Time of diversity

Gaetano Pesce tells about the monographic show dedicated to him by the MAXXI in Rome, with a reflection on the meaning of curating, the importance of pluralist expression and multidisciplinariness, and on the value of differences.

This article was originally published in Domus 981 / June 2014

The exhibition of my work that opened at the MAXXI in Rome on 26 June is another retrospective. It follows the one at the Milan Triennale in 2005, which in its turn had been preceded by the one at the Centre Pompidou in 1996.

On these occasions, besides showing my work, I explored different ways of exhibiting. At the Paris show, for example, some works were visible on certain days, others on the days that followed; and while some were revealed, others were hidden. This is to say that an exhibition is like discovering a city, which does not reveal itself in all its aspects in a single visit, but requires further reconnoitring before it discloses every corner.

View of the exhibition “Gaetano Pesce: il tempo della diversità” curated by Gianni Mercurio and Domitilla Dardi at the MAXXI in Rome. Above: the piazza dominated by the giant version of Up 5&6, the iconic armchair in the form of a woman, created by Gaetano Pesce in 1969 (and manufactured by B&B Italia) in protest at the status of women

At the Triennale however, my thinking was that besides Silvana Annicchiarico and her masterly supervision, some people who are not specialised in our field of interest might decide what to put on display for two weeks of the exhibition. I therefore prepared a list of eight “curators” (the show lasted four months), ranging from a child to a housewife, a lawyer, a prelate, and so on – who were then asked to examine the works on view and say which ones they liked and which ones they didn’t.

Those deemed uninteresting by each of these temporary judges were duly hidden or covered. As a result, here too the visitor was stimulated to return, to see what the other “curators” had chosen. At the MAXXI in Rome for the exhibition curated by Domitilla Dardi and Gianni Mercurio, I have decided to show the works on trolleys. During opening hours, the order of these trolleys is continually changed by five people appointed for that purpose. Thus spectators will be confronted with exhibits in constant movement, suggesting a different understanding of the meaning of the exhibition’s title, “Il tempo della diversità”

In this case, the difference consists in the mutation of exhibits, which is a great change from back in the day. At the Louvre, which was the first museum to be opened to the public, towards the end of the 18th century, works were displayed in a succession of rooms. Their routes were imposed by the curator, so that visitors had no possibility of different itineraries or viewpoints. By comparison, today, at the beginning of the 21st century, I think that “showing” must reckon with the “disorderliness” of our time, with its mobile and contradictory values and their liquidity. Furthermore, the works exhibited extend from 1965 to 2014 and belong to diverse disciplines or categories.

People will be able to see architectural projects and models, drawings and tactile drawings, trial materials, odours, music, videos, sculptures, objects and lights. In other words, with what I have exhibited I am trying to draw attention to a pluralistic expression and a multidisciplinary viewpoint. I believe that art movements and mono-expressions today are out of step with our time. I try to invite creators to reflect on the importance of having horizontal knowledge, and a capacity for expression through diverse areas of what is called art. I think that doctors with a horizontal knowledge of medicine can be more useful to their patients (and it’s even better if they also possesses vertical knowledge); and that goes for teachers, physicists, architects, politicians, administrators, etcetera.

As for the title of this exhibition, it is meant to suggest that the equality among people, things, cultures and identities to which 19th and early-20th-century thinkers aspired is a decidedly outdated goal. Equality among people leads inevitably to boredom and to non-communication. If everyone had the same thoughts and behaviour, we would clearly have nothing left to say. If on the one hand globalisation is useful because democracy will be the administrative method used by every country and the single currency will help us to exchange and to travel more easily, on the other hand it would be a tragedy if the different geographical, identifying and linguistic realities and differences among people were erased.

With my work, I have been fighting for years to convince anybody who cares to listen of the importance of being different. The different individual has values that the others do not have, and these in their turn have others that enrich the catalogue of human qualities. A diversity of places and cities justifies travel and enriches knowledge. My one-off objects produced in aleatory series – something I have been pursuing for decades – are available to buyers at reasonable prices, whereas in the past, art was sold only to the narrow circles of wealthy individuals who could afford to buy it. Not to mention the importance of reflecting on the diversity of time, which is exactly the opposite of what is communicated by the instruments that measure it. Time is never the same, and by understanding it we can try to experience it without wasting it.

That is why the first of the two installations in the exhibition, inside the museum, was supposed to be about time, but unfortunately it will not be built. There was a room with a temperature of one degree centigrade and spectators entering it would have felt the cold on their skin. Inside, they would have been able to observe a mass of very slowly melting, suspended ice, dripping at different speeds into a receptacle on the floor. The noise of this dripping would be amplified by small microphones, documenting the different nature of time in here. Further, this mass of ice would be the proper volume expected to melt entirely by the end of the fourth month of the exhibition.

An installation built at the end of the exhibition route, outside the museum, is the macroscopic realisation of an object-armchair that I designed and put into production 45 years ago. Many remember the UP5&6 because it is still in production (manufactured by B&B Italia). The features of this chair are those of a female body. The chair is tied by a chain to a pouf for the user’s convenience.

In the case of the Rome show, this object is enlarged to a height of seven metres, allowing spectators to enter it, to discover a prison-like atmosphere inside, and to read, on 40 or more monitors, about issues relating to the condition of women in the world, suffering from the well-known prejudices and fears of men – and not only in the less developed countries, but in the more advanced ones too.

In a large ball with a diameter of about four metres, a film is projected about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani girl who in 2013 delivered a historic speech to the United Nations in New York on the right of women to be educated on a par with men. All this is a way of saying that art ought to be a comment by artists on reality: a stance, a tool for improving our lives, to serve progress and to combat prejudices, ignorance and the conservative spirit. In this way, artistic expression becomes once again a service still more useful than it was – and is – without abdicating its role as provocation, defiance, discovery and as an instrument for the constant transformation of future into present.

26 June – 5 October 2014
Il tempo della diversità
Galleria 1 and Piazza del MAXXI
curated by Gianni Mercurio and Domitilla Dardi

Time of diversity

Gaetano Pesce tells about the monographic show dedicated to him by the MAXXI in Rome, with a reflection on the meaning of curating, the importance of pluralist expression and multidisciplinariness, and on the value of differences.

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