Superstudio: the Italian radical design group saw the future

In 1972, the architecture design collective Superstudio arrived in New York along with many other Italian designers for MoMA's Italy: the New Domestic Landscape exhibition. At the time, they were labelled 'radical'. In 2016 the Maxxi Museum did a 50th retrospective of their work which had presented 'an alternative model for life on earth...a final attempt of design...for a society no longer based on work and on power and violence.." By 2020 they can no longer be called radical but rather prescient. Their theories about the need to reduce waste, overproduction, superfluous design, consumerism, and rather to encourage living with nature, to take only what we need with us on our backs, to look to the sun, the clouds, the stars, to live without possessions on a grid and simply plug in wherever you are now resonate in a contemporary way. "Life will be the only environmental art", they once wrote. In this time of Covid, their message aligns with the message of Earth Day 2020. 

Images of Gli anti fundamentali, Self Portrait, Poltronova sofa all by Cristiano Toraldo di Francia; Images of Il Monumento Continuo and Atti Fondamentali Vita - Supersuperficie. Pulizie di primavera, by Superstudio, all courtesy Fondazione Maxxi, Roma.  

Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold at the Met Breuer

Lucio Fontana: On the Threshold at the Met Breuer comes at the proper moment.  We are all ready to pierce and slash things right now, and Fontana gives us a vision of how we might do that and also produce beauty. What better metaphor for our times? 

In his early years, Fontana, an Argentinian-Italian hybrid, made wonderful sculptures with a rare freedom both in form and color also riffing on the Majolica which was omnipresent (they oddly reminded me of Dana Schutz’s new series). His work was popular almost right away and he received a commission on the Life of the Sea, which showed his affinities for the natural world. They were to be totally obscured in the later work. 

He is particularly famous for two series that broke through the picture plane. 

The ‘Concetto spaziale,’ which were first conceived as screens for the transmission of light, display holes punched in patterns on canvas connecting us to the void, the infinite, the 4th dimension. 

The early gallery of these, without chroma, but instead a kind of washed out beige, are so very pure.

I feel like my heart is being pierced. Somehow they made me think of Janis Joplin’s lyric “Take a little piece of my heart now baby.”  

Later, he added chroma, glass and stone and the paintings grew larger, but those don’t have the same resonance. There is actually a pink painting that looks like the cavity of the chest—perhaps too literal. 

His “Cuts” series was considered his most radical, acts of sabotage painting. These are likely the ones you are more familiar with. Fontana said it was as hard to decide where to put the cuts as anything else he had done, and that he then folded them back and affixed them to the back of the canvas. No more fenestration as with the holes—just violent fissures. Once again, it’s impossible not to think of our contemporary social and political anguish. 

A decade later, he had cycled through color and come back to white, using house paint because it was flatter.

Fontana has come back into vogue along with his compatriots Alberto Burri and Piero Dorazio and the mid-century school of Italian painting, design and architecture. Here at the Met we have the reason why. 

January 23 - April 14, 2019.

Studio 54: A new film brings back the highs and lows

Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Am I regretting the jackets with shoulder pads that added heft but not necessarily strength? How about that picture of me with hair that looked like a magnolia tree? Every couple of years it seems fashion and art loop us back to a decade about which I have very mixed feelings.  First it was the 60’s, then the 80’s.  Now the 70’s are grabbing hold.

 Almost concurrently with a giant retrospective of Andy Warhol’s work due soon at the Whitney comes Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary on Studio 54.  Or “Studio” as the owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager and anyone who was anyone referred to it. Warhol hung at Studio. So did Liza Minelli, and Halston, and Bianca Jagger and Capote.

 That did not include me.  Oh, I don’t mean to suggest I was a victim of the velvet rope.  In fact, my boyfriend in college belonged to a fraternity in which Rubell and Schrager were older brothers, already besties, and I met them at events and so it was not impossible to think I could have become a denizen. The journey of these two Brooklyn boys who remained soulmates and partners until Rubell died of AIDS is the film’s narrative spine. I did not know that Schrager’s father was a mobster but it makes perfect sense in light of what eventually befell him.  I suppose you can learn the grift at the knee just like woodworking. 

 But truth be told, Studio 54 terrified me.  Walking in there reminded me of Dead concerts only better dressed, or mostly undressed, but with the same lighting and tripped-out sweaty scene that brought back intense acid flashbacks. Representing as it did the age of celebrity mixed with the toxicity of drugs, the scourge of AIDS, and then the revelation that the two owners were crooks, Studio 54 took the temperature of the 70’s with a vengeance.

Club culture, until then decidedly fringe, became mainstream. The place to see and be seen. Dancing--which I did love-- took on an added sexual dimension, a way to hook up, especially if you were gay.  The documentary is replete with interviews with the worker-bee non-celebrities: the silent investor, the Rubell brother, the door guy, the lighting guy, the accountant, and a narration provided largely by Schrager who by the looks of it can’t decide if he’s really contrite about his tax evasions, or not. Events, he implies, got away from them.  The headiness of being at the epicenter of a certain cultural zeitgeist was too tempting to resist. He almost seems bemused by his follies, his stay in prison.

I’m trying to decide if anyone who did not live through that era will find Studio 54 avant garde or totally retro.  Nobody knows who Minelli and Halston are anymore.  Nobody knows that Capote totally combusted after his novel Answered Prayers, which contained a infamous chapter on the rich who had supported him, abandoned him, precipitating a fall into alchoholism and drug addiction similar to many of the celebs at Studio 54.   How was it to have close friends and colleagues in the culture world get sick with AIDS, keep it a secret until they couldn’t anymore and then die?  It was a brutal era, less optimistic than the decade that preceded it, and it gradually gave way to a New York which was all about money. 

Tyrnauer, who has had his eye on more intellectual residents of NY as well, does a good job conveying the madness and the mayhem. But in the end,though the ostensible through line is the ‘freedom’ that Studio 54 purportedly made its regulars feel, the documentary made me sad for all the missing persons and not at all nostalgic for this aspect of the seventies when being able to do whatever you wanted began to seem like the scariest thing in the world.   

The film opens in NY on October 5 and then rolls out across the country.  I’m curious to see how it does outside the NY region.