Today, we’re going back to the Brera district, to see if we can find more of the BreArt shows. We walk along the main street, familiar now with the stores and cafes along the way. When we reach the main piazza, we take the opportunity to have another look inside the cathedral. The renovations are continuing, and some areas that were closed before are open for us today. There’s a man on a cherry-picker cleaning one of the center cornices high up on a marble column. The crane is fully extended so he can reach the cornice, and it reveals to us just how impossibly high the ceiling is. After our visit, we pick up a sandwich from a snack truck and join all the students and tourists sitting on the church steps having their lunches, with the pigeons hopping around us looking for crumbs.
We make our way over to the Brera neighborhood, looking for BreArt signs on the streets. We visit several interesting exhibitions; one photorealist artist painting fruits and flowers is pretty noteworthy. Then, we come across a former palace exhibition site. We enter through a typical courtyard and grand staircase to the palace rooms with the usual ornate fireplaces, lavish wallpapers and carved crown moldings. Here, though, the rooms are filled with performance art, video art and weird installations. I’m not a huge fan of most of this, it all looks like student work, exploring concepts and experimenting. It probably is student work, actually, since the Academy is right across the street. But it is great to see the space used for creative and untraditional work. We watch a group doing a dance performance that involves marching in formation around the room, turning and clapping, and looking very serious. There doesn’t seem to be any ending coming up soon, so we move on past a guy playing a grand piano with a porthole cut through the top so he can stand inside it and play the keys backwards and upside down, sort of. He’s not bad, although it’s hard to see what he gains, artistically, by the inside-the-piano gimmick.
At the Fine Art Academy, we see an exhibition of work by Joseph Albers, a favorite of both of us. There are several pieces from the Homage to the Square series, very exciting to see in such an accessible placement, but most of the exhibit includes artifacts from Albers work as a professor of art. After teaching at the Bauhaus in Europe, Albers became a professor at the new Black Mountain College in North Carolina, and then at Yale. The exhibit showed some of his student’s projects, and also a black and white film, with no sound, unfortunately, of Albers teaching a class. His method was often to present a basic problem to the class, and let them work to a solution. “Here is a newspaper. Use it to make something more than a newspaper.” Then he would leave the room, and return in an hour to explore whatever the students had created, talking about their process, what they created, what they learned. His premise was that the more “teaching” that is imposed on the students, the less “learning” they experienced.
1 Video Included
Milan Brera Arts
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