The Transitory Museum

by Emanuele Coccia

  At stake here is not beauty as much as the sublime. From pseudo-Longinus to Barnett Newman, the sublime is defined as “the echo of a great soul”2 that, by virtue of its greatness, makes us perceive in art its transcending nature; “in the fine arts man’s nature desire [sic] is to express his relation with the absolute.”3 Carla Sozzani ceaselessly aspires to humanize the sublime: the sublime must not be an experience of disconnection, hierarchical, socially conditioned by the space of a museum. Today we need the sublime to continue to illuminate our lives as if it were a light shining from within. A response to this crisis bears the name 10 Corso Como. Carla Sozzani underlines it in her own words: “I wanted to make an art gallery where the works could be touched.” Her remark is anything but indifferent, indeed it is reminiscent of Brâncuși’s dream when he wanted his viewers to caress the surface of his works, and when he went as far as to conceive a series of Sculptures for the Blind in 1916.4

  Throughout the 1980s, she played a considerable part in the change of the nature of fashion magazines. From being a simple seismograph—faithful but blind—obstinately limited to recording, season after season, variations in taste and in social appearances, much like a faintly colored atlas of a world destined to disappear before the first printing. Under her editorship, the special issues of Vogue and the Italian edition of Elle have become veritable organs of vision—more precisely, instruments of a unique utopia: namely, in a limited space of a few pages, she gathers together the most wondrous images and the most wondrous words about the most wondrous things, both present and future.

  Her idea is that we must break away from the limitation of forms, which makes it right to qualify a given form of creation as sublime, but not another. This means creating a space stronger and greater even than a museum, in order to open the experience of the sublime to all forms of human creativity: a space that is what a museum ought to be, an atmosphere in which things will be accorded the force of art and thus will be able to stir, in each one, an experience of the order of those that lead one beyond oneself.

  Corso Como has been the name of the quest for all forms of mundus that have yet to exist, of future worlds that she has explored. Exactly like the hero of Plato’s myth of the cave, we are first to exit into the light and to discover that images correspond to things, even the images discovered and created for the place itself.

  The experience of a visit to 10 Corso Como will persists in every memory; if a buyer purchases an object, no matter how insignificant it may be, he or she takes part in an experience of going beyond. In the face of consumerism, 10 Corso Como imposes upon clients the antidote of a vision from which they emerge inoculated, mithridatized, strengthened by the power of a vision.

  Plutarch tells us that every city has to be able to found itself upon this little world. 10 Corso Como is not merely a concept store. Vogue and Elle were not merely monthlies. They are the mundus of our world, the world upon which she has founded a parallel city on the inner folds of Milan’s urban fabric.

  In the 1980s Milan witnessed an economic success until then unknown. It was the period of Milano da bere [“Milan to drink”], which invigorated everything Italian and is found in cinema, in literature, in journalism. The city turned itself into a center of fashion, of creation, of art, and of money. Rome, on the other hand, which had seen a tremendous surge of energy in the postwar years until the 1960s and even in the 1970s, progressively began to fall asleep. Likewise Turin, where artists had congregated through the 1960s and 1970s, had now been turned into a backwater.

  Through her editorial duties, through the relations that she held with photographers, creators, and designers both Italian and international, Carla Sozzani was a central figure of this moment in which Milan was in the process of becoming a center of the world of creation. Throughout Italy she helped build the careers of artists with whom she was still working three decades later. She sided with the artists and allowed them to enter the world. She was the guardian at the portal of a universe access to which had become desirable to everyone.

  A new generation of fashion magazines and tendencies emerged in the 1970s. Even traditional magazines such as Vogue changed their editorial policies radically: from simple gazettes of international clothing style that cared for the feminine image, they turned into organs of periodic visual inquiry into the ambient material culture. Every issue stops being a collection of possible modes of dress and purchase advices and makes itself into a printed museum of objects and images originating from the world of fashion, of design, of gastronomic research, of cinema, of books. The magazine becomes a space for the collection and study of style, conceived of as a family resemblance that permeates all things: not only objects recognized as art on formal and academic grounds, but all the objects that populate public and private space. In turn, the very idea of material culture, as the store had forged it and academic anthropology was trying to define it, underwent a further transformation: at stake was no longer a culture assimilated or acquired, but one imagined and imaginary. From a certain standpoint the magazine represents the phase of ultimate achievement, in the twentieth century, of culture as material culture, a state in which culture recovered its status of shared imagination. On the other hand, from the 1980s on, the magazines are, even more than the stores, the true driving force of global material culture.

  Carla Sozzani has been one of the great protagonists in this story. Having begun by working for Vogue Italia in the mid-1970s, she graduated in modern languages from Bocconi University and immediately afterwards embarked on a collaboration with those who were to become the greatest fashion photographers at the end of the twentieth century: Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Moon, Herb Ritts, Paolo Roversi, Deborah Turbeville, Wegman and Bruce Weber. To borrow the title of a famous New York exhibition related to the 1990s, this season can be summed up as the attempt to turn photographic fiction into the very medium of fashion making. Fashion photography stops portraying the model as a piece of abstract, surrealist still life that highlights the product—clothing, accessories—to become the narrative of a mysterious and not always comprehensible story, whose object is a form of life, a style, a mode of being—and the object of that is only a vehicle and incarnation. The series of photographic expositions assembled over the years at 10 Corso Como was to be, at once, the expression and the cause of this deep investigation, narrative and existential, of contemporary photography. The role of this concept store in the diffusion and disclosure of the photographic art in Italy is enormous.

  Carla Sozzani took leave of Vogue Italia’s special issues to become the editor-in-chief of Italian Elle in 1987. She would have time to publish only three issues—now legendary—which have played a most important role in international fashion publishing. She collaborated with the greatest photographers of the era, from formal figures such as Sarah Moon, Peter Lindbergh, Bruce Weber, Paolo Roversi, and Steven Meisel to the new ones that define the 1990s—including Nick Night and Jürgen Teller. She decided to be rid entirely of the commercial side of things in order to create spaces of visual inspiration: she associated with Robin Derrick, who had worked for I-D and The Face; and she opened the magazine to fashion and to international design, at a time when the label “Made in Italy” was turning from myth into a marketing strategy designed to conserve a drained patrimony. At stake, as Cathy Horyn had written, was “an aesthetic interruption in the direction of a magazine, something rare in its beauty and its influence.” The birth of 10 Corso Como—an umpteenth instance of the heterogenesis of aims—is due to her abrupt and inexplicable dismissal from the editorship of Italian Elle. In Carla Sozzani’s words, the goal was, with her new venture, to “create a magazine in a different way, to express the same thing I had been doing with the magazines, but from life itself.”5 10 Corso Como was the project of a tridimensional magazine, a sort of collage and installation in vivo of entities simultaneously commercial, cultural, and visual. “Its pages were becoming walls, shelves, and tables; its readers were becoming clients.” Also at s
take, in this instance, was a movement of radicalization. Material culture, which had conquered once more a space of purely visual imagination through the magazine, was coming back to make itself into a world, a living space, a place of life, material time.

  1990 was different from the 1980s: preparations were made to enter into a new decade. The luxury, the sumptuousness of life that prevailed in the 1980s were already beginning to fade; in the 1990s, they declined. Milan was no exception: the more this city had grown in the preceding decade, the more it repositioned itself in the 1990s: money, flowing to a point that had gone beyond measure in the 1980s, became scarce. Its use had to find legitimacy. Hereafter the gratuity of spending was no longer a worthy alibi.

  The 1990s were the years in which Europe’s economic lethargy deepened. The luxury industry, of which 10 Corso Como was part, needed to find a new place in society. Extravagance was no longer a value in itself. Art could no longer be sold at astronomical prices, as happened in the 1980s when the fame of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fishl, David Salle, Julian Schnabel had created a speculative bubble. From that point on art, the art of life, hieratic creation, all had to defend their place in the market and in the city.

  During the 1980s Milan had become more than ever an international city linked to Paris, New York, London, and Tokyo. A cosmopolis was sprawling across countries and constituted its own horizon for creation. Carla Sozzani had spent a good deal of time in New York in the 1980s and had learned its lessons. New York was a city whose margins had become brutally central. Greenwich Village, SoHo, Tribeca, later on Chelsea, and finally Brooklyn, which in the 1980s were shady places populated with garages, nightclubs, and sex stores, had been absorbed by the world of art and creation, which made them into its theater before entering directly into speculation. In such places—uncared for, often dilapidated, made of concrete, with exposed stone, with rickety stairwells, with cracked sidewalks—people felt astonishingly at ease with life; perhaps it was becoming more responsive to them.

  The urban horizon changed: this New York feeling that what was beautiful didn’t have to be perfect, that what was ultra-chic did not have to be order and tradition—that was alien to Europe. In Milan everyone spoke only of the golden quadrilateral. In Paris, the Marais neighborhood emerged thanks to the presence of the Centre Pompidou. In London it was only toward the end of the 1990s that the urban structure changed, through integration with the financial market of East London.

  Carla Sozzani has drawn all the consequences from this situation and from the opportunities it offered. She has extracted the substance from the sites of creation and life in New York and has transformed them into a place dedicated to the presentation and diffusion of the same creation—a place of commerce. This was 10 Corso Como. As she puts it herself, “the neighborhood was lost: amid fruit sellers and hardware stores.” That she chose such an area attests to an awareness that the urban equilibrium, in Milan as in other locales of this western cosmopolis, was about to change.

  The impact of money and societal transformation were to lead to a larger inclusion of neighborhoods than ever before; the absorption that had taken place in New York was inevitable and, just as in the United States, it was up to the field of creation to get it going. The new space filled this role. The very fact that the place had taken its address to be its name signaled that 10 Corso Como was a manifesto: it was possible to open a place of creation in that very spot in the city. And the sole fact that it had existed proved that times were changing and that a new era had begun.

  When 10 Corso Como was conceived, it opened first of all as a photography gallery, then a windowless store with a cement floor, at a time when every store in Milan had windows and a marble floor. In contrast to what was done then for the sake of selling the goods—and those were the days when the buyer had to be satisfied in every way, so as to feel at ease and be able to acquire the object with an impression of gregarious luxury—Carla Sozzani tilted the new setting in the direction of creation—no shopwindows, a cement floor: the store could be an artist’s studio.

  The fact that the place had originally been dedicated to photography and clothing can also be interpreted as a sign of awareness of the challenges of the time: in the 1980s, as Dave Hickey stressed, photography had been rising as a medium.6 In moving from fashion photography to what was called “art” photography, the field of photography had marked its own identity with specific traits: the treatment of light, the place left for the human face, the use of modern techniques or, on the contrary, the intention to remain within the historical modalities of form. Carla Sozzani, who had worked with many photographers and taken part in the birth of the careers of Steven Meisel, David LaChapelle, Patrick Demarchelier, Peter Lindbergh, Paolo Roversi, and Bruce Weber, who had been very close to Helmut Newton, had a new approach to photography: she conceived of a photography that exists in itself, as art, and no longer suffers from some crisis of legitimacy. The kind of photography that interests her just is and never calls itself in question; a formed language, it perfects itself and moves forward.

  In the same fashion, in the 1980s clothing had entered into a new era: the inaugural rupture between haute couture and prêt-à-porter was mended. Until then the common idea related to the fact that, since the 1950s and more so with Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint-Laurent Rive Gauche, the prêt-à-porter had opened a breach. It popularized a universe of style that had previously belonged only to the cream of the elite. Hence there was a basic suspicion that the prêt-à-porter was a mere surrogate of couture, a vulgarization and, as Benjamin’s theory of art would have it, a loss of aura.

  The 1980s swept this suspicion aside. Even before the beginnings of 10 Corso Como, great voices of the decade, from Azzedine Alaïa to Rei Kawakubo, who were both very close to Carla Sozzani, made it clear that the gap no longer existed; that it was possible (and more important even) to make clothing into a unique horizon, without any hierarchy or separation between couture and prêt-à-porter, and to develop the potential of clothing in such a way that it enters the stores and does not remain the exclusive reality of a privileged few, as a result of structural factors. Azzedine Alaïa, whose work was accompanied by photography all the way from Bill Cunningham to Paolo Roversi, conceived of clothing beyond the divide between couture and prêt-à-porter. In a word, Carla Sozzani made couture an element of everyday life.

  Thus this sense of community between couture and photography, both of them pillars of Carla Sozzani’s creative work, reveals an assumption of her project: creating the place most suitable for two media that had undergone the test of popularization without getting lost but had emerged from it even stronger, more sharply defined, and more dominant than they had been before.

  On the one hand, this elaboration was, then, the result of a democratization: painting was not initially on display at 10 Corso Como and was only rarely later on, and sculpture remained a marginal element in programming. Sculpture and painting, hierarchical modes of art, were for the most part excluded from the program. At the same time, what had been democratized was—through its own quality and ambition—caught in a perspective of innovation. This was not photography made by just anybody: it was Man Ray, Elgort, La Chapelle, Meisel, Leibovitz, Rober Ballen, Lindbergh, Guy Bourdin, Newton, Rodchenko, and many more. Nor was it common couture: it was Alaïa and Comme des Garçons, Martin Margiela’s first collection.

  The point was to get to the heart of the matter—namely the problem of hierarchies—and to act on the oscillations that had come into daylight in order to mark the entry into a new era of resolution. That was a site where poetic, creative activity was taking place; one had to stitch up the conflicts of domination between this form and that, between this horizon and that. It was a working-class neighborhood, far away from everything. It was also a metaphor for the terrain that Carla Sozzani was opening for herself—a metaphor for her seeking a renewal of creative work in that opening, for her stepping out of the isolation that threatened
the fertility of a period of intense life.

  In 1991, right at the beginning of the decade, Galleria Carla Sozzani—the exhibition section of 10 Corso Como—had organized an exhibition entitled “Espressioni dell’arte degli anni ’90” [“Expressions of the Art of the 1990s”]. This exhibition, which took an active interest in very original creators—among them, already, Kris Ruhs—was a manifesto: one had to show that the space in the process of developing had a good hold on the decade that had hardly begun. As of 1991, the Galleria indicated that it was interested in irreducible singularities and attempted, with the help of these singularities, to seize a moment that was nevertheless still in the future for the most part.

  The entire spirit of the project was revealed in that exhibition: the Galleria, just like 10 Corso Como, of which it was part, inherited from the 1980s a taste for individuality, whereas the 1990s, especially in art, built more around collaboration, around the idea of the group—this diffuse “avant-garde that was not an avant-garde,” which Olivier Zahm mentions with reference to the artists of the “decade,”7 namely that of Martin Margiela, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Philippe Parreno, and Pierre Huyghe. At the same time the Galleria asserted that these figures were making it possible to understand the art of a period—the genitive in l’arte degli anni ’90 [the art of the 1990s] rather than the locative in l’arte negli anni ’90 [the art in the 1990s]—and thus to enter in this decade one way or another. At stake here was not art, not fashion, not design, not photography; it was the moment itself and how it could be grasped, on the one hand by those who had designed the site and its programming, on the other, remotely, by those who visited it.

  In consequence, many components that seemed scattered or disjointed at a first glance became crystallized in this project. In the mix were the political and economic future of Italy and Milan’s urban scene; creative cosmopolitism and a keen sense of place; an unshakeable faith in the work of art and cessation of the supremacy of the traditional media of painting and sculpture; the legacy of the 1980s and a direct orientation toward the decade to come.