print May 1987

Lanfranco Baldi

Lanfranco Baldi showed his sculpture series “Ombre della sera” (Shadows of the evening, 1986) in the building that, about four and a half centuries ago, housed the forge where Benvenuto Cellini cast his Perseus. As described in Cellini’s own Life, it was a difficult and adventurous casting, during which there was an explosion in the furnace, and to keep the molten bronze in the proper state he had his men throw all of his pewter platters, porringers, and dishes (about 200 pieces) into the furnace and channels of the forge. However, whereas Cellini melted down a multitude of domestic objects in

print April 1987

Bruce Weber

Just as the female body has been exalted in Western painting from the Renaissance on, so has the male body played a prominent role in the history of photography. Despite the homophobic moralism of the dominant culture, male eroticism has been a frequent theme of photographers, from the 19th-century pioneer Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden up to the current work of Bruce Weber. Clearly, a great deal has changed since the semiclandestine circulation of the baron’s photos—indeed, Weber’s unabashedly admiring images appear in fashion magazines these days with great regularity—but a veil of alibis still

print February 1987

Thomas Schütte

Thomas Schütte’s work shown here is clearly involved with deliberate deformations that instinctively make reference to Giorgio de Chirico, as evidenced in his titles: Piazza Uno (Plaza one), Piazza Due (Plaza two), and Tre (Three), all 1986. The shape of the building in Piazza Uno reminds me likewise of state architecture between the two wars—of Albert Speer’s, for example, but also of a more anonymous one. Piazza Due, which was shown in the same space as Uno and formed with it a single ambience, cannot help but bring to mind those watchtowers placed along the boundary that divides the two

print January 1987

Reinhard Mucha

There are artists whose work is nothing but a projection of their vision of the world and, as such, it prevails over the world, participating in it and at times enriching it. We might call this type of artist “Modern” In our century, another sort of artist has made an appearance, one who swoops down on the world, touches upon things without leaving a trace, yet lets those things make an impression upon him or her while experiencing them. This sort of “passive” artist, whose activity is a nomadic voyage, this artist who has developed a sensibility in terms of and in love with existence, is perhaps

print December 1986

Corrado Levi, “New Polverone”

The site was a Tuscan country house from the period between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, a place of bare spaces and materials that don’t accumulate, neither modifying or interfering with each other nor integrating in a way that betrays and hides their original meaning. There is an articulation of relationships that neither dominates nor transcends those who make use of or cross through them; but they are to scale, to the scale of man. Within this environment was set a dissemination of concrete signs, neither decorative nor clearly symbolic: small, germinal nuclei, slender and multiple

print December 1986

Manfred Stumpf

A lean monk, his body hardened by intense physical and spiritual exercise, nearly always nude (the habit doesn’t make the monk), moves about in a universe of dry symbols, of cosmic trajectories, of seemingly powerful machines. The monk is alone, now and then he looks about, he masturbates. Self-portrait and representation of the double, the Angel, projection of desire when desire is a desire for oneself. This is the monodic story of Manfred Stumpf, refined yet hardened by a sharp and banal comic-strip touch (not accidentally it’s a precise reference to something said by Moebius, the great French

print November 1986

“Sculture da camera”

"Myths of power collapse while the monuments which represent them crumble” Thus Marilena Bonomo introduced and justified the exhibition “Sculture da camera” (Chamber sculpture), yet another testimonial to the renewed interest in sculpture after years of its “splendid isolation” from critical consideration.

Forty-seven small sculptures, fragments from those crumbling monuments to which Bonomo refers, invaded two galleries of the classically appointed Castello Svevo. There were “historical” pieces, such as an untitled work from 1933 by Fausto Melotti, Piero Manzoni’s Linea Iunga m. 3,15 (Line 3.15

print November 1986

Gino De Dominicis

Following a long period of silence broken by occasional piercing interruptions (among the most recent being the 1985 exhibitions “Ouverture,” at the Castello di Rivoli, Venice, and the “Nouvelle Biennale” in Paris), Gino De Dominicis emerged in late summer to prove himself in a one-person show. This was a substantial exhibition of paintings by an artist who was not fundamentally a painter throughout the ’70s (he first received critical attention in 1972, for his “exhibition” of a handicapped boy at the Venice Biennale). In fact, with the rise of the Transavangardia in Rome and the provinces, De

print September 1986

Our Journey Takes Place In A Port Of Embarkation. . . .

ACCORDING TO ANCIENT LEGEND, you can find one of the centers of the world—the omphali or navels—among the islands of La Grazia, San Giorgio Maggiore, and San Servolo, in a specific area of the lagoon in front of the San Marco basin in Venice. Who knows, maybe this is why the Venice Biennale, in addition to being the oldest international survey of art (it was first held in 1895), remains so intriguing. Not even the Documenta exhibition in Kassel, West Germany—justly prestigious for the rigorous intellectual work that often goes into its discovery, delineation, and celebration of major trends and

print September 1986

ALBRECHT DÜRER WOULD HAVE COME TOO

THE PATRON SAINT OF GEEL, where Jan Hoet, the director of Gent’s Museum von Hedendaagse Kunst, grew up, is Saint Dymphna, and, in the name of that mysterious protectress, this Belgian village preserves a medieval tradition that has passed unscathed through the Renaissance and into the modern era: to honor Saint Dymphna, a family offers hospitality to a lunatic. With the waning of the Middle Ages, the idea of the Narrenschiff, the ship of fools, made its disturbing appearance, condemning the insane to a state of aterritoriality; during the centuries when what Edmund Husserl called “European

print September 1986

Pier Luigi Tazzi

WHAT IS TODAY’S SCULPTURES? THREE VIEWS
Park Sonsbeek, Arnhem

The Sonsbeek exhibition in Arnhem, Holland, was established in 1949 as a triennial international survey of sculpture, but two long breaks interrupted its appearance—the first from 1958 to 1966, and the second from 1971 until right now It is not surprising that Sonsbeek has been revived this year. Recently we have seen an increase of activity in the field of sculpture, and in exhibitions specifically designed to explore that field—for example, Harald Szeemann’s “Spuren, Skulpturen and Monumente ihrer präzisen Reise” (Traces, sculptures,

print Summer 1986

Sol LeWitt and Mario Merz

For Sol LeWitt, pictorial space is a temple, symbolic and articulated, that owes its most profound reality to the abstract or spiritual meanings for which it is a sign. Its correlation is geometry—sublime, cohesive, irrefutable. For Mario Merz, space is a refuge, the site of an archetypal sacredness that is immune to the vagaries of technique and culture. This refuge is characterized by the dissemination of signs, which coalesce into a whole only when identified by whoever finds shelter within it. Merz’s graffiti and poor materials are scattered traces that point to the incongruity and transience