Burri

Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri's Sacchi
Author(s): Jaimey Hamilton

Source: October, Vol. 124, Postwar Italian Art (Spring, 2008), pp. 31-52
Published by: The MIT Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40368499
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Making Art Matter:
Alberto Burri's Sacchr*
JAIMEY HAMILTON
Burri is in this excavation, in this open

wound that reveals the unique possibility of
suturing. . . . [His] material is ... an inter-
mediary of a corruptibility, but also a
germinating action, one that in his individ-
ual choice is realized as necessary for creative
liberation, of the total conscience of the self
- Toni Toniato, "Burri," 1958
The Excesses of Silence
"Form and Space! Form and Space! The end. There is nothing else. Form
and Space!"1 This intractable statement was made by Italian artist Alberto Burri
in an effort to sum up the logic of his lifelong aesthetic ambitions in a rare inter-
view at the end of his life in 1994. It was not a new mantra, but one that he had
been repeating for decades. To his friend and interlocutor Stefano Zorzi, he once
again reiterated vehemently that despite the sometimes shocking diversity and
associational content of the material and processes he employed throughout his
career, his artistic project had been a fundamentally formalist one: to achieve
harmony and balance through the purest material expression of form and space.
But the exclamatory nature of his statement ("Form and Space!"), as he looked
back at a career of unusual materials and processes, hints that this mantra was
more than just a positive affirmation of his passion for modernist painting tenets.
It was also a defiant negation of any social or psychological meaning that had
been or could be read into his artwork and method ("There is nothing else"). He
insisted, for example, that there were no intentional metaphors in his stitching
* This article derives from the first chapter of my dissertation, Strategies of Excess: The Postwar
Assemblages of Alberto Burri, Robert Rauschenberg, and Arman (Boston University, 2006). For all their sup-
port and constructive criticism, my deepest thanks to Caroline Jones, Yve-Alain Bois, Leah Dickerman,
Mari Dumett,John X. Christ, Emily Gephardt, Maria Sensi, the Fondazione Burri, and all of the partic-
ipants and organizers of the 2005 CAA panel "Colonization of Everydayness: Cold War Histories."
1. Burri quoted in Stefano Zorzi, Parola di Burri (Turin: Allemandi, 1995), p. 99.
OCTOBER 124, Spring 2008, pp. 31-52. © 2008 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
32 OCTOBER
Alberto Burn. Sacco 5P. 1953.

Courtesy Fondazione Bum'.
of old burlap sacks in the Sacchi series of the 1950s; his torching of wood, iron, or
plastic in the 1960s; or his eventual incising of Celotex in the 1980s and '90s.
Articulated in the context of this final interview, the statement can be read as a
last-ditch attempt at interdicting the inquisitive and, to Burri's mind, hyperimagi-
native art critics and writers who had plagued him since the very earliest
reception of his Sacchi in the 1950s.
In fact, Burri's insistence on formalism contradicts the semiotic richness of
the Sacchi, which revolves quite clearly around the materiality of the burlap sacks
that the artist tore into and reassembled with thread. From 1949 to 1960, Burri
made hundreds of Sacchi with stitched scraps riddled with holes that seemed to
readily elicit associations with the body. There were, of course, critics who related
the sacks to the ascetic robes of the Franciscan order founded in the countryside
near Burri's hometown and those who even hinted that the holes in the canvases
referenced stigmata.2 But these religious readings were trumped by the more
2. These readings have been broached by Guilio Carlo Argan in UEspresso (1956); James Byrnes
Making Art Matter 33
widely accepted notion that the

existential body of the postwar
deU'Obelisco in Rome in 1952 (t
commented that Burri's paintin
and nihilism are fused to the p
flicts, [and] nightmares."3 Truc
a skin of traumatic memory th
Others were more explicit about
respected Italian art writer, fo
treatise on the state of Italian a
argued that the "current situat
with the triggering of world wa
atomic bomb." He argued that B
and remind his audience of hum
this cloth, nature seems symbolic
like a sinister morgue, where th
flowing, tearing themselves apart
Trucchi and Arcangeli represe
reading of the Sacchts surfaces
tion had to grapple. Such early
more tempting by the fact tha
been a medic during the war. A
the connection: "Alberto Burri
tured by the Americans and sh
painting and constructing abst
with a surgeon's stitch."5 While
explanation of Burri's art (the a
but about three years later), it i
both the real flesh wounds of s
trauma of the Holocaust and atomic annihilation.
So why would Burri, even as his health failed toward the end of his life,
continue to resist allusions that were discussed so freely in the postwar
moment - allusions that seemed so clearly called for? Part of the answer, I would
like to propose, is that there seemed to be a power in the contradictory process
of acting out the wounds of war through his painting while at the same time
silencing that trauma through his rhetoric. This was a strategy Burri came upon
The Collages of Alberto Burri (Colorado Springs: Fine Arts Center, 1955); and Cesare Brandi in "Burri ad
Assisi," Qui Arte Contemporanea 15 (September 1975), pp. 29-32, reprinted in Scritti suWarte contempo-
ranea (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1976), pp. 362-63.
3. Lorenza Trucchi, "Dal casto omiccioli aU'alchimia di Burri," H Momenta (January 18, 1952), n.p.
4. Francesco Arcangeli, "Una Situazione non improbabile," Paragone 8, no. 35 (January 1957),
pp. 14, 42.
5. Fairfield Porter, "Alberto Burri," Art News 52, no. 8 (December 1953), p. 41.
34 OCTOBER
as early as 19
first major
Decade: 22 Eur
Words are no
irreducible pr
expression
which I cannot reveal in words
a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilan

draw from it the power to paint more.6
The problem was that in his very denial of the explan

Burri had already said too much. The loaded phras
practice ("freedom attained, constantly consolidated,
and still are, irresistibly provocative. The notion that
irreducible presence and part of himself is a tantalizi
tology of his statement, in which the practice of pain
paint more," invites serious reflection. All of this sugg
was by no means empty. As historian Maurizio Calvesi h
"the silence of Burri that truly complements his pict
their existence. . . . His silence is a dense message of pr
This distance between the semiotic resonances of the material and Burri's
refusal to talk about them (even while he hints at what he wants to avoid) seems
to reveal an interesting and important moment of anxiety in postwar Italian
modernist discourse. What might this paradoxical movement between revelation
and denial tell us about what was at stake for Burri as an artist? How does it ani-
mate his relationship with the artistic language of modernism in the postwar
moment? Indeed, the "wounds" of Burri's Sacchi could indicate more than the
bodies of soldiers he encountered when he was a war medic. Perhaps the obvious
metaphor of the suture stitch that constantly crops up in Sacchi literature, usually
read as simply biographical, needs to be pressed further. The fact that it served as
a recurring motif in the justification of Burri's work is exactly what needs to be
explained. What I will propose is this: if the stitch correlated the activity of paint-
ing with the doctor's healing touch, as so many critics have pointed out, then
perhaps this correlation also functioned as a subjective performative strategy in
which Burri's struggle over the materiality of the burlap was part of a larger psy-
chosocial suturing of the wounds of modernist painting, which was seen to be in
serious crisis.
6. Alberto Burri, "Words Are No Help," The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors, ed.
Andrew Carduff Ritchie (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955), p. 82.
7. Maurizio Calvesi, Burri trans. Robert Wolf (New York: Abrams, [1971] 1974), reprinted in Zorzi,
Parola di Burri, p. 85.
The Wounds o
Burri first used burlap sacks

paintings while he was a prisoner
Hereford, Texas, for three years
the encouragement of the local
began using discarded burlap
retrieved from the mess tent. W
new profession, he continued t
Texas as canvas and sought out a
It was in the Art Informel-i
began making the Sacchi consis
international, existentialist langu
effort to align itself with the
1950s by the French critic Mi
Tapie broadly defined as an int
the Japanese Gutai group, and
tantly, Tapie implicitly argue
primarily French, avant-garde
actively wrestling with the war-
an uncertain moment in which
expressed a dialectical tension
artists that Tapie championed
among others) had already b
brought them together in his ca
York-affiliated Studio Facch
Vehemences Confrontees (1951) a
at Studio Facchetti, which incl
tone for the international prolif
If the term now seems hard to
an ideological vortex of postw
center of a renewed internatio
aesthetic, Informel was defin
but as a rejection of the prem
ing. Specifically, Tapie compla
Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Pica
habits of intellectual comfort
[that] had profoundly ossified th
the risk of a creative ethic in th
8. The following early events of B

pp. 12-25.
9. Michel Tapie, statement of 1953
Jenkins (New York: George Wittenborn
36 OCTOBER
He proposed
other rules"
Indeed, the a
mative gestu
contemporary
Burri's relati
tion in which
way of refor
the Agenda f
paradox of c
with an inter
attempted to
of abstractio
morass of Ita
Rome, this s
Prampolini, t
of abstraction
artists work
poUmaterism
Polymateria
function of the visual illusionism of pictorial means
most unthinkable materials rise to a sensitive, em

constitutes the most uncompromising critical a
nostalgic, romantic, and bourgeois palette.13
Prampolini's manifesto and art club worked on man
10. Tapie, "The Necessity of an autre esthetic" (1953), Observati

11. For more on the history of Tapie's usage of these terms, se
Tapie and the Informel Adventure in France, Japan, and Italy (Ph.D. d
20-28. Regarding the internationalization and codification of th
Informalismo (Barcelona: Omega, 1959); Enrico Crispolti, Ricerche
Renato Barilli and Franco Solmi, Vlnformale in Italia (Milan: M
Durbe, Ulnformale in Italia fino al 1957 (Livorno: Palazzo Comm
L'informale: Stati Uniti, Europa, Italia, Arte contempcranea, series 5
A Rebours: La Rebelion InformaUsta, 1939-1968 (Las Palmas: Centr
Susanne Anna, ed., Die InformeUen von Pollock bis Schumacher (Bonn
12. This very complicated political agenda is represented more f
ing Marcia E. Vetrocq, "National Style and the Agenda for Abstr
History 12, no. 4 (December 1989), pp. 448-71; Germano Cel
1943-1968" and Marcia Vetrocq, "Painting and Beyond: Recovery
The Italian Metamorphoses, 1943-68, ed. Germano Celant (New Y
2-31; Lucio Caramel, ed., Arte in Italia, 1945-1960 (Milan: Vita e
Bakargiev, "Alberto Burri: The Surface at Risk," in Burri: Open, 1
and Maria Grazia Tolomeo (Rome: Electa, 1996), pp. 110-25.
13. Enrico Prampolini, "Arte Polimaterica," originally published
The Italian Metamorphosis, and also collected in Enrico Prampolini,
(Rome: Carte Segrete, 1992). Prampolini was a younger Futurist w
manifestos, which called for "plurimaterialism."
between the Italian avant-gard

avant-garde practice, and the th
against bourgeois taste. Even more
bilities attentive to emotion and
line with the development of Infor
Within a matter of three years
lished himself within this disco
wide range of materials. As Bu
whole European painting scen
abstraction. He went to Paris for
Miro's studio and the galleries of
venues for the Informel painters
he saw Dubuffet's experiments w
in the controversial 1946 Mirobol
growing friendship with Cahier
aware of Picasso's and Kurt Sch
knowledge of modern art was pu
with tar in the late 1940s. He exhibited these works in Rome at Galleria
Margherita, in 1947 and 1948, and at the Arte Club in 1949 and 1951. Soo
under the mentoring of Informel sculptor Ettore Colla, he joined the Roman
Gruppo Origine. By 1954, Burri had become an established part of the Inform
scene. International acknowledgment came that same year with his inclusion i
Tapie's essay "Devenir d'un art autre."16
As Burri worked consistently on the Sacchi, the Italian Informel critics bega
to connect them more vigorously to the existential traumatic present and
French Informel artists such as Wols and Jean Fautrier. The works of these bett
known Frenchmen were already seen to be operating in terms of the load
metaphor of the existential body. Much was made of Fautrier's "Otage" series
1943-45, for instance, whose flattened, decapitated heads constructed from a
build-up of paint, paste, and powdered pigment were purportedly based on hi
memories of the screams of prisoners tortured by Nazis in the German-occupie
French forest during the war.17 Enrico Crispolti, Italy's premier Informel crit
wrote a short essay for an exhibition of the Sacchi in 1957 that asserted Burr
relationship to these postwar European painters.18 What Wols and Fautrier shar
14. Guiliano Serafini, Burri: The Measure and the Phenomenon (Milan: Charta, 1999), p. 128. Burri did
receive one of Prampolini's travel grants, so his friend and mentor, artist Ettore Colla, gave him the mo
to go to Paris. Though Prampolini gave him some of his first real exposure as an artist, Burri claimed
dislike Prampolini and his artistic agenda. See Burri, quoted in Zorzi, Parola di Burriy p. 28.
15. Zorzi, Parola di Burn, p. 29.
16. Michel Tapie, "Devenir d'un art autre,w US Lines Paris Review (July 1954), p. 63.
17. Francis Ponge, for one, states, "It is a matter here of tortured bodies and faces, deformed, tr
cated, disfigured by bullets," in "Note sur les otages, Pietures de Fautrier," published in 1946
Editions Seghers, Paris, reprinted in Jean Fautrier, 1898-1964 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000
p. 170.
18. Enrico Crispolti, "Nota su Alberto Burri," in Notiziario: La Medusa studio d'arte contemporanea, 16
(May 1958), n.p. See also Crispolti, Un Saggio e tre note (Milano: Scheiwiller, 1961). In these essays, he
38 OCTOBER
with Burri,
exposed by th
verification"
Burri's mater
sensation; it is
language, Cri
work express
tively "claime
had unleashed
Writing in 19
tive response
in this open wound that reveals the unique possibility of suturing
ial is ... an intermediary of a corruptibility, but also a ge

in his individual choice is realized as necessary for creati
conscience of the self."20 For both Crispolti and Toniat
wound - the actual activity of opening painting up and e
of feeling inside and "verifying" its existence - was a wa
ter" to the human world again. It was humble, real, and
steeped in arcane art theory.
Indeed, Burri's paintings seem to treat the canvas wit
burlap as a thickness of flesh to be "excavated" in Tonia
of Sacco 5P (1953), for example, is built up with red pa
medium with which the artist was experimenting. Burr
uid form, which dried in viscous globs evocative of coag
Burri added a burlap "skin." Finally, he torched and tor
holes. As Burri built up and excavated layers, he foc
between interior "wound" and outer "skin." In 1954, Milt
this process in the Art News article "Burri Makes a Picture"
The plastic blobs on the protuberances had become t

time to proceed to their slabbramento, a term often used
'opening a wound.' With a palette knife incisions
blobs along the curving ridge of the swellings, and
plastic were retracted and secured with straight pins.
reminiscent of organic processes, looked like proud fl
In Sacco S3, from 1953, we can see this kind of exhibitio
extensively connects Burri to the international art scene and the artists
as well as establishing the differences between European existentialism
19. Crispolti, "Nota su Alberto Burri," n.p.
20. Toni Toniato, "Burri" Evento delle arti 2 ( 1958). dd. 28-29.
21. Milton Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," Art News 53, no. 8 (December 1954), pp. 28-31, 67-69.
the wound's "proud flesh." In

exposed while the three loose
anything together; the suture
blatantly left exposed, and t
In many Sacchi, Burri actuall
rative arabesques that meande
its abscesses. The pathetic ins
should close the wound, become evidence instead of the wound's freshness.
Stitches are placed in the wound's context but refuse to sew it up, accentuating
the need for reparation, rather than suggesting its happy conclusion.
This discussion of Burri's stitching as alluding to an existential postwar cri-
sis not yet healed correlated with an ongoing discussion about how to repair faith
in avant-garde ideals. Tapie and Gruppo Origine both used the language of the
wound as a foundation on which to re-launch modernism. The way to remedy
this failure and inertia of the avant-garde, Tapie proposed, was to capture a
"cubist rigor, ultimate testimony of the classic structure, laid bare in a totally
Burri. Sacco S3. 1953. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.
40 OCTOBER
flayed state."
metaphysics o
do the work
ment coalesce
that the avan
was ruptured.2
This languag
pen through
Origine, with
"Painting," th
figurative."
moment of d
the artist."26
expressing on
itself indicate
simple and di
slabbramento
his affiliation
than with any
Sacchi into th
invited these
ment of the
perceived legi
22. Ibid., p. 25.

23. Ibid.
24. Serge Guilbaut, Benjamin Buchloh, and Hal Foster all make convincing
perceived failure of the historical avant-garde in the eyes of postwar artists and c
Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal, 1945-1964 (Camb
1992); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, The Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on
Art from 1955 to 1975 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); and Hal Foster
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996). Though Guilbaut never explicitly describe
needed to be reconstructed, he provides the historical context for this same sen
reparation happening in Paris. The concept of modern art upon which Tapie p
departure was typical of most other European art critics at the time. Though by
it was largely Francophile, and there was rarely a distinction made between the "a
ernism of Impressionist painters, the aesthetic avant-gardism of the Cubist revolu
icalism of Dada and Constructivism, the utopianism of De Stijl, and the anarchi
Italian literature, this is evident in Cesare Brandi's "L'arte d'oggi" (1951), reprin
contemporaneo II (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1979), pp. 126-65. Brandi mentions all
movements in the context of postwar abstraction, emphasizing the need to und
the "last avant-garde" in order to be successful in the present epoch. See also Franc
e vita: pagine di gallerie 1941-1973 (Bologna: Accademia Clementina: M. Boni
Romanticismo alVInformale (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1977); and Guilio Argan, "Salve
moderna " in Studi e note II (Milan: II Sa&giotore, 1964).
25. Zorzi, Parola di Burri p. 28.
26. Mario Ballocco, "Origine," originally appeared in the catalog Origine: BaUoc
Colla (Rome: Foundazione Origine, 1951), anthologized in Caramel, ed., Arte in I
27. Zorzi, Parola di Burri, p. 28.
much he denied it, he was a perf

lating the new function of, a
through his peculiar operations.
In fact, his actions define thi
tered, unified modernist self. In
that the body of the painting w
also separate from him - a repr
artist had to constantly engage
Gendel describes this struggle:
[Burri] rejects the usual for

painting, where the canvas
around. With Burri, both he a
vas is laid on the floor, dragg
or hung on the wall. It is attack
The article, true to the formula

bally conveys, from blank canv
eventually overcoming, the amorp
Josephine Powell's accompanying
narrative, also show the close an
material. In many of the photos, B
stitch through and to torch its su
person. Often, he was pictured th
is a 1961 cover for L'illustrazione
through the large opening of th
eye, animating the canvas, making
between the artist and the world"
self is constituted.30 These imag
work within the larger convention
other, in which subjectivity was
the abject remainder of a socially c
What both Gendel's text and the
Burri struggled to define himse
his activities of penetration, ex
28. Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," p

29. Initiated in 1949 and running until
the Abstract Expressionists in the U.S.
ventionalizing abstract painting in the
cization of the modern artist in the stud
A. Jones, Machine in the Studio: Construc
Press, 1996), especially chapters 1 and 2
30. Maurizio Calvesi, "Informel and Abs
(Munich: Prestel Verlag, 1989), p. 289.
31. Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," p.
42 OCTOBER
conflated. In
ing at the bu
must - a cut
the diminishi
tionship betw
the acknowle
the newly con
Burri's practi
I use the term
motivates sub
Jacques-Alain
pellation by d
the subject to
ality of the c
incoherence i
loss. Specifica
stage a recove
theticized, ma
as triumphan
Indeed, Tapi
dynamic. In t
Informel, he
emerge from
Those who h
sciously, ha
womb, a place
diction make
The act of p
through Sartre's
same time that th
or denial of loss
also Martin Jay,
University of Cal
32. Suture is desc
18, no. 4 (Winter
1 (1966), pp. 39-
1977-78), pp. 35-4
in 1949) and "Th
(first delivered in
later film theoris
Stephen Heath, Q
Silverman, Subject
33. Michel Tapie
womb/eye/wound. (Not coinci

"moment of departure" elaborate
In the highly individualistic mas
each painter must figure and en
of the wound necessarily manife
Fleshy Grids
If it was through Burri's continual figuration of the wound that most critics
addressed the failure of modern ideals, it was through his attempt to compose its
excessiveness that they found modernism's rejuvenation. One of the most dominant
and prolific Italian postwar critics, Cesare Brandi, led the way by representing Burri
as the triumphant Italian in a long line of modernist abstractionists striving to
achieve a transcendental viewing experience.34 For the artist's first major mono-
graph, published in 1963, Brandi began by acknowledging the wounds of the Sacchi
and the many things they had come to represent. In his introduction he laid out the
cultural context of Burri's work in rather bleak terms: "Either the cold war will go
on endlessly, or our whole world will crumble in atomic deflagrations."35 But he also
argued that Burri's visualization of loss was subordinate to visual harmony. Brandi
stated: "We wish to emphasize the fact that the existential knot, although it serves to
establish a direct contact with the spectator, will be dissolved in a moment, through
the painting's Apollonian hypostasis."36 That is, if Burri's paintings retained any vis-
ceral charge or dramatically conveyed violence, they did so only in order to make
the effect of formal artistic control in the face of it that much more compelling. To
support his argument, Brandi tended to favor the more subdued Sacchi In his cata-
log, pieces such as Grande Sacco BS (1956), with its pliable fabric stretched slightly
off-kilter and rumpled edges that occasionally get caught in the stitches, supply the
appropriate tension for an otherwise calm geometric grid. Brandi then compared
Burri's art to Picasso's and Mondrian's neo-plastic dynamics, claiming that the vari-
ous gradations of burlap against the canvas ground complemented each other. The
composed rectangular swaths, he argued, revealed the painting's "self-evident for-
mal justifications" and "plastic dignity."37 Burri was much more comfortable with
this reading (though he continued his official silence) and it is the one that has per-
sisted in the literature.38
Brandi's emphasis on Burri's grid, as it related to Picasso's and Mondrian's
grids, performed a vital role in the discursive suturing of modernism precisely
34. See Cesare Brandi, "L'arte d'oggi" (1951), for a taste of his earlier writing in comparison with
the later BurrL trans. Martha Hadzi (Rome: Editalia, 1963), n.p.
35. Ibid., p. 10.
36. Ibid., p. 31.
37. Ibid., pp. 30, 34.
38. Many of the Italian monographs on Burri follow a phenomenologically inflected formalism that
44 OCTOBER
Burri. Grande
because of it
of modernist
Krauss elucida
"[The grid's]
from its pote
one and the
seen, it does
plain view (a
were a brand
Perhaps it is
zero, that ar
which to wo
though the o
sentation to
ground, were
pays tribute to t
sality of Burri's
The Measure and the Phenomenon.
39. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, [1986] 1994), p. 12.
40. Ibid., p. 158.
While Krauss rightly suggests

in each artist's adoption and rep
also, especially by the time Burr
tion that compels him to adap
modernist grid's fecundity, and it
of new beginnings as it was par
of modernism - a way to furthe
grid to overcome the wound se
struggle (and imminent triump
Mondrian's, or Malevich's) form
The hundreds of Sacchi that Bu
this compulsion to recall the
"birth" or origin that had to b
but also then through forcible s
pulsive act of making is reference
attained, constantly consolidate
power to paint more." In his vig
as importantly, sewing and gri
modernism through the selfjust
tology of his statement.
The act of repetition at the h
claimed, on a particular state of
for it," even though one canno
patient] is obliged to repeat the
instead of ... remembering it as
ing here that Burri's compulsion
that happened on the battlefield
larger discursive reclamation of
traumatic relationship to the f
Italy, the entanglement of mode
porary experience that Burri, ot
compelled to repeat in an effort t
ceral burlap disrupted and expo
establish a new place for its ideals
Burri's process of suture (not
actively engage and overcome t
moment of containment, which
as both a ravaging debasement
artist's Apollonian control. Mor
Italian critics of the 1950s, the
provided a way of addressing It
41. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure

Pub. Corp., 1961), pp. 6, 12.
46 OCTOBER
during the w
immediate p
overnarrate
clearly as per
ing Italian na
America's Accursed Share
But are Burri's sutures and their accompanying critical discourse only about
coming to terms with the past? Why go to such rhetorical excesses and performa-
tive extremes? What else was at stake here? The glaring, almost deafening, silence
around the sources of Burri's materials is perhaps the greatest indication that a
traumatic geopolitical present was also driving the performative aesthetics of
Italian Informel. All of the effort of trying to signify burlap, string, paint, and plas-
tic as wound and then as grid left the materials' simple existence, the very fact of
their being there in Italy and available for Burri's use, unexplained. No one cared
to clarify that the sacks, before they were flesh or grids, were commodity objects
(and transporters of other commodity products) shipped into Italy by the United
States. No one followed up on Gendel's curious claim that the plastic Burri
used - a fairly new material at the time - was developed in the U.S. with the origi-
nal purpose of sealing airplanes and jeeps in storage to be shipped overseas for
military campaigns.42 No one commented on the mix of different fabrics that indi-
cated an Italy on the verge of transforming itself from an agrarian state to a new
consumer economy (linen, cotton, and upholstery were used almost as frequently
as burlap). The suppression of these simple facts, while the violence of the wound
was directly addressed, indicates some of the larger cultural forces driving
Informel 's rescue of modernism. I would even argue that the focus on war wounds
and avant-garde rupture functioned to silence the even greater, more present
"wound" signified in the burlap's relationship to postwar American commerce.
While Burri hid many of the sacks' trade stamps by placing them on the
reverse side or under paint, or simply tearing them out, more than a few of the
sacks explicitly expose their original markings. Some of the earliest were saved
from the mess tents of the U.S. POW camp and used in food-aid packaging that
were widely disseminated throughout Italy just after the war. SZ1 (1949), for
instance, the very first Sacco, prominently paraded a star-spangled United
Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration sack. (The UNRRA was a
recovery program predominately funded by the U.S., initiated before the
Marshall Plan, which eventually took its place.) Burri cut and reconfigured the
sack and then painted over segments of it so that it fragmented the American
flag. The materialization of America's gift to Italy is reconfigured within a mod-
42. Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," p. 68.
Burri. SZI. 1949. Cou
ernist collage with isolated abs

clear indication of the giver, "
instance of suture, this work
the mythic excesses of postwa
emphasizing formal relationsh
The political and economic
would have surely felt, even if
Italy's recent economic strugg
economic dominance. Mauriz
the University of Rome, has
burlap's geopolitical significan
The image of Italy embodied

industrial Italy of Fontana
48 OCTOBER
Morlotti. It i
aloof from p
quered, reduc
Calvesi 's rea

of humanity
cultural and
poignancy to
and critics at
argued, was
American pat
tence of imp
self-perceive
especially pal
the major ag
Italy's agrari
from the star
war, as the
Monetary Fu
self-sufficien
were replace
price of food
omy, sacks o
of which is s
through the
which uses a
Incorporated
conform to t
but they nev
If the Sacch
American w
Georges Bata
1949, Bataille
43. Calvesi, Burr

ment he indicat
begun to invade t
sionist and anti-
44. Ibid., p. 20
45. Edward Tan
1972); Giuseppe T
for Integral Lan
46. John Killick
University Press,
47. John Harper
Press, 1986), p. 4
fears about capitalist econom

into growing nuclear arsenals
the U.S. Marshall Plan as a mo
Mankind will move peaceful

lems only if this threat cau
excess - deliberately and wit
of living, economic activity
outlet other than war.48
The Marshall Plan, cobbled together by the U.S., Canada, and a still-
rationed Britain, was indeed a generous aid program, one aimed at nothing less
than the full economic and political recovery of Europe and Asia. But its agenda,
as the material history of the sacks evidences, was also a tool for gaining economic
power and political containment.49 One of the most fascinating, and not as fre-
quently acknowledged, motivations of the Marshall Plan's food aid program was
48. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, [1949]
1989), p. 187.
49. The annual cost of the Marshall Plan was $5 billion on a GNP of $230 billion - a relatively small
Burn. Sacco e Verde. 1 956.

Courtesy Fondazione Bum'.
50 OCTOBER
simply to ge
market pric
tion of cott
warehouses.
more globall
first, creatin
lion metric t
to Italy, the
economy and
stabilized th
accursed shar
of World Wa
utions of th
everyday lif
which postw
capitalist eco
geographic t
price to pay f
Reconstruction
University Pres
Hegemony," in Se
Giovanni Arrig
50. Mitchell Wa
See also Vernon
Burri. Sacco. 1955.

Courtesy Fondazione Burri.
Making Art Matter 5 1
But the sacks do more than s

ity and calculated orchestrat
additional tensions between th
imported sacks and Italian ma
top left and the remains of fur
For centuries, Italy had produce
cade in Europe. Textile produ
regime as an "indigenous" indu
agricultural programs after the
India in the eighteenth century
the world, designed specifically
tural products overseas.52 By th
the commodities market, fashi
out. The burlap, as a new meta-
ing capital between producer
world - replaced an older tradi
Italian fabric, ravaged by yea
exhausted, if not more so, as th
streets of Rome. The scraps o
picked up off the street. What
structs not oppositions but eq
the finer materials are sewn in
The visibly devalued nature o
Sacchi subtly indicates the c
Calvesi. In Bataille's theory, th
the leftover wealth produced b
Trash, on the other hand, is th
sacks filled with food were read
their ragged and ravaged state
the everyday life of postwar It
the leftovers of America's left
consume, an even more abject
Burri had to struggle to over
were discursively silenced by B
readings. They became the mos
the excessive wounds the Sacchi
51. Laboratorio Tela Umbra, a well-kno

Castello, was established at the beginn
Alvaro Tacchini, Artigianato e industri
Petruzzi, 1988) and Anna Bento Bull an
Family Economy in Italy (Oxford: Berg, 1
52. George Chacko, International Trad
Bookman Associates, 1961). Its first lar
East India Company in 1793.
52 OCTOBER
"The O
In his monog
once overhear
bolic and cont
who consisten
Burri declare
and declare t
oscillation bet
and statement
speaks volume
be read as a m
postwar situat
appeared in r
European cul
enforcement o
between a pro
cepts of ident
infecting oth
again into a w
Ultimately, t
cursive suture
modernism, t
recover a mod
were caught u
images of an a
trash, about
material and i
ernist formal
their participa
excesses. The o
53. Brandi, Bur

54. Buchloh, The N
1975, pp. xviii-xix.

Burri

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Making Art Matter: Alberto Burri's Sacchi

Author(s): Jaimey Hamilton

Burri is in this excavation, in this open

- Toni Toniato, "Burri," 1958

The Excesses of Silence

Alberto Burn. Sacco 5P. 1953.

widely accepted notion that the

which I cannot reveal in words

a freedom attained, constantly consolidated, vigilan

The problem was that in his very denial of the explan

Burri first used burlap sacks

8. The following early events of B

most unthinkable materials rise to a sensitive, em

Prampolini's manifesto and art club worked on man

10. Tapie, "The Necessity of an autre esthetic" (1953), Observati

between the Italian avant-gard

ial is ... an intermediary of a corruptibility, but also a ge

The plastic blobs on the protuberances had become t

In Sacco S3, from 1953, we can see this kind of exhibitio

the wound's "proud flesh." In

Burri. Sacco S3. 1953. Courtesy Fondazione Burri.

22. Ibid., p. 25.

much he denied it, he was a perf

[Burri] rejects the usual for

The article, true to the formula

28. Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," p

womb/eye/wound. (Not coinci

While Krauss rightly suggests

41. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure

America's Accursed Share

42. Gendel, "Burri Makes a Picture," p. 68.

Burri. SZI. 1949. Cou

ernist collage with isolated abs

The image of Italy embodied

Calvesi 's rea

43. Calvesi, Burr

fears about capitalist econom

Mankind will move peaceful

Burn. Sacco e Verde. 1 956.

Burri. Sacco. 1955.

But the sacks do more than s

51. Laboratorio Tela Umbra, a well-kno

53. Brandi, Bur

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