What Is To Be Done

In Mario Merz’s work, everyday objects and natural materials are placed alongside one another in unusual ways that alter both the physical composition and visual appearance of objects. In Che fare? an aluminum cooking pan is filled with beeswax. A neon sign runs across it in the form of the text that gives the work its title. The illuminated tubing, based on the artist’s own handwriting, forms a continuous script that translates to “What is to be done?" Made during the tumultuous years surrounding 1968 and the associated Italian “hot autumn” of 1969, the phrase originated in mid-19th-century pre-Soviet Russian literature, in the subversive work of Nikolaj G. Cernysevskij. The phrase was concretized as a platform for socialist revolution when Vladimir Lenin used it in a pamphlet in 1902 as a call to arms prior to the Russian Revolution. The phrase was adopted with great enthusiasm in 1960s Italy. For Merz, the maxim underwent a change in the work from its political origins to an existential question. “What is to be done?” refers generally to the responsibility of the new artistic generation to question artistic practice in the 1960s.