In March
1978, at Galleria Persano in Turin, Pistoletto opened an exhibition
preceded by the placement of a mirror on the altar of the church of
San Sicario, a mountain village where the artist periodically resided.
Through his works, his actions and his discussions with the public
during the opening, Pistoletto announced and presented two basic directions—Division
and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art Takes On Religion—in
which he would develop his work. The first arose from the artist’s
realization that a mirror can reflect anything except itself. By dividing
the mirror in two and gradually shifting the two sides at an angle,
along the axis of their division, however, the mirrors could be made
to multiply. This phenomenon formed the basis of a new series of works
drawing attention to the principle of division as a universal element
of organic development and, on the social plane, of sharing as a logic
alternative to accumulation and exclusion.
Art Takes On Religion situates art in relation to spirituality and
constitutes a first attribution of centrality to art, which Pistoletto
will later develop as Project Art and Cittadellarte.
“I cut the mirror together with its frame,
so that the two halves of the frame, sticking to the two mirrors,
testified to their original oneness. A series of works and operations
on the divided mirror followed in different places and environments,
from Corpus Christi in the United States, to Aalborg in Denmark.
At the same time, my cooperative work, begun in 1967 with the poster
for my studio opening, continued. Thus, the theoretical and factual
side of my work proceeded along parallel lines. The mirror stood
for the theoretical side, cooperation stood for the factual one.
My individuality, compared to the singularity of the mirror, was
divided and multiplied when I created with someone else, just as
the mirror is divided and multiplied…
At San Sicario … I placed a mirror, where usually there was
a painting, in a baroque frame on the altar of the church. Thus,
just as in the early sixties I replaced canvas with mirrors on the
walls of houses, art galleries, and museums, here, I replaced the
canvas on the altar with a mirror…. At the beginning of our
century, the avant-garde made art again autonomous. Art ceased to
be a symbol of religious and political power, but it is still far
from the people, because its autonomy regards only its aesthetic
side. Now art must find autonomy for its factual side as well….
‘Art takes on religion’ means that art actively takes
possession of those structures, such as religion, which rule thought;
not with a view to replacing them itself, but in order to substitute
them with a different interpretative system, a system intended to
enhance people’s capacity to exert the functions of their
own thought” (Michelangelo Pistoletto, Divisione e moltiplicazione
dello specchio – L’arte assume la religione, Galleria
Persano, Turin 1978).
In 1978 Pistoletto began a year-long residency at
DAAD (the German academic exchange service) in Berlin. During this
time the Nationalgalerie showed a group of his mirror paintings
interspersed with works from the museum’s permanent collection.
Thirteen of his other works were scattered in thirteen public places
around the city. At Schweinebraden Gallery, in East Berlin, Pistoletto
showed up at the opening of his exhibition An Island in Time dressed
as a seventeenth-century gentleman. Here he also exhibited the design
of a bridge, which became the logo of Creative Collaboration, carried
out by Pistoletto in the United States the following year.
|
