CESENA 47—A.C. FORNITURE SUD 12, 1991
Even after all these years in the art world, I still have the feeling of
being an alien. It’s not a pleasant sensation, but I recognize that I’ve
courted it. At an art fair in Bologna, Italy, I set up a table in a
corner to collect donations for my soccer team, the Southern Supplies
Football Club, made up entirely of African immigrants. I started to feel
like a real team president, so I said to myself, What does a good
executive do for his team? He builds a new stadium! So I did—well, not a
stadium, exactly, but a little tabletop soccer set with 11 white players
on one side and 11 black players on the other. Visitors to the fair
played and screamed and scored. It was just like being in a real
stadium. And I started getting noticed. I made new friends—artists,
curators, collectors, gallerists—who asked me what kind of work I did.
I didn’t know how to answer, but I do now: I was framing states of mind.
The soccer team was racism, framed and transformed into a game.
UNTITLED, 1993
I met a gallerist in Milan who offered me a show. I agreed, but first I
bet him that he couldn’t sell one of my works—an empty ballpoint pen. A
week after, he called to concede. He couldn’t get rid of it. A couple of
days later I showed up in the gallery with a collector and managed to
palm the empty ballpoint off on him. Even though the gallerist lost the
bet, we agreed to do the show, but I imposed another condition: For two
days before the opening, nobody could come to the gallery—even he had to
stay away.
On the morning of the opening, the gallerist showed up. He had a bad moment when he realized that the front door had been bricked shut, but then he looked through a small slit and saw a mechanical teddy bear on a unicycle ride past in midair, balancing on a wire. I can still see that gallerist guffaw and his eyes sparkle. The greatest gift an artist can receive is when people react with joy to an idea that you thought might just be idiotic. I put my artistic license on the line that day. I was that bear on a wire, pedaling furiously to keep from crashing to the ground. That was my first self-portrait. »
NOVECENTO, 1997
In Milan, I was getting depressed. I was spinning my wheels and living
in a shoebox apartment that I enlarged by chiseling away plaster from
the walls. Every work was a battle, and the war I was waging against
myself dragged on and on. When it came time to do a show, I suspended a
stuffed horse from the ceiling. I had gotten the idea from World War I
photographs of horses being hoisted onto ships headed for the front, but
in the end it was really another self-portrait. I felt powerless, hung
out to dry, horse meat for grinders wielded by curators and critics.
