Visible Lines of the Imagination

In 1976, the Italian critic and curator Achille Bonito Oliva organized Drawing/ Transparence: Disegno/Trasparenza, a seminal exhibition at the gallery Cannaviello Studio d’Arte in Rome. Running from March 5 to April 25, 1976, the exhibition gathered works on paper by 57 American and as many Italian artists. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition assesses the status of drawing within the practice of the most important Post-minimalist and Conceptual artists at that time, shedding light on an aspect of the new avant-garde which hadn’t been taken yet into serious consideration up to that point in Italy. The bilingual essay is preceded with the definition of the word drawing and disegno from English and Italian dictionaries.

The English definition is split between the act of delineating forms or plans and the notion of “drawing lots:” “Draw-ing, n. 1. The act of one who or that which draws. 2. A representation by lines; a delineation of form without reference to color. 3. A sketch, plan or design, esp. one made with pen, pencil, or crayon. 4. The art or technique of making these. 5. Something decided by drawing lots; lottery. 6. The selection, or time of selection of the winning chance or chances sold by lottery or raffle. ME; see DRAW, - ING 1 (The Random House Dictionary of the English Language).”(1)

On the other hand, the Italian word disegno expands the definition of the act of marking a surface: “Drawing: masculine noun. Representation of an objects through lines and marks; the object thus represented: make the drawing of a church; he/she exhibited a beautiful drawing // the art of drawing: he/she studies drawing // the way of drawing: your drawing way is incorrect // figurative. sketch of a work: the draft of a book [il disegno di un libro] // draft: a draft law [un disegno di legge] // thought, intention: I have the intention to go to Naples [ho fatto disegno di andarmene a Napoli] // to color a drawing, to accomplish a goal // far disegno su cosa o persona, have plans for, rely on something or somebody // Name: mark, scratch, image, effigy, line, draft, arabesque, squiggle, landscape, layout, diagram, profile, silhouette (French), cartoon, illustration, figure, view, print, section, sketch, impression, graffito, engraving, lithograph, map, pastel, etching, xylograph (architectural, geometric, outline, color, watercolor, charcoal, tattoo) TOOLS: charcoal, graphite, pen, brush, pencil, compass, drawing pen, set square, panthograph, ruler, smudge tool, stencil / draw arabesques [arabescare], trace, compose, copy, erase, correct, polish, derive / field, outline, shade, ornamental design, perspective, hatching / Verb: paradigms PAINTING, SCULPTURE, ARCHITECTURE / figurative: scheme, project, model, sketch, idea, proposal, INTENTION / incarnate. (Dizionario Palazzi)”(2)

The entry disegno in the Italian dictionary encompasses a broad spectrum of terms identifying the essential acts of composing images over a surface, often interwoven with psychological semantic areas of vision, intention, and intimacy. On the other hand, the definition of the English word drawing adds elements of chance and randomness referencing the lottery systems. Bonito Oliva’s essay elaborates a theory on those meanings, culminating in the definition of transparence. Expanding beyond the traditional concept of drawing as a preparatory sketch and responding to the notion of dematerialization that had been formulated to identify the work of the avant-garde artists at the turn of the 1960s, the critic places the autonomous status of the drawing on the threshold between the artist’s imagination and its actual formulation, between the mental elaboration of an image and its realization into a matter.(3) As envisioned in the exhibition of 1976, drawing is the trace of the artist’s first creative impulse, featuring an essential in-between-ness. It’s a borderland, the ultimate place of negotiation for the artist’s identity and imagination.

The status of drawing in the American art of the 1960s and 1970s has been already extensively examined, at least since Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay in the catalogue of the exhibition Line as Language: Six Artists Draw in 1974.(4)

On the other hand, despite some relevant, yet general anthologies of artists and works and important surveys on the practice of specific artists, the importance of drawing in Italian art in those years seems to have been scantily acknowledged in its multilayered entirety.(5) In regards to Arte Povera, only one exhibition catalogue, with an insightful historic reconstruction by Lara Conte, has been published on the specific issue of drawing, alongside some catalogues and articles focusing on the drawing of single figures in the movement.(6) A deep analysis on the whole situation exceeds the aim of this exhibition and catalogue; nonetheless, I would like to hint at some themes that might serve as a platform for further discussion on the status of drawing as a practice in Italian art at that time, and on the possible reasons why it has not yet been taken into specific consideration.

Disegno

In 1943, the Hungarian born art historian Charles de Tolnay published History and Technique of Old Master Drawings: A Handbook, an ambitious and lavishly illustrated repertoire of the history of drawing, from the antiquity to early 19th century.(7) Despite the wide-ranging plan, the volume was not unanimously praised by reviewers. De Tolnay’s text seemed often to incur in the trope of considering drawing the most intimate transfer of the artist’s mind, and was too short to properly survey such a broad subject. Ulrich Middeldorf, the German-born connoisseur and scholar of Renaissance sculpture,(8) explained the inadequacy of that essay by elaborating an argument that applies to the Italian concept and practice of drawing in general: “The present reviewer,” Middeldorf noted about himself, “experienced great difficulties in following an analysis which assumes for instance that the development of the theory of disegno is identical with the history of drawing, even if the Italians use the same word disegno for both ‘drawing’ and ‘design,’ (or whatever other English word one wants to use to translate the second, difficult meaning of this word).”(9)

The line separating drawing and disegno is crucial, and brings us back to the dictionary definitions that Achille Bonito Oliva chose to publish as a sort of foreword to the catalogue of his exhibition. A broad range of meanings are at stake in the notion of disegno, referencing the themes of intentionality, the psychological attitude of acting with a purpose, and the early stages of an intellectual elaboration. The almost Duchampian sense of chance embraced by the reference to lottery in the English word drawing is the opposite of the intentionality of disegno. Besides the ones which are actual sketches or projects, American drawings and Italian disegni unfolding through the catalogue of Drawing/Transparence feature distinctly specific qualities.

I would like to focus especially on the works on paper by artists who may be more closely associated with Post-minimalist and Conceptual tendencies— the selection in the catalogue including also artists like Jasper Johns, Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. Most of the drawings in the catalogue are characterized by the extreme reduction to essential means: Robert Barry draws with pen a rectangle connecting words printed on the margins of the sheet; Mel Bochner measures 12 inches with a line drawn in felt-tip pen; Douglas Huebler printed on paper a phrase referencing the nature of the paper sheet itself (The surface above changes from the warm spectrum to the cool spectrum at an imperceptible but absolute speed); Richard Nonas traces a line in charcoal in the center of the paper, reminiscent of its primary sculptures interacting with the space where they are installed; Robert Ryman explores the physical whiteness of a white fabric by drawing a square with a pen on it.(10)

The section of the catalogue devoted to Italian artists includes works that can be well compared to the American Post-minimalist and Conceptual drawings listed above, such as the works by Vincenzo Agnetti, Carlo Alfano, Enrico Castellani, Gino De Dominicis, or Marco Gastini. Turning to the group of the artists associated with Arte Povera, which means the artists who more consistently and frequently participated in exhibitions aligning Italian and international tendencies at that time, the panorama is quite different. Besides Emilio Prini, who was in fact the closest to international Conceptual art, whose drawing is a simple structure plainly rendered in ink, the group of works comprises: Lato destro [Right Side] (1970), the chiaroscuro self-portrait in graphite by Giovanni Anselmo, with the phrase lato destro inscribed on the left side of his neck; an example from the series Sale e zucchero [Salt and Sugar] (1973) by Alighiero Boetti, in which the artist stenciled the image of a salt and a sugar packet through rubber stamps;(11) a typical work on paper by Pier Paolo Calzolari, combining salt, ground tobacco and graphite, most likely made around 1969;(12) the tracing of some clothes patterns enclosed in the fashion magazine Burda Moden and printed on paper, traced in felt-tip pen by Luciano Fabro; one of the earliest Alfabeti [Alphabets] by Jannis Kounellis, a drawing in china ink on paper created in 1960;(13) an early version of Mario Merz’s studies on the Fibonacci series (1970), in which the marks drawn with pen on a glass panel and a sheet of paper overlapped each other to compose Disegno su vetro, fiore composto: 2 esterni, 2 interni [Drawing on Glass, Composite Flowers: 2 interiors, 2 exteriors]; the exact outline of a human profile delineated by Marisa Merz in 1974 with graphite on a large sheet of paper; Giulio Paolini’s Orizzontale (Prospetto e assonometria) [Horizontal (elevation and axonometric projection)], a 1963 project of two panels of the same size, separated by a subtle gap, suspended at eye level in the middle of a room, rendered in graphite around the silhouette of an Écorché; Pino Pascali’s drawing of his sculptures Bachi da setola [Bristle Worms] in crayon on paper (1968); Giuseppe Penone’s Cambiare l’immagine [Changing the Image] (1973), the almost uncanny self-portrait of the artist with the mouth wide open, made in red chalk on paper;(14) Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Untitled, a realistic portrait in charcoal of a figure seen from behind, made in 1963, at the time of the early experimentation on Mirror Paintings; and Gilberto Zorio’s highly detailed rendering of a star in ink on parchment paper (1974).

The collection of works illustrated in the catalogue of Drawing/Transparence cannot indeed encompass the whole issue of the reassessment of drawing practice in the 1960s and 1970s, and one can argue that it was easier to gather a better selection of drawings by Italian than by American artists. Nevertheless, the view on the drawing practice provided in that catalogue is both broad and good enough to be extended and analyzed. It seems that the works on paper by the Arte Povera artists differ from the essential, anodyne drawings and sketches by the leading figures of Post-minimalist and Conceptual art in two major aspects. The first one is the subject. Even when focusing on the internal rules and status of the practice itself, as Paolini does, the artists seem to refer to external sources, to other space and time dimensions which they engage with and finally integrate into their work. Portraits, patterns from fashion magazines, forms of nature, archetypal symbols, images taken from the repertoire of art history, are all forays into other realms. The reference doesn’t have to be explicitly depicted on the surface, it might be evoked, ghosting through the physical condition of the work. Works sometimes look totally dematerialized, including Boetti’s tracing of the square grid of a graph paper or Paolini’s collages of blank papers, yet resolve themselves in a reference to the artist’s gesture or the specific time of execution, resonating with the artist’s individuality and identity.(15) Questioning the essential modern structure of the grids, those works could eventually be compared to the practice of American artists who are heterodox figures of Post-minimalism, such as Eva Hesse.(16) Exploring the materiality of drawing, artists were then able to imbue that practice with multiple connections to individual and collective history and everyday life at once.

Various issues are at stake in the polarity opposing referentiality and self-referentiality, on which an analysis of Arte Povera vis à vis American Conceptual drawings can be based. Arte Povera artists are definitely aware of the specific status of drawings, yet reassess it often avoiding too explicit, or too precise, marks of self-referentiality. Those works ultimately point at the opposition between an artist’s private and public persona. Even the most essential drawings of Arte Povera are in general not the declaration of a system, for they do not exclude a subtle sense of “psychological privacy” in the artist’s practice—an aspect that distinguishes them from many international contemporary developments.(17)

Materiality and Practice

Strictly connected to the unique sense of referential images, the second distinctive trait of Arte Povera drawings and prints is the notion of materiality. Several works on paper show a highly refined concentration on the physical aspects of the drawing, as well as an exquisite degree of craftsmanship

in their execution, which most of the artists of the group learned essentially at the schools of fine arts or institutes for graphic design that they attended. Even Boetti, a self-taught artist, was a skilled draughtsman; his series of works based on the collaboration for which the material execution of the works was assigned to other people, ultimately conceptualize the handmade practice as the first notion that has to be questioned.(18) Such a high technical awareness, and the exposure to the conception of drawing as a manual practice featuring a long tradition in art history–the notion of the so-called mestiere which identifies a certain type of artistic education in Italy–allowed the artist to experiment with a wide range of mediums and materials. Looking at the works illustrated in the catalogue of Drawing/Transparence, the list includes the more traditional, even outdated, media—such as graphite, crayon, red chalk, china ink, charcoal—non-artistic materials (salt, tobacco), techniques like collage, tracing, printmaking and stamps, and support materials, including parchment and glass, different from the most common paper.

The visual and material allure of the work is then the major focus of these artists, whose ideas are not just conveyed, but fashioned by the materials they choose and the procedures of their manipulation. By doing so, the works on paper of Arte Povera mostly envision the sense of hand as the physical extension of the notion of technique elaborated by Henri Focillon, the French art historian who regularly taught at Yale from 1933 until his death in 1943.

In The Life of Forms in Art—his examination of the development of art as the creation of “artistic forms,” phenomenological entities evolving according to internal rules, imprints of the creating spirit, yet immersed in the network of space and time conditions—Focillon noticed that “Hands are almost living beings. [...] The hand means action: it grasps, it creates, at times it would seem even to think. In repose, the hand is not a soulless tool lying on the table or hanging beside the body. Habit, instinct and the will to action all are stored in it, and no long practice is needed to learn what gesture it is about to make.”(19) On this basis, Focillon’s essay ends up in praise of drawing as opposed to a camera. Drawing is not just the imprint of the artist’s intimacy extended through hand, though. Considering form and matter as a whole, Focillon denied the notion that forms are “their own pattern, their own mere naked representation,” and focused instead on their development in space through the substance they assume in a given material, with which form ultimately identifies. Significantly, it’s by referencing drawing that the author elaborates that concept: “In a drawing, however, the paper is an element of life; it is the very heart of the design. A form without support is not form, and the support itself is form.

It is essential, therefore, to bear in mind how immense is the variety of techniques in the genealogy of a work of art, and to show how that principle of all technique is not inertia, but activity.”(20) Drawings confront us with the ever-changing variety of life; the works on paper of Arte Povera seem especially to fit within Focillon’s theory, when he dismantled the common interpretation of drawing as a process of extreme and pure abstraction in which “matter is reduced to a mere armature of the slenderest possible sort, and is, indeed, very nearly volatilized,” and defines instead the power that matter assumes by virtue of its manipulation on the paper, through the extreme variety of media and techniques.(21) The final definition of drawing as the expression of the power of hand especially resonates with some works on paper of Arte Povera: “A line, a spot on the emptiness of a white sheet flooded by light, no yielding to technical artifice, no dawdling over a complicated alchemy. One might say that spirit is speaking to spirit. And yet, the full weight of the human being is here in all its impulsive vivacity [...]. The hand finds every instrument useful for writing down its signs. It fashions strange and hazardous ones; it borrows them from nature—a twig, a bird’s feather.”(22)

Far from being neither an ethereal, ideal entity, nor a still matter, drawing mediates life and spirit. Works on paper stand in an intermediary realm, in which form and matter, and ultimately the artist’s public and private persona, coincide. The notion of medium as milieu, as a system of forces, a network connecting and mediating human perception (and human feelings) and the perceived object within a specific ambiance, seems to apply to the reassessment of the drawing practice carried by Italian artists since the 1960s. Its first and foremost through drawing that the artists of the Arte Povera generation were able to react to the revival of painting and traditional media at the turn of the 1970s.(23) The concept of medium as a whole spatial and time entity and a dispositif of perception at once applies even more to printmaking. Thanks to the activity of dealers and publishers such as Gian Enzo Sperone and Giorgio Persano, founder of Galleria Multipli in 1971, in Turin, and Pio Monti, who founded the gallery and publisher Artestudio in Macerata in 1969 before moving to Rome, the artists associated with Arte Povera created numerous prints, portfolios, multiples and artists’ books.(24) Imbuing a printing procedure with private imagery referring to the artist’s studio and experimenting with various techniques, the artists often created portfolios and books which can hardly be defined as mere multiples, featuring specific aspects that make each edition unique. Printmaking implies circulation, transmission and information, which were all keywords fashioning the artistic debate at the turn of the 1960s. The specific role of printmaking in the practice of Arte Povera seems inherently mediating in the transfer of the artist’s privacy into public exposure; the physicality of the medium seems then not far from the role of the apparatus, even from the sense of estrangement it might imply, in Walter Benjamin’s theory of medium.(25)

“Drawing in the expanded field,” one might say referencing a seminal essay by Rosalind Krauss.(26) Works on paper extending into the space of life, acting as spaces themselves, filters and thresholds between realms, and time and space conditions: in brief, Paper Media, intermediate and intermediary objects, whose expansion to embrace various materials and media ends up in a process of remediation, a broader synthesis of practices, tools, matter, form, and life. “To trace out the visible lines of the imagination,”(27) as Bonito Oliva encapsulates the drawing procedure, implies the ever-changing exploration of practice vis à vis real life. In the founding essay of Arte Povera, published in 1967, Germano Celant defined the attitude of those artists as a practice in motion: “A new attitude for taking repossession of a ‘real’ dominion over our existence leads the artists to continual forays outside of the places assigned to them, eradicating the cliché that society has stamped on their wrist.”(28)

Midway between the real dominion over existence addressed by Celant and the supreme sense of life theorized by Focillon, the drawings of Arte Povera could be considered the visual expression of the Living Thought which identifies the specific status of Italian philosophy for the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito, who defined its vitality through “the particular capacity of Italian thought to situate itself at the point of tension between highly determined historical-political events and philosophical categories of great conceptual depth. The peculiarity of contemporary Italian thought resides precisely in this unprecedented double vision: a split gaze focused on the most pressing current events [attualità] and at the same time on the dispositifs that come with a long or even ancient history.”(29) The final elaboration resonates with the works on paper of Arte Povera as Living Art: “Instead of pointlessly attempting to force life into the formal parameters of philosophy,” wonders Esposito, “why not give philosophy the concrete characteristics of life? In order to be able to tap into a vital substratum that is refractory to the conceptual dimension, a thought that seeks to be worthy of its time must immerse itself in it, transforming itself into “living thought.” But to make this possible—this is the last and most drastic step in this reasoning process—it must intersect with politics; or to be more precise, it must rediscover its inherent ‘politicalness.’ Only in this way, through practical action in the world, can philosophy truly revitalize itself, identifying itself in a historicity that is one with the inexhaustible movement of life.”(30)