In 1967, the then radical Italian artists of Arte Povera hung out at the Piper Club, a disco of Turin’s avant-garde artists. During one night’s events, a young woman danced like a riverbed in a tunic made of polyurethane birch logs and ponchos studded with foam rocks. Like a natural sprite, the dancer hung on a “natural carpet” made of foam by the Turin artist Piero Gilardi. Guests leaned against a simulated cabbage field and sipped Campari.
In the radical cheeks of the disco, adorned as a forest vacant lot, Girardi delivered a serious message embodying the ecological lessons of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.”” Written a few years ago: Chemicals poisoned the earth. Nature starts at home. Live with it, respect it, and keep it.
Now, about 55 years later, at the show “Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura” At the Italian Magazzino Museum in Cold Spring, New York, two long-legged mannequins dressed in the same tunic look at the watermelon summer farmer’s market for more than half a century in the nature of Girardi. I’m watching the carpet.
Magazzino is handing over the same environmental message to another agency in the immediate vicinity of Garrison. Manitoga / Russel Wright Design Center, An architectural version of Girardi’s Nature Carpet. Magazzino introduced the Milanese design company Formafantasma, basically a modernist tree house. There, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin redesigned the wood structure by subtly arranging their own organic product design throughout the organic building.
In retrospect, given today’s environmental crisis, Girardi’s Nature Carpets and Russell Wright’s timber structures dating back to the 1960s stand as an example of historically visionary art with an environmental message. Modern Sus vs. Walden Pond.
In Magazzino, Girardi carved a rough technicolor landscape of fruits and vegetables from the most synthetic industrial materials, polyurethane painted with synthetic pigments. He glued sea urchins, pumpkins, corn cobs, grapes, and even occasionally passing armadillos to a thick contoured foam bed. “Furniture” has allowed families to live with outdoor ideas in the living room, reconnecting urban life to an increasingly vulnerable and defensive nature. He introduced nature to the over-industrialized world that was killing it.
Gilardi, now 79 years old and living in Turin, was intellectually far-flung, entering and exiting the world of art, pursuing ideas from ecology to digital technology to community-based art. However, in his more than 60 years of career, the backbone of his production remained the Nature Carpet. This genre is back almost every 10 years. Bright colors, slightly cartoonish, and sometimes over-the-top ecology messages were always delivered. A work that avoids the master’s dominant hand. He was a Geppetto, an anti-Michelangelo who carved cheap materials that could not be refined into a masterpiece. He seemed to mock the object when he made it.
In 1966, Girardi had already dreamed of reintegrating all the carpets into one space. This is an idea that curator Elena Re respected in Magazzino. Nature carpets form a small field. Each tile of this artificial yet horny paradise is fascinating in its own microscopic way. Some live in fluorescent green and some are covered with seagulls that slide over sea patches. A piece of rug is attached to the wall of the spindle, as if the rug is not valuable, but it is sold off the shelves by the garden.
In Italy, the early environmental movement was one of many forces breaking the country’s long tradition of classic masterpieces that seemed to impede the entry of art into modern life. In Western Europe and the United States, the new era was opening up the old era. Students opposed consumerism. Television swallowed life. The decade of social turmoil has proved to be particularly violent in Italy, with bloody demonstrations and weekly kidnappings.
Radical artists and designers have pivoted from the legendary Italian art and architectural past to create a future that responds to changing times. Girardi went through the world of art, evaded success, fame, and signatures, emigrated with a series of interests, reinvented himself, and then disappeared. He traveled extensively outside Italy, including New York, to understand the rapidly changing panorama of art. To maintain artistic autonomy early in his career, Girardi rejected the gallery system and cut off ties with several galleries, including Sonabend in Paris. Returning to Turin, he incorporated workers and activists into a collaborative art project aimed at interacting with the community. Democratic art had to be accessible and the artist had to be free.
Girardi became an early member of the Arte Povera (“poor art”) group. This is an anti-formalist artist who uses everyday materials to create anti-masterpieces and is often casually organized. He was more about concept than beauty. An American land artist has left the gallery system to work in the landscape. Girardi brought the landscape inside.
Opened in 2017, Magazzino is active in the United States as a landing site for Arte Povera and other post-war and contemporary Italian works. Girardi’s rugs are the suites of Magazzino’s top light gallery with Arte Povera’s masterpieces, all of which show an attitude beyond form.The gallery goes around the courtyard of the former farm warehouse — magazzino means warehouse Italian — Reused as a white minimalist-style museum by Spanish architect Miguel Quismondo.
The bright interior, pristine yet unpretentious building is a subtle container of destructive and challenging art, a geometric foil to the surrounding landscape, itself proposed by Girardi’s microecosystem. It embodies the lessons learned. Pastures surrounded by native vegetation give way to orchards and protected wetlands beyond. The sculpture is temporarily embedded in the lawn. The 16 donkey enclosures just above the hill suggest a rural affinity for the museum. Asiatic black bears sometimes scope out the scene from the hillside. In collaboration with Kismond, a new monumental wing designed by renowned Madrid minimalist Alberto Campovaesa is currently being built.
Magazzino has built relationships with other institutions in the Hudson Valley. Manitoga / Russel Wright Design Center, A famous house built on a rock ledge overlooking a freshwater pool that was once a quarry. The Light Center, in collaboration with Magazzino, invited Forma Fantazuma’s Trimarki and Faresin to comment on the house with their own contemporary product design.
Like the Girardi carpet, the design of the light, which was infused with nature on the hillside from 1958 to 1961, is an ecology with an internal pillar made from a grass roof and tree trunks cut from the surrounding forest. There was a scientific foresight. In relation to nature, his design is probably better than Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater (irrelevant), Farnsworth House Outside Chicago, and Eames, Stahl, Sindler’s HouseAll in Los Angeles.
Wright saturated the house with handmade details, such as butterflies floating on acrylic door panels, as if they were flying in amber. Wright was the most famous industrial designer in the American modern tableware series, but spent years reflecting Japanese inspiration to complete a home that lives in nature rather than looking at it. The house disappears into the forest that swallows it. Still, he carefully woven acrylic and fiberglass with natural materials. Like Vivaldi, Wright composed seasonally and designed panels and fabrics that change in the fall and spring. He tuned the house like an instrument and played it.
At the current show, Formafantasma, the exhibition designer of the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale of this year’s Venice Biennale, seamlessly incorporates contemporary work into the interior. From the lights of the Delta collection, two moon-like discs with separate wall-mounted candle holders (one reflective and one eclipse) illuminate the entry. Recycling animal parts, Formafantasma designed a glass carafe that was closed with a stopper made from bovine vertebrae. A chandelier on a dining table made of resin-coated cow bladder flows through twice as high space next to a siloped rocky cliff.
The organic design is outdated: the original interior and the new parts are mixed.
The bedroom above the living room has been transformed into a gallery of domestic designs by Wright, a specimen selected by Veteran New York curator Donald Albrecht, and a beautiful curve of the blonde forest by New York architect Wendie Vans Joseph. It is exhibited in the glass of.
The main building leads to a trail that climbs to nearby rooms and studios where Wright invented the details. The windows surrounding the studio disappear from the walls around waist height, turning the room into an outdoor pavilion. The studio faces the moon terrace, which leads to trails that loop through the surrounding wilderness. This trail is a 75-acre site entirely owned by Nature.
Wright and his wife, Mary Small Einstein Wright, named the estate Manitoga after the Algonquin word for “place of great spirit.” Inside and outside the house looks like a temporary pause in the landscape. It’s a place to stop in the spirit of things, a natural carpet in nature.
Gilardi: Tappeto-Natura
Until January 9th at the Magazzino Italian Museum on Route 9 in Cold Spring, NY. 845-666 7202, magazzino.art.. Advance reservation is recommended.
Forma Fantazuma at Manitoga’s Dragon Rock: Natural Design
Manitoga / Russell Wright Design Center, 584 Route 9D, Garrison, New York; 845-424-3812; visitmanitoga.org. Advance reservations are required to access the landscape of the house, studio and internal quarry.
