Luciano Fabro; cool Independent obit (Arte Poverist)
Hyfler/Rosner
Luciano Fabro
Popular Arte Poverist who saw his art as a means of
enriching, rather than embracing, the mundane
The Independent
11July 2007
Charles Darwent
In September 2006, an article in the Daily Mail revealed
details of Tate Modern's acquisitions budget for the
previous year. Amid general outrage, one purchase came in
for particular scorn: a three-metre-high pillar of bronze
and perspex that had cost the gallery £400,000 and which the
newspaper dubbed "the world's most expensive hat-stand".
This sculpture, called Piede ("Foot"), was one of the key
works of the Italian artist Luciano Fabro.
An irony of the story, overlooked by the Mail, was that
Fabro was a founding father of the movement known as Arte
Povera, or "poor art". First named by the critic Germano
Celant, in 1967, Arte Povera was never a school in the
narrow sense of the word. Rather, the term described a
common response by many young Italians in the mid-1960s to
US domination of the contemporary art scene. While Americans
like Andy Warhol celebrated the graphic slickness of
consumerism, Celant encouraged his countrymen to concentrate
on the mundane and everyday. This dictum was meant to extend
to the materials used in Arte Povera artworks - wool and
concrete were recommended - although, Italians being
Italians, Celant's advice was often ignored.
This was particularly true of Luciano Fabro, whose work from
the start was made of costly materials such as stainless
steel and silk. Fabro's insistence that the truth was not to
be found in Celant's form of minimalism was surprising, as
his own background had all the makings of social militancy.
Born in the car town of Turin, he lost his father as a young
child; he was then raised near Udine in the Friuli in
conditions of varying poverty. Fabro was older than many of
his fellow Arte Poverists, however: he was already in his
late twenties when economic recession hit Italy in the early
1960s, and in his thirties when students stormed the Venice
Biennale in 1968. The political rage that gave rise to the
Red Brigades seems largely to have passed him by.
Instead, his overlap with Arte Povera came in the form of
what John Cage called "an experimental condition in which
one experiments with living". Art, for Fabro, was a means of
enriching the mundane rather than of embracing it. At the
age of 12, fatherless and poor, he decided to become an
artist, and he never wavered in his resolve. Dazzled by the
work of Luciano Fontana at the 1958 Venice Biennale, Fabro
moved to Milan, where he spent the rest of his life. For the
last 25 years of it, he taught at the city's twin art
schools, the Accademia di Brera and the Casa degli Artisti.
Students were encouraged to think of the universe in three
parts, as microcosm, macrocosm and - Fabro's own word -
"androcosm". "Although the term doesn't actually exist," he
would say, "it describes a world that includes humanity."
Quite what he meant by this can be seen in a late work,
called Sisyphus (1994), at the Walker Art Center in
Minneapolis. Sisyphus consists of a cylindrical volume of
marble, etched with the artist's own likeness, which is
rolled over a bed of flour to leave a life-sized
self-portrait on the floor. Given the delicacy of the
medium, the image has to be remade at least once a week by
weary conservators. Like the myth from which it takes its
name, Sisyphus might be read as a reflection on the futility
of life. Its maker, though, saw things differently, the
point of the story being, he said, that "Sisyphus always
succeeds in rolling his stone". The public evidently
identified with this optimism, in a 1996 poll voting Fabro's
the work they would most like to see on permanent display.
This kind of popularity eluded other Arte Poverists who toed
Celant's line more strictly. Fabro, who had involved himself
in performance art in the 1960s and 1970s, had a way of
making people feel included in his work. In part, this was
because he saw art as tentative rather than dogmatic, prone
to an infinity of readings and constantly evolving. His
Enfasi (baldacchino) ("Emphasis (canopy)") began its life in
Rome in 1982 as a relatively austere copper-and-aluminium
wall piece. In the decade that followed, it travelled to
Kassel, Aachen, London and Lucerne, gradually changing shape
as it went. By the time it reached the San Francisco Museum
of Modern Art in 1992, Enfasi was suspended from the
ceiling, studded with hand-made copper medallions and
a-flutter with brown-paper streamers. Faced with the work's
nomadic history, visitors had to decide for themselves how
best to navigate their way around it. Fabro himself could
offer no clues. His art, he said, wasn't "predestined and
fixed", catching him just as unawares as his public.
Like the recurring triumph of Sisyphus, Enfasi's migration
from wall to ceiling seemed to hint at a personal ascension,
a life raised from the mundane to the heavenly by the
democratising process of art. Early, floor-based works
concentrated on the ugliness of the past. Fabro's late-1960s
Piede series, so derided by the Daily Mail, mocked Italian
classicism by clothing monstrous feet in silk; his famous
maps of Italy, made in wood and lead and gilt bronze, played
on the peninsula's resemblance to a boot.
As his works moved from the earthly to the cosmic - Sisyphus
was dotted with golden stars - so the materials of which
they were made tended to become shinier and more expensive.
To the end of his life, this disconcerted curators who
insisted on believing that Arte Povera meant "cheap art".
Shortly before his death, Fabro was invited to take part in
the Louvre's "Contrepoint" series, which pits contemporary
sculpture against the museum's classical collection. Given
the scale of the commission's intended site - the sepulchral
Cour Marly - the artist submitted a plan for a suitably
monumental work. This was turned down on the grounds of
cost. Stung, Fabro made the smaller piece which was
installed in the Louvre in April. Made of pink and white
marble, this sits, significantly, on the floor. It is called
Cul de Ciel, or "Sky's Arse".
Luciano Fabro, artist: born Turin 20 November 1936; married
(one daughter); died Milan 22 June 2007.
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