Self-portrait

DIVIDED

Published in the United Kingdom by Divided in association with Dia Art Foundation, dépendance gallery and Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea.

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Dia Art Foundation

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dépendance gallery

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Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea

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00197 Rome

www.lagallerianazionale.com

Translation and note copyright © Allison Grimaldi Donahue, 2021

Afterword copyright © Claire Fontaine, 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any means without prior permission of the publisher.

Front cover design by Allison Katz

Printed by Graphius Brussels

ISBN 978-1-9164250-8-8

CONTENTS

Translator’s note

Allison Grimaldi Donahue

Self-portrait

Carla Lonzi

Afterword

Claire Fontaine

List of illustrations

Artist biographies

Translator’s acknowledgements

Translator’s note

Carla Lonzi was always interested in letting the artist and the works speak for themselves. Self-portrait, a collection of recorded and transcribed interviews with fourteen artists made between 1962 and 1969, continually challenges the very notion of the artist or writer – or translator – at work in a capitalist patriarchal society. It asks how to go on in an environment so hostile to creativity (it is frustrating that, over fifty years after its publication, many of the problems and barriers to making works of art persist, and have in some cases worsened). The result is deceivingly simple, filled with chatter, non sequiturs, fillers, gaffes and gossip. Initially it feels like eavesdropping on a very personal studio visit.

Most artist interviews published today have been cleaned up, edited, made coherent. Here the artists jump from topic to topic and change their mind mid-sentence: following them becomes an adventure that carries the reader to unexpected places. Lonzi transcribed every utterance, every sigh, every ‘ha’. This translation attempts to keep this spoken nature of the text and to bring it into English with clarity and fluidity while allowing Italian rhythms and structures to rise to the surface – to allow English to perform Italian voices. To anglicise the conversation or to polish it felt to me disloyal; this is a live record, not perfect Italian literary prose.

The artists speak openly, carrying their prejudices into the conversation: certain of them at times make sexist and racist comments. Mimmo Rotella speaks explicitly about his conception of female sexuality and what he believes women need in terms of eroticism; Pino Pascali expresses his view of ‘Negro art’ as something primitive and pure. Such passages remain. I believe that translators are stewards of culture: here that means presenting the realities of 1960s Italian speech and the legacy of patriarchal–colonial Eurocentrism that it evidences.

At the beginning of the text Lonzi, Accardi, Fabro and Kounellis discuss the role and behaviour of the critic – he is always male, bourgeois, power-hungry. The artist is also always assumed to be male: men compare themselves to other men, whether that’s Consagra talking about Raphael, or Fontanta discussing Manzù, or the great pride with which he talks about Manzoni’s experimentalism, and his own. While in my own writing I use ‘they’ as a third-person singular, I felt it was important here to retain the ‘he’, both for historical accuracy and to highlight the ubiquity and normativity of machoism in Lonzi’s world. By pushing back against this impersonal ‘he’, Lonzi shows us what she was up against. She was attempting to dismantle the idea of the male artist-genius: showing the artists’ ignorance is integral to that process.

There are some factual errors that have been carried over from the original; these have been reproduced in various editions and I have kept them as they are – they represent the way a given artist (mis)remembers something, and as this is a recording of a conversation, I remained true to that conversation and the inaccuracies of spontaneous speech.

It goes without saying, perhaps, that this translation – like all translations – is an iteration. It reflects my reading and inhabiting of Lonzi’s work over many years, and the process of solidifying my own understanding of the text over time. The work remade the shapes of my particular language, and thus remade me. Lonzi is a complex writer, a complex figure, and I wanted to be as true to her voice and pursuit as possible, and, in my own way, to participate in it.

Allison Grimaldi Donahue, October 2021

Self-portrait

Carla Lonzi

Introduction

This book emerges from the collection and rearrangement of discussions with some artists. Yet the conversations did not originate as material for a book: they respond less to the need to understand than to the need to spend time with someone in a fully communicative and humanly satisfying way. The work of art felt to me, at a certain point, like a possibility for meeting, like an invitation to participate, addressed by the artists to each of us. It seemed to be a gesture to which I could not respond in a professional manner.

Over these years I have felt my perplexity grow about the role of the critic, in which I’ve noticed a codified alienation towards the artistic fact, along with the exercise of a discriminating power towards artists. Even if the technology of recording isn’t automatically, in and of itself, enough to produce a transformation in the critic, for whom many interviews are nothing but judgements in the form of dialogue, it seems to me that from these discussions an observation emerges: the complete and verifiable critical act is part of artistic creation. Whoever is a stranger to artistic creation can have a socially determined critical role only in as far as he is part of a majority that is also distant from art, a majority that avails itself of this bond in order to in some way find a point of contact. This is how a false model for considering art has been established: a cultural model. The critic is he who has accepted measuring creation with culture, giving the latter the prerogative of acceptance, of rejection, of the artwork’s meaning. Our society gave birth to an absurdity when it made the critical moment institutional, distinguishing it from the creative moment and attributing to it cultural and practical power over art and artists. Without realising that the artist is naturally critical, implicitly critical, by his very creative framework. Certainly not through the mental, cultural, didactic, professional methods of the critic. But the artist is also on the level of reflection and not only of procedure, even though he has no incentive to make this ability socially effective. So this routine with artists, the speaking together, the listening, bring this fact to consciousness: there is no critic who can trigger the interest of the artist, work-wise. He will be interesting to the artist, naturally, very much as a situation, analogous to any other person who has an artistic experience.

Think of Vasari: an academic painter, official, not comparable to those artists whose lives he wrote about. That’s why, perhaps, he found the energy to write. But, frankly, is it possible he said something about the artists that they hadn’t already lived out, at least in the work itself? And how many layers of culture, of structures, of commonplaces and passing tastes didn’t he put between them and the public. If it had been possible to record what those artists said in their daily discussions, would it be necessary to read Vasari’s Lives to enter into contact with them? I don’t think so; rather, if anything, the reader enters into contact with Vasari the man, with Vasari the exemplar of the sixteenth century, with Vasari the writer and his personal charge. Artists live for that which others will have them live, it’s true; however, if Vasari was legitimate in his time, three centuries later Fénéon is already much less so, and contemporary critics truly belong to an anachronism, since here criticism is no longer about bringing to life, but rendering sterile.

Perhaps without being aware of it, the critic plays the game of a society that tends to consider art as an accessory, a secondary problem, a danger to transform into diversion, an unknown to transform into myth, in any case, an activity to contain. And how to contain it? Precisely through the practice of criticism, working on the false dissociation: creation-criticism.

This book does not intend to suggest a fetishism about the artist, but to call him into another relationship with society, negating the role, and thus the power, of the critic as repressive control over art and artists, and above all in terms of the ideology regarding art and artists at work in our society. But how could one distinguish the true artist from the false artist, if there were no more critics, this is the question that emerges in this case. However, first, one must ask why this distinction is considered so essential by society. Where does this need for a guarantee come from? Isn’t the saint recognised by the scent of sanctity he releases? Is it possible to hypothesise a critic of sanctity? Despite the intermediary of the Churches, the tally of the elect is beyond the purposes of this world. The conviction of the believer is that the phenomenon exists even when it is trivialised and that this is not an indifferent element to its value. Therefore no one, essentially, renounces being a saint: independently from religions, religiosity is part of the structure of humanity.

Aesthetic behaviour, art, are part of the structure of humanity too, but this conviction is not a patrimony of those who deal with art: it is a patrimony reserved for artists. Differently from Churches, Cultural Institutions are founded on the need to offer the spiritual quota of a world, the salvation of which is none of their business. This is why art, also, like every other human expression, becomes accessible only as an object of evaluation. Through Cultural Institutions art does not appear as a responsibility of human achievement: the tasks of consuming art and of identifying oneself as public are reserved for ‘others’. In this scenario the profession of the critic shows all of its functionality in service of a System. But why not ask if this way of consuming art is compatible with the sense of art, with its true raison d’être? Why be satisfied with the alienated role, even if it is elevated to the very same condition of judgement itself?

The discussions collected here were not done with the intention of demonstrating the above, but in order to initiate myself in an activity and a humanity to which I was drawn, when at the same time I found ridiculous the claim handed to me by the University of being a critic of a humanity and an activity that were not my own. To seek to belong to it and to see the role of the critic collapse happened all at once. What remains, now that I’ve lost this role within the art world? Maybe I’ve become an artist myself? I can respond: I am no longer alienated. If art is not in my abilities as creation, it is as creativity, as consciousness of art in the willingness to do good.

This book is composed of tracks arranged freely in a way to reproduce a sort of convivium, real for me since I lived it, even if it didn’t happen in a single unit of time and place. The tracks are parts of recordings: in ’65 Fabro; in ’66 Kounellis, Accardi, Pascali, Paolini; in ’67 Nigro, Fontana, Alviani, Turcato, Consagra, Paolini, Castellani; in ’68 Paolini, Scarpitta, Kounellis, Fabro, Rotella, Consagra, Castellani, Accardi; in ’69 Nigro. The questions directed at Twombly are from ’62: they were written, and they betray my previous behaviour towards the artist. By chance, perhaps, Twombly didn’t respond, but it came to me to put them in the book anyway, both because his silence, made me reflect, and because they bring forth a somehow gracious echo of the academic language.

LUCIO FONTANA: What do you want me to say if you don’t tell me what to talk about . . . What do I have to say, more or less . . . You have to ask me questions, or something . . . provoke me.

CARLA LONZI: We can start from anywhere because I simply want . . .

PINO PASCALI: I would prefer to have some little topics. Haha! . . .

MARIO NIGRO: I could stop being a painter, a producer of objects and do other things . . . I don’t know, an explorer, a warrior, a Franciscan monk, I don’t know what.

ENRICO CASTELLANI: I forgot what I told you last year and I don’t know what to tell you this year.

GIULIO PAOLINI : I’m pretty sure I already talked about some works, but out of gallantry it might be best if I repeat myself.

GETULIO ALVIANI: Look, let’s just do this, take it easy.

LONZI: Here: Rome, the 13th of . . .

LUCIANO FABRO : . . . September. Early afternoon. Test to hear the recording and make sure the sound is okay. So: Carla, tell me something. Excite me.

SALVATORE SCARPITTA: You are so beautiful . . .

PIETRO CONSAGRA: I’d like to say this.

GIULIO TURCATO: You should do something like this, but conversational, that is, don’t ask questions.

LONZI: Yes yes . . . no no . . . in fact, I’ve always . . .

MIMMO ROTELLA : Actually . . . Can you repeat that? Because I didn’t really understand.

LONZI : You give your paintings very precise titles – Scuola d’Atene, Ratto delle Sabine, Amore e Psiche (‘The School of Athens’, ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’, ‘Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss’) – that very much recall the most important topics of the Renaissance masters. Then again, the world of antiquity, with its myths, became a topic of interest after the emergence of psychoanalysis. Do you see this connection?

CY TWOMBLY: (silence)

CARLA ACCARDI: I am so completely instinctive, for now, that if just for a moment I lose interest, the thought vanishes.

FABRO: I’ll tell you about that later because it arrives later.

LONZI: Ah, that later . . . Okay, tell me in chronological order.

FABRO: Chronological order?

LONZI: In order of what’s most exciting.

JANNIS KOUNELLIS : It’s better to begin from the most recent things, isn’t it? And then, maybe, we can even go a bit further back . . . But, I don’t know, going back, speaking like this, in this sense, it doesn’t mean anything, because there isn’t a formal process. That is, you say ‘After Cézanne’s landscapes come the Cubists, after the Cubists comes Mondrian, etc.’ It’s very reasonable, and that’s where criticism is based, right. A process like this puts the painting in an extremely different condition than when I see it now, a detached condition. Reasoning about the painting comes from the painting itself, they say painting gives way to more painting, the world outside doesn’t exist, does it? Or it exists in a very relative way. Today there is no process as such. Our very conscience has been transformed in this sense, that there no longer exists a formal, logical process. Today, something is born because there the conditions for it to be born naturally exist, right?

FABRO: Let’s take the example of Buco: it is not a problem of form. In fact, I call it the ‘hole’, Buco, not by way of the pattern that I used to make the hole, because it cannot be a definite pattern and, even less, a visual pattern. Even a blind man can discover the hole, he doesn’t know its shape, but he discovers it. Same goes for a baby. All of our senses intervene as a total organising mechanism to take hold of a situation. It’s a pattern that we cannot define visually: form has nothing to do with it, nor does colour. Me, I don’t gain experience from a painting, a mirror, a structure: I gain experience from living, looking at things, taking possession of them. When you’re alive you’re interested in everything, aren’t you? It never crossed my mind to do something analogous to Jasper Johns but, at the same time, his concerns resonate with me, they interest me: when he took the American flag and put it there, like that. It’s so different from the made-up experience of the Surrealists. Surrealism pointed out man’s behaviour when he doesn’t see things: a saddle placed next to the handlebars becomes a bull. The American flag doesn’t become something else, it’s not Magritte’s tree. But, even to Johns, something strange happens, he takes things, he remakes them exactly the same and he realises they are no longer the same. They have become a pictorial fact. So, I’ve understood that through the re-proposal of the object itself we do not re-propose the experience: the problem is still beyond. It’s not a figurative process, even at the tautological level, it proposes the thing to us again, but there is some different element that must occur. A stiff board feels stiff, although it is quite different than a line with the same form. I want to get back to that moment there. My interest in Johns is from 1961–1962. It was necessary to start anew, from the beginning. Once the figurative elements were taken apart . . . I express myself this way because also, Abstract Art, at its core, depicted through form and colour . . . I could have set out quietly, to look at things. And these things no longer interest me on an emotional level, but they interested me for their cognitive value. So, the approach changes: you set out to really look at things. You know you can’t copy them because in copying them they are no longer the same things . . . you know that form, even copied, synthesised, transposed, is temporary: you can make a thousand and help the procedure of the designer. So, what do you do? Look at how things are, the reason why you take hold of them, and you realise – it’s really wild, it’s evil, look, painful – you realise that we never manage to take hold of things. Yes, we take them, yeah, we see them . . . but to possess them, and know how we possess them, it always escapes us. I am able to make one or two works in a year. To pass from one mental step to another, even if they are on the same plane, it’s always a leap. I look and try and turn and reverse and see. There’s this moment of attention: I look. I realise that I’ve taken possession of a situation, like that of the hole or of reflection and transparency. From this last one I could have made a little game out of it, creating, I don’t know, a chessboard of mirror-reflectors. It would have been more fun than co-ordinating an experience. An experience, in and of itself, is neither pleasant nor unpleasant: it is pleasant only in how much, when we have lived it, we’re happy. We are forced to put things into some kind of order, not because of an outside force, but because that’s how it is, when we become aware of disorder, we should make some order . . . if we’re not imbeciles, or we’re not in some state of imbecility, which is 99 per cent of the hours of the day. To take hold of the world does not have an abstract value, but it is an opening so that everyone who’s up for it can pass through. Now, the pleasure of opening those gates, it is a true pleasure, to feel like oneself, to understand others, to move together . . . When you feel like you have lived and all of the moments have had meaning in their existence, the knowledge that you did things, that you were part of something . . .

PASCALI: What I’d like is to be as natural as possible. But not natural . . . um, I don’t know how even to explain this idea of the natural myself. That rhinoceros there, besides being a rhinoceros, it’s a form that I looked for without really looking, exactly because of its very structure as the form of the rhinoceros, but it isn’t because of this that I sacrificed other factors. I rescued what was salvageable of this form. Within it there might be discoveries that aren’t even a part of me, discoveries by other sculptors, of another way of thinking: the structure of this species of snake could also seem like something from Brancusi. I say that because Brancusi is also a part of a world we consider almost natural, right? It’s like somebody sees whatever animal, sees . . . a horse, I have a regular horse in mind, and after, I’ve never made horses, who knows why . . . a horse, a bird, a fish . . . and he says ‘Brancusi’, it’s part of a kind of imaginary that’s already completed. It isn’t that I’m interested in a formal departure from Brancusi . . . no, Brancusi already exists and is already sculpture . . . maybe it was simply easier for me to understand it in this way. I like animals, but that doesn’t mean I want to remake animals: it’s a subject, it’s an image, it’s an outline that’s already in place, a word already printed that still fascinates me, the reason why I get into that discussion, I take it as a presupposition.

PAOLINI: I absolutely do not believe that one can arrive at covering spaces, whether they are mental or physical, covering them in an effective, concrete way, that is with objects, with formal proposals, or any other kind. Rather, it is possible, I’m not sure whether it’d be better to say to evoke them or to allude to them, anyway, to present them even through a modestly constructed model, with materials that are not already preloaded with meaning . . . These results, to arrive at not having them replicate themselves, but, rather, to become, who knows what else. It is in this unpretentious way one can work, better than with the most up-to-date tools, what technology can offer us today, to arrive at this, in order to achieve this, although I believe that once they are achieved one is never satisfied. When I think of Manzoni, for example, I maintain that within him there was still a pictorial implication, let’s call it, in the sense that maybe, maybe he still wasn’t aware of using the canvas, the frame, the brush itself as mediated and established limit. Anyway, he acted naturally, in a field of the destruction of image and form, without thinking of the refusal of other more modern techniques, let’s say. I believe that to do it consciously, to want to remain, on purpose, before these canvases, these jars of paint and to use them to not arrive at a result, to console myself for not having made use of electric current, for example, that is to have given life to a model, to an idea rather than to an object in and of itself.

CONSAGRA : Having lost animality, spontaneous life, there is nothing except the city as possibility for reclaiming contact with nature inside us. Within ourselves, what does it mean? You mirror yourself based on the human contact you have. Now, the city gives us most of these kinds of relationships, the city removes nostalgia, absorbs all of your intelligence, it unleashes you, it moulds you. The possibilities are there, that is, the possibility to meet people who can give you the maximum of their human experience, who can give you the richness of spontaneity, taken up in the identity of the city. You don’t want to go to the city and find peasants, that is: you want to go to the city, and you want to go to the biggest city, where there are fewer neurotic people. Because a provincial person is exactly this: a disassociated person, who might have all of the sweetness in the world, all of the best qualities in the world, but also has this dissatisfied nostalgia, an incapacity, within, to get used to anything. One feels that this makes the city . . . it’s the activity, still, there’s a lifeforce within it. Then of course this relationship can result in a complete failure, there are some people rendered so nervous, so disturbed that they can run backwards towards a ‘possible return’. Every so often we think that there is a completely natural camel-driver . . . who gives you a sense of nature that’s purer than one can imagine, more innocent, more disarming . . . disarming in the sense of artificiality, isn’t it true? Well, this may no longer exist either . . . Yes, the sadness at watching journalists venturing into the forest to discover a tribe . . . you see there is a disappointment . . . We, in these reportages, on the one hand we seem curious about this very state of naturalness, and on the other hand you’re bitter that these tribes have actually already lost it . . . we begin to lose naturalness. And you see that, like this, the photographer, the journalist, the scholar . . . has already ruined this, like someone has stepped on a beautiful flower.

NIGRO: When you go outside or we’re in the city also, I, for my part . . . more than the crowds, more than the traffic, I like to see the sky. Even in the middle of the city. This may be something common to many people, it’s obvious, of course. Don’t you think? . . . It’s a link . . . yes, it is a link . . . in the sense that I have really to be an actor in this world, I have to participate in the tragicomedy of this world . . . otherwise is it possible that, at a certain point, I don’t take part in it?

ALVIANI: The nature of things in their – I’d say autochthonous, but I’m not sure if it’s the right word – state, meaning the trees, plants, flowers, rivers, I don’t know, grasses, clouds . . . they’re all excellent elements, meaning ‘good’ because they are ‘good’ in and of themselves, aren’t they? They are. We’re also ‘good’, made with two hands, etc. Man has always ruined these elements, he ruined them, this is clear, with architecture, he made terrifying things, horrible . . . why? Because man wanted to express himself, each one needed to see himself realised in the environment, in a building, in a thing, to remove himself from the monotony. I am for the contrary, for this absolutely functionalist life in every aspect, like for a bathroom, get it? And the toilet is functional for a given objective . . . see, and like this the bed should be the place that welcomes two people when they speak or four people and that’s it, right? Things that are less irritating, to your neighbour, it’s possible . . . that they don’t create these enormous problems that are everywhere, crooked roads, all of it . . . And man says ‘And then, what do we have?’ We have this enormous nature which one could analyse, each in a precise manner, because there are billions of things in nature and I think that man, really getting close to them, we would no longer need to create all of these things: crooked villas, little stucco hallways where natural light doesn’t come in . . . Now I, idealistically, bring forth, very well, these serial objects, that are very small, because one can have phenomena created by man that are also quite valid, don’t you think? Actually, I think that one sets out to make things and does make things . . . like the grass was made . . . as it was created, I don’t know, the sun, get it? But, he leaves everything at the right point, where they are useful, don’t harm anyone, you can’t say ‘They don’t do harm to one’ . . . don’t hinder, or rather, they happen gradually.

PASCALI : I like the sea, for instance, I like spearfishing, any silly thing about it, I like the rocks, near the rocks there is the sea, I played there as a child, I was born near the sea, of course, here it’s quite common . . . I like animals because they look like intruders, something that doesn’t belong to our race, something that moves us, sometimes in the country, sometimes in the city: you try to understand it. Then you say, ‘Yeah, okay’ and you put it aside. But the very fact of seeing a horse walking down the street or a tree growing out of the pavement on a city block, I don’t know in which way I see it, but I see it: it isn’t that one tree is part of all the other trees . . . anyway, it’s very dear to me. An animal, for me, is such a strange thing, it’s already a phenomenon to see sheep passing by houses or men, there’s a shift in something that isn’t a part of what’s already organised, it appears as something other. For me, it is much stranger to see a horse than to see a car, or a missile that goes 7,000 kilometres an hour, you know? It isn’t like I live in New York; I live in Rome. It’s like the story of taking a bird that once flew in your hands, a sparrow, a swallow . . . really, I find myself in contact with a being that isn’t part of the calculations, you know, it has already existed and has the same presence as me, the same lifeforce, the same nature. I am talking about a purely physical nature, not a nature created rationally like that of machines: man existed, the animal existed . . . first, maybe, man didn’t exist, there were other animals, but it doesn’t matter. Sure, I feel very close to animals . . . it’s funny but it’s true. I am much more amazed to see, I don’t know, even a small baby, simply because babies aren’t part of my . . . and once I am able to see their softness, the way they are, really it takes me to the next level . . . Automobiles, houses, trams, everything that I do every day doesn’t interest me: once in a while one notices something that has its own heat, a heat . . . now I don’t want to sound sly here . . . it isn’t a human heat, but it’s simply that it doesn’t matter, and because it doesn’t matter it’s very beautiful . . . it seems like the Last of the Mohicans, you know, or there might be lots of Mohicans, what do I know?

LONZI: I wanted to make a book that’s a bit meandering, you know? Because what really bothers me . . . no, what I really like in artists but what really bothers me in critics, where there’s none, is this sense of measure, this moving from one argument to the next. Critics, on the other hand, are always stubborn types. For me . . . I just can’t stand this sense of mind that fixates on one thing. This need to produce knowledge . . . the cultural worker, that one has to work over and over the culture itself, so they become obstinate about pulling something out . . . What do they call it . . . ‘obsessive praise’, the existentialists, that is this imbalance between one’s concrete personality and one’s ideas, to extract all of the possible mental consequences from an assumption and, really, go on to infinity.

ACCARDI : When someone wants to make a book like this, she’s got to actually put a lot of herself into it, as if it were also a part of her life, you know? You could never do it, Carla, as you want it, I’m sorry, I have to tell you . . . I don’t know, if we’re talking about the level of creativity, yes . . . Now, it is an extremely great leap you are asking yourself to make, or so at least it seems to me, because as a creative person, you should put yourself in there as you are in particular moments of your life, do you know what I mean? How can you do that? It’s that, maybe, artists are able to communicate this a bit better, it’s what makes others suffer . . . Maybe, I don’t know, I keep saying ‘maybe’. You say, ‘Look how artists talk, and they are more, yes, casual . . .’ Yes, because in that moment, they are doing work that is practically a continuation of the work they’ve already done so far . . . so, can you imagine what calm, what ease they speak with. Hey, it isn’t all based on what they are saying . . . did you think of that?

PAOLINI: Look, I would like Carla to remember my painting from 1965 titled Delfo. In that painting I appeared, I appeared from behind the frame, life-sized. I mention this in order to describe another work that is, in fact, called Delfo II. The painting has the same dimensions, 95 × 180 centimetres, and the same technique, screen-printing on canvas, as the previous painting. It reproduces my image, nothing more, so, on the same level as the canvas, which is in this juxtaposition, but in the foreground, it’s in its entirety, and therefore: I am wearing a long white tunic and in my right hand I hold the Bandiera (‘Flag’) in one fist and in my left hand I am holding the bust of Saffo (‘Sappho’), which covers my face and hides it, in the same way that you couldn’t see my face in the previous work since it was covered by the frame of the canvas, an identity . . . Yes. This time I’m hidden by the bust of Sappho and so I’m in this ecstatic mood, I don’t know . . . Behind me, as a background, appearing as a work of mine, also from 1965, there is that white staircase with the perspective that leads to an infinite point.

CONSAGRA: I only use painting rarely, since I am not a painter, but I could have been because I very much like a painting I have in my head, but I have never made it because as soon as I add colour, as soon as I touch the brush, etc. Then, even to think of other materials with colour, it has always been so difficult for me, I don’t like to paint, it doesn’t satisfy me. And I think: I wouldn’t even like to be Raphael because I don’t like painting the way Raphael did and I think nobody will ever like it again. You can’t become Raphael if his manner of painting is no longer appreciated: one becomes Raphael because one likes that kind of painting. What’s an even more banal sort of reasoning? That no one could become Raphael because they aren’t as intelligent as Raphael. No, a priori one has no interest in being