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拍品专文
‘These images have reminded some of the cinema of Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, and the phenomenology of the école du regard. Of course there is a kind of iconography of contemporary life, one can find it anywhere, it is enough to look at oneself in the mirror. And this is what happened with Pistoletto’s work. But in fact, it is cinematic technique that is implicit in his work. Pistoletto likes going to the movies: “the story interests me, of course,” [he has said], “but what really fascinates me is the mechanism of the images.”’ – T. Trini
‘In my mirror-paintings the dynamic reflection does not create a place, because it only reflects a place which already exists... I can create a place by bringing about a passage between the photograph and the mirror: this place is whole time...there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror’ – M. Pistoletto
‘We have the ephemerality of the moment, which is, however, detained in the duration of time. The figure that I fix endures in the present: in this case it is the ephemeral that makes the static, the past endure’ – M. Pistoletto
Formerly in the collection of famous photographer, film-maker, industrialist and international playboy Gunter Sachs, L’Ecolier is a fascinating early Mirror-Painting made by Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1967. Depicting the apparently banal, everyday image of an adolescent schoolboy carrying his books along a suburban street, the ‘painting’ is a work that marks an intriguing coming-together of Neo-Realist film-making, arte povera and American Pop. These tendencies were, of course, all leading aspects of the European cultural scene in the late 1960s of which Gunter Sachs was himself very much a part.
1967 was famously the year in which the Italian critic Germano Celant defined ‘arte povera’ as the emergence in Italy of a ‘movement’ whose ‘poverty’ of materials represented a ‘guerilla strike against the world of conspicuous consumption’ (G. Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War’, Flash Art, 5, November, 1967, p. 3). It was also the year in which Pistoletto parted from Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend because of the American and Paris-based dealers’ refusal to countenance the new direction his art had taken in the creation of his ‘Minus Objects’. Castelli and Sonnabend wanted Pistoletto to pursue what they saw as the ‘Pop’ direction of the Mirror Paintings which had garnered him popularity and success in America. In truth, of course, there was very little ‘Pop’ (in the more sanitised American understanding of the word) about the alienating ‘realism’ of Pistoletto’s Mirror-Paintings. As many European critics had observed, the figures and objects of Pistoletto’s Mirror-Paintings exude a pervasive sense of alienation and of banality that echoed strongly the aesthetics of Italian Neo-Realist film-making, particularly the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. As Ettore Sottsass Jr. wrote in a revealing article about Pistoletto on this subject, the figures in his Mirror-Paintings are ‘characters’ who seem ‘as if they were waiting along with us for a happy train that in truth will never come, waiting for something, burdened by the melancholy fates ... resonant of old tramways on those Sunday afternoons ... This youngster named Michelangelo Pistoletto, one cannot say that he is a Pop painter ... this guy has nothing to do with Pop because in Turin, as probably in all of Italy, the premises for Pop painting do not exist, there is only this oppressive and invincible weight, no American Coke, no Vermouth Perlino, no vamps, not much use of deodorant, people still sleep in their pyjamas, people still cook pasta, squeeze the tomatoes, people still do all those things’ (E. Sottsass Jr., ‘Pop e non pop: A proposito di Michelangelo Pistoletto,’ Domus 414, May 1964, pp. 32–35).
As the lone figure of a passing schoolboy set in an empty and open space in L’Ecolier reveals, Pistoletto was fascinated with a sense of the mundane estrangement of so much contemporary life in a way that reflected both the style and concerns of much contemporary European film-making of the period. The deliberate ordinariness of Pistoletto’s images of figures on the street, household furnishings and fittings was in this respect more in accordance with the Capitalist Realist-Pop approach of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke than with the pre-packaged imagery of advertising, cartoons or celebrity practiced by American Pop painters. As in so many of Pistoletto’s mirror paintings there is a deeply existential sense of isolation conveyed by the large empty space of L’Ecolier between the schoolboy and the leafless tree he has seemingly just passed. This space is, of course, also the reflective space that is occupied by the viewer’s reflection when they encounter the work. Its illustrative emptiness becomes filled with their contrastingly active and animated reflection as well as that of whatever room the picture is hung in.
‘In the Mirror Paintings,’ Pistoletto told Celant in 1988, ‘we have the ephemerality of the moment, which is, however, detained in the duration of time. The figure that I fix endures in the present: in this case it is the ephemeral that makes the static, the past endure’ (M. Pistoletto quoted in G. Celant, ed., Pistoletto: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, exh. cat. Institute of Contemporary Art, New York, 1988, pp. 45-6). In Mirror-Paintings of the late 1960s such as L’Ecolier, Pistoletto was particularly interested in the drama of this contrast between the frozen dynamism of his static images – caught in motion by photography and yet also trapped in time – and the real dynamism of the viewer’s animated and reflective presence, moving and existing in the real space and time of the present. This contrast between the real and the fictive, between the static, representational, photographic or filmic image and the animate living presence of the viewer, lent his work and the space of the mirror a spatial and temporal paradox that he recognised, opening up his work to dramatic new possibilities.
As Pistoletto argued in 1966, ‘In my mirror-paintings the dynamic reflection does not create a place, because it only reflects a place which already exists - the static silhouette does no more than re-propose an already existing place. But I can create a place by bringing about a passage between the photograph and the mirror: this place is whole time. If the film frame could carry out another movement in addition to its interrupted gesture, there would be a new time between the two movements; but this does not come about, so the film frame represents a maximum of slowness. The reflection is simultaneous with the real image - there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror: if the reflection occurred an instant before or after the presence of the body, it would be possible to measure the velocity of the image in becoming a reflection, but this does not happen. In the case of a mirror the image is so fast as to be body and reflection simultaneously, thus representing a maximum of speed. In the distance-in-time between the film frame (minimum velocity) and the reflection (maximum velocity), all possible places and all possible times exist. But because the two extremes coincide in the picture, we perceive, simultaneously, the cancelling of all created places and times at the moment of their creation. Past and future simply do not come into this process. All that remains of my action in any given moment are the materials and the language ... Just as no space is occupied by the relationship between the silhouette and the mirror (although the entirety of existing time is suggested) so each new work comes about as though it were inside the space between the paper of the film frame and the mirror of the previous pictures. The artistic act must contain an individual dynamic system’ (M. Pistoletto, Minus Objects, exh cat. Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, 1966).
‘In my mirror-paintings the dynamic reflection does not create a place, because it only reflects a place which already exists... I can create a place by bringing about a passage between the photograph and the mirror: this place is whole time...there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror’ – M. Pistoletto
‘We have the ephemerality of the moment, which is, however, detained in the duration of time. The figure that I fix endures in the present: in this case it is the ephemeral that makes the static, the past endure’ – M. Pistoletto
Formerly in the collection of famous photographer, film-maker, industrialist and international playboy Gunter Sachs, L’Ecolier is a fascinating early Mirror-Painting made by Michelangelo Pistoletto in 1967. Depicting the apparently banal, everyday image of an adolescent schoolboy carrying his books along a suburban street, the ‘painting’ is a work that marks an intriguing coming-together of Neo-Realist film-making, arte povera and American Pop. These tendencies were, of course, all leading aspects of the European cultural scene in the late 1960s of which Gunter Sachs was himself very much a part.
1967 was famously the year in which the Italian critic Germano Celant defined ‘arte povera’ as the emergence in Italy of a ‘movement’ whose ‘poverty’ of materials represented a ‘guerilla strike against the world of conspicuous consumption’ (G. Celant, ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War’, Flash Art, 5, November, 1967, p. 3). It was also the year in which Pistoletto parted from Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend because of the American and Paris-based dealers’ refusal to countenance the new direction his art had taken in the creation of his ‘Minus Objects’. Castelli and Sonnabend wanted Pistoletto to pursue what they saw as the ‘Pop’ direction of the Mirror Paintings which had garnered him popularity and success in America. In truth, of course, there was very little ‘Pop’ (in the more sanitised American understanding of the word) about the alienating ‘realism’ of Pistoletto’s Mirror-Paintings. As many European critics had observed, the figures and objects of Pistoletto’s Mirror-Paintings exude a pervasive sense of alienation and of banality that echoed strongly the aesthetics of Italian Neo-Realist film-making, particularly the films of Michelangelo Antonioni. As Ettore Sottsass Jr. wrote in a revealing article about Pistoletto on this subject, the figures in his Mirror-Paintings are ‘characters’ who seem ‘as if they were waiting along with us for a happy train that in truth will never come, waiting for something, burdened by the melancholy fates ... resonant of old tramways on those Sunday afternoons ... This youngster named Michelangelo Pistoletto, one cannot say that he is a Pop painter ... this guy has nothing to do with Pop because in Turin, as probably in all of Italy, the premises for Pop painting do not exist, there is only this oppressive and invincible weight, no American Coke, no Vermouth Perlino, no vamps, not much use of deodorant, people still sleep in their pyjamas, people still cook pasta, squeeze the tomatoes, people still do all those things’ (E. Sottsass Jr., ‘Pop e non pop: A proposito di Michelangelo Pistoletto,’ Domus 414, May 1964, pp. 32–35).
As the lone figure of a passing schoolboy set in an empty and open space in L’Ecolier reveals, Pistoletto was fascinated with a sense of the mundane estrangement of so much contemporary life in a way that reflected both the style and concerns of much contemporary European film-making of the period. The deliberate ordinariness of Pistoletto’s images of figures on the street, household furnishings and fittings was in this respect more in accordance with the Capitalist Realist-Pop approach of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke than with the pre-packaged imagery of advertising, cartoons or celebrity practiced by American Pop painters. As in so many of Pistoletto’s mirror paintings there is a deeply existential sense of isolation conveyed by the large empty space of L’Ecolier between the schoolboy and the leafless tree he has seemingly just passed. This space is, of course, also the reflective space that is occupied by the viewer’s reflection when they encounter the work. Its illustrative emptiness becomes filled with their contrastingly active and animated reflection as well as that of whatever room the picture is hung in.
‘In the Mirror Paintings,’ Pistoletto told Celant in 1988, ‘we have the ephemerality of the moment, which is, however, detained in the duration of time. The figure that I fix endures in the present: in this case it is the ephemeral that makes the static, the past endure’ (M. Pistoletto quoted in G. Celant, ed., Pistoletto: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror, exh. cat. Institute of Contemporary Art, New York, 1988, pp. 45-6). In Mirror-Paintings of the late 1960s such as L’Ecolier, Pistoletto was particularly interested in the drama of this contrast between the frozen dynamism of his static images – caught in motion by photography and yet also trapped in time – and the real dynamism of the viewer’s animated and reflective presence, moving and existing in the real space and time of the present. This contrast between the real and the fictive, between the static, representational, photographic or filmic image and the animate living presence of the viewer, lent his work and the space of the mirror a spatial and temporal paradox that he recognised, opening up his work to dramatic new possibilities.
As Pistoletto argued in 1966, ‘In my mirror-paintings the dynamic reflection does not create a place, because it only reflects a place which already exists - the static silhouette does no more than re-propose an already existing place. But I can create a place by bringing about a passage between the photograph and the mirror: this place is whole time. If the film frame could carry out another movement in addition to its interrupted gesture, there would be a new time between the two movements; but this does not come about, so the film frame represents a maximum of slowness. The reflection is simultaneous with the real image - there is no time between a body and its reflection in a mirror: if the reflection occurred an instant before or after the presence of the body, it would be possible to measure the velocity of the image in becoming a reflection, but this does not happen. In the case of a mirror the image is so fast as to be body and reflection simultaneously, thus representing a maximum of speed. In the distance-in-time between the film frame (minimum velocity) and the reflection (maximum velocity), all possible places and all possible times exist. But because the two extremes coincide in the picture, we perceive, simultaneously, the cancelling of all created places and times at the moment of their creation. Past and future simply do not come into this process. All that remains of my action in any given moment are the materials and the language ... Just as no space is occupied by the relationship between the silhouette and the mirror (although the entirety of existing time is suggested) so each new work comes about as though it were inside the space between the paper of the film frame and the mirror of the previous pictures. The artistic act must contain an individual dynamic system’ (M. Pistoletto, Minus Objects, exh cat. Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, 1966).