I feel Piranesi predicted Pop Art in terms of creating icons of irrelevant stuff.
My name is Luis Camnitzer.
I don’t like to be categorized under a skill. For me, art really is about expanding knowledge, and it doesn’t matter what skill you use. I decided I’m not a printmaker who is trying to do art, but I should be an artist who sometimes uses printmaking.
I’m not an art historian, but I don’t like conservative printmaking that was developed to reproduce paintings, not to come up with new knowledge on its own terms. For me, Piranesi is one of the printmakers that managed to generate knowledge. Piranesi was a failed architect, but he used this architectural view to deconstruct it into the smallest units and then organized them. He makes a taxonomic order of things. His work was really not about the technique, but about organizing the universe.
That makes me say that his work is contemporary. Until, let’s say, the early twentieth century, rendering was the ultimate achievement in art. Re-presentation—you present again what’s there. That worked for a while, it developed skills, and then in the sixties, the concept became important over the skill. I feel Piranesi predicted Pop Art in terms of creating icons of irrelevant stuff.
I think art history in general is a projective activity: we project our present onto an object and don’t know if we understand it in the terms of the creator. We’re in that sense very selfish. We understand it in terms of what’s useful to us, and there’s nothing wrong with this; we just should take responsibility for what we’re doing.
And my politics are basically anti-authoritarian. I feel dogma should be examined and not accepted, that heresy is healthy. And ultimately art is really about dealing with orders: challenge the given orders to make sure that they are operative and connect orders to find out new things. Because it’s the only area in which you have unbound imagination.
Piranesi tells you you can organize anything as long as you have criteria to do so. And you are actually free to establish your criteria. And that gives you permission to start your own order, and that’s very important.
