Michelangelo Pistoletto at 93: “The mirror does not lie; it is we who distort the truth”

On the day of his 93rd birthday, Michelangelo Pistoletto speaks about truth, ego, the Third Paradise and demopraxy, reminding us why art can still be a force for transforming the present.

Read the shorter Italian version on Artribune

An artist who remains a decisive presence in the history of contemporary art, one he has traversed and often helped shape. In this interview he speaks about art, truth, relationships, the Third Paradise, demopraxy, and artificial intelligence.

At a time when the image increasingly coincides with the construction of the self and its constant exposure, speaking with Michelangelo Pistoletto about the mirror means entering a zone that exceeds representation and touches identity, truth, and the responsibility of looking.

From there the conversation expands to the Mirror Paintings, Love Difference, the Third Paradise, and demopraxy, eventually reaching a theme that has become impossible to avoid today: the relationship between human intelligence, artificial intelligence, and the future of the human being.

The interview with Michelangelo Pistoletto

You worked with the mirror in a decisive way, but today the mirror is not only a reflective surface: it is also a social, psychological, identitarian image. If the mirror does not lie, are we the ones who lie when we stand before it?

The mirror does not lie if it is perfectly flat and not distorted. But the mirror can distort: it can widen, narrow, turn things upside down. In that sense it lies in relation to a pure, simple, clear vision.

And so it is we ourselves who distort, imagining differently from what a true scientific verification could give us as proof.

The whole human capacity to imagine, the imaginal dimension, is typically human. Yet it is always a search for a truth that we establish even before we have verified it. Even the idea of the divine is born there.

Between giving life and taking life, we go on giving life and taking life in everything we do. Our life is a continual repetition of what nature does, which does nothing other than make use of life and death.

Imaginal means that we have given an image to nature. We create images in our own way. We have given an image to this fundamental origin of existence in our own way.

In this sense, beyond “our own way,” is there still a real, true way to recognize truth? Or do we always remain within a human construction?

Absolutely, there must always be a primary element to believe in. Because here one enters the spiritual problem in its depth, but also the phenomenon of mutual understanding: without an element on which to agree, we are not human.

And yet truth seems to have become almost unbearable. If all of us really stood in front of the mirror, what would be the hardest thing to bear?

Truth is frightening. Truth is monstrous. In fact the mirror is totally inhuman.

We see humanity within it, yet the response is a total demolition of all the fantasies that hold us back.

If we all looked at ourselves at the same time, then, what would be the greatest lie we keep telling ourselves?

In the mirror we want to find the most beautiful part of ourselves. We want to see our ego brought to its highest point. We want to find the absolute ego.

I think we do not see the mirror as the profile of infinity, but as an individualistic speculation. And this individual speculation, which then becomes economy, money, politics, ends up helping us see ourselves as more beautiful in the mirror.

Has selfishness changed over time, or has it always remained the same?

I do not think it has changed. The ego is a fundamental component: everything depends on how it is administered. There have always been people capable of placing their ego on a plane different from the imperialistic one.

I am thinking, for example, of figures who individually took on the highest form of altruism. I also believe I work in this direction. I am extremely ambitious, but my ambition concerns something that can have a return through the contribution of the whole of society.

The greatest selfishness, in the end, is altruism: if everything around me functions wonderfully, I too benefit from it. To think one can make it alone is foolishness.

I had seen a note of yours on collaboration, also in relation to working with other people. In the end it is a way of moving the self outside itself.

Giving a part of myself to whoever wants to give a part of themselves: that is the work that interests me.

And within this shift from the self to relation, does the Third Paradise also enter as a possible equilibrium between nature and artifice?

It is difficult, but necessary. If we do not become aware of our capacity to create, and if we do not place art as the seed of all seeds, we end up complaining that everything proceeds only on the scientific and technological plane.

For this reason it remains fundamental to bring the natural system and the artificial system into accord. The Third Paradise continues to function for precisely this reason: because nature and artifice are still the two elements that must find a new balance.

In this sketch drawn by Pistoletto, several central themes of his work emerge: the human figure, geometry, and the relationship between balance and transformation. The reference to the Third Paradise is evident, yet the drawing also points to a broader vision of his practice, where opposites meet and generate a new reality.

Within the Third Paradise there is also demopraxy. How would you define it today, in concrete terms?

Demopraxy is the practical system through which one tries to realize that dream which has largely proved unattainable and which we call democracy. The problem already lies in the word itself: Demos mean people, Kratos means power.

But if the people are made up of millions of people, the single individual cannot truly exercise that power in its entirety. This is where one has to move from the abstract idea to practice.

And practice begins when one is no longer one, but two. When there are two, a relationship is born at once, and with it the need for a shared form of management.

Let us start with the minimum: two people who want to live together. If they do not build a small form of government, they cannot coexist.

In the past this form was almost always the family, linked to the agro-food system and to the surface of the earth. Then we put our hands beneath the earth, drew out hydrocarbons, and completely changed the conditions of life.

If demopraxy is a practice and not an abstract idea, where does one really begin at Cittadellarte?

All active organizations are small governments, small entities. These small governments must find the time to stay together, to participate in common forums, and to work out the questions that inevitably have to be resolved together.

In this sense, between nature and artifice, in a territory like this one, made up of seventy-four municipal administrations and many practical activities, we are developing here, concretely, this laboratory of democracy.

I would like to place Messanudo and Love Difference in relation to one another, that is, the question of diversity and interreligiousness. How do they interact in your vision of society?

“Messanudo” and “Love Difference” are two very important subjects.

“Messanudo” means that we live through uniforms, costumes, attire. Cultures are uniforms, forms that clothe the human body.

There has always been a way of giving shape to things that allows people to understand one another, to live together, through expressions that then become dress. In fact I made an exhibition in Florence on the theme Habitus: dress is a sign, a language, a cultural skin.

There is this intermediate skin, this intermediate garment, which carries the imaginal concept even of the absolute into the relativity of every organization that takes on a form and becomes a symbol.

We load ourselves with symbols. Even fur, for example, was a sign of human dominion over the animal. So speaking of truth, of the search for what is essential, leads one to look beneath the garment and see what is there: there is nakedness.

Today we must recover this nakedness. It is what we are also trying to do with the mirror painting: to see how we can move without ornaments. The images I have tried to make move precisely in this direction.

At the interreligious table in Bologna, how does all this “nakedness” relate to religions? Not nakedness in the literal sense, but the fact that religions often define the human being. And then there is Love Difference, with the Mediterranean as a space of relation.

The Mediterranean lends itself perfectly to this discourse, because Italy is at the center of the Mediterranean, but also at the center of three continents: Asia, Africa, and Europe. They are three original continents with different histories and cultures.

This sea has continually been crossed by great loves and great conflicts, by major cultural exchanges, by the passage of different cultures and religions.

Love Difference means creating an Inter-Mediterranean Parliament, that is, an idea of politics that assumes a cultural responsibility and that is rooted in art.

Here the concept of Arte Povera also enters. Today, instead, we live within a cultural and economic superfluity that produces conflict, not pacification.

Provocatively speaking: while your art does not judge the human being, and in fact does not define it, leaving it to whoever looks at the work to define themselves by looking at themselves in the mirror, religions instead often define the human being.

Exactly. Religions are different skins, different cultural skins. Religious figures are all dressed in a symbolic way, almost militarily: they have a uniform, a hat, a scarf, a tunic, a cord. It is all symbolism of uniqueness.

So it is also a matter of defining the human being.

Exactly. I found a symbol, which is the symbol of creation, the fundamental symbol. It is a symbol that excludes the absolute as a static and definitively determined phenomenon.

It is a line that creates a trinamic structure formed by three consecutive circles. We always have two outer circles that are opposite, different. These two opposite elements are determining. There is no circle without another circle.

There is no element that does not have its opposite. There is no absolute element. Every element has its opposite. And these two opposites meet in the central circle, where they create a new element that did not exist before.

Everything that exists is born from the union of two elements that generate something new: this is the discourse of trinamics.

At the center of infinity the circle of the finite is born. “Finite” means the existent. Thus we have a truth about existence: not only the truth given by the mirror that does not lie, but also its translation into the structure of reality.

It is a formula confirmed by science as well, because science has come to understand the birth of the universe through the conjunction of the positive and the negative. The positive is energy-mass, the negative is space.

In an infinite way, perhaps.

Infinite in a relative sense, because the absolute does not exist. Nothing is absolute, nothing lasts forever. Infinity would mean eternal duration, and that is something we are still not in a position to prove.

We can only stand at the limit of our knowledge. We cannot go beyond it. The search for knowledge is born precisely from this: from looking at the sea from the shore and asking what lies beyond.

Can this symbol of the Third Paradise also enter into a classical aesthetic?

I called it “Third Paradise” because I wanted to take stock of the situation. Behind us we have nature, the first paradise: the natural one. Then, progressively, we lived more and more within artifice.

Today nature and artifice have entered into deep conflict. That is why there is an urgency to the Third Paradise: to overcome the conflict between nature and artifice.

Will there be a Fourth Paradise?

No, there is not and there will not be a Fourth Paradise. Three is already born from duality. There is one and there is another one: I am here, you are here, and we are already two who must find an understanding.

But two does not remain still. The two enter into relation, they act, they may come to clash, to embrace, or to all the intermediate forms necessary to coexist and survive. It is from this relation that the third is born.

So the Third Paradise is not a provisional passage?

No. It is a structure. Even when the system expands, it still begins from there: two polarities and a third force that puts them into relation.

Returning to artifice: today artificial intelligence no longer merely assists the human being, it already partly replaces it. People even speak of the Singularity, that is, the moment when the computational power of the machine will exceed human intelligence.

Not only that: one ends up no longer knowing how to do anything in an organized way, mentally and practically, because the result is already there. You have an artificial intelligence that gives you the result, and so you no longer have the time of process.

And when artificial intelligence becomes intelligent enough on the human model, what use will it have for the human being any longer?

Artificial intelligence may no longer need the human being, I do not know. I know that I am useful as long as I am alive. When I am no longer alive, I am no longer useful, and for that reason the universe does not collapse. The universe goes on.

But if, while I am alive, I manage to organize a being that is no longer only my body of flesh and bones, but a self projected into a different and new system, then in a certain sense I survive. In this sense artificial intelligence already allows a form of survival.

So artificial intelligence, rather than erasing the human being, could become a form of continuation of the human?

Yes, that is how I see it. I already imagine myself inside this world, and in that world I meet all the others. Together something is produced that physical beings, on their own, had never been able to make possible.

Naturally all this remains relative. Biologically everything is born and everything dies. Even when we speak of immortality, we always speak of it in a relative sense, never an absolute one. Humanity has always sought to go beyond its own limit.

So we are already moving in that direction, and it is no longer possible to turn back?

That is so. We are all already moving in that direction. But one must know how to identify oneself within this being-with-others, because it is there that transformation opens up.

How could we physically go to Mars or other planets? We cannot do it with flesh, because flesh is made to remain on Earth. But the instruments to go there already exist. This means that the extension of the human being has already begun.

Whoever is on this path knows it. Then all of this also passes through transversal and problematic economies, and there are figures, such as Musk, who reason in these terms.

But beyond individual cases, the point is that we can no longer go back. Technology is now necessary for everything: for the home, for light, for washing ourselves, for communicating. If electricity fails, we are lost.

Cittadellarte has helped many artists and continues to be an active laboratory. What was the initial idea? How would you describe it today?

It is also reborn out of school. Between 1989 and 1990 I had two exhibitions at the Secession in Vienna, which had been born from the will of artists like Klimt to leave the academic system and create an independent space of art.

But it was precisely there that I understood that I did not want to take in hand something that already existed. I felt the need to create a different place, not a museum understood only as a space for exhibition, but a true factory of ideas, of production, of relation between art and society.

Was that experience in Vienna also the moment when you decided to bring that project back to Biella?

Yes. Instead of leaving that dream in Vienna, I brought it to my city. In 1991 I purchased the former Lanificio Trombetta, and from there a work began that would later find its theoretical formulation in 1994 with the manifesto Progetto Arte.

Even today Cittadellarte is a place where young people arrive from many parts of the world, within a multicultural and multinational context. Experiences are shared here that are not only local, and a practical idea of coexistence is built.

When you were in America, in the period when Pop Art was at its height, I have always had the impression that at a certain point you also came back home because you did not fully like that environment. Is that so?

They thought that America had by then become autonomous on the artistic plane as well, that it no longer needed Europe as a point of reference. They were basically telling me: now the center is here, art is here, power is here.

That is why they said to me: either you, who by now are part of our great family, forget that you are European and come to live here. I never lived in America. I went there two or three times, but I never wanted to live there.

But at a certain point the discourse became clear: either you choose the United States completely, or you are out, you no longer exist, because by now the power of art is American. And then I said: fine, stay there, and I will go back to Turin and make the Minus Objects.

The Minus Objects meant exactly this: that each work could be by a different artist. If the system wanted to turn me into a brand, into a Pistoletto-brand, into an American-style brand, then I took that brand away.

I made the whole concept of consumerist branding disappear. I de-branded myself, I withdrew from that logic. And Arte Povera was born.

The most incredible thing is that international criticism hardly speaks of it any more, it does not even remember that I played an important role in the international Pop Art exhibitions. They erased me, but for me that too is a sign.

And yet in the United States all the artists know you, and they value you greatly for precisely this reason.

But for that very reason I remain independent.

In this conversation Michelangelo Pistoletto returns to one of the oldest and still unresolved nuclei of his research: the mirror as a place of truth and, at the same time, as a surface on which humanity continually projects and distorts itself.

The most unexpected turn comes when he connects all this to artificial intelligence and to the idea of a survival beyond flesh. Yet even there the point remains the same: not a simple opposition between nature and artifice, but the search for a new relation.

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