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The Sculpture Garden of Spoerri at Seggiano |
 
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The extraordinary "Sculpture Garden"
created by Daniel Spoerri near Seggiano, in a vast
estate on the slopes of Monte Amiata, has now become a Foundation, the
latest in a series of such initiatives in Tuscany and elsewhere, based on
a direct encounter of the world of art and culture with the themes of nature, landscape
and environment. The link, or the dialectic, between art and nature la as old as
civilisation itself. Today attempts are being made to rethink the situation in new forms
and modes, closer to the contemporary sensibility. The cultural events and installations
(from the "Giardino dei Tarocchi" of Niki de Saint-Phalle at Garavicchio, near
Capalbio, to the "Spazi d'arte" of Villa Gori in the Fattoria di Celle at
Santomaso di Montale, near Pistoia, etc.) are rooted in a general situation of crisis. On
the one hand, art tends to withdraw into the "auratic" schemes of the 1800s,
hiding in museum, while it dissipates its creative energies in the commercia circuits and
mechanisms of mass communications On the other, the territory altered by man la also
subjected to processes of settlement and production, with the result of the
"museumization" of entire historical or geographical areas. The central issue la
the loss of identity of places, due to an unnatural idea of development and progress that
systematically seeks to standardise behaviours and habitats such degenerative phenomena
can be n combated by means of art, rediscovering ita contextual character, making il- it
an active tool for the knowledge, interpretation and conservation of the characters and
structural resources of places, not only in the aesthetic sense, but also in terms of
ecology. This is one key for the interpretation of the latest adventure, in Italy, of
Daniel Spoerri multifaceted personality and versatile artist from Switzerland, of Rumanian
origin.
Now 69 years old, Spoerri
is well-known as one of the exponents of the Nouveau realisme of Pierre Restany, together
with his friend Jean Tinguely, Arman, Christo, Rotella, César and others, but he has also
been a dancer, a mime, and a theatre director, a poet and 'concrete' writer, a member of
Fluxus, founder of Edition MAT (Multiplication d'Art Transformable), inventor of Eat Art.
Most of his works - from the famous tableaux-piègea, to the palettes d'artistes, the
dé-trompes-l'oeil, the Cabinets of anatomy and the Carnevales des Animaux, down to the
ethnosyncretic idols and gastronomic delicacles of Eat Art, in the memory of the Merzbild
of Schwitters or the Ready-mades of Duchamp - touch on the issue of the ephemeral object.
Only in 1970 did he begin to work with bronze castings, and the ambitious project of the
garden of Seggiano la an anthology of the more recent activity. Here Spoerri has created a
long "path of initiation" with forty-five sculptural installations; works by the
artist himself, and by friends both living (Aeppli, Dietmann, Duwen, Geatner, Ghersi,
Huppi, Luginbuhl, Roth, Schmidt, Seidel and Steiner, Soto, Wiedmer) and dead (Talman,
Tinguely, Topor).
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These are
"signa", "figures against pain and exercises to battle fear",
scattered in triangular groupings to establish a dialogue with the topography of the site,
the vegetation, the traces left by man. "The path la important - Spoerri declares -,
the path that la measured in steps, the odors, the sounds, the water, the slopes, the
fields and lawns, the woods". The landscape itinerary la joined by a botanical
excursus (designed by Irma Beniamino) that illustrates the local ecosystem. In the
sculpture garden of Spoerri at Seggiano, the sculpture la seen as a possibility for the
enrichment of the landscape context with signa, reinforcing memory and history. (M.B.)
Ville Giardini 348 full text |
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