Give Me Yesterday

The first photographic survey of Osservatorio Prada focuses on the diary as a theme: anything but secret pages that speak of daily lives a bit out of whack, a bit banal and decidedly disillusioned.

Give Me Yesterday
In the novel The Key (Kagi, 1956) by the Japanese author Junichiro Tanizaki, a husband a wife each keep a secret diary in the hope that it will be read by the other. The key in the title is that of the husband’s drawer where he, a 55-year-old professor, hides his diary. He leaves the key intentionally in view, trusting that his ten-year-younger wife Ikuko, who is attracted to a family friend named Kimura, will open the drawer and behave along the lines of the sexual fantasies described in his diary. In this book, intimacy is transcribed like a Facebook post, in the sense that we know (the authors hope) it will be read. Whoever is writing is already imagining who will read it and what that person will do.
The diary is a theme within everyone’s reach, making the curator Francesco Zanot choose it as the refrain of the inaugural exhibition at the new Prada Foundation art space in Milan. The 800-square-metre space is called Osservatorio (“observatory”) and for a good reason. It is located at number 2 of Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a covered arcade lined with luxury boutiques, and looks out from the fifth and sixth floors over the octagonal intersection of the arcades lying under a proud dome of glass and cast iron. The name “observatory” refers to gazing, of course, as well as to monitoring (in its combined use: meteorological observatory, vulcanological observatory, bird observatory, military observatory). In our case, the Osservatorio will be monitoring photography.

 

This first exhibition shows the work of 14 mostly young photographers, including several born in the 1990s. The best known is indubitably the American Ryan McGinley (1977). Sylvia Wolf, the curator of his solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2003, writes in 2012: “McGinley’s subjects, most in their twenties, are willing collaborators. Drawn from skateboard, music, graffiti, and gay subcultures, they perform for the photographer and expose themselves with a frank self-awareness that is distinctly contemporary. While each new generation embraces sex, drugs, and rock and roll as though theirs is the first to discover the rush of rebellion, McGinley’s crowd indulges in this rite of passage with the full knowledge of how identity can be shaped on film.”

Wolf’s words not only aptly describe McGinley’s photos (nude youths posing with wind-blown hair in bucolic landscapes), but all of the work on display. Here, the diary is not the kind that is written in secret and then, with a certain worriment, opened and made public (snapshots of reality, experienced and sometimes endured; persons aware or unaware or heedless of being portrayed; diaries like Nan Goldin’s, Larry Clark’s or Richard Billingham’s, which, just to be clear, are this show’s inevitable references). Rather it is the tale of daily existence, but more than documented, it is whisked to foam, like egg yolks for whipped mayonnaise. All is staged and performed.
Give Me Yesterday
Antonio Rovaldi, Orizzonte in Italia (dalla serie), 2011-2015. Installation's view “Give Me Yesterday”, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada
And here we have a spotlight trained on a woman named Tina in a black garter and bare breasts. In another photo, she is kneeled on a bed in a see-through negligee. We soon discover that she is the mother of the artist Leigh Ledare (USA, 1976), whose series Pretend You’re Actually Alive (2000–2008) portrays his disinhibited mom in the most risqué sexual circumstances. The Czech Vendula Knopová (1987) is another one who has no truck with family taboos. Also her work exploits the mother figure, or rather her hard disk, to give life to the series Tutorial (2015), a compilation of ambiguous, screwball snapshots of domestic life. The same subject is taken up by Maurice van Es (Holland, 1984) and by the South African Lebohang Kganye (1990).
Van Es lines up five insignificant objects put in order by his mother (a towel, a remote control and others) and photographs them as if they were sculptures: To Me You Are a Work of Art (2011). In Her-Story (2013), Kganye digs out some pictures from the family photo album and layers them with transparent portraits of herself on top of her late mother. The Italian Irene Fenara (1990) measures the distance separating her from her subject, using it as a metre of affection. Her series of Polaroids called Ho preso le distanze (2013) orders the different shots (Rosetta is full-length; Leo is half-length; Axel is very close-up) to correspond to how close she feels to these people.

 

The other Italian, Antonio Rovaldi (1975), “writes” his diary from the handlebar of his bicycle, taking note of nothing but horizons. His 90-photo-large series Orizzonte in Italia (2011–2015) is aligned along the imaginary line dividing the sky from the sea. In the exact centre, one is different from the others. It reads Nient'altro che noi (“Nothing but us”). Next to it, he has sketched a heart, but the addressee of the inscription is unknown. From sidereal outer space, the horizon nears, comes close and becomes the nearest horizon of sentiment. The Chinese Wen Ling (1976) made the blog Ziboy.com his personal diary from 2001 to 2008. A small part of it is on display here.

While Wen Ling proposes insipid views of neighbourhoods and gatherings with people eating and running, the Japanese Kenta Cobayashi (1992) focuses on digital means like him, but makes distortion his stylistic hallmark. His photos have but an ear or an eyelash that can be recognised. Like Ling, the other Japanese artist, Izumi Miyazaki (1994), confides in a blog (Tumblr) to transmit her photos (all self-portraits), and like Cobayashi, she uses tricks to arrive at the end result: here she has a twin double, there she is flying, elsewhere her decapitated head lies bleeding on a rug. Hers is the photograph on the exhibition’s advertisement poster, which shows her lying down, a close-up of her face staring up at the ceiling as her hair is being cut with an office utility knife.

Give Me Yesterday
From left: Kenta Cobayashi, Greg Reynolds, Antonio Rovaldi, Ryan McGinley. Installation's view “Give Me Yesterday”, Fondazione Prada Osservatorio, Milan. Photo Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada

Two more artists at the show take pictures of themselves. One is the Dutch Melanie Bonajo (1978), whom we recognise in a catalogue of ruddy cheeks and swollen eyes: she photographed herself every time she cried over a ten-year period (2001-2011). The result is Thank You for Hurting Me I Really Needed It (2008–2016), a wall covering made up of 60 selfies that follows the whole wall, even the safety exit’s panic bar. The other is the Portuguese Tomé Duarte (1979). After being dumped by his girlfriend, he decided to put himself in her shoes, literally. Dressed up in her clothes found in the closet, he photographed himself in grotesque get-ups in every corner of the house where he used to live with his beloved.

The Polish Joanna Piotrowska (1985) presents her carefully staged series of black-and-white images Frowst (2013–2014), whose subject matter is the fundamental anxiety at the heart of the family. Influenced by the philosophy of the German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger, Piotrowska integrated movements and gestures from Hellinger’s therapeutic method Family Constellations, which attempts to expose and heal multi-generational trauma. Also the American Greg Reynolds (1958) looks to the past, unburying it and labelling it Jesus Days, 1978–1983 (2014). The photos are from a period when Reynolds was a youth minister for an evangelical Christian organisation, before he came out as a gay man and moved to New York City to study film.

 

Lastly, the title of this exhibition, “Give Me Yesterday”, is taken from an old song recorded in 1916 by Harry Macdonough and the Orpheus Quartet, Turn Back the Universe and Give Me Yesterday. It is the curator’s way of reminding us how fresh (from yesterday) the ink is on the diary pages stuck on the wall, and how fresh the plaster of those walls is in Prada’s new Osservatorio. The pages are anything but secret, and speak of daily lives that are a bit out of whack, a bit banal and decidedly disillusioned. The pages seem to intentionally not have much to say and little to share. They are put away in a locked drawer with the key left in plain sight.

© all rights reserved

until 25 March 2017
Give Me Yesterday
Osservatorio Prada
Curator: Francesco Zanot

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