‘60s, Italian Style

War rages. Terrorists conspire. Repression and abuse proliferate. Economies shiver. The world is coming apart at the seams.

Today the chaotic tumult of the 1960s seems less remote than it has for some time. Internationally, our current social and political landscape offers enough recognizable scenery to form an essential context for the art in “Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962-1972,” which opened Sunday at the Geffen Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s warehouse facility in Little Tokyo. This is an exceptionally good show--provocative, poetic, comprehensive and unexpectedly timely. It focuses on 14 Italian artists working mostly in Milan, Turin and Rome during an especially charged period.

The show has been trimmed somewhat from its debut last year at Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center, which organized “Zero to Infinity.” The MOCA presentation was postponed (it was originally scheduled to open in March).

Trimmed or not, be grateful that it has arrived. MOCA’s exhibition is laid out as 14 solo shows, with an introductory gallery that samples work by each artist. The salutary effect is to demonstrate both similarities and individual differences among these important artists, who never really worked as a single, coherent group. Arte povera arrived in sequential waves with an expanding number of artists throughout the decade.

The name Arte povera says a lot. (It’s pronounced “AR-tay po-VAIR-uh.”) Most cleanly translated as “poor art,” it suggests humility. For sculpture the durable elegance of bronze was out, the dull inertia of lead was in. Domestic crafts such as knitting and embroidery turn up far more often than the courtly medium of oil paint and canvas.

Marketable artistic commodities, such as traditional paintings and sculptures, got replaced by ephemeral propositions, including disposable art made from cardboard and consumable foodstuffs. The shift was partly an effect of the postwar economic boom known as “the Italian miracle,” skittering to a halt in 1964. But stripping down to non-art basics provides the “zero” of “Zero to Infinity.”

The term Arte povera isn’t just a reference to modest means and humble materials, though. It also implies a more fundamental sense of the impoverishment of art as it was then known. What good was a painting when the world was in collapse? Why bother with figures carved from stone when social chaos reigned? Changing the way people were used to thinking was one mandate of this art.

Even the latest radical forms of American avant-garde art circa 1962 seem to have felt extravagant to these artists. The four sleek, low-slung iron troughs in an untitled sculpture by Jannis Kounellis, a Greek expatriate working in Rome, pointedly echo the then-new Minimalist abstraction of sculptors like Donald Judd. But Kounellis filled his industrial troughs with rich loam, then planted them with a tenaciously elegant, ecologically spare cactus garden. A high-toned Minimalist sculpture is cheekily transformed into a workmanlike planter.

It’s important to note that Arte povera was one symptom of the era’s larger international youth movement. All the artists included in “Zero to Infinity” were under 30 in 1962, with the exception of Mario Merz (born 1925) and his wife, Marisa (born 1931 and the only woman among the loosely configured group). The generation was mostly born during World War II and--artistically--their youthfulness collided head-on with Italy’s ancient past.

Luciano Fabro’s six colossal sculptures of feet are emblematic. Like fragments of monumental statues that are all that remains from the antique reign of some obscure Roman emperor, they are carved from sleek marble and deep maroon porphyry, or cast in glass with the density of rock crystal or in eternal bronze. The huge, claw-like feet imply mythological origins. Their legs rise up to the ceiling, towering overhead but cloaked in dainty silk bloomers. A buffoonish aura of Victorian modesty descends on these bird-like feet, which suggest a gigantic serving of roast pheasant from some pretentious bourgeois chef.

Nearby, Fabro’s paper and glass maps of the boot of Italy wrapped in lead give blunt form to the weight of history. Another map, fashioned from gilded bronze, is strung up by its heel and suspended from a chain overhead, like Mussolini lynched by the mob.

The most beautiful map is by Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994). On a commercially printed political map of the world, Boetti filled in each country with the painted emblem of its modern national flag. This served as the design template for a fabric wall hanging, which he had embroidered by traditional Afghan and Pakistani weavers. As political demarcations were made into aesthetic decisions, Boetti transformed the isolating partitions of national boundaries into colorful, luxurious visual abstractions.

Italian Renaissance painting turns up in a sly conundrum by Giulio Paolini. This simple work consists of a life-size black-and-white photograph of an elegant, face-front portrait painting. Its title, “Young Man Looking at Lorenzo Lotto,” describes what the long-dead portrait subject did when the 16th century Venetian artist painted the picture reproduced in the photograph. Now, a photograph takes the place of the painting, and we assume the position once held by the artist. The photograph “looks” at us.

Paolini’s deft work shows how mass reproduction regards the audience as its object. Ounce for ounce, this lucid, unassuming facsimile may be the most eloquent work in the exhibition.

For Italians, the experience of a world coming apart at the seams is hardly new. (Pick a century; any century.) Unsurprisingly, ritual repetition turns up as a leitmotif in Arte povera, especially in the Merzes’ very different sculptures.

When Mario Merz rendered a medieval numerical system in neon tubing, a natural pattern of spiral growth got advertised--just the way beer or cigarettes might be on a supermarket storefront. When Marisa Merz knitted the letters of her daughter’s name from nylon thread, she used the material of space-age plastic to repeat an ancient domestic task. (Think of Homer’s famous epic of family and fate, “The Odyssey,” with Penelope repeatedly knitting and then unraveling her handiwork as she waits for Odysseus to return.) Ritual repetition offers the infinity that follows zero.

There is some weak work in the exhibition. The cannon, submachine gun and jungle bridge made from steel wool and scrap metal by Pino Pascali (1935-1968), who is little known today, is pretty corny. Emilio Prini’s printed paper declaring, “He confirms his participation in the exhibition” is as thin and tedious as Conceptual art gets. Michelangelo Pistoletto’s sculptures that frame the physical activity of looking at art have long been popular, although they’ve always struck me as gimmicky. But works like these are in the minority.

In 1967 the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant, who vigorously promoted the artists and coined the term by which they came to be identified, published an essay called “Arte Povera: Notes on a Guerrilla War.” The idea that art could perform a kind of underground combat might now seem unsound, not least because art has moved from the margins to center stage.

Yet the notion also recalls the faith of Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci, imprisoned during the rise of European fascism in the 1930s, who argued that social change could best be fostered by capturing the culture. That proposition might be arguable, but as “Zero to Infinity” makes more than plain, the art produced in its spirit can be thrillingly ambitious.

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“Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera, 1962-1972,” Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Little Tokyo, (213) 626-6222, through Sept. 22. Closed Monday.