Michelangelo Pistoletto: “My art is intuition”

Ninety years doesn’t seem like that long if you’ve always lived ahead. Michelangelo Pistoletto performs them on June 25 and prepares a party at the City of Art in Biella. As a young man he trained with advertising without fear of losing his artistic streak, he anticipated selfies by more than 40 years, he found the perfect icon for our lady of ecology decades before global warming was recognized. Today he theorizes preventive peace and squeezed an infinity into three circles to give it a universal sign. And for almost 60 years he has been with the same woman, Maria Pioppi, convinced that without fidelity love just doesn’t have time to express itself. Perhaps for this very reason he lives his 90 years very well.

Exhibited in every museum in the world, it has an Italian exhibition underway, in Rome, at the Chiostro del Bramante, awaiting the November appointment, at the Castello di Rivoli. Famous above all for the mirror paintings that invited the viewer to enter the work and, before becoming amused self-portraits in his latest works, they were a real revolution at the beginning of the Sixties, the years in which he made a name for himself and left a legacy, a force of attraction.

If today you are reflected in one of your works, what do you see?

“I see what has been and what we are and what we can do better.”

What was the creative moment that marked your career?

«When I made the first mirror black painting and I saw that the representation of reality was no longer fixed, static, but dynamic, exactly like everything we look for in modernity. With each discovery: the cinema, the internet, we want to go beyond the fixity of the image».

Remember momwhere did you get the insight?

«It happened in an instant, space and time entered the work. There was infinity, but made of the existing, of human beings. Real people. The concreteness overwhelmed me».

Arte Povera, a movement in which you still recognize yourself?

«I started it, how could it be otherwise? The critical label Arte Povera dates back to 1967, the mirror paintings arrived earlier. It is a current that has the quality of dialoguing with science, which is why it has lasted and with an important legacy».

Are mirror paintings really ancestors of the selfie?

«Yes, of course, it doesn’t bother me at all that they are defined like this: the spectator becomes the protagonist, enters the scene».

Haven’t we become too protagonists?

«You can never enter the center of the action enough, it would be wonderful if all people wanted to enter a mirror instead of standing in a corner, we are an integral part of the universe, we must participate, relate to each other».

More than anything the trend is to put yourself in the foreground, don’t you think?

“Perhaps, but man has the power of creation. It can think and do marvels, perhaps the first instinct is to see oneself reflected, but from there one can go further, art can teach one to do so, at least that is what we propose to do at the City of Art that we have created in Biella, where 1991 I acquired an abandoned wool mill and a new business was born from an abandoned industrial system. Today regenerating is our job, which is why I invented the symbol of the third paradise, which is an infinity made up of three circles: at the ends there are the two elements, one opposite to the other, and in the center they must mix. They can do it in harmony or in a destructive way, it’s up to us ».

So the future depends on free will?

“No, no, no, you need to be organised, this is what politics, science, philosophy and art are for: to educate in personal responsibility”.

At 90, what effect does artificial intelligence have?

«It reflects human intelligence, with multiplied possibilities, it is an extraordinary accumulator of memory. It’s a technology, it’s up to us to understand how to use it».

Isn’t there a risk that it will take over?

«We have always been god and devil, we don’t find out with artificial intelligence. Let’s not blame her that she doesn’t have».

The Venus of rags is from 1967, today it is an ecological icon. Does she also look at it differently?

«I’ve always looked at it like this: Venus is there to make degradation shine, it revitalizes discarded clothes and today the only thing we can do is rehabilitate what we have damaged. It’s time to sift through the production process and recreate a relationship with nature».

Are we really doing this?

«Eh, I put a Venus in it, a divine element. To help us, guide us. At the end of the Sixties we were far from the concept of pollution acquired today, now my Venus is the photograph of an African mountain transformed into a dumping ground for used clothes by the West, but then it had the same power and the same purpose, even if the context was less obvious”.

Is this the task of art, to anticipate?

«Intuit, yes. And understand if intuition translates into possible action. Still an affinity with science that often finds its formula in error».

Where was the error in the Venus?

«By default, it interpreted a problem, anticipated a fear, but it went much further: it is the image of the contemporary».

He also portrayed his wife Maria as a Venus. In a mirror of course. Married in 2017, in Cuba, after an engagement lasting more than 50 years. Did she worship her?

We are an essential duality, I could never live alone. The possibilities for understanding between two people are endless and we have always lived them to the fullest degree».

Always?

“Yes. If there was only the white side it wouldn’t be life, but we have inhabited the contrasts with the discussions. There’s white, black and many colors in between: if you run away as soon as the shade changes, then it’s not understood».

The City of Art is designed for creative young people, do those who pass by tell you that Italy is a country for old people?

«It’s not a place that calls for complaint and then it would be absurd to say it to me, I don’t behave like this. I believe in young people, it’s just not right to expect every solution from them, without a school they can’t and more than the space to express themselves, they lack the transmission of knowledge».

Born in Biella in 1933, lived in Turin, returned to the city of origin in 1991. Have you ever wanted to live elsewhere?

«I never found the reason but I went to other places. I have never moved as a tourist, it is my work that has taken me around the world, in its own way every time a move and a bond. New York, Paris, Beijing, the extreme south of the Americas. Today the City of Art has 240 scattered embassies».

What is the place that surprised you the most?

«Amazement is found everywhere, it is the essence of love: surprising each other every day».