Contemporary Art in Rome: the Maxxi Ed eccoci nel nuovissimo museo di Roma, il
Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo , inaugurato lo scorso maggio. In realtà, credo che sia ancora da terminare, per quanto riguarda la sistemazione del piazzale antistante, e soprattutto da riempire: per ora non c’è moltissimo, tranne una bella mostra su Pierluigi Nerves, a true innovator in the field of architecture after the war. The
Maxxi is located in the modern
Flaminio Quarter, right next to the Sports Hall designed by Nervi for the 1960 Summer Olympics: a neighborhood quite modern, quiet, not far from Piazza del Popolo.
The building has an irregular, sinuous, certainly the best one to occupy space in L: it is a light concrete building, where the feature you notice is the first time the use of glass, the facade and also at the top projecting. The museum was designed by architect Anglo-Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid (another woman, as Odile Decq, the architect French Macro)
This is one of the rare museums, however, in which more than the content, the container is important: I would say that will be quite difficult to fill it with something equal (because, perhaps for this reason has a well-known art critic: I just want to see how to hang paintings on the walls of the normal curved and strongly inclined) ... but perhaps we need to rethink the whole '
classic idea of \u200b\u200bthe museum, the picture gallery with paintings in a row, in their beautiful frames are used as imagine. It seems to me obvious that the new museum trends are going in a different direction.
I do not like modern architecture, in general, unless they are truly harmonic, or colored, or geometrically fascinating (such as Defense in Paris, for example), in which case I've found very interesting geometric and chromatic harmony.
The impression is confirmed from the outside: a huge atrium, the ceiling high, an architecture that mixes cement, glass and metal, all declined in a palette of white and gray that are the strong color contrast stairs and aerial structures of the ceilings, black, red and some touches to break the monochrome . The bright orange coat of my friend Martha there was a spell, a work of art in a work of art could be a nice suggestion for the designers!
Unfortunately you can only photograph the outside atrium, absolutely forbidden to photograph the great dining rooms, exhibition space.
Una volta oltrepassato l’enorme atrio, con una sinuosa scala nera che porta al piano superiore e che percorre praticamente tutti gli spazi (se soffrite di vertigini è un bel problema), sulla destra si apre un ampio corridoio, con degli interessanti divani stile
Star Trek. In fondo ci sono le ariose vetrate della facciata che illuminano lo spazio: qui si apre una grande sala, con la
mostra di Nervi : gigantografie in bianco and black designs, scale models of many works from the Thirties to the Seventies, around the world.
Beyond the exhibition hall to return to continue with a photographic exhibition
on the site of the Maxi, which lasted a dozen years have documented several photographers, each with its own style, growth the museum, picking colors, shapes, people.
back in the lobby, we finally got the aerial ladder black, formed by steps grating metal and glass.
Upstairs are exposed to the works that define contemporary art
is a euphemism, perhaps we could call it art in the future, because maybe in a couple of centuries will be perfectly understandable and almost taken for granted, a bit 'like the Impressionist paintings of Picasso or women squinting, that all' time not spinning them because no one considered them ugly.
I must admit that I have some serious difficulty, after studying the masterpieces of the past, to consider artwork a hole in the wall from which comes a breath of air (which is reasonably Marta took a leak in the system for air conditioning) , or two tents with flags sewn on. So perplexed us were raised in a forest of light bulbs hanging from the ceiling (outside the law, among other things: the old bulbs have gone out of production for a while '), each with neon wire under the name of a compound alchemy. Collage, assemblage, composition, media associations: nothing you can define a work of art in the classical sense, in fact.
I must confess that, occasionally, we were caught by an excess of uncontrolled laughter, perhaps our souls are too cynical, too little open to catch the breath of some poetic performance, I do not know.
Another work is curious
The Western Wall Wailing , inspired by the Holocaust: a wall made up of old leather suitcases, trunks and hat worn.
Climbing to the third floor, some of the performances that combine sound, music to video images, multimedia works of art that we have not understood the meaning. The applicant impression when I go to these kinds of exhibitions, is not really able to grasp the sense of not knowing where contemporary art is going, he's always going somewhere.
Obviously not an expert, maybe my training archaeologist me too addicted to another kind of beauty, per riuscire a cogliere significati e poesia in questo genere di opere, non so. Forse associamo comunque all'arte, l'idea del genio, della bravura tecnica, del virtuosismo, che magari gli artisti moderni non considerano invece intrinseca all'arte. Forse
arte contemporanea significa semplicemente ricerca di strade diverse, rottura con il passato, esplorazione di nuove modalità espressive.
Come però commentavamo con la mia amica Marta, passeggiando tra quelle opere così enigmatiche, molyi altri artisti prima di questi, anzi:
tutti gli artisti, cercano strane alternative, cercano la rivoluzione, break with the past. As there is an art before and after Caravggio, an art before and after the Impressionists, Picasso's art before and after all the great ... have found a new and unexplored path, otherwise they would not be the genes.
Epper, each first came to perfection in design, sculpture, architecture has already been tried, then potersene seconded, to revolutionize the art and invent a personal language, all over again (just citavamo Picasso, whose early works as Self-Portrait in Charcoal and especially the old man sitting with watercolor, are of unparalleled beauty, in the fullest sense of the word).
seems to me that many contemporary artists have skipped all the way to go directly to the end, without intermediate steps.
I do not know whether it is enough to proclaim a genius and pull some bucket of paint on a canvas, to be a true artist. I do not know ecstasy in front of a canvas shredded, or a combination of pipes, I just can not.
short, the discussion would be long and complex, and above all it would take an expert to me maybe illuminimi!
Our journey into Maxxi, unfortunately, ends here. If you want to deepen
:
Museum Maxxi
