This adventure that bears the name of an address makes it so that the address itself becomes, by metonymy, that adventure, the collection, and joins the ranks of the musée du Quai Branly, the Louvre, the Hermitage, and the Uffizi. The form becomes the content. All these buildings and places have become instantiations of the human idea, which had come to deposit itself and instantiate itself there in things. Hence they managed to get out of their immediate locations and become fragments of the universal—because in the entire world these place names have become significant symbols, even beyond the Florentine, Parisian, or Saint-Petersburgian addresses they had in the beginning. 10 Corso Como has reached the beyond of universality; for it dreamt of a world beyond humans, a non-political but essential universal and, as it dreamt of it, it constructed it—fragment by fragment, piece by piece.
It is in constructing a new universal, in perpetually shaping meaning at a new cost that we can finally discover it; there is no conflict between construction and discovery, as was often believed, naively. In reality they are the two facets of the same activity: that it is given to human beings, momentarily conscious of the sublime tragedy of their lives, to perceive, stepping beyond what had begun, at the start of the 1990s, like a garage opened to clothing and photographic images, only to become the temple of the dream of the eternal—a dream that exists only insofar as it is transitory.
Notes
1. Calvin Tomkins, “Art or Not, It’s Food for Thought,” Life 20 (November 1964), p. 138. On the exposition, see Christoph Gunenberg and Max Hollein, in Shopping: A Century of Art and Consumer Culture (Ofildern: Hatje Cantz, 2002).
2. Store Days: Documents from “The Store” (1961) and Ray Gun Theater (1962), selected by Claes Oldenburg and Emmet Williams (New York: Something Else Press, 1967).
3. Quentin Meillassoux, “Dieu à venir, deuil à venir,” Critique, 704–5 (2006), pp. 105–15.
4. Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979).
Postface
At Calm
It is late, two o’clock in the morning. The last visitor has just left. Light falls on this place, which remained animated up to that moment. The store is closed, and so too the library. The restaurant and the bar are still lively. Music is playing, people are moving, words could be heard until then through the fountain and the abstractions of forms across civilizations. Italian is audible, but also English, Japanese, Spanish, French, and other idioms as well.
They have all left. The serpentine entrance is now closed, but only for a few hours. If, then, one is alone in these places, one can live in the empire of things: articles of clothing, which are there, unlit but only touchable, photographs barely visible in the shadows of the night, books that can’t be read, foods not yet prepared, cocktails still unmixed: the totality of this integral civilization, which is assembled here without humans, but owing them everything. In a strict sense, nothing is natural here, and yet everything has become second nature, fully human and fully autonomous, functioning according to its own norms.
The museum makes us think that it needs no one; and yet, like Hubert Robert’s Louvre, it would quickly disappear if were not looked after every day. We forget its fragility—and that is its genius. At this very moment everything seems to be in place at 10 Corso Como: the places that remain—their parts, chandeliers, murals, fountains—and the objects in them, come and go, all give the impression of being at the same level, all equal in status, and all in time. The truth is that they are not; and yet at this time of the night, when everyone is gone, one could well believe it. The objects could make the absent human feel that they have a life of their own, and that this autonomous life unites them like a parallel city. In the night, things are in the city, neighboring the plants that inhabit these places, just as they neighbor humans throughout the day; they are at calm, they aren’t being touched, they exist for themselves.
When the day breaks and the place opens afresh for a curious public, some snatches of this silent conversation the objects hold among themselves will no doubt remain; and it will be possible to believe, for a few seconds, that they can exist without human beings but are there nevertheless for them, when they arrive; and that they are available. This belief is a great achievement for humankind, no doubt one of the greatest: to manage being able to make itself believe, for an instant, that the world exists without it, in a space entirely conceived by it.
In the morning, having come from all over, from around the corner as well as from the other side of the globe, people will, again, encounter all their things, in their diversity and porosity. They will sense their place among them, their propriety, and also the great freedom of things, which finds its origins in them and outside them. And they will be able to leave with them or with a part of them: they can do so—they don’t have to do so. But just this possibility indicates that the world is more open, more transactional, and more transitory than it may seem to be in a museum; and yet, there too, it is. 10 Corso Como is the site of the acute conscience of the features of the museum; for it is not one, as it possesses the human distinction—or it is not a museum yet.
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The Transitory Museum Page 9
