Fondazione Prada in Milan lacks a good bookstore. It is so reduced that it is almost non-existing. I wanted to buy a book on Pino Pascali but only the catalogue was on sale, which was too big (and expensive) to carry with me on my travels. Eh!
I do have Carla Lonzi's 1969 book Self-Portrait lying on my desk at home and Pascali is in it. Self-Portrait is a collage of Lonzi's interviews as a farewell to art criticism. These interviews were peculiar, basically letting the artists talk, and those Arte Povera artists of the 1960s were talkers. Or, maybe, Italians, in general, are good at talking and taking the scenic route.
'I would prefer to have some little topics. Haha!...' says Pascali on the first page of the book. Laughter, like in those first lines of Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist: 'Gilbert (at the piano). My dear Ernest, what you are laughing at?' Laughter is here combined with playing (the piano), and that's the first topic Pascali talks about with Lonzi in the original interview: 'Play is not just the prerogative of children.'
For the sake of summer time, I'm gonna keep it short and just say that the Pascali exhibition at Fondazione Prada is beautiful with capital letters and exclamation marks. Now, I want to go to the Arte Povera show that Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is curating in autumn at the Pinault Collection in Paris. Just try to imagine what a sparkling mind like that of Christov-Bakargiev will do with the work.
Also, thinking about poor materials, I was reading again Frank O'Hara's love poem Drinking a Coke with You. In the fourth line he mentions 'yoghurt'. which is such an unpoetic word. 'Coke' has a cool sound to it, but with yoghurt, it might be the 'h' that makes it so unattractive. Was there something like Arte Povera poetry?