Keeping Up With Milano’s Art: July 2022 Issue
I was really not sure about what to bring to the attention of my 6 people audience for the July ‘22 Issue of Keeping Up with Milano’s Art … then I had this conversation on Grindr.
Grindr is a n y t h i n g but the platform you speak about art on. If you know, you know. So I thought this guy must have been desperate to figure out what the hell Osservatorio Fondazione Prada was, and that perhaps also the crowd of Business&Arts alike may be wondering the same.
For the non-English speakers: in this screenshot seasoned with dozens of grammar mistakes a guy is just asking me what such space is about as he keeps hearing about it, but finds it very gate-kept. As a matter of fact, Fondazione Prada’s graphic advertising is surely among the most undecipherable in town.
But no problem, Keeping up with Milano’s art is a monthly digestible format which offers a curated look into Milan’s contemporary (and not only) art scene, between established institutions as well as non-profit, hybrid art spaces. In the hope to help amateur art lovers or paesani freshly moved to Milan to orientate themselves through this art maze and figure out where cool stuff goes on.
Role Play is the name of the current exhibition on display until September 26th in the Osservatorio of Fondazione Prada, or, as I called it in the screenshot, Formazione Prada. Forgive me, Miuccia.
Apart from the notorious exhibition space by Rem Koolhaas, the Foundation also includes two more: one in Venice, the other - the Osservatorio - right next to Duomo. - don’t worry, I didn’t know it existed until I moved to Milan either.
So, if you manage to survive through the jungle - cause it literally is a jungle - of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and you get to the Prada store, you’ll find a door next to it, with nothing but a golden plate with Osservatorio carved on it. Then, a very fancy elevator will take you to the last floor where you’re immediately submerged in a sea of deep blue lighting.
The exhibition design curated by Random Studio is indeed stunning. If you’re into that, I’d highly suggest you check out this Amsterdam based creative studio because it gives birth to really immersive projects.
Many of the reviews I read on this exhibition mostly spoke about the soothing blue display design, leaving a little aside the works of the artists. Osservatorio is a space usually reserved to emerging artists, mostly working with photography or video installations.
Therefore , the curatorial effort of Melissa Harris who put together eleven upcoming international artists proposing this intense and dazzling experience made of a plethora of different personalities is worth of praise: it somehow gives the same aesthetic anesthesia that scrolling through your phone for two hours does. If someone had already visited it may confirm.
THE EXHIBITION EXPLORES THE VIRTUAL PROCESSES OF METAMORPHOSIS, CREATION, CRYSTALLIZATION AND PROJECTION OF IDENTITIES, INVESTIGATING WHAT THE NOTION OF SELF ENTAILS, ANALYZING ITS CONSTRUCTION AND DISSEMINATION, WHICH IS A MASSIVELY AMPLIFIED PHENOMENON IN THE POST-INTERNET ERA.
Now, let me tell you something… the narrative is genuinely interesting in my opinion, undoubtedly hard to develop as we’re not talking about some women in renaissance painting stuff or other predictable blockbuster exhibition narratives. It is not easy to reconstruct a logic file rouge encompassing eleven completely separated artists: the guide written by the curator sounded indeed slightly forced some passages. Still, consideration has nothing to do with the quality of the works.
As a matter of fact, three artists have genuinely enchanted me: Meriem Bennani, Narcissister and Juno Calipso.
As usual, I am already running out of space in here, so I will cut short: to get a full understanding of what I’m saying, I suggest you get your buns up, go there, and discover them yourself. I am no exhibition catalogue anyways.
As I said before, Osservatorio focuses on photography, and this is an exhibition that certainly hybridizes and democratizes this medium. It does so very much, to the point that some artworks have left me quite confused, not necessarily positively. Just confused.
During my experience of the exhibition, I thought back to a guy called Arthur Danto, who - starting from the 70s - promoted a shift of the attention towards the contextual existence of the artwork, thus planting the seed for artistic theories coming from a sociological matrix.
These theories were led by the view of another too, George Dickie, according to whom art is a conferred status, and institutions such as museums and galleries, and specific agents working within them formed a dense, global and hierarchical network within which the cultural/artistic and economic value of art pieces has been simultaneously assessed.
All institutions that surround art cannot be ignored if one wants to deliver an art theory acknowledging that art lives through a community of social relationships and assume meaning as such. According to these procedural perspectives - to just sum it up - nothing explains the use of the term art except for the fact that various institutionalized groups have undertaken certain decisions of cultural character regarding what shall be considered similar to paradigmatic cases of Art. Capital letter A.
ART IS A CONFERRED STATUS, AND INSTITUTIONS SUCH AS MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES, ORMED A GLOBAL AND HIERARCHICAL NETWORK WITHIN WHICH THE CULTURAL/ARTISTIC AND ECONOMIC VALUE OF ART PIECES HAS BEEN SIMULTANEOUSLY ASSESSED.
It is a bit of a cynical art theory, but when you find yourself in front of literal screenshots of video games or Instagram posts, you may be tempted to think that Danto and Dickie were really not wrong after all… but this is mostly because I place extremely high expectations upon Fondazione Prada’s projects and it doesn’t mean I wasn’t satisfied by Role Play.
If you have been exploring the contemporary art scene you must have already bumped into some sorts artistic projects dedicated to digital art. Role Play is surely not the first one on the scene, yet, the conversation on post-internet art still struggles to be taken seriously.
Even then, post-internet art is mostly used as platform to reflect on the societal transformation brought about by the internet, or consumer critique and so on, but only marginally is preoccupied with the new possibilities offered by the use of computational tools, digital fabrication, and CAD software as mediums in the actual making of artworks.
In architecture on the other hand, even coming from the last couple of decades, digital fabrication became a field of solid experimentations, while this profound disconnection in the literacy on digital culture and computational tools in the two fields has only recently started to resolve.
Zaza’, COMPLETE TRUST curated by Alessandro Bava
June 7th - July 15th 2022
For this reason, staying on the line of post-internet art, but moving further from Role Play, I’m happy to let the folks of B&A discover a niche space in our city: Zaza’ Project Space, where the collective show Complete Trust is currently on display until July 15th.
This is the first collective show organized at Zaza’, bringing together the work of experimental architects and different generations of artists, some of them only 24 years old, engaging in convergent ways with algorithmic forms either as a tool or as an object of reflection.
Zaza’ indeed presents a research-led program of exhibitions focused on connecting experimental art and architecture practices and all the shows are curated by the owner of the space, Alessandro Bava, architect, exhibition designer, writer for the famous art magazine Flash Art and professor at NABA as well as in other universities.
I don’t know how Alessandro could be as a professor, but he gives me the impression of a mix between the auratic seriousness of Bauhaus teaching, and the avantgarde free spirit of Black Mountain College. He is most definitely a cool one, with a solid vision and an enviable passion.
When I heard him speaking about architecture for the first time I remember being genuinely fascinated.
His research is concerned with the continuous intersection between the two disciplines, art and architecture, in the attempt not to let space be exhausted as a mere functional ingredient, but re-configuring it as an artistic module and medium, capable of subverting the paradigms of traditional architecture and the primacy of construction and material, thus mobilizing space as a cultural and relational substratum, as the architect Octave Perrault wrote in the Vol. 55 of Flash Art Italia.
In picture: Levent Ozruh, TWO POINT ONE of PRIMITIVES 3D Printed Sand, 2021(left) & Jan Vorisek, Untitled 2022, PLA, paint, latex 2022 (right)
Zaza’ is not an easy artistic project to explain as its strongest peculiarity relies precisely in its hybridity, so I thought Alessandro’s words were the best tool to let the audience have a glimpse of what the project is about, through this short interview.
Why Project Space instead of Gallery?
I define Zaza’ as an artist-run gallery, by which I mean an independent space for the promotion of artistic research, supported by the sales of artworks and projects. It is quite an idiosyncratic formula, which nonetheless I find fitting to my practice and interests. We are used to the strict division between independent, non-for-profit spaces producing cultural value on one hand, and commercial spaces which extract that value and multiply it on the other.
Zaza’ wants to break away from this paradigm.
In picture: AA Cavia, Unicode (left) & Sylvano Bussotti, Senza Titolo (right)