After World War II a new material body was born, revealing its obstacles and vitality. Action Painting in America and Art Informel [more] in Europe brought the material of art into the light. Leaving its womb, material began an active, howling life. During the late 1950s, Neo-Dada [more] and Pop artists began exalting the “lowly” materials of our world. These new materials could be a body and its organic traces, or cultural remnants that fetishize the icons of communication and consumerism. Painting and sculpture plunged into the maelstrom of things and objects, actions and bodies, possessing them and thereby transfiguring them. In the 1960s an effluvium of material passed through the wonders and witchcraft of Arte Povera [more] and Environmental art. Their materials fascinated and awakened the viewers by putting them in touch with the breath, the inspiration of nature. With Minimalism [more] and Conceptualism, the eruption of material led to the point of its disappearance. Such were the ecstasies of logic and planning that art was designated a pure condition of consciousness, in which neither subject nor object exists, and the process itself comes to light. Today, after entering the world, material has returned to itself, becoming persona through a second birth, claiming the right to be disparate and multiple. From Louise Bourgeois to Robert Mapplethorpe, this process carries the energy charge of an enigma, that of the “inner view,” which can be evoked by the formulations of a morbid and ironic art or a profound and transgressive art. Thus, after insemination and gestation, after birth and adolescence, artistic material, in its growth, has begun to ponder its sensual and sexual identity.

GERMANO CELANT