I've been talking with Ivano for about 10 years. I had just moved from London to Milan and I was editing Boiler Magazine while -known as "Dumbo"- was running "King Kong", the street couture shop where the Milanese Underground Intellighenzia was meeting up. Ivano meant trouble, dreams and fun. In 2003 we managed to upset the gallerist Franco Noero with Dumbo's intervention on "We Are Animals" Boiler issue. Noero couldn't believe we had just vandalised Henrik Hakansson's pages on Boiler with his graffiti. For us it was a statement of independence from "the system". Another sweet memory is when- in 2006 -he collaborated with Barry McGee for Beautiful Losers at Triennale di Milano.The outcast intervenes on the Institutional walls…Once he left to NYC we kept our dialogue alive and kicking and once he "became" Ivano Atzori -the artist- I felt it was all coming together: the wilderness of family life in the country, his new approach and our set of conversations.
This is one of those.
A conversation about Independence with Ivano Atzori
IMV: Dear Ivano, define independence.
I.Atzori: I like to consider independence from a distance, from an ancestral point of view. Independence, first off, requires a continuous and deep questioning of one’s self. It means an examination of our own actions. It means living intensely. It means having an identity, respecting your resources, exercising your freedom. Independence is rebellion but also intellectual awareness. Not being controlled, not serving anyone else. But let us not forget that independence is also the power to decide to depend on others for our existence and belonging.
The major obstacle, in my opinion, is accepting that an individual thought must, I repeat, must then develop into a collective thought in order to come into being.
IMV: What drives you to focus on this issue?
I.Atzori: Well, not so long ago I read a book of collected letters of Jackson Pollock to his family – all from the period before he became well known and respected. His words were rich with struggle, hope, confusion, breakdowns and break-ups, loneliness, dreams and frustration.
The video that you liked and ended up writing about – GRAVITY – meant all that, in my mind. A state of being, phases. We seem to always give very little credit to our feelings, but being independent is also about examining yourself more deeply and more constantly.
IMV: You refer to slavery. Are we slaves in the 21st century [First World]? Whose slaves are we? What do we fight for?
I.Atzori: Yes, I alluded to slavery. Of course even our world is full of slaves and servants. I could simplify my answer by listing the objects I have in my house and their dubious origins that remind us that someone, somewhere is deprived of their freedom in order to “liberate” us. But I’d rather take this question in another direction. I’ve often felt, and at times still feel, a slave to my own words and actions. And more recently I’ve begun working on knowing and appreciating myself without taking into account other people’s judgments or even my own. It isn’t easy.
I.Atzori: Yes, I alluded to slavery. Of course even our world is full of slaves and servants. I could simplify my answer by listing the objects I have in my house and their dubious origins that remind us that someone, somewhere is deprived of their freedom in order to “liberate” us. But I’d rather take this question in another direction. I’ve often felt, and at times still feel, a slave to my own words and actions. And more recently I’ve begun working on knowing and appreciating myself without taking into account other people’s judgments or even my own. It isn’t easy.
I consider it a true struggle. It’s never easy to admit to not knowing something, not being able to achieve something or even just not being interested in something. Today we’re all terrorized by the idea of showing who we really are. It seems that impartiality, neutrality and aloofness reign. We’re only prepared to say what we think about people and things that have already been judged by someone else we deem an authority. Our opinions are guaranteed; our considerations are piloted.
IMV: You’re talking about manipulation of thought. According to Chomsky, there are ten golden rules for manipulating the population through media (among which: the strategy of distraction; create problems then offer solutions; speak to the public as to a small child and encourage the public to be complacent, satisfied with mediocrity). Do you think there is an exit strategy from all this? What is your personal take?
I.Atzori: I don’t think there’s a global exit strategy, but I do believe in a personal exit strategy. Like I said before, the most difficult part is being able to transform an individual concept into a truly collective idea based on sharing and participating. To do this, we need to have a real sense of community and belonging. Each of us should be contributing, independently of what we get out of it, where we come from, what we do for a living. I talk about knowing and learning because if you don’t know the entity that you’re up against, their language and means and their strategies of power, how can you recognize when it’s being used against you? How can you begin to anticipate those processes and therefore stop yourself before you begin to fall in line, before it becomes second nature? Our country is fucked up now for this reason. In the last twenty years, people have been shut up and oppositional thought has been shut down. Our political leaders have stopped informing us, involving us in decisions, representing us – they’ve stopped leading us! And now we find ourselves in a state of numbing limbo – indifference, ignorance, distraction.
That said, I continue to be optimistic. In this period of my life, I’m concentrating on educating my children about the importance of feeling a sense of belonging, the need to contribute and having the courage to share something without necessarily looking at what they’ll receive from it, aside from self-satisfaction.
IMV:The art system is a consequence of the business world.
How do you feel about that? Where do you belong?
I.Atzori: If you’re referring to the fact that the art world is controlled by the market, then I admit, yes, it always has been and, yes, I find aspects of it disgusting.
But I think one of the healthiest things to do these days is to put aside the idea of being absolute, perfect or pure. We can get better, be better, in small steps by trying to make even the smallest “right choice”, even with all of our other misdeeds and flaws. Because, regardless of what part of your life they belong to, hasty, careless choices tend to bring terrible results.
It’s important for me, as an artist, to maintain my integrity, to stay aware of my own nature rather than talk about a world that isn’t mine. My idea of a career is comparable to an echo in time. I want to leave an evident and recognizable trace, which isn’t easy to package and sell, of course. I get labeled often as being an “artista indipendente”, which I guess I don’t mind. But independence can’t mean working without support of institutions, at least not in this field. I like to imagine that it can mean building a relationship where you and your work have the exact same value as that institution. It’s difficult, but I probably wouldn’t be so interested in insisting, if it were easy. Going back to the Pollock letters, I truly find myself in them: I’m scared, but my objective – as difficult as it may be – is clear.
IMV: Tell me about your recent work.
I.Atzori: I take note and remember and elaborate. That’s basically my process. It’s all very spontaneous, which I think isn’t very common.
Right now, there’s a lot of removal, conceptualizing, distancing ourselves from the true nature of the individual – this stick in the corner stands for the fluidity of time and all that crap. I try to keep my work focused on all the furtive things inside us, because I find there is still so much to say about it.
I.Atzori: I never intended to open a website; my wife convinced me. Kyre helps me constantly and often without receiving anything in turn aside from one of my occasional identity crises. I find her help fundamental to my existence. On my own, I wouldn’t be able to carry on like this; I probably wouldn’t have saved myself from that enticing and excessive life that was strangling me.
Now we live far away from everyone and everything, which poses an opposite problem. I think that having a presence (in that imaginary somewhere that is the web) is the right compromise for me to feel that I’m still alive and to give a certain rhythm to my work and to my life.
Publishing a new work on my site is a small victory. It means taking a breath and letting go.
There’s a big part of me that would have wanted to respond that the art world is terrible and shitty construction, and that the idea of independence is useless utopia. But simplistic answers are banal and that’s a mistake I’m working on correcting, gradually as it may be.
IMV: So we should consider the website as an important piece of your perfomance as an artist?
I.Atzori: I imagine my site as a vehicle to get someplace more important, more organic and, why not, more official. It’s definitely important for me in this phase of my life, though it’s difficult to say what that might mean. It’s a place, cold and flat as it may be, that helps me and that does me good. It’s always been fundamental for me have a place to create and externalize.
IMV: One of your recent performances inspired a sort of war of opinions on various art blogs and websites. Anonymous users posted comments of strong, negative statements and startlingly personal accusations. What does this sort of “conversation in the dark” mean to you? Do you think it can lead to a sort of artistic payoff?
I.Atzori: I’ve always believed, perhaps thanks to my vandalistic past, that the dark helps us be our true selves. Couples choose dimly lit restaurants for their first date, therapists draw the curtains in their offices, we only dare to dance in dark nightclubs, we pray in semi-darkness. So anonymous comments remind me of that protective dimness that we need on so many other important occasions. This is also a part of our common humanity, whether it’s good or bad.
But it is fascinating to analyze how many parts of ourselves are not completely free or understood or accepted. Again, this is one of those deep dark wells that I draw plenty of inspiration from.
The attempt with that performance piece, “House of an Alien”, was to shed some light, if you will, on the behaviors, visions, preferences and actions that make up our daily life and remain undisputed. I remember one anonymous comment in particular that said something like, “Enough about Ivano Atzori, he’s a junkie and his friends are all animals.” So that’s interesting – this guy knows me and I probably know him. Never too well, of course. We’re always devising new ways of avoiding scrutiny and staying in that euphemistic dark.
The artworks in this article are previously unpublished photographs from the series "Black Sheet"
Ivano Atzori web project : http://www.ivanoatzori.it
