Amalfi toast.
Galdieri, Francesco
Contemporary art and the city of Naples haven't always gone hand-in-hand. To understand the extent of the ostracism. contemporary art has experienced here in the past, one only need recall that "Terrae Motus," the exhibition of sixty-five artists organized in the aftermath of the tremendous 1980 earthquake in southern Italy and shown in museum spaces throughout half the world, was held at Reggia de Caserta, twenty miles out of town, through the private sponsorship of the late gallerist Lucio Amelio. Naples, after all, lacks a museum dedicated exclusively to contemporary art. But with the opening of numerous galleries here since the early '90s, there are signs that the "renaissance" the international press attributed to Naples after the city hosted the Group of Seven conference of heads of state in 1994 has extended to the local art scene as well.
Over the past two years shows have taken place in any number of settings: in museum and institutional spaces as well as the streets and piazzas of this "porous" city, as Walter Benjamin described it during his six-month stay in nearby Capri. The local government, led by Antonio Bassolino, has shown an unprecedented sensitivity to contemporary art, sponsoring Mimmo Paladino's installation "Montagna di Sale" - black horses amid a truckload of salt - in December of 1995 and a retrospective of twentieth-century Mexican art, currently on view at the Castel dell' Ovo, the landmark Neapolitan site reconstructed in 1282. And at the end of last year it became apparent that private galleries and public institutions were working together as never before to boost Naples' status and visibility as a center for contemporary art.
In December, the exhibition "Contemporanea a Capodimonte" (Contemporary at Capodimonte) broke the unwritten law forbidding collaboration between foundations and private dealers. Reopening its doors to contemporary art, the Capodimonte museum, better known for its collection of paintings by Caravaggio and Brueghel, exhibited work by more than twenty artists - including Alberto Burri, Joseph Beuys, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Sigmar Polke, Luciano Fabro, Joseph Kosuth, Gino De Dominicis, and Enzo Cucchi - represented by local dealers such as Alfonso Artiaco, Graziella Lonardi (on behalf of Incontri Internazionali), Peppe Morra, Lia Rumma, and Pasquale Trisorio. The work on view ranged from De Dominicis' gigantic skeleton in one of the three courtyards of the Medrano palazzo to Kounellis' imposing installation in piazza del Plebiscito, the semicircular "square" in the center of Naples. In the Pantheon-inspired colonnade of the church of San Francesco di Paola, Kounellis used cables to suspend wardrobes, bedside tables, and bureaus; he also hung numerous polished metal scales on which, in homage to Mediterranean culture, he placed fragments of boats. A few yards from the equestrian monument of Ferdinand I, again in the piazza del Plebiscito, Kounellis' enormous iron blackboard and sculptures of furniture and flames transformed the piazza into a point of arrival and departure for an imaginary voyage.
With some exceptions, galleries have principally concentrated over the last several months on artists with international reputations. At Lia Rumma, Haim Steinbach, in his first show in Naples in nine years, installed tomato cans, bingo baskets, and a pack of Neapolitan cards - three fetishized objects of popular Neapolitan culture - on metal shelves, as well as four wall-mounted rectangular pieces of furniture, each equipped with a drawer for hiding spotless handkerchiefs and coins. In April, the gallery showed work by Vanessa Beecroft: Polaroids, a video, and a portrait in oil, as well as one of the artist's signature "performances," with eleven models clad in panties, bras, stockings, and high heels wandering throughout the gallery.
Photography was a strong point in a number of shows this spring. At Th.E., Nan Goldin exhibited "Napoli 1986 e 1996," forty-three photographs taken in Positano in the summer of '86 as well as in Naples, at Pompeii, in '96. The photographs of Sebastiao Salgado document an entirely different order of pain and suffering - from Indians digging the Rajasthan canal in the desert and Brazilians working the gold mines in the Sierra Pelada to women making bricks in India. The Riviera di Chiaia retrospective of this Brazilian photographer, sponsored by the Trisorio gallery from March to May, was one of the most beautiful shows in the city this year.
Shows of Italian photographers were also strong. In April and May, Scognamiglio e Teano, a gallery opened by Lucio Amelio's longtime assistants Mimmo Scognamiglio and Corrado Teano in December 1995 in a historic building on via Settembrini (not far from the Duomo), exhibited the work of the young local artist Antonio Biasucci. In these images, the interplay of light and dark in the recesses of the photographer's chosen material - lava, bread dough, rock - dictates the composition. In another noteworthy show, Ferdinando Scianna, a Sicilian photographer from Bagheria, collected hundreds of shots of sleeping people while he worked as a journalist in India, Bolivia, Sicily, and the United States. The eighty photos exhibited at the Istituto Suor Orsola Benincasa, a university on the corso Vittorio Emanuele, are the result of his obsessive documentation.
With the city's galleries tending to concentrate on bigger names, both national and foreign, in the wake of the transavanguardia, young artists in some cases are showing in spaces outside their native city. Marisa Albanese, for example, shows at Pino Casagrande in Rome but is not currently represented in Naples. Since 1990 Albanese has turned her attention to the intrinsic structures of artworks. Her work, which she calls an attempt to "remove sculpture from its pedestal," uses materials such as glass, metal, photographs, and neon lights and is often made to be walked through, to be looked at from within; her sheet-metal corridors illuminated by blue light are a case in point. In other pieces she makes use of wordplay, palindromes, and stylized series of cliched, often vulgar hand gestures. Her 1994 steel-box pieces, which she calls "Ipertesto" (hypertext), contain photographic images of gestures that appear distorted; in another work, small sculptures of hands are frozen in acts of nonverbal language.
Another artist of note working in Naples is Marina Arlotta. Arlotta's solo exhibition of large-format black and white photographs, shot in a direct, matter-of-fact manner, opened in February of last year at Lia Rumma. These images featured wax models of anatomical deformities, such as Siamese twins joined at the head, and embalmed baby lambs with six legs and a single head. In these photographs, Arlotta's normally repulsive subject matter - taken from the collections of anatomy departments of various Italian universities - becomes transformed into uncanny figures evocative of classical sculpture.
Nino Longobardi continues to deal with themes relating to the body and death, as he has done for some time. Longobardi's show last summer was his first in Naples since the death of Amelio, who was the artist's 'mentor and dealer, in 1992. At Scognamiglio e Teano, he drew a gigantic figure, filling the walls of the second room of the gallery. Lying face down, the prone figure rested its head on a pile of bones; the artist also hung bronze plates on which he had etched skeletons, primitive shapes, and forms that seem to represent visions.
In Maurizio Elettrico's readymades, what dominates is an ironic and playful attitude that contrasts with the installations and videos exhibited by this young Neapolitan artist in his '93 and '95 one-person shows at Veravitagioia. The materials the artist uses are eclectic, and his techniques as demonstrated in his most recent show were varied, bringing together examples of photography, assemblage, etchings, and readymades of articles of clothing and small plastic objects. Elettrico creates mysterious "clothing for the soul" (black and white suits whose sleeves are sewn onto the trouser pleats) and revisits the long Neapolitan tradition of the still life by filling fruit bowls with plastic fruits and miniature plastic figures seated on park benches reading the daily newspaper.
Raffaella Mariniello, another emerging Neapolitan artist who continues to work in the city, is best known for her photo-documentation of the discarded smokestacks and abandoned industrial sheds of the Bagnoli factory. These images first came to public attention in 1991's "Bagnoli, una fabbrica" [Bagnoli, a factory], published by Electra. The ghostly shots recall the history of this Neapolitan factory, symbol of the years when the city was as known for being an industrial force in Italy as much as a popular destination for tourists. Mariniello's work demonstrates above all her attentiveness to landscape; the influence the city exerts on her work is evidenced by her series "Moltitudini" (Multitudes), 1995, exhibited at the Trisorio gallery in February '95. These photos capture in detail rather run-of-the-mill items (such as nails, motorcycles, and fishmongers' counters) that document the activities of Naples' working class.
The coming months promise much in the way of contemporary art in Naples. After the public success a year ago of Maschio Angiono's "Viaggio in Italia" - a survey of many works from Andy Warhol's "Flowers," "Marilyn," and "Campbell's" series that, while being criticized for its poor installation, still managed to attract 55,000 visitors - this summer's exhibition of "grafitti art," featuring work by Americans Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, is expected to draw large crowds. And in November Naples will have its turn hosting a contemporary art fair. While it's too soon to know who will attend, so far eighty Italian galleries, including all the major Neapolitan dealers, have been invited to the show organized by MIART, the Milan-based association. The show should give visitors from throughout Italy a good sampling of what Naples has to offer - both old and new.
Francesco Galdieri is a journalist and critic based in Naples.
