A gaunt body with a crown of thorns sitting on a coffin. The emaciated figure is covered with bleeding wounds and is supported with difficulty by three weeping angels. Experts still do not know where Giacomo Del Maino’s filigree wooden sculpture “Cristo in Pietà sostenuto da Angeli” from 1490 once stood, it probably adorned an altar.
But anyone who faces the Man of Sorrows by the Lombard sculptor these days in the Castello di Rivoli art museum outside the gates of Turin is struck by the shock of a universal pathos formula whose echo reaches into our days of war: deadly suffering that never ends.
It’s almost exactly ten years since Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev curated Documenta 13 in Kassel. And the show she opened, just after the opening of the Venice Biennale and just before Documenta Fifteen, in the baroque fortress in Piedmont, where she has been running Italy’s oldest art museum (which also houses the largest collection of Arte Povera) since 2016), can compete with these formats.
From cave paintings to NFTs: It’s about the universal historical big picture
“Espressioni con frazioni”, their title, aims at the universal-historical big picture. When asked how human forms of expression have changed since the beginning of history, the 63-year-old art historian does not. At Bakargiev’s there is always a biennial, so to speak: the enormous course covers five continents, works by 60 artists, from photos of prehistoric cave paintings to NFTs.
Whoever sets his sights on the fundus of art history with such a large caliber will of course make fat loot. Hardly anything that doesn’t fall under Bakargiev’s “Espressioni” – even two artists who are as different as fire and water. The strict conceptualist Sol Lewitt breaks the sense of space in one of the halls by repeating its rectangular shape as a wall painting in blue, gold and burgundy, slightly offset. On the other hand, “Novecento”, the horse dangling from the ceiling in a harness by the ready-made provocateur Maurizio Cattelan, can only be sold as a symbol of a broken expression with a lot of good will. The limp steed hangs from the original stuccoed ceiling, as if the former householder Victor Amadeus, King of Savoy and Sardinia, had left it there when his son and heir to the throne had him arrested in 1731.
After all, Bakargiev does not just draw from the inventory: for her exhibition, she mixes works from the impressive collection of the Castello Rivoli, which was newly opened in 1984 by the then director Rudi Fuchs, who was still an ex-Documenta boss, with new works by contemporary artists. Julie Mehretu revives the abstract expressionism of a macho like Jackson Pollock from the spirit of feminist resistance. The picture “Orient” by the American-Ethiopian painter abstracts the war in Syria into a filigree tangle of lines.
The war in Syria as a filigree tangle of lines: Julie Mehretu’s “Orient”
(Photo: Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery © Julie Mehretu, Photo: Tom Powel Imaging)
As always, Bakargiev aims at the political “frazioni” of the present. That’s why she integrated the first mini-retrospective of indigenous artist Richard Bell into the show. The rickety corrugated iron shack he placed in the Castello Gardens is modeled on the one his family used to demolish with a bulldozer in 1967 when the artist was 14 years old.
The big theme with which Bakargiev drove the art world either incandescent or enthusiastic in 2012 in Kassel was, of course, an art that is created without human intervention. That’s why Pierre Huyghe is allowed to show his video in Rivoli about the rotting biotope with Pink Paw Dog in the Karlsaue and Agnieszka Kurant her pictures, the plant forms of which develop from inorganic minerals.
This time, however, the master programmer Beeple, alias Michael Winkelmann, shoots the bird of the posthuman. “Human One”, his kinetic video sculpture in which an astronaut wanders incessantly through an ever-changing landscape, shines like a beacon through the 147-meter-long Manica Lunga exhibition hall in Rivoli.
With Blockchain’s help, the art world’s new megastar has programmed the work so that no moment of the loop is the same as the next. “The first human in the Metaverse,” Bakargiev states euphorically. If you turn your gaze from Beeple’s dynamic post-humanoid to Francis Bacon’s 1956 work “Study for Portrait IX”, which is cunningly compared to him, you might get an idea of Bakargiev’s idea of using “Espressioni frazioni” to show what it means to “be humane in a posthuman world”.
Their call for “strawberries and dogs to vote” is common knowledge today
It’s funny, of course, that an art historian should put a digital prophet on such a pedestal that she shuns social media, lashes out at the “overdose of digital, screen-based technology,” and happily slaps her purse in exasperation when her cell phone rings. But in some respects she was always ahead of her time: her demand for “the right to vote for strawberries and dogs”, which earned her the reputation of a crazy esotericist, is now intellectual common property. And now many museums are following Bakargiev’s example.
During the pandemic, she turned the Castello Rivoli into a vaccination center. And after the Afghanistan debacle, she ferried Afghan artists and curators from Kabul to Turin. “Today, a museum must be a place where culture meets the world at large, it is an agent of change,” says Bakargiev in her own demanding way.
At the latest with the rendezvous of colleagues Beeple and Bacon, this stubborn art lover should have come a step closer to her most recent wish to create a “museum of non-human culture”. Then what the ultimate expression would.
Expressions Con Frazioni. Until September 25th. Castle of Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Collezione Cerruti.