"The Devil of Hearth and Home" in Milan

["Dennis Moore" <clayboy56>]

Artists Challenge Their Audiences, Creating a Sense of Discomfort
By BRADFORD MCKEE
Published: April 13, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/13/garden/13mbox2.html

IN a dim back gallery of the Triennale di Milano, the imposing museum
in Milan's city center, Patti Smith, the artist and punk godmother,
stood quietly, surveying what she described as a meditation room. She
and her friend the artist Marco Tirelli were wrapping up their
installation for a group show, "The Devil of Hearth and Home," timed
to coincide with the 45th International Furniture Fair.

The show, which was to open the following day, would feature 34 women
(plus Mr. Tirelli, thanks to his collaborator's insistence) presenting
their notions of domestic life. They included the artist Kiki Smith,
the Spanish video artist Lucia Gironis and the French designer Matali
Crasset, whose metal-and-wood garlands of flames occupied a central
position, creating a focus for the larger exhibition.

Patti Smith's version of domesticity involved a table and chair
sheathed in a rumpled cotton sheet on which she had scribbled
illegible fragments of poetry in pencil. A painting of a white sphere
in a black void by Mr. Tirelli hung in the background, on a dusky red
wall. "The red signifies sacrificial blood," Ms. Smith explained in a
near-whisper. "We are entering the season of the sacrifice," she said,
presumably referring to the Christian holy week.

Every year, while their more commercially minded colleagues exhibit
work at the furniture fair, a few designers and artists come to Milan
simply to vent  or to show off. Some are well established, others
less so, but their installations tend to be similarly iconoclastic. If
much of the furniture at the city's fairgrounds and showrooms
reflected a preoccupation with comfort, the work of some of these
designers called attention to that by attempting to create a certain
discomfort.

"We live in a dangerous world," read the statement drafted by Droog
Design of Amsterdam, to describe the show assembled in a gallery next
to La Scala opera house. "Every day the media bring misery and threats
into our living rooms."

In response, the Droog designers created an escapist paradise called a
"Garden of Delight." Songbirds chirped softly over a sound system. On
a low picnic table, a white tablecloth by Maurice Scheltens displayed
burned-on shadows of chaotically arrayed dinnerware, napkins and
leaves. (One could only hope that the shadows were intended to suggest
a postprandial setting rather than a postnuclear one.)

Marcel Wanders redesigned a tree swing as a planting container with
ivy climbing up the ropes. And on the far side of the gallery, Susanne
Kessler and Petra Eichler erected a many-layered "forest" of
stencil-cut Tyvek paper, illuminated in various intense colors (while
I was there, the foliage had the hue of Bombay Sapphire gin).

In a 15th-century seminary in the next neighborhood over, the students
of the Dutch Design Academy Eindhoven abstained from that kind of
ilanthough not from black humorin their annual graduate exhibition.
The show, "Post-Mortem," was inspired by the death of a classmate,
Tessa Van Dam. In the installation by Hilde Koenders, "Bleeding Till
Death," 16 tulips were arranged across a table, each receiving a
transfusion of colored liquid from an intravenous drip bag.

The piece with the most currency, though, was Rogier Corbeau's "Bird
Influenza" wallpaper printed with what appeared to be electron
micrographs of viral particles.

The show created a lingering effect that took a few blocks' walk to
dissipate. Along the way, a poster on a sunlit cafe window advertised
an upcoming run of a 2001 play called "Xanax," by Angelo Longoni, and
a few doors down, another poster announced a performance of Mozart's
"Requiem" at the church of Santa Maria del Carmine, in observance of
the season of sacrifice.