Milan EXPOsed

By Barbara Casavecchia

Milan l’è un grand Milan (Milan is a great Milan) is an old saying in Milanese dialect, simultaneously hoity-toity and self-ironic, embodying the residents’ pragmatic attitude of thinking big while being doubtful about the actual outcome. With the Expo 2015 finally opening its gates to the public yesterday on 1 May (it will run until 31 October), no other expression could feel more appropriate. The city is split in half between ‘expoptimists’ (#expottimisti) and ‘exposkepticals’ (#exposcettici), like in a saga with new daily chapters and collective bipolar leanings.

The last weeks witnessed a frenzied urban crescendo of last touches on road works, new bicycle lanes, new pedestrian areas; after a decade, the Darsena (dockyard) of the Navigli (canals) finally reopened to boats and people, with new large public areas along the water and ‘The Cube’, a temporary digital installation, spinning images of the past and the present. Five stations of the new metro line M5 opened on April 29. In the meantime, news of the Great Leap Forward to finish all the pavilions and facilities at the Expo site in Rho-Pero (on the city outskirts, reachable by train and metro) kept leaking through either expoenthusiastic or expopessimist news reports and social media.

This crescendo, however, finally lead to yesterday’s (anti-)climax of riots on the streets of Milan, with clouds of teargas and protesters angry about the obvious irony of an Expo supposedly focussing on issues of global sustainability of food production, healthy nutrition and feeding the needy while being sponsored by Mc Donald’s, Coca-Cola, and Ferrero.
April was a busy month. The first ‘pavilion’ to open its doors to the press (with the installation still in progress, on April 6) was the group show
‘Arts & Foods. Rituals since 1851’ at the Triennale, the only Expo venue officially located in the city centre, and accessible with the general fair ticket. The exhibition was preceded, last summer, by a heated wave of polemics around the extraordinary – at least for Italian parameters – curatorial/managerial fee of 750.000 euros granted to Germano Celant and his staff, out of an overall budget of over 5 millions (as declared by the Triennale’s president Claudio De Albertis), mainly provided by Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, a joint-stock company 80% of whose share capital is owned by Italy’s Ministry of Economy and Finances.

The investment of so much public money on a single exhibition project, in an era of severe cuts and budget starvation for most museums, brought into sharp relief the problem of distribution of resources at times of paucity, somehow evoking the infamous ‘Let them eat cake’. The show (co-curated by Chiara Spangaro) is as encyclopaedic as bulimic, ranging from 1851, the year of London’s Great Exhibition, to the early 2000s, with over 2000 works from the fields of art, design, architecture, fashion, music, and television spread over 7000 square meters (ca. 75000 square feet). The ground floor begins as a frenetic stroll in wonderland, with paintings by Claude Monet, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, Futurist kitchens, Murano glass vases, toys, kinetoscopes, Constructivist ceramics, Jean Prouvé’s entire Maison des Jours Meilleurs (1956), Pop Art masterpieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol and Tom Wesselman, science fictional furniture from the 1960s, psychedelic cookbooks, film projections, Martha Rosler’s ever genial Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975), to quote but a few examples.

The broth is increasingly spoiled on the second floor though, where a series of XL-sized works from the 1990s and 2000s (Jeff Koons, Urs Fischer, Andreas Gursky, to name but a few) feels quite disconnected and lost in space among the white walls. A visit to the terrace, rewards though with the newly inaugurated Triennale restaurant (designed by OBR studio), with picture-perfect views of the park outside: sit down, eat, enjoy.

In the dense and well-researched catalogue which accompanies the exhibition, Serge Latouche’s essay on food, hunger and the advantages of degrowth, addresses the crucial issue of how to reverse the world-wide concentration of all goods (arts, foods?) in the hands of the happy few. I couldn’t help noticing that Angelo Morbelli, a brilliant Milanese Divisionist painter, is here represented by Asfissia (1884), a tableau depicting a table filled with the remains of an excessive dinner, while I would have expected to see his famous painting Feast Day at the Hospice Trivulzio in Milan (one version, from 1892, is at Musée d’Orsay in Paris), capturing a sad Christmas morning in Milan’s oldest refuge for the needy. According to Internazionale magazine, last year the meals served in the soup kitchens of the city amounted to over two millions, while the number of Italians queuing up for free meals increased by about 23% from 2008 to 2013.

The allegory of abundance proposed by this show, as well as by the Expo, made me think of a classic topos of the Commedia dell’Arte: the hungrier Pulcinella gets, the bigger becomes the pile of spaghetti that he dreams of having on his plate. Originally, the Expo’s slogan ‘Feeding the Planet’ intended to respond to the world’s urgency for sustaining its growing population. Then came the mascot named ‘Foodie’ (English only) designed by Disney, the corporate sponsorships, the gourmet attractions. Now the Expo should arguably alter its slogan to a less utopic ‘(Over-)Feeding the Visitors’.

In the second week of April, the MiArt art fair coincided with the Spring Awakening program of openings involving almost all of the city’s contemporary art venues. Hangar Bicocca opened ‘Double Bind & Around’ by Juan Muñoz, a series of fifteen installations documenting the artist’s career, from 1986 to the gigantic, eponymous work created in 2001 for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern, reinstalled here for the first time. In a 12 acres landfill between the Isola area and the new skyscrapers of Porta Nuova, Fondazione Trussardi, together with Confagricoltura and Fondazione Catella, recreated Agnes Denes’ famous Wheatfield, an environmental work originally planted in Battery Park, New York, in 1982. It was like the closing of an urban cycle, with a slightly cruel ironic twist: this beautifully green field borders an area once occupied by a public park and the artists-run Isola Art center, both razed in 2007, after months of conflicts, to make room for new high-rises. Furthermore, last February brought the announcement that, after its renovation and rebuilding, Milan’s entire business district Porta Nuova has been sold for an undisclosed sum (the area’s market value is estimated around 2 billions euros) to the Qatar Investment Authority.

In the private galleris, the Italian scene was represented by Luisa Lambri’s photo series of Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels at “Studio Guenzani“http://www.studioguenzani.it, and Pietro Roccasalva’s return to Zero gallery after almost a decade with new paintings and a new mixed media piece_ The Wooden O_ (2015), while Andrea Kvas and Nicola Martini joined forces in the project room of Kaufmann Repetto, to use the same materials, such as shellac and resin, in very different ways, resulting in expanded paintings and mirror sculptures. At Monica De Cardenas, Linda Fregni Nagler presented her latest cycle Pour commander à l’air (2014), based on archival news photos, re-photographed and enlarged, to reveal the high level of cropping, post-production and retouching on all supposedly documentary news images already in the mid 20th century, way before the mystifications of the digital era. Analogic photography took centre stage also at Massimo De Carlo with Elad Lassry, whose latest series Untitled (Swimmers) (2015) embeds silver gelatine prints, beads, and pigments within sheets of acrylic glass, and at Raffaella Cortese, where Roni Horn presented a series of irksome portraits of Jürgen Teller, appearing as a sort of two-headed god reflected in still water. Armada, a new space run by young artists and curators mostly coming from the Brera art academy, in the peripheral Bovisa area, hosted a women-only group show, ‘Venganza (i don’t want to be friends)’ curated by Gea Politi, with works by Carol Bove, Lucy Dodd, Jana Euler, Betty Tompkins, Amalia Ulman, and Julie Wachtel. At Lisson, under the ironic title of ‘Hot Topics’, Cory Arcangel displayed seven groups of anthropomorphic sculptures, from the same series he created for ‘This is all so crazy, everybody seems so famous’, his solo at Palazzo della Regione in Bergamo (organized by GAMeC’s curator Stefano Raimondi; until 28 June) – a great eye candy made to break the Internet, with an eternally sunny carpeted rainbow occupying the Palazzo’s medieval main hall.

One of the final acts of the week was the opening at PeepHole of ‘painting, painting’, with Tom Burr staging the paintings of a late studio neighbour and friend, Ull Hohn (1965-90): a box of very personal memories, especially of that time in life when killing the fathers (Gerhard Richter, in Hohn’s case) still seems a central issue. Patrick Tuttofuoco tuned into this oedipal theme with his public sculpture …MOM, DAD (2015), installed next to Brera, once his alma mater.

No time to rest, really, and on Monday morning the Design Week’s stampede started to pour into town, to attend over one thousand scheduled events. The proper Salone del Mobile is located in the fair premises in Rho-Pero, while the FuoriSalone (off Salon) takes over the entire city, which perennially reinvents itself trough the occupation of ‘new’ districts – this year, one of the most visited was Cinque Vie (5 Streets) in the centre, with interesting experimental projects by Space Caviar and Z33 at Palazzo Clerici. Alice Rawsthorn, in her much discussed article in April’s issue of frieze, denounced the Salone as the empty indigestion of superficial consumer products, less and less oriented towards function, theory, concept – to be fair, I would add that design at large seem to have a problem in this regard. My admittedly slightly arbitrary pick is the exhibition ‘The Astounding Candy Power’ by Benjamin Loyauté at the French Institute, next to Santa Maria delle Grazie which holds Leonardo’s Last Supper (1494–99), a show that reflected on the emotional impact of objects, even at zero degree, when they are associated with personal memories: the installation was based on small, sugary pink bonbons that Loyauté recreated from a traditional Syrian shape and recipe involving rose-water – a little bite of unforgettable happiness, as described by the postcards sent to him by numerous Syrian friends and families involved in the project.

There are good public exhibitions in town: a small, refined selection of sculptures and photographs by Medardo Rosso (1858-1928) at Galleria Arte Moderna (until 30 May), the rare survey Leonardo da Vinci 1452-1519 at Palazzo Reale (until 19 July), and the new instalment of Michelangelo’s last Pietà Rondanini (1564) at Castello Sforzesco, designed by architect Michele De Lucchi. All wonderful masters, but definitely Old Masters. When it comes to contemporary art production, it’s evident that the Milanese scene is driven by the private sector. The city doesn’t have a public contemporary art museum and seems to have given up on the idea of needing one. It’s a matter of distribution of resources and endowments, over and over again.
For its upcoming blockbuster on motherhood and the condition of women over the last century, La Grande Madre (The Great Mother, 25 August to 15 November), curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Fondazione Trussardi decided to team up directly with the Cultural Office of the City of Milan, so that the exhibition (sponsored by BNL Gruppo BNP Paribas) will be held at Palazzo Reale, next to the Duomo. Usually, public and private paths don’t cross much. Fondazione HangarBicocca, so far the biggest and most successful contemporary art space (thanks to a series of spectacular solo exhibitions, such as the recent ‘Light Time Tales’ by Joan Jonas, as well as thanks to its free entrance policy), has been created and is generously sponsored by Pirelli, a tyre manufacturing company. The news however that by 2019 Pirelli will move into the hands of China National Chemical Corp raises possible questions on the future of Hangar, whose program is currently announced until the end of 2015, with upcoming exhibitions by Damián Ortega and Philippe Parreno.
Private galleries are starting to super-size as well. While Giò Marconi relocated his gallery to a smaller space on Via Tadino, his father’s Fondazione Marconi has renewed and taken over the entire building formerly shared by the two, and in conjunction with the Expo, the Fondazione hosts a ‘Tribute to Lucio Fontana’, with a recreation of the monumental artist’s project Spatial Concept, Trinity(1966). Last Autumn, Christian Stein gallery organized a retrospective of Alighiero Boetti (in collaboration with Fondazione Boetti) that would have been perfectly at home in any museum, in terms of quality and epic size of the works. To accommodate the larger works, Stein opened the doors of their enormous storage, in the satellite town of Pero, right next to the Expo area.

A missed occasion of rejuvenation, on the public side, was the long-awaited opening of the MUDEC, the Museum of Cultures housing the rich ethnographic collection of the city, with over 7000 pieces in the ex-Ansaldo factory, close to Porta Genova. It has a joint governance: a public committee of experts supervises the program, which is conceived and produced by 24 Ore Cultura (a society which organizes big exhibitions across Italy, as a private contractor).

Fifteen years in the making, the museum made all the first pages for the wrong reasons: a harsh dispute with the municipality over the poor quality of the flooring installed against the expressed wishes of the architect David Chipperfield prompted him to issue a public statement forbidding the attribution to his studio of this otherwise beautiful glass building, flooded with natural light. Anyone having seen the floor will probably not consider Chipperfield’s statement an overreaction. What I’ve found more dispiriting, however, was that all the articles focused on this controversy but had little to say about the actual opening shows.

‘Mondi a Milano’ (Worlds in Milan) documents all the Expos that took place in the city from 1874 to WWII: well researched and rich in original materials, it also highlights the connections between rationalist architecture and colonialism, though more information on the horrors of Italy’s occupation of Libya and Ethiopia would have been welcome. The other exhibition, ‘Africa. Land of Spirits’ proposes such an old-fashioned vision of African art that it verges on the embarrassing. What to say of a room where wooden sculptures from different countries and periods are surrounded by gigantic portraits of the great heroes of the Western avant-garde (Picasso!), who were influenced by their ‘primitivism’? No sign of contemporary African perspectives, voices, cultures, counter-histories. Pity.

Chipperfield was not the only international starchitect engaged in a Milanese commission. SANAA are at work on the new Bocconi university campus, while Herzog & De Meuron designed the new Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, in progress at Porta Volta. The new Fondazione Prada, that opens its door to the general public on 9 May is conceived by Rem Koolhaas/OMA, who have a long partnership with the brand. Koolhaas, who was also the director of the last Architecture Biennale in Venice, knows very well that ‘Space is a marketing tool’, as he declared in the Prada book, published in 2010 to celebrate the first three decades of the company. When he first unveiled the plans for the new headquarters, back in 2008, together with Prada’s CEO Patrizio Bertelli and Germano Celant (director of the Fondazione since 1995), he described the concept for the new compound as ‘a collection of artefacts that encounters a collection of architectural typologies’. He added three new structures (a museum, a gallery tower for displaying the Prada collection, a cinema) to the existing facilities of this former distillery from 1910, in Largo Isarco, to the south of Milan, for a total of over 20.000 square meters. The most visible body is, of course, the tower, conspicuously covered in painted gold – an ageless emblem of power.

The opening program includes site-specific installations by Thomas Demand and Robert Gober, a thematic selection of artworks, a new documentary by Roman Polanski, a new bar designed by Wes Anderson (a year ago, Prada acquired one of Milan’s oldest pastry shops, the Pasticceria Marchesi in Corso Magenta) and a temporary exhibition, with display system by OMA on seriality, iteration and reproduction in classical art. It is divided in two sections: ‘Serial Classic’ (9 May until 24 August) takes place in Milan, and ‘Portable Classic’ (9 May – 13 September) at Fondazione Prada’s Venice outpost. Both shows are curated by Salvatore Settis, in collaboration with Anna Anguissola and Davide Gasparotto. Professor of classical archaeology at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, and a former director of the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Settis is also a well-known public figure, who often advocates for the defence of Italian heritage, landscape and culture as democratic common goods. A few days ago Carol Vogel wrote in the New York Times that the Fondazione Prada is ‘poised to become a major international destination for the arts’ and that it ‘has more than twice the exhibition space of the galleries at the new Whitney Museum of American Art’. She also quoted the art historian Emily Braun, who thinks that ‘potentially it will fill the role of a contemporary art museum’. In Europe, museums used to be public, but that seems to be changing quickly.

As we know, the opening of the Venice Biennale was rescheduled to early May in order to bring it closer to the Expo and to create an additional tour for the international art circuit. Interestingly, the structure of the two events – both deriving from the World Fair paradigm – is similar: hundreds of participating nations, each one with its own pavilion, installed within the exhibition complex or somewhere around the city, and a central core, represented in both cases by the Padiglione Italia. In Milan, it’s a structure covered in candid panels of ‘i.active Biodynamic’ concrete, made to capture air pollution, overlooking an artificial lake and the Avataresque Tree of Life, the symbol of the Expo diffusing fireworks and music, i.e. son et lumière (in October, the pavilion’s general manager Antonio Acerbo, was arrested for corruption and sentenced to three years of jail, after a series of investigations unveiled a ‘cupola of contracts’ involving local businessmen, developers and politicians). In Venice, Okwui Enwezor decided to install inside the ex-Padiglione Italia (now Padiglione Centrale) a new Arena, designed by David Adjaye, to host live performances and the non-stop readings of Marx’s Capital. Speaking of which: the Biennale has a 13 million euro budget, again mostly provided by private sponsors.
Last year, Salvatore Settis, published a pamphlet titled ‘Se Venezia muore’ (If Venice Dies), against the disneyfication of historical cities in Italy, the impact of tourism and the progressive privatization of public spaces. ‘By contributing to the process … of the dismantling of the state, the same institutions that should guard it, end up by betraying it, and turn from the guardians of the public good into standard bearers of private interests.’ Let’s try and think positive, ok?

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