It’s Thursday afternoon in New York City, early Friday morning in Melbourne as the mutually agreed-upon Zoom date with design great Gaetano Pesce drops into the chasm of daylight saving. NYC has just ‘sprung forward’, causing a fold in time, which Pesce’s people promptly iron out with a wickedly early ‘wake-up’ text: “Gaetano is ready now.”
It’s a fitting prelude to a pow-pow with the 83-year-old New York-based Italian artist, architect and industrial designer who, for more than six decades, has messed with the fluidity of time in boundary-straddling works that declare war on conformity and count in the permanent collections of the world’s best museums. Minutes and hours are the metaphorical and material measure of all that he makes, and in this moment, they are as slippery as hell.
But when the Sith Lord of design subversion finally beams in from his Brooklyn studio, backdropped by a red bookshelf as superficially gelatinous as jelly, he leans in to ask the exact hour in Melbourne, and self-absolves with the tell that time is the God who decides everything we do.
“It decides when we are born, when we die, when we repeat, when we don’t repeat, when we are in contradiction, when we are not, so [it] is a very powerful element and for a long time I decided for me it was important to follow, more or less, what time is asking me to do,”
