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Since his manifesto for arte povera, 'Notes for a Guerrilla War', was first published in 1967, the Italian critic and curator Germano Celant has been something of a cultural renegade on both sides of the Atlantic. Whether helping to define the oeuvres of Robert Mapplethorpe or Piero Manzoni, Celant has been drawn to art history's shadow narratives and is equally fluent in postwar American and European art. In 1995 Celant was appointed Artistic Director of the Prada Foundation, the Milan-based non-profit organisation founded by fashion designer Miuccia Prada and her partner Patrizio Bertelli, where he has investigated the dual worlds of art and fashion. In Venice on the occasion of a retrospective of American painter John Wesley for Prada, and a new collaboration with architect Renzo Piano for the Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation, Celant spoke with Michael Fitzgerald about the 'mirror-like' ways of art history.

Michael Fitzgerald: John Wesley is something of an art-world oddity. While included by Harald Szeemann in a grouping of post-pop art at documenta v in 1972, his comic-strip canvases – referencing anything from surrealism to Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints – have defied categorisation. Is this what attracted you to his elusive practice in the first place?

Germano Celant: Wesley's artistic territory is borne of two opposing polarities. Raised in California, where his training as an artist can be traced back to 1960, Wesley may be placed on the threshold, or in transition, between pop and minimal art. Following an abstract-expressionist period, he has dealt, first in Los Angeles and later in New York, with pictorial languages – unemotional and detached like those employed by Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly in New York or John McLaughlin in California – that have taken on a popular iconography inspired by Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol, Edward Kienholz and Ed Ruscha ...

MF: To what extent has your work with the Prada Foundation tested the boundaries between art and fashion? For you as a curator and cultural commentator, do these fields become more distinct or more blurred over time?

GC: My relation with Fondazione Prada has been mainly a personal one, based on a continuous exchange of ideas with Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. Here two visions are intertwined: on one side the fashion designer and manufacturer; on the other the art historian. Each has influenced the other's way of thinking. Within such a flow of ideas, we have shaped a mutual knowledge about the way space and product, image and matter might be considered. Such an osmosis has helped form the choices we have made. Such choices have never been affected by fashion as an industry, but rather by fashion as a way of thinking and of perceiving the world ...

MF: Across the canal from the wonderfully exuberant hang of Wesley, one can visit the more minimalist space of the newly opened Emilio and Annabianca Vedova Foundation, where you and Renzo Piano have devised an astonishing motorised display of Emilio Vedora's abstract expressionist work. Here the 'curating' happens around the spectator in space. What is it like to have the mystery of your creative process made visible in such a public way?

GC: The best result for a curator is the creation of an emotionally charged and moving environment in which the works of art are perceived in their autonomy but are also enriched by an intense, new, spectacular way of looking at them. On the one hand, John Wesley's works on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore have been arranged within the nineteenth-century quadreria, or picture gallery, with paintings placed very closely on high walls, covering them almost entirely from floor to ceiling. Conversely, in the new space of the Fondazione Emilio and Annabianca Vedova, Renzo Piano has designed a 'container' that comes alive through a series of gestures ...

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Summer 2009 issue.