GAC: Four Places, Many Faces, and Thousands of Races

With Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (aka GAC), it’s difficult to discern which sense of “place” surfaced first: artist, dealer, collector, or critic/historian. Born in Brescia in 1914, he spent most of his life producing art, yet his influence as a cunning collector/dealer still endures. Soon after meeting Italian painter Emilio Vedova, whom the 2007 Venice Biennale honored, GAC exhibited Vedova’s work in his home, transforming him into an art dealer in 1946. Later home exhibitions were attended by artists and critics alike, eager to discover Italy’s abstract painting scene. Thirty years later, he reversed the home gallery concept by mailing exhibitions at home catalogues to his massive mailing list (supposedly 10600 addresses), enabling recipients to view eight different exhibitions of his own work over a fourteen-year period in their homes. An active collector, he acquired up to 100 paintings by a single artist. He was among the first in Italy to collect post-war Italy’s abstract painters known as the Group of Eight, as well as works by Alberto Burri, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, David Hockney, Asger Jorns, Roy Lichtenstein, Roberto Matta, Piero Manzini, Robert Rauschenberg, and several Nouveaux Réalistes. Germany’s first Documenta (1955) featured over two dozen works from GAC’s personal collection. From 1957-1958, hundreds of Italian paintings from his collection traveled to Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Basel and the Musée de Beaux-Arts in La Chaux-de-Fonds. In 1958, GAC authored Arte Astratta (Abstract Art), one of the first Italian texts on this subject, followed by The Man as Painter in 1960, which documented his artistic relationship with painter Renato Birolli. Of course, every dealer is first and foremost a critic; the collector puts his money where his mouth is; and the artist’s every move says “yes,” so GAC was a critic from the getgo, even if it took him a decade to get a book deal. As a visual artist, his earliest self-portraits date from just after World War II, but it wasn’t until 1960 that he devoted himself entirely to art-making activities. I use the term “art-making activities,” since I can’t imagine concurrent audiences considering his output art until at least the 1980s when related practices such as Art & Language’s cataloguing systems, John Baldessari’s text panels, Joseph Beuys’ felt suit, Marcel Broodthaers’ poetic diagrams, Chris Burden’s performance relics, Hanne Darboven’s all-over writing, Robert Filliou’s unstructured games, Gilbert and George’s posturing, Ray Johnson’s mail art, Yayoi Kusama’s polka-dot obliterations, Cildo Mereiles’ Insertions into global systems , Allan Ruppersberg’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Lucas Samaras’ boxed shrines began to gain wider acclaim. Italian critic Marco Meneguzzo best describes GAC’s transition from collector/dealer to artist:

Cavellini collected pictures almost throughout the Fifties, but in reality he collected the brushstrokes, or in other words the actions of the artists. It is no coincidence that he nearly always concentrated on informal artists. And so, when the brushstroke was freed from the support and became action, happening, performance, from which the object, the work, emerged- or might emerge as residue of event, Cavellini was ready.

In fact, GAC’s art-making activities resembled the spirit of London’s 1962 Festival of Misfit antics far more than concurrent Italian avant-garde collectives such as Gruppo T (Milan) or Gruppo N (Padua), whose super-slick experiential paintings and installations employed Constructivist vocabularies. While GAC’s practice has been associated with Fluxus, he doesn’t seem to have worked directly with any of its members until 1980, when he participated in Interdada ’80, organized by Fluxus-ex Dick Higgins. GAC’s mid-60s Opera Oggetto (Object Works), assemblages made from scavenged objects; late ‘60s Cassetta che Contengono Opere Destrutte (Drawers Containing Destroyed Works), wooden shelves containing either sawed up works or other artists’ works, including a Fontana; and ‘70s-era Carbone (Carbons), partially charred pictures and objects; bear greater resemblance to early Nouveau Réaliste (NR) works than to Fluxus games or event-scores. The scruffy NR look (what Alain Jouffroy termed “mental Pompeii”) was already passé by 1965, the year of GAC’s first solo exhibition at Milan’s Galleria Apollinaire, where NR’s world premiere occurred only five years earlier. In 1970, GAC dedicated one of his Carbone, a sculpture comprising a cascade of seven charred wooden gears, to NR member Jean Tinguely.

Between 1964-1970, GAC was oddly fond of shaping wood using a blowtorch and a jigsaw. Of two wooden paintings from 1964, one resembles an early Warhol shoe portrait, while the other features a floral tie whose imagery prefigures Warhol’s flower paintings, which premiered at Leo Castelli Gallery in late November 1964. He created intricate panel paintings, including elaborate portraits and postage stamps, using inlaid wood. His portraits gathered contemporary masters, such as I Progtagonisti della Pop Art (The Protagonists of Pop Art)(1967) or L’Ultima Cena (The Last Supper)(1968), which featured everyone from Morandi to Dubuffet to Warhol to Cavellini with Picasso seated in the center. Just as stamps honor historical figures, his postage-stamp panels featuring painted replicas by well-known artists celebrated their contributions. After 1970, he stopped making intricately inlaid postage-stamp panels, yet the postage-stamp motif remained vital, appearing as actual postage stamps, posters, postcards, canvases, plywood panels, and even collages made using match sticks, measuring tapes, or skinny pine cones. GAC’s 1970 Carbons: Flags features a parade of mostly blackened flags, making it rather difficult to identify the nations’ flags, save the US and UK flags.

Rather than attempt to fit him into some prior movement, it seems more relevant to explore how GAC’s later work anticipated contemporary art’s preoccupations. Quite spontaneously, he eradicated art/life boundaries, recycled imagery from past works, appropriated and reused other artists’ works, generated exhibition possibilities, staged live events, utilized advertising strategies, inserted fictions into real situations, celebrated silliness, and devised publicity stunts. Given his “can-do” approach to his career possibilities, his admiration for that era’s US artists is hardly surprising. His Elencio Dei Movimenti dei Protagonisti (List of the Movements and Protagonists) intersperses AUTOSTORICIZZAZIONE (his self-proclaimed art movement) between George Brecht’s event-scores and Dennis Oppenheim and Walter de Maria’s land art. This 1973 text piece on canvas lists a disproportionately high number of US artists (15/27) who arrived on the scene in the years following Lucio Fontana. Eager to position himself atop the prestigious Kunstkompass chart, assembled annually by Art Aktuel editor Dr. Willi Bongard, he wrote Bongard to explain that he had earned enough points in 1976 to be ranked first, since recipients of his home exhibition catalogs tacitly agreed that keeping the catalogs meant that GAC had effectively exhibited at their respective location (home, gallery or museum). In this letter, GAC remarked: ”I therefore feel authorized to declare that I held 10,600 exhibitions in the spring of 1976, including exhibitions in all the world’s most important museums, no exceptions being made for the museums used as the basis of the compilation of your Kunstkompass.”

So, what is AUTOSTORICIZZAZIONE (self-historicization)? Interestingly enough, the same Kunstkompass chart created by GAC describes Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaer’s tendency as mitologia individuale (personal mythology), a category that applies equally to GAC, but since he named his tendency autostoricizzazione, he must have meant that his approach went beyond mere mythmaking, a strategy already linked to Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, and Andy Warhol. Meneguzzo notes that GAC’s first “history-making” gesture entailed substituting his photo for that of Lenin on the cover of one of the youth protest movement’s bestselling books and adding the text “Che Fare? (What Shall We Do?).” Emblematic of the artworld’s linguistic turn; whereby textual works replaced objects, GAC’s 1968 gesture gave rise to his notion of autostoricizzazione. He coined this term in 1971 after designing sixteen wildly different museum posters, each featuring the years “1914-2014,” one of his artworks and the dates for a solo exhibition celebrating the centenary of Cavellini’s birth. The next year, he assembled all 16 images onto one canvas, which he called “Sixteen Manifestoes” of the most important museums in the world to celebrate GAC’s centenary. That same year, he documented banners hanging outside museums, such as Venice’s Palazzo Ducale and Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art, advertising his centenary exhibition. His capacity to both insert himself into past and future art history, while “making” art history using this unusual strategy, both demonstrated the vast difference between mere mythmaking and actually writing oneself into history, and inaugurated his self-fulfilled prophecies. Rather than wait for others to invite him to participate, GAC inserted himself into the “reality” of the system of art. Autostoricizzazione is the transformation of fictional possibilities into historical events.

Building on his book that explored his relationship with artist Renato Birolli, GAC embarked upon a similar project, though this entailed an imaginary letter exchange with Vincent Van Gogh, enabling him to immortalize 25 letters dating from the 19th Century on canvas panels. In 1973, he exhibited 25 fictitious book covers by famous authors who dedicated entire books to the Cavellini story, such as Karl Marx’s Il Capitale di Cavellini or Friedrich Nietzsche Così Parlò Cavellini. The next year, he presented 25 hand-written responses to their books on canvas panels. These activities inspired GAC to script his own biography, which first appeared as The Entry “Cavellini” in the Universal Encyclopedia (1973), followed by The Diaries of Guglielmo Achille Cavellini (1975); 1946-1976: In the Jungle of Art (1977), (these three were published in English and Italian); and Vita di un genio (1989). GAC’s dense encyclopedia entry begins with confirmed truths about his life, but escalates into meetings with Mao Tse Tung, winning the Nobel Prize in art, missions to the moon, MOMA and Tate exhibitions, culminating with his discovering a new color, which he donates to the rainbow! He apparently wrote and rewrote his autobiography, until he had filled rolls and rolls of canvas, which he used to fashion shirts, suits, and raincoats, as well as drape around objects such as buildings, columns, closets, and mannequins. During this period (1973-1976), he wrote his story on everything, including flags, globes, live models, Plexiglas, and umbrellas. In 1974, GAC had the good fortune to get Andy Warhol to paint his portrait, an image that appears in his work in various contexts, such as an image on a stamp and as an element in solo exhibitions.

While some might consider GAC’s shameless self-promotion and one-man campaign interventions into the artworld (hence the title’s “thousands of races”) obnoxious, audacious, ridiculous, or even “ugly,” his life’s work anticipated the kinds of stunts today’s artists routinely pull off to attract media attention. He apparently inspired the creative juices of people living around the world, since they sent him plenty of interesting examples of collaged mail art, presumably from the recipients of his home exhibition catalogs. There is so much silliness here, especially his “impertinent” self-portraits, whereby his tongue is stuck to a Cavellini sticker and his eyes are blocked by giant glasses sporting Cavellini campaign stickers that one can’t take his obnoxiousness too seriously. With his Exhibitions at home catalogues (1974-1987), he continued producing text-based work, but on a much smaller scale. This format complemented his interest to explore various strategies for inserting himself into art history. His last catalog No Man is a Prophet in his Native Land assembled the worldwide replies that his catalogs had inspired, taking his project full circle from his responses to other authors’ fictional texts thirteen years earlier.

Given his 40 year publicity campaign in advance of his centenary exhibitions, I will be surprised if no museum organizes a survey of his work on the centenary of his birthday, turning his life’s campaign into a self-fulfilled prophesy. The very iteration and reiteration of these ideas ensures that this fiction gains instantiation. His 1975 postcard, Ten Ways to Make Yourself Famous, presents various actions one can do, all promoting the Cavellini legacy of course, such as “VIII Write a book or an essay on Cavellini.” He’s thus already appropriated my efforts here into his notoriety schemes. Much more worrisome, however, is the fact that this essay is based on information gathered from material compiled by his supporters. I never met GAC, nor have I seen any of his objects, read his books and catalogs, viewed his art collection or visited the Cavellinian Museum, so my essay is actually part of his ploy to insert his art career into the real. People who read the words I’ve penned will naturally assume this really happened. I hope it did. Even if it didn’t, the Fake GAC offers artists great strategies for jump-starting their careers.