The Transitory Museum

by Emanuele Coccia

  What we see here, of course, is the result of Carla Sozzani’s passion for Asia and, more specifically, for China, which she crossed by train in 1980. What we also see—and perhaps especially that—is her understanding of how anchoring enables expansion. Identical in all these places, the name 10 Corso Como bears a very precise meaning in Milan, because it is a local address. On the other hand, in Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York it exists only insofar as the institution in that location has succeeded in establishing itself above and beyond an address, by containing a world that constitutes an object of desire. The same is true for the Guggenheim: wishing to have a Guggenheim in every corner of the globe has little to do with Solomon R. Guggenheim, the initial donor, or with his history, with the reasons that governed his decision to create a museum, or even with the adventure of the construction of the building itself. At stake here is an identity—some would call it “a brand”—but especially a “methodology,” a way of addressing the world and its things.

  The methodology of the two institutions, developed as it were simultaneously, is the same: to give to every citizen of the world a view of the world. This is what goes by the name “cosmopolitanism” in the aristocratic culture of the nineteenth century (of which 10 Corso Como is an inheritor) and by the name “global culture” in the open-ended version that the Guggenheim developed. The central idea is simple: what is presented targets citizens of the contemporary world, who belong to an extended, albeit somewhat diluted western culture, but who also pay heed to the distinctive features of every setting where they become established, which come to revitalize somewhat. To this extent, the critics of the Guggenheim have been able to see in it a kind of Trojan horse of the end of the West, which established its narratives, in a last attempt to maintain some kind of validity and power. Tom Krens, its author, regards this tension, much to the contrary, as a will to initiate a constructive relation, a real conversation designed both to keep the West alive and to bring to nations deprived of a museum culture the know-how that the Guggenheim had mastered. Well, this tension can be read at the core of 10 Corso Como’s founding model: in fact the point of origin is clearly western—an address in a neighborhood of Milan; and what is represented, both in terms of display and in terms of publications or fashion choice, is essentially western too—it comes from this West that has just changed under the description of “global.” Today restaurants all feature Italian cuisine—in Milan, in Shanghai, in Beijing, in Seoul, and in New York.

  And it is within this “global” horizon that inspirations from all corners of the globe are integrated, yet kept in due proportion, as if in order to perpetuate the central, western model: this is why Kris Ruhs can be emblematic of the positioning of the Milanese institution. He is a New Yorker of German origin who lives in Milan and speaks French in equal measure: from either side of the Atlantic it would be difficult to envisage a more western identity than his. Nevertheless, it is a whole imagery of the entire world that transpires in the universe of forms he works in, those anthropomorphic images in hanging gardens: the human figures call to mind the totems of primitive art, while the garden can take you to the East—the Near East with the dream of Babylon, the Far East with Japan and China, which embody the art of the garden. And yet everything is integrated in the figure of the artist: a demiurgic, world-creating figure that manifests itself in all the forms, without exception.

  In this way 10 Corso Como seems to belong to global culture even more than the Guggenheim. Once in a while the Guggenheim made incursions into this arena, where the motorcycle can be a subject, perhaps of art and certainly of discourse, or where Giorgio Armani deserves an exhibition in the museum; but, as a general rule, it remained faithful to its mission to be a temple of modern art—a mission defined by its collection. 10 Corso Como operates in conformity with a museological way of thinking, but without a collection, and hence without that anchor in modernism by which the Guggenheim defined itself and its mission. Thus, according to a number of principles that seem somehow to command what is being put on display, it can fully embrace this classical postmodernity of global culture.

  First of all, what is on display is made: workmanship and fabrication are paramount. 10 Corso Como is not about a marvelous idea realized in a few seconds. Time, the way of doing things, the precision, and the work are integral components. Next, what is on display is taken from a situation to which it fully belongs, displaced as it is and replaced on another horizon: just the fact that it has been made and that its workmanship holds it together allows this exit and displacement. Finally, we are dealing with an object that has a deviant relationship with the present, an object that is not merely inscribed in the unconscious pursuit of its course but ether dramatizes this pursuit or else departs from it radically. At all events it strikes a chord with the consciousness of time, in the contemporary moment itself.

  Hence fashion is in some way the backbone of this great body of 10 Corso Como: it is, by virtue of necessity, the medium most immediately conscious of time. It can choose to forget it and to get lost in it—to continue, season after season, to take up whatever there is, and to perpetuate itself without end. Or, as in the case of 10 Corso Como—and this is where the institution’s museological signature shows up—fashion can choose to reverse time and wear it like a jacket, both inside and out, in order to show the couture and thereby give food for thought. That is where Carla Sozzani’s fashion decisions originate. Craft, and only craft, is what makes a couture recognizable; coutures have to be well made before they can be seen. They can be rendered visible through sheer will of affirmation, once they have been designed and crafted with care—as they are by Rei Kawakubo or Vivienne Westwood, whom Carla Sozzani greatly admires; or they can be rendered visible in the perfection of a form, as in the work of Azzedine Alaïa. These three figures, together with Pierre Cardin, to whom she dedicated two exhibitions at the Galleria, came together just as a result of the crisis they imposed on the accelerated, unconscious passage of time, which is the very oblivion of our contemporary society.

  This is also why 10 Corso Como is a museological space: there can be no museum without time specific to the museum. To be sure, it is increasingly common to witness visitors going through museums as if they were ambling through department stores. And it is true that 10 Corso Como is a department store (the department store [magasin] being the twin of the magazine [magazine]) that we must enter as if we were getting into a museum, or even into a church whose place it has taken. This is a space where, at the heart of the contemporary, at the heart of its things, a deviation has opened that allows the current time to be mirrored and reflected upon, and thus generates the possibility of an inner life.

  The subtlety of the place consists, then, in its veering between permanence and impermanence: in appearance, the place does not change. Since the overall impression is always the same, it would be possible to draw an immediate conclusion to the effect that it is definitely a museum. The museum is what never changes—what we have established must not change, according to the model of the universal museum. Yet everything changes all the time, and surreptitiously at that: some books disappear, being replaced by others; clothing styles change every season; and, in reality, one is never in the same place. The contemporary is not, then, the negation of the time that passes, according to the model developed at the Guggenheim and to 10 Corso Como’s idiosyncratic style: it is neither a refusal of it nor really its acceleration. It plays its game in an ambiguous, duplicitous space where at one and the same time everything changes incessantly and things remain what they are. The contemporary—such as it is, once it has been museified in this manner—is a deviation inherent in time.

  One of the questions that the museum had to deal with right from the start of its development in the eighteenth century concerns its relation with the public sphere: at once with public space—its access—and with the public as a political notion—its paying heed to the community. For this reason it was in England that the first system of
museums was inaugurated—the Ashmolean in Oxford and the British Museum in London. These institutions are free and are often associated with mechanisms of representation and of knowledge that are alien to the pure imperative of aesthetic contemplation: for the Ashmolean, knowledge tied to the university; for the British Museum, an openly English identity. This is an important point because it marks a difference from the art gallery, from the boutique, and even from the art center: none of these three models has it as an a priori calling to be open to the public space and to take hold of the public process so as to absorb it and to become its reflection.

  The gallery and the boutique have their own public, on which they count for their sales; the art center has its own public, which comes to consume. But the museum seeks to confront the public, understood in the broadest sense: the child who knows nothing but feels everything, the specialist who knows everything but feels nothing any more; the metropolitan citizen; the visitor from the most faraway places. We find at 10 Corso Como this care for the “public” in the broadest sense: the Milanese setting is not simply about welcoming “a” public that is supposed to purchase everything on display—a specialized public, that of fashion, of design, or of art, indeed even of literature or gastronomy. 10 Corso Como mixes the various publics and, in doing so, creates a total public: one that attempts, all at once, to see beauty, to live in its clothes, and to have exquisite sensory and human experiences. The visitor is not a client: if he or she buys something, so much the better; but that’s not the aim. The visitor comes to a museum that is also a public place. Within it lectures, presentations, conversations, events are organized—even a complete reading of the Divine Comedy, in 2015. More than just to “consume,” the public comes to participate in the act of art in all of its distinct forms: the act of this art that happens to be aesthetic life.

  Without saying it in so many words, 10 Corso Como is an arena of combat for our subjectivity: in fact it touches on our relation with the world in a most penetrating manner, as a museum can do. A museum, if it is fully felt and lived, is the most unsettling and most reassuring place in the world: we see everything of perfection and beauty that has been made before our time; we feel the effects of human destruction; we delimit our knowledge and discover, just like the infinite clouds that stretch below us when we fly in a plane, at what point our knowledge is limited. Knowing all that allows us to live better, that is, to live in awareness of our exact place in the world. It is a modest place but a real one, which can be up to the task of conquering the world, once its humbleness is accepted, even flaunted. With the museum we also sense what we have lost of our relation with things: we try to catch with our fingers the digital cloud over which a part of our lives has tipped and, just for an instant and only in this place, it seems possible to retain it.

  To the contemporary mind, 10 Corso Como gives the same impression: we feel rightaway the immensity of human creativity. Books, images, objects, clothing, drawings—everything can be found in it, everything is beautiful even when it’s the object of a game, everything lies before us. We can realize Brâncuși’s imperative: everything—or almost everything—can be touched. We can run the fabrics through our fingers, caress the design pieces, leaf through the books. What is offered has no hierarchy, and yet everything goes beyond us and leads us into another space.

  To be even more precise, through what it excludes, the place gives us an even more intense impression about the point of the selection. With a few exceptions, neither ancient nor “contemporary” art is to be found there. Ancient art is preserved in museums that are disconnected from the world; and “contemporary” art can seem even more disconnected. For its part, 10 Corso Como is clearly in this world of ours: it is a museum in which all the things that multiply around us outside are brought together in an inside. This inside is at once a world of its own and in perfect osmosis with the world: one finds the external things, yet all are transformed through their inclusion. This is really a world at the heart of our world, and one that reflects and magnifies it.

  It’s a place where we find things, where we look at things and we look at ourselves; a place where the community is invited to perceive, and at the same time each individual has a place; where from time to time the person and the totality that we are find things to converse about.

  From its beginning, the Galleria Carla Sozzani has reserved a central place for photography in its programming; this was not the case with painting and sculpture, which were almost absent. This absence carries a piece of evidence: the dream that this place represents has a strong streak of humanist inspiration. Painting very much intensifies our perception of the world; but, in order to have beauty, it must also come from the gesture of a master. To be a great photographer is no small achievement—and Carla Sozzani has shown how much this art we call photography can have diversity and yet submit to its own rules. The mechanism at work is plain to see: painting and sculpture, old elitist and “sublime” forms that have spread everywhere, don’t have a place; by contrast, photography, a democratic form whose transcendence is perilous, is marvelously visible. Beyond the simple reality of Carla Sozzani’s own human and aesthetic knowledge, which is a consequence of her former editorial work, the fact remains that she has an ambition and a mission: Corso Como is rooted in contemporary democratic humanity, which it elevates through a gesture that is at once firm and delicate. Even in the 1990s, when photography was confined to magazines and books, she had been introduced to it. The proof is in the example she gives that yes, a photograph can be sublime, that it is not only a funerary art, as Roland Barthes used to say, that it is also the possible affirmation of an intensified life—our own.

  For this reason one can never let the person out of sight, and the place remains a laboratory for our transcendent experiences: the problem of crowds entering 10 Corso Como does not arise and, if groups of tourists decide to come, it’s by their own volition. When the Carla Sozzani Editore team publishes books, these are always magnificent, collector’s books, fashioned so as to emanate a feeling of beauty. When an exhibition is presented, it always elicits contemplation from the individual. The garment, which comes conspicuously from the world of couture, is tailored first of all to the individual. The person does not deny the human community but constitutes it.

  10 Corso Como is a museum; 10 Corso Como is a forum. This institutional character of the place is especially striking, for it invites asking about the status of its founder, Carla Sozzani. This is a status that she has invented all by herself, for herself—the person par excellence. When situations demand that she define her goal in setting up 10 Corso Como, this great Italian lady says, very simply: “I wanted to create a magazine that one can touch.” As a result, the first identifier that springs to mind is the editor-in-chief that she once was. Certain persons who, like Claudio dell’Olio, continue to work with her today began at the time when she directed Vogue. It is easy to see, especially given the eminent role that photography plays in the programming, how there can be a parallelism with the magazine in the way the store operates.

  One could even say that that the contribution of 10 Corso Como is to have conceived of a transferable museum of things that are in a photographic state—a museum where things are images and take part in an image. Carla Sozzani would then play the role of the contemporary curator as much as that of a museum registrar who gets attached to objects and keeps them as if they were his or her own forever. For curating makes objects float, disappear, and fade as they are taken in a vertiginous spiral of lists, compositions, and movement.

  The history of 10 Corso Como from the 1990s to the present is also that of the rise of the curator—in Italy, the passing of the torch from Germano Celant, who was described as a curator but considered himself a critic, to Massimiliano Gioni, who is truly a curator. It is also a history of working to raise public awareness, a task to which Hans Ulrich Obrist, author of A Brief History of Curating6 and of Ways of Curating,7 has tirelessly devoted himself.

  10 Co
rso Como is the result of a conception of curating in which things assume their existence in our floating, mercurial world; even before the term became a big topic in contemporary debates on our civilization, the Milanese institution had thematized and accelerated the reality it denotes. Curation is a response to the fact that, with the support of photography, from this point on things have become images in the first place.

  And yet this primacy of photography does not account for the reality of Corso Como itself; for, from the moment we can touch the objects, they are exposed, they are presented to us, and the job is no longer the same. Another possibility opens, then: Carla Sozzani would have continued in her role as editor-in-chief and would have become an exhibition commissioner. And indeed she organized many exhibitions at 10 Corso Como in twenty-five years—well over a hundred. The place itself is a permanent exhibition that she puts up without cease, a presentation of objects and images in unremitting movement. There as well as in her characterization as “editor,” the term is insufficient. For the organization of an exhibition is an isolated occurrence, whereas what Carla Sozzani has created is more in the nature of a kaleidoscopic portrait or programming.

  She is ceaselessly programming a view of civilization via the place itself and via the Galleria. Programming in a public space means directing an exhibition center; and, with a project and a vision such as Corso Como embodies, it means in fact having a museum activity. Carla Sozzani is the founder and director of a new kind of museum. She says it herself: “What I do I do for the public, for visitors, for the people who come, hear the birds, and feel the peace. If your goal, your only goal, is to make money, this is not how you do it” [personal conversation]. There is pragmatism and idealism in her approach, both of them remarkable and concomitant. She does not deny that 10 Corso Como generates revenue—after all, the place has to maintain itself—but that is not the goal. Thus on the one hand she does not deny the commercial character of her institution, but on the other hand she absorbs this character into a far wider approach, which belongs precisely to this public mission of Milan, this civilizing mission that Carla has defined for herself and for her project.