Catalogue

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.

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 Laera

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.

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).

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.    

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”.

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.

I think that the solution to the possible conflict between Busci as architect and as painter lies in this original dialectic, a kind of obstacle course: the redemption, sublimation and evanescence of the pictorial sign as against the harshness of reality.The delicate strokes of a deft calligrapher delineating dark gleams, nocturnal lights, hypnotic monochrome landscapes of obscure foreboding. A dark vision of the urban drama of the world. A sort of de Pisis in reverse, where the gracefully choreographic movements of the entranced artist's brush give way to scenarios of metropolitan apocalypse with monochrome lyrical and theatrical overtones.

In his works Adrian Paci creates stories in pictures that blend the uniqueness of everyday experience with the history of painting, film and literature. He reflects on issues like loss and migration: people abandoning their homelands and embarking on a quest for a personal and geographical alternative. Paci works with photography, sculpture and video, using different techniques and materials which enable him to achieve considerable freedom of expression and style.Against the backdrop of these narratives he often inserts or simply evokes the presence of one or more female figures that do not appear to play a distinct role but rather embody a mystery that the artist chooses not to reveal. But what is the role of the female figure in this fascinating visual era?She sprang a desire to explore this aspect of Paci's work by analysing a selection of works on the theme. The book, which features a new piece by the artist, is the result of a dialogue between Paci and Paola Nicolin: an opportunity to reflect on the visible or invisible presence of a female figure that adds a human element to the narrative. In Paci's art women are often entrusted with the task of preserving memories and traditions, and being the focal point for the interwoven stories that contribute to constructing our constantly shifting identity: the alternation of crisis, alienation, abandonment and return that characterises human existence.

Marco Petrus's work is a dizzying chromatic and compositional swirl soon transmuted into a journey through the buildings of countless cities, to which the trained eye will be able to assign names and precise paternity from one painting to the next. An opportunity for recognition but also surprise, for an unusual view of something known that the artist's mimetic ability is able to recreate on canvas. A walk through Helsinki, Milan, Marseilles and Naples but above all through the nuances and geometrics of an authentic ideal atlas of 20th-century and contemporary architecture.

It was in the 1970s that the Argentinean video maker David Lamelas began producing specific works based on long periods of residence in various European cities. This book is devoted to the “People of Milan” project undertaken in 1970 specifically for a solo show at the Galleria Françoise Lambert in Milan. The continuous flow of a four-minute film minutely documenting the passersby and events on the busy high street of Via Orefici is juxtaposed with eleven photographs, taken at regular intervals over the same period of time. The publication, of a markedly artistic character, presents the famous artist’s “Milanese period” through a combination of images from the video and observations by Lamelas on his Italian experience.

What is an image and why have images become so important in our daily lives? And what does the gaze mean? Federico Ferrari reflects on our society of images and the cadenced relationship between words and pictures, a relationship that forges our horizon. He focuses on the use made of images and the world they create, and how the gaze refracts: a single vision of the world, a single measure is impossible. The contemporary image calls for a new definition of the gaze, which springs from the unique nature of each vision and is also capable of embracing its plurality. As the number of possible visions is by definition infinite, what really counts is what underpins them and is therefore common to them all. To borrow the terms of set theory, it is an empty set that appears null but also contains something: our gaze. The force that precedes us and is remains open, capable of going beyond all possible visions, all given images. The empty set of the gaze and the power of vision.