TROUBLE & BEDAZZLEMENT: “THE ITALIAN METAMORPHOSIS” AT THE GUGGENHEIM

I work on a darling little computer. The color is industrial gray, the casing construction-site rough, and yet the trackball¹ and keyboard invite the touch, smooth and gleaming. The impression is of a subdued, shadowy elegance that contains both the far edges of science and my own lumpen makeup in a single handsome, handy packet. And while the name of this machine is Anglo, ending in the hard k that doesn’t exist in Latin countries, I know its forebears were Italian.

To see where the laptop came from, look to Rome. The design models for the computer age remain the materials of a Fellini set circa 8 1/2—that is, 1963. Consider for instance the Vespa scooter, bug-like yet sleek, still the model for any city-wise runabout though it was designed by Corradino D’Ascanio in 1946. In the ’50s came Marcello Nizzoli’s trim Olivetti typewriters, in the ’60s snug portable televisions designed by Marco Zanuso, and all have since proved the shape of things to come. Certainly the Japanese knew a good thing when they saw one. Honda and Sony owe an obvious debt to Fiat and Vespa, and to the appliance designs of Zanuso or the Castiglioni brothers. Anyone who needed proof had only to visit New York while the Guggenheim Museum was showing “The Italian Metamorphosis: 1943–1968,” an exhibit that included over a thousand objects in just about every medium.

Too much, too quick, and yet full of light and laughter, the event showcased a culture swept up in a transformation as radical as any this century. More than that, it demonstrated that the ways in which Italy handled its “Metamorphosis”—in artists’ lofts or on draftsmen’s tables—left a notably workable blueprint for how to live at this crowded and changeable turn of the millennium.

But if the world has come to fit Italy’s boot, that same culture proved a tight squeeze for the Guggenheim. An art museum after all, the Gugg set aside its Rotunda space (its signature mushroom spiral) for the art per se, the sculpture, wallpieces, installations. Climbing the central ramp, one passed two or three isolated pieces every sixty degrees or so, a thinking-friendly pace. But something like the Design section, where the Fiat and Vespa were on display, was shunted whole into one of the side galleries. Indeed, half a gallery: Design shared its space with Photography. The crowding left cinema coverage, in particular, shortchanged. The Film section offered nothing more than screenings of a few classics, wonderful yet shopworn, plus a couple sets of self-congratulatory clips from CinéCitta and a winding corridor of poster-plastered walls. Yet that splashy narrow corridor was, as well, a clever touch. It was an imitation Roman or Florentine alleyway of the period, a bit of Italian street life brought in-house.

Certainly you could carp at the show’s limitations. Where was the historical grounding, the samples of ’20s Futurism and monument-happy Fascism? Where was the better work by ’60s iconoclast Jannis Kounnellis? But such carping would ignore the unique challenges posed by the “Metamorphosis.” Curator Germano Celant had to make like Fellini, whirling a whole fractious world into a single prolonged dance. Simply to have pulled off something coherent would have deserved praise. But Celant did more: He got the alleyway into the house. His cramming left room for wit.

Wit was about all Italy had left after 1943. The urge to create is always in part contrary, a renunciation of whatever’s too true, and art-infected Italians at the end of the Fascist misadventure found themselves with more than most to react against. The country was bankrupt, its finest minds in exile or dead. The claim that Mussolini made the trains run on time proves, alas, elitist folklore; he poured money into the luxuries enjoyed by his generals, like first-class trains, but left the rank and file to sink into a cultural backwardness unmatched in Western Europe. After that, during the Allied drive up the peninsula, more than one eyewitness reported that the triumph of democracy often reduced local life to near barbarism.

Small wonder that most of those in the first wave of talent to have an impact following the War had played some part in the leftist resistance. They reacted not only against the hollow exaggerations of the “blackshirts,” however, but also against the mannered swoops and coils of Bruncusi and the Futurists, which seemed hopelessly out of touch. Instead they embraced a harsher credo: Get real.

The Neo-realist movement, best known in this country via movies like Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (’48), seems at first glance far removed from the suave tech of something like my laptop. The Guggenheim’s photography section, for instance, began with the grim urban scenes of Alberto Lattuada; these suggest, to a present-day visitor, the footage out of devastated Mogadishu. Over in the high arts, meanwhile, the back-to-basics impulse led to the composizioni of Alberto Burri—some of the most arresting pieces around the Guggenheim Rotunda—cobbled together out of materials like burlap and charred wood. Even the ’46 Vespa is nothing if not down to earth: the name means “wasp” and repair requires no more than a jackknife. Then how does one get from such naked postwar homeliness to the fine Italian hand of, say, mid-’60s Ferragamo shoes? The sequence makes sense only to those who can open themselves anew to the dizzying power of its initial step.

The exhibit’s film clips, even edited so as to send everyone home happy, couldn’t entirely neuter the movement’s power. The agitated faces and bodies onscreen shook off even the smarm caked over them by a thousand imitations. What most sets these originals apart from their followers, one saw again, is the women. Even a great disciple like Martin Scorsese must rest his reputation on men’s roles, and lesser American attempts at capturing the Italian feminine mystique prove blandly Hefneresque.² But when Ingrid Bergman abandoned Hollywood for Rossellini, in 1950, it wasn’t because of any nonsense about Latin lovers. It was because of what he’d done for Anna Magnani and the young Loren. The women of this movement were true screen sirens: encouraged to a raw emotionality actresses had rarely if ever been allowed. Dramas were pursued down to the root: money, shame, family.

At the Guggenheim show the sheer muscle of Neo-realism had its brute way once more, not just in the Film section but also in Design and Photography and elsewhere. It’s no small measure of the exhibition’s success that, by unearthing this old touchstone, it achieved a startling cross-cultural insight. It demonstrated that postwar Italian realism uncorked the same genie as early rock ’n’ roll—the magic of the organic and libidinous.

With that in mind, the later modulations of this Metamorphosis seem natural. On the one hand, by insisting on the streetwise and bottomline, engaged imaginations moved toward practicality and flexibility. Thus Ferragamo, unencumbered by the limitations of his materials in 1944, combines scraps of suede and chunks of cork to make a patchwork high-heeled slip-on that remains a staple of boho fashion to this day. On the other hand, by putting a premium on impulse and the back of the brain, makers and doers were carried away from the constraints of logic and unity. Thus about 1960 the artist Mimmo Rotella develops his “Décollage” style, in which layers of wall posters are peeled away in pieces in order to reveal startling colors and perceptions.

By the early ’60s Italy had entered a heyday of money and sensibility known as Il Boom, surfing these twinned waves of adaptability in the marketplace and fidelity to human dimensions. The high arts, too, broke away from realism, and from any leftist dogma that might demand it. At the Guggenheim, the manifestos of that break and its reactions (and counter-reactions), made up much of the exhibit on “The Literature of Art.” Including everything from novels to graffiti-style notices, in one sense these literature collections amounted to little more than a flag display, under glass. But then again, they constituted the flags of a new universe, parti-color testimony to the country’s leap from Third World to First.

Even the most extravagant excesses of this moment, the most cutting-edge assemblages, imply an awareness of donkey carts, a feudal Mafia, and public health disasters that most of Europe hadn’t encountered in a century or more. Thus Missoni’s rainbow tunic-dresses, though made of rayon and associated with the ’60s jet set, nonetheless derive unmistakeably from Sicilian and Saharan peasant gear. Having begun in naked human outcry, the Metamorphosis kept finding ways to keep hands and bodies part of the changing formula. Industrial design had a trademark asymmetry, jamming the rounded against the flat, the fleshy against the mechanical, and it moved always toward basics, so that a TV would appear nothing but screen. Yet its other defining element remained something then called “aerodynamic,” now known as “biomorphic,” but in any case natural, down-home, simpatico.

In high arts, as more and more unusual materials found a way into assemblages, they did so with humor. The Guggenheim Rotunda featured a delightful Piero Manzoni confabulation of fake fur and charcoal bricks. At times, too, the work achieved mythic Mediterranean resonance. The very title of the New York show pointed toward legendary benchmarks of the civilized animal: Kafka’s twentieth-century bug and Ovid’s first-century transformations.

The exhibition’s choice of closure was in some ways arbitrary. In Italy the dislocations of the sudden postwar jump into the future continue to this day—as do their creative responses. Yet 1968 was indeed a watershed year, as Rome and Milan, like Paris and Mexico City, saw strikes and protests. Cantankerous freethinkers, at that point, began to react against the very boom they had helped create. To put it another way, the Guggenheim show provided a fresh example of a familiar cultural pattern: following do-it-yourselfers who seize the foreground through the golden triumphs of their initiative to the moment of their inevitable disillusionment and return to origins. That return was Arte Povera, “poor art,” with installations made of things like treetrunks and sandbags; it was as usual echoed in other media, for example in Joe Columbo’s gleaming plastic stacking chairs, in-your-face childish and disposable. Those chairs suggest what’s notable about the Italian version of retrenchment, namely its lightheartedness. Although the same era produced the deadly serious Red Brigades, in the arts and the media reaching out to the disenfranchised remained a game rather than a duty.

That last juxtaposition, the terrorist cell and the happy craftsman, may provide the most revealing and sobering image out of the entire event. An energetic expansion of the museum mission—and as such a great success—the exhibit also couldn’t help pointing up the ongoing crisis in its source country. During the show yet another Italian government collapsed, one that had been elected on the promise of ending the previous half-century of corrupt and inefficient administration.³ As breathtaking and influential as the country’s creative minds continue to be, they seem to make their way as much in spite of their homeland as because of it. At the Guggenheim, the least interesting room covered architecture; even the wall-text there, while noting figures like Mario Rodolfi and Carlo Mollino, spoke of a “general sense of failure.” And it’s a telling failure. Architecture more than any other medium depends on civic cohesion, on a community commitment that exists in some better form than extremist cabals. From Turin to Naples, however, the postwar artist seems to thrive on such cabals. Or he works entirely solo, fiddling on ancient instruments or new while his city burns. One hopes that this won’t prove another of the international models to emerge from the protean bedazzlements of the Italian Metamorphosis.

—millennium pop, 1995

__________

1. Why not stick with the terms of mid-’90s technology?

3. This was the first administration of Silvio Berlusconi, 1994–95. Twenty years later, many Italians still consider him a force for honest and responsible government.

2. At this point I cited the John Mellencamp video for “Dancing Naked;” a more up-to-date example would be the movie Nine.