Keeping Up With Milano’s Art: October 2022 Issue
Just like Jesus Christ after 3 days from its death, Milano has finally resuscitated after 3 months of summer! Gallerists and curators are back in town from Capalbio or Forte dei Marmi, and the art scene has woken up again. A new vibrant year of exhibitions is ahead of us, and Keeping Up with Milano’s Art will accompany its readers into these fresh new experiences.
For all the new members of B&A, the new freshmen or whoever clicked accidentally on this link: 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.
This, 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.
First of all, I want to bring to the attention of those who have already been living in Milan for some time the opening of a brand-new art foundation which has immediately mobilized the attention of the critique and of the art hoes in town alike.
Fondazione Luigi Rovati is the new art gem in the city, which rises up in a freshly restored palace in Corso Venezia. If you have the chance, go and visit it in its first month of opening as the entrance is free prior registration. I stress, prior registration because of course I forgot to register and they did not want to let me in.
The Foundation is named after a physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur honoured by the Italian Republic with the title of Knight.
L. Rovati, eager art collector on the side of his successful scientific career, says:
I HAVE ALWAYS COLLECTED WITH THE SAME METHOD WITH WHICH I SHAPED MY LIFE AS A RESEARCHER. I COLLECT THE ELEMENTS FOR KNOWLEDGE
I must admit that I could feel the resonance of this approach to art in the display and discourses proposed by the foundation. My feelings towards it are a bit mixed… I’ll try to constructively explain why.
The visit starts from the underground floor, where the restoration works were undeniably stunning: they created an amazing space, designed through domes and immersive lights, and here a collection of Etruscan pieces is preserved. The feeling I had from the underground floor’s audio guide was a bit… dusty, if you get what I mean.
Museums - especially in the 21st century - shall not be graveyards displaying fossils of a begone time, it is the least exciting approach to museology one could think of. All the erudite information I received from the audio-guide were a bit redundant, few and meaningful elements from a mysterious and fascinating civilization like the Etruscans were enough to trigger really provoking reflections on our contemporaneity.
Religion, fashion, death, all these elements could have been bridges between our age and that of the VII century B.C., but the “collecting like researching” of Mr. Rovati definitely had its resonance in the audio guides.
After an underwhelming kick-off, I went to the upper floor, where a completely different dimension is opened to the visitor. This part of the palace is eclectic, eccentric and dreamy. Each room is designed in detail with pieces coming from archaeology to contemporary art, oriental tapestries and photography.
My absolute favorite works were those by Luigi Ontani. Psychedelic and oniric, but not in a Klimt-y way, rather in a fuck all western constructs way, visually promiscuous and unbounded.
The overall atmosphere at the upper floor is that of a Casa-Museo, which is a somehow recurrent motive in Milano. These are private houses, belonging to collectors who decorated them in the tiniest detail, making them just as precious as a museum. Think of: Casa Museo Boschi di Stefano, Poldi Pezzoli and so on.
What I like about these is that you can sense everywhere the personal taste of the collector, who in turn left this heritage which somehow becomes a piece of art itself. And we shall not forget that the tastes of collectors, from early modern time onwards, became a structural element of the art system, contributing in dictating the history of art as we have inherited it today.
Overall, I do not think Fondazione Luigi Rovati will become the new cultural milieu of Milan, it is more like another shining gem adding up to the monopoly of high-end cultural venues of the city center.
I will always, on the other hand, be an advocate for the endorsement of cultural spaces in the outskirts and suburbs, the potential they hold for the urban regeneration is still extremely underestimated by the municipalities in my opinion. Of course this holds true only if the implementation of such projects is well thought through, otherwise the result is mostly just a big gentrification process which raises real estate’s prices. *cough cough* …Tate Modern… *cough cough*.
Either way, my second suggestion for the month of October concerns indeed another foundation which exploits 15000 squares meters of ex-industrial plants to promote contemporary art, a foundation whose mission I sympathize with much more: Fondazione Pirelli Hangar-Bicocca. I had already mentioned it in the June 2022 issue, concerning Anicka Yi exhibition, and now the new retrospective on Bruce Nauman has just been inaugurated.
I feel like Bruce Nauman is one of those artists that just needs to be part of everyone’s contemporary art experience. He set down pillars of contemporary art practices since the 60s, through radical artistic actions which expanded the collective notion of art. He transcended centuries of philosophy of art with the radical statement which underscores all of his work:
IF I WAS AN ARTIST AND I WAS IN THE STUDIO, THEN WHATEVER I WAS DOING IN THE STUDIO MUST BE ART
Throughout his career Nauman embraces a process of synthesis that leads him to refuse every medium and category, his own body and his studio become the only raw materials and tool in art, an autonomous “deskilling”, for which he received numerous critics, like those of being “Thin” “Vapid” or “Boring”.
To such critics he replied with the artwork Pay attention motherfuckers: an open rebellion to the art system and market which struggled to fixate him inside taxonomies and exploit his works, thus defining them as vapid.
When visiting the exhibition I suggest you adopt a different intellectual posture from that of those dusty critics. I propose you instead the intellectual posture of Leo Steinberg. The visionary critic argued that audiences’ “habitual assumptions” and previous experience made them feel “entitled to some pleasurable reward”, but there is a curious lack of reward in Nauman’s art. There is something withheld.
THERE IS A SENSE OF LOSS, OF SUDDEN EXILE, OF SOMETHING WILLFULLY DENIED - SOMETIMES A FEELING THAT ONE’S ACCUMULATED CULTURE OR EXPERIENCE IS HOPELESSLY DEVALUED. THIS SENSE OF LOSS OR BEWILDERMENT IS TOO OFTEN DESCRIBED SIMPLY AS A FAILURE OF AESTHETIC APPRECIATION OR AN INABILITY TO PERCEIVE THE POSITIVE VALUES IN A NOVEL EXPERIENCE.
- LEO STEINBERG