When we reflect on 10 Corso Como, one of the most pressing questions that arise concerns its status. What is it? A store? A concept store—in line with the name that the sociologist Francesco Morace coined for it in 1991? Yes. “A magazine in the real world,” as Carla Sozzani described it in her own words? Besides, who is Carla Sozzani? What is her function? Is she a businesswoman? An editor-in-chief at the head of a new genre of publication? A collector? The three answers can support one another but hardly allow us to grasp, even in a piecemeal way, the nature of her activity—and the nature of 10 Corso Como, which is so much an intrinsic part of it.
By liberating the store from its functionalist reduction to the Existenzminimum [minimum subsistence level] of exchange, 10 Corso Como transforms it into a privileged space through which style, human beings, and things no longer stand separate and in opposition to one another. Only in this prolonged and reiterated encounter do we succeed in recognizing a style and in developing a sense for it. Such is exactly the goal of the store: to display and make possible the existence of style, but also to make style accessible, a something that is unique not only to things (to the work of art), but to individuals as well. A store is in the first place the manifestation of style, of the power of things; only in the store can the power of things manifest itself.
Pop art had made commodities as such—their status, their aesthetics, their relation with works of art—its privileged target. American Supermarket had transformed and intensified this reflection on the store as store—the unique space in which the commodity exists qua commodity and neither as object of production (as it is in the factory) nor as object of consumption and use (as it becomes in people’s homes, once its purchase has taken place). Being a market, the store seems, then, to exist within and beyond, before and after the simple fact of the economic transaction around a specific object.
This coincidence between the store and the gallery indicates to what point the store is the site of a pure and total display of things, a space in which things are revealed in their most perceptible nature. Rather the display of things loses its purely commercial finality: the shopwindow is an arrangement that invites contemplation but not seduction. We can no longer think of the display as something external to the commercial arrangement of things and posterior to it. The display becomes the deepest economic force, economy becomes synonymous with aesthetics, and the store seems to be the purest and most primitive encounter with things, within and beyond exchange.
That had already been the claim of the avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century: “the shopwindow is an important part of the general appearance of our cities. The storekeeper uses it as an artist and not as a mediator,”1 wrote Friedrich Naumann. And in an overlooked book, published in 1939, Friedrick Kiesler (who had previously been part of the De Stijl movement) was thinking of the shopwindow as the summation of all the arts. It was Kiesler who first announced: “We will have no more walls.”2 The shopwindow is not simply the outer threshold of the store; rather it is the incarnation of its deeper essence. The store is the form of existence of culture in the new century, the one and only form that allows the arts to reach the public and the masses.
Since the 1960s the shopwindow has become, remarkably, a world of its own through the extraordinary inventiveness that Leila Menchari deployed for Hermès from 1978 to 2013,3 but also with the help of the “windows” of great English and American department stores—Barneys in New York, Harvey Nichols and Harrods in London. Storefronts have become windows for creation and dream arrangements, in which objects available for sale are integrated into the present transformation of striking images. In the case of Hermès, these open-ended worlds in a closed container—the store window—have become a signature that is felt and recognized by generations of onlookers. As for 10 Corso Como, the windows there are on the inside.
And here resides the propensity of commodities to mutate—here, in this coincidence between the store and the gallery. Commodities have ceased to be the crystallization of labor; on the contrary, the gallery seems to be a crystallized form of the marketplace. This purification or “aesthetic reduction” is something in which time plays a fundamental role. In 1985 Andy Warhol stated: “Close a department store today, open it a hundred years later, and you’ll have an art museum.” As we know, twenty years later, this miracle already took place: organized at the Tinguely Museum in Basel, the exhibition titled “Das grosse Stilleben: Le petit Grand-Magasin” staged a department store in Mugron, in the south of France, that had remained intact for about thirty years after its closing.4 It would seem that what makes a store entirely “commercial,” what conceals its profoundly aesthetic nature, is its relation with the present. We could thus reverse Warhol’s diagnostic by saying that the store is not a museum without a past, but a museum that prefers time to history.
Any store seems blend with the institution of the museum, but with several important differences: it conserves and at the same time transforms, just as the museum actualizes (in a process of overcoming itself).
In a museum, the principal function of displaying artifacts is to bring about and intensify a sensory, affective, and intellectual experience construed as a goal. The goal of the display is a sensory and mental actualization of the objects, which are, so to speak, summed up in and entirely absorbed by their pure appearance. No other use is possible, nor is any kind of interaction: the object cannot be integrated into the living world of any other subject and cannot build a personal biography. Once it is placed in a museum, an object is condemned to exist in a sort of acosmic interval in which, separated from its use and from its existence, it neither lives nor dies. It is as if the object were reified and materialized in the experience of display and contemplation. From this point of view the museum represents the most complete structure of abstraction. A store on the other hand is a mechanism intended to produce the opposite result: if the museum takes the object out of the world, the store is what opens the object onto all possible worlds. A store is not a catalogue of possible worlds, but an opening onto objects of all the possible worlds of those who could acquire them. For this reason the display in a commercial establishment does not have purely contemplative goals and the material reality of the object is not summed up in its appearance: its task is to suggest a sketch of the world that the acquisition of the object can liberate.
If the museum is a machine capable of producing a void in the ambient world, an acosmic interval in the worldly continuum of objects, actions, words, and events, the commercial establishment has to condense in the objects on display the possible transformations that the ambient world (and the worlds of the lives of the subjects who enter into contact with the object) will undergo. In a display it’s not enough to set forward in a pure form every quality and every meaning embodied in the object itself: one must also make visible the forms in which this subject will itself structure the world and the sensory experience of the subject who will appropriate it. From this angle, a store is like a sum of indeterminate and nascent cosmogonies that will flourish only when the object will have left this floor. On the other hand, the store produces a strange cosmological inversion: a world is not what precedes the sum of the objects, but the twist that each object produces in a preexisting world as soon as it enters into contact with it.
A museum underscores and reinforces the autonomy of the object, in other words its separation from the rest of the objects and subjects that make up the cosmos. A store is a space in which the object can become the zenith of heteronomy: what the display must make visible is the capacity to enter into different worlds or, better, into any possible world, not only by adapting oneself to each of them but also by making each of them at once different and special. A store is not there to isolate the things of the world but to produce an intermediary world and to enable its insertion into any individual world.
If the museum is a cave that promises illumination, the store remains paradoxically faithful to the Platonic myth: it sets clients or b
uyers in a condition where they exit the cave knowing that the real world is the one that opens outside the store.
If the museum is essentially the incarnation of the universality of public space in opposition to what is private, the store seems to be an intermediary and indeed hybrid space that reconfigures the topology of cohabitation. It is not an entirely private space because any one can enter, and property is shown to be purely contingent and transitory. But neither is it not a public space either: one finds in it no pretense of universality, no wish to renounce individuality.
In order for new objects to be continually produced and for the things produced to be able to circulate, to be sufficiently desirable to pass from one hand to another, one must see the world as a property and emanation of the things themselves, from which something can be appropriated and is immediately communicable through their appearance. The store is the operator of this objectivation (in the sense of a reduction of the world to the echo of an object), of this multiplication and sensory composition of the cosmos. Through the store, the marketplace coincides with this same operation of reduction and sensory intensification of the world.
Many elements of the boutique can be found in 10 Corso Como. To be sure, the selection and formal layout may recall a magazine; but when you lay out objects on the page you don’t work on paper, you work in space: you don’t publish as much as you expose. And there are three kinds of place where you can do this: it can be a gallery—and there is after all the Galleria Carla Sozzani at 10 Corso Como, but that is only a part of the whole and not the whole itself—the same as Carla Sozzani Editore. It can also be an art center devoted to exhibitions of different natures. 10 Corso Como is surely a place where objects of different origins and realities are on display. However, the proliferation of these objects and their diversity make it difficult to put everything under the neat label “art center,” all the more as the place obviously has a lot more than the resources of an art center in which works are presented and then withdrawn; there is of course a restaurant, a residential site, and a garden.
At this stage a conclusion would be possible: 10 Corso Como is neither a boutique, nor a gallery, nor an art center. It’s a “concept store” whose model is by definition irreducible and, in the words of Franceso Morace, emanates only from itself. Corso Como is, to Corso Como, its own norm, its own “concept,” which bears “a style of cultural selection, a philosophy of life and a unique vision of the world.”5 An approach of this sort has its own truth because, after all, it involves a person’s vision, expressed in a specific place; certainly, then, this “unique” character has a role to play. Yet, as Carla Sozzani remarks herself, “unique” is the word that has become the least unique; and this unicity exists only insofar as it is a counterpoint to the institution that, in the western world, inclines most in the direction of the collective: the museum. It follows that the museum becomes—again, in the words of Francesco Morace—a “museum of beauty.”
What is a museum? First of all, a museum is a place where things are presented: things presumed to be destined to last and be on call to nourish the public’s mind. This is certainly the case with 10 Corso Como: here is the heart of the matter and the point that marks the break with the art center and the gallery, and clearly with the boutique. Most often—and especially when they deal with contemporary elements, as is the case here—these last three forms are dedicated to presenting the latest creations—in art, in style, in bookmanship, in all genres of production.
As soon as things are presented there, this carries an inherent assertion that they are destined to last: a book that is in the bookstore, a dish that is on the menu, a piece of clothing that makes its appearance, a set of photographs or design pieces that show up, all are in that place only because they are legitimized through their durability. This is often manifest in their aspect, which, albeit very audacious sometimes, does not belong to any period: whether it is a garment by Azedine Alaïa or by Comme des Garçons, a tomato pasta dish, a photographic album or a philosophy book, futurist works or an installation by Kris Ruhs, all these elements share a common point. At the moment when they are presented, they have already surpassed the age in which they exist, in order to attain a constructed timelessness—which is a kind of surpassing or Aufhebung.
In the same fashion, 10 Corso Como has created an aesthetics of black and white, which is evident in clothes of the 10 Corso Como brand—as the place manufactures its own creations—and in related accessories—pens, notebooks, handbags, and so on. Every one of these objects belongs to a simple aesthetics, which asserts itself without taking itself seriously. In the series of definitions of graphic design, it is situated in the 1980s and 1990s; at the same time, this efficacity refuses localization within a latest fashion.
This timelessness is also a form of universality, which is just as constructed and belongs just as much to a given moment: things are timeless in a precise moment and the museum, which gives its visitors a dizzying sense of time, does so in a totally different manner in 1800, in 1900, in 1930, in 2000, in 2020. Everything on display at 10 Corso Como is at once anchored with great precision in the heart of its moment—such and such a book, fresh from the press; one of Maurizio Cartelan’s installations (look over there), a recent expression of his and Pierpaolo Ferrari’s vision—and exists in its own order. 10 Corso Como is extremely local—it is a quintessentially Milanese place—and yet all the places on the planet can be found inside; if we take a good look, the entire world is contained between the articles of clothing, the traces of foods, the program of exhibitions, and the books. This is notably the case with World Press Photo, the international photojournalism competition that the Galleria Carla Sozzani stages every year as an overture to what is happening everywhere, part of this universality she retranscribes.
If 10 Corso Como has a museal type of relationship with the selection of objects, if what is constructed there is what we call “universality” (extrapolating it from a narrow, western community), a nagging question remains: Would 10 Corso Como be, in its own manner, the new, mutated version of these ten or so universal museums that western civilization has on record? A priori, the question might seem enigmatic, and yet there are indications that tend to support such a view. First, there is just this presence of different worlds, all conjoined here. Thus we might also identify here a universal museum of contemporary creativity—a place in which all the arts of living and thinking are brought together. Besides, one finds here, as in the universal museum, an equalization of all components that is notably absent from the Museum of Modern Art, where reception must be governed by an effect of immediate rapture in front of works of art with abstract forms of representation—what goes by the name of the “wow” effect.
At 10 Corso Como there is no “wow effect,” and (symbolic) figuration is omnipresent: the humanism of the place owes to the fact that everything in it is created by and for the human being. This humanity holds together manifestations of human creativity that hierarchies would otherwise tend to disjoin and separate: cooking, literature, design, art, clothing, souvenirs. Everything has its place there because everything emanates from this great human talent. And one cannot help thinking that here, in this non-hierarchical relation with things, is an element that comes very close to the universal museum, where the thing itself—not the idea of it or the assumptions we make about it—holds it together; where value is inherent and not attributed; where belief occupies less space than its inscription (which is often immediate) in systems of axiological appreciation.
Nevertheless, 10 Corso Como is even closer to the contemporary museum than it is to the universal museum. One cannot help thinking that, two years before the opening of the Milanese institution, Tom Krens became director of the Guggenheim in New York, where he was preparing the definition of what would soon become the embodiment of the contemporary museum. There is a stunning chronological coincidence here; and the parallels between the Guggenheim under Tom Krens’ conception and 10 Corso Como as defined by
Carla Sozzani are numerous and striking.
In the first place, they both envisage the world starting from the contemporary: the universal museum arises from the depths of the ages it deposits in order to transmit them to us, whereas the contemporary museum captures in the past whatever it wishes and takes hold of it. Thus Carla Sozzani has come to programme, among her exhibitions of contemporary photography, a Horst or a May Ray retrospective, or an exhibition of futurist photography curated by the art historian Giovanni Lista. These moments of the past shed light on the present and justify themselves, at the moment they are shown, as a counterpoint or as a reinforcement. Their relation with history is thus, permanently, an input from the contemporary. Another point of comparison with the Guggenheim is the understanding of the place and of its diffusion. The institution must be firmly anchored in a site that defines it: the Frank Lloyd Wright building on Fifth Avenue, or this extraordinary installation of Carla Sozzani and Kris Ruhs that is 10 Corso Como. And, at the same time, it must spread from this specific anchoring, symbolic and visual. This is why, beginning with the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Tom Krens launched projects in Bilbao, Abu Dhabi, Guadalajara, Rio de Janeiro, and Tokyo too, and 10 Corso Como collaborated with Comme des Garçons and many others at the same time. This was hardly an obstacle, if only by reason of the identity of 10 Corso Como. The most visible local anchoring does not diminish diffusion—on the contrary, it facilitates it; for it allow us to make variations starting from a point of identity and to change the lights cast in different places upon the same institution. Today 10 Corso Como exists in Milan as well as in Seoul, Beijing, and Shanghai, and it was in Tokyo for a decade.
The Transitory Museum Page 4