2003 variazione da Fermacarte 1968, Emilio Prini, 2003

In occasione della VIII edizione di Art to Art, i curatori Elio Grazioli and Hou Hanru invitarono Emilio Prini, protagonista dell’Arte Povera, ad esporre a Montalcino.

"Emilio Prini, a key figure of Arte Povera since its inception, is one of the most challenging artists of the moment—not only in Italy. His “rare-rapid” appearances have intensified this aspect of his artistic image, but they are the necessary consequence of his “stance” toward himself and toward history. When Attitudes Become Form is the famous title of one of the manifesto exhibitions (held in Bern in 1969) in which he participated. Is art not a choice of lifestyle—a way that constantly has to deal with exposure, with exposing oneself, with the work? A text by Germano Celant states: “The world of artistic practice is reduced to the mode of being and acting.” Prini empties the relationship between the artist-as-person and the object-as-work, flattening it as much as possible onto the standard, onto the empirical and non-speculative nature of research, onto the “life side as a biological key.” His work transposes the material-quantitative data of reality into something else, into a game of “standards” that entrap thought as both identical and yet alien—indeed, “exchanged.” After participating in all the most important international exhibitions from 1967 to 1971, Prini reduced his participation in exhibitions to a minimum: a solo show titled Fermi in dogana at the Ancienne Douane in Strasbourg in 1995, Documenta X in Kassel in 1997, Arte Povera at the Tate Gallery in London in 2001, and the subsequent American “tour.” Returning to the material of his beginnings, Prini “repeats” this work, as he has done on various other occasions, recombining the pieces from those years—identical yet entirely different. In a room of the theater in Montalcino, he exhibits da Fermacarte 1968, composed of lead weights on photographic prints. As he succinctly stated at the time:

“I HAVE NO PLANS, I GO BY FEEL, I SEE NO TRACE OF THE BIRTH OF ART (NOR OF TRAGEDY) BECAUSE C.S. IS NOT THE RESULT OF PURE HUMAN WORK (BECAUSE I DID NOT MAKE THE CHAIR, THE TABLE, THE SHEET, THE PEN WITH WHICH I WRITE) I DO NOT CREATE, IF POSSIBLE.”

Arte all’Arte VIII, 2003