Measure and Autobiography in Arte Povera

The text focuses on the particular dimension of the action and the process in Italian art from 1966 to the early 1970s. Several themes are discussed by tracing the transition from sculpture as object to space and action, including autobiography and the dimension of the body as models for a politicalness of what exists in Italian art. This perspective makes it possible to define the aesthetic renewal underway in relation to the socio-political climate of the moment, as well as to identify this turning point as a germinal moment in the different performative and behavioural practices, of intervention in the public, environmental, and social space, which will be completely defined over the course of the 1970s. Autobiography and the dimension of the body define a new phenomenology and anthropology of the sculptural given. In this transition, “sculpture” becomes a space to be pervaded, to measure in a physical and mental sense, to search for as time unfolds, and to be recounted. The themes of autobiography and the dimension of the body allow for an in-depth analysis of the concepts of temporality, process, and action, also in dialectical relation to the contemporary or more pragmatic scenario of the process and anti-form research that was being carried out in the United States.