Piero Golia
Leafcutter John plays Piero Golia or viceversa
Exhibition August – September 2024
Kenny Schachter on artnet.com about Piero Golia, September 2024
Exhibition Video
Exhibition Views
Leafcutter John plays Piero Golia or viceversa
A choreography born from the incidental. An orchestra played by machines upon what was almost, but not quite, art.
The conveyor belt whirls, the hanging strikers strike, and a song is born. Out of a community of artists and the remnants of their studios comes the latest creation by artist Piero Golia (played or playing, as you wish, with Leafcutter John).
From Piero…
“I’m kind of trying to kill the sculpture and save the effect, you know what I mean… Replacing a formal object or shape with whatever comes to me from my friends and is good enough to generate noise.”
Improvisationalist and composer Leafcutter John can make music from almost anything. The strikers move along a conveyor belt beneath which Piero has gathered what was nearly sculpture from other artists for Leafcutter John to turn into a tune. This creates a trail of objects with seemingly no connections, except for the fact that we know all the objects were discarded by his friends. Don’t underestimate when we call them “friends”; you might not have heard his name, and you certainly haven’t seen his work at major auctions, but Piero is definitely an artist for artists. In response to the call to provide materials for his new creation, some of the most significant living artists have contributed: a stone leftover from an aquarium by Pierre Huyghe, flowers from Paul McCarthy’s White Snow, fan blades remaining from a Kathryn Andrews sculpture, emptied film canisters from Tacita Dean, and from Eric Wesley, a vodka bottle along with a metal pipe and a rug (something in between a Molotov cocktail and a bong). Along with these, there are sundry not-quite-aesthetic detritus from Albert Oehlen, Anri Sala, Christopher Williams, Kelly Akashi, William Leavitt, Frances Stark, Sterling Ruby and Jordan Wolfson, among others.
What has lost its use, those things that never quite made the cut into the impractical alchemy of art, here get another chance. Eschewing stasis, an emotional momentum and music, shifting the air of the room into action, a mechanical pied piper, an -almost- player piano, a kind of a game.
How paint or clay, light or charcoal, urinals or bicycle tires become art has always been a trick of perception, a leap and a wager. Piero Golia has long been fascinated with this transmutation, like that moment in the Sistine Chapel where Michelangelo paints that bearded godfather fingering into life the mythical first human. With humor and grace, Piero takes the rejects of his artist friends and does his best to give them a second act, another chance at becoming art in this folly, to bring them to life.
While it’s fallen out of everyday use in English, lately Piero has been playing with “follies”. In one definition, a lack of good sense. In another, a building made purely for pleasure in a garden. Drop an L and fly to Paris, and you can find yourself in a lavishly extravagant theatrical spectacular or more simply madness. And depending on your dictionary, an excessively unprofitable undertaking (the last another easy definition of art for most artists).
A folly seems purposeless but generates beauty; the effect is more important than the purpose. So often art objects are invested with clear directives, to interrogate politics or radically question etc, but here Golia posits that the purpose is less important than the effect, which is largely up to us, the unlikely collaborators of his audience.
And all these definitions come together in that particular leap of faith that Piero always asks of us, that art always asks of us, but nowhere with more humor and grace, hubris and humility, as in the folly that is the work of Piero Golia.
Andrew Berardini, August 2024