File Note 57: Pino Pascali

If I had to say what I liked most about Pino, what I would put first: his capacity to use his hands, those big, tough dirty hands, to transform ideas … I also liked his contradictions, his need for order at the same time as an instinct for chaos, because he easily got high on ideas and then he preferred chaos to order.

Eliseo Mattiacci 1969 ² 

The hands of a sculptor? Pino Pascali was a chameleon, an artist who also worked in advertising, film and television, who took performance as seriously as a clown and in just five years produced a dizzying carnival of work, always new. Fewer than a hundred works survive. He took life by the throat, rode fast bikes and became an Italian legend. He died after an accident riding his Moto Guzzi 750cc at the age of 32. He lives forever in the ether of the internet, an icon for artists and bikers alike. He believed sculptors and all artists played like anyone who does what they like to do. To his friends he seemed to be several artists in one, for the artist Maurizio Cattelan he was at least two: Pino and Pascali. And they often contradicted each other. In his restless need for change and renewal Pascali never stopped questioning what sculpture was and whether what he made was image, object or sculpture. The most he conceded was that his works were ‘feigned’ sculptures, but he also declared that however theatrical an exhibition ‘sculptures are not actors and they’re not scenery either’. 

A typically trenchant insight by an artist who was the least overtly cerebral of the thirteen Italian artists now regarded as associated with Arte Povera in the late 1960s. Pascali said ‘our problems are problems of consciousness, not of aesthetics’³; he instinctively understood the paradoxes of his own work and its roots in the tensions between a European, specifically Italian, cultural tradition and technological advance, modern life and a dominant American modernism. He was enthralled by American culture; by fast cars, comics, movies, especially popular sci-fi, Tarzan and blockbusters like One Million Years BC; and by American artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Jim Dine, but he recognised his difference: ‘Nothing belongs to me –– neither what I’ve got, nor what the Americans have got. It’s that I belong neither to this world, nor to the other’. He had no illusions, with his saturnine Roman looks and bikes he had the image of Marlon Brando but knew he was no ‘wild man’: he was an Italian born by the sea, living in Rome.

Kounellis’ odyssey through the accumulated and living memories of his Greek roots is mirrored by Pascali’s ceaseless sorties through his internal labyrinth of images imagined and real. Both artists saw the sacred in the common object and identified the artist with the hero and art with the potential of myth. This demanded an unequivocal pursuit, even the students and workers’ revolts on both sides of the Atlantic, which reached a crisis in 1968, did not deflect them, as Sargentini recalled: ‘But no, we didn’t go to any of the marches, or protests, not one of us. The thing was the art’.⁹ Pascali, the radical artist, stood apart from the political maelstrom; when students clashed with police at the Venice Biennale he abhorred the attempt to ‘resolve moral problems with violence … we found ourselves between two fires …  which in no way corresponds to the real necessities of Italy’s cultural situation’.¹⁰ 

While Pascali’s work was part of that driving force demonstrated by Harald Szeeman in his legendary exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form 1969 to turn the ‘nature of art and the artist’, through natural processes, into ‘form’¹¹, Pascali ‘liked clear shapes’ and his starting point was always an idea ‘a subject, an image, a pre-established context. What I am doing is not research into form.’ His focus was not so much the poetics of the object but pleasure in making and in the primacy of the image: to create make-believe sculptures where stuff, volume and weight are elusive. Even the titles make word play with the object: Bachi da Setola (brushworms), setola is an acrylic brush, seta means silk. 

This challenged the more astringent conventions of sculpture. Even the curator of Arte Povera, Germano Celant, seemed incredulous: ‘His image in just a few years, has gone from objects put together to form birds and animals, to busts of women; from walls to cannons; from mythical animals to waterfalls; from the sea to pools; from cubes of earth to ploughed fields. His latest works are large silkworms realised in coloured nylon and metal wire’.¹² Pascali’s last works with their animal, vegetable and mineral guises, including those eight shown at the XXXIV Venice Biennale in 1968 –– for which he was posthumously awarded the prize for Italian sculpture, are not so much synecdoches of a natural world as hallucinations which he enacted with his own presence. An iconic work such as the fake fur Vedova Blu (Blue Widow) wickedly bows to Yves Klein and his blue monochrome when he howled ‘kitsch, corn, bad taste’ ¹³ but is rudely real to the spidery idea. Pascali playfully crawled under it, getting up-close; he loved ‘animals because I see them as intruders, things that don’t belong to our species but which move about’. Like Pascali’s rampant brushworms, they invade our space: living emblems of our own mortality.