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13/1/2009

Two Exhibitions

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, London

One hundred years on from the publication of F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, Luca Buvoli’s multi-media work explores the themes at the very heart of Futurism – dynamism, conflict and the changing society – as well as engaging directly with the contradictions of the movement itself. Velocity Zero is a unique installation comprising film and animation, works on paper, mural painting and sculpture, which will be exhibited at the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, from 14 January to 19 April 2009. The artist will present a talk at 3pm on Saturday 21 March 2009 about his work and his experience of Futurism.

Luca Buvoli (b. 1963) is an Italian-born contemporary artist who now lives in New York City. In recent years, he has explored the tenets of Futurism, the bombastic Italian movement that began with the publication of Marinetti’s Manifesto in the popular Parisian newspaper Le Figaro on 20 February 1909, in the light of subsequent historical events.

The relationship of Futurism with Italian Fascism, and the clash of its celebration of war with the horrors of the First World War, are of particular interest to Buvoli, who sees in them a relevance to today’s society – a gulf between theoretical ideal and reality that is still pervasive. “I am revisiting Italian Futurism and its cooption by Fascism not out of historical interest, but because of the parallels with demagogic strategies used today by mediative societies… In my work I deal with philosophical, psychological and sociological issues, and try to propose, within a discrete and creative vision, an alternative to our society’s celebration of violence.”

Buvoli has created a new installation for the Estorick Collection. The centrepiece is the video animation Excerpts from: Velocity Zero, in which sections of the Futurist manifesto are read out loud by people with speech difficulties. The halting, difficult speech of the readers is contrasted with the values of speed and efficiency espoused by the Futurists. As the artist explains, “Marinetti’s original celebration of velocity and aggression from his Futurist text is neutralised by its readers’ speech disorders and my subsequent hand-drawn animation of the footage, which at times delays and overlaps images in mimicry of the Futurists’ representation of motion. The result is a sense of fragmentation and incompletion that parallels the struggle of the readers to capture the original text. The purpose of having the manifesto read by people with speech disorders was to utilise the difficulty of communication and the slowing of language in order to symbolically critique the rhetoric of velocity, aggression and violence in our society.” Excerpts from an Italian-language version of the film were used by the Associazioni Italiani Afasici (Italian Aphasia Associations) as part of their campaign to highlight the condition.

The film will be shown in the setting of a gallery decorated with mural paintings designed specifically for the site. This will be complemented by works of sculpture and ‘propaganda posters’ which Buvoli often includes in his installations and which form, according to art critic and writer Jeffrey Kastner, “yet another element that draws out, with the artist’s characteristic subtlety, the socio-political malleability of language and image, and dramatises the chasm that too often divides theory and practice”.

Completing the installation will be a second animated film, A Very Beautiful Day After Tomorrow. The title takes its inspiration from words spoken by F.T. Marinetti to his daughter towards the end of the Second World War, when he was seriously ill and the regime that he had supported was collapsing. He encouraged her not to dwell on current difficulties, but to remember that “There will be a very beautiful day after tomorrow”. The film is described by Christine Poggi, associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania: “As in Sergei Eisenstein’s montage theory, Buvoli employs the collision of juxtaposed shots to spark critical thought about the relation of past and present fantasies of velocity, flight, power and violence. As the video nears its conclusion, it seems to encounter resistance: the soundtrack slows so that the refrain of the patriotic song (‘the motor rumbles’) becomes garbled, while the whirling propellers wind down. The final echoes of the song convey a sense of spatial and temporal distance; it is as if we are present at the far reaches of a stadium, and can hear the booming sounds of the loudspeaker only in blurred and distorted traces.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated publication with an essay by curator Francesca Pietropaolo, who has worked at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the 52nd International Venice Biennale.

Luca Buvoli has achieved considerable acclaim both in Italy and America. Venues hosting his solo shows include the ICA in Philadelphia (2007), the M.I.T. List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2000), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2001), the Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art (part of Mythopoeia: projects by Matthew Barney, Luca Buvoli, and Matthew Ritchie) (1999), the Santa Monica Museum of Art, CA (1996), the Queens Museum of Art, NY (2001), the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC (2003), the Glassell School of Art of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2003), and the John Weber Gallery, New York (1995, ’97, ‘99). Group shows include the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale, South Africa (1997), and Greater New York at PS1, New York (2000). Several recent works, part of a large multi-media installation, have recently been shown at the 52nd Venice Biennale, at the entrance of the Arsenale. His animated works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2004), the Lincoln Center (1998), the ICA in Boston (1997), the ICA in London (1998) and the British Library (2008), among other places. Articles on his works have appeared in numerous newspapers and journals including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Flash Art, Frieze, Art on Paper, Art in America and ArtNews.

Opening Times: Wednesday to Saturday 11.00 to 18.00 hours.
Sunday 12.00 to 17.00 hours
Late night opening on Thursdays until 20.00 hours
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
Shop: open gallery hours.
Admission Prices: £5.00, concessions £3.50. Free to under-16s and students on production of a valid NUS card. Library, by appointment only, £2.50 per visit.

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Unique Forms: The Drawing and Sculpture of Umberto Boccioni

As part of its celebrations to mark the centenary of the Futurist movement, founded by F. T. Marinetti in 1909, the Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art is proud to be hosting the first exhibition in Britain to focus solely on the work of Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916) for many years. Comprising some twenty dynamic works, Unique Forms: The Drawing and Sculpture of Umberto Boccioni on view at 39a Canonbury Square, London N1, from 14 January to 19 April 2009 incorporates work from the Estorick’s permanent collection as well as loans from museums in Italy, France and the United Kingdom. Running concurrently and complementing this exhibition will be a show focusing on the contemporary Italian artist Luca Buvoli, whose work directly engages with Futurist ideas and themes.

A signatory of the 1910 ‘Manifesto of the Futurist Painters’, Boccioni was perhaps the most significant of the five artists associated with the first wave of Futurist art. Born in the south of Italy, Boccioni later settled in Rome where he experimented with the languages of Divisionism, Symbolism and Expressionism prior to his move to Milan and association with Marinetti’s movement. Equally articulate with verbal and visual imagery, Boccioni went on to become the foremost theorist of Futurist aesthetics, which he expounded with tremendous energy and rigour in his tract Futurist Painting and Sculpture published in 1914, two years prior to his untimely death during a military exercise. The power and energy of Boccioni’s thought and work remains exhilarating to this day, and familiarisation with his ideas and imagery makes it clear that the First World War deprived modernism of one of its most talented and promising artists.

Like all Futurists, Boccioni was fascinated with speed and movement, although he eschewed the influence of experimental photographers such as Etienne-Jules Marey which led other members of the movement to create their famous images of objects repeated in such a way as to suggest their passage through different points in time and space. Inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, who maintained that movement may be analysed but never experienced in this fragmentary manner, Boccioni’s goal was to capture the indivisible flux of life, an ambition that led to the creation of arguably his greatest masterpiece, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, which is being loaned to the exhibition by Tate (fig. 8).

Futurism remains perhaps most closely associated in the public imagination with its emphasis on the beauty and power of machinery, and its fascination with the dynamism of the urban environment. However, it was in his Divisionist works that Boccioni chronicled the bustling, expanding urban sprawl of the Milanese suburbs where he lived, while his mature Futurist explorations of dynamism centred around more traditional iconography – such as the human body, galloping horses and the seemingly paradoxical genre of the still life.

A number of the works in the exhibition reflect these themes. Drawn from the Civiche Raccolte d’Arte Moderna in Milan, a series of works on paper capture the explosive dynamism of muscular energy in densely worked pieces whose sombre tones and volumetric character recall the vocabulary of Cubism, although here used to achieve quite different ends (figs. 1-4).

In fact, the subject most favoured by the Cubists was to be the unlikely vehicle for some of Boccioni’s most intriguing explorations of dynamism. Inspired partly perhaps by Marinetti’s exhortation for Futurists to explore the dynamic properties of matter (“its crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons”), and partly by the more poetic belief that “every object reveals by its lines how it would resolve itself were it to follow the tendencies of its forces”, Boccioni revealed a world in perpetual motion, most famously in his images of bottles that spiral and thrust outward and upward into space, such as Development of a Bottle in Space (fig. 5).

It is an unfortunate fact that very few of Boccioni’s sculptures have survived, having been destroyed after the death of the artist. One of the earliest of these, Empty and Full Abstracts of a Head, a portrait of the artist’s mother in which Boccioni undertook an exploration of positive and negative space, was also the subject of several preparatory studies, two of which will be included in the exhibition (fig. 7). Displayed alongside the version belonging to the Estorick will be another from the The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, which once belonged to Eric Estorick. Reuniting these two works will provide an insight into the radical evolution and reworking of this iconic image.

Unique Forms: The Drawing and Sculpture of Umberto Boccioni represents a long-overdue consideration of the work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, of whom the painter and sculptor Lucio Fontana once said: “I am every day more convinced of Boccioni’s genius. He is the great initiator of modern art.”

Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art
39a Canonbury Square, London
Wednesday to Saturday 11.00 to 18.00 hours.
Sunday 12.00 to 17.00 hours
Late night opening on Thursdays until 20.00 hours
Closed Mondays and Tuesdays.
Admission Prices: £5.00, concessions £3.50.
Free to under-16s and students on production of a valid NUS card.

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