GETTING NEARER TO NEARISM

 From Superbad (McSweeneys, 2001), by Ben Greenman. All rights whatever.

 

Among artists, originality and talent are prized above all other qualities, so much so that it is rare to find a renowned artist whose work has an absence of original vision. It is even rarer to find a renowned artist whose work shows no sign of artistic talent or temperament—whose work is, in a way, defiantly artless. Paolo Legno was one of those rare specimens. The Parma-born, Rome-raised Legno spent his career producing works that can broadly be classified as prints, but which are more accurately described as copies: slightly altered replicas of previously published documents. Legno’s works were neither satires nor appropriations. Rather, they were exact-size imitations that differed from the originals only slightly. Legno’s first works, “Menus,” were near-copies of Roman restaurant menus in which he changed only the prices of the entrees, and only minimally. After “Menus,” he applied the same technique to street maps, tourist pamphlets, liner notes from record albums, and advertising circulars. Over the years, Legno was called a fraud, a genius, and “a Xerox machine with an impish sense of humor”; wary of being classified with Dada, surrealism, conceptual art, or media art, Legno coined a term for his own genre, “nearism,” and promptly became the world’s premier nearist. One afternoon last spring, shortly after the opening of “Phone Book,” a show that exhibited replicas of sections of the telephone directory, he sat down with the English painter and critic Paul Wood, a longtime friend, to discuss his career.

Paul Wood: Let’s talk about your new work.

Paolo Legno: “White Pages” or “Yellow Pages”?

PW: Let’s start with “Yellow Pages.” They are a series of sheets, eight in all, that look as if they have been simply ripped out from a big-city phone book. One is taken from the Locksmith section, one from Plumbing, one from Sporting Goods: Retail, and so on.

PL: Yes.

PW: But these are not actual pages from an actual phone book.

PL: Well, they are partly actual. In “Air Conditioning: Repair,” for example, I only altered the names of four repair companies and then the phone numbers of four different companies. I left the layout of the page, and the artwork, exactly as it was in the original version.

PW: So if I were to call these phone numbers, I would not reach air conditioning repairmen?

PL: You might. Remember, I did not change them all. It is possible that you might select one in which the name and the number are as they were in the original. 

PW: Tell me a little bit about your process. How do you create these works?

PL: I use the same process as the people who created the originals. I design electronic files in a desktop publishing program, and then I output them to the same kind of paper. In the case of “Yellow Pages,” I used the same commercial printer.

PW: So how are your works different than the originals?

PL: Slightly. And at the same time, entirely.

PW: Recently, the critic Linus Howard compared you to Borges’s Pierre Menard, who exactly rewrote sections of Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

PL: I saw that. Menard is an interesting case, but not the same case as me, because the original Quixote required an astounding amount of creative energy, and the second Quixote required considerably less. I use originals that required little or no creative energy, and I expend some creative energy in copying them, in that I must invent new names or words or numbers. Borges is writing about a man who is, arguably, less creative than their sources. I am, inarguably, more creative than mine. 

PW: You once said that you are simply making explicit the debts that are implicit in every artwork. 

PL: Every artist has sources. Picasso drew on African art. Rauschenberg looked at Johns. When I first started my career as an artist, I was a painter, and I was utterly indebted to Hockney. It was difficult to liberate myself from that. It took great effort, and almost cost me my creative life. Having unshackled myself, I was free to do whatever I wanted.

PW: But drawing stylistic inspiration from another piece of art is somewhat different than simply copying a piece of printing.

PL: The cardinal rule of this sort of thing is that the cardinal rule is an ordinal rule. What is first is first. Everything else is not-first. We have the original, and we have the others. 

PW: You could say that about any artistic representation. We have life, and then we have art. We have fact, and then we have fiction.

PL: Yes. But I like to think of my work as fact.

PW: Meaning that they are entirely true? But you know that they are not true, because you have changed information. The price of an item according to one of your “Grocery Store Specials” is not actually the price, nor is the time a movie is showing according to one of your “Movie Times” actually the time. You know that because you have read the actual information, and then changed it.

PL: Is a fact that which is indisputably true or is a fact that which assumes the stance of truthfulness?

PW: Is that a rhetorical question?

PL: No.

PW: Let’s talk a bit about counterfeiting. Do you consider yourself a kind of counterfeiter or forger?

PL: I suppose. But  great forgers work hard to mimic the style of the works they are copying. I do not work hard. It is easy, because the work is without style. No, that’s not right: not without style, but without a hard style. It has an easy style: a certain kind of paper, a certain font, a certain piece of art. This is what I was saying before about the relative difficulty of these works. It is much more difficult to forge the Mona Lisa than to forge a poster promising specials on Granny Smith apples. The Mona Lisa forger might give himself away by not exactly capturing the folds of skin around the eye. I could create a verisimilar grocery poster with ease, but I choose to change it slightly: maybe these apples are 99¢ per pound rather than $1.09 per pound.

PW: Does your work, after it is created, become its own original?

PL: Of course. And I will tell you something. I had a student a few years ago who decided to make artworks that stood in relation to my works as my works stand in relation to, say, the public telephone directory, or the newspaper ads. He took my work and he created his own electronic file, and he changed a few more things, and he printed them, and he showed them as his own. 

PW: Did he get an A?

PL: He did. He was a clever student. But he started me thinking about this, and since then, I have been working on my own second-generation works, in which I work off of my own copies and change the information again 

PW: So there is even a greater distance between the original and your work?

PL: That’s what is interesting. The second set of changes has, for some reason, been exactly counterweighting the first set of changes. So the second-generation copy ends up being exactly the same as the original.

PW: So will these be your next works?

PL: No. Next I will exhibit a different set of pieces that I have recently begun. They are catalogs from past shows, and I have collected them, and reprinted them. I am thinking about binding them into a book. 

PW: And they just have a few details changed?

PL: No. When it came to the catalogs, I changed almost everything. It is the incontinent version of the controlled experiment I have been performing for the last decade, and it is an exciting departure. I tell you, it is incredibly liberating to be able to change your name, the titles of your works, the dimensions of them, everything but the pictures. I have recreated a version of my restaurant menus where the works exhibited are, according to the notation in the catalog, twenty feet tall. Can you imagine these monumental menus? You would need a waiter more than a hundred feet tall just to carry them to your table.

* 

Soon after the opening of “White Pages/Yellow Pages,” the Spanish collector Pablo Madera invited Legno to speak at a symposium in Barcelona. Legno agreed. When he did not appear as scheduled and would not answer his phone, Madera had police enter Legno’s hotel room. They found the artist in his bathroom, dead by his own hand. “Those who take their own lives,” he once wrote in a letter to the Polish critic Inek Drzewo, “should go by pills, because pills are painless and free of mess, and because they have a printed label that lends itself quite nicely to nearism in a way that other instruments of oblivion, whether gun, rope, or automobile, do not.” Legno was perverse even in death. He did not use pills, but rather a pistol, and the fatal course he plotted was hardly free of mess—the officer who discovered his body said that the scene was “like a landscape painting made with blood.” To the pistol, Legno had taped a small label on which he had typed the word “gun.”