From the cultural climate of the Pop Art came the American artist Robert Watts (1923-1989), who, after initially producing works in the proto-Pop style and participating in Pop Art exhibitions with his colleagues Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Tom Wesselmann, abandoned the art gallery system in the early 1960s and focused on the anti-art scene of the New York avant-garde: the Fluxus movement. In contrast to art as an object, a marketable fetish, untouchable and destined for contemplation, the production of the Fluxus network amounted to a gigantic arsenal of ready-mades, objects of industrial derivation, as in Pop Art, but destined for performances. In fact, the Fluxus movement emphasised the essential nature of an artistic action designed to erase both the boundaries between art and non-art, as had been the case with Dadaism, and the boundaries that still existed between the various arts.
In May 1963, Robert Watts, together with fellow artist and chemist George Brecht (1926-2008), organised the proto-Fluxus festival Yam. Using mail art, Watts invited artists to participate in and animate a month-long series of events, concerts, happenings and performances at Rutgers University in New York City as well as at the farm of fellow artist George Segal in New Jersey: a clear refusal to fit into the more traditional circuits of aesthetic culture (galleries and museums). The result was art for everyone, dedicated to the amusement and appreciation of the most obvious and banal aspects and events of everyday life. Thus, in Casual Event by Robert Watts (1962), an industrial object, the tyre, and the act of inflating it become the flywheel of a performance.
The denial of the artistic object is extreme: the artist telegraphically describes an elementary event that occurs daily. The work is limited to an Event Card, a printed card, but through the artist's instructions, a common everyday gesture becomes an object of contemplation.
As expected, in the 1960s the traditional meaning of a work of art gave way to other ways of looking at the making of arts. As part of this transformation, the role of the gallery itself changed radically: from being a container in which works of art were exhibited, galleries imposed themselves as spaces of communication, showcasing the artists' own actions. Objects, in the strictest sense, were no longer exhibited, replaced by productions, performances and temporary actions. At the end of 1967, the art critic Germano Celant presented a group of artists in private galleries in Genoa and Turin and coined the term Arte Povera (literally Poor Art) for them. The adjective “poor” referred both to the voluntary reduction of the image to zero and to the choice of techniques and materials used. The work of art was thus reduced to its material essence, to the simplicity of its basic elements, such as earth, water, fire, to the introduction of materials never before used: asbestos, lead, tar, nets, chemicals, ice and tyres.
In November 1967, the “poor artist” Gilberto Zorio (1944) exhibited Colonna di Eternit (Pillar of Eternit) at the Galleria Sperone in Turin: a cylinder of Eternit placed vertically to create a pillar that did not rest directly on the ground but on partially inflated black rubber inner tubes, thus undermining the sense of stability inherent in the figure. Thus, the rock-solid appearance of the pillar and the solidity of concrete were undermined by other substances (in this case the inner tubes) with opposite mechanical, physical and formal characteristics. Determined to challenge the market, the so-called “rich people” art, Zorio chose the alchemies of the contemporary world as an artistic phenomenon.
The objects selected by the Arte Povera artists thus become ambiguous and fluid plastic devices, halfway between ready-made and object trouvé, scenic tools strongly opposed to commercialisation to the point that the objects dissolve into work-environment-happening. This is what happens in the production of another Arte Povera exponent, Eliseo Mattiacci (1940-2019), who together with colleagues Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali is the protagonist of one of the four episodes of the film SKMP2. Filmed by Luca Maria Patella (1934-2023) in 16 mm between April and the end of July 1968 and first screened on December 21 of the same year after the relocation of Fabio Sargentini's L'Attico gallery to the garage spaces in Via Beccaria in Rome, it portrayed the artists as they carried out apparent random actions, performances, spontaneous actions and then staging their ephemeral works. The opening titles read “SKMP2 Kounellis – Mattiacci - Pascali Patella's Ironic Visual Reportage”. The first episode is dedicated to Mattiacci and is divided into three sub-episodes (of which the opening and closing segments are filmed inside L'Attico). The artist is filmed playing with large truck tyres, which seem to dance to the notes of Saint-Saens and Bach. Riding them as if they were a motorbike or wandering around the city inside his sculptures of corrugated galvanised sheet metal (Cilindri Praticabili), at the end of the third act Mattiacci falls to his death on the floor of the gallery hit by his playful tyres.
Completely different is the use of the tyre by Claudio Parmiggiani (1943) starting in 1970 when he took part in an exhibition in the Galleria Civica in Modena, the city where he was educated. The space he had been assigned was an old warehouse and in order to clear it out, he began to move some objects leaning against the wall: paintings, canvases, a ladder. He thus discovered that, over time, dust had imprinted their shape on the wall, which then looked like photographic negative. The work entitled Delocazioni stemmed from this revelation: something that is no longer there but has left a trace of its presence. The work revolved precisely around those markings, the absence of the objects embodied in an intangible presence created by dust: to create his Delocazioni, Parmiggiani replaced the dust with smoke and ash from the burning of tyres.
The tyre became the material through which Filipino artist Roberto Chabet (1937-2013) paid homage to Eva Hesse, who died prematurely in 1970, in the exhibition New Works or For E.H. at the Luz Gallery (Makati City, Philippines, 1-20 February 1973). Most of Chabet's works exhibited in New Works consisted of thick white or black plywood frames with pieces of rubber salvaged from tyres and resting on the frames.
The choice of rubber reflected Hesse's preference for industrial and everyday materials, while the way it was arranged recalled the sensuality inherent in Hesse's installations. Chabet had also placed black plywood boxes filled with pieces of tyres on the gallery floor.
This was not the first time Chabet had used tyres: in May 1970, together with colleagues Ray Albano and Boy Perez (The Liwayway Recapping Co.), he presented a four-hour installation at the Print Gallery in Dayrit that included tyres, black balloons, mirrors, strips of coloured paper and among others…Pictures of the exhibition show a series of painted white inner tubes hanging from the ceiling at various angles throughout the Print Gallery. Similar images returned for an exhibition curated by Chabet at the Cultural Centre of the Philippines in 1970, entitled “Illuminations”. The exhibition was an investigation into the effects of light shone directly on various materials and light moving through time, and included devices such as projectors, spotlights, black lights, suspended mirrors, suspended aluminium pieces, foam rubber and painted tyres: a mixture of opaque and reflective materials that created a sense of instability. The 1970 exhibition at the Print Gallery and Illuminations, testify to Chabet's early efforts to use materials discovered during his travels in the United States and Europe. In “New Works”, differently to the 1970 exhibitions, the tyre had been cut and deformed by Chabet in order to exploit and display its material properties. The irregular edges and imprecise dimensions of the various strips of rubber seem to allude to the effects of destruction, like the pieces of black rubber left on the road after a tyre bursts.
