During
the two-year period 1979-1980 Pistoletto presented a series of one-person
shows, installations and actions in museums, galleries and public
places in different cities across the United States. In Atlanta he
set about a city-wide creative collaboration. To achieve this, he
turned for help to three artists with whom he had worked previously:
theater director and actor Lionello Gennero, a former member of The
Zoo; jazz musician Enrico Rava; and American composer Morton Feldmann,
with whom he had staged the theater piece Neither, based
on a text written expressly by Samuel Beckett, in June 1977 at the
Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. Together with these three artists
and with the assistance of Maria Pioppi, Pistoletto organized and
took part in a dense program of collaborations with local visual artists,
music and theater groups, involving a large number of people of diverse
ages and social backgrounds.
Creative Collaboration continued during that same year in
various cities: in the USA in Athens (GA), New York and Los Angeles;
and in Italy in Bologna and above all Corniglia, where in August,
together with Laura Culver and David Head (two artists who participated
in the Atlanta Creative Collaboration), Enrico Rava, his
daughters Cristina, Armona and Pietra, and Maria Pioppi, Pistoletto
coodinated and took part in a series of theater pieces in the village
streets, among them Opera Ah and Sung Sheep, in
which a large part of the populace took part. |
