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Homepage: Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eye

marcia e. vetrocq 11/11/10

"MICHELANGELO EYE TO EYE" is the English title given to the final w ork of Michelangelo Antonioni, a brief documentary of 2004 in w hich the frail, 92-year-old director communes w ith his namesake's great carved figure of Moses . This month brings a more mediated but nonetheless suggestive encounter betw een tw o Michelangelos: the publication by Steidl of Antonioni's Blow-Up, a monograph on the landmark film w ith trim, penetrating essays by Philippe Garner and David Alan Mellor, and the opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art of the deeply researched retrospective "Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974," curated by Carlos Basualdo. Beyond the calendar coincidence, the connection grow s personal. For me, like many others of my generation, Blow-Up triggered a lifelong fascination w ith the processes, seductions and puzzles of photography. I've long kept my art historian's eye on the complex role played by photography in Pistoletto's w ork as w ell as on the photographs taken of his art by Ugo Mulas. Indeed, seeing Mulas's photographs in the late 1970s w as for me the first revelation of a connection betw een the tw o modern-day Michelangelos. Antonioni filmed Blow-Up in London during the spring and summer of 1966; before the end of the year it had been released in the U.S., and a special jury prize at Cannes w ould follow in May 1967. In the spring of 1966, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis presented "Michelangelo Pistoletto: A Reflected World," a touchstone exhibition of Pistoletto's "mirror paintings," w hich feature racings of photographed figures and objects applied to polished stainless steel, a surface that incorporates ambient reflections into a changeable, forever unfinished composition. Blow-Up tells the story of Thomas, a jaded fashion photographer in hyper-hip London w ho comes to believe that the photographs he shot in a park have inadvertently recorded the scene of a crime. Yet w ith each enlargement of the key evidentiary picture, the area that seems to represent a halfhidden corpse loses resolution, eventually dissolving in a granular field. For Pistoletto, the photographed figure remains reliable and static, a condition countered by the moving view er, w ho "enters" the mirror painting like an anthropologist w hose mere presence alters the situation he has come to observe. Photographic at birth but animated by reflections, a mirror painting is neutralized in reproduction as irrevocably as enlargement erodes the documentary photograph's purported truth.

GARNER AND MELLOR are not so much concerned w ith the cinematic status of Blow-Up as w ith the visual culture of mid- 60s London, w here it w as filmed. Ranging from the fashion w orld and crime tabloids to the studios of photographers and painters, they lead a grand tour that recapitulates the visual education of Antonioni himself. Introduced to the painter Ian Stephenson (w hose divisionism-derived technique surely reminded the director, a know ledgeable collector, of canvases by Italian Symbolist and Futurist painters), Antonioni w as moved to add a painter to his cast of characters. He is an abstract artist, w hose compositions of accumulated strokes arrive at meaning over time-the opposite of the loss of significance that accompanies the decomposition into grain of the photographic blow -up. It w as precisely the clarity of the photographic image that recommended it for the stainless steel mirrors. In Suzanne Penn's essay on Pistoletto's materials and processes for the Philadelphia catalogue, the artist explains, "I had to go find something that w as objective, like the reflection, to be used for the figure. It is w hy I couldn't escape photography." How extraordinary are those w ords "couldn't escape photography," in their combination of resistance and resignation. The catalyst in Pistoletto's transition from conventional painting w as the sight of his ow n reflection in a varnished black surface. He painted around that shadow w ith silver. The figure emerging from glossy black and silver (its consistency is described by Penn as "granular") evokes nothing so much as a darkroom event, just as the later, mercurial compositions on metal plates, w hich change w ith the angle of view , seem like distant cousins to the daguerreotype. Seeking a flatter and more uniform surface, far from the gestural "matter" of postw ar painting, Pistoletto turned to stainless steel (w hich avoids the depth of a glass mirror), affixed tissue-thin tracings of photos and sealed the w hole w ith varnish. The image is not "on" a support but seemingly continuous
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Printing - Homepage: Michelangelo and Ugo Eye to Eye - Art in America

w ith the ground-as is true of a photograph.

[ Above, left Michelangelo Pistoletto: He and She Talking, 1967, painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel, 90 12 by 47 14 inches. Private collection. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art;Right, still from Michelangelo Antonioni's film Blow -Up, 1966. Courtesy Steidl. ]

Penn establishes that Pistoletto counted many photographers among his friends, and that he w as responsible for every photographic element of the mirror paintings, posing the models, positioning the lights, framing the shot, choosing certain figures to duplicate w ith additional tracings of the printed original and conceiving groupings that had never occurred in reality. Although Pistoletto controlled everything but the shutter release, he is a photographer no more than Thomas Demand is a sculptor. Discussing the addition of color to a black and w hite tracing, Pistoletto invokes Titian and the Venetian School of painting, not the making of a hand-painted photograph. Since photography never rose above the level of a means to an end in the reinvention of painting, it seems to have possessed for him no added value, symbolic or sentimental. Yet certain photographic exceptions in Pistoletto's oeuvre suggest otherw ise.

BETWEEN DECEMBER 1965 and January 1966, Pistoletto created his initial series of so-called Minus Objects, eccentric sculptures, extremely heterogeneous in form and material, often implying a social or domestic purpose. Among the Minus Objects is an enlarged and aggressively cropped photograph of a smiling Jasper Johns. Its singularity can't be overstated: presiding over the human-scale, unique objects is a photo-based readymade show ing a rising contemporary art star. Pistoletto's reproduction of a photograph not of his ow n making (it w as copied from an exhibition invitation) and the encoded references to the new international art order mark a radical departure from the presentness and everyday materiality that prevail in the Minus Objects. Among those w ho came to see the Minus Objects in Pistoletto's studio that January w as Alighiero Boetti. The follow ing year Pistoletto portrayed his new friend in Alighiero Boetti Looking at a Negative (1967), a mirror painting that involved an exceptional measure of manipulation: a photograph w as reshot to generate a negative, w hich w as then applied to the mirror w ith a gelatin-transfer process. The negative remains materially distinct from the tracing of Boetti. (The contact betw een the Torinese artists must have been decisive. In 1967, Pistoletto w rote about the divided self-not the reflected Other-in the essay "Famous Last Words." The next year, Boetti photomontaged tw o pictures of himself to create Gemelli , Tw ins, initiating a career-long investigation of his ow n double identity.) A third and profound exception in Pistoletto's otherw ise instrumental regard for the photograph w as prompted by his friendship w ith Ugo Mulas. Mulas w as one of the most adroit photographers of art (an underappreciated skill), and of Pistoletto's in particular. Arguably his most brilliant effort in this genre is a photograph of Pistoletto's w orks taken in a room of the 1970 exhibition "Vitalit del Negativo" in Rome. By positioning himself before a mirror painting that incorporates the tracing of a female nude photographed from the rear, and w ith another mirror painting of a frontal nude visible on the w all behind him as if it w ere reflecting the non-existent "front" of the rear-view ed figure, Mulas diagrams Pistoletto's ricocheting visuality. He underscores Pistoletto's pictorial dialogue w ith painters from Velzquez to Ingres and Manet even as he validates Pistoletto's aversion to reproduction by claiming the photograph for himself: situated in the center of the composition, hunched over a tripod, Mulas dramatizes a "shoot," not of a Pistoletto mirror painting but of a reclining model-and the view er, for that matter-w ho is looking at Mulas's camera.

[ Above, Left, still from Blow -Up. Courtesy Steidl. Right, Pistoletto: Alighiero Boetti Looking at a Negative, 1967, painted tissue paper on polished stainless steel, 90 12 by 47 14 inches. Abrams Family Collection. Photo Constance Mensh, Philadelphia Museum of Art. ]

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During his final w orking years, 197072, Mulas engaged in a series of photographic investigations, paired them w ith commentaries and called them "Le Verifiche," the verifications or proofs. He proceeds through the means of photography, considering lens, caption, exposure, enlargement. Enlargement alone gets tw o treatments, a rather standard one based on a shot of a commercial sign, and a far less conventional one, a view of the sky, progressively enlarged (using a detail, as does the character Thomas) to a blow -up of 3 meters. Mulas w rites, "At that point the sky disappears and w hat remains is only a granular surface. The dominant elements are the clumps of silver salts, the grain, and you realize that it is possible to obtain the same image by photographing a w all, that the image is then reversible, inter- changeable." Or as Thomas might add, unbelievable. But the deeper connection here is not w ith Thomas but w ith the amateur photographer Michel, the protagonist of Julio Cortzar's "Blow -Up," the short story that inspired Antonioni, and w hich Mulas surely knew w ell. At the story's end, Michel, utterly unhinged by photography's rupture of time and the human narrative, enters his ow n blow -up and stares-for eternity?- at the sky. Antonioni w ould bring this through-the-looking-glass photo- graphic rapture dow n to earth in his painterly conclusion of Blow-Up: Thomas vanishes from a grainy monochrome field that in a previous tighter shot had rep- resented bright green grass. "Le Verifiche" opens w ith a contact sheet of a blank filmstripa 36-unit readymade and closes w ith that same image rephotographed through broken glass. An allusion to the Large Glass , the last verifica is dedicated to Duchamp, w hom Mulas had photographed in New York in the mid '60s and here credits as an inspiration. In 1974, the year after Mulas's death, Pistoletto completed another photo-based rarity in his oeuvre, a mirror painting for w hich he traced someone else's picture: Mulas's portrait- a gift from the late photographer-of Duchamp seated on a Brancusi. That w ork is reproduced here in a canonical photograph by Paolo Mussat Sartor. The photograph captures no additional reflected figures, but many more artists than the one depicted are present in the picture. Special thanks to Gabriele Guercio and Romy Golan.

Left, Ugo Mulas: Michelangelo Pistoletto: Vitalit del Negativo, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, 1970. Photo Ugo Mulas Ugo Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved. Right, Paolo Mussat Sartor's photograph of Pistoletto's Marcel Duchamp Sitting on a Brancusi, 1974.

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