Currently on view at the Bourse de Commerce/Pinault Collection, the “Arte Povera” exhibition traces the Italian origins, development, and international legacy of this unique artistic movement. Visitors can discover more than 250 works by the leading figures of Arte Povera. We visited the exhibition with Joël Chevrier, a physicist who takes a keen interest in the connections between the arts and sciences and was particularly impressed by this large-scale retrospective.
This is an exhibition that makes an immediate impression—not only because of the space in which it is displayed and the 250 works on view, but also because of the nature of the works themselves, most of which were created in Italy during the “Thirty Glorious Years.” Here, we see fossil-fuel energy explicitly at work, transforming matter in a thousand different ways. Energy, materials, transformations: a physicist is in his element!
In 1967, when art critic Germano Celant founded this movement and named it “Arte Povera,” Michelangelo Pistoletto was 34, Giovanni Anselmo was 33, and Jannis Kounellis was 31, as was Luciano Fabro. As a physicist, I realize during the visit that, while my discipline helped transform the world during that period, it is not a point of reference here.
These artists’ works are rooted not in science but in their creativity and their own vision, set against a backdrop of experimentation in the studio. They go behind the curtain, revealing the inner workings of the machine stripped of its design. This brings to mind the contrast between the visions of their contemporaries: on the one hand, Raymond Loewy, the designer of the entire consumer society—as early as 1893, the Chicago World’s Fair proclaimed, “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms,” “Science discovers, industry applies, and man follows”)—and, on the other hand , the designer Victor Papanek , who wrote *Designfor theReal World: Human Ecology and Social Change* in 1971.
Working outside the scientific and technical conceptual framework that permeates everything around them, they appropriate it in order to better turn away from it. Everything is fair game: the materials, devices, and thermal machines that define the20thcentury (thermal power plants, cars, airplanes…). By laying it all bare, they show us the world as it is and as it will come to be—increasingly industrialized and increasingly energy-intensive. Their insight and relevance are formidable.
Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Mirror Paintings” are, first and foremost, stainless steel plates. Pistoletto had also experimented with aluminum: steel and aluminum are two flagship materials of the thermo-industrial society, and—in an apparent paradox for “poor art”—they require a very high level of scientific and technological expertise as well as a great deal of energy to produce. Michelangelo Pistoletto invites us to look ourselves in the face through the very material that, at that moment, was changing the world, in the era of the steel industry’s triumph. What a mise en abîme!
Jannis Kounelis, for his part, burns gas through a nozzle into a raw steel flower. The gas forms a small blue flame, producing a distinctive sound. The gas cylinder is clearly visible. It is a very clean, highly controlled flame—one that allows him to reach high temperatures and thus produce movement and transformations in the material.
But let’s pause for a moment to consider Gilberto Zorio’s *Piombi II* (1968). The exhibition label describes it best: “Two sheets of lead, copper sulfate, hydrochloric acid, fluorescein, copper wire, rope.”
The work, designed as a battery, converts chemical energy into electricity. On the floor, Gilberto Zorio places two lead containers attached to the wall by a rope, and pours into one of them a mixture of copper sulfates and water, which turns blue, and into the other a mixture of hydrochloric acid and water, which turns green. A braided leather cord is stretched between the two containers, with each end submerged in one of the two liquids. When in prolonged contact with the two substances, the copper becomes covered with crystals, while the color change in the two liquids indicates the transfer of energy from one to the other. The artist uses industrial materials to create an energetic process that evokes an alchemical experiment._”
The work has a rustic feel; it resembles a slapdash laboratory setup. We find ourselves right in the heart of the setup, as if the artist had lifted the hood. And with this work, the detailed examination of key elements of20th-centuryindustry continues: in this case, electrochemistry and electrometallurgy.
Other notable works include the thermal machines by Gilberto Zorio himself. What a shock to see them like this! They are scattered throughout the exhibition, starting at the entrance and continuing into the rotunda. They are also on display in a room dedicated to them (the “Casa ideale”), where you can actually feel the cold! The engines and heat exchangers are on display; they are part of the artwork. You can see them wasting energy right before your eyes as they try to cool the world. Just like those air conditioners in stores with wide-open doors… Here, the cooling is so intense that frost forms on lead structures, just as it would in a refrigerator with the door left open. Having seen the exhibition on opening day, I don’t know if the intention is to let the frost accumulate into an ever-thicker layer.
I am thinking here of Sadi Carnot’s unique and seminal work, *Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire and on the Machines Capable of Developing That Power*: “If, one day, improvements to the steam engine advance far enough to make it inexpensive to build and operate, it will possess all desirable qualities and will give the industrial arts a boost whose full extent would be difficult to foresee. For not only will a powerful and convenient engine—one that can be obtained or transported anywhere—replace the engines already in use, but it will also spur rapid expansion in the industries where it is applied; it may even give rise to entirely new industries.”
Carnot was a visionary in articulating this as early as 1824. But so was Gilberto Zorio, who, like his peers, had grasped the full scope of the issue and continues to confront us with the effects of thermo-industrial civilization.
Today, the artist JR asks once again: “Can art change the world?” As early as the 1960s, Arte Povera forcefully emphasized that art could reveal how the world was undergoing a transformation of unprecedented scale. This group of artists had identified all the elements of this transformation: the massive mobilization of energy, the profusion of materials used, and ever-expanding industrial changes. They turned these elements into works devoid of artifice—“poor” in this sense—stripped of the layer of design that was then intended to make everything not only functional but also desirable. Here, the refrigerators are bare, lacking the metal casing of the legendary American Coldspot refrigerator designed by Raymond Loewy—a symbol of the “American way of life.” If we recall the advertisements or American films contemporary to Arte Povera, the contrast is stark.
The Arte Povera artists explored just about everything. In *Venere degli stracci*(*Venus of the Rags*), Michelangelo Pistoletto displays a mountain of fabrics and clothes piled up in front of a statue of Venus. Today, we know that textiles, clothing, and fashion constitute a global industry that consumes vast amounts of resources and generates enormous amounts of pollution.
Further on, Jannis Kounelis exhibits a pile of coal. But other artists are also working with various materials: we see leather, stone, precast concrete, water of course, more fabrics, woven copper wires, and so on. Finally, there are the works by Giovanni Anselmo, in a room that astounds me as a physicist: our smartphones are equipped with sensors that precisely measure orientation in space—the vertical axis and gravity, the horizontal plane, and rotation in space. The artist, through a unique process I can’t even begin to imagine, captures this fundamental truth through installations and sculptures of moving elegance and simplicity.
I discovered Arte Povera long after I had become familiar with Giuseppe Penone’s work. It has taken my breath away for quite some time now (which, incidentally, he has sculpted). Here, his metal tree laden with heavy stones, in front of the Bourse de Commerce, sets the tone.
Exploring gravity, moving beyond categories—including those of the inanimate and the living—through the hybridization of materials; questioning the concept of time with these stones and grains of sand that are unusually similar; and then bringing the young tree back to life within a wooden beam… I have already written on some of his works, still a physicist—which, incidentally, means nothing to him. I collaborated with him on the work To Be the Wind, and sculpted for him the grains of sand on display here. Within the Arte Povera movement, he has carved out a unique path that, to me, seems to open up new horizons and raise new questions.
