If the Turner prize had been decided by Instagram, then Anthea Hamilton’s Project for Door (After Gaetano Pesce) would be a shoo-in to win on Monday. Since mid-September, the UK’s favourite spot for a selfie has been beneath this pair of large, splayed buttocks.
Hamilton’s photogenic piece is actually a re-creation of a 1970s proposal by the Italian architect Gaetano Pesce for a building in New York. The buttocks in question were modelled on Pesce’s friend and collaborator Ulderico Manani, who was, Pesce says, delighted to help. “Ulderico was a homosexual and also a bit of an exhibitionist, so he was quite happy to do what I asked,” says Pesce. “When you have an idea and are convinced of its quality, you have no problem communicating it.”
Born in La Spezia in 1939, Pesce studied architecture under Carlo Scarpa at the University of Venice. There Pesce began to turn away from what he calls the “abstract geometry” of traditional architecture and towards something more organic. “There is an international, bland style of architecture from Stockholm to São Paulo,” he says. “But the organic element is able to surprise us – in a positive way – because we are not used to it.”
The human body, he says, is important in architecture: “Architecture is done for the human being, so the human can be present through a fragment like this.” Could the fragment, I wonder, be another orifice? “Absolutely,” says Pesce. “I did a house in Brazil, in Bahia. Parts of it remind us of the profile of an animal or a human being. When a person sees part of a human figure, they try to interpret it. But with a geometric shape there is nothing to interpret. A triangle is a triangle, a square is a square – there’s nothing to say about that.”
The original model for the doorway was one metre long, 60cm high and 40cm deep, and made in silicon. Over the years, it has disintegrated into a sort of rubbery glue. “When Anthea came to New York to talk to me about her project, I was happy for two reasons,” says Pesce. “Firstly, that something I did in the past was able to excite the mind of a young woman like Anthea. Secondly, it was a way to recuperate something that was lost. I wasn’t particularly sad that the original model had been lost – everything in life has a time. We age, everything ages. But now what Anthea is doing is revisiting that, and with her creativity she can make something else.”
New York, says Pesce, isn’t really so different nowadays compared to how he found it in the 1970s. “What’s always interested me is that it’s a city of minorities. Minorities live everywhere, but what is special about New York is that it allows them to keep their identity. In France, when you have someone from another culture, they’re expected to change, to integrate. Here, we don’t have that expectation. Sometimes when I visit my workshop in Brooklyn from my office in Manhattan, I cross an area of the traditional Jewish Orthodox community. For several blocks I’m traversing a new world. This is quite fantastic – that the city can allow you to experience something you don’t know.”
Opening things up seems to be Pesce’s overriding concern – minds, communities and, of course, buttocks. “Imagine walking along the street and suddenly you see a building with that door,” he says. “Your imagination explodes. You can’t help but be surprised – and that opens a door in our conservative minds. Surprise is very healthy in the city.”
• The Turner prize winner will be announced on Monday 5 December. The Turner prize exhibition is at Tate Britain, London, until 2 January.
• This article was amended on 1 December 2016 to correct Anthea Hamilton’s name.
