Mario Merz

Acceleration=Dream, Fibonacci Numbers in Neon and Motorcycle Phantom (1972)

Selected by Guggenheim Chief Curator Naomi Beckwith

A sculpture that was an unassuming inflection point for the curatorial direction of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 1989 is again driving its creative direction from the center of a new exhibit titled, “By Way Of.” It features a motorcycle with its handlebars replaced by the horns of an ankole, speeding on the walls, parallel to the floor, while leaving a trail of neon numbers representing the Fibonacci sequence.

I thought it would be great for audiences to see where my mind is right now and Merz is an artist who sits close to my heart. I don’t think anyone can understate his influence in the world of new sculptural directions, being central to the Arte Povera movement.

The work wasn’t actually first made for the Guggenheim. It was made and lost in the 1970s, but Merz reconstituted it for the Guggenheim when it came into the collection during a show of his work in 1989. So, it’s something that’s close to the Guggenheim’s heart, too. When I investigated the museum’s files, it was clear this was the first time the Guggenheim really worked in a site-specific installation in real-time, realizing works with an artist.

When the works in that 1989 show were fabricated, including this piece, Merz sent people down to Canal Street every day asking for materials. The crew then built it onsite. We had to hire twice the crew, and it took two and a half weeks to put this together. And, though it’s a recreation of a work that had been lost prior, he knew it would be perfect for the Guggenheim—whose spiral form was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. The Fibonacci sequence is the numeric model for a spiral.

There are two things I love about this work. One is that it’s just flat-out whimsical. I must admit, I have kind of a Spider-man fantasy; who doesn’t want to be able to move in unusual ways around space with your body, or imagine yourself going so fast that you could ride the wall sideways? So, the whimsy is real.

The other thing that I love is that Merz is deeply interested in Italy’s relationship to itself and the world in the aftermath of World War II. Italy was on the losing side of the war, so it relied on one thing Italy has always kind of been able to put forward: its ties to the arts.

But it was ancient art. It was old art. There was no sense of Italy as a modern place, and so Merz and these post-war Italian artists were really trying to think about a modern Italy. These artists were wondering, “Well, what makes us Italian? And what’s left over from the dregs of war?” The iconic curator Germano Celant put a name to it in the 1960s, Arte Povera. Celant would later become one of the first contemporary curators at the Guggenheim in the late 1980s, and his first show was the Merz exhibition.

Meanwhile, in Turin, they began making cars and motorcycles, with companies like Fiat becoming symbols of post-war recovery for Italy. But there also exists this interesting violent dependence on the African continent, with the raw materials of this new industrial rise of Italy coming from what at that time would have been called the Third World.

The motorcycle then is whimsical, not just because of its location on the wall, but because it turned into a beast. It has horns from an ankole, an animal only found in Africa. And so, Merz is thinking about how the nation is industrializing.

It’s fair to say the aesthetic of the piece would be more equitable to a theme park attraction than a museum. I don’t think Merz would be offended by the idea that it looks like it belongs to something more carnivalesque because that’s what Arte Povera was working against—this idea that the most important parts of Italian culture came from the ancient past.

The modern art world has always been slightly skeptical of classic forms. So, when they show up, they usually mean something retrograde. The first time it happened when Picasso started making neoclassical-inspired paintings. Someone called it the ritorno all’ordine, return to order. And “order” itself has a dark connotation; it is the kind of idea undergirding of fascist thought.

White marbles were never white to begin with, they were likely painted. But this idea that white equals purity ruined how we thought about African art, which showed up on European stores with various materials on its surfaces. Everybody scrubbed them down and took off the beads and hair, the things that make them look “dirty.” This sense of cleanliness in sculpture was something Arte Povera artists were fighting against.

Now, with the likes of Steve Bannon seeking to open a school that emphasizes such a “return to order” in Italy, you can see how there will always be a conservative faction pushing back against forward-thinking movements like Arte Povera.

And an Italian audience would certainly see this work differently from an American one. That motorcycle is not a Harley-Davidson hog. It doesn’t have a whole lot of horsepower. It’s the kind of thing you would use to zip around an Italian city. Part of the joke is that it’s a Honda motorcycle; it’s not even Italian. Merz absolutely would have seen the humility of that, with a nation emerging from fascism trying to encourage people back into the cities.

There’s no way now to show some of the amazing innovations of someone like David Hammons or Mark Bradford without going back to the Arte Povera movement. So, I wanted to give honor where honor is due.

Lastly, we are now in a world grappling with this question of tactility and experience. There’s a craving for audiences to see something that feels physical, not just a real work of art, but a work of art that engages your body. With this work, you’re looking up at it. You have to imagine something crazy going on for this thing to exist in the gallery.

The definition of contemporary is always going to change. I love that you can, in the space of an exhibition, collapse time a little bit. I’m amazed how fresh the sculpture looks, like it could have been made last week. And while Merz was a special being, the show is also an homage to Celant, who we lost in the COVID-19 pandemic.

What artwork hangs across from Mona Lisa? What lies downstairs from Van Gogh’s Sunflowers? In “The Permanent Collection,” we journey to museums around the globe, illuminating hidden gems and sharing stories behind artworks that often lie beyond the spotlight.