Francesco Vezzoli & Hans Ulrich Olbrist on The 24 Hours Muse

With New York over, and London nearly done, thoughts are turning towards Milan fashion week, which is set to start tomorrow, and includes some of the most exciting shows on the fashion calendar. Chief among these is Prada, who never fail to create stunning clothes and extraordinary spectacle, a tendency which extends beyond their runway shows. Indeed, taking place on a multitude of platforms over just 24 hours, one of this year’s most innovative and exhilarating events was Prada's collaboration with artist Francesco Vezzoli and AMO, the think tank arm of Rem Koolhaas’ design collective OMA. The 24 Hours Museum, held at Paris’ historic Palais d'Iéna, made a whirlwind Cinderella-esque appearance this January, with a Vezzoli designed installation incorporating three sections, the classical, the contemporary and the “forgotten”. By making literal iterations of generic curation styles, the entire space turned into a meditation of how presentation moves us to interact with art, emphasising, by use of elements of performance, disco sculptures, and an ephemeral time frame, the very fluidity of the notion of art itself. Here, we look back on a conversation between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist in which he discussed the inspirations and preoccupations - ranging across classicism, Baroque feasts and Studio 54 – that provoked this unconventional event.

Francesco Vezzoli: This is a first in my career. So far, I’ve done exactly the opposite: I’ve brought public figures and popular icons inside museums and art institutions, for example, Veruschka at the Venice Biennale, Cate Blanchett and Natalie Portman in the Guggenheim, Lady Gaga in the MOCA… Now here I am building a museum inside a building that is not a museum and creating an unexpected situation. It’s the reverse.

All the objects I have prepared for this event refer to my biography and previous artworks and so – in that sense – I’m playing with the notion of the past. Paradoxically, I am creating a sort of ironic retrospective of my work as an artist. Conceptually speaking, this is a parody of a Baroque feast.

Hans Ulrich Obrist: What prompted you to do it here?

"Aren’t artists like squatters somehow, in the best sense of the word?"

FV: Firstly, I experienced this place when it was transformed into the perfect setting for a Miu Miu fashion show. And then I noticed that it’s simply full of elements that appeal to my imagination: I love grandiosity, I love staircases and I love modernism. This looks to me like a nave in a modernist church. And at the same time it looks like an empty space or, better, a virgin space you can inappropriately occupy. Aren’t artists like squatters somehow, in the best sense of the word? It was a fascinating challenge for me, especially as I intended to use it for something so ephemeral.

So I conceived this absurd rehearsal of looking back at my work, a conceptualisation of a Baroque feast, as I said, which hopefully will address many of the issues that art critics tend to avoid. When you arrive at the entrance to this “museum”, you understand that this project is mainly a social ritual, which, at the end of the 24-hour period, will be deprived of the object for which the social ritual is being organized.

HUO: This is going to be a show for one day. There's not going to be a single object, it's way beyond objects.

FV: Technically, the rooms could be empty. The performance I did with Lady Gaga at the MOCA was a success for me the second we got Lady Gaga on stage with the dancers from the Bolshoi and the music and the audience staring at it. Then, next moment, Lady Gaga could have fallen down, left without performing, anything… for me the performance was equally achieved.

The same was true for the Right you are (If you think you are) re-enactment for the “Performa” event at the Guggenheim Museum in 2007. Some people saw the show inside the Rotunda, some people saw it from the staircase, some in the lower level in the theatre. Everybody found it too long, some criticized the acting of Cate Blanchett and the other actors, some complained about sound problems… but for me the performance was accomplished when the door opened and the things were there.

It’s a collage and that’s why in the programme at the Guggenheim I included a quote from a letter Pirandello wrote in 1917 to his sister Lina after the première of Right you are (If you think you are): “It has truly been a great success. Not for the applause, but for the astonishment, the bafflement, the exasperation and the dismay I caused the audience. You can’t imagine how much I enjoyed it!”

I don’t want to say I’m thrilled when people hate it, that would be pushing it too far. I am just thrilled about the reactions. So, now I am curious to see how people will react when they come in here and see this space entirely transformed into something that looks like A Clockwork Orange mixed with Studio 54.

HUO: And that comes back to your old dream of Studio 54?

FV: Yes, in fact I've conceived a series of statues that light up from the inside. So they look like disco lights rather than sculptures, turning from white to pink and red. One of my wildest obsessions has always been the fact that we see ancient sculptures without their original multi-coloured appearance. Our idea of classic artworks is inevitably linked to the whiteness of the marble. It’s as if Calvin Klein had washed out all the colour from the history of Roman and Greek sculpture. On the contrary, the Parthenon was painted, those sculptures we admire at the Louvre had colours and gold leaf and faceted stones. So, I thought: let’s bring some colour back!

Hans Ulrich Obrist speaks to legendary actress Jeanne Moreau in the latest issue of AnOther Magazine, out now.