Venice by Venezia: an interview with artist Emilio Isgrò

Emilio Isgrò, born in Sicily in 1937, is one of the most internationally renowned Italian artists of the 20th and 21st centuries, with his work having been exhibited at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and four editions of La Biennale di Venezia in 1972, 1978, 1986 and 1993.

Venice by Venezia met with Isgrò on the occasion of his latest work, a sail for the Edipo Re (Oedipus Rex), the boat that belonged to film director and public intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini, in a project sponsored by the Venice Venice Hotel.

The Edipo Re takes its name from the 1967 film written and directed by Pasolini, inspired by Sophocles’ Greek tragedy Oedipus Rex. Built in Pola in 1943, the 17-meter boat faced bullets throughout the war to save refugees, before it was acquired by Italian painter Giuseppe Zigaina, and his friend Pasolini would use it for glamorous trips around Italy in the 1960s, with companions including Maria Callas, star of his film Medea. In the years to come, traces of the boat would be lost, until the Righetti family found it in Croatia, restored it, and brought it back to Venice.

What was Venice like back in your day?

I think it was the last period of cultural splendor in Venice, at the time it was still a European leader in that sense. When the Agnellis and the Americans arrived in the city, the old Venetian aristocracy kind of backed out, stepped aside, and the city consequently plunged into the speculative dynamics of modern tourism.

Among the high-profile people in Venice of the time, with whom were you spending time?

The popular Americans, so to speak, I would hang out with were Peggy Guggenheim and Ezra Pound, who was her exact opposite. Il Gazzettino wanted me to interview Pound, but he never responded to the editorial office requests. That was because he was an ex-fascist who found himself in a democratic context, and he was embarrassed. He suffered for that, he felt uncomfortable, and that was maybe why he kept this silence that upset Pasolini so much. I insisted a lot for that interview, and in the end he gave just a single sentence that was enough for me to write an entire piece about it — “I got it all wrong,” he said. Pound and I had a friend in common, Joan Fitzgerald, an American sculptor of Irish Catholic descent. She was close friends with Ezra, and that was how I met him, at Fitzgerald’s country house in San Maurizio.

What do you remember about Peggy Guggenheim?

She was very attached to Europe, maybe she didn’t say it openly, but she made it clear. She was very close with Max Ernst, who had once been her husband, and to Samuel Beckett.

Who were the most important artists in Venice?

The famous painters were not the Americans that arrived in ’64, but the Viennese and French. That was Venice.

What were the most important Italian cultural centers at the time?

When it came to art, but not only that, it’s always been Milan, Rome, and Venice. Then Turin came on. As for the market, Milan was the leading one. In Venice there were a couple of big collectors: Camuffo and Codognato, who later became a close friend of mine. When he saw my first pieces he wanted to buy them, but back then I had more of a writer’s kind of mindset, rather than an artist’s one, so I said to myself, “If I sell them to you, I’m left with nothing,” not thinking that the painter can do it all over again a minute later. So I didn’t give them to him. I still regret that, he was very much representative at the time. I was really happy when, after my exhibition at the Fondazione Cini, his son sent me a beautiful message on behalf of his father.

When was the first time you “erased” something as artistic technique?

It was in 1964, it was books and newspaper pieces, I think the Gazzettino.

So what was the point in erasing?

Erasing doesn’t mean destroying, it was a vision of the superfluous in comparison to a broader vision of reality. If you erase what is superfluous, you show something is necessary, and you activate the thought. When I started erasing, I had understood that words were in danger, newspapers were in danger, and you could see that from the fact that shows like Bob Wilson’s were becoming popular around the world, because evidently not everyone knew English as we do now, since the majority of people knows at least bits and pieces of it. Our dialectic is Hegel’s, revisited by Marx, so when I erase words I apply the “to be or not to be” dialectic of things, of words, and therefore of the world that lies beyond words. It’s not a simple issue, but we have to make it comprehensible.

Does this also apply to performances?

Of course, you just have to think about the increase in the variety of visual expression of theatre, and this was when theatre itself represented a strong defense of human words and of cultures. It was an American who predicted “there will be no more wars between nations but between cultures”, but if there have to be wars between cultures it means that said cultures have to be different, and if they get mixed and become the same there will be no more wars, and we’ll go towards the “peace of the cemetery”, a situation where there is no creativity. In this regard, there is a sentence in the Talmud that reads: “where there is conflict, there is God”, that God that is the symbol of human creativity itself, because you don’t know where God ends and man begins, and vice versa.

How do you view art?

I refuse to see it as something ineffable, art is human and you can address it, it won’t eat you, and it won’t save or kill you, but it will tell you a lot of things. I am allowed a lot of things because others give them to me, I am lucky because a lot of artists are not so lucky, they struggle, and they are good, better than me or Kapoor or Michelangelo. You can always learn from others, and I personally learn the most important things from smaller artists, not the big ones. Small artists have to come up with the craft, the technique, maybe to hide their inadequacy. Not only big artists teach in academies, and the best teachers are often the smaller ones. With this, I do not want to say that art has no value, it would be snobbish on my part. I’m sure it has a value, as I am aware there is a social issue: the artist must show their social worth, and not only to those people that can afford art. Art is not for everyone, just like football isn’t, despite being the national sport by definition. Art should be exclusive, but not excluding, and I don’t say this to sound like the super democrat that I’m not: I’m a democrat, but I don’t like crowds.

What was your relationship with Eugenio Montale?

Montale appreciated my poetry, and when he
came to the Fondazione Cini, he would call me at the newspaper and ask me to go for walks. It was a huge honor for me. I was young, looking for glory, and I once told him words were dead, and he got angry to the point of not wanting to talk to me ever again. I lost a friend. Of course, those were strong words, but it was a way to make myself heard at 20 yeas old. The editor of the paper, Giuseppe Longo, an old liberal, also got angry about that. He was uncomfortable with me, the head of the culture section, erasing. Imagine the ideological disgrace. But looking at the current world, where words and freedom really are dead, maybe I was right. For example, Milan at the time was full of fascists, as well as communists, but compared to the fascists that came after, those seemed perfect democrats, because at least they liked to debate.

In Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex we find a tension between free will and destiny. What do you think about man being incapable of explaining what they do not know, while one is (hypothetically and relatively) capable of explaining everything they have learned? Do you think this could open doors a specific logic explanation for everything, and what man sees as chance or fate might just be a consequence of ignorance?

Do you know where God begins and where he ends? You don’t even know where the world ends, the universe, these are question marks. With this being said, I don’t play the believer for a living. Asking ourselves too many questions drives us crazy. Let’s take Jesus Christ’s resurrection as an example: it’s about the transformation of matter, and if you think about it, this has to do with other religions, too, like Hinduism. Maybe the Church should simply keep up to date.

What was your first reaction when you were asked to create something on the Edipo Re?

My first reaction was maybe a bit of fear, but that goes away when I realize I can meet the client’s demand. I thought about it, and I did my job trying to utilize my skills as best I could. It is not up to me to say whether I succeeded or not.

What is your favorite memory from the Edipo Re?

Probably my favorite memory is not about Pasolini’s boat, but Sophocles’ work. I remember a Tiresia verse: “I knew this, but I forgot. Sometimes forgetting is memory’s reverse side: you cannot remember if you forget”. I’m honored to hoist a sail on the boat of such a great poet, and it was on this same boat that I was given the inclusiveness prize, and I’m happy that the affection that binds me to Sibylle Righetti and all of her friends continues on the sea and on this boat.

How did you choose the name of your work?

As a matter of fact, when I thought about naming it “Pasolini’s sail” out of respect for the poet, it was Sybille who told me to name it “Isgrò’s sail”. She knew, since I told her many times, that, as much as I respect Pier Paolo Pasolini, you cannot turn this poet into a saint, a sort of Anthony of Padua that does miracles. You have to quote him less and understand that his sense of commitment that was useful at his time is not functional nowadays, cause times have changed. We are not in a world divided into two blocks anymore, where taking a stand, for an intellectual such as him, meant having a social impact. Today the artist is less influential in that sense, because society is controlled by forces that not always have something to do with art and culture. With all that considered, I was happy about taking part in the project, not only because it was Sibylle who asked me, but because it is a responsibility to start defining with likeminded people a new idea. An idea that is not about political commitment, cause artists have that even when talking about flowers, but a sort of hand-to-hand fight with the life that allows artists to talk to all humans and not only a specific group of people that sees art as a product like many others.

After realizing this work for the Edipo Re, what are you going to be focusing on? We know you have a poetry book that’s about to be published. What else?

I’m preparing something on Galileo for the 800th anniversary of the University of Padua, where I will read Galileo my way, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

What advice would you give to a poet?

They must write with their ears, feel the musicality.

Which current artists do you like?

I like many artists. Anish Kapoor is definitely a great artist. He came to one of my exhibitions, and I would like to go see his exhibition in Venice these days.

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Photos courtesy of The Venice Venice Hotel