Precronistoria
Simone Ciglia
In 1976, art critic Germano Celant had his Precronistoria, 1966-69 published by Centro Di in Florence. The text collects a set of chronologically ordered documents reporting the complex artistic developments in the four-year period considered, characterised by the emergence of minimal art, systemic painting, arte povera, land art, conceptual art, body art, environmental art and new media. In doing so, Celant trod the path set out four years earlier by his American colleague Lucy Lippard, who had employed the same classification methodology to sort the materials which – in the time span considered (in her case, from 1966 to 1972) – illustrated the concept of dematerialisation of the art object. In its (apparent) neutrality, this chronology still remains a widely adopted approach for the interpretation of art practices. This is evident in the text co-authored by Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh, which construes twentieth-century art history «as a succession of important events» on a year-by-year basis.
The chronological approach informs the present text as well, albeit applied to the work by a single artist. This new ‘precronistoria’ aims to trace a genealogy of Giovanni Termini’s work: this is just one among many possibilities, since the host of associations hinted at can be examined to a very limited extent here. This ‘chronicle’ will select specific episodes from twentieth-century art history and philosophy relating to one of the tenets of Termini’s practice: the archetype of sculpture as building and the iconography of the construction site.
1914
In 1914 Vladimir Evgrafovič Tatlin (Char´kov 1885 – Moscow 1953) realises Selection of Materials: Iron, Stucco, Glass, Asphalt. It is a rectangular relief within which the artist assembled the materials referred to in the title: the stucco surface is crossed by an upright wooden rod, onto which an iron triangle – protruding into the viewer’s space – has been inserted.
The upper and lower portions incorporate, respectively, a curved glass fragment and some metal. The artist negotiates these materials with an attitude he calls «truth». As observed firsthand by Russian art critic Nicolaj Tarabukin, here it is the material which dictates the shapes, not the opposite.
The son of an engineer and a poetess, Tatlin is one of the protagonists of the Russian avant-garde of the early twentieth century.
As a young man he joined the navy, where in all likelihood he worked as a shipwright. A trip to Paris in 1914, during which he saw sculptures by Picasso, marked a turning point in Tatlin’s artistic career.
The Russian word faktura epitomises the “culture of materials” which characterises the multi-faceted current of the Russian avant-garde which Tatlin, among others, inaugurated: Constructivism, as the name itself suggests, put forward a concept of art as construction. To the traditional representative function of art, Constructivists opposed an objective vision of form. They were driven, above all, by a revolutionary afflatus, aimed at edifying a new society.
A century later, in a completely transformed historical context, Termini inherits the constructive conception of art, maintaining a Tatlinian truth towards materials. Like the Russian artist, Termini used to work in a shipyard: from this daily practice in contact with materials he developed a particular attention towards their structural properties.
1948
Termini’s body of work has its foundations in the history of sculpture. It continues a tradition that has been unfolding over the course of the twentieth century: that of the sculpture as construction. Back in 1948, American art critic Clement Greenberg identified this tendency in the context of what he called the «new sculpture»:
Space is there to be shaped, divided, enclosed, but not to be filled. The new sculpture tends to abandon stone, bronze and clay for industrial materials like iron, steel, alloys, glass, plastics, celluloid, etc., etc., which are worked with the blacksmith’s, the welder’s and even the carpenter’s tools […] the new sculpture is not so much sculpted as constructed, built, assembled, arranged.
Greenberg thus acknowledges the huge broadening of the range of materials and techniques that marked the history of sculpture in the twentieth century, all the way to the «expanded field» detailed by Rosalind Krauss.
Termini embraces the materials, processes and spatial conception that animate the idea of sculpture as construction. His work, based on an iconography of the construction site, seems to take this assumption to its extreme.
1951
The issue of building became the focus of much philosophical thinking in the twentieth century. Questioned about the problem of housing in post-war Europe, Martin Heidegger responded with his essay Building Dwelling Thinking. His reasoning starts from an etymological analysis of the term building:
But if we listen to what language says in the word bauen we hear three things:
1 – Building is really dwelling.
2 – Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth.
3 – Building as dwelling unfolds into the building that cultivates growing things and the building that erects buildings.
To build does not result in a self-contained activity, rather it implicates other terms. Heidegger connects building with «dwelling» e «thinking»:
The nature of building is letting dwell. Building accomplishes its nature in the raising of locations by the joining of their spaces. Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then we can build.
With his sculpture-construction, Termini represents a building site made for dwelling, for man’s being-in-the-world.
1957-1958
Giuseppe Uncini (Fabriano, 1929 – Trevi, 2008) starts working on Cementarmati, a series that marks a turning point in his practice. It is a set of raw concrete slabs propped by armours made up of mesh and iron elements. The artist collected such materials from the surrounding reality, against the backdrop of the reconstruction fervour which animated post-war Italy. Reinforced concrete – as Enrico Crispolti pointed out – is «the symbol itself of the constructive power of contemporary man». After a few years he realised the Ferrocementi (1962-65), works which emphasise the element of rebar as the guiding principle of form. Between the 1960s and the 1970s, Uncini employed further materials from construction industry in his work: particularly, the bricks, which are the subjects of a series realised between 1969 and 1972.
In this regard, in 1972 the artist stated: «for me, the choice of materials is already part of the idea: the materials (iron, bricks, concrete) require me to employ strictly suitable techniques».
A similar conception of materials underlies Termini’s work: for him, materials represent «the means or the superstructure to get to the final form». A form he is not interested in «any more than the work being undertaken to get to it».
Among the materials employed, we find – by way of example: panels from a building site which delimit the gallery’s walls (as in the exhibition Pregressa, 2016); a wooden plank painted yellow and covered in concrete (Tentativo di ripresa, 2015); framed plasterboard panels (Necessità di una posizione ben precisa, 2014); PVC nets (Zona limitata, 2010).
1965
In 1965, Minimalist sculpture Carl Andre made the following statement to the critic Barbara Rose:
Instead of sculpting materials, I employ materials as means to sculpt space.
Minimalism subverted some of the assumptions on which sculpture was based at that time. By presenting seemingly mute objects – primary forms, industrial materials, serial configurations – minimalist sculpture establishes a relationship with the space in which it is placed and with the viewer, by investing them in their physical dimension. The serial attitude of Minimalism is evoked by Termini in relation to the idea of construction site, which intrigues him with «its serial operative gestures, its stacked up materials»; industrial materials – such as neon tubes, bricks, steel – which the artist borrows from the American movement.
1968
At Circus Maximus in Rome, in 1968 Eliseo Mattiacci (Cagli, Pesaro, 1940) staged the performance Lavori in corso, in collaboration with some students from the Istituto d’Arte of Rome. The action consisted of different moments: several beach umbrellas, arranged in a circle, were being spun, while huge clothes were lain on the ground and a tarpaper roll was unfurled onto some trestles. The performance was finally stopped by the police.
The following year, at the L’Attico gallery in Rome, Mattiacci enacted a new performance (Percorso): the artist drove a steamroller into the exhibition space, levelling the ground and creating what he defined as a «practicable path».
A performative quality can be identified in Termini’s work as well: even though the artist has rarely resorted to this specific medium, his sculpture retains the traces of a process able to evoke the temporal factor.
1981
Rosalind Krauss publishes Passages in Modern Sculpture.
In the introduction she addresses the issue of the traditional aesthetic division between an art of time and an art of space and stresses the need to consider the temporal dimension of sculpture:
The underlying premise of the following study of modern sculpture is that, even in a spatial art, space and time cannot be separated for purposes of analysis. Into any spatial organisation there will be folded an implicit statement about the nature of temporal experience. The history of modern sculpture is incomplete without discussion of the temporal consequences of a particular arrangement of form.
1980s
Anthony Caro (New Melden, England 1924 – London 2013) coins the word sculpitecture in order to describe his own works. Starting from the 1980s, the artist took up the relationship between sculpture and architecture as one of his main lines of research. Qualities such as volume, scale, and space underpin both the disciplines. Caro’s works require the physical involvement of the viewer, which are invited not only to look at them, but to explore them with their own bodies.
2007
The New Museum inaugurates its new premises in New York with the exhibition Unmonumental. The Object in the 21st Century. The show’s ambitious aim is to take stock of the state of contemporary sculpture, by presenting the work of thirty artists. The panorama that emerges is characterised by fragmentariness and precariousness; a deliberately anti-heroic statute mirroring a time of crisis. Laura Hoptman provides us with a definition of the word which condenses this attitude:
If the term “monumental” connotes massiveness, timelessness and public significance, the neologism “un-monumental” is meant to describe a kind of sculpture that is not against these values (as in “anti-monumental”) but intentionally lacks them. Most obviously, the piecemeal, jury-rigged or put-together state of these new sculptures lends a distinct sense of contingency.
We can subsume under this heading also Termini’s sculptural practice, which rejects peremptoriness even when it features a large scale.
2013
In the former church of Suffragio in Pesaro, Giovanni Termini presents Armatura, a massive installation reproducing a building site’s scaffolding. This is the most incisive representation of his constructive conception of sculpture. The work, whose realisation was entrusted to workers in the building sector, is a double-sided: on the one hand the building site seems to be still in progress and expresses a constructive potential; on the other hand, the factory appears to have been shut down, perhaps a reminder of the current setback in the building sector caused by an economic crisis.
As a response to the ultimate wish of Heidegger, Termini’s work teaches us how to dwell.
Germano Celant, Precronistoria 1966-69, Centro Di, Florence 1976.
Lucy Lippard, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries…, Praeger, New York 1973.
Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin Buchloh, Preface: a reader’s guide in Art since 1900. Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism, Thames & Hudson, London 2004, p. 12.
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture. Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston 1961 (Italian trans. Arte e Cultura, Umberto Allemandi & C., Torino 1991, p. 145).
Rosalind Krauss, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, in “October”, Vol. 8. (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.
Martin Heidegger, Bauen Wohnen Denken, 1951 (Italian trans. Costruire Abitare Pensare, in Saggi e Discorsi, Italian edition by Gianni Vattimo, Mursia, Milan 1976, p. 98).
Ibid., p. 107.
Giuseppe Uncini, quoted in Giuseppe Uncini, catalogue of the exhibition Pardi, Spagnulo, Uncini, curated by R. Sanesi, Palazzo Reale, Milan, 1972.
Giovanni Termini, cit. in Il Tempo, lo Spazio e il Vuoto (che non c’è), curated by Alberto Zanchetta, in “Exibart onpaper”, n.73, June 2011 p. 79.
Carl Andre, cit. in Barbara Rose, ABC Art, in “Art in America”, October-November 1965, p. 67.
Giovanni Termini, op. cit.
Rosalind Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, MIT Press, 1981 (Italian edition Passaggi. Storia della scultura da Rodin alla Land art, Bruno Mondadori, Milan 1998, p. 12).
Laura Hoptman, UNMONUMENTAL. Going to pieces in 21st Century, in Unmonumental. The Object in the 21st Century, Phaidon, London-New York 2007, p. 138.