The Brooklyn Rail

Widely regarded as an elusive multidisciplinary artist who traverses abstraction, figuration, photography and performance, Lucio Pozzi defies easy categorization. Throughout his six-decade career, his art has thwarted conventional art-historical analysis and sidestepped trends in critical art theory. While his work is related to Minimalism, Arte Povera, Fluxus, geometric abstraction, and Expressionism, he has cultivated a unique visual vocabulary. Pozzi is guided by the paradigm he calls “The Inventory Game,” a conceptual instrument that helps liberate him from dogma, from pre-established rules, and allows him access to infinite tools for making art. “No rules but tools,” is a favorite quote. The through-line of his extraordinarily diverse oeuvre is a firm belief in the infinite possibilities of painting. The Italian-born artist from Milan spent decades in New York City and navigated the burgeoning downtown art scene of the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond—a denizen of the avant-garde milieu of the period. He was one of the catalysts for the birth of the influential journal October in the mid-1970s, before launching the edgy culture magazine New Observations in the eighties. Today, Pozzi divides his time between studios in Hudson, New York and Valeggio, Italy. To mark his ninetieth birthday, Pozzi is being honored this year with exhibitions in Europe and the United States, including a survey of his abstract works at the Magazzino Italian Art Museum in Cold Spring, New York.

David Ebony (Rail): Lucio, your exhibition at the Magazzino, the museum for Italian Art in Cold Spring, New York, is about to open. This show is very special for you in several ways. First, it’s a survey that marks your ninetieth year; and you have had a long career. But the exhibition focuses only on your abstract works. Can you tell us how you feel about that?

Lucio Pozzi: I am happy about it because I did not want to do yet another exhibition of everything all together. Since the 1980s, I’ve done several retrospective shows around the world, in which all my various types of works were shown together—so-called abstractions, figurative works, paintings, and sculpture. The Magazzino idea to show only abstract works seemed fresh. Anyhow, I feel that my abstract works imply all the others. I remember one day, talking with James Bishop, I said, “Basically all art is realistic.” And he answered by saying—not really to challenge me, but to concur—“Yes, art is all abstract.”

Rail: Let’s go back to the beginning and talk about your upbringing in Italy, your youth, and your eventual attraction to art—how you became an artist.

Pozzi: I was born into a wealthy family and was expected to become a big businessman in Milan. At one point, right after World War II, my parents divorced. Theirs was one of very few divorces granted by a judge in Turin before the new constitution was signed, which again eliminated divorce from Italian law. Not long after, my mother met a British sculptor, Michael Noble, who had initially come to Italy with the British Army during the Allied advance. He returned to Italy; they started living together and eventually married. I was a very unhappy teenager and unable to study. But when Michael Noble entered my life, I discovered that modern art existed. I was interested in architecture and design up until then.

Rail: Did you have a good relationship with him? Did he take you under his wing and nurture your interests?

Pozzi: He and my mother rented a villa on the sea near Genoa. He had transported there a big piece of marble to make a sculpture. The first time I met him, he traced an oval outline with some chalk on the marble, gave me a scalpel and a hammer, and said, “Now start making a hole here.” So we started making the sculpture.

Rail: How old were you?

Pozzi: I was probably fifteen or sixteen. That opened up a whole new world for me, and I took to it with a passion. He showed me how to experiment with paint. At one point, he had me arrange some steel pieces on the gridded cement floor of a garage to show me how composition can happen, then he had them cast in bronze. I still have the cast in my studio in Italy. He saw that I was very serious about art. I met his colleagues, the artists who were showing in Galleria il Milione in Milan, a most important gallery at the time. The gallerist who himself was a painter, Gino Ghiringhelli, came every month to my bedroom to look at my paintings and drawings. One day, Michael put a plastic cast of a skeleton in my room and said, “You must draw one of these bones every day.” He also gave me a medical anatomy book to learn about the body. There was also music, many visitors, and models; he smoked a lot, and was a heavy drinker—standard behavior of British eccentrics of the period. But it was all fascinating to me, since I’d grown up miserable with the bourgeois environment around me. My mother, though, was a rebel against her surroundings, and I followed suit.

Rail: So your mother was also supportive of your interest in art?

Pozzi: She felt that I should have a more reliable vocation than art. She was probably torn. She was always involved in culture in some way. After the war she had organized a lending library of all the books from England and France that had been censored during fascism. Through it, she’d met lots of writers and journalists, and I was quite taken by this atmosphere.

Rail: And you had only one other sibling, your late brother. He was autistic. You said he had a big influence on you.

Pozzi: My brother, who was a year younger, had a gigantic influence on me. He was—we used to say, “handicapped.” He was probably born with hydrocephalus. The doctors saved his life by removing liquid from his spine, which in 1936 was an experimental procedure in Italy. He retained mobility difficulties, and there were some signs of autism. He was very intelligent. He invented a whole parallel fantasy world; this world was made of frogs. He wrote all the time and was quite erudite. No one knew how much he knew. I think of my painting as being the parallel world to his frogs—to what frogs were for him.

Rail: How did he interact with the rest of your family?

Pozzi: There was quite a bit of prejudice. Everyone patronized him, saying things like, “How is poor Marcello?” Or “Oh, he has improved.” That would make me furious. I became very defensive. He and Michael both contributed to my desperate search for freedom. Michael wrote in 1964: “I am breaking a habit that appears to have become a general rule: the rule of unity, that narrow unity designed to leave the observer with a simple and easily classifiable impression.” He wanted to follow instead the multiple lines of his art. He was one of the first rebels against what I now call “Consumer Orthodoxy.” I found that my personal experience echoes the culture at large. In my art, writing, and teaching, I try to offer an example for others, giving courage to artists who want to explore diversity in their art, with all due respect for those who with authentic passion restrict their field of endeavor.

Rail: You said you weren’t a good student in boarding school. But did you continue your interest in art while in school? Or was that not part of your curriculum?

Pozzi: It was not really part of my curriculum. Mother brought art reproductions to post on the walls of my room. The only baccalaureate exam I passed brilliantly was on the history of art. I was asked about Michelangelo’s technique in sculpture, and I just described what I saw Michael Noble do.

Rail: So you studied art and learned about modern and contemporary art on your own.

Pozzi: Yes. I tried to find books on art, but I studied modernism later, mostly when I was appointed to become the Professor of History of Modern Art and Architecture for the Cooper Union in New York. It was a compulsory course. I stopped making my art for over a year and studied what I needed to teach.

Rail: But earlier you studied at the architecture university in Rome?

Pozzi: I was registered at that school, but I passed only one exam because I read in English the Stones of Venice by John Ruskin, a book appointed by the professor. It influenced me because Ruskin was supporting the very core of creativity that I was seeking. I also befriended some older students who were followers of a senior, Manfredo Tafuri, a person who became a major historian of architecture, and director of the History Department at the University of Venice. He was keen on stressing context in architecture. My fellow students all became historians rather than architects.

Rail: So when and how did you decide that New York City was the place you ought to be? What drew you to the US?

Pozzi: It’s very simple. I was divorcing my first wife, the writer Dacia Maraini. After our son was stillborn, our marriage started to fall apart. The man who later became her partner, the well-known writer Alberto Moravia, offered to introduce me to a seminar program in the US. Basically, he was getting rid of me, but he did me a great favor. He pulled me out of a marriage that was no longer working, helped me escape from my family and everything else, and gave me an opportunity to build my own life in America.

Rail: You first went to Harvard University?

Pozzi: Thanks to Moravia, I attended the Harvard International Summer Seminar. I was the painter from Italy. There was a poet from Sweden, and a critic from Turkey in the humanities section. The seminar was Henry Kissinger’s way to meet journalists, economists, and young politicians from all over the world, especially people who would stay in their profession regardless of what government changes happen in their countries.

Rail: But you decided to settle in New York.

Pozzi: In New York, I walked from 125th Street down to Chinatown, collecting advertisements for lofts. Within a few days, I rented a little loft on Second Avenue and Fourth Street. It so happened that in the same building there were also two other artists: the sculptor Lyman Kipp, and the painter Jim Dine.

Rail: And that was when you first met the painters Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason, who became close friends?

Pozzi: I first met them in Rome. We exchanged apartments. I had an apartment in Rome, which, of course, I wasn’t using anymore during my divorce. Emily and Wolf stayed there when they were in Italy, and I used their apartment in New York. This was in the early 1960s.

Rail: So you were living in New York and already teaching at Cooper Union by then?

Pozzi: No. First, I found that one-room loft on Fourth Street and Second Avenue. I shared it with my brother-in-law, Mohamed Melehi, a painter from Morocco. We shared this loft for quite a few months, I think all winter. And then his future wife came—Dacia’s sister—and my future wife came, a painter from Boston, Susanna Tanger, whom I had met while in the seminar at Harvard. It was impossible for the four of us to share this place, so Mohamed went to find a loft elsewhere, and Susanna and I moved to a loft on Avenue B and Sixth Street. Teaching came later.

Rail: What was your involvement in the art world like at that time?

Pozzi: I was just painting and trying to bring around my slides to the galleries. Mohamed knew more people than I knew because he was from a little town near Tangier. In Morocco, he had met lots of the American diaspora. He would always ask me to join him when he visited people like curator Henry Geldzahler, the architect Dick Beringer, writer and editor Elizabeth Baker, and others. Through Mohamed, I met the printer and teacher Bob Blackburn, who became a great friend and protector of mine. Through Mohamed I also met people of the Fluxus group, and Nam June Paik. Dick Higgins would come to our parties. Years later, I did a long interview with Nam June when I was gathering information for my opera Machunas, done with composer Frank J.Oteri. At one noisy party somewhere, I got into a heavy discussion with Joseph Kosuth, screaming about the value of painting. Surely, he doesn’t remember!

Rail: Eventually, you relocated to SoHo before it became the hub of the contemporary art world.

Pozzi: After Susanna and I married, we moved from one place to another and finally found a loft south of Houston that stretched all the way from Broadway to Mercer Street, which had been renovated by the art dealer Charles Cowles. The painter David Lund introduced me to the Cooper Union administrators with the possibility of becoming the Professor of History of Modern Art and Architecture, which I wound up doing.

Rail: Is that when you gave the lecture on Duchamp and Morandi? Was this kind of presentation influenced by Fluxus performance? What influence did Fluxus have on you at this time?

Pozzi: I had already met a few Fluxus members. Among them, Al Hansen, the guy who made all kinds of collages with Hershey chocolate bar wrappings—because, you know, the brand name incorporates “he” and “she,” “her” and “hers.” I was interested in Fluxus, especially in the Annual Avant Garde Festival. I shared with Fluxus and Arte Povera a critique of what I call “ballast art,” the status quo, and especially the fallacies painting was burdened with. The more the ballast of rhetoric could be shed, the more painting would become itself, I believed. Of course, some people involved in the critique stopped short and didn’t go further than denying any value to painting.

Rail: Were you aware of Arte Povera in Italy, or when you came here?

Pozzi: When I first came to New York, in 1962, I didn’t know Arte Povera yet. Earlier, in Italy, whenever John Cage would do a concert, I would go. He was a major influence. Another influence was the Giorgio Strehler productions of Bertolt Brecht, a theater very much influenced by director Erwin Piscator—or parallel to Piscator, “truth to the material” kind of theater. Whether they knew it or not Arte Povera artists were developing ideas along those lines. It’s a whole trend—from Constructivism through Bauhaus, Piscator and the Total Theater—the totality of culture without specialization. Arte Povera’s respect for materials comes from the Arts and Crafts movement, which had been ahead of it all. I learned from teaching that the Arts and Crafts movement was much more influential on modern art than we think. That movement is all about respect for materials and the use of materials for what they are. Arts and Crafts is often looked down upon because it’s supposed to be decorative. Decoration began to be despised during the rebellion against the exaggerations of Art Nouveau. But decoration is very important in art. I consider many of my works to be decorative, and some Arte Povera works, too. And that’s a compliment.

Rail: So you began teaching at Cooper Union with the lecture about Duchamp and Morandi. What made you connect them?

Pozzi: When I was invited to lecture, I knew it was my test—kind of an audition. I was in America with a tourist visa, so I could not work legally. But despite this, the school gave me a chance. I knew the appointment was for a professorship of the history of modern art and architecture, and I was in disagreement with most of the things that were written about modern art and architecture. So I searched for something that could represent my feelings. I looked at the birth dates of Duchamp and Morandi and they’re very similar. There’s a dichotomy in the whole century of modern art, and I thought that it could be ideally represented by Duchamp and Morandi, who seemed to be opposites. The polarities of the modern oxymoron. I sense something else, though—the Duchampians will hate me for saying it—but both artists cultivated a personal sensibility. Duchamp is regarded as being against it; he said he sought indifference, but if you compare him and his followers, he had a touch the others don’t have. It was unique. When he places the found objects, there’s always a personal touch that he adds to it. It’s never just a found object. This was one of the considerations that prompted me to analyze Duchamp and Morandi. I followed them step by step—for instance, Duchamp was publicly active and international, Morandi had a very reserved life limited to his little village.

Rail: I think that the dichotomy you mention also reflects your own artistic personality. Not only in the sense that Duchamp was also an expatriate living in New York, but Morandi connects to your Italian heritage—it unites the two very clearly. And at the time of the lecture, your artistic enterprise was just about to begin. In the late sixties and early seventies, you became more active in the art scene. You started to show your work frequently.

Pozzi: I started showing in the mid-sixties, at a co-operative gallery, New York Six, on St. Mark’s Place. I exhibited works that I called Hard Edge Baroque. At Cooper Union, I made the acquaintance of Hans Haacke. I admired his work, but he was suspicious of painting. It was stimulating, though, to discuss certain things with him, and we became friends. I also met the dealer John Weber at this time, and he interested me in his gallery. I never expected him to be interested in my work, but he asked to visit my studio. At the time, I was renovating a studio in a building on Greene Street that my mother invested in. I had little time, caught between teaching and family life, and all kinds of problems. Anyway, I was making very simple paintings that were a kind of meditation for me. John Weber came to see this work while I was still in the turmoil of building the studio and offered me a show. Soon after, he introduced me to art dealers Gian Enzo Sperone, and to Konrad Fischer; this was my entry into the international art world.

Rail: The paintings you refer to were part of the Level Group?

Pozzi: At the beginning I called them A-Z Group, diptychs made with subtly differentiated grey colors. One panel had brush strokes that were applied vertically, and the other panel had brushstrokes with the same gray applied horizontally. They were acrylic and quite small. These were in my first show at John Weber Gallery.

Rail: And you started to publish your writings at this time?

Pozzi: I was writing articles for a magazine in Italy called Bolaffi Arte, whose director had invited me to write. And I was writing under a pseudonym that had the same initials as Lucio Pozzi. It was “PL” instead of “LP.” I invented a name for myself, Peter Licht. “Peter” means “stone,” right? And “Pozzi” means “wells.” Normally, wells were built with stone. And “Lucio” means “light,” and “Licht” means “light” in German. Peter Licht wrote big articles; one was about Land Art, another about reductivist painting. I also wrote articles about a few collectors, including one about Herb and Dorothy Vogel, with photographs by Gianfranco Gorgoni. Bolaffi Arte chose him for the piece, and he then became a photographer of art—I think probably because of this article. While I was writing this piece, I befriended the Vogels, and they came to my studio. Eventually, they acquired more than four hundred of my works.

Rail: And when did you begin to do performances?

Pozzi: I had a show at Galleria dell’Ariete in Milan in 1971. It was quite a prominent gallery, showing Robert Rauschenberg, and Arakawa, among others. I asked the gallerist Beatrice Monti if we could use an empty storefront space that was next to the gallery. She contacted the landlord, and I got access to this space. I did a couple of performances and planned a few installations there. The first performance was Paperswim (1971). I found out that newspapers threw out yards and yards of newsprint, because they have to quickly change the rolls of the newsprint going into the machine. I collected these yards of unprinted white paper, and I crumpled them in piles eight feet high. I dressed in a leotard with blinders to symbolize the blindness to the world as the painter concentrates. Instead of painting on the material, I dove into it. I would emerge like Venus from the sea every two minutes, and with a marker would mark on the paper. There were morning marks and evening marks—the performance lasted eight hours; the performer was called “Sylo Varrése,” an anagram of “Rrose Sélavy.” I performed Paperswim three times. The last one was at Dia Center for the Arts in New York on Mercer Street.

Rail: So back to New York.

Pozzi: When I was showing with John Weber, I got to know people who understood or agreed with what I was doing. I got to know artists Gordon Matta-Clark, Richard Nonas, and Jene Highstein, as well as Suzie Harris, Ree Morton—all the people whose work I respected, and who were circling around what was then The Clocktower. I became part of the group and was one of the only painters—painting was not very much accepted then, but they accepted me. What linked us was my interest in The Clocktower site itself, in the environment, which came from my architectural studies in Rome, and dovetailed with their interest in the context of art.

Rail: And you were doing site-specific work in PS1?

Pozzi: First in The Clocktower, and then at PS1, in Long Island City. The Clocktower director and future PS1 director Alanna Heiss brought all of us to take part in the opening exhibition of PS1, in 1976. I eventually had twelve shows at PS1—performances, installations, and I was also included in group shows organized by guest curators.

Rail: Then this is around the time you were teaching at Princeton University?

Pozzi: I was teaching everywhere. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe—who had written an interesting review of my exhibition at John Weber—became a friend, and he was teaching at the Princeton art program. He suggested me to the director of the program James Seawright. I started teaching a course there. I saw these copy machines all around, and I said to Jeremy, “ Why don’t we publish a little ad hoc magazine?” He agreed. Then, while we were developing ideas for the magazine, he told me that writers and editors Annette Michelson and Rosalind Krauss wanted to leave Artforum. They accepted our invitation to join the new magazine venture. The whole thing snowballed very quickly. We had meetings. I designed the graphics, and Annette Michelson came up with the name, October magazine. We began to explore which writers to invite and topics for articles, with an emphasis on art theory, psychoanalysis, and politics. I was feeling overburdened by the project because at the same time my art was taking off and I was exhibiting all over the world. I could not cope with it all, so I resigned before the first installment of the journal came out in 1976. They used my basic cover design and my graphics, though.

Rail: You continued your relationship with Rosalind Krauss for a time, and she wrote about your work in her essay “Notes on the Index,” which became part of her 1985 book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths—a book that had a big impact on me in college.

Pozzi: Yes, it was a brilliant analysis of my work. But as I started to exhibit more, and show various types of works in many places, the October magazine people disapproved. While I was showing monochrome, meditative diptychs at John Weber and elsewhere, I was also painting landscape watercolors—three of which we have incorporated in the show at Magazzino. A friend of mine, the shamanic poet critic and gallerist Mario Diacono, Italian in origin and American now, saw early on that I had this urge to also represent images and figures alongside abstract compositions and encouraged the expansion of my practice. When Krauss republished her essay in French, she added a disclaimer to express her disappointment about my evolution. An associate of hers, the writer Yve-Alain Bois, published a critique about the two main deviant trends: Stellism and Pozzism. The basic complaint of some critics was that I was—what was the slogan at the time?—“all over the place.”

Rail: And what’s wrong with being all over the place? Isn’t that “radical pluralism”? Around this time, you were developing some of the ideas of “radical pluralism” with poet and critic David Shapiro.

Pozzi: I had many conversations with David Shapiro, and with Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, sometimes the three of us. I had illustrated several of Shapiro’s books, produced by various publishers. The idea of radical pluralism came out in writing later in the seventies, maybe early 1980s. I proposed a related show to Kirk Varnedoe, chief curator of MoMA at the time, who was asking artists to curate exhibitions; but he could not do it. The show was called Concurrencies, and was picked up by Grace Borgenicht Gallery and co-curated by its director the painter Mac Chambers. They had the power to borrow important works. I included about thirty artists—starting from Picasso onwards, including Mondrian and Ellsworth Kelly. We paired two works by the artists in different or contradictory forms—for instance, an abstract work with a flower drawing of Kelly’s. We paired a Cubist print next to a figure drawing by Picasso. I asked David Shapiro to contribute a sentence, and that’s when he wrote of “radical pluralism” as a force in contemporary culture.

Rail: The art world in general expects artists to have an easily identifiable style or create similar works over and over. You appear to have an anti-style style. In fact, though, you have your own consistent methodology, the Inventory Game.

Pozzi: As I look at the images of my work on my computer, I realize that my stylistic diversity is not so wide at all. There’s something that connects the works, sometimes almost too much for my taste. I wouldn’t know how to define it. And maybe defining it would betray the feeling. Tagging artists not within a style, but within a formula results in what I call the competent yawn of our visual culture. There are wonderful artists around, but the way the culture tries to corral us sometimes goes against the spirit and the intensity of the individual works. Often this happens through classifications which unfortunately get attached to us. This attempt to corral art is something many artists resent, and I’m one of them. Artists should pursue their ways independently, whether they’re narrow or wide.

The Inventory Game is a grid in which I placed randomly all kinds of concepts materials or processes. They are the ingredients one may make art with. The concept is that any work of art is a cocktail of ingredients and quality comes from how they are mixed. It is an answer to the rigid parameters that modern culture has landed in, and it’s a way for me—offered also to others—to reconceive of art in a way that does not pre-determine one’s style, originality, novelty, or consistency, but lets style, novelty, originality, and consistency emerge from the doing, like water from the sand. The Inventory Game is an instrument for that, and it has been very useful. By now, at my age, it has led to feeling as free as I’ve ever felt in my whole life. I breathe into art like I’ve never done before. It is an instrument that liberates me from strictures, from dogma, and from pre-established rules of making art. It allows instead access to infinite tools for making art. No rules but tools.

In the Magazzino show, for instance, I felt that there are lots of light things or small things, and I really felt a visceral need for something heavy: something big leaning on the wall (not hanging on the wall), to be placed in a far corner. I went around looking and chose two big heavy beams and painted half of each with blue, green, red and yellow, leaving the other half raw as it came from the lumberyard. I now have this sculpture, installation, or whatever you call it, of two heavy beams leaning one on the other (Lean on Me [2024]). It’s something tender, like a couple, with all the psychological associations you want. I left some dirt and the scratches below on the raw wood. I thought this could also be an interesting echo of Arte Povera, with its respect for natural materials, or the materials unaltered. Of course, for me, this comes from the Arts and Crafts tradition, through the Bauhaus, and onward. It is a matter of ceaselessly expanding the languages of painting through which I discover what I don’t know. Jumping in the ineffable unknown allows me to follow rather than will the flux of my thoughts and feelings.

Rail: And you’ve written that “Viewers today have never been so free to create their own gaze instead of depending on the canons of others,” including your own.

Pozzi: Yes. The viewers mirror my doing and find their own inspiration independently from mine. I work with instruments, not canons. “They’re not rules, they’re tools,” as I’ve said. By now, I am able to activate them automatically, and incredible things happen. Often, they lead me far beyond whatever I might have decided in the beginning to do, because the process leads me astray, and toward new discoveries.