When forms become fashion?
On Wednesday May 29, the opening cocktail of ‘When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013’ exhibition was held at Fondazione Prada’s Ca’ Corner della Regina in Venice, at the presence of Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli. The exhibition — curated by Germano Celant in dialogue with Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaas — is open to the public from June 1 to November 3. During the event, artist Walter De Maria reenacted his famous artwork “Art by Telephone” (1967), by calling the phone exhibited in the show. Miuccia Prada was the first person to answer.
To present, today, an exhibition from 1969 just as it was, maintaining its original visual and formal relations and links between the works, has posed a series of questions on the complexity and very meaning of the project, which has developed through a profound debate from various perspectives: the artistic, the architectural and the curatorial. Underlining and highlighting the transition from the past to the present, the complex identity of which it is important to conserve, it has been decided to graft the exhibition in its totality—walls, floors, installations and art objects, including their relative positions—onto the historical architectural and environmental structure of Ca’ Corner della Regina, thereby inserting—on a full-size scale—the modern rooms of the Kunsthalle, delimited by white wall surfaces, into the ancient frescoed and decorated halls of the Venetian palazzo.
It is, in fact, an exercise in “double occupancy”: in the same way that the spaces of the Kunsthalle were occupied by a generation of young revolutionary artists in 1969, taking the same approach, the richly decorated spaces of Ca’ Corner della Regina are in turn being invaded by the Kunsthalle’s twentieth-century rooms. The result is a literal and radical superposition of spaces that produces new and unexpected relationships: between the artworks themselves and between the artworks and the space they occupy.
The act of transferring the exhibition in its entirety, made up of the interlacement of rooms and plastic and visual ensembles, creates an estrangement. It is a way of transforming “When Attitudes Become Form” into a readymade, or an archeological object that is restored by putting together its different fragments. The new vision results from the dislocation and display in Venice, which provide further interpretation and additional meanings related not only to the history, but to our present time as well.
