TRACES:Germano Celant
Today is the occasion to bear in mind Germano Celant (1940-29/4/2020), a name everyone in the art world recognizes. It was Celant who coined the term Arte Povera in 1967, referring to the group of artists in Italy using everyday objects to create their art. Since then, Celant has cemented himself as the curator of world-renowned art. For 20 years he served the senior curator in Guggenheim Museum, New York. Since 1995 he has served as curator for Fondazione Prada and even served as main curator at 1997 Venice Biennale. Through documents or interviews, starting with: moments and memories, we reveal out from the past-unknown sides of big personalities, who left their indelible traces in time and history…
By Dimitris Lempesis
Germano Celant was born in the North Italian city of Genoa in 1940. Italy’s largest port town, Genoa was a city with a large working-class population that moreover became the center of one of the nation’s largest Communist parties in the mid-20th Century. Among Celant’s early memories of his youth are the violent fights that occurred in the early 1960s and which he witnessed among the Communist workers and neo-Fascist party members. Celant’s later interpretations of artists’ working practices would be read through his leftist political beliefs developed within this political environment and his experiences of the revolts by the working class in Genoa. Germano Celant attended the University of Genoa, where he studied history of art with Eugenio Battisti. In 1963 he worked as assistant editor for Marcatrè, a Genoa-based magazine about architecture, art, design, music and literature. In 1967, at the age of 27, Celant launched his career as an art critic with his creation of the term “Arte Povera”, his manifesto “Arte Povera, Notes for a Guerilla War”, was published In Flash Art, in which he took Arte Povera in a more political direction and drew a clear distinction between the Italians and contemporary American Pop, Minimalist and Op artists. He used this term to refer to a group of Italian avant-garde artists who often exhibited together between 1967 and 1971. They worked in different styles, with diverse materials and with varying concepts. Though the roster of artists included within Arte Povera shifted with each exhibition during these initial years, by the early 1980s Celant established a definitive group of thirteen artists.2 The impetus behind Celant’s creation of “Arte Povera” was due in part to the need he perceived for the identification of Italian avant-garde artistic practices that offered an alternative to the then-dominant U.S. art movements of Minimalism and Pop Art. Celant sought to promote artists who created work that offered engaging and thought-provoking experiences not mediated by the consumer market. Yet once the Arte Povera group was accepted by the art world, Celant grew concerned that they were failing to directly confront consumerism and that they were functioning as part of the larger art establishment. This concern led him to declare in 1971 that the grouping of artists under the heading “Arte Povera” was no longer relevant. However, ten years later, Celant decided to reestablish “Arte Povera” as a group through a series of international exhibitions held in the early 1980s. At this point he believed a reconsideration of their artistic methods was necessary, in part because of his concern that current international art practices no longer supported critical art that reflected upon social and cultural issues.
Although Celant is still best known today for his connection to Arte Povera, his decision in 1971 to turn his attention toward other new artistic languages and to focus more specifically on the careers of individual artists was a pivotal moment in the trajectory of his professional development. At this point he turned from identifying with the role of the art critic to considering himself an art historian. His relationship to artists associated with Arte Povera continued, but he also began to examine a broader range of contemporary artistic practices utilized by artists working primarily in Western Europe and the United States who were engaging in diverse and radical new mediums. No longer just writing texts for gallery show catalogues, Celant now focused his scholarly endeavors on monographs devoted to individual artist and essays for museum exhibition catalogues. Between 1971 and 2014 Celant published more than one hundred books, articles and essays, many of which coincide with the hundreds of large-scale exhibitions he curated worldwide. In addition to these manuscripts, Celant has published widely in numerous art journals and has served as a contributing editor to Artforum since 1977, Interview since 1991 and L’Espresso since 1999. In 1974, Celant edited and curated the “Catalogue Raisonné” of Italian artist Piero Manzoni. A pivotal moment in Celant’s career came in 1988 when Thomas Krens, the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, invited Celant to join a new team he was forming at the museum. Celant was the first European art critic to be asked to join such a group in America and he continued to hold his position as Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Guggenheim until 2008. n 1995, Celant’s expanded his curatorial scope by accepting the position of Artistic Director at the Prada Foundation. The unique agendas of these two institutions, the Guggenheim Museum and the Prada Foundation, coincide with Celant’s desire to rethink and dismantle hierarchical art-world structures and traditional curatorial practices. In conjunction with the Venice Biennale 2009, Celant organized the second major survey of John Wesley, at the boarding-school buildings on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice. His 2012 exhibition “The Small Utopia. Ars Multiplicata” at Ca’ Corner della Regina, Venice, tackled the issue of art in the age of mechanical reproduction and how artists from Marcel Duchamp to Andy Warhol have used multiplication of various sorts. It contained over 600 items, produced between 1900 and 1975, and included design, ceramics, glassware, textiles, film, magazines, books, and sound recordings. Celant curated exhibitions at other venues. In collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana, he mounted the 2012 survey “Lucio Fontana: Ambienti Spaziali” at Gagosian Gallery. In 2016, he was the Project Director of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Floating Piers”, at Lago d’Iseo, Italy. He died at age 80 in Milan due to complications from the coronavirus.