Search for tomorrow - promoting contemporary art in Rome, Italy

ArtForum, Summer, 1997 by Mario Codognato

At once sublimely evanescent and maddeningly dysfunctional, Rome remains suspended between a venerable past and a chaotic present, bewildering even to its oldest habitues. In this labyrinthine metropolis, contemporary art suffers the same fate as everything else, emerging from this ancient maze only to disappear into its tangled arteries. Initiatives for exhibitions, even at the highest level, are almost exclusively the product of iron-willed individuals who somehow manage to function in the absence of an adequate infrastructure for support of the arts. Navigating the logistical complexities of mounting exhibitions in Rome is a task that often seems daunting, even to those who ought to know how to slip through secret alleys.

The Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna is the only state museum dedicated to contemporary art in Italy. Its new director, Sandra Pinto, has sought to revive the institution, moving to update the collection, which, incredibly, ends with the late '60s, and filling some of the many gaps in programming by establishing a series of exhibitions showcasing the work of recent generations. At least ten years behind its European counterparts, the GNAM has acquired under Pinto's stewardship one work by each of the best-known transavanguardia artists - Sandro Chia, Enzo Cucchi, Francesco Clemente, Mimmo Paladino, and Nicola De Maria. Acquisitions of sculptures by Luigi Ontani, Maurizio Mochetti, and Nunzio are planned. Many are hoping these forays into Italian contemporary art will establish a curatorial standard worthy of a national museum, despite the serious lack of funds and of tax incentives for donors (a situation Walter Veltroni, the current minister of culture and a powerful deputy leader of the reformed Communist Party, has promised to remedy). Another innovative project proposed by staff curator Anna Mattirolo, "Partito Preso" (Taking sides), enables the institution to acquire and exhibit the work of emerging Italian artists. Each artist is accorded a specific gallery space, and the works remain on loan for five years, after which they will be purchased for prices based on the average of their current market value and their estimated worth at the end of that period. Among the artists chosen are Liliana Moro, who fills traditional earthenware pots with plasticine animals, and Luisa Lambri, whose quasi-metaphysical photographs depict interiors. There are also plans for a similar exhibition with a more international flavor, in the spirit of much larger surveys like the Venice Biennale's "Aperto." This spring, the GNAM also held a large show of the last works of one of arte povera's most celebrated figures, Alighiero e Boetti, who met with an untimely death three years ago. It consisted of four extremely large installation pieces executed between 1993 and 1994, including: Oeuvre postale (Mail piece), a series of 500 envelopes and stamps, and Alternando da uno a cento e viceversa (Alternating from one to a hundred and vice versa), fifty kilims, fabricated by Boetti in Peshawar, India, whose black-and-white-checked designs are generated by a numerical system capable of infinite compositional variations.

The Palazzo delle Esposizioni, a sort of monumental gallery and multipurpose cultural center administered by the city of Rome, has also successfully organized a few exhibitions of contemporary art, though, unfortunately, this is not its sole or primary focus: there is no overarching curatorial program. Last year chief curator M. Grazia Tolomeo and freelance curator Carolyn Christov Bakargiev put together a retrospective of sculptor Alberto Burri's work, which traveled to the Lenbachhaus in Munich and is scheduled to open at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels on June 5. To celebrate the anniversary of Rome's founding, the same team, joined by Ludovico Pratesi, mounted an exhibition that explores the relationships between nature and culture, the rural and the urban, through existing works and site-specific pieces by more than twenty contemporary artists. "Citta Natura" (City nature) includes pieces by Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Yves Klein, Joseph Beuys, Robert Smithson, and Wolfgang Laib. In keeping with the project's theme, the exhibition's scope extends to various sites beyond the Palazzo's walls. Haim Steinbach's wooden structure, set inside a greenhouse filled with a shipment of palm trees that had been confiscated by the Italian government, is located in Rome's botanical gardens, a site itself symptomatic of the often-strained relation between nature and culture. Steinbach covered the outer wall of the wooden structure in posters advertising both political and cultural events; the space between the wall and the glass of the greenhouse was transformed into a giant Habitrail filled with more than forty hamsters. Giving the show unexpected attention (and more than a little bite), an animal-rights group protested the use of hamsters in public art and the furry creatures had to be removed two days after the opening. Villa Mazzanti, the public park on Monte Mario, was selected as the site for projects by Rodney Graham, Ettore Spalletti, Dan Graham, and Gillian Wearing, among others, that, unfortunately, address the relationship between nature and culture in only the broadest possible sense. More successful was Jannis Kounellis' installation in Trajan's Market, perhaps the oldest enclosed market in the West. A row of old wardrobes coated in lead, Kounellis' piece returns to an essential element of his artistic vocabulary which, because it is an everyday object used for storage, also echoes, however unintentionally, the history, of the site in which it is installed. Next fall, the Palazzo will host the "Art and Film" exhibition organized by LA MOCA.