|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Gaetano Pesce: Renaissance Craftsman
| Article
# : |
19876 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1992 |
1,588 Words |
| Author
: |
Karen S. Chambers
Karen S. Chambers is a craft writer, critic, and curator
currently based in New York. |
Gaetano Pesce - architect and furniture designer, graphic designer and artist--talks passionately about art and design today. His aesthetic battle cry is innovation--new ideas expressed in new mediums--but he grounds this in the tradition of art not for art's sake. Pesce, fifty-three, speaks eloquently and intensely about the visual environment we are creating; "I think critics, in general, have forgotten what art always was….Art always had a social function. Then there was another function, which was much more private…Art always had that double function: one directly satisfying the need of the client, who was the church or the state or a rich family; the other function, the private capacity of the artist to transform the need of the client into something that was artistic and with cultural value.
"Then something happened to this tradition. Slowly, the social function of art disappeared. The artist became a person working in private, following his or her need to make, to express culture. [Today] there is nothing interesting coming from the art world because there is a big crisis. Why? Because artists don't know what they have to do…[Art has become so private that] the artist is able to communicate the content of a certain work of art only to someone who is in the same moment looking for the same thing…. Today, we go around Soho, we go around in the Beaubourg Center, and we look for modern art. It's not there that we have to look. It's in maybe showrooms, maybe in some industrial designers who are pushing their jobs in a new direction. There is the new expression."
Pesce was born in La Spezia, a port city in northern Italy, studied architecture at the University of Venice, and worked in Paris before moving to New York, now his base of operations. He has taught at the school of Architecture at Cooper Union in New York, Domus Academy in Milan, and the Institute d'Architecture et d'Etudes Urbaines in Strasbourg, France. With studios in New York, Paris, Venice, Brazil, and Japan, Pesce travels constantly. It is not surprising that Pesce says, "I think we are in the world, and we are citizens of the world."
Pesce's career has encompassed making radical performance artworks as well as designing furniture from companies including B&B Italy, Knoll International in the United States, and VITRA International in Switzerland. In addition to designing an office building in Osaka, Japan, and private residences in France, he has made startling proposals for a new and more individualistic form of high rise in Sao Paolo and for an underground church in Manhattan. He is currently working on the interiors for the Osaka
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
