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

«The main question I was asking to myself was how poetry could resist and live today, what possible developments it might go through, its metamorphoses; art and especially the avant-gardes had already dealt with this issue with brilliant, futuristic and charming solutions. Many of the protagonists of that unique season were originally poets and men of letters (Breton, Marinetti, Tzara, just to mention a few), who later applied their own poetics to life itself and shared it with the outside world, making their poetry alive and flooding it with innovative points of view. From here, it seemed natural to me dealing with life and action and involving that portion of contemporary theatre which was interested in installation and performance.”

Although every work portrays dynamics which are constantly tied to the wills of an always different “tyrannical present,” it is with space that Domenico manages to merge the various demands of his work into a univocal dimension which gives life to it.

And it is exactly in a well-defined space – such as those spaces offered by Morra Foundation in the 18^th century Palazzo Bagnara, in the old town center of Naples –  that Mennillo staged Atlante della Fertilità (Atlas of Fertility) between the end of 2011 and the beginnings of 2012.

«When I was in Naples, I started writing a poem about a Western city, portraying its habits and manners, verses which arose every morning when I woke up. I had a draft almost every morning. Once I finished the poem, I was convinced that the operation should stop with the writing process itself and I decided to add a visual part to the poem. I started this visual work in New York during the following fall when I finished the final draft. Photographs, papers, cardboards, sketches on notebooks, books from local markets, objects found in the street, materials to be used for collages; once I got back to Italy with sketched collages from New York, I understood that the poetical work could go beyond the collages and that instead it could have sound and installation applications».

From there, the natural need was that of setting up his own Atlas, consciously inspired by Warburg’s precedent Mnemosyne-Atlas, in a physical and “sensual” space in Naples. Mennillo’s physical and sensual space is obviously a sensory space, a dimension dedicated to the experimentation of physical perceptions and coming directly from senses, where the mixture of space, language and sound is creatively experimented by the artist and perceptively ventured by the beholder.

The need of creating a classification system for memory comes from the idea that «memory is the basis of human thought and it is conceived via emotional images». Creating a sensual space made up of sounds, smells and especially images, Mennillo gives the possibility to the visitors of Atlas to meet a series of combinations of images of three cities  symbols of the Western decadence, Naples, Paris and New York: «The past of those images was mine, but symbols and images were communal heritage which could be grasped and met by those people wandering around the installations and whose memory was put into close contact with stimulations-thoughts».

It is exactly the role of nowadays decayed capitals of the Western culture that allows the artist to associate the cities of Naples, Paris and New York in his Atlas. This work, indeed, made up of thinking and poetic language –  with the fundamental role of images – digs up memory to reveal the decadence and oblivion of our age: «The slow oblivion of images is what strong powers and the related economies aim the most to for the individual, their attentions and cares are often directed towards those even very slight processes of evaporation and formation of thoughts which come from images».

The production of Atlas took up a lot of Domenico’s time (from 2008 to 2011). During this long period, he had the opportunity to search for the known and the unknown through the innumerable visual and sound combinations which were offered by the chosen places, as well as to confront himself with three key figures which characterize the work as a whole: Giordano Bruno, Abi Warburg and Charles Baudelaire.

The exhibition, indeed, went through three rooms. The first room was inspired by Charles Baudelaire’s Addiition de la troisième édition des Fleures du Mal: paper drawings, which illustrated and expanded Baudelaire’s texts, took inspiration from Giordano Bruno’s engravings which he employed to clarify his philosophical writings. «Baudelaire has always been a very important author for me (and not only for me); all of his words, from verses to fragments of unfinished projects, conceal treasures which meant a lot for the 20^th century as a whole to understand the fundamental contradictions and implications of modernity».

The second room hosted an “infinite library” or a “library of the infinity,” which conceptually recalled Warburg Institute Library in Hamburg. Finally, the third room hosted an installation with soundtrack from the unpublished poem Atlante della Fertilità (Atlas of Fertility), realized through super8 projectors and analog machines from the 70s (this project was born in collaboration with composer and musician Nino Bruno).

Domenico Mennillo will exhibit again in  Naples next December in the rooms of Nitsch Museum, with the show Alcune Architetture di Napoli 2003-2013 – Il teatro di lunGrabbe nelle architetture napoletane: a retrospective to celebrate ten years of activity for lunGrabbe in Naples. LunGrabbe theatre, founded by Domenico Mennillo and Rosaria Castiglione in 2001, is based on the duo architecture-theatre and centered on Mennillo’s writings. It employs always different spatial solutions and favors performances simulating representational theatre. During these past years, cinema as well has gained a lot of attention thanks to films and videos in relation with performances and poems-concerts, which focus on verses and acoustic or electronic instruments and are practically always staged outside the theatre itself.