A light has gone out on Florence’s art scene. For 26 years it shone out of a ground-floor property at via San Niccolò 18R. It was not a grand edifice, but a typical space for a neighbourhood edicola. The light was the metaphorical variety, the sort that beings inspiration and revelation. BASE Progetti per l’arte occupied unlikely premises for an art powerhouse: two narrow rooms with modest dimensions ending abruptly in a flat wall. Stimulating ideas spilled into the street from that address. The location was a rare and wonderful place, but that light has been extinguished since 25 September.
The building’s owner, unrelated to the operation, is a realist who sees that, in a rapidly changing Florence, property is a greater asset than the cultural hinterland it may contain. In uncertain economic and political times, confidence is sought through bricks and mortar rather than in ideas with the potential to alter attitudes, widen horizons and change lives.
While plans for the next phase of BASE are afoot, the stand-alone project space has been reluctantly inserted into the pages of Florence’s storied past. In the course of 15 years, I have seen installations that I easily recall. Due to the physical restraints, BASE only housed a few works at any one time, and they were always in dialogue with the space, the viewer, the passer-by who glimpsed them through the glazed door and window, the local worker and resident families. Scale was no indicator of the value of these propositions. The experience was what mattered and the ideas that flowed round it, regardless of the artist’s reputation. Nonetheless, they were the cream, practitioners familiar with showing in the greatest museums.
Yet the aroma of the museum never infiltrated BASE. That was why names like Robert Barry, Franz West, Christian Jankowski, Marco Bagnoli, Tino Seghal, Martin Creed, Richard Long and Pedro Cabrita Reis accepted invitations. For them, the setting was studio-like, intimate, intelligent…and authentic. From a small interior, wide horizons opened out.
I remember individual projects by Milan-based Stefano Arienti and, a few months later in 2010, by German sculptor Thomas Bayrle. The next year, Austrian artist Hans Schabus planted a mammoth’s foot in the larger space. (Well, a fibreglass sculpture tall enough, from scientific evidence, to be life-size.) Where else than in the beating heart of the Renaissance to encounter the deep past?
I wrote about several exhibitions here in The Florentine, such as the mesmerising head-high cylinder suspended by Maurizio Mochetti from the gallery ceiling in 2012. It floated like a plane or a missile with its sight trained on a black circle on the wall. It could easily have been pointing to a far-off destination, too distant to make out its detail.
There I met one of conceptual art’s greatest innovators, Lawrence Weiner. For this American master, the idea is paramount. He did not make permanent objects; rather, he intervened on walls, floor and ceilings, installing words and phrases in his distinctive typography. Their layers of meaning had the effect, like Mochetti’s dot, of expanding actual space with an unlimited mindset. Within weeks, the words disappeared.
The first project opened on September 9, 1998, with the prominent American conceptual artist and theorist Sol LeWitt. His intervention appeared simple: he painted that end wall in two shades of red, one matt and the other with a gloss finish. A single oscillating wave line was the boundary. Not only did the intense colour bathe the space in reflected in tinted light, it seemed to confer a meaning, too. LeWitt, who had a long professional and personal relationship with Italy, viewed the artist as the “transmitter” of an idea and the viewer as its “receiver”. Such terms defined information theory, in which LeWitt was deeply involved and anticipated the onset of digital communication. The line in the wall painting (such an Italian artform!) suggests airwaves of signals and sounds that the colour projects. We were at the dawn of the digital age.
BASE stressed the temporary, the fleeting encounter and almost the semi-clandestine. Its programme was not emblazoned on buses or trumpeted in posters. Instead, its audience was drawn in by connecting with others who already knew. After all, this venue was as important as a meeting place as it was for hosting art. Ideas circulate in that sort of environment, seeded in contacts between artists and visitors, gathering pace and currency.
At first, the cooperative of no more than a dozen artist-motivators bankrolled the programme. Later it made sense to seek support elsewhere. At different times, Regione Toscana, the Cassa di Risparmio di Florence and others provided it, but the founding principle of not-for-profit independence from institutions was upheld.
Flexibility was the venue’s key principle. Matt Mullican’s videos and banners occupied the space for two months in 2004, a fairly typical duration. During the summer, a show might stay several months: in 2015, Giuseppe Gabellone transferred indoors the street light from the building’s exterior. It hung over four other works, two of which the artist borrowed from Maurizio Nannucci and fellow BASE founder, Mario Airò. For Rikrit Tirivanija, in 2004, the interior became an ad-hoc studio for a free TV station reporting on local street life.
Other events were brief. BASE hosted one-night events with musicians, such as Michael Galasso (1999) and Steve Piccolo (2004). In 2004, Giuliano Scabia trotted up in a hobby horse. And, of course, there was always time for talks and discussions.
In a city of immeasurable beauty that has, with one eye on the tourist dollar and yuan, culturally immersed itself in its glorious past, BASE glistened with its perspective firmly on the future. Today, it is hard to believe that in the 1960s and ‘70s, the Tuscan capital claimed a place in the thriving Italian avantgarde. Concrete poetry, electronic music and radical architecture thrived here. Galleries like Schema, Area and Centro di, as well as the activities of Art/tapes/22, reminded residents and visitors alike that Florence traditionally invested in the contemporary. And there was Zona in San Niccolò, the forerunner of BASE from 1974 to 1985. As Nannucci, co-founder and leading light of both artist-run spaces, affirmed in perhaps his most famous neon text piece from 1999, ‘All Art Has Been Contemporary’.
Art is made for the society in whose midst its makers live and work. The relationship is symbiotic. That spirit cannot be suppressed, which is why BASE enters an itinerant phase of activity as a guest of its near neighbour, the congenial Casa del Popolo in via San Niccolò. Berlin-based American artist Jason Dodge brings the outdoors inside, whether its nature or street detritus, to see if our point of view changes when matter appears out of place. It will make beautiful sense, if not easily.
Jason Dodge: Water Papercut
October 26 – December 3
BASE/Progetti per l’arte at Unione Ricreativa Lavoratori di S. Niccolò
Via San Niccolò 33