Living sculptures: Marisa Merz and Mila Leva Pistoi in the sign of Merleau-Ponty. A post-minimalist horizon

Abstract

The first critical account of Marisa Merz's work was an unsigned interview, published on December 1966 in "marcatrè". We propose here to refer that text to the Turin critic Mila Leva Pistoi, author of other dialogues with the leading personalities of the new Italian art scene. The reference to the thought of Maurice Merleau-Ponty returns constantly, allowing Leva Pistoi to interpret in a phenomenological key the Living Sculptures of Marisa Merz, as well as the recent works of Mario Merz and Michelangelo Pistoletto.  

In that same 1966 a reference to the Freudian notion of «corporeal self» was used by Lucy Lippard in presenting the exhibition Eccentric Abstraction, with specific attention to the unstable and metamorphic works of Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois, for many aspects close to those of Marisa Merz, while Rosalind Krauss in "Artforum" leaned on the thought of Merleau-Ponty for her interpretation of the work of Donald Judd.  

The contributions of these three authors opened a post-minimalist critical perspective, which emphasized the essential character of every act of perception to define the meaning of the artwork and proposed an unprecedented triangulation, mediated by the living body, between the subject, the artwork, and the world.