{"id":16315,"date":"2014-09-21T23:31:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-21T21:31:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/the-noise-of-time-2\/"},"modified":"2015-10-07T11:24:55","modified_gmt":"2015-10-07T09:24:55","slug":"the-noise-of-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.area-arch.it\/en\/the-noise-of-time\/","title":{"rendered":"The noise of time"},"content":{"rendered":"

If asked to suggest a figure capable of summarizing, synthetically and paradigmatically, the work of Gaetano Pesce, I would not hesitate: I would say the oxymoron. The coexistence of opposites. All the design activities of Gaetano Pesce \u2013 whether on the scale of architecture or of design \u2013 are at the same time democratic and aristocratic, and they present themselves to the gaze as if suspended between a tangible physicality and an equally evident conceptuality. It is in this that the peculiarity and \u2013 in some aspects \u2013 also the uniqueness of Pesce\u2019s work lies:\u00a0 his being a creature that is totally physical, corporeal and material, but at the same time also metaphysical, theoretical and conceptual. Pesce works with his hands. He gets them dirty, he uses them to create and to correct. There is always a surprising corporeality in everything he does. There is flesh and blood, skin and hairs in everything he creates. But then there is also thought. There is, above all, thought. There is meaning. His work is an activity that goes through the body, but it is aimed at meaning rather than sensations. Gaetano Pesce is neither a functionalist nor a decorativist. He is
\na philosopher of forms. His single works are not always likeable, they may even be irritating. And yet, also in this case, they force us to think and to feel. They make us think better and feel more. And to clarify with ourselves the relationship we have, not just with things, with signs and objects, but also \u2013 more ambitiously \u2013 with the world. To deal with him, with the visions underlying his work, means to take into consideration some of the most problematic nodes of design culture in the contemporary society. And to venture into an intentionally nomadic expressive universe (just as nomadic as his biography, always on the move between La Spezia, Padua, Venice, Helsinki, Paris, New York, London, Bahia, Milan\u2026), which is not afraid of contradictions, but that indeed makes it the distinctive trait of his own style. We will therefore try to dwell on some of the problematic nodes that occur most frequently in his theoretic recollection and empiric practice, in the hope of succeeding, by these paths, to analyse every aspect of a rich and complex personality that thwarts every attempt at easy and schematic classification.<\/p>\n

\u201cPersonalization of industrial products\/the series\u201c.
\nOne of the most innovative and original peculiarities of Pesce\u2019s work lies in his attempt to combine two theoretically opposite and irreconcilable categories as the one-off and the mass produced item. In other words, Pesce accepts the logic of industrial mass production as the manufacturing method that makes it possible to make products for everyone, but he also denunciates the limit of mass production, i.e. the inevitable standardization it produces. Industrially produced objects are, in other words, doomed to be identical, they are slaves of an equality that makes it impossible to distinguish them from one another. As a provoking reaction to this state of affairs, Pesce theorizes and practices what he himself calls the \u201cpersonalization of the industrial series\u201d: whether it is a matter of furniture that is produced industrially but rendered unique by the fact that the individual craftsmen are allowed to give them a personal touch, (the Nobody\u2019s Perfect series, 2002), or an architectonic structure where all the floors are different from one another\u00a0 (the Tower in\u00a0 Sao Paulo in Brazil, 1987-89), Pesce conducts a systematic attack against the cultures of monolithism and standardization, in the name of the liberation of differences.\u00a0All this is inspired by a dream of managing to free the industrial objects from the standardizing anonymity that often characterize them, to allow them to enter into a relational regime where they may be \u2013 as in the case of human beings \u2013 to be similar, but not identical.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom abstractionism to figurativism\u201c.
\nOne of the dogmas of the architectonic culture consists of articulating every project on a combination of types that are always based on the same figures of solid and flat geometry (the circle, the square, the rectangle, the parallelepiped, the cube, the cone, the pyramid and so on). In extreme cases this tendency has \u2013 where rationalism modernism has been followed to the letter \u2013 resulted in the anonymous standardization of the so-called \u201cinternational style\u201d. Gaetano Pesce refuses this design method, with adamant coherence, forcefully vindicating an architecture and design capable of recovering their expressiveness by making the transition from abstractionism to figurativism. Witness the Maison des enfants of La Villette in Paris, whose plan reminds of the contour of the body of a child of ten, or \u2013 in the field of design \u2013 the Vesuvio coffee pot (1992), that takes the form (as well as the eruptive function) of a volcano. Pesce\u2019s style is neither much neo-expressionistic or postmodern: we are rather dealing with a \u201cfeeling\u201d of the form that is never satisfied with abstract and universal schemes, instead seeking to animate things and architectures, to reveal \u2013 through leaps in scale and unexpected short-circuits \u2013 the hidden and secret meaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe badly done as aesthetic canon\u201c.
\nImperfections, defects, errors\"\"<\/a> and deformations have almost always been considered alien to the sphere of beauty, and usually considered as signs of reduced value. Gaetano Pesce, on the contrary, overturns this dogma of classical aesthetics, openly theorizing the \u201cbadly done\u201d as fundamental and constitutive element of a new canon of beauty that may be able to free itself from every prescriptive rigidity (symmetry, proportion, regularity) to, on the contrary, open the door to the discovery of the different, the incomplete, the casual. Aware that the cult of perfection, purity and absolute beauty has produced some of the worst totalitarianisms of the Twentieth century, Pesce refuses to trace a rigid and clear border between beauty and ugliness, vindicating a design method capable of including also the unexpected, the formless, the hybrid and the irregular within the aesthetic sphere. Objects as the armchairs of the Senza fine unica series (2010), made in urethane spaghetti, twisted and tangled in a haphazard and unpredictable manner, or the Olo lamp (2001), with its grotesque appearance that reminds of an alien, are examples of a research on forms that is never an end in itself, but that also implies a certain vision of the world, and an attempt to harmonize with the forms the world is taking in this moment in history.<\/p>\n

\u201cNew materials, new languages\u201c.
\nContemporary design and architecture must express themselves with the materials of our time: all Gaetano Pesce\u2019s research is based on a rejection of traditional rigid and heavy materials, and on an awareness that no linguistic or formal innovation can ignore a parallel innovation in the choice and use of materials. Rather than stone, metal and concrete Pesce prefers foam, resin and urethane: materials whose technical, constructive and formal potentials could hardly be imagined some time ago.
\nSometimes Pesce makes a surprising use of \u201cpoor\u201d materials from popular tradition such as felt (I Feltri, 1986), or gives new value and dignity in terms of design to discards such as rags (Rag Chair 1972), in other cases he creates forms by exploiting the technical peculiarities of new materials in pioneering ways (the Up armchair, 1969, made by taking advantage of the performative opportunities of polyurethane foam) always assuming a design attitude willing to let itself be surprised by the unexpected uses suggested by listening and by an attentive and unprejudiced use of such materials. From this point of view, the material ceases to be a simple inert instrument, becoming a co-protagonist in the process of creation and innovation. Pink Pavilion (2008) is a good example of this approach: it is a matter of an innovative and experimental architecture, in polyurethane, that offers alternative solutions and ways to build and live.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018Femininity\u2018 as driving power in design\u201c.
\nUnleashing the female part of the brain: Gaetano Pesce is convinced that there is a direct link between femininity and creativity, and he therefore pursues it as the driving engine of every design project. Masculinity is rigid, monolithic, dogmatic, normative; femininity, on the contrary, is to Pesce a guarantee of pluralism, flexibility, availability, multilinguality, tolerance, democracy. Many of Pesce\u2019s designs therefore bury their roots in the female, understood not only as way to feel, but also the way the I relates to the world: if the male dominates, orders, prescribes and provides, the female accommodates, accepts, mixes and regenerates. Many of Pesce\u2019s projects can be read from this perspective, from the lamp Alda, 2003 (musical and scented like the mother, to whom Pesce has dedicated it) to the project for the reconstruction of the Twin Towers on Manhattan (the World Trade\"\"<\/a> Center, 2002), recreated with all their virile presumption, but linked by a hyper-popular symbol, dear to the feminine imagery: a gigantic heart. Pesce links, through femininity, the world of objects and design culture to the sphere of affectivity, emotionality and sensuality.<\/p>\n

\u201cDesign as political expression\u201c.
\nOnce it has been freed from functionalist rules, design lends itself to new and many-sided uses, first of all the possibility to transform it into an explicitly and deliberately political language. Gaetano Pesce is aware of the fact that every object, once it leaves the crafts industry or workshop where it has been made, immediately becomes public and thus political in the etymological sense of the term (that is to say, linked to the polis, to ways and forms of community life).\u00a0But the political nature of Pesce\u2019s design goes further; indeed, he experiments with much more advanced forms of radicality: in short, it becomes a testimonial of time, taking its conflicts upon itself, expressing dissent with its consolidated myths, absorbing and exposing dominant atmospheres, provoking irreverent short-circuits, denunciating the hierarchies of taste and the standardizing dogmas of the majorities in power.
\nA sofa like Sunset in New York (1980), for instance, has prophesized the decline of the West (and its city-symbol) already in the Eighties, with a formal play that \u2013 transferring the city\u2019s skyline at sunset to a furniture item for a middle-class parlour \u2013 oscillates between disenchanted irony and affectionate nostalgia, while the 16 January chair echoes, on a furniture item for interiors, the forms and signs of the First Gulf War, opened by Bush in 1991, precisely on the day the item is named after. But Pesce is not always content with creating objects cum manifestos that carry traces and marks of epochs impressed on their bodies: sometimes, almost as if to accentuate the political aims of his design vision, he also resorts to words, using the surface of an object \u2013 as in the case of the La Smorfia or grimace armchair (2003) or in the Goto vase (1995) \u2013 to add the force of the word and the logos to the figurative, metaphoric and allusive evidence of the object itself, in a perspective that gives his work an extraordinary conceptual power. Pesce has in recent years further radicalized the political and provocative use of his design projects, which are more and more contaminated by the coeval research in contemporary art, something which is evident for instance in works as Italia in croce or Italy crucified (2011).<\/p>\n

\u201cDesign as religious dimension\u201c.
\nGaetano Pesce\u2019s production teems with objects and projects that evoke the dimension of sacredness and religion: the Manodidio or God\u2019s hand ashtray (1969-70), marked by the blood of the stigmata, the Golgotha table (1972-73), resounding of echoes that evoke the Calvary and the passion of Christ, the San Sebastiano Cabinet (1991), pierced and dripping like the body of a martyr.\u00a0Pesce justifies this component of his work with a desire to make contemporary design the last heir of the great tradition of Western art, with its ability to express all spheres of existence, including the one that centres on the relationship with the religious dimension. In fact, all Pesce\u2019s works are dominated by the hovering presence of the sacred in the dual meaning implicit in the etymology of the term: something that fascinates and at the same time terrifies, that attracts and scares. There is, in his work, a hovering presence of blood that seeps, oozes and coagulates more or less everywhere, as sign of a physicality and corporeality that is so strong and violent as to take on almost metaphysical connotations. It is never a confessional religiosity, the one that shines through in Pesce\u2019s works: rather, it is a hybrid combining mysticism and paganism, carnality and spirituality, swearing and prayer, where the sacred emerges as the epiphany of everything that proves to be \u201cunexplainable\u201d in the experience of life.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe participation of the senses\u201c.
\nGaetano Pesce\u2019s desire to realize projects capable of communicating with all the senses cannot be dismissed as the umpteenth synaesthetic operation of Twentieth-century art. It is true that Pesce is not content with exciting the eyes, but aspires to interact with hearing and touch, with taste and smell. And yet his synaesthesias never fall into the accepted and shared canons of taste: on the contrary, they often represent a challenge to \u201cgood taste\u201d, they are inspired by a refusal of that sensorial anaesthesia that, in the present-day society, cancels smells and flavours, standardizes tastes, dampens sounds and in any case tends to guide every perceptive experience back within the tracks of reassuring pleasantness. Pesce often works in the opposite direction: he is not afraid of the smells and stenches produced by organic materials that inevitably decompose, he does not shy strong and unusual flavours, he loves the harshness of the sounds of life, and he aspires to expand the range of tactile experiences we may enjoy when handling his objects.
\nHe therefore creates thermosensitive chairs that change colour when they come into contact with the body heat (Broadway, 1993), and builds a house made of soft, rubbery bricks that smell of juniper (Bahia House, 1999), but goes so far as to present, in an exhibition of Italian lifestyles, typical foods and dishes that are altered with the passing of time, offering the visitor an unusual and unforgettable olfactory experience.
\nIn 1980, invited to a convention on postmodernism at the Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re in Paris, Pesce appeared provocatively wearing a gas mask. He wanted to be annoying, unpleasant, to make a nuisance of himself. To break with the ritual liturgy of traditional conventions with a conspicuous gesture capable of overturning the protocol and to challenge the rules. That\u2019s how Pesce acts. Every attempt to stably pigeonhole him in any discipline, school or area of expression would be reductive. Pesce does not build borders, he blurs them. He does not facilitate any mapping of the design territory. Rather, he complicates it. That is to say, he enriches it. He forces his users to make a continuous slalom between the disciplinary areas, the linguistic feuds, the academic Disneylands. Between architecture, design and the figurative arts. But also the art of staging: it is no coincidence that the exhibition design always plays a very important role in his shows. In the exhibition \u201cItaly: the new domestic landscape\u201c curated by Emilio Ambasz at the MoMA in New York in 1972 Pesce presented an unsettling post-apocalyptic habitat for two persons in which, among steps reminding of Escher, in the darkness of a cavernous space, anthropomorphic figures telling a story of drama, energy crisis and unsustainability emerged here and there. Or consider the exhibition presented in Tokyo in 1992 (where he built a large bed for watching movies), the Pavillon des Souvenirs of Avignon in 1999, his reinterpretation of the city of Fedora within the context of the exhibition titled \u201cLe citt\u00e0 in\/visibili\u201c at the Triennale of Milan in 2002, his decision to use supermarket trolleys as bases for the objects in his retrospective \u201cIl rumore del tempo\u201c (the noise of time), also presented at the Triennale in 2005. Pesce also introduces a new concept of time for the enjoyment of an exhibition, experimenting with shows that change with time: from the decision to appoint several curators who replace one another in the period the exhibition remains open, presenting new exhibits or removing some of the objects on show, to the introduction of works the visitors may interact with by modifying them, so they are never the same. All this cannot be hastily dismissed with the facile formula of eclecticism. Rather, it is an authentic and sincere interest in any practice that deals \u2013 etymologically speaking \u2013 with confusion, contamination, superimposition. Something that means to transfer, into other languages, conquests and experiences made in a given expressive context. Or to channel contents elaborated in a given context and on a certain scale to different contexts and scales: from architecture to design, from design to figurative art, from the latter to a material, scenic and gestural performance. The transition make the materials change, literally re-mediating them. In other words, it makes them live in another media, at the same time protecting them from any mediocre, minimalistic or depressing uses with which they have been treated in the past.
\nHis approach cannot even be defined as post-modernism. If for no other reason, because of the consistency with which Pesce never ceases to remind designers of the social effects of their work. To Pesce, the concept of utility means experimentation: on materials, on typologies, on the formation of flavours, even on the choral nature of the design activity.
\nFew other designers today are as conscious of the manufacturing processes and at the same time so extraneous, so impermeable to the logic of standardization. From this point of view the position of Gaetano Pesce with respect to the manufacturing system is truly original and positively provocative: no other designer interprets his profession the way he does. The others are all more or less aligned with the industry, while he remains outside it, but at the same time \u2013 paradoxically \u2013 he is more inside it than anyone else, if for no other reason, because he is more familiar than almost all of them with the logics of manufacturing, the materials and the economic principles governing the production processes. Gaetano Pesce is no executor. He does not follow trends, he does not adapt to fashions, he does not stroke the dominant tastes with the hair. He does not conform. In this he is a child of the radical thought of the Sixties and Seventies in which humus he has received his education; Pesce produces theory through his work. Every one of his works is a political, aesthetic and conceptual manifesto. Even if he is convinced that the consumer society has changed the world (for the better….), Pesce produces objects that are, in their own way, unconsumable. It may be possible to destroy or disassemble them, they may be perishable, but they can never be defined merely in terms of use, consumption and fruition. They all have a hard core, that always goes beyond. Like all the great interpreters of the Twentieth century, Gaetano Pesce is first of all a producer of sense. And of dis\/sent. Every one of his designs introduces different meanings, he makes them short-circuit, or places them on a collision course. He crushes the rigid forms and the pre-established functions of industrial design and replaces them with soft \u2013 almost feminine \u2013 forms that are certainly more tactile, more sensual, more corporeal. Intolerant of any stable and unchangeable design code, he turns all his creations into an uninterrupted research aimed at experience, emotion and narration.<\/p>\n