Installation at Seno Gallery, Milano
The Hand-Made Ready-Mades of Cosimo Ricatto
by Arthur C. Danto
©2000

According to Aristotle, writing is to speech as speech is to thought. This means that any given word can exist in any of three modes: as thought, as sound, and as inscription.. By convention, a written word can stand for a spoken word, or a word in the silent speech of thought. The speech balloon of the everyday comic strip is a device hit upon by artists to convey spoken or thought words by means of written words. In this respect they were like the sub-titles in silent films -- lines of dialogue which appear between the images. When talking pictures were invented, the subtitle vanished (except for purposes of translation), and speech transpired in the same space in which the characters opened their mouths to talk. If the comic strip were animated, the characters too would exist in an atmosphere of spoken sounds. But in what we might call "still" comic strips, the balloon is a kind of cartouche, the shape of which conveyed to readers that though the written words occur in the same drawn space as the characters, they are understood as heard and not seen. Each balloon has a kind of stem, making it unambiguous by whom the words were uttered. There are also thought balloons, which serve the function of soliloquies -- enabling those outside the frames of action to know what is hidden from those within the frame -- the unexpressed thoughts and feelings of one of the characters.

The balloon opens up opportunities for a certain order of philosophical joke, in which the characters interact with balloons as if they were tangible. The great fabulist, Baron Munchausen, told of a place so cold that speech froze in the air and fell to the ground: with the coming of Spring, the air was filled with the cacophony of thawed speech. I can imagine a cartoon in which a character walks through a room, gathering up the speech balloons as if they were suspended in the air, for example, there for the taking. In the next frame, we might see him walking along, grasping his harvest of speech balloons, floating above his head, as if he were a vendor at the circus. In the next frame, he has tied them to his bed post. Detached from their speakers, they are anonymous speech. They say "OH, ..ALRIGHT..." or "THANK YOU!" or "I KNOW HOW YOU FEEL, BRAD..."-- to display some pieces of balloon speech I have stolen from Roy Lichtenstein.

In a way, this is what Cosimo Ricatto has done. He has preserved a number of speech balloons as if they were palpable, and snatched from the air, turning life, as it were, into a comic strip. The words he has captured take up room in real space on real walls, like pictures of words. He could in fact hang them from the ceiling, like clouds. A gallery filled with his balloons would be a cartoon of a cartoon. They would be suspended in space, like puffs of cigarette smoke, but no one in the room is speaking them. They are ownerless words. It would be somewhat charming, were a gallery to decorate its space with floating balloons inscribed with the kind of speech we overhear in galleries all the time -- "HOW INTERESTING!!" or "IT'S BEEN DONE BEFORE!!" or "IT REMINDS ME OF..."

There is another possible joke. As a general rule, the words written in speech balloons have the zero degree of graphic distinction. They draw no attention to themselves as writing, since whatever attributes they have belong to speech. If a cartoonist wants to indicate that a Russian is speaking, the written words will inform us of how the spoken words sound -- they will be so written as to produce a Russian accent were we to try to speak them ourselves. They will be written in Russian dialect, say -- but not in the Cyrillic alphabet, not in Russian notation. If an artist could count on his reader's grasping such refinements, however, he could use Russian-looking letters to represent English words as spoken by someone with a Russian accent. Or he could use a recognizable notation to convey information about the speaker. He could, for example, use digital notation to convey the fact that the speaker is a nerd. The great cartoonist, Walt Kelly, used gothic lettering to convey the fact that the speaker was a preacher, a kind of walking Bible. The speech balloons of an optometrist could have the format of an eye-chart. Ricatto composes the speeches he appropriates into elaborate graphic patterns with a certain resemblance to John Cage's mesostics -- with a resemblance to pieces of concrete poetry. Speech does not come in fonts. Nor does it come in colors. It is not composed within the balloon the way words are composed on a page. But Ricatto treats speech as logogrammatic, belonging to sound and sight at once, like the capital letters in medieval texts. Medieval texts were not read silently! The intertwined leopards and angels belonged, however, to the eye alone. No one could hear them. One cannot hear that the opening letter of the opening word in Joyce's Ulysses is as tall as the page it is printed on. Its scale goes with the meaning of the word -- stately. But there is no way of pronouncing the letter S in an especially stately way.

It is possible to read any of Cage's metostics aloud. The first word of one of them is dance -- easily voiced. But voice will not convey the fact that the letters have different sizes:

Dance.

But neither will the spoken word dance tell us how it would appear transcribed in a metostic. Any of Ricatto's Suspends is also easily spoken. But the words, as they would occur in the common flow of speech, imply nothing as to how they would be transcribed in a Suspend. Someone -- I myself -- might have said "The word ART interests me very much."I might have said this in the course of explaining that the Greeks had no word for Art, or that it does not occur in the native languages of cultures which possess art to a very high degree. Or whatever. But nothing is implied to the effect that the Suspend shows the balloon in three different colors, that some of the letters are in upper, some in lower case, and that they are of different sizes, with T much the largest letter. But at least

"The word ART interests me very much" is a full sentence, by contrast with many of the Suspends, which transcribe sentential fragments, and we must count on our powers of conversational implicature to infer the thought from the fragment (by the criterion that a sentence expresses a complete thought) and the dialog in which that reconstituted sentence will have occurred. We don't just utter sentences! We engage in dialogues.

The Suspends convey the sense of being overheard. It as if, walking through a room in which others are engaged in their various conversations, we only register fragments of what is being said, perhaps as in a New York restaurant, where the noise level is very high, and as we make our way to our table, bits and pieces of language lodge momentarily in consciousness before fading away. A lot can be inferred about the speakers. What we read in the Suspends are not the things we would very likely overhear in a locker room, or in a working-class bar, or at a baby shower in Des Moines. They are very much art world fragments, voiced by explainers. If we take them together, they might furnish the script for an avant garde play, consisting just of fragments. A party is taking place. A woman -- perhaps a copy editor-- says "I added a comma..." Several characters say, at once, like a chorus, "Making some money." Anyone who attends a show of Suspends would feel entirely at home.

By chance, I encountered the original to which the Suspend "It's not readymade, it's handmade" corresponds. It occurs in Pierre Cabanne's Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp tells Cabanne that he has just made an awning, for the terrace of his house in Spain. "Is this awning your last ready-made?" Cabanne asks, I suppose jocularly. "It's not ready-made. It's hand-made" is Duchamp's response. It should go without saying that ready-mades are not made by hand. But there are parties I have attended recently in which that has been challenged. With words, however, they can be hand-made and ready- made at once, as in this particular Suspend. As spoken, the words were readymade: they were found, and captured by means of writing them down. They were then re-copied in the balloon as cut, shaped, and colored felt. All the Suspends in this sense are handmade and readymade. This could not be true of ready-mades that are things. A metal grooming comb only exists as a thing. It cannot be spoken. It can be thought about, but it is not a thought. Only words have the multiple identities that make it possible for them to be ready-made and hand-made. "It's not ready-made, it's hand-made" misdescribes itself.

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Installation at Velan Gallery, Torino
Interview by Ombretta Agrò
November 2001

OA: Let’s talk about something besides art.
How long have you been living and working in NY?

CDR: I arrived in New York in March 1981: exactly 20 years and 4 months ago. Since I moved here, I lived most of the time in the US. During the ‘80s I used to go to Europe only once a year. Then, after becoming a US resident in 1988, I began to move around much more often. Since then, I usually travel 4 times a year, mostly to Europe and sometimes to South-America.

OA: Where were you born and raised?

CDR: I was born in Sicily, in Catania, at the foot of the Etna Volcano. I lived for a few years in Aragona Caldare, near Agrigento, and then in Siracusa until the end of my undergraduate studies. I began to study art after elementary school, at the age of 10, and I can say that I decided back then that I was going to be an artist. In 1968 I received my degree in sculpture from the Institute of Art of Siracusa. I remember that one day one of our teachers, Prof. Migliara, brought a book to school on the American New-Dada, which blew me away. That book really shocked me and it left a profound mark on me. Towards the end of that year I left for Milan where I enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts.

OA: Why Milan?

CDR: I had friends who, after studying in Siracusa, moved to the North. They told me that the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan was the most experimental one, with the most interesting professors…so I decided that Milan would be the place where I was going to continue my studies. My first year I studied stage decoration, then I moved to the sculpture department where I studied with Prof. Cavaliere until I received my diploma. The approach at the Academy was much more theoretical than practical. Those were the years of the ‘60s movement and experimentation was taken to its extreme not only in the arts but also in all disciplines. My professor, a great artist with an extremely open mind, allowed us students to widen the field of our research towards worlds that otherwise would have remained unknown. My generation was the one that most opened the Academy’s horizons.

OA: Can you tell me about where and how you were living and what you were doing before moving to New York? What made you decide to take the big step?

CDR: The study, the political engagement and the making of art characterized my first years in Milan. The city was living an extremely fomenting moment and I spent great years there, incredibly meaningful but also very insecure. Those were years of great changes: there were many people challenging us and we were challenging ourselves. Many of my generation wanted to transform the society in which we were living, we had great aspirations and ideals that we were impassioned by, not only as artists but as individuals as well. All this continued until the mid ‘70s. Afterward I undertook a much more individualistic path: I changed the kind of work I was producing and began to use the photographic medium.

OA: Were you working as an artist full time?

CDR: Yes, from this point of view I have always been very lucky. Thanks to my energy, curiosity and openness to listen I have had the chance to learn a lot. This has allowed me to be extremely mobile and has offered me many chances. Right after my graduation from the Academy I began to sell my art works. I used to work with young art dealers; I didn’t have a gallery. This has been a fundamental element of my life as a creative person: besides Sandra Gering, who represented me in New York for a few years, I never had a gallery that followed my work in a continuous way.

OA: Why do you think this is? Could it be caused by your restlessness, the fact that your work moves at the same time in different directions?

CDR: Certainly, you used a very exact term. Existentially I have always been incredibly restless and this state of mind of course is reflected in my expression as an artist. Since the very beginning of my career I have been attracted to investigation and profound changes and I think that this is somehow related to my experience as an emigrant. To emigrate in those years it meant to jump into the void. Milan was incredibly far from Sicily, I think today it is hard to understand to what extent. To be sure Milan at the beginning of the ‘70s was much further from Sicily than it was from New York at the beginning of the ‘80s. During those 10 years lots of gaps had been filled. The movie industry was no longer the only source of visual stimuli. The images were multiplying: there were lots of publications, the music was circulating in a much freer way. Traveling also became much easier and the American movies had made New York almost a familiar place. When I was a teen-ager in Sicily the TV was still rather rare and we were lacking the sources of information that we have today.

OA: So we arrive at the beginning of the ‘80s. What brought you to New York?

CDR: It was not a conscious choice, at least in the beginning. During my first trip to New York I had no intention of moving here at all. I stayed for about two months and then went back to Milan where things were going very well: I had taken part in important shows such as the Triennale organized by Caroli, a very well respected critic and curator, a show where many of the artists eventually went on to become international stars. But I had fallen in love with New York and found a way to come back here. I didn’t speak a single word of English, only French, through which surprisingly I met many people. Obviously I had to start all over again; everything that had counted in my career in my own country did not count in the wider dimension that was New York.

OA: How was New York in the early ‘80s, when you arrived, compared to the City nowadays?

CDR: It was wonderful! It was a dream, a fantasy projection. New York has always been a myth and not only in the art field. I arrived toward the end of an economic recession, and shortly after my arrival the City began the process through which it became what it is today. At the beginning of the ‘80s the City was the center of all contemporary culture, which unfortunately is not true anymore. I believe now there is no such a catalytic center, but rather culture is being produced everywhere around the world. New York is still, though, the capitol of the “distribution” of culture.

The City is now much better looking, cleaner and more secure…as we would say in Italy it “has become more bourgeois”. In that era to live in New York was risky in every aspect, but it was also very exciting and challenging. Of course the concept of “business” already existed but it was not as evident as it is today.

OA: Did you see the movie “Downtown ‘81”?

CDR: Not in its final form, but years ago I saw some of the footage. I remember that someone had organized an evening during which they had shown part of it not yet edited. I knew Basquiat. I cannot say that we were friends, but every now and then we would bump into each other at some shows and would exchange a few words. He wasn’t a very talkative person.

OA: And what about Andy Warhol, did you know him?

CDR: Yes, I met him in SoHo at the beginning of the ‘80s, if I am not mistaken in the fall of 1981, while he was going around distributing the magazine Interview. I even recall where we met, on Prince Street near Grand Street. Since then I saw him often at various openings: at Castelli Gallery, in the most important Museums, at certain parties. One evening I bumped into him at Studio 54…which makes me think of another place, the Mudd Club, in TriBeCa, one of the most cutting-edge clubs of those days. It was a small building with many floors in which they used to organize concerts, films screenings, DJs would spin…it was a very alternative place. Many of the bands that became famous in the ‘80s started there.

OA: Where were you living when you arrived in New York?

CDR: My first apartment was on East 37th Street. It was a really nice place that Claudio Guenzani generously lent me. In those days he didn’t have his gallery yet but he collected art. He was very interested in the new phenomena that were taking place in the art world and was often coming to New York. After then the pilgrimage started, the move from place to place… and now I have been living for about 10 years on West 37th Street…if you think about it it’s almost coming full circle!

OA: How and to what extent has living in the New York environment influenced your work?

CDR: I can’t measure it directly, but of course the influence has been quite strong. When I arrived in New York I was already informed about the current art scene. I was quite knowledgeable thanks to the fact that I had traveled extensively in Europe in the previous years. Obviously to experience in person many things and be part of such energetic and lively humus opened my vision incredibly and enriched me with new and unexpected information. This has led to a revision of myself as a human being as well as an artist. As my Italian contemporaries would say, “I put myself in discussion”.

In New York I had the chance to meet some very profound people and not only in the art field. The beauty of being in the City during those years was the feeling of being a true pioneer of a new reality. During the ‘80s the City started to become more international; the interest from the American people regarding the rest of the world was growing at an incredible pace. This same world was being introduced by many public institutions and commercial galleries and globalized into a new dimension.

OA: In my activity as a curator I have encountered many different types of artists. From the point of view of their modus operandi, though, I can identify two main groups. The first group is composed by those artists who have identified, since the very beginning of their career, their style, and their “brand”, which allows even an inexperienced eye to recognize their work. The second one, to which you belong, seems to always be in search of new ways of expression. It is characterized by a constant change of media and subjects. In your case though, there is a very strong presence of a conceptual thread that runs through your entire production. Can you please comment on this thought and identify this thread?

CDR: As an artist who loves change, I have always nurtured a transformation within my work and myself. My vision is very stable and firm but has as its underlying philosophy the evolution of ideas, which results in a variety of esthetic mutations. I don’t mean to praise the avant-garde at all costs but I believe that when someone inherits the tradition that preceded him or her, they cannot simply reproduce something that has been already made in the past (and probably in a much better way)… we must elaborate this heritage and transform it into a stable foundation on which we can start building. I always tried to communicate through my art something new and very personal.

In order to grow as a human being and as an intellectual or as an artist it is necessary to examine and answer the questions that we encounter in our everyday life. This of course leads to a continuous change that derives from the fact that we are always brought to face new challenges. This is my philosophical approach to life and, consequently, to my art: it is my way of participating in the eternal debate on existence. Often though fear is the force that dominates us all: it’s fear of change and of self-transformation.

With the advent of the historic avant-gardes the tendency to classify artists per genre was reversed. The most important example is Marcel Duchamp who, soon after a pictorial beginning, started experimenting with different mediums. He, in fact, understood that the medium comes as a natural response to the kind of research and issues the artist is about to explore. The linearity of the language was substituted by a much more dynamic vision of producing art which then developed into a true philosophy of art making. Duchamp is a mythic figure, an incredibly profound man who I respect immensely; he was a very just individual, in him there was neither malice nor shrewdness. His entire artistic life has been dictated by the necessity of creating art and not by the market. Two others artists who have deeply influenced my work as well as my life are Man Ray and John Cage. The latter is also an individual who lived outside of the power games even if he always played a quite important role in the art world. Man Ray was a genius, in him the continuous transformation became a game. The heritage that they left behind is a deep sense of freedom that goes well beyond the often narrow limitations that the art world imposes. Knowing these antecedents I think makes it much easier to understand my research. The language that I use is always mutating but the subjects that I explore are the same. You can change the font used in writing a letter and, by doing so, modify the way the page looks, but not its contents. So is my work. Whether I use black and white photography or painting or the minimal language of some of my installations, the content examined remains the same.

OA: We met in the fall 1998 through Demetrio Paparoni, the former editor of Tema Celeste. The first time I saw you it was during the opening of one of your shows in SoHo. You were exhibiting some of yours “military blankets” there. Some time after you sent me a catalogue of your show at the Marlborough Gallery in Santiago, Chile, in which you were presenting b/w photographs. Then I came to your studio and fell in love with the series “Crossing”, which is for me one of your most poetic works, made with handkerchiefs and presented in Germany. Today, at VELAN, we are introducing your most pop work, the series “Suspended”.
What is leading you to such restlessness? Dissatisfaction?! Research of new horizons?! Or simply desire of experimentation?!

CDR: The most precious thing for an artist is the possibility to live in total freedom, freedom to become whatever your research leads you to be. Thanks to this belief I am afraid neither of the contradiction nor of the contrapositions of different kind of languages, which I myself often utilize. Years ago this attitude was highly criticized and rarely understood, today it seems much more common and therefore better accepted. What interests me is talking about the world that surrounds me by using metaphor and symbolism. Each individual elaborates his/her own intuitions and the information he/she gathers in a very unique manner. There are no rules in this game. I am not interested in a linear path. I never ask myself whether or not what I am producing is an artwork. This is a problem that may concern society but not me. My ideas are the result of an entire life of study and research, which has caused me to refine my thoughts and my language. The same language may be some times very immediate and direct, other times very obscure. In this variety resides the beauty of human life and the beauty of making art; to show your strength as well as your weakness, the finished and the unfinished without trying to define an absolute. I have always been against absolute thoughts. They scare me. I never take my belief systems for granted, I continuously revisit them. My work, as well as my life, is an open field, I don’t want to preclude myself from any possibility. The key is to find in every new day something interesting to explore, even in the most boring periods of our existence.

OA: I would like to deepen a point that you made earlier and which I believe to be crucial. You said that your art talks about the world that surrounds you: does this mean that you are more interested in the exterior world than in your interior one?

CDR: No, I am mainly interested in my intimate world. The more you understand yourself the more you understand others. Mine is not a journey that only explores my inner side, it goes much beyond that, but it does have its roots within my intimate self. It is necessary to know and love yourself in order to get to know and love others.

OA: How much of the everyday life becomes part of your work?

CDR: The daily life is part of my being an artist. All my works were born out of a constant elaboration; they are intuitions that are developed. Behind every single series of my work there is an accurate literary research that allows me to intellectually deepen some specific issues that I then elaborate in a more existential way.

OA: Which one is, so far, the work that you are the most proud of, the one that you consider the most complete?

CDR: To tell you the truth I never consider myself fully satisfied or complete. Every series takes me to the next one. If I started to think about which one I liked the most or the least I would fall into a trap. Sometimes though it happens that I see some older works at a collector’s house and what really strikes me is a feeling of surprise, almost incredulity of the fact that they are truly mine. I never think too much about my older body of work. I’m always looking for new interlocutors: gallery owners, critics, curators or artists who have a background similar to mine and I try to create a dialogue with them.

OA: How was the series “Suspended” born?

CDR: The series “Suspended” was born from the desire to communicate more, the will to have people understand me at all costs. Re-reading Cabanne’s interview with Marcel Duchamp, that is for me a true Bible, I found quite interesting a remark about the influence that Raymond Roussel’s way of playing with words and their content had on Duchamp’s research. This led me to read again some of Roussel’s texts: he was a very curious individual who had a strong influence not only on the Dadaists but also on the Surrealists. By deepening my investigation I also rediscovered a book by Sciascia on Roussel’s mysterious death in Palermo. From Roussel I then moved on to the “Mesostics” by John Cage, who also analyzed similar concerns of writing poetry with a particular attention to the graphic fonts utilized. This is the literary foundation. During the next phase the idea of using a pop language was born. I studied the different types of speech bubbles used in the comics and their variety really surprised me! From all these different sources was born the real work to which I then purposely gave a sense of extreme lightness, an apparent superficiality that hides interesting conceptual aspects for those who are willing to explore them.

OA: Do you consider them as a complete work, as a closed chapter, or do you envision a further evolution?

CDR: I cannot consider any of my works as fully completed…maybe one day I may go back and start working on an older series… it’s a problem that doesn’t really touch me. In the case of “Suspended” it’s a series that is still in evolution and I don’t know yet where it is going. Simultaneously I am working on other series: I never focus only on one single project.

OA: Arthur C. Danto wrote a beautiful text for a previous catalogue and artist book published on the occasion of the show that took place in Milan during the month of June 2001 in which you presented the first series of “Suspended”. How does an artist feel when one of the most brilliant critics/theorists of recent years responds with such enthusiasm and clarity of vision to his work?

CDR: I feel extremely fortunate for having met Arthur C. Danto because he is someone who belongs to that category of people who I admire that we have talked about earlier such as Duchamp, Man Ray and Cage. He is very open, extremely generous, intellectually willing to explore. I was not looking for a critic just for his name, I wanted this to be a true life experience, and getting to know Danto is definitively a great lesson in life. He wrote the text because he sincerely liked the work, since our very first meeting we experienced a profound mutual intellectual and human understanding. The text that was born is very meaningful; he used a clear writing, accessible to the reader.

OA: As a man and as an artist, do you have any regrets and, if so, would you like to share them with me? What would you change, if anything at all, in your life if you were given a second chance?

CDR: I really don’t know how to answer this since I have never asked myself if I have any regrets. At the end of the ‘80s I became involved with Buddhist meditation and this practice led me to accept the transformations that happen inside and outside of us. It is a way of looking at life that doesn’t leave much space for this kind of speculation.