I n November 1967, in the pages of “Flash Art,” the Italian art historian Germano Celant published “Arte Povera: Notes for a Guerrilla War,” a manifesto for the then-burgeoning movement. In it, Celant renounced the art market’s growing appetite for commodification, as well as the notion of the artist as a producer for consumption. Emerging from the social and political turmoil of the 1960s, arte povera stood in opposition to the artistic trends of the time, such as pop and minimalism, advocating an ethos of resistance through a turn to “poor” materials.
Recently, we spoke with Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, holders of one of the largest arte povera collections in the US. “Whatever you do, please don’t call us collectors,” Spanu stated upfront—perhaps a startling place to begin. Yet in understanding arte povera as both an artistic and sociopolitical project, one can begin to grasp why normative ideas of collecting might fail to resonate with the couple. “Nancy and I decided that whatever we are fortunate enough to be able to acquire had to be shared with others,” Spanu explained, “and that could not be further apart from the world of collecting.” As we talked, it became clear that they don’t just collect the work of arte povera, they also live by its principles.
Magazzino Italian Art, Olnick and Spanu’s museum and research center, was founded to house their collection and exhibit artists who are, as they say, “telling a new story with existing materials.” Located in Cold Spring, New York, Magazzino feels like a physical manifestation of the couple’s collecting philosophy. From the range of art on view—shows featuring the work of Piero Manzoni and Yoichi Ohira are up through March—to the corral of Sardinian donkeys on the grounds, Magazzino embodies arte povera’s desire for life and art to converge.
“It felt like a genre that would always stay fresh,” Olnick said of their decision to collect arte povera, “because it was dealing with the phenomenological experience of people on how they encounter everyday life, gravity, the center of the earth.” Reflecting on their preference to share their collection, the couple stressed that founding Magazzino felt “much more gratifying than just being a collector,” thanks to the enthusiasm it generates within the community.
Through Magazzino, Olnick and Spanu have been able to redefine collecting away from possession toward a commitment to public good, education and shared experience. On a psychological level, this is a clear expression of the difference between a more primitive defensive function and sublimation. Freud wrote that the infant’s earliest psychical decisions surround the desire to take in (incorporate, eat, possess) versus expel or keep out. From a Freudian lens, we can interpret the urge to possess and collect as a way of mastering or controlling the object by making it part of the subject. Tracing the infant’s stages of development, Freud discusses a period of infancy during which questions around retention versus expulsion come to the fore. He dubbed this the “anal stage,” when the child begins to assert control by either holding in or letting go. Hoarding can be linked to these early impulses to grab ahold of the concrete as a stand-in for lost objects. Collecting is a way of taking in things that help maintain a sense of control and identity. Possessiveness is therefore an attachment strategy: keeping the object to oneself.
“Nancy and I decided that whatever we are fortunate enough to be able to acquire had to be shared with others, and that could not be further apart from the world of collecting.” —Giorgio Spanu
One can become fixated in certain stages of development and use more early or primitive defenses; this can manifest as being overly attached to keeping—objects, money, psychological content—and resisting sharing. Sharing or letting go requires tolerating loss and the inner resources to trust that giving something up does not mean losing the self.
Olnick and Spanu’s shared desire to make their collection public can be interpreted as their ability to renounce narcissistic possession of their art in favor of contributing to the world around us. Healthy sharing—we could call it reciprocal relatedness—emerges when self-object needs
are adequately met and the self feels cohesive enough to enter mutuality rather than to experience others purely as resources there for the self.
Arte povera aimed to deconstruct universalized artistic values of permanence, possession and marketability, all inherent in traditional understandings of collecting. The arte povera artists deliberately chose simple, accessible materials, from industrial detritus to natural or ephemeral substances such as charcoal, cotton, earth and water. In the aftermath of 1968, the movement became interested in “dematerialized” art, stressing process and contingency rather than a fixed, permanent product.
Much like arte povera’s subversion of traditional notions of the art object, Olnick and Spanu are invested in destabilizing normative concepts of what collecting is and does. Per Spanu, “You should buy a piece of art for the beauty it is going to give to your life.”
