Arte povera 1970: Processes of Visualized Writing

Abstract

Between 1969 and 1970 the Arte Povera artists adopted the practice of writing in a series of works and projects related both to the linguistic and the artistic framework (statements, quotations, annotations / drawings, sculptures, performances). Tracing the perimeter of these works allows to focus on a turning point in the individual paths of these artists, who through these writing acts came to define the possibilities and meaning of their action, recovering and amplifying the forgotten bond between writing and the body, facing from different perspectives the theme of infinity, and giving birth to early examples of institutional critique. The title of this text is a paraphrase of the statement chosen by Ammann for the exhibition dedicated in 1970 to the «young Italian avant-garde» at the Kunstmuseum in Lucerne, Processi di pensiero visualizzati. The catalogue of that exhibition offers, along with those of other international shows held between Europe and the United States in the same months, a major source for this analysis, which calls into question the indissolubility of the relationship between the act of writing (or rather the practice which Barthes defined not as «écriture» but as «scription») and its material support and gives strength to the theoretical antiplatonic proposal of Derrida, matured in those same years, which identified in writing the necessary condition for the manifestation of thought.

Keywords

• arte povera
• giovanni anselmo
• roland barthes
• jacques derrida
• gilberto zorio