printing - homepage_ michelangelo and ugo eye to eye - art in america

7/27/2019 Printing - Homepage_ Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eye - Art in America

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/printing-homepage-michelangelo-and-ugo-eye-to-eye-art-in-america 1/3

13/06/13 Printing - Homepage: Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eye - Art in America

www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/editors-homepage/2010-11-11/homepage-michelangelo-and-ugo-eye-to-eye/print/ 1/3

Close Window

Homepage: Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eyemarcia e. vetrocq 11/11/10

"MICHELANGELO EYE TO EYE" is the English title given to the f inal work of Michelangelo Antonioni, a brief documentary of 2004 in w hich the f rail,

92-year-old director communes w ith his namesake's great carved figure of Moses. This month brings a more mediated but nonetheless

suggestive encounter betw een tw o Michelangelos: the publication by Steidl of Antonioni's Blow-Up, a monograph on the landmark film w ith trim,

penetrating essays by Philippe Garner and David Alan Mellor, and the opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of the deeply researched

retrospective "Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974," curated by Carlos Basualdo. Beyond the calendar coincidence, the

connection grow s personal. For me, like many others of my generation, Blow-Up triggered a lifelong fascination with the processes, seductions

and puzzles of photography. I've long kept my art historian's eye on the complex role played by photography in Pistoletto's w ork as w ell as on thephotographs taken of his art by Ugo Mulas. Indeed, seeing Mulas's photographs in the late 1970s w as f or me the first revelation of a connection

betw een the tw o modern-day Michelangelos.

Antonioni f ilmed Blow-Up in London during the spring and summer of 1966; before

the end of the year it had been released in the U.S., and a special jury prize at

Cannes w ould follow in May 1967. In the spring of 1966, the Walker Art Center in

Minneapolis presented "Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World," a touchstone

exhibition of Pistoletto's "mirror paintings," w hich feature racings of photographed

figures and objects applied to polished stainless steel, a surf ace that incorporates

ambient ref lections into a changeable, forever unfinished composition. Blow-Up tells

the story of Thomas, a jaded fashion photographer in hyper-hip London w ho comes

to believe that the photographs he shot in a park have inadvertently recorded the

scene of a crime. Yet w ith each enlargement of the key evidentiary picture, the areathat seems to represent a half-

hidden corpse loses resolution,

eventually dissolving in a granular

field. For Pistoletto, the

photographed figure remains

reliable and static, a condition

countered by the moving view er, w ho "enters" the mirror painting like an anthropologist w hose

mere presence alters the situation he has come to observe. Photographic at birth but animated by

ref lections, a mirror painting is neutralized in reproduction as irrevocably as enlargement erodes

the documentary photograph's purported truth.

GARNER AND MELLOR are not so much concerned w ith the cinematic status of Blow-Up as w iththe visual culture of mid- ‘60s London, where it was f ilmed. Ranging from the fashion world and

crime tabloids to the studios of photographers and painters, they lead a grand tour that

recapitulates the visual education of Antonioni himself. Introduced to the painter Ian Stephenson

(w hose divisionism-derived technique surely reminded the director, a know ledgeable collector,

of canvases by Italian Symbolist and Futurist painters), Antonioni was moved to add a painter to

his cast of characters. He is an abstract artist, w hose compositions of accumulated strokes

arrive at meaning over time-the opposite of the loss of significance that accompanies the

decomposition into grain of the photographic blow-up.

It was precisely the clarity of the photographic image that recommended it for the stainless steel

mirrors. In Suzanne Penn's essay on Pistoletto's materials and processes for the Philadelphia

catalogue, the artist explains, "I had to go f ind something that was objective, like the ref lection, to

be used for the f igure. It is w hy I couldn't escape photography." How extraordinary are those

w ords "couldn't escape photography," in their combination of resistance and resignation. The

catalyst in Pistoletto's transition from conventional painting w as the sight of his ow n ref lection in

a varnished black surface. He painted around that shadow w ith silver. The f igure emerging from

glossy black and silver ( its consistency is described by Penn as "granular") evokes nothing so much as a darkroom event, just as the later,

mercurial compositions on metal plates, w hich change w ith the angle of view , seem like distant cousins to the daguerreotype. Seeking a f latter

and more uniform surface, far f rom the gestural "matter" of postw ar painting, Pistoletto turned to stainless steel (w hich avoids the depth of a

glass mirror) , aff ixed tissue-thin tracings of photos and sealed the w hole with varnish. The image is not "on" a support but seemingly continuous

http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/editors-homepage/2010-11-11/homepage-michelangelo-and-ugo-eye-to-eye/print/#







w ith the ground-as is true of a photograph.

[ Above, left Michelangelo Pistoletto: He and She Talking, 1967, painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel, 90 1⁄2 by 47 1⁄4 inches. Private

collection. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art;Right, still from Michelangelo Antonioni's f ilm Blow-Up, 1966. Courtesy Steidl. ]

Penn establishes that Pistoletto counted many photographers among his friends, and that he w as responsible for every photographic element of

the mirror paintings, posing the models, positioning the lights, framing the shot,

choosing certain f igures to duplicate w ith additional tracings of the printed originaland conceiving groupings that had never occurred in reality. Although Pistoletto

controlled everything but the shutter release, he is a photographer no more than

Thomas Demand is a sculptor. Discussing the addition of color to a black and w hite

tracing, Pistoletto invokes Titian and the Venetian School of painting, not the making

of a hand-painted photograph. Since photography never rose above the level of a

means to an end in the reinvention of painting, it seems to have possessed for him no

added value, symbolic or

sentimental. Yet certain photographic

exceptions in Pistoletto's oeuvre

suggest otherw ise.

BETWEEN DECEMBER 1965 and

January 1966, Pistoletto created his initial series of so-called Minus Objects, eccentric

sculptures, extremely heterogeneous in form and material, often implying a social or domestic

purpose. Among the Minus Objects is an enlarged and aggressively cropped photograph of a

smiling Jasper Johns. Its singularity can't be overstated: presiding over the human-scale, unique

objects is a photo-based readymade show ing a rising contemporary art star. Pistoletto's

reproduction of a photograph not of his ow n making (it w as copied f rom an exhibition invitation)

and the encoded references to the new international art order mark a radical departure f rom the

presentness and everyday materiality that prevail in the Minus Objects.

Among those w ho came to see the Minus Objects in Pistoletto's s tudio that January w as

Alighiero Boetti. The follow ing year Pistoletto portrayed his new fr iend in Alighiero Boetti Looking

at a Negative (1967), a mirror painting that involved an exceptional measure of manipulation: a

photograph w as reshot to generate a negative, w hich w as then applied to the mirror w ith a

gelatin-transfer process. The negative remains materially distinct f rom the tracing of Boetti. (The

contact betw een the Torinese artists must have been decisive. In 1967, Pistoletto wrote about

the divided self-not the ref lected Other-in the essay "Famous Last Words." The next year, Boetti

photomontaged tw o pictures of himself to create Gemelli , Tw ins, initiating a career-long

investigation of his ow n double identity.)

A third and profound exception in Pistoletto's otherw ise instrumental regard for the

photograph was prompted by his f riendship with Ugo Mulas. Mulas w as one of the most adroit

photographers of art (an underappreciated skill), and of Pistoletto's in particular. Arguably his

most brilliant effort in this genre is a photograph of Pistoletto's w orks taken in a room of the 1970 exhibition "Vitalità del Negativo" in Rome. By

positioning himself before a mirror painting that incorporates the trac ing of a female nude photographed from the rear, and w ith another mirror

painting of a f rontal nude visible on the wall behind him as if it w ere ref lecting the non-existent "f ront" of the rear-view ed figure, Mulas diagrams

Pistoletto's ricocheting visuality. He underscores Pistoletto's pictorial dialogue w ith painters from Velázquez to Ingres and Manet even as he

validates Pistoletto's aversion to reproduction by c laiming the photograph for himself: situated in the center of the composition, hunched over a

tripod, Mulas dramatizes a "shoot," not of a Pistoletto mirror painting but of a reclining model-and the view er, for that matter-w ho is looking at

Mulas's camera.

[ Above, Left, still from Blow -Up. Courtesy Steidl. Right, Pistoletto: A lighiero Boetti Looking at a Negative, 1967, painted tissue paper on polished

stainless steel, 90 1⁄2 by 47 1⁄4 inches. Abrams Family Collection. Photo Constance Mensh, Philadelphia Museum of Art. ]





During his f inal working years, 1970–72, Mulas engaged in a ser ies

of photographic investigations, paired them w ith commentaries and

called them "Le Verifiche," the verifications or proofs. He proceeds

through the means of photography, considering lens, caption,

exposure, enlargement. Enlargement alone gets tw o treatments, a

rather standard one based on a shot of a commercial sign, and a far

less conventional one, a view of the sky, progressively enlarged

(using a detail, as does the character Thomas) to a blow -up of 3½

meters. Mulas w rites, "At that point the sky disappears and w hat

remains is only a granular surface. The dominant elements are the

clumps of silver salts, the grain, and you realize that it is possible toobtain the same image by photographing a w all, that the image is

then reversible, inter- changeable." Or as Thomas might add,

unbelievable.

But the deeper connection here is not w ith Thomas but w ith the

amateur photographer Michel, the protagonist of Julio Cortázar's

"Blow -Up," the short story that inspired Antonioni, and w hich Mulas

surely knew w ell. At the story 's end, Michel, utterly unhinged by

photography's rupture of time and the human narrative, enters his

ow n blow -up and stares- for eternity?- at the sky. Antonioni w ould

bring this through-the-looking-glass photographic rapture dow n to earth in his painterly

conclusion of Blow-Up: Thomas vanishes from a grainy monochrome field that in a

previous tighter shot had rep- resented bright green grass.

"Le Verif iche" opens w ith a contact sheet of a blank filmstrip—a 36-unit readymade—

and closes w ith that same image rephotographed through broken glass. An allusion to

the Large Glass, the last verifica is dedicated to Duchamp, w hom Mulas had

photographed in New York in the mid '60s and here credits as an inspiration. In 1974, the

year after Mulas's death, Pistoletto completed another photo-based rarity in his oeuvre, a

mirror painting for w hich he traced someone else's picture: Mulas's portrait- a gift f rom

the late photographer-of Duchamp seated on a Brancusi. That w ork is reproduced here

in a canonical photograph by Paolo Mussat Sartor. The photograph captures no

additional reflected f igures, but many more artists than the one depicted are present in

the picture.

Special thanks to Gabriele Guercio and Romy Golan.

Left, Ugo Mulas: Michelangelo Pistoletto: Vitalità del Negativo, Palazzo delle Esposizioni,

Rome, 1970. Photo Ugo Mulas © Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. Right, Paolo

Mussat Sartor's photograph of Pistoletto's Marcel Duchamp Sitting on a Brancusi, 1974.

find this article: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/editors-homepage/2010-11-

11/homepage-michelangelo-and-ugo-eye-to-eye/


http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-opinion/editors-homepage/2010-11-11/homepage-michelangelo-and-ugo-eye-to-eye/

printing - homepage_ michelangelo and ugo eye to eye - art in america

Documents