Art: Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibit at Art Museum: Making viewer part of the art

Trying to understand Michelangelo Pistoletto by visiting an exhibition of his art is like trying to learn to drive by reading a manual. Looking and reading get you only so far.

This is because the 77-year-old Pistoletto operates in a far larger arena than the studio. He's as much an art theorist, performer, educator, and social activist as a painter, which is how he began in the mid-1950s.

The exhibition of work from Pistoletto's early career now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art puts one in touch with the various dimensions of his art practice as effectively as any such show can, yet the experience inevitably feels incomplete.

This is partly because some of his art responds to social and political conditions in his native Italy, particularly during the turbulent 1960s. Some activities, such as his "street theater" performances in the late 1960s with a group called Lo Zoo - "The Zoo" - and his "open studios," can't be adequately represented by ephemera such as posters, catalogs, and photographs.

A group of films in which the artist appears in various roles communicates some of this flavor, yet their improvisational nature makes them difficult to fully comprehend.

The trajectory of Pistoletto's career has carried him from studio painter to something like an impresario of art activism, which he carries out through Cittadellarte, an organization in his hometown of Biella, in northern Italy.

There, in a converted factory, he presides over a series of staff-generated cultural interventions that involve education, the environment, fashion, architecture, economics, and politics.

The Art Museum represents this activity, the fullest expression of Pistoletto's philosophy, with a separate installation in Gallery 176. Two large tables, one shaped like the Caribbean Sea, the other like the Mediterranean, occupy most of the space, where the education department has scheduled a number of related programs.

These programs speak to Pistoletto's belief that, as he says, "art is the center of a responsible transformation of society." He views art as a two-way conversation that should happen within the context of daily life.

The exhibition, which the Art Museum organized with the National Museum of Art of the 21st Century (MAXXI) in Rome, reveals how Pistoletto arrived at this notion of collaboration between artist and audience, and the importance of art interacting with other spheres of human existence.

Part of the message is relatively easy to grasp through the works on display, especially the so-called mirror paintings, the artist's signature objects.

While hardly a household name in the United States, Pistoletto belongs to the generation who effected a radical transformation in 20th-century art by extending its parameters. The period covered by the show, 1956 to 1974, saw the emergence of such movements as pop art, conceptualism, minimalism, and the performances known as happenings.

Pistoletto reacted against minimalism, brushed against conceptualism, and staged his own performances. He also was a key figure in the Italian movement Arte Povera, "humble," antihierarchical art made of pedestrian materials - in his case, rags.

So, while Pistoletto moved toward involving the public in his art, he did so within a broader revolutionary framework in which art gradually become more democratic.

He began in the mid-1950s with conventionally painted self-portraits in which the figures are frontal and slightly compressed, as if they were being squeezed by their dense, glossy backgrounds. After seeing his reflection in one of these backgrounds, Pistoletto was inspired to place figures on thin sheets of highly polished stainless steel.

These "mirror paintings" are really tinted tracings (on tissue-thin paper) of photographs. The mirrored surfaces supply background and context; when you look at one, you become part of the image.

As the artist explains, these works not only extend space, they blend past and present. The figures, pasted to the foreground, are immutably past, but the mirrored context is always the present.

This is obvious if one gives a mirror painting more than a glance, as is the fact that the audience becomes part of the work involuntarily.

It's for this reason, I think, that the figures in these works are rarely frontal, they're seen either in profile or facing away from the viewer. This tends to amplify the impression that viewers are standing in pictorial space.

The figures also are casually deployed - usually standing, but sometimes sitting on the floor. Two nude women dance, while another drinks tea. The attitudes are similar to those in street photography in that nothing looks posed and all actions, where they occur, seem impromptu.

The mirror paintings occupy a major portion of the exhibition, in several chronological and thematic sections. Some address political street protests of the 1960s, while those from the early 1970s are the most disturbing.

Several of these suggest confinement behind bars or fencing, another depicts a hanging noose, and in a third a man points a gun. In the most transgressive, even by today's standards, a woman squats on the floor, as if defecating.

The mirror paintings still deliver a frisson, even if their optical effects no longer startle; it is, after all, an old trick. Yet while Pistoletto was making them, he had begun to move into actual public space with his performances.

Another major body of work - again, still relatively fresh after 45 years - are what he calls "minus objects." These are nominally sculptures made in 1965 and 1966, in part to refute the idea of repetitive, monotonous seriality inherent in minimalism. They also reject the notion of branded commercialism that was beginning to rear its coiffed head in the art market.

The "minus quality" appears to be the absence of the artist's identity, and of stylistic relationships among the pieces, which range from a small house to a giant rural mailbox to a stepped bathtub to a globe made of newspapers inside a wire cage.

Pistoletto's characterization of these objects stands as a vivid example of why one should avoid his excessively turgid and obscurantist written pronouncements (even allowing for infelicitous translation):

"They are not constructions, then, but liberations. I do not consider them more but less, not pluses but minuses."

His contribution to Arte Povera, his rag assemblages, are equally playful and even aesthetically liberating. For one, he nudged a classical statue of Venus into a head-high pile of rags. Several others involve small walls of bricks wrapped in varicolored and patterned rags. The result are lively, improvised mosaics.

To experience the full Pistoletto effect (or as close as this exhibition can create), one should participate in some of the programming in the Cittadellarte gallery. Still, the artist's vision of social harmony through art seems excessively sanguine. Particularly in America, too many people are indifferent to art for his ideas to have meaningful influence.

Yet one admires the altruism and optimism behind the effort, especially for trying to put his audience squarely in the picture.

The Michelangelo Pistoletto exhibition continues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, through Jan. 16. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 8:45 p.m. Fridays. Closed Thanksgiving and Christmas. Admission: $16 general, $14 for visitors 65 and older, and $12 for students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Pay what you wish first Sunday of the month. Information: 215-763-8100, 215-684-7500 or www.philamuseum.org.

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