Boetti and Pascali: Revisiting Arte Povera through Two Case Studies.

Alighiero Boetti and Pino Pascali were two particularly important Arte Povera artists, and my study of them is very much about this postwar Italian movement. However, my dissertation is also a non-Arte Povera, Arte Povera project in that I have chosen two artists whose work is in many ways at odds with prevailing understandings of an Arte Povera aesthetic. Germano Celant envisaged Arte Povera in 1967 as an art “stripped of ambiguity.” I, on the other hand, offer a history of Boetti’s and Pascali’s practices and Arte Povera more generally by way of an engagement with the aporias and apparent contradictions present in such work. My focus on the entanglement of nature and artifice, and unification and splitting, in Boetti’s and Pascali’s various projects, for instance, provides a ground upon which I interrogate the socio-political situation that shaped their individual approaches. I also bring together Celant’s perspective with other intellectual voices that contributed to the theorization of what is now widely known as Arte Povera and, through the revisitation of such criticism, grant readers access to the broader cultural context that informed the practices of the artists on whom I have chosen to focus the dissertation.PhDHistory of ArtUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/60890/1/cgbennet_1.pd