Amalfi toast - the revival of Naples, Italy's local art scene

ArtForum, Summer, 1997 by Francesco Galdieri

Contemporary art and the city of Naples haven't always gone hand-in-hand. To understand the extent of the ostracism. contemporary art has experienced here in the past, one only need recall that "Terrae Motus," the exhibition of sixty-five artists organized in the aftermath of the tremendous 1980 earthquake in southern Italy and shown in museum spaces throughout half the world, was held at Reggia de Caserta, twenty miles out of town, through the private sponsorship of the late gallerist Lucio Amelio. Naples, after all, lacks a museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art. But with the opening of numerous galleries here since the early '90s, there are signs that the "renaissance" the international press attributed to Naples after the city hosted the Group of Seven conference of heads of state in 1994 has extended to the local art scene as well.

Over the past two years shows have taken place in any number of settings: in museum and institutional spaces as well as the streets and piazzas of this "porous" city, as Walter Benjamin described it during his six-month stay in nearby Capri. The local government, led by Antonio Bassolino, has shown an unprecedented sensitivity to contemporary art, sponsoring Mimmo Paladino's installation "Montagna di Sale" - black horses amid a truckload of salt - in December of 1995 and a retrospective of twentieth-century Mexican art, currently on view at the Castel dell' Ovo, the landmark Neapolitan site reconstructed in 1282. And at the end of last year it became apparent that private galleries and public institutions were working together as never before to boost Naples' status and visibility as a center for contemporary art.

In December, the exhibition "Contemporanea a Capodimonte" (Contemporary at Capodimonte) broke the unwritten law forbidding collaboration between foundations and private dealers. Reopening its doors to contemporary art, the Capodimonte museum, better known for its collection of paintings by Caravaggio and Brueghel, exhibited work by more than twenty artists - including Alberto Burri, Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Sigmar Polke, Luciano Fabro, Joseph Kosuth, Gino De Dominicis, and Enzo Cucchi - represented by local dealers such as Alfonso Artiaco, Graziella Lonardi (on behalf of Incontri Internazionali), Peppe Morra, Lia Rumma, and Pasquale Trisorio. The work on view ranged from De Dominicis' gigantic skeleton in one of the three courtyards of the Medrano palazzo to Kounellis' imposing installation in piazza del Plebiscito, the semicircular "square" in the center of Naples. In the Pantheon-inspired colonnade of the church of San Francesco di Paola, Kounellis used cables to suspend wardrobes, bedside tables, and bureaus; he also hung numerous polished metal scales on which, in homage to Mediterranean culture, he placed fragments of boats. A few yards from the equestrian monument of Ferdinand I, again in the piazza del Plebiscito, Kounellis' enormous iron blackboard and sculptures of furniture and flames transformed the piazza into a point of arrival and departure for an imaginary voyage.

With some exceptions, galleries have principally concentrated over the last several months on artists with international reputations. At Lia Rumma, Haim Steinbach, in his first show in Naples in nine years, installed tomato cans, bingo baskets, and a pack of Neapolitan cards - three fetishized objects of popular Neapolitan culture - on metal shelves, as well as four wall-mounted rectangular pieces of furniture, each equipped with a drawer for hiding spotless handkerchiefs and coins. In April, the gallery showed work by Vanessa Beecroft: Polaroids, a video, and a portrait in oil, as well as one of the artist's signature "performances," with eleven models clad in panties, bras, stockings, and high heels wandering throughout the gallery.

Photography was a strong point in a number of shows this spring. At Th.E., Nan Goldin exhibited "Napoli 1986 e 1996," forty-three photographs taken in Positano in the summer of '86 as well as in Naples, at Pompeii, in '96. The photographs of Sebastiao Salgado document an entirely different order of pain and suffering - from Indians digging the Rajasthan canal in the desert and Brazilians working the gold mines in the Sierra Pelada to women making bricks in India. The Riviera di Chiaia retrospective of this Brazilian photographer, sponsored by the Trisorio gallery from March to May, was one of the most beautiful shows in the city this year.

Shows of Italian photographers were also strong. In April and May, Scognamiglio e Teano, a gallery opened by Lucio Amelio's longtime assistants Mimmo Scognamiglio and Corrado Teano in December 1995 in a historic building on via Settembrini (not far from the Duomo), exhibited the work of the young local artist Antonio Biasucci. In these images, the interplay of light and dark in the recesses of the photographer's chosen material - lava, bread dough, rock - dictates the composition. In another noteworthy show, Ferdinando Scianna, a Sicilian photographer from Bagheria, collected hundreds of shots of sleeping people while he worked as a journalist in India, Bolivia, Sicily, and the United States. The eighty photos exhibited at the Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, a university on the corso Vittorio Emanuele, are the result of his obsessive documentation.