Invited
to the 1992 Documenta in Kassel, during a site inspection in July
1991 Pistoletto chose to show in a disused shop opposite the entrance
to the Museum Fridericianum, the exhibition’s main venue. He
then decided to call his artistic activity for the following year
Happy Turtle, molding his work into a “time continent”
of thirty places in which he would metaphorically transfer his house
like a turtle. The Kassel show constituted the point of arrival, with
an installation that underscored the interlacing of the public and
private dimensions in his work. Within his exhibition space and clearly
visible from outside through two shop windows, he arranged, on one
side of the room, Self-Portrait Through My Father (1933-1973)
and a sofa; on the other his daughter Cristina, seated at a table,
executed a performance of her own, Mouthpiece, during which
she sang newspaper excerpts while eating a dish of rice. The room
was cut in two by a stone construction similar to an antique Roman
road, which from the open front door went all the way to the back
of the shop where stood The Etruscan (1976), a copy of the
bronze statue known as L’arringatore (Speaker)
with its arm reaching forward to touch a mirror that reflected the
statue’s own image and, in this case, the Fridericianum. For
a description of the entire Happy Turtle project, see the
volume edited by Cecilia Casorati and published by Carte d’Arte
(Messina, 1992).
“After the opening of the reflecting threshold
that offers an alterative to time-honored perspective, art must
raise an arm and hold out its index finger to point, in the mirror,
to the road that leads beyond the wall on which human individuality
is shattering: an extremely high wall where the progressive quality
of modern media mixes with old beliefs, antiquated and abhorrent
associative methods, devastating rules. An arm’s length is
the first distance that one can take from the tragic point of final
impact. This is in the work that I presented, at the end and beginning
of a road, at Documenta IX in Kassel” (Michelangelo Pistoletto,
La distanza senza ritardo, in Fama & Fortune Bullettin,
P&S, Vienna 1993).
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