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Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many


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Published: Nov 10, 2010

Michelangelo Pistoletto is not as well known in the U.S. as he should be. Perhaps it's because American artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein dominated international Pop Art. Meanwhile the Italian Pistoletto's most accessible work is his Pop-related "mirror paintings," in which tissue-thin images of full-scale figures are glued to a mirror background. Visitors see their reflections integrated into unsettlingly real settings. Sometimes, Pistoletto includes a painted figure looking at its own reflection. In one series, architectural elements enhance the illusion of an opening in the wall complete with barriers.

The element of real time adds to the resonance of these experiences. The most melodramatic one centers on a noose suspended at around the height of the viewer's head. The ominous vignette induces an authentic, if momentary, frisson of atavistic panic — at least in those who've watched too many reruns of The Twilight Zone.

In 1964, Pop Art gallerist Leo Castelli invited Pistoletto to immigrate to the U.S. and join Castelli's New York stable, where his mirror works would be super-marketable. According to Pistoletto, his response was to shun the U.S. for more than 15 years. His ultimate reply in the mid-1960s was a heterogeneous group of minimal, impersonal sculptures. Recognizable as a house or a generic photograph of Jasper Johns or a table with a pyramid on it, they remain stolidly uncommunicative. Pistoletto calls them "Minus Objects." I call them boring, but also must acknowledge that they were a necessary cleansing response to the powerful personal vision of the mirror paintings.

In a reaction against corporate manipulation of society and in sympathy for the working class, Pistoletto joined the Arte Povera movement of the late 1960s. This specifically Italian movement turned to common, non-elite, even cast-off materials in art-making. It rejected the detached irony of Pop and was profoundly anti-hierarchical. Perhaps Pistoletto's best-known work in this vein is a wall composed of bricks wrapped in colorful rags.

Two huge, irregular, mirrored tables represent the Mediterranean and Caribbean seas. They are surrounded by an eclectic collection of chairs and stools meant to be sat on. The metaphor is a simple one: Let everyone, of every culture, come to the table and communicate.

(r_rice@citypaper.net)

Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many | Through Jan. 16, 2011, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2600 Ben Franklin Parkway, 215-763-8100, philamuseum.org.