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by Debika Ray
M&C 13
M&C 13
#MolteniGroup
It’s a coincidence that the curator and writer Glenn
Adamson’s latest book, Fewer Better Things, launched
around the same time that Marie Kondo-mania went
global, although the synchronisation does mean that
he’s now often asked about the commonalities between
his world view and that of the Japanese tidying-up guru.
“My sense is that she’s focusing much more on the fewer,
with occasional attention to the better,” says Adamson.
“Like, why would you want to keep this item?
It’s very much an exercise in stripping back. I’m much
more interested in the idea of informing yourself
about the material world.”
What the two share is an endorsement of a more selective approach to the
possessions we gather and keep, but Adamson’s approach diverges from Kondo’s
in his interest in objects themselves and how they are made. “I’m fascinated by
the human factor of a well-made object, which can connect you to the person that
made it or the person that gave it to you,” says Adamson, senior scholar of craft
and design at the Yale Center for British Art.
As far back as 1880, designer and social activist William Morris said:
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe
to be beautiful.” In his view, an aesthete’s talent was in identifying these useful
and beautiful objects.
Today, we tend to agree that the value of objects is a subjective judgement
– that an object’s value is defined in relation to the person using it. The central
thrust of Adamson’s new book is that we have an instinctive understanding of how
to make such judgements – albeit one that is being undermined by our increasing
interaction with the intangible, digital world. “For all the benefits of contemporary
technology, I also feel that it’s a giant distraction machine,” he explains. “It’s really
divorcing us from that material base, that sort of immersive sense of human
knowledge, expertise and understanding that infuses every object and building
around us.” Central to understanding whether an object is worth becoming
personally attached to is knowing the story behind it – whether the touch
of the human hand or the thinking that went into the design. This idea need not
only apply to luxury objects or one-off, unique items – these qualities can equally
be embodied in inexpensive or mass-produced items that have been produced
with care, thought and skill.
Adamson calls this intuitive understanding “material intelligence” – a form of
literacy about the world and objects around us that can help us make decisions,
rather than simply worrying about over-consumption. “We should be trying to
reconnect to that inherited intelligence and trying to cultivate it in ourselves,”
he says. “It’s a necessary part of having a sustainable relationship to the earth,
because if you don’t understand anything about where things come from, how
can you possibly hope to have an ethical means of navigating through your life?”
In many ways, the rise of craft in the retail landscape – whether through artisanal
cheese or handmade furniture – is a response to a growing desire to know where
our belongings come from. Adamson is encouraged by this shift. “It’s not
surprising that people are turning to craft,” he says. “It shows you that they are
responsive to a sense of loss and the flatness and superficiality of digital experience,
which, as seductive as it is, also leaves a lot of your primal instincts unaddressed.”
Often, however, the term “craft” is used superficially as a brand strategy to sell
unexceptional objects with no ethical or sustainable merit. What remains within
this landscape is our ability to make judgements based on a well-honed and
exercised material intelligence. “You always want to look for an opportunity
to consume in a way that you feel proud of,” Adamson says. “So when you buy
something, informing yourself about the situation that made that thing possible,
and recognising that you have responsibility for having helped create
and maintain it – that’s really the argument.”
The Collector‘s
House
by Caroline Corbetta
Fewer
Better Things
There are no two art collectors alike. There are, however, some exemplary types.
Let’s take two, poles apart on a scale that acknowledges a thousand different shades.
The first includes the collector who buys artworks to keep them locked away in
a warehouse, content with just possessing them and quivering with excitement at
the thought that one day they will open the crates and see their “creatures” as if
for the first time and fall in love with them all over again. At the other end of the
scale there is the collector who, from the minute they make their purchase, never
separates themself from their artworks, but keeps them all on display in their home;
has sliding walls built when they no longer know where to hang them, just to keep
them close by and, at the same time, commissions others – made to measure – when
their compositions of paintings and photographs display a gap that can’t be solved
just by shifting things around a little. We, in this story of ours, are interested in the
latter kind of collectors; those who cannot imagine their everyday lives without art.
Their collections live and grow within their domestic walls in tune with the interior
decoration which, alternating between premeditation and spontaneity, creates
a uniqueness in which their personality reverberates.
A table and a painting, a sculpture and an armchair form an organic whole, a total
aesthetic and cultural harmony that is the fruit of personal research and intuition,
often corroborated by the advice of an art curator who has to know how to indulge,
and direct the collector’s taste and idiosyncrasies. This type of collector is the ideal
owner of a refined Italian villa.
Equally ideal, almost literary, is their collection. Imaginary and yet absolutely
tangible, it consists of a series of heterogeneous contributions made by young talents,
born between the end of the seventies and eighties and brought together by the
author of this text – a curator by profession and by passion. The works include the
polychrome marbles of Gabriele De Santis (1983), which play with the illusion of
the perception and concepts of luxury, exclusivity and mass culture; the geometric-
abstract compositions of Alek O. (1981), achieved by undoing and reassembling
used objects and garments of which they have traces and memories; and lastly,
the still life with peeled fruits or the anonymous sculptures of the rotundas of Italy
which, reproduced by Santo Tolone (1979) on precious metal backgrounds, become
mysterious and irresistible icons – minimal and powerful gestures which overturn
our view of reality. The overall result is a plastic ecosystem that perfectly expresses
the representative and comunicative functions of design and art.
The two languages create a home that is at once intimate refuge and social space.
The art collection of Molteni&C is one of the numerous storylines that the encounter
between art and design can bring together. It is a story featuring a lifestyle that is
both possible, cultured and aware. But above all it is a wide-ranging project that
underlines Molteni&C’s commitment to culture through a form of contemporary
patronage
that supports artists at the height of their creative flair.
In fact, this project marks the launch of a contemporary art collection linked to
the Molteni Museum, a creative powerhouse set up in 2015 in Giussano, alongside
the company’s headquarters, to conserve and share its past and to plan its future.
