The atmosphere is playful, banking on the allure of color and the background rock-pop to engage audiences of all ages. It mixes Gino Marotta's methacrylate metal, mini giraffes, and modular trees with Spadari's social struggle and Mondino's spray freedom. But the content is serious, very serious, and somewhat complicated because it deals with configuring the Italian dimension of two movements born abroad and that became something else in their Italian version: Pop, the Anglo-American artistic current of the late 1950s, and Beat, which pertains not only to music but also to art and literature of protest against any type of rule, style, and materialism.
Roberto Floreani, curator of the exhibition "Pop Beat Italia 1960-1979," which opened last weekend at the Basilica Palladiana, wanted by the Municipality and produced by Silvana editoriale, has studied them extensively: until June 30, it displays 100 works by 35 artists in addition to documents on Italian beats, of which Alessandro Manca knows everything, consulting on the history of Nat Scammacca's Antigruppo.
A show within the show, in fact, brings back the forgotten Sicilian story of the Manifesto which in 21 points declared war on the Gruppo '63 and its leading exponents - Edoardo Sanguineti and Umberto Eco - but also on the bourgeois left, publishing houses, with the cry of "woe to those who want to be masters."
It all culminates in 1973 with a visit to Ferlinghetti in San Francisco and the proclamation of Scammacca, born in Brooklyn, as the greatest Italian beat poet. On the showcases where the cyclostyles of the time speak, there looms the video of the two nights of Castelporziano, where the festival of dissent poets gathered stars like Evtušenko and Ginsberg, Urban and Piromalli, ending with a sequence of "vaffa" from the audience and a minestrone on stage that collapsed. Total chaos, filmed by Andrea Andermann who specially restored the Rai images from June 1979. In the "U" shaped route in the hall of the Basilica, the white walls reinforce a thesis dear to Floreani, namely that the entire Italian twentieth century owes its energy to the Futurist Movement, citing in this regard the critic Alan Jones, mentor of American Pop Art, who recognized the strength of Italian Pop: "Too bad that it could not be called neo-Futurism at the time."
An emblematic picture of these references is Mario Schifano's Revisited Futurism, 1967, a member of the Roman group in Piazza del Popolo with Franco Angeli and Giosetta Fioroni, Tano Festa, all represented here.
(GdV, sabato 2 marzo)