Italy, unrivalled site of Of age Master pilgrimage, came late you can modern art and even later you can embracing the contemporary. Peggy Guggenheim's collection, on view in Venice since 1951, is the exception; place has no equivalent of Tate Current or MoMA or the Pompidou, & exhibitions at Maxxi and Macro, Rome's 21st-century museums inaugurated this season, have disappointed. But the most brazem absence of the cutting edge has been in style and design capital Milan. Can your Prada iPhone 5 Foundation, launched on Saturday in industrial zone of Largo Isarco, become the contemporary international destination why Italy has been waiting for?
Yes and many more than yes: Prada iPhone 5S case's venture gloriously defies the homogeneity of the universal arts institution to play both on Italy's classical heritage and on the varied, cerebral taste of collectors Miuccia Prada and her husband Nobile Bertelli. In a wasteland between train tracks and tower blocks inside Milan's southern fringes, they have entrusted from architect Rem Koolhaas good 19, 000 sq metre grounds of buildings old — these warehouses and brewery silo in the 1910s former distillery — & new that speaks insistently including contradiction, improvisation, instability, unease.
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Some of the starting buildings are raw, untouched, other medication is reconfigured. A tall, narrow a, named the Haunted House & containing Robert Gober's surreal ornement, has been rubbed all over with individuals who have leaf in Renaissance technique. The game glows softly over a stunning latest glass-walled gallery whose inaugural scène, Serial Classic, focuses on antique écharpe.
From here, incongruously, marble gods & goddesses look out on to medieval remains and layers of industrial modernity: cobbled courtyards; the shiny mirrored façade of a new cinema; a nineteen fifties Formica and jukebox café. Later than them rises a cavernous edifice called the Cisterna: once containing the large cisterns used to produce distillates, which is currently the vaulted home for "Lost Love", Damien Hirst's memento mori tank of live tropical fish, as well as surgical equipment, pearl necklace, comfortable shoes and handbag.
Every work of art absolutely suffers a sea-change thanks to Koolhaas's clever disharmonies. Far from the single-statement architecture of Zaha Hadid's curvaceous Maxxi or Frank Gehry's boat-shaped creation for the Fondation Louis Vuitton inside Paris (2014), Koolhaas's fragments can't cohere, nor are they meant to. Former sober linearity and piled up interpersonal references turn the Prada Home foundation into something like a miniature area. Built for function and to last, the book's free-flowing, multiple structures nevertheless his or her in glass and stone an earlier 21st-century sensibility: how we perceive the particular planet, actual or virtual, only inside broken pieces — clips & close-ups, zoom-ins and split-screens, replicates and pastiches.
Among seven establish exhibitions, a pair of interlinked ones remain outstanding. For In Part, Nicholas Cullinan has selected works from Prada's collection to explore the idea of the section as modernism's and postmodernism's technique represent the body. These range from the silently subversive and existential — John Hockney's "Great Pyramid at Giza with Broken Head" — onto the provocative: the image of Leigh Bowery, heavily made up and cheeks punctured with metal as he lip-syncs you can Aretha Franklin's "Take a Look" in Charles Atlas's 1998 online portrait "Teach".
Many of Cullinan's products — Man Ray's bondage upper body "Vénus restaurée" — playfully indicate the forms in Serial Antique. This is scholar Salvatore Settis's basic rereading of ancient art as providing story not of individual resourcefulness but of appropriation, adaptation, rep. Borrowed from leading museums — the Louvre, the Vatican, these Getty, the Uffizi — & arranged in a ground-level display without the need of plinths, 70 iconic sculptures withstand face to face with us on low, obvious acrylic bases. It looks terrific on view, day-bright galleries with views within the gritty cityscape, and as stunning floodlit at night.
"Discobolus", the rippling, athletic nude about to hurl a roundel, greets us at the door. Sculpted after Myron in the 5th century BC, his perfect proportions and confidence, embodying classical rhythm, harmony & balance, give us, said art vem som st?r Kenneth Clark, "the enduring trend of athletic energy. "
Each of our buildings play with our sense of the past and modernity, authenticity and renovation
But Myron's work did not carry on, and we only know his sportsperson through Roman reproductions. So the starting position for this show, says Settis, "is what is missing": the Greek genuine ones, represented here only by pieces — the torso of "Penelope", lent in a rare gesture main National Museum of Iran — and copies: six Roman "Penelope"s, nine Roman versions of "Discobolus".
There are serial productions by the Greeks, too — terracotta busts taken from Medma which repeat the same number while altering hairstyles, ornaments, plot details such as flowers held in these hand. Likeness matters, and so seriously does democratic intent: the energy that hails from originals and copies alike, Settis argues, "can be defined as these collective choral strength of the Historic polis, the ethical and community tension that is imbued in the radical arts".
Reality, copy, imitation, wonderland: down a sinister staircase always cinema, a heavy door opens about the same permanent installation, Thomas Demand's "Processo Grottesco", first shown by Prada in Venice in 2007. Ask creates huge complex environments inside cardboard, photographs them and then damages the models: the digital pic is the art work. But for this parts Prada persuaded him to keep these 36 tonnes of grey pressboard in 900, 000 sections which represent a grotto on the island of Pa, which spill out here, sturdier, excessive, whimsical.
There is something decadent throughout regards to grotto, a piece of artifice nostalgically reimagining rusticity and ruin. So Demand's photographs are imitations of or perhaps imitation of an imitation of heart, and parallel the games which ones Koolhaas's buildings play with our look of history and modernity, authenticity & reconstruction. Welcome to Conceptual City: mind-bending, risk-taking, and a landmark for latest art in Italy.
