Very often we talk about problem-solving. But not as frequently do we come across the concept of problem-searching. Is a problem necessarily something negative? What and how many approaches can one take when working artistically in public space in solitary or in groups? Is graffiti goliardic? What meeting on a cultural level was possible between Moscow and Washington during the Cold War? And where does anamorphosis fit into all this?
This and other questions were answered by Mimmo Rubino, aka Rub Kandy who calls himself an art-designer. Which by his own admission then is nothing more than a made-up term. From scratch. Not too bad, one more excuse to keep looking for poetic solutions to practical needs.

Hi Mimmo, let’s start right away with a difficult question because it is existential, not to say ontological.

Your very dense biographical introduction for the Philosophy Festival in June 2019 stated:

“Mimmo Rubino, known as Rub Kandy, lives in Rome.

He calls himself an art-designer, trying to hold together, in an invented term, conflicting creative practices that can be reconciled only in the terrain of maybes, prototypes, exemplarity. Problem-solving vs Problem-searching. Accurate processes for negligible goals. Poetic solutions to practical necessities. Aesthetics of failure, Crisis-Surfing, self-sabotage, cult of neurosis, egocentrism in the public, the interference of social in the private. Uninhabitable rooms, half-full glasses, vices, procrastination. dreaming to find order.”

And here’s a hypothetical set of questions that might have come to curious people reading this biography of yours: What is an art designer? What is the relationship between Rub Kandy and Mimmo Rubino?

Many years ago a high school teacher of mine told us students probably something quite obvious that I had not yet thought about, however: a problem is not necessarily something negative. I would add, as known to many, the meaning that the word crisis takes on in Japanese in the semantic sense of opportunity. In this sense, it seems to me that I can detect a conceptual closeness between some of the utterances in your biography. Specifically Problem-solving vs Problem-searching, Aesthetics of Failure, Crisis-Surfing. Am I wrong?

Two decades ago Davide Grassi and Igor Stromajer registered the domain problemarket.com (now no longer active 😭). A kind of parabolic quotation of the value of problems. The idea was more or less: everything has value, so many important things come from solving problems, WE QUOTE THE PROBLEMS!
In a passage in the film doc Helvetica, two designers (I think NORM) tell in exact words the value that the question, the problem, the “constraint” has for them and, in general, in graphic design. The constraint is fundamental. The blank sheet is tough and not too useful. Universal language says nothing if there are no universal things to talk about. You need terrain. Grip.
The more or less serious testimonies about how problems and solutions are linked cannot be counted. So yes, a much discussed topic, probably one of the cornerstones of our development. Analyze and solve the problem… of course you have to understand and look at the problem, identify it, choose the point of view… if you approach the problem of global warming with air conditioners, I don’t know if you have the problem and the solution clearly in mind.
Let’s put it this way: the solution to a problem is maybe always a bit of an ideological question, I mean, it depends on your ideal and even more often on your goal. What do you get out of a problem? The seller of refrigerators profits from the problem of heat. The inventor (and let’s take everyone in between, designers, mechanics, artists) can gain a solution from the decomposition of the problem, which can sometimes even be aesthetically interesting, for example if you find the right word for just that thing there.

Coming back to the more artistic question, well, the artist, or at least I, when I talk about problems and crises, I always add the value of error, the little pains of the young painter that never die in me. Master Gianni Motti, my friend and mentor, often joked with me and said, “When your back is against the wall, you have to do a somersault”. He is a lover of soccer and the figures of the old soccer, the libero, the fantasist, the COUNTER-ATTACKER… Here, paradoxically, the artist also has an ethical role, that of recognizing the flaws in the scheme and launching the counterattack. Besides, and this is more my method, you can feel sorry for yourself, but with style :-). Crisis surfing indeed. Hence, one of my main problems you know as a friend: that of moving only at the end, just before the deadline, and waiting for the energy, the wave. One of the advantages of the artistic method is that you can use these “energy” frictions. Linear planning sometimes kills the creative project, which doesn’t need to be delivered by monkeys on LSD (although…), but definitely needs non-linear prototyping. That’s pretty much the opposite of corporate planning (even though modern companies rely heavily on artistic methods and often hire monkeys on LSD to do the brainstorming). In short, while the producer’s refrigerator must work, the artist’s refrigerator may not work at all, because it is not used to refrigerate food, but is literature of the aesthetic journey, of the eternal struggle of people to tell difficult things (yeah yeah yeah) with words, objects, forms, sculptures. In this sense, the method of an artist, even if close to a designer, remains perhaps a more authoritarian method, less necessary to save materials, production and time (is that a luxury?) and therefore more open to talk about the travails of those who made them. I always think of a phrase of Lodola: “In my shop window there is a sign “Here we sell potatoes”, but I do not sell potatoes, I sell the sign”. Art designer seemed to me, when I wrote it, a way of saying this strange thing: this need of an artist to draw heavily on the magnificent potential of the creative method of applied art, this equally important need to leave in the process the famous openings, the opacities, the hooks and, why not, the personal literature. After all, we are only what we are. It’s better to look in the mirror once in a while. In short, it means that I would like to be a designer, but then I get lost in thoughts of my ex-girlfriends.

In early 2019 at the Macro in Rome, I attended a live lecture by Nicolas Bourriaud on relational aesthetics. In that lecture, the French critic quoted British artist Liam Gillick who often repeated, “My work is like the light in the fridge. It only works when there are people to open the fridge door. Without people, it’s not art – it’s something else – stuff in a room.” Does your refrigerator light work well? Are we really what we eat? Is your fridge usually full or empty, and what do you keep in it? For your works in public space, depending on the type and age of the people you involve in the artistic process, how does your relational approach change? If you want, you can give some examples.

My refrigerator is always empty or you find moldy stuff in it. The light comes on wrong, like randomly, always when it’s closed. If a famous collector opened it, he wouldn’t notice anything. Shit!
I’m also physically bothered by the fridge, ‘this vertical coffin.

Of course we are what we eat, for millennia and millennia we have been reincarnated in the same flesh: we eat other species and reproduce with our own. Inside you have the memory of the first form of life. we are like a sourdough starter, a mush of copy copy copy copy cells…a foam.

I basically have two approaches in public space:
the more autistic one, more focused on writing, meaning I go straight ahead and bring the work home and try to block out the context, one example is REVOLVER, the concrete mixer. Another is the Simon Bolivar staircase. All things are aligned with the outcome.
The more workshop/workshop/prosperity, works that do not emerge from a fixed project, but rather from a method, from certain rules that I give myself, in a more or less clear way. Works that then evolve with more or less luck, depending on the actor. An example of this is L’Albergo delle Piante with Angelo Sabatiello, where we were agitators as artists rather than designers. Another example is the workshops. You know I like to do workshops that I set up as if we were a communication agency: You come up with the idea and build it together, nobody knows what’s going to come out of it. Or another example is the collaboration with Biancoshock in an abandoned factory in the northeast of Milan. Neither me nor him had a project there, but we played around and ALL OF THE LIGHTS came out.

The editor of “Non Essere Cattivo” says in the making of the film that Caligari “doesn’t waste a film”, that the film was already cut in the director’s head. Everything was written.
In a text by Kiarostami, on the other hand, the director says that making a film for him is like choosing the players of a team, putting them on the field and enjoying the game.

I think those are two valid attitudes. Sometimes you have a prior vision and draw it, sometimes you’re a diviner looking for water. For example, in Cyprus I searched for water for a week and then found a cistern and called an Orthodox pope to have him say a blessing mass.

I’d like to ask you more about the first approach you use in public space, “the more autistic, more derived from writing, meaning I go straight ahead and bring the work home and try to block out the context.”

On April 14, 2022, you posted a picture on Facebook and Instagram of a Parisian graffiti:

“Graffiti is a testimony.
Art, not art, that is an irrelevant attribute. Its aesthetic revolution was to produce signed works without the work, or to make the signature the work. Nothing that could be analyzed according to the categories available at the time. Just as the introduction of the DJ with the base changed all music, hip-hop or not.
Graffiti is not a “you like it/you don’t like it.” Graffiti doesn’t care about you. Graffiti is a testimony. Graffiti is I WAS HERE.”

What is your relationship with graffiti, with writing (although the more purist of the distinction may not see them juxtaposed one after the other)? Have you done them, been part of crews? If so, how have they affected your artistic and non-artistic research path?

How freaking boomer is it to write the serious stuff on Facebook? You could have saved me that embarrassment.

The first time I saw an aerosol can was in my brother’s hand, he was twelve and I was eight, we bought it with other kids at Giannattasio, the hardware store in via Messina (Potenza ed.). He asked us several times what to do with it and he said “paint bicycles”. The result was a TEDDY BOYS on a small wall and ULTRA’ POTENZA and MATERANO CONIGLIO with a CAZZOCONIGLIO drawing.

Around ’95 there was a good scene in Potenza, we’re talking about the province of course, a small thing, but the way Italy is, the province has often done better than the city, albeit with some delay.

Of course I did graffiti, the whole package, from writing on the pupa under the school to libertarian posse stuff and a bit of bombing on buses and so on. Although I mostly liked drawing, while nowadays I prefer ignorant writing and a return to naive writing NOEMI TI AMO, back then I was one of those in the 2BK crew (Briganti del Basento ed.) who loved puppets.
I’ll try to summarize what I think about graffiti (at the time they used to call it Aerosol Art and woe betide dripping color). I think that while in the art schools veteran-Guttusian artists were breaking their dicks to defend some failed pique of their own .. like a fresh wind, albeit a little late, came this new thing. We have suffered for years from the cancel culture against writing, “eh but it’s just writing” “eh but it’s just script vandalism” “eh but it’s just gang stuff” “eh but it’s just exhibitionism” … and instead all the disciplines of marketing, visibility, graphic design, branding, were passing by while in art schools they were busting their balls with chiaroscuro. It is to this day inexplicable how writing still does not find its respected space in Art History, always dismissed as a phenomenon and never addressed as a formal revolution. Indicative how precisely street art is treated as a revolution and not a restoration, but that is another story.

How have the graffiti influenced my development?The VERBO, for sure, the love for words. And then that ULTRAS, let’s say GOLIARDICO attitude that makes you smile under your mustache when you see the writing MICIOO (right) OOOO (left) on the parked SMART. I mean… you know it’s poop. Come on guys, you don’t do that….How awesome is that? ❤️
In short, going back to the beginning of your question: The approach is that you just do certain things at some point. I remember a derby between Potenza and Matera where a man walked up to a Celerino in a relatively calm moment, lifted his helmet and threw a punch that knocked him to the ground. Obviously, he was arrested immediately. But now I’ll tell the story. It happened. I don’t know if this need to tell is born of real poetry or frustration. I don’t. But I am an art lover, not a security guard, and unfortunately I see poetry even in silly gestures. I am happy as a wagon with S U P E R C A L I F R A G I L I S T I C H E S P I R A L I D O S O.. WHAT DOES IT MEAN? protests someone… NOTHING, I reply. I JUST KNOW THAT IT IS SO and THAT I ENJOY IT.
It’s hard to find meaning in a jerk who throws a punch at a policeman for no reason, if you don’t understand that sometimes the poetry is in the vice, in the perversion.
The climax of this stuff I had with the opera WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREEEEEE what a mess on that occasion 🙂
TEDDY BOYS NEVER DIE!
RIP BROTHER MY BIG LOVE!

That’s right, the work WILL MAKE YOU FREE that you installed between April 25 and 26, 2011 in Pigneto, created quite a stir especially in the media… Would you like to go over the highlights as well as the meaning with which you had conceived it?

I wanted it that way 🙂 What shocks me the most is that 11 years have passed. At that time I was mostly interested in WORD and the abusive side of uranium art. I often collaborated with Lorenzo Lo Sasso, a designer with whom we had a project called BLACKLAB, an abusive iron sculpture that had already produced Trilly (2001), then an Untitled (2002) and then RATZINGER (2009). The first works were more romantic and figurative, then I had taken a more straightforward path…. in short, I was the cat that went to the lard, we were drunk 🙂

We mounted on a small bridge in Rome the inscription WORK WILL MAKE YOU FREE, In iron, arched, a bit Disney. More or less literal translation of the Auschwitz sign. Throw in the fact that it happened to be April 25. The comrades of the Pigneto neighborhood committee couldn’t believe that, on that very day, fate gave them the opportunity to show themselves as anti-fascists in such an obvious way and so, despite the fact that most, including Digos, had understood it was not the work of a nostalgic person, they began to contact journalists to tell them that “we are the ones in the neighborhood and we tell you that the Nazis have mounted a Nazi sign,” to show how hard and pure they were they even made a negotiation with the fire brigade so that they would personally be the ones to take down the sign. Thus was the frenzy. The headline “Nazi writing” appeared in some newspapers, Alemanno, mayor at the time, declared “I hope they are caught as soon as possible,” and within a few hours the guards, informed who knows by whom, called me directly on my cellphone. What happened at that point was that the newspaper headline took over, rightly so, the work and there was a holy wave of anti-fascist outrage. I mean, if you read that Nazis mounted a sign in town you get pissed off. I was at home reading the news, it was like a Simpsons episode of those where all the people with torches and pitchforks are chasing homer who made some mess.
I was prepared for pippings about nice and bad taste but not for being referred to as a Nazi. My roommate wrote me that two nice men had come by asking questions and seeing my room on Zeno Street. So on the advice of the lawyer I decided to do an interview to clarify. The rest is a work under seizure and a trial for “spreading Nazi and racist ideas…” from which I came out innocent because the fact does not exist or does not constitute a crime…I don’t remember well. I don’t feel like telling or having claims about what the meaning of the opera was or was not for me or for others. I think the work is all of that together and I keep clippings and reliefs and court papers. Of course, words can be light as a feather and it can be fierce.

When you use letters, sometimes you are taken literally. Although I do appreciate the text message a leprechaun sent me at the time – words attributed to Baudelaire, but who knows:
WORDS CAN AND SHOULD DO FOR THEMSELVES.
THEY HAVE THEIR POWER PERSONNEL, THEIR STRENGTH, THEIR INDIVIDUALITY, THEIR EXISTENCE OWN.
THEY HAVE ENOUGH STRENGTH TO RESIST THE AGGRESSION OF IDEAS.

I am most amused by the trial in which an agent was called as a prosecution witness:
JUDGE: “What did you think when you saw that Nazi writing?”
AGENT: “But we knew it wasn’t Nazi writing, everybody knew it, you could see it.”

There are a thousand other funny things… like then to pay for my trial, together with dear Jessica Stewart we built a really mythical street art exhibition at the time. With a bang of good artists helping me and it went all sold-out. Were you there?