Johan & Levi

Milan is a city dear to Orhan Pamuk, Nobel prize for literature in 2006 and author of The Museum of Innocence (2008), a novel conceived at exactly the same time as the eponymous museum in Istanbul, opened to the public a few years after the book came out. In both, reality and fiction intertwine in a project that challenges categories and encourages us to question not only relations between writing and reality and between artistic and functional objects, but also the very statute of the artwork and that of its container, the museum. The central focus of the twofold enterprise is the relationship established between word, image and representation, with “image” meaning everything that pertains to the visual realm. The youthful aspiration of Pamuk to become an artist – with drawings that did not reproduce nature, objects and streets, but the forms of his mind – fuelled the refined visual sensitivity of the author that permeates the entire novel, in which Milan itself plays a significant part. This is the city where the main character Kemal dies, after visiting the Museo Bagatti Valsecchi for the last time, and it was also in Milan, in January 2017, that the Accademia di Brera awarded Pamuk a diploma honoris causa, devoting a conference to him, the contents of which feature in this book. Together with Pamuk’s lectio magistralis, Salvatore Settis’ laudatio and contributions from scholars in different disciplines regarding the Museum of Innocence “operation”, a number of texts by the Turkish writer are presented here on his museum poetics, including a brand new piece inspired precisely by the dialogues of his Milanese days. The importance and topicality of Pamuk’s ideas, in relation not only to the mose recent museographic and museological conceptions, but also the research of contemporary artists who conceive collections as an art form, are therefore strongly reiterated: his work as a writer and artist is the expression of a precise desire not to tell the “Story”, but to bring “stories” back to life within a vision that is both utopian and real at the same time.OUT OF PRINT

"Each became absorbed in their own artistic universe, in ways that gradually acquired consistency and weight over the years. Art animated their lives, an inexorable imperative. Painting was the sole, intimate necessity for both, perhaps the only real secret of their indissoluble bond."OUT OF PRINT

Re-programmed Art: An Open Manifesto is an action research project that explored the impact of methods and approaches linked to open source hardware and software on the field of art. The aim was to produce a number of physical and technological artefacts whose information and implementation specifications are publicly released under free licenses.The group of digital artists and designers involved in the project had the task of re-programming a number of works by Gruppo T, the pioneering group at the forefront of the Italian art movement known as Arte Programmata. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, these artists developed a ground-breaking vision of art as reproducible, participatory and interactive, and created prototypes based on the use of algorithms and technology which were designed to be reproduced as series of constantly changing artefacts. The concept of 're-programming' is about more than just reconstructing the original works, understanding what they were made of and how they were made, and the algorithms used to incorporate an element of chance. It means bringing them to life again, reworked using new materials and technology. Pieces by Gruppo T were thus transformed into new, open artworks that can be reproduced, expanded on and completed by other users: a vibrant tribute to an original, innovative movement that occupied the no man's land between art and design.OUT OF PRINT

Federica Sala interviews Michele De Lucchi to investigate his idea of creative act as basis of his work as new as his private life. Sketches taken from Michele De Lucchi scrapbooks illustrate his interdisciplinary approach.OUT OF PRINT

Art is always contemporary. From this principle and the renewed collaboration between the Pinacoteca and the Accademia di Belle Arti springs the exhibition Contemporary Brera. Fabro Garutti Kounellis Paolini, a tribute to four great artists whose names are variously associated with Brera. The exhibition promotes the active presence of Contemporary Art in a historic museum such as the Pinacoteca, in keeping with the well-established role of the Palazzo di Brera as a laboratory for innovation. At the same time, it updates the revolutionary message of Processo per il museo, organized by Franco Russoli in the short-lived 1970s season of his career, encouraging visitors to experience the palace as a dynamic space in which the arts undergo a constant rebirth. On display are Luciano Fabro’s Groma per Spinoza, Io (L’Uovo) and Modo di mettere le lenzuola, and new installations have been especially designed by Alberto Garutti, Jannis Kounellis and Giulio Paolini for the rooms of the Pinacoteca, from the spacious Napoleonic halls to the chapel of St. Joseph – where they stand in direct and ‘simultaneous’ contact with the masterpieces by Raffaello, Bernardino Luini and Bramantino. This juxtaposition of works from different periods confirms and renews the ultimate significance of exhibiting art, as well as the role that the Palazzo di Brera is seeking to reclaim: that of a venue for observation, discovery and personal, inner research, always open to the contemporary.OUT OF PRINT

A single place with three projects: Brera Palace tells its story, revealing its soul in all its glory through three projects. For the first time, with ‘Accademia aperta,’ students and professors open the doors to the classrooms of the Academy’s ten schools, offering visitors the unique possibility to observe the daily activities of its studios and workshops up close, while ‘Ai confini del quadro. Brera anni sessanta-settanta’ (Beyond the Frame: Brera in the 60s and 70s) puts the spotlight on historical figures of that unique era who brought international fame to Brera and its district, where “art-making” was evolving through the constant interchange both inside and out of the palace walls. ‘Bagnoli, Curran, Lim, Pistoletto, Richter. Installazioni nel Palazzo di Brera’ brings visitors into the world of contemporary art as the entire building thanks to its natural, centuries-old tradition of opening its historical spaces –  the Academy of Fine Arts, Braidense National Library, Botanical Garden, Astronomical Observatory and Art Gallery – fills with dynamism, to dialogue and interact with the new in search of unexpected parallels and convergences. Thus, past, present and future are the trajectories along which the original calling of this “encyclopaedic palace” manages to constantly express and revitalize itself. In the end, Brera puts its patrimony in touch with the contemporary world, activating a process that increases its value and engages the legends of yesterday and the talents of today and tomorrow.   Cover Photo: Cosmo LaeraOUT OF PRINT

Inaugurated in May 2010 to great public acclaim, and placed in receivership in May 2012 for budgetary imbalances, the MAXXI is currently in the laborious process of getting back on its feet with a different board of directors. This text is a cautionary tale of over-ambitious projects, managerial shortcomings, erratic funding and  political decisions taken without a detailed analysis of costs and benefits for the community. In the incongruous position of being a state-owned museum run by a private foundation, the MAXXI was launched without a clear, convincing cultural raison d'être, compared to similar bodies which boast a greater social utility.Alessandro Monti reconstructs the political and bureaucratic implications of creating a museum "on paper", and the controversial aspects of an administration that had to contend with an excess of competing museum spaces and an unsuitable container: designed by renowned Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid at a cost to the Treasury of over one hundred and eighty million euro, the imposing concrete building has proved to be more spectacular than functional.This in-depth investigation of the MAXXI's crucial issues and weaknesses concludes with a series of possible solutions to the current problems, and various proposals to improve future performance, rethinking the Foundation's strategic priorities and overall game plan in organisational, operational and relational terms. Moving forward, it will be important to ensure greater transparency and get the staff more involved in the management of the museum, as well as taking a more selective approach to the exhibition programme, capitalising above all on the permanent collections and finally making the MAXXI a national landmark.OUT OF PRINT

Hyperrealism is usually taken to mean the current in painting that represents reality by starting from a photographic image which is enlarged as much as possible and then drawn, in an attempt to get as close as possible to life-like perception. However the phenomenon has developed in various ways and to date there is no single definition of hyperrealism.Starting from painterly hyperrealism, Rinaldo Censi investigates the characteristics, potential and variety of a cinema that could be termed hyperrealist and that (as in painting) has various different identities. The volume covers two main strands: on one hand it analyses the hyperrealism characterised by satire and social criticism against bourgeois mediocrity (including the works of Hershell Gordon Lewis, John Waters, Bob Clark and Willard Huyck); while on the other it dwells on a more subtle, profound aspect that emerges from a certain vein of experimental cinema, which explores the temporal dimension and encourages us to prioritise the photographic or chronophotographic element (this section includes Andy Warhol, Stan Brakhage, Carolee Schneemann, Kenneth Anger and Paul Sharits).OUT OF PRINT

This work in praise of the “funny guy” Francis Picabia as the inventor of Pop Art was born out of the posthumous discovery of a set of twelve ink drawings on paper that he produced in 1923. Intended as covers for André Breton’s literary revue Littérature but never published, the drawings are copies of advertisements taken from magazines and department store brochures complete with the name and price of the article concerned. Picabia added his initials to this simple advertising material, perhaps as an ironic comment on his inability to sell himself and perhaps to play down the failure of his show at the Dalmau gallery in Barcelona, which Breton witnessed. They mark a stylistic and thematic turning point with respect to the artist’s previous projects. Picabia was the first to use marketing material as a strategy of artistic subversion, elevating crude advertising to the status of artwork. He thus invented Pop Art and can be seen as a forerunner of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. The author reconstructs the context and circumstances in which the drawings were produced. The period 1922–23 saw the implosion of the Dada movement and its drift into Surrealism, the publication of Littérature as a forum for the artists and writers involved to air their sometimes conflicting views, the friendship and collaboration between Picabia and Breton, and the journey by car to Barcelona for the show at the Galerie Dalmau preceded by a lecture at the Ateneu Barcelonés. This is not a text for specialists and the author, while addressing a little-known and highly specific part of Picabia’s superabundant and kaleidoscopic oeuvre, succeeds in introducing the ordinary reader to the artist’s universe and the context in which he worked. Lebel is no denigrator of American Pop Art. Picabia’s drawings had yet to be rediscovered and were never seen by Warhol and the other Pop artists. There is thus no suggestion that the Americans “stole” the idea from him. The text is accompanied by a previously unpublished material in the shape of a letter from Picabia to Breton dated 1923 and a drawing of the same year that accompanied it.  OUT OF PRINT  

The machine and the star, emblems bequeathed by Duchamp to the second half of the 20th century, provide the basis for three short essays on the theme of inspiration and its intermittency, a crucial point for the modernist tradition that is often overlooked by scholars. Michele Dantini seeks to shed new light on the metaphor of the artist as machine and how the first ready-mades (c. 1913) undermined the creative process as an ordered professional routine that had traditionally characterized the transposition of idea into image. Though liberating in some respects, this revolution also had alarming implications experienced in all their urgency by the Art Informel generation. How to find protection against the discontinuity of inspiration? How to endow interior time with duration if everything boils down to the unrepeatable exceptionality of the instant? Ranging from the American movements of the 1950s to Conceptual Art and Arte Povera, Michele Dantini focuses on three fundamental stages, namely Duchamp’s “monster works”, the flags and the rotating devices of Jasper Johns, and the drawings and embroideries of Arrigo Boetti. The reinvention of the artist’s profession is analyzed step by step: the curious adoption of the ready-made in order to restore plausibility and vigour to traditional techniques; the indefinite dilation of the time of execution: the art of repetition and the creation of satisfying routines (series, catalogues and encyclopaedias) through “automatic” procedures that are impersonal and can even be delegated. It is the task of the “wretched viewers” and their perspicacity to identify continuity in transition within the works, to reconstruct the underlying metaphors and “to interpret a routine suddenly swept clean of recognizable points of reference and techniques”.OUT OF PRINT

Known primarily as a visual artist, Mike Kelley was in actual fact an irrepressible, multifaceted figure. In addition to using the most varied means of expression, from drawing to video, performance and installation, he often went beyond the traditional boundaries of the work by incorporating writing in the creative process and producing statements and texts of various kinds. Above all, he broke down the barrier that traditionally exists between the roles of the critic and the artist. It is by focusing on these parallel pathways of action and word and highlighting their powers of reciprocal cross-fertilization that the author addresses questions such as Kelley’s collaboration in the artistic and musical fields, e.g. with Paul McCarthy and as a member of the Destroy All Monsters noise band, his interest in the aesthetic of ufology, his obsession with rag toys, the importance of authority and memory in his art, and what can be regarded as a key turning point in his work and thought, namely the uncanny, Freud’s Unheimliche, to which he devoted an important show. An artist, curator, writer, interviewer, critic, musician active on the alternative scene and many other things, Mike Kelley was one of the most original artists of our time.OUT OF PRINT