Cesare Pietroiusti

Cesare Pietroiusti 

Born 1956, in Rome, Italy / lives and works in Rome.

Owing to his psychological education, Cesare Pietroiusti chose to devote his early works to social psychology of relations in art. At the same time, the artist embarked on different social projects, which he considered not so much as separate endeavours but as a part of his oeuvre. He initiated the Rivista di Psicologia dell'Arte, a periodical on art psychology (1979-1984), and co-founded the Oreste project (1996-2001). The latter brought together an ever-changing group of people (mostly, artists and curators) who joined their efforts to generate ideas and projects, produce art objects, organize exhibitions, meetings, discussions and develop other forms of human relations.

In recent years Pietroiusti has been focused on the economic dimension of art, namely, on the role of money as an artwork equivalent, a warrant of its value and/or the author’s signature. The artist quotes a passage on money from Karl Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 which says:

‘Just as it reduces everything to its abstract form, so it reduces itself in the course of its own movement to quantitative being. Excess and intemperance come to be its true norm.’

«The Bitter Pill» 2011

Collective performance, sculpture, video, Aug 30, 2011

Cesare Pietroiusti participates in the Impossible Community project with a performance entitled Bitter Pill. It’s a collective project effectuated by a small community of eight participants, all representing different roles in the art system and different modes of its conceptualization. Those participants were a famous Moscow artist and sculptor Boris Orlov, who hosted the performance at his studio, a contemporary art collector and dealer Igor Markin, an independent curator Viktor Misiano, a Museum curator Ekaterina Zenzinova, a philosopher Keti Chukhrov, an economist Daniil Shestakov, a sociologist Alexander Sogomonov, a film director Andrey Silvestrov, and a representative of the Moscow Museum of Modern Art Ekaterina Perventseva. At the beginning of this performance, Pietroiusti distributed among the participants the largest banknotes of the world leading currencies, and the performers were supposed, well, literally to chew them. After that Orlov made a sculptural object of the pulp, being the product of this collective effort. Then followed a discussion intended to determine the status and future of the resulting art object. Being defined as a collective artwork, the object has been eventually included in the exhibition.

Thus, a ludic intervention, akin to the present-day Play Therapy methods, which Pietroiusti knows so well from his first profession, allows to recreate the interactions within the artistic community conditioning the context of both the universal value and the price of an art product.

Cesare Pietroiusti and Paul Griffiths Eating Money - An Auction Performance, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, May 2007 Photo: Caters News Courtesy: Ikon Gallery and the artist «The Bitter Pill» Collective performance 2011 «The Bitter Pill» Collective performance 2011 «The Bitter Pill» Collective performance 2011 «The Bitter Pill» Collective performance 2011 «The Bitter Pill» Collective performance 2011