Essay Excerpt: Arte Povera. Notes on a guerrilla war November–December by Germano Celant, 1967

The shift that has to be brought about is thus the return to limited and ancillary projects where the human being is the fulcrum and the fire of research, in replacement of the medium and the instrument. The man is the message, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan. Freedom, in the visual arts, is an all-contaminating germ. The artist refuses all labels and finds identification only with himself.

Ever since 1964, Michelangelo Pistoletto (like Andy Warhol, Enzo Mari, and Jerzy Grotowski) has thus given himself over to the problem of a freedom of language no longer connected to the system or to any kind of visual consistency; he’s concerned, instead, with ‘interior’ consistency, and in 1966 he produced a series of extremely ‘poor’ works: a Christmas manger, a cardboard well with torn canvas at its center, a showcase for clothing, a structure for conversing standing up and a structure for conversing sitting down, a table made of picture frames and paintings, a giant-sized photograph of Jasper Johns, and a mercury light. This work is committed to the registration of “the irrepeatability of every instant” (Pistoletto), and it presupposes the rejection of any and all systems and of all codified expectations. A free mode of action, unforeseeable and without restraints (in 1967, a sarcophagus, a house painted with great chromatic freedom, a sphere of compressed newspaper, a body covered with mica) and franchised to frustrate expectations, which allows Pistoletto always to straddle the borderline between art and life.

This revolutionary way of existence turns into the Reign of Terror with Boetti, Zorio, Anselmo, Piacentino, Gilardi, Prini, Merz, Kounellis, Paolini and Pascali, all of whom are artists whose modes of action pose the problem of this recovery of free self-determination.

Douglas Crimp essay excerpt: Pictures, 1979.

At the beginning of this essay, I said that it was due precisely to this kind of abandonment of the artistic medium as such that we had witnessed a break with modernism, or more precisely with what was espoused as modernism by Michael Fried. Fried's is, however, a very particular and partisan conception of modernism, one that does not, for example, allow for the inclusion of cinema ("cinema, even at its most experimental, is not a modernist art") or for the preeminently theatrical painting of surrealism. The work I have attempted to introduce here is related to a modernism conceived differently, whose roots are in the symbolist aesthetic announced by Mallarme,'4 which includes works whose dimension is literally or metaphorically temporal, and which does not seek the transcendence of the material condition of the signs through which meaning is generated. Nevertheless, it remains useful to consider recent work as having effected a break with modernism and therefore as postmodernist. But if postmodernism is to have theoretical value, it cannot be used merely as another chronological term; rather it must disclose the particular nature of a breach with modernism.15 It is in this sense that the radically new approach to mediums is important. If it had been characteristic of the formal descriptions of modernist art that they were topographical, that they mapped the surfaces of artworks in order to determine their structures, then it has now become necessary to think of description as a stratigraphic activity. Those processes of quotation, excerptation, framing, and staging that constitute the strategies of the work I have been discussing necessitate uncovering strata of representation. Needless to say, we are not in search of sources or origins, but of structures of signification: underneath each picture there is always another picture.