Beyond Environment

“Italy: USA = City: Nature” is the invisible equation behind the “Beyond Environment” exhibition curated by Emanuele Piccardo and Amit Wolf at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. The Italian reference is the Superarchitettura experience (1963-1973) and, more specifically, Gianni Pettena’s architectural /artistic experiments in the 1960s.

For the USA, on the other hand, it is works by Robert Smithson, Allan Kaprow and Gordon Matta-Clark, who introduced the concept of environment and all its potential permutations into the American art scene. The core theme stressed by the two curators is the interchange between art and architecture, city and nature that marked the second half of the 20th century via the disenchanted and provocative work of the aforementioned protagonists.

“Beyond Environment” received grants from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Woodbury University School of Architecture. More than just an exhibition, it is a project comprising a publication and a competition to for the exhibition design. The book, published by Actar, was not conceived as a catalogue but a critical-interpretational investigation of the environment, backed up by significant testimonies and archive materials not in the exhibition. The design competition, won by the Pentagon collective of architects (Dale Strong/ Paul Trussler/Paul Stoelting/Tyler McMartin), was devised  to generate interaction between visitors and works. The result is Sonic, a series of three spiral environments that animate the exhibition space and produce a new spatial perception.

The first environment projects the 1969 Living Theatre performance in the Space Electronic discotheque in Florence (a project by 9999), filmed by Fabrizio Fiumi. The other two feature the work of Allan Kaprow with the especially important projection of a still image and a video, previously unseen records found in the Getty Research Institute archives.  The image chosen is an upside-down beard with the ironic title, Smile, part of the score of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959) and the soundtrack of the same project, which contaminates the whole gallery. In the second case, Scales (1971) is a video of a happening consisting in the construction of a staircase with blocks of concrete.

On the one hand, we see the strategy of Kaprow’s happenings, influenced by the work of Anna Halprin, the inventor of performing art and wife of the landscape artist Lawrence Halprin; on the other, the use of the discotheque space allows the public to experiment with behaviour totally free from constrictions – as suggested by Leonardo Savioli in his Interior Architecture and Design university course devoted to the “Piper” and which greatly influenced many superarchitects.

The synthesis of American and Italian aspirations was developed by a young Pettena, fresh from his architectural studies in Florence and a keen visitor to art galleries, the true anti-academic location of his architectural education.

Pettena met Smithson during the Asphalt Rundown performance. Smithson produced the bitumen flow at the invitation of Fabio Sargentini, who owned the L’Attico gallery, in 1969. Perfectly recorded in wonderful photographs by Claudio Abate, it sets the measure of the operation and the breadth of the different approach adopted by Pettena.

This is confirmed by the idealised dialogues established by Pettena primarily with Kaprow, via the Ice House I & II (1971) in Minneapolis. In them, the architectural presence, albeit literally drowned, is the soul needed to fulfil the artistic experiments undertaken. The same applies to Pettena’s works in Utah, Salt Lake City. There, the relationship between the environment and the “material” of nature is indirect, mediated by the presence of an architectural structure, as in the Clay House (1972), a small detached house covered with clay in a student performance, and as in the Tumbleweeds Catcher (1972) installation, a wooden tower covered with the famous rolling bushes.

By highlighting analogies and differences between installations and performances with detailed documentation, the curators emphasise that the relationship with the environment acts as a catalyst, even though Pettena’s American experiments never really detach from the urban dimension that had distinguished his previous Italian phase.

The meaning of the exhibition is not that of mere historiographic research because it raises important questions: Why have contemporary projects lost the desire to provoke or go beyond the simply superficial? Is it still possible to question pre-established aesthetic values as these experiments sought to do? The significance of the “Beyond Environment” project lies not only in having evoked idealised collaborations but also in having indicated spaces for freedom and suggested that there are other potential ways to construct our environment.

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until 9 November 2014
Beyond Environment
LACE, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions