MUSEUMS´S RHAPSODY
A MICROCOSMOS OF COLLECTION OBJECTS
October 24, 2019 - January 5, 2020
Curated by Sara Salute
In collaboration with Galerie Alessandro Casciaro

Marcel Duchamp made the "iconoclastic" recommendation to use a painting by Rembrandt as an ironing board. As is well known, the creator of the Readymade expanded his concept, first formulated in 1916, to include the so-called "reciprocal Readymade" in 1934. Whereas in the Readymade any object of utility is elevated to the rank of a work of art solely by the choice of the artist, in the reciprocal Readymade it works in the opposite direction: a work of art is transformed back into an object of utility. Sissa Micheli does not go that far. She remains within the realm of museality, but her combinatorial procedure is in the tradition of Duchamp's Readymade concept.
The act of choice, which replaces production in the handicraft sense, the assignment of a new purpose and the transfer of aesthetic qualities into a new visual presence are conceptually placed in the context of the reciprocal readymade. In the exhibition Museum's Rhapsody, the artist combines objects from the Palais Mamming collection with pieces of fur and other objects in the sense of Duchamp's "most unexpected contacts" in order to enable new discursive contexts and perspectives. Her leitmotif could be a bon mot of the poet Comte de Lautréamont, which became a surrealistic creed: "As beautiful as the chance encounter between an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table". She combines the head of Empress Sissi, cut off by the fascists, with quartz stones that look like stone tears (Tears of the Past). She crowns a marble skull (King of Pins) with a magnificent historical hair comb, the fruit cone of a pine tree becomes a hedgehog (Armored Procupine) by combining it with a fur collar, three wooden microscopes (The Factory) are arranged into factory towers over which a dark cloud of fur weaves, and a ruined city of mineral rock (City in Furs) protrudes from a fur collar. The hard meets the soft, the mineral meets the animal world, and one does not fail to recognize in it a reflex of Meret Oppenheim's legendary surrealistic fur cup. In general, Sissa Micheli's references to works of early modernism and the avant-garde are numerous. Sissi's tears evoke the iconic "Glass Bead Tears" by Man Ray, City in Furs could allude to the song "Venus in Furs" by the US rock band The Velvet Underground. Micheli's object assemblages are temporary stagings that are fixed as photographs. Torn from their museum sleep, where they function as passive witnesses and evidence of their former function, they are reactivated for a photographic moment, only to return to the museum context again afterwards. The photographs document and store Michelis Museum for a limited time. If one conceives of a photograph as memory, the major theme of memory also comes into play. To describe her combinatorial practice, Micheli uses the literary term "objective correlative", coined by T. S. Eliot. For which emotions does the artist seek correlates in objects, situations or events? The title of the exhibition, Museum's Rhapsody. A Microcosmos of Collection Objects, suggests a musical thinking. The artist as curator acts as conductor or composer of an orchestra of objects, so that they reveal their "original", scientifically classified meaning for a moment and exist in a more sensual collection principle. In this way she places herself in the tradition of museum and institutional critique, which since the Futurists has placed the institution of the museum more or less revolutionarily at the disposal of the public. The protest of the futurist avant-garde was directed against the institution museum as such and failed because of its dependence on the very institution on which its critique was directed.
The artists' museums of Daniel Spoerri and Claes Oldenburg, on the other hand, adopted the seriousness of the museum in order to undermine the exclusive right of the curators to select, collect, and present the art objects. They were an attempt to rethink the order of things: non-hierarchical, without priorities, ironic towards the demands of cataloguing science and gifted with a great deal of surrealist combinatorics. Sissa Micheli's musically grounded metamorphoses of meaning stand in this genealogical line. Her objects revive in small format the principle of the historical chambers of art and curiosities that once captured the world in an exuberant mixture of art, craftsmanship and nature, folklore and technology, rarities, precious and curious. With the Enlightenment, the Chambers of Wonder went out of fashion and were regarded by museums as outdated and ignorant. Coupling things together that ostensibly contradict any logic brings wonders to light.
— Heinrich Schwazer