Italics. Italian Art between Tradition and Revolution. (1968 – 2008).

Francesco Bonami's Italics: Italian Art Between Tradition and Revolution, 1968-2008 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; November 14, 2009 - February 12,2010). It includes 250 works by 107 Italian artists, Italics is not just an exhibition about art made in Italy but, more importantly, demonstrates how these artists have forged new identities from deep roots blossoming in many different directions.
In the polemical essay from the exhibition catalogue, Borami writes that Italics was "not based on a thesis but on a situation." The curate maintains and develop contemporary art on an adequate scale. So, Boanami set out to prove the richness of the contemporary Italian art scene through this exhibition. His excoriation of the cultural apparatuses at work in Italy gives a good sense of the passion that he brought to the task of organizing the show. Indeed, as he sought to demonstrate the sophistication, vitality, and idiosyncrasy of contemporary Italian artists, Bonami selected some pitch-perfect examples that do make us wonder why many of these artists are not more widely known.
Parting down the list of discoveries from this show is a daunting task, but at the very least would be the works by Pietro Roccasalva and Carol Rama, followed by those of Roberto Cuoghi and Giuseppe Gabellone. The highlight of the exhibition for me, though, was a curatorial gambit rather than a single work; the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated videos in one room. The first is Domenico Mangano's The Story of Mimmo (1999-2000), an eight-minute piece that features the artist's fat uncle ruminating on life, religion, and food while wearing only a pair of skimpy shorts.
Because of his large size, Mimmo no longer works or even seems to leave his cramped apartment. The video emphasizes this idle claustrophobia in unrelenting fashion as Mimmo's body fills almost every frame while he eats, tries to sleep, and even sits on the toilet at one point. In this way, the viewer gets a sense that the totality of this man's existence is talking and digesting.
Just to Mangano’s work is Monica Bonvincini’s video shows a nude woman whose head is entirely covered by a white architectural model of a home. She is backed into a corner space created by two bare walls against which she repeatedly bangs her house-head. Clearly, Bonvicini has attempted to bring one of Louise Bourgeois’ feminine-maison figures to life. In that regard, the work feels somewhat strident and student-like. Yet, there is also a grace and dignity to the woman’s repetitive struggle, which elevates it beyond merely derivative.
Bonami also includes a fair number of works by Italy’s more established artists. Mario Merz, Michelangelo Pistolletto, Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia are here. However, there works by Italian A-listers particularly stood out. Of those, surely the most striking is Maurizo Cattelan’s All (2008), which greets us as we enter the exhibition. The piece consists of nine marble sculptures meticulously carved to represent covered corpses, neatly lined up in a row. Walking around the prostate figures, I kept looking for some sign that would clue me in to the joke or the wry humor I expected. Instead, the piece was powerfully sober and I felt oddly chastened by the gulf between my expectations and my experience.
The show had is curatorial flaws – half hearted thematic groupings and excessive amounts of photojournalism were the most onerous. Simone Berti’s Senza titolo (1999) offers spokes models for Bonami’s theory. The large-scale color photo depicts a carefully coiffed family posing on a lawn. Its strength is the consistently good work featured throughout the exhibition. Countless times, I was excitedly jotting down artists’ names so that I could find additional information about them later or recording my surprise at works or artists I thought I already knew. But Italics is more than old fashioned ideas that good art continues to be made because artists simply have to do it.

Though the former Museum of Contemporary Art senior curator Reiner Zetti insists, in the “Italics” catalog, he “does not pretend to rewrite 40 years of art history but rather to tell a different tale in a new way,” artist Jannis Kounellis disliked Bonami’s departures from the canon so much he withdrew from the show. Though Bonami rails against the conservative art system that has stifled artistic opportunities and recognition in his homeland, the quality of the work here indicates that at least something is going right.