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Tutttovero

In Turin, Francesco Bonami has developed an extensively scattered exhibition that, we are told, “pursues the inner significance of speaking about the truth in art, at a time when augmented reality and the faster communication of facts raise doubts on the credibility of any news.”

“The Truth? An adolescent fad or a symptom of senility.” (Emil Cioran). “…the service of truth is the hardest service.” (Friedrich Nietzsche). “It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody’s beard.” (Georg Lichtenberg). “The truth is the bread and butter of robust intellects.” (Arturo Graf). “There is nothing as boring as the truth.” (Charles Bukowski).

For centuries, people have passionately pontificated on the call for truth, at least since Parmenides and drawing in epistemologists, gnoseologists, philosophers of science and language, poets and men of letters. All this has magnified its purchase inordinately, as too its fundamental oiliness.

If, as they say, the path of the truth is the narrowest this would explain why the curator Francesco Bonami has developed an extensively scattered exhibition (Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, GAM Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea and Fondazione Merz) that, we are told, “pursues the inner significance of speaking about the truth in art, at a time when augmented reality and the faster communication of facts raise doubts on the credibility of any news.” Alternatively, the truth is so superficially referenced that its shadow appears around every corner: “Medjugorje: it’ all true!” (www.amazon.it); “Stop dreaming, it is all true!” (www.tripadvisor.it).

“Tutttovero” (with three t’s) is the title chosen by Bonami to lend substance to an idea that brings together the highly diverse works progressively accumulated by Turin’s art collections over the last 200 years (we can even fix a start date: Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815). The accentuated meaning added by the stuttering consonant emphasises the distinguishing trait of an exhibition that does, indeed, define the concept of truth while, at the same time, evoking the contrary (It’s All True was, after all, the tongue-in-cheek title of a film by that master of forgery Orson Welles). All is true, nothing is true! as they used to say and this seeming contradiction, the terms of which date presumably from way back, is precisely what informs every inch of the exhibition route.

The exhibition laid out in the Manica Lunga of the Castello di Rivoli (no works on the walls of what, in Napoleonic times, was the picture gallery of House of Savoy) is certainly the most energetic, featuring athleticism and machismo from top to bottom: from the firing range revisited by László Moholy-Nagy (The Shooting Gallery, 1927) to Francesco Messina and Marino Marini’s two fine-looking boxers (two bronzes dated 1929 and 1934), it is all very “muscle flexing”. Luciano Fabro’s iron Croce (1965-86) splits the exhibition promenade in half. On both sides of it hang Pier Paolo Calzolari’s chattering light bulbs (mortificatio, imperfectio, putrefatio ecc., 1970-71), Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s polyurethane Architectural Fragments (1985), Maurizio Cattelan’s dead horse (Novecento, 1997), the high-sounding Barca nuragica (2000) by Gilberto Zorio, Fausto Melotti’s enchanting Altalena di violette (1963), and Mario Airò’s two rose petals in love in Parlez moi d’amour… (2002).

Towering over the whole is the Albero di 11 metri (1969-89) by Giuseppe Penone (Arte Povera was always going to speak the loudest in Rivoli, with Mario and Marisa Merz, Boetti, Anselmo and Pistoletto all in attendance) and, flat on the floor, are the spartan beds by Monica Bonvicini, Massimo Bartolini and Jannis Kounellis, as too Leoncillo Leonardi’s dishevelled Donna al sole (1954). Every work tends fatally to hang in a precarious balance and Charles Ray’s Viral Research (1986) more so than others. Perhaps the most upsetting in this section, it illustrates the drama of HIV contagion using a vascular system of eight glass vessels containing black ink.

Leaning clearly towards pretence, the exhibition at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo is based exclusively on doubt. A class of young school children peered up at the colourful constructions in Landscape with Houses (2009) by James Casebere, a seemingly classical snapshot of a quiet residential area in Dutchess County, New York. “There aren’t any doors!” cried one little boy, pointing at it. “Or dogs! Or people!”, echoed the others. “Art is the world of the imagination”, was the prompt reply from their frank teacher, “a sweet mix of truth and invention.” Everything around them proves her right: hyperbolic drops of alabaster water by Hermann Pitz (Des gouttes d’eau, 1989), the artificial archaeological exhibits by Liz Glynn (Hellenistic Silver Collection, 2011), Sherrie Levine’s appropriations, Robert Kusmirowski’s unusable recording studio (UHER.C, 2008), Pierre Huyghe’s imaginary journey to the outer edges of the earth (A Journey that Wasn’t, 2005) and Piotr Uklański’s one in the old West (Summer Love, 2000). With no pretension, the truth is nonchalantly accompanied by the fanciful, deceiving, illusory, virtual, symbolic and synthetic.

The exhibition in the GAM basement (the descent conveying its focus) corresponds to the whole myth of memento mori, reflecting an intention to explore the issue of death as well as that “twisting” space (Torsione by Anselmo is on display) that exists between an idea and its implementation (“I am making art, I’m making art” repeats John Baldessari obsessively in an eponymous video dated 1974). Here, it is the transition that is clarified. “Ero di nuovo vivo, vivo!” (I was alive again, alive!) reads one of the 99 parchment plates in the MDLXIV series (1976) by Luigi Mainolfi, rendering painstaking testimony to the sculptural process via the creation of a cast of the artist’s body.

The sense of reclusion caressed by Mainolfi is echoed and amplified opposite in Thomas Demand’s real, fake and finished crypt packed with paper stalactites and stalagmites entitled Grotto (2006). The same obscurity houses I funerali di Tiziano (1855) by Enrico Gamba, Ostaggi and Dioscuri (1956 and 1964) by Ettore Colla, Autoritratto in forma di gufo (1936) by Alberto Savinio and a post-mortem portrait of Giuseppe Antonio Petrolini, commissioned by his wife to Giuseppe Mazzola (1802), black bronzes of dogs, bulls, goats, greyhounds and wild boar by Pierre Jules Mène and burnt heads by Medardo Rosso and Umberto Mastroianni. The Mole Antonelliana is also present, demystified in the late-19th century perspectives of Studio Antonelli – the one with its pentagram having for years represented the symbol of the city, consumed in its image and in its mysterious aura.

Another figure of the lower world, the crocodile, enters the Fondazione Merz exhibition without the need to present any credentials as it is at home here. Stripped of flesh and nailed high up on the wall, at the head of a fertile row of recursive numbers from 1 to 55, Coccodrillo Fibonacci (Mario Merz, 1989) is not one of those who cry (it is stuffed) but, should it shed a tear, it will fall down below into one of the 120 protean Coca Cola bottles in hand-blown glass by Damian Ortega (120 giornate, 2002) or moisten the sighing sea sponge driven into Giovanni Anselmo’s iron Respiro (1969). Echoing in the air is the rolling lament of Names in the Doldrums (2014) by Anri Sala in which an animated drum commemorates all the young Palestinians who died that year in the Gaza Strip with just a beat of its drumsticks.

Here is the white and silent Complex Form #52 (1990) polyhedron by Sol LeWitt; and, there, the black arrangement of shabby leaden coats and mismatched old men’s shoes laid out by Jannis Kounellis in memory of the Holocaust. The all-pervasive centre of gravity of this exhibition, embracing and enveloping everything, is certainly a huge table with stones, fruit and vegetables by Mario Merz (Pietra serena sedimentata depositata e schiacciata dal proprio peso ecc., 2003). “The size of the whole work”, the young room attendant assured me with unwavering certainty, “exactly reproduces the volumes of Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence.” “Really?” I asked. “Of course!” she hastened to reply. Then she leant her head to one side as if to mull it over. “Well, to tell the truth…”, she added a few moments later, “no one has ever bothered to measure it…”

Tutttovero

Details

  • Metropolitan City of Turin, Italy
  • Francesco Bonami