AT—03

3 (a) Book

Musée d’art contemporain de Lyon. Giovanni Anselmo. Florence: Hopeful Monster Editore, 1989. Exhibition catalogue.

A selection of work by artist Giovanni Anselmo (b. 1934 in Borgofranco d’Ivrea, near Turin, Italy), profiling his practice from the mid 1960s to late 1980s. Emerging as part of the Arte Povera movement, his social and political awareness, alongside an interest in forces like gravity and invisibility, generates a wide range of sculptures provoking metaphysical contemplation. For example, Untitled (Sculpture That Eats) (1968) is a precarious assemblage of “traditional” sculptural elements (stone, wire) and organic matter (lettuce), in dialog with time, space and process. The work consists of a head of fresh lettuce, held vertically between a large freestanding granite plinth, and smaller granite stone using a strand of wire pulled tightly around the exterior of the plinth and smaller stone. As the lettuce wilts, reducing in size, the tension is lost and the outer stone eventually falls from the central stone. Rather than existing as a single occurrence, the work remains in a state of flux as it is constantly “fed” so as to maintain a consistent version of its form. This reenactment is both perfectly natural (all living things must eat), but unusual in the sense that art is usually deemed “finished” and treated more like a corpse than a living entity.

3 (b) Book (chapter)

Ikoniadou, Eleni. “Rhythmic Time.” In The Rhythmic Event: Art, Media, and the Sonic, 67-84. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014.