PLACES & ARCHITECTURES | 900+100
Opened in 2010 in Palazzo dell’Arengario, located on the same square as the Duomo of Milan, the Museo del Novecento is a city museum which was founded upon the generous donations of artists and collectors. It’s a museum that, with its entirely Milanese history, cuts through the 20th century, from Futurism to Arte Povera, and which today is getting ready to double its exhibition spaces. To join the new millennium.
By Francesca Molteni
Open, osmotic, transparent. A museum that offers so much, after being given so much. Beautiful because it’s connected to the city. That’s how it’s described by the Director of the Polo Museale Moderno e Contemporaneo di Milano, Gianfranco Maraniello, who sits at the head of five different entities: the Museo del Novecento, GAM Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palazzo Morando, Casa Museo Boschi Di Stefano and the Studio Museo Francesco Messina.
FM: New projects, big changes. The Museo del Novecento is going through a moment of transformation. What are the main developments?
GM: Working on the space within the Museo del Novecento means considering what will happen when it’s extended to the second Arengario. So, imagining what its final form will be. Today’s Museum will become a permanent collection space, the start and end points of which will be two poles of the 20th century. It will start with hope, the idea of influencing the world, so the idea of the avant-garde, and Futurism, which is currently the most complete part of the collection, with a deep Milanese connotation, despite being an international phenomenon. It will conclude with a date that’s symbolic for 20th-century Italy, and certainly for this city and for the art of this city: 1993, the year in which lots of things happened in Milan—the mafia-terrorist Via Palestro massacre, the phenomenon known as Mani Pulite (lit. ‘clean hands’), but also the founding of Berlusconi’s political party. Culture, politics, society, the media—so, a very significant past, which in art has been represented in important works in our collection. The second Arengario, on the other hand, will be the place for exhibitions, the contemporary, also in correspondence to spaces which are better adapted to temporary exhibitions, precisely for their flexibility. I see architectural restoration as a crucial topic for Palazzo dell’Arengario too, to find the almost osmotic relationship between the interior and exterior of the Museum.
So, we’re preparing this springboard, which is actually a suspended walkway, to jump into the second Arengario, and metaphorically into the new millennium, because that’s also the image projected by Milan, an international city catapulted into the challenges of contemporary life. In this sense, we’re also envisioning the redistribution of the services offered, which will happen when the large cafeteria is opened on Piazza Duomo, on the ground floor, with dedicated rooms for activities. Above all, it will be an identity-creating place where people come together and engage in the practice of the arts.
FM: Who are the key figures along this path? The builders of dreams who make its completion possible?
GM: We are entirely part of the Municipality of Milan; we are already in a public context. This also means making ourselves available to listen to a city which is proving to be very generous with us. We’re implementing an important project for people with different abilities, so routes for the blind and visually impaired, for people with physical disabilities, and people with cognitive disabilities, in a traditional museum visit. Moreover, we’re finding new stakeholders in relation to new projects. In reality, we asked ourselves: what is it that characterises the art of the 20th century? The 20th century is undoubtedly the century in which art is no longer made as a ‘work’, a ‘piece’, as a completed form which is condensed into a statue or a painting. Art is no longer contained within the perimeter of a frame or pedestal. The 20th century is the one in which art appears in temporary exhibitions, in spaces, in dialogues between artwork and space, in a peculiar relationship with time and with exhibition spaces, and also in the relationship between works of art. And then the idea is to continue to make more room for the voices of the 20th century, working with archives, with foundations, with those who safeguard memories, but also with historically important art galleries, especially in a city like Milan. And then to reconstruct the events, rediscover the narratives, and even the connection and the cultural weight of all that. The challenge is to create a platform which is shared and participated in, with lots of partners. Then, it’s also about building the history to come, which is the main scope of the second Arengario, and it’s no accident that this project has been given the title ‘900 plus 100’, thinking of the century we’re living in today.
FM: How do you highlight the relationship with the city, in the sense of dialogue but also architecture?
GM: The fourth floor of the Museum is a sort of observatory which looks out onto, on the one side, the Duomo and the Galleria, and on the other, a modern building, Torre Velasca. This is in part the meaning behind the now-famous walkway, the idea of being suspended over the city and thus an observatory onto it. The strength of this building lies precisely in its being a place of observation but also visual permeability. It’s so beautiful in summer, at sundown, with the Candoglia marble of the Duomo and its pink tones reflected into the Fontana Room. I’m not surprised that it’s the best place in the city to take a selfie. I think that this aspect should be highlighted, and that the display of the artwork should have an organic relationship with the interior of the building, but also with the exterior. It’s the idea that the Museum can transmit continuous signals about that which is also found in the city. Because the museum always plays an exemplary role, it’s an example, it can’t exhaust the history of art. It has to provide a way to learn about it, because after all, we all, in our own experiences, have art in our everyday lives, in our practical lives, in the experiences we have elsewhere. The museum is an artificial space that summarises and, in some way, intensifies the perception of art, without exhausting it. Thinking that the Museum refers to things outside of itself is my mission.
FM: And the idea of an exhibition, which, in some way, the new project negates?
GM: All the artists which I’ve worked with have talked to me about the importance of creating exhibitions that have a direct relationship with a given space, and even with the work of other artists. Which is why we’ll progressively go beyond the perimeter of the canvas, that which the frame ideally invented in 17th-century Europe, a cultural invention which, all considered, is recent and also limited geographically speaking, and which contemporary art has learned to dismantle, discovering instead art as action, as space, as a relationship, as time. And we must also exhibit this exemplarity in the way the art is displayed, because it will then lead us to the three large exhibition spaces, indoor squares which in realty are also transparent, with large window walls, which will be places for temporary exhibitions. And then we have to know how to construct the possibility of encountering art and perceiving its continuous breaking-through, the continuous going beyond its boundaries, which is then an artistic metaphor.
FM: What relationship can be established with design, the other large pillar which carries this city out to the world, and which also brings much of the world to Milan?
GM: The line between the two disciplines is always quite ephemeral. It’s hard to know if we’re in the world of design or art, and maybe being so decisive isn’t particularly useful anyway, if we’re talking about the work in the collection, artists like Enzo Mari or Fausto Melotti, in some ways, and certain expressions of Futurism also come to mind. At the same time, I think, in this explosion of energy, that it’s essential for the city of Milan to position itself as an easily recognisable representative. We need clear positioning, precisely so that we’re points of reference and also so that we don’t create redundant roles. So, it’s clear that, when you design a museum such as the Museo del Novecento, you have to consider that the same city also has important private foundations, like the Triennale and the ADI Museum, which do extraordinary work. But we have to know how to do things that those foundations can’t, starting with the creation of collections, with the very mission of the Museum.
FM: What about contemporary art at the Museum?
GM: Quite honestly, we aren’t yet at the point in which we can present ourselves as producers of contemporary art. At the moment, but only at the moment, we’re a museum connected to roles pertaining to the conservation of cultural heritage. We aren’t the main players in that type of exploration. There are others who do it as their main vocation, foundations such as those of Prada, Trussardi, Hangar Bicocca, and many other private galleries. So, our job is, if anything, to become, as we await the spaces of the second Arengario, important references due to our institutional character. That means, not just research, which is no trivial matter, but the idea that this entity has value within society. The difference between what a museum does and what an entity like a foundation or a gallery does, is that, in reality, what we do should also interest those who don’t go to museums. I’ve always thought that museums should be even more important for those who aren’t interested in art. Our job isn’t to address our natural audience, it’s to understand that what we do has meaning even for those who aren’t interested.
FM: Right, so in all that, where do the digital world and public engagement fit in?
GM: We can’t ignore it, because the digital world, as Francesco Casetti says, has relocated even traditional media; we’re already permeated by it. In the English-speaking world, they talk about the phenomenon of mediatization (incredibly important in museum studies), which is no longer about how museums use all that’s digital, but how museums understand their being immersed in a digital environment. We know that the most effective form of communication is that which visitors themselves carry out, reflecting their experience at the museum through the tools in their hands. I think that, more than saying which tools we’ll adopt, it’s about understanding what our attitude should be. There are two things we must always keep in mind. The first is that we have to think about how to become not subjects but the content of communication. The other is to consider everything digital not as a tool for communication, but as a realm of action. In a certain sense, it’s about thinking of the opportunities offered by the digital to create spaces not only for documentation and archiving, but even for cultural production.