Paola Pivi: Fondazione Nicola Trussardi.
Verzotti, Giorgio
The Fondazione Nicola Trussardi in Milan has no fixed premises and
is always changing locations for its exhibitions. For Paola Pivi's
exhibition "My Religion Is Kindness. Thank You, See You in the
Future," curator Massimiliano Gioni chose the old, unused warehouse
of the Porta Genova train station, a regional hub in a working-class
neighborhood. The space is structured like a long corridor, divided into
three sections. In the first section, Pivi exhibited Interesting, 2006,
a series of live animals, all of them white: two gigantic metal aviaries
contained, respectively, a solitary white peacock and a snowy owl, while
three white fish swam inside two aquariums. This section led directly
into a sort of anteroom, where fifty more animals, again all white,
freely inhabited the space, among them swans and geese, hens and doves,
puppies, ponies, and goats, a sheep with its lamb, and a cow. At the
opening, a trainer held a docile horse on a leash while a llama stood
enigmatically, motionless, observing its public. Crowds and noises can
frighten animals, so visitors often passed through in silence, lending
the place an unreal atmosphere--even at the opening, attended by more
than one thousand people. Pivi had already created something along these
lines last summer at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris, where pairs
of white animals inhabited the space just for the opening, thereafter
being replaced by two large photographs, including one depicting Florida
crocodiles completely covered in whipped cream. Here in Milan the
animals were present for the duration of the exhibition.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
At the far end of the same space, visitors encountered Untitled
(Airplane), 1999, a large military craft that Pivi also exhibited at the
1999 Venice Biennale. The warplane was upside down, conveying the idea
of lightness despite its massive structure, but also signifying a
negation of its function: No to war. The next work, Guitar Guitar,
2001/2006, was an installation originally created for the Sonsbeek 9
exhibition in Holland. The artist had asked shopkeepers in that small
city to lend pairs of objects, and from these she composed a sort of
self-portrait of the place through its merchandise. In Milan the
operation was repeated on a much larger scale, conveying a portrait of
the city as vast as it was claustrophobic and anxiety-provoking. The
great quantity of collected objects, here, too, in identical pairs,
occupied the entire space of the remaining building, with only a narrow
passage left for visitors. There were cars and tractors, lamps (which
provided illumination), furniture (befitting the design capital of
Italy), and a variety of household appliances--an enormous quantity of
objects of every size, many with high formal value, many in the worst
possible taste. The result was disorienting. In contrast to the Edenic
space with white animals, the "noise" of the pile of objects
was, metaphorically, deafening--their bulk suffocating and their
presence rendered disquieting through duplication. Guitar Guitar
introduces the idea of musical rhythm, which the double objects induce
visually. Immersed in the universe of duplicate commodities echoing, if
anything, the rhythm of mass production, of the Fordist assembly line,
what came to mind was the demonic music of the instruments in Hieronymus
Bosch's Hell, as opposed to his harmonious Garden of Earthly
Delights. Our infernal reality is as cacophonous and raucous (too many
forms, too many colors, too much material) as the paradise of animals is
silent, peaceful, and unattainable. Thus, by negation, Pivi succeeded in
making us "hear" what the word utopia means.
--Giorgio Verzotti
Translated from Italian by Marguerite Shore.
