Per_forming a collection #4
23 May 2015–in progress
Madre-Museo d’arte contemporanea Donnaregina
Napoli Via Settembrini 79
80139 Naples
Italy
Per_forming a collection #4 is the final chapter of the project Per_forming a collection—launched in 2013 and which, starting in autumn 2015, will envision new and further modes of intervention—is dedicated to the progressive establishment of the permanent collection of the Madre museum in Naples. The research-based project stems from the wish to explore and share the identity and function of a museum collection today, as an instrument for critical reflection, public education and ongoing narration, which the community of artists, art historians, critics, curators, collectors, gallery owners, other institutions and the various audiences are commonly called on to take part in. The Madre museum’s collection is configured as a “per_formative” entity, developing and purposeful, which defines the museum not only as a physical and digital space but also as a time-based platform, as a set of social and symbolic relations, as a repertory of histories to be documented, of stories to be told and of possibilities to be configured.
Per_forming a collection #4 confirms the two principal axes along which the Madre’s collection has developed over the past two years. While, on the one hand, the collection recounts the history of avant-garde cultures, with particular reference to all that has happened in Naples and Campania in the last 50 years—embodying their historical role as the crossroads for the most authoritative research in all fields of experimentation, from the visual arts to theater, film, architecture, music and literature—on the other, it explores the present and suggests the future, through the inclusion of artists who respond to this history, with often newly commissioned works. The path is not organized in a chronological order or on a geographical approach, but by the thematic organization of the overall collection walk-through. In this way the Madre museum has endowed itself with a collection that is both rooted in its territory and in action, attentive to the dynamics of the contemporary practices in the world at large.
Joseph Beuys’s La rivoluzione siamo noi (“The Revolution Is Us,” 1971) and Rosa per la democrazia diretta (“Rose for the Direct Democracy,” 1973) are the epitome of this generative and implicating museum collection, and they summarize the philosophy of a per-formative museum, which, hosting several actions, actors and activities, perform its multiple and welcoming identity: exhibitions, experiments, prototypes, hypothesizes, encounters, seminars, workshops, concerts, parties, productions and proposals for sharing the future of the museum and the museum of the near future. The project is indeed destined to continue over time, to further explore the per_formative character that the collection actively exerts on the identity and functions of the contemporary museum.
After the previous chapters—Per_forming a collection #1, #2, Intermezzo and #3, which structured the entire project as an open-ended storytelling and a partly real and partly fictional scenario—on the occasion of this last chapter the Madre’s collection has been enriched with historical works and new commissions by more than 60 artists as, among them, Marina Abramović, Getulio Alviani, Giovanni Anselmo, Richard Artschwager, Renato Barisani, Bill Beckley, Bianco-Valente, Agostino Bonalumi, James Lee Byars, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Capri. Un pretesto, Carter, Danilo Correale, Tony Cragg, Riccardo Dalisi, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Giuseppe Desiato, Bruno Di Bello, Gabriele Di Matteo, Jimmie Durham, Falso Movimento, Lucio Fontana, Gilbert & George, Liam Gillick, Dan Graham, Gruppo XX, Judith Hopf, Thomas Houseago, Mimmo Jodice, Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Christian Leperino, Nino Longobardi, Francesco Lo Savio, Léa Lublin, Urs Lüthi, Luigi Mainolfi, Piero Manzoni, Giuseppe Maraniello, Raffaela Mariniello, Allan McCollum, Fausto Melotti, Mario Merz, Hidetoshi Nagasawa, Roman Ondák, Luigi Ontani, Operazione Vesuvio, Gina Pane, Luca Maria Patella, Manfred Pernice, Pino Pinelli, Robert Rauschenberg, Paolo Scheggi, Markus Schinwald, Lorenzo Scotto Di Luzio, Cindy Sherman, Ettore Sottsass, Ettore Spalletti, Haim Steinbach, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Superstudio, Ernesto Tatafiore, Eugenio Tibaldi, Andy Warhol, and Franz West.
Curated by Alessandro Rabottini, Eugenio Viola, Curators at Large, Madre.
Collaboration to the research: Alessandra Troncone, Olga Scotto di Vettimo, Research Department, Madre.
General coordination: Silvia Salvati
Coordination of the exhibition design: Dolores Lettieri
