One hundred years from now

At Palazzo Reale in Milan, an impressive display of 100 pieces of work made between 1967 and 1987 renders homage to Vincenzo Agnetti, an early, subtle, sharp-minded exponent of Italian conceptualism.

View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Entrance to the exhibition is free. But you need to deserve it by staying a long while. You will enter and exit many rooms, reviewing something like 100 pieces of work made between 1967 and 1981. Every so often, like a butterfly flitting in and out of view, a black-and-white archive photo of Vincenzo Agnetti materialises in the narrow halls connecting one room to the next. They are hung high on the wall, so you end up seeing them on a slant at the last second.

Img.1 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

From there, Agnetti insists on looking at you with his brow furrowed, head cocked, expression mildly irritated, caught immersed in thought or behind mirrored glasses as we pass in front of him and step over the threshold. You return his eye as you slip by or squeeze past in answer to the calling of a voice (his) or an image. This is a particularly fitting and unconventional device for a retrospective wanting to render homage here in the centre of Milan at Palazzo Reale to a precocious artist ("painter, sculptor, essayist, writer and theoretician, but above all, poet," writes Vanni Scheiwiller). He was born in Milan and prematurely died there (September 1926–September 1981), one of the most subtle and sharp-minded exponents of what is known as Italian conceptualism.

Img.2 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.3 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.4 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.5 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.6 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.7 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.8 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.9 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.10 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Img.11 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

The exhibition itself has something chronometric about it (in the sense of precise, punctilious) and also something combative and rushed (the promotional poster features a photo from the 1979 series La lettera perduta, where the artist trips and falls with a great pile of letters in his arms). The title of the show, “A cent’anni da adesso” (“One hundred years from now”), was chosen for being a phrase he would often repeat, according to his daughter Germana. She is the president of Archivio Vincenzo Agnetti, which organised the anthology together with Marco Meneguzzo. The title aims to connote how time – cyclical, slow, tired – was the cornerstone on top of which the artist’s entire production was stacked. The examples are many, innumerable even, but one is the mute series of sundials, Tempus Mentis (1970-1971), encountered as soon as you enter. Their long shadows sound out not the hours, but thoughts. In their slow rotation, they caress phrases whose subject is time itself. Next to them hangs L’età media di A (1973), where a woman’s face looks like a tin can crushed by an automobile. Then there are the famous “telegrams” Quattordici proposizioni sul linguaggio portatile (also 1973) – “Fourteen propositions regarding portable language” – of which Agnetti is both sender and recipient. They appear to have been thrown around by the sluggish shade of a giant gnomon. The four large dark windows of Stagioni are on display, as they were in 1980 at the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan, Agnetti’s last show. In some of his work, time is passé: we could call Obsoleto a novel-cum-manifesto written with Scheiwiller. One thousand copies of it were published in 1962 with a cover by Enrico Castellani. In other pieces, time is something yet to come, as he declares in one of his famous maxims that can be seen in his studio at Via Machiavelli 30 in Milan, handwritten with chalk on a black sheet of paper dated 1975. It says, L’artista coglie solo frutti acerbi (“The artist only picks unripe fruit”).

Img.12 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

“Uno, due, tre, quattro,” is the soliloquy of only numbers heard confusedly in the inner routes of the exhibition. The baritone voice of Agnetti sounds like it is coming from the heart. “Sei, sette, otto,” as we track down where its coming from, the numbers more intelligible now. "Uno, due, tre,” the voice is alive and perfectly intonated. “Quattro, cinque, sei,” until the curtain opens and an empty stage appears, surrounded by 60 flags from all different nations. The recorded voice of Agnetti continues to count the “marbles” he hasn’t lost, with slow increases and decreases, “Uno, due, pause, tre, quattro, pause, cinque, sei,” and this goes on for hours. Amleto politico (1973) is one of his greatest, most famous works, in front of which you want to applaud most heartily. Agnetti found its right description by calling it "an operation of static theatre (Agnetti used to study acting with Giorgio Strehler at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan), meaning a play without movement, characters or script. Next to each flag is a plaque with numbers (“Numbers are an elementary aid for intonation,” writes Agnetti. “All the languages in the world can be translated into numbers.”) and a gloss that explains several things, for example, “Hamlet is not a man of doubt. He is an ordinary chap who harangues the crowd by means of monologue. The monologue is a long speech without meaning.” As if alluding to the fact that all that is left over of the harangue is the tone, the emphasis, the person who makes what has been done universal, yes, but also incomprehensible, within everyone’s reach.

In a gross simplification, we could say that Amleto politico carries all the tunes that Agnetti has whistled until then, ones that resonate in future work, too. Here, language, which for him represents the Establishment, is overridden. He replaces letters with numbers, like a few years earlier he had replaced numerals with letters in his well-known Macchina drogata (1968), where a common Divisumma calculator made by Olivetti was so out of whack that by pressing its disengaged keys, not sums or multiplications were produced, but stuttering lumps of syllables. Agnetti’s preoccupation with translation and language are especially evident in his “axioms”. There are about 30 of them on display at this show, and they are among the pieces he worked on with the most gusto (1968-1977). Engraved on sheets of black Bakelite, the texts are made up of words, yes, but also numbers, diagrams, abscissae and ordinates.

In Amleto, the pulpit is empty; the orator is an unkept promise. Agnetti begins to make art by identifying its absence. He heavily underlines its unavailability. Assenza is the title of a pile of notebooks full of annotations never to be reread, compiled between 1962 and 1967, the years of “down with art”, during which we find him in Argentina working as an electronics consultant and in the desert of Qatar. Other examples of this are his “self-portrait” written in the form of a paradox on a felt-covered board, Quando mi vidi non c’ero (1971) (“When you saw me I wasn’t there”); his “self-calls” Yes and No No No (1972), a photo series showing the artist with two telephone receivers, one on each ear, miming subsequent expressions of attentiveness, concern and inconsolability to the point where he disappears, leaving the two receivers to speak to each other alone; and his Libro quasi dimenticato a memoria (1971) (“Book almost forgotten by heart”), a book with a rectangular hole cut out in the middle, emptied of the words like a melon whose seeds and pulp have been scooped out. Here, the ideas are so tightly packed that it is difficult to dissect them in one fell swoop. Ones that made me smile were his “felt-portraits”, boards covered with non-woven felt, striking for their lapidary aesthetics, bulletined with telegraphic enunciation that explore all the humoristic possibilities of conceptual art: Ritratto di eroe: Illuminato aiutato e ucciso secondo le regole del gioco (1969) – “Portrait of a hero: Enlightened, helped and killed according to the rules of the game"; Ritratto di attore: Sempre arrivò preceduto da se stesso (1972) – “Portrait of an actor: He always arrived preceded by himself”; Ritratto di ignoto: Coprendo il volto cercava di assomigliarsi (1972) – “Portrait of an unknown: By covering his face he tried to look like himself”.

There is one piece of work in this exhibition that contains a breath of subtle poetry. It is composed of seven photographs mounted on aluminium, together called Progetto panteistico n. 2 Foglia (1972). As I was observing them, a man came up next to me and stood silently. In unison, we trained our eyes on the first picture, a crossing of untidy lines. We shifted to the second, where the branched lines become more organic by the addition of the veins of a leaf, and where there is written in childish handwriting, “Climbing on a tree”. In the third, a leaf emerges and one word, “Waiting”.

Img.13 View of the exhibition “Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso”, Palazzo Reale di Milano. Photo Franco Russo

Mechanically and in concert, he and I moved our eyes from one photo to the next until all the blades of the leaf were complete, drawn arrayed in a sunburst pattern around the stem. Each one echoes the word “Waiting,” “Waiting,” “Waiting”. The man precedes me in reading the last photo, where the leaf is recognisable, and beckons me to read the last caption: “Waiting for leaves to grow out of your skin”. At first, I don’t understand, but I nod. We introduce ourselves. He offers his hand. As I shake it, I notice some writing tattooed on his forearm. It says Chi entra esce, Chi esce entra (“Those who enter exit, Those who exit enter”). I recognise it: it’s one of Agnetti’s axioms. Then I understand. I also understand everything else about this exhibition that I hadn’t understood until then, and I smile back.

until 24 september 2017
Agnetti. A cent’anni da adesso
Palazzo Reale di Milano
Curator: Marco Meneguzzo

One hundred years from now

At Palazzo Reale in Milan, an impressive display of 100 pieces of work made between 1967 and 1987 renders homage to Vincenzo Agnetti, an early, subtle, sharp-minded exponent of Italian conceptualism.

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