16 March 2006

a pause from eating

For those of you who must think that all we do is eat Italian food and wander the streets of Milan admiring the overwhelming fabulousness of it all... we also go to museums.

This past weekend we visited the Milan Triennale, a museum seated at the far end of the Parco Sempione. It's a very large space and memorably unimpressive from the outside. But inside is what it's all about.



We saw two exhibits. The first one, "Looking for," was free and featured the display of a private collection of objects designed in Italy over the years. The objects ran the gamut. Displayed were radios and chairs, plug adapters and type writers. Every kind of common object. They would not have been nearly as captivating had they been displayed separated and single. However, en masse the room itself and the objects displayed along its walls became its own large-scale object d'art.

You might get a sense of it from the photo but it doesn't really capture the cell-like repetition of the objects displayed, and the sleek system of shelves and ladders. There was minimal signage (difficult to really learn anything) but that kept the design pure and of itself. Nothing to distract but, it's true, also nothing to instruct/educate the viewer.

In sum, Italian design is gorgeous but I know nothing about it.



The second exhibit was entitled "Beautiful Losers" (8 euro each) and is probably the only art exhibit in Italy in which we, as Americans, could feel superior in our grasp of the pieces before us. It was basically a collection of the grungy and bizarre; street level art that Americans created on the fringe but eventually came to be embraced by mainstream culture. Graffiti and skateboards, indie music and grainy photos. Before MTV could rock the look, these people came up with it.

There was an intriguing display of hard-form teddy bears that had been decorated by various artists. Each of the bears was about the height of a three year old and displayed standing on a thin platform hanging from the ceiling. The room was darkened and there hung an army of these bears. People wandered in between the rows looking more closely at the details, noticing who had created which bear. Again, the joy of the exhibit was in the replication, the multiplication of the idea; the absolute squadron of bears that hung before the viewer.



The skateboard display was impressive and raw. I could appreciate most of the imagery and I could certainly see how it was/is ground-breaking, but I am also not a teenage boy. And skateboarding, by and large, seems to be dominated by individuals whose tastes might be a bit different than my own. That being said, silk screening a bunch of wild imagery on the bottom of a skate board is pretty cool and seeing them all hanging in a museum is also refreshing.

There was most certainly some eating done after the exhibits but I will leave that for another posting. If I look at the photos I might not be able to wait until dinner.

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