Catalogue

The work of art and the space around it exist in a relationship of close interdependence: this essay looks at this symbiotic relationship by means of an extensive and detailed account of the major avant-garde installational and environmental experiments right up to the present. It traces the evolution of the art system and the itinerary that led to the post-modern paradox whereby the placing of any artefact in a particular context is, on its own, enough for it to be transformed into an artistic device. It is the chronicle of a relationship in constant tension, the one between text and context, between content and container. And testing it, bringing about the evolution, not only of art, but also of the characteristics of the exhibition spaces, are always and above all the most avant-garde artists. Their investigations are structured within a dense dialogue with real space, which is gradually involved in a constitutive way in the creation of the works. The first stage is to overcome the conventional limits of the pedestal and the frame: the painting, unadorned, comes into the world to receive fragments of reality within its enclosure. It cites the emblematic case of Fontana, who in the post-war years invaded the surrounding area to give life to the first works created using space and light alone. It moves on to the creation of installations that have a great impact on the environment – often site-specific with process artists, exponents of arte povera, conceptualists and land art among others. And finally reaches an awareness, nowadays totally taken for granted, that the work of art should find its raison d’être in relation to the setting and to the interplay between them. The discussion is both clear and systematic, also documenting the most paradigmatic exhibitions and international shows including the most recent ones. But nor does the author ignore the importance of the curators, now omnipresent figures due to their ability (real or presumed) to stage shows that are seen as creative productions in their own right, subordinating the space of the work of art to the space managed by them.

In a culture marked by the virtual and rapidly changing new media, what is the place of the surface, the very expression of a physical substance? A border area between internal and external worlds, a threshold that separates the visual from the tactile, the surface is also and above all a place of material relations. In order to discover the materiality of the images that fill the contemporary and grasp their significance, it is therefore essential to explore the space of these relations and how they are mediated through surfaces that may take on the features of skin, of a dress, of a cinema screen or of a canvas, and even the screens of the electronic devices that dominate our daily lives. In following the thread of these encounters we discover how the visual is structured and understand that the image is not just a two-dimensional element, but something porous, an epidermis that absorbs time, a place where forms of memory and transformation can find expression; it is a device for bringing distant space-time dimensions together. Delving deep into the object relations between art, architecture, fashion, design, cinema and new media, Giuliana Bruno asks questions about the concept of materiality and its many manifestations.Superfici is a magisterial wandering through contemporary visual culture; a walk that traverses the light spaces of artists such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Tacita Dean and Anthony McCall, touches the tactile surfaces of the cinema screens of Isaac Julien, Sally Potter and Wong Kar-wai and travels across materiality in the architectural practices of Diller Scofidio + Renfro and Herzog & de Meuron to the art of Doris Salcedo and Rachel Whiteread, where the surface tension of media becomes concrete. It is a dissertation that manages to dispel a myth – that the surface is something superficial.

10 February 1985: Jean-Michel Basquiat appears on the cover of the New York Times magazine, sitting in his studio in Great Jones Street. His stares idly into the lens while his hand grasps his brush like a weapon. His bare feet, resting on an overturned chair that looks like an animal carcass, are in sharp contrast to the formality of the Armani suit where you can just see the hem of his trousers streaked with paint. He is light years away from his early days when, having removed himself from the bourgeois indifference of his father and his mother’s psychic instability, he chose his path, the underground world of graffiti and new wave music, of clubs, but above all the walls of New York where he gave vent to the “80 per cent of anger” that fed his hunger for success. From the anonymity of SAMO – the label he adopted to brand the skin of a city still hostage to racism and urban decay – Jean-Michel went on, in just a few years, to co-sign paintings with Andy Warhol. Today he is the most famous black artist, the first to become internationally famous, a goal he really wanted to achieve and single-mindedly worked towards. But it quickly became a label he couldn’t shake off, in the gilded cage that the art establishment seemed to have put him in, from which not even his excesses and perhaps his last desperate attempt to escape – a return to his origins, to the African destination on the air ticket found in his pocket at the time of his premature death at 27 – would manage to save him. A contradictory temperament in a time of contradictions, Basquiat personally experienced a whirlwind of stimuli, a maelstrom of emotions that he then poured out onto his canvas and any other support to hand: words, images and sounds were magically recomposed into a new form that makes him one of the greatest visual poets of the 20th century.  

One day in 1823, on a football pitch in the north of England, a player picked up the ball and, with exquisite indifference to the rules of the game, he started to run with it: he had invented rugby. It is commonly held that around 1860 some artists invented modern art, rejecting all the rules and breaking the chains of tradition, such as perspective, which made up the commonly accepted and understood artistic language. But that is not how it went: Degas, Van Gogh, Rodin, Gauguin and Picasso did not restrict themselves to dodging the rules of the game, but, just like the inventor of rugby, they decided to seize the possibilities that lay hidden in traditional art to create a new game with a new system of rules. In this essay, brilliantly written and with a richness and depth of analysis second to none, Kirk Varnedoe offers us an overview of the birth and development of modern art, from what is an original and, in many respects, revolutionary perspective. According to the American scholar it is simplistic to attribute the new pictorial dimension adopted by Degas and Van Gogh to the influence of photography and the flat perspective of Japanese prints. And it is equally reductive to interpret the primitivism of Gauguin and Picasso as romantic yearning for exotic representations of distant lands. On the contrary, its innovative force comes from the free exchange of forms in juxtaposition which, removed from their original contexts, give rise to new ensembles of meanings. The analysis of fragmentation and serialization in Rodin’s sculptures is a key stage in shedding light on how the development of abstract art is not concerned purely with form. The sudden spread of the aerial point of view in the painting of the Belle Èpoque period and in the Russian avant-garde of the 1920s is one of the instruments Varnedoe gives us to understand not only how dialectical the relationship between art history and the history of ideas is, but even what it is that links Degas’ ballerinas to Pollock’s Abstract Expressionism and the minimalist trends that followed.

In the Uyghur language, Taklamakan means the desert "in which you can enter but from which you don’t return”. Nevertheless, many have defied the desert and triumphed. Oases and even kingdom rose from its sands, prospered and then fell down during the centuries. Today only few millennial ruins remain as testimony of this past, and at their side new towns, oil fields and skyscrapers have soared, symbols of the recent industrialisation that has turned the Xinjiang region, rich in oil, gas and uranium, into the new Chinese Eldorado. The book intertwines two ways of storytelling, photographs and narration, which are set in dialogue so as to present two points of view on the world which complement one another, mixing past and present, fiction and reality.The volume is also published in french edition with ISBN 978-88-6010-177-8.

From image makers to playlists, from gourmet menus to singing festivals and even VIP weddings, nowadays everything is “curated by”, and “curate”, “curator” and related terms are on the lips and on the curriculum of everyone who wants to make an impression and stand out from the crowd. Whereas even the most disparate companies have adopted this strategy of extreme evaluation of content, it is in the field of art where curators rule the roost. Architects of high-profile group shows and biennials to which they lend their name and their face, the various Obrists, Christov-Bakargievs and Gionis overshadow the work of the individual artists to become the protagonists of the events they have been asked to curate, divided between the need to tap into public taste and the mission to shape a new avant-garde.The phenomenon began in the nineties and soon became widespread, to the extent that even the museums, once havens separate from the frenetic world of marketing, jumped on the curatorial bandwagon, ready to serve up a pre-digested helping of their treasures. What set off the unstoppable rise of these “guarantors of value” so skilled at promoting mainly themselves, so that they appear to be the “must-have” arbiters of taste? How has this role infiltrated mass culture bringing about a hyper-professionalization of roles in the art world and a proliferation of new areas of specialization? David Balzer does not investigate curatorial practice as an expression of taste, sensibility and competence,  and thus endorse  the cult of the curator,  but denounces its excesses by diagnosing what he effectively calls “curationism”. A pathology of our culture, a story of our time.

New York, autumn 1978. Thursday evening at eight o’clock on the dot, Robert Mapplethorpe, bold and elegant in his black leather jacket, descends the stairs and makes his entrance into the main room of the notorious Mineshaft, the buzzy underground men-only club, temple and haven for every form of perversion. This is the sparkling voracious decade of gay emancipation: art and sex are closely bound together and Warhol’s prediction about everyone’s fifteen minutes of fame is an existential imperative. Mapplethorpe, the outrageous provocative photographer, brandishes his Hasselblad as if it were a revolver and aims straight at the dark side of those years when he is both witness and protagonist: statuesque nudes or bodies wrapped in latex and ropes, leather scenes, fetishistic activity, and his Mephistophelean self-portraits. He was an “outlaw” from hell who took the dogmas of American society by storm and became, in spite of attempts to censure him, one of the most acclaimed artists of the twentieth century after his death from AIDS in 1989.  Written by Jack Fritscher – lover and companion to Mapplethorpe in the late seventies and editor of the first magazine to publish his controversial images – this is not a biography in the strict sense: it is the portrait of a wild-at-heart period, recounted in all its excess and bizarre detail in an ironic upbeat style, comprising rapid-fire dialogue and hallucinatory portraits. But it is above all an intimate and personal collage of memories, meetings, loves, vices, obsessions, illness, illustrious friendships, lyrical interludes, scenes from everyday life and tales of derring-do, which allows the profile of a vulnerable man to emerge, a man of crystalline purity and at the same time ambitious and cocky, always intent on feeding the mystique that surrounded his public image. Robert Mapplethorpe was a risk-taker in life and in art, he courted danger and turned his own existence into a sequence of “perfect shots”.

If we know what we know about the extraordinary art revolution of the second half of the sixties, about Arte Povera, Conceptural Art, Process Art and Land Art; if we now see in Boetti, Pistoletto and Zorio some of the most important exponents of their generation; if we know what Lucio Fontana’s last comments were or we have read about recently discovered figures such as the ones by Agnetti, Baruchello, Dadamaino, Mulas and Griffa, it is also thanks to the news reports, the reviews, the essays, and the publishing and teaching work of Tommaso Trini (Sanremo, 1937).This anthology fills a gap that has long needed to be filled and contributes to drawing up a more accurate map of the panorama of Italian art criticism, leaving aside tired polarized ways of thinking. Through painstaking research and discussion carried out by Luca Cerizza in conversation with the author, the book brings together for the first time a selection of Trini’s art criticism: from pioneering texts dedicated to the future protagonists of Arte Povera, to the series of in-depth descriptions of other key figures in the post-war years, as well as newspaper reports and analyses – some of the earliest international ones – that define in real time the characteristics of the post-minimalist art movements that shook up the second half of the sixties. Trini is revealed here to be a keen-eyed witness and a perceptive interpreter of much of the best art in this half-century. This book gives art lovers (but also the general reader) sparkling well-paced criticism written with intelligence, where the “militant” stance never strays into sectarian or ideological positions.

Art, says William Kentridge, is its own form of knowledge. It is not a simple integration of the real world, nor can it be considered only in the rational terms of classic academic disciplines. The studio is the crucial place for the creation of meaning: it is the place where linear thinking gives way to eye, hand, paper and charcoal, to the material processes that give creativity its vital spark. The act of drawing, of dirtying our hands, has the power to put us in touch with the most complex issues of our time. Kentridge is particularly interested in how we attribute structure and meaning to the fluidity of experience: we strive to glimpse a familiar outline in the changing shapes of clouds and we assemble scraps of paper into a shape that is instantly recognizable to an onlooker. This powerful need for meaning – looking at a group of fragments and attributing a value to them, taking the fragments and composing an image – is present not only when looking at the shadows of things, but in everything we see, even in how we interpret the world of geography or politics. To show us the mechanisms – often illusory – by which we give meaning to the world, the author uses language and the instruments of logic to flesh out an idea as if they were paper and charcoal. He thus also adds practical notions to a discussion that ranges from Plato’s cave to the Enlightenment’s role in colonial oppression, from how optical instruments work to the depiction of animals in art: Kentridge’s Sei lezioni di disegno is a compendium of his ideas about art, on making art and on the need to leave space for stupidity, that is both clever and light-hearted. He does not celebrate stupidity itself, but tells us it can hold more surprises than a studio full of good ideas.

Champion of a violently revolutionary art, Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), painter and sculptor, is, jointly with Marinetti, the greatest exponent of Futurism and the first in his circle to have tapped into the new sensibility ushered in with the century of the machine and technology. It is no accident that Apollinaire immediately saw in him the theoretician of the group, the one who was to distil in the celebrated “striding figure” his investigation of an almost metaphysical dynamism of Aristotelian origin. Boccioni had a quick intellect and singular way of thinking, which ranged over every field. He had the characteristics of genius, he absorbed and processed his reading and experiences, remaking them in extraordinary inventions that fixed the principles of a new aesthetic. Although he followed in Balla’s wake during his apprenticeship in Rome, he was, however, the one to draw the manifesto into the adventure that was the Futurist painters’ manifesto in 1910, to which Carrà, Severini and Russolo were signatories. They were a lively bunch with the poet Marinetti in the role of leader who missed no opportunity to launch his companions on the path to international fame, achieved in February 1912 with the first Futurist exhibition in avant-garde Paris. This was an event Boccioni had longed for more than anything and it brought all his expectations into focus. This was followed by London, Brussels and Berlin, before going back to the Italian tour of Futurist shows, where the young artist was to give further proof of his magnetic personality and keen intelligence. These qualities also had their effect on women, some of whom were well known, such as the art critic Margherita Sarfatti, the writer Sibilla Aleramo and Princess Vittoria Colonna Caetani, his final desperate passion. But prior to them was Ines, the woman immortalized in many portraits, a continuous thread running through Boccioni’s very brief existence. He signed up as a volunteer for the Great War, and died at the age of 34 when he was thrown from his horse. He left behind a mystery regarding his legacy – revealed in these pages – and a great heritage for the future of art.

The name of Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) is intrinsically linked to the history of art, taste and museology of the 20th century, so much so that in the seventies the French art historian André Chastel wrote: “Many of those who travel round Italy know him without realizing it: he is the greatest organizer of art exhibitions in Europe”. He still stands tall in the pantheon of those who revolutionized museums in the post-war years (in spite of widespread resistance and provincialism) transforming them into outposts of the avant-garde. The resounding success of the installation created to host the work of Paul Klee at the Venice Biennale in 1948 was followed by many others in quick succession. The personal exhibitions of Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp, the collaborations with Lucio Fontana and Arturo Martini and his work on many historic buildings trace the development of an original architect who up-dated the way art was displayed by setting out a model that takes bold liberties to incomparable lyrical effect. It becomes unfettered from the lofty grandeur of the pre-existing places, fostering a style that is light and spare. His career was a series of legendary solutions resolved in situ (always dealig with time constraints and a great lack of resources), in symbiosis with the mastery of the craftspeople around him.How to find one’s way around the huge number of exhibitions and museums for which Carlo Scarpa was wholly or partially responsible? Philippe Duboÿ, who worked with him and had access to many archives, is the ideal guide to help us understand the plans, reliefs, sketches, and photographs relating to each and every one of Scarpa’s projects. Rare documents written by Carlo Scarpa have been included in the book, which has been conceived according to the principle of synchronism between image and word, so dear to Le Corbusier. The author reveals the personal dialogue between this great figure of the European culture and the work of art.

Petala aurea (petali d’oro) è il termine che i trattati altomedievali utilizzano per definire sottili lamine e foglie (brattee) usate in oreficeria. Il volume presenta i 47 manufatti in lamina d’oro, con alcune eccezioni in lega d’argento, che appartengono alla famiglia monzese Rovati, industriali e collezionisti d’arte; la collezione Rovati viene esposta per la prima volta a Monza, presso la Cappella della Villa Reale, e rappresenta un importante contributo allo studio e alla comprensione dell’oreficeria altomedievale. La raccolta, datata prevalentemente tra il VI e VII secolo, comprende principalmente brattee auree: di questo insieme fanno parte un nucleo di crocette in lamina d’ambito longobardo e un gruppo di sottili laminette di differenti forme e dotate di forellini, probabilmente per essere applicate a tessuti o vari supporti; alle brattee si affiancano placche ornamentali in lega d’argento e rame. I manufatti sono privi di una cifra stilistica definita e ben riflettono le contaminazioni culturali del periodo, rendendo difficile definire la loro provenienza geografica e l’ambito culturale di pertinenza: alcuni oggetti risultano di sicura matrice protobizantina, altri rimandano al gusto barbarico e in qualche caso è possibile ipotizzare che siano stati prodotti in Italia settentrionale. Queste testimonianze preziose trasmettono sensibilità artistiche, retaggi culturali e concezioni religiose che contribuiscono a ricostruire il quadro di una società che tra il VI e VII secolo conosceva proprio in Monza, grazie alla frequente presenza della corte longobarda, un centro privilegiato di interrelazioni tra genti di tradizioni culturali differenti.