Q&A: Gaetano Pesce on Gender Inequality, Humor in Architecture, and the Element of Surprise
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Italian designer Gaetano Pesce is busily opening exhibitions this fall. While the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is currently showing a survey of his work with cast resin, Pesce’s critique of patriarchy takes center stage at a three-part conceptu
Q&A: Gaetano Pesce on Gender Inequality, Humor in Architecture, and the Element of Surprise
Italian designer Gaetano Pesce is busily opening exhibitions this fall. While the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles is currently showing a survey of his work with cast resin, Pesce’s critique of patriarchy takes center stage at a three-part conceptual exhibition recently opened in Florence, Italy. “Maestà Tradita (Majesty Betrayed)” is on view at the Museo Novecento, as well as on the Piazza Santa Maria Novella in front of the church of Santa Maria Novella, featuring almost 40 drawings dating from 1969 to present day, documenting Pesce’s career-long engagement with the politics of femininity and gender discrimination, as well as contemporary renderings of his perhaps most widely known creation, the 1969 “Up 5” Chair and “Up 6” Ottoman, design icons in the shape of voluptuous female forms.BLOUIN ARTINFO caught up with the designer to talk about his interest in gender inequality and concepts of “femininity” and “masculinity,” influential female figures in his life, and his view on British artist Anthea Hamilton’s Turner Prize-nominated “Project for a Door (After Gaetano Pesce),” featuring a gigantic male posterior dedicated to a design of his from the 1970s.For more than three decades, gender inequality and the “women’s cause” have been playing an important role in your work, and you have tirelessly pointed out the imbalance between the “feminine” and the “masculine” both as a principle and as a (political) reality.It started when I first observed that the Western and Eastern world, both in the Northern and the Southern hemisphere, began to show signs of crisis, whether political, generational, regarding population size and environmental crisis, as well as all sorts of critical points; and that this was due to a fatigue of the masculine way of leading and/or governing.I began to observe that to govern didn’t mean serving the governed anymore but it actually demanded the opposite, to be served instead.These perceptions started when I was about 25 years old. The first time I made a piece that represented this content was with UP 5&6 and I was then 28 years old.Other observations brought me to think that the coincidence between the nature of my time and the nature of the feminine were in tight correlation and that therefore the feminine essence interprets the nature of time in a better way than men do.Our time is a time where values clash, confront one another, disappear to then reappear again and many times in a contradictory and incoherent way. The feminine nature has an extremely important quality which is that of multidisciplinarity.This makes me think that time, so liquid in its form, is better understood and mastered in the future by the feminine nature.The trajectory of the masculine way of thinking is linear, it loves power and it does not like to contradict itself.The opposite can be said for the feminine which is more complex and organic in its essence and it does not love the confrontation or violence.Who were the strongest female figures in your life growing up? How have they and how do they influence your work?Growing up, it was my mother and her friends, one of which was a renowned psychoanalyst who introduced me to psychoanalysis when I was 15 or 16 years of age.The masculine world has always been very estranged to me and it still is. While women at the head of governments such as Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Indira Gandhi, have always been personalities who demand respect with courage and generosity.British artist Anthea Hamilton was nominated for the Turner Prize 2016 with a work titled “Project for a Door (After Gaetano Pesce)”, a sculptural work referencing an idea you had for a New York apartment building in the early 1970s. What are your thoughts about the work, the reference to your work, and also about the controversy it has sparked?I am extremely grateful to her, also because that work of mine has disappeared due to materials that had not yet been perfected. I had used silicone at its early stages that self-destructed in time.Your original proposal from the 1970s could almost be seen as a “male” response to Niki de Saint Phalle’s “Hon” from 1955, a gigantic female figure she installed at the Moderna Museet, which visitors could enter through a vagina doorway? There is no connection. However the interpretations could be absolutely possible. My explanation is that an organic element in the urban abstract is necessary to create surprise.The element of surprise is useful to interrupt our slumber and our habits.Therefore walking along a road and finding an entrance in the shape of a butt that apparently would like to defecate on the head of whoever is entering the premises, is something that is surprising and that gives a sense of hilarity.I believe we need all this.Gaetano Pesce, “Maestà Tradita (Majesty Betrayed)” is on view through February 2, 2017 at Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy. Click here for more information.This interview was edited from a longer conversation. Read more
