Vienna and surroundings

Through the voices of six architects, the map is protagonist in an exhibition curated by Gianni Pettena for the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, marking the launch of the gallery's Milanese outpost.

THE MAP IS MORE INTERESTING THAN THE TERRITORY, declares in capitals the title of the first exhibition that the protagonist of Michel Houellebecq's novel La carte et le territoire, dedicates to the theme. Jed Martin is an artist, a photographer and the son of a famous Paris architect from whom he seems to have absorbed, in an entirely involuntary fashion, a refined sensitivity towards pictures. The map for him is an erotic and sublime device that only the surgical eye of the camera can succeed in capturing in a series of brief, concise shots. The map is a non-verbal syntax that encloses within it something profoundly ancestral, the mark, and the highest intellectual sophistication, design. Imitating the divine, this sheet of folded paper is like a medieval code that refers to all that man describes of what he possesses, his own territory, and how much more elusive nature is, the impossibility of fixing change. The map is an abstraction, for some a reduction in complexity of the real world — even though it is part of this real, even though it shapes and unshapes it; for others an indispensable tool for understanding where you are going — a guide routière; for others, still, an object to display and collect.

The map is the protagonist in the latest exhibition curated by Gianni Pettena for the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli and marks the launch of the gallery's Milan outpost. The map is at the centre of the tale that unfolds through six important voices, connected thanks to a geographic instrument. Raimund Abraham, Hans Hollein, Max Peinter, Walter Pichler, Ettore Sottsass and Pettena himself run into one another on an imaginary plane between Bolzano and Vienna, in that Mitteleuropa they all originate from. Each of these six protagonists was born within a fifty-kilometre radius of each other, as if an imaginary compass had marked, ab originem, the intellectual friendships that form this gallery of human and professional portraits. The map traces unexpected trajectories of kinship and brotherhood (Peinter and Sottsass were first cousins); describes in detail shared attitudes and passions; explores under the microscope reports and stories that, due to the sporadic knowledge of the sources, we risk losing track of.

Top and above: <em>Vienna e dintorni</em> ["Vienna and surroundings"], installation at the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milan. Photos by Floriana Giacinti — Top and above: *Vienna e dintorni* ["Vienna and surroundings"], installation at the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milan. Photos by Floriana Giacinti

The map however actually helps us in this process of recomposition of aesthetic affections, when we find ourselves before powerful projects that foretell and announce the coming of a dissolute world, more than in dissolution, that today appears to us in part comprehensible thanks to the interpretations offered by the six architects on show. In curating the exhibition, Pettena, who has always laid claim to the artistic nature of his work, works with playful intuition, using that ironic, anarchic and cunning hallmark that distinguishes him. He acts as a divider, like a map and its territory, passing with childlike agility from the role of organiser to that of invited artist; he does it always with great lightness, without taking himself too seriously and, perhaps for this reason, comes across as seriously credible. His trump card, here another form of carta ["map"], resides in the complicity that he establishes with the project, with any of his projects, using more his gut (and heart) than the head. Not because the head is not used: it is, and always will be the territory from which Pettena draws suggestions for the story. Rather, here we have a liberation from an obsessive control of sources and citations — crutches to demonstrate who we are through the knowledge of others —, that disappear swallowed up by a seductive play of mirrors: what is the map and what is the territory?

Ettore Sottsass jr., <em>Il pianeta come festival</em>, 1973 — Ettore Sottsass jr., *Il pianeta come festival*, 1973

The convention of representation in plan seems to be the primary language with which Gianni Pettena presents himself to the public: two maps that take something of a backseat ("I put my works in a corner because I wanted to give space to the others") prove to be the necessary tool for understanding a poignant display that draws on the 1970s to describe, obviously, a piece of the future. They are cartographies of a hypothetical territory specified through the congestion of architectural archetypes: considering the nature of the exhibition, Nature VS Architecture resembles more the name of a road drawn in detail on the map's surface than the difficult crossing of its territory. Of the two versions, the most successful is a mechanistic entropy of ellipses, spirals, circles and rays that could recall the sensual Ballet Mécanique by Fernand Léger with a nod to that false dichotomy that would like nature to be an external element to culture. Here the territory, or its representation, gains terrain on the human project, compacting the latter into a zona franca, a nostalgic reduction of Rome skilfully described and interpreted by Giovan Battista Nolli.

The convention of representation in plan seems to be the primary language with which Gianni Pettena presents himself to the public: two maps that take something of a backseat prove to be the necessary tool for understanding a poignant display that draws on the 1970s to describe, obviously, a piece of the future

Gianni Pettena, <em>Nature vs Architecture</em>, 2012 — Gianni Pettena, *Nature vs Architecture*, 2012

These two maps represent a false contemporary, mixed in the gallery with designs (some of great quality, some less incisive) that originate from the six authors' extensive archives. Ettore Sottsass's excellent series The Planet as a Festival is displayed, perverting human territory and describing with ironic elegance the vices and pleasures of the homus tenologicus. This map became paper on the pages of Casabella under then-editor Alessandro Mendini but, seen here, regains the vast richness of its stories. A voyeuristic and rubbery infrastructure energetically dives into the waters of the Irrawaddy river, while the design of erotic buildings is described in plan like an ancient temple of pleasure. At the centre of a canyon that seems to have come out of one of Pettena's works, stands alone and mocking a rock stadium: then, the club was not a design taboo. Meanwhile Archigram's lysergic spaceships are precipitated in a tropical paradise in which, born again, nature gains primordial power, taking over the old dinosaurs of architecture. Kubrick's space shuttle turns out to be a simple bone in these drawings, and the interstellar voyage, without its own territory, is universal only on paper.

<em>Vienna e dintorni</em> ["Vienna and surroundings"], installation at the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milan. Photo by Floriana Giacinti — *Vienna e dintorni* ["Vienna and surroundings"], installation at the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, Milan. Photo by Floriana Giacinti

Universal, however, are the seven versions of private houses that Raimund Abraham designed in 1976 as an incontrovertible response to that "post" that two years later was to enter voraciously into "modern". Seven gates to Eden is a sumptuous work comprised of drawings and models arranged in a theory that revokes any territory to automatically exalt paper. Utopian, as only architectural drawings know how to be, these dwellings wrecked by a violent nature — cracked despite having just been built, torn up by denser living nuclei — and by a culture that is adrift — each version has a car about to crash into a wall — disturb and attract in a spatial justness that makes them hypnotic. Abraham's drawing is a winter without balm, precise and cutting, as if it had to reveal in each line the true sense of a territory that can only be fully understood in its representation. It is a pleasure then the almost direct, paratactic comparison between this series and the large version of the NY skyline designed by Hans Hollein — in which a number of masterful designs are displayed like sophisticated travel documents. Here is also displayed the poster of the first exhibition that the Viennese architect opened with his colleague Pichler; the non-physical environment of the red and blue pill; and the sculptural model of Vulcania that, with its centripetal force, recalls Pettena's map on the other side of the room.

Raimund Abraham, <em>Separation from Seven gates to Eden</em>, 1976 — Raimund Abraham, *Separation from Seven gates to Eden*, 1976

If an ironic map hovers over the whole exhibition as a minimal common denominator in the work of the six architects, it is possible to detect two interesting counterpoints in the works of Max Peinter and Walter Pichler. Peinter presents a series of large oils with sharp and violent lines, describing a rough and romantic territory inspired by the sublime visions of nature by Caspar David Friedrich. In these paintings, the artist is also the protagonist of the scene: absorbed in the vision of a stormy sea or intent on scaling a rocky wall — another analogy with Gianni Pettena, whose portrait "hung on a rock" appears at the beginning of his first monograph — Peinter describes the surrounding environment purged of the specific characteristics of the place and returns to a perfect map of the mountain. The same strength can also be seen in the works of Walter Pichler, which oscillate between the primordial and archetypes of architecture, opening a rich array of suggestions that the rhythm of the seasons confers on our senses. A collection of suggestions and impressions follow in the various spaces of the Giovanni Bonelli gallery, which used to be an experimental centre for music and an artists' hangout, precisely in the years in which the six architects cited produced the works on display.

Walter Pichler, <em>Kleiner Raum</em>, 1967 — Walter Pichler, *Kleiner Raum*, 1967

When contemplating the work of composition that Gianni Pettena has created around the theme of the map and its territory in Vienna and surroundings, the words of Paul Claudel spring to mind when, speaking of his much-loved Tokyo, he wrote "J'ai appris que pour aller d'un point a un autre il est possible de passer partout excepté par le centre" ["I've learned that to go from one place to another it is possible to pass everywhere, except the centre"]. Elisa Poli, co-founder of Cluster Theory

Max Peintner, <em>Fukushima daiichi</em>, 2011 — Max Peintner, *Fukushima daiichi*, 2011

Through 2 February 2012
Vienna e dintorni: Abraham, Hollein, Peintner, Pettena, Pichler, Sottsass ["Vienna and surroundings"]
Galleria Giovanni Bonelli
Via Porro Lambertenghi 6, Milan

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Vienna and surroundings

Through the voices of six architects, the map is protagonist in an exhibition curated by Gianni Pettena for the Galleria Giovanni Bonelli, marking the launch of the gallery's Milanese outpost.

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