This book is a project by Blauer Hase. It has been developed between August 2008 and May 2009 with the help of SdS IUAV and Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa.

Blauer Hase is:Mario Ciaramitaro Riccardo GiacconiGiulia Marzin Daniele Zoico

www.blauerhase.com

© 2008 the authorsAll rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

Concept & EditingBlauer Hase

Copy editorEnrica Serafini

DesignMario Ciaramitaro

CoverGiulia Marzin

TranslationsMaria BeggiPaul BowleyStefania CorsaliniGabriella GentiliGuido D. GiacconiEmanuela MigliorelliMariachiara RicchiutiEnrica Serafini

Financial supportSdS IUAV

Supported by

Printed byCompuservice Poligrafica Venezia

Furniture Music

InstrumentsBlauer Hase

The Empty SpaceGillo Dorfles interviewed by Blauer Hase

Erik Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement, some ninety years laterNicola Bernardini

From Domestic to Aesthetic: Art in Everyday LifeSolène Bertrand

Protection of the IndividualJan Hoet interviewed by Blauer Hase

Room 307Daniela Zangrando

What is the Rest of WhatRaqs Media Collective interviewed by Blauer Hase and Andrea Morbio

Variable GeometryStefano Boeri interviewed by Blauer Hase

A Private Conversation in a Public SpaceEva Marisaldi interviewed by Daniele Zoico

Contents

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10

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32

39

44

55

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Furnishing TraditionFrancesca Cappelletti interviewed by Alessandra Landi

Window PainCornelia Lauf

Design without DisegnoMartino Gamper interviewed by Riccardo Giacconi

Is it Equivalent to an Indoor Car for Your Apartment?Joa Herrenknecht and Felix Vogel in conversation

New Domestic NomadismGiulio Cappellini interviewed by Riccardo Giacconi

House WorkSam Thorne

Another Form of IntimacyHans Ulrich Obrist interviewed by Riccardo Giacconi

Musique d’Ameublement for EveryoneMassimo De Nardo

Biographies

Acknowledgments

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79

84

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109

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133

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143

Furniture Musicedited by Blauer Hase

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Blauer Hase

fireplace curfewcomfortcabinetvirginalsRope (A. Hitchcock, 1948)still liferestsnailsdomestic pleasureslocked room mystery VermeerCorotslidesiconsLares/PenatesTen Little Indians (A. Christie, 1939)reality showRear Window (A. Hitchcock, 1954)gardenbalconywindowsthresholddrawing roomfamily portraitsiphoncornerdusttracesLost Highway (D. Lynch, 1997)Baker Street

Instruments

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Furniture Music is an instrument for research.The included essays and interviews investigate the sphere

of cultural production in domestic space throughout a series of subjects: the relationship between art and domesticity, the modalities of contemporary inhabitation, the cultural and political status of furniture and design.

These topics are addressed through a plurality of standpoints and modalities. Without it claiming to be an exhaustive collection, Furniture Music aims to be the setting for an open and trans-disclipinary discussion; a place for reflection and exchange; a forum in which to present some perspectives on the analysis of domestic space, and of devices and practices connected to it.

The project takes its queues from the concept of ‘musique d’ameublement’ (‘furniture music’), first introduced by Erik Satie in 1917. A recurring theme within the book is the hypothesis of a historical constellation between the sociocultural situation in which Satie conceived a music, self-defined as “furnishing”, and the present condition of contemporary art and culture. Furthermore, the social value of furniture and the possibility of a cultural form specific to the domestic space are investigated. Finally, the book reflects on the condition of the artwork in the living spaces.

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Gillo Dorfles interviewed by Blauer Hase

[Milan, October 2008]

Blauer Hase: In 1969 you and Filiberto Menna curated an exhibition called Al di là della pittura [Beyond Painting] in San Benedetto del Tronto. Could we talk about it?

Gillo Dorfles: Yes, that was a very important exhibition: there were installations, objects, paintings, various things that were completely new at the time. But what does this have to do with furniture music?

BH: On that occasion, there were artists like Fontana who exhibited spaces. We consider the spatial aspects of displayed works very interesting.

GD: That exhibition was the first to feature the discoveries and inventions by some artists who were just emerging at that time. For instance, Fontana had already created the famous Ambiente nero at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan, and had carried out research on spaces in Argentina. In San Benedetto del Tronto, some spaces were prepared by artists who had already experimented with the spatial-environmental aspects in their practice, such as Fontana, Bonalumi, Castellani, Scheggi.

BH: People used to talk about spaces in those years, today it’s more about installations.

GD: In fact, they are almost the same thing. Whereas installations don’t necessarily need an enclosed space, those spaces were rooms or closets with installations inside. Therefore,

The Empty Space

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we can say that installations started at that time.

BH: Why was there a particular interest in enclosed spaces?

GD: That’s easily explained. Under the crisis of – let’s say – traditional, especially figurative painting, there was a revival of the abstract, mainly thanks to Fontana and to such streams as Spacialism, the “Nuclears” and MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta). All those trends put painting, that’s the painted picture, aside and turned to a more spatial form of art, in which the work was conceived as form projecting itself into the surrounding space. Hence the name of the exhibition, Al di là della Pittura [Beyond Painting], which wasn’t about paintings, but about objects displayed in the space, or spaces including artistic displays, even installations. This was the principle.

Of course we must not forget the historical background to this. In the Fifties there was a struggle against the dominant figuration of the former Fascist period, not only in Italy but all over Europe. The Bauhaus had paved the way for a type of research going beyond painting and combining elements from architecture and industrial design. For instance, industrial design, has a lot to do with the Movimento Arte Concreta (MAC), which Munari, Soldati, Monnetand I founded in the late 1940s. Not only were we interested in abstract painting, but also in design, hence in the relationship between art and architecture. I would say, this is the background for the practices of those artists.

BH: We were talking about spaces.

GD: Obviously we should draw a distinction between the space containing a work of art, and the space itself being a work of art, which is fundamental. Fontana’s black space, Castellani’s space, as well as some spaces by Scheggi (who died at a very young age, so he could not create many works), were works of art “consisting of” space. For instance, a wall with holes or hollow spaces in it was a work of art in itself because it was a “spatial receptacle”. What is

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architecture but an internal space developing through the external space? Hence, spaces could be referred to as “small architectures”.

BH: Our starting point is Erik Satie’s “musique d’ameublement”. His provocation consisted in composing music which was openly “furniture”, without an artistic value, and he did that in the years of the avant-garde, of Schönberg. We would like to understand if such a provocation can find an equivalent in the contemporary world.

GD: Erik Satie (as well as Poulenc and the French school) had an idea of music which had grown away from big orchestral music, it was “apartment” music, suitable for small spaces and totally different from the big instrumental music of Stockhausen. Debussy was the first to compose works of this kind, that is compositions thought for small ensembles such as Les Chansons de Bilitis or La Mer. They were written for small orchestras made up of five, six, seven chamber instruments, the type of musical ensemble which prevails today.

BH: Do you think Satie was running contrary to the pursuit of the Avant-gardes?

GD: He was against big orchestral music: Wagner most of all, then Hindemith, and the whole German school. French music, especially Erik Satie’s, was music for piano and voice, or violins and cellos, and small ensembles which could play in a room, thus “furnish a room with music”. However, I think it’s important to remark that this must not be confused with “background music” – which is unfortunately the opposite of what should be done. This background music is played in a place where people talk, have tea, have a cocktail, and nobody listens to it. It’s like non-existent. This is the real way to rape music, to spoil it; music must be listened to, background music doesn’t have to be listened to, so it is anti-music.

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BH: Maybe nowadays we should beware of this “background culture”, “furniture culture”, that’s to say entertainment produced only to spend people’s time away. Do you agree?

GD: I think this might be true for visual arts as well. Instead of being observed, of being listened to, these forms of art are just a “side dish” and therefore, in my opinion, deleterious.

BH: We can also include television in this, can’t we?

GD: Television is the great culprit, isn’t it? If it were compulsory to watch it only in a certain environment and at a certain time, television might become a very effective media. Instead, it’s not watched, it’s not listened to, it is absorbed without the awareness of what you see or hear. It’s the opposite of what should be done, therefore it’s destructive. You watch the beginning of a movie by Dreyer on TV, and after five minutes you turn over because you are getting bored; this way you miss the chance to watch the great movie you were going to see.

BH: When he performs 4’33’’ for the first time in 1952, John Cage, leads us to a reflection on background noise; this performance is often considered as silent dirge for all the music ever played before.

GD: Cage was very important, but he cannot be considered a key figure. His ideas, were seminal: the silence, the noise. But today’s music is not Cage’s music.

BH: Maybe Cage’s music was a consequence of Satie’s “furniture music”?

GD: I wouldn’t say so. Cage was very important for such ideas as silence and indeterminacy, which influenced musicians after him. But Ligeti, Berio, Schnabel, Stockhausen have nothing to do

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with Cage. After the twelve-tone crisis, music shook off the twelve-tone grasp and developed independently, mainly along the lines of atonality. In any case it had nothing else to do with Cage but for some “silences”, which can be found in Webern, too.

BH: There was a cultural form which had the domestic space for a stage: chamber music. According to Adorno, this genre – from Haydn to Webern – is an expression of the bourgeoisie. In your opinion, is there any current cultural form of the domestic space which can parallel chamber music?

GD: Absolutely none. In the past any respectable bourgeois family had at least one member, mainly a young woman, who could play the piano. Such figures do not exist any longer at present. Those times are gone, and therefore the music of the good old fin de siècle bourgeoisie is fortunately over. Or unfortunately, because we can say that at least people studied music then. Nowadays there isn’t anything like the “homely” music of those days. I’d say at present there is a bigger difference between “consumer music” and genuine contemporary music. We have kinds of music intended for few people and a load of “non-music” which can be heard in the streets and is a far cry from even good old street jazz of the origins. It’s some kind of simple catchy tune such as low-quality Neapolitan music or Sanremo. In short, it’s non-music.

BH: Speaking of domestic spaces, do you think today’s furniture has a social function? Because, in a way, furniture has always conveyed social identity.

GD: Furniture has no doubt a great importance, in a way it’s a sign of one’s personal taste. It can represent the aesthetic qualities of a person better than anything else: it’s not for everybody to own contemporary art paintings, but anybody can have a chair designed by Mari or Magistretti, or a lamp by Castiglioni instead

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of a horrible lamp bought at Rinascente. Of course, social issues have their importance. However, aesthetic choice doesn’t depend on social class: it’s a matter of cultural knowledge. You can have refined furniture even if you don’t have much money. As a counterpoint, let me mention this: I once visited [Gianni] Versace’s flat; considering his wealth and despite the presence of some precious pieces and antiques, the flat proved of doubtful taste in the way it was furnished! So, money is not the only requirement when it comes to tasteful furniture.

BH: So, furniture is not the expression of class any longer, is it?

GD: Fortunately, nowadays there are – or there should be – no classes and castes anymore. Thus anybody can have good furniture.

BH: In what ways has contemporary architecture dealt with domestic spaces?

GD: Some architects devoted most of their energy to the domestic space, while others haven’t dealt with it at all, In my opinion, Lloyd Wright is outstanding when it comes to domestic spaces. His prairie houses around Chicago are interesting right because of Wright’s treatment of the domestic space, which he liked to manipulate. On the other hand Mies van der Rohe made wonderful buildings, no doubt about it, but he didn’t worked on the domestic space at all. This reminds me of an anecdote. I was with Mies van der Rohe on a visit to one of his skyscrapers in Chicago. At some point he said, “Now I’ll take you to an apartment which is really worth seeing.” We got to this apartment, which I thought would be typically Mies van der Rohe: you know, glass, see-through, empty spaces and so on. To my surprise, I saw that the walls were completely covered, there was huge Biedermeier furniture everywhere and you could hardly see the glass. Then he said, “This is the home of a Viennese Jewish widow, who moved

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in with all of her Biedermeier furniture.” The domestic space was completely ruined, the van der Rohe apartment had been turned into the one the woman used to have in Vienna, and she couldn’t care less about modern architecture. So you see, it’s up to the tenant.

BH: Talking about contemporary art, in your books Horror Pleni and L’Intervallo Perduto, you state that the world is full of stimuli and there are no more intervals in between them. Does this imply a confusion between text and context?

GD: Sure it does. The lack of intervals is an alarming phenomenon. John Cage is fundamental in this respect. Cage’s silence states that there is no music without the silence to go with it. Thus there is no architecture without a surrounding space. The vacuum is fundamental. No wonder it is part of Zen aesthetics.

BH: We are very interested in the issue of vacuum space around the work of art. In the white cube, the work of art is in a place that makes it perfectly legible and separable from the context. But there are kinds of art that cannot work in the white cube, for example Land Art.

GD: Land Art is a kind of art made on landscape and has a whole landscape at its disposal, there’s no lack of space at all. In fact, Land Art exploits the big intervals in the environment. Naturally we must agree upon what we consider Land Art. Isolating a particular vegetable or mineral element might be considered a work of Land Art. Alternatively, you can produce Land Art by combining natural elements artificially, no matter if you arrange them according a certain sequence or leave them as they are. Consider Penone. We have various kinds of Land Art.

BH: Back to visual arts, you said that a work needs a surrounding space. What happens to this space when people – collectors for example – keep the works of art in

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their homes? You’ve been living with these works for years.

GD: Of course there are some collectors who cover up the walls with paintings, so that you can’t see either the walls or the paintings. I have many works of art here in my apartment, but I tried to hang them in a way so that they’re not suffocating each other. If I added more, they wouldn’t be seen, because there wouldn’t be any surrounding space to them. For example, I remember James Johnson Sweeney, the famous director of the Museum of Modern Art, who had a big apartment. It was nearly empty, in one of the rooms there was only a Mondrian painting and nothing else. And indeed, it was enough! However not everybody can afford a painting like that. If I had a Mondrian I would eliminate all the other pieces and hang it on its own.

BH: You’ve been living with these works for years.

GD: Yes, I have pleasure in seeing them hanging on the walls.

BH: Could you tell us more about these works?

GD: You’ll probably recognise them easily: Fontana, Capogrossi, Scanavino, some of the artists I’ve been interested in ever since they were unknown.

BH: We are an artistic collective, a group of artists who work together. We are interested in your idea of the collective, since you’re one of the founders of MAC.

GD: I would say that the formation of artistic avant-garde groups has been declining lately, I don’t know why. After the war, we had the Nuclears and the Spacialists in Milan, and Forma Uno in Rome. Abroad there were groups like Die Brücke, Der Blaue Reiter, and so on. They were groups of ten, twenty artists; I don’t think there is anything similar today.

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BH: In your opinion, what’s the reason why we have such a fragmentation in the art world today?

GD: It might be the market’s fault. Everybody wants to be the one and only artist whose works are worth billions, so he or she prefers to have no competitors.

BH: Also, less manifestos are written today.

GD: I think this happens for the same reason. The Futurist Manifesto and the other big manifestos were made because once there was no press and no television either, so manifestos were also forms of advertising a group. Today there are lots of advertising means, therefore manifestos are less needed.

BH: Back to spaces, in his exhibition Italics at Palazzo Grassi in Venezia, Francesco Bonami put many spaces on display, included those by Fontana and Colombo.

GD: It must be acknowledged that Fontana was very good at realizing his “elastic spaces”, and so was Colombo. Of course they are outdated now; such experiences as Colombo’s, as well as those of Gruppo 0, Gruppo T or Gruppo N, can’t be continued. But their historical importance cannot be denied.

BH: Do you think that the space as a form is outdated?

GD: It is the form they had at that time which is outdated; those spatial creations wouldn’t make much sense today

BH: Our relationship with space might have changed as a consequence of the Internet and new media.

GD: This is also a point. Virtual spaces could not be imagined then. Today, with the creation of virtual spaces, we have the chance to create completely new forms, which are not necessarily

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artistic, but might as well be.

BH: Do you trust visual arts less today?

GD: No, I believe there are always interesting things, today as yesterday. In the past few years I haven’t seen a Fontana or a Melotti in Italy yet, but we have a great artist like Paladino for instance, and many promising young people in general.

BH: Like Cattelan?

GD: I find Cattelan interesting; I don’t dislike him, he’s smart. Obviously one shouldn’t overdo in hanging dummies. As another example, I also find Vanessa Beecroft interesting, because she has done something completely new. Let’s wait and see. if she goes on doing those feminine statuettes, the public might grow tired of her art. But up to now her works have been quite interesting.

BH: Can you mention anything impressive among the latest things you’ve seen?

GD: You mean something that struck me? Nothing has really struck me lately...

BH: Thank you very much. To conclude, would you like to give us some advice?

GD: What is important is not to paint!

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Nicola Bernardini

A few days ago it rained. I should be out gathering mushrooms. But here I am, having to write about Satie. In an unguarded moment I said I would. Now I am pestered with a deadline. Why, in heaven’s name, don’t people read the books about him that are available, play the music that’s published? Then I for one could go back to the woods and spend my time profitably.

John Cage, ”Erik Satie”, in Silence, 1961, p.76.

1. Introduction

After having been ignored or despised during his lifetime, composer Erik Satie and his concepts and ideas are an all-time favorite target of “colonial appropriation” by art and industry alike. His Musique d’Ameublement is no exception. Perhaps the boldest and most provocative intellectual gesture of his production, the series of the Musiques d’Ameublement was, as we will see later on, essentially a failure during his existence and went on being forgotten for about another thirty years after his death, until John Cage resuscitated them out of oblivion with his long-time dedication and wit. Since then, the cohort of eccentric artists of all sorts that call themselves “followers” of Satie, his “Furniture Music”, his “Vexations”, etc. grows every day with unresting pace. The Musiques d’Ameublement are said to be at the origin of musique concrète, then of minimal music, then of ambient music, and so on

Erik Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement, some ninety years later1

1 - (V. 1220 2008-11-23) nicb@sme-ccppd.org 2008 <Nicola Bernardini>

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(cf. Rowley, 2004). Even Cage seemed attracted more by the ability of Satie’s surrealist ideas to explain his own thinking about music at an early stage - rather than by their extraordinary appearance in the context in which Satie was operating (cf. Cage, 1961).

There is little surprise in this since Satie’s musical and aesthetic intelligence is by all means exceptional and any kind of artistic production may powder itself with a (possibly pale-ish) halo of humor and prestige by simply mentioning it. However, one might wonder instead if a closer understanding of Satie’s thinking embedded in his own days, rather than a simple appropriation of his ideas out of context, would not produce a stronger appreciation of the aesthetic wealth that we have inherited from the Maître d’Arcueil. This short paper will attempt to sketch a different point of view on the Musique d’Ameublement - setting it as a starting point for a wider exercise on the evolution of the functions of music.

2. The Musiques d’Ameublement

The Musiques d’Ameublement are well described by a number of sources (see, for ex. Volta and Pleasance, 1998, Orledge, 1990, Templier, 1932, Shlomowitz, 1999, Wikipedia, 2005-2008) relieving this author to extend this paper with another lengthy description. While the Musique d’Ameublement might have become a compositional procedure in his last works (cf. Orledge, 1990, p.4), the term is officially used in three sets of pieces, ranging from 1917 to 1923 (cf. Wikipedia, 2005-2008). Only the second set was played by Satie (counting Milhaud as a fellow player, follower and long-time friend) during his life. The three pieces composing the set were created as “intermission music” to Max Jacob’s play Ruffian toujours, truand jamais at the Barbazanges Gallery in Paris. Besides the provocative description embedded by Satie and Milhaud in the scores of the first performance (“Furnishing music completes one’s property; it’s new; it doesn’t upset customs; it isn’t tiring; it’s French; it won’t wear out; it isn’t boring”, cf. Gillmor, 1988, pp.325-

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326), and in the descriptive text written in the program (“We are presenting today for the first time a creation of Messieurs Erik Satie and Darius Milhaud, directed by M. Delgrange, the ‘musique d’ameublement’ which will be played during the intermissions. We urge you to take no notice of it and to behave during the intervals as if it did not exist. This music, specially composed for Max Jacob’s play claims to make a contribution to life in the same way as a private conversation, a painting in a gallery, or the chair on which you may or may not be seated.”, quoted by Templier, 1932), a really enlightening detail is revealed by a well-known anecdote concerning this play. Apparently, the artists’ invitation neither to listen nor care for the music being played, and to visit an exposition of children’s drawings which was concurrently showing in the same gallery, went unnoticed. When the ensemble started playing, the public stopped and sat, listening attentively to the music being played - much to the dismay of the creators.

While Satie’s descriptions are often deceptive and subtly satirical - and indeed the ones related to this second set are really like that - this detail is enlighting because it shows the real intent with which Satie conceived his Musique d’Ameublement: breaking the representational model and function of bourgeois music performance, possibly recovering/discovering other functions for music. Another well-known characteristic of Satie was his elaborate opposition to a vast number of musical styles which were very trendy in his times: these range from the late German romanticism to the fauve composers, from impressionism to expressionism, etc. In general, Satie was attuned to the Dadaist movement in his animosity towards crystallized functions and roles in music: it is easy to think that he did not hold in high consideration the bourgeois public of his time - and that his Musique d’Ameublement (along with the Vexations) constitute the sublime insult to that public.

Musically speaking, the Musique d’Ameublement is very ingeniously conceived. It consists of very short pieces which may be repeated an indefinite number of times. In the case of the 1920 set, the composer considered the number of repetitions in

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function of the duration of the entr’acte. The astounding feature of this music is that its harmonic texture and its counterpoint are designed to create a circular endless form whose repetition constitutes always a new starting point while being completely expectable. Satie did not use all the musical tricks and shortcuts that were used later on by his would-be epigons. No simplistic modal progressions or pedal notes are being used, no melodic device is put forth to smooth the endless repetition. The harmony is tonal, the music features cadences, pick-ups, salient points and catchy melodies. The form of Satie’s Musiques d’Ameublement show even less resemblance to any minimal music, not to mention muzak: repetitions are always strictly identical, there is no identifiable “musical” form related to them, there are no variations, no extensions, there is no evolution in the strict sense. The message is exasperatingly static, and it does not seek to offer any solution nor escape to its staticity.

3. Plundering followers

The idea that the Musique d’Ameublement was the first muzak ever conceived was proposed by Milhaud at a later time. “Satie was right: nowadays, children and housewives fill their homes with unheeded music, reading and working to the sound of the wireless. And in all public places, large stores and restaurants, the customers are drenched in an unending flood of music. It is ‘musique d’ameublement’, heard, but not listened to” (quoted by Orledge, 1995). Again, Satie’s wit can indeed serve to many purposes, but the distance between Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement and present-day muzak is simply incommensurable on musical terms.

The same goes for ambient music, another category that pleases itself with the idea of deriving from the Musique d’Ameublement. Again, the differences in musical conception would suffice to dismiss any connection between the two.

But there is also an opposition in another dimension that is

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worthwhile mentioning here. This opposition is made by the fact that Satie’s Musique d’Ameublement was conceived as a tribute to the making of a culture: the claim that Musique d’Ameublement was “pure entertainment” which does not deserve attention nor intellectual speculation is obviously deceptive and it indicates that Satie was concerned with the deviations of the society of his time, unable to conceive music as a social bonding device any longer, leaving all its functions to its representational capabilities.

Muzak and ambient music are two commercial categories that have exactly the opposite function: they exist to anesthetize the musical speculation functions of the brain of their listeners, possibly benumbing it to convert its owner to a more accommodating consumer and/or voter. There is no provocation, no satirical intention whatsoever.

4. Culture versus Entertainment

How is it possible that the opposition between the Musiques d’Ameublement and its would-be followers muzak and ambient music has been rarely (if ever) caught by analysts and scholars, while the general trend has been to claim Satie’s “precursor” abilities towards these and other musical endeavors?

The problem is precisely the one that had been perceived by Satie himself. The role in which the bourgeois society has confined music – that of representation – has ended up blurring the distinction between “making culture” and “producing entertainment”. Entertainment is a service provided by a specific industry for mass consumption. It is a unidirectional production of contents aimed at satisfying the largest public it can reach. Mass production systems like sound and video reproduction have been readily adopted by entertainment to extend its market share to planetary dimensions. There is no communication, no feedback between content producers and content consumers in entertainment other than market success. Content is designed by marketing managers tot specific market segments – “art” is

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just a glossy external cover to make products recognizable and palatable. Fashion replaces cultural heritage. While there may indeed be a high degree professional craftmanship, there is hardly any space for cultural processes in entertainment.

Culture is not a service. It is the essential binding glue of any human society. It is the fuel that feeds its growth and prosperity. It is not unidirectional, it is omnidirectional: while some humans may be more “culturally” productive than others, the making of culture requires that all human beings related to it are capable of forming individual perspectives about it. Not all such perspectives may be equally interesting, but it is their interaction that is the quintessence of culture production.

Music is perhaps the archetypical human activity to illustrate this opposition (cf. Blacking, 1973). It can certainly be used to entertain (to the extent that today it is its almost exclusive function), but it can be and it has been used to produce intellectual speculation, to identify expressive urges and intentions of given communities in given periods and to create the cultural identity of entire societies – in brief: to create culture. Whether Satie was consciously aware of the strong dichotomy between culture and entertainment or not, the Musique d’Ameublement seems to indicate that this is one of Satie’s contributions to the culture of his own time – certainly not an “entertainment product” in the way the term is intended nowadays.

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5. Concluding remarks and sound design

Finally, whether Satie can be considered a precursor of all incidental sounds and music or not, be them muzak or ambient etc., it is quite clear that at this point in time even these functional categories hardly exist any longer. While mass production of furniture has generated what we now know as design, the massive usage of sound in everyday appliances and signalling has lead to sound design.

Musical sound is used nowadays as a vehicle for specific information, with the result that our soundscapes are polluted with sonic interjections of all sorts produced by the most diverse appliances. The imagination exercise of how Satie would have reacted to our world of mobile phones, kitchen appliances, alarms, security devices, supermarket booths and so on - in short, to the intoxicating sound environment in which we live - can be left to the reader. One thing is clear, though: like in many other ecosystems that have a strong impact on our daily life, our society must learn to handle its sonic environment in a much better way than it has done to date.

Luckily, some signs of attention are starting to emerge. Science is beginning to step in to study this phenomenon under its many aspects (acoustical, physiological, psychological, and even musical and artistic). For example, the European COST research action on Sonic Interaction Design2 is a clear indicator of the interest the European research is expressing toward these issues. Satie showed us that sound and music creation should not be deprived of its cultural functions. May he exert a positive influence on scientific research too.

2 - SID, COST-IC0601, http://www.cost-sid.org

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REFERENCES

John Blacking. How musical is man? University of Washington Press, 1973.

John Cage. Erik Satie, pages 76-83. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, USA, 1961.

Alan M. Gillmor. Erik Satie. Twayne Publishing, 1988.

Robert Orledge. Satie the composer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990.

Robert Orledge. Satie remembered. Amadeus Press, 1995.

Caitlin Rowley. Erik satie’s crystal ball. http://www.minim-media.com/satie/index.html, 2004.

Matthew Shlomowitz. Cage’s place in the reception of Satie. http://www.af.lu.se/~fogwall/article8.html, 1999.

Pierre-Daniel Templier. Erik Satie. Rieder, 1932.

Ornella Volta and Simon Pleasance. Erik Satie. Hazan, 1998.

Wikipedia. Furniture music. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furniture_music, 2005-2008.

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Solène Bertrand

Is art destined only to be displayed in consecrated places like museums, to be sacralised and thus marginalized? Is it not possible for it to become part of our life by transforming it into a work of art? Artistic experience is similar to the experience of life: a mix of joy and frustration, emotions and sensations. Why separate these two movements of expressions of being?

Turning to the disordering of all the senses1, the exhibition (in terms of both show and ostentation) of works of art involves our whole being and refers to all our senses. To cause this frontier to materialize between the real and the perceived, between sensation and reality, it would seem appropriate for the presentation of works to make use of a place that is anchored in everyday life. Holding exhibitions in a flat for example (or in other everyday places that by housing a work of art would be removed from their habitual use), would enable works of art to be placed inside a domestic and standard setting. What is real is this codified environment that everybody knows, because the flat, which imitates our body, protects our lives, our joy, our suffering, our quarrels and existential drifts. In short, our life spaces are an extension of our intimate expressions and feelings, and it is in this sense that we prefer to take refuge and pick ourselves up. A flat is a separate place. It belongs to us. It is familiar to us. By playing on this expectation, on this predetermined match with a living place, we are given the chance to deviate from and to betray expectations. And if this living place, as a result of the

1 - Arthur Rimbaud, Lettres dites “du Voyant”, 1871

From Domestic to Aesthetic: Art in Everyday Life

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presence of works of art in its spaces, were to lose all its ordinary characteristics? If the works overturned our domestic and architectural conception, if they pushed back our walls in order to present the space within another dimension? It would produce new spaces, new dimensions. It would flaunt daily life in order to be able to break away from daily life. An emancipation from habitat is thus needed to create a domus artistica.

This work on habitat, living place, calls for the involvement of the contemporary works of Gregor Schneider, German artist for whom the home is an ominous, erratic and distressing place. His installations deconstruct spaces and invite the spectator to walk through oppressive and unidentifiable places. In this way art interrogates the habitat, the home. There are references made to the classical environments that accompany the paintings of Karen Kilimnik. This artist, in her exhibition at the Paris Modern Art Museum (October 2006-January 2007), rebuilt rooms with fireplaces – a bourgeois decoration for the presentation of her works. Playing with domestic places thus provided a platform for her works. This was the same idea that inspired John Armleder to entrust his exhibition at the Swiss Cultural Centre (Paris, 18 May-28 September 2008) to the interior architect Jacques Garcia. Garcia produced a fictitious flat, a kind of hall of curiosities, to present works and create a monumental furniture sculpture. The place of the exhibition thus became an intimate space, the “Home sweet home” that Martin Parr modified and rebuilt for his retrospective at the European Museum of Photography (Paris, 13 May-18 September 2005). In fact a room was presented as a setting of synthesis of kitsch where the visitor moved around – an extension, a prolonging and a materialization of the sensations of photography. Artists are regaining possession of everyday life, of the codified and structured living space, in order to transform it into mental space. The flat, the home thus become an echo of hidden thoughts. To transform a living space into an art space is to project one’s own internal life: “we must all organize our own spirits just like we furnish our home. If your life is cold and empty, you only have yourself to blame” (Louis L’Amour).

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What links art to domestic life? Can art merge with domestic life without becoming design, affectation or ornamentation? Can art preserve its unique and aesthetic character by being placed alongside a family and domestic setting? This question refers back to the concepts of the defenders of art for art’s sake. Does art only live in the absence of primary functionality? Must art necessarily live outside any form of utilitarian function? Can’t we put art and life together? Is it possible for the domestic and the artistic to live together, without transforming art purely into an object of design or of simple decoration?

These questions animate the artistic world, as is described by the paths of several contemporary artists. Art can therefore be given a place in the domestic world by choosing to use a flat as a context for an exhibition. It is a way of exposing the codification of art places, but it is also an invitation to revisit the artistic world, and to question it… Isn’t the challenge to put art back at the centre of life?

Many fields have enabled art to merge with domestic life. But the result was not always satisfactory. Lift music (muzak) became superfluous, supplementary. Musique d’ameublement became musique de meublement in order to occupy the space of the spirit. There is thus a need, by placing art at the centre of daily life, to avoid an impoverishment of artistic expression; on the contrary it must be sublimated. It is art that must transfigure life, not life that must transfigure art. We recall emblematic figures such as the hero of À Rebours2, Des Esseintes, who enjoyed deforming all everyday objects to the point that their vulgarity and banality disappeared and were thus hidden. In this way the hero decided to turn a simple turtle into a pure object of jewellery, by transforming the animal’s carapace into a gem-studded sculpture. In the same way, he decided to create a contraption that materialized Baudelaire’s correspondence, producing a synesthesia, or anesthesia, of the

2 - Joris-Karl Huysmans, À Rebours, 1884

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senses. Art can merge and converse with domestic life if maintains its foundations.

So we need to put art into life, merge nature with culture, but we must nevertheless preserve the unique essence of art. In this movement, in this communication, therefore, the link between art and domestic life can become richer and can work as a re-evaluation of both components. How can we reconcile the artistic with the domestic? Is it necessary to break down the boundary? Would introducing art into domestic life not be like Théophile Gautier’s project “The useless alone is truly beautiful; everything useful is ugly, since it is the expression of a need, and man’s needs are, like his pitiful, infirm nature, ignoble and disgusting.”3 Art in everyday life must be a way for reintroducing what is spiritual, the transcendence that has disappeared. In this way art in daily life must teach us to look again at a world that has become ugly, besmirched by the human error and dark materialism that characterizes contemporary society. These are the stakes of such a dialogue: to remind everyone that that art is life, and that man’s challenge is to be able to make an art of his life, according to the ideas of Michel Foucault: “What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life (…). But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object but not our life?”4

4 - Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits, no. 326, Quarto Gallimard (1994-2001),

Paris, pg.392

3 - Théophile Gautier, preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin, 1835

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Jan Hoet interviewed by Blauer Hase

Blauer Hase: What was the connection between Chambres d’amis and that specific moment in 1986?

Jan Hoet: In 1986 there was Chernobyl. It was a catastrophe, a private catastrophe, for private individuals. And I think that Chambres d’amis was a protection of the individual.

BH: What do you mean by “protection of the individual”?

JH: It was in people’s houses. And a house is always a form of protection. My house, my home, my castle. The house is protecting the human body. And the reason why I did that exhibition was to get the city involved. The museum is not an island, but an...

BH: Archipelago.

JH: Yes. The idea of the house was also inspired by the artists: the studio of the artist is the psychological factor in the reception of art. I was also interested in the ambiguity between private and public. Today, what could be private? What could be public? I think the private is also public. And the public is also private. Today the public is private because it is made for the individual car: the lines, the red lights, everything is in function of the individuality. So public space is also private space, because everybody has a car and mostly everybody is alone in their car. And private space becomes public, because of television, communication, telephone, Internet and all the actual properties of media.

BH: But in 1986 it was different, wasn’t it?

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JH: Yes, of course. It was different but it was the beginning of this ambiguity between private and public. Maria Nordman, for example, did an installation in a house which was a reflection on the cathedral with the work of Jan van Eyck, so there was a link between the home and the public.

BH: What about the connection between Chambres d’Amis and this specific moment in 2009? How would that project respond to the present moment, to contemporary Gent?

JH: Since 1986 S.M.A.K.’s popularity with the city has been growing steadily: today the museum is accepted by the city and its people. And it has been accepted because of Chambres d’amis. It was the first start to have a link between the museum and the people and between the people and the museum. It has created a social network in the city.

BH: So this was the change you wanted to introduce in the relation between Gent and the museum?

JH: Yes. The city, the population and the museum, but also the position of art in society.

BH: What do you mean?

JH: The importance of art in the individual approach of reality. Because art is the only medium to obtain freedom. Art is not at condition, art is always out of the condition.

BH: Do you think it would make sense to repeat Chambres d’amis today?

JH: No, I don’t think so. I think the reference and the memory of Chambres d’amis are bigger than a possible repitition would be. Absolutely. The memory of it is much stronger than a second time. Also, it would become touristic: that is the danger of this kind of

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exhibitions. One of the competitive references of that time was also Skulptur Projekte in Münster – the exhibition, the landscape of the city. Another kind of exhibition which was very important at that time was Sonsbeek ’86 in Arnhem, curated by Saskia Bos.

BH: So these were references for Chambres d’amis?

JH: Not references, because everything happened at the same time. I remember, for example, that there were a lot of artists – Mario Merz, Ettore Spalletti, Luciano Fabro and so many more – who participated in all these big exhibitions but also participated in Chambres d’amis the same year. I think the best would be to have Chambres d’amis as a unique moment in history, it is strongest when you have it one time only.

BH: Since Chambres d’amis, many art exhibitions in domestic contexts have been produced. What are the ones you value the most?

JH: I am not so sure that I have found an equivalent to Chambres d’amis, I don’t think so. Honestly I have to say that sometimes it is better to have domestic shows with poets or musicians than with visual arts. Other art exhibitions in domestic space were never that expanded in the city. For example, I remember the exhibition Hans Ulrich Obrist did in a hotel [Chambre 763, Hôtel Carlton Palace, Paris, 1993]: that was very interesting, at the beginning of the 90s. It was an important moment, but you cannot compare it to Chambres d’amis, because Chambres d’amis had to do with the city.

BH: So not only with domestic spaces, but with the city itself.

JH: Yes, because it also gave an idea of the history of the city. All the major historical moments of the city were also part of the show and of the selection of houses.

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That is a totally different thing.

BH: So you were more interested in the city than in the house.

JH: Yes. Art and the city, through the individual house.

BH: What is the status of the artwork in a domestic space? We can say that the function of the white cube is to create a vacuum around the work, to facilitate the creation of an aura. How does it work in a house? What are the ways in which artwork can interact with context?

JH: Chambres d’amis was a reaction to the white cube. It was against it, because it was an unusual space. A house is not an isolated space, because my house is also yours. The structure of the house is always the same: the entrance door, then the corridor, then the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom

BH: Why did you decide to go against the white cube?

JH: Because everybody was speaking about the white cube, and everybody was like: “the best space for art is four walls and light from above”. I said, “no, because there is no psychological frame behind the work”. When I visit a studio with an artist, I have the psychological way of life of the artist, the perception is helped by such a situation. And I, as a director of a museum, am privileged to get into the houses or the studios of the artists; not everybody has this opportunity.

BH: Is there a particular kind of intimacy in the relation the viewer has with the work of art when it is placed in a house?

JH: Yes, there is intimacy but there is also a breaking of intimacy.

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BH: What do you mean by ‘breaking of intimacy’?

JH: It becomes public, and everybody can enter the house. It is also a negation, because it is not an exhibition in the traditional sense, with a painting above the furniture – Chambres d’amis was not that. When you entered the house, you were in the artwork. That is the difference.

BH: Can you give some examples from Chambres d’amis?

JH: Salvadori and Spalletti completely changed a house, and that house is still the same way today. The inhabitants of that house are living in the work of Spalletti and Salvadori. You cannot compare it with a physical collection of artworks. In this case, the house is the frame; it is the support of the work.

BH: What is the starting point in history? Is it Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau?

JH: Yes, that was a reference. So were El Lissitzky and Vladimir Majakovskij. Then, Marcel Broodthaers did an exhibition in his house in Brussels, in 1968 [Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles].

BH: Do you think contemporary art’s relation with domestic spaces has changed in the last twenty years?

JH: I think much more in the direction of design than in art. But that is difficult to see, because today the relationship with art has also changed.

BH: What about the Internet?

JH: People, when they hear a name, check the Internet and they think they have seen it. The space is more virtual, while 20 years ago it was much more concrete. Today the only thing you

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have is maybe the nostalgia towards concrete ideas.

BH: So you think the house is becoming a virtual idea?

JH: Absolutely. And much more uniform. The house but also the people! [laughs] And the politicians are looking for uniformity. Chambres d’amis was much more about the individual and much more about differentiation.

BH: And now we have returned to what you were saying at the beginning of this interview: protecting the individual

JH: ...

BH: Or protecting individuality?

JH: Protecting individuality and providing individuality. And individual freedom.

BH: Domestic space often informed cultural production: Adorno said that chamber music was bourgeoisie’s specific cultural form. Do you think a specific cultural form of domestic space exists, today? And, if so, what is it an expression of?

JH: I think domestic space has this kind of bourgeois reflection: bourgeois reflection of protection, and protection of what individual people possess. My things, my world. Today I have the impression that there is a greater uniformity in the world. But I am not so sure it is less bourgeois.

BH: Do you think Internet is a bourgeois cultural form?

JH: It is difficult to say

BH: Maybe it is too early?

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JH: Anyway it is an illusion, it creates an illusion. An illusion to be part of the world. This is my opinion: the most important thing, today, would be to make people conscious about the selection they are making. It is all about selection, and the Internet is not always a selection. We need to be conscious about how to deal with this illusion, with this virtuality. You have to be autocritical, and I think there are lots of people who are really autocritical.

BH: Are you optimistic?

JH: I am still optimistic. Of course, the economical crisis and the monotheistic wars are dangerous signs, absolutely.

BH: Last question: what does art need from curators, today?

JH: I think what is necessary for curators is direct contact with the artists. Curators should be present in the studios of the artists, not start from information but get their own information from direct contact with the artists. A lot of curators are based on information/network. They should not start from an existing network, but build their own network.

BH: Which is what you wanted to do with Chambres d’amis, right?

JH: Yes, for example.

BH: Many, many thanks.

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Daniela Zangrando

Furniture Music. Musique d’ameublement. So what noise is this furniture making on the floor? Rubbing, squeaking, scraping or creaking? And do the other things in a closed room make noise? And do they dance to their own music?

It’s a little like Beauty and the Beast. Here’s a bedside carpet that slides on the ground to reach the exact spot where I slowly reach out a foot groping for my slippers, a wall clock intent on moving from legal to solar time, a candelabra that moves up and down along the old sideboard, waiting for the arrival of night, and a teapot intent on reproaching a chipped cup. Finally a chair comes at full speed from the back of the room, it comes closer to make me comfortable in front of my breakfast. It could be said, without a doubt, each has its own voice, and there is a great clatter – a continuous buzzing.

Some days ago, and with these thoughts, I was walking through the flea market of Saint-Ouen at the Porte de Clignancourt. Along the way, in every den, pieces of furniture and objects appeared, from the most common to the most extravagant and unknown. They were piled next to each other. One on the other, all their parts exposed: fabric, stroke, colour, race, muscle, frame, paint, snuff, age, size, brightness, tone, and line. They appeared free to show off and strut with a greatest freedom, almost capriciously, which was renewed at each step.

My gaze starts to wander, not knowing where to go, feet move randomly, never satisfied. A jukebox is noted, we see a lamp standing dangerously on a flimsy support, we are moved in front of a suitcase resting on a stack of metal military boxes, a little out of place, ready to be taken away. Then, at a certain point, we come to a sudden halt. A small space, apparently smelly and very dark, makes us stop at the door. On the right, below, a cabinet with a

Room 307

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skull on it. The eye moves forward, touching the bottom of the room,

where a high piece of furniture, perhaps a library, looks like a number of caskets: a braid of hair, butterflies, snakes and vipers soaked in liquid and placed in bottles, the stuffed head of a dog. Feathers of some bird of bluish-green plumage arranged around a stick of wood in a circular flourish.

At the back of the room, a mummy with a cumbersome label around its neck as an unlikely necklace. A little oil painting casts glances from a wall, hanging there as if it were lying comfortably in a living room, showing the unclear contours of figures in which we think we can see an allegory of death. We proceed. Let us move forward. A little farther, there is a heavy chandelier made of glass, huge, hung too low, just above our heads. A deeper analysis of these spaces would provide details for an endless story. We don’t understand where we have ended up. Are we in a museum, catapulted into a work by Guillaume Bijl? Or are we in a house? It is a bedroom or an Ikea store where you can comfortably choose your bedside table to suit that nice lamp from the start of the last century? Can we sit down and have tea or must we be careful not to touch anything?

As we moved away, the pieces of furniture continue to hum softly, each one weaving the melody on a different chord, making a mockery of our amazement, our indecision between everyday life, intimacy and excessive exposure, letting our thoughts wander in this ambiguity, plunged into a multiform, blushed buzz.

Our thoughts span for a moment, and consider the furniture of our house, or better of all the houses we had lived in. The legs of those tables and chairs we once used talk about fabulous things while standing on the wooden floor which in spring made us jump when it settled with sudden cracking sounds. The shelf of the credenza on which we had climbed so many times also blathers. The gestures followed a precise protocol: take a chair, bring it closer to the piece of furniture – lift the chair, don’t drag it, and while you do so, be careful not to knock anything down – put your

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feet on the credenza and climb it up, without looking down and especially try no to get entangled in the twisted phone cord, so as to not unbalance the receiver and cause the phone to fall heavily on the floor. At this point, you only needed to extend your arm and reach the ceramic jar that contained the hidden sweets. The lid made a strange noise when it closed, as if you were compressing a thick layer of air, causing it to wriggle and mutter.

We remember how one day the container began to spin around an unlikely pivot, perhaps unwittingly imposed by one of our fingers. The single rose painted on it looked like a big bouquet swirling in the hands of an unrehearsed magician. The container, which was trying to resist the force of gravity as hard as it could clinging to the credenza, in the end was flung to the ground, and spread, along with the noise of broken shards, all the sweets over the floor. What is left of this story is a great noise and a deep scar on my right hand, the memory of a wound inflicted by a fragment before it surrendered and ended up on the floor.

“It is a fish, it’s just arrived, see? It entered, continued and stopped there. It cannot go farther. It is a fish that came from the wind of the garden.”

While I watch him, Eric is arranging his glasses on his nose. He disappears for a few minutes in the kitchen, or in what I imagine to be a kitchen and returns, slouching, offering me a coffee. He sits down again. Looking at his legs, as he pushes them under the small table, I notice a toaster on the floor near the wall, connected to a dangerously old socket. “I don’t know where to start, I could tell you many things.”

First, he tells me about the research he is doing, about his hope to complete a study on cells in wood. Then he talks about him, not calling him by name, but talking about the moment in which he had arrived in Gent to see his home for the first time. He hesitates for a moment, and starts from an even more distant past, talking about a colleague who mentioned that eccentric idea which looked so much like an adventure it seemed impossible to say no.

“I think that you have understood. He wanted to be the best.

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He wanted to visit all the houses to see what the others had done. Only after scrutinizing everything did he really start to think.”

Abandoning the notebook on which I have quickly written my first notes, I follow his gaze that caresses the three rooms stuck on top, the road to the garden, including the two of us and our discussions.

“I tried to return every day for lunch, eager to follow the evolution of what was happening at home. He was sitting in the garden for long hours, filling pieces of paper with drawings, with Fibonacci numbers, he wrote poems around leaves taken from trees. He did not speak to us. No one saw progress in the work. Then I think that at a certain point, he suddenly decided to work very hard: they want a great artist, so they will have a great work. So when one day when I returned home for lunch, I saw him through the open window, the one opening on to the road. Not realizing that I was coming, he was sitting with hands and feet on the floor, which was covered in white paper, he was drawing large ellipses that passed through the three rooms.”

He stops abruptly and puts the glasses on the table. “They were the preparatory drawings for the work. But you’ve

certainly seen the pictures. It was a table. A table made of iron, glass and stone.”

He gets up and runs all over the place. He shows me where this table moved, and in his words the table takes on the appearance of a large reptile; he sketches the dimensions with gestures, trying to make me understand the gravity, the space. Then he gets lost in the technical and organizational details, illustrating the difficulty in assembling and preparing the installation. When he stops and sits down in silence, we feel uneasy. It seems to me that that table is there to occupy too much space and make movement difficult.

“A table? A fish? A large reptile? But what was this object?”“I have to tell you something. He made a table in a house. But

what is a table? He said that it is only a plane that has been raised for human beings in order to fulfil a physical need. When the ground is lifted, you have created a table. What else is a table if

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not an elevation from the ground?” I shut up. I follow his words with difficulty.“I’m sitting at a table, you’re sitting at a table, we are all sitting

at a table.” He tells me that it is neither a table nor a sculpture, or better, it is both a table and a sculpture.

He continues, “He said: You have told me that I have made a table for a house, that I have taken a table into that house. But there are tables in every house already. Why should I tell the owner to move his own tables out of his home and take mine, the one I have made for him? If this table is just a table, it is not necessary. If the table starts to become a sculpture, then it is necessary, because I am an artist. He wants art in his house, then I will sculpt. But, since I do not want to sculpt, I will make a table. A table in an office is a just table because that it doesn’t serve any other purpose than work. I made a table that runs from the garden to the street. My table runs. Do you understand now?”

To be honest, I don’t really understand everything. Eric proceeds in his analysis, he shows me a few sentences from articles, cites some extracts by heart, dwelling on details and pictures. He also shows me some photographs. His eye is continuously searching for a shape in the space, and by now this shape is outlined very well on the floor. Here it is: entering, you can see this shape that creeps in its heavy surfaces of stone and glass. It stands on many small adjustable legs. It has merged with the space so well that it has become its perfect protagonist.

With his passionate tale, Eric has managed to make me forget that he was Mario Merz, who happened to be in his house, as he was one of the artists of the exhibition Chambres d’Amis.

I try to listen, but the table has withdrawn into arrogant and obstinate silence. Those surfaces mask something, they are engaged in a discussion which you feel excluded from. Perhaps they speak a foreign language and their language comes to us as incomprehensible. Leaving Eric’s house, I am sure that anything they have said – and are still saying – sounds hostile and otherworldly, remaining mysterious and unapproachable.

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Raqs Media Collective interviewed by Blauer Hase and Andrea Morbio

[Ex Alumix, Bolzano, Italy, October 2008 ]

Blauer Hase: Could we ask you to speak about domestic spaces in India, and about the relationship betweeen public and private, home and city? How is it different from Western culture, and how is it changing?

Monica Narula: In a landscape of different temperatures and vegetations, traditionally there is a different relationship with space, also between the outside and the inside. The idea of the threshold was an important concept. Often you had a veranda or an inner courtyard, which was either open to the front (verandah) or enclosed with an opening in the middle (inner courtyard). You see it often, for example, in middle-eastern architecture.

But there is definitely a sense of the privileging of the threshold between inside and outside space: preferably a large space – depending upon the house, but as much as possible – where the inside and the outside could meet. This is specially visible in the architecture of southern India, where the householders would sit in the veranda, and you would have passers-by who would stop and talk. It is a space that cannot be described either as public or as private.

Jeebesh Bagchi: It is like in Jacques Derrida’s beautiful meditation on the postcard. You have a postcard and you send it to your lover. It is in neither public nor private domain. It is in that indeterminate, unspeakable in-between zone. You can conceptualize the veranda or the courtyard as a postcard, which has a private intimate world attached to it but remains open,

What is the Rest of What

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exposed. It is that kind of liminal space which is very difficult to articulate conceptually. A lot of urban spaces are constructed in various ways over time and becomes like a postcard, an indeterminate space. Domesticity has its doubleness: it is a kind of secured space but also a phantasmic one - it produces a fantasy of your life, of your ability to live life. Conceptually, you can draw many different social worlds through reading a domestic space, and yet it allows certain fantasies to play out.

You can find it in Western culture also, but with one big difference: the kitchen would be very differently marked. In India, the kitchen will not be a space where you eat. The kitchen would be a space where you cook or where you stand and go. Eating is outside the kitchen. In this way, the eating and the kitchen transform the structure of the habitation inside the house, and that changes the way one socializes, the way one exposes one’s craft to the world.

MN: Here in Europe, the kitchen is quite large and you often have a little bar where you can sit, eat and cook. There is a blurring of functions. But in India the kitchen is never an open plan – some people might begin to do that now, but it’s still very rare. The kitchen is quite small, and it really was quite “gendered” – still is, to quite an extent, although not in our lives. The cooking happens there and the eating happens in another place, so the dining table and the dining-together, as concepts, have different meanings.

JB: Another big difference in domestic life would be what extends out: the front of the house or the balcony. As in Italy, the drying of laundry is exposed, you don’t have a problem with exposing your clothes to the world, there is no embarrassment. In Delhi there is sunlight almost eleven months a year, and the extension to the outside is quite opened-up.

In the last 150 years a new set of infrastructures has been developed: there is tap water inside houses, and centralised sewage systems. The structure of the building, specifically the

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structure of moving to the toilets has changed, the location of the toilets has changed. There are also other different ways, such as shared toilets or shared or open sleeping spaces, like the terrace or the roof. This is not something that can be conceptualized simply within a public/private dichotomy. One can say that domesticity spills over to public visibility and the public eye spills into the domestic. This movement of visibility is there as an everyday encounter.

MN: If you look at most middle class households in India, the living room (or what is still quaintly called ‘the drawing room’) is there. And the television has become important in there. But it is also a function of class, and a function of the urban/non-urban dichotomy, which is quite sharp. If you go to smaller places, or to different places in the city, all these things are not stable. The separation between rooms as functions is another function of class. Historically, it was not necessarily like that. If you have a small space everyone lives there and sleeps there, so the room changes: in the day it is something, in the evening it is something else; it is your living room, your dining room, your sleeping room. The function of spaces is quite crucial in a place where spaces are the premium, and that’s straightforward.

JB: In Europe, the idea of the public life is a 19th century construct: you go out and you have a rational discourse in the public life. And domestic life is something you keep for yourself. This neat division does not really capture all the complexity with which one hears or lives. Especially with the rise of the feminist movement, it was very clear that the domestic site had to be re-thought completely. It was the site of labour, and a double language of how to look at labour had to be brought into those spaces. This labour was not a public act. It had to be brought out as a public act.

Secondly, we can talk about the idea that the way you represent yourself in social life is played out in the domestic space. Stanley Cavell, the American philosopher, says that the

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biggest transformations happen through domestic conversations: big questions of rights and justice are being worked out in these micro-conversations that the domestic space hosts. The idea that public space is a space of negotiation, rational discourse and public performance of the self, and that the domestic is the site that has a different architecture of conversation, needs a substantial historical interrogation. Maybe there is a much more fluent relationship, it is not marked by barriers, but it is moving between the two. Stanley Cavell is basically trying to introduce the idea that the ordinary, the everyday, has a possibility to hold within itself an enormous ethical and moral question, which actually transforms the way social life is imagined.

BH: What about the social function of furniture? Historically furniture has always been used to represent a status, an identity. Do you think it still has this function?

MN: We were actually having a conversation on the train that was so much about this. If you wanted to come into Jeebesh’s house, you would sit on the floor. There is no notion of sofas or chairs. It is a floor-sitting arrangement, which means that there is a different dynamic than if you were sitting on chairs and there was a centre table. If you look at the traditional notion of house, especially if you look at Bengal after the Bengali renaissance, there began to be an enormous bed where a lot of the personal home life was lived out (we are talking about an upper class situation). So you would talk, play cards, read, rest on the bed, and it was not only for one or two people.

JB: When we talk about furniture, we usually talk about sitting: furniture that would provide a seat to dine or a seat to talk. But if you look at the furniture used for keeping things in the house – like cupboards – you have a very different architecture of the house that emerges. Or you can look at the furniture where you take a rest or lie down; or the furniture that makes you dress up. This changes the way you look at a household. I remember my

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grandmother used to have a beautiful big bed, which was a main site for telling stories, sitting, chatting. We would come and meet her there; she had no discomfort with people meeting her in a bed. Another thing she had was a big chest, a trunk, and as you went deeper into the trunk it “aged”, in the sense that its contents got older. There is a temporal depth with spatial architecture that furniture provides inside a house. As in our house’s shelves: old books and old papers are locked higher, but as you go down you have the latest books we have bought, the things we are doing now. Furniture gives a sense of time and the way time is lived – how accessible time is in your daily life. Secondly, it shows what the functions are and the things of your daily life that are visible at eye level. I think that in Western housing you have the same structure: the exposed shelves for everyday circulation and some closed shelves for the structured occasions.

BH: What about the relationship between furniture and identity?

JB: Identity is not a fixed form: as you move into a house the identity structure changes. If someone comes to meet you in the drawing room, or spends the evening with you for dinner, the identity structure of the house will change, unless you are talking of the facade or of the external parts. But if you talk of the interior structure, it morphs and changes and mutates with every encounter. It is not stable; identity is not the correct word. You can see it as a kind of performative visibility of life: I am doing well in life, or I am not doing well in life. I know of people whose house is extremely full – too full, like they want you to figure out that they are doing very well in life. The insides of houses are not easy to read culturally.

MN: I think there is an increase in the exhibitionism of the “performance of status”. But I also think it is about a specific kind of people, and quite a small number of them.

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BH: Adorno talks about the connection between the crisis of chamber music and the crisis of European bourgeoisie. He connects a cultural form specific of the domestic space with a specific social class. Did anything similar happen in India?

MN: Hindustani classical music is fundamentally a chamber construct; it is not a mass event.

JB: I think you guys should see a 1956 film called Jalsaghar [The Music Room] by Satyajit Ray if you are studying domestic space, visibility and performativity. That is where you would see the “chamberness” of one of the most famous singers of Hindustani classical music. In the dining room of this house – which is not a dining room in the classic sense, but rather a meeting room – a woman is performing, and two cultures are contending on the appreciation of her music. It is a story set in a moment when one form of cultural life, patronized by a certain form of domestic structure, gives way to another form of cultural life.

MN: The end of one kind of time, and therefore also of a kind of relationship with space. The music room is the centre of the story: the protagonist is an old landlord whose money is gone, his house is falling apart but he still has the desire to sustain the idea of the music room. I think Hindustani classical music had a lot to do with patronage, as it was in Western chamber music. It was not domestic space in the strict sense, it was in those large houses where one room was for music, where people would come to listen to music and perform music.

BH: We are interested in the way domestic space changes in relation to new media. For example, in the 20th century television transformed the way furniture was arranged. With the Internet, it is like having the whole world inside our house, our house is connected with the whole world.

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Some theorists say the house is becoming a mental idea.

JB: There is a difference between “house” and “home”. The material reality of the house stays as a space, while the home becomes dispersed. It is a big conceptual shift. A geographer who was working in Delhi used to say that there are houseless people in Delhi, not homeless people; and that there are homeless people in Europe. All these people in Delhi who do not get enough resources to build a house – or to live in a house – they live on the streets or they share night shelters. But they always have a home; they send money back home to their families. In this sense they are only houseless. With the Internet the idea of the home gets dispersed; not so much the idea of the house.

The house is a material concept. Technologically, television started as a fixed-location technology. People tended to organise sitting and viewing positions around it. But with more and more wireless and laptops, the Internet makes the house internally recalibrated to the practices of viewing. For example, in Monica’s house her daughter watches videos on her laptop, which moves throughout the house. For her the idea of a fixed place of entertainment or news is not going to be there. Like a newspaper, it disperses into the house; it does not have any threshold as such within the house. That is a big shift.

BH: Does Internet produce a new way of thinking about our homes?

MN: What you do is not a function of technology. You make the decision about your relationship with any technology. For example – I am referring to the personal because it is a good starting point – never having had a television in our personal spaces, it meant we were making a certain decision about which way we wanted the world to enter. But that is not the point; the starting point was much more about how we wanted to situate ourselves in relationship to that. It seems almost as if technology forces you – through television, for instance – but it is not so

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straightforward. No matter what technology you get, if you think about the world in X way, how you change that way of looking can only be modified by technology, it cannot be caused by it. You can have as much Internet as you like and you can still have the notion of home as a strong impulse. A lot of literature is all about the “empty home”, even if it is from the early 20th century. It is not because of the Internet that we talk about a hollow space where people are feeling distant from each other.

BH: Do you think “reality shows”such as Big Brother can be seen as symptoms of an issue Western culture has with domestic spaces?

JB: I think in the West you have a crisis related to the fact that domestic space is no longer legible by the earlier terms. It seems you do not really know why that space is there! It is more difficult to read that space than it used to be. And that crisis is represented by all this desire to continuously see domestic space enacted, to see the performativity inside the domestic space, to see the crisis inside the domestic space, to see the breakdown of it. A ‘Reality Show’, if you take aside the word “reality”, is a breakdown show: it is about how things break apart, how individuals break down, how a selected group breaks down. What is left is the residue, the one person who gets it all; you start with twenty people and finally you come down to one person or two persons who will play it out for you. The rest are all turned out of that milieu, out of that domestic space. In this sense it is a profound crisis, it is like re-living the history of the domestic space, starting from hundreds of people and slowly shrinking to that one individual who does not even know why s/he should be spending and investing so much energy in maintaining this space, when s/he could backpack and travel. You can say reality shows answers the question, “is domestic space still meaningful?”.

BH: It seems that in many of your works – maybe in all of them – the notion of the ‘white cube’ is not there at

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all, because the space is always influenced by historical, geographic and social settings. Is the ‘white cube’ an impossible space?

JB: An unmarked white cube, a white cube without history, without geography... The colour white comes from the post-plague chalk paint: it is an evacuated concept which comes from making a space disease-free, safe. Contemporary art is all about making spaces contagious and filled with possibilities of another life, another thinking. In that sense it is always in a contradiction with the idea of the white in the white cube. But now, with technological operators like video and projections, it is the black cube that is more the materialization of the crisis. I no longer think the white cube is the discussion; the discussion is: what happens to this black cube? Because the black cube has other resonances: less from diseases but more from the “black hole” where all meanings become meaningless, where meaning can just keep being absorbed endlessly. It is a profound site of absorption. Whatever you produce can be absorbed.

MN: Jeebesh is using this notion of the black cube quite metaphorically. Whatever one generates in the forms of art, it is easily absorbed and stopped at that point. The whole point of something that is exhibited is that it is meant to go out and leach out. But if it gets absorbed by the structure, that leaching out does not happen. Does a structure that is showing work absorb it? Or does it allow it to disperse out?

BH: We are now sitting in front of the ex Alumix, the building that is hosting The Rest of Now, the exhibition you curated as part of Manifesta 7. Can you talk about how you created a show within a place like this?

MN: When we first came here, a year and a bit ago, it did not look like this at all. It was completely broken down: broken glass, plants growing wild everywhere... The question was of restoring it,

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which was what the municipality and the province wanted to do: to restore this building and make it have another function. For us, this question became quite an important one during the course of this building becoming ready, because when you say “restore” you are talking about a certain other point in time. It is not about changing it to make it new; it is like taking it back to another time. But then the question always rises: which time? To which point do you want to restore this, what is this notion of restoration, when is that moment in time to which you want to take a building back? It is a difficult question, and it is something we wanted to address.

JB: The question of ‘newness’. How the “new” comes into the world is a very complicated question. There are two ways of looking at newness. You can say that “new” comes by doing away with the “old”, by finishing it and cleaning it out. Or you can say that the “new” comes in a very entangled way with the “old”. In this exhibition, our idea was to pose the question of the “new” as an extremely entangled process. It is not just about restoration, it is about restoration asking the question of how does the new come into the world. It is a double dialogue with time past and with the future.

BH: The word “restoration” contains the word “rest”. An artwork can be seen in two ways: it can be seen as a residual matter of a time, of a practice, of a research, of a theory. But if you start from the artwork, then everything else becomes the rest: time, practice, research, theory. We can say that there are two ways of looking at art history.

JB: Remainder or arrival. You got it right. The idea of The Rest of Now is all about this multiplicity of meanings to be played out, so it is also a question of how you look at art history.

MN: Yes, you can move things around and ask yourself...

BH: What is the rest of what.

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MN: That is an important point of access for us: what is the rest of what. A big question.

JB: That has been the main point of investigation of this past year and a half.

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Stefano Boeri interviewed by Blauer Hase

[Milan, December 2008]

Blauer Hase: What role does the study of domestic space play in your research? Stefano Boeri: It is a role of growing interest, especially

related to my directing Abitare, a magazine which has always dealt with the domestic dimension, or what I would rather call comfort, which is a much more interesting term in my opinion. I think comfort is one of the keys to the understanding of domestic space; nowadays each room is both specializing in a specific function and multiplying its functions to the point of fragmentation. This process started between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth century due to the rise of the industrial bourgeoisie. In this perspective, I think we should take Tomàs Maldonado’s writings into serious consideration.

If you look at the housing market today, you can see that what people demand – and I mean people from all walks of life – is in line with two main usage trends. The first is what I call the “mono-localisation” of individual rooms, which is redefining even the most intimate spaces within the domestic sphere. Let’s consider the bedroom, for example. Once the core of domestic intimacy, the bedroom is now becoming a multi-functional space where you work, live, and meet people. As a consequence of its new functions, it is an increasingly technological room, often featuring a refrigerator and a computer, not to mention the TV set, which has been there for a long time now.

The second trend characterizing life spaces is the renewed importance of the kitchen, which for some time now has been considered not only as a food space but also as a room for social

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interaction which all co-habitants share. Increasing co-habitation patterns are creating a new set of life-styles, and the notions of home and life space are changing accordingly.

People tend to co-habitate in order to rationalize expenditure, but this tendency is also favoured by a new more flexible notion of family. For example children leave, but then parents get older and the children’s room is used for elderly relatives, grandparents for instance. Sometimes forms of co-habitation rise within the same extended family in order to cut costs; however, co-habitation is becoming more and more common even among individuals who have no family ties, such as students, business people and global tourists. I think this growing tendency to co-habitate, in all its various and heterogeneous forms, is the sign of the domestic dimension of our times. Co-habitation is also opening out towards the development of a brand new set of live-in models. I’ll give you two examples. The arrangement of the domestic space is no longer fixed; the home is becoming a space of “variable geometry” and the domestic space is constantly adapted to suit the new needs required by changing co-habitation patterns.

My second example concerns sustainability and the possible creation of sustainable energy networks. What I have in mind here is Jeremy Rifkin’s ideas. He maintains that a democratization of sustainable energy distribution is possible through the presence of small environmentally-friendly power stations in all sorts of building, so that each of them will be capable of producing, storing and possibly exchanging energy from renewable energy sources. In existing buildings, former common spaces, for example the laundry room, could easily be reconfigured as rooms where to put hydrogen cells or energy storing devices. These new localised molecular forms of energy production could support the development of larger collective service spaces, too.

BH: Nowadays architecture is often criticized for being a thing for “archistars”. Apparently it deals less with the experience of home-living, that is the vital narrative essence of the domestic space. Do you endorse this point

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of view?

SB: As it is, this criticism doesn’t mean anything. Some of the architects who are defined “archistars” are actually very sensitive to the experiential aspects of the domestic space, others aren’t. Not all of them are the same, I don’t think you can generalize here.

BH: You often mention the importance of the empty spaces in a city. Do you think that architecture should be concerned with the living conditions of those people who do not live in a domestic space, such as the homeless, or the ones who inhabit the in-between spaces of the city?

SB: Absolutely. I think that a good housing policy should consider all forms of habitation. Two years ago I worked with the students at Politecnico di Milano on a research laboratory called Multiplicity.lab. Following our two-year-long research, we published a book entitled Milano: cronache dell’abitare [Bruno Mondadori, 2007], which is an unparalleled research on all types of housing conditions in Milan. Here are some of the titles of the book parts: “living in a shanty town, in a migrant bed-sitting space, in a shop-home space or in an attic; inhabiting a world-building; living in a residential insula, in a loft or in service flats; living in a working-class neighbourhood or in a multi-ethnic one, in a house for elderly people or in a house for students, sofa surfing; living in a temporary accommodation centre for immigrants.” As you can see, we considered a very wide range of live-in spaces which people might call home.

First of all we analysed about 400 local news reports, which we used as a starting point for a circumstantial research. We also used the events in the news reports to map and to decipher the various habitation forms in Milan. Thanks to our investigative approach to space and following the direct observation of phenomena on site, in the end we got a complete first-hand vision of different types of domestic space, even the ones

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which generally remain on the margins of political attention; for example forms of temporary accommodation which include cohabitation as well as the transformation of shops into live-in spaces. In particular we accounted for all the housing types that are connected to social marginalization and difficulty, which are unfortunately on the rise in the Milan area today.

BH: Let’s talk about Europe. Within the project Uncertain States of Europe, you consider Europe as a principle for endless variations on a theme. The European theme can provide fragmented individual identities with a shared and recognizable code of belonging. Do you think there is a common code supporting a European notion of domestic space?

SB: That’s an interesting point. I think this common code could be comfort, which as a notion was invented in Europe. Comfort can be used as a a sort of paradigm for sampling the gradual transformations in the concept of domestic space. In addition, we should consider other important elements such as the notion of home privacy, the specialization and the growing multi-functionality of interaction spaces; for example, the rooms where we look after ourselves, as Foucault would say, that is the bathroom, the changing room, and the domestic spa.

BH: In Uncertain States of Europe, you also look at Europe as a smooth space where people, goods and ideas constantly flow across borders. Do you reckon this could be affecting the notion of housing European citizens have?

SB: I do think so. Europe is a wide territory of migratory waves and transnational flows, which has always affected the notion of housing as well as the people’s behaviours in their use of exterior urban spaces; a certain use of exterior spaces is typical of Southern, African, Asian or Middle-Eastern cultures. It is really easy to realize this if you go to Palermo or to the historical city

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centre in Genoa; as cities by the sea, they have a more direct relationship with migration flows.

The European space can very easily absorb innovative, even transgressive, behaviours. In port cities, the old dock areas are extremely porous. Their variety and their flair for hosting the unexpected depend on their extraordinary capacity for absorbing and digesting anything, different as it might be. Therefore we can say that the code is constantly being re-written and altered.

The point is: how does the domestic space change according to this new code? This is a question that must be considered carefully. I think that the urban space can accommodate new behaviours only up to a certain point. There is a limit to its absorption capacity, the space has a sort of selective tolerance which sometimes modifies the behaviours that occur within it. Let me give you an example. The landing used to be a semi-public space which all house tenants had to cross to go to the common toilets, usually opening onto the landing itself. In addition, it was a meeting space, a place for social interaction and confrontation.

In the 1970s the city underwent a process of massive urban renewal, and most blocks of flats were rebuilt; as a consequence, new classes of people moved in. The toilets were moved inside the flats and this changed the status of the landing, which has now become a mere structural part of the building that you have to cross in order to reach you flat. It is still “public”, you can still meet meet people there, but it has lost most of its interaction functions. This is due to the selective tolerance of space which I have mentioned before. However, as long as the landing exists, people will have to take part in some form of interaction necessarily happening there, even though the original form and value of this space have got lost.

I could give you many more similar examples. Genoa city centre is probably the most interesting place where to study the multiplicity in lifestyles and notions of domestic space. The historical area of Genoa is built on a huge monolith (about 30 metres high) which was carved up with an incredible number of tiny alleys. Throughout the centuries this area has hosted many

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peoples, lifestyles, behaviours, fixations, tastes and desires. It is like a whole world we should consider very carefully. I’d like to study the Genoa case myself, and if I ever should, I’d start with a series of biopsies on the city’s immense stone body.

BH: Through the ages, furniture has often been used to convey a notion of social status. Do you think furniture has a social function today?

SB: I think the function of furniture has remained more or less the same. Furniture has a very strong symbolic value as well as an important technological dimension. As I was saying before, furniture plays a technological role in the “mono-localisation” of individual rooms. A fridge with an inbuilt TV set is an innovative item reflecting the growing demand for the kitchen-space to perform multiple functions. Technology often drives the innovation processes concerning furniture, too. The changed function of the home computer and the new TV applications have certainly changed the relationship between working and leisure spaces in the home. Also, I believe the Playstation somehow re-centred family ties around the TV set. So we can consider furniture as a range of performances and functions that are updated on the basis of new technologies and modified according to lifestyle transformations. On top of this, we still have the traditional function of furniture, which is – as you said before – to convey one’s social status.

Let’s get back to the notion of comfort and consider it in this perspective. The first 19th century armchairs were designed according to the leisure style of the head of the family. There were armchairs made for reading, for conversation, for music listening, and for a post-meal nap in front of the fireplace. These pieces of furniture suited very different performance needs. Nevertheless they also served to convey, I would even say to enact, the free time spent at home because of the importance it was gaining within the social context of European urban bourgeoisie; after all this was the social class that invented the very notion of free time.

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BH: Television transformed the relationship to the domestic space in the 20th century. Now the Internet is acting likewise, we can say we have the whole world in our homes. In your opinion, what will the consequences be? Do you think “home” is becoming a mental concept rather than a physical and tangible space?

SB: No, that’s rubbish. Home and habitation can’t be conceived as sheer immaterial concepts, they will always have a spatial and material dimension. Every single immaterial process of global connection must come to terms with the need for location and physical space. We need to position both our bodies and the device that acts as a stimulus for our bodily sensation in a specific location. The home and all the objects it features can’t be separated from their physical qualities, the material they are made of; for example plastic, glass, metal, concrete, etc.

Today the Internet is mostly about groups, it is a community participating in the same interior and exterior space. Domesticity, which is connected to the notion of interiorness, is still one of our primary needs, and the analysis of proxemics (the study of the distance between individuals as they interact in interior spaces) remains the best way to measure social relationships. Apparently, present time is one of constant bodiless flows, everything seems to flow immaterially. But in the end the physical barriers and the borders have the better hand – not the flowing.

BH: So you are not worried about a possible fragmentation of social relationships as a consequence of the Internet, are you?

SB: Not at all. Although they spend hours on Messenger and Facebook, my children have no problems with social relationships. As a matter fact, using the Internet has even multiplied their social relationships.

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BH: However, some say relationships tend to become more mediatic.

SB: It isn’t necessarily so. When printed media arrived, people thought that they would reduce relations to daily life, and the same thing happened with the diffusion of television. I don’t think that technological innovations can wipe out the basic human attitude to interpersonal communication; they can only question its premises. Compared to the past, forms of communication as Facebook and Messenger produce a much more intense system of relationships which are not necessarily confined to the virtual dimension and can result in actual meetings in real places. Social contacts through the Internet are currently leading to the creation of new urban spaces where people can actually meet as a consequence of virtual contacts. I do think that all this talk of the alleged immateriality of living spaces is a load of utter nonsense.

BH: We asked Gillo Dorfles about cultural production in the domestic space. Domestic spaces have often affected cultural production; Adorno said that chamber music was the cultural form of the bourgeoisie par excellence.

SB: Absolutely.

BH: Dorfles doesn’t think that today there is a cultural form of the domestic space with the same role or impact as chamber music. What do you think? Do you see any form of culture specific to the domestic space? And if so, what is it an expression of?

SB: The only cultural form which can be compared to chamber music in its essence is probably the Internet. Sociologist Erving Goffmann wrote a book about forms of focused and unfocused interaction in public spaces [Behavior in Public Places: notes on the social organization of gatherings, The Free Press, 1963]. Also interaction within domestic spaces can be focused or unfocused.

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There are spaces where people gather to take part in a single event together, whereas in other spaces, the ones oriented to unfocused interaction, people develop a wide range of behaviors which are completely independent on and different from one another. Internet is probably favouring the emergence of the second type of interaction spaces. I consider co-habitation and domestic-space sharing as the most interesting cultural and symbolic form today. People live in one shared domestic space where a number of individual actions are carried on simultaneously. Possibly each person in the room is connected to the world outside through a personal electronic device, and they all feel they belong to the interior space and live in connection to the world outside at the same time. However, this cultural form of the domestic space is still class-specific. You can easily find it in a loft where a group of students live or in an upper-middle class environment. It isn’t something you would see in a council flat or in a temporary accommodation centre for immigrants.

BH: Talking about art, you said that nowadays new ideas are presented and circulated on inaugural occasions such as exhibitions rather than through written texts or architectural works. Do you have any good examples of exhibitions or artworks which offer an innovative perspective on the relationship to the domestic space?

SB: Well, I’d say that a permanent and evident need for the intimate and domestic dimensions permeates all art. This is apparent even in those exhibitions and events that are not a mere documentation of the domestic aspects. A lot of artists come to my mind whose works would make good examples – from Matthew Barney to Pipilotti Rist. Fischli & Weiss have worked on the interior dimension and so did Rirkrit Tiravanija and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. It is clear that domesticity is to be considered as a real constitutive element of art.

As it often happens with art, it is no surprise that the most innovative contributions don’t come from works that treat the

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domestic condition directly or focus on home privacy. Actually the most meaningful works on this theme appear to be very far from it. I think that some photographs by Jeff Wall perfectly express the process by which a public exterior space can become very private, almost an interior. Wall builds scenery which he then takes photographs of; it’s a work of mise en scène which obliges us to reflect on the notion of unfocused interaction. I think that some of his works are fundamental pieces in this perspective. Another artist who has thoroughly investigated the notion of room is Dan Graham. But not a single work of his is actually a domestic space.

BH: Hans Ulrich Obrist has organized several exhibitions in domestic spaces and claims that these situations are very rich in stimuli and can help bridge the gap between art and life, because a sort of intimacy with the work can be created there. In a domestic context, the artwork doesn’t float in a white space, but performs the task of responding to the environment around it. Maybe the ‘white cube’ is not really white, it is tinged with the socio-political, historical and geographical context it is set in. It might even be an impossible space.

SB: The white cube is an extremely binding place, it’s full of conditions. As any other space which sets conditions to one’s action, it is a stimulus because it is absolutely specific. Paradoxically, even standardization is a form of specificity. If an artwork is designed for an exhibition in a neutral space, it has to be adaptable and flexible in its essence, therefore it is subjected to a form of constriction. The white cube forces forms of specification and specialization onto the work of art right because of its neutrality, and a place with special characteristics and its own history will influence the work of art in a similar way. In both cases it’s a question of relocation. What is interesting to discuss here is whether the work of art is basically adaptable and can fit anywhere or is thought for one specific space, no matter if that one specific space is just a white cube that can be placed

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in different parts of the world. Space is not the measure for the work’s specificity. Time is, and the possible relocation of the work in time. That’s the big issue: everything else does not interest me.

BH: What do you mean exactly when you say that specificity is measured in time?

SB: In the intentional process of producing a work of art, the artist is aware of its prospective location in a specific space, be it a neutral one like the white cube or a more defined one. An artwork is always space-specific, abstract as the space might be. Regardless of the relationship between the artwork and the space – be it open or unambiguous – time will always be the problem. Creating a work that will always be there is one thing; creating a work that may be there as well as in any other place is a completely different matter. This is the real, significant difference.

BH: Thank you very much.

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Eva Marisaldi interviewed by Daniele Zoico

Daniele Zoico: Let’s start with a delicate question: do you think that contemporary art needs its own specific space that would define clear boundaries and would favour the construction and growth of an aura? Let’s take the example of Land Artists – I mean the experiments carried out by Smithson in the late 60s or the ones then conducted by Long and Fulton or later again by Christo and Jean-Claude – who worked in non-institutionalized spaces, in the wild. They necessarily had to produce “artefacts” that were subsequently displayed, used and absorbed by the art market as if they were real works of art. Actually, to Fulton, for example, the work of art amounted to no more than the experience of that very moment and its re-evocation by means of posters. Nowadays, does contemporary art still need a temple, a place that justifies its presence and protects it at the same time? Or does the art displayed in a public space, or a non-institutionalized space, have a meaning?

Eva Marisaldi: Museums and art centres are embassies. They perform many tasks: they present, they document, they bring together artists and the passage of curators. This does not mean that interesting things cannot happen outside that protected space, but museums represent starting points for whoever “comes from the outside”, unless you have privileged information about other situations.

DZ: And turning to contemporary art in a domestic setting. What happens when an exhibition is held in this kind of context because the curator specifically chose to do

A Private Conversation in a Public Space

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so? This was very frequent in the exhibition Artempo, for example, held in Venice in 2007 at Palazzo Fortuny: colour harmony created by a work by Fontana and the tapestry, a combustion by Yves Klein harmoniously interacting with the flaky plaster of the building, a cracked-effect painting by Burri next to a burnt Canaletto, a wunderkammer created with works of art, relics and artefacts related to the passing of time. Would you define it a courageous choice to make free use of interior furnishings by investigating new forms of management and by juxtaposing works of art in unusual spaces?

EM: I didn’t see the exhibition even though I would have been interested, but I wouldn’t talk of courage… you just have to think of the palace, the simultaneity with the Biennale and the selection of artists. In Italy, they have always used all kinds of settings: deconsecrated churches, parks, town areas and beaches. Maybe I should say in the world, in the Arctic, in fortresses, in the sky, in the sea. When living artists are involved as such, you can see the extent of their involvement with the space that they are given. This is once again a question of timing.

DZ: I remember a conference where you talked about one of your works, Studio, from 1995 at the FRAC Languedoc-Roussillon in Montpellier, where you used a furnishing system, wallpaper with printed traces of tennis balls. What inspired you to cover the surfaces of the room, as if there were a parallel operation to the artistic intent that makes use of the house interior?

EM: I did that work in order to visualize thought in search of a solution, like a thing that bounces and compresses on one side more than another. But the starting material came from the outside. Outsourcing to a flat turned out to be useful. Anyway, there isn’t an operation that is parallel to artistic intent, there’s life.

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DZ: For a design competition you had the idea of creating a room made of blades of air in the middle of a roundabout. That way, people would have been able to meet inside this room, to talk or telephone. The outside noise of traffic would have been softened in such a way as to seem only like background noise. I’d like to know what was behind that idea, and what implications are carried by the transformation of a public space that in some way becomes private. Did you want to call into question the difference between the two?

EM: The five-lane roundabout was the subject of the competition. The proposed project, which was extremely anti-ecological but with weak visual impact, allowed me to transform a chaotic place, once silenced, into a film location. The roundabout is already a public space, but is not attractive. It’s a place to ignore. The attempted project proposed another possible use.

DZ: You talked about the idea of lending works, which produces confused distribution. Works are installed in various houses and intermediation is made easier through trust. When we visit museums, we can see many things but maybe without being able to pay close attention, whilst it’s easier to make better use and to focalize at any point of the 15 day period of the loan. I’m very interested in the “domestic” and “private” aspect of the way artworks are used. Is there perhaps an intention to open a debate regarding the efficiency of the way art is used in a public context and to suggest better efficiency in the domestic context?

EM: No. I recognize my words in your question that would be my answer: easier intermediation, trust, attention. The efficiency of a public context is not in question. Did you read that Minister Bondi no longer deems loans between museums to be economic? News from the summer, that I hope has been dropped, spoke of

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a decision to sell part of the national parks due to management costs. Without mentioning what is happening at all levels of schools. I still am attracted to the idea of collective patrimony.

DZ: Plasmoniana in 1993, however, although denying it, still seems very close to the space that contained it, Neon in Bologna. This hole of quicksand, created following unusual development work that allowed you to have real quicksand of the right consistency, was as if it was waiting in ambush for the unsuspecting visitor. Albeit in a more cerebral and less direct way, I see something similar in a recent contribution by Urs Fischer (You), where the artist dug inside the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise Gallery in New York, to create a crater that activated the architecture of the scintillating ‘white cube’. It was a timidly violent operation, because it contained a potential danger. How do you perceive the bond that is continuously broken and re-established between your work and its space?

EM: Of course. Plasmoniana was designed precisely for that two-tier space, and with an opportune cut in the floor on the stairway side, it lent itself to containing the idea. The quicksand wasn’t there to wait for unsuspecting visitors; there was even an inscription on aluminium that asked people to be careful. I completed the initial idea because I was interested in the idea of indirect knowledge of the phenomenon, the idea of artificial nature, the chance to think about an undecipherable aspect of fascination for people, and yes, also a neutral, involving potentiality. There are more “elastic” works for occasions where no heed is to be taken of the space, but in any case it is now not enough to work on hosting contexts.

DZ: In 1917 Erik Satie defined “Furniture Music” as music for covering the unpleasant noises in a domestic space, for example the sounds produced by the preparation and consumption of a lunch. In the 30s, a project called Muzak

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emerged in America. Initially used for military purposes, Muzak sneaked its way into people’s everyday life through radio and invaded their domestic spaces. This music had no other purpose than to cut out silence and cover domestic noise. In the 50s, John Cage conceived of and played his 4’33’’, almost to celebrate a ceremonial silence for the whole of that type of music that had existed before him. In the 60s, Muzak reached the height of its fortune, conquering work spaces with the purpose of increasing employee productivity, lifts and waiting rooms to keep people company and even astronauts’ spaceships that for the first time reached the moon. Today, Muzak no longer exists in this light, but in our society the phenomenon continues to be present. What do you think of all this?

EM: Enrico Serotti and I recorded pure muzak in the car park of a shopping centre for the sound track of a video on the subject of rubbish, for Legambiente. A female dancer moved around, improvising with a black sack of scenery in her hand, in her house, on the stairs and in the road. What shall I keep? What shall I throw away? These were the two sentences that ended the shoot. The problem comes before this. I read that “comfort sounds” are to be kept on telephones because, even now when we could get rid of them, it’s useful for there to be a signal of mute presence from the other caller, when the person we’re speaking to is there, but is silent. I don’t think there should be televisions on in bars, that we should be tormented so often and so uselessly. This may be a more invasive form of muzak that is less poetic and musical, more financial and oppressive, that is working against us.

DZ: I recall one of your first works, Scatola di Montaggio from 1991. You were hidden inside a big box and you started an almost personal relationship with the people who sat down next to you. Inside you kept written texts that you read to people there, visually, when you were in there, that volume assumed an inanimate connotation

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even though it emitted your voice. How did that idea come about?

EM: I wanted a private conversation in a public space. I felt a responsibility. I wanted to be sincere.

DZ: Do you think we can understand how new media will influence art in the next few years? And if painting, sculpture, photography, video and performance are the often unsatisfactory categories for describing an artistic contribution, what will happen with the new technologies that will also require special spaces, make new demands and live in unthinkable futures? We find ourselves at a time where new media could emerge in order to sound out reality, just like in those instants that preceded the dawning of the camera?

EM: The media are racing ahead, but they don’t give us the trendiest ones until we’ve finished the stock of the ones we’ve got. Japanese cameras don’t need batteries any more, they have handles, but for a post-electronic standard. Studies on energy from magnets seem to be interesting, it seems that they have known certain things for some time, but they are more reticent than I am. The “categories” are not unsatisfactory, but for me everything is tending towards simplification. New spaces, fine, new demands… futures must be thinkable otherwise they come crashing down on us…

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Francesca Cappelletti interviewed by Alessandra Landi

Alessandra Landi: Is it possible to talk about a work of art as furniture in the 14th and 15th centuries? Obviously, without missing the complexity a work of art had in those centuries.

Francesca Cappelletti: At that time, talking about the furnishing function of an artwork was not dismissive at all. In fact, the so-called collecting and assignment models were based on that. At the beginning of the 15th century people ordered altarpieces for family chapels, and then commissioned works to be placed there that were both for public enjoyment and intended for the glorification and self-celebration of the family itself. It was obvious that the artwork had to contribute to the beauty of the palace interiors, and for that reason sometimes people spent more money on tapestries and carved furniture than on paintings; these elements were all contributing to the furnishing and the embellishment of the house. In inventories, furniture and paintings were not always listed together but generally they were both classified as beni mobili, so they are sometimes described together. Paintings, as well as antique statues, were considered important furnishing items, especially within halls and arcades.

Concerning allocation, I suggest you should read a treatise Giulio Mancini wrote between 1610 and 1620. In the section about painting, among other things, he discusses the way one should arrange paintings within the house: those to be placed in the “public” rooms, those for the private ones, those for the country house, those for the city palace. Although he treats the subject under the aspect of taste, he anyhow inherits some concepts from the tradition of decorum. Dating back to the beginning of the 16th century, this tradition established what types of painting best

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fitted the different types of mansion to be adorned or built. For example, landscape paintings, paintings about cheerful tales or less demanding subjects were deemed suitable for country houses: there was always a link between the prospective use, the function of the building, and the sort of paintings to be hung there.

AL: That’s an interesting point, that one should study the main mansions and collections, whereas the minor ones and their amenities were left out...

FC: According to subject or quality, minor works were usually assigned to houses in the country or to places which were not particularly meaningful. When it came to important mansions, for example Pietro Aldobrandini’s villa in Frascati, things changed completely. They were furnished and adorned on the model of the Roman villa, where people used to invite guests to show a significant part of their culture; they wanted to bring back the antique villa, with its gardens of statues and everything else. So, less important paintings, or the ones which found no different allocation, were usually assigned to distant houses. But in any case there was always this idea that a house should brim with paintings.

AL: So site-specific art isn’t exactly a contemporary invention, is it? And neither is the idea of an artwork being placed outside the domestic space, and set into a private yet external space like a garden.

FC: Yes, let’s say that between the 16th and the 17th centuries external private spaces in city mansions included courtyards and gardens, whose boulevards and paths were decorated with antique statues…

AL: It’s a long tradition that sometimes tends to be forgotten.

FC: I would definitely say so! The garden of statues has a very

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long history.

AL: Unfortunately we tend to forget the past. For example, contemporary art often introduces concepts it asserts to be innovative although they may find their intimate and distant roots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As a matter of fact, most of what we have today has its roots in the mansions, the arcades, the collections, and the ideas of that age. It’s a sort of continuing tradition.

FC: Yes, there is no real break. Exhibiting a work of art in open spaces is a long time tradition. In the Renaissance, people found mention of it in Vitruvio’s writings and of course they had an example in the Domus Aurea; the villas of Roman emperors featured a series of open spaces, arcades and courtyards which were “furnished” with works of art. We seem to be drawing on this concept again today; it is a philosophical issue that permeates all Western culture. We need to ascertain if models re-emerge from time to time or if there is a continuous transmission. The exhibition, for instance, is another very old tradition...

AL: Much older than people want to admit; it is the same with originality...

FC: ...often at all costs! [laughs]

AL: Contemporary art hates, or shuns this idea of the artwork as furniture, because it feels dismissive.

FC That’s for sure! But even the paintings Caravaggio made for Giustiniani and Del Monte were commissioned with a specific space or room in mind and I don’t see anything dismissive in that. On the contrary, perhaps I find it limiting to work with museums only. For sure the museum is an equivalent to what churches were at that time; even Salvator Rosa was tormented by the fact that he was working only for private collections and had no public

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commissions – being publicly known was an honour, it’s self evident. Today the consecration of art does not happen in the church but in the museum. Private collections do give visibility as well: the distinction between the network of private collections (which used to be an extremely narrow circle, prestigious as it was) and the public work is no longer so sharp. The Saatchi Gallery is exactly like a public space: anyone can go there, therefore it gives you an incredible amount of visibility. I think it depends on the level of the collecting, but anyway the former separation between public and private is definitely easing up today.

AL: The owner of the collection was like the centre of a cosmos. In the past, this was evident in cabinets of curiosities.

FC: Sure, that was the quintessential microcosm.

AL: And what about the gallery in this perspective? How does the gallery compare to this? We can say it starts to take shape in the sixteenth century and gets a much more definite form in the seventeenth century: to which extent can the collector be considered the true centre of the gallery?

FC: The cabinet of curiosities is more representational, since it is a studiolo, a small studio that hosts naturalia and mirabilia rather than artistic manufactures. According to the sources, it conveyed the notion of a universe compressed in a small room much better than the gallery. Poniano wrote a lot on this conception of the microcosm reproduced in the studio, whose sense is given by the choice of the personality who lives there.

The gallery is different. In 1615, long before the developing of that architectural space which became so popular in the eighteenth century, Scamozzi says that the gallery suited only gentlemen and illustrious names. Obviously, having a gallery where one’s collection could be displayed implied the existence of a place

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where walks could be taken and several works of art could be admired. These were the most representative ones in the whole collection, which meant that there was a much larger collection in the palace. If someone owned twenty paintings, he wasn’t in a position to set up a gallery. Scamozzi describes this space as “the portrait of the illustrious and noble owner”: the gallery is a true cultural self-portrait, for the gallery owner it is a way to portray himself as a patron of the arts; it’s a measure of his taste and affordances, for instance the possibility of having important artists work for you.

AL: We can think of the differences between cardinal Del Monte’s and the papal collections.

FC: The papal collections are a complicated topic, since the collections never belong to the Popes personally – with the exception of the Belvedere, perhaps – and the decorations inside the Vatican palaces always belong to the Holy See. The Pope does not have his own collection. Nevertheless, there are the collections of the cardinal nipoti; these are much wider and richer, and may well reflect the Pontiff ’s taste – as it happens during Barberini’s age. Sometimes it is even more difficult for the Pontiffs to define criteria of taste: the Vatican collections are so wide that they are considered nearly eclectic. On the contrary, some collections, such as Cardinal Del Monte’s, are much more oriented and focused – probably because he used to receive less presents, had less opportunities to invest money and to have famous artists work for him. His collection is visibly in line with his taste; in such cases we can infer elements of the person’s profile more easily.

AL: Going back a bit, in the cabinet of curiosities there were both naturalia and artificialia, so the leitmotiv was a common feel of wonder, wasn’t it?

FC: The space was smaller. Moreover the purpose and the concept were different: the studiolo is a space of meditation, while

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the gallery is a space of strolling.

AL: Surely the collecting style changes, but the idea of the architectural space is modified, too. How does the relationship between the collection and the space change between the 16th and the 17th centuries?

FC: This is a very complicated matter. First of all the palaces, especially the ones in the Roman area, undergo a significant change. A seventeenth-century palace is three times bigger than a sixteenth-century one. In the 17th century, a space for the gallery starts to be clearly introduced in the architectural project, while in the middle of the 16th century only a few palaces featured galleries, which were also smaller, shorter and narrower. The first galleries appear in Fontainebleau in the early 16th century. It’s a shy beginning, and at first these architectural spaces meet different functional needs. Nevertheless they anticipate the meaning of the gallery we were describing before: the gallery as a space where the owner displays his culture and celebrates the glory of his family as well as his own. At the beginning French galleries hosted the ancestors’ portraits, so they were a celebration of the family through a sort of family tree, including the kings and the aristocrats with whom the family was in contact. Later this celebration of the family is achieved through artworks, which is an interesting shift.

AL: The Este family did so, they used culture as a family flag.

FC: There is a specific iconographic topic in Isabella and Alfonso d’Este’s dressing rooms, according to what they write to the painters in their service and what we know about their design. The works on display in these rooms were commissioned to gain a meaning, whereas this did not happen in the galleries, where only the best pieces of the collection were shown. Sometimes a few pieces were commissioned specially for galleries, but

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commissioning an entire gallery with a specific topic was not a frequent case. The studiolo represented a much more private space, a place to be contemplated, whereas the gallery space was admittedly more open.

AL: We can also consider this issue from an architectural point of view. Thinking of dimensions, the studiolo was cosier, it was defined as the place for otium; perhaps it was more charming just because it was the space for various objects and works, where art and science nearly coincided because they were not sharply distinguished at that time yet. I am very interested in discussing what might become of such a space in the present-day world. Adalgisa Lugli showed something similar at the Venice Biennale in 1986. She curated a captivating pavilion where, starting from the idea of the ‘wunderkammer’, she managed to recreate a modern cabinet of curiosities. She combined genuine period objects with contemporary art pieces which, in a more or less conscious way, had been inspired by them. I love this example because it blurs the distinction between modern and contemporary art.

FC: Oh, come to my place then! You’ll see, the distinction doesn’t exist there: my husband has put the copies of Parmigianino right next to a lightbox!

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Cornelia Lauf

The first window I can remember is the window of the hospital room through which I saw my newborn sister, when I was about three years old. It was in Freiburg; we had traveled there from Marburg, where my father had a job at the Max Planck Institute. I was born in Freiburg too; my mother’s parents lived there. From a window in their apartment, my grandmother used to watch my grandfather stroll down the allée in front of their building, after she had washed and ironed Opa’s shirts for the Sunday excursion with his mistress.

Take four pieces of wood and nail them together into a cross shape. Square. Take four more, longer, pieces of wood, build a frame around this holy form. We now have a stretcher for a canvas. No canvas – just paint the stretcher white, and it is a work by Sol LeWitt from the mid-1960s. A window.

Pondering the “sound” of inert objects, and what differentiates a window from a stretcher from an artwork, a few memories come to mind. Some of them concern inert objects, as innocent as a dried sausage could be for Dieter Roth, or fur lining the cup of a Meret Oppenheim.

Joseph Beuys, in Paris, in the rear room of the Galerie Durand-Dessert, holding a russet paprika in his hand, turning it, until it seemed to glow. Franz West, walking through the factory of Artemide, near Milan, on a commission to invent a lamp for MetaMemphis. Reaching down into a pile of rusted iron chains, pulling one up into the air, coiling its base, calling for a light bulb, and inventing a lamp. Claes Oldenburg, hand-carrying a small stuffed miniature

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workbench made of pink cloth, to Josh Baer’s gallery, for an exhibition to benefit a theater company. Although it looked like a toy, he priced it at 75,000 dollars, which, in 1988, was a lot of money. Mike Kelley’s handmade stuffed animals, which he found at flea markets, and placed, huddling on the floor in mystic gatherings, in the Soho gallery of Metro Pictures. La Monte Young, and Marian Zazeela, sitting in yoga position, also in mystic gatherings, around Pandit Pranh Nath, and his mournful chants, in the ambient light – lavender, blues, and pinks – suffusing the old Cotton Exchange run by Dia. John Cage, at Oberlin College, teaching a course at the Conservatory… I think it was on mushrooms. All the different types. Regular classes. Then, brunch in Tribeca, with Cage, thanks to a friend who worked for Young. Small job for Young and Zazeela. Many concerts, but more often, just the clang clang tzum tzum of pots and pans in the kitchen of some artist’s loft, on a Sunday. Donald Judd, lecturing at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, a speech on his real estate holdings. Slide after slide of buildings he had owned, or restored. Nothing else, just a catalogue of properties. Almost the entire audience left, angry not to have heard more about art, and wishing to have seen less of wood, mortar, and brick. Dan Flavin, complaining that a few toes had been removed, due to gangrene, maintaining inscrutability about his work, despite literal and graphic analyses of his feet. John Chamberlain, who needed a limousine in order to travel one hundred blocks for a lecture, and refused anyway, even when it was found, but came willingly to a picnic in the backyard out on Long Island, taking Polaroid after Polaroid of anything, streaming, moving images, just bands of color, really. Gino de Dominicis, whose acid humor about those who professed to be his closest friends, and wicked sense of place and mood, gave rise to scenes such as his imitation of lovemaking with an elderly woman, who fainted after orgasm, her eyes rolling back in her head. This piece of theater was performed in the bedroom

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of a Venetian palace lit only by candles… he had just given the daughter of a Jordanian princess an empty gilded cage. Drinks at the Hemingway, and dinners in New York, when he was not out courting. No photographs.

Alighiero Boetti, half crestfallen, half mischievous, walking down some calle in the early morning in Venice, after a long night.

And some others, even closer, unnamed.

Loading film into the projector, watching the frames go by, the window of film no less real than the frame through which we gaze at a landscape. Meet Stan Brakhage, where the scratches on the film became the film. Screening the films of Fassbinder twenty years ago, I had a job as a projectionist, and took pleasure in showing the most obscure films one could find. No audience to speak of.

It was the furniture of Michelangelo Pistoletto that spoke loudest though. I met Pistoletto, during a period spent working in Paris, and his subsequent invitation to travel to his and Maria Pistoletto’s home in Corniglia, was decisive. I remember Maria serving polenta directly on a long oak table, flanked by long benches. There was a window overlooking the ocean below next to the table.

I had been living in New York, in the East Village, with a high school friend, who became addicted to heroin the semester I moved in. There was a purple bathtub in the center of the shotgun-style apartment, and our front windows (two of them) looked out on Eighth Street. I left when the apartment was burglarized, and I was robbed of most everything, and could not dissuade my friend from self-destruction.

The next set of windows was in Spanish Harlem, where I also roomed for a number of years while studying at Columbia. A brownstone, Greek restaurant in basement, third floor, one-bedroom apartment, with tar rooftop, and three grated windows

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overlooking a courtyard and an acacia or two.

Then SoHo. Broadway, between Houston and Prince. Twenty years here, at windows that on one side faced Broadway, and, at the rear of the sprawling loft, looked out on Mercer Street. Pine floors were painted black, walls gray, cast iron ceiling of acanthus leaves, first painted white, then gray. I had two windows at the back. They faced lower Manhattan rooftops, and the wooden water towers dotting SoHo’s cast iron architecture. This room bore some bookshelves built on a tilt, a faded red armchair, and a stucco bust of Marie Antoinette, as well as some dingy gray industrial carpet, which was subsequently ripped up. The desk was a pane of white glass on some trestles. Chipped and scratched black chair, repeatedy painted.

Belgian windows. A villa in the heart of Ghent, lost. A Sicilian family, on the eighteenth century foundation of an earlier house, had built the home. One of the oldest windows was salvaged and placed inside a small sitting room on the third floor. A crescent-shaped thing, with fine wooden struts dividing the panes.

The ground floor of the house, opening onto a marble foyer, looked out on a veritable garden of Eden, designed by a Belgian garden architect, who obeyed his clients’ wishes and planted only white and black flowers. The enormous windows of the winter garden (filled with palm trees and Lloyd Loom furniture) looked over this garden, its paths, pools of water, and ancient ferns visible through the large Arts & Crafts-Era panes of this sitting room.

In Rome, it is common practice for the front façade of a palace to have windowsills executed in travertine, and secondary façades to carry lintels and frames whose ornamentation can even be plaster. The windows looking out of the palace at Piazza Benedetto Cairoli faced a Baroque church, S.Carlo ai Catinari, on one side and on the other, a small park that had been designed in the nineteenth century. The sounds carrying through the thin panes of the windows of this house included the nighttime howls

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of drunken students, trams rattling down the tracks every ten minutes or so, and the shouts of street vendors.

A minute ago I was here thinking of windows, and now that minute has passed. The window here next to me is floor to ceiling and overlooks a countryside that has been inhabited for millennia. The window is partially open, and the view outside is bathed in a pale blue evening light, like the colors of a Monet. I am not moved to do more than say that, though this moment has much that could contain the essence of an artistic moment. Cautious optimism. But the decision to name a window a work, or the topic of a work of art, takes a particular kind of mind. It is the ability to make harmony in a shape, moment, or place and make it work eternally. For those committed to serving artistic practice, windows usually remain windows.

But ever so once in a while, the mere thought of a piece of wood, or stick of furniture, can trigger rivers of prose. And in that moment, the object sings.

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Martino Gamper interviewed by Riccardo Giacconi

[Martino Gamper’s studio, London, October 2008]

Riccardo Giacconi: What are you working on, at the moment?

Martino Gamper: At the moment I am moving my studio. It’s a big project. I have been here for four years, and everything is coming to an end. I have found a new studio and a new house, so I am splitting living and working.

RG:Because now you live here.

MG: I live here. Living and working will be separated. That’s good news! [laughs] I am going to spend quite a bit of time working on my new studio. I did some cooking events with some friends, and one of the ideas is that my new place will become quite a social place. People are going to come and either eat food or see furniture. It’s going to be something between a kitchen, a living space and a gallery.

RG: Did you do any cooking event here in this studio?

MG: I did some events here and in many different other places: in London and abroad as well. Actually I did one in Venice with Giorgio Camuffo and his gallery. And in Berlin... It’s quite a mobile event. Then, I’m working on a show with my girlfriend, Francis Upritchard, who is an artist. We are doing a collaboration between myself, her and jewellery designer Karl Fritsch. I think it can be quite interesting, I often collaborate with other people. It’s going to be in January at Kate MacGarry gallery [Feierabend, 2009]. And I am trying to slow down a little bit, this year is very

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busy: I did Manifesta, for example...

RG:You just said you live here in your studio: this is a really interesting point, relating to the nature of your work.

MG: Yes I think it is really good. But it came to the point when is not so compatible anymore. It is disruptive: I work too much, basically. I don’t have any life which is not work. [laughs] That is one of the reasons why I am moving: I think it is good to separate things a little bit.

RG: I was looking at your chairs here: you live with your chairs.

MG: Yes, I live with my chairs. I have some of them downstairs. I usually change them. There are something like 100 chairs.

RG: In your website you say that you have an interest in the psycho-social aspects of furniture design. Can you talk about this?

MG: Most of the time designers make furniture that fulfils certain criteria, be it ergonomics, production costs, process, if it is made out of plastic or wood... Those are the kind of briefs you get from companies: it has to be cheap, made with this material, for this market. For me, furniture always had a much wider spectrum around it. Much more about sociality and interaction, like having a meal around this table: you need furniture to be able to do this. I try to utilize the furniture also in the exhibitions that I do: people can use them, experience them rather than only look at them. I am interested in the experience of the user. This is the psycho-social aspect of it. It is not just a new “oh-very-nice” chair on a plinth. It is about the user: if it is comfortable, OK; maybe it is uncomfortable... And it is about creating a situation using furniture. In a sense, furniture becomes part of the architecture.

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This interests me: how furniture interacts with architecture, with its surroundings.

RG: Furniture has always been a way of expressing a status. I am thinking about the way aristocratic homes aimed at expressing a certain identity. Does a social function of furniture still exist, today?

MG: Yes, I think there is, in the market. But I see a lot of soulless pieces of furniture. They make one hundred thousands of the same pieces, and they leave them is a shop or in a warehouse where they are sold for a lot. It is about reproducing things rather than experiencing them and the context where they can live in. But this is one part of the market. I don’t say that I hate this, but it is a different thing I am interested in: playing with furniture to create spaces for people.

RG: Would you provide a definition for furniture?

MG: I think it depends on what the project is. If it is for public furniture it may have a different definition than the domestic one. Every project defines it in a little different way. I think furniture is self-defining: once you use it, it define itself. And it is defined by people interacting with it.

RG: Can you talk about the 100 chairs in 100 days project?

MG:It all started by collecting broken or half-broken chairs from the streets of London. It became quite obsessive: every day I would find a chair and bring it home. This whole thing grew until 150, 200 chairs gathered around. The method itself is something I used before with a friend of mine, Rainer Spehl. We used to share a studio, and on some occasions we used to do performances. He then moved away from London. I very much enjoyed this kind of process of spontaneously doing furniture without drawing, without having a preconceived idea, working only by tri-dimensionally

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sketching the object. This process is very close to the way I work and I thought that, in order to give a certain impact, the chairs would have to be 100; 10 wouldn’t have been enough. In a way it was an investigation, a research, a project where I could somehow explore all this wide range of what a chair could potentially be. Its different characters. I realized that, as we all have our individual characters, the chairs can somehow mirror this. So I did 100 different characters. I loved the idea of doing an exhibition of 100 different characters: each chair is telling a story about a different subject, a different identity. Each of them has a name.

RG: Are you interested in narrative?

MG: Yes, narrative definitely interests me. That might come back to the psycho-social thing. For me it is more interesting to create stories with furniture than saying, “This chair costs 100 pounds and you can buy it there”. I think furniture can transport something more. It’s not just a basic transaction in a shop. I think furniture has a much broader interesting aspect.

RG: You play with different styles. Is there a political aspect in putting together a Victorian chair with a plastic mass production chair?

MG: For me it is not really political but more anthropological. I go out in the streets, I look for these pieces of furniture and I find them in different areas of London. This talks about the social hierarchy. And then I mess around with those pieces, I put them together again and I create hybrids of different hierarchies. I am also looking at how to categorize these chairs. What categories do you use? Are they purely based on material? On the process? On the shape? Or is there a different value system? There isn’t a perfect chair for me. And there is not a perfect way of using a chair. A lot of times designers try to find out how to make the perfect chair. But there isn’t anything like a perfect person. Nobody is perfect.

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RG: You said that chairs are the most interesting pieces of furniture.

MG: Yes, I think that they can convey a lot of ideas, because of their super-functionality. A chair is something super-functional and so basic as well. You know that if there is nothing to sit, people will immediately find a chair to use – be it a bin or something else. There is this kind of immediate “chairness” with any object around. You can play with chairs, it is almost like a medium in itself. At least in our culture, we all have chairs. They are in every space where we live and work.

RG: Once in an exhibition do your chairs become “auratical” objects? Or do they remain furniture? What is your relationship with sculpture?

MG: I think a lot of them are very sculptural and you could probably put them in an “art context” and say, “Don’t sit! Just look!”. And then they would become sculptures. But I am interested in people sitting down on them, and only secondarily in their sculptural quality. For me they have to work as chairs. But a chair can be a sculpture, it doesn’t have to be stripped down from its sculptural quality. It can be expressive as well.

RG: In Furniture While You Wait, you and Rainer Spehl created furniture from old junk. The word “restoring” includes the word “rest”. Are you interested in the residual part of furniture?

MG: That’s maybe where the narrative comes in. You find a chair, and it has some kind of a story attached to it: the materials, the value, the place where it comes from, the process that was used to produce it, the colours, the decorative elements... When you work with found materials you can’t hide these things. That interests me, because there is a richness you subtract: you take the things you need, and then mix them with something else, be

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it new or be it used. So the story becomes something more. It’s a little bit like in music. In music it is quite common to re-sample things, take beats and rejuggle them in a different order. I think design is always searching for new things. Inventing something, having something completely new because what reminds of something else is not pure. I am interested in the old, in the old bits, in the texture. It’s a much more interesting starting point then starting with a flat piece of wood. Some people are also talking about recycling, but recycling is not the right word. The recycling process is slowly downgrading the material; instead, my process is somehow upgrading broken things while fixing them. But you used the term “restoring”: in English restoring also implies the act of reading the context of things, and creating a new one.

RG: It’s a term that comes from a conversation we had with Raqs Media Collective. Their section of Manifesta was called The Rest of Now, and we were talking about the restoration of the ex-Alumix factory, in Bolzano, where the show was held. It seems that “improvisation” is another key word, in your practice. Almost in a musical sense. But it can also be connected to cooking.

MG: Yes, very much. As English say: “What you can’t hide you should emphasize”. I think I am not the best organizer in the world, since I am not too structured in the way I work. So if I can’t get it perfectly organized, I have to start improvising. I used to think that this was a negative thing, that I am always a bit too spontaneous in the way I work. But at one point I started thinking that I could use this spontaneity and try not to know, before I start the piece, what the outcome will be. This has become a quite important part of my process, because I realized you learn a lot by being spontaneous and by keeping yourself away from the answer. I started thinking like, “I don’t have an idea now, but I will have one.” And then things start to work, you start playing and having fun, in a way. It is less about trying to come out with an idea for a chair. It is more like in cooking: “Let’s have a look

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what’s in the fridge... I could do this and this and that. What an interesting combination, I never thought of it”. And then if you need something you can get it, but for me is important to have that element of play. Lots of things in the world nowadays are very controlled from the top. Just think of what happened in financial markets last weeks. It was the most controlled market in the world, the most controlled thing in the world. And when you suddenly realize that one little thing in the whole machinery doesn’t work anymore, the whole thing collapses. And that’s where you need spontaneity, that’s where you have to make something out of the situation. I don’t know, I realized I am just much better in improvising than in organizing.

RG: Improvisation involves the notion of time. The whole process of making things is involved. This goes against the notion of “project”, which is very common in design. You are making design without a project.

MG: Project design means having control. Controlling the shape, controlling things. You wake up in the morning and say: “Hum, I’ve seen this thing. I had this dream or I have seen something in the street. It interested me, and I would like to bring this in”. In project design this is impossible, because you need to have a concept and then a result, be it a formal one or a drawing. Then, from that onwards you downgrade, and it becomes less and less of the initial thing. You end up with something that is a project, it may be very well executed, but perhaps the idea in itself got lost in the process. For me, when possible I work the other way around: I don’t know anything at the beginning but I know more at the end. If everyone is doing the same thing, you want to do something different. Not because the others are doing bad, but because it is pointless to do again things other people have done.

RG: I was thinking about the word “design”. In a way, what you do is against design, against disegno.

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MG: It is against disegno; it is quite artisanal, artigianato. Design in the 60s and in the 70s was very much about control and form and shaping things, not leaving any room for unexpected things. Everything was controlled: “here is the drawing and here is how you are going to make it”. Instead, I go like: “No. I don’t have a drawing. There is no drawing. The drawing is my head”. Nonetheless, I would really like to design an industrial product, to make a mass produced chair. Not quite sure how to start the process, because the drawing doesn’t interest me very much. I would probably have to make the chair first and then see... For me it would be a challenge. I hope that one day I will find someone who is interested enough to do it. I would like to see if I am capable of making disegno. A lot of people are asking me: “When are you going to do a proper chair?”. It seems that you have to make something mass produced to be recognized and to be taken as serious in design. I would be more interested in the experience than in seeing the chair in a shop. The process would interest me. To see, with a company, how I could change the process to get to the final thing. Maybe going a little different way.

RG: Can you talk about your interest for corners?

MG: I think that a corner is something which is exactly between furniture and architecture. It is micro-architecture and macro-furniture, somehow. It is such an evident space in each room, but very little used. Usually it creates more problems than anything else. A corner is this thing between three planes: x, y, z. I did some Get Together pieces for corners: a Get Together Sofa, for example. It is about sharing a space, and creating a space at the same time. Also the lighting interests me, because usually light comes from a central point of the room. But actually you are lighting empty space. My idea was to have light coming from the corners, because that’s where the walls are. I did light pieces, sound pieces, sitting pieces, storage pieces: each of them used the corner. Before I did furniture, I looked at corners, because it seemed to me the next scale up from furniture. It seemed to me

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a very important part of architecture and, at the same time, of furniture.

RG: Yes, because corners are the limit of furniture and the limit of architecture. And they come together.

MG: In every space you enter, the corner gives you an idea of how much someone has thought about the space. When three planes come together, you can actually see how much the architect has actually thought about the building. Carlo Scarpa, for example, really understood the corner. You can see his sensibility from how he dealt with corners in every space.

RG: Can you talk about the Total Trattoria project?

MG: Maybe it comes back again to the psycho-social aspects of furniture. I like to use my furniture to create events, to create gatherings, to engage with people. In that sense, I did the Total Trattoria project with three other people: Maki Suzuki, Alex Rich and Kajsa Stahl, with whom I work a lot. During our conversations, we realized that we share a common interest in hosting or having people around us: cooking for them, experimenting with food and appreciating the value of a nice meal. And the social value of sharing and exchanging something. We wanted to mix those things rather than having an exhibition; it was more about making the furniture, cooking something, putting one and one together and creating this event. We first started with a very small event, in a bar in Clerkenwell called “Hat on Wall”, which doesn’t exist anymore.

Then we did similar events in other spaces. I find it very difficult to go to restaurants in London. It’s different in Italy: there is a different atmosphere, a different feel about going out. I always felt that in London most restaurants you go to are very anonymous: the owner is not the restaurant cook, the place is run by the restaurant manager and the waiters are never the same ones. So you hardly have the feeling of actually going to a place

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that someone runs: some person, some character. It’s very much a business, which can be okay as well, but it doesn’t have the same value for me. Equally, if you cook at home you have a limited amount of people you can invite.

The Trattoria is something between these two entities: between a restaurant and home-cooking; between the semi-public and the semi-private. It is the situation where I see my furniture: they are not only public and they are not only private, so they can have this ambiguity. Again, I like to do furniture as a medium for other things. And on the top of it, I like cooking and inviting other people. Total Trattoria was an exhibition where I tried to define, or design, all the elements involved, from the cutlery to the placements of the glasses, to the food, to the kitchen, to the table and chairs. It was about doing all of it and creating a big atmosphere.

RG: So the atmosphere was part of the total artwork.

MG: Yes, it was a total experience. We tried to do 100% of all the elements that were there. In some cases, this involves specifying things and changing little details: each bit is considered.

RG: Thank you very much, Martino.

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Joa Herrenknecht and Felix Vogel in conversation

[Karlsruhe, London and Glasgow during autumn 2008]

Felix Vogel: For a start, I would like to discuss what it means, and which semantic shift it contains, if Erik Satie uses the metaphor of ‘furniture’ for his compositions. What does it mean to transfer a relatively stable term (furniture) to a certain genre of music that is supposed to stay in the background and should not attract people’s attention too much? If we then consider the concept of ‘furniture music’ further in its history, pointing to the idea of ‘Muzak’ (i.e. music specially composed to have a certain effect on the consumer, remaining unnoticed and supporting a capitalist logic), it comes to the fore that the term ‘furniture’ is being used in a very limited way here. Furniture is understood as something that creates a pleasant and inconspicuous surrounding. It is not exactly an object, that is something that contrasts with space through its very presence. It seems to somehow merge with space and is not longer recognized as independent. Hence, furniture is not even decoration. I feel that this notion of furniture has nothing to do with either an historical understanding of design or contemporary design practice. How would you evaluate this definition of furniture? And how do you think it relates to design?

Joa Herrenknecht: Thinking about ‘furniture music’ and Muzak, used to manipulate the emotional state of a consumer so that he or she buys more, I can see a difference and a similarity in

Is it Equivalent to an Indoor Carfor Your Apartment?

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the presence of furniture and music. The furniture will generate a picture, perhaps an illusion of taste, an image that creates expectations we are all manipulated by. We definitely expect a specific look or mood when we enter a certain space, for example a 5-star hotel or an ecological supermarket. Both spaces use furniture as an identity frame, thus the appearance of it, its design, (is this the design we think of when speaking of ‘furniture music’?) is used to make a statement and create an appearance. In any case, it is a reproduction of a picture we expect to see – and I don’t think it really surprises us to see wooden racks stacked with paper boxes carrying fair trade products in an ecological supermarket, or to see a design classic like the Barcelona Chair in an up-scale villa. Furniture is not able to convey the same message as music, it has a different impact. It might reproduce an image, or mood – you very likely will feel better in an elegantly decorated house than in a shack, but it is always limited to a specifically appointed three-dimensional picture and often to a certain class of social space.

FV: You are right; this has very much to do with different forms of display and the somehow prefigured reaction to it. Space is defined through different rules and regulations of visibility. The Barcelona Chair in an up-scale villa works as an object, as an iconic symbol and I claim that it functions as a spatial metonymy. If we recall the history of this chair and remember that it was specially designed for one particular space, we realize that its original purpose and its proper or intended function was given in connection with the particular space it was meant to inhabit. If we see the chair in a villa today, it is more like exhibiting it. It is exhibited in almost the same way as art, or at least with the same outcome. I think your second example of supermarket shelves, especially the differently designed ones from the ‘ecological supermarket’ (a perfect foil to a Mies-like piece of furniture) describes the term furniture as it is to be understood in ‘furniture music’ very well. If we

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understand space as something that exists out of different layers (starting with parameters for three dimensions, location, light, etc.), design has in turn further intermediate layers that vary from an almost invisible furnishing, which is more or less sculptural work at the space for the sake of defining it, to decorating the space, to placing an object in the space.

What I find interesting is your mentioning the impact of design on the subject who is confronted with it (what should we call this person? user? viewer?) You say this impact is very often limited to a certain class of social space, and I totally agree. Nevertheless I would turn your statement upside down and claim that design itself is producing these restrictions. How would you as a practitioner in the field of design evaluate the importance of furnishing or design by and large? What is the recent condition of design and do you have a set of conditions in your own design practice?

JH: The decorative parts of our lives, which we mostly identify our social status with, matter too much. We shall not forget that they are just things and that there is a difference between a person, his character, his soul and his way ‘of dressing’. Nowadays furniture often becomes fashion because we blindly consume too much and there are so many badly made objects such as mass furniture and products with no soul to them. That’s what upsets me. There is so much trash blending in and so much pretentious stuff that we forget objects are primarily intended to be used.

There are two things I believe in. First of all, I feel the way you live and the things you surround yourself with have an influence on you personally, no matter if they are cheap or expensive, good or bad design. Consequently you should think about the way you live, you should give yourself some sort of value, by creating your own space to magnify your presence. You should do this just for yourself and not to impress others, this makes a big difference

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in my opinion. I hate to hear your home is your mirror, but there is something true about this. So is it possible that furniture is more than basic decoration? More than illusion? More influential than you thought? Is it an active force? For example if you have some flowers at home (these could be some sort of 3-D Muzak), I think you will feel it, you can feel an image. And you can feel a comfortable chair, a sharp knife, a clear light, too.

Secondly I believe a designer should do a good job, creating a product that either supports you while using it (without making ‘big noise’, so you almost won’t notice it) or exhilarates you like a piece of jewellery, because its shape, its material, its colour and idea evoke a holistic response of reality to and for you. If design is a tool, then it would be real “furniture music” and blend in with the background without you noticing it. What we mostly refer to when we talk about furniture design today often takes up the role of a pretentious jewel, a loud piece that wants to be seen. These pieces are produced to be seen.

Here we get to the point where there is a difference in the interpretation of design. There is the design product, intended to be used as a tool and mostly produced industrially, and there is the design object, used for visual pleasure only, which could even be seen as... could it be art? Is it sculpture? Is it equivalent to an indoor car for your apartment? There are many examples of this sort of products today. For example the ‘Voronoi shelf ’ by Marc Newson or the sculptural ‘Drift bench’ by Amanda Levete, which are meant to be looked at rather than used. Their function almost sounds like an excuse because they are not just furniture any more but designed art pieces available in limited editions. There is a whole new world in which you need to know names. Are you a Bouroullec or rather a Grcic design fan? Whose design do you like? This is the daily question. Then you go on talking about a specific chair, which also has a specific name, as an art piece and so on. So I think designed art furniture can really be seen independently, thus perhaps even out of the space context. In the end of course you expect to have a suitable surrounding for it. I wonder if a person who buys a design object for 1 million dollars

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would actually (dare to) use it or rather treat it like a piece of art – enjoying its presence, could we possibly even name this ‘species’ the new ‘furniture music’?

FV: I witnessed this development, too. Somehow furniture is moving away from furnishing space, sometimes it merges with it. It is becoming an autonomous object and this does not have anything to do with the notion of furniture as it is understood in Satie’s idea of ‘furniture music’… Still, I am not sure if one can or should equate these particular design objects with art, but I love your comparison with an indoor car for an apartment and I think this is a most suitable metaphor for some recent design objects. It is always a matter of identification and signification. Does it become art if we call it art or does it become art if it is displayed in the same way as art? I still claim that art (in opposition to design as well as other visual and sensual ‘actions’) is free, sterile and uncommitted. On the contrary design is never sterile, although its function is sometimes present only as an excuse, as you describe it. Even design that is exhibited, which means that you are not allowed to use it and it is placed in a totally different context from the one it was intended for, tells you that it is meant to fulfil a certain purpose and is not just pure form. This would also lead to the question if it is possible to exhibit design. And if so, how. Is not every placing already a form of exhibiting and thus furnishing an apartment equivalent to curating? Is exhibition only possible if you place the object of interest outside its usual context? How important is the functionality of a design object in the context of exhibiting it? Is not it necessary to use, or at least have an impression of the haptic qualities of, let’s say, a chair? Is not it limiting to just relate to its visual appearance? I have observed that exhibiting design confronts us mostly (mostly, because there have been several interesting

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exhibitions that questioned the pure fetish character of design) with a paradoxical situation; the object appears as losing something (that is its purpose or function) but at the same time a symbolic surplus is generated through the spatial connotation of the museum. The exhibited design object loses something that it actually is and claims to be something that it can never be. It is a sacrifice of the proper object in favour of becoming pure fetish. The museum and other formats of exhibition spaces can be understood as a democratization of objects, things are transformed into something else and their proper status or identity is dissolved. Of course, this has a lot of advantages because the object is no longer part of the capitalist circulation of commodities, but at the same time its very identity and purpose is concealed.

Having this in mind and coming back to your description of the differentiation of design you gave earlier, what is the job of a designer today, if it is not simply about developing ‘tools’?

JH: Sometimes I think of our job as being the one of a modern sculptor – not an artist – but an industrial sculptor. When you are done with a project, it seems to me that you lose the power over it. It gets independent and has its own life, there is no chance to change its presence or its destiny any more. It’s almost like giving birth to something and then having to wait to see how it will be perceived. Even though you have spent so much time with the object, thinking about so many dimensions, cuts, production details, etc. the character of this product may change in the room, in the space, in the consumer’s hand or presence. I cannot forecast anything. We want the object to be successful, to matter, to show presence in a room or to function gently and steadily like a good tool, but there is no guaranty for the one or the other. Many good designs are not selling well, others aren’t even noticed because they are so well-designed, for example a standard stable wooden

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chair. Therefore I embrace the possibility to exhibit design objects in public.

At one point there should be a better explication of design. Everything has been designed, every little screw – but when I talk to you about it, I try to think of design as being some object with a quality seal. But there is no such thing as a quality control for the term “design furniture” and everybody sells everything tagged with ‘design’. Do we think that design is more than just low-quality mass-produced items? Yes, this is certain, but further defining it has become difficult lately.

FV: But is not there already something like a ‘quality control’? There is a certain canonization of design, there are different channels of distribution, be it magazines, fairs, books or exhibition, which shape the term of what is called ‘design’. However, this is driven more often by economic reasons, it doesn’t point to a certain quality. Precise quality level specifications would be hard to establish. Furthermore it could be dangerous to fix too rigid and stable standards because this would make any radical development extremely difficult.

JH: You might be right that there is some sort of ‘quality control’ for design, perhaps, but if so it is definitely not media, but time. If a certain object still functions after a long time, if you still like and use it, if the idea of it still works, then this is quality. Quality that is given by its design, its material and its way of usage. The time factor has a very important role in the world of design I don’t think media, especially magazines, can provide a quality seal. Mainly they are interested in nice pictures. There are so many magazines lately that it’s like selling different versions of stylish ‘Art of living bibles’ for the temples we live in. Who remembers the magazine articles really? Nevertheless I acknowledge the importance of exhibition spaces, magazines and media, in communicating design to the broad public, especially because this is a form of design itself !

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There has been a very big effort made in shaping the public’s view on design to this point. Today almost everyone has their own apartment and has the freedom of private expression and choice of consumption habits. Only 200 years ago it was not normal to have your own privacy. The notion of ‘home-privacy’ was not established then. Either you were living in the countryside in large multi-generational houses with servants (and animals) or you were one of the privileged few, but there was no intimacy as we know it today. Think of Versailles and all the rooms which were connected to one another, you rarely had corridors. Everything was public. With the change of society structures consumption started, there was a shift towards emotionalizing privacy and expressing individuality. Politics was certainly important in this process. And it still is.

FV: Yes, but that is exactly the reason why design is an issue of politics. The division of private and public space, or the development of what we call ‘private space’ today, is closely linked to the history of capitalism. The important role of design did not occur simultaneously with the complete takeover of capitalism (that is during the age of industrialization) but it is closely connected to this shift. Design took over the role of structuring the living together and social life and has therefore an immanent political role.

JH: Let us say that good design is likely to inform the broad public about what is possible, people might get aware and train their eyes and their consumption habits. Against your opinion, I think that by ensuring ‘new food’ the media are urged to inform the public about radical developments as well as participate in them. In my view, having the capitalistic freedom of consumption is a political statement. Perhaps this is the time in which we realize that it is not just freedom. We are starting to be aware of our consumption habits and their outcome. Design may provide solutions, ideas, great objects, but we also need to know that it

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won’t heal the world.

FV: You mentioned earlier that there is too much design. If there is too much of something, it always means that there is a loss of something else. What would this be? And does it also imply that design is not meant to be for the masses? I think this is a question we should investigate a bit further. Is the designer just working for people who can afford it? You mentioned apartment indoor cars earlier. Is not there a more political dimension of design? And being very much influenced by Marxist thoughts, I feel the need to ask this: is there a possibility for the designer to advocate for the people? I have two examples for this, both may seem to be outdated, but I still find them somehow attracting or at least interesting to discuss.

The first example is Walter Benjamin’s lecture The Author as Producer, which he gave at the Institute of the Study of Fascism in Paris in 1934. Benjamin questions the role of the author and of the artist and maintains that they should not respond to the social and political shifts of that time from an observational point, but engage actively; a ‘tendency’ is not enough, one ‘must act on the side of the proletariat’. Benjamin was not very successful with his call. In history artists engaged politically, but not many of them gave up their individual artistic ideals in favour of committing their art to something that goes beyond art itself, and could be described, in the worst case, as exploitation. The limit has always been one’s own artistic practice; nothing goes beyond it. When reading the text, I always have the feeling that this could or should be applied to designers, because what Benjamin describes can be transformed very easily into a designer’s way of working – developing ideas and concepts, but with a certain functionality and not always as independently as an artist does.

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The second example is Viktor Papanek’s 1971 published book Design for the Real World: Human Ecology and Social Change. In this book – and every other lecture or text – he advocates against designs that just look nice, unsafe, showy or simply useless. He was also one of the first who took on ecological issues and tried to find solutions for an engaged design practice, somehow closely related to the Hochschule für Gestaltung in Ulm. Papanek was emphatic about the idea that the real purpose of the designer is to develop ‘designs’ for people who are in a dis-advanced position, such as the inhabitants of the so-called third world countries, who do not need (and cannot afford) a trendy designer radio, but who do urgently need just a functional radio. Consequently Papanek designed a radio that is made of old tins and runs on cow dung. He understood this as real design, and this differs very much from what we know from design magazines and exhibitions…

Do you think the designer has the responsibility, or at least the potential, to act political? A more modest and less radical example, yet one that is still described as political, is Droog. Can you explain the concept behind Droog and what you understand is political in their way of treating design? Personally, I believe their practice is less political and more based in aesthetics. It has little to do with Papanek’s understanding of design as political action.

JH: Before answering the question about politics, I would first like to express something else. You mentioned economics earlier, which I think plays a major role in the developing of new ideas. Design is strongly linked to a people’s economy, which ensures a stable progressive productivity and their prosperity. I have to admit that if we weren’t able to buy the things we wanted and had no money, there would be no progress in production. And no evolution either. Think of mobile phones or computers! Today

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we have so many things to buy and in addition we now know our natural resources are getting smaller by the day. This is the cost of over-production.

FV: But should not this be the role of the designer to act upon this situation and to take care of natural resources rather than just concentrate on producing something beautiful by all means? This is what I understand as the political responsibility of a designer…

JH: Some years ago cars were developed with minimal gas consumption, but they are starting to sell now. As people have to pay more for fuel due to shrinking resources, they are beginning to realize they’d better consider resource depletion.

I don’t think we will buy less, but at one point we will definitely think about what we really need, if we need it. We will think about aesthetics, materials and function in a different way. These will become even more important and the designer will have a higher responsibility, if he doesn’t already. Referring to the question you asked before, whether we design for the rich, I don’t think you can say ‘yes or no’. If there was no money to be spent we wouldn’t be able to have such a variety of designs and so high living standards. Personally I can get really caught-up in questioning this. To be honest, the economical issues are so terribly complex that I would even say a lot of ‘our design world’ is just “furniture music” in some parts of the world. But it is not.

I really like the social issue Papanek stresses, but it is not the duty of design to help the poor. I think it is the duty of society and especially of the politicians to act responsibly. There are so many countries in Africa or South America that are rich in natural resources, you wonder why one should send designers around to help. This cannot be ‘the solution’ for corrupt regimes. What is really needed is education and the creation of an independent political will for change in an appropriately democratic environment. It makes one dizzy to think of ‘us’ exploiting other countries to feed our consumption needs. Furthermore it is crazy

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to think that we are the ones who should send people in these countries rudimentary design as aid. We should do better than that!

Back to the design issue, what is very interesting is that you find the most creative designers among poorer people. They have to think of daily and practical solutions constantly! The potential for these everyday designs to prosper independently is something that I wish to see. Perhaps we could learn much more from them than they could ever from us.

FV: Yes, you are right. In addition I find it strange to say that the designer has the ability to help, which would give him a privileged role in society. This can easily end up sounding very arrogant, even condescending, as if the designer was colonizing and superimposing his vision on ‘the people’. I think it is a very problematic issue one has to be aware of. However, agreeing with Papanek, I do think that the designer has the potential to create solutions that can help and that design can actually have a role in structuring and improving living. The designer just has to be aware of the position he is occupying.

JH: An economy is driven by consumers themselves, it is a cycle in which the designer can interact by giving the society new material to perceive and meditate upon. The designer is not an artist, who wants to express a thought, he is producing a product which is intended for use. I don’t think a designer is as free as an artist. He will always be driven by necessities and restrictions; he usually has a client and most likely he works under contract towards a production deadline. All of this narrows his freedom of expression. Nevertheless, as it is mainly driven by innovation and using technology, design is always idealistic and it is intended for the user, so it’s a socialistic move. I don’t think design is self-seeking at all. Designing is self-fulfilling but it is not intentioned to be egoistic or useless.

Back to your question about design and politics, I think acting

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political and questioning politics is partially possible with design. For example some of the Droog designs make you think and elicit a response on the part of the public through the use of artistic language and by scrutinizing production. In a broad sense this is a political act because it questions the composition of the order of world industry. However, Droog is just making casual comments rather than being seriously political/rather than serious political discourse. Instead of creating just nice functional objects, they are provocatively addressing the consumer’s awareness.

FV: Looking closely at Droog, we can see that they are giving new ideas. But are they really political or radical at all?

JH: You might be right, in saying that their practice is mainly based in a formal layer: all of their designs are aesthetical and the Form is a way of expression. For a long time they just wanted to question design, their first show in Milan 1993 was entitled No comment, no price. Now they also use capitalism and commercialism. To be able to survive Droog is being commercial, they have their own little collection. So in the end I think that design will always be part of the economic cycle and although you might question it, its role hasn’t changed yet. Design is meant to be consumed and provides the market with consumer goods.

As an art theoretician and a modern Marxist, what do you think of Aesthetics? I’d like to know because I believe there is as a difference in design, not every design is intended to be aesthetical - some things just function - and as I see it, the ideal is that function and aesthetics come together. In art I do not believe that aesthetics are so important at all. How do art and design compare in this respect? Also, what do you think of the bond between design and economy as a consumer?

FV: The bond you mention exists and it is very strong. I do think that everything is linked to economics in our capitalist system, but that does not mean that there are

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no ways to act within capitalism using different rules. I am not at all opting for revolution; I just do not agree with capitalism and there are many ways that this could be addressed. Design might be one. It is true that everything is based on the commercial distribution of goods and monetary values, everything is connected to the market. But this doesn’t mean that it is impossible to oppose it.

And to answer your question about the role of aesthetics, I think that a potential for change lies in the aesthetics itself. I understand aesthetics not simply as form and surface, but as something that has the potential to be political. It is not only the case that Aesthetics can trigger political action, but the political is itself already inscribed in it. When I am talking about the political here, I am referring to Chantal Mouffe’s conception of this term. She observes that an ever-present possibility of conflict or antagonism is necessary for democracy. I strongly believe that all sensual and aesthetic manifestations, design being one of them, take part in this conflict. Design is able to question the predetermined set-up as well as establish something different, whatever that ‘different’ might be. Speaking very abstractly, that is what politics is about. I do not think that design, and this is certainly the case with art too, can or should be understood as something like Ersatz-politics, if you understand what I mean. However. design has the ability to raise questions and to act in a very positive way as a catalyst. Another example has just come to my mind, quite a different one from Papanek or the Benjamin case. I am referring to the scandal that took place during the ‘International Design Conference Aspen’ (IDCA) in 1970. The ‘French Group’, lead by Jean Baudrillard, was not at all d’accord with the agenda driven by its speakers and its head, Reyner Banham. The latter was aware of the relationships between design and environmental issues, but he somehow ignored the political or social dimension

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of his practice.

The French Group argued that designers, even if they are totally aware of environmental issues, do not understand the real problem, which they observe in the very conception of the theory of design. This theory establishes an utopia in order to support the capitalist system, which in turns needs this utopia as a second nature in order “to survive and to perpetuate itself under the pretext of nature”, as they would say. This might have been the most radical statement that someone delivered in reaction to design, because it questions the idea of design in its very roots, on its very basic level. I am not sure how their statement can be applied to a design practice or if it is even meant to be. They are not making any positive proposals on how a desired design practice could look like. Someone might argue that they are advocating for the abolition of design, but that just misses their point. Recently I have been to a conference on art and public space and one of the lecturers argued that design is more about appearance than about reality, which reminds me somehow of the argument at the IDCA. However, I think this is a very limited and small-minded idea of design. Design is far more complex to approach than through a simple division between appearance and reality. I was just imagining, how would a world without design look like? Is this actually possible or is our imagination simply based on or shaped by design? How would you – in one last sentence – picture a world without design?

JH: Design started when the first man grabbed a stone and used it as a tool, everything between then and today, the whole evolution and rise of culture and technology would not have been possible without it. Design is a proof of human intelligence and our existence.

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Giulio Cappellini interviewed by Riccardo Giacconi

Riccardo Giacconi: What was the relationship with art in your education and training years?

Giulio Cappellini: It was essential to me, and it still is. I studied Architecture at the Milan Politecnico, and in my first years at university I had the chance to work in Gio Ponti’s studio. Thanks to that experience, I realized that the boundaries between art, craft, design and culture are very thin, almost insubstantial in fact.

RG: What is your definition of furniture?

GC: I think furniture is the reflection of what we are. I believe that our homes should mirror us as we are, in our consistency and inconsistency, in our freedom in short. In recent years we have seen that the word freedom – in the sense of freedom of expression – is perhaps the one that best identifies the consumer, who no longer wants to be a victim of ready-made package deals and well-defined trends. This is critical because the notion and use of the home have been changing in recent years as never before; the functions of the rooms are changing and furniture is becoming more and more tailored to what we are. This happens regardless of whether the house is big, small or medium, be it inhabited by a young single man or woman or by a large family.

RG: Can you describe how the social function of furniture evolved through the twentieth century and explain what it is like now?

GC: In the past the diffusion of some kinds of furniture and certain types of product was limited to specific niche markets.

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Nowadays, thanks to companies such as Ikea, everybody’s house can be filled with beautiful objects. This serves to educate people and free them from those trends that are expressions of a single-minded culture. In the past buyers would furnish their homes in one style, following one trend. If they were well-off, they would choose design furniture and build a design home. If they could not spend much money, they just put together some pieces of furniture. Today the consumer is free: the quality of design is no longer defined by the economic value of the product. I think design has a powerful and social function. Together with art and culture, design leads us towards constant improvement, and in my view this is a very strong cultural enrichment: it allows you to live better.

RG: Domestic spaces have often influenced cultural production. Adorno said that chamber music was the cultural form of the bourgeoisie. Is there a cultural form of the domestic space today? And if so, what is it an expression of?

GC: We are currently experiencing a dramatic change. In the past domestic spaces and their roles were clearly defined; you would cook in the kitchen and sleep in the bedroom, whereas the living room was the place for having friends in and so on. What we see in the world today is what I call “new domestic nomadism”. There is a new ambiguity in the use of rooms: the kitchen is no longer just the place to cook but also where your children do their homework, where you do your computer work or receive friends. The living room has become the agora of the house, the place where the family gets together. It is no longer the respectable room that you open only when friends call in, today it is much more lived in. The bathroom has become the wellness room, no matter if it is a small two-by-one-meter room. By and large, greater emphasis is put on our wellness.

Better consideration is also devoted to the relationship between the inside and the outside. We might have a small terrace

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but we treat and take care of it as if it were a big garden. The distinctive elements are no longer linked to the presence of special situations, but to a general feeling that transpires from the home as a whole. There is greater public use of every space. Today we move more freely from the living room to the balcony and to the kitchen. We tend to open our homes up more, to have guest more often. This is a big change.

RG: Would you say there is a greater exhibition value in the domestic space?

GC: I’d say that the home has a value for ourselves. In the past it was more linked to the idea of exhibition. You would buy some design items in order to show them to visitors. It is no longer like that today, and I think that young people in particular tend to purchase design items because they like their designs. This way of thinking has always been quite popular in other countries, for example in Northern Europe, but it is quite a new attitude to Italy. People want to own an object not because it was designed by a great designer or produced by a large company or just fashionable. They want to have it to enjoy its presence in time, they take pleasure in this presence.

RG: So you think that the home is no longer just the place where you exhibit your social or cultural status. At the same time it has also become a more open place, and one that can be accessed in an easier way.

GC: Absolutely. Our homes contain our memories. They don’t have to be exhibition spaces for well-combined or valuable objects. In the home, we just have those objects that are important to our lives. Our home is where we lay ourselves bare, it’s the place that reflects our life and the highest expression of our personality.

RG: In 1917 Erik Satie wrote a series of compositions that he called ‘musique d’ameublement’, furniture music. He

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wanted this kind of music to remain in the background and not to draw attention. In fact he was being provocative and pointing to the multi-layered quality of culture. In addition to this, he was trying to show that the relationship to the work of art in the domestic space is a different one. Could you explain the role of sound in your notion of furniture design?

GC: I believe that sound and music are absolutely essential inside the house, namely that they are part of the expression of ourselves. Never was so much attention devoted to music and lighting. In different parts of the world, the relationship between the light inside the home and the light outdoors is totally different. For example, the white sun of Miami is very different from the sun in London. Sensory perceptions are really important. When I enter a house and hear music, I can discover a number of things about the people who live there. Another theme which is currently being developed is aromatherapy for the home, and a link is established between the music, light and the scent in a room. Although these sensations are immaterial and we might perceive them in a mostly indirect way, they affect our lives deeply.

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Sam Thorne

Rivane Neuenschwander’s means are sometimes living and often organic, small collections of items that are more like ingredients than self-sufficient materials. Shown internationally since the mid-1990s, the Brazilian artist’s considerable body of work concerns the rhythms of domesticity by taking account of the familiar, modest elements of everyday life – dust, spices, fruit, soap and water. While this work may face slow disintegration or sudden destruction, such outcomes are not necessarily wished for. Instead it requires a degree of care (on the behalf of both viewer and sheltering institution) in order for it to live.

Neuenschwander’s earlier work includes several iterations of the calendar as a regulating device that aims to coordinate continuous human lives with natural cycles. In Deadline Calendar (2002), for example, she compiled 12 months’ worth of expiry dates – small reminders snipped from food packaging – and ordered them on adhesive sheets to create a year-long calendar. This work was of course preceded by an extended period of shopping and saving – a practice of home economics. For some the work may hold echoes of Lygia Pape’s Livro do tempo (Book of time, 1960-61), in which a year was represented by 365 painted wood blocks, though Neuenschwander shows that it is not the days that ‘pass’ but innumerable organic things that die. The work characterizes the calendar structure as being defined by a daily exercise in small losses, not by an overarching continuity.

The diverse forms of Neuenschwander’s work are usually based upon linguistic, chronological and cartographic systems – iconic codes such as the world map or classificatory models like the alphabet that yield unexpected beauty when introduced to the dirt and surprise of life. This strategy calls to mind a line that is stitched along the upper border of Alighiero e Boetti’s 1972

House Work

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tapestry Mappa: mettere al mondo il mondo (‘to bring the world into the world’). Like Boetti, Neuenschwander returns to the standardized planimetric projection of the world, although rather than employing professional workers to chart shifting borders and governments, continental bodies are always represented by either paper or food. In Contingent (2008), a time-lapse film follows a single meal, as a world map – daubed in honey on blotting paper – is consumed by ants, the land masses becoming first emaciated then completely disconnected. Pitching a rational (and of course stubbornly Eurocentric) chart against an unpredictable system, Neuenschwander’s dynamic territories refer back to when terra incognita spaces – visual representations of what is not known1– had yet to disappear from maps, when the distinction between pictorial and cartographic representation was less certain, and when the mapping of new lands was motivated by trade.

Pangaea’s Diaries (2008), shown at the 2008 Carnegie International, is a microcosmic account of massive shift by way of single meal: a stop-motion projection of ants shuffling a beef carpaccio around a white oval plate reveals glimpses of a world map amidst the flux. The vertiginous compression through which a 250 million-year-old supercontinent is collapsed into a two-minute projection is matched by the title, which refers to both the vast land mass that preceded the separation of the continents and the three-month period that the work’s painstaking frame-by-frame production required. Time spent simply living – or perhaps just eating carpaccio at a restaurant – is casually placed alongside the rhythms of vast geological processes, as though the significances of both weren’t so far apart.

Embedded in social habits and cultural representation, particular sense memories are an important element of Neuenschwander’s work, from the black pepper-encrusted Still-life

1 - Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2006, p.163

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Calendar (2002) to the spices ordered into 26 Agnes Martin-like grids in Eatable Alphabet (2001). But what happens when specific associations are lost and meanings don’t migrate? As works circulate through biennials, related publications, private collections and online, they inevitably address different audiences and cities, calling into question not only art’s intelligibility but also its sensory impact. The connection between language and eating in Neuenschwander’s work has been well documented, but if her practice understands reading as a form of eating (and vice-versa),2 it is less engaged with the familiar discourse of cannibalism in Brazilian modernism than with transactions between different grammars and culinary traditions. Gastronomic Translations (2003), for example, tests how much is lost in transit and what is gained. A scrawled shopping list written in English but found in Frankfurt was sent to two chefs in São Paulo, each of whom created two very different meals comprising different dishes and influences. (One crossed-out scribble on the list left a characteristic space for improvisation.) A list addressed to oneself is found in another country, turned into an order on a distant continent and eaten in a different language; first intentions are forgotten and an unexpected feast is the result.

The kitchen is the place in which everyday transformations take place. As Akiko Busch notes in Geography of Home (2003), ‘In watercolours of 19th-century interiors we rarely see kitchens – whereas bedrooms, drawing rooms, and assorted salons are all amply illustrated.’ In those rare occasions that the kitchen was painted, ‘the room was recorded as a humble place of work rather than as one of pleasure.’ Cooking is now a public activity – something to be ‘performed’ by TV chefs – rather than a set of hidden duties. The popularity of what Busch calls ‘laborious rituals of food preparation’ has to do with a comforting sense

2 - Daniel Birnbaum, ‘Feast for the Eyes’, Artforum, May 2003 pp. 142-46

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of slowness. In her essay ‘Speech Acts’ (2000), Lisette Lagnado describes Neuenschwander’s work with a lovely phrase: ‘slowness improvised’ 3. In musical terms, improvisation typically refers to a system in which the technical problems of composition are dealt with during the actual performance, but how to improvise slowness, a system that doesn’t bend to impatient expectation? While there is little music of the traditional kind in Neuenschwander’s films – the closest is a samba rhythm assembled from dropped matchsticks in Ash Wednesday/Epilogue (2006), recorded by occasional collaborators Brazilian musicians, O Grivo – there are plenty of small sounds in her installations. Many of these water-based works function like simple chronometers, beating out time in small droplets that land in startlingly percussive aluminium basins (a recurrent formal element that, in a characteristic distillation of scale, are often titled ‘continents’). Chova Chuva (Rains the rain, 2002), shown at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha in Belo Horizonte, comprised 25 aluminium buckets strung above head-height and each pierced with a small hole at its base so that water dripped from one level to another over a four-hour period. Needing regular attention, like an old clock, this cycle in turn regulated the movement of the museum assistant charged with keeping Chova Chuva alive, with keeping the rain raining. As well as requiring the care of the sheltering structure of the institution, Neuenschwander charges viewers with a certain responsibility to the work and to each other. Visitors were welcome to take what they wanted from En desejo o seu desejo (I wish your wish, 2003) which comprised hundreds of coloured ribbons printed with dozens of people’s wishes, inserted into rows of holes drilled into several walls. As with a work such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Placebo – Landscape – for Roni) (1993), there is a possibility that the viewer will take everything that is offered; as with every freedom, there is also a corresponding responsibility.

3 - Lisette Lagnado, ‘Speech Acts’, Rivane Neuenschwander, London, Sao Paulo,

Dublin, 2000 p.52

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The implication of imprecise territorial boundaries – between the home and institution, rational labour and chaotic natural forces – governs much of Neuenschwander’s approach to the exhibition space. The punning English translation of O Trabalho dos dias (Days’ work, 1998), for example, posited a link between homely activity and artistic practice, as Neuenschwander gathered the dust and small food scraps from her London residence onto squares of adhesive tape, using them to plaster the walls and floors of two white cubicles at the 24th Sao Paulo Bienal. (Note that the English translation is ‘Days’ work’ rather than ‘Day’s work’; time itself is getting its hands dirty here, its toll on the body and the home being measured via the sum total of dust.) Over the course of the exhibition, the traces of the artist’s home gradually blended with the tiny remnants of the biennial crowds. In many of Neuenschwander’s works the gallery retains a minute record of every visit, each viewer making the tiniest of additions or subtractions. The floor-piece Walking in Circles (2000), for instance, comprising thin rings of stamped adhesive that darken with the footsteps of each new visitor, was brought into visibility over the course of the show. Neuenschwander orders daily occurrences into small signs of life, bringing carefully assembled environments into being by engaging small communities of helpers, participants and players. If endings are emphasized, it is only to make apparent the lives contained within the slow business of disappearance.

A version of this essay was first published in the April 2009 issue of frieze.

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Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed by Riccardo Giacconi

[Hans Ulrich Obrist’s office, London]

Riccardo Giacconi: Can we talk about The Kitchen Show?

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In the second half of the 80s, when I was a teenager – about sixteen or seventeen – I was looking at art encyclopaedically. I went to see exhibitions all over Europe and then at a certain moment I started to think, “What could I do in this world, what could be my contribution?” It was not so obvious, because I felt like everything had been done. I was not very interested in filling out some boxes which had already been invented, but I felt it would be important to come out with something new or different. When I was at school I went to Rome, I was eighteen or something, and Fischli & Weiss, whom I was friends with in Switzerland, said I should go and see Alighiero Boetti. So I went to see him, and that was a trigger. He said we should look out of the box, we should look at other possibilities because artists are always invited to do the same things: gallery shows, museum shows, public commissions, art fairs, biennials. It is a very limited typology, whereas artists have the desire to do many more things.

So I started thinking, “Maybe it would be interesting to find out what artists really have the desire to do.” In the aftermath of the 1987 crash, the beginning of the 90s was a very peculiar moment of economic downturn. Many artists started to say, “Why don’t we do something just very simple?” Like a new beginning, something which would almost be like a link to how one would do it in the 1960s, a very simple and self-organized beginning. And yet, obviously very different from the Sixties, because there were other networks and circuits, there was another kind of more

Another Form of Intimacy

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global communication in the late Eighties. I was thinking how I could connect to all that. Then, all of a sudden Fischli & Weiss and Christian Boltanski, who were my close artist friends, said, “Maybe you are looking too far; maybe the solution is in front of your door – a bit like in Edgar Allan Poe’s The purloined letter.” I realized I never used the kitchen, I never even made tea or coffee because I always ate out, so to me the kitchen was a place for books, a kind of library. So Fischli & Weiss had this idea that maybe it could be funny to render my kitchen a real kitchen, so that the exhibition would actually produce reality! [laughs] And Boltanski thought, “Maybe one could do a very hidden exhibit in the kitchen.” At the moment when art had more exposure, it was interesting to go underground, or maybe do something which was not so visible, and which would almost be like an intimate exhibition.

I welcomed both ideas, and I invited Boltanski to display a very hidden exhibit underneath my kitchen sink, where he installed a projection of a candle, visible only through the crack of the closed cupboard under the sink. It was a small miracle just where you usually have the garbage, a change of expectations. Above the sink was a big cupboard, where you usually keep food. There, Fischli & Weiss installed a sort of altar – a very everyday altar – using the food supply from a restaurant. So everything was too big, like five kilograms of noodles and five litres of ketchup. It was gigantic, a bit like when children have their shop and a real shop looks so huge to them. All of a sudden reality was for adults almost like it is for children. I think the only thing we ever opened was a chocolate cream dessert, but otherwise the rest of the work was kept intact as a ready-made, and then the exhibits returned to the artists, who kept them for many years in their basements until they started to rot in a sort of Dieter Roth way.

It was all very playful, because play has always been an important aspect of my exhibitions. And it was also self-organized; I have always believed in the idea that we should not wait until somebody asks us to do something, but if there is a desire, we just do it. And self-organize it. It was this idea of improvising, and just getting it done. Look at what Damien Hirst did with Freeze,

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he thought that something was missing and just did it. With exhibitions, if there is a desire and an urgency and then something is missing, that’s a great premise. Exhibition making is a sort of utopian dimension, but it is a very concrete utopia: more Yona Friedman than Ernst Bloch. Now, The Kitchen Show didn’t have many visitors, but it developed quite fast into a rumour, almost like in concentric circles. We had thirty visitors over three months, so it was really intimate: some days there were no visitors at all, some weekends maybe five visitors. But there was a visitor from the Cartier Foundation in France, curator Jean De Loisy. He was very excited about the show and gave me a grant to go to Paris and be the curator in residence at the Cartier Foundation. And that was really the possibility for me to leave Switzerland for a longer period of time because I had never had any money before, so I couldn’t really travel for longer than a day. I was just always travelling on night-trains through Europe. I had an InterRail ticket, which allowed you to travel for one month only, so I would never stay at a hotel, I would always go from one city to the next and spend the night on the train, and the next day make studio visits and look at exhibitions and go on the train again. Basically the Cartier Foundation changed my life. Somehow the connections with everything started there: it started with the Museé d’Art Moderne, and the dialogues with a lot of artists in town.

Ultimately we can say that The Kitchen Show was a catalyst, a trigger; it was where everything started. But I had been waiting for quite a long time, because I did not want to make a wrong beginning. I felt it was important to find something which was very much, in a subjective way, relating to me and which was somehow urgent and necessary. Finally, with the kitchen, it felt like it all came together. Then, from the kitchen we went to the St. Gallen monastery library, where we had an exhibition with Christian Boltanski in 1991. And then from there we felt like doing another house, and so we went from my kitchen into Friedrich Nietzsche’s bedroom in Sils Maria, where he developed Zarathustra. Gerhard Richter went very often to Sils Maria on holiday, like I did. I invited him to do an exhibit of his work related to Nietzsche. Nietzsche

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inspired Richter a lot at the beginning of his trajectory, when he was a student. And obviously he was very inspired by the mountains near Sils Maria. So Gerhard Richter did a very subtle intervention in the Nietzsche house, and from there everything went on.

RG: What is the status of the artwork in a domestic space? We can say that the function of the white cube is to create a vacuum around the work, to facilitate the creation of an aura. How does it work in a house? What are the ways in which an artwork can interact with the context?

HUO: First of all, the scale is very different. The work that is created by the artist is not just a work which could also be exhibited in a big museum. That’s why very often the works I exhibit when I do shows in such domestic contexts are specially created. We can say they are commissioned, made for that specific context. At the same time we can also say that there is a coexistence with other things which are worth looking at; contemporary art is not alone in these situations, whereas in a white cube setting contemporary art is on its own. If an exhibition happens in such a domestic context, particularly a museum like the Nietzsche house, or the Sir John Soane’s Museum, or the Casa Lorca in Spain, or the Casa Barragán in Mexico, the house has a reality of its own. We do not necessarily want to unpick the house and just throw everything out, instead it is about how, on the existing display, we can maybe add something, create a détournement, turn something around into a different meaning. It has to do with infiltration but also with contemporary art connecting to other contexts, I mean, in The Kitchen Show it is obviously the context of life, the blurring of art and life as Allan Kaprow said. There was Hans-Peter Feldmann, who explored the fridge. He had six eggs made out of marble and then feathers. At the same time we had Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, who developed a kitchen drawing with a rose and a cup of coffee. In the Nietzsche Haus there was a link to philosophy, so it was possible to make a

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bridge between the disciplines. That was really the startup, with Richter on one hand and Nietzsche on the other. When we went to Casa Barragán, in Mexico [The Air is Blue, 2002/2003], there was a lot about art and architecture, because the architecture of the house was very present, and at the same time you had Luis Barragán’s collection of Albers paintings. There were lots of objects which art could relate to. Then we went to the García Lorca house, in Granada [Everstill/siempretodavia, 2007/2008]: we had the link to literature. In this sense, these house exhibitions can be transdisciplinary endeavours, because they are not in the white cube setting, where art is isolated, but they create a new contact zone between art and the context the house stands for.

Very often the house is a museum for someone; it is the house of Federico García Lorca, or it is the house of Luis Barragán, or it is the house of Friedrich Nietzsche, so you have a dialogue with this deceased person, with the memory of the person who used to live there. And this is a dynamic memory, through the artist’s intervention the house starts to live again. In Barragán’s house, Rirkrit Tiravanija repaired Luis Barragán’s car, a beautiful Cadillac, so someday the car could drive again in the streets. Cerith Wyn Evans repaired the record players and made a remix of all the Barragán’s records – a very eclectic collection. Suddenly there was music again on those record players which had been broken for many years since Barragán’s death. The fact that these records played brought him back, it was almost as if the ghost of Barragán re-emerged. So it has also something to do with death, a house where nobody lives is dead.

Particularly in the house of somebody, which is a house museum, there are possibilities to bring life back through art. Adorno talks about the threshold between art and life; if you work in museums, one of the things which is very often being questioned is how you can actually create situations of art and life, and how the threshold can be altered or changed or removed. In a house museum you don’t have this threshold: it is a more intimate setting, and visitors may feel like being in someone’s house. That leads to a strange situation, there is obviously a sort of respect,

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but there is also a sense of being more free to talk. In museums there is not necessarily a conversation going on because one feels that it may not be appropriate to talk. Very often when there is a quite intense conversation in a museum, somebody will ask you to stop it because people want to be in silence. In an interesting way, a house museum is more like a conversation piece, and I have always felt it triggers real conversations between the visitors. This is something you can observe: have you been to the Sir John Soane’s Museum [in London]?

RG: Not yet.

HUO: The Sir John Soane’s Museum, this 19th Century house of the architect Sir John Soane, functions very much like a conversation piece. You enter the house, you sign the golden book, you sign the guest book, you have a chat with the guard who tells you that you can go anywhere. You move freely and you see a lot of conversations happening. That is why, at a certain moment, we decided to do a house exhibition in the Sir John Soane’s Museum with Cerith Wyn Evans in 2000 [Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow].

But before that, we did the Chambre 763 exhibition at the Carlton Palace Hotel in Paris. It was quite soon after The Kitchen Show and after the Nietzsche show, in 1993. By then, I had started to work with Kasper König on large-scale projects such as The Broken Mirror [Der zerbrochene Spiegel, Kunsthalle Wien and Vienna Festival, 1993]. I was also working with Suzanne Pagé at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. It was almost like learning the craft from two great masters, from whom I learned how museums work and what the concrete daily practice of a museum is. But I felt like, “OK, this is all great, and I want to do big things, but I shouldn’t lose the intimacy of my first exhibitions.” So that’s why then, as an answer, I developed the Carlton Palace Hotel exhibition. It was really an answer to The Broken Mirror, where basically we had 43 artists on thousands of square metres. I felt, “Maybe I should have even more artists, but on 10 square metres

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– a super-dense condition. What would happen if the experience of the kitchen exhibition was repeated on the same small scale but with many many artists, like a biennial or a documenta?”.

From that point of view you can see that there was not a masterplan. It was much more biological, organic. It sort of grew as a complex dynamic system, with many feedback loops, and I always reacted as if having antennas, trying to embrace chance and then trying to push it in a certain direction. The opportunity and the great experience of working on The Broken Mirror with Kasper really made the hotel exhibition possible, because – it was just an intuition, I couldn’t explain why – I felt a real sense of urgency to invite 70 artists to do something for my hotel room in Paris. At the beginning the hotel didn’t really know what I was doing, they just rented me a room and thought I had a strange profession, because numerous times per day artists came to my room and installed something. But they didn’t really have a clue. They probably thought it was a weird idea that a guest should decorate his hotel room but they let me do.

Ultimately, at a certain moment lots of visitors started to come, and the exhibition became a rumour in Paris: that was the difference from The Kitchen Show, which happened in St. Gallen, a tiny city in the East of Switzerland, where very few people came. Paris was a big centre with millions of people instead, so suddenly my strange exhibition became a gigantic rumour; it was on the radio and on the television, and people were queuing around the hotel to get in. It was very much self-organized and I maintained that very intimate kind of atmosphere. I was always in my hotel room and people arrived, so over the couple of weeks of the exhibition several thousands of people visited my show and I gave each and every one of them an individual guided tour. It was a way, after I arrived in Paris, to connect to the city.

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RG: How was the show installed? Were all the pieces together?

HUO: To me, working very close with artists has always been a curatorial premise. So I would not say, “This has to go here, this has to go there...”, there was not an a priori masterplan, but I would start somewhere and take it from there. Michelangelo Pistoletto was one of the first visitors in the hotel room and he was fascinated by the yellow colour of the room and by a column. So he chose the column. He was amused that our exhibition in Vienna was called The Broken Mirror (Pistoletto pioneered the way mirrors can be used in art) so he took the postcard of The Broken Mirror, literally broke it and developed a segno d’arte out of it. Then he covered the whole column, in an almost architectural way, with these newly-painted postcards. The rule of the game was that each artist would make a postcard. This was very much related to what Maurizio Nannucci had done with the Méla post card book, where he commissioned many artists to do a postcard. In a similar way we asked all the artists in the exhibition to do a postcard, and this postcard was an original artwork. So you can say that the exhibition was also the box of postcards which we published. Then it got disseminated, the visitors got the postcards and it became a very nice mobile element of developing and inventing other circuits.

Then, starting from this Pistoletto work, we decided to use the cupboard, the armadio. Armadio means “armory” in English and in 1913 there was the famous Armory Show, which was the breakthrough of Marcel Duchamp and many other avant-garde pioneers in New York. My hotel show was in 1993. It was the 80th birthday of The Armory Show, so we made an armory exhibition in the armadio of my hotel room, where we invited artists to work with clothes, like the Hohenbüchler sisters, or Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin.

Later, Fischli & Weiss came in. They decided to do a radio. It actually was an hour of radio recorded on a cassette, playing in loop. It was done in high summer but when the exhibition

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happened, it was September. So the radio would always say things like, “32 degrees in Paris. We have a heat wave at three o’clock in the afternoon.” Every day there was that summer heat wave, and the more we went into October (and it became chilly and people were covering themselves from cold) the funnier it became that the radio still announced the heat wave. Some visitors noticed, but others just got confused. Sometimes the radio said it was 3 o’clock and people were running out of the hotel room because they thought they were going to miss their appointments. It was a beautiful piece about time.

Then, Andreas Slominski sent me instructions and Annette Messager covered the bed with a mosquito net. She had hung some strange animals out of the net, so I started to sleep in this strange bed with all these dead animals. There was something very spooky about all this because sleeping in this room felt like sleeping in a museum. Then there was German sculptor Reiner Ruthenbeck, who wanted to have a very heavy piece of wood with round-shaped edges. It was placed in another room downstairs, so visitors could get the key and go to this other hotel room to see the work. It was a very big sculpture in the middle of the bed and it felt like a heavy object lying on your belly at night, almost like a nightmare.

RG: Let’s talk about the narrative aspect of house exhibitions. When a house becomes a museum, in a way it embraces the goal of telling a story. When art enters this situation, how does it deal with this narrative function?

HUO: There is necessarily some form of narration between different rooms in a house, a story evolves there. But what is so interesting about the Sir John Soane’s Museum, which is something I tried to re-constitute in each of my house-museum exhibitions, is the idea that many different narratives are possible. You are not pinning down the viewer on one narrative which you tell him, which I think is very prescriptive and narrowing up. It’s much more a non-linear promenade. Particularly when you go

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to the Soane’s Museum, you see that there is never a pre-given route, two visits are never the same, there is an infinity of possible routes.

I would say there is a narrative but I think that, to some extent, it is the viewer who creates it. It is a very participatory model, but not in an explicit way. As Giancarlo De Carlo always said, participation can become very patronizing: it might have made more sense in the Sixties, but maybe it has become something which is very often instrumentalized. For this reason, an explicit participation where you basically tell the viewer, “Take this DVD and do this,” is probably less interesting than an implicit participation. I think it has a lot to do with interior complexity, and that leads us also to Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau. The politics of my house museum exhibitions have also to do with the politics of museology. In the 90s there was very much this idea of the museum becoming an exterior sign, an iconic presence in the city attracting visitors. I believe that in our time it is very important that we start to think about interior complexity again, as in Schwitters’ Merzbau or in the Soane’s Museum. I care less about how it looks from the outside, but I care about what happens inside. That’s what also the hotel exhibition was about. Visitors could spend hours in the hotel room, just navigating through the different exhibits. I would give them a little bit of explanation but then they would travel on their own. From that point of view it is related to experimental novels, where you do not have a linearity of the narrative situation.

[some days later, in a cab]

RG: I finally saw the Sir John Soane’s Museum. Can you tell me about the exhibition you did there [Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow, 2000]?

HUO: It was a very peculiar story. As it often goes with these house museums, they do not really do advertising, they are rumours, just people telling each other about them. It is almost

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like storytelling. The Soane’s Museum has always been a museum which friends tell friends about, like “You should go and see”. It happened to many people, and it also happened to me because one day Cerith Wyn Evans, an artist I had worked with on several shows before, said, “There is a place you should know.” And he just took me there. It was an incredible encounter, I immediately felt I did not want to leave. I thought, “I would like to live in this house.” We spent many hours in the house, then I suggested, “Let’s go and see the director, and tell her we want to do a show here.”

That’s something which happened a lot – with my airplane exhibitions [museum in progress, 1993/94], with the Soane’s house, with the Barragán house – I was not actually asked to do exhibitions there, because these are not contexts where you usually have contemporary art shows, so I just went there and convinced them. Margaret Richardson, the director, was a wonderful woman, very open, but she had no clue who we were. So we had to convince her from scratch, that’s why it felt a bit like a miracle to us that for the first time contemporary art could happen in the Sir John Soane’s house.

They had a guest room on the top floor. It is a fundraising office now, which shows the change of the spirit of the time. Anyway, it was a room for scholars but there weren’t many Soane scholars from abroad who used that room, so I almost lived there for a year. I spent many nights there and it was always very interesting to come back late at night, with the night guards. It was a very spooky situation to go through the museum, which was completely dark and completely empty, to my small room on the top floor.

I became so close to the museum that I slept there, I spent many months there, while somehow the exhibition grew. The artists always came on Mondays when the museum was closed, so they could have the house for themselves, almost like their laboratory or their studio. I was also working in Paris at that time, so I was not always using the guest room. Very often artists, also from abroad, spent some time there when I was not using it. I remember for example architect Jacques Herzog always wanted to

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spend the night in the Soane’s Museum. At the time when he was doing Tate Modern, he spent a night there and he decided what he would do for the show.

Layer by layer, the project grew. Douglas Gordon did the title “Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow”, which obviously had a link to the memory of the place but also had an interesting link to This is tomorrow [Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956]. That leads us to Richard Hamilton, one of the great pioneers in the exhibition, who developed a poster. Cerith Wyn Evans conceived the leaflet. All the structural elements of the exhibition, the title, the poster, the little publication, were done by artists. Then, Steve McQueen did a piece that was a sculpture but also the soundtrack to the show. So they were all structural elements and artworks at the same time.

RG: So one could say that the artwork was the whole occasion, the whole situation.

HUO: Yes, one can say that. To some extent the artwork was like a Gesamtkunstwerk. I mean, the Soane’s Museum is a Gesamtkunstwerk anyway, because all the elements in it form a holistic whole. There are many fragments as parts of this whole, and because it is so complex, you can always have a different parcours. It is the opposite of a ski-slope museum, where you have the difficult slope and the easy slope in different colours, with audio-guides and more. This takes away the complexity and non-linearity of the museum experience.

RG: There are artworks that can only work in these house museum contexts, and which would be difficult to transfer in a ‘white cube’ situation.

HUO: It’s a good point. As I see it, not only wouldn’t these artworks necessarily work in the white cube – maybe they would or maybe they wouldn’t. They would simply not happen in a white cube. House museums or even apartments trigger artworks which

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otherwise would not exist. The shift of scale is crucial. If you look at art history, sometimes important artworks are very tiny or gigantic. Maybe the biggest satisfaction and the biggest joy in doing these house exhibitions is that I know that these artworks would not have existed without these exhibitions. They produce something which, in the vocabulary of the artists, is very different from what they would usually do. So it has also to do with the unexpected. This does not mean the white cube is not necessary. It is, but it is surrounded by other possibilities worth exploring.

RG: How do these exhibitions relate to the people who used to live in these houses?

HUO: The people who used to live there are mostly dead. So, in the case of Soane, in the case of Barragán or in the case of Lorca, these house museums are celebrating a protagonist who used to live there. This person charged the house enormously with memory and energy and then died. Obviously it has also something to do with bringing these people back. For example this happened in the Barragán house, when Cerith Wyn Evans fixed the record players Barragán had in all the rooms of his house, and that led to a very unusual kind of resuscitation of his spirit. That is very peculiar because these are basically houses of the dead, where there is something about raising the dead, or at least making them active again. A similar thing happened also in the Lorca house, where Enrique Morente specially composed a flamenco music and played it in the Lorca kitchen, where suddenly there was this sound.

Reinserting new life: that’s maybe how one could phrase it. It is obviously a very different scenario when you have a place where somebody still lives. When I did my exhibitions in the kitchen and in the hotel room, I used to live there, those were my living environments. Then it has to do with something more intimate, and in this sense the visitor needs the person who lives there. When you visit a house museum, no matter if the person lives there or not, the threshold is somehow not so much there

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because you just visit somebody’s house, and your experience of the works is a very different one. In order to produce a variety of experiences, I have always thought it could be very interesting to inject these small conditions into larger conditions, like an oxymoron, to have tiny museums in big museums, where a museum can hide another museum.

[thirty minutes later, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s office]

RG: Is there a house museum where you would like to work?

HUO: An unrealized house exhibition! Yes, there is always the next house. For me it is an ongoing series: it went from the Soane’s house, a very encyclopaedic house, to the Barragán house, where we explored the relationship between art and architecture. It then went to Granada, to the García Lorca house, where we explored the relationship between art and literature. I think in the next house we will have to do something with science. I am very interested in the Darwin house right now, even if I am not sure if it is going to be possible. However, I definitely think it could be interesting to explore the relationship between art and science in a scientist’s house. And obviously the house and the garden of Darwin are places of experiment. I would say this is my big unrealized project.

RG: House exhibitions can easily connect to different fields of knowledge.

HUO: Yes. I have been thinking for a long time how I could channel my intention to do an exhibition or a bigger project on art and literature. I haven’t really found my way around it because I thought that doing a big exhibition about it in a museum or in a gallery could end up being very illustrative. It would somehow illustrate the proposal, and that might be wrong. For this reason I have come to the conclusion that in a house, like the Lorca house,

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you can do it in a very playful way, it doesn’t have the heavy hand of a big theme exhibition. From that point of view, it proves to be the most interesting way forward.

RG: It is a parallel reality, a parallel track for contemporary art.

HUO: It is a parallel reality, and it has a lot to do with the fact that, when you are curating a show in a house as the Lorca house, all the artworks have something to do with literature but in a very subtle way, in an almost poetic way. It is beautiful that many things are implicit when you have a house of a poet or a scientist or an architect, and you don’t have to make them explicit. Alexander Dorner said that we should look at what happens in all disciplines if we want to understand the forces which are effective in visual art. This is something that is true for all the projects, but particularly in a context like house museums, where art and life are so much together. There, it seems to be something which just casually can fall in place. When Enrique Vila-Matas and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster met, or when Gilbert & George met Enrique Morente, it did not have anything to do with an artificial conference in a lecture hall where you bring a novelist together with an artist. It just happened they sat together in Lorca’s kitchen, and that is quite unbeatable, because it creates something which is very... how should I say?

RG: Familiar?

HUO: It is another form of intimacy.

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Massimo De Nardo

The two foresti enter the apartment, wearing white earphones, holding iPods. For the moment they move around gesticulating like deaf-mutes. The apartment is completely empty. Except for a small wicker armchair. They haven’t seen it yet. Everything will have to be whitewashed. Someone will have to scrub the dull patchy-marble floorings, the tiny lozenged tiles of the parquetry. A Sixties house. Hollow-core panel doors and rancid-white wooden frames. All the shutters are rolled up, the daylight is sufficient. It is sunny.

They stop in the hallway. They look around. The dust outline of a mirror on the wall, a stump of electric wire sticking out.

I don’t know, she says out loud, talking over the volume of her earphones. I don’t know what to put here. What do you think?

We’ll see, he answers silently, circling his finger in the air to mean, afterwards.

The two of them walk down the small hallway and the tiny corridor. Then they enter the kitchen. Breakfast nook and kitchenette. They inspect the room with care, repeatedly gazing upwards, downwards, aside. There is a greasy film on the white glossy kitchenette tiles. It is not so evident as a blotch on the wall would be, but they know it is fat from pans boiled dry.

He V-shapes his fingers at her to mean two, that’s the second track of the “Composers” playlist flashing ready on their iPod displays. A nod, and they both press play on their iPods. They listen for almost a minute. Yes, they agree. The kitchen will become like this, like the second mp3 track suggests. In the kitchenette there is a glass door leading to a balcony. It overlooks a yard, some trees and three red buildings with white window frames. From time to time, small balconies with round bracket-shaped railings jut out. The train station is in the close vicinity, the Canal Grande just a bit further away.

Musique d’Ameublement for Everyone

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The inspection continues. The two look for the bathroom. Pink tiles all the way up to the ceiling. The window panes are opaque, privacy in a block of flats. They will leave the bathroom fittings the way they are. Just a little disinfection scrub, it takes a bit of “elbow grease” to dress hygiene properly. The bathtub is too close to the sink, to the bidet and to the toilet, which are all lined up as if that was the routine sequence of personal cleaning. It doesn’t take much to fill the space here. She goes 5 with her hand and then runs her fingers through her hair, like a comb. Five. They listen to track number five for some seconds.

No, he says waving his forefinger, number four is better (he shows four fingers). But she frowns, and he nods, OK. After all they don’t need so much to and fro as you have in track number four.

They enter a room; it is the biggest one. Someone has left a small wicker armchair, who knows why. On a wall there is the shadow of a bookshelf, a skeleton of horizontal and vertical axes printed on the plaster. Time bequeaths us mould, dirt, grease, void rather than years. The choice must be reflected upon, most of the day is going to be spent here: it is a living room-cum-study. Therefore, partly work, partly leisure, partly friends. One could choose number seven or nine; eleven would not be so bad either.

Let’s try them, she says. She’s whispering this time. The iPod displays are off, but it just takes a light touch of their fingertips to light them up again. They would like to have a seat, but the armchair pillow has more stains than daisies on it.

The room resonates with long bell tolls. Then the bell stops tolling. It has already delivered a message that they do not know. They listen to their mp3 music. They are undecided. They will decide.

They are in the bedroom now, at least that’s where they think they are going to set up their sleeping area. Their choice selection of Mp3 tracks ranges from 15 to 19. It’s because of the titles: “Nocturnes”. Optionally, from I to V. The nocturnes last fourteen minutes. They may use them in turns, some time one track, some time the other, depending on the kind of notte, or nottata.

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After three months, they open their apartment by inviting two friends. A little party: intimate, sober, minimal. They get in and give the guests two iPods right away. Then they tour the flat together: it is clean and completely empty. The wicker armchair is still standing in the same place, but it has another pillow, a completely red one. With her fingers, she indicates the number of the mp3 track to listen to. After each listening, the two friends say something like: congratulations, a beautiful flat, that piece of furniture is really gorgeous, the rooms are well furnished.

Everybody is satisfied. The girl friend asks: who advised you on furniture? An architect? A designer? He and she answer, almost synchronously: Satie, Erik Satie.

The last mp3 they listen to is titled Musique d’ameublement, from 1920. Still new, no dust, no marks on the walls.

The two friends nod. When they renovate their house, they will probably listen to Erik Satie too, like everyone else.*

* “I call myself Erik Satie, like everyone else” (Erik Satie)

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Blauer Hase is an art collective formed in 2007 by Mario Ciaramitaro, Riccardo Giacconi, Giulia Marzin, Daniele Zoico. Based in Venice, Blauer Hase investigates and proposes new experimental forms of art production and use. Blauer Hase’s research and work is to be considered as basically collective: it transcends individual practice through constant discussion and cooperation among the group members. The first exhibition produced by Blauer Hase was Hic sunt Leones (December 2007), including various art interventions in an antique Venetian palace, Ca’ Corniani degli Algarotti. For the year of their residency at Fondazione Bevilacqua-La Masa, Blauer Hase presents the project Rodeo. Inspired by the movie The five obstructions by Lars Von Trier and Jørgen Leth, Rodeo is an investigation on the nature of the exhibition, conducted by pushing to the extreme some of its variables. Each month, in collaboration with artists, curators and authors, an event is produced, which has to respond to a series of rules and obstructions.

Nicola Bernardini was born in Roma in 1956 and studied composition with Thomas McGah and John Bavicchi at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. He has composed several works for traditional, electroacoustic and computer instruments. As an interpreter and technical assistant, Nicola Bernardini has contributed to the production of several works by composers and ensembles such as: Giorgio Battistelli, Luciano Berio, Aldo Clementi, Alvin Curran, Adriano Guarnieri, Kronos Quartet, Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV), Rova Saxophone Quartet, Fausto Razzi, Salvatore Sciarrino, Marco Stroppa, etc. His collaborations include works with artist Pietro Consagra and theatre director Richard Foreman. Nicola Bernardini teaches electronic music at the “C. Pollini” Conservatory of Padova. In the same Conservatory he has coordinated the experimental school for Sound Engineering from 2001 to 2005.

Solène Bertrand lives and works in France. She got a Phd in Literature and is a specialist of medieval modernity and its contemporary rewrites. She is interested in the expression of Middle Ages in contemporary art

Biographies

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(J. Fabre, W. Delvoye). She also holds a master of Cultural Engineering and organizes events and exhibitions of contemporary art. She is a member of Maelstrom (Le Havre), and writes about art and critics.

Stefano Boeri (www.stefanoboeri.net) was born in 1956 and studied architecture in Milan. Since september 2007, Stefano Boeri is the editor in chief of the international magazine Abitare (www.abitare.it). In the recent past (2004-2007), he has been editor in chief of the Domus international magazine. He teaches urban design at the Milan Polytechnic, at Harvard GSD and has been visiting professor at the Berlage Institute in Amsterdam. In 1989 he received his PhD from the IUAV, in Venice. His Milan-based Boeri Studio is active in urban design and architecture. He is the founder of the international research network “Multiplicity” (www.multiplicity.it) His work has focused on the transformation of European urban areas and the forms in which different disciplines observe and represent the contemporary city.He has organized several interdisciplinary exhibitions and coordinated various research projects, among which the Uncertain States of Europe (USE) and Border Device(s). Curator of many exhibits throughout the world and of volumes such as Mutations, with Obrist and Koolhaas, he has designed installations reflecting the new urban status quo for the Paris IFA, the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale.

Francesca Cappelletti was born in Rome in 1964. She took a degree in Art History at University La Sapienza in Rome, with Maurizio Calvesi in 1987. She got her PhD at the Warburg Institute in London and at College de France in Paris. She is Associate Professor of European Countries’ History of Art at Ferrara University and devotes herself to studying 17th century Italian collecting. She published a book about the Mattei collection in Rome and several articles about its scattering, which contributed the retrieval of Caravaggio’s painting La cattura di Cristo. She also contributed to the constitution and ordering of Doria Pamphili Gallery in Rome. She studied the presence of foreign artists in Italy during 17th century, with particular focus to the Caravaggio school, Flemish painters and German painter Danil Seiter. She wrote many essays and curated an international convention about the birth of landscape painting. She contributed to many catalogues and participated to scientific committees of exhibitions such as The Genius of

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Rome (London 2001); Caravaggio e i Giustiniani (Berlin and Roma 2001); Dipinti Fiamminghi e Olandesi della Galleria Doria Pamphili (Genova 1996). Since 2007 she is co-director of Ermitage Italia.

Giulio Cappellini was born in Milan in 1954. In 1979 he graduated in Architecture and afterwards he attended the School of Management at Bocconi University in Milan. In 1979 he joined the Cappellini Spa, first as head of communication and then as head of management. Giulio Cappellini personally supervises the company’s brand image and products, both as art director and, sometimes, as designer. Many Cappellini products are exhibited in permanent collections of the most important contemporary art museums all over the world. “Time” magazine has recently nominated him among the ten most influential fashion and design trend setters in the world. He organizes design exhibitions and events, and is visiting professor in many architecture and design faculties all over the world. The France Government has recently awarded him with a prize for his commitment to spreading “good design” in the world.

Massimo De Nardo, copywriter. He teaches Communication and Storytelling in high schools. His short stories and theatre plays are published by many online and printed magazines. His play Classe Novecento won the national prize “Oreste Calabresi” in 2008. In 2006 he published Se dici parole, 16 parole (omografi), with Milano Editore (Cappelli Group Bologna), a work included within the Guida di italiano per la quinta elementare. In 2000-2008 was director of Segnal’etica, an online magazine about communication and languages, and Calibro Zeroquindici, a mini online publishing house for under 15s. He writes on his personal website www.massimodenardo.it.

Gillo Dorfles was born in Trieste in 1910. He got a degree in Medicine and a specialisation in Psychiatry. He is philosopher, pianist, painter. In 1948 he founded the MAC (Movimento Arte Concreta) together with Monnet, Soldati and Munari.). Since 1960 he worked as professor of Aesthetics in Milan and then in Cagliari and Trieste. He has been visiting professor in many American and South-American Universities. Among the many ad-honorem degrees he got around the world, it is significant to outline the two most recent ones in Industrial Design at

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the Politecnico di Milano (2002) and at the Mexico City Independent University (2004). Dorfles’ bibliography is huge, due to his multi-disciplinary interests. The “Mario Botta Archivio del Moderno” at the Mendrisio Architecture Academy has recently classified more than 2.500 of his texts until 2000. Among them, are 150 books issued in Italy and abroad. His books have been translated in several languages. Since 1970 he writes for Corriere della Sera.

Martino Gamper was born and spent his childhood in Merano (Italy). After an apprenticeship in cabinet making he studied sculpture and product-design at the University of Applied Art and the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna, in 1996 he moved to Milan working as a freelancer for international renown design studios. In 1998 he moved to London to start a master at the RCA where he then graduated from in 2000. He consequently started his own practice, where he develops and produces a wide range of objects from limited edition to semi-industrial products and site-specific installations. His work has been exhibited in various exhibitions from the V&A, Design Museum, Sotheby’s, Nilufar Gallery, Oxo Tower, Kulturhuset/Stockholm, MAK/Vienna, National Gallery /Oslo, Mudam Luxembourg, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Centre Geneva, Somerset House London, and various other Galleries.

Joa Herrenknecht is product designer. She has worked for Patricia Urquiola in Milan and is now designing freelance for different companies, while graduating from the University of Arts and Design. She is currently living and working in Karlsruhe.

Jan Hoet was born in Belgium in 1936. His international breakthrough was largely due to his 1986 exhibition “Chambres d’Amis”, – a project for which he succeeded in persuading seventy inhabitants of Ghent to place their private living space at the disposal of an art installation, thus removing the divide between art and everyday life for a few weeks. Since then, Jan Hoet has curated important exhibitions all over the world. S. M. A. K. (Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst), which Jan Hoet built up in Ghent, is one of Europe’s best-known museums of contemporary art. Hoet’s services to art led to him being appointed head of the world-famous documenta IX in Kassel in 1992. From 2001 to 2008, Jan Hoet was director of MARTa Herford, Germany.

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Alessandra Landi was born in Cento, Italy, in 1983. In 2007 she got a degree in Literature and Philosophy at the University of Ferrara with Professors F. Cappelletti and E. Filippi, with a graduation thesis on Albrecht Dürer’s letters from Italy. In 2007-2008 she worked with Agenzia04 contemporary art gallery, and MAMbo, Bologna. At present she is attending the postgraduate course in Visual Arts at IUAV University in Venice.

Cornelia Lauf is a curator and writer based in Rome. She teaches at the IUAV, Venice, is the editor of Three Star Books, Paris, and is an author of many publications.

Eva Marisaldi is an artist born in 1966. She lives and works in Bologna.

Hans Ulrich Obrist was born in Zurich in May 1968. He joined the Serpentine Gallery as Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects in April 2006. Prior to this he was Curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris since 2000, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vienna, from 1993-2000. He has curated and co-curated over 200 solo and group exhibitions internationally since 1991, including: Take Me, I’m Yours; do it; Manifesta 1; Cities on the Move; Live/Life; Nuit Blanche; 1st Berlin Biennale; Utopia Station; 2nd Guangzhou Triennale; Dakar Biennale; 1st & 2nd Moscow Biennale; Uncertain States of America, Lyon Biennale; and Yokohama Triennale. In 2007, Hans Ulrich Obrist co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philippe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival. In the same year, the Van Alen Institute awarded him the New York Prize Senior Fellowship for 2007-2008. In 2008 he curated Everstill at the Lorca House in Granada, Indian Highway at the Serpentine Gallery, and was the curator for Artpace residencies in Texas.

The Raqs Media Collective (Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula & Shuddhabrata Sengupta) has been variously described as artists, media practitioners, curators, researchers, editors and catalysts of cultural processes. Their work, which has been exhibited widely in major international spaces and events, locates them squarely along the intersections of contemporary art, historical enquiry, philosophical speculation, research and theory - often taking the form of installations,

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online and offline media objects, performances and encounters. They live and work in Delhi, based at Sarai, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, an initiative they co-founded in 2000. They are members of the editorial collective of the Sarai Reader series, and have curated “The Rest of Now” and co-curated “Scenarios” for Manifesta 7.

Sam Thorne is a writer and critic based in London.

Felix Vogel is curator and theoretician. His research and curatorial practice is focused on the relations between aesthetics and the social sphere. Consequently, he is interested in areas linked to activism, gender, historical avant-gardes as well as participative architecture. Recently, he was appointed curator for the forthcoming Bucharest Biennale in 2010. He is currently living and working in Karlsruhe, Madrid and Bucharest.

Daniela Zangrando is a curator. She lives and works between Milan and Cadore.

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A special thanks goes to Enrica Serafini, Danila Domizi, Alessandra Landi, Andrea Morbio for their kind support during both the conceptual and production phase of this project.

Blauer Hase would like to thank also:Mara Ambrožic, Stefano Coletto, Michela Lupieri, Nancy Matthews, Marco Peruzzo, Mariana Pickering, Claudia Maria Spampinato, Nataša Vasiljevic, Angela Vettese.

Thanks also to Senato degli Studenti IUAV for the financial support.

Acknowledgements