by Jon Lackman | 28 September 2007 | Books, Modern
Here we are, half a century or so after contemporary artists began appropriating, tearing and re-assembling street posters, still without solid answers to the questions of who did what when, of who affected whom how. Who tore first? Was it décollage if you didn’t call it décollage? Does it matter? Are these artists incommensurable?
Skira and the Fondazione Mimmo Rotella have just published Rotella, a 575-page tome that includes a 49-page essay by Germano Celant as well as a lavishly illustrated chronology incorporating biography, exhibition history, documentation, and statements by the artist. Celant writes:
Mimmo Rotella was invited to join the Nouveau Realisme group when the first manifesto was written in 1960 … when Restany wrote the various manifestos, he adopted the strategic ploy of placing Rotella’s contribution after that of the French members, so that it might appear “subsquent” to them. But a different story emerges if we analyze the relative documents and events … Restany was not an art historian who was interested in documents and datings, nor even, perhaps in priority and paternity; but he was a poet and a French critic whose ambition was to “mark” the cultural history of his country, and particularly of his own city, Paris, which was competing tooth and nail with New York for world leadership in art … [In his 1968 book, Restany] uses the term décollage — which was coined by Emilio Villa in 1955 and certainly adopted, between 1955 and 1958, in various texts and catalogues on Rotella in Milan and Rome — and “attributes” it to Hains. The period between 1949 and 1952, during which Hains and Mahé de la Villeglé “appropriated” their affiches, has yet to be verified through documents and facts … Apart from the dates, which establish the absolute linguistic priority of Rotella’s décollage over the works of the affichistes Hains, Mahé de la Villeglé, and Dufrêne, there is also a differentiation in the linguistic discourse conducted through the use of the poster … If the affichistes aimed to displace the poster from its original context onto another territory, Mahé de la Villeglé onto that of poetry and Hains onto that of photography and the object, Rotella’s goal was to make it emerge in the sphere of painting.
In an interview in the recently published 208-page Flammarion book Jacques Villeglé, which includes essays by Kaira Cabañas and François Bon, Villeglé also asserts that he and Raymond Hains differed from Rotella:
… Rotella, meanwhile, understood [our] shredded posters because Restany explained them to him; Rotella had shown his own early posters upside down, in order to make them more abstract. But Rotella was eight years older than us, he was an Italian maestro; we didn’t have the same understanding of things …
Final question: did Rotella need Restany to explain to him the concept of a shredded poster?
