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Marshall Plan Modernism
Italian Postwar Abstraction and the Beginnings of Autonomia
By Jaleh Mansoor Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7368-1
CHAPTER 1
THE MONOCHROME IN THE NEOCAPITALIST LABORATORY
The a-priori system on which the division of labour in the workshop is regularly carried out, becomes in the division of labour in the society an a-posteriori, nature-imposed necessity, controlling the lawless caprice of the producers, and perceptible in the barometric fluctuation of the market prices.
Raniero Panzieri, Surplus Value and Planning: Notes on a Reading of Capital (1964)
Big business capitalism was given a chance to demonstrate all its growth potential precisely because of the horrors and glories of the Second World War.
Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century (1994)
History or the Real is an absent cause. Totality is not available for representation any more than it is available in the form of some ultimate truth. The whole is kept faith with and represented in its very absence ... totality is affirmed in the very moment whereby it is denied, and represented in the same language that denies it possible representation.
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1981)
In 1960 Piero Manzoni wrote a letter to Henk Peeters, the Dutch artist who became an esteemed if distant interlocutor over the following two years until Manzoni's death, and with whom he formed, along with Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein, Enrico Castellani, and Otto Piene, the self-avowed constellation the "International Zero Movement" — based on a handful of shows in Holland in the early sixties — to explain the category he had inaugurated some years before, in 1957: the "achrome" (see pl. 2). A permutation of "monochrome," "achrome" denoted a further reduction of painting to its material support beyond the horizon set by painting between the wars. This entailed stripping it of its last painterly value, color. In the letter, drafted in French, Manzoni tried to locate a shared tendency that was formative of the grouping, a tendency he described as poised against expressionism on the one hand and constructivism and neoplasticism on the other.
In another letter in 1962, Manzoni presented a narrative of the achrome's development, remarking on the trajectory that led to it as overdetermined by modernist and avant-garde "isms" so numerous that they structured a (self-) consciousness in which it was impossible to act. But he again cites 1957 as a year when not only did he break ground in his own research but also began to note the "tendency," as he calls it, circumscribing it only negatively, to monochrome painting crystallized among his friends. The year is curious for being rather late to include Fontana, who had been consistently practicing the same idiom of cut and punctures on a monochromatic field since 1949, and who had been Manzoni's teacher at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera in Milan.
But the "isms" Manzoni cites (constructivism, neoplasticism) are striking for having been absent from the litany of isms listed in both artists' texts and publications over the years. Fontana's magazine Il Gesto, which ran for four issues from 1955 to 1959, appearing approximately once a year, and Manzoni's Azimuth both evidence preoccupation with Jackson Pollock's particular gestural expressionism, with its influence on French art informel, and with its aftermath in Johns's antigestural exploration of the encaustic matrix. Above all, these publications betray an interest bordering on obsessive with Picabia and Duchamp, particularly in Manzoni's magazine Azimuth.
The inclusion of Duchamp's work in issue 3 of Il Gesto may indicate his collaboration on that issue, which may have tipped it heavily toward the direction of New York Dada. Caught in a kind of meandering eclecticism absent in both Manzoni's and Fontana's actual practice, both magazines explored a broad range of the historical avant-garde and of modernism. Striking is the absence of any reference to constructivism or Italian futurism. The latter comes up only once, in passing, in the fourth issue of Il Gesto, September 1959, in the form of a quote by Umberto Boccioni stating that "a time will come when the frame will no longer inhere," to accompany a drawing by Fontana.
The first issue of Il Gesto opens with an image by Max Ernst; the second is dominated by French critic Pierre Restany's at once breathless and hyperbolic celebration of the originary, "primitive" gesture, in a text titled "The Morality of the Gesture" (Moralité du Geste), to which I return in chapter 2. Much of issue 3 is devoted to Picabia and Duchamp. Both The Large Glass and Picabia's Mechanomorph abut a reproduction of one of Manzoni's achromes from 1958, a grid of linen patchwork. Picabia and Duchamp appear heavily in both issues of Azimuth. But neither Kasimir Malevich nor Aleksandr Rodchenko come up, despite being the most obvious point of reference in both artists' actual production — until Manzoni cites constructivism as the term, along with its continuity in neoplasticism, that had to be superseded, in 1957. To practice one trope while persistently citing the other describes the particular tension structuring the neo-avant-garde, indicative of a broader field of contradiction from the late 1940s through the 1960s, and into the 1970s in Italy.
Malevich is, by contrast, a primary reference point for Yves Klein, whose Propositions Monochromes made an impact on both Manzoni and Fontana when he began showing his monochromatic work — notably in Milan. It was in 1957 that Klein presented his eleven identically signed and formatted, yet differently priced, blue monochrome paintings at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan. Both Fontana and Manzoni attended the opening; Fontana bought a work. The Milan exhibition marked the first time the entire series was presented in one space, two years after Klein's attempt to short-circuit the exhibition process through juridical ratification. Klein had attempted to acquire a patent for a particular blue ubiquitous throughout the history of western painting, from Giotto to Redon. But the particular positioning, and inversion, of Soviet constructivism in Klein's narrative seems to have been the real moment of insight for Manzoni, even as he differentiated himself from Klein thereafter. The nuances of the encounter, and how it conducted the complex lines of recovery and influence of prewar monochrome painting — still associated with the revolutionary avant-garde — is the concern of this chapter.
In order to work through this terrain of influence and differentiation determining postwar Italian painting, I will briefly turn to Klein's project, which coalesced in an exhibit in Milan in 1957 becoming influential for Manzoni and Fontana, before returning to the printed matter both artists produced. I will then turn to the ways those materials operated as a vehicle to locate autonomy for each artist's own practice in the context of a culturally, or rather economically, colonized Italy at the moment of its purported recovery. Here, the role of the readymade is paramount. I will argue that it functions as a silent and hidden structural matrix of art making a decade before what the standard art historical narrative posits historical reception as an object in the recovery of Duchamp's oeuvre in the United States in the late fifties and early sixties. Duchamp's slightly earlier significance in Italy is practically institutionalized in Milan in the 1950s, with the opening of the Arturo Schwarz Gallery which was responsible for reproducing and reissuing the readymade objects. Finally, to situate the internationalist concerns of this constellation of painters, I will also explore the cultural endorsements of the Italian Communist Party as it defensively attempted to reconsolidate a national identity at the very moment of its capitulation to capital inflected by American intervention.
This chapter pursues the double-helix-like trajectory of politics and culture that converged on the monochrome in the practice of Italian postwar abstraction. The monochrome appears to have risen, phoenix-like, in the crucible of Italy in the 1950s after its development and decline in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, undergirding Fontana's, Burri's, and Manzoni's projects. The monochrome is the one trope that Il Gesto and Azimuth fail to discuss, until it suddenly comes up in 1962 as the term that had to have been superseded — back in 1957. The constructivist monochrome functions, then, as a historical unconscious, a platform over which to test strategies and to carve out autonomy for the set of practices that relied on it most heavily, in practice if not in explanatory language. But this ground was, indeed still is, far from neutral. The historicity of the monochrome, and its sudden recrudescence in Italy, of all places, at the moment when "the century turned on itself," as Mario Tronti put it — or when capital consolidated itself as never before or since, forming a "revolution from above," to quote George Bataille — structures the moment in a way that signals the volatile midcentury transitions in advance of the moment's theorization in political economy as a test site for what Negri would eventually come to call, however problematically, Empire.
In keeping with the methodological horizon of this book, I situate transitions in painting as an etiology that tells us as much about changes at the level of political economy as changes at the manifest level of culture itself. Rather than providing a merely ideological deciphering, much less critique, of the capitalist mode of production, the art work could be seen to unscramble seemingly independent strata of a socioeconomic totality; objective forms of value production on the one hand and their subjective mediation on the other. But that "turn," in the symptoms of capital that are culture, only involved the recovery of the monochrome as it crossed paths with the readymade, the latter having resurfaced as an allegory for the totalizing introjection of capital by the art work.
Yves Klein, again, stands at the nexus of the convergence of monochrome and readymade. A third aspiration of this chapter, then, is a genealogy of the monochrome and of the readymade, each independent and incompatible at the moment of their inception in the teens and until the fifties, and their mutual introjection in Italy throughout the fifties, situated in a larger complex network of reception and recovery vectoring the moment. I attempt to suggest why this hybrid of monochrome and readymade emerged at the moment and the geopolitical site it did. For the historical development of this unlikely entwinement finds itself woven into and contrasting with a larger movement, forming a cultural kernel that prefigured eventual real resistance to emergent global capital, which official culture was to mask.
Corporate Painting
Propositions Monochromes, at the Galleria Apollinaire in Milan in 1957, turned on paintings' ability to be repeated serially, in advance of Warhol's better known Campbell's Soup at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Propositions Monochromes located an overlooked quality that was more salient to the monochrome than to any other modernist trope, except the readymade, a quality in common that set both the readymade and the monochrome into a mimetic relationship with the products of Fordist techniques, in which skill was diminished in the interest of primary form, seriality, and interchangeability, shored up by elements external to the frame, such as price. Klein's strategy of serial presentation highlighted his emphatically random approach to pricing, which self-consciously imitated the vagaries, the apparent irrationality, of the market. To illustrate his engagement with the logic of the commodity, Klein attempted to acquire a patent on a color he named IKB, for International Klein Blue, in 1956, in relation to the work first shown in Milan. This act of brand-naming a pigment for the first time in painting's history can be understood as a response to the international proliferation of brand-named American products. Klein, unlike his American counterpart, Andy Warhol, never had the "hands-on" experience of working in commercial design or in constructing window displays for department stores. He skipped the many steps that culminated in Warhol's importation of mass culture into art. Klein preferred to simply insert art into a market with the much more efficient, if brute, economy of a declarative assertion. He asserted, for instance, that the color of the sky along the French Riviera should be patented and that he should hold the patent. Color, then, could be given a brand name and a kind of brand (here, IKB), much as Campbell's Soup or Coca-Cola are brands rather than names of contents could. Going one step further than Warhol, again in advance of him, Klein fashioned the brand from his own proper name. Finally, he referred to his IKB in English. A brand name in a foreign language (English) operates on the home language (French) in a special way that acknowledges the ceding of a locally specific culture to market-determined international culture. This last strategy is not exclusive to Klein but marks a set of shifts that gained ground in European painterly production in the fifties, again, in anticipation of Warhol and the appellation "pop." While Klein claimed that he had himself invented the monochrome by mentally signing his name to the sky as early as 1946, he paradoxically treated the monochrome as a fabricated template that he manipulated according to the demands of his own particular self-branding. With this statement, he was channeling Malevich. Here is Malevich in 1919: "I have ripped through the lampshade of color," and "I swim in the white, free abyss." In 1955, when Yves Klein signed his name to the Riviera sky and then attempted to gain an official patent for color under the brand International Klein Blue, he was well aware of Malevich's assertion to have conquered gravity thirty-five years earlier. It isn't clear whether he was aware of Duchamp's attempt to gain a patent under the name of his alter ego, Rose Selavy (1926). But Klein's use of a patent and a title mimicking the logic of the corporate logo acknowledges the degree to which the readymade had also come to be the basic constituent element of painting.
How might we understand the passage from Malevich's horizon, and Klein's, a transition in which neither of the dominant narratives of modernism, neither the telos of flatness nor that of autonomy against reification, hold sway? How might we account for transitions imminent to the paradigm yet utterly transparent to the totalizing triumph of capitalism — perversely staked out over the trope associated with the further reaches of anticapitalist aspiration at the opening of the century? A clue into this is, not surprisingly, unremarked aspects of Duchamp's project. The readymade mediates the transition. Tu M' of 1918 already signaled the total rationalization of color by the market at the turn of the century. Predating Rodchenko's Monochrome Triptych of 1921 by three years, Tu M' presented Duchamp's previous work as pale indices, as represented shadows of missing artworks. This two-dimensional field functions like a retrospective, or, more properly speaking, an inventory. This inventory, in turn, is that of the author's own labor presented as though completed by another, alienated to the shop floor, turned inside out. In this, Duchamp not only augurs but also enacts what so many voices a half century later would come to see as art's endgame. My account replaces the logic of endgames with the set of relations imminent to the work of art as it is situated in a field charged by the conditions of historical possibility. Yet, among numerous authors' laments of a teleological unfolding of modernism in which, testing its limits, it painted itself into a corner, Giorgio Agamben's description of art's impasse in relation to the factory floor, which it sought in its vanguard moments to set itself against through reflexivity and limit testing, stands apart:
Contemporary art, in its most recent tendencies, has further advanced this process and has by now produced that "reciprocal readymade" Duchamp had been thinking of when he suggested the use of a Rembrandt as an ironing board. The extreme object centeredness of contemporary art, through its holes, stains, slits, and non-pictorial materials, tends to identify the work of art with the non-artistic product. Thus, becoming aware of its shadow, art immediately receives in itself its own negation, and bridging the gap that used to separate it from criticism, itself becomes the logos of art and its shadow, that is, critical reflection on art. In contemporary art, critical judgment lays bare its own split, rendering superfluous its own space.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Marshall Plan Modernism by Jaleh Mansoor. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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