«Everyone can criticize, rape, demystify and propose reforms, but he must remain in the system, he is not allowed to be free. Once created an object, it accompanies you. The system orders so. The expectation cannot be frustrated, acquired a part, the human being, until death, must continue acting. Every gesture must be absolutely consistent with his past attitude and must anticipate the future. Leaving the system means revolution. So the artist, a new jester, satisfies refined consumption, produces objects for cultured palates.»

This is the beginning of Arte Povera: Appunti per una guerriglia. It is dated 23 November 1967 and Germano Celant wrote it. In a few sentences he sculpted the status quo of the artistic panorama of those years in a perfectly turned marble form. But at the same time the following words draw its rethinking, the structure for a new shape to be forged, which was only possible thanks to the “exit from the system” that was annihilating the artistic research. The artistic research was asleep by the propulsive energy that the new economic model capitalist was drawing, the pop paradigm was difficult to overcome by plausible alternatives. Art Povera was officially born. However, it is Celant himself who specifies at the end of what in all respects can be considered a manifesto, that the announced guerrilla was already underway, numerous artists who were starting to take part in different places in Italy by implementing a decisive change of course (“This text is already incomplete in its making. We are in fact already guerrilla”). So not an invention but an entropic sensitivity towards a saturated climate that proposed as a contrast to the production of “objects for cultured palates” the discovery of “a poor art, committed to the contingency, with the event, with the ahistorical, in the present […] with the anthropological conception, with the “real” man». No longer a man-market identification but a man-nature identification, as Celant himself had described the new trend, an “attitude”.

Germano Celant dies on April 29, 2020 due to complications caused by Covid-19. Instead of the ‘who was him’ priority that the commemorative article usually places in these cases, there is the instantaneous need to reread his lucid texts to take the place of the chronological memory. We all know who Germano Celant was: the father of Art Povera but also an art historian, especially a critic and curator. Since 1967 Celant had carried out the fulminating intellectual inventiveness typical of the critic together with the enlightened clairvoyance of the curator, as more easily happened in the past when the two activities could not be mutually exclusive, and as rarely happens today. The historical artistic identity-inheritance that inevitably characterized him, did not prevent him from maintaining the liveliness of a timeless character in the most contemporary of times.

It was the feeling that was perceived, for example, by visiting his penultimate exhibition at the Prada Foundation in the Venetian headquarters of Palazzo Ca ‘Corner della Regina, Jannis Kounellis, or the largest retrospective dedicated to the artist after his death in 2017. Crossing the magnificent exhibition halls one came across fragments of some of the most significant pieces on Kounellis’ work and on some images of the original installations, shown on metal plates positioned in the intrados of each entrance or slightly hidden, one had the feeling of being silently accompanied in the space, occasionally delicately interrupted by a tap on the shoulder, that of a reverent guide, almost respectful of the silent, divine power emanated by the imposing works of Kounellis.

The distinctive feature of Celant was still today to be a personality halfway between the historical symbol and the innovator of the present, probably the only one to still represent this attitude in the glorious generation of the so-called militant critics of the seventies and eighties. It was no coincidence that his curatorial activity had remained the active one of those years. We only mention his role as senior curator at the Guggenheim in New York (from 1989 to 2008), director of the 47th Venice Biennale (1997), artistic and scientific superintendent of the Prada Foundation, curator of the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation in Venice. In 2016 he had been project director of The Floating Piers, the work by Christo and Jeanne-Claude at Lake Iseo in Italy among the most popular events in recent years. All institutional but pragmatic positions, which have given rise to exciting artistic fruition, with the irreplaceable quality that only Celant put in place.

If we think today of that needy rethinking of the role of the critic, some words of Celant cannot fail to come to mind. Once again of fulminating topicality (in Arte Povera + Azioni Povere, catalog of the exhibition at the Ancient Arsenals of Amalfi, 1968, Rumma ed., Salerno 1969, p.53):

«In Amalfi I realized that you cannot explain, speculate, organize, give titles, condition, invite, organize, promote unsolicited meetings, structure a community, seek dialogue.
The work of a critic, when it is established as autonomous, spontaneous and individual, becomes violent, dictatorial, alive but mortifying, at the same time, the freedom of others.
It is useless to argue with people with different sensibilities»

They may sound like cynical words, but it must be admitted, actual. The rereading of Celant’s texts now brings us back to a reconsideration of the professions of art, now more than ever. In the horizons of practice where it moves, it must maintain a visible aura of the events of our present. Let’s introduce also a limitation of the artistic episodes (may the moment of a natural selection have arrived?) but that these may be of impact, of action, to “think and fix, perceive and present, feel and exhaust the sensation in a image, in an action, in an object, art and life, a proceeding on parallel tracks that aspires to its point indefinitely ». (Ibid, p. 9)

Video selection:

Germano Celant and Michelangelo Pistole discuss ‘Ileana Sonnabend and Arte Povera’

24.09.2015 | Anselm Kiefer e Germano Celant | Hangar Bicocca