Boccioni: Continuidade no Espaço, on view at MAC-USP, is an exhibition of fundamental importance both to art historical research and to reflection on the functions of university museums within cultural policy
I visited the exhibition Boccioni: Continuidade no Espaço, on view at MAC-USP. Curated by Ana Gonçalves Magalhães, a faculty curator at MAC, and Rosalind McKever of London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, it is the outcome of the curators’ unprecedented multidisciplinary research.
The exhibition revolves around the sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, part of the collection of USP’s Museum of Contemporary Art. It is the most celebrated work by the Italian Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni and marks the high point of his attempt to bring sculpture to life by creating figures in motion.
Boccioni was a revolutionary sculptor who sought to resolve every aspect of dynamic form in three-dimensional language. He studied the movement of the human body in space intensively. That investigation reaches its limit in Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, a body advancing determinedly into the viewer’s space.
The sculpture was made in plaster, a fragile material that runs counter to sculptural tradition but responds to principles cherished by several Futurist artists, who called for their works to be destroyed by later, more innovative artists rather than preserved in museums.
The material fragility of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, combined with Boccioni’s premature death at thirty-three during military exercises in the First World War, turned this work’s history into a veritable maze of enigmas and art-market impasses, which this exhibition unravels.
Most of Boccioni’s work was destroyed in the late 1920s, and a number of bronze copies were made between the 1930s and 1970s, despite his aversion to that material. As a reproducible artwork, the curators explain in the exhibition’s introductory text, it “became popular and coveted on the art market, feeding confusion about its original material.”
X-ray studies and advanced techniques for investigating and analyzing materials developed at the Institute of Physics, modeling systematized at POLI, and studies of documents and photographs of Boccioni’s studio from institutional archives in Brazil, Italy, and the United States made it possible to establish that the plaster sculpture in MAC-USP’s collection is the one exhibited by the artist in 1913.
The exhibition at MAC-USP presents this entire investigative process. It is fundamentally important both to research in art history and to reflection on the place and functions of university museums within cultural policy.
This is not a spectacular show in the entertainment industry’s sense of the word, but a laboratory exhibition in which the museum makes public and shares the study of a work in its collection, revealing the exchanges between research and curatorship.
The exhibition runs until March 24, 2019, Tuesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.
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