interview by Dan Thawley
portraits by Alessandro Sartori
Art and spirituality have been inseparable for millennia as humanity grapples with the unknowable through sculpture, painting, performance, and the written word. Through depictions of beauty and pain, using figuration and abstraction, artists construct their own mythologies in conversation with the world around them. The ninety-year-old Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto is a living legend and a world builder who has traveled further down this philosophical rabbit hole than most. His ‘mirror paintings’—first executed in the 1960s—formed a crucial axis of the Arte Povera movement, one that found an explicit universality due to its interrogation of the relationship between self and society. In 1994, Pistoletto returned to his native Biella, a historical textile town one hour north of Milan, to consolidate his practice into the Cittadellarte - Fondazione Pistoletto where continues to provoke new conversations in the arts and sciences.
Our visit to Cittadellarte in early spring came at the invitation of the Italian fashion designer Alessandro Sartori, creative director of Zegna, a global empire with historic roots in the region. Born and raised in Biella, Sartori first visited Pistoletto as a student and returned to his hometown with us to photograph the artist for this interview. Today, Pistoletto’s cultural factory serves as both an art foundation and a ‘laboratory school’ for students and traveling academics. The sprawling riverside complex inhabits multiple sites with temporary exhibitions and permanent installations, artist residencies, a restaurant, and a library. Its most spectacular asset is a vast expression of The Third Paradise, a long-term artistic and philosophical project represented by a tripled infinity symbol inside the vaulted concrete hall of a former wool mill. Traced in yellow on the smooth floors and studded with metal tactile paving, it’s an idea that continues to morph in form and scale across the globe—from a mirrored loop on IM Pei’s glass pyramid of the Louvre in Paris in 2013, to flash mobs in Milan and Sarajevo, to ‘land art’ installations featuring textiles, benches, and flags in other major cities.
For those only familiar with Pistoletto’s ‘mirror paintings’—stalwart presences in art foundations and museums across the planet—the scope of his vision as a cross-disciplinary thinker may come as a surprise. Yet it is that very immediate, unapologetic nature of the mirror’s reflection that remains at the center of his practice, which demands us to look back at the successes and failures of humankind as a new roadmap for a more equitable existence. Despite its associations with ego and vanity, Pistoletto deconstructs our relationship with ourselves and the world through the collective and transient possibilities of the mirror. Often the mirror is removed entirely, yet the idea remains more palpable than ever. It’s a soothing balm in troubled times.
DAN THAWLEY I wanted to start by asking you about infinity.
MICHELANGELO PISTOLETTO Infinity is the right word. My mirror paintings date back to ’61 or ’62, and I still engage with mirror painting, because the mirror represents infinity. Within infinity, we have all that exists. So, in the mirror painting, are we looking at what exists directly? No. The mirror painting represents what exists. The mirror comes from the work of making the material smoother, taking roughness, and making it more brilliant—increasing its ability to take in the vision. Art in the ’40s and ’50s, even before that, was based on creating more and more material on the canvas.
THAWLEY Like Abstract Expressionism?
PISTOLETTO I did the opposite until the material disappeared. The canvas was not the canvas anymore, it was a mirror. The first mirror paintings were black varnish, and very shiny. So shiny that they started to reflect not only the light but also the images. It was absolutely necessary to give the meaning of art to that material because that material became representative, and representation is the entire history of art. So, putting my image in the middle of the mirror meant putting art in the middle of infinity, you see? It's incredible because we have two opposite elements. One is me, and the other is the world. I am necessary to make the conception of what exists. So, in that case, what exists becomes conscious. The universe that is reflected becomes conscious of its existence through me. For me, this is incredibly important because I discovered what I was looking for. Who am I? Why do I exist? All the questions were finally answered.
THAWLEY I wanted to ask you about technology and how it has changed the way you think about your work. You have continued making mirror paintings up until today, yet the meaning of the mirror has changed so much over time. The meaning of a photograph, of a self-portrait, has changed in the 21st century, with the camera, with the smartphone. So, how have you evolved that thinking with technology yourself?
PISTOLETTO I couldn't go on painting my figure on the reflective surface with a brush, because the reflection is so objective that any intervention I make is not as objective if I use my hands. So, I had to use something as objective as the mirror, and that was the camera. Photography can fix an image that would otherwise exist in the mirror for a fraction of a second. That image becomes the memory of a moment that immediately passes. So, what we have in our mind is the memory. The mirror paintings have the same function: the figure that is fixed within the photo is the memory that lives in each moment of the future of the mirror painting. Not only for one person but for everybody. They represent everybody, every mind, every life. Art is virtuality and the mirror is the maximum possible expression of virtuality. I recognized that the mirror itself doesn't have any image of itself. Because it is a zero image, it can reflect all existing images. It’s a binary system. But what is important is that the mirror becomes activated through technology. It's always a metaphysical process.
THAWLEY Most of your body of work sees layers of symbols placed between the viewer and their reality, with the trompe l'oeil painting or photographic transfer that you add to the surface of the mirror. What we've just discussed shows how the practical application of the work leads to an entire ideology that you have extrapolated from this universal capacity of the works. You've mentioned the everyman and how everybody can see themselves in the work. So, everybody can relate to what is in the mirror differently due to their lived experience too.
PISTOLETTO Society is dependent on common thinking. This is always a question of using our collective memory to reorganize and create new dimensions of living. And for me, art is the fertilizer of science, religion, and society. Art is a kind of stimulation that comes from the combination of the material of the universe and the capacity of that material to think about itself. This is incredible. That's humanity. And we’ve arrived at a point where humanity can possess the universe. And we have the responsibility of possessing that universe. What we are doing today with artificial intelligence—this accumulation of memory that is so vast and so big—that it is getting closer to reality. The present moment and memory are almost connected. I think that's something that we are very, very close to. It is why we have become responsible for the way we connect memory and reality.
THAWLEY I wanted to ask you about the concept of “demopraxy,” which is another essential idea in your approach to art and philosophy.
PISTOLETTO At Cittadellarte we have the school, UNIDEE, a university of ideas. Every year, for almost twenty years, we have invited artists or designers who come from all over the world. As artists, as designers, as architects, we have to explore democracy. At a certain point, there were two or three guests from different countries who said, “For us, democracy is the wrong word.” So, we started to search for the right word. Paolo Nardini, the director of Cittadellarte, came up with the idea of using another root. Instead of ‘kratos,’ which means ‘power,’ use ‘praxis,’ which means ‘practice.’ So, how can we use the practice? Practice is in all the different organizations that exist everywhere, and each organization needs a small government.
THAWLEY Where does the idea of protest and social responsibility come into your work?
PISTOLETTO We call Biella an Archipelago City because there are seventy-four municipalities. We have land, we have mountains, we have water. We have been organizing forums to discuss renewable energy among all the different municipalities. It is difficult to convince everybody, but we can no longer have destructive energy sources. If we really want to eliminate war, eliminate conflict, we have to learn to put the monster on one side and virtue on the other side. To eliminate the violence, you cannot just have virtue, you have to have the two elements. There has to be harmony. It is why in art we look to find harmony. If you put together two sounds, you have a third sound, and the more sounds you put together, the more harmony you can have. That is the chorus. The chorus of life. This is the chorus of society. There's a chorus of war or a chorus of peace. You decide. This is politics.