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«Knowing how to be and remain pupils is no small thing — it means almost already being a teacher»
Claudio Magris
For Jannis Kounellis, “There is no problem with young artists, because if one is a great artist, one is a great artist even at the age of twelve”. He continued “Youth is an extraordinary blessing, if you meet a young person with that status, you have to love them with all your heart, you don’t have to wait”.
I think anyone who teaches in an academy should always remember these words. For if we think that artists should come out of the academies, it would be necessary to welcome them in as artists. The question of education and the validity of the institutions tasked with it, particularly the Academies of Fine Arts, is no simple matter. Have they had their day? Are they are absolutely necessary, an indispensable condition of a career? Is their structure adequate to cope with the times, perhaps with some partial alterations, or should they be rebuilt from scratch? Let us say right away that it is not strictly necessary to follow such a course of study to be an artist — think for example of Stefano Arienti, one of the best artists of his generation, who studied agriculture, and of the many autodidacts. So, here I have been entrusted with a rather difficult task. I apologise, therefore, if this text will be largely autobiographical, but the experience I have gained in my thirty-plus years as a lecturer at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts is the only compass I can use to navigate through such a complex subject. I arrived at the Brera in December 1992 as chair in History of Art, after a national selection process based on qualifications, written and oral exams. Collaboration with colleagues has always been important to me, and there was a large group of art historians at the Academy. Here, I will especially refer to the work done in synergy and harmony with Albero Garutti and Giacinto Di Pietrantonio. Indeed, Giacinto and I had an assistant — the “luxury” assistant I called him. By happy coincidence, Alberto Garutti, whom I had known and followed since 1979, had returned from his Bolognese “exile” in 1994. Brera was the best of the Academies in Italy and one of the best in Europe: Luciano Fabro, a really emblematic figure (his students had included Liliana Moro, Mario Airò, and even Gianni Caravaggio), Jole De Sanna, and Francesco Leonetti. And Milan was certainly an attractive city: there was “Flash Art” where entire generations of critics were being trained, non-profit spaces such as Viafarini and Care of, young gallery owners such as Claudio Guenzani, Giò Marconi, Massimo De Carlo, Pasquale Leccese and, immediately afterwards, Emi Fontana, in Fac-simile, the occupied space opened up by Horatio Goni; and there were collectors such as Paolo Consolandi and Riccardo Tettamanti. There was no doubt that at Brera, around the mid-1990s, something was about to happen. After seeing her drawings and her “food diary”, Giacinto and I invited Vanessa Beecroft, who was studying set design, to Salon (1993), the annual student exhibition: it was her performance “number zero”. We immediately shared a working method based on direct contact with the work and the artist. We invited many artists: Carla Accardi, Nan Goldin, William Kentridge, Ettore Spalletti, Enzo Cucchi, Martin Creed, Lawrence Weiner, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luigi Ontani, Jan Fabre, Fabio Mauri, and Malcom Morley, to name but a few. The presence of our guests was essential; Mimmo Rotella, for example, did the last recitation of his phonetic (“epistaltic”) verses in my classroom.
But something very special also happened: when Garutti returned to Milan, a group of students from Bologna followed him, and in 1996 some of them moved in together in via Fiuggi: Simone Berti, Giuseppe Gabellone, Stefania Galegati, Sara Ciracì, Diego Perrone, Deborah Ligorio, Gian Maria Marcaccini, Pietro Marchioni, Nada Cingolani. These nine were later joined by Lara Favaretto, Davide Bertocchi, and Chyoko Miura, while others came and went, such as Marco Boggio Sella (after the end of the shared dwelling in via Fiuggi, other collective living situations were created with Perrone, Alessandro Ceresoli, Farid Rahimi, or with Gabellone, Favaretto, Ettore Favini; later there would be via Poerio). Some were enrolled at university, such as Ciracì at DAMS, but attended Garutti’s course; others had already finished their studies, such as Bertocchi and Cingolani, but continued to attend classes. It was the first nucleus of an aggregation that would be highlighted by a sharp-eyed critic, Giorgio Verzotti (“It’s Academic” in Art Forum, summer 1998; an article by Davide Bertocchi about Via Fiuggi appeared in Flash Art). This experience of living together — made up of exchanges, encounters, and clashes — was very important for the young artists. But it is also telling that the group situation was limited to the aspect of cohabitation, while there was a great deal of individual freedom and their work took very different paths. Not even ten years earlier, in Milan, the group in via Lazzaro Palazzi had been created (founded by Fabro pupils such as Moro and Airò, nicknamed the “fabrini” by Amedeo Martegani). But while it is interesting to note that both groups named themselves after streets in Milan — i.e. having no intention of referring to common poetics or ideologies — even more significant is the fact that in the case of Lazzaro Palazzi, this was the address of a self-managed space, a venue for exhibitions and a magazine, while via Fiuggi was simply a lodging that the young artists shared. Shared experience is life, not work.
In short, the inside and the outside are both important to the Academy.
Garutti’s students included Roberto Cuoghi and Paola Pivi. Then Massimo Grimaldi, Patrick Tuttofuoco, Christian Frosi, Patrizio Di Massimo and Petrit Halilaj; later on, Beatrice Marchi, Davide Stucchi and the Armada, Gasconade and Lucie Fontaine groups. Quite clearly, a large part of the generation that has also established itself internationally emerged from Garutti’s school (just think of Paola Pivi, Golden Lion at the 1999 Venice Biennale, Giuseppe Gabellone at Documenta in Kassel in 2002, and Diego Perrone and Petrit Halilaj at the Berlin Biennale).
Initiatives for young artists, previously absent from the Italian context, also multiplied, such as the MoMA PS1 scholarship, which was active for six editions between 1998 and 2003, whose juries were chaired by Michelangelo Pistoletto, Luigi Ontani and Alberto Garutti (I was myself on the first jury for the first two editions).
It is worth emphasising that our relationship with the young artists was not limited to the time spent at the Academy; the students frequented Garutti’s studio, they came with Giacinto and me to exhibitions, some of them participated in the ones curated by Garutti with Roberto Daolio and with Di Pietrantonio in the Viafarini space, and in the two editions of Fuori uso, dedicated to very young artists, which I curated in Pescara, in 1997 and 1998. We have always continued to follow their progress, and we still work with some of them. For me, these were important life-long relationships, such as the ones with Lara Favaretto and Paola Pivi, which became a great friendship. People would often say to us: “How lucky these guys were to have you as teachers!’ I always replied: “How lucky we were to have these artists as students!”
In an interview with Diego Perrone, published in part in Tema celeste I wrote: “Alberto Garutti says that Diego Perrone, whom we consider one of our best students, did not even enrol… Is this an urban legend?”, and Diego replied: “I had found the right approach: in mid-December I would withdraw, so I had the chance to re-enrol the following year, because that’s the way it is at the Academy, at least the way I did it: since it is not an institution that can give you much from a working point of view, in my opinion you have to follow the people you like, who excite you, like Alberto, who takes you by the hand, you are young, you are also a bit scared of the things you see in galleries, Garutti makes you touch it with the hand, he tells you, look, it doesn’t bite, you can do it too, maybe…” In Garutti’s courses the students were treated like artists, they presented their work, explained it, and discussed the others’ work. The relationship with the professor was important, but so, too, was the relationship between the students. I remember Lara Favaretto’s relentless criticism (she continued to come to the Academy, even when she was no longer enrolled; like many, she never graduated), they were almost a nightmare for the other students. Roberto Cuoghi was a biologist technician, enrolled at the Statale university in the course to become a psychiatric therapist, and decided to make one last attempt at the Academy after meeting Garutti by chance, while he was following a nun: “I came to the Academy because I knew that there were the two weeks of course presentations. In the courtyard, I came across this Romanian nun, quite young, dressed in a strange electric-blue habit. I saw her enter room 1 and I thought she was a member of teaching staff — strange, a nun in the Academy, I went to hear what she had to say, and as I entered I saw Garutti caressing the nun’s habit, because he too had been impressed by it, he was commending its gold trimmings, it was really a beautiful item. Then I felt — more like saw — the character he was, and decided to leave the psychiatric therapy course”. I have always found this passage, taken from an unpublished interview of mine with the artist, a beautiful story.
Then things changed. The number of artists coming out of Brera has fallen somewhat, the art world has changed, other centres have established themselves, and for some it has been necessary to look outside Italy. But I believe that the reorganisation of the Academies on the University model (a model also much criticised by many university professors) was not extraneous to this change. I have always believed that the Academy had a specific character and that this should be maintained as much as possible, albeit in its rightful equivalence with the University (an equivalence that, moreover, has never quite been realised). The organisation into modules and semesters and the division into three years for the bachelor’s degree and two years for the specialisation (the so-called 3+2) mean that instead of following students for the whole year for four years, lecturers in the core subjects follow them half the year, for two or three years. The range of courses on offer has increased but teaching is more fragmented, courses are more like seminars and many reference points are lost. The new system leads to a fragmentation of education which, in my opinion, has never worked at all. I believe that the previous order achieved more effective results. I think it necessary to restore continuity and real regularity to core lecturers and core subjects by offering — in parallel to these courses — seminars, workshops, and visiting professors. I fear this will never happen, but I believe it would be a major advance for the Academy. A less rigid work organisation and a streamlining of bureaucracy would make the Italian Academies more accessible to artists with a rich professional background. Let us remember Vedova, Fabro, Mauri (all of whose performances were born in the Academy in L’Aquila), Kounellis and Pistoletto, who taught in Germany and Austria. But it would also be interesting to involve young people as much as possible in teaching experiences. Seminars and workshops could be handed over to them. We also have to consider that in the Academies it is difficult for students to reach the specialist level: many start professional art work early on and a good number of our students, often the very best artists, have never completed their studies. This has never been the most important aspect, even if I have surely not forgotten the beautiful theses of Stefania Galegati and Simone Berti.
In short I think it is very important that students are not considered as such (and even in this text the terms “student”, “pupil”, and “young artist’ have been used for convenience’s sake), but as true artists. Most importantly, always bear in mind that a real teacher is one who trains pupils who could surpass them, and is not afraid of that. When people ask me: “But how did you get such students?” I just answer: “We loved them.” This is not some vapid comment, but my way of saying, with my language and character, the same thing that Alberto Garutti used to say: “Nobody should think that art can be taught”. Finally, the real secret is revealed by the great Salvatore Scarpitta, whose pupils are said to have included many American artists, from Joseph Kosuth to Lawrence Weiner and Julian Schnabel… I asked him: “What would you recommend to a young artist today?” He replied: “Wherever there is a great artist, go to them, and stay there”.
