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Making Art Matter:
Alberto Burri's Sacchr*
JAIMEY HAMILTON
"Form and Space! Form and Space! The end. There is nothing else. Form
and Space!"1 This intractable statement was made by Italian artist Alberto Burri
in an effort to sum up the logic of his lifelong aesthetic ambitions in a rare inter-
view at the end of his life in 1994. It was not a new mantra, but one that he had
been repeating for decades. To his friend and interlocutor Stefano Zorzi, he once
again reiterated vehemently that despite the sometimes shocking diversity and
associational content of the material and processes he employed throughout his
career, his artistic project had been a fundamentally formalist one: to achieve
harmony and balance through the purest material expression of form and space.
But the exclamatory nature of his statement ("Form and Space!"), as he looked
back at a career of unusual materials and processes, hints that this mantra was
more than just a positive affirmation of his passion for modernist painting tenets.
It was also a defiant negation of any social or psychological meaning that had
been or could be read into his artwork and method ("There is nothing else"). He
insisted, for example, that there were no intentional metaphors in his stitching
* This article derives from the first chapter of my dissertation, Strategies of Excess: The Postwar
Assemblages of Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, and Arman (Boston University, 2006). For all their sup-
port and constructive criticism, my deepest thanks to Caroline Jones, Yve-Alain Bois, Leah Dickerman,
Mari Dumett,John X. Christ, Emily Gephardt, Maria Sensi, the Fondazione Burri, and all of the partic-
ipants and organizers of the 2005 CAA panel "Colonization of Everydayness: Cold War Histories."
1. Burri quoted in Stefano Zorzi, Parola di Burri (Turin: Allemandi, 1995), p. 99.
OCTOBER 124, Spring 2008, pp. 31-52. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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32 OCTOBER
of old burlap sacks in the Sacchi series of the 1950s; his torching of wood, iron, or
plastic in the 1960s; or his eventual incising of Celotex in the 1980s and '90s.
Articulated in the context of this final interview, the statement can be read as a
last-ditch attempt at interdicting the inquisitive and, to Burri's mind, hyperimagi-
native art critics and writers who had plagued him since the very earliest
reception of his Sacchi in the 1950s.
In fact, Burri's insistence on formalism contradicts the semiotic richness of
the Sacchi, which revolves quite clearly around the materiality of the burlap sacks
that the artist tore into and reassembled with thread. From 1949 to 1960, Burri
made hundreds of Sacchi with stitched scraps riddled with holes that seemed to
readily elicit associations with the body. There were, of course, critics who related
the sacks to the ascetic robes of the Franciscan order founded in the countryside
near Burri's hometown and those who even hinted that the holes in the canvases
referenced stigmata.2 But these religious readings were trumped by the more
2. These readings have been broached by Guilio Carlo Argan in UEspresso (1956); James Byrnes
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Making Art Matter 33
The Collages of Alberto Burri (Colorado Springs: Fine Arts Center, 1955); and Cesare Brandi in "Burri ad
Assisi," Qui Arte Contemporanea 15 (September 1975), pp. 29-32, reprinted in Scritti suWarte contempo-
ranea (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1976), pp. 362-63.
3. Lorenza Trucchi, "Dal casto omiccioli aU'alchimia di Burri," H Momenta (January 18, 1952), n.p.
4. Francesco Arcangeli, "Una Situazione non improbabile," Paragone 8, no. 35 (January 1957),
pp. 14, 42.
5. Fairfield Porter, "Alberto Burri," Art News 52, no. 8 (December 1953), p. 41.
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34 OCTOBER
as early as 19
first major
Decade: 22 Eur
Words are no
irreducible pr
expression
6. Alberto Burri, "Words Are No Help," The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, ed.
Andrew Carduff Ritchie (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 82.
7. Maurizio Calvesi, Burri trans. Robert Wolf (New York: Abrams, [1971] 1974), reprinted in Zorzi,
Parola di Burri, p. 85.
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Making Art Matter 35
The Wounds o
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36 OCTOBER
He proposed
other rules"
Indeed, the a
mative gestu
contemporary
Burri's relati
tion in which
way of refor
the Agenda f
paradox of c
with an inter
attempted to
of abstractio
morass of Ita
Rome, this s
Prampolini, t
of abstraction
artists work
poUmaterism
Polymateria
function of the visual illusionism of pictorial means
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Making Art Matter 37
14. Guiliano Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon (Milan: Charta, 1999), p. 128. Burri did
receive one of Prampolini's travel grants, so his friend and mentor, artist Ettore Colla, gave him the mo
to go to Paris. Though Prampolini gave him some of his first real exposure as an artist, Burri claimed
dislike Prampolini and his artistic agenda. See Burri, quoted in Zorzi, Parola di Burriy p. 28.
15. Zorzi, Parola di Burn, p. 29.
16. Michel Tapie, "Devenir d'un art autre,w US Lines Paris Review (July 1954), p. 63.
17. Francis Ponge, for one, states, "It is a matter here of tortured bodies and faces, deformed, tr
cated, disfigured by bullets," in "Note sur les otages, Pietures de Fautrier," published in 1946
Editions Seghers, Paris, reprinted in Jean Fautrier, 1898-1964 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000
p. 170.
18. Enrico Crispolti, "Nota su Alberto Burri," in Notiziario: La Medusa studio d'arte contemporanea, 16
(May 1958), n.p. See also Crispolti, Un Saggio e tre note (Milano: Scheiwiller, 1961). In these essays, he
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38 OCTOBER
with Burri,
exposed by th
verification"
Burri's mater
sensation; it is
language, Cri
work express
tively "claime
had unleashed
Writing in 19
tive response
in this open wound that reveals the unique possibility of suturing
extensively connects Burri to the international art scene and the artists
as well as establishing the differences between European existentialism
19. Crispolti, "Nota su Alberto Burri," n.p.
20. Toni Toniato, "Burri" Evento delle arti 2 ( 1958). dd. 28-29.
21. Milton Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," Art News 53, no. 8 (December 1954), pp. 28-31, 67-69.
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Making Art Matter 39
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40 OCTOBER
flayed state."
metaphysics o
do the work
ment coalesce
that the avan
was ruptured.2
This languag
pen through
Origine, with
"Painting," th
figurative."
moment of d
the artist."26
expressing on
itself indicate
simple and di
slabbramento
his affiliation
than with any
Sacchi into th
invited these
ment of the
perceived legi
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Making Art Matter 41
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42 OCTOBER
conflated. In
ing at the bu
must - a cut
the diminishi
tionship betw
the acknowle
the newly con
Burri's practi
I use the term
motivates sub
Jacques-Alain
pellation by d
the subject to
ality of the c
incoherence i
loss. Specifica
stage a recove
theticized, ma
as triumphan
Indeed, Tapi
dynamic. In t
Informel, he
emerge from
Those who h
sciously, ha
womb, a place
diction make
The act of p
through Sartre's
same time that th
or denial of loss
also Martin Jay,
University of Cal
32. Suture is desc
18, no. 4 (Winter
1 (1966), pp. 39-
1977-78), pp. 35-4
in 1949) and "Th
(first delivered in
later film theoris
Stephen Heath, Q
Silverman, Subject
33. Michel Tapie
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Making Art Matter 43
Fleshy Grids
If it was through Burri's continual figuration of the wound that most critics
addressed the failure of modern ideals, it was through his attempt to compose its
excessiveness that they found modernism's rejuvenation. One of the most dominant
and prolific Italian postwar critics, Cesare Brandi, led the way by representing Burri
as the triumphant Italian in a long line of modernist abstractionists striving to
achieve a transcendental viewing experience.34 For the artist's first major mono-
graph, published in 1963, Brandi began by acknowledging the wounds of the Sacchi
and the many things they had come to represent. In his introduction he laid out the
cultural context of Burri's work in rather bleak terms: "Either the cold war will go
on endlessly, or our whole world will crumble in atomic deflagrations."35 But he also
argued that Burri's visualization of loss was subordinate to visual harmony. Brandi
stated: "We wish to emphasize the fact that the existential knot, although it serves to
establish a direct contact with the spectator, will be dissolved in a moment, through
the painting's Apollonian hypostasis."36 That is, if Burri's paintings retained any vis-
ceral charge or dramatically conveyed violence, they did so only in order to make
the effect of formal artistic control in the face of it that much more compelling. To
support his argument, Brandi tended to favor the more subdued Sacchi In his cata-
log, pieces such as Grande Sacco BS (1956), with its pliable fabric stretched slightly
off-kilter and rumpled edges that occasionally get caught in the stitches, supply the
appropriate tension for an otherwise calm geometric grid. Brandi then compared
Burri's art to Picasso's and Mondrian's neo-plastic dynamics, claiming that the vari-
ous gradations of burlap against the canvas ground complemented each other. The
composed rectangular swaths, he argued, revealed the painting's "self-evident for-
mal justifications" and "plastic dignity."37 Burri was much more comfortable with
this reading (though he continued his official silence) and it is the one that has per-
sisted in the literature.38
Brandi's emphasis on Burri's grid, as it related to Picasso's and Mondrian's
grids, performed a vital role in the discursive suturing of modernism precisely
34. See Cesare Brandi, "L'arte d'oggi" (1951), for a taste of his earlier writing in comparison with
the later BurrL trans. Martha Hadzi (Rome: Editalia, 1963), n.p.
35. Ibid., p. 10.
36. Ibid., p. 31.
37. Ibid., pp. 30, 34.
38. Many of the Italian monographs on Burri follow a phenomenologically inflected formalism that
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44 OCTOBER
Burri. Grande
because of it
of modernist
Krauss elucida
"[The grid's]
from its pote
one and the
seen, it does
plain view (a
were a brand
Perhaps it is
zero, that ar
which to wo
though the o
sentation to
ground, were
pays tribute to t
sality of Burri's
The Measure and the Phenomenon.
39. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, [1986] 1994), p. 12.
40. Ibid., p. 158.
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Making Art Matter 45
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46 OCTOBER
during the w
immediate p
overnarrate
clearly as per
ing Italian na
But are Burri's sutures and their accompanying critical discourse only about
coming to terms with the past? Why go to such rhetorical excesses and performa-
tive extremes? What else was at stake here? The glaring, almost deafening, silence
around the sources of Burri's materials is perhaps the greatest indication that a
traumatic geopolitical present was also driving the performative aesthetics of
Italian Informel. All of the effort of trying to signify burlap, string, paint, and plas-
tic as wound and then as grid left the materials' simple existence, the very fact of
their being there in Italy and available for Burri's use, unexplained. No one cared
to clarify that the sacks, before they were flesh or grids, were commodity objects
(and transporters of other commodity products) shipped into Italy by the United
States. No one followed up on Gendel's curious claim that the plastic Burri
used - a fairly new material at the time - was developed in the U.S. with the origi-
nal purpose of sealing airplanes and jeeps in storage to be shipped overseas for
military campaigns.42 No one commented on the mix of different fabrics that indi-
cated an Italy on the verge of transforming itself from an agrarian state to a new
consumer economy (linen, cotton, and upholstery were used almost as frequently
as burlap). The suppression of these simple facts, while the violence of the wound
was directly addressed, indicates some of the larger cultural forces driving
Informel 's rescue of modernism. I would even argue that the focus on war wounds
and avant-garde rupture functioned to silence the even greater, more present
"wound" signified in the burlap's relationship to postwar American commerce.
While Burri hid many of the sacks' trade stamps by placing them on the
reverse side or under paint, or simply tearing them out, more than a few of the
sacks explicitly expose their original markings. Some of the earliest were saved
from the mess tents of the U.S. POW camp and used in food-aid packaging that
were widely disseminated throughout Italy just after the war. SZ1 (1949), for
instance, the very first Sacco, prominently paraded a star-spangled United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration sack. (The UNRRA was a
recovery program predominately funded by the U.S., initiated before the
Marshall Plan, which eventually took its place.) Burri cut and reconfigured the
sack and then painted over segments of it so that it fragmented the American
flag. The materialization of America's gift to Italy is reconfigured within a mod-
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Making Art Matter 47
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48 OCTOBER
Morlotti. It i
aloof from p
quered, reduc
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Making Art Matter 49
The Marshall Plan, cobbled together by the U.S., Canada, and a still-
rationed Britain, was indeed a generous aid program, one aimed at nothing less
than the full economic and political recovery of Europe and Asia. But its agenda,
as the material history of the sacks evidences, was also a tool for gaining economic
power and political containment.49 One of the most fascinating, and not as fre-
quently acknowledged, motivations of the Marshall Plan's food aid program was
48. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, [1949]
1989), p. 187.
49. The annual cost of the Marshall Plan was $5 billion on a GNP of $230 billion - a relatively small
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50 OCTOBER
simply to ge
market pric
tion of cott
warehouses.
more globall
first, creatin
lion metric t
to Italy, the
economy and
stabilized th
accursed shar
of World Wa
utions of th
everyday lif
which postw
capitalist eco
geographic t
price to pay f
Reconstruction
University Pres
Hegemony," in Se
Giovanni Arrig
50. Mitchell Wa
See also Vernon
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Making Art Matter 5 1
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52 OCTOBER
"The O
In his monog
once overhear
bolic and cont
who consisten
Burri declare
and declare t
oscillation bet
and statement
speaks volume
be read as a m
postwar situat
appeared in r
European cul
enforcement o
between a pro
cepts of ident
infecting oth
again into a w
Ultimately, t
cursive suture
modernism, t
recover a mod
were caught u
images of an a
trash, about
material and i
ernist formal
their participa
excesses. The o
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