Vol. 2

Mind over Matter

the wit of Italian modern art

text by Barry Schwabsky

Why do people put on such serious faces when they talk about art? So much of it ought to make you crack a smile. From the sly verbal-visual puns of Marcel Duchamp and the deadpan paradoxes of René Magritte through the self-contradictory games of Fluxus to the painted put-ons of John Baldessari (“Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell” and so on) and Marcel Broodthaers’s goofs on his Belgian identity, the artist’s wit is the signature of his intelligence at work—or, rather, at play. Our smile registers the triumph of the mind over matter.

It may be, however, that we are less ready to ascribe this kind of intellectual wit to Italian art. Whether it’s the aggressive, even pugnacious energy of Futurism, the brooding character of Metaphysical painting, dedicated to a muse of disquiet, or the atmospheric gravitas of Arte povera (think of Giuseppe Penone with his roughly gestural figurative statuary inhabited by live trees or Jannis Kounellis with his lead sheets hanging like resonantly inert paintings on the wall, his sacks of coal evoking the weight of time), a spirit of seriousness—and self-seriousness—can seem to dominate…