Giovanni Anselmo

Abstract

This study examines the early work of Giovanni Anselmo(born 1934), who gained attention as a member of “Arte Povera”, which led the postwar avant-garde of Italy. Arte Povera, led by Germano Celant, had tried to contribute to the maintenance of Italy’s reputation as an artistic powerhouse since the Renaissance after failing to make some particular achievement to make much progress in its postwar avant-garde art history, except for “Futurism.” But in the process of categorizing Italy’s art movement so that it can be matched with conceptual art movements in the United States and other European countries, the features of “Arte Povera” are comprehensive and ambiguous, as many scholars have reversed the definition of the movement several times. As a result, the definition of this movement resulted in poor object, natural form, active force, material reality, etc., in which Anselmo’s role was very important. Anselmo participated in all the ‘Arte Povera’ exhibitions except for the first exhibition, effectively expressing the characteristics of the movement defined by Celant in the work and choosing a theme that would embrace the broad category of contemporary writers he wanted. Anselmo’s most important ‘energy’ existing open and is expressed in a way that breaks the boundaries of all fixed and fluid things. As well, the metal’s constriction due to evaporation or heat of water, and the work done with direct organic materials, conforms to Arte Povera’s code of importance for natural and vital power. These works of Anselmo not only effectively represented the movement in the early years of the settlement of Arte Povera, but also linked to discourse in Umberto Eco’s ‘open work’, ‘increase of entropy’ and Georges Bataille’s ‘depense’ to elicit consent from contemporary research.