lismore castle arts

This opportunity brings together our two families’ particular collecting viewpoints and each of our families’ relationships to place, time and our geographic positions.’

For the first time, the private, semi-derelict stable yards have been opened up to visitors and it is here, amidst the dilapidation of the old buildings, that the contemporary work from the Rubell Family Collection is shown. In contrast, the contemporary gallery, which occupies the west wing of the Castle, plays host to Gainsborough, Van Dyck and others from the Devonshire Collection.

William Burlington adds “It was fascinating seeing how the Rubells worked together and how they reacted to Lismore. Their idea of including the extraordinary setting of the stable yards was a masterstroke which adds a whole new layer of intrigue to the exhibition”

IMAGES AVAILABLE UPON REQUEST.

Lismore Castle Arts was founded in 2005 by William Burlington, son of the Duke of Devonshire. One major exhibition is held each year, along with an exciting and vibrant education programme and other arts events.

The Devonshire Collection is one of the great private collections, housed at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, England and Lismore Castle, the Irish home of the Devonshire family. Amassed by generations of the Cavendish family, from Sir William Cavendish and his wife Bess of Hardwick in the 16th century through to the current Duke of Devonshire, the Collection has developed over 500 years. For further information on the Devonshire family and their collection.

The Rubell Family Collection is one of the leading collections of contemporary art in the world and includes a research library with over 30,000 volumes. Housed in a permanent museum in Miami, USA, and open to the public since 1996, the Collection features work dating from the 1960s to the present day with rotating exhibitions including work by the world’s foremost contemporary artists. The Collection began soon after Don and Mera Rubell were married in 1964 and at a relatively young age, their son, Jason and their daughter, Jennifer, joined their parents in expanding the Collection which is now known as the Rubell Family Collection.

LISMORE CASTLE ARTS PUBLIC TALKS SERIES
SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 14TH 2.30PM
Cultural Revolution/Culture Clash: Arte Povera as “Guerrilla War”
Nicholas Cullinan
Nicholas Cullinan is Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, London and is currently completing a Ph.D. on Arte Povera at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He has recently worked on the exhibition Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia and Cy Twombly: Cycles and Seasons. Forthcoming projects include Sold Out, an exhibition at Tate Modern in 2009 and a monograph on Cy Twombly for Phaidon.

Cultural Revolution/Culture Clash: Arte Povera as “Guerrilla War”

In 1967, the critic Germano Celant issued his overtly politicized manifesto ‘Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerilla War’, which launched the group in a blaze of revolutionary and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Celant’s text was consonant with the Italian political situation. By 1968, his metaphorical ‘guerrilla war’ was appropriated by dissenting university students, who identified themselves with political heroes such as Fidel Castro, Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Che Guevara, and also espoused the guerrilla tactics of General Nguyen Giap, predicting that: “The university will be our Vietnam”.

The language of guerrilla war echoed through Celant’s text, ricocheted through the universities and was also inscribed upon Mario Merz’s Giap’s Igloo of 1968. Merz scrawled the Vietcong General’s statement on guerrilla tactics in neon across a primitive hemispherical structure covered in defensive sandbags, imbuing it with revolutionary intent. What are we to make of the nexus between the simultaneously aggressive and defensive aesthetic of Merz’s work, Celant’s rhetoric and Giap’s strategy? Why the alignment with guerrilla war as analogue for cultural rivalry, peasant resistance as a model for Arte Povera’s renunciation of consumerism, and Vietnam as a metaphor for the university protests? In the late 1960s in Italy, invoking the ideology of guerrilla warfare acted not only as a reference to, and condemnation of, American troops in Vietnam, but was also deployed as a charged metaphor for the struggle against burgeoning American economic and cultural domination.

This characterisation of Arte Povera reflects Italy’s struggle to reconcile and adapt to the transition from a relatively impoverished, and predominantly agricultural country ravaged by the Second World War, to the rapid industrialisation propelled by the Marshall Plan-backed miracolo italiano or ‘economic miracle’ in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Within this framework, Arte Povera’s deliberate positioning as an oppositional and antagonistic ‘other’ to the technological imperatives of American culture, and its artisanal and proletarian impulse – from Alighiero Boetti eastern exoticism and shamanistic persona, Jannis Kounellis’ recourse to remnants and fragments of the archaic, Giuseppe Penone’s recuperation of what Pier Paolo Pasolini’s lamented as Italy’s lost agrarian culture, to Michelangelo Pistoletto’s street theatre collective, Lo Zoo, which explored themes of madness and deviancy – acquires a more politicized meaning. As Celant recalled, the aim of Arte Povera was to: ‘corrode, cut open, and fragment – to decompose the imposed cultural regime.’