In 2005, Tomaso was invited by C. Severi (IUAVUniversity in Venice) to deliver a lecture to students of architecture and design. He was asked to speak about his work process and give insights into how an artist thinks and works.
This is the transcript of the second lecture of the two-part lecture series. You can read the Italian version here.
Venetian lecture #2
From inspiration to the work itself
In dreams begin responsibilities…
W.B. Yeats
a) A few years ago, a colleague made me promise that I would never recount those which are called “the secrets of the trade”, and today I have every intention of keeping that promise. As you can see, this will pose quite tight limits on my little conference. And therefore, in recounting the journey, from the first confused intuition that “this should be told” (that which the romantics have always liked to call inspiration) to the finished work (the artwork), I’ll start with this: don’t expect to hear me say everything. Not only because there’s always a very personal part put in public in our profession, and one shouldn’t exaggerate with confessions, but also because I will deliberately hide parts, also important ones, of this journey to protect the work from a very narrow interpretation. In fact, I strongly and passionately believe that my way of reading what I do is only one, perhaps authoritative, but just one, of the possible ways. A lot of times, I have heard beautiful and surprising opinions about my work that have shone a completely different light on them, and every time I have felt that the work has grown in stature and depth under the rough caresses of these new interpretations. With the passing of years, this has become a kind of method: at times I detach from a work, things that would have gone well in it in order to leave for the viewer more space to maneuver, in order to see in their own way that which I have done in my way. In the last hundred years, many colleagues have used similar techniques and there are various reasons for it (historical, sociological, political). I want to give you just one example: many titles of works hide more than what they state; at times, the artist develops a kind of virtuosity in giving rather narrative titles to works made up of a couple of lines, a speck of color on a piece of vintage wood, an action just mentioned, just documented by a photo. At times, they are magnificent works, and at times have even more beautiful titles. And then, who can say with conviction that they know how to reconstruct the stages of a mental process? There are simply (and banally) a lot of things that I don’t know of myself and of my work, and I can’t recount these things for sure… moreover, the question is even more complicated by the fact that I use techniques that are very different from each other, and even for this, over the years, I have made a method: if, at the end of the process that initiates inside my mind and that lands on something visible, there is a design or an installation or a performance (or all of these things together, or a new technique) I cannot know it, and this uncertainty is perhaps the aspect that I like the most about the work I do.
b) That about which I can and want to speak instead is the rapport between the first intuition and the final work, and in order to do so, the first thing I’ll do is to show you the result of the process “2 foto del Lusitania” (2 photos of Lusitania). It was one of my last works, but I’ve been thinking about it for at least 2 years. The title is “Lusitania, the captain’s dinner” (Lusitania was a British transatlantic ship that was sunk by a German torpedo in 1915. It was a greater disaster than that of Titanic; almost 1400 people died). In my journal from 2004, I found this phrase: Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti. The photos of Rauschenberg: when you think you’ve got everything under control, disaster and ruin are about to take you to windward. As you can see, the problem is that of representing a state of quiet, but in way that makes you imagine a subsequent negative development. I remember well (I believe now that I remember well) that I left from the exhibition with the idea of working on this theme. There are many examples of solutions to this problem in the history of art. This photo is n. 5 (1969) by Richard Serra; like in many of his sculptures, everything is in absolutely precarious equilibrium, and only the enormous weight of the material allows the work to remain standing and lets he who sees it imagine the ruin that the fall of all that steel would lead to. This other (photo) work is the French Window at Collioure (1914) by Matisse (precisely he, who said, “he who paints should cut out his tongue”…). The quality of the photo is very low, but if you’ve seen the painting in Paris at the Pompidou Museum, maybe you’ll agree with me: the inside of the room (that you can almost not see) seems to want that the menacing outside world, almost dark, enters and breaks an equilibrium that’s become unbearable. As the last one, I’ll show you (photo) what is according to me the most moving and disturbing of my examples: the two embracing figures of Dosso Dossi (1524), divided in half between two states: stillness (with ominous foreboding) and fear. The two subjects are very close, but distanced by their respective and opposing sentiments. Dosso was probably working here on one of his most dear themes: the double rapport painting/sculpture and instant/temporal sequence, but it seems to me that the painting also perfectly illustrates our theme for today. As for my part, I started with making a series of sketches (photo); I also wanted to start painting again after 10 years. After a while, I realized that, without understanding why, the sketches were being filled by water and air (photo). Said like this, it seems strange, but it was as if a tide was rising and I should be doing something (about it). There is a beautiful legend, that of King Cnut, which talks about a proud sovereign who commands the tide to stop and finds himself soaked and humiliated. There’s no need to try and stop natural phenomena, rising tides or thoughts that want to find a way for themselves, if one doesn’t want to get oneself ridiculed like that King Cnut. However, I didn’t have an idea about why things unfolded this way and I was bringing to the final result the installation that I showed you at the beginning, until I hadn’t turned back to the phrase I had written on the photos of Rauschenberg. That expression “to windward” is the hidden key, its maritime origin foreshadows and contains the entire finished work, but I realize it only now while I write these notes.
My Russian colleagues, who consider the fields of arts and ethics inseparable, always insist on the sincerity of the work (“creating sincere works means living without reticence”, says Igor Shirshkov). That which I very modestly try to do is to make the very origin of a work resurface from the profound dark where it lies, a movement, which is the inverse of that of the captain of Lusitania, who is having dinner and doesn’t know yet about that water which already rises around him and which will enwrap around him and drag him to the depths, along with his ship…