Altalena per Bea by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
Turin, November 8, 1972
(Recording)
Mirella Bandini: Marisa, would you like to read me what you have prepared for a possible interview?
Marisa Merz: I write. I identify. I think. I don't tell. The Nail is clearly a nail. We make it work as a nail. If art were an apple or a bunch of dollars – but what is it if not a bunch of dollars? Function has taken the place of essence – it makes money circulate badly.
Altalena per Bea by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
MY PERSON COSTED UNTIL TODAY, NOVEMBER 8, 1972, 29.250.000 ITALIAN LIRAS.
Political power doesn't care about artists – but despite this, artists are public men, because they pay money if they buy butter or if they travel by plane, like everyone else.
But they want something more than the goals men want to achieve.
Artists are sensitive, rebels, subverters of values. They pay society the same price as others, so they participate like others. But they want something else, they participate in something else.
Where do they look for and find to raise awareness? Inside their own person? Outside their own person? What is the artist in today's world?
I AM THE ARTIST. Relating to what? I am looking for something different from how much current production invests the minds and energy of men. The quality of this something different, my quality!
Marisa Merz
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
Marisa Merz
(Turin, 1926–2019)
Marisa Merz started her artistic research in the mid-1960s in Turin, where she had her first solo exhibition at Galleria Sperone in 1967. While supporting the artists of Arte Povera, her poetics has always maintained an autonomous and independent dimension.
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
When Germano Celant relaunched the definition of Arte Povera in the 1980s, in full Transavantgarde spread, he historicized the work of Marisa Merz in the context of an Arte Povera koiné, although the artist's work has always escaped rigid and univocal classifications.
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
Autobiographical and maternity-related themes emerge in her work (such as Altalena per Bea, 1968), often associated with a research based on the temporality of doing that crosses techniques and materials and explores drawing, sculpture, painting, and their relationship in environmental installations, as well as film experimentation.
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
The film La conta (1967, 16 mm, b/w, 2 '44 ") re-emerged among the documents and materials of the Merz Foundation on the occasion of the recent retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2017).
Disarming for her radical simplicity, La conta films the artist at her kitchen table while she is opening a tin of canned food from which she takes out and counts peas which she places on a plate with a ritual gesture.
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
In La conta the dimension of counting is central as a measurement of time, a primordial and in some way paradoxical gesture.
The counting of Merz, like her other sculptural gestures – knotting, sewing, pinning, embroidering… – allows us to trace a matrilineal genealogy and at the same time infuses a vital and unhinging lymph in the present, reformulating a new vision of creativity.
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
In La conta Merz portrays herself through a gesture that belongs to her, against the background of her sculptures and in the home environment in which she recognizes herself as a mother, a wife, and an artist.
Since the 1980s, her portraits, and in particular the female portraits, are at the center of her sculptural, pictorial and drawing production.
As Francesca Pasini pointed out, they are all faces that disregard the usual iconographic schemes, in that “very complex excavation between a detail of an expression, a gaze and the materialization of a sign that can concern the physical body of a person or the emotional, linguistic expressions that situate that body in the dimension of the subject.”
La conta by Marisa MerzLa Galleria Nazionale
Merz's enigmatic presences are suspended in a rarefied temporality that seems to transform seeing into vision.
Lara Conte
Marisa Merz e Lara Conte
Works cited: F. Pasini, ripubblicato in Arte Povera in collezione, a cura di I. Gianelli, Charta, Milano 2000, p. 194.
