The last time I spoke to Maurizio Cattelan he was coming out of a swimming pool in Milan, the young women working at his friend's Milanese gallery welcomed us with a snobbish manners, and his press agent wanted him on the cover on Dazed & Confused. Time passes, things change.
Fast-forward to now and Cattelan has jumped on the Cinzia Ruggeri bandwagon, which is absolutely understandable, considering the fact that, though understated and rarely acknowledged, the late Italian artist, fashion and interior designer has often been an inspiration for many creative minds (especially since she died). Yet you wish that all the people currently and amusingly overcrowding the Ruggeri bandwagon had done so while she was still alive, but - sorry - I digress. In collaboration with Marta Papini, Cattelan curated an exhibition dedicated to Ruggeri and artist Birgit Jürgensse.
Opening on 26th June at the Galerie Hubert Winter (Breite Gasse 17, Vienna, Austria), the exhibition is entitled "Lonely Are All Bridges" and one of the images on the gallery site is a photograph taken in 1982 portraying Ruggeri in her studio surrounded by her designs and by other iconic interior design pieces (such as Ettore Sottsass' "Ultrafragola" mirror, for the joy of all those influencers who have turned the piece into an Instagram sensation). The event is conceived as another of those fictional improbable dialogues that never happened between two creative minds, the kind of dialogues that curators put together to justify their vision (Prada/Schiap at the Met anybody?).
Anyway, maybe Cattelan didn't just jump on the Cinzia Ruggeri bandwagon now, he was actually already there and I had never realised it. There is indeed one mirror designed by Toiletpaper, a project by Pierpaolo Ferrari and Maurizio Cattelan, that seems to be a modern reinvention of Ruggeri's "Shatzi" mirror.
As you may remember from previous posts, the latter featured six arms equipped with hands that protruded from behind the mirror, a way to transform this object from a cruel tool that reflects our image telling the harsh truth about how we look, to a friend that offered with its hands help and comfort, maybe even a caress, a comb, a toothbrush or a tissue.
Produced by Seletti Toiletpaper's mirror doesn't feature any three-dimensional hands, but images of multiple hands offering red lipstick to the person reflecting in the mirror, so the final concept is the same. Guess Ruggeri would have laughed at this all, like she laughed at Viktor & Rolf's "Bed Dress", reminding me that not everything went lost, meaning that the echoes of her designs appearing in modern pieces were the proof that the seeds she had sown decades before, continued to blossom, grow and transform.
I should actually be pretty happy about this exhibition as two of the quotes taken from the imaginary dialogue on which they based the exhibition are taken from my interview "The Quirky Aesthetics of Joy: Interview with Cinzia Ruggeri" (2013), even though they never asked for any permission (would they have asked for permission if they had taken the quotes from an article published by an established magazine/a powerful publishing group?). It is interesting to see that the dialogue between the two artists is the result of a remix of quotes they randomly found on the Internet, which turns this incident into a copyright case as the dialogue is not fictitious, but assembled by the curators from pre-existing quotes (while the case of the mirror could be conceived as inspiration or derivation, but not as a copyright infringement case). But, hey, don't think I'm pissed off about all this, it is indeed always uplifting to know that, not everything I have done is useless, at least it is helping some curators organising their exhibitions, justifying their views and, hopefully for them, making some money.
But let's leave fictitious dialogues behind and let's have some fun with this cover taken from the 1982 September issue of "Domus". The magazine featured a long piece on new technologies, computers and the office of the future, hence the desk ("Quark" by Achille Castiglioni and Paolo Ferrari) with an Olivetti M20 ST personal computer in the foreground.
The man in the background, Italian sound poet and artist Arrigo Lora Totino, wears instead a design by Cinzia Ruggeri entitled "Ballerino Inquieto" (Anxious Dancer). The design was a combination of a tuxedo and a tutu, an idea that became real years later: we have seen the late ballroom icon Hector Xtravaganza, Grandfather of the House of Xtravaganza, wearing a tuxedo/long tutu ensemble and a biker jacket-tutu ensemble reappeared in Jeremy Scott's Moschino Men's A/W 19 collection, View this photo). I'm obviously posting this "Domus" cover with the hope that other curators may find all these links, connections and comparisons useful for their own purposes and exhibitions and in case Cattelan may need other inspirations for the Vienna exhibition.
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