For well known historical and cultural reasons, which kept them apart from the world scene for decades, now the Chinese artists, aiming at becoming players on the world scene, have become researchers of different avant-garde art expressions, including while renovating the most traditional topics and traits of their culture: colours and shapes, clothing and symbols, architecture and monuments, socialist era icons. That’s why they must have been at ease under this versatile “rehearsal” thematic umbrella. I could appreciate the gigantic wooden children-woodblocks-style castle structure by Liu Wei’s “Merely a mistake II” installation, an assemblage of demolition refuses. It was amazing entering the outstanding, oniric, kaleidoscopic and perturbing photo studio reconstruction of the Shanghai based artist Ma Liang – known as Maleonn – a kind of contemporary reddish wonder chamber. I was amused by the work of Mou Boyan with his obese, surrealistic, funny sculptures – “The fat series” – which makes me wonder why Chinese artists, and there are many, are so obsessed from chubby bodies. Eventually I stirred by a second installation from the same artist displaying ambiguous cats and skinny dogs bodies: are they just resting or are they dying? Are they artificial or are they real? They almost seem to breath! Not to mention another big name Zhang Huan who installed here the reassembled ancient wooden temple, relocated from Zhejiang Province, that he used, back in 2009, as a magical stage for the opera Semele, which he directed in Brussels. Then I just skipped works representing abused westerns symbols: dollars, food and beverage icons famous public characters. I have seen something like a hundred times in any art gallery downtown!! I just preferred to head to the upper floors for a walk through many widespread installations (noteworthy the re-reading of the famous traditional painting “Colorful Lanterns at Shang Yuan Festival” from Qiu Zhijie, the China’s master of bizarre) and art projects, like the huge “Ho Chi Minh Trail” project which involved different Asian countries from Vietnam to Cambodia and the “Ten thousand waves” performance.

As an adopted Shanghailander I fell in love with the work of the mysterious French artist JR. Nobody knows his face and his real name. His photos of amazing wrinkles furrowed faces of Chinese elder people, which he enlarged up to colossal size and pasted to ruined building all around town, have caught so perfectly the melancholic spirit of the disappearing Shanghai: old buildings, old traditions and the old generation of Chinese people, whose eyes have seen the history of 20th century China, are now forced to leave and make room for the new and the modern.

I have the feeling, that the Biennale has been slowly succeeding in helping Shanghai to become a kind of “gateway to the west” in the art area. The fully Chinese curatorial team, headed by “Mr Chinese art” Fan Di’an, considered the most representative curator in China, challenged their artists to experiment new borders and make this way the Biennale really flourish!

I have to admit I was as curious about the public as I was about the exhibition itself: what kind of people is attending the most discussed art event of the year? Well, I was surrounded by very young people, like high school and university students but also by families and mums with very young children despite the fact that some art installations can be quite disturbing. I could realise that Chinese are really willing to see all, to read all, to understand all, to shoot any possible subject. Here’s the new Chinese city people, more than anything else they are the real innovation!

爱丽

]]> http://www.illywords.com/2011/02/rehearsing-an-overview-of-the-biennale-in-shanghai/feed/ 1 http://www.illywords.com/2010/07/berlin-fashion-week/ http://www.illywords.com/2010/07/berlin-fashion-week/#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 15:15:23 +0000 Ariella Risch http://www.illywords.com/?p=4422 Yesterday I was in Berlin. You cannot imagine what this was like given that Germany just lost the soccer world cup semi-final. Both young and old were wrapped in German flags in support of their team. Some were naked underneath. Taxis and cars waved flags on antennas, from windows, big colourful traffic jams so unusual in this normally orderly city.

Soccer set aside, there is a lot more going on in Berlin these days. I didn’t make it to the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art from June 6 to August 8 2010, though I swear I will go and will tell you all about it soon on illywords, as it really is worth a visit.

Berlin’s fashion week opened yesterday, set off with a “white night”. The 7th Berlin Fashion Week takes place from July 7 to 10 2010, and shows fashion of spring-summer 2011.

Our friend Björn Kloos reported upon the first ever major fashion show by Calvin Klein in Germany, and a première for Berlin Fashion week. The luscious photos you see in this post are from this event that involved 50 models wearing underwear, jeans, and both mens’ and womens’ clothing. The new CK fragrance “Beauty” presented in the “Münze”, an old mint and a very hot location in Berlin-Mitte. Glamorous stars attended, including Diane Kruger, the face of “Beauty”.

Shall we book a trip to Berlin ASAP? Here are some useful resources:

• Berlin Biennale programme
• Follow @berlintourism on twitter or visit the city’s official site www.visitberlin.de
• Look for low cost plane tickets within Europe with Lufthansa or AirBerlin

Smiling and nodding towards my left and right companions, I aim not be deeply involved in various conversations.

Usually I find myself with loquacious table companions, and I can also eat.

Only once I flaunted my learning and I addressed a handsome person on my left, speaking about art. I spoke a lot that time and I expressed my opinion and ideas on contemporary art. Unusual indeed.

Smiling, he waited for me to finish and at the end of my rather determined speech he introduced himself. He was the new and not very well known curator of Biennale: the contemporary exhibition of art in Venice. He thought quite the opposite. Now I will never forget his name and I have returned to just smiling at these dinners.

illywords wants you…

In each paper copy of illywords #28 we inserted a piece of paper (see image) asking you to tell us: Who was your table companion when…? in the comments below. We look forward to your funny, painful, or fascinating stories; the best ones will be highlighted on this blog.

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Vado a molte cene di lavoro durante l’anno.  Forse troppe. Ma ho una tecnica, sorrido…

Sorridendo ed annuendo ai miei commensali a sinistra e a destra, sono certa di non essere coinvolta in maniera troppo impegnativa nelle varie conversazioni. Di solito mi ritrovo con compagni di tavola molto loquaci, così posso mangiare.

Solo una volta ho sfoggiato il mio sapere e mi sono rivolta ad una persona elegante alla mia sinistra iniziando a parlare d’arte. Parlai molto quella volta ed espressi anche alcune idee singolari sull’arte contemporanea.

Sorridendo, lui attese che io finissi il mio discorso convinto per presentarsi. Era il nuovo e non ancora ben conosciuto curatore della Biennale di Venezia. Lui la pensava esattamente al contrario di me. Ovviamente non mi dimenticherò mai il suo nome ma… ho ricominciato a sorridere durante le cene.

illywords vuole il tuo contributo

In ogni copia di illywords #28 troverete un pezzo di carta dove ti chiediamo di dirci “Chi era il tuo vicino a tavola la volta che…” nei commenti. Non vediamo l’ora di leggere  le vostre esperienze divertenti, imbarazzanti, o affascinanti; i migliori veranno pubblicati sul blog.

This is one of the many works in which Bruce Nauman invites us to ask ourselves who we are, starting with the simplest questions, in other words where we are, how we behave, what our body is asking of us. They are not today’s works but they announce others – like those giant rotating mushrooms, also extraordinarily the wrong way up, created by Carsten Hoeller – which play on doubt, and on the other hand, on the quest for awareness.

Under those red mushrooms dotted with white, we wondered, like Alice, whether we had grown smaller or whether the world itself had changed dimension.

We are hit by a similar state of uncertainty looking at Mona Hatoum’s map: an enormous quantity of marbles placed on the ground, arranged according to the pattern formed by the land above sea level.

We immediately recognise the outline of the countries but do not see the political borders, the fissures of the mountains, the rivers; we cannot locate the cities and gingerly try to imagine where we are.

The blossoming of so many works on uncertainty tells us of the need for security that assails us, not only on an emotional level, but also makes us want to explain our everyday lives. We need to clearly understand at least what we can know, as far as possible, we need to come out of that darkness in which we are thrown by a period so full of new developments that it dazzles us.

Being aware of what we eat. Of what we learn. Of what we read. Of how artificial intelligence interferes with our own, and how the computer’s way of thinking becomes ours, to some extent. This other side of the coin, this way of treating uncertainty like an enemy to be defeated, has been taken to heart by many artists: “I shop therefore I am” read a famous slogan by Barbara Kruger, in a red, black and white graphic design with an imperative air.

I shop therefore I am. But is it really true that we cannot do anything about the idea of ourselves that tends to give us the flow of merchandise?
Perhaps not. The first of the opponents of this pessimism is Michelangelo Pistoletto. For years, he has been offering his physical presence as a possible accompaniment to his works and as a committed show of his own sense of social responsibility. This presence, in the “offices” that accompanied his works in large exhibitions like the Documenta in Kassel or the Venice Bienniale, has evolved, gaining enough power to create schools, projects, works and ideas, mainly focused in one place, Cittadellarte in Biella, where groups of young people are encouraged and “bred” to make them aware of the new ideas of the moment. Overall, Pistoletto’s work represents the ultimate realisation of those who think art is all the more important the more it helps the observer with his or her own level of awareness. To understand where we are, where we want to go, where we will end up if we do not exercise any control, if we flounder in uncertainty without knowing what we do or don’t want.

What’s art’s role in building up awareness on such major issues as the environment, human rights, social development?
Maria de Corral: Today’s artists do not share a style, but an attempt to build personal aesthetic worlds, to establish their own formal needs, to shape a new reality for themselves, by accepting the challenge to produce an art that makes sense in the new context that has been delineated by the events of the past four years.

In the art of the past ten years it is extremely difficult to detect a dominating artistic doctrine or formal style, in blatant contrast with the constant anxiety about the effects of globalization or multiculturalism.

Artists establish the meaning and usefulness of their own raison d’être and the survival of the artistic gesture in a world dominated by the media, in which reality does not appear to manifest itself beyond representation.

By entitling this exhibition The Experience of Art, I wanted to share with the visitors some of the issues that artists address in their works every day: nostalgia as the feeling that the past is lost forever, expressed in a metaphorical language; the body and its redefinition, the introduction of fragmentation, dissolution and even death; power, domination and violence in the everyday life of each individual; the socio-political critique of current events by means of irony; the use of images, films and narration of the past as an immense archives thanks to which one can produce multiple operations of redefinition and appropriation.

Rosa Martinez: I believe that contemporary art has always sought points of contact between art and life, and has attempted to give form to our most profound feelings. Art is a fight in the symbolic order – the most relevant creators are those who open new perspectives for linguistic, social and ideological transformation. Today, questioning the autonomy of art and taking aesthetics into everyday life is part of an unstoppable widening of frontiers, of an extension of horizons that goes beyond established models. The adventurer, the philosopher, the scientist, the artist or the exhibition organiser, try constantly to discover new lands and to create new possibilities of thought.

This exercise is difficult in a context where new ideas, people and products circulate at high velocity, where the artists often mimic each other, where institutions franchise culture and in which marketing is the principal methodology of action.

One of the main functions of the curator is to reduce the background noise, to assign value and to organise syntax and discourses, which introduce sense into the unending traffic of messages.

In this context, the exhibition Always a Little Further is an essay presenting artists and aesthetic trends relevant at the beginning of the third millennium. A visit to the Arsenale proposes a fragmentary trip, a subjective and passionate dramatisation to discover the zones of light and dark in our convulsed world.

The Biennale’s always been an important “meeting of the waters”, where art practitioners and art consumers (visitors and public opinion in general) converge. It’s a venue, an opportunity for those who are even overproficient on the subject of art to meet those who are just starting out and finding it difficult to get their bearings. Have you ever tackled this issue during your direction of the event, and if so, how?
MdC: The Exhibition that will be held in the Italian Pavilion should not be understood as a self-serving discussion on the art of our times, but as a field open to distinct practices within which one can fulfill the desire to exchange experiences, ideas, thoughts, or even to provoke them. I would be pleased if the labyrinthian itinerary of art could be experienced not as a finished story but as a process defined in terms of the relationships between different subjects, forms, ideas and spaces, that would be more “similar to a center for experimentation than a stack of certainties”.

In that sense I would like the exhibition to deal with intensity, not categories. I would also be pleased if it were not historical or linear, but demonstrated the relationship that exists between artists of different generations who debate and work on specific ideas about art and the life of our times, creating a nexus between approaches that are similar in intensity and obsessive quality. My idea is for an exhibition that does not simply strive for a concept or a gratifying visualization, but is rich in thought and pleasure. I seek to address the themes that trouble and concern today’s society, and that artists know how to express in such a real, poetic and in many cases visionary, manner.

In approaching these issues implicit in the creative act, that do not belong strictly to the field of art, my intention is to show what is common in diversity, so that the viewer may admit the quality of what is unexpected and exceptional, and abandon his own reluctance at the idea of Pleasure in contemporary art.

RM: Throughout its long history, the Venice Biennale has become the epicentre, the privileged context for the confluence of artists coming from different geopolitical and cultural contexts. Offering a chance to analyse the concept of internationality and to redraw the contemporary topographies of alterity, the Biennale is a unique opportunity to invent new forms of neighbourhoods between artists, disciplines and audiences. This journey intends to draw the most significant lines in contemporary artistic production and to show that art still holds a promise for those who want to embark on the sort of voyage that made Deleuze take Proust’s motto: the real dreamer is the one who goes out to try to verify something.

Here, in our society of the “always on” and of the world always carried in our pocket, we are asked to rapidly interpret any kind of situation and keep the re-fresh function active at all times.
Reformulate, update and renovate the perceptive and cognitive field, be fluid when processing data and know how to move through the maze of our interpretative handholds. Anyone who can’t manage it is lost, like rules that lose value as they become more unbending.

Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham talks of his relationship with America and says he wants nothing more to do with it because of the wrong it did to his ancestors and because he was accepted there more for his blue eyes, which give him the look of a quasi-wasp, than for the tolerance the country boasts of. In his work, however, all this resentment is transformed; it is not violent but takes the shape of subtle mickey-taking: the market is made to swallow broken stones as though they were precious; puppets with a huge male member, like in a recurring fable, that repairs with supposed sexual hyperpower the evil deeds done to dwarfs, blacks and other minorities; fables like a double-edged sword, that tickle the enemy on one side and on the other engender the suspicion that someone is cutting his throat.

Be vigilant and prepared. As the boy scouts’ motto goes, estote parati. In the age of the computer, nothing much has changed but everything is transformed.
The slow weavings of Annette Messager, the French artist who exposes the opposite of the celebrated golden hands, who has for years shown us tangles of unending, choked threads, once again explains the same thing: actions may be thinly spread over time and skills may fade away from generation to generation, but the loss can become a victory. And this is what we should be ready for; to promptly grasp the new form of knowledge implicit in the disintegration of past knowledge.

Antoni Muntadas has been telling us for over ten years (since his work on censorship, The File Room, 1994) about the danger of not grasping the new: put it all in a censorial box and underestimate its impact, forget it was ever there and, therefore, not know how to dominate it. In his work On Translation in the Venice Biennale Gardens, he shows us how much this has changed in form and cultural significance: a sort of kiosk inside the Spain Pavilion displays all the early photographs of the Pavilions. The changes are apparent even though no one seems to have noticed. We often forget that to renew always involves reviewing the old, transforming obsolete parts and keeping the rest.

Transforming resentment into irony, accepting that the old and the new are now part of each other, recapitulating the past… how difficult it is to re-fresh. Fearful folk do best to batten down the hatches. For the brave, however, the adventure promises to be a continuous, mental lifting. Being young again, and not just skin deep.

Personality is a big thing with Aldo Cibic. A type of design which is studied with a highly personal imprint, found in all of his works.
Not exactly an architect, not exactly a town planner. Is this an anti-conformist approach, a way of breaking free, or a way of creating differences between the many standardisations of this type of expression?
Actually, I consider myself to be a curious observer of the reality I find myself in, and that my job is to transform into planning what I believe to be pressing issues in terms of social relations and the places in which these relations are played out.

Biennale Architecture is an important event because it is visited not only by architects but also the public at large, and families who perhaps don’t stop to think about the shape of the objects or spaces they see in their everyday lives. The theme is large cities and everything that goes with them (density, mobility, living…). Is there an educational aspect that needs to be transmitted to the public at large?
And what is an architect’s normal role, culturally speaking?
The thing that I like most about the project we’re working on is the fascinating quantity of information we have access to, which, along with the curator, we try to give back in the exhibition, in a way that is understandable and stimulating for the public as well.
It’s about getting to know the world around us, and the world we want.
This is why I think it will give everyone a great deal to think about.

A literary, musical or film recommendation. What would you give us, on the theme of our magazine, “Food for the mind”?
At the moment, the food for the mind which I need has to do with all the literature that helps me to understand and see things I don’t know about future scenarios and innovative, alternative ways to produce new projects.

* Architect and town planner in London, Richard Burdett is a professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the London School of Economics (LSE) and an architectural consultant to the Mayor of London.

Having taken to heart its mission of research into modern art, the Venice Biennale has sometimes found it hard to identify and communicate with its public. Its experimental, often provocative nature has occasionally been misunderstood by artists and specialists, including the broader spectrum of art enthusiasts. To give an important example, which now raises a smile: the Biennale’s launch of Pop Art from the USA in 1964, when the Golden Lion was awarded to Robert Rauschenberg. Not an easy decision, it was derided by critics, visitors and institutions. Yet partly thanks to this Venetian award, Pop Art soon became one of the most appreciated forms of art and was very popular with the general public. The main cultural and social aim of the Biennale is exactly that: to perform a bold yet delicate role of mediation (in tandem with the role of art critics) between those who develop complex artistic ideas and those who are looking to acquire a deeper, more articulated vision of reality. Although on the one hand there is a duty to allow artists to produce their ideas freely and express themselves as creatively as possible, conversely, the demands of society cannot go unfulfilled. This is why the Biennale, like every cultural institution, should not be ashamed to ask itself who its “customers” are. This is why marketing and partnership initiatives, designed to improve the accessibility of cultural events – with specific projects designed to modernise the facilities on offer – should certainly not detract from the quality of exhibitions, or the artists on show. There is no law which states that an event is less “artistic” if marketing initiatives are used to promote it in order to make the experience more enjoyable and stimulating, establishing a more open, informal relationship with the public, in an environment that welcomes debate. Obviously, there has to be a balance.

Not only that, generating more resources, whether from private financing or proceeds from visitors is a way to become less dependent on public funding, which is increasingly hard to come by.

Yet for those who work in the field of culture, economic profitability and successful promotions are still a means to a very different end: to publicise new ideas as widely as possible to ensure that individual artists can flourish.

The megalopolis to end all megalopolises, Tokyo, is also the most efficient. Out of 35 million inhabitants, 80% use public transport (trains) to go to work. In Los Angeles, it’s the complete opposite. They are different models, and this has an impact on the landscape, but it also affects people’s sense of social cohesion. If you spend four hours in a car to get to work, as happens in Mexico City, Bangkok or Los Angeles, you’re not spending time with your family. You feel isolated, you’re totally dependent on a system which is not a public club… and I think this has a negative impact. It is important to stress that for the first time, the ecological equation goes hand in hand with social integration, and also with the large-scale architecture that brings people into the city squares and streets. Architects create the scenario, then authors write poems, whether it’s Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, comparing the horrors of Paris and London in the 19th century, or the great contemporary novels like Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam which speaks of integrated life… you can’t see the difference between architecture and people’s lives.

I don’t think we could put it so bluntly as to say that there’s a one-to-one relationship between architecture and a literary vocation. A city is a wonderful thing, because it changes completely in twenty-four hours: it isn’t unique, it has many temporal dimensions. I think that great authors and writers manage to capture this complexity, which is fascinating. The big problem for us as architects is to create cities of the future without this complexity. It is a real problem, which should be debated at this event and elsewhere: the problem of how to create the cities of the future, not like Pudong in Shanghai, where you go to work and then go to bed, but where you can do a thousand different things in the evening, in public or in private.

I realise that an institution like the Biennale, visited by thousands of people, is a remarkable opportunity for communication. If there’s one thing we want to start doing with this event, it’s to move the debate towards three or four major issues. One is the problem of the rapport between the shape of buildings and their democratic potential. Is it possible to create a fairer society by constructing buildings of a certain type? It’s an ambition. The second thing is the relationship between transport, or the world of mobility, to use a rather boring technical term, and social justice. We’ve already mentioned the third issue, that is, the importance of a city’s shape with regard to sustainability, i.e. a one-to-one relationship. The fourth issue is highly complex and delicate, one that is widely perceived in Italy today. In other words, the higher the immigration of foreigners from different races and religions, the higher the probability that the public spaces in cities become the scene of conflict, not tolerance. Just think of what happened in Paris or Marseilles a few months ago. The last thing is a very old story for Italy: good government. Without a good government, we can forget about everything we have said up to now. Without a good government, great architects and engineers can no longer do anything. These are the five key themes of the agenda we are setting up: architecture and democracy, transport and justice, sustainability, tolerance and good government.

We are all willing to linger more in front of a shop window than in front of a work of art. We are all vulnerable, nobody is excluded. This phenomenon is already being investigated as a form of addiction to shopping, allegedly replacing other types of more hazardous addictions: tobacco, alcohol, drugs and that ever risky obsession of needing to feel approved.

When Rirkrit Tiravanija invites you to have a cup of tea with him, or within his space, when he treats you to a beer at the inauguration ceremony of his exhibition, being a good Buddhist he is forcing you to reflect precisely upon the fact that his is simply a gift and that, as such, it is already criticising and pointing out our addiction to consumption.
For we enjoy paying for consumption, as Andy Warhol stressed in his paintings made of dollars.
If it is for free, it conveys a feeling of reduced power, of being able to possess and to show it to others and to ourselves, and hence the main corollary of owning crumbles dramatically.

Ways out? None.
The object-artists of the Eighties explained this well, first among all Jeff Koons, when he placed in glass showcases two brand new vacuum cleaners: not used objects like the Pop Art ones or viewed as objects that can be used, but as projections of ourselves.
Unless you pursue a more refined path: “I shop therefore I am”.
During those same years, Barbara Kruger gave this definition to the Cartesian cogito. Not because we think less, but because buying often embodies also a new way of thinking: in fact, it means choosing and judging, using one’s personal judgement standards to respond to the constant seduction of publicity.
Once our basic needs are satisfied, according to the scale designed by psychologist Marlow, we move on to satisfy our secondary needs.
Among the latter is the need to assert oneself as a being that is capable of choosing the best offer.
If all of this becomes pathological, then we’re in trouble, as is often the case.

But if instead it entails that at the moment we are buying something we are actually implementing increasingly-refined abilities to select or we are actually using our judgement faculty and not simply responding to an impaired impulse, then even consumption can become creative.
No matter how prosaic it may seem, this also entails inner control: will we learn how to use it?

Why are consumers attracted by your products, what do they base their purchasing choice on?
Carlotta de Bevilacqua Gismondi: Light today is conceived as something that is fundamental to improve and personalise environmental qualities in every context of our life. For the past forty years Artemide has been promoting design and qualitative standards by developing a strong brand and product identity.
Consumers choose our products because Artemide has succeeded in conveying to end clients the importance of its brand values through its integrated product/communication system.
Therefore, people prefer our products because they offer a correct mix between value that is expected and value that is perceived, in terms of four aspects.
The first is the cultural dimension, the design, as the synthesis between aesthetic suggestion and designing expertise. Second, the experience dimension, which is the relationship the client establishes with the product that is no longer subjected to it and, instead, generating new qualities in terms of global relations and experiences when interacting both with the object itself and with the management of light. Third, the centrality of man as opposed to the object, where it is the product that complies with our daily life needs, contributing to improving our wellbeing and increasing personal pleasure. And finally, the aspect of innovation dimension and research that the product must convey.

Patrizia Moroso: Since there are many types of consumers and different kinds of commodities, let us imagine that our consumers are well-informed, careful, with good purchasing power and that the purchase concerned, far from being an occasional one, is the important kind that one would normally make around the age of 30/45.
Our consumer has been considering this purchase for a long time, perhaps it was even recommended by a professional interior decorator, and the choice he/she has made is a very careful one, certainly not one made on the spur of the moment.
Our consumer has probably consulted magazines, looked for more information, been to many shops before making up his/her mind. And when the choice is made at last, precisely because it concerns an important “item” that has been chosen specifically for his/her house, it is in that very object that our consumer wishes to identify or reflect him/herself.

What type of feelings of well-being do your products convey and what type of elements do you use to convey them?
C.d.B.: Artemide has always placed man and his wellbeing at the heart of its plan to improve lighting performance in line with newlyarising needs. Our products are expressive and multi-sensorial generating emotions through their aesthetic-sensorial and performance-oriented design favouring perceptive well-being.
They are more human and use innovative lighting solutions to create lighting atmospheres that reflect more closely to our moods or functional needs. They are environment-friendly, using “good” materials, energy-saving sources and are prime quality products in terms of duration. Our corporate communication policy is based on a process where every tool aims at making perceivable not only our brand values but also the well-being and comfort values that are inherent to every single product.

P.M.: It is also because of the above-mentioned reasons that manufactured goods should not be all the same; instead, they should each have a soul of their own, a strong personality, which they are able to convey. Our items have strong characteristic features, they are the result of a synergic process between two different entities, they are like sons, their father being the designer and their mother the company.
But eventually, these powerful, beautiful and communicative products on their own are not enough, even though they naturally enclose an assumption: that they need to be conveyed properly, through images that are consistent with their very essence, otherwise they lose part of their intrinsic force.
One example for all, Malmö e Fjord: a wide collection of seating and furnishing accessories, lovingly designed by Patricia Urquiola, recalling Nordic landscapes; an excellent production, down to the smallest detail; those very objects become the main actors at last, photographed for the catalogue and the advertising inside the Nordic Countries pavilion in the Gardens of the Venice Biennale, suggesting a proper relation between the objects themselves and their reference space; a graphic project that is amazing and charged with sensitivity at the same time: then everything becomes clear, the project’s soul flows freely, the objects speak. The result: perfect communication, an exciting catalogue.

Functionality and design: how are they combined?
C.d.B.: Right from the start, Artemide has always pursued the goal of designing lighting devices that were the perfect synthesis between shape, function, innovation and efficiency.
Artemide has enriched its current strategy by adopting a process that aims at generating innovation in terms of product significance and identity, bringing together functional, aesthetic and technological aspects, and allowing Artemide to keep its stance and role as a great innovator and precursor of lighting design for mankind.

P.M.: “FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION” is not such a strict rule anymore.
The purposes of an object may also be emotional, apart from ergonomic and functional. This doesn’t mean that a sofa or armchair may be uncomfortable (that’s its function), but these two notions change inline with the rapid changing of the customs and habits of our way of living our home.
Moreover, there is another increasingly important value that is prevailing over “comfort”: the object’s “image”, which is precisely what consumers relate to or even identify themselves with.

Marina Abramovic and her boyfriend Ulay run in great strides towards each other, as if attracted by a magnet.
Their bodies slam into each other. They fall, they get up, they do it again and again, until they are totally wiped out. Is this nonsense? Maybe, but it is definitely passion. Only a few images like this performance, staged at the Venice Biennale back in the seventies and documented today in nostalgic black and white strips of film, are capable of synthesising so accurately the physical and violent but at the same time moral and mental temperamental drive that makes us go at all costs in a specific direction. No matter what the consequences may be: nothing can be done to counter a determination that goes beyond the notion of personal safety itself.
A man and a woman. But also a mountain or a desert: what makes Hamish Fulton walk to Japan, to the Himalayas, up alpine glaciers or down endless stretches covered with underbrush? It cannot be his fondness for photography, since he has produced only very few pictures that are hardly more interesting than postcards. It cannot be that he wants to challenge his physical fitness, as this would more likely be the case for a mountaineer or a professional sportsman. Fulton is an artist, instead. His form of art is walking, showing us this inextinguishable drive, this having to walk for miles and miles, regardless of the fact there is no special reason for doing so. The special reason is experiencing passion, even though in his case it is a passion for nature and for perceiving it through all his senses, including tiredness and hunger.

Haim Steinbach is in a shop. He looks around; touching, buying, picking, captured by an irresistible attraction for objects and their design: in his gaze there is a dash of madness, but it has almost nothing to do with the desire to own things. He wants to understand how shapes change one season after the other, one fashion, as it were, after the other, he wants to understand the reason for new fashions and how new lifestyles are embodied in objects and shop windows.

In his novel L’opéra, Emile Zola tells the story of a painter who destroys his own life because he cannot finish a painting , his only painting, the very one for the sake of which he gradually gives up his beloved one, his friends, his own health. The writer sharpened what he saw: painters like Cézanne, mostly, but also Manet and the other Impressionists, whose lives were driven by an unreasonable and inscrutable fury which, however, became understandable when viewed from their stance.
Romantic exaggerations? Maybe. But even in the driest years of minimal and conceptual art, what fervour lies behind the gestures that reduced sculptures to mere boxes, copper plates or cement blocks, or behind the tautological phrases the young Joseph Kosuth wrote out using a string of neon light? Even the action of reducing is born from an urgent need, from being overwhelmed by a need that is asking in no uncertain terms to be heeded.

Perhaps history, at least the history of art, is always written by rational people; surely, however, those who make history, those who build it before someone else comes along to arrange it in tidy categories, those are people who seem to be fanatics.
Otherwise, how can someone be brave enough to renew something – this holds true for the expression of art as it does for any other expression – if he/she is not driven by such a force? Reasonableness leads to diplomacy, it knows how to negotiate and wait, but it has never conquered territories or invented paths that no one had ever walked on before.
There is no need, however, to die or consume oneself with solitary work as does the main character in L’opéra. Passion reveals itself also in much less sentimental ways and in teamwork: take Andy Warhol and his Factory, with its walls covered with aluminum foil, a place half of New York went to and certainly its noisiest part; imagine him as he touches up the poster of Marilyn in Niagara and then hands it to his assistants so that they can apply a gold- or orange-colored background: how different, for example, from the physical and individual gestures of any German Expressionist or of Emilio Vedova.
Despite his open coldness and his ability to run a real factory, also Warhol’s life and actions were dominated by a vector which went well beyond reason and the possibility of stopping it: he tried to stop being an artist, soon after he had been attacked, but he was forced to start again. There is nothing you can do about it when novelty runs in your blood, when you do something without knowing why but just knowing that you simply must do it, when you live in that merciful condition that makes you look ahead and that’s that. In ancient times it was called “enthusiasm” (literally “entering in god”), today we prefer to talk about “strong motivation”.

No pioneer lives outside this condition and every artist works in the hope of becoming a pioneer. But for this to happen, if there is passion one must know how to recognize it and treat it properly: if it is matched with stupidity, then it will burn out very rapidly. It must be freed from all collateral thrusts, as if they were weeds, such as the desire for security, immediate acknowledgement by the public and rapid economic gratification. Every time Brancusi sold one of his works, he would cry. And passion should be developed sternly: it is not enough to slam into each other’s body once, you need also to get up and start all over again.

By listening to her dual nature, she achieved a rare ability to invent mental “micro-climates”, opportunities to avoid the here and now and enter the “forever”. However, a listening, thinking mind should not aspire to the noisy confusion of large events but should introduce small ideas. These ideas then generate transformations, tiny but active, nourished by that special form of attention: “making yourself available, like paper”.

There is nothing heroic about it: “see small, hear small and think small”, she writes on those pages typed between 1952 and 1964. Even today, in her book The other rooms (2009), she invites us to listen to shadows: “People need shadows in order to rest. I’d like you to send a bunch of shadows to a friend”. Silent shadows which could be the faces of people loved and lost, but also the shadows created by the sun in a room, which become three-dimensional before our eyes and therefore a welcoming space filled with emptiness created especially for us, a space we can fill with our bodies or thoughts.

Listening to birdsong means understanding what the emptiness of the sky contains: life. Ono’s short film Outro consists of a single image coming in and out of focus. It shows Ono, Sean as a young boy, and John Lennon in a garden, a family appearing and disappearing. It is already in a void, or no longer exists, but the game of disappearing images is guided by the constant presence of the birds.

John Cage, her lifelong friend, also dedicated one of his most famous pieces to birds. The same birds who represent the sound of the skies and also of emptiness, and which represent the soundtrack of silence. We all know what idea Cage had of silence, as he even tried looking for it inside an anechoic chamber and was forced to accept that in the absence of any sound, we hear at the very least the blood flowing through our veins and the beating of the heart. Silence, the music consisting of a rest sign written on a fiveline stave, is nothing more than another anthem to listening, to the noise of the heart, the noise of emptiness, the fullness of meaning we can achieve even when there are no more words. We should mention at this point that Japan, a significant influence on both Yoko Ono and Cage, is a universe in which the kind of silence aimed at listening to the rustling of a falling leaf is much more highly regarded than it is in the West. In this fluctuating world every moment comes and goes, and it is worth remembering this even by just concentrating on the noise that consumes it.

We should remember that ancient practice brought back in vogue by Yoko Ono: the wish tree. It can be an olive tree, a maple or even a simple wooden panel bedecked with handwritten notes declaring our wishes. The artist arrives and gathers them all up, as with the Wish Tree at the 2003 Biennale, makes a small bonfire and delivers them up to the dustbowl of the world. Burning them is not intended to be an offence, but a way of perpetrating our wishes. We, who expressed these desires, have another powerful ritual at our disposal to help us achieve them: not magic, but listening. By writing down what we want, by hanging up that note, we have had to focus on an emotion, a future prospect. Nothing, other than understanding, re-reading and listening to our desire, can help us realise it. Yoko is not a witch, she is an elderly fairy, who now has the wisdom to help us listen to what we feel.

Are venues and events like the Venice Biennale suitable for keeping up with the latest trends and developments in the art world and in general?
Art has always been tied to communication. With contemporary communication, can a genius be overlooked in some remote part of the world?

In Plato’s opinion art imitates reality and thus causes a rift with the essence of things, hence his disapproval. Do you see contemporary art as attempting to imitate the contemporary world?
No. Art has always pushed the boundaries of perception beyond contemporary life, art is not an illustration of contemporary life.

What work of art of the past do you reckon is still capable of strongly communicating its meaning to us today?
Artwork has survived because someone has pushed the plasticity of the picture plane or space into sculpture. Through the ages from prehistoric cave paintings, why is an artwork that is not personal still attractive?

Do you believe that the message conveyed by contemporary art influences the conscience of a multitude of people or is it intended for a small cultural elite instead?
Art in all historical periods had its public that was often reduced to a cultural elite. Only after passing through a historical approval it becomes closer to the wide public, like today impressionism is. At the time of its creation it also was seen and appreciated only by a small circle. It is a normal process that contemporary art is going through as well. I do not think that art should flatter or adapt to the tastes of the large public. For that we have entertainment, TV, design etc. I do not see art as something that should entertain and be largely accepted straight away like a pop star.

Your research underlines the need for a new ethical and political awareness. Could you please elaborate on this statement?
I position myself more as a witness then as a preacher. There are fields of human activity for everything so if one wants to be politically or socially active, one can do that without misusing art for it. I find that a social engagement as such cannot be enough to be considered as art.

Belonging to a community bound to a specific territory and, at same time, living in a globalized and “homogenized” society. How can these two contradictions coexist?
I do not think that I, or any of us, lives in a globalized or homogenized society. If you are talking about the Coca-Cola, McDonalds etc. society that is only a part of the society, the part of  economic goods. And that of only a part of the world. Otherwise I see many differences in between France and Italy for example. Even more so in between Europe and the States. I do not know what would be this homogenized society? The world is at a point of being the least homogenised than it has probably ever been.

Some of your artworks highlight the role played by women. To what extent did your “woman’s point of view” influence your artworks?
It influenced my work to the extent that I am, as a person a woman and therefore have a female point of view. The male point of view is what we are used to, what we see in majority. The female point of view was so long in the shadow that we almost forgot that it exists and that it is somewhat different from the male.

The need to translate my ideas into a form that the world could understand gradually combined with a growing need for structure. It was during this period that I began studying philosophy. Derrida, Foucault, Wittgenstein, the great anti-metaphysical tradition of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – that was my new discovery.

After all, philosophy is the architecture of ideas. Structure and sensory representation, rational thought and sensitivity; I had found a form of expression that represented me: architecture, the material expression of a systemic, systematic approach to life.

So your introduction to architecture came from an inner thirst for improvement and discovery.
For me, architecture is the point of contact between a person’s interior world and his interaction with the outside world. A viewpoint, a metaphor for my inner world, that lives in the external one.

A building is somewhere that people act, and interact. It is for people who live within a frame that has been designed and constructed to form an integral part of the stories of their lives. This is how the project Push Button House originated, a project which I presented at the Venice Biennale for the first time in Europe.

This is where architecture is superior to painting or the other arts, because it is part of the life and history of each person, not just an artistic experience.

Even music?
Music is a mental structure and a physical experience which come together and act directly on our nerve centres. It is a physical wave of sound that acts on our neural chemistry, but does not have a constant effect on our daily lives or people’s stories.

Architect, artist, musician, poet… a very eclectic career path. What does the role of artist mean to you?
Unfortunately, schools put too much emphasis on standardisation, certification. Too little space is left for expression or the understanding of those differentiating elements hidden at a deeper level which make up the marvellous individuality of each one of us.

In some way, an artist explores these elements, following a path to improvement, completely aware that he will inevitably make mistakes and experience failure.

It means taking risks and assuming responsibilities, exploring, growing within your social context through a network of relations that is developed day by day.

You might say that life is a road towards continuous improvement.

So we need to ask ourselves questions and try to understand what makes us feel alive. Touch the point where you start feeling uneasy, where you start to lose balance, and it is around this point that you should explore.

An artist interrogates himself, takes risks with himself and then transmits to others what he thinks he has learned during this process.

illy will be present at the international art exhibition of the Venice Biennale for the fourth time.

THINK WITH YOUR SENSES, FEEL WITH YOUR MIND. ART IN THE PRESENT.

Is the title of the 52nd International Art Exhibition curated by Robert Storr and organised by the Venice Biennale chaired by Davide Croff. Installed at the Arsenale and Giardini, it features the work of about a hundred international artists. “This exhibition looks to the future, not the past”, is how Storr defines the broad scope that places all the guest artists and their works on the same level. Each work is there to speak for itself and for the whole display, the similarities are designed to highlight the diversity of emotions, materials and subject matter featured in works of different styles, related to the present day.

77 countries and a large number of spinoff events will be presenting their works in the city centre, the Giardini and the Arsenale, where the new Italian Pavilion curated by Ida Gianelli will be inaugurated. At the Arsenale there will be a Turkish Pavilion and Check List of the Sindika Dokolo African Collection of Contemporary Art curated by Fernando Alvim and Simon Njami. At the Giardini, the Venetian Pavilion presents a tribute to Emilio Vedova. The Venice Biennale is offering an invitation to the general public, together with Art 38 Basel, documenta 12 and skulptur projekte münster 07, with the home page www.grandtour2007.com, and the catalogue for the 52nd exhibition is published by Marsilio.

We had a coffee and an interesting chat with chairman Davide Croff, on the subject of sentimental-mente…

You are a manager: a graduate in Business Studies and Economics, Director of financial Affairs at the fiat Group, CEo of the Banca Nazionale del lavoro and now Chairman of the Biennale since 2004: these all seem to be roles in which emotion plays no part. Is that true?

I’m afraid I have to disagree: every job, even in the business world, contains a high emotional charge if it is done with passion, and out of passion.  I’ll give you a personal example: my 10 years at FIAT, apart from the rich and varied professional experience, were characterised by an incredible passion for the “car product”. Unconsciously, the car was the real reason why I started at the company, and it bolstered my enthusiasm and enjoyment in the years that followed… Another piece of my life: BNL, 20,000 employees, a professional bank which is deeply rooted in the history of Italy, open to the world, and all the staff have a very strong sense of belonging. 14 years after I stopped working there, I think that all my colleagues will remember the misty eyes of their managing director during the last meeting.

But let’s move on to what I’m doing now: at the Venice Biennale, emotion is the real core business.

We offer pure emotion: with a modern art installation in the gardens, a large architectural project that might soon go down in history, a world film première at the Lido, a theatrical performance in a local field, modern dance, a concert, and why not, the photographs of our past and the great names of our history.

As you can see, emotion is a common theme that runs throughout the whole of a manager’s career, even though it might take different forms.

The result of an institution such as the Biennale comes from the work of a strong, enthusiastic team. how, and with what means, can you motivate the team?

We often think that the main motivational tools available to a manager are salaries, bonuses and stock options. They are certainly important. But the things that allow you to build a team are credibility, your powers of persuasion, enthusiasm and most of all, having clear ideas about how to direct the team’s work.  The salary at the Biennale isn’t that high, there are no real bonuses to speak of, and there are no stock options, so people with responsibility have an even more important role to play in terms of providing motivation.

A team is not just the sum total of individual and professional abilities. It becomes a team when it manages to express something that goes beyond individual contributions. Everyone has his own qualities and his own story, which is why relations should always be calibrated to suit individual personalities. The “chief scout” has to be able to lead the team as a whole, to communicate with and handle each man and woman on an individual level.

I’ll give you an example of the human machine that is the real strength of the Venice Biennale: the 24 hours leading up to the great event, when a world made up of a thousand people unites and pulls together in an incredible way.

If you walk past the gardens or the Lido a day before opening, you’d probably think those doors were never going to open…

But this is where everyone’s generosity, ingenuity and enthusiasm come in. People on all levels give of their best, in the firm belief that the success of the exhibition, event or festival represents the success of all those involved. Everyone’s needed, even those who make only the smallest contribution.

The strength of the team at the Biennale (I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them), is precisely that: they have a solid vision, they know how to accept and handle a challenge, and they keep their nerve. We will keep going as we always have done, on a never-ending quest for new ideas. During an architecture exhibition, we work on the next art show, while putting together ideas and links to the dmt festival or the film festival. To get the motor running and engage the gears, you need intellectual ability, certainly, but also emotion. Always.