Christoph Büchel and the inexorable devaluation of every social model

It is the scrupulously labelled balloons made of alleged Murano glass that swarm behind the shop windows that welcome tourists to Venice, the potential buyers to be charmed. And not surprisingly, Koons' glittering poodles remain among the best-selling works between St Mark's and the Rialto Bridge. Similarly, and hanging like balloons, on the ground floor some rusty, rounded blacksmith's irons stand out in front of visitors to 'Monte di Pietà', Christoph Büchel's immersive exhibition that occupies the Fondazione Prada building, transforming the whole of it into a pawnshop.

The Swiss artist could not have chosen a more suitable setting than the Serenissima to set up such an exhibition of "stuff", where the details of history are lost in the dusty chaos, choked by the disordered stratification of time, or rather, by the use that human beings persist in making of it, needing superstructures and fleeting hierarchies to resolve their physiological contradictions. Once through the entrance, Büchel immediately places the wealthy seats of an auction in progress next to wheelchairs disused by old people's homes and an expanse of stretchers reminiscent of those advanced by Covid: the commodification of sexuality, passions, ideals and religious beliefs, to the point of falling back on individual anonymous experiences, annihilates the "feeling of time" that we are so concerned with, the salvific function of collective memory that goes beyond the cult of the individual, but passes on experiences. Between kitch and rarity, the quotation from the essay "The Memory of Objects" (Mimesis, 2023) emerges tangibly, but only for the explanatory cover.

Büchel reconstructs a series of usual environments, from home interiors to offices, guardhouses and other ordinary trades, proceeding by scanning habits. The bedroom opens onto a row of desks equipped with PCs that reproduce the current propensity of young people to play online games at night, then moves to the centre of the room with double beds and dressers, ending with a long table set against the wall: a cumbersome and misplaced representation of da Vinci's "The Last Supper", which interprets the bourgeois gesture of hanging scenes from the Gospel above the headboard of the wedding bed, and thus debasing them.

Camera da letto con Ultima Cena. (Foto MB)

The disorientation generated by the sight of a mountain of discarded clothes under one of the full-wall frescoes is reminiscent of Pistoletto's 'Venus of rags' from 1967. The process of the dissolution of aesthetic canons intensifies as it climbs from floor to floor, upwards, in a sort of return to a clear sky, the opposite of the artistic sublimation whereby the work would restore dignity to the discards of everyday life, at least in the boutade canned by Manzoni with the infamous 'Merda d'artista' (Artist's Shit) (1961). Not far away, the cast of the Rosetta stone and several Mesopotamian clay tablets are placed side by side with disused washing machines and dryers, and stocks of sanitary ware. The multiplication of visual associations results in a process of semantic juxtaposition, i.e. when one meaning partially precedes another due to factors of cultural and social priorities limited to the viewer's gaze.

The art drowns amidst a pressapochistic craftsmanship, in stark contrast to the batch of majolica plates in the Giovanni Pietro Campana collection, assigned to the Louvre in 1862 by the French state that had acquired it the previous year. Marquis Campana was general director of the Monte di Pietà in Rome from 1839 to 1857, under whose aegis he enjoyed a flourishing period of economic growth. Campana used various illicit strategies to finance one of the most prestigious collections in Europe: his salary, personal loans and even the use of the institution's funds. An overt greed that led to his indictment and conviction for embezzlement.