2023-05-26 15:23:45
Making life emerge behind, inside and beyond the works. Highlight the relationship between the passions and wounds of existence on the one hand and the unexpected results of creative activity on the other. Mixing eros and logos, metis and pathos: it is this original approach that makes the beautiful volume precious and indispensable Cajetan Fish. The Complete Inchoerence (in English, Monacelli Press), That Glenn Adamson dedicated to the life and works of the great master. Not a book like many. Not a diligent chronological review of the projects and objects created.
But not even a paratext that in turn becomes an artifact, like certain catalogs that Pesce designed himself, perhaps by designing a book that, in homage to his surname, takes on fish shapes, or the profile of his face covered in animal bristles. The Complete Inchoerence has a different approach. The author summarizes it well right at the beginning of the volume: «It’s a mad undertaking to try to put Gaetano Pesce between two covers. Over the past fifty years and more, he has led a career full of contradictions, changing his mind to his liking, to the point of complete inconsistency.’ But it is starting from here, from this biographical rather than planning observation, that Glenn Adamson tries to go through and re-read the volcanic prolificacy of Gaetano Pesce, recognizing in radicalism – by turns provocative, aesthetic or political – the glue that manages to keep together the most varied creative experiences of which Pesce was the protagonist. «Every aspect of his work – writes Adamson again – has found the opposite of him. Pesce is a rigorous researcher who hates repetition. He is playful to the point of irresponsibility, yet political to the core. He loves to make people happy and also antagonize them. He speaks of design as an intimate relationship and as a bomb in the brain ».
Fish is told. He gets naked. In seven meetings that took place in New York, between the end of 2018 and the end of 2019, gives Adamson precious fragments of his life experience. And Adamson puts them together, gives them a complete shape, and makes the book. At the start, Pesce recalls and summarizes the “nine principles” of his creativity: the acceptance of the random and the random in design (a disruptive affirmation if applied to an industry oriented towards seriality such as that of design), the personalization of the series (and therefore the predilection for diversity with respect to the standard, with the acceptance of wrongdoing and defects in the creative process), the experimental use of contemporary materials instead of those of tradition, the predilection for figuration as a communicative strategy, awareness of the feminine nature of the project, the will to make architecture and design also of political expressions, the attempt to create synesthetic projects capable of speaking to all the senses, the taste for multidisciplinarity and the hybridization of languages and finally the most radical principle of all: the will to speak an unrecognizable language, so as to escape even to his own identity.
As Adamson notes, Pesce ‘seems to thrive in the impossible intersection between extreme individuality on the one hand, and the dissipation of authorship in the liquidity of time on the other. In other words, to truly be himself, he must continually become something else.’ Reviewed all together, these principles draw a sort of map “to access the wild lands of his imagination”. But they are ideas and intuitions that were already known. It is from chapter 2 that the book begins to vibrate. When Pesce talks about himself, when he remembers and confesses, the pages light up and the reader finds himself involved in a whirlwind in the narration of a life that becomes art and thought and wound and repair.
Gaetano and Luisa, skin feeling
by Manuela Mimosa Ravasio
From his education in an all-female convent school, after he had been expelled from all other schools for indiscipline, to the premature loss of Milena, a youthful companion taken away by a cerebral hemorrhage when he was not yet thirty (hence the blood which is rampant in creations such as the performance entitled Piece for a Shootingor in the ashtray La Mano di Dio) gradually until his flight from Italy, to 1968 in Paris, to his relationship with Francesca Lucco who gives him two children, in a crescendo with a more than romantic flavour, the biography becomes an additional access key to understand the works of one of the great artists of our time: the most inconsistent of all, but for this reason, perhaps, also the one who in the end understood our time more than anyone else , and knew how to give it shape and voice like no other.
Fish: “My oar for a Venice that has folded”
by AURELIUS MAGISTY
Gaetano Pesce talks about himself in China
by Francesca Molteni
#Fish #contradicting #coherence #Republic