Since a few decades, we are witnessing the birth of several sculpture parks or sculpture gardens all over the world and especially in the USA. These amazing open-air contemporary art museums give credit not only to the old European legacy of gardens in Renaissance villas (these were, indeed, parks with contemporary sculptures!), but especially to the more recent example of Land Art and its site-specific works, which often modified the geography of the location selected by artists. The reason why this phenomenon can be considered typical in the US goes back to the enormous natural areas of the American landscape, which was inspirational also for the gigantism in some minimalist works. These enormous sculptures involved the creation of great public spaces, where visitors could enjoy large-sized artworks, which got hardly set in museum buildings. Hence, this led to a very successful integration of art with landscape, culture and nature, in the aim of getting to environmental awareness involving visual arts, architecture and city planning.

Francesca Cigola, architect and essayist, has been carrying out a research over the identity of the American landscape for many years. The outcomes of this research are well presented in this volume: Art Parks. A Tour of America’s Sculpture Parks and Gardens, which is the first complete collection of the most important open-air sculpture gardens of North America.
From large parks in boundless natural environments, to small gardens in urban contexts, from private to museums collections, Art parks is a truly reasoned, solid though portable, guidebook, which is ordered by themes in three long chapters: Leisure Spaces, areas devoted to free time, idleness, and relax; Learning Spaces, designed for learning and hosted in museums and public spaces; Collectors’ Spaces, those parks devoted to collecting, where works from private collection are shown; finally, the section Additional Parks whit a complete list of additional parks.
To the brief, though thorough, general introduction, specific profiles ensue with illustrated and detailed descriptions of every garden and beautiful pictures of landscapes and artworks. Among the great artists: Alexander Calder, Lewis DeSoto, Olafur Eliasson, William Tucker, Sol Lewitt, Roy Lichtenstein, Henry Moore, Isaumu Noguchi, Louise Bourgeois, Mark di Suvero, Jean Dubuffet, Andy Goldsworthy, Donald Judd, and many more… (The complete index of artists in the appendix section is five pages long!). Every profile is a small essay about the story and mission of the park with a hint at useful information at the end of the page: web site, artists, and bibliography.
The book, thanks to both its format and contents, gets to the right balance between specialist essay and instructive guidebook for art and nature lovers.

Info

• Title: Art Parks
• Author: Francesca Cigola
• Editor: Luca Sassi Editore (Ita ed.); Princeton Architectural Press (En ed.)
• Year of publication: 2013
• Price: 24,00 €
• Pages: 224

www.sassieditore.it

AC: When did you find out about your love for photography?

CP: My love for photography dates back to when I was in primary school and used my camera during school trips, but later became a true love when I bought my first digital camera and I could travel to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

AC: Why do you always choose to be the subject of your photos?

CP: I came to the necessity to take pictures of myself in time or maybe, I should say, the necessity itself evolved. My first self-portraits date back to when I was in high school: When I was 17, I felt marginalized and never appeared in those classic pictures with mates and friends and then I just wanted to be photographed as well: I was the only one who could do it because this way I did not get embarrassed.
For many years, it has been only about this: it was a way to keep the memory of myself. Later in 2006 – in a period in which I felt such a pain that I could not overcome – one day I started taking picture of myself, shooting a picture after the other and stopping only when I actually felt “released” from the mess I sensed in my stomach. Starting from that time, I realized that taking pictures of myself helped me exorcise in a way my discomforts and tell more about myself, something which I was never able to do with words but which I always needed to do.

AC: Do you feel inspired by any author?

CP: My approach to photography has always been instinctive and only during these last years, I finally discovered and appreciated the history of photography. I don’t know if I can actually say to be inspired by any specific author; however, there are certainly some photographers that struck me deep inside and who I love for something which I would like to be able to bring in my approach to photography, more than in the photographs themselves.
About Franesca Woodman I feel the “pain” and what I like about her the most is how she is able “to do research”: I am fascinated by the way she investigates the space and connects it to her deepest Self by employing her body and also I am fascinated by how taking pictures of herself becomes a true experience. In one of her retrospectives of some years ago in Siena there was a video in a loop shot by one of Woodman’s friends while she was taking picture of herself: it is a video which shows how she used to prepare everything in monastic silence and all of her movements are, even before the snapshot, art.
About Jan Saudek I love her search for beauty by expropriating the real which becomes almost grotesque. About Weston I love the sensuality of forms, about Roversi sensitivity and elegance, about Newton perfectionism, about Man Ray all of his experimentation.

AC: Why did you choose Polaroid cameras? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this medium?

CP: The Polaroid camera has been for years an object of desire for me: it was the camera of all the pictures during my childhood. Later it stayed unused and locked in the closet. For years, I have been thinking that eventually I might have brought it back to life. Hence, when I finally started using it more often with such curiosity, I realized that it was going to be active part of my experiences. The Polaroid camera holds inside so many characters and maybe many contradictions.
The Polaroid camera is a medium born to be “easy to use” (“point and shoot” commercials used to say): aside from more professional models, Polaroid cameras all have a fixed diaphragm and a sensor that, according to light, decides shooting time-lapses. “To change” the behavior of the camera with some tricks becomes a challenge and active part of the pre-production stage, which I love to experiment with. This pre-production stage implies also overcoming difficulties that arise while shooting self-portraits with these cameras. They sometimes don’t have delayed snapshot or, if they have it, it is quite severe (usually you have 10 seconds to position yourself), sometimes they don’t have the tripod connection and others misfire (they are all quite old cameras) exactly when you think you got the perfect photo (although we clearly know that it does not really exist).
Shooting with a Polaroid is almost cruel and close to what life really is: considering the cost of films, you have few occasions and very little margin of error. When you decide to move an image in your head on film, the photograph you get stands as the “unique possible moment” which, in spite of all the imperfections, succeeds sometimes in being “the perfect moment” for me and which I decide to show also to others. Finally, there is the frame: the film strongly characterizes the final image with tones and output; therefore, prior choices are needed to optimize results. Film calls for concentration to develop awareness of what you are going to do. Another very important element for me is that the film has its own size and consistency which you can touch and feel immediately (without “filters” due to developing times in the dark room for traditional films, the transfer process on pc or light room for digital frames). Moreover, for its chemical and physical properties, you can work on it “manually” and “with your hands” and this gives me the possibility to dialogue with the pictured myself like in a very personal auto-analysis.

AC: Talking about your past works, what is the one you were the most excited about and which one do you identify the most with?

CP: It is hard to answer this question because every one of my works is strongly tied to an important moment for me; however, I can tell you about those works which mean to me the important cornerstones of my career. Among these, I would like to mention “Musae”, a project carried on with Alan Marcheselli and which not only started our collaborations but also constituted the moment which taught me to think also in a planning perspective. In addition, “Io, tu e le rose” (You, me and the roses), which is the moment in which I tested the urgency of self-portraying to exorcise a negative moment and finally “L’anima è blu” (Soul is blue), a series of long exposures with pinhole camera.

AC: You mentioned your collaboration with Alan Marcheseli. Tell us about Polaroiders, the web community you founded with him.

CP: Polaroiders was born in 2010 thanks to Alan Marcheselli’s idea which I completely supported from the very beginning. We wanted to give a “virtual” home to passionate photographers to immediately develop, a place where to meet, confront and share a mutual passion, trying to anyway create concrete events so as all this could live also in the “real” world and actually promote many emergent Italians’ work which is underestimated in the traditional art system. Today, Polaroiders.it records almost 2000 enrollments, more than 25.000 photographs, about 50 active events and exhibitions both in Italy and abroad and two Snapshots Festivals.

AC: What projects are you working on now?

CP: I will soon start experimenting long exposure with pinhole cameras and Impossible 8×10 film (the new company which in 2008, after Polaroid bankrupted, bought the last plant in Europe starting again the production of instant developing films). However, I have not yet defined the project so well in my mind and that urgent need which leads me to shoot has not yet come.

AC: What is still “almost” in you?

CP: I feel “almost” in many things, but mainly “almost” is the condition I feel when I need to shoot, it is that undefined perception which I try to define, something I would like to say but stays wordless until I get in front of the camera.

Arena is an Italian artist who was born in 1978. He considers news report as the reference point for his personal critical reflection and thinks of it as an unchangeable element since it is both part of the past but still open to transformation by memory transmission; according to the artist, news stories lose their tangible characters and become pure concepts, which collective memory elaborates.

For example, this happens with the work Untitled (Bologna), 2001. It stands as a square marble sheet, which is pierced in the middle as if a grenade would have torn it. Actually, the deep cut is due to the 85 names of the victims of the massacre at Bologna train station in August 1980: they are carved repeatedly until they create a central hole that passes through it. It seems that the presence of the sheet as the symbol of collective memory and the continual celebration are not enough to stop the complete abstraction and cancellation of those names. Arena’s work is both charming and moving at the same time: he matches a formal with a perceptual antithesis. While plunging into the historical event, he appropriates it and gives us back a barer though more significant version.

In Genova 2011 (group picture), Arena goes one step further and summons up collective and political conscience to reflect on what has happened. He does so by producing one of his most engaging works. Starting from the official group picture of the ten leaders who were at the Genoa G8 in 2001, he produced ten square molds (40×40 cm) of different height (from 0,5 cm to 22 cm) in a way which, if Carlo Giuliani would have been alive, he might have come up them to look in the leaders’ eyes searching for culpability or maybe only answers.

For 18.900 meters on slate (Pinelli’s way) of 2009, Arena physically became integral part of his creative project. He himself travelled through again anarchist Pinelli’s last way as a free man from the train station to home and then at the bar, anarchist circles and up to the central police station. He walked through an 18.900 meters long way as everyone of us carelessly does every day. The installation is made up of 332 slate sheets of 60x60x1 cm on which Pinelli’s 18.900 meters long way is carved.

The confrontation with these affairs goes through the artist’s very spirit, both from a conceptual and physical point of view, becoming the measurement unit of his own reflection and, hence, of the project itself, as it is for the more recent work Tube of 2013. It is a square box-shaped metal tube, which has been cut and recomposed to become a square. The amount of metal employed corresponds to the artist’s body mass in cubic centimeters when the interior of the tube would be filled up with earth.

Therefore, the news report is no more employed as a medium to reflect upon the flowing of events and the memory depository; instead, it is the Self, our own presence on earth in a specific given moment. The artist becomes himself the question, starting and ending point of the investigation, his own weight and height become the limits and parameters of his works. This centrality and personal calling into question seems to be clarified and expressed in works as Untitled (Eliot), 2013 and Untitled (Agostino), 2012. The first work is made up of two marble plates marquinia on which the artist carved the initial line of the quartet East Coker “In my beginning is my end” which Eliot himself chose for his own epitaph. In the second work, Saint Augustine’s words “I Have Become a Question to Myself” are stamped on two square slate and white Carrara marble molds. In this second work the answer itself becomes another question, actually a flood of questions as much as the beholder’s gazes. Arena leaves the beholders questioning themselves about Saint Augustine’s words while returning the work to collectivity and following an almost inverse path to the one he did in the previously mentioned works.

It is exactly in front of a sometimes distracted collectivity that Arena presented Riduzione di mare (2013) in the spaces of Monitor gallery in Rome. The work included an installation and a performance, which told about the tragedy of emigration. Performers progressively licked a 34 kg block of salt during the days of the exhibition with the aim of overwriting on the block a text translated in Morse code. The document filled up by the Dutch organization United for Intercultural Action (European Network Against Nationalism, Racism, Fascism and in Support of Migrants and Refugees) included the list of the names of those 16136 people who died in the attempt of emigrating to Europe, which mass media told us about from January 1993 to January 2012. At the end of the exhibition, the block seemed eroded and changed by human movement and humors as a fragment of past and at the same time still fluxing in time.

This interesting group of works completely clarifies the coordinates of the artist’s action in creating and producing his works. Arena identifies certain news reports or apparently completely private and personal events with the reading keys to break up the ordinary worldview, which mass media and collective gaze sometimes refer to, establishing a dialogue with American minimalism and carefully rooting all of his projects in a planning scheme working as the conceptual skeleton of every installation and performance.

The square shape, which is present in this selection of works, is the artist’s favorite; indeed, even though it is one of the most elementary polygons, various artists have often chosen the square as the ideal expression of the spatial dimension of their own works. Let’s think about Josef Albers or Donald Judd who have been celebrating square for many years.

Arena’s works, as those by Albers, indeed, show an extreme reduction of forms in a lapidary and geometric style which is rendered through technical perfection. More than other 20^th century artists, Albers gave shape to philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s words, which stated that everything we see can be different and everything we depict can be different in the same way, showing that sometimes the most basic things are the most incompressible ones. As in Albers’ works, Arena’s installations as well might set some traps in which the spectator risks to be repeatedly caught because of the insecurity the work itself instills.

At the same time, Arena’s research formally materializes in tridimensional works, which place the experience of the space at the core in a similar way to Judd’s works. The apparently autonomous installations can’t be perceived without considering the relationship with the space they take up and influence. Formal rendering, instead, although materializes in a geometrical and abstract art, conceptually distances from the cold elegance of Judd’s research, which seemed to be banning any form of subjectivity.