Art Journal

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Contemporanea: An Exhibition in an Underground

Car Park

Luigia Lonardelli

To cite this article: Luigia Lonardelli (2018) Contemporanea: An Exhibition in an Underground Car
Park, Art Journal, 77:1, 6-29, DOI: 10.1080/00043249.2018.1456247

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2018.1456247

Published online: 08 May 2018.

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Wolf Vostell, Sono le cose che non conoscete
che cambieranno la vostra vita, 1973, published
in l’Unità, November 30, 1973 (artwork © The
Wolf Vostell Estate, published under fair use;
photograph provided by Archivi MAXXI—Fondo
“Archivio Incontri Internazionali d’Arte”)
Luigia Lonardelli
Contemporanea:
An Exhibition in an
Underground Car Park
Unless otherwise noted, translations from the
Italian are by the author.
Contemporanea was an exhibition held in Rome at the end of 1973, a time of crucial
change for both the city and the country. It took place inside a car park and was
coordinated by Achille Bonito Oliva and a group of eleven curators. Still consid-
ered a fundamental point of reference by those who had the opportunity to visit
it, the exhibition was especially pertinent to the generation of artists born in the
1950s. Many of them were still in training at the time of Contemporanea, and the
exhibition offered them a glimpse of an early postmodern sensi-
bility, something they would go on to develop more fully through
artistic research during the 1980s. The exhibition also took place
during a decade in which critical interest was starting to focus
particularly on group shows of various kinds, developments
fundamental to a moment in which the collective became the
founding agent of a participatory narrative.
Through the interpretation of archival documents, this essay
will reconstruct the path that led to the conception and realiza-
tion of Contemporanea, beginning with a consideration of the sociocultural factors
at play in Rome at the time, and how they related to the public’s perceptions of
the choice of a parking garage as an exhibition site. It will then give the reader
the opportunity to “enter” the parking garage, follow the route through the exhibi-
tion, and get a sense of how a visitor might have perceived it. Trends, artistic move-
ments and mediums, and highly diverse fields of research will be analyzed: Pop art,
Conceptual art, children’s workshops, dance and experimental music, cinema, and
records by artists. All of these, totaling more than one hundred artists and dozens of
events, made up the exhibition and will be considered here as part of a varied and
complex path tracing the reality of life in Italy at the time. Philip Glass’s concerts
intersect with Joan Jonas’s performances, Piero Manzoni’s work is placed next to
Carl Andre’s installations, Fluxus documents are not far from large paintings by Roy
Lichtenstein, which you pass on the way to the early performance works of Luigi
Ontani. The versatility of the interests Contemporanea displayed tells of a desire to
describe reality in its entirety, without mediation, and of a time when curatorial
practice, not only in Italy, started getting closer to the definitions of empathy and
elective affinities instead of the constitutions of groups or defined art movements.
Furthermore, by openly declaring a neutral and inclusive attitude toward all artistic
styles, Bonito Oliva effectively called into question the entire Italian art critique
that, in the 1960s, had been taking increasingly ideological positions.
Today, at a time when ostensibly solved problems regarding the functionality
and ontological identity of culture are starting to reappear, this exhibition stands
as a key moment that points to issues that remain unresolved: Can we overcome
the traditional format of the exhibition while keeping its recognizability? Is there
an insurmountable dichotomy between art and entertainment? Can we find a
viable solution by examining the awareness that we gain from the pervasiveness
of our own aesthetic experiences?
“It is the things you do not know that will change your life”
Thus the translation of a full-page spread in l’Unità on November 30, 1973. The
phrase, conceived by Wolf Vostell, was part of the communications campaign
for Contemporanea, which had opened the previous day in the car park of Villa
7 artjournal

1. The association was formally founded in July
1971, after the experience of the Vitalità del
negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/1970 exhibition
(Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, November 30,
1970–February 1971), and had its headquarters in
the Palazzo Taverna.
2. The other exhibitions include the Italian
participation in the 7th Biennale de Paris (Parc
Floral, Bois de Vincennes, Paris, September
24–November 1, 1971); Joseph Beuys, La rivoluzi-
one siamo noi. Freier Demokratischer Sozialismus
(Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, Palazzo Taverna,
Rome, April 21, 1972); Roma interrotta (Trajan’s
Market, Rome, May 13–June 1978); and Identité
italienne depuis 1959 (Musée National d’Art
Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, June
24–September 7, 1981).
3. Contemporanea was included in the collection
of the history of exhibitions by Bernd Klüser and
Katharina Hegewisch, Die Kunst der Ausstellung:
Eine Dokumentation dreißig exemplarischer
Kunstausstellungen dieses Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt
am Main–Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1991). It has been
analyzed on rare occasions: Daniela Lancioni,
“Gli Incontri Internazionali d’Arte,” in Incontri . . .
dalla collezione di Graziella Lonardi Buontempo, ed.
Richard Peduzzi, exh. cat. (Rome: Villa Medici,
2003)—the exhibition took place at Villa Medici,
Rome, September 26–November 2, 2003;
Francesca Pola, “Contemporanea: Una cultura
del dialogo e dell’azione, alle radici dell’oggi,” in A
Roma la nostra era avanguardia, ed. Luca Massimo
Barbero and Pola, exh. cat. (Milan: Electa,
2010)—the exhibition took place at MACRO,
Rome, January 23–April 5, 2010; Laura Cherubini,
“Contemporanea,” Flash Art 287 (October 2010):
56–59; Filipa Ramos, “The Absent Spectator 1:
The Present Was Now,” Manifesta Journal 15 (July
2012): 24–28; Luigia Lonardelli, “Sotterranea,
Contemporanea,” in Anni ’70: Arte a Roma, ed.
Daniela Lancioni, exh. cat. (Rome: Palazzo delle
Esposizioni, 2013)—the exhibition took place at
Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, December 17,
2013–March 2, 2014,.
Borghese in Rome, a location that perfectly reflected the sense of the unex-
pected that the exhibition aimed to convey. There were three entrances to the
exhibition: the pedestrian ramp from Muro Torto, the steps down from Porta
Pinciana, and the lower level of the garage. In each case it was necessary to
go down, underground, and this was something that the people of Rome did
not particularly appear to appreciate during the first few months of the show.
The exhibition was organized by Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, an association
founded by patron of the arts Graziella Lonardi Buontempo in 1970, with the
critical assistance of Bonito Oliva.1 The association is best known for some of the
key exhibitions of the 1970s, including Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/1970
and Roma interrotta. Nonetheless, Contemporanea’s renown outranks all of these.2 It
is a project that would be unthinkable today, if only because of the economic
and organizational resources that would be needed to achieve it. Now legendary,
it has nonetheless suffered from a sort of critical silence, as often happens in
these cases, possibly motivated by a fear of taking on its complex and multi-
faceted nature. Many of the studies that have looked at the exhibition have done
so from the perspective of Rome’s artistic landscape, or looked at it as one of
the events realized by the association that oversaw its production. More recently,
it has been considered from a perspective that analyzes the exhibition’s physical
display, including its grids and specially designed dividing walls, as part of the
curatorial discourse.3
Contemporanea is acknowledged as one of the most important exhibitions of
the twentieth century. Its aim was to compete with the great periodical shows,
such as Harald Szeemann’s Documenta 5 and the Museum of Modern Art’s Italy:
The New Domestic Landscape, both of 1972. These exhibitions were proving to be
important intersections, not only for the art system per se but also for fields of
research such as city planning, theater, and independent music, which had not
yet found a mode of presentation outside the underground scenes. Furthermore,
these areas provided new views of the common assumptions, certainties, and
ideologies of a society that had just emerged from, and was beginning to deal
with, the shocks brought about by the social upheavals of 1968. Contemporanea
foreshadowed a fully fluid, postmodern phase, with projects from the most
diverse areas of creativity. In its meetings, conferences, and debates on political
and social issues, it went well beyond the field of the visual arts to include forms
of purely intellectual expression, such as new approaches to psychiatry (the
basis for the contemporary concept of mental health) or the theories of impris-
onment and incarceration that left-leaning magistrates of the day were reformu-
lating in the direction of greater social inclusion. These are areas of interest
that an exhibition may not seem to have the right to explore, but that work to
broaden its scope. This stance can be interpreted as more than just a genera-
tional attitude to the task at hand; it also signified the opening up of the project
to the fears and preconceptions present in the country at that time. Its unique
location, a new underground parking lot, also more or less consciously reminded
the people of Rome of a series of unspoken ideas and unanswered questions
regarding the ability of the Eternal City to respond to and to withstand the pres-
sures of modernity.
8 SPRING 2018
 1

3 5
4 8
6 7
Vatican
City

2 9

1 Rebibbia, one of the neighbourhoods described by Pier Paolo Pasolini

2 San Giovanni, one of the stops on the Metro’s A line
3 Underpass shot by Federico Fellini in 8½ (1963)
4 Parking lot of Villa Borghese
5 Pincio Hill (Collina del Pincio)
6 Piazza di Spagna
7 Via Veneto
8 Porta Pinciana
9 Termini-EUR train, designed by the Fascist regime in the 30s

Map of Rome indicating referenced locations A New City

(map provided by the author)
Indeed, like the exhibition itself, the history of unauthorized or, worse, thought-
less building in Rome has its roots and its problems underground. The subsoil in
the city is often hollow due to natural phenomena or ancient substructures, and
the episodes concerning it are iconically etched into the minds of Romans. On
the one hand, there are the homes of southern immigrants, such as those high-
lighted in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, that are without foundations and which
slowly sink into the claylike soil of the city’s inner suburbs. On the other hand,
there are the 1960s building sites of the metro system, the progress of which was
constantly interrupted by a lack of organization and by archaeological finds, as
depicted in Federico Fellini’s 1972 film Roma. Then there is the disturbing vision
of traffic jams in the underpass along the banks of the Tiber as in Fellini’s 8½
(1963), a perfect metaphor for the short-sighted view of the city’s administrators.
This particular scene is also a symbol of the impossibility of movement in a city
that, on the contrary, was supposed to become an innovative, futuristic metropo-
lis, where all traffic would be permanently on the move. This list of episodes con-
tinues through to the paradoxical halting of the construction of the new metro
line near San Giovanni, when an underground river was “discovered”—although
the district’s inhabitants knew it was there all along. By a strange twist of fate, it
was the little Termini-EUR train, designed by the Fascist regime and transformed

9 artjournal

4. The company was founded in 1880 and imme-
diately started specializing in large engineering
projects. At the time of the exhibition, it had just
finished one of its most spectacular projects, the
Mont Blanc Tunnel. Condotte d’Acqua was priva-
tized in 1997 as part of the process to dismantle
the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI).
into a metro line in the mid-1950s, that offered the city one of its best examples
of public infrastructure.
The futuristic dream of a new city, which never actually materialized, was
the challenging starting point for the new city plan of 1962–65, which had conse-
quences that were inauspicious to say the least. Contested from the very beginning,
the entire document was filled with an air of optimism, but it nonetheless had little
long-term vision when it came to the management of traffic and parking areas. As
part of this plan, the car park was to complete a dream that, for the benefit of local
shopkeepers, would allow all the people of Rome to reach the city center by car,
through narrow tunnels dug underneath the Pincio hill. When the new metro line
was complete, it would allow them to ride all the way to Piazza di Spagna.
All of this would come with a Piranesi-like tangle of escalators leading to
the Via Veneto, which had already lost the splendor of its postwar social life, but
which in the popular imagination still retained its aura of fashionability. It was
traditionally a place of representation for many Italian companies, with side
streets full of corporate headquarters. The parking garage heralded the next step
toward the creation of an articifial historical center, which was to come about
definitively only in the following decade, but that was beginning during these
years: not a place to live in, but to go to, and preferably in the most comfortable
way possible. Thus at first sight the car park had reason to be made on a large
scale—but even the most optimistic forecasts could hardly have imagined it
would be filled with 2,288 cars, its full capacity.
Owned by the state and under the management of the City of Rome, this
underground area was leased to the water company Società Italiana per Condotte
d’Acqua, one of Italy’s longest-lived companies, for thirty years.4 The project was
approved under the 1960s city-planning scheme, and construction started in
1968, disrupting the park area above that opens toward the Porta Pinciana.
During the four years of construction, when it was often a featured in specialist
magazines, a fundamental and highly controversial transfer of the company’s
ownership occurred. The largest shareholder of Condotte d’Acqua was IOR, the
Vatican Bank, which, with the mediation of Michele Sindona, sold the company
to Italstat, the property investment arm of the Istituto per la Ricostruzione
Industriale. The IRI was a state-controlled company that, at a time when the
momentum of the postwar economic miracle was ending, was seriously brought
into question by the public, to a great extent thanks to its own poor investments.
During this transfer, Loris Corbi became the new managing director of IRI. It
later turned out that Corbi was a member of the P2, a Masonic lodge the authori-
ties investigated in the early 1980s for an allegedly subversive plan to organize a
coup during the 1970s. The association between the car park and the exhibition
was thus not without rather disturbing overtones. This was especially true for the
left-wing newspapers, which saw in it a fundamentally authoritarian continuity
between two powers, powers not yet sated by the old fascism and the new corpo-
ratism, and accused of crypto-Fascism, a term that was particularly overused at
the time with respect to the Incontri Internazionali d’Arte. For the political Left,
particularly in Rome, which was accustomed to dealing with the central govern-
ment’s dynamics, it was common during those years to cry conspiracy every
time a compromising situation involving companies or institutions occurred. The
exhibition was thus a breeding ground for controversy.
10 SPRING 2018
Entrance to Contemporanea, 1973 (pho-
tograph © Claudio Abate, provided by the
photographer)
5. See Sandro Sergi, “Un teatro sotterraneo,”
La Nazione, November 29, 1973, 9; Costanzo
Costantini, “I sotterranei dell’anima,” Il
Messaggero, November 30, 1973. 3; Gaia Servadio,
“Romans Flock to Underground Art,” The Times
of London, December 24, 1973, 7; Maurizio
Calvesi, “Le nuove catacombe,” Corriere della
Sera, January 15, 1974, 3; Gregory Battcock,
“Contemporanaea e sotterranea pinacoteca
drive-in,” Domus, February 1974, 48–52; Renzo
Tian, “Bob Wilson nella catacomb,” Il Messaggero,
March 3, 1974, 8; Michel Colin-Lacoste, “Le garage
enchanté de ‘Contemporanea,’” Le Monde, March
21, 1974, 17.
To complicate matters further, the design of the parking garage was assigned
to Luigi Moretti; in fact, it turned out to be the architect’s last project, as he died
in 1973. Moretti decided to lavish all his ideas of modernity on the project: an
underground space interspersed with futuristic flared pillars, flattened domes,
and coffered ceilings, all made of bare concrete. The complex reputation of
Moretti, whose career was associated with important commissions for Fascist
infrastructure projects and whose name had recently been linked to the Watergate
scandal (he designed the apartment complex in 1960–65), meant that the press
took a particular interest in his appointment. The city planning situation in Rome
was always beset by the dark overtones of scandals, conspiracies, and corruption,
and every new building always ran the risk of being perceived as the result of
devious agreements to divide the city. However, it is still strange that the exhibi-
tion was subject to exactly the same prejudice. The exhibition seemed to collect
criticisms and doubts more pertinent to the state of the city than to the exhibi-
tion itself, taking on fears from across the country that to be “contemporary”
naturally leads to being a guilty party.
In Rome, a descent underground inevitably brings to mind the catacombs
and a social life that runs in parallel with the world of the dead—a dark side that
nonetheless retains its vitality, since it takes its meals and holds its meetings in
the world of the living. And it was this subterranean, catacomblike nature of the
event that was emphasized in many reviews.5 “Making your way into the great
11 artjournal

6. John Hart, “Avant-garde Art at Home in
Subterranean Parking Lot,” Daily American, January
10, 1974.
7. “The Parking Lot as Art Form,” Daily American,
December 3, 1973.
8. Paul Hofmann, “Rome: Avant-Garde Parks in
Garage,” New York Times, February 19, 1974, 26.
9. Calvesi, 3.
10. Paolo Giraldi, “Cattedrale sotterranea o bun-
ker?” Il tempo illustrato, December 16, 1973, 41.
11. Sergi, 9.
12. Budget, Archivio Incontri Internazionali d’Arte
(hereafter “AIIA”). Correspondence concern-
ing the organization of the exhibition is now in
the association’s archives at the MAXXI (Museo
nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo), Rome.
13. Achille Bonito Oliva, conversation with the
author, Rome, June 10, 2013.
14. See Romy Golan, “Vitalità del negativo/
Negativo della vitalità,” October 150 (January
2015): 113–32.
international rally of avant-garde art sprawled over four acres of Rome’s new sub-
terranean parking lot . . . is like entering the Valley of Kings and opening King
Tut’s Tomb.”6 These were the words of the Daily American, which in December had
entitled its first review “The Parking Lot as Art Form.”7 The New York Times, on the
other hand, called it a “cavernous, neon-lighted affair.”8 The reactions of Italian
newspapers wavered between curiosity and perplexity, an example being the arti-
cle entitled “The New Catacombs” by the critic Maurizio Calvesi in Il Corriere della
Sera: “In the presence of a coincidental, indeterminate space, which is the very
opposite of a museological design, what is surprising is that people feel free, as
though going for a walk.”9 Paolo Giraldi, on the other hand, wrote that “the aim
is to ensure that tomorrow, and who knows in how many years’ time, no one will
examine this concrete monster embedded in the ground and wonder: whatever
were these catacombs for?”10 In La Nazione, Sandro Sergi described it as “a low
black crypt” in an article entitled “An Underground Theater.”11
How to Make an Exhibition
This was the complicated sociopolitical context in which the exhibition came
about. In order to consider it in all its breadth, it may be useful first to exam-
ine the technical premises that were necessary and precise prerequisites for
all the work that followed; the first instructions for setting up the display and
the requests that came from Incontri, summed up in the budget, convey the
atmosphere that surrounds all heroic and visionary enterprises. In an extraordi-
nary mix of pragmatism, confusion, and technicalities that curiously recall the
“instructive” trends of the latest research by the American Minimalists of the
time, this is what it takes to create a Contemporanea:
Rusty scrap metal; colored neon tubes on wooden stands, a circular wooden
structure diameter 12 meters, height 50 cm; eight wooden cubes 120 x
120 x 120 cm; real tree with mirrors; four stones, 2 cubic meters each; piles
of earth; pieces of wood and stone; rotating wooden platform; butterflies;
one roll of corrugated cardboard, diameter 100 cm, height 230 cm; used
newspapers; small neon numbers; two canvas screens; 100 chairs in wood
and metal; panels for posters, about 1 x 1 meters; metal shelving. Electrical
system: all mobile systems hired, only fixed ones to be made, so as to be
more independent.12
While the space available (ten thousand square meters) was essential for such an
extraordinary and vast undertaking, it is also true that the curator, Bonito Oliva,
had had his “extended” idea, an idea that went far beyond the normal boundar-
ies of the field of visual arts, for at least for a couple of years, ever since he first
started working with Lonardi on Incontri’s cultural program, which included
exhibitions, conferences, and shows.13 The idea of mapping had already come
out in Vitalità del negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/1970, and that of crossing boundaries
was a theme of the Biennale in Paris, both of which had been organized by the
association.14 Throughout 1972, and with a final spurt early in the following year,
the exhibition acquired a precise organizational structure. It relied on a group
of independent curators, each of whom worked on a particular section and, as
the accompanying press release stated, was “responsible for the selections on a
12 SPRING 2018

15. Press release for Contemporanea, October 30,
1973, AIIA. Each curator was assisted by a section
coordinator; Gian Enzo Sperone was invited for
the “Art” section, but he later resigned. Letter
from Sperone to Graziella Lonardi, August 6 1973,
AIIA.
16. Achille Bonito Oliva, conversation with the
author, Rome, June 10, 2013.
17. Achille Bonito Oliva, Il territorio magico:
Comportamenti alternativi dell’arte (1971), new edi-
tion (Florence: Le Lettere, 2009), 58.
18. Massimo Piersanti, conversation with the
author, Rome, June 14, 2013.
critical-historical level.”15 Their activities were subject to the general coordination
of Bonito Oliva, who also curated the “Art” section.
The car park was completed in 1972, but the forecast levels of use were
overly optimistic and consequently nowhere near achieved; this in turn marked
the beginning of what came to be one of the most influential shows in the his-
tory of exhibitions in Italy. Graziella Lonardi Buontempo knew Loris Corbi, the
chairman of the company, well and in 1972 asked him to lend her the first level of
the garage, which was not yet open, for an exhibition. The opening of the exhibi-
tion was postponed a number of times, as the project became more and more
complex. Eventually, it morphed into an event embracing a vast range of forms of
artistic expression: architecture, visual art, cinema, dance, design, artists’ books
and records, photography, alternative information, music, performance, visual
poetry, theater, and urban planning.
Contemporanea was originally called Mostra Internazionale dell’arte dell’avanguardia (1963–
1973), but that summer it acquired an interim title, Contemporanea (1973–1955), with
the timespan extended and reversed. The choice to place the earlier date last was
intended to emphasize the fact that it was a “retrospective account,” which would
retrace the motivations, origins, and connections between the various forms of
expression.16 (The dates were later dropped from the title.) It would also be inap-
propriate to call it an “exhibition” (mostra) because it was so extended, but also
because of its experiential qualities: you did not go to Contemporanea to see things,
but rather because things happened there. There was therefore a critical shift, with a
rapid succession of increasingly advanced exhibition concepts which, while they
had certainly already been tried out in initial critical and theoretical forms, found in
the exhibition fundamental verification through an extensive experience of art and
the coexistence of different artistic languages. The parking lot simulated a descent
into hell—into the magical territory already theorized by Bonito Oliva the previous
year, “where all the confluences of space and time are thrown wide open, and the
process of doing forms a connection with the historical present.”17 Here projects
could be conveyed only in their phenomenological continuity, and in their immer-
sion in a space-time continuum. In this sense, Vostell’s words were prophetic: going
down below Villa Borghese meant signing an initiation pact and accepting the less
evident side of things, looking at the city from a different point of view and aban-
doning all previous knowledge. Before Christo wrapped the Aurelian Walls, a nearby
contemporaneous project that took place just a few months after the opening,
there was nothing to indicate the entrance to the car park other than some posters,
which reproduced the image of the catalogue cover, freed from the vertical cut
inserted by the Centro Di: a photograph of Massimo Piersanti facing the camera
and of the entrance to the garage, empty and eerie in its semantic absence, where
only the title of the exhibition stood out.18 The choice of title conveys and highlights
the quality of the experience, a mysterious and almost esoteric way of relating to
the exhibition, rather ambivalent, on the borderline between above and below, vis-
ible and invisible, permanent and temporary: grammatically, the word contemporanea
is always poised between its adjectival quality—making us wonder what it refers to,
with the feminine declension inviting us to pose the question—and its transforma-
tion into an independent noun, which indicates the show itself. This confusion
appears in the private correspondence and in the testimony of those who continue
to call it “La Contemporanea,” as though it were an essence of its own. It is variously
13 artjournal
Installation view, Contemporanea, 1973 (pho-
tograph by Massimo Piersanti, provided by Archivi
MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio Incontri Internazionali
d’Arte”)
19. Amore mio, curated by Achille Bonito Oliva,
Palazzo Ricci, Montepulciano, June 30–September
30, 1970. On the occasion of this exhibition came
the encounter between Bonito Oliva and Lonardi
that was to lead to the organization of Vitalità del
negativo nell’arte italiana 1960/1970.
20. The nine sections were “Architettura
e design,” “Arte,” “Cinema,” “Fotografia,”
“Informazione alternativa,” “Libri e dischi
d’artista,” “Musica e danza,” “Poesia visiva e
concreta,” and “Teatro.”
described as a review, an exhibition, or a festival, with little clarification of its
essential nature.
The amazing organizational effort that led to its opening was also partly
motivated by this hybrid quality and by the difficulty of working in such a huge,
completely free space with just concrete pillars and four large light wells. The
architect Piero Sartogo, who had already worked with Bonito Oliva on Amore mio
and then on Vitalità del negativo, saw to its overall image, which was intended to
attribute authorship to the installation design.19 It thus did away with the idea
that the work was simply and solely that of the architecture and created an inde-
pendent identity aimed at forming a visual image of the exhibition, making it a
work in its own right. In the case of the car park this operation introduced a
pressing need: to arrange an open space with nine distinct sections, the differ-
ences between which could be maintained without a loss of visual continuity.20
Even today, the solution they devised is the aspect of the exhibition that
remains strongly in the memory of many: a series of wire mesh grids, like theater
wings, fastened by hooks to the floor and the ceiling, emphasized the central
walkway from which the various sections branched off in an ascending modular
progression. Only the space for music and dance and that for theater and cinema
were indoors, accessible from the entrance and separated from the rest of the
14 SPRING 2018
Exhibition plan of Contemporanea, 1973
(drawing provided by Archivi MAXXI—Fondo
“Archivio Incontri Internazionali d’Arte”)
21. Although the largest area was devoted to the
visual arts, Bonito Oliva takes credit for recogniz-
ing the necessity to emphasize the equal status
of all the sections, which was achieved through
a difficult reduction in the number of exhibited
works in August 1973.
22. Piero Sartogo conversation with the author,
Rome, June 24, 2013.
exhibition. The grid extended to the sides at the beginning of each section, while
blue neon lighting, which ran along the central path, underscored the linear con-
tinuity of the passageway. The effect of a descent underground was thus intensi-
fied by a setting—made particularly disturbing by the very low ceiling—that led
the eye to seek rather than to find, always coming back to the central corridor.
The pathway was designated as “Image” on the map that was distributed with the
packet of visitor information. Unless visitors decided to stop in the first event
spaces, where film screenings, performances, and concerts took place each day,
they would enter the long corridor that eventually led to the entrance to the
visual arts section. As though on a sort of initiatory journey, one was encouraged
to pass through the other sections as if they were preludes, necessities, or prem-
ises for other forms of artistic expression. Even though the map gave the impres-
sion that visual art was a natural consequence and culmination of the rest, a kind
of volcanic explosion at the end of the journey, it should be borne in mind that
there was no form of barrier between one section and the next, so that from
each section one could see the works of art in the adjacent spaces.21 The fact that
the grids intersected with each other meant that visitors had to make a conscious
effort to establish their own routes—which were never linear—visualizing the
corresponding interweaving of interpretations among the various sections.22
15 artjournal
“Alternative Information” section, instal-
lation view, Contemporanea, 1973 (provided
by Archivi MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio Incontri
Internazionali d’Arte”)
23. The study day was held on March 1, 1974. Over
the months, the exhibition, and the “Alternative
Information” section in particular, was the subject
of numerous reports to the police headquarters,
eventually leading to the intervention of Franco
Maria Malfatti, the Minister of Education, who
ordered it to be closed down. Bruno Corà con-
versation with the author (December 10, 2011).
Reconstructing the events that took place in this
area is particularly complex, as the main sources
are short articles published in the newspapers.
Contemporanea had no precise closing date. The
works began to be returned at the beginning of
April, but the exhibition did not actually close until
May; the first notice given by Condotte d’Acqua
to leave the space was dated March 18, 1974, AIIA.
24. Invitation letter from Graziella Lonardi to
the members of the international committee,
July 1973, AIIA. The members were Giulio Carlo
Argan, Rudolf Arnheim, Peter Brook, Palma
Bucarelli, John Cage, Maurizio Calvesi, Merce
Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Jerzy Grotowski,
Renato Guttuso, Miklós Jancsó, Jean Claude
Lemagny, Nathan Lyons, Bruno Molajoli, Alberto
Moravia, Man Ray, and Hans Richter.
What You Saw at Contemporanea
Opening the way, slightly to the side before the entrance to the central artery,
was the section titled “Alternative Information.” Here a reading room provided
information about the leading personalities and the world of the associations
involved in the social protests of those years. This section and the related docu-
mentation at the end of the catalogue convey important sources of information
about that period: everyone was involved in the project, from Soccorso Rosso to
the housing committees in the Magliana, through to Magistratura Democratica,
Franco Basaglia’s psychiatry group, and the new ecology movements. Meetings
and debates took place in this area, and the program included a day devoted to
the study of different types of fascism in the Mediterranean; however, this latter
event was cancelled by Condotte d’Acqua, which was concerned about the dam-
age it might do to its image.23 In the context of Italy, the idea that the reality of
the world, with all its political and social aspects, had the right to enter into indi-
vidual forms of expression certainly resulted from the social movements of the
late 1960s; but it was at Contemporanea that the opportunity arose to bring together
in one exhibition space the artifacts that expressed this commitment. As Lonardi
wrote in July 1973, “For the first time in Italy and in Europe, unpublished works,
plays, films, dance, contemporary music concerts, radical architectural and urban
projects, audiovisual documentation, and many other expressions of international
cultural research will be gathered together in one place for a number of months.
They will give the exhibition a critical, educational, alternative nature, as found
in the famous Venice Biennale and Documenta in Kassel, but with a difference,
however, in the cultural organization, which is that of a not-for-profit association
with educational objectives.”24 In this sense, each decision should be viewed as a
precise critical and strategic intention. One example was to cater to all types of
16 SPRING 2018

25. “A review of the Alternative Information sec-
tion of Contemporanea opened yesterday at the
Magliana, documenting the struggle for housing,
prison conditions, Fascist attacks from ’69 to
the present day, and the liberation struggles of
the peoples of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.”
L’Unità, February 3, 1974, 11.
26. The selection of books for the store was
made by Centro Di of Florence, which had
previously worked with Incontri on the catalogue
for Vitalità del negativo, and which also published
the catalogue for the exhibition: Contemporanea:
Roma, Parcheggio di Villa Borghese, 11.1973–2.1974,
ed. Bruno Mantura, exh. cat. in Italian and English
(Florence: Centro Di, 1973).
27. Combattimento per un’immagine: Fotografi e
pittori, curated by Luigi Carluccio and Daniela
Palazzoli, Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna, Turin,
March–April 1973..
28. Palazzoli pointed out that Mulas wanted to
show only the series Verifiche. “A project by
Daniela Palazzoli for the Photography section of
Contemporanea,” September 29 1973, AIIA.
29. The section included vending machines for the
distribution of slides.
30. In addition to institutional support—from the
Presidency of the Republic, the Prime Minister’s
office, the Ministry of Education, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs, and the Ministry of Tourism
and Entertainment—Lonardi also called for
financial support from a number of companies,
and banks in particular: Banca Commerciale
Italiana, October 12, 1973; Banca d’Italia, April 11,
1973; Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura, October
16, 1973; Banca Nazionale del Lavoro, April 11,
1973; Banco Ambrosiano, December 13, 1973;
Banco di Napoli, October 30, 1973; Banco di
Roma, March 14, 1973; Banco di Santo Spirito,
October 12, 1973; Banco di Sardegna, October
16, 1973; Banco di Sicilia, April 11, 1973; Cassa di
Risparmio di Roma, April 11, 1973; Confindustria,
April 11, 1973; Efim, April 11, 1973; ENI, April 11,
1973; Esso, April 11, 1973; Finanziaria Finsider,
April 11, 1973; Ernesto Breda, January 25, 1974;
Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale (IRI),
April 11, 1973; Istituto Accademico Italiano, April
11, 1973; Istituto Bancario San Paolo, October 12,
1973; Montedison, May 8, 1973; Raffinerie Sarde,
November 7, 1973; and SIR April 11, 1973. Letters
from Graziella Lonardi to the companies, AIIA.
31. Letter from Mario Diacono to Bruno Corà,
May 13, 1974, AIIA.
visitors in the “Alternative Information” section, from elementary schools, for
whom there was a program of special events, to the tenant movement in Rome.
At times, this section even became a traveling event: one cell of Contemporanea jour-
neyed to the suburban district of Magliana, an area of high social risk.25 The exhi-
bition project had become a verified theory; a gathering of intellectuals, artists,
curators, and, more generally, thinkers converged temporarily, took “contempora-
neity” as their only assumption, and created a model that could extend beyond its
original venue.
After entering through the information section, visitors returned to the cor-
ridor, where, passing between the wings, they could peek inside the various sec-
tions and decide whether to go in, temporarily abandoning the central line. The
first space on the right, just opposite the bookshop, was devoted to photography.26
This placement expressed another documentary instinct, guiding visitors’ first
steps along the way and sometimes introducing a comment, looking at things
starting from the end, from their consequences rather than through an initial
intuition. The placement, made by curator Daniela Palazzoli, who had just closed
the controversial exhibition Combattimento per un’immagine, only reaffirmed the nec-
essary autonomy of photography as a visual language, with a view to achieving its
definitive emancipation.27 As we see it today, the decision to have a separate sec-
tion, detached from the visual arts, might appear debatable, but at the time it was
probably still necessary to emphasize the specific nature of the language of pho-
tography. Palazzoli chose to examine the state of the new American photography
(Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Ralph Gibson, and Kenneth
Josephson). With them was the work of just one Italian, Ugo Mulas, who had just
died.28 His Verifiche were shown, works that illustrate the search for control over
the linguistic status of the medium, and of its technique and history. The section
devoted to photography as a form of mass consumption was completed by works
by Mario Cresci and by the Phantomatic group of Milan.29
The idea of having a bookshop in the exhibition space is particularly inter-
esting because it accentuates the idea of the exhibition as a place where people
go to spend time. Visitors were intercepted by the rest area, another “neutral”
space at the end of the corridor, and only by passing through this space were they
able to access the “Art” section. This chronological aspect of the exhibition was
very much intentional, aimed at emphasizing the nature of the place: you went
to Contemporanea to stay in the car park. There was a premonition, which Incontri
had felt several times, that it was necessary to go beyond a traditional exhibition
format, overcoming the contrast between museums and galleries and providing
something new, even at the cost of using corporate funding.30 In the prevailing
ideology of the time, this was an original sin from which the association would
find it hard to redeem itself in the eyes of the Roman Left.
The request by Bonito Oliva to increase the numbers of artists in the next
section, “Visual and Concrete Poetry,” reflected the aforementioned intention to
broaden the scope of the event. Mario Diacono, the section’s curator, had just
returned to the United States and thus could only follow through from afar, by
providing a list of names. He would have preferred to call it “Visual Poetry” but,
probably in order to include more Florentine works, such as those of Lamberto
Pignotti and Eugenio Miccini, Incontri changed its name.31 As a result, the section
was highly diversified and introduced an interaction between different experiences,
17 artjournal

32. Entry from the “Architecture and Design”
section, AIIA.
33. The magazine published a five-page report on
the Contemporanea exhibition, “Contemporanea,”
Casabella 386 (February 1974): 2–6.
34. Contemporanea had the organizational support
of a number of gallery owners, and especially of
Leo Castelli, Ileana Sonnabend, John Weber, and
Gian Enzo Sperone. Among the most conten-
tious articles about them were Franco Cordelli,
“Una rassegna di tutte le arti nel parcheggio di
Villa Borghese,” Paese Sera, November 29, 1973,
14; Federica Di Castro, “È soltanto una mostra
sbagliata,” L’Astrolabio, December 1973, 40–41;
Lea Vergine, “A chi serve ‘Contemporanea,’” Il
Manifesto, December 13, 1973, 3; “Amerikana,”
NAC 1 (January 1974): 10–12; “Contemporanea:
cosa c’è dietro il deficit di 270 milioni?,” Lo
Spettatore, January 31, 1974, 1–2; Nello Ponente,
“Udite, o rustici!,” Paese Sera, February 12, 1974,
3. In Flash Art, Giancarlo Politi interviewed Bonito
Oliva and accused him of giving too much space
to American artists; Politi, “Contemporanea:
Intervista con Achille Bonito Oliva,” Flash Art
46–47 (June 1974): 6–7.
35. For a detailed list of works, see Lonardelli,
92–95.
36. Achille Bonito Oliva, “Contemporanea
(arte 1973–1955),” in Contemporanea, 28. The
“Synthetic” area was divided into further
subsections: “Art as Behavior,” “Fluxus,”
“Reconnaissance of Urban and Object-based
Civilization.”
37. The Sonnabend and Castelli galleries were
often cited.
38. Vergine, 3; “Amerikana,” 10–12. Almost all
the initial articles carried an ANSA news item by
Antonello Trombadori in which he spoke of the
Pop works as remainders from the United States.
which had in common an intensification of writing but which started out from
very diverse premises.
Just opposite was the area devoted to architecture and design, where
Alessandro Mendini decided not to mount an exhibition of materials, but rather
to show slides in the dim light, creating a map of radical architecture and design
around the world from 1960 to 1973.32 With about three hundred images of vari-
ous types shown in sequence (drawings, works, objects, magazines, exhibitions,
and critical essays), and in view of the intense auteurship of the composition, the
display could be considered as a work of art by Mendini himself. In addition to
architectural projects, anonymous works, works by critics, and literary excerpts,
there were images of crafts, artifacts, and works by visual artists. The research
showed by Mendini was highly collaborative, brought about by close relationships
with all those involved. This effort was clear to see in the catalogue, in which he
devoted the space he had to the works of each architect. This section had great
support from a leading magazine, Casabella, a fundamental vehicle for discussing
and promoting design in Italy; Mendini was its director at the time.33
The “Architecture and Design” section was in one of the larger spaces and
was opposite not only “Visual and Concrete Poetry,” but also the section “Artists’
Books and Records.” The selection, organized by Yvon Lambert with the critical
contribution of Michael Claura, was particularly important for the documentation
of genres. The decision to have a gallery owner on the curatorial committee, as
was the case with Fabio Sargentini for “Music and Dance,” was another way in
which Bonito Oliva and Lonardi broke with the past, and was one of the aspects
most criticized by the press.34
After a “rest area,” the visitor came to the “Art” section. Bonito Oliva
divided the works of the one hundred artists taking part into three subsections,
“Analytical,” “Procedural,” and “Synthetic,” plus an additional “Open Area.” Works
in the “Analytical” area referred only to themselves and had no external refer-
ences.35 In “Procedural” were those that focused on the process of their creation;
while the “Synthetic” area featured art with a “global consciousness,” with refer-
ences outside the work itself.36 Looking at the works and the artists, it is clear that
their inclusion in one group rather than another was often a bit artificial, but it
was justified by the desire to avoid a diachronic or synchronic vision. This partly
meant accepting the contradictions in the artistic expressions of the previous
twenty years, which had shifted, perhaps all too rapidly, from Neo-Dada to Land
art. The American presence was considerable, and indeed the attacks in the press
concentrated on the involvement of these “imperialist” galleries.37 This has been an
ever-present controversy in Italian journalism since the Venice Biennale of 1964. In
the 1970s these attacks, initially more focused on a purely artistic debate over the
impossibility for the European market to compete with the American system, later
became more pointedly ideological, identifying a clear message of cultural colo-
nialism in American politics. Looking through just some of the titles—“Who
Needs Contemporanea?”, “Amerikana?”38—as well as taking into consideration
the power of private funding, we can also see allegations of a supposed cultural
subordination, particularly in the presence of Pop, which was considered to be
lacking in commitment. At the time of the exhibition, Pop-style works essentially
corresponded to kowtowing to a market that was “easy” and controlled by the
United States, which further exacerbated the tone of the discussion.
18 SPRING 2018

39. See in particular the letter from Giuseppe
Panza di Biumo to Achille Bonito Oliva, October
4, 1973; letter from Gian Enzo Sperone to
Graziella Lonardi, August 6, 1973; and letter from
Gian Tomaso Liverani to Achille Bonito Oliva and
Graziella Lonardi, December 18, 1973, in which
he complains that the grids do not support the
weight of Francesco Lo Savio’s works; all in AIIA.
40. The curator himself played on the ambiguity
between the concept of “underground” and the
“subterranean” nature of the show: “Considering
the nature of the venue, this really can be consid-
ered as the first underground exhibition.” Press
release signed by Achille Bonito Oliva, no date,
AIIA.
41. Report on the performance of the communi-
cation by STP, AIIA. STP managed all communica-
tions for the exhibition.
42. “in the next few days a belgrade actress,
marina abramović, will be in rome, she is an
interesting artist, just recently she showed disks in
the exhibition in the galleria lamber, Milan. . . . she
is interested for the free space of the contempo-
ranea. . . . I would be happy if you do it the show
for a week.” Letter from Biljana Tomić and Ješa
De Negri to Achille Bonito Oliva, January 27, 1974,
AIIA. Abramović took part in “Open Area” with
her performance Rhythm 10; Achille Bonito Oliva,
conversation with the author, July 8, 2013. Tomić
had already worked with Bonito Oliva on Pèrsona,
an Italian participation organized by Incontri, as
part of Bitef, the festival of experimental theatre
in Belgrade (September 1971).
43. Achille Bonito Oliva, Contemporanea (arte
1973–1955), 30.
The decision to work along such broad lines of interpretation, maintaining
the “Open Area” display, however, was to be one of the main reasons for the
quarrel with some lenders and galleries who demanded a more “private” space.39
The risk, which in the end was averted by a series of physical partitions, was that
an unspecified whole would be created, and indeed the underground setting of
Contemporanea simply accentuated a feeling of perceptual disorder.40 The preexistent
works were those that suffered most, but the presence of living artists in the
show often averted this danger, as many of them devised new ways of displaying
existing works or created new ones. The installation of the “Open” section, which
was supervised by Maurizio Di Puolo, became a two-week-long gathering of
artists. Their stay for this relatively long period of time, as planned by Incontri
despite the financial burden it placed on an already shaky budget, made it pos-
sible to show extraordinary works such as those by Vito Acconci, Carl Andre,
Daniel Buren, Jan Dibbets, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Mario Merz, Robert Morris,
Bruce Nauman, George Segal, Richard Serra, and Lawrence Weiner. Robert
Rauschenberg made his works by picking up and assembling old objects around
the city, and the same was true of the works by Vostell, whose performance
opened the exhibition. The speed with which the new works were created led
to unexpected encounters, as when works by Joseph Beuys, LeWitt, Merz, and
Rauschenberg all coexisted in the same space. It was precisely this lack of atten-
tion to categories such as “schools”—an approach deliberately sought by the
curator in order to avoid falling into particular trends and to instead seek to pro-
pose a creative community—that aroused the suspicions of the most orthodox
critics; it was this same reason—the total disregard for the dictates of the crit-
ics—that made the exhibition so unprejudiced in its visual results, and that ulti-
mately resulted in fifteen thousand visitors on opening day. In all, a hundred
thousand visitors visited Contemporeana, and two hundred schools with five thou-
sand students and teachers were also involved.41 Tickets to the exhibition cost just
600 lire (300 lire for students and children). It was also possible to pay 1,000 lire
for a season ticket for the cinema and theater events. Tickets were sold in book-
shops throughout Rome, thus helping convey the festival aspect of the exhibition.
It was the “Open Area” that brought the biggest surprises at Contemporanea, but
its self-managed nature means it is not possible to reconstruct all that happened
in the space—it was basically a free stage for anyone who showed up. The Aperto
80 exhibition at the Magazzini del Sale at the Zattere during the Venice Biennale
of 1980, curated by Bonito Oliva and Szeemann, appears to have taken direct
inspiration from the concept first developed for Contemporanea. It was in this area
that Luigi Ontani showed his Tarzan, and it also inspired Biljana Tomić to write to
Bonito Oliva to recommend a young artist from Belgrade, who turned out to be
Marina Abramović.42 Here again the word “information” returned: as the curator
put it, the space was to accommodate “information cycles,” and on the map the
area appears as a perfect parallel conclusion to the “Alternative Information” sec-
tion.43 The information cycles were a series of temporary events by artists and, in
general, a space for unplanned experimentation, giving the curator an opportu-
nity to decide during the exhibition which works to give space to, in order to
inform the public (hence the name of the cycles) about less known or less semi-
nal events. In particular, the area was the backdrop for a series of interventions
in the relationship between art and ideology, on the experimental art of Latin
19 artjournal
Donald Judd, Untitled, 1973, installation
view, Contemporanea, 1973 (artwork © 2018 Judd
Foundation, published under fair use; photo-
graph by Massimo Piersanti, provided by Archivi
MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio Incontri Internazionali
d’Arte”)
Carl Andre, Diamond Sutra, 1973, installa-
tion view, Contemporanea, 1973 (artwork © Carl
Andre, published under fair use; photograph by
Massimo Piersanti, provided by Archivi MAXXI—
Fondo “Archivio Incontri Internazionali d’Arte”)
George Segal, Girl on a Swing, 1972, and
in the background, George Segal, American
Scene, 1973, installation view, Contemporanea,
1973 (artwork © George and Helen Segal
Foundation, published under fair use; photo-
graph by Massimo Piersanti, provided by Archivi
MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio Incontri Internazionali
d’Arte”)
American countries, and for the projection of film-performances that included
much material from the archive of Luciano Giaccari. This last part was particu-
larly sizeable, and indeed it was originally intended to be an independent section.
The area also featured two projects devoted to self-made works, where it was
possible to record and show videotapes independently, and an entire space was
left for the artists to manage on their own. It was also in this section that schools
could intervene with their own workshops, in line with recent trends in educa-
tional reform.
Who Was in Contemporanea?
While the gallery sections of Contemporanea were based on works from major
European museums, an anarchic form of vitality also prevailed: the contra-
dictions that permeated the car park demonstrate the combination of revo-
lutionary energies and authoritarian lobbying that affected Italy in late 1973.
The country was in fact standing between modernization, which took place
in the two decades following the war and which required a fast reconsidera-
tion of the welfare state, just acquired if not desired, and a more overtly leftist
political alternative, strongly opposed by the Catholic establishment. The most
forthcoming solution seemed to be one of mediation, which opened a politi-
cal season of reforms and the “historic compromise” between the Communist
Party and the Christian Democrats. While art specialists were familiar with
21 artjournal
Artists list for the “Open Area” section of
Contemporanea, 1973 (photograph provided
by Archivi MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio Incontri
Internazionali d’Arte”)
44. Letter from Graziella Lonardi to Fabio
Sargentini, n.d., AIIA. In the second cycle of
Danza Volo Musica Dinamite, in June 1972, L’Attico
presented performances by Trisha Brown, Laura
Dean, Philip Glass, Simone Forti, Joan Jonas,
Charlemagne Palestine, Yvonne Rainer, and Steve
Reich. See the timeline by Roberto Lambarelli in
L’Attico 1957–1987: Trent’anni di pittura, scultura,
musica, danza, performance, video, ed. Lambarelli,
Lucia Masina, Fabio Sargentini, exh. cat. (Milan:
Mondadori, 1987), updated and republished in
L’Attico di Fabio Sargentini 1966–1978, ed. Luca
Massimo Barbero, Francesca Pola, exh. cat. (Milan:
Electa, 2010).
the most recent and experimental developments, such as Arte Povera, and had
seen many of the works on display, the combination of these works with per-
formances and cinema was perceived by all as something quite extraordinary.
This was to be a fundamental reason the success of Contemporanea continued for
so long, thus achieving one of its main goals: to convince the public to keep
coming back. Visitors to the exhibition did indeed continue to return, enticed
by the never-ending succession of events. The sections that made this possible
were “Theater,” “Cinema,” and “Music and Dance.” Following the success of the
important Danza Volo Musica Dinamite festival in 1969, the curator Fabio Sargentini
was acknowledged in Rome as the foremost expert on new American dance, and
he continued to be granted total autonomy in his choice of works and in man-
aging the budget.44 Unlike “Theater,” the section curated by Giuseppe Bartolucci,
Sargentini asked for his space to have no tiered seating, thus definitively moving
away from the classic theatrical format. In this section he again brought in the
exponents of vanguard musical research, together with the latest in American
experimental dance. Trisha Brown, Joan Jonas, Steve Paxton, Grand Union, and
Simone Forti took turns on the platform in the middle of the viewers, who
arranged themselves freely around it. Philip Glass, Terry Riley, and Pandit Pran
Nath also presented concerts. Bonito Oliva fully understood the highly perfor-
mative nature of these events, and he assigned music and dance to a single sec-
tion and a single space. As with all the events in the exhibition, the area had its
own dedicated publicity, as though it were an independent theater. The graphic
style of the posters that promoted the shows is interesting, for it was midway
22 SPRING 2018

45. Fabio Sargentini conversation with the author,
Rome, June 11, 2013.
46. Giuseppe Bartolucci, “Dall’immagine
all’animazione (Ipotesi di lavoro per gli anni set-
tanta),” in Contemporanea, 283.
47. Maurizio Di Puolo conversation with the
author, Rome, June 13, 2013.
48. Christo had already worked in Rome on a
statue in Villa Borghese in 1963, in Spoleto on a
medieval tower and a Baroque fountain (Festival
dei Due Mondi, July 1968), and in Milan on the
monument to Vittorio Emanuele II and the
monument to Leonardo da Vinci (Decennale del
Nouveau Réalisme, November 1970). In 1968 and
1969 he had often stayed in Rome, trying to secure
permits, which were never granted, to work on
a number of buildings: the Sant’Angelo bridge
and Castel Sant’Angelo, the Galleria Nazionale
d’Arte Moderna, the Pantheon, St Peter’s, and the
Colosseum.
between the communications of Contemporanea and the italic typeface which,
at the time, was recognizable as the hallmark of events at Sargentini’s gallery,
L’Attico. This is another example of how Incontri was totally open to other situ-
ations and had no ideological bias regarding other forms of artistic expression,
even though this meant exposing the association to the risk of losing its identity.
While the decision to combine these two forms of expression—music
and dance—was particularly avant-garde, the same criterion was not applied to
the theater program. On the other hand, with a selection carefully guided by
Bartolucci to give space to all the latest forms of expression, this section clearly
showed that the gap that separated viewers from “actions” had not yet been
crossed. An emblematic case was that of Robert Wilson, who was invited to the
“Theater” section but decided instead to work in Sargentini’s space, precisely
because he rejected the spatial relationship with the viewer, which he considered
too traditional.45 At the same time, choreographic works of Brown, Rainer,
Paxton, and Forti are cited as landmarks in the essay Bartolucci published in
the catalogue.46 It was the theatrical section, and the Rat Theatre and Richard
Foreman’s Ontological/Hysteric Theater in particular, that prompted the strongest
reactions in the press. Spread out over the months of the exhibition, it was these
events that kept curiosity and interest in Contemporanea so high.
The “Cinema” space, specially built for the occasion, had four hundred seats
and offered a program that was quite out of the ordinary in the nature of the
films that were shown. The selection by Paolo Bertetto combined the French
Nouvelle Vague, the Cinéma Nôvo of Brazil, New American Cinema, and a review
of political cinema. Filmstudio and the Politecnico movie theater in Rome had
already made it possible for many of these titles to be seen, but once again
Contemporanea stood out for the diversity and scope of what it offered. Ranging
from Umano non umano (Mario Schifano, 1969) to the films of Andy Warhol and
Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962), it also had incursions from the works
of factory collectives (Alfa Romeo, Spezziamo la catena—“Let’s Break the Chain,”
(ca. 1970), so it is not surprising that the visitors were so diverse and included
leading intellectuals such as the writers Alberto Moravia and Pasolini. The
“Cinema” section remains one of the most interesting experiments in opening
up to all expressions of the moving image.
At the end of January 1974, Christo was able to carry out his Aurelian Walls
project with the assistance of Guido Le Noci. The delay meant that it was possible
to give the exhibition a new start with a breathtaking urban sign that completely
subverted the profile of the Aurelian Walls: 7,500 square meters of polypropylene
fabric and 2,000 meters of orange mooring rope covered a 250-meter stretch of
the walls like a vast shroud.47 This was the first time that such a powerful artistic
operation had been attempted on a historical monument in Rome, and the reac-
tions were extremely negative (the work was subject to two arson attacks).48
During the forty days of the display, the wrapping catalyzed attention to the exhi-
bition which, in the end, managed to secure an ideal entrance through the Porta
Pinciana. The wrapped gate really seemed to be a metaphorical portal, either
ready or not for a burial ritual. It could have been the first step toward dealing
with a cultural past; the walls became the prelude to that descent into hell that
seemed to be evoked by the underground car park. Christo’s work alludes to
the decision to be prepared for a new vision, abandoning preconceptions and
23 artjournal
Flyer for Philip Glass performance,
Contemporanea, February 15–17, 1974 (photograph
provided by Archivi MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio
Incontri Internazionali d’Arte”)
49. See the views of passersby collected in Danilo
Maestosi, “Un ‘pacco’ di cui si parla,” Il Tempo,
February 1, 1974, 5.
preparing the past for a journey or for a deposit but, at the same time, attempting
to stop it and anchor it to the ground.49 His action fit perfectly into the image of
the exhibition: a suspension of judgment by packaging what had been, while still
waiting to encounter it anew. It was Christo’s walls that remained impressed in
the memory of many, including those who never visited the exhibition but who
were, often against their will, forced not to enter the work, but to go through it
by car, in a sudden, unknown, and unexpected vision.
How to Become Contemporary
We have seen how, until just a few months before the opening, the exhibition
retained the interim title with dates, Contemporanea (1973–1955), with the more
recent date first. This conceptual development, which came from a subsequent
expansion of the scenic effect that was exponential to the expansion of the exhi-
bition, did indeed have a precedent in the 1972 Documenta, which had aimed
24 SPRING 2018

50. Harald Szeemann, ed., Documenta 5: Befragung
der Realität Bildwelten heute, exh. cat. (Kassel:
Documenta, 1972); the exhibition took place
at the Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, June 30–
October 8, 1972.
51. Germano Celant, ed., Arte povera + Azioni
povere, exh. cat. (Salerno: Rumma, 1969); the exhi-
bition took place at the Arsenali della Repubblica,
Amalfi, October 1968.
52. See Bonito Oliva, Il territorio magico.
for the inclusion of all that society produced, and constituted a sort of evolution
of it.50 This openly comprehensive approach had had an important moment of
validation in Italy with the idea of using the exhibition space as a place where
events occur, as in Arte povera + Azioni povere in Amalfi in 1968.51 One legendary
space where this combination had been tried out in embryonic form was the
Deposito di Arte of 1967–68 in Turin, which, for the first time, granted artists
an unstructured place in which to create and exhibit, the very name of which
pointed to its temporary nature. All these spaces were thus ready to be occupied
in order to record temporary situations or momentary interpretive pathways.
These became manifest by escaping the ideological impasse of critical silence
and any attempt to impose visual form on a movement. These “proposals”—as
they were lovingly referred to in the 1970s—definitively abandoned the attempt
to construct a conceptual paradigm, preferring instead the fragmentary nature
of the discourse. This development quickly led to a certain melancholy in the
narratives, fed partly by discontent and disaffection, and partly by changes in
party, faith, and militancy.
In late 1972, however, there was still time to hope for the creation of a uto-
pia, and especially for the idea of a country uncontaminated by the bitterness
and disillusionment that would shortly after permeate the intellectual commu-
nity. This community had gathered around the protest movements of the late
1960s, which later led to a split in which each side would accuse the other of
abandoning the initial ideas of the struggle and the utopian purity of their first
projects. Bruno Corà, who worked at Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, was almost
as a matter of course assigned a curatorship that would today be considered
“internal.” This type of improvisation speaks to the need to internalize the level
of confrontation, and to the awareness that the approach was indeed to be
included as a form of creativity; we can still see the legacy of the optimistic yet
controlled atmosphere of 1968.
In particular, the opening up to all areas of creativity at Documenta in Kassel
directly recalls the basic format of Contemporanea. And it was indeed during the
course of 1972 that the first idea, initially much closer to that of Vitalità del negativo,
was expanded in its international scope and substantially opened up to other
areas. This change, which was followed by a series of negotiations with a number
of curators, was not however accompanied by direct cooperation with the artists.
Throughout the entire process it seemed that the main issue was manifestly cura-
torial, dogged by the problems that had arisen at the end of the 1960s with the
debate on the role of the critic. The discussion had been permeated by reflections
on the nature of a system hard put to the test by the onslaught of marketing and
modernity. A parallel interest remained in the curatorial work of Bonito Oliva,
who on many occasions took care to repeat that his was purely a coordinating
role, that he was an equal among others, and that he did not consider himself to
be outside or above the arena, but rather an active participant in the celebrations
and in events that he always felt were a direct consequence of a contingent flow
of creativity. These concepts, which were theorized at the time and culminated in
his essay of 1971, were based on the idea that the operator acts in a sort of “magic
land” in which the artist is the agent of the work and, at the same time, is acted
on by it, while the public remains entangled in a sort of emotional sphere that
incorporates all these relationships.52
25 artjournal

53. W. A. L. Beeren, ed., Op Losse Schroeven:
Situaties en cryptostructuren, exh. cat.,
(Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum, 1969); the
exhibition took place at the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam, March 15–April 27, 1969.
54. Letters of invitation from Achille Bonito Oliva
to the artists and gallery owners, May–June 1973,
AIIA.
In spite of this careful strategy to ensure joint responsibility, the structure
of Contemporanea was complex and required all the energy Bonito Oliva could bring
to it beginning in 1972, when the other activities of the association came to a
halt in order to concentrate on the new project. On the other hand, the second
time around is always more difficult: the artistic community in Rome was still
coping with the pomp and the criticism of Vitalità del negativo, which, after the
Quadriennale in 1972, remained the most interesting event in how it put the
latest experiments to the test in an institutional context. And just as in Vitalità
del negativo, Bonito Oliva decided to deal with the latest works, taking a careful
sideways glance at history viewed in a diachronic manner, placing Fluxus along-
side those works that expressed a “reconnaissance of reality,” and thus making
Nouveau Réalisme, American Pop, and the School of Piazza del Popolo all interact
with one another. On his first reconnaissance trips he found no embarrassment
in the idea of including the most diverse experiences, paying particular attention
to Belgian and Dutch developments. This region had been noted not only for its
emerging curatorial talents, but also for seminal exhibitions such as Op Losse
Schroeven, which had given rise to the idea of a contemporary reconnaissance.53
Bonito Oliva, however, went one step further in his quest for total coverage
of all artistic languages, drawing parallels between diverse artistic streams and
ignoring the classic divisions of art. He approached the work as an expression of
a particular relationship with the context in which it was created: art as event, as
reconnaissance, as modular research. A closer look at this approach reveals the
work he later developed with the Transavanguardia artists: a free, liberated rela-
tionship with history, putting into practice curatorial theories that had already
been widely tested in the 1970s. But the real revolution brought about by this
exhibition was in conceiving an event that was able to break out of the realm of
academic criticism and present itself in the form of “eventuality.” By doing so, it
continued to reason along the lines of the communicative scope of the structure
as a whole, without becoming attached to any particular preconceived critical
orchestration. It was a strategy that became the basis of the practice, often consid-
ered disengaged, for a group of cultural workers who actually refuse to take sides,
preferring a mode of reviewing rather than one of endorsement.
Curatorial Work and Some Misunderstandings
During the course of 1972, and even more rapidly early the following year, it
became plain that Bonito Oliva considered it especially important to arrange for
works that could be made on site, so that the exhibition could justly claim to be
out of the ordinary.54 At the same time, the need arose to have sections devoted
to the other arts, which were also to be conceived of as a mix of the experimen-
tal avant-garde, new works, and an overview of the best research carried out in
recent decades. In this sense, while Contemporanea may not have had a didactic
approach, it certainly aimed to inform: the stubbornly inclusive attitude of the
Incontri committee to some extent recalls the format of a biennale rather than
that of an exhibition. In this trend we read the influence of the Marxist thinking
of Giulio Carlo Argan, the art critic whom Bonito Oliva recognizes as his teacher,
and who reckoned a precise educational function in art. Once again, however,
the approach of the curator is not linear; on one side it welcomes an openly
26 SPRING 2018

55. Andrea Del Guercio, “Contemporanea all’età
dei parcheggi,” Rinascita 7 (February 15, 1974): 27.
leftist attitude, on the other it seems to grant a substantial space to American
galleries, for the Italian intellectual world an obvious symbol of the commercial-
ization of culture.
But was the presence of the American galleries really so large? If we look
through the list of lenders, we can see that, although the involvement of the
Ileana Sonnabend and Leo Castelli galleries was fundamental to ensuring contact
with artists who by that time were already established in the market, it is also
clear that quantitatively, compared with the total number of works, these galler-
ies played a decidedly minor role. Perhaps most worrying was an aspect that
sounded alarm bells among the most committed critics: the mingling of institu-
tional power and self-managed groups, of large and small collectors, and of gen-
erations that saw themselves as far apart and wanted to stay that way. The main
presence was actually reserved for Italian gallery owners, some of whom had
previously worked with the same curators on Vitalità del negativo. The exception
was Plinio de Martiis, who did not lend any works for the exhibition, for by this
time his Galleria La Tartaruga was no longer central to the more experimental
circles in Rome. The most important contributions to the exhibition actually
came from Milan. One such contributor was Gino Di Maggio, whose Multipla
space was revolutionizing the concept of serial production and paving the way
for the rise of the multiple; he thereby promoted what was to become a form of
artistic research in its own right, dominating debate in Italian art magazines dur-
ing the second half of the decade: “multiplied art.” Di Maggio played a key role
in mediating with Fluxus, and he ensured the loan of works by George Brecht,
Giuseppe Chiari, George Maciunas, Daniel Spoerri, and Vostell; he also drew up
the list of the works by Allan Kaprow. Outside this line-up, which was more
clearly linked to artistic research that was still adjusting to the Italian gallery
system, another important loan from Di Maggio consisted of two paintings by
Ellsworth Kelly, Black and White and Yellow and Blue, both of 1970. It is interesting to
note how many of the most important Pop works loaned to the exhibition came
from Europe, a fact that the press seemed to ignore or deliberately not take into
account. Indeed, the fact that many of the Pop works in the exhibition came
from Italian galleries and collectors shows how quick they had been to adopt the
new art and the opportunity to invest in work endorsed by the American system.
Many of them had begun to acquire Pop works immediately after the Venice
Biennale of 1964, where the American pavilion had played a decisive role.
The accusation of Antonello Trombadori, an art critic and an official of the
Communist Party, that the exhibition was nothing more than a branch of the
American galleries, does not appear to find justification in the actual list of
lenders. However, journalists did not know the details of this list at the time, so
the claims were essentially based on inferences. Even so, it should be said that
the most important artworks, even in terms of insurance value alone, came
from storage spaces in Zurich and, although there is no documentary evidence
of their ownership, it was known that Castelli and Sonnabend stored works
there that they wanted to keep available for the European circuit. Many articles
openly denounce this situation, referring to it as “intensely colonial,” describing
in conspiracylike tones the mechanisms that were said to have influenced the
decisions.55 “In Rome, a city of corrupt and evil metics . . . where ‘Evita-Peronism’
rules supreme, where personages of fragile conscience but dizzyingly robust
27 artjournal
 appetites between a dinner and a cavalcade extort tailor-made little laws . . . ,
anything can happen in Rome.”56 These were the words chosen by Lea Vergine
to describe the agreements and powers that ultimately led to the lease of the
parking lot.
In assessing the fierce criticism that raged around these items—which would
probably be unthinkable today for twenty works out of a total of a hundred—
it should be borne in mind that the anti-Americanism in the art system in
Rome was felt not just in certain politically committed circles, but more widely
as a reaction to the situation that had come about in the mid-1960s with the
“American” Biennale. Considered from a historical perspective, a less emotional
view of art as “Reconnaissance of Urban and Object-based Civilization” (the title
of a subsection of the “Art” section) should have seen the danger in systematizing
a general sensitivity to Pop, a genre shared by artists as diverse as Michelangelo
Pistoletto (in a decidedly non-Povera manner), Arman, Mario Schifano, and
James Rosenquist. In the long run, this attitude proved to be a sign of weakness
for European artistic research, which was in any case crushed when it was assim-
ilated, and then quickly accused by critics of being peripheral to a vital driving
force that had its roots in the United States. At the same time, Bonito Oliva’s deci-
sion at that particular moment gave European artists, and especially the Italians,
the chance to be put on a par with a top-notch market system. As a result, they
could be viewed in a way that was not merely superficially figurative, precisely
because they were placed alongside works that had already reached a higher level
of critical understanding. Last, but possibly not least, it must be said that the
opportunity for advancement that this exhibition presented to the artists was due
in part to Italian collectors and galleries.
One possible interpretation of the historical confluences that came together
in Contemporanea may come from a work in the exhibition, Luigi Ontani’s Tarzan, in
which the artist, dressed as Tarzan, lies on a platform, reading comic books that
tell the story of the character. Behind him is a poster of a forest on which images
from the comics are projected. The work is critical of Pop language, while also
adopting its heroes and showing them as characters that by then had become
part of the legend. The car park at the Villa Borghese was thus also a place where,
by moving back in time, a modernist approach could be made to coexist with the
phenomena of Pop consumption as well as with the covert but prescient post-
modernist vision of Ontani. He reinterpreted the myths produced by those very
phenomena as if they had already become classics of Western civilization. In the
exhibition of his work at L’Attico in Via del Paradiso in November 1973, Ontani
continued in this direction, impersonating Don Quixote, Don Giovanni, and
Superman. At the 24 ore su 24 exhibition, exactly one year after his performance at
Contemporanea, he placed two long canine teeth in his mouth and lay in a glass cof-
fin, holding a paperback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in his hands. From this
point of view, it seems hardly a coincidence that Ontani had presented his Contare
da 0 a 1972: Chi è dentro è dentro—Chi è fuori è fuori (“Count from 0 to 1972: who’s in is
in—who’s out is out”) at Incontri in November 1972. As in a children’s game,
with his face to the wall, he counted to 1,972, and when he got to the end he
turned round and said in a loud voice: “Who’s in is in, who’s out is out.”
The passage of time and the concept of historicizing creative developments
56. Vergine, 3. and feeling oneself to be part of a process that was coming to an end were the

28 SPRING 2018
Luigi Ontani, Tarzan, 1974, performance
presented at Contemporanea, January 18–20 and
26–27, 1974 (artwork © Luigi Ontani; photo-
graph by Massimo Piersanti, provided by Archivi
MAXXI—Fondo “Archivio Incontri Internazionali
d’Arte”)
underlying themes in this work, but there was also the same condemnation—
the same need to look back in time—that appeared to inform all aspects of
Contemporanea. The exhibition was unable to establish an empathetic relationship
with the past other than by means of a long Via Crucis. This awareness also
involved the search for a way, between the metal grids that offered only a glimpse
of a possible end, to once again tell a story bringing together different plots.
However, it would do so by means of an entirely subjective interpretation that
left everything to the experience charted by each individual. We are still hearing
echoes of the main role played by individual experience, between the acceptance
of its pervasiveness and the vertigo of the vanishing boundaries between medi-
ums within an indistinct whole.
Luigia Lonardelli received a master’s degree in the history of photography in 2009 from the University of
Siena, with a focus on the color photography of Ugo Mulas. Her doctoral research at the University of
Florence was on the alternative space Incontri Internazionali d’Arte in Rome in the 1970s and is published
in her first book, Dalla sperimentazione alla crisi (Milan: Doppiozero, 2016). She began working at Rome’s
Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI) in 2010 and is currently a curator there. She has
curated exhibitions dedicated to Marisa Merz (2012) and Alighiero Boetti (2013). and was cocurator of the
XVI Quadriennale d’Arte di Roma (2016).
29 artjournal