Conversations. Carla Lonzi and Pino Pascali
by Carla Lonzi

First published in Marcatrè, Lerici, Milan, July 1967, Nos. 30/31/32/33, p. 239.

I try to do what I love doing, basically it’s the only system which works for me.
I don’t think a sculptor does a tiring job; he plays, the painter plays too, like all those who do what they want to do. Playing is not just a child’s prerogative. Everything is a game, isn’t it?
There are people who work….children’s games are transformed into adolescent games, then adolescent games become adult games. But they’re still games. At a certain moment a person is in his office; if the work isn’t interesting, he’ll wish he had a powerful car to go for a ride in. Just because he does a job which doesn’t interest him. But if he likes it, this job is a game for him, and he dedicates himself to it completely. I’m not talking here about games in the sense of “pure amusement” (that’s another thing), rather of a normal human activity. And playing for children is a serious thing, it’s a way of gaining knowledge. The purpose of children’s games is really to allow them to experiment with and discover things, to get to know them and at the same time to move beyond them.
But what do we mean by “child”? Whatever their age, men can remain “children” up to the end of their lives. Of course, if someone hits his head with a spoon it’s because he’s an idiot! But if this person manages to live as he wishes, for example like children who are happy to go to school, then he’s playing…
Yes, I love the sea, underwater fishing, little things like that… I love the rocks surrounded by the sea. I was born by the sea, I played in it as a child… I love animals, they seem to me like intruders, beings which don’t belong to our species, which can move around. They are in towns, in the country, we try to get to know them. Then we conclude “Good, good” and go back to where we came from. But seeing a horse going along the road, or a tree growing on a square metre of pavement, I couldn’t really say what effect that has on me. I see it, the tree, and it is not just part of the essence of “treeness”; I’m fond of it, dammit! But for me an animal is a wholly different reality. It’s already an extraordinary phenomenon seeing sheep passing near houses or near a man. We’re skipping a step, the sheep is not part of what’s organised, something else is going on here.
It’s much stranger to perceive a horse than to see a car, or a missile launched at 7000 km per hour… know what I mean?
As you can easily realise, my inner universe, my imaginary world has been more affected by adventure stories than by all the very intelligent books I’ve read since. The latter have been useful for me to understand, to be efficient. It has been like going back to school a second time. Actually, I’ve not read very much since. At a certain point I read everything together, just as you shouldn’t; suddenly now I can’t concentrate on a book any more, I prefer to look at images, which offer me another type of openness. Certainly, well-constructed discourses, everything to do with organised reality, the mental world, all this is OK for me, it’s a help, yes, but it bores me terribly. And if I were to follow up this type of discourse ad infinitum, it would destroy me completely. Exactly like a dot going endlessly round on round on a sheet of paper. The whole sheet could be filled without any kind of significant image emerging. Of course all this helps me to understand. It’s a long journey and this allows me to create crossroads, but in the end for me the result is simply a series of dots, a line. Some people will say this same sheet of paper is a kind of floor plan, or will imagine a large number of stories, but that’s not my way of proceeding. Am I not included in this context? What would I like? To be the most natural possible, but in a certain way not natural, and I’m unable to explain what natural actually means.
Nature? It’s a scary word. For example if you look at this rhino, it’s certainly a rhino, it’s a form I’ve sought without seeking; I haven’t made it because it’s structured according to the shape of a rhino, but I haven’t however rejected other factors, and of this shape I’ve saved what might have been it. Maybe in this interpretation there are solutions which are not mine, which are of other sculptors, which reveal other ways of thinking.
So the structure of this kind of large snake might be a work by Brancusi. The name came to me instinctively because Brancusi belongs to a category we define as being close to nature, doesn’t he? When someone sees an animal, for example a horse (this famous horse I have in my head but have never sculpted, I don’t know why) when someone sees a horse, a bird, a fish, he immediately thinks of Brancusi, obviously! In all this it doesn’t interest me that the starting-point of this shape is Brancusi. A Brancusi already exists, there’s already the sculpture, maybe for me it was just a way of solving my problem.
Yes of course I love animals, but that doesn’t mean I still want to make animals; it’s a subject, an image, a pre-established context, they are already-impressed words that still fascinate me, so I accept them and choose them as starting points. What I do is not a search for form. It’s a way of verifying what others have already done, starting from a different viewpoint. A way of verifying my system by comparing it to other people’s.
Not that I want to be three-dimensional like Brancusi, but I love seeing or rather I simply love occupying a space with these pieces and in the end I don’t really know if I want to see them again, or if I like them. Yes, all in all I don’t think I love them….oh, I’m not sentimental; once the process is underway it doesn’t interest me anymore. It may be that what interests me is observing the reaction of others, the spectacular space which is created; people look, ask questions, on the basis of something which in the end does not exist, because for me they are so-called sculptures and the space of the farce which is the exhibition fascinates me. For me these pieces die; the moment I set up the exhibition, they are almost wholly foreign to me. At the end of the day it’s in other people that they provoke certain reactions, so for a while I have the impression of being a sculptor, even though I don’t consider myself such, it’s the impression I have of myself. This can be quite serious….that’s what always amuses me. In the period when I made the cannons I used to say: “how nice to exhibit a cannon in a space reserved for sculptors”, and manage to place it on that hallowed ground where everything is artifice.
For me these objects have no other purpose than in themselves. They aren’t useful to anyone. I don’t think anyone can put them in their homes and I don’t want anyone to look at them in their own home, that’s understandable, isn’t it? However sometimes I think I would like to see them, say, in a garden, a large hall, a museum, but it’s an idea which comes to me out of a childish reaction without any positive value: the wish to be a sculptor is to find myself in a garden tended in one way or another, in a space which is very much me. Actually, I know nothing about this; these sculptures aren’t magic! They are objects placed there and, because I want people to look at them, I sometimes make them huge. Ridiculous, I know! It’s exactly like dressing in yellow; that can seem completely idiotic too, but why not? The essential thing is that these objects give me courage, they’re the proof that I actually exist! Even if it’s a kind of pretence, starting from there I manage to prove to myself that I exist, just because I believe it, you know what I mean? Maybe it’s just an alibi…but I’m sure of one thing, that doing this work I manage to exist, I manage to look at myself in the mirror. But looking at oneself in the mirror is not so easy; we look and we see someone who never……it’s like the story of the horse we see in the street, we say to ourselves :”Look! It’s me”. We realise we habitually live in a world made up of mental images, a collage of images, of things completely foreign to our outer appearance; suddenly, as if through a keyhole, we see ourselves as others see us. It’s quite shocking to see yourself from the outside. A bit like seeing yourself for the first time. It’s because you aren’t conscious of being a certain shape, a certain object, of having a certain physical presence. What are your hair, your sideburns and, why not, the hairs in your nostrils? And if you wear a beard you look at it and see it’s nicely trimmed; you note like everyone else that you have a nice way of carrying yourself. It’s all very well, but the image you see is not interiorised for lots of reasons. Seeing your own image is like introducing your outside to your inside. Like when you see a car and a horse, two things…… Oh sorry! Sometimes when I’m speaking I say things I’d never thought of before. Similarly, when you work you decide to do something just with the means at your disposal, and you abolish other possibilities which were embryonic in your initial idea. I like this, to start from the material which imposes its own limits. Choosing a type of material is the equivalent of projecting your possibilities within precise limits; a certain type of material doesn’t allow you to make whatever you want, you can make just one thing, and this one thing is an idea in itself. But wasting a whole life not achieving it and refusing to end up elsewhere, is stupid.
I love this wealth of possibilities, it makes me feel present in the world, it stops me feeling anguished by an image of myself I have fixed on previously. I look at myself again in the mirror, I see my image, strange or not, a new useless image: “Yes, it’s me, Pino Pascali; I wear my sideburns one centimetre below my ears. My moustache? I might wear it right up to the end of my days”. Today I’m wearing a moustache, tomorrow I’m going to wear a beard, maybe the day after tomorrow I’m going to let my hair grow, unless I cut it short. It’s doing these things that I’m aware of the passing of time. It’s really what I think. I delve further and further into things, a way of cheating my world.
What’s important is to proceed towards what unsettles you, no, not exactly what unsettles you, but what is new. In my opinion the best thing is to deceive oneself. The expression might surprise you, but, yes, deceive oneself in order to understand. I don’t deceive myself really, I take responsibility for my mistakes! How can I put it? For me they aren’t mistakes. Evidently, 30 years ago were people who were fascists deceiving themselves? Or maybe 30 years ago their character and morality did not permit them to be fascists? Changing does not mean denying the past; nothing is cancelled, we are really different from what we were before; presence changes as history unfolds. I can’t understand for example how a 90-year-old painter can paint as he did at 20. It would be a way of staying anchored to your youth, an era, a history which have all disappeared.
So OK to an evolution or to an evolution in a manner of speaking, since it might also be a regression, OK as long as the evolution expresses a step forward in knowledge. It’s a lack of interest in existence, a way of presenting yourself again in front of the mirror, you know? In front of the mirror, someone says: “Ah, this is what I’m like” and goes away. He comes back and says: “Ah, that’s what I’m like”.
I don’t want to be theatrical about this; actors can change costumes as much as they like, they have their own way of acting and they always act in the same way. Well on the other hand the personality of each human being exists and is built up (and de-constructed) according to our desire for annihilation, hence for incessant reconstruction.
It’s not a case of wholly annihilating yourself but of shaking off already-explored aspects which have become useless. This is basically simply the technique which industrialists have had recourse to; they reject the past and create the new. In the economics of thought, it’s an intelligent way to proceed: self-destruct and recreate yourself differently so as never to be the same.
A refusal to be identical because we don’t want to be identical, no! The important thing is always to do new things, not new for others, but for ourselves.
To copy his father, a child puts a gun in his belt, puts on a uniform because his father wears one. But if he had dressed exactly like his father, with a miniature uniform, it wouldn’t have been amusing; the little boy takes a stick as if it were a gun, puts on a paper jacket, a cardboard kepi. And he’s lovely. Sometimes his imitation of his father is to all extents and purposes similar to what I do with horses. I reproduce a horse but, since I can’t cover it with a coat glistening with sweat, I can’t show the flies buzzing around or the rounded muscles in constant motion, I use material which is simple to use, I put cloth over wooden ribs. I don’t put cloth because it resembles skin. What I create is an exterior, not interior, appearance. One day a man puts on a tie of a colour he likes. The fact that he’s wearing it doesn’t mean it can’t evoke an image for him. It’s obvious, the tie is the transfiguration of the image he had in his head! The image which becomes reality is transfigured, with a different expression. It’s the image itself which changes. A person buys a house, furnishes it; nothing reveals who he is more than how he furnishes it. A person creates a corner which recalls Caravaggio’s paintings, another person has a house built to look like a monastery. Other people order pieces and objects to suit their daily routine of life.
Finally, some people make their house exactly as if they were building their personality, and the space created is fantastic. There’s always projection; when we live in a society which we adapt to, it’s always like that. Everyone has a precise world around them. For example, to make a sculpture some black people use zebra skins, a piece of wood; they use what they have around them. It’s the same thing for us…but the difficulty lies in putting the various elements together. In doing so each person defines his own space and as a consequence his own image. It’s in this sense that materials interest me…..if only I knew all of them! But certainly not plastic! Plastic? I can’t use it, it’s a foreign medium to me. It’s as if I were a savage….I’m not a savage, I’m an Italian living in Rome, but the use of plastic for me corresponds to a particular dimension. If it were like going to a shop and buying a sheet of paper, well why not, buy the plastic and start working on it. But things are not like that. The universe is like a gigantic Meccano; everyone has a certain number of pieces at their disposal. But remember, all the pieces are not identical. As you fit them together you can create a certain possible combination instead of another; you reject it because it touches on a territory which is foreign to you. For example, if I stretch a canvas on a frame and emphasise the stitching and holes in it, I’m entering Burri territory. But if instead of the jute canvas you find material “x” and this material “x” corresponds simply to an idea of nature, an idea which you share, which belongs to your world, your era, and this material is structured according to the features which made you choose it, it means that it belongs exactly to your particular personal space. The mistake some people make is to choose plastic in order to seem ultra-modern, with a mental attitude which is not Burri’s, but which in any case belongs to an already-occupied space. It’s just a form of modernism. Instead, when it’s an American using plastic, the space created is new. An Italian using plastic as his material…..unless he lives in a region where they only make plastic, is…...but I don’t want to get too argumentative. We were born here, we’ve inherited these images. To triumph over them, we must look at them with a cold eye and see them for what they are, so as to verify what possibilities they still have of existing.
If this possibility is fiction, then we should acknowledge the fiction; if they are obsolete things, then they no longer belong to us.
No-one can take them seriously anymore, no-one can any longer believe in problems like, for example, Mediterranean civilisation…Concretely, in order to feel like a sculptor I can only make fake sculptures. And again we come to the dominion of falsification. Nothing serious, there is a kind of invention of civilisation to the extent where people are really searching; maybe they aren’t even searching at all, it’s difficult to say.
At the end of the day, what I do is always outside, never inside. Even with the cannons, it was important to me that they should look like real cannons. I had green paint to hide the imperfections. It was a cannon, it doesn’t matter if it was made of wood or iron. It doesn’t matter how I made them, for me the main thing is that they look like real cannons. And these pieces here? The important thing is that they look like sculptures.
I don’t choose to focus on the inside or on the surface part, the important thing is the light layer which forms all around. It is the fiction aspect which automatically triggers identification with one image or another, a certain word in the dictionary: a cannon, a sculpture, a Brancusi. It’s exactly like that for certain works of Lichtenstein.
He repaints a Picasso canvas as if it were a comic strip.
I do without creating sculptures, but I don’t want them to become the sculptures they would seem to be! What I hope is that they have no weight, that they are not what they are, without any precise meaning, that’s how I made them, full stop! Just as I am what I am, is it not just cloth stretched over bones, vaguely resembling sculptures or images that live within us.
Yes, they describe what I do as a show, but I don’t think that’s the right interpretation. I present an exhibition, my gesture is the same as that of other sculptors when they exhibit. When an artist makes an exhibition he necessarily prepares a show, but it’s not like at the theatre. Sculptors are not actors or set designers. Theatre is theatre because on the stage there’s a flesh-and-blood man; if there isn’t, then it’s not theatre, it becomes something else. At most, if someone wants to make a comparison with this sector (but it may be dangerous), we should say that in this case the spectator is the actor. I personally get an almost sadistic pleasure, I somehow become almost wicked when I see the spectator of an exhibition. Yes, you can talk about “show” if you mean it exclusively in the sense of the organisation which men have invented: galleries, exhibitions. It’s certainly a show, a socio-political event which allows an artist to have a place in society, provides him with a brief justification, the only way within his reach by which he finds a place in society. Without this space, the painter of today no longer exists; there is only an artisan, a skilled worker. The gallery is an abstract place, a place which allows you to express yourself. Let’s say a kind of pulpit, with everything this ambiguous word of Christian connotation implies: a man says his personal mass, whatever! And there are a kind of ex-votos hanging on the walls, if you know what I mean. In a gallery, the pieces on show are transformed into hanging ex-votos, and it all works fine as long as the artist has an intention of this kind, when he believes in it and creates an existential bond; otherwise it’s just a theatrical scene. When a director of a gallery accepts the works, when the artist himself installs them, they take on another dimension. This can be a negative aspect but, in any case, it’s an inevitable phenomenon.
Galleries become a kind of cemetery; in reality the works are tombs, but also simulacra, altars, Blue-bells. The works are transformed into objects to be looked at, since these are objects which spur people to walk round the space of the gallery.
If someone says to me: “I like your picture”, what I feel is very nice but also very negative. If they say: “I don’t like that one”, my vanity is hurt, above all if it is said to offend me; nothing more. But when someone says: “How beautiful it is!”, I answer: “Yes dear friend, it’s beautiful, very beautiful”. But I assure you that at that precise moment, it’s nonsense, it all means nothing; all that doesn’t make my head spin at least like the world spins, I see only the negative aspect, the disinterested observation of “you saw me” with the feather in my cap. Nothing more than that, because for me it’s not a question of beauty, pictures are neither beautiful nor ugly.
For me the real spectators are the painters, the sculptors. The others are foreign to what happens. The person who goes to galleries because it’s cool or because he wants to put “something” over a chair or a sofa. Or a person wants to show off his eccentricity, or wants to appear serious and traditional. Nothing more. But when a visitor says to me: “It’s extraordinary, this picture makes me think of…..”, this is very interesting for me, sometimes it makes me laugh but they really do say this kind of thing to me.
I absolutely don’t accept aesthetic judgments. So, imagine a spectator goes as far as to say: “You’ve been a complete idiot to put such and such a colour in such and such a place, can’t you see it ruins everything?”. I automatically feel the need to verify if there really is such an incompatibility.
They say for example: “This shape looks like a penis!”; for me it’s fine that that form reminds people of a penis if we have to draw all the consequences from it! Or: “They aren’t dinosaurs!”; that helps me grasp that one factor has generated another, then I check if this is in any way interesting for me. It’s the simplest things which most arouse my interest. If one day someone says: “These cannons here are the real thing for me”, I’m happy because they really are cannons. Another person may say: “They don’t look like cannons, they don’t look like anything”, or “They remind me of an ancient sculpture!”. Well, then I understand I’ve really been barking up the wrong tree. Finally, if someone says. “You’re going in a direction which leads to destruction….” and other idiocies, well then I get bored and don’t even feel like hearing the rest of the comment; for me this type of reasoning is going round in circles, I can’t follow it. Exactly like reading a book without any interest; concentration disappears. Or like listening to a conversation which is so interesting that you forget its actual object and remember just a tiny point in it, a point which sets off in your head a thousand flashes radiating out in all directions. Afterwards you end up getting lost, don’t you?
I don’t try to provoke. It may be that cannons make people think of a battle, even if the difference is not so huge between an imaginary marble woman embracing a minotaur and the imitation of a cannon. People are certainly sensitive to the theme of peace and war; it’s normal, but after all these cannons are not real cannons. That’s what counts. And if they were real cannons, the important thing is that they don’t shoot.
Yes, the sea is made up of a series of small soft mattresses. The thing might work because of the shape, the material they’re made out of, the cut, the fascinating curve, the alternately slack and stretched material. The cloth resembles a sheet, and basically there are the head and the foot of beds. Do you remember “Wall of sleep”, a picture made up of pillows? It’s very near the sea. It’s a serial structure, a repeated element, but with a small material difference: at one point the cloth is stretched too tight, it doesn’t fit; at other points it’s slacker.
I have an image in my head. My retina imposes limits on me, so I cut the image. It’s not the result of a focal point in the strict sense of the word; it’s a structural focal point. Sculptures then are cut at the precise point imposed by the structural model. After the cut, critics start talking about psychology, psychoanalysis, they deduce all kinds of right or wrong, I hope at least interesting, interpretations, but….for example if you look at the cuts I’ve made here, rather than cuts they’re sections. As for the fact of cutting, we can talk about a form of sadism or whatever! Here there’s a cut, a cut which forms two clear sections; that’s it! These sections are simply forms indicating the limit of the sculpture and if it has taken this form, it was without any particular intention. Structurally speaking, the cut, the shape, were so natural that this did not present any problem of either form or design. The sculpture for me ended there, it was finished. But evidently if you behead an animal it’s more amusing to talk about “The beheading of the rhino”! It’s not a question of the beheading of a rhino, but of a beheaded rhino, a whole other thing! It’s a beheaded rhino, a trophy as the dinosaurs were, the dinosaur heads chopped off and hung on the wall.
When someone hangs a deer’s head with its horns in their house, they could put a sculpture in its place! This is my mind-blowing idea: instead of one trophy I put four. And obviously four will take up a whole room. First idea: “Great, hang a sculpture which resembles a trophy on the wall”. Then: “No, it’s better not to hang anything on the wall”. Then, make four of them; four to be grouped together, that’s what’s needed. Finally, why not, become a collector of trophies one metre fifty by one metre fifty, get it?
My projects? The things I’m getting ready to make will be to do with water. I may never make them, but in any case I want to try.
I’m very attracted to water, it’s a real mirror, water offers thousands of possibilities, I’d like to make puddles of muddy water. At this point I ask myself which of the two will exploit the other, because if it’s water who takes me over and not vice versa, it’s the end! Often when I think of things in advance, they don’t work out. Instead if I choose just a really sketchy image, this turns out well. Undoubtedly, the making is more automatic, and certain unexpected stimulating factors come into play and make everything interesting.
The artists of the past? What can I say? As children in church we see the statue of Christ. We exclaim “Jesus!” and looking into His eyes (glass eyes) we may be moved to tears. After childhood, all this seems funereal, and the experience is remembered as negative. The painters, sculptors of the past, like the contemporary ones, interest me because they exist. Oldenburg, for example; what I never manage to grasp is not the making. There was no way this could be surprising, it had such a strong presence that you couldn’t help admitting its existence. No, it was the way in which he had modified the rules of the game, to make an object emerge from the inside; how had he managed to trigger a reality of this kind? It’s phenomena of this type which seem to me grandiose in the painters of the past. Michelangelo for example; how did he manage to create that huge space in the Sistine Chapel? In any case, whatever your judgment of the Sistine Chapel may be, this achievement gives me a sense of inferiority, or sends me into ecstasies. Maybe just because we are looking at painters from the past, I am awed when I find myself suddenly face-to-face with a work made by such a great artist. Maybe it’s the same as for Napoleon’s uniform; it’s not the uniform in itself which is important, but something, something….I don’t want to be iconoclastic, I don’t want to belittle anything, but my impressions of a work are in fact linked to factors which are wholly extraneous to art. For painters in particular, what strikes me are the presences.
A sculptor has taken real animals; for me it’s enough for the animals to be present in the gallery as an idea, dammit! When you go and visit the Sistine chapel, when you discover Botticelli, all these artists, even just their names, are frightening; we are conditioned by an infinity of factors, things we’ve studied before seeing them.
The same thing can also happen for certain American painters who were completely unknown until just a short time ago. We’re intimidated before seeing anything. In front of the work, we discover it’s close to us, human, simple; nothing of the great personage about it, no friezes, none of all that. Before meeting him we always think he’s a great personage. What strike me most of all are black people’s sculptures.
Their works have such presence, such strength that they capture me, they possess me. Nowadays the art books I buy are all on this subject. All the works, even the artisanal ones, all the authentic things they make satisfy me far more than contemporary artefacts, I can assure you! There’s an unfillable gap between a spoon carved with an axe, with its extraordinary decoration, and our cutlery. In my opinion, these industrial products are too elegant. Design is always dependent on an established taste; everyday objects are not invented, they are manufactured to satisfy a taste, which may be rough or refined, but is always a certain taste. Between a leaf woven to create a glass and a crystal goblet, I prefer the leaf. Saying and doing is all very well. The consumer society creates an object. When black people make an object they are creating a civilisation. They are creating it at that very moment, the zeal of mankind discovering mechanisms, the science of mankind discovering everything.
The difference between the specific taste involved in a fashionable product and the humanity involved in the process of inventing the world, the creative force, can be perceived in this small black god. It is fashioned in such a way as to create religion itself at that moment. The greatest sculptures of the 14^th, 15^th, 16^th century or of any other age you like showed Christ, but they cannot compare with the small black god. I may be exaggerating, but I prefer black people from all points of view. Primitive man, the man who walks naked, is aware that the sun rises to the right of a certain mountain and sets to the left of a certain tree. That same man, walking along a forest, discovers that the sun can also rise behind another mountain. When this man needs to drink he creates a shape with his own hands…to do this he uses all his energy. He creates a civilisation, a world adapted to himself. It’s not a work of art for the work of art’s sake. The important thing is the intensity used to make it…A glass inevitably invites us to drink. It’s not me criticizing; what I’ve always loved are clean shapes. What I want to point out above all is the passion presiding over the creation of a civilisation. Here’s the problem of Italians, Europeans; in order really to be able to create something, what is needed is the zeal of the man who has nothing else except zeal.



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