Keeping Up With Milano’s Art: June 2022 Issue

Milan may not yet be comparable to the art scenes of Berlin, London, or New York, but in the past decade thanks to the growth of the international art fair MIArt, EXPO 2015, new international projects such as Fondazione Prada and many others, the city of Italian finance and banking is gently opening up to a vibrant art scene. Milan is becoming a unique blend of European and Italian culture.

As an amateur art lover, or simply a new entry in Milan, you may find yourself a little dazzled by the art scene of the city: lots of galleries, names of museums that you keep hearing, or cryptic and undecipherable advertising poster graphics.

It’s okay, you’re not the only one who wondered at least once whether Fondazione Prada was just a very fancy store, if Hangar Bicocca was a branch of the university, or what the fuck Triennale even is: an event every three years? No hun – little spoiler –  it’s an actual institution. A very cool one for the matter.

No rush and no worries, if you stay updated with Keeping Up With Milano’s Art, you’ll slowly learn to orientate yourself through this art maze, understand where cool stuff goes on, which museums are able to inspire and stimulate critical dialogue, and which instead are just dusty graveyards displaying fossils of a begone time.

Keeping up with Milano’s art is indeed a monthly digestible format which offers a curated look into Milan’s contemporary (and not only) art scene, between artists studios, established institutions as well as non-profit hybrid art spaces or niche\emerging creative hubs.

The first event I want to bring to the attention of Business&Arts’ community is the solo exhibition of the Korean-American artists Anicka Yi held at Pirelli HangarBicocca.

This was maybe the third time I happened to be at Pirelli HangarBicocca, and I am never let down by this foundation. Located in the former industrial district of Bicocca (in the northern part of the city), it is one of Milan's most successful examples of urban regeneration through cultural activities.

I genuinely appreciate and believe in these projects that reveal the power of cultural activities in improving the social fabric as well as the architectural quality of a city, you know what I mean: fuck the shopping malls and build art centres instead!

Actually, why even build them? Creating more useless infrastructure when there are endless existing unused spaces…

HangarBicocca indeed exploits and brings back to life an ex-factory of over 15.000 square meters. Once space of industrial production, now locus for experimentation and research of the most cutting-edge contemporary art. This makes it one of the biggest exhibition spaces in Europe, they also have a very relaxing and refined café with an external patio (10\10), the kind of place you would bring your Tinder date to leave an impression.

They say their mission is #ArtTothePeople, i.e. “make art accessible to anyone” and this time I have to admit they don’t lie, the entry ticket is indeed free with prior registration on their website, unlike Fondazione Prada for which I opened a collateralized loan with my bank to pay an entrance ticket to their last exhibition. Yet, they both are no-profit foundations, but we’re not here to discuss their governance decisions.

We’re instead here to review and speak about Art so let’s dig deeper into why encountering Anicka Yi’s artworks is an experience worth mentioning.

Anicka Yi’s artistic production revolves around the reconfiguration of categories such as human and non-human, technology and biology, natural and synthetic. To have a semantic hint, some titles of her exhibited works are biologizing the machine or as others say, releasing the human from the human and so on. It was some time ago that I heard for the first time speaking about this natural-artificial hybridization, the urge for new definitions of these emerging challenges.

Indeed I believe Anicka Yi’s investigations fit into a wider scope of contemporary research on this issue.

As a matter of fact, completely new sub-disciplines were conceived in the last decades such as cyborg-anthropology (“a form of anthropological analysis based on the notion of organism-machine hybrids that offers a new model for challenging rigid social-political-economic boundaries that have been used to separate people” -Shulz, Lavenda 2008) by the biologist and radical feminist Donna Haraway who wrote pretty abstruse things such as A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century (1985).

Or even more abstruse and interesting are the new contemporary philosophical debates opened on this topic by authors like Emanuele Coccia in his book Metamorphosis.

Insomma, whether you like it or not, these are the issues that many contemporary intellectuals are engaged with: rethinking the relation between natural and artificial, and this is why I encourage you to go and experience Yi’s work, because it must be acknowledged that hers is a prominent frontier of investigation in art as well as many other disciplines. I’m no soothsayer, but I’m quite sure we will witness more and more experimentations along these lines in the future, so start catching up with Anicka.

One of the stupidest complaints that is often moved towards contemporary art is that of “I could have done that too”.

Well, not in the case of Anicka Yi, you could have never done that. Her works entail a plethora of extremely complex and mysterious mediums such as bacteria eco-systems, fabrics made of seaweed, oxygenated metals in ultrasound gel, and other materials I won’t even pretend to have understood. She collaborated with the scientific departments of MIT, Oxford and many other institutions for such complex biomaterials.

But you read right, whole bacteria eco-systems make up some of her works, living cultures of microorganisms expand in a rectangular glass display case as if they were Flemish landscape paintings. If you look close, you’ll actually see certain parts moving.

Along the lines of Ernst Gombrich (who is for me like the wise old master, he is my professor Oak of art history if you know Pokèmon), I don’t like to think of art history as a sequence of progresses, of new things, which reduces art to a race, artists surpassing one another proposing something always new. Yes, Monet was the first to do that, Duchamp was the first to do this, and so on. But that is genuinely not the criteria upon which I personally judge artists. Nonetheless, in this case I must say it was something I had never seen before, and that probably positively influenced my review.

If you visit the exhibition, you’ll ask for the brochure which formally describes all the exhibited works, so I’m not here to do that. I will just finish by shortly describing my favourite artwork, which pretty much sums it all up. It’s a sculpture, but it's actually a fragrance, a scent.

I grew up in a Korean-American home and my mother cooked Korean food. Our house was labelled by other kids as the stinky home. If you talk to Korean-Americans about smell, many of them associate early memories of smell with shame and rejection.

Yi re-configured an aroma as a sculpture, a statue, and well, she is not wrong after all: a smell is made of particles which somehow take up space just like the particles of marble of Michelangelo’s David do. The sense of smell is one of the most stimulated by her artistic production, I can barely recall any other artworks I experienced through smell, rather than sight or hearing in the past.

So every visitor walks through the entrance by inevitably passing through this essence, sprayed by three containers placed on the floor. The essence is made by hybridising chemical components of the sweat of Korean women collected in New York and samples of secretions of ants. This is a trans-species aroma, accompanied by a strong connotation: on one side the Korean women, an identity, a minority immigrated in the USA, often subject to low-paid and exploiting labour, the ants on the other one, symbol of industriousness, collaboration, and hard work.