Alberto Garutti at Magazzino d'Arte Moderna

Over the last decade, Alberto Garutti has become a prominent advocate of community-sensitive, anti-monumental public art. An influential teacher at Milan's Accademia di Brera, his projects have included a modest cubic pavilion on the periphery of Bolzano, intended to introduce objects from that city's modern and contemporary art museum to residents of a working-class neighborhood, and an urban scheme (realized in a Ghent city square in 2000 and on a bridge spanning the Bosporus during the 2001 Istanbul Biennial) in which outdoor lighting briefly brightened to acknowledge each birth at a nearby maternity hospital. It's been an extroverted evolution for an artist whose earlier works often drew upon the colors and furnishings--even the shapes of shadows--found in his own home.

The domestic did play a key role in Garutti's latest and gently compelling installation in Rome, as did history and myth. The central event was the restoration of a centuries-old wall fountain in the courtyard at via dei Prefetti 17, an otherwise unremarkable cortile containing laundry racks and parked cars as well as a pair of doors leading to the gallery's two spaces. According to legend, the she-wolf of Rome had refreshed herself at this ancient source.

With the participation of the inhabitants and hydraulic specialists, Garutti mapped the building's hidden network of pipes, eventually delivering water to the long-disused fountain, and generating the forms and materials for the show.

Entering the gallery door nearer the fountain, visitors encountered an empty room marked by a length of exposed pipe that became visible several feet up one wall, angled across the floor and exited into a second room, where it disappeared into the masonry to serve the fountain on the other side. That second room housed Acqua (2004), five imposing industrial glass vases irregularly spaced and filled with water from the fountain. Over the course of the exhibition, the color, clarity and level of the liquid changed, and the lidded vessels, all marginally varied in height and contour, assumed the aspect of personages, aging with time.

The courtyard entrance to the gallery's other pair of rooms led to a large (62 1/2 by 58 1/2 inches) axonometric projection of the entire building's plumbing, its branching lines detailing a system that links every kitchen and bath, and unites every neighbor in functions at once banal and quintessentially human. Beyond, in the gallery office, sat a fat black coil of nylon thread that bore the bluntly descriptive title 583.4 Kin: the distance from the door of my house in Milan to the door of via dei Prefetti in Rome (2004). No Nee-Dada feint (like Piero Manzoni's sealed cylinders, whose labels declare them to contain lines of a specified length), the nylon umbilical cord, like the axonometric projection, visualized a relationship, in this instance between Garutti and the microcosmic community of No. 17. That relationship endures, of course, in the perfectly Roman form of a fountain.

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