3 (March/June 1971) featured the British illustrator Jim Burns and the architectural group Archigram; volume 4 (January/ February 1972) highlighted the art of American artist Rudi Stern; and volume 5 (May/June, 1972) detailed the work of the American collective Ant Farm.
39 Ugo La Pietra, Gillo Dorfles, and Vincenzo Accame, Ugo La Pietra: la sinestesia delle arti, 1960–2000 (Milano: Mazzotta, 2001), 61.
40. Maurizio Nannucci, “15 verdi naturali,” Progettare Inpiù no. 5/6 (1974): 14–15.
41. Global Tools was established in January 1973, and the group carried out a series of seminars and workshops on the subject of returning to a primordial type of design that was primitive and handmade. Global Tools was informed by a Marxist ideology and criticized the stultifying effects of alienation on humankind’s creative abilities. See Catherine Rossi, “Between the Nomadic and the Impossible: Radical Architecture and the Cavart Group,” in The Italian Avant-Garde, 1968–1976, ed. Alex Coles, 48.
42. Ugo La Pietra, Abitare la città: ricerche, interventi, progetti nello spazio urbano dal 1962 al 1982 (Firenze: Alinea, 1983), 148.
43 Accompanying text on Ugo La Pietra’s Viaggio sul reno, 1974 photo collage.
44. Franco Vaccari, Vittorio Fagone, Valerio Dehò, Nicoletta Leonardi, and Chiara Scardoni, Esposizioni in tempo reale = Exhibitions in Real Time (Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2007), 92.
45 Summa was relatively well connected with artists in Europe and America. He was friendly with French critic Pierre Restany, who was a dominant voice in the Nouveau Réalism movement in the 1960s, and with Gordon Matta-Clark, who traveled through Italy in the mid 1970s.
46. Franco Summa, interview with the author, June 26, 2012, Pescara, Italy.
47. Angelo Porro, La Partecipazione politica: problemi e prospettive: atti del convegno della Facoltà di scienze politiche, Trieste, 9–10 maggio 1978 (Trieste: CLUET, 1979), 26.
48. La Fabbrica diffusa: Dall’operaio massa all’operaio sociale (Milano: Collettivo editoriale Librirossi, 1977), n.p.
49 Michael Ryan, “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri and Jim Fleming, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse (South Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1984), xxix.
50 Pablo Echaurren and Claudia Salaris, Controcultura in Italia 1966–1977: viaggio nell’underground (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 1999), 159.
51. Patrick Gun Cuninghame, Autonomia a Movement of Refusal: Social Movements and Social Conflict in Italy in the 1970’s (PhD diss., Middlesex University, 2002), 2.
52. Patrick Cuninghame, “For an Analysis of Autonomia: An Interview with Sergio Bologna,” Left History 7, no. 2 (2000): 89.
53 Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of Autonomy: Politics and Architecture within and against Capitalism (New York: Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, 2008), 12.
54 Only a few scholars, such as Jacopo Galimberti, have connected Negri’s 1970s theories with art. See Galimberti, “The N Group and the Operaisti,” 80–101. This essay looks at the influence Negri had on the collective working model that Gruppo ENNE adopted during the 1960s.
55. Timothy Murphy, “Introduction,” in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005), x.
56. Antonio Negri, “Towards a Critique of the Material Constitution,” in Antonio Negri, Books for Burning: Between Civil War and Democracy in 1970s Italy (London: Verso, 2005), 199.
57. It is estimated that between 1955 and 1971 some 9,140,000 Italians were involved in interregional migration. See Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy, 219.
58 Nella Ginatempo, La casa in Italia: abitazioni e crisi del capitale (Milano: Mazzotta, 1975), 73. Original Italian: “La causa sta nella struttura privatistica del bene-casa, nel fatto che esso è stato usato come bene di investimento, rispondente perciò a certi canoni di convenienza e guadagno privato, e non a esigenze sociali.”
59. Umberto Dragone, “Il decentramento urbano: partecipazione, crisi della città, lotta politica,” in Decentramento urbano e democrazia: Milano, Bologna, Roma, Torino, Pavia, ed. Gabriele Baccalini and Umberto Dragone (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1975), 18.
60. Amintore Fanfani, Italy’s prime minister (July 1958–January 1959; July 1960–May 1963), founded INA-Casa in 1949 to provide the efficient and fast construction of housing complexes across the country. The institution was to build self-sufficient neighborhoods with communal spaces made familiar through the presence of buildings with high symbolic and identity-forming content, such as the Piazza, church, and school. IACP (L’Istituto Autonomo per le Case Popolari [The Independent Institute for Social Housing]) and GESCAL (GEStione CAse per i Lavoratori [Management of Houses for the Workers]).
61. Andreina Daolio, Le lotte per la casa in Italia. Milano, Torino, Roma, Napoli (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1974), 23. Additionally, publicly funded construction dropped from 25% of the total construction in 1951 to 6% by 1968 and just 2% in 1973. See Manfredo Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, 1944–1985, trans. Jessica Levine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 98.
62. For example, much of the real estate in Italy’s major cities was in breach of the existing antiquated regulations. Journalist Giorgio Ruffolo reported that by 1970, one in every six homes in Rome was “abusive”—built without legal permit—and approximately 400,000 people were living in houses that did not officially exist. See Giorgio Ruffolo, Riforme e controriforme (Roma: Laterza, 1975), 34.
63. Dragone, “Il decentramento urbano,” 22.
64. Katherine Coit, “Local Action Not Citizen Participation,” in Marxism and the Metropolis: New Perspectives in Urban Political Economy, ed. William K. Tabb and Larry Sawers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 305.
65. Mario Fazio, Il destino dei centri storico (Florence: La nuova Italia, 1977), 9.
66 Aldo Aniasi, “Prefazione,” in Decentramento urbano e democrazia, 15.
67. Guido Martinotti, Metropoli: la nuova morfologia sociale della città (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993), 61.
68 Enrico Crispolti, Arti visive e partecipazione sociale (Bari: De Donato, 1977), 17.
69. Enzo Mari, “Atti delle assemblee di Reggio Emilia,” insert in NAC no. 6/7 (June–July 1971): 17–18.
70 Ugo La Pietra, “Dal sistema disequilibrante: Strumenti e metodi per la riappropriazione e l’uso della struttura urbana,” IN: argomenti e immagini di design no. 5 (1972): 38–47.
71 Crispolti, Arti visive e partecipazione sociale, 13.
72. Ibid., 18.
73. Written from an intellectual stance within the PCI, literary critic Alberto Asor Rosa’s essay “La Cultura” legitimized intellectuals as important figures in the sphere of politics and culture. See Alberto Asor Rosa, “La Cultura,” in Storia d’Italia, Vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi 1975). See also Romano Luperini, Gli intellettuali di sinistra e l’ideologia della ricostruzione nel dopoguerra (Rome: Edizioni di Ideologia, 1971) and Romano Luperini, “Nota sulla politica culturale della sinistra e sugli intelletuali marxisti nel dopoguerra,” in Marxismo e intellettuali (Venice: Marsilio, 1974).
74 Lumley, States of Emergency, 131.
75. David Forgacs, “The Italian Communist Party and Culture,” in Culture and Conflict in Postwar Italy: Essays on Mass and Popular Culture, ed. Zygmunt G. Barański and Robert Lumley (New York: St. Martin Press, 1990), 100.
76. Enrico Crispolti’s notion of “extra media” is a precursor to similar artistic practices emerging in the 1990s, such as Critical Art Ensemble (CAE). As interventionist artists, CAE sought to use “tactical media” strategies: “Tactical media is situational, ephemeral and selfterminating. It encourages the use of any media that will engage a particular sociopolitical context in order to create molecular interventions and semiotic shocks that contribute to the negation of the rising intensity of authoritarian culture.” See Critical Art Ensemble, Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media (New York: Autonomedia, 2001).
77 Enrico Crispolti, Extra Media: Esperienze Attuali di Comunicazione Estetica (Torino: Studio Forma Editrice, 1978), 9.
78. Ibid., 12.
79 Ibid., 13.
80. Piero Ignazi, “Italy in the 1970s between Self-Expression and Organicism,” in Anna Cento Bull and Adalgisa Giorgio, Speaking Out and Silencing (Leeds: Legenda, 2006), 18.
81 Gianni Pettena participated in the Viaggio Sul Reno with Franco Vaccari and Ugo La Pietra in 1974 but did not produce a significant work from this experience. Pettena’s other Arte Ambientale projects are few, although he was part of the conversations. Specifically of interest, he created Vestirsi di Sedie (Wearable Chairs) in 1971, Some Call Him Pig in 1971, Tumbleweeds Catcher in 1972, and Already Seen Portable Landscapes in 1973.
82. Luigi Manconi, Nuovo, difficile: una proposta bibliografica sulla produzione culturale delle ultime generazioni (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979), 22 cit in Lumley, States of Emergency, 133.
