Arte Povera's theater: Artifice and anti-modernism in Italian art of the 1960s

This dissertation considers the works of three artists associated with Arte Povera: Michelangelo Pistoletto, Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. It places their work in the context of the cultural and political dialogue that shaped 1960s Italy at large and challenges the critical monopoly on the movement held by Germano Celant, the critic who coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, and who continues to dominate scholarly interpretations of the group today. Disputing Celant's definition of Arte Povera as an art of poor materials, and exposing the contradictions inherent in his effort to align the group with wider international (and specifically modernist trends), this dissertation examines the Italian artists' pointed critique of standard modernist paradigms. Against the tradition within which Celant found a place for the Arte Povera artists, these three artists developed a position specific to their country's situation as a postfascist, newly consumerized culture. For them, such typically taboo concepts as art's fictional status and its memorial and narrative impulse were essential to maintaining a dialogue between subject and object in the face of what Italian postwar intellectuals perceived to be the sustained predominance of absolutist modes of thought. This dissertation will examine these artists' effort to confront autonomy, material immediacy and the quest for objectively verifiable truths with an acceptance of artifice, openness and insufficiency that is less nostalgic than corrective of all determinate positions both past and present.; After a detailed introduction, which examines Celant's writings, the discussion begins with the role of vision and theatricality in Pistoletto's mirror paintings and performative work. The second chapter investigates Kounellis' turn to outmoded artistic forms as a specific alternative to modernism's prohibition on narrative communication and historical memory. The third and final chapter analyzes Pascali's mobilization of artifice and disguise in response to the growing consumer hegemony. The dissertation concludes by considering these three artists in relationship to Arte Povera as a whole.