For those who had the opportunity to be in Rome during the last week-end of May 2010 it is impossible to forget the euphoria of a city which finally felt contemporary. Three events took place. The first was the triumphal, polemical and high security inauguration of the MAXXI, the monumental National Museum of 21st Century Art designed by Zahar Hadid in the suburb Flaminio, consisting of a much awaited and discussed twenty-seven thousand square metres of art and architecture (the announcement of a less resounding national centre for contemporary art was made in 1998). The second was the crowded preview of the expansion of the spaces of the Macro, the council Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, founded in 1999 following a restoration of the Peroni factory based upon the project of the French architect Odile Decq. And finally, the less chaotic yet equally significant third edition of the Rome-based fair – The Road to Contemporary Art – hosted by the Macro in Testaccio after various unsuccessful and deluded attempts to use buildings and monuments in the historical centre (these museums and fair are worth following more closely). Within the space of a week these three events, each with a different orientation and international significance, seemed to have stimulated the re-awakening of a city which had long given way to a politics without imagination. With its sudden opening onto the future or at least the present in art at the beginning of this decade, the Italian capital became the centre of media attention. However, if we look at this moment more closely, rather than representing a beginning it can actually be seen as an the epilogue of a process undertaken in Italy at the end of the last century.
Whilst recognising the value of various pioneering ventures, which, as such, have already exhausted their innovative potential and in the best cases have been transformed into museums – for example, in the case of the revival of the historical legacy of the Museum of Modern Art by Mambo in 2007 – it is in fact from the end of the 1980s and ’90s that the contemporary art system in Italy, traditionally supported by private galleries and the act of collecting, has become the subject of an ever more intense institutionalisation and growing interest by local adminstrations. In the course of a few years, these administrations have enabled the founding of a series of museums focusing upon contemporary art. Zones considered to be in the periphery have seen the rapid and somewhat tumultuous development of museum spaces for contemporary art. In 1984 one of the first examples of private-public management in Italy, Castello di Rivoli, Museum of Contemporary Art, opened in the municipality of Torino. In 1987 the Mart, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Trento and Rovereto opened, and in 2002 its building designed by Mario Botta was inaugurated in Rovereto. In 1988 the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art opened in Prato, today Tuscan Regional Museum of Contempory Art. This type of rapid and tumultuous museum development has trickled into extremely diverse situations, from the founding of the Institute The Man, Museum of Art in the region of Nuoro in Sardegna, to the Campania region, where in Napoli, the museum Madre (the Donnaregina Museum of Contemporary Art) opened in 2005 (and is now at risk of closing down) in a context which already houses some of the more historically important galleries. We must not forget the Museion of Bolzano, the Musma in Matera and the more recent – and perhaps more foreseeable – Museum of the Twentieth Century in Milan. This striking rise in museum openings – Kartsen Schubert was not wrong when he referred to the museum of contemporary art as ‘an urban status symbol’ – has reached in Rome, I believe, its apotheosis and critical centre.
Despite the specific programs which determined and transformed the policies of the two most recent art museums in the capital, the state of contemporary art institutions in Rome still remains problematic and uncertain and thus exemplary of a condition which affects all cultural insitutions in Italy. The MAXXI, with its two components – art and architecture – and large spaces, is a complex and contradictory hyper-museum in search of a balance between display organisation and communication on the one hand, and acquisition and maintenance of an international collection of art on the other hand. Whereas the Macro, located in the lively suburb of Testaccio, is attempting to openly define its role as a municipal museum, that is, in its relation to the community and work in the information field. Not only has it set up residencies for artists focusing on the processes of artistic production as well as display, but it has also instigated new practices in the education arena which engage the city. These projects bring together the research of contemporary art foundations and experiment with diverse sensibilities as well as modalities which are more open to artistic intervention, different ways of exhibiting and various educative approaches.
The Volume and the Pastificio Cerere foundations and more recently the Nomas and the Giuliani foundations (all evolving from collections) play an important role in the Roman art scene. Their contribution lies in their spreading of artistic experiences throughout the city and the focus which they place upon marginal areas on the one hand, and setting up of dialogues and international exchanges on the other. The task of cultural foundations has begun to replace that of public institutions which are chronically unable to support the development of contemporary artistic production in Italy. The role of the latter should be not only to sustain this development with awards and commissions but to set up networks involving exchange with the institutions of other countries. This type of activity of the ‘Global Art World’ is not a marketing strategy but the very reason for the existence of museums. Museums should not be urban gadgets or elegant forms of ‘bigoted junkspace’ (Rem Koolhaas) but critical spaces capable of posing specific questions to a world in continuous and inevitable transformation.
STEFANIA ZULIANI Professor of History and Theory of the contemporary museum at the University of Salerno. Art critic, collaborates with Filiberto Menna Foundation, Salerno.