The Transitory Museum

by Emanuele Coccia

  Notes

  1. Friedrich Naumann, “Werkbund und Handel,” in Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, 1913, p. 13.

  2. Friedrich Kiesler, Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display (New York: Brentano’s, 1930).

  3. Michèle Gazier, Leila Menchari, la Reine Mage (Arles: Actes Sud, 2017).

  4. See the catalogue Das grosse Stillleben: The Big Still Life/Le petit Grand-Magasin (Basel: Reinhardt Friedrich Verlag, 2004).

  5. Francesco Morace, “Nuovi luoghi per il consumo Zen,” Interni magazine, December 1991.

  6. Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating (Dijon/Zürich: Presses du Réel/JRP Ringier, 2008).

  7. Hans Ulrich Obrist, Ways of Curating (New York: FSG, 2014).

  3

  The Far Ends of Fashion

  We spend hours in them every day. And it is within their walls that we find everything that makes our life not only livable but above all beautiful, intense, self-sufficient. Everything we use comes from these places. All the things we love have been nourished by them. All the objects that we can imagine are contained right now, at this very moment, within their walls. The stores are the transcending horizon of every form of objectivity, and yet they seem to be culturally imperceptible.

  Unlike what one would think, economy has always neglected these spaces—or, if it has paid them any attention, it has always failed to acknowledge their material, spatial, and symbolic reality. Their necessity is purely instrumental: a store exists insofar as it allows the producer to gain contact with the final consumer—the buyer: it is the phantasmagoria that is vital for masking the imbalance of power and conscience between the two, the detour through spectacle and illusions that is needed for the exchange to take place. Philosophy and the social sciences seem to have followed economy’s lack of interest and myopia to the letter. There is nothing either spiritual or symbolic in trade and exchange. They are defined by an operation whose unique goal and unique rationale are the maximization of gain and of utility, an operation in which the symbol can exist solely as lie and deception. In exchange there is no truth other than gain; there is no discourse belonging to commerce or immanent in it that is not the one—brutal, oppressive, deceptive—of the capitalist.

  The mistake has been to crush commerce, negotium, under exchange, and thus to polarize everything else, everything that is not immediately a condition of possibility required for exchange, into an opposite pole, at once unreal and artificial: the exhibition. As a result, commercial locales become failed or partial museums (because they are limited to the liminal space of the shopwindow) or into dirty museums (since the exhibiting function has been contaminated by purchase—a real pudendum to be hidden away, to be ashamed about). By multiplying the spaces for pausing and contemplating that have no links with consumption, by transforming the inside of the commercial site into an immense transit space where one can browse on one’s own, 10 Corso Como turns on their head the visible functional hierarchies on which the commercial form is structured. First of all, it assembles and arranges harmoniously, in the same space, the sum of some of the most beautiful things, yet without making them inaccessible or untouchable: the shopwindow becomes a space for pause and living; purchase becomes a way of deepening our encounter with things. The store is not an enclosure for exchange to take place; it is the resonance chamber of things. From this point of view one should look for the origins of 10 Corso Como in the artistic avant-gardes of the 1960s more than in some marketing strategy.

  One October, slightly over fifty years ago, any passersby who happened to go through 78th Street in New York would have found themselves in front of a strange spectacle. Having brushed against a wagon built by Richard Artschwager, a tourist would have come across a normallooking supermarket. But the prices would have stupefied the observer: eggs at $144 to the dozen; pork chops for $49. The elevated prices were not due to an economic crisis but were due to the fact that, in spite of appearances, this was not a supermarket but “a veritable gallery in which the works of a half-dozen eminent pop artists were selling like hotcakes, and in like manner … for a special price one would have offered three for the price of one.”1 Organized by Paul Bianchini, Ben Birillo, and Dorothy Herzka (Roy Lichtenstein’s future wife), American Supermarket brought together a variety of artists who included Andy Warhol, Robert Watts, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann, Jasper Johns, Lichtenstein, and Billy Apple. Mary Inma, a professional artist who specialized in commercial presentations, had prepared replicas of cheeses, meats, and drinks of another genre, but those objects did not claim to be “works of art.” The mimetic element in the comparison with traditional spaces devoted to the sale of commodities reached a point where Paul Banchini, the owner of the gallery, was ambling about with a grocer’s pad and pencil, to take orders. The exhibition seemed to aim at reproducing Zeuxis’ paradox, as described by Pliny the Elder: however, verisimilitude no longer defines the competition between art and nature, but rather that between art and the market, between an artistic object and a piece of merchandise. American Supermarket can be thought of as the installation of a three-dimensional still life that tries to call into question the boundaries between gallery and museum. Other artists had attempted and would attempt to work along similar trajectories. In The Show, Claes Oldenburg had already assembled, in the same space, all kinds of objects, from clothing to drinking containers, all of similar flesh tone and material, to demonstrate, in his own words, “the unity and non-separation between commerce and art.” Allen Ruppersberg’s installation Al’s Café (1969) or Robert Filliou and George Brecht’s La Cédille qui sourit (The Smiling Cedilla), the non-store destined to become a center of permanent creation that was open at Villefranche-sur-Mer between 1965 and 1969, seemed to resonate with quite a few of the features that marked the exhibition in New York. Even so, the radical character of American Supermarket was unprecedented. It was not just a matter of reproducing a decor that resembled a supermarket in order to exhibit an assemblage of pop art; and, unlike in Claes Oldenburg’s reproductions of objects of common use, here the goal was not to replace everyday goods with art objects in order to make it possible to reintegrate “the magic proper to the universe,” which would allow people to “live in a religious and affable exchange with materials and the objects surrounding them.”2 Nor was it a superficial reproduction of the store form—as in Christo’s Shop Fronts, which had been on display since the same year—or a deconstruction of the idea of commerce, as in the case of Ruppersberg and Filliou. And there was not a trace of the critical attitude that had informed Paul McCarthy’s 2014 exhibition The Chocolate Factory, in which the museum—the ancient Paris mint, La Monnaie de Paris—was transformed into a factory of small chocolate statues that represented Santa Claus or plug-like Christmas trees—as if to denounce both the dangerous proximity between money, pleasure, and product and the ambiguity that makes the distinction between them impossible. American Supermarket applied a sort of reversal of Duchamp’s readymade. If the latter introduced a prefabricated object into the gallery in order to change its status and make a work of art out of it, here a series of works of art took on the appearance of goods and everyday objects in order to change the form and the status of the space in which they were into a genuine store. The works of art became inseparable from the space of the exhibition, but not because they were inextricably tied to the decor, or because they were site-specific, but because the space itself then seemed to be a pure emanation of the objects present in it. It is no longer the space (the gallery, the white box) that determines the state of the objects within itself; on the contrary, from now on the objects create and produce the identity of the space. By transforming the gallery into a “real-life store” (Grace Glueck), American Supermarket elevated shopping itself to a form of art, making artistic contemplation and life coincide inside the market. The store was only the emanation, the effect, the echo of the things that existed inside it. It was in fact the works of art and their sensory appearance that transformed an arti
stic space into commercial space; and, at the other end, the commercial space itself became a work of art. The store was the object and means of the aesthetic experience par excellence. It was this coincidence between art and the market, between museum and store, that liberated the market from the reality of exchange: the store is only the emanation of the things that are in it.

  10 Corso Como is perhaps the heir most aware of this discovery. It is first of all able to radicalize it, to be done with the last remains of the separation, and to realize the identification between art and life for which all the artistic avant-gardes of the beginning of the twentieth century have sought to invent a formula. To construct a store does not mean simply organizing a space in a certain manner: it means putting together things that can transform the space, open it to the power of things.

  What is the status of the atmosphere that things create around themselves and that we call commerce? And why is commerce the first effect of the power of things? Conversely, why must things be gathered under the form of commerce in order to exert their own power? In a word, what is the meaning of what we call commerce, if their goal does not express itself in the simple fact of exchange? 10 Corso Como has transformed commerce into the transcendental form of performative reflection on the meaning of things and on their power.

  The power of things to give human life a shape and to influence attitudes, thoughts, desires, tendencies, habits, and relations with the world is called style. Style is not something of a purely personal nature; it is not a simple emanation of the character of this or that person. Style is above all a property of things: a painting, a sculpture, a book have style. Sure, this style is considered to be the emanation of the personality that produced this painting, this sculpture, this book; but, through emanation, contiguity, and participation, things can make it so that the style in question becomes the property of hundreds of other men and women. This is the power of any thing whatsoever and not only of those that, for arbitrary reasons, are classified as works of art. Not only paintings or sculpture, but any artifact, of any kind whatsoever, can embody style—and especially can transmit it to anyone who comes near it. And probably this radioactivity of being is exactly what constitutes the ultimate source of our love for things. This radioactivity is what we seek in all things. Because it is the things that we wear, that we don, that we make to adhere to our bodies that allow us to have style. These are the things that we desire and imagine in order to define the shape of our movements. These are the things that we surround ourselves with in order to make the ambient space into a world.

  10 Corso Como appeared as a Geiger counter, as a detector of the style that inheres in things, as a tireless explorer of the style of things. Before it, this function had been performed by the fashion press—thanks to this revolution of the 1980s that had Carla Sozzani among its great protagonists and that prompted the traditional magazines to open up to the world of style and things without constraints of genre or discipline. Yet, unlike the printed page—which cannot do it unless it restricts itself to this function of representing and scouting—commerce does not limit itself to informing or broadcasting, after the fashion typical to any artistic or cultural history from before 1900, but makes us touch and live things; on the contrary, it makes art into a space of life as well as of contemplation. That is exactly where we find this material radicalization, this spatial veracity of everything that was condemned for a while to be discourse—in liberating the force and power of things. The store becomes then the place of style or, better, the space in which style is at the same time an attribute of things and one of individuals, passing without interruption between them.

  10 Corso Como has changed the store into a place where the medium and the object of aesthetic experience coincide. This is the reason why time in its entirety begins to be characterized by style. Aesthetic experience no longer takes place in time, because it is the primary source of time and of history: what the boutiques have discovered (and what fashion has taught them) is that time is only the echo of an aesthetic experience, not its condition. Memory of the past and apperception of time are no longer tied to the order of things and of events, but to the taste that defines the totality of objects with which they surround themselves. To speak of the 1960s and the 1970s is to name a certain aesthetic experience, a certain style in the appearance of things and of bodies, not just a collection of political and social events. We characterize and recognize the periods of the past on the basis of the aesthetic appearance of the things that populated them. Fashion, not history, identifies an era. On the contrary, the world and the era become pure functions of taste and style. The concept store has transformed the relation between aesthetic experience and time, has freed it from the necessity of history. This is also why they are condemned to live outside history, in a topicality different from the present, which can never accumulate and expand into history.

  At one point or another, any human existence has to face a heartbreaking situation: we are mortal. No matter what we do, a moment will come when we will no longer be. We can decide to forget it and continue to live; we can take refuge in entertainment; we can equally shut ourselves up in despair; we can believe in an afterlife. For, as the atheist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux has underscored, psychological awareness of the fact that we live on a planet nourished by the flesh of billions of dead people who preceded us makes it unlivable.3 In order to survive while accepting it, we must envisage the possibility not of a God who is truly a redeemer but of one who raises the dead. In order to live metaphysically we must accept parousia.

  Or else we must do the opposite—and accept that the time that remains is the time that builds; like museums or cathedrals, where those who constructed them lived, from which they drew the metaphysical substance of their existence, and which nonetheless survive long after their death, as affirmations of their grandeur—outside the mortal order of the testament. We must accept that life is lived now in order to go on residually after us, and even without us. This acceptance is not possible without courage, without will, and without force.

  In the past, deciding to build a cathedral meant knowing that one would never see it completed; and yet one would see it draw toward its completion; one would see the thing, and see it tending toward another existence. Cathedrals were spaces of the awareness of an infinite time. Museums, which came later and have recently multiplied so much, are generally built considerably faster, say, over a decade. They are the monuments of finished and yet extended human time.

  10 Corso Como, whose creation follows the age of museums in the Enlightenment, displays the moment of tension in which three apparently antagonistic models come to be in dialogue: the cathedral, where we believe in God; the museum, where we believe in the human being; the store, where we believe in the object. The store’s object is not indebted to God for its capacity to produce meaning—God is quite remote. It is surely indebted to the human being, to whom it owes its creation; but it is especially indebted to itself, to the coalescence of the senses that it proposes. In reality, it is the human being that is indebted to the object, within the store.

  From the moment human beings are indebted to objects, they try to define a space of their own, not to owe too much to an isolated object; thus they introduce variety. And therefore they consume. They try to dissimulate their debt through the reduction of instances of indebtedness. Such is the truth of our globalized society. 10 Corso Como bears its conscience; for it is, after all, a boutique. This Milanese boutique has expanded to Tokyo, then to Shanghai, Seoul, Beijing, and New York. In this sense it has integrated the consumption needs of all these societies, which were opening up to our world; it has mobilized them, thereby taking its place in the order of transitoriness, of Pascalian pastime extended to a lot more people than kings and queens. It is true that at all times something is changing at 10 Corso Como. And there we are indeed in the realm of this “accelerated culture” that Douglas Coupland had diagnosed at the end of the 1980s—this civilization that we co
ver by plane, from town to town, from continent to continent; this civilization that started at the beginning of 10 Corso Como and has expanded with the gigantic planetary alternative that the Internet opens and covers. But we are also confronted by a radicalization of what happens in museums—where, because of loans, exhibitions, and new acquisitions, everything always changes.

  It’s not just a store. The twenty-five years of 10 Corso Como’s life are also a privileged outpost for observing the evolution that has occurred in the world of fashion in the past few decades. From the 1960s on the boutique became the hub of the production of style. From Mary Quant’s Bazaar (which opened in October 1955 on King’s Road, Chelsea) to Terence Conran, from the series of Biba stores (beginning with the one that opened in September 1964) and from Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive Gauche (which opened in 1966) to Mr. Freedom and to Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood’s very famous Sex—the fashion establishment, sometimes single-branded, became the point of creation and invention of new tendencies and new social styles. These were the spaces that would allow fashion to descend into the street—to recall Yves Saint Laurent’s celebrated remark. As Pierre Cardin would say, fashion should not be about a few hundred people, it should be about the millions that were about to ask for new clothes, new style, new lifestyles. These were the spaces that would create a new alliance between haute couture and prêt-à-porter in all major firms. These were the spaces that would turn the street into the theater of a new dandyism and of a new art of browsing—which, unlike its nineteenthcentury counterpart, concerned not a minute and marginal public but large swathes of the middle classes. The boutiques are not marginal spaces but centers of a new form of culture, which speaks through things—objects it makes use of—more than through literary or artistic magazines; and it prefers to construct its own identity through a clothing style more than through a series of beliefs and convictions, or through a specific Weltanschauung. With the boutique was also born what will come to be called “subculture”: the distinction between different groups in the same society is no longer based on hierarchies of class, but on elements of style.4 The movements of social imitation and emulation that characterized the nineteenth century are replaced by those of an antagonistic distinction: a minority that stands against hegemonic mainstream culture. Culture, especially the kind that can express itself through style, becomes the theater of the most radical and most important social changes. It was the physiology of subculture that turned the minority into a majority that had to have the new tendencies and the new styles stand against it. From the 1960s on, boutiques became the heartbeat of this new dynamism—global, capillary—in the production of social and cultural identities. The case of the punk movement, entangled as it was with the history of Sex, is only the most spectacular example. This was a revolution whose consequences could hardly be fathomed: it was not just a change in the aspect and composition of the social fabric, it was a radical change in the very idea of social life. Over the passing years this dynamism has become radical and has invested the entire society: today the whole culture is the product of the subcultural mechanism at the basis of the creation of styles and tendencies. Culture is only the visible flow of subcultural invention.