A retrospective of 50 works made by the Italian artist Jannis Kounellis (1936 - 2017) demonstrates with single-minded commitment the weaknesses of Arte Povera. Kounellis worked entirely within this vein between 1960 and about 2000 and, with a couple of exceptions (atypical of his work) created nothing of any interest. Arte Povera was a mainstream movement in Italian contemporary art. As the name implies, Arte Povera artists used materials that had no intrinsic value or esthetic qualities -- in the case of Kounnellis, bags made of jute or burlap, metal plates, bits of broken furniture, old shoes set on piles of lead sheared into sole shapes, coffee, fragments of wool and old plaster casts, airline cable and broken wooden piers. What you see is what you get -- and this work is not rewarding. It is hard to write about because Kounellis' ouevre is so impoverished he doesn't give names to his creations -- everything is simply "Untitled" with a date behind the word. There's nothing to see here and Arte Povera, at least in the hands of Kounellis seems to be a cul-de-sac; the works don't evolve or progress in any way -- shabby-looking in 1967, the later sculptures are equally shabby. Nothing is painted. The junk is just hooked to steel plates and stuck on the wall. (This show is very, very heavy -- and I mean this literally; I would estimate the combines of raw-looking steel and bulky broken wood to weigh, in total, about 20 tons.)
The Kounellis exhibition is divided into six galleries. The most spectacular items are in the last gallery described as a sort of reprise of the artist's themes. Kounellis began with paintings of letters, some of them stenciled on pieces of rough plywood and, then, painted over. The first gallery looks a bit like the early work of Jasper Johns. These alphabet painting are crudely made and seem to have been produced between about 1960 and 1967. Kounellis, then, did a series of large works that are vaguely nautical. The objects seem to be fragments of wooden boats and pier infrastructure looped by elaborate tangles of air-line cable to flat plates of steel. (This theme is reiterated in a later gallery in which large bits of cheap furniture are stuck to metal plates.) One object suspends a big burlap sack of something from a superstructure of timber and metal -- it looks like a thing you might find hanging from sea-going vessel at dock. In another room, there are three long, utilitarian shelves with hundreds of pieces of cheap-looking glass ware on them -- at the center of the middle shelf, there's a single small shot-glass that has a vaguely pinkish color. This seems an inadequate and impoverished response to viewers who would like their art to be attractive, even beautiful, and, perhaps, classically symmetrical. Other objects are metal cots stacked with wool, a series of suspended trays on which there are neat piles of either sulphur or coffee. Another set of shelves displays nothing but traces of burning on the walls where something was lit on fire with a propane torch and allowed to burn itself to ashes leaving soot on the white walls. There are some plywood booths of the kind you used to see in old porno places -- these were used for a installation in which the artist hid in one booth behind a plaster-cast classical mask while someone in the other booth played fragments from Mozart's Magic Flute. The last gallery is large and contains two works that are impressive by their sheer size. Against one wall there is a forty-foot frame of I-beams that encloses four- or five-foot long timbers, stacked together to create a rough-hewn wall. Across from this object, there are seven big sails, some of them thirty or forty feet in size, brown, ocher, yellow, and cream-colored. On one of the sails there is an image of the crucified Christ. By this point in the show, the viewer is so satiated with blacks and dark brown and lead, the color of old dock works, that the eye is, in fact, enthused to see anything with a figurative meaning and, indeed, an overdetermined meaning like Jesus on the cross -- the work is big and has a sort of gloomy magnificence like the huge wall of stacked timber, but these effects are the result of scale only and the painting of Christ is completely inconsistent with the rest of the show.
I didn't like the show. Kounellis dramatizes ugliness. He shoves it in your face. I understand that the purpose of the art is to sensitize the viewer to the junk-yard qualities of the broken wood, the metal plates and the hooks and cables. But the world is so full of ugliness and decay that it seems a little gratuitous to set our to achieve an effect that you can find in any scrap yard or construction site anywhere in the world.
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