GONG Eliseo Mattiacci
Sergio Risaliti
Cosmic-Mechanical Man
Eliseo Mattiacci is certainly one of the great leading figures in contemporary art, one of the pioneers of the post-Sixties avant-garde, creator of experimentation and renewal in sculpture, inventor of astronomical-cosmological iconographies and of new spatial and conceptual relationships between art and nature, between man and environment. The art of Mattiacci connects the individual soul and the anima mundi. The farmer and the American Indian, the motorcyclist and the astronaut, the alchemist and the shaman, Vulcan and Quetzalcoatl, the Aztec god of life and wind, the morning star. The strike of a gong and the echo of barking dogs. Mattiacci has given to Uomo meccanico [Mechanical Man] a space of freedom and endless imagination, directing his work towards the sky and the immeasurable expanse of the universe. His work has been discussed and made known over time by art historians and critics (Diacono, Boatto, Rubiu, Trini, Briganti, Corà, Castagnoli and Barilli) who grasped the originality, independence and vigour of his creative vis. In this regard, we are offering you a catalogue containing a compact critical anthology that finally makes it possible to recognise the poetic unity in the unravelling historical stages, from conquest to conquest, in a straight line travelled in a zig-zag, like an arrow to transmit energy by crossing through the glancing eyes, the bodies. With careful sensitivity, Mattiacci wanted to connect the anthropological dimension to the epistemological one, using, however, the language of art; that is, acting as a pivot on the imagination and prefiguration, choosing the way of the symbolic and the archetypes, referring to geometry and poetry, to shamanism and alchemy to stay within nature and the cosmos as if it were a second skin. When he was very young, he attracted the attention of colleagues and the public with
Tubo [Tube], laid out in the Galleria La Tartaruga in Rome in 1967, an exemplary plastic gesture that to this day still reveals a special freshness and grace. Then he achieved a classic measure: the Equilibri precari quasi impossibili [Almost Impossible Precarious Balances] in 1991, a perfect combination of materials, structures, symbols and also Senza titolo (Scultura che guarda) [Untitled – Sculpture that Looks] (2008-2009), the artist’s absolute peak achievement. With this invention of his, he delivered to our day by day time a timeless piece of work, a totemic element that is primordial and of the future, as much of barbaric power as of wonderful childlike simplicity. The exhibit at Forte di Belvedere – which we imagined as a ritual place and astronomic observatory akine to ancient settlements and layouts such as those at Stonehenge, and in line with the hill of Arcetri where Galileo Galilei closed his eyes on 8 January 1642, his modern scientist’s gaze getting closer than ever before to the celestial orbits – offers a way to learn about Mattiacci’s artistic journey from 1961 to present-day: more than half a century of vigorous, consistent inspiration. For the occasion, about twenty sculptures were installed inside and outside the Medici building, several of which were monumental in size. Displayed in front of the highest achievements in western architecture, including the magnetic dome of Santa Maria del Fiore – symbol of a civilisation that placed man at the centre of the universe, the great miracle and marvellous combination of micro and macrocosm – are the transcendental objects of Mattiacci, the tireless forger of metal shapes arranged to conduct energy and messages, sublime feelings and surreal fantasies. Inside the building, the public discovers a large group of drawings, which for the first time ever grant Mattiacci’s ever-excellent graphic work its due. An almost
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and the energy of the street to the sculpture, sanctioning the plastic object’s crossing into a participatory practice in the urban space, through a collective, real, unhinging involvement, which constitutes a crucial point of reference in the history of a new collective mode of participation in the plastic reality of art. Exhibited several times and in several versions through 1967, on the Italian peninsula and abroad,6 the Tubo made its return to Rome at the end of the year to fill the grand staircase of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, an important contemporary art institution in Italy, where Mattiacci had been invited by Palma Bucarelli together with Pino Pascali to present the works exhibited at the Biennale des jeunes artistes in Paris. Starting in the summer of 1967, and especially during 1968, outdoor shows followed one another, becoming the central phenomenon of the Italian artistic avant-garde, in different centres on the peninsula. For Mattiacci, the operational location of his action-sculpture is Rome, where he worked with a method that was inclusive but completely freed from group logic.7 In the capital, he created works with a strong impact that involved the historical city’s emblematic locations, filled with evocative recollections and memories, and parks in the working-class suburbs. In 1968 Mattiacci received an invitation to take part in the exhibit, Nuovo Paesaggio, planned by Enrico Castellani and Gino Marotta within the Triennale del Grande Numero, conceived as a widespread exhibition event that was supposed to involve Italian places in transformation, from North to South – highway crossings, water airports, underground stations, etc., as well as squares in historical city centres – with works by more than thirty artists representing the current art scene.8 For this large exhibit, which never came to be because of the protest taking place and the occupation of the Triennale, Mattiacci thought of an action-sculpture for a historical Tuscan square9 where he had wanted to place fifty cylinders of corrugated sheet metal, each measuring roughly two metres in diameter, suggesting the width of the open arms of an adult body. Like the Tubo, the Cilindri praticabili [Practicable Cylinders] can be activated by the viewer who is urged to pass through, stop and rock back and forth, or walk inside the plastic shape. With his chance to tackle the Tuscan square as part of the Nuovo Paesaggio exhibit gone, Mattiacci set up his Cilindri outside, in Parco Nomentano near his studio, where he had just moved from via Laurina, a few steps from Piazza del Popolo, on via Nomentana, near the Aniene River. As we can see in some photographs taken by Claudio Abate and in Luca Maria Patella’s footage for the film SKMP2, it is the spontaneous, not over-thought, enjoyment of children, to ferry the sculpture towards a hybrid, lateral condition of object-toy fully in tune with Marcuse’s
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utopia of liberation that was feeding that time. Attesting to a militancy that disregards ideology, the Cilindri praticabili bestow a specific “politicality of the existent” on the artistic gesture. Shortly thereafter, they were transferred into gallery where the public experienced them bringing other semantic nuances to their processual nature.10 From industrial material, to large toys, the Cilindri praticabili become ambiguous, fluid plastic devices in the gallery, between ready-made and objet trouvé, with their strong propensity towards decommodification that dissolves the object into work-environment-happening. On the occasion of the exhibit, Vittorio Rubiu spoke about Mattiacci’s “second tubism”; obviously not in relation to Léger’s pictorial “tubism” as much as to the modernist visionary quality that emerges in the French artist’s theoretical reflections, where industry, imagination and reality meet, without a solution of continuity.11 For Mattiacci, reality becomes the street, his body, working with the forces and tensions of the materials. The industrial-technological dimension, instead, finds in his research an intrinsic, natural dialectic polarity in an archaic-primary propensity through which the artist draws attention to the earth as a material evoking ancient peasant rituals and as a place of intervention, as well as the Earth, intended in its primary motions of revolution and rotation, in a continuity that goes from the actions of Lavori in corso [Work in Progress] to Percorso [Route]. Lavori in corso was divided into three events which took place on 23 November 1968 at Circo Massimo; they aroused a lot of public interest and caused a great stir, due to the illegal occupation of public land, so much so that the police intervened to suspend the action.12 Mattiacci and his students arranged ten large market umbrellas in a circle and made them rotate, to evoke the movement of the Earth’s revolution and rotation. At the same time they carried and waved several large pieces of white, green and blue cloth and rested them on the ground, appropriating that land where horse races were held in Roman times. Finally, they unrolled tar paper on white wooden stands, forming an undulating strip like an ocean wave that transformed the sculpture into an infinite body. This latest action, called Scultura salta ostacoli [Jump Hurdle Sculpture], ideally flips the Brancusian verticality of the Endless Column in a process that makes the plastic form horizontal. While Richard Serra was across the ocean drafting the verb list of processes and actions that the sculptor could perform on materials, which broadened the horizon of the new post-minimalist plastic syntax – “to role, to crease, to fold, to store, to bend, to shorten, to twist...” (Verb List, 1967-1968)13 – Mattiacci gave his works titles that highlighted the sculpture’s behaviours and experiences in relation to the body and the forces that activate the materials’
Above: An action organized by Mattiacci on the occasion of the solo show held at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome, 1967 Top, right: Luca Maria Patella, SKMP2, 1968, 16 mm film-artwork, frame Right: Percorso [Route], 1969, action at Galleria L’Attico, Rome
Page 70: An action organized by Mattiacci on the occasion of the solo show held at Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome, 1967
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Emanuele Pace
Art in the Presence of the Harmony of the Worlds
Creative inspiration is that happy moment when you approach the infinite of the cosmos, wherein boundless figures like space and geometric forms, which potentially fill it, are captured and become shapes. Shapes that fill, shapes that connect, shapes that set us off on an ideal journey through the emotions suggested to us by the view of nature and the expression of feelings. We have a constant yearning to fill the inner nature of infinite, which seems to emerge from every corner of our universe, regardless of the direction we choose – towards the infinitely small or towards the immensity in the fragments of a telescope’s field of view. The breath of the infinitely large takes its ideal shape through the geometric forms of Master Eliseo Mattiacci, in the Cosmic Order that is space as well as time, that is rhythm on lines which are everlasting compared to the tiny grain of our existence. And yet, from that small fragment of space-instant, Mattiacci was able to grasp and offer to us these aspects of eternity, was able to condense the sense of the permanence of time, of the constant repetition of orbits, of planetary, stellar and even galactic wanderings. The cosmos is expressed in shapes that only a great artist can grasp, can hold in a work that in turn restores the unending and the eternal, the dimension that escapes us and dismays us. Yes, because dismay is the emotion that binds us to the cosmos; it is the inability to know how to grasp it with our mind and give it a familiar form that makes us friends of the universal vastness. Man contemplates the universe in order to grasp it within the limits of the eye and the mind; one in front of the other, almost closing the life cycle of the begetter and the begotten. According to modern theories of the formation
of life, the stars produced the elements and the molecules that in suitable conditions gave life to life, which – produced by man himself – now looks beyond itself to the place of its possible origin. And in an incredible succession of fortuitous events, Mattiacci’s exhibit can be admired at the Forte di Belvedere, a wonderful fort, which was the scene of difficult times for Florence, times that demanded the valiant defence of its identity and culture. The hill upon which Forte di Belvedere rises faces Arcetri, where the Astrophysical Observatory now stands, a space of excellence dedicated to observing the cosmos and researching its mysteries. Forte di Belvedere facing Arcetri: the art, the emotion and the inspiration place themselves before the cosmos, the cause that searches there for the answers and the reasons; once again, man and his eyes admire the cosmos and question it in order to then describe it; artistic forms that accompany scientific studies in order to bring the universe and its wonders back to man. Forte di Belvedere facing Arcetri; Mattiacci facing Galileo. This does not wish to be a daring comparison, but rather a fact. Mattiacci is inspired by him who first looked at the universe in a new way. He draws inspiration from that first look upon an unknown macrocosm in order to gaze upon the geometric forms that the scientist from Pisa would translate into a scientific language and that today the artist from the Marches translates into evocative shapes. In reality, within these two figures, now placed one in front of the other, hides the essence of man. This is emotion and rationality, the amazement that becomes language capable to tell stories, to convey that instantaneous yearning that becomes eternal form. That incessant presence of the force of gravity, which is nothing more than the clear expression of a space-time
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Per Cornelia [For Cornelia], 1985, graphite on paper, 100Ă—70 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
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Occhio del cielo [Eye of the Sky], 1985, graphite and pastel on paper, 210×150 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
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Senza titolo (Scultura stratosferica) [Untitled – Stratospheric Sculpture], 1985, graphite and pastel on paper, 100×70 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
Drawings and Texts
Senza titolo (Vuoto) [Untitled – Void], 1985-86 ca., graphite on paper, 100×70 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
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Senza titolo (Vuoto) [Untitled – Void], 1985-86 ca., graphite on paper, 100×70 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
Senza titolo (Vuoto) [Untitled – Void], 1985-86 ca., graphite on paper, 100×70 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
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Senza titolo (Vuoto) [Untitled – Void], 1985-86 ca., graphite on paper, 100×70 cm. Artist Collection, Pesaro
Drawings and Texts
Senza titolo (Corpi celesti) [Untitled – Celestial Bodies], 2008, Indian ink on paper, 58×78 cm. Courtesy Galleria Poggiali, Florence
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Senza titolo (Corpi celesti) [Untitled – Celestial Bodies], 2008, Indian ink on paper, 78×58 cm. Courtesy Galleria Poggiali, Florence
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Drawings and Texts
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Critical Anthology Cesare Brandi p. 114 Mario Diacono pp. 116, 126 Germano Celant p. 118* Vittorio Rubiu pp. 125, 128* Alberto Boatto p. 126 Tommaso Trini pp. 129*, 160* Maurizio Fagiolo p. 128 Giuliano Briganti pp. 130, 141 Emilio Villa p. 134 Bruno Corà pp. 138, 147 Giovanni Carandente p. 139* Fabrizio D’Amico pp. 139, 151* Renato Barilli p. 151* Pier Giovanni Castagnoli p. 156 Daniela Lancioni p. 159* Luigi Ballerini p. 159* Paolo Fabbri p. 159* Ludovico Pratesi p. 160* Gianfranco Maraniello p. 161* The texts marked with an asterisk are identical transcriptions of the original published versions.
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Eliseo Mattiacci and Cesare Brandi, 1967 ca. Photographic Archive Cesare Brandi, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, Polo Museale della Toscana
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Above: Gate, 1967, Villa Brandi, Siena. Photographic Archive Cesare Brandi, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, Polo Museale della Toscana
Above: Card sent to Cesare Brandi by Vittorio Rubiu, Eliseo Mattiacci, Jannis Kounellis, Fabio Sargentini and Claudio Abate, 21 March 1969, Berna. Photographic Archive Cesare Brandi, Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, Polo Museale della Toscana
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Above: Eliseo Mattiacci in his studio in Via Laurina, Rome, 1966 ca.
Opposite page: Tubo [Tube], 1967, Galleria La Tartaruga, Rome
Above, right: Tubo [Tube], 1966 ca., Rome
Mario Diacono in Bit, issue 2, May 1967; republished in Mario Diacono, KA. Da Kounellis ad Acconci. Arte materia concetto 1960-1975, Postmedia Books, Milan, 2013, p. 71.
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[...] After Ceroli’s Cina and Pascali’s Mare, Mattiacci’s large Tubo [Tube] (it extends along the stairs that lead to the gallery, spreads and develops through the entire room, exits through the door at the end and disappears into a secondary room), Mattiacci’s “to be” [tubo] is the new work/space that, in the incessant updating of international language, particularly American English, taking place in Rome, seems to want to exclude from its purposes the commodification, the commercialisation of the work. Things are not exactly that way, given that in the United States the marketability of the work/space can be fully verified. However, in Rome credit must certainly be given to the disinterest of this operation. This would like to be the imitation of the individual’s re-descent into the collective unconscious. Complementary aspects are: the need to elevate monuments to mass culture and industrialised society; the awareness that if the work has no action/function in a collective group of viewers, it regresses to a knick-knack; the de-psychologising inherent in a cool existence. But the meanderings of Mattiacci’s Tubo have a limit in the mystic ecstasy of a work in the infinite. A limit further evident in the elementary nature and ingenuity of an anti-work that wishes to present itself as discourse, in the dexterity of solution to which the work alludes. After the Great Carpenter and the Great Framer, the Great Plumber attests to the archetypical being of the Father Stitcher of Sacks, Welder of Irons. [...]
familiarization, as Anders asserts, only increases alienation, since they are instruments that take away from human beings the capacity to realize that they have been estranged from the world and the world from them. Rotor is the kinematic object created by Bignardi. As a rotor the weight and physical dimension of our body in space is lost, just as with rotor vision, the “particular” image, the primary gestures (here Bignardi’s work connects up with the hypotheses of the New American Cinema and Arte Povera, as is confirmed by the revival of Eadweard Muybridge and the new works with Leonardi and Ricci: Bignardi should be making movies!) are spun onto the walls, onto the objects, onto the viewer, losing the dimension of fixed image, picture, canvas, of perceptible motionless surface and becoming pure im-space. The machine-pivot-core
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of the vision pushes, in fact, the image into space, not caring about invading it, superimposing itself on other images. Like an insatiable image-machine it devours every gesture and every setting with which it comes into contact, constructing im-space. If the rotor devours space, Mattiacci’s tube destroys and violates it. Just put it there and it unrolls, running through rooms, corridors, staircases, whole buildings, districts, cities. A true plastic event, it passively accepts every position, every location, creating and reproducing itself to assert its omnipresence and ubiquity. A despotic spatial tyrant, it does not respect our privacy, comes right up to our bed, listens to our conversations, lives with us. What have we done to deserve such a monster? Anti-relaxation, dissociation, violence, everything can be catalogued. And so we have Mambor’s Im-Pages.
A patient and meticulous sterilizer of creative forms and gestures, his white canvases are pages on which to write or portray the moments and instruments of Ceroli, Tacchi, Mattiacci, Remotti, Pascali... Or the simple forms of everyday objects, the gun, resistance (the electric resistor of course, get thee behind me ideology!). Or the chromatic scale, the elements that make up our perceptual panorama, cultural and otherwise. A great notebook, a true diary, indeed, in which Mambor notes down each gesture, each color, each artist that happens to fall under his gaze. Pointless and erroneous to accuse him of plagiarism, of imitation, of sampling. Like a steamroller his canvas records, annotates, sterilizes, in order to set down in front of us, as a spatial and visual catalogue, all the instruments and details of the world.
→ Vittorio Rubiu “Il Secondo Tubismo” [The Second Tubism] in La Fiera Letteraria, a. XLIII, no. 22, 30 May 1968, p. 25. Eliseo Mattiacci, born in the region of Le Marche and living in Rome, twenty-eight years of age, sculptor otherwise known as the inventor of a second tubism (the first, as we all know, was that of Fernand Léger). But between the first and second tubism, the only terms of comparison are not Léger’s paintings, which are cubist more than tubist; they are his writings. Here is one of them, which could very well have well appeared in the programme of Mattiacci’s first exhibit at the Galleria La Tartaruga: “For the masses, it will not take a great deal of effort to get to feel and understand the new realism, whose origins are in the same modern life, in the continuous phenomena of life, under the influence of industrial and geometric objects transposed into a realm where imagination and reality meet and become tied together”. And so it was. Mattiacci did not only feel and understand the real tube, the stainless steel tube that is used in industry. He felt and understood the imaginary tube, the yellow enamelled tube that fills the space of a gallery, the gallery that makes the tube a work of art, the tube that goes down the stairs, the tube that when measured reaches the Museo d’Arte Moderna, the yellow of the tube that seems even more yellow against the green of the grass. And there is not only the yellow with its current of vital energy, there is a line that slowly unwinds, and it is like a design that has slipped out of one’s hand, a liberty invention that turns its back on nature, and meanwhile there it lies. “Que j’aime voir, chère indolente, / De ton corps si beau, / Comme une étoffe vacillante, / Miroiter la peau !”. Is Baudelaire’s poetry is too lofty for Mattiacci’s tube? But Mattiacci’s tube is a snake, and there are those who say they’ve seen it dance! People protest. A tube is a tube, after all; and its only use is industrial. But it’s also useful to Mattiacci. And then, along the way, the tube has become a cylinder, the stainless steel a galvanised sheet, La Tartaruga, L’Attico. And more, two or three bands of galvanised sheet arranged in such a way as to form a kind of hut or camping tent with or without a roof, a pre-stressed concrete joist resting on a triangular base, an aluminium profile poised on an easel, lorry tyres covered with thousand-point rubber mats and enamelled in green. I don’t know why, but when these industrial objects or materials pass through artists’ hand, they almost always give rise to something tremendously serious, to an exaggerated optimism or pessimism. In America they have become a form of technological intimidation. A good example is Don Judd’s primary structures; as lovely as they are to look at and important to analyse, when they are not a reduced architectural structure, or a sculpture blocked to arrive immediately at furniture, they are luxury objects, the intellectual comfort of a civilisation at its technological peak. Better, then, is Mattiacci’s antigrazioso [antigraceful]! Arte povera, certainly, as Celant says. Because Italy is a poor country. Because it always involves found objects. To invent an object, there is no need at all to build it; you just need to know how to find it. In the same way, you can guess or, if you like, measure the space without giving it a numerical entity. You cannot design an industrial material twice, remake industry with industry, technology with technology. Mattiacci knows this, and he restricts himself to designing the space, the space that is in one position rather than another, the space that is in the distance between one object and the other, the mental space, finally, rebellious and mocking, that makes the object into a monument, but if you touch it, it falls. In this way Mattiacci, with his manner that is both physical and sly, changing proportions, expanding them without deforming them, creating spaces where there are only objects, rediscovers the naivety of an element that is even more primitive than primary. Serious art that entertains. Doesn’t seem like much? Stand back and make room for young artists like Mattiacci.
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Alberto Boatto “Anticipazioni” [Anticipations] in Cartabianca, May, 1968.
Mario Diacono “Critica in atto” [Critique in progress] intervention to Critica in atto, Palazzo Taverna, Rome, 10 marzo 1972; in e/o, June 1972; republished in Mario Diacono, KA. Da Kounellis ad Acconci. Arte materia concetto 1960-1975, Postmedia Books, Milan, 2013, pp. 97-98.
[...] “Opere praticabili” is the functional term used by Eliseo Mattiacci for his new works. These are a series of modular pieces made by working different materials and objects: galvanised and cambered sheet metal, rope, large lorry tyres. Mattiacci’s “opere praticabili” will occupy the space of the Galleria L’Attico in Rome at the end of May. [...]
Two co-actions Cesare Tacchi Deciphering Franco Gozzano One minute Eliseo Mattiacci Phonology Gianfranco Notargiacomo Dactylology Ferruccio De Filippi Archaeology: biographies Sandro Chia and/or around catachresis Mario Diacono Cancelled
1. The plan was to cancel (that is, not to abolish, but project, design on nothing) an individual creative-critical speech (Diacono) into a tribal critical-creative speech (n artists). 2. The mode of speech had to be conceived according to the linguistic space to act. It was necessary to convert a time of conventional fruition in a time of questioning (in crisis) of the convention, designating other linguistic gestures; each one had to resolve in an exemplary way a situation of personal challenge with the issue of the use of language as a social medium, highlighting to the utmost, therefore visually, the nihilistic dimension of language – visualising the linguistic arbitrariness of formal criticism and psychology with the language of the arbitrary. 3. To carry this out, it was necessary to overturn the conversation into a linguistic ‘other’ that – without denying the need to define the limit of a current artistic situation (that is, actually taking place in a definite time and space) – would present this situation at a level of activating metaphor. Therefore: Chia assembled a tautological structure, within the area of his work on the double element (the shadow, the copy), mirroring a question into a homological answer – using a portable tape-recorder and two speakers, one placed on the table behind where the artists were sitting (answer), the other on a chair in the middle of the audience (meagre: I mean, the audience cancelled too) and operated by two buttons. De Filippi consumed the language into vision with an archaeology sign; he updated the anthropological unit of past and present, fixating on the reading of Plutarch’s Vite, projecting the biographical dimension onto the semiological diversion. Gozzano acted on the auto-communication in language; taking a guess, I’d say that he proposed the work “consider for 60 seconds the following proposition: 1 minute”; that is to say, reading the language of
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Top: Cilindri praticabili [Practicable Cylinders], 1968, Parco Nomentano, Rome Above, left: Recupero di un mito [Recovery of a Myth], 1975, Galleria L’Attico, Rome Above, right: Annullamento (Richiami) [Abatement – Birdcalls], 1972, intervention by Eliseo Mattiacci, Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, Palazzo Taverna, Rome
within the dimension of time. Notargiacomo put the sign-meaning relationship into play, having a fingerspeller read the chapter from Chomsky’s The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. Mattiacci investigated the ‘other’ of phonology, reproducing a closed series of birds’ phonemes. Tacchi focused on the sensation of writing, retracing a history of written languages until he blocked the sensation and recovered it in the origin of writing, in sensory names of the environment. My cancellation, I declared by placing a poem of mine on a large board, namely my previous speech on a white sheet of paper that I had (in print) “cancelled”, and the photocopy of the book that I continued to read during the cancellation, seated between those who use the linguistic “other”, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
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