The project can be summed up in Dostoevsky’s famous and enigmatic assertion that beauty will save the world. The beauty of this world of the ancients, transferred into the universe of global civilization, is that of a contemporary form of the museum. It reintegrates all the values that museums share across the board: the integration of what is rare and what is common, the qualification of an interest in civilization—all these fragments are signs of something about the world they emanate from.
We find there, above all, the great value on which the aristocratic museums of the past were based, a value present nowadays and in this case at the heart of contemporary civilization: connoisseurship. This old value, which is also the supreme virtue of the inborn scholar, that of Bernard Berenson and of Roberto Longhi, is acquired only through incessant work, by exercising a gaze sharpened by looking again and again. Carla Sozzani has never stopped looking at clothes and images; above all, she has never stopped looking at works of ancient art. This world of Italian art—the world of Piero della Francesca and of Carravaggio, two artists to whom she is especially drawn, both of them so conspicuously human, one in the spirit, the other in the flesh—constitutes the horizon within which her thought has been built. She can perceive, and she can think as she perceives: that is what connoisseurship is. She has taken up its practice and ideology to extend its application to a domain where we would never have expected connoisseurship to extend: fashion, photography, and especially the flux of imagery and of image things in our contemporary civilization.
Carla Sozzani herself believes in the museum more than in anything else: she visits museums, thinks about them incessantly. However, as she enjoys the freedom of being the head of her own museum, she can do with it whatever she wants—provided that the public finds here its own place and the aesthetic experience it came looking for. Whether large or small, a museum can be considered an immobile institution that cannot be made to experience anything and will not be able to make us live anything: this is what happens when we shut ourselves within its walls. With Corso Como, the walls have opened and a new model asserts itself.
Museum institutions that define their own identities are not given thematic names thematically. They are most often baptized after their location, be it wide or narrow. The British Museum is in Great Britain; the Metropolitan Museum of Art is in New York; the Hermitage Museum is in the Winter Palace nicknamed Hermitage; the Uffizi is in the Uffizi Palace; the Quai Branly Museum is on the Quai Branly. From the beginning, just by virtue of its name, 10 Corso Como has construed itself as an alternative model of museum; and this alternative model—a few photos here, some clothes there, in a windowless room with a concrete floor—has evolved to become the embodiment of all the questions that arise in the contemporary museum, a place that, more than many others, picks up and adopts our doubts, our desires, and our dreams.
Whether or not this is the result of a will, 10 Corso Como offers us the best possible avenue of inquiry into questions pertaining to the museum. And yet it is not a museum in the institutional sense of the term; it’s a model sui generis. After all, it sells objects and visitors can leave with what pleases them, be it for a few Euros or a few thousand. Anything is possible. Sure, museum stores have spread everywhere, they are now a proper architectural genre; but it’s from the store that one can take an object, not from the museum itself. Besides, the variation in price is not so great in the areas of diffusion of “private products” of the museum.
10 Corso Como’s peculiarity is its sales. Thus, if it doesn’t enrich its owners, at the very least it allows the place (which does not receive a public subsidy) to survive on its own. At the same time it is not a foundation—because sales transactions take place there. Hence it is a space with a hybrid identity, where everything should in permanence disappear, according to shopkeeping needs. After all, if everything were to disappear, if everything were sold, the commercial success would be total. What would happen if the space were empty? The answer is simple: it would be a space available for meditation. Just as Tom Krens’ team had estimated how many visitors the Guggenheim would attract if it were emptied of its collections—somewhere between 200 and 300,000—we might imagine visitors going to a 10 Corso Como that would be only its own object, as it were. But then it would no longer be 10 Corso Como itself but rather its cenotaph, reminding us that there had been life, things, “collections”—both in the museological sense and as we understand it in fashion—but that, by losing them, the place abandoned a part of its existence.
In the same way, if the contents of 10 Corso Como were entirely removed from the buildings, in Milan and elsewhere, that reproduce its identity, then the very identity of the place would be partially lost; for it is this museum space that things are incrusted, as a permanent repository in a perpetually changing world. A maxim for our time, Lampedusa’s remark, “everything has to change so that everything can stay the same,” allows us to grasp, with its help alone, the movement embodied in this place. In reality, everything changes: objects, books, images; everything is on display and everything varies; and despite this change, or maybe by virtue of it, everything continues. After all, the museum collections on display in this space are not required to belong to it. This is an infinite and infinitely seductive collection of things waiting to bring us happiness if we are prepared to enter into their fairyland. It is not by chance that Maurizio Cattelan was one of the first to frequent 10 Corso Como from its beginnings; Cattelan’s art is based on the transformation of images into things and on the successful transfiguration of a mental image—a shocking and moving cosa mentale—into sculpture; all of his creations operate by means of a systematic materialization of images, by a “thingification” of imaginary abstraction. 10 Corso Como proposes the exact opposite: an association of things so that they become a mental image.
This is how a path opens, maybe, for a new model of the museum, one that would take over a part of the fundamental functions of the institution—its mission of public service, its enrolment in public space, its selection of the most remarkable things—but would leave out the limitations inherent in the “museum genre”: a tactile model, which grasps things by seeing them and then lets go of them, so that they may in fact remain as they are; a place of transcendence, but of a transcendence whose origin and major justification are among things and in the way we negotiate our lives amid them. Much like in the contemplation of works, and beyond that “wow” of admiration on which modern art is founded, 10 Corso Como—a museum of impermanence, a museum that passes—leads to a humanism where we contemplate what is made by and for us; and it can intensify the reality of our voyage in the world. The institution navigates this ambiguous space in which perhaps we can acquire things—or perhaps not—but where, more importantly, the question does not arise. 10 Corso Como takes us to a seemingly provocative suggestion, but one that occurred to Tom Krens as well: if the works of art are protected, is the museum, by nature, the space where they must be conserved? Or is that not rather this public space built around human beings, where the works can be made visible to everyone from now on—for free in the case of 10 Corso Como, just as it is in English museums?
There would then be two distinct expressions of the museum. One would be the great museum of the world, in which all collections are preserved and accumulate; this great, indeed this divine museum already exists without our being aware of it; it holds together everything that exists. The other would be the museum of presentation, where everyone can live the experience of art, the ecstatic trance that formerly was offered only in churches.
Collecting does not mean simply expressing a judgment of taste. Collecting means allowing judgment to grow beyond its mental or linguistic consistency, letting it spread up to the point of defining the forms of the real, the limits of what has the right to exist and of what does not have a right to survive. By the same token, everything that exists in a culture exists not only by virtue of the act of creation that allowed some object to be born into the world, but a
lso and especially by virtue of the judgment (or series of judgments) that allows every existing object to be chosen by someone, to be part of a collection. Collections are everywhere, and not only in museums or homes. The collection marks the very form of our metropoles; it influences that mysterious physiology of the appearance and circulation of things and forms that we call fashion; it also governs the rhythm of our encounters. But if it is today the force that fashions everything, it is because capitalism has transformed collecting and the collection into the two prime movers of social life. We always forget that purchasing is merely a form in the inflected paradigm of collecting: what is more, in purchasing something we are only moving an object from one collection (the department store) to another (the private home). What we call the market is just the immense sea in which every object and every artifact is supposed to be able to find its collection of choice; the water of this sea is not the desire for profit but the passion for the collection. If this is true, every store and every department store is no more than an ephemeral collection of objects destined to be a basis for the constitution of other collections of objects, and the status of merchandise represents no more than this readiness of an object to move through several collections, to be integrated into anyone’s collection. Capitalism has been the extension, to all individuals, of the right to collect—which pertained to an extremely narrow segment of the population; and it has turned the collection into a principle of life and of individuation.
It is this omnipresence of the collection that has turned the museum into a banal space—or rather has turned any space of an object’s residence into museal space. From this point of view there is no longer—nor will there be—a real distinction between warehouse and museum, or between a gallery and a store. Not only has Carla Sozzani grasped this obvious fact before anyone else, she has built a complete cultural project that is entirely founded on it. In all likelihood, in the memory of our time, Carla Sozzani’s name will be associated with that of the concept store and with the toponym that has become synonymous with it everywhere in the world: 10 Corso Como. But we would be wrong to see in this space a simple phase in the blazing evolution that the spaces of sales have undergone since the first revolution wrought by Mary Quant, Barbara Hulanicki, or Vivienne Westwood in London during the 1960s. From a purely formal standpoint, this is much more than a space for sales or a simple boutique. Surely it is also a collection of spaces: a hotel, a gallery, a boutique, a restaurant. But these spaces are not simply juxtaposed, in a relation of spatial contiguity, as they could be in any street in the historical center of an Italian village. This was no longer about multiplying or diversifying people’s experiences, adding a sense of contemplation, repose, or restauration to the act of buying. On the contrary, 10 Corso Como constructs a space in which experience has no limits and allows no distinctions. It is about transforming the storehouse into a space of life and total experience, where thing, space, life, society can no longer be distinguished. It is perhaps in this sense that Corso Como represents the most accomplished attempt at transcending the contradictions and oppositions of contemporary avant-gardes and at achieving a total reconciliation of art and life. From the museum to the galleries, contemporary art continues to get mired in mechanisms of exclusion: art is possible only on condition of excluding life, commerce, the everyday, consumption—in other words life itself, in its homogeneous and unitary experience. And it’s not by chance that, in order to realize a space simultaneously of exposition and of consumption, Sozzani has preferred to concentrate on the “minor” and “applied” arts, those that have always seemed closest to life: fashion, design, gastronomy, publishing, and especially photography.
In this space photography is more than one object among others. For over twenty-five years 10 Corso Como has been one of the most important spaces for the exhibition of contemporary photography in Italy and in the world at large. And the collection displayed today represents a sort of encrypted journal of it: from Carlo Mollino to Horst P. Horst, from August Sanders to Eberhard Schrammen, from Maso Yamamoto to Robert Polidori: Marcel Duchamp, Nobuyoshi Araki, Urs Lüthi, Duane Michaels, William Klein—almost all the authors included have been the subject of an exhibition in this mythic place. But 10 Corso Como is not simply a place where contemporary photographic research could become visible: photography is its ultimate matrix. Carla Sozzani has often indicated having conceived of this space in an attempt to amplify the pages of her magazine into a three-dimensional space of life, to transform them into walls, shelves, and tables. From a certain point of view this is only a radicalization the visual revolution that Carla Sozzani had the savvy to launch in the pages of Elle and Vogue. By adding a third dimension, she has made real an experience of which any photography is, through a mysterious agreement, both promise and memory.
The reduction of art to the pure act of creation goes hand in hand with an ancient ambiguity of theological origin. We always believe divinity to be the subject defined by a capacity to create the world; nonetheless, Christian myths explain very clearly that the ultimate cause of God’s divinity does not reside in his (or her) capacity to create this world. God is divine especially because he (or she) is the Great Collector: God is the one who, at the right moment, will destroy the world, will bring time to an end by selecting from all those who lived, at all times and in all places, the few dozens of human companions with whom it will be possible to live in eternity. Everything else, not only men and women, but every object, every plant, every animal—the winds, the volcanoes, the clouds, the sky and the earth, the stars, the waters—will disappear. We often forget that it is this act and this power that, more than creation, confer upon God a status of divinity, make God at once an object of terror an object of veneration. The final collection is not only the supreme expression of wisdom and of divine will. It is the finality of every activity, of every event, the real objective of every desire and of every will. Everything conspires toward it, everything exists in order to become a part of it. And yet its status is more than ambiguous. In the act of selecting, of casting aside the great majority of what has existed or of what exists in order to give to an elected few the right to survive or to be resurrected, there is more than a smidgeon of cruelty. The divine mercy that we are told characterizes God the creator, the generosity that had allowed all things to emerge from chaos regardless of their qualities, their merits, or their power, turns topsy-turvy into an unscrupulous ferocity, into the father’s Saturnian drive to devour his own children. And yet it’s only this act that makes divinity the master (or mistress) of justice. On the other hand, it is only in the final collection that creation becomes just: or, better, the final collection is the realization, the definitive achievement of the ideal of justice, the gathering of the just. As if justice were a matter of destruction more than of creation or engendering: a destruction of time and of space, before it is an elimination of everything that is not absolutely necessary, urgent, apt to live for eternity. Just a matter of collection.
From this point of view, the originary nature of the photographic act becomes clear. Considered in its metaphysical aspect, any photography is an act of collection: to take a photo means to select a portion of the real, to invest it with light, to choose it by condemning the rest—everything else—to obscurity. More than an act of salvaging the real, the shift of frame is, first and foremost, the supreme exercise of a final optical judgment. Any photograph is an anticipation of the great final collection, an operation that arbitrarily distributes the right to survival and resurrection, the rare place of a paradise of the world’s visual memory. And unlike Christian myths, in which the great collector is a wizened sage perfectly aware of what he collects (because he is the one who created it), here the collection is by and large dispersed and arbitrarily shared among a multiplicity of subjects, occasions, and reasons. And it doesn’t take place once and for all, but at all times.
As a paradigmatic form of the aesthetic collection, photography is the organ of sentient justice—and
this is why it plays a major role in Carla Sozzani’s creation, which may seem to be a form of construction of the world in the age of photography. In every photo, the real is summoned to come back to life in the gathering of the elected. In other words, photography is not the mimetic reproduction of the real: rather it is its resurrection. To bring back to life always means making a gift of grace to an object of choice—and especially having to hand enough grace—enough force—to rescue a fragment from overall destruction. The photographer is the person who has this grace to hand, this superhuman sensitivity that allows you to understand what inhabits the world to come, the one that we well always be able to remember. And it is in this act—in its ability to make a collection, in its capacity to cast aside, to select, to consign to oblivion—and not in its capacity to create, that photography has something of the divine. Any art can create and engender, but only photography is capable of choosing, electing, collecting the real. Like gods, photos are not of this world: they come from the world that comes after the end of all things. They are literally a memory that we will have in our future. They are pure images: the exact opposite of memory.
It is, then, in this capacity to produce the Last Judgment all the time that we can understand the intimate, almost consanguineous relationship that ties all of Carla Sozzani’s activities—and, more broadly, her cultural, political, and aesthetic projects—to photography. Through photography she has constructed new forms and new grammars for what used to be called “criticism”: the activity of judgment, in the will to assemble, one day, the final collection.
The Transitory Museum Page 6