tere

ttler
Living Differently, Seeing Differently:
Carla Accardis Temporary
Structures (19651972)
Teresa Kittler

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently:
Carla Accardis Temporary Structures
(19651972)
Teresa Kittler

Italian second-wave feminism and its legacy has been the subject of renewed 1. See for example Molly Toynbee, The Lost Wave,
critical attention across a number of disciplines in recent years. Among the Women and Democracy in Postwar Italy (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2013); Maud Anne
most significant contributions have been studies examining the influence of Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the Political
womens groups across Italy on both national and regional political discourse.1 (London: Routledge, 2015); and Ruth Glynn,
Beyond this focus, efforts have also been made to write a more global history of Women, Terrorism, and Trauma in Italian Culture
Italian second-wave feminism by underscoring the relationship between national (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
and international womens movements in the postwar period.2 At the same 2. See Wendy Pojmann, Italian Women and
time, there has been a growing interest in the writings of key Italian feminist International Cold War Politics, 19441968 (New
York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2013).
theorists, as testified by the republication of the entire art critical output of
Carla Lonzi, as well as the publication of writings by women associated with the 3. See the following edited by Lara Conte, Laura
Italian feminist-autonomist tradition, such as Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Iamurri, and Vanessa Martini: Autoritratto (Milan:
et al., 2010); Taci Anzi Parla: Diario di Una
Costa, Selma James, Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa, and Leopoldina Fortunati.3 Femminista (Milan: et al., 2011); Vai Pure. Dialogo
Through campaigns known internationally as Wages for Housework, and co- Con Pietro Consagra (Milan: et al., 2011); Scritti
ordinated in Italy by the Padua-based Lotta Femminista (Feminist Struggle), sullarte (Milan: et al., 2012). On the writings of
Italian feminist-autonomists see for example
which counted Federici and Dalla Costa amongst its numbers, these women Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, Housework,
have been committed to the restructuring of reproductive labour, foreground- Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA:
ing the domestic in their attempts to rethink the nature of work in capitalism.4 PM press, 2012); Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa
That this discourse has enjoyed something of a revival in the last decade, not and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, The Work of Love:
Unpaid Housework, Poverty and Sexual Violence at the
least within artistic practice, suggests the relevance of Italian feminism to a Dawn of the 21st Century (New York, NY and
discussion of the relationship between art, feminism, and the domestic, and the London: Autonomedia; Pluto, 2008); Leopoldina
timeliness of revisiting this question now.5 I want to reflect on this relationship Fortunati, The Arcane of Reproduction: Housework,
as it relates to the practice of the artist Carla Accardi during a period that Prostitution, Labour and Capital (New York, NY:
Autonomedia, 1995).
encompasses her involvement in the collective Rivolta Femminile (Feminine
Revolt), from the summer of 1970 when the group published their Manifesto di 4. Reproductive labour encompasses the
unwaged domestic and affective labour that
Rivolta Femminile. One of the first separatist feminist collectives to appear in enables waged labour to take place. See Silvia
Italy, it would serve as a model for similar groups across the country in Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, Housework,
subsequent years.6 Reproduction and Feminist Struggle (Oakland, CA:
Despite Accardis founding role, her relationship to Rivolta Femminile and PM press, 2012), p. 6. See also the following for
a discussion of immaterial labour to which these
its legacy remains marred by what were irreconcilable differences with her co- debates have problematically been connected in
founder Lonzi, leading to a split within the group in 1973. This was in part recent years: Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt
based on a fundamental conflict in their perspectives on arts place within femi- (eds), Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics
nism.7 Lonzi regarded the two as ultimately incompatible. In an entry in her di- (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 1996), p. 261. For analyses of the
ary Taci Anzi Parla: Diario di una Femminista, Lonzi reflects on the experience of developments of Autonomia (or Autonomia
writing Autoritratto (1969), the book that marked her departure from the cir- Operaia as it was initially known) from its
cuits of artistic production.8 She writes of the fourteen artists who had been origins in Operaism, see Steve Wright, Storming
her interlocutors: what disturbed me was that they viewed me as a spectator Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian
Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002);
. . . perhaps they thought, I was more intelligent, more sensitive, better at re- Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically
cording, certainly more honest, but that is as far as it would go, an ideal (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2000), esp. pp. 6477.
spectator.9 As the feminist philosopher Maria Luisa Boccia has pointed out, See also Pier Vittorio Aureli, The Project of
there is an analogy to be made here between the ideal spectator referred to by Autonomy Politics and Architecture within and Against

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 Teresa Kittler

Lonzi, and womans role in society as mere passive spectator and not active par-
ticipant.10 Her refusal of art was in part a refusal of its reliance on a spectator
as an intrinsically gendered role.
In contrast, and throughout her involvement in Rivolta Femminile, Accardi
continued to practice as an artist. After Rivolta Femminile disbanded she even
went on to establish the Beato Angelico Cooperative in Rome between 1976
and 1978, whose express aims were to unite art and feminism. In subsequent
decades she would, however, renege on any association of her practice with
feminism, most adamantly so with reference to the series of temporary home
structures she made between 1965 and 1972.11 It suggests a rather complicated
relationship on the part of the artist with her own involvement in the history of
Italian feminism. Despite Accardis distancing from that milieu, these works
seem to want to reimagine the domestic in ways that suggest at the very least a
cursory engagement with feminist debates. In what follows I want to read these
works a little against the grain, given her later statements, to ask in what ways
Accardi posed the relationship between art, feminism, and the domestic.
Specifically, I want to explore how her commitment to art, in contrast to her
co-founder Lonzi, could speak to a utopian possibility for feminism. Beyond
Accardis own ambivalent statements about her work and in light of the current
interest in Italian feminism, which does not resonate now for exactly the same
reasons as it did in the 1970s but has been taken up and retooled, perhaps artis-
tic practice operating in the same context should be approached in a similar
fashion?
I begin with a photograph from a series taken in the countryside around
Fig. 1. (a) Carla Lonzi, Carla Accardi, Giulio Alba in 1965 (Fig. 1a). Standing between Lonzi and the artist Luciano Fabro,
Paolini, Luciano Fabro, and Luciano Pistoi in Accardi assumes a tongue in cheek pose that unmistakably refers to a shelter
Alba, 1965, black and white photograph of sorts, a pose replicated in Fig. 1b. These photographs were taken at a time
(Photo: Anna Piva. Courtesy Studio Accardi,
Rome). (b) Carla Accardi, Giulio Paolini, and
when Accardi was making Tenda (19651966) (Fig. 2), a work that has since
Luciano Fabro in Alba, 1965, black and white been claimed as the first art environment to have been made in Italy.12
photograph (Photo: Anna Piva. Courtesy Accardi went on to make three further environments by 1972: Ambiente
Studio Accardi, Rome). Arancio (Orange Environment) (19661968) (Fig. 3), Triplice Tenda (Triple
Tent) (19691971) (Fig. 4), and Cilindrocono (Cylindercone) (1972) (Fig. 5).
If, at first sight, they appear as a heterogeneous body of work a tent, a
Capitalism (New York, NY; Enfield: Princeton
Architectural, 2008), p. 7.
yurt, a large cylinder, and an installation comprising what Accardi described
as nearly the contents of a room they are all made from the same
5. A number of books, conferences, and
symposia have taken the contested relationship
transparent Sicofoil material, a derivative of acetate, and together they mark
between art and immaterial labour as a point of a striking phase in the artists practice, registering a decisive shift into three
departure in recent years, including Art and dimensions.13
Immaterial Labour held at Tate Britain on 19 Connecting these works explicitly to the question of habitation, the critic
January 2008. This was followed by Untitled
(Labour): contemporary art and immaterial
Laura Cherubini asks Accardi if the idea came . . . to be your own architect . . .
production, also held at Tate Britain, on 17 [as] the form is that of a house[?]14 Tenda also has the secondary meaning of
March 2012. In 2013 Auto Italia organised a curtain, which literally evokes the idea of homemaking and connects the work
series of talks, workshops, texts, and online to a broader conception of textile as the first aspect of architecture put forward
contributions under the heading: Immaterial
Labour Isnt working: Digital Culture, Digital
by Gottfried Semper in 1851.15 If in recent years Accardi has made works that
Work, Digital Insurrection (20 April12 May directly reference the home and the furniture traditionally found in that space,
2013). See also Ina Blom et al., Art and then the artist has nevertheless been reluctant to label her work in this way.
Subjecthood: The Return of the Human Figure in Referring to her environments of the 1960s Accardi would say tear down walls
Semiocapitalism (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2011);
John Roberts develops a critique of immaterial . . . I cant stand houses.16 More recently, she has restated this claim,
labour in The Intangibilities of Form: Skill and describing a dislike for the modern home of that time which she found to be
Deskilling in Art After the Readymade (London: ugly and heavy, as she put it, further explaining: I had been an admirer of
Verso, 2007) as does Stewart Martin in, Artistic the Bauhaus, but I saw that people lived in houses that were tacky.17
Communism A Sketch in Third Text, vol. 23,
issue 4, July 2009, pp. 48194. Particularly notable is that, despite her rejection of the notion that her
structures straightforwardly reference home, Accardi has consistently spoken

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

Fig. 2. Carla Accardi, Tenda, 19651966, paint on Sicofoil, 215  220  140 cm. Private Collection, Turin (Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

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 Teresa Kittler

Fig. 3. Carla Accardi, Ambiente Arancio,

19661968, paint on Sicofoil and mixed me-
dia, 251  337  441 cm. Musee dArt
Moderne et Contemporaine, Strasbourg
(Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

6. Bracke, Women and the Invention of the Political,

p. 66.
7. On this subject see Marta Seravalli, Arte e
Femminismo a Roma negli anni settanta (Rome:
Biblinki editori, 2013), chapters 1 and 2.
8. Carla Lonzi, Autoritratto (Bari: De Donato,
1969).
9. See Carla Lonzi, Taci, anzi parla: diario di una
femminista (Milan: et al., 2010), p. 58.
10. Maria Luisa Boccia, Lio in rivolta (Milan:
Tartaruga edizioni, 1990), p. 59.
Fig. 4. Carla Accardi, Triplice Tenda, 19691971, paint on Sicofoil, 270.9  451 cm. Musee Centre
11. See Rosma Scuteri, Carla Accardi Flash Art,
Georges Pompidou (Photo: Giorgio Colombo. Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).
no. 152, OctoberNovember 1989, pp. 637,
p. 66.
12. Claudio Cerritelli (ed.), Accardi: Opere 1947
1997 (Milan: Charta, 1998), p. 33. This account
omits obvious precedents in the history of
environment art in Italy, most notably Lucio
Fontanas spatial environments, which he began
making over a decade earlier.
13. Quoted in Danilo Eccher (ed.), Carla Accardi
(Rome: MACRO, 2004), p. 145.
14. Laura Cherubini in conversation with Accardi
in Vanni Bramanti (ed.), Carla Accardi (Ravenna:
Essegi, 1983), pp. 334.
15. Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of
Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry
Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
16. Michele Causse and Maryvonne Lapouge,
Ecrits, Voix dItalie (Paris: Des femmes, 1977),
p. 393.
17. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carla Accardi, To Dig
Deep, Flash Art (International Edition), vol. 41,
no. 260, June 2008, p. 98.

Fig. 5. Carla Accardi, Cilindrocono, 1972, paint on Sicofoil mounted on Perspex, 120  130 cm
(Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).
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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

of them as offering a different way of living. Summing up her practice in

1972, Accardi explained:
18. See Maurizio Vallarino, Luminous marks, in
The objects that I made recently are, broadly speaking, tents . . . [they] hold a certain fascination for Art and Artists, June 1972, p. 33.
me; they interest me because they represent a way of living [that is] symbolically different [a] life
lived in the open, in contact with nature, with air and light, free and without the superstructures of 19. Obrist, Carla Accardi, To Dig Deep, p. 98.
civilisation.18
20. See for example Mariarosa Dalla Costa and
Selma James, The Power of Women and the
On another occasion, Accardi reiterates this when she recounts that behind Subversion of the Community (Bristol: Falling Wall
Ambiente Arancio was the drive to push one towards something unknown that Press, 1972), p. 3. See also Lonzi et al. Manifesto
could become a different kind of living.19 Far from the idea of living in any di Rivolta Femminile, Rome, 1970, n/
p. Feminism has been the first political instance
conventional sense of the term or according to prevailing social and sexual of historical criticism of the family and
norms, Accardis reference to superstructures of civilisation reads as an society.(Il femminismo e stato il primo
unmistakable complaint against patriarchy. It connects the domestic more momento politico di critica storica alla famiglia e
alla societa.) For a discussion of the way in which
directly to the family and specifically a rejection of its bourgeois nuclear model. these debates have been historicised in the recent
At the same time, the choice of the term superstructure is intriguing as it is literature, see Bracke, Women and the Reinvention
also worth remembering that the family was a particularly live issue within of the Political, pp. 3444.
feminist interpretations of orthodox currents of Marxism and psychoanalysis, 21. Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future the
where the inadequacy of the way the family was addressed became a main Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, 2nd
preoccupation.20 ed. (London: Verso, 2007), p. xiii.
Despite these allusions, Accardis statements remain largely rhetorical; after 22. Federici, Wages Against Housework in
all, she hardly offers a comprehensive blueprint for an alternative existence, but Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction,
this of course was partly the point. Rather than simply dismissing the and Feminist Struggle, p. 19.
statements made by Accardi as merely rhetorical, I want to ask how this 23. On this subject see Kathi Weeks, The Problem
utopian thinking might play out on the site of the work at a material as well as with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and
Postwork Imaginaries (Durham, NC, and London:
conceptual level. What does it mean for Accardi to remake her home as a tent,
Duke University Press, 2011), chapter 5.
and specifically to do so out of plastic? Most obviously here the domestic not
only becomes charged but is altogether transformed into a problem about how
to live. I want to ask both what made it possible, necessary even, to speak in
these terms of alternative existence, and how this rhetoric might indicate what
was at stake for Accardi in reformulating the lived experience of the home into
another mode of living entirely? As Frederic Jameson put it in his response to
the view that any utopianism could only ever be hostage to our own mode of
production, in fact the best Utopia can serve the negative purpose of making
us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment; and . . . therefore
the best Utopias are those that fail most comprehensively.21
Accardi rejects the motif of home and by extension the domestic in favour of
utopia, something that is ultimately unattainable. The trade-off is revealing;
Accardi risks everything for a future unknown and a promise which she
ultimately fails to deliver on beyond what might be described as a maquette or
model for living through her tents. This approach connects with the utopian
strategy adopted by Federici in Wages Against Housework. Hers is effectively an
impossible demand, a revolutionary struggle whose fulfillment would signal the
end of capitalism, would break capitals plan for women.22 The point is that
such demands need to be understood as a provocation to imagine possible
alternatives rather than a concrete vision.23 Indeed this is the reason it is so
difficult to discern what Accardi meant by the idea of living differently; the
artist was only ever able to define it in the most provisional of ways or in
negative terms most obviously as not a home understood in terms of
conventional domestic architecture.
Living differently is of course living against the norm but what are the
utopian tropes that Accardi is working with here and, moreover, how might
this relate to feminism? It is of course hardly surprising that she should couch

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 Teresa Kittler

24. Felicity D. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia:

Politics after Modernism (Cambridge, MA; London:
MIT Press, 2007), p. 1.
25. Scott, Architecture or Techno-Utopia, p. 3.
26. Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies
and Beyond (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University
Press, 1999), p. xiii.
27. In an interview with Lonzi, Accardi refers to
the following nomadic culture as one of the
sources of inspiration for her tents: the tent
derived from an idea that came to me when you
showed me those images of the Turkish tents
from the Museum in Krakow. It made me think
that those Turks took beautiful tents on their war
travels, and set them up at moments that I
imagine must have been very difficult. Lonzi,
Autoritratto, p. 296.

Fig. 6. Carla Accardi, Untitled (Maquettes), 1968, paint on Sicofoil and wood, variable dimensions.
Now lost (Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

her environments in these terms. The desire to live differently chimed with
the moment of their making, capturing the imagination of a mid-1960s
generation. It took shape through attempts at communal living and redesigning
architecture that challenged notions of the home and domestic as fixed, known
sites.24 In fact the rhetoric of alternative existence to which Accardi refers is
perhaps best encapsulated by the image of the hippie commune, or the
intentional community, as this has been called, and enshrined in the form of the
nomadic shelter.25 While communal societies have a long history extending
beyond the period under consideration, the moment when Accardi began to
make her temporary structures has been described by commentators as one
gripped by communal fever.26 Whilst Accardis notion of living differently is
not reducible to the idea of collective dwelling, the image of the commune
belongs to a broader imaginary whose visual vocabulary and makeshift logic the
artist taps into through her work. For her exhibition in 1968 at the
Marlborough Gallery in Rome, she made a series of small maquettes of her
environments that were shown together in the corner of the room and on the
floor (Fig. 6). A drawing by Accardi from 1970 further evokes this idea of
communal living and suggests that her temporary shelters were conceived or at
least subsequently imagined as a body of work (Fig. 7). The drawing offers a
vision of a pre-industrial community, a sparse landscape in which Tenda, Triplice
Tenda, and Cilindrocono each feature.27 Such visual tropes raise the question of
how Accardis utopian horizon was bounded. If her visual vocabulary might hint

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

28. For a discussion of Ettore Sottsasss role in

bringing the Beats to Italy see Catharine Rossi,
From East to West and Back Again: Utopianism
in Italian Radical Design in Andre Blauvelt et al.,
Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia published
on the occasion of the exhibition held at the
Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN, 24
October 201528 February 2016, pp. 5867;
See also Gianni De Martino, Capelloni & Ninfette:
Mondo Beat, 19661967 (Milan: Costa & Nolan,
2008); for an overview of the journals and
publications associated with the underground
press see Matteo Guarnaccia, Underground
Italiana: gli Anni Gioiosamente Ribelli della
Controcultura (Milan: Shake, 2011), pp. 192208.
29. For an overview of the way that the
commune in via Ripamonti was established and
subsequently demolished see the first-hand ac-
count given by De Martino in De Martino,
Capelloni & Ninfette, pp. 89, 13.

Fig. 7. Carla Accardi, Untitled, 1970, pencil on paper, unknown dimensions. Studio Carla Accardi
(Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

at a so-called primitive communism, to what extent was the artists vision of a

future based on non-Western or seemingly ancient models?
Certainly Rene Groussets major study on nomadism, Empire of the Steppes,
gave the lives of nomadic and semi-nomadic people a currency at this moment
when it was republished in 1970, but perhaps the point here is that this drawing
comes to stand for an archetypal community, one of so many that were formed
throughout this period, and which together have come to stand as a symbol of
protest and resistance against what was viewed as the dominant form of society
or at the very least an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. In this
respect, Italy would take its cue from the American Beatniks, with an under-
ground press and diverse communities appearing throughout the country.28
One of the most famous of these communes in Italy and closely connected to
Mondo Beat, the first journal founded by the underground press in Milan in
1966, would be the scandal of the short-lived tent city, Tendopolis or New
Barbonia (a conflation of the derogatory Italian word for the homeless
(Barbone) and Babylon (Babilonia)), as it came to be called by the hostile
press, of via Ripamonti in the outskirts of the city in 1967 (Fig. 8).29

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 Teresa Kittler

30. See Marc Dessauce and Architectural League

of New York, The Inflatable Moment: Pneumatics
and Protest in 1968 (New York, NY: Princeton
Architectural Press, 1999).
31. Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Art Povera:
Conceptual, Actual or Impossible Art (1969) in
Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 19621972 (London:
Tate Gallery Publications, 2001), p. 26.
32. See Larry Busbea, Topologies: The Urban Utopia
in France, 19601970 (Cambridge, MA and
London: MIT, 2007), fn. 37, p. 55. See also
Jacques Berque, Nomades et Vagabonds (Paris:
Union Generale dEditions, 1975); Gilles Deleuze
et al., A Thousand Plateaus Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 1988); Susan
Sontag, Against Interpretation (London: Vintage,
1994), pp. 6981. Most recently on this subject
within the Italian context see Silvia Bottinelli,
The Discourse of Modern Nomadism: The Tent
in Italian Art and Architecture of the 1960s and Fig. 8. Tendopolis, via Ripamonti, Milan, 1967. Press cuttings.
1970s, Art Journal, vol. 74, no. 2, 2015,
pp. 6280.
33. Bramanti (ed.), Carla Accardi, p. 34.
Accardi was not alone amongst her contemporaries in couching her work in
34. Bramanti (ed.), Carla Accardi, p. 34.
these terms. Experiments in this period within architectural design would come
35. See Germano Celant, in La Repubblica, 1920 in the form of a wide range of inflatable, tensile, lightweight, and temporary
March 1978 quoted in Claudio Cerritelli, Carla structures.30 Similarly, throughout the 1960s, artists in Italy were appropriating
Accardi. Le infinite risorse del segno 19471997
in Cerritelli (ed.), Carla Accardi, p. 20. the form of the hut or temporary shelter through visual as well as conceptual
references. Tenda, which Accardi had begun making as early as 1965, pre-dates
36. Bramanti (ed.), Carla Accardi, p. 34; Obrist,
Carla Accardi, p. 98.
many of these examples and has even been suggested as something of a
prototype for works by artists such as Mario Merz and Luciano Fabro.31
37. Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural
Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present (London:
Accardis Tenda, Ambiente Arancio, and Triplice Tenda all take the image of home
Zwemmer, 1994), pp. 1524, 201; See also The as a starting point but they also resolutely reject sedentary dwelling.32 The
Cult of Origins in Mari Hvattum, Gottfried forms her environments take are a central theoretical trope in the 1960s; they
Semper and the Problem of Historicism (Cambridge: coincided with a moment in which anti-architecture offered political, intellec-
Cambridge University Press, 2004), chapter 1;
Joseph Rykwert, On Adams House in Paradise: The
tual, and material possibilities within postwar artistic practice and more broadly
Idea of the Primitive Hut in Architectural History within a postwar Europe. That these temporary structures and by extension the
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), pp. 13, 17. provisional and alternative modes of existence they suggest have proved fertile
ground in philosophical and ideological narratives of the period is implicitly ac-
knowledged by the artist.33 When asked whether her environments specifically
engaged with the idea of nomadic existence, Accardi points to interpretations
that had already been offered by Germano Celant and Achille Bonito Oliva.34
The reference to mobility is invoked repeatedly by Celant in discussions of
Accardis environments, as when he writes: it is true that Tenda, the big um-
brella, the bed, respond to the desire for a precarious space, a temporary and
mobile architecture, a tipi or a tent that can be easily moved by the individual
to accommodate their way of life.35
However, Accardi seems wary of any such over-determined readings of her
work.36 If the nomadic shelter had once been articulated in terms of a cult of
origins in architectural thinking or elsewhere in terms of fantasies of a lost plan,
then Accardis tents can also be understood as registering a broad shift away
from this conception in the 1960s with the temporary shelter reconceived as a
matter of design.37 Despite the straightforward connection with the image of
the nomadic shelter and the overstated associations of her work with

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

nomadism, there remains much that is compelling about this body of work.
Accardi rejects the idea of home understood in terms of fixed domestic
architecture, and in doing so she is able to appropriate the utopian rhetoric of 38. See for example Adachiara Zevi, Painting
living differently which is associated with these forms. I want to argue that this Versus Canvas in Carla Accardi (catalogue of the
rhetoric is made to speak to her artistic practice, and to the possibility of exhibition held at Haunch of Venison 10 May26
artistic renewal. June 2010) (New York, NY: Haunch of Venison,
2010), pp. 1516; Musee dArt Moderne de la
Of particular importance is the fact that Accardis environments are made Ville de Paris, Carla Accardi (catalogue of the
almost entirely of transparent plastic material. Although this aspect of Accardis exhibition held in Paris, 17 January3 March
practice has not gone unnoticed in the literature, it has not been adequately 2002) (Paris: Editions des musees de la ville de
examined alongside the utopian rhetoric with which Accardi framed these Paris, 2002), p. 5; Bramanti (ed.), Carla Accardi,
pp. 289.
works.38 The artist used this transparent material almost exclusively
throughout the second half of the 1960s and in subsequent decades, and it is a 39. See Letizia Modena, Italo Calvinos Architecture
of Lightness (New York, NY and London:
choice that she foregrounds repeatedly in statements made about her Routledge, 2011), p. 71.
environments and her working practice. These concerns can be understood
within the context of a broader debate about a new way of seeing that 40. Modena, Italo Calvinos Architecture of Lightness,
p. 71. On this subject see also Gyorgy Kepes,
developed in the postwar period in the USA and which was subsequently taken Language of Vision (Chicago, IL: Theobald, 1944);
up in Europe within artistic as well as architectural practice and urban theory. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago,
As Letizia Modena explains, these debates comprised nuanced discussions on IL: Theobold, 1947), Rudolf Arnheim, Art and
Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye
the urban environment as site of aesthetic experience, quality of life, and social
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
welfare.39 One of the key threads of the debate, to parse Modena, focused on 1954), and Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City
the phenomenology of the urban setting and the role of art and architecture in (Cambridge, MA: Technology Press and Harvard
revitalis[ing] the imagination of city dwellers.40 University Press, 1960).
Within architectural and urbanism discussions from the 1960s onwards in 41. Modena, Italo Calvinos Architecture of Lightness,
Italy, critical assessments of utopia were often focused on conceptualising it p. 12.
in relation to the imagination (including this new way of seeing) and visual 42. Stephen Phillips, Plastics in Beatriz
perception. Crucially, lightness played a fundamental role in the interdisciplinary Colomina et al., Cold War Hothouses: Inventing
field of utopian studies and numerous analyses were devoted to the intricacies of Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy (New York,
NY and London: Princeton Architectural, 2004),
visual perception, imagination, and cognition and significantly to lightness of chapter 4; Beatriz Colomina, Unbreathed Air
materials.41 Accardi appropriates this lexicon and makes it speak to her own 1956, Grey Room, vol. 15, 2004, pp. 2859;
condition of working as a woman artist. By considering Accardis practice Beatriz Colomina, Domesticity at War (Cambridge,
alongside statements the artist made about her temporary dwellings, I want to MA: MIT Press, 2007), chapter 6. Also on this
subject, see Esther Leslie, Synthetic Worlds
ask how this material signalled a new way of working and what new possibilities (London: Reaktion Books, 2005).
it offered for transforming her practice, before considering how the artist aligns
43. Stephen Phillips, Plastics, chapter 4.
this new way of working to her own feminist project.

How to Make a Home

That Accardi should turn to plastics to make her alternative homes is hardly
surprising. It does, however, rub against those images of a pre-industrial com-
munity invoked by the artist, hinting at an altogether different utopian horizon:
the techno-utopia of postwar consumer capitalism. It was precisely in this pe-
riod that new housing typologies were delivered in this material. The first all-
plastic house had already appeared in 1956 in France designed by the architect
Ionel Schein, with subsequent competing models produced in the USA and
Russia underscoring a global belief in this materials potential to fulfil the uto-
pian dream of a new domestic architecture.42 By the time Accardi began making
her first environment in 1965, plastics had long been advertised as a new won-
der substance, heralding the house of the future in a postwar plastic world;
manufacturers promoted plastic in largely utopian terms as a means of offering
a radically different existence one in which housework could be virtually elim-
inated through labour-saving materials and objects destined for use in the
home.43

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 Teresa Kittler

Accardi, however, was keen to reject any connection to this consumer-

orientated world despite the obvious associations of her temporary homes with
44. Lonzi, Discorsi: Carla Lonzi e Carla
the world of fashion and interior design for which Italy had, by this point, be-
Accardi, Marcatre, vol. 235, June 1966, p. 193. come famous. If the artist had couched her environments in utopian language
then she had expressly described how she had not wanted to create false things
45. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193. See also Anne-
Marie Sauzeau-Boetti, Negative Capability as to dupe people.44 If plastic was proclaimed as the material capable of imitation
Practice in Womens Art, Studio International, par excellence then the artist had somehow wanted to recuperate it from its
vol. 191, no. 979, 1976, p. 50. connotations of mass production, and reclaim the potential for it beyond the
46. Adachiara Zevi, Carla Accardi: Segni merely derivative. Accardis use of plastic had initially elicited some criticism
Galleggianti, LArchitettura: Cronache e Storia, vol. but she would defend her choice, explaining in an interview with Lonzi that she
38, 1992, p. 888. had wanted to ennoble it.45 Such comments on the part of the artist betray a
47. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193. concern to distinguish her art from other kinds of production (when visual and
48. These effects have been subsequently material distinctions were no longer possible), and the artist from other kinds
suppressed in recent restoration initiatives where of roles (such as art critic or designer). Perhaps the point is that Accardis tem-
the Sicofoil has been secured between sheets of porary homes seem to draw from a range of contradictory historic and contem-
Plexiglas creating the appearance of a rigid porary references as she works through the complex question of how it might
structure rather than a supple canopy. See Luisa
Mensi and Mariano Boggia, Le Opere Di Arte be possible to even begin to conceive an alternative existence.
Ambientale Di Carla Accardi, in E. Di Martino Crucially, reimagining the idea of the domestic in this material also went
(ed.), Arte Contemporanea. Conservazione e Restauro. hand in hand with what it meant to rethink the transformative potential of her
Atti Del Convegno Internazionale (Turin: Allemandi,
work. As I want to argue, it was the way that Accardi would conceive of the
2005), p. 224.
import of this possibility and its significance for painting that suggests a utopian
49. Daniel Soutif has carried out the most promise for feminism. When Accardi began to make Tenda in 1965, it signalled
exhaustive technical research into Accardis use of
Sicofoil. Daniel Soutif, La Vie en rose Carla an important transition in scale from the individual panels the artist had been
Accardi, Triplice Tenda, 19691971, Les Cahiers painting previously. Accardi had spoken about Tenda as the first work she
du Musee National dArt Moderne, vol. 98, winter made that could be walked into.46 Her practice did not, however, alter
2006, pp. 478. significantly when she began making her first environment. Rather, the move
50. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193. into three dimensions ultimately constituted an expansion of her painting
practice. As Accardi explains it:

The tent is not an object because if I wanted to make an object I would have had to make one that was
intriguing, invented, new, I would have had to try to astonish people; no, for me the tent was an
obvious thing, I had thought of it as an extension of painting.47

Tenda is constructed out of thirty-six painted panels, whose assorted shapes

triangular, rectangular, or trapezoidal together form Tendas A-Line structure,
anticipating the shaped canvases that the artist would go on to make in later
years. Each panel of Tenda is made with two sheets of Sicofoil fixed within a
Perspex frame. Sicofoil resembles plastic film and resists absorption, so the
speed and force with which each brushstroke is made is registered on its sur-
face. Accardi had applied water-based fluorescent colour to the reverse sides,
all over and monochromatically, with hot pink or acid green waves. These lines
of different thickness run perpendicular to each other so that when placed back
to back within a single panel they overlap and appear to interact in a rippling ef-
fect, creating a wave-like pattern that befits the supple quality of the material
(Fig. 9) with vertiginous results (Fig. 10).48
Accardis experiments with transparent plastic had begun as early as 1964
when the artist turned to Perspex and then to Sicofoil, which she used
exclusively thereafter.49 Two years later in an interview with Lonzi, Accardi
referred to that moment as a turning point: I had a crisis, which had its origins
in the way I had lived.50 Accardi describes her way out of this crisis in terms of
a release from the traditions of post-war painting. Crucially, here Accardi con-
flates her work with her life the crisis in painting is defined in terms of a crisis
in the way she had lived. Accardis temporary homes become shorthand for

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

51. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.

52. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
53. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
54. Carla Accardi and Puglisi Cosentino
Fondazione, Carla Accardi: Segno e Trasparenza
(Milan: Silvana, 2011), p. 33.

Fig. 9. Carla Accardi, Tenda (detail), 19651966, paint on Sicofoil, 215  220  140 cm. Private
Collection, Turin (Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

the way in which she conceives of her practice in this period, where visibility,
transparency, and lightening came to stand for a certain openness, liberation,
and freedom in art but also in life. In this context, the refrain living differently
can be seen as part of an ongoing avant-garde project in the sense that it carries
forward familiar utopian cries to unite art and life. But it also takes a distinctive
turn a domestic turn which is quite at odds with that legacy.
In the same interview Lonzi describes how Accardi had needed to find a way
of distancing herself from painting.51 According to the critic, Tenda offered a
way of doing this, and adds that it had allowed the artist to reflect on the
conditions of painting.52 For Accardi, the solution to this crisis would come
through the discovery of transparent material and the possibilities this presented
for lightening her work. At the time Accardi put it in this way:

[I had been] mistaken about those preconceived ideas . . . those post-war canons, believing with good
faith in everything that others had said . . . at the time I took it out on my work . . . I had said it
doesnt matter, its worthless, it isnt important. After that moment, I can truly speak about lightening
my work . . . it comes from having been through a kind of trauma, from having uncovered all those my-
thologies connected to painting.53

The lightening that the artist had sought to achieve is rendered both
palpably and figuratively with Sicofoil, the inspiration . . . the start of it all she
calls it, explaining how she had wanted to make everything . . . transparent . . .
so [as] to unveil the mysteries of art. It was the sixties.54 Transparency is
foregrounded in Accardis origin story as it takes centre stage in her conception

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 Teresa Kittler

55. See Maurizio Calvesi, Intervista con i

pittori, Marcatre, vol. 810, June 1964,
pp. 21920.

Fig. 10. Carla Accardi, Tenda (detail), 19651966, paint on Sicofoil, 215  220  140 cm. Private
Collection, Turin (Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

of a new way of working. When she speaks of transparency, she equates it with
being contemporary; it was, after all, the sixties. There is ongoing tension in
statements such as these between the search for an alternative way of life and
Accardis desire to be absolutely contemporary, as if the artist were
interrogating how far these two overlap or how far they might be a way of
saying the same thing. Similarly, when asked to reflect on her use of colour in
an interview with Maurizio Calvesi for Marcatre, she writes: I . . . have always
been aware of the fact that today no landscape exists without neon and
fluorescent lights and it is for this reason that I arrived at these colours.55
By drawing on her contemporary environment, Accardi seems to want to ask
how far the material and social conditions of the present could offer utopian

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

possibilities for the future and implies that being contemporary in the right way
might in fact deliver a means of living differently.
Additionally, when Accardi speaks of unveil[ing] the mysteries of art, the
properties of plastic offer an antidote, in a literal sense, to the perceived
encumbrances of painting. As she puts it, you could see the frame. Her choice
of language to describe her work in terms of lightening speaks closely to the
logic of subtraction, echoed throughout this period within artistic practice.56
The significance of lightening in Accardis work extends to her notion of living
differently as premised on contact with nature, air and light, free from
civilising structures.57 As already mentioned, this vocabulary allies her work to
a widespread debate prevalent across the disciplines in Italy on the relationship
between lightness and utopia, perhaps the most famous examples of which
were elaborated later by Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities (1972) and Six Memos
(1988) in close dialogue with the architectural and urban theory of the
preceding decades.58
Moreover her attempt to unveil the mysteries of art would be echoed in
later years by Rivolta Femminile. In a statement published in 1971, they put it
in the following way: The artist expects woman to mythicize his gesture[;] Fig. 11. Photograph of the Carla Accardis
until a process of liberation occurs.59 Anticipating Rivolta Femminiles studio in Via del Babuino, Rome, 1967
criticism that the mythologisation of art was symptomatic of female repression, (Photo: Giancarlo Mibelli Courtesy Studio
Accardi, Rome).
Accardis notion of lightening offers an initial response to the form that
liberation would need to take. This process, whose aims were to unveil the
mysteries of art, involved putting her work in dialogue with the surrounding 56. For a discussion of this tendency within the
space. Rotoli and Coni (Rolls and Cones) (Fig. 11) are some of the first Italian context see Alex Potts in Disencumbered
Objects, October, Special issue on Postwar Italian
experiments that emerge from this development, anticipating the larger scaled Art, vol. 124, Spring 2008, pp. 16989.
environments which Accardi started making soon after.
57. Vallarino, Luminous marks, in Art and
A photograph taken in the Rome studio in 1966 reads almost like a Artists, June 1972, p. 33. My emphasis.
production manual for these works; the Rotoli and Coni dispersed around the
room offer themselves as clues for the likely transformation of the flat sheet in 58. Modena, Italo Calvinos Architecture of Lightness,
chapter 2.
the centre, suggestively curled at one end (Fig. 12). A material more closely
associated with commercial packaging than with art making, Accardi would buy 59. Rivolta Femminile, Assenza della Donna:
Dai Momenti Celebrativi della Manifestazione
Sicofoil at the local stationers, Vertecchi, where, as she explains, it was Creativa Maschile, Milan, March 1971, n/p.
normally used for shoe boxes, it was sold by the roll and . . . I used to buy [the]
entire roll.60 If the form of the Rotoli recall those rolled units of Sicofoils mass 60. Lorenzo Benedetti, Conversazione con Carla
Accardi in Universita degli studi di Roma, La
production, then the effects are quite unlike those that might be expected of Sapienza, Forma 1 e i Suoi Artisti: Accardi, Consagra,
modular, geometric sculpture in this period as it came to be associated with Dorazio, Perilli, Sanfilippo, Turcato (Rome:
industrially produced materials. Rotoli have none of that monumentality to Gangemi, 2000), p. 96.
which their column-like structure would seem to refer. Difficult to define, they
share a vocabulary with sculptural and painterly practices but the results elude
both these categories. At once, they release sculpture from its associations with
volume and weight, and painting from its adherence to a ground.
Accardi explores the fullest flexibility of this plastic material and the kinds
of visual lighting effects, metaphorical anti-gravitational effects, as well as the
range of colours that could be produced on its surface. Certainly, the installa-
tion shots taken of Rotoli and Coni outdoors seem to recall this, where dispersal
and concentration of light deflected off the curvilinear surface project an array
of patterns and colours onto the surrounding floor space, producing what seems
like an animated surface (Fig. 13). The same light effects that permeate and de-
flect off the shiny, pliable surfaces of Rotoli and Coni are also visible in Tenda and
would be replicated in the other environments that Accardi made between
1965 and 1972. In ways that resonate with the provisional nature of Accardis
temporary homes, and which she had hinted at when she had spoken of tearing
down walls another veiled allusion to patriarchy the notion of demystifying

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 Teresa Kittler

Fig. 12. Photograph of the Carla Accardis studio, 1965 (Photo: Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome).

the work of art went hand in hand with a physical and material challenge to ex-
isting borders alluded to by the tent motif.61
The artist presses the transparent surface to its limits, in ways that bind her
practice to a knot of concerns around optics and identity. Indeed, Accardis
practice might be better understood through metaphors of visibility. The artist
emphasises the protective, decorative, and interactive possibilities of surface in
ways that redefine the relationship between the work and its surroundings, and
additionally, the way that those surroundings come to be viewed through the
work. This distinctive aspect of her practice did not escape the attention of
critics at the time; for example, in 1966 Lonzi described Accardis brushstrokes
as signs belonging to the unity of our visual experience.62 The critic offers a
structuralist reading of Accardis environments in which she insists that the
painted signs that characterised the artists practice and that here appeared to
Fig. 13. Carla Accardi, Rotoli e Coni, 1966, float in space, had begun to assume a significance in relation to their
paint on Sicofoil, variable dimensions (Photo: surroundings.63 Lonzi seems to be saying that the meaning of Accardis painting
Courtesy Studio Accardi, Rome). would be determined by this relationship. Liberated from their frames, the
painted panels that comprised the work can no longer claim to occupy a
separate or autonomous space but rather seem to want to ask what it might

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

mean to live with art differently, in a more interactive way. The all-over paint-
ing typical of the artists practice in the 1950s comes, with the arrival of
Sicofoil, to resemble camouflage or animal markings, pressing these concerns 61. Causse and Lapouge, Ecrits, Voix dItalie,
around vision further: the logic of camouflage, after all, traces a line between p. 393.
identity and concealment but also of the possibility of adapting to a given envi-
62. Carla Accardi in Catalogo della mostra,
ronment.64 Sicofoil dramatises these possibilities of interaction with the sur- (Turin: Galleria Notizie, 1966). Lonzi is the first
rounding space. It also blurs the boundary between material and skin that had to frame Accardis practice in semiotic terms. See
long informed Accardis practice. for example Udo Kultermann, The New Painting,
(New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 44; Corrado Levi
If Accardis temporary environments can be understood as short hand for the (ed.), Una Diversa Tradizione (Milan: Clup, 1985),
idea of living differently then this, I argue, is premised on a different way of pp. 1405; Bramanti (ed.), Carla Accardi, p. 20.
seeing. This takes on a variety of meanings in relation to Accardis practice,
63. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
from her search to uncover the mythologies of painting, to see the frame as
Accardi had put it, right through to redefining the encounter between the 64. There is a wide body of scholarship on the
subject of camouflage. Among some of the more
viewer and her work.65 This also connects to the political stakes of seeing interesting examples are Roger Caillois and John
differently and the practice of autocoscienza (consciousness raising) whose aims Shepley, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia,
were in part about the possibility of a new vision of the world. Accardis October, vol. 31, Winter 1984, pp. 1732; David
experiments with optical effects take on an additional meaning in her Lomas, ArtistSorcerers: Mimicry, Magic and
Hysteria, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 35, no. 3,
environments as they relate to privacy and shelter.66 She had referred to her 2012, pp. 36388.
environments as transparent tents and the drawing that dates to 1970 suggests
65. Accardi and Puglisi Cosentino Fondazione,
a model of dwelling at odds with the notion of privacy. But a work like Triplice
Carla Accardi: Segno e Trasparenza, p. 33.
Tenda also has the effect of closing up the space, a space that Accardi had
conceived as entirely pink despite its diaphanous quality. It was described as 66. This has been connected to the politicisation
of the private sphere by Leslie Cozzi in Spaces of
labyrinthine, to borrow the words of Anne-Marie Sauzeau-Boetti from 1975, Self-Consciousness: Carla Accardis Environments
who had wanted to conjure a bodily, specifically uterine, space created by and the Rise of Italian Feminism, Women &
the three pink tents nestled together in decreasing size, one inside the other Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, vol. 21,
(Fig. 14). The inner and outer panels of each tent interact in such a way as to no. 1, 2011, p. 68.
transform the painted wave-like pattern on their surfaces into a lattice. It sug- 67. Causse and Lapouge, Ecrits, Voix dItalie,
gests the different ways in which transparency could be made to work here as p. 393.
a form of enclosure, and to disorientating effect. If Accardi offers a model of liv- 68. Timothy Leary et al., The Psychedelic
ing differently, then it is proposed as an idea of unsettled, unfixed space. Experience was published in Italy in 1964. See
Acid Visions in Scott, Architecture or Techno-
Accardi had spoken about this before Celant would famously articulate it in
Utopia, pp. 1878.
terms of acculturation, conflating an idea of alternative dwelling and an anti-
masculinist impulse by explaining that she had wanted to make something de- 69. Accardi, Carla Accardi, pp. 834.
structible . . . in opposition to a traditional masculine taste for the immutable,
the imperishable.67
Additionally, her environments, and particularly Tenda, speak to the aesthetic
tropes of psychedelia of this moment mind-altering experiences and fluid en-
vironments which hailed the body as being one with the surroundings and lib-
erated from the constraints of the physical world.68 The use of bold,
contrasting colours achieves the kinds of disorientating effects associated with
Op Art, effects that Accardi appears to welcome as when she says: Ill say
straightaway that I begin by putting the viewer in front of a work that is unstable
and precarious . . . they should abandon themselves entirely to a kind of hyp-
notic state, where they are suspended in time.69 The point is that the artist
wants to challenge the viewer, and thereby transform the role of the spectator
by creating works with no fixed point of view in ways that might be understood
as a response to Lonzis grievances over the ultimately passive role of the specta-
tor. By expanding her painting practice into the surrounding space, and putting
it in dialogue with architecture, Accardi rethinks paintings limits, and in doing
so allows for the possibility of new forms of interaction.
By enfolding her way of working and seeing with her way of living, Accardi
accords equal status and urgency to art as to life. That she does so betrays a
concern to distinguish her art from other kinds of production, and concerns

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 Teresa Kittler

70. Flavio Fergonzi, La Critica Militante, La

Pittura in Italia Il Novecento 2, 19451990 (Milan:
Electa, 1993), pp. 56990; G. Guercio and A.
Mattirolo (eds), Il Confine Evanescente. Arte Italiana
19602000 (Milan and Rome: Mondadori Electa,
2010), pp. 263309.

Fig. 14. Photograph of Carla Accardi making Triplice Tenda, 1970 (Photo: Courtesy Studio
Accardi, Rome).

Fig. 15. Photograph of Carla Accardi in her studio in Rome, 1967 (Photo: Ugo Mulas # Ugo
Mulas Heirs. All rights reserved).

over the role of the artist, which had dominated debates in the postwar period
in Italy.70 Crucially, it also hints at Accardis faith in the utopian possibilities of
art. Her aim to transform optics in painting was to assume a social and political
scope beyond the canvas. In so doing, Accardi set out to dismantle what would
later be articulated by Rivolta Femminile as the patriarchal and hierarchical
structures of art. Through her transparent Sicofoil tents, Accardi proposed her
practice as offering a model and at the very least an imperative to carry out
that same critical project in life as in art.

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

Living Differently, Seeing Differently

Accardi remakes a model of home guided by the imperative to figuratively and
materially lighten her environments and, by extension, the dwelling space. 71. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
This was literally achieved through the use of Sicofoil and, as the artist was at 72. Bracke, Women and the Reinvention of the
pains to point out, through a lot of hard work. But what were the implications Political, p. 67.
of this move and more specifically how did this speak to the utopianism with 73. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
which she framed these temporary shelters? For the artist this choice of
material was explicitly connected to a new way of working, one defined in 74. Sauzeau-Boetti, Lo Specchio Ardente,
p. 51.
terms of a process of stripping back, anticipating the entirely transparent works
that Accardi began making in the 1970s. Accardi sums up this way of working 75. Sauzeau-Boetti, Lo Specchio Ardente,
p. 50.
when she explains that it had allowed her to take away, take away, take
away.71 The concept of lightness that underpins this attitude takes on a further 76. Accardi, Carla Accardi, p. 34.
significance as it is couched by Accardi in two key terms that would be 77. It is specifically the association with the
elaborated through Rivolta Femminile, with which she was involved as works on the ground that I claim can be
founding member from the 1970s: authenticity and liberation. As Maud understood as anti-humanist. There are
numerous examples in the literature that align
Anne Bracke explains, these terms took on a pronounced meaning in Italy both Pollocks practice and more broadly that of the
inspired by the cultures of 1968 and their year zero impulse as well as the Abstract Expressionists with humanism. See for
influence of black liberation for Italian feminism, and were central to the example, Caroline Jones, The Machine in the
project of defining sexual difference.72 This is how Accardi put it in 1966: Studio (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press,
1996), chapter 1; Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract
Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s
[T]aking everything away, might also have left nothing. But, perhaps, if a person has a certain attitude, (London: Yale University Press, 1997), and Peter
takes a certain amount of care in trying to understand, yes, to see things in a new way, emptied out, Selz, New Images of Man (London: Forgotten
in the end taking everything away will not result in nothing, something remains: for me it was an Books, 2016).
experience that I liked, that I enjoyed . . . I have the right to do something in whichever way I choose,
the simplest way, to experiment, and if by making and trying to live each day in a way that was not
vulgar, to remove everything, this thing remains . . . I risk making empty things, I risk losing things,
unable to make works because an element is missing. But I dont think so.73

Of the four environments that Accardi realised, Triplice Tenda is the most
ambitious, and she describes making it as a slow process, as two years of
difficulty both with the material and its [Triplice Tendas] production.74
Importantly in the artists conception, the material lightening of the ground was
never at the expense of technical difficulty. Accardi describes it here as
meticulous work, and elsewhere she has spoken about the huge problem
involved in making Triplice Tenda.75
Accardi made much of the effort involved in working on the floor. Ambiente
Arancio, made with seven wooden stretchers wrapped in Sicofoil sheets and
arranged flat on the ground, makes a feature of the floor in a distinctive way,
just as Accardis own approach to painting had by 1953 become floor-bound
and distinguishable by its repeated all-over patterns. She described making
Tenda as a summer spent working on the floor, painting all these panels by
hand with the overlapping pink and green.76 A series of photographs by Ugo
Mulas taken of the artist in her studio in Rome in 1967 (Fig. 15) shows Accardi
at work on her hands and knees; she literally builds her temporary homes from
the floor upwards. In another photograph from this largely unpublished series
she appears as if literally scrubbing the floor as she negotiates the unwieldy pan-
els that comprise her plastic environments. Accardi works directly on the
ground but with none of the heroics associated with the Abstract Expressionists
as they have come to be read. And while these shots of Accardi by Mulas exhibit
nothing of the theatrics enshrined in photographs by Hans Namuth of Jackson
Pollocks drip paintings, she does share in the anti-heroic and anti-humanist tra-
dition that might be associated with their working practice, connected as it was
with the ground, rather than with something that stands upright.77 By working

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 Teresa Kittler

on the floor in ways that evoke the kind of labours involved in homemaking
that is as if she were literally scrubbing the floor it is as if Accardi were trying
78. Glenn Adamson, The Craft Reader (Oxford:
to domesticate her gesture.
Berg, 2010), pp. 491524. When Accardi speaks about her own practice she echoes the ambivalence
and often troubled relationship with female domestic work as it had come to be
79. Causse and Lapouge, Ecrits, Voix dItalie,
p. 393. regarded in the 1970s as both trivialised and degraded categories of womens
work outside of the fine arts, but also as an arena for self-expression in the
80. Candance West and Don Zimmerman,
Doing Gender in The Social Construction of
face of oppression.78 Accardi writes: we know that women work with repeti-
Gender edited by Judith Lorber and Susan A tion. My paintings took a long time to make. I would make them on the floor
Farrell (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1991), p. 30. like a rug. Repetition is an inherent fact of oppression . . . but it needs to be re-
81. Maurizio Fagiolo dellArco, Le Arti Oggi in vived, to be recovered and made into a liberatory gesture.79 She takes a mode
Italia (Rome: Mario Bulzoni, 1966), reprinted in of working long associated with the conditions of female oppression and de-
Levi, Carla Accardi, in Corrado Levi (ed.), Una clares it a distinctive feature of her own practice. Moreover, she claims to trans-
Diversa Tradizione, p. 156.
form those repetitive operations into something liberatory. To borrow from
82. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193; Sauzeau-Boetti, Candance West and Don Zimmerman, it is as if Accardi were appropriating the
Negative Capability as Practice in Womens gestures of the domestic, only to refuse the activities of a life connected to that
Art, Studio International, vol. 191, no. 979,
1976, p. 50. space and by extension the subjectivities constructed through those roles.80
The artists practice has from the outset elicited multiple interpretations.81
83. Sauzeau-Boetti, Carla Accardi, Data, vol.
20, 1976, p. 73.
By the mid-1970s, the politics of Accardis tents would be recognised and
claimed as a feminist critique by both Lonzi and Sauzeau-Boetti.82 In an
84. Sauzeau-Boetti, Carla Accardi, p. 73.
important though little-known contribution to the narrative of postwar wom-
85. Sauzeau-Boetti, Carla Accardi, p. 73. ens art in Italy, Sauzeau-Boetti makes a case for a productive space on the mar-
86. Patrick Hanafin, Conceiving Life: Reproductive gins. She reads Triplice Tenda through the lens of psychoanalysis, in pre-Oedipal
Politics and the Law in Contemporary Italy (Farnham: terms, writing in 1976: at the time she had a vision of primordial existence
Ashgate, 2013), p. 30, fn. 13; Monica Threlfall, and feminine desire . . . the mother, love before castration and the involvement
Mapping the Womens Movement: Feminist Politics and
Social Transformation in the North (London: Verso,
of the rival father.83 Framed by Accardis own participation in consciousness-
1996), p. 106. raising groups, Sauzeau-Boetti describes a turning point in the artists practice
in the following way: the end of the 1960s represented a moment of intense in-
87. This is, to my knowledge, the only English-
language scholarly work that exclusively examines trospection for Carla, the search for her own historical condition, the immer-
Accardis environments an aspect of Accardis sion in the dream/sign and continues, Accardis feminine sign . . . [is] a move
practice that Leslie Cozzi describes as obscure. through a certain appropriation of culture . . . a different way of being in the
See Cozzi, Spaces of Self-Consciousness, p. 68.
world.84 Sauzeau-Boetti evokes the spatial organisation and formal logic of
88. Cozzi, Spaces of Self-Consciousness, p. 76. Triplice Tenda to read its pink labyrinthine space as a psychic metaphor and the
89. Cozzi, Spaces of Self-Consciousness, p. 76. temporary structure as symbolic resistance to civilisation, referring specifically
to the law of the father.85 This association of civilisation in masculine terms
was not of course limited to feminist discourse, though it was famously articu-
lated explicitly in these terms by the Milan-based radical feminist collective
Demau (Demistificazione dellautoritarismo) which held meetings jointly with
Rivolta Femminile throughout the 1970s.86 Their focus was turned towards the
experience of women in patriarchal society, and they called for a politics outside
of its civilising and explicitly masculine norms.
Informed by these early feminist readings of Accardis environments, Leslie
Cozzi has recently analysed Accardis quasi-domestic structures as prototypes
for the kind of anti-institutional spaces proposed by organised feminism and ap-
propriate to the consciousness-raising groups with which Accardi was involved
as member of Rivolta Femminile.87 At stake in Cozzis analysis is the desire to
foreground the significance of Italian feminism amongst women artists in this
period. She argues that Tenda, Triplice Tenda, and Ambiente Arancio are the artists
response to the aims of that movement as they unfolded in Italy. Cozzi claims
that Accardis environments and the institutions of Italian feminism were predi-
cated on the notion that a new consciousness could be facilitated if a separate
institutional structure were provided to nurture it.88 This later became a cen-
tral tenet of Italian feminist thought.89 Accardis environments are understood

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

as occupying a space somewhere between the private, as it was called for within
feminist thought, and the public, as autocoscienza became an active political
tool.90 To parse Cozzis argument, Accardis environments trace a shift within 90. Cozzi, Spaces of Self-Consciousness, p. 68.
her own development of feminism from individual to group endeavour. Triplice
Tenda marks the transformation of this development as a communal space and a 91. See Rosma Scuteri, Carla Accardi, p. 66.
prototype for those alternatives established by Rivolta Femminile. 92. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
Cozzi is right, I think, to connect Tenda, Ambient Arancio, and Triplice Tenda to 93. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
the aims of radical design, which was also committed to offering alternative
94. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
ways of living in this period. In this way, Cozzi proposes a much-needed reading
of Accardis environments that binds these works to social and political concerns 95. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
and sees them as visual instances of the call for an alternative existence and af- 96. Accardi was not alone in her thinking. Piero
ter all, these environments do overlap chronologically with Accardis involve- Gilardi put it in similar terms in a recent
ment in Rivolta Femminile. Accardi, however, has expressed ambivalence in interview when he explained: To dedicate
oneself to a minimal output compared to that of
recent years towards these kinds of interpretations that emphasise her involve- consumer society was intended to be a metaphor
ment in feminist politics. She has repeatedly stressed her departure from the for a new way of seeing things, a new way for the
politics of organised feminism. Two decades earlier, Accardi claimed that her individual to create. See Piero Gilardi and
transparent objects and environments preceded her interest in feminism and Claudio Spadoni, Piero Gilardi (Milan: Mazzotta,
1999), p. 35.
that her involvement with feminism only coincided with her grey works of the
1970s.91 The point perhaps is that to read her works strictly through the lens of 97. Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193.
her political involvement fails to acknowledge the importance of aesthetic con-
cerns as they were foregrounded by the artist and the question of how those
aesthetic concerns might themselves be able to speak to politics. How might it
be possible, then, to examine her political involvement with Rivolta Femminile
through the lens of her artistic practice rather than the other way around?
If Tenda, Ambiente Arancio, and Triplice Tenda could offer another way of living,
then this, I argue, was principally played out through Accardis way of working,
and the concomitant experience of viewing her work. For Accardi, as already
noted, this is predicated on a different way of seeing. Sicofoil offers a distinctly
new way of working and transparency is literally and symbolically equated
here with that new approach of peeling away or stripping back. Elsewhere, and
perhaps in a way that seems at odds with the repeated brushwork technique and
resulting dense wave-like patterns that distinguish her environments, Accardi
affirms that to me it was more important to take away than to add.92 For
Accardi this attitude also carried with it a moral imperative.93 She describes her
new approach as underpinned by the right attitude and as working with the
right degree of care.94 Furthermore, it is underscored by the need to try to
understand things properly, and crucially, to see in a new way, by emptying
out.95 Accardi seems to be saying that understanding things properly or seeing
things in a new way becomes possible through an emptying out.96 Importantly,
Accardi seems to want to explore what remains as a result of this process
whether the effect of stripping back could reveal something radical or funda-
mental. This thinking informs the way Accardi conceives of artistic production,
which she couches in terms of authenticity but also as redefining an everyday
existence. though it obviously also connects closely to the aims of consciousness
raising, not necessarily as an organised practice but as the idea of a political con-
sciousness based on a process of stripping away, a revelation.
This process of taking away extends to the viewing encounter. It is as if the
artist wants to elicit a similar set of responses in the viewer when she writes:
In front of the things I make the viewer could feel a kind of lack and emotional
poverty.97 Accardi literally removes the obstacle posed by the canvas, making
works whose constituent elements are all visible. In an interview with Marisa
Volpi she reiterates this when she explains: My works are almost entirely
aesthetic, visual objects: the tents, the umbrella, the sunbed have a lightness for

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 Teresa Kittler

those that look at them, if the [viewer] looks at them in a straightforward way,
and wants to liberate [themselves] from the heavy and conventional objects
98. See Marisa Volpi, Intervista a Carla
which surround us.98 As mentioned above, one of the crucial differences
Accardi, Marcatre, vol. 42, May 1968, Milan. between Lonzi and Accardis perspectives was the role of art in feminism. For
Lonzi the two were incompatible precisely because art replicated the patriarchal
99. Sauzeau-Boetti, Negative Capability as
Practice in Womens Art, p. 50. structures of society by relying on the role of spectator. Accardis response
seems to want to redefine those roles, as when she claims: I wanted to
100. Causse and Lapouge, Ecrits, Voix dItalie,
p. 393.
understand what lay behind it [art] and I wanted for people not to feel stuck in
front of a work. I found that to be too automatic a position. I wanted the
101. Causse and Lapouge, Ecrits, Voix dItalie,
audience to be shaken.99
p. 393.
Undoubtedly the viewing encounter is transformed with transparent plastic,
102. See Lonzi, Discorsi, p. 193. as Accardi explores what it means to view an object and to have the object
103. Obrist, Carla Accardi, p. 98. negotiate the terms of the encounter for the viewer. Looking at something is of
course different to looking through it and these environments transform that
process. But if Accardi had ambitions to make everything transparent, then how
did the use of plastic transform those relations?
Sicofoil animates the dynamics of vision; it implies alternative points of view
with works that can literally be seen from all sides and it insists that art has to
speak to that space around the work. It also interrogates the act of looking, and
the different aspects that impinge on that experience. The effects of this move
are far-reaching. Accardi not only physically situates her environments in rela-
tion to the surrounding space but also makes them a function of viewing that
space. It is this, above all else, that seems to take on a political significance in
Accardis practice of this period, anticipating rather than directly mapping on to
the way in which these concerns would subsequently be articulated through
Rivolta Femminile. For the artist, this renewed interest in a politics of vision
went hand in hand with what it meant to be a woman artist, as when she writes:
already in 64 I began a study . . . to lighten . . . especially to demystify the pic-
ture and for me this demystification had a feminine content.100
Another way that Accardi negotiates the experience of space is through
recourse to memory, weaving these works into her own life story (she speaks of
having dreamt of Tenda as a child).101 But she also does this by locating these
works in the imaginary, insisting that Tenda is a thought, perhaps in the same
way that utopia is not a place.102 With reference to Ambiente Arancio Accardi
insists, before anything, it was a fabrication of my imagination.103 Accardi
seems to be describing a different kind of interaction with the viewer, one that
relies on a conception of the work as mise-en-scene rather than immersive
environment. In her account of the different kinds of viewing encounter that
emerged with installation art in the 1960s, Claire Bishop characterised the
dream/fantasy divide as a way of distinguishing between installations that
function more like tableaux that is, where the viewing subject is indirectly
solicited to imagine being part of the work, in contrast to installations where the
viewer is immersed in an environment. Accardi flirts with these distinctions:
Ambiente Arancio seems to address itself directly to the viewer, in a way that
appears to function like a dreamscape, but by describing Ambiente Arancio as
rarefied she relies on a conception of the work as tableau or mise-en-scene as
well as a space or place in which to project those reveries. In doing so Accardi
seems to suggest not only that the locus of this alternative might be found in an
attitude a particular perspective taken in relation to things but also that the
ability to conceive of an alternative existence might be just as important as its
realisation.
As the complex and inherently paradoxical experience of remaking home
testifies, the domestic becomes a site of an impossible utopia in this period as

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 Living Differently, Seeing Differently

Accardi grapples with the question of how you might ever begin to start living
differently. Accardi highlights the floor-based and repetitive labour involved in
remaking her temporary homes while at the same time emphatically refusing to
take part in productive labour. Rather, she speaks of taking pleasure in making
a useless object, rejecting means-end rationality. In doing so, she wants to ad-
vance an altogether different model of working, transforming the kind of labour
normally associated with oppression in the home into something liberatory.
If her artistic practice has anything to say about the relationship between femi-
nism and the domestic it is this. Her alternative homes signal new possibilities
for both her practice and the experience of viewing the work. With the same
stroke she unmakes home and undoes painting, asking both of her work and her
life what it might mean to think of an alternative. Through her emphasis on
transparency and commitment to lightening, she materially and metaphorically
finds a way of challenging myths of art as masculine and, by extension, the do-
mestic structure of female oppression. In doing so she raises the question of
what the utopian possibilities of feminism might be without giving clear-cut an-
swers. Instead, through her practice she offers a set of guiding principles and
suggests an ethical approach to her work that, if adopted, could form the basis
for thinking and working otherwise, through the formation of alternative mod-
els for living.

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