PARIS.- With « Un art pauvre » (« A Plain Art »), a completely new, multidisciplinary event, the Centre Pompidou proposes an analysis of artistic practices linked with the idea of « plainness » in creation from the Sixties onwards: not only in the visual arts, of course, with the prominent Arte Povera movement, but also in the field of music, design, architecture, theatre, performance and experimental cinema.

Sensitive to traces, reliefs and the most elementary manifestations of life, the artists of the Arte Povera movement, and more largely of « plain art », drew on every kind of archaic gesture. They all frequently used natural and waste materials. And though none of them wanted to make gold from straw or rags, all of them sought to establish a new symbolic power. This form of recycling was not so much a creed as a practice ; it was originally an opposition to American minimalism. Arte Povera came about through emulation, not through « membership ». However, its birth was announced in two manifestos in 1967: one by the critic Germano Celant, who invented the expression; the other by the artist Alighiero Boetti with his Manifesto poster, which featured a list of sixteen names: some well-known, some forgotten, and some whose presence seems distinctly surprising.

For Serge Lasvignes, president of the Centre Pompidou, the exhibition « Un art pauvre was conceived as a new expression of the Centre Pompidou’s ability to bring together different disciplines. Other examples will be following shortly. »

With « Un art pauvre », we do indeed find every component of the Centre Pompidou – from the Musée National d’Art Moderne to IRCAM and the Cinema and Live Performances Departments – joining forces to highlight the rich variety and breadth of this event. « Un art pauvre » is also an invitation to journey through the entire Centre Pompidou.

∙ Starting with the Forum, with the presentation of the 1972 mural sculpture Crocodilus Fibonacci by Mario Merz, where the animal engenders the arithmetic sequence that so fascinated the artist.

∙ The exhibition in Galerie 4 starts and ends with three figures of Italian post-war art: Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni and Alberto Burri. It reveals all Arte Povera’s diversity through some 40 works by the movement’s leading representatives and other artists who are not as well-known for being its pioneers : Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Mario Ceroli, Luciano Fabro, Piero Gilardi, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini and Gilberto Zorio. The exhibition focuses on the decade between 1964-1974. As well a few later exceptions, the spotlight is also on 1960, a significant year bringing Fontana, Manzoni and Merz together by way of an introduction, before moving on to the major preoccupations of Arte Povera, which include tautology, writing, the spoken word, vital energy, animality and shelter. Historic printed and photographic documents are presented in showcases, shedding further light on the context and relationship between works and artists. The Musée National d’Art Moderne has one of the world’s largest collections of Arte Povera. This has now been swelled by the recent donation to the Bibliothèque Kandinsky of the archives (photographs, objects, printed documents and letters) of Ida Gianelli, a frequent exhibitor of these artists.

∙ Cinema. In resonance with the exhibition « Un art pauvre », two sessions based on Arte Povera and its principal figures are being presented in Cinéma 2. Based on artists’ films and exhibitions archives, these two events help audiences appreciate the close relationship between this artistic movement and the art of the cinema, and grasp the simultaneously complementary and contradictory relationship between works and their documentation. In addition, at the end of the Galerie 4 circuit, there is a screening of two films shot by Thierry De Mey and Raphaël Zarka on the site of Gibellina in Sicily, reconfigured as a huge landscape artwork by Alberto Burri.

∙ Collections. In the Centre Pompidou collections on level 5 of the museum, architecture and design are featured with installations, films, photos, models and objects devised around the « Global Tools » movement founded in 1973. This design « counter-school » consists of workshops, performances and urban experiments, proclaiming a return to manual skills and a new multidisciplinary teaching method for projects and collective creation. Andrea Branzi, Ettore Sottsass, Michele de Lucchi, Ugo La Pietra, Gianni Pettena, Riccardo Dalisi and Franco Raggi reclaim the city through actions designed as an instrument to confront society.

∙ ManiFeste Festival. The 2016 edition of the IRCAM festival (June 2-July 2), the annual event focused on creation in the arts of the times and technological innovation, comes together with the visual arts for the first time to explore the idea of « plainness ». It is being staged in both the Centre Pompidou and further afield in partner concert halls (the Grand Halle de la Villette and Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord). With reenchanted nature, the appearance of a rarefied sound material and the enticement to listen through fragile utterances, a whole history of the contemporary can be written around the idea of « plainness », from the pioneering one-time hobo composer Harry Partch in the US to the subtractive art of choreographer Xavier Le Roy, by way of composers Beat Furrer, Gérard Pesson and Salvatore Sciarrino. Each year, ManiFeste brings together a hundred and twenty artists (composers, performers, stage directors, actors, choreographers, dancers, sound designers and video makers) from five continents.

∙ Dance and Performance. In Galerie 4 and Forum-1, dance and performance are in the spotlight for three weekends. One features a solo by choreographer Thomas Hauert on a baroque madrigal by Monteverdi. The second features the Grand Magasin company in two performance/talks, one on the history of the black screen in the cinema. The last weekend is devoted to the young scene with the duo EW, halfway between dance, sculpture and informal architecture, and with Marius Schaffter and Jérôme Stünzi creating study objects and humorously lending them the status of art works.