Having a ball with the news

Michelangelo Pistoletto is adept at making old news new news.

It's really very simple. The white-bearded 77-year-old Italian artist gathers up discarded newspapers, fashions them into large spheres, and then parades them out into the world for encounters with the unsuspecting.

He's done it in London. He's done it in Turin.

And on Saturday, beginning at 1 p.m. at the west entrance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, he will do it in Philadelphia, an American reenactment of the first great rolling-news-ball event in the streets of Turin in 1967.

The 2010 ball will break out from the museum and proceed down the Schuylkill Banks trail, across Chestnut Street, down to Rittenhouse Square, north to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and then back to the museum at roughly 4 p.m.

The final fashioning of the piece - about four feet in diameter - was done this week by members of Philadelphia's Spiral Q Puppet Theater in the humid bowels of the museum. During the ball's odyssey outside the museum, it will encounter large Spiral Q puppets along the way.

This historical reenactment of the Turin rolling is one of several events connected with the two major Pistoletto shows that open Tuesday at the Art Museum for a run through Jan. 16.

One is a broad retrospective, Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956-1974; the other is Michelangelo Pistoletto: Cittadellarte, a presentation of Pistoletto's current work from his interdisciplinary laboratory workshop, Cittadellarte, founded in 1998 in Biella, Italy.

The exhibitions were organized by the Art Museum and MAXXI, the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, in Rome, where they will travel after Philadelphia.

(An elaborate array of public programs - conversations with the museum's Carlos Basualdo, curator of the shows, and Pistoletto himself, movie screenings, lectures and various events - has been scheduled by the Art Museum; information can be found on the museum's website at http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/.)

Somehow the simple newspaper ball - officially titled Walking Sculpture - combines many of the ideas and themes that have animated Pistoletto's work from the 1960s to the present day.

First off, the ball can't be any old scrap of paper.

"It must be the newspaper," Pistoletto said the other day as he shed his dark gray jacket, shoved his hands into a bucket of milky white flour paste and slapped at a headline - "Reputed mob leader awaits term" - smoothing it over a small patch of curved surface.

"When you read the newspaper, you take away the words in your mind, and you are left with the material, the paper, and it needs to be recycled," he said.

"It is daily life, rolling in daily life, producing news again in a way, rolling in the street, making artistic news. The people take possession of it in the street, use it, and start to play with it."

He whacked at the surface of the sphere.

Tracy Broyles, Spiral Q executive director, hands dripping paste, said that Walking Sculpture was headed out into the world and that Pistoletto wanted it made of local papers so that it would "reflect the life of the community."

"This newspaper is telling our story," she said, massaging the papier-mache. "That's my understanding. The important thing is that the newspaper is local."

The rolling news ball also reflects Pistoletto's decades-long interest in breaking art out of its traditional institutional settings, dissolving the distance between art and daily life, transforming observers into participants and compelling the passive to become active.

This theme is literally reflected throughout the museum's retrospective opening Tuesday, filled with Pistoletto's signature mirror paintings. These large works, many life-size or nearly so, consist of figures and ordinary objects, painted or silk-screened onto polished stainless steel.

Reflected on the mirrored surfaces, the viewer becomes part of the art, contained within the "canvas," interacting with what is already there - whether the image is of a group chatting, nude women dancing, prison bars, a noose, a gun.

With each movement in the gallery, the work changes. Pistoletto's art is never the same from moment to moment and is never complete. It continuously morphs visually and intellectually.

Breaking down aesthetic barriers led him into active collaborations with 1960s filmmakers, theatrical troupes and musicians early in his career (the exhibition contains several films that resulted from such collaborations). Decades later, the impulse to break boundaries was a major factor in the multitude of projects that have emerged from the Cittadellarte lab.

"This is the right moment for showing my work in Philadelphia," Pistoletto said. He has not had a major exhibition in the United States for more than 20 years.

"In the '60s we went away from institutions; now I build institutions," he said. "Society has become a participant with the artist's projects - art and politics, art and economics, art and education, art and architecture, art and ecology. Now art involves researching new perspectives. The '60s were criticism and provocation.

"Today the situation is much more serious. New problems arise, like ecological problem, economical problem, financial problem, banks. This is new."

But it is also OK to roll a ball of newspapers through the streets, the artist says. "I just want to open up the possibility of interaction."

"Scultura da passeggio: Walking Sculpture" with Michelangelo Pistoletto departs from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's west entrance at 1 p.m. Saturday. It proceeds south down the Schuylkill Banks trail to the Chestnut Street ramp, goes east on Chestnut, south on 20th Street, east on Locust, arriving at Rittenhouse Square about 2, continuing east on Locust, north on Broad to City Hall, about 2:30, going through LOVE Park and up the Parkway to the Rodin Museum, about 3, and to the Art Museum's east entrance between 3:30 and 4 p.m.

Art Museum exhibitions "Michelangelo Pistoletto: Cittadellarte" and "Michelangelo Pistoletto: From One to Many, 1956–1974" open Tuesday and continue through Jan. 16.

Hours at the Art Museum, at 26th Street and the Parkway, are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays and to 8:45 p.m. Fridays.

Admission is $16 general, $14 for visitors 65 and older, and $12 for students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Pay what you wish first Sunday of the month.

Information: 215-763-8100, 215-684-7500 or www.philamuseum.org.

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