Performing
Textiles
GIOVANNI BONOTTO
I haven’t seen his business card yet. I know many things about him, but not what’s written on his business card, that limited space containing one’s professional image. While some people find it hard to fill all the space of the small rectangle, others simply don’t fit in the boundaries of a card or of a definition. And why even try? Definitions were created to simplify, but simplification is a limit and a vulgarization, fostering a superficial interpretation of things. Specificity implies complexity and interrelation, it requires space. Just think of the old workshop of a craftsman, which has now also become a marketplace, social space and photo set. However, even though it is now clear that a craftsman in the age of social networks “opens” a workshop to the world for commercial reasons, this does not automatically open up new horizons in terms of cultural enrichment.
Performing
Textiles
The challenge is for craft to meet art, for example, finding oneself on the “bridge” that allows a concept to extend itself. This has happened in the past, from Weimar to Gio Ponti, but it still emphasizes how the craftsman can – and must – also be an artist, someone who can combine abstraction and daily life. Giovanni Bonotto’s fabrics live, worn on the bodies of men and women around the world, yet they speak the same language as the avant-gardes of the past century who are honored in museums and galleries. The language of Fluxus, of John Cage’s silences and Yoko Ono’s performances.
Definitions were created to simplify, but simplification is a limit and a vulgarization, fostering a superficial interpretation of things.
○ What’s on your business card? While I was preparing this interview, my first hurdle was that I didn’t know how to address you. Would I be meeting an artist or a craftsman?
In 2015, Bonotto S.p.a. was among the artists selected for the Venice pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale. We created an installation, in which I assembled fabrics from nomadic cultures all over the world, imagining myself as a nomad as well. To do that, I spent years trying to discover and learn the secrets of textile manufacturing in tribes from the most remote provinces of Japan, where the masters taught me their techniques, to the Argentinian Pampa, where I met the gauchos. I always try to delve into nature, to keep these traditions from disappearing over the years. For example, there is a very important tradition among the Berbers, where the parents offer a traditional blanket to their children as a rite of their passage to adulthood. Consider that, for a nomad, the blanket is the first home. In order to be accepted by this Moroccan people, I spent one day and one night inside my car. In the end, they were moved by compassion and let me into one of their tents, where I was able to see the yarn being spun for one of these special blankets, which can take up to 5 years to weave. Back to your question: am I a craftsman? Am I an artist? I don’t know how to answer.
○ Your hybrid position can be a strength, but at the same time it can cause insecurity, make you feel different. Has this lack of classification ever been a problem for you?
My father Luigi has always been considered an eccentric figure among the industrialists in Vicenza, as he was more interested in art than in business. One year, for Christmas, he asked me to go to the train station to pick up a dear friend of his, Gustav Metzger, and bring him to the annual dinner of the Federation of Italian Employers. I didn’t know him, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Then I was pretty disappointed when I saw a man with a long unkempt beard, no coat, no shoes, just a sweater and a shirt, with slippers on his feet – on a cold winter day – coming towards me holding two plastic bags full of stuff – his luggage. I could not understand why I had to bring a hobo
to the Christmas dinner, even more so as this was in the 1980s, the age of yuppies and consumerism. We reached the dinner, but left soon: when my father welcomed Gustav with a hug, people looked disgusted. That’s when I understood a lot of things about him, and about the importance of our uniqueness. Of being atypical.
○ Going back in time to the 1970s, when you were a child, what was it like to have so many artists around in your house, as extreme and radical as avant-garde artists of the time could be?
The artists who visited our home were a bother, because when they were there I became invisible. My soccer field was ruined when someone turned it into a vegetable garden. John Cage practiced his music and played the gong at 3 a.m., but I thought he was crazy and annoying because I had to wake up early for school the next day. I also didn’t like to spend my afternoons with that Japanese lady who gave me tofu instead of my usual snacks. I didn’t care if she was Yoko Ono, I just wanted to be like all the other kids, nothing more and nothing less. What is more, these crazy people didn’t even make me more popular with girls, because at that time in Molvena this was not seen as something as cool as it would be today.
Over the years, art destructured my family’s business administration, and this is one of the reasons why our company is one of only two in our industry that were able to survive the crisis.
○ The years of economic crisis must have been very hard, both on the personal and professional front. Yet they also were a turning point for you. How did you experience this?
Over the years, art destructured my family’s business administration, and this is one of the reasons why our company is one of only two in our industry that were able to survive the crisis. The Veneto region was rich in satellite activities, including spinning mills, yarn factories and finishing plants, but they all disappeared. Even the Conte wool mill, the first to be founded in Italy over 280 years ago; the Ferritin wool mill, founded by the first man to fly from Rome to Tokyo, had the same fate. This was due to the rush to automation: we did not realize how technology enslaves us. It reduces the costs, but also eliminates details and nuances. After thirty years of skimming off and smoothing things over, our craft was hollowed out. After that, the Asians came: they bought machines that were newer and better than ours, they were willing to work more and for less money, and that was the final blow. That’s why you will see looms from 1956 in the factory, not the newest. We survived by looking at this world in a different way, through the eyes of imagination. I think was also a matter of chance, an alignment of the planets, and something happened that could not be planned.
○ Who is your hero?
I have two idols. One is Leonardo Da Vinci, someone who became an artist because he wanted to paint what couldn’t be painted. And he did it by combining art and science; this is where his technical-scientific greatness lies: knowing how to paint air. You can see it in the Virgin of the Rocks, where the Virgin Mary holds down a page of the Bible she is reading, lifted by the beating of the archangel’s wing. My other idol is Dante who, in the third verse of the third canto of the third cantica, says “Trying and trying again”: this is the key of Italian Renaissance. Inside the factory, we try to paint what cannot be painted by trying and trying again, and that’s why we create fabrics that are not shapeless but maieutic materials that have their own soul and life.
○ They say that art always has a message. What is the message of the fabrics woven on the 1956 looms?
Marcel Duchamp taught my father that life itself is a masterpiece – to live one’s life is a masterpiece. Whenever they got together, they would play chess without talking. Just by playing, they exchanged a lot of information. For the Fluxus group, the game of chess is a key matrix, as it is seen as action, a happening. Bonotto S.p.a. is the masterpiece, a performance that is documented in our library, which hosts one of the world’s richest collections of texts on art. This is something that my dad never talks about, because it is part of his vision. My brother and I are just his slaves, entrusted to light the fire each morning. ●
