How a Group of Young Italian Artists Redefined Avant-Garde Photography

We tend to call it, rather generically and perhaps vaguely, “conceptual photography.” It has been commonplace in the contemporary artist’s bag of tricks since the mid-1960s: the use of photography to either produce an artwork (the aesthetic aim of which is beyond the photograph, so to speak) or to document an ephemeral performance. Early examples often cited include the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher (beginning in 1961), Ed Ruscha’s Twentysix Gasoline Stations (1962), Bruce Nauman’s Pictures of Sculpture in a Room (1965–66), or Dan Graham’s Homes for America (1966–67). It’s mostly associated with cities like Los Angeles, Düsseldorf, and later Vancouver. Rarely, though, do artists from the Italian Arte Povera movement—such as Ugo Mulas or Giulio Paolini—jump to mind as readily, and that is an unfortunate blind spot. Reversing the Eye: Arte Povera and Beyond: 1960–75: Photography, Film, Video, the landmark joint exhibition at Jeu de Paume and Le Bal in Paris, attempts to challenge those received ideas. It makes the case for a closer examination of the contribution Arte Povera made to lens-based mediums of avant-garde art in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

Reversing the Eye takes its title from a 1970 piece by Giuseppe Penone wherein a series of slides depict the artist in landscapes, his eyes replaced with a reflective surface. The objects in the exhibition are spread across both institutions, gathered into four general themes. In the galleries at Jeu de Paume, the works are organized around “Experience” on the ground floor and “Image” and “Theater” on the second, while those at Le Bal are about the “Body.” In certain cases, the themes offer helpful ways of understanding the concerns present in the work. In the section on “Experience,” Laura Grisi’s The Measuring of Time (1969), a film in which the artist counts single grains of sand, explores how mediated experiences can, in fact, heighten our sensations of the world, the way watching her seems to focus attention on the experience of each speck—similarly, in some ways, to what Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s Stone and air (1966) does with a simple rock. In the “Image” section, Emilio Prini’s Magnet (1969), piles of printed images of a camera, reflects on the technologies we use to make and distribute images. Prini’s The Sign of a Film Not Made (1967–68) is a text piece that describes, in Italian, a film that would have documented a specific place in Rome for one evening, a piece so conceptual it isn’t even a photograph or film.

At times, the thematic groupings feel reductive or arbitrary. Ugo Mulas’s The Verifications (1968–1972), a series that examines the history and process of making photographs, for example, is separated from L’Attesa (1964), his photojournalistic portrait of the artist Lucio Fontana. There are far more depictions of naked bodies in the “Body” and “Theater,” though couldn’t nudity equally be a concern of the “Image,” the way spectacle culture commodified images of the body, or, for that matter, of “Experience”? The more compelling works under the “Body” theme explore the body as a material, such as Penone’s To Unroll One’s Skin (1970), which consists of a series of prints of close-up images of his skin, transferred and rolled onto neon tubes. Giulio Paolini’s early works are also particularly intriguing. In the mid-1960s, he began producing images that represented painting and artists. Paolini’s 1421965 (1965) is considered his first photograph as an artwork (somewhat randomly displayed in the “Body” section). It’s a picture of a man in a suit, spreading his arms across the length of a large blank canvas, being photographed by another man. In one panel of his diptych Diaframma (1965), a man carries a blank canvas across a street, while, in a second panel, someone else carries a canvas that contains an image of the preceding print, a thrillingly dizzying mise en abyme of self-representation.

Reversing the Eye makes clear the influence Arte Povera has had on the development of conceptual photography. At Le Bal, vitrines display the significant publications and photobooks associated with the movement, which had significant reach outside of Italy. The Canadian photo-conceptualist Ian Wallace, whose early pieces were influenced by Art Povera and also date from the late ’60s, for example, had Germano Celant’s early publications (Wallace’s work also seems to share affinities with those early pieces by Giulio Paolini, though only in the ’80s did he begin to collage monochromes with photographs). Emilio Prini, whose work was included in Harald Szeemann’s 1969 exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, has also had an impact on many contemporary artists, perhaps most notably Christopher Williams. In 2020, the artist-entity Studio for Propositional Cinema (the work of which often takes the form of texts about images or films) even curated an exhibition, at the now-defunct London location of Milan-based ML Fine Art, of Prini’s work in concert with contemporary artists such as Roy Arden, Williams, the Studio itself, and Julia Scher.

Dates can tell us something about the early history of conceptual photography, but they can’t tell us everything. An artist such as Giulio Paolini is rarely mentioned prominently in the canon of conceptual photography, and yet his first artwork made with a photograph was in 1965, preceding some of the works that are said to inaugurate the use of photography in contemporary art. It’s not a matter of recording who was there first; to be sure, other artists—including Piero Manzoni—documented ephemeral works with cameras before the ’60s. Yet Reversing the Eye opens up the field, not staking tiresome claims for “firsts” or canonical posturing, but instead making visible another point in a nexus of experimentation that changed art-marking. Reversing the eye, it seems, means expanding the discussion.

Reversing the Eye: Arte Povera and Beyond, 1960–75, Photography, Film, Video is on view in Paris at Jeu de Paume and Le Bal through January 29, 2023.