Giovanni Anselmo
Ian Hunt
TJ Clark, in Farewell to an Idea, proposes that Modernism had two great aims: to lead its audiences towards recognition of the social reality of the sign and, equally, to dream 'of turning the sign back to a bedrock of World/Nature/Sensation/Subjectivity which the to and fro of capitalism had all but destroyed'. The book's mode – lyric critique – is more thrilling than that point can show, and its readers are implicitly expected to find examples of their own that sustain, counter or extend Clark's strenuous demands. Somewhere in Arte Povera – often misrecognised as being concerned only by material, now generally agreed to be equally preoccupied by language – is work that is up to the challenge. Giovanni Anselmo's beautifully made summation of 40 years of activity, which was united over two floors at Ikon by irregularly placed granite blocks available for standing (Where the stars are coming one span closer ... , 2004) might represent some of that work: Anselmo is attentive to the first of Clark's wishes as well as the second.
Standing on the blocks did not, of course, bring the stars closer. My thoughts ran to unwanted echoes, talent show dreams to 'reach for the stars'. My friend pointed out that only in the Ptolemaic universe of crystalline hemispheres could you become 'closer' to the stars. But this was one of the things you forgave, for the to and fro was suspended all right, and for such holidays a degree of awkwardness and embarrassment is essential. You mounted these plinths like a counterfeit Olympian, or a wayfarer crossing a stream. It is a seriously silly naivety that proposes that you consider yourself as an upright held in place by gravity, the kind of naivety British artists of Anselmo's generation, preoccupied by what they call Nature, rarely pull off.
You know Anselmo's icons I suppose: the perspex sheet the height of a person, held tensioned by a stiff iron wire; the iron rod the height of a person, fixed in a block of hardwood, faintly wavering in registration of your presence; the floppy lettuce supporting the polished granite block, the cotton wool drinking water from a replenishable source. Iconic photographs too: Into the Work, the artist running isolated into a horizonless landscape (a tantalising title for anyone seeking to connect all this to parallel endeavours such as Umberto Eco's The Open Work). And in the catalogue the same photo of Anselmo on Stromboli in 1965 – his symbolic inauguration as an artist when his cast shadow disappeared. An entry in a modern Lives of the Saints would record the time he spends on this island volcano (thereby twinning it with Turin's factories). But the self-mythologising is not excessive, and it's easy to get past. Much more significantly, Anselmo's installation of his works made what in a survey can seem like slide illustrations into living proposals, and this is why the show was superior to Kounellis's recent exhibition in Oxford, which seemed inclined to accept reliquary status for the early works by mounting them on an inaccessible platform.
Installation has an inevitable and pleasingly open aspect of meaning here. On the upper floor, which is more gothic and churchy, play was made with the building's axial geometry. The long iron bars squeezed a sea-sponge according to the ambient temperature: Breathing. The single slide projector Invisibile– the one where you catch the word VISIBILE – fired at right angles over it, along the longest axis the galleries offer. Multiple projections elsewhere announce PARTICOLARE ('detail'). The placed granite blocks suggested an order of a different and irregular kind. They indicate movement through and beyond the given architecture. Hence also the presence ofthe compass, here set in a drift of earth, and the repeated useof ultramarine pigment. There is a pointing to beyond thatserves to reconform your sense of where you stand, what thesethings are made of and how their separate elements are held inplace, whether they are a perfectly installed line of photographs(Documentation of human interference in universal gravitation,1969), or an iron bar held twisted against the wall by a bolt ofcloth (Torsion, 1968). This is the non-mystical showing forth ofreality, facticity, presence that accounts of Arte Povera (andrelated currents) struggle to define. It is worth struggling with.The stylistic giveaway is fixing and placing: Anselmo's cablesand slipknots, Robert Ryman's tacks and screws, Lee Ufan'splaced river boulders and brushstrokes.
Anselmo's work may seem to stand aloof from the social, butreal caution is required before that charge is made; his work maybe defending it. This dream of humankind as part of nature isn'tthe purchased one of a timeshare in a holiday island, but anopening to a time that is neither leisure nor work.
Giovanni Anselmo was at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham from February 1 to March 28 2005.
This review was originally published in April 2005 / No 285, p22-23.
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