A God Called Time

For more than a half-century, Gaetano Pesce challenged convention. In 1969, the Italian-born, New York-based architect, artist, and designer introduced La Mamma, his renowned feminist chair. Made of polyurethane, its bulbous form echoes the curved silhouettes of fertility goddesses, while a round ottoman is attached to the main seat by a cord. The piece is full of meaning, a metaphor for the figurative ball-and-chain that represses women even today. Pesce’s architectural accomplishments include the plant-clad Organic Building in Osaka, Japan. Built in 1993, it’s covered in fiberglass planters filled with 80 varieties of foliage that are watered through a computer-controlled system. More recently, Bottega Veneta tapped the designer to create a rainbow of resin chairs for its Spring/Summer 2023 fashion show; then he made two special-edition, nature-in-spired handbags for the Italian fashion house that debuted last year during Salone del Mobile.

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Awol Erizku, 35, caught the art world’s attention with his 2009 work Girl with a Bamboo Earring, which references Johannes Vermeer’s iconic Girl with a Pearl Earring from 1665. Erizku challenges the original’s European beauty standards with a Black model and a heart-shaped bamboo earring. The Ethiopian-born, Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist and DJ brings new meaning to images ingrained in our collective memory, like a disco ball in the shape of Nefertiti’s bust that dangled from the ceiling of both his 2022 Gagosian exhibition and his 2023 Sean Kelly show. He recently opened “X,” his first solo museum show at the SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, Georgia, exploring El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, widely known as Malcolm X, “as a metaphorical prism” through which he reflects the nuances of Islam around the world. Like Pesce, Erizku imbues socio-political statements within his work, referencing his own experiences and observations. He also always finds himself surrounded by music in his studio. The designer and artist spoke in February of this year, two months before Pesce passed away on April 4, 2024 at 84.

Awol Erizku: I spent the weekend showing my daughter your work. It’s an honor to be in conversation with you. She’s 4, she loves your work, too. She’s an artist in-training.

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Gaetano Pesce: Fantastic.

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AE: I took her to MOCA this weekend to see some exhibitions and was showing her Cy Twombly. I said to her, “It’s fascinating how this man got to the later phase in his career only to go back to his infancy to make these works.” These are the conversations I try to have with her at this age, so she’s not only thinking about toys, though that’s okay, too.

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GP: I understand very well. I have one daughter who is 53, living in Paris. I have a son who is 50 years old and also living in Paris. I have another daughter living in a very small village on the west side of England, and she is 17. I am the son of a pianist; my mother taught me when I was 8 or 9. She taught me why a composer makes music that is usually in relation to time. Not only that, but she also taught me how to read music. So, I found myself following the music.

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AE: Listening to music is important to your practice, and it’s equally important to me. New music, in particular, is something that I’m fascinated with.

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GP: I cannot work without music. When I go to work with my collaborators, I ask them to put on music, possibly something new, something that I don’t know. And this is the only thing I like to maintain. When I worked in my house, it was very easy to create conditions to have ideas. The ideas come by observing reality: people young and old, and diversity. I don’t believe we are all the same because the world would be stupid if we were all the same—we create energy through our differences. When I travel, I look to places to give me ideas because they are different from me. Different from my culture, different from my everyday life.

AE: What type of music are you listening to now?

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GP: I’m working on something that is related to the music of Debussy and Chopin. Nothing to do with today, but I am very interested in the electronic bisecting of certain people who are composing in a way that they evoke the space. And they usually evoke a space that is difficult to reach. It’s very intriguing; that kind of music gives me ideas.

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AE: Because I’m a DJ, I spend a good portion of my studio time listening to music, kind of indirectly, not sitting and clicking through things. My favorite time to work is in the wee hours, after I’ve put the kids to bed. I come into the studio at probably 9 p.m. and work until whenever. I’ll have something that I’m focused on in the back of the studio, and then over here to my side, I have my sort of audiovisual side. So, I like to put on music. I like to listen to Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, this 99-year-old nun, who died last year. She trained in Switzerland, but she’s Ethiopian and lived the rest of her life there and gave all the money she made back to her monastery. I love to listen to this sort of music that comes from a synthesis of different cultures. It’s not Ethiopian by nature, although it has some elements, but it’s also not Western. It’s a hybrid between these two. In a lot of what you do—and largely what I do, perhaps—there’s a lot of synthesis that happens, whether that’s from different genres of disciplines that we work with, or even materials that we use.

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GP: Send me this music. I like Ethiopia.

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AE: Why is that?

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GP: Ethiopia is a very noble, very old country: one of the first civilizations with a strong attitude toward being correct, in a certain way, and always very respectful. They are the very, very beginning of civilization. And still today they can teach other countries many things.

“We repeat ourselves all the time using the same geometry, so I push architecture to become a witness of a cultural place, its memory, and its future.”
— Gaetano Pesce

AE: I have heard you talk about language a lot. What is the language that is universal today, if there is any? Has that changed since you were my age? I know you don’t like the homogeneity of people saying we’re very much the same.

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GP: The only chance at survival we have is to not have a common interest. The future of the world is diversity in culture, with the ultimate being our diverse languages. We have to maintain our diverse memory, because we come in from different geographic positions, different identities. And then there are the stupid ones who want to convince us the world is the same: the authoritarian politicians. And that is not true. There are a billion differences. When people are nostalgic for the past, they can easily become criminals. When someone is involved in the future, it is always very beautiful.

AE: I remember when my daughter was born, [Guèbrou’s] was the only music that we were listening to in the car. I like to think of it as thinking-music. I’m going to make you a playlist. You can send me some materials as well. How do you engage with social media and communication with the world? Is it important to you to work in a vacuum, or are you in a feedback loop with the world?

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GP: I am a fan of curiosity because it’s the sign of progress. The idea I had from the beginning was to convince the people around me that architecture is the measure of art because everything is contained in architecture: music, sound, movement, cinema. The object was practical until a certain point in history—practical because of its material use over the use of its aesthetic. Then in my mind, I said, You have to convince the world that objects can become art. Architecture today is very traditional and also very totalitarian because of the international style that we have been living in for a hundred years. It was interesting at the beginning, and it is not interesting anymore. We repeat ourselves all the time using the same geometry, so I push architecture to become a witness of a cultural place, its memory, and its future. Design and architecture are, for me, the sublime arts.

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AE: I went to the Cooper Union School of Art, so my first conscious engagement with color theory was through the teachings of Josef Albers and Bauhaus. I know that you’ve taught at Cooper. I also know that color is very important to you.

GP: The story of me and colors is very simple: I am very far from art-heads and people from Bauhaus. Venice [where Pesce studied] is a city on the water. The lighting is very special, and the colors are magnified by the reflection of the water. The history of art in Venice is very rich, not in drawings, but in the mass of color. Titian, Tintoretto, and the beautiful Bellini are great artists who taught us the capacity of color—which is not only to make a beautiful presentation, but also that the color gives good humor, optimistic thinking of the future. So this is the heritage that I received from my city. In part, I grew up there. And the use of color for me is this: Transfer energy to the people who observe my work. And maybe this helps them in life. The other day, a philosopher said to me: “Your work gives me a good way to have a good day.” It’s a beautiful comment.

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AE: I’ve heard you say how time makes the work for you. I love that idea. This still life that I’m working on is sort of predicting the future by using what I’ve gathered in the past. In a way, I’m still stuck in inventing my own vernacular. Certain things that I’ve made five years ago, I look back on and I think, Wow, I can’t even bring myself to make this again. So I have to take some of the teachings from this particular work and apply them to what I’m doing now, but I could not replicate what I was doing back then.

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GP: I don’t believe in God: I believe in the presence of a God called time. Time is a kind of energy that exists, but we don’t know why. We decide what is important at the moment. We change values from one day to another without order, and the intelligent person needs to follow and be able to understand. The day we are not able to understand the message of time, we become old. I try to understand the changes of time from yesterday to today to tomorrow, and I try to represent that in my work. God is time, and we have to pay attention to it. Because if we go against time, we lose ourselves.

AE: How do you create the type of environment that gives you your best ideas?

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GP: The story is simple. The night gives me suggestions. I have an idea—then I want to imagine how that idea comes out. I think about this during the night, then the idea is realized around 6 o’clock in the morning. The day after, I go to the workshop, and I start to communicate the idea to my collaborators. Sometimes, we start to do something, and then we realize that it is not very interesting. This also happens during the day when I’m on the street or listening to music. When I was very young, I used to stay awake during the night, thinking. That is a very good exercise. People today need to think deeper and not be superficial. Superficiality leads nowhere. Deep thoughts lead to goodness, to art, to enterprise, to important construction, to extraordinary discovery.

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AE: What is your message to the youth, the next generation?

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GP: Be curious. Never believe your teachers. They teach to you what they learned when they were young, so it’s not valuable for you. School, in general, is rarely interesting. The best school is life—the street, values that we usually call vulgar but they are the masterpieces of our time—Burroughs said that, and it’s still very valuable. If you have an opportunity to read The Divine Comedy, you will realize how many things are very actual. That is the source of every modest work I do.