The artist Francesco Vezzoli on the ancient world, celebrity and ‘Mrs Prada’

 

(Photo:backless prom dresses)Some interviewees can be guarded: but artists, happily, generally delight in telling you exactly what they think. So it goes with Italy’s Francesco Vezzoli, who the Guardian meets over breakfast at the glamorous Nautilus hotel in Miami in the week of enormous US art fair Art Basel Miami Beach. The fair is a major commercial event for any contemporary artist – with big buyers eager to take home the hottest new pieces on the market. But this morning, Vezzoli doesn’t want to talk sales. He wants to talk about sex.

“For me it’s either Grindr or it’s love,” declares the artist, looking glamorous if slightly hungover in a leather jacket and aviator shades, and bringing up his adventures on the gay dating app entirely unprompted. “I don’t get laid any more on the basis of my looks alone, very unfortunately. The last thing I like to do is cruise places where I can’t say who I am or what I do. ‘Oh, Google me! See all these magazine covers! Mario Testino shot me here, I look beautiful!’ No.”

It’s a very Vezzoli moment, involving as it does sex and glamour (he is a favourite with the fashion crowd, one of his biggest patrons being the woman to whom he refers as “my friend Mrs Prada”). There’s also something very charming about it – and charm is one of Vezzoli’s most potent weapons. He could have your pants off at 40 paces.

This quality came into its own a few years ago when Vezzoli made a series of works involving celebrities. After bombarding his favourite stars with letters and flowers, his persuasive powers resulted in projects including Greed, a fake perfume ad directed by Roman Polanski, in which Natalie Portman and Michelle Williams wrestled for the bottle. Then there was the 2005 trailer for an imaginary version of Caligula, which featured Helen Mirren and Courtney Love, with a voiceover by Gore Vidal. Vezzoli also created a 24-hour museum in Paris, which culminated in a party at which Kate Moss DJ’d, and masterminded a performance for LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art which saw Lady Gaga perform at a piano designed by Damien Hirst, wearing a hat by Frank Gehry, surrounded by dancers from the Bolshoi ballet. Only one person has eluded his attentions: Madonna. “She’s known for wanting so much control … it never happened.”

These days, however, Vezzoli has moved on from collaborating with stars – as he points out, “there are so many artists working with celebrities now” – though he would make an exception for Maggie Smith. “I love her!” His more recent work has delved into his more enduring obsession, the ancient world. At last year’s show at MoMA PS1 in New York, he displayed five Ancient Roman busts he had bought at auction, the white marble painted by restorers to show the way they would have looked when they were originally displayed.

His original idea, which also touched on Italy’s relationship to its ancient monuments, was even more radical: he bought a ruined church for $100,000 in Montegiordano, southern Italy, in order to dismantle and rebuild it at PS1, where he would show his videos inside. The church was packed and ready to go when he was accused of exporting items of cultural value without authorisation, which could have earned him four years in jail.

“It belonged to an aristocrat, it was in ruins, it had no roof, the artistocrat built opposite to it another church, so for the community the rights to rite was granted by the presence of the new church, so our asses were covered from every perspective: moral, legal, architectural, historical,” says Vezzoli. “But some crazy professor came up and ignited this drama.” Much to his relief, Vezzoli was “archived … the highest rank of cleanness you can get from Italian justice”. The charge carried up to four years in prison. “Jail is not a funny perspective.”

These and other adventures are detailed in a new documentary, Ossessione Vezzoli, which he debuted in Miami with a lavish party sponsored by Interview magazine and Tiffany’s. It’s an engaging if fairly straightforward one-hour arts documentary made over the past two years by Alessandra Galetta (“She works a lot with Sky and the cultural channels in Italy,” explains Vezzoli), though there is a strange subplot in which Vezzoli is being obsessively Googled by a young, stalkerish fan.

Vezzoli was born in Brescia at the foot of the Alps and is now based in Milan. “I come from northern Italy, the land of industrialists,” he says, “so I know all about work.” His family were in the PDUP, the proletarian unity party, “which was a cooler fringe of the communist party”, he chuckles. Despite the glamorous friends and designer threads, he’s still a man of the left: as we talk about artists who have declared themselves rightwing, he’s disappointed to hear about Tracey Emin’s support for the British Conservative party a few years ago. “That makes me sad.”

While there are plenty of critics – some included in the documentary – who describe him as a “red carpet artist” whose work is frivolous, it has a political edge no less sharp for being largely concealed; for instance, his Caligula piece can easily be read as a billious portrait of the bunga bunga era of Berlusconi. “That’s what my friend Mrs Prada says all the time,” says Vezzoli. “We had a public debate at the National Synotec in Rome and one of the presidents of Italian television who is one of the wittiest men in Italy kept screaming ‘You’re such a Marxist!’, because of the things I was saying. I said ‘I must have been able to come out of the closet as a homosexual, but the Marxist thing is still locked somewhere in there.’ Many people say that the work is way more political than I seem to realise, but that must come from my family. I think that it’s kind of sweet that it’s there; I leave for other people to read it.”

Incidentally, Miuccia Prada also comes from Italy’s far left: she’s a former member of the Communist party. While she’s said to be highly conscious of how a high-end fashion designer espousing Marxist views might appear, and therefore keeps quiet in public, her politics are not thought to have shifted that much. So is she still a Marxist? “I don’t think we could define her as a Marxist,” ponders Vezzoli, “but she clearly has a very precise and ambitious cultural vision. There is something very sociological and educational in her intellectual approach. She is always concerned with reaching out to a wide audience in a clear way – very often I tease her and say to her that she should open her own university.”

Vezzoli describes his young self as a “pop, gay kid” in his parents’ lefty milieu, steeped in Italian arte povera. He had a rigorous classical education; then, inspired by British style magazines like the Face and i-D, where he read about exotic nightlife habituees like Leigh Bowery, Vezzoli escaped to Central Saint Martins, the London art college, where he studied from 1989 to 1993. Unleashed, the young artist hit the club scene. “I was living the adolescence that Italy didn’t give me,” he says, reeling off a list of the British cultural touchstones that fascinated him. “Cilla Black, Neighbours, Hello!, Bubbles Rothermere …”

Despite his anglophilia, Vezzoli has barely had a public museum show in the UK. “It’s somehow as if the British didn’t know what to do with this kid they nurtured,” he muses. But the artist has built a strong reputation in the rest of the world: first making pieces in needlework; then expanding to film; and now antiquities. Changing his work so often, says Vezzoli, has done him no favours on the art market, but he gets plenty of museum shows, “which in the end is probably what I’ve always wanted. It’s the public that I love more than the collectors. And if I’ve made money I’ve happily spent it doing my crazy stuff so hey, wonderful”.

This year will be a busy one for Vezzoli. He’ll have his first sculpture show at theSouth Tyrol archeology museum in Bolzano, Italy: “I’m rehanging all their collection”. In May, he’ll take over the New National Museum of Monaco’s Villa Sauber site for a show imagining that Marlene Dietrich commissioned the artists of her day to paint her portrait “so there’s going to be a fake Magritte, a fake Bacon”. Later in 2016, “with Zaha Hadid we’re taking over the Oscar Niemeyerpavillion in Sao Paulo for the Biennale and transforming it into a videodrome, and last but not least I’m working on a huge curatorial project for the Prada foundation” – comprised of two art museums built by the fashion house, one in Milan, the other in Venice.

In Miami, however, he is right up against the art world at its most nakedly commercial, a place from which most artists run a mile. “It’s particularly abrasive,” he says of the fair, to which collectors flock in private jets. “The art world has become an industry. We’re seeing what happened in Hollywood in the 20s or to Italian cinema in the 50s – there is a creative universe which is exciting, full of rage and suddenly the plutocracy from a globalised world comes in and says ‘Oh, we think you’re so great, you’re the flag of our wealth or our power.’ And then you decide where you want to stand, and that’s not necessarily where they’re going to put you.”

As he says, these days there are several art worlds into which artists can operate, with varying degrees of creative or financial success. “There’s the artist that sells and doesn’t have many museum shows, there’s the artist who has museum shows and still lives out of very little, there is people that sell five paintings and their tax declaration is like the chairman of Fiat.” Vezzoli, however, has managed to find an unusal audience in both the academy and fashion worlds, a Prada-clad pop kid pondering the ancient world.

It’s a standpoint that gives him a particular perspective. With the refugee crisis and an ongoing economic calamity in southern Europe, the continent looks pretty screwed, I suggest. “Yeah, but I’m still in love with Europe,” says Vezzoli, finishing his plate of watermelon and adjusting his shades. “What about all those places where there are no civil rights? Where a gun is sold to every kid on the street? We’re in bad shape, but God, we’ve written so many books. It’s time to go back to a friendly bilbliotheque and learn who we are.”Read more at:cocktail dresses