He’s been an artist for nearly 50 years now, but he’s never gotten so much news. Men from Argentina call him a fraud, women from Russia celebrate him as a genius. “Everything goes in on the left and out on the right,” says Salvatore Garau and smiles, “but I’m happy about every reaction.”
He is sitting in his living room, behind him one of his paintings, expressive green and purple brush strokes, in front of him the camera of his laptop. A man in his late sixties who looks ten years younger, curly dark hair, black-framed artist glasses. One thing is particularly important to him, he says several times during the next hour: “I really don’t want to be kidding anyone.” Nor is he a satirist. “I mean all of this very seriously.”
The anger and the love, the accusations that he was a “thief” and enriched himself on the backs of “real artists” – all the excitement that has flared up against this relaxed Sardinian for a few weeks is related to his last idea. She made it into the headlines around the world. “Artist sells invisible sculpture for 15,000 euros” was the headline The Sun from the UK. The Globe and Mail from Canada reported, Mexican and Argentine newspapers, Fox News. A showmaster, from which country he no longer remembers, joked that he was going to give his wife invisible diamonds this evening.
The sculpture is not invisible. But not visible. A difference.
Since then, Salvatore Garau has been a star, a rogue, a role model. Under the video he posted of one of the invisible sculptures on Instagram – it is in front of the Scala in Milan, where you can only see a square of adhesive tape on the floor – almost 1,000 comments have now accumulated, in English, Italian , Spanish, Russian, Catalan. Mostly angry to very angry. One of the most frequently liked comments is: “The emperor’s new clothes.” Whereby Garau corrected immediately: The auctioned sculpture was not invisible at all. “It’s not visible to the eye. That makes a difference.” That is why he prefers to call his sculpture “immaterial”.
It was auctioned at a small auction house in Milan in May. The sculpture called “Io Sono” (“I am”), advertised the prospectus, was a work “of the utmost importance and intellectual stimulation”. A sales price of 6,000 to 8,000 euros was expected. In the end it was twice as much. “And 15,000 euros is really, really little money for an original Garau,” says Garau. It almost seems as if he really wants to incite the people in the comment column.
The buyer is a private individual who wants to remain unknown. The artist also says he doesn’t know him. The purchase is not entirely immaterial, however; the auction house accepted real money, for example – and gave the buyer a certificate with Salvatore Garau’s seal and signature. There is also the instruction: “To be installed in a private house, in a room free of obstacles of 150 x 150 cm.” This certificate, it says there, may not be issued in the same room as the work. “Nothing should distract”, says Garau, “from the thoughts, from the ideas that my sculpture stimulates.”
What is art worth? The controversy over this question is as old as modern art. For more than a hundred years, countless artists have put the question at the center of their work. Because if it is no longer more material costs, technology or working hours decide what art is and how much it is worth, the exciting question is: what then? If it is the artist’s mere declaration that an object he has chosen is art, as Marcel Duchamp showed with his urinal – is the object still needed at all? Based on this idea, Yves Klein exhibited “immaterial” pictures in an empty gallery in the 1950s. In 1961 Robert Rauschenberg was invited to make a portrait of the gallery owner Iris Clert for a group exhibition. He sent a telegram: “This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I say so.”
Many artists have also worked with invisibility for decades, from Andy Warhol to Maurizio Cattelan, who declared an official police report to be art: He documented the complaint made by Cattelan that an invisible sculpture had been stolen from the artist’s car. In 2019, Cattelan stuck a banana with gaffer tape on an Art Basel wall and set the price at $ 120,000. (This work was eaten on site by another artist, another twist in the debate about work and value, which is always reminiscent of penniless humor in a somewhat exhausting way.)
His art is climate neutral
“Crypto-Art” is currently the big topic on the art market. Purely virtual works that are marked as unique using NFTs, i.e. blockchain technology, and are often paid for with cryptocurrencies. Damien Hirst just got into one mirrors-Interview announced that his art will also be fed into this completely virtual world. He wanted to know “what happens when art and finance come together”. An interesting phrase from one of the richest artists in the world.
An NFT collage by a previously unknown graphic artist named Beeple sold for nearly $ 70 million at Christie’s in February. This makes him one of the three most expensive living artists right from the start. Could the outcry when finishing off the invisible sculpture made its way through the world press also have something to do with such developments? Salvatore Garau is not a fan of NFTs. In fact, he thinks it’s downright terrible. “Just like crypto-currencies, crypto-art uses as much electricity as entire countries,” he says into the camera. “We are destroying our planet for art that is ultimately nothing more than a JPEG file.” His sculptures, on the other hand, are “not only forgery-proof, but also completely climate-neutral. In production, packaging and shipping”. A little smile now plays around the corner of his mouth.
He has been dealing with environmental protection for a long time. At the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic began and with it the time of video calls, virtual concerts and empty football stadiums, he recognized something that he urgently had to process as a motive: “Absence is the central protagonist of our time.”
Salvatore Garau has been active in the art world for 50 years. Here his iron sculpture called “Eel from Mars”.
(Photo: Salvatore Garau)
Garau, which is also an important detail of this story, is no stranger. He has been active in the art world for 50 years. He paints, produces films and music. He had exhibitions in Barcelona, San Francisco, London, and his works were twice part of the Venice Biennale. On a square in his home village of Santa Giusta in Sardinia, he has built a twelve-meter-high iron sculpture called “Eel from Mars” – weighing seven tons, a tentacle that Garau has hand-welded and protruding from the ground. The accusation of the angry commentators on the net that an unsuspecting pseudo-artist is making fast money here cannot be held up if you take a closer look.
Apart from “Io Sono”, the intangible sculpture sold, Garau currently has seven invisible works in stock. He created them for a specific city. It started in February with “Buddha in Contemplation”. This sculpture, marked with a square of adhesive tape on the paving stones, stands in a prominent place: in front of the Scala in Milan. In May, Garau will then set up his second sculpture in an equally symbolic place: in front of the New York Stock Exchange. He calls this sculpture “Aphrodite weeps”. A collaboration with the Italian cultural institute in New York.
He has been widowed for eight years
“As soon as I decide on a title and place, people’s thoughts concentrate there and create an individual sculpture,” says Garau. Similar to a church. He doesn’t want it to be understood as a parody, but as poetry, a reflection of our time. “On the stock exchange, immaterial money is being earned and destroyed every minute. The beauty of the planet is ruined. That is why Aphrodite weeps.”
He then speaks very passionately of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, of Parmenides’ conception of the non-existent and a few other theories that sound heavily like artist gossip. But then comes a question that gets stuck: “Why do people believe in a God that no one has ever seen?” The invisible works, he says, cost him more work than all of his paintings and metal sculptures. The idea would come to him in a moment, but then he would work on the theoretical elaboration for weeks: where would he place the sculpture? What could the title be that sends the viewer’s thoughts on their journey? The other day he went for a walk on the beach, a friend called and heard the sea in the background: Was he disturbing? No, he said, but he was working right now. That’s the way it is, says Garau: When he works on intangible works, there is no studio door that he can close in the evening.
He has been widowed for eight years, his wife was an artist, no children. After her death, he says, he lost his language for a while. He lives in his homeland, in Sardinia, in a hundred square meter house, in front of a narrow asphalt road, then the sea. He hasn’t left the island for two years. A friend made the rectangle made of adhesive tape in front of the Scala in Milan for him. She then filmed the invisible sculpture so that he could post something on Instagram. That’s it. In New York, he directed a cameraman over the square at dawn by video call. “The artist, too, was immaterial, so to speak.”
Why is there apparently no greater provocation for many people than when a man earns a few thousand euros with a mischievous, if perhaps not entirely new, idea that already worked quite well for Till Eulenspiegel? One explanation would be envy. Condensed in the brazen sentence that modern art has had to endure for a hundred years: “I could have done that too.”
Even artist colleagues don’t seem immune to envy. Garau recently received mail from lawyers. An artist from Florida and one from Spain accuse him, independently of each other, of having copied from them. Both had created invisible sculptures years ago and are now asserting copyright law. Garau laughs. With one of the two he wrote back and forth briefly and clarified the matter – “the man had no idea how many conceptual artists dedicated themselves to the subject of invisibility 60 years ago”. The other may mean serious threats to go to court.
The matter should be settled there at the latest. Because even the accusation that he was concerned about money is difficult to keep up with on closer inspection. The EUR 15,000 sculpture – and all reports in the international media have forgotten to mention this – Garau himself did not sell it. But one of his collectors. A nice young man from Italy who bought a few small paintings by Garau years ago. In any case, this collector had the sculpture auctioned through the auction house and received the 15,000 euros. Garau has never seen any of that money. He had sold his intangible work to the collector in spring 2020. For 2800 euros.