CITYist

When Massimiliano Gioni moved to New York in 1999, he didn’t plan on becoming a curator. But 10 years later, as Director of Special Exhibitions at the New Museum, he is at the forefront of the contemporary art world and about to mount “Younger Than Jesus,” the New Museum’s the first major international triennial and New York’s only international exhibition devoted to emerging artists.

As most stories go, Gioni discovered he was interested in art at an early age and by the time he went to college, he knew he would study art history. “The profession of being a curator wasn’t really known at that point,” recalls Gioni, who pursued the path of art criticism after his studies and landed a job as an editor at Flash Art, the influential Milan-based magazine. “I knew I wanted to be involved with art and artists, and writing allowed me to do that, almost as an accomplice.”

The transition from critic to curator began in 1999 when Gioni moved to New York to be the U.S editor for Flash and began working with Maurizio Cattelan and Ali Subotnick. “I met Maurizio in 1998 when I interviewed him for Flash Art and Ali was the first person I met the first evening I went out in New York.” They first collaborated on the contemporary publication series “Charley,” and then at The Wrong Gallery, an exhibition space in Chelsea. Both the magazine and the art space grew organically out of the their desire to experiment, to push the boundaries of artists and to create a new way of looking at curating. “Harold Szeemann, the father of modern curating, once said ‘curating is like writing poems in space’ – you have to be able to write and express thoughts through the actual art.” His big break for space writing came in 2003 when he was invited to be the artistic director at the Trussardi Foundation, which had decided to abandon its permanent home at the Palazzo Marina alla Scala in favor of becoming a floating foundation. “I was presented with the challenge of working without an exhibition space and with a migratory institution that only exists when we find a new space.” The lack of space was hardly an empty offer for Gioni, who was drawn to the idea of creating temporary installations throughout Milan and diffusing contemporary art across the city. He installed Swiss artist Urs Fischer’s “House of Bread” at the Instituto dei Ciechi, a prestigious architectural complex that had never before opened to the public for a contemporary art exhibition, and presented Martin Creed’s “I Like Things” in the Palazzo dell’Arengario in Piazza del Duomo in Milan (including Creed’s iconic neon sign reading “Everything is Going to Be Alright” on its façade).

His work at Trussardi led to other international gigs like co-curating Manifesta 5 in San Sebastian (2004) and the Berlin Biennial (2006). While working in Berlin he quoted his co-curator, Maurizio Cattelan as saying, “curating a biennial is like pointing a gun at your head and smiling at the same time, and waiting for someone else to come and pull the trigger…” But Gioni doesn’t have a slow death wish, rather just the opposite. “What Maurizio was saying is that if you take the rules as they are then you are just expecting the critics to come and pull the trigger, but if you reinvent things then it is an interesting experience.” In Berlin, he re-invented what a biennial meant, countering the traditional definition of an event that happens once every two years, and instead mounting exhibits that lasted for two years. Other aspects of the Berlin experience were a magazine collaboration and even an illegal franchise of Gagosian gallery. “We wanted to create an exhibition that could happen in many different moments in space and time,” recalls Gionni, “you don’t need a Frank Gehry to have a museum – the new model for an institution is that of a phantom.”

And while he continues to abide by this principle in the work he does for Trussardi, his position at the New Museum has him operating out of a building that is anything but phantom-like. But Gioni sees no conflict between his more free form exhibitions and the work he does at the museum. “The New Museum is far from institutional, and it is still very young, so it is able to work and change at a much faster speed,” explains Gioni, “it is in a constant state of being and rethinking itself. I always think of it as a strange control tower – capturing signals and emitting systems,” he adds, “it is a place to do things, and to challenge the definition of a museum.”

That definition will be challenged in the upcoming triennial less by the physical space and more by the actual content. “People are against [triennials] because of the format – but it depends on what you do with them,” Gioni says. “What we are trying to do is to use the tool of the exhibition to capture a generation that has not yet been represented in contemporary art.” Working with fellow curators Lauren Cornell and Laura Hauptman, the first thing that they’ve done is make use of the building’s “antenna” quality to power human search engines. “We are relying on friends, writers, and people all over the world to alert us of art in places we don’t know that much about, like Africa or South America.”

These international collaborators will then be invited to share their findings in public programs during the exhibition and in an accompanying catalogue that will serve as a “Facebook” guide of their findings. Gioni feels that people will be surprised by what has come out of this so-called generation of Millenials, “they have been cannibalized in every field and we often think of them as consumers, not producers – we only study their producing habits as an excuse to sell them something.” Framing this debate about where Generation Y has come from and where they are going will be integral to the triennial. “There is one aspect of the generation that totally focuses on modern technology, but there is more complex nostalgia in their relationship with the past that is quite interesting.”

Working on the triennial also comes at an interesting time for Gionni, who at age 34 has just missed the age limit for the exhibition (the artists featured in “Younger Than Jesus” are under 33). “When I was 33, I was at the pinnacle of my career, but I don’t know what will come next. I think it’s healthy to keep one foot in two shoes – to be able to move in two different places,” he says. For him that means hanging on a little bit for the past: “I am not on Facebook – I can’t have another tool of communication”, he has said, but making sure that he is connected to the present: “I do have three cell phones.” But regardless of his position on his future, he still looks to his past as an editor and remembers that sometimes with writing, less is more. “there is a Yiddish saying ‘people are born with a certain number of words, and when you use them up you have said enough’ it is important to edit things out, to edit your life, and to sometimes be silent.”