The Transitory Museum Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Front Matter

  Preface In Action

  1 Absolute Commerce Notes

  2 The Eternal and the Ephemeral Notes

  3 The Far Ends of Fashion Notes

  Postface At Calm

  End User License Agreement

  The Transitory Museum

  Emanuele Coccia

  Donatien Grau

  Translated by Tom Conley

  polity

  First published in French as Le musée transitoire © Editions Klincksieck, 2018

  This English edition copyright © Emanuele Coccia and Donantien Grau, 2019

  Polity Press

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  Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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  ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3307-7

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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  Preface

  In Action

  It could be anytime in the day. We are walking down a pedestrian street in Milan. Only a few decades ago it was almost dilapidated, deserted; today, well-paved, cutting its way among equally recent high financial towers, it bustles with people. At a corner of an address—number 10—we see blue and green glass panels whose well-traced and separated colors meet and open onto a pathway. Above, we glimpse some tufts of vegetation: even plants have a life here.

  Above all, one is in for a surprise; for groups—not isolated individuals, who are there as well, but groups—sneak between two sections that leave a winding path, to enter a completely green garden. Alongside this garden three rooms of a hotel overlook the levels of the courtyard. In the courtyard there’s almost no flower, but there is instead greenery that generates a vegetal atmosphere, oxygen. Left and right lie tables and terraces, once you pass this wall of shrubbery. Straight ahead, very close, is a building. It opens onto a great hall and, to the left, a stairwell. At a slight left, we find an entry where clothing is on display, together with other objects that cannot yet be identified. From the dishes that are carried and from the drinks that are served, which differ according to the time of day, one can see that the great hall is a café and a restaurant. But it’s not merely a café, not merely a restaurant: in the middle stands a big fountain, from which no water springs but where rings of glass are enclosed in one another; they are fixed but look as if they were in motion. Further away there is a bar, framed from behind but with an overview by a wall with works on paper that, seen together, resemble a landscape. We look up and find porcelain branches falling from the ceiling, like stalactites.

  We would take a turn and discover the clothing: fabrics adorning mannequins, suspended on hangers and racks, but also, further away, handbags, brooches, makeup, all kinds of objects. Certain objects are marked with letters that seem related to the place. We note brand names, but we see them in a big whole, coordinated with drawings in the background, with murals, with a large chandelier that hangs like a piece of vegetation. In the middle, people, visitors, and others are ready to present the objects, to describe them as if they were tourist guides, and to sell them.

  A stairwell leads to the first floor; at the mezzanine, a little gallery, which on this day displays an installation; going further up, we bump into a bookstore: books of literature, art, photography, style, design, and then pens, pencils, and notebooks: the world of writing. Continuing along, we come to a larger gallery where photographs are on display. Through the windows we see the terrace replete with vegetation. We then decipher an inscription down below: 10 Corso Como.

  1

  Absolute Commerce

  It’s not merely commerce—and for banal reasons to begin with. The space, which has taken its address as its name, brings together different realities: a gallery, a bookstore, a store, a restaurant—and the list goes on. These spaces aren’t simply juxtaposed, one beside the other, as they could be along one of these endless streets in any number of Italian or European centers. They aren’t even disparate portions of a huge area, as they would be in a mall or in the commercial centers that have imitated and reproduced the urban landscapes of Italy. At 10 Corso Como each of these parts is a function and expression of something larger—something more homogeneous and more coherent than what we see in each one of them. The scene is not one of an experience that multiplies and diversifies, or one where the setting induces in the act of purchase a sense of contemplation, relaxation, or restauration. What we behold is a space of a limitless experience that no longer tolerates distinction. Paradoxical as it may seem, here is where commerce is transformed into a space of total life. That’s exactly why the multiplication of spaces in no way follows the pattern of the city. On the contrary, it attempts to construct the exception, an island in which people and things can exist differently. It’s a place where things can be encountered, notably objects from faraway places otherwise unavailable to the city’s inhabitants; a place where the things that make our existence possible and livable can be encountered differently.

  It’s not merely commerce. In this space it is the very idea of commerce that has to transform itself, to put on a front unlike the one that has marked it over the centuries. We usually think of commerce as a necessary evil that makes exchange possible, a minimal form that space must take for the reason that objects can be sold and bought. Commerce is a limbo unworthy of memory, a center of temporary permanence in which commodities are stationed after being produced, where they remain before being conserved, a state of urgency from which objects must be liberated. Deprived of life and reality, commodities can only appear on the floor, display themselves in a shopwindow, be reduced to their own image only. But 10 Corso Como transforms the relation between space and object. It breaks the window asunder, opens it, turns it into the very body of commerce. Bodies, then, are like people: we meet them—we don’t observe them. We spend time next to them and with them; they aren’t simple objects within arm’s reach. 10 Corso Como has dedicated to the encounter with things all the time and all the space it needs. We never enter a store only to buy things and carry them away; we enter in order to see them, touch them, smell them, spend time with them; we enter in order to meet them. At 10 Corso Como we literally live among things. We sleep there. The commercial establishment is no longer the uncertain border that isolates the exchange and makes it possible; nor is it the museum that isolates things outside exchange. Commerce is the forum of things, the space where we go to spend time with the objects that make our everyday lives possible.

  It’s not merely commerce. It’s a city within the city or, better, it’s a core born of a new urban model. No other commerce has sought to respond to the revolution that objects have wrought in the urban world. For more than a century,
the aspect of the modern city has radically changed. All of a sudden telephones, cars, refrigerators, washing machines, television sets—but also new clothing, books, papers, tables, chairs, lamps, together with meats, vegetables, jewels, wrist watches—in sum, an infinite and for the most part unprecedented cohort of everyday objects has invaded the city, occupied domestic spaces, imposed itself as a privileged object of desire and attraction. It is not only new and unusual objects or objects generally rare to find within homes (washing machines, dishwashers, television sets, and now laptop computers) that irrupt into our households. It is above all the most usual, ordinary, banal objects, which multiply at an exponential rate—things like shoes, spaghetti, seats: everything today exists in tens of varieties, in hundreds of possible forms, in thousands of meticulously distinct modes of being. No single thing can be confused with another specimen with which it shares the same function and form. It is no longer a sweater, a refrigerator, a table—but a Benetton or a Missoni sweater, a Frau armchair or a Kartell seat. Every single thing has acquired a name of its own that belongs to it alone, a blazon that testifies to its prestige in society. Every single thing is narcissistically absorbed in its own appearance and preoccupied to make visible its own value and its own longevity.

  The invasion of things “thingifies” both the urban landscape and the political landscape. Today, in the city, the number and quality of things present exceeds those of men and women. The city and political space become a place where things are collected rather than one where people assemble. Commerce is, then, the true paradigm of political space. No longer is it the home or an aggregate of homes: political is, first and foremost, the space that allows people and things to meet one another, the space where each of the things produced, desired, sold, and acquired in the city becomes available to the totality of its inhabitants. On the other hand, political will be any space that makes consumption possible—the free, individual, and contingent relation people hold with things—and not the one that allows people to live side by side, in accordance with relations of kinship or unknown proximities. To choose the objects we wish to wear in public, to construct and establish a space in which they are accessible to all, to define the form of their public existence—all this means drawing a line between the borders and the face of the city, its habits and customs. 10 Corso Como has created a space where the most important and beautiful objects that humanity has produced—the first seeds of all things, the extreme perfection of human industry—are gathered, brought to life, and opened onto the world. It’s where premises of all things are displayed. It has endowed the city with new inhabitants, has extended its borders and has changed the idea of a city center once and for all.

  It’s not merely commerce. It makes things exist in different ways, it allows commodities to be something other than the simple components of a commercial transaction. Things are the inhabitants and the structures of a space where one stops, where one eats, where one sleeps: distribution is not the missing or ungraspable link between production and consumption. It is the pivot of all this heterogeneous and contradictory sum of practices, ideas, objects, and portions of the world that we call economy. 10 Corso Como transforms the very idea of economy.

  It’s not merely commerce. It’s the transfiguration of everything we’ve imagined that commerce could be. If we want to tell its story, we have to begin from afar. In this very place Carla Sozzani managed to bring together and express different histories, very far from one another, and at the same time to transform them profoundly. 10 Corso Como is also—and above all—the ultimate stage of a slow evolution that commerce witnessed in the West from the 1960s on. It is the most complete result of the revolution that she contributed to bringing to the fashion magazine, the most mature expression of all transformations that marketing and publicity have inspired in the idea of commodity. Recounting how and why 10 Como Corso came to be is to give a historical account of European culture and economy over the last decades. This is not a minor or local account of a small commercial province. It is the history of our global world and of the choices one could make of the things it imagines, produces, and consumes—its most beautiful and most precious part.

  In 1990 Carla Sozzani founded 10 Corso Como. The inauguration of this site devoted to creation occurred at a historic tipping point—local, national, and international—in the field of creative economy. It is from here that we must begin if we are to understand the scale of a project born of a transition. We can then take note of the successive stakes it entailed. For the founding was situated between two epochs, in a moment that was not yet the 1990s but had already passed the 1980s; and this straddling allowed it to operate a synthesis of the two, and hence to place itself beyond the limitations that come with too strong anchoring.

  First of all, the name calls to mind a place. The name “10 Corso Como” coincides with that of an address—the name of a street, a destination, a voyage. Involved here is not an ordinary trajectory but a brief and intense pilgrimage. In full view at 10 Corso Como is not just a unique or special space, or Carla Sozzani’s very personal and elegant universe, her obsessions, her taste, her intuitions. We go to 10 Corso Como for more ambitious ends: we go there to see—literally—what the ancients used to call the world.

  The place is a presence. Real places, as real persons—persons who are alert, and therefore really human—surpass the status of a composite being, made up of fragments that can be counted, analyzed, and itemized, to become a kind of syncretic totality that can be called “a presence.” A presence is the mark of life that gets affixed to an existing substance.

  Plutarch tells us that, at the moment of the foundation of Rome, Romulus, following an ancient Etruscan ritual, threw the first seeds of all things into a hole that he then proceeded to fill. The hole, Plutarch says, had the same name as the universe: mundus.1 At 10 Corso Como emphasis is placed on all the first seeds of the world—everything of the most beautiful and of the most unbelievable sort that has come to life, has appeared, and has been produced in the world. 10 Corso Como’s name coincides with this space, a space that concentrates for us all the beauty that exists on the planet, a space that makes beauty exist in things, that wondrously transforms our earth into cosmos.

  Carla Sozzani, in her previous life as an editor, has imposed an image of the woman, an image of fashion, even an image of the image. Over the years, every articulation of her vision has been strengthened; in the end, what she has established is an architecture of existence. This powerful woman, who published images of women by turns sensuous, strong, and timeless, is the person whose salient traits she herself—or at any rate an extension of herself—saw making their mark.

  The name of 10 Corso Como is that of our mundus: it is present both among us and in the world, not as a simple conscience or a person. This presence is not only a gaze, a taste, an infinite knowledge cast upon things and their novelty. It is the force that makes beauty exist in things here and now.

  This image and this fashion belong in a moment and push away its limits in order to enter a space of timelessness—being thus entirely of an era and entirely outside that era. They maintain the tension without making it the source of a negation: on the contrary, both emerge stronger. The moment obtains a duration it never had, and as a result its timelesness is grounded in its own reality. Carla Sozzani’s proximity to Azzedine Alaïa, to Rei Kawakubo, to Ettore Sottsass, to Marc Newson, to Helmut Newton, to Sarah Moon, to Paolo Roversi, to Bruce Weber, and to so many others is a sign of a passion to live the present—and life—all the more intensely as it carries in itself the roots of the past and the foundations of the future. All these designers and photographers have embedded within their work traces, references, and methods from the past, while pushing it to the most unexpected of places.

  A shrewd detective, Carla Sozzani can find signs of vision everywhere, both in the moment and outside time; and she recognizes them in art, in photography, in fashion, in design, in literature. There is no field in which her par
ticular criterion, so difficult to apply, both contemporary and timeless, does not manifest itself. The criterion itself defines expertise: she can play with everything, not only because she is an expert in these areas but especially because she masters the arcana of a vision that is not subjective but rather objective.

  This capacity to bring together the most diverse and unexpected manifestations of beauty and make them live in the same place is the very faculty that allows her to build creative friendships with great visionaries of our time.

  Subjectivity is often expressed in what is passing: at some point in our lives, we love something that we know will pass. As the saying goes, “it’s just a fling.” We know well that it can’t last, that, as Proust’s Swann would say, “it’s not his type”—yet out of laziness, out of carelessness, we let ourselves go. That’s the domain of the subjective. The new is subjective. It’s limited.

  On the other hand, the domain of objectivity is determined by a passion, an admiration, an act of giving oneself to an ideal, which lies outside ourselves: the objective puts itself before our eyes; it must be universal, as we see it, and we restrict ourselves to serving this ideal. Carla Sozzani says it often: speaking of her love of beauty, she says that she is there only to serve creators in all domains. By defining her role in this way, she relegates to silence the essential contribution she brings to their creations. But above all she emphasizes the objectivity of her vocation: she serves an object, her ideal, a certain idea of beauty, harmony, transcendence.

  10 Corso Como is one of Carla Sozzani’s many names: one of the forms that her personality has invented in order to make mundus exist in our time. But there are thousands of others. The place is a mundus, a space in which the ideas of beauty that have visited and will visit humanity are contained as if in a jewelry case that can be gazed at each time anyone speaks with her.