Exhibition Gianni Colombo
January 4, 2010 4:18 pm
Spazio Elastico
Gianni Colombo Exhibition
Castello di Rivoli – Contemporary Art Museum
The Castello di Rivoli recently closed its retrospective dedicated to the artist Gianni Colombo.
For all of those dear artists among you that use interactive space as their artistic medium, you’d go ga-ga in the “Elastic Space” installation set up in the Manica Lunga wing of the museum. This perceptual dream-like space is extraordinarily designed to disorientate the viewer. Here, fluorescent elastic strings are illuminated by black light, creating a perceptual environment that triggers an emotional response and makes a statement.
This is without a doubt Colombo’s most famous work, winning him first prize at the 1968 Venice Biennale. Unlike much of the conceptual art produced in those years, this work has not been tarnished by time, holding its own in today’s digital art world, though without the need for digital apparatus or sensors. How’s that you ask?
Because Colombo sought to involve the viewer, building his work on the concept of a participatory artistic space, which viewers could enter and not just observe. Colombo focused on creating synaesthetic art, anticipating many current schools of thought that have flourished in the Internet age.
The space in which a work unfolds is its environment, coming to life through the interaction of viewers. In this way, an art work is a space for action.
As the curator of the exhibition Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (who is already sorely missed, but let’s not delve into the controversy of her successor for the top spot at the museum) says, Colombo wouldn’t have been too happy to see his work written-off as kinetic art, the movement developed over the 1950s and 1960s.
We too agree that such a categorisation does not do Colombo justice. His work goes well beyond the exploration of mechanical movement which characterised kinetic art, focusing instead on the relationship with time that is built through participation in the work – anticipating the co-operative aspects that digital languages and the Internet have enabled us to explore forty years on. Hence art becomes participation, inspired by an ideal point of contact between technology and science, which here is expressed as an artistic language (a theme that environmental art has also developed, as for instance by Christo and Jeanne-Claude).
In 1959 Colombo founded Gruppo T together with Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi and Grazia Varisco. Here T stands for TIME, understood in an impersonal and scientific sense, which is what gives rhythm to an art work, which in turn should evoke a psychological response in the audience.
Colombo’s “Alveolar Acentric Structures” are another example of a work that, thanks to its characteristic unpredictability, anticipates contemporary generative art (whose value is rooted in the shapes self-generated by the code that gives the work its shape).
Unveiling the process is the aim of this aesthetic, where the idea is the random, statistical process itself. These were the years when Umberto Eco wrote his “Open Work” and the Gruppo T artists were exhibiting their work in Olivetti’s Milan store, earning themselves the title of “maniacs of the mathematizing programme.”
These were also the heady years of the economic boom in what was a fundamentally bourgeois era that has long been left behind and whose legacy of conflict bequeathed to future generations has made sure that it is in no way missed.