Archivio Conz

Francesco Conz was born in 1935 in the medieval walled city of Cittadella, in the Veneto region of Italy, into a wealthy family of Austro-Hungarian descent. He dropped out of university in 1958 and immediately traveled Europe learning languages—he would eventually speak and write in eight. In Berlin in 1972 he met the artists Hermann Nitsch and Günter Brus, and American composer and constructor of music machines Joe Jones. This encounter was followed in 1973 by a winter reise—together with Hermann and Beate Nitsch, and Günther Brus—in which he travelled to New York. There he became acquainted with the avant-garde. The complete list of Conz’s pilgrimages to New York over the next four decades, driven by curiosity and inquisitiveness, would go on to include meetings with John Cage, Allan Kaprow, Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, George Maciunas, Alison Knowles, Dick Higgins, Ann Noël and Emmett Williams. On one such visit to New York, Conz bought the famous anti-Vietnam War car—Charlotte Moorman’s red Beetle—which had a fake bomb installed on the roof rack. This was the car that took Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Carolee Schneemann and many others across America in the 1960s, with Charlotte Moorman at the wheel. From that time on, Conz traveled to art festivals all over the world, visiting Eastern and Western Europe, the United States, Japan and Korea to meet and collaborate with artists for his collection which specialized in Fluxus art, Viennese Actionism, Concrete Poetry and Lettrism. Prolific in his activities, Conz staged numerous exhibitions, produced over 500 editions under the banner Edizioni Conz, published hundreds of books, invited artists to his homes in Asolo and Verona, and surrounded himself with a large circle of disciples. He opened Casa Museo, a ‘secret museum’ in the village of Cappella Fasani, north of Verona. It was known only to intimate friends, and became a vibrant hub and important site of artistic production. Recorded in his correspondence and other ephemera are notes for an additional 250 unrealized projects. Of particular note, Conz had numerous pianos and refrigerators prepared, fitted, painted, and inscribed by artists. Allan Kaprow, for example, replaced the chords of a grand piano with telephones and Esther Ferrer added wings to a grand piano and raised it to an imagined limbo. Hermann Nitsch stayed in Conz’s home in Asolo for seven years and created the famous Asolo Room. Günther Brus painted the cardinals in Asolo, and Takako Saito produced several vendor’s trays and boxes there. Early on, Conz was committed to archiving, naming, and stamping his collection ‘Archivio Francesco Conz’, and recording and documenting his experiences by way of some 30,000 photographs. At the time of his death in 2010, his collection had grown to include over 4,000 objects, mostly purchased or commissioned directly from artists. Unlike other collectors of Fluxus art, Conz also collected Concrete Poetry and Lettrism, identifying the peculiar synergies between them. Conz developed an interest in the art market as he had to sell works to finance the making of his editions or, later, simply to survive. For a short time in the 1970s he ran a commercial gallery in Venice called La Galleria d’arte moltiplicata (The gallery of multiplied art). Where he could, rather than sell works, he donated them to museums and universities in Italy, England, Australia, Hungary and then-Czechoslovakia. When he died Conz left behind warehouses, barns, cellars, two apartments and his secret museum, all stacked full of works of art: sculptures, objects, paintings, drawings and editions, as well as photographs, archives of correspondence and ephemera, and a peculiar collection of fetishes. Initially a religious person but later disenchanted with the corporatization of the Catholic Church, Conz made artists his saints, and their works his relics.