pino pascali

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LA DECAPITIONE DELLA SCULTURA

Photography by DARIO CATELLANI

at the “Pino Pascali” retrospective at Fondazione Prada, Milan, 2024

 

Before his tragic motorcycle accident in 1968 at the age of 32, Pino Pascali had already made his mark as a leading figure in the Italian Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and early ’70s. He combined elements of nature, folklore, and mythology, playfully exploring materials and forms with techniques from his work in television set design. Pascali’s latest retrospective at the Fondazione Prada showcases his legacy and profound impact on the art world.

 

INTERVIEW WITH MARK GODFREY, CURATOR OF THE PINO PASCALI RETROSPECTIVE AT THE FONDAZIONE PRADA

by OLIVIER ZAHM

 

OLIVIER ZAHM — Mark, the show you curated on Pino Pascali is incredible. As a teenager, I saw some of his sculptures at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and they were a shock to me. Would you describe Pino Pascali as having cult status?

MARK GODFREY — A lot of artists who died young get cult status because they don’t live long enough to fail.

OLIVIER ZAHM — That’s a good point.

MARK GODFREY — Pino Pascali died after only four years of solo shows from 1965 to ’68, and everything he did in those four years was fantastic and impressive. There are a few things that people love about him that give him cult status. First of all, he was very sexy and always looked cool with the work. He also had a powerful relationship with self-portraits. He would perform with his sculptures in a way that no one else was doing, in a sort of playful but serious way — one day playing a soldier with a weapon and the next day pretending to be a baby spider, or hiding inside the trap. So, that’s part of his cult status. He also committed himself to the radical idea that every exhibition had to be a new body of work and that he had to reinvent his approach to sculpture every time he made a show.

OLIVIER ZAHM — In the ’60s, it was quite transgressive to play with your own image in front of a camera, next to a sculpture, because the art world was a bit opposed to this kind of superficiality or narcissism.

MARK GODFREY — I don’t know. He would’ve been aware of the way in which Piero Manzoni had used photography and television, but Manzoni only performed ideas about the artist — he wasn’t really performing with sculpture. The difference is that Pascali spent a lot of time making the sculptures, and he also knew how to make an image of himself next to a sculpture that wasn’t the conventional image of the artist fabricating the work. That was unusual.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And it wasn’t the artist creating a persona, like André Breton or Salvador Dalí.

MARK GODFREY — He wasn’t interested in that. I think those artists wanted to have a consistent persona from one photograph to the next, whereas Pascali created different characters with each photograph.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And did he know fashion photography? Did he have friends who were photographers?

MARK GODFREY — He was aware of all those things. He was very close to Claudio Abate, who took many of the photographs we know today. He was also involved with photographing different types of people. I don’t think Pascali wanted to appear in the same way as models or film stars — as a celebrity or a fashion icon. He had his own approach that wasn’t taken from the world of fashion or film.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It was really about bringing the sculpture and the installation to life — being part of it and creating a space of freedom for the spectator in front of the work.

MARK GODFREY — Exactly.

OLIVIER ZAHM — It’s very participatory. I think an artist of my generation, like Maurizio Cattelan, wouldn’t exist without this attitude.

MARK GODFREY — I think Cattelan knows that. He once made a fake interview: Cattelan interviewing Pascali. Pascali was dead, so it was fiction. But I think Cattelan looked up to Pascali and Alighiero Boetti, two Italian artists from the ’60s whom he respected most and who allowed his kind of practice to happen.

OLIVIER ZAHM — This issue is about magic. I don’t know why, but I see Pascali’s work as magical. Do you see it that way?

MARK GODFREY — Magic is when you transform an everyday material into something that is totally fantastical, but at the same time you don’t allow the viewer to forget what it’s really made of. Pino Pascali would take everyday objects that we use in the kitchen, like steel pads or bottle cleaners, and build a series of sculptures that created the vines of a jungle, a rope bridge, or a trap. When you look at them, you see two things at once — that it’s a jungle and that it’s clearly made out of everyday stuff. And I think the magic is in allowing those two possibilities of perception to exist at the same time. If you look carefully at the tanks he made, it’s clear they’re made out of parts of old cars, tractors, and farm machinery. On the one hand, there’s the illusion it’s a tank or a machine gun, and on the other, we know it’s made from bits and pieces taken from a garage or a scrapyard. Or take his sculptures of dolphins swimming through a column or through the wall — they play with our desire to see such things happen. That’s how I understand the magic in his work. To me, that’s where the magic is.

OLIVIER ZAHM — And he also had a childlike eye because he picked up a simple and elemental vocabulary, like images from children’s books — this is a tank, this is a cloud, this is a fish, this is a spider — and transformed childlike emotions into something that questions who we are in front of nature.

MARK GODFREY — I think so. If you look at Jeff Koons’s sculptures from the Celebration series, some remind you of childish toys like balloons or other things you might find at a five-year-old’s birthday party. And Koons takes those things and makes sculptures out of extremely expensive metal. It’s clear that Pascali’s sculptures, like the fish or the spider or the tank, are made without much money and with low-tech production. They’re made in a simple way, in an artist’s studio, by him and one assistant. This is something we explored in the show — that he really uses new materials like fake fur or hair spray or the brushes you use to clean your house. He takes things we recognize from our daily lives, and that’s different from Jeff Koons, who uses materials you can only find in specialist workshops.

OLIVIER ZAHM — Absolutely. And I read that he called his sculptures “fake sculptures.” Is that a critical point of view?

MARK GODFREY — Some people say his works are props from theater or film sets because he was working as a set designer on Italian television. But I don’t think so. He wanted to place the work somewhere between a prop and a sculpture. So, the sculpture might mean something that’s solid and substantial, and the prop is something that will disappear after the film is made. He wanted to establish an interesting relationship and make an object that would not be either. So, that’s how they’re kind of fake sculptures — in the sense that the works are more than props and yet not quite sculptures.

OLIVIER ZAHM — That’s interesting because it questions the status of an art object, which is in a way over­evaluated, like Koons with his luxury objects. And Brâncusi, too: his works were made from marble and other expensive materials. So, there’s a sense of humor or a playfulness with what we consider to be art. Did Pascali have a critical point of view on media and communication, and also on the political situation, or was his approach more innocent?

MARK GODFREY — I don’t think he was innocent. He didn’t make those sculptures of arms and tanks to comment on the Cold War or be critical of America’s role in Vietnam. The way I see it, he made those sculptures to make viewers think about what they’re really looking at. Are you looking at a gun, or are you looking at a collection of objects that have been made to look like a gun? In that way, I think he may have been critical of how the media or advertising works to create very simple messages. I’ve never thought it’s as simple as saying Pascali opposed the war in Vietnam or wanted to fight for workers’ rights. He died in September 1968, but earlier that year, in June, he had seen students turn up at the Venice Biennale, where he was installing his work, to accuse the Biennale of complicity in the war. And he said very clearly that he felt the students had too simplistic a method, and at the same time, he thought the police had too aggressive a presence. He said that, as an artist, he felt caught between the two groups, and neither of them cared about what it meant to make art or show art. I think he just wanted to have a space for artists that was different from political programs.

END