The other day, Griffin and I visited the MAXXI, way up in the north of Rome. The whole family had spent the morning at the Castel Sant’Angelo, a giant circular fortress with the best views of Rome from its roof. Then we split up. Griffin and I looked for a place for lunch and ended up at a Mexican spot, Taco Libre, which was perfect: our first meal on our first night of this whole trip, was at an Italian restaurant in Mexico City, and we’ve been joking this whole time in Italy that we should have started with a Mexican restaurant here. Our waitress the other day could not have been cooler. She told us that she used to live in Los Angeles for 3 years, and that she’d been engaged to Beck’s drummer, and worked as a tour manager for Beck and the Beastie Boys. She said Adam Yauch was the sweetest Beastie, that she was so sad when he died, and that she’d also become good buddies with Mike Diamond’s wife and Beck’s then-wife during that time, but Beck and his wife kept trying to convert her to Scientology. Oh, and that Cat Power’s then-partner was brother of Beck’s wife, so she got to hang with her all the time, too, and it was weird because Cat Power wasn’t a Scientologist. So fun to gossip about early-aughts celebrities! I wish I’d gotten her name, because I’d love to hear more of her stories, including how she’s now working as a waitress at Taco Libre…
Anyway, we made it to MAXXI, and the building is insanely cool. Designed by Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi architect. If anything, it’s kind of weirdly hidden: you can only see its coolness when you enter the gates of the grounds, set back from the sidewalk. The main exhibit was Ambienti 1956-2010, Environments by Women Artists II. Two?! So this was a sequel!? I just read in the brochure: Environments by Women Artists 1956-1976 was presented in 1976 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. Aha! Anyway, this was SO well produced and presented. Lots of very fun, playful spaces to enter, including a giant, like multi-room-sized, phallic-shaped balloon called “Penetración/Expulsión” by Argentinian artist Lea Lublin, plus this magical sound installation “Bird Tree” by Christina Kubisch that used headphones to interact with a metal “tree” on the wall. “By wearing magnetic headphones, listeners can move freely along the wall to generate and mix their own score, becoming a composer and at the same time, a performer with their way of walking, stopping, and moving.” The fact that the sounds were birds I’d hear in northern New England, in particular loons and owls, plus that this was made in the 70’s!!!!! Just completely floored me. How have I never heard of this artist?! Also, looking at the brochure for the show, I just discovered that one part of it that I totally thought was its own, stand-alone exhibit about gentrification and homelessness, Martha Rosler’s If You Lived Here, was actually one of the “environments!” It was a whole separate room, filled with protest posters from around the world, and luxury hi-rise ads from NYC and NJ, and the ostentatiousness of those ads was so ridiculous, you sometimes couldn’t tell what was real and what was satire. I thought it was a project of the museum itself, so I wrote my friend Molly to tell her that they HAVE to have a copy of her mom’s amazing book, Root Shock (I played on the soundtrack for my dear friend Sara Booth’s documentary with Mindy, called “Urban Renewal is People Removal”) in the collection, but I guess it needs to be sent to Martha Rosler. Anyway. I really enjoyed this whole show, not least because it gave Griffin a really good time, and he’s been really down on modern art lately. To have him be so moved and thought-provoked and happy, meant a lot. There was another show we saw, about the Finnish architects Alvar, Ainar and Elissa Aalto, and it was cool, but not very energizing. Did make us want to go see the Aalto-designed dorm at MIT when we get home, though.
But I titled this, way back, “Two Museums,” and the other one I wanted to mention is much smaller, but also very cool, and on my list of recs for Rome: the Casa di Goethe, near the Piazza del Popolo. The curator is a good friend of my friend Daniella, who was just here from Berlin, so I went with D after she dropped off her girls there for a workshop. The special exhibit there was called “The Uncanny House,” and it took the fact that this was Goethe’s actual abode, to consider works that deal with interior dwellings and, literally, uncanny ways of viewing them. I don’t have pictures of them, because D and I were too busy talking, but I really enjoyed the variety of works and the space itself, with its midnight-blue shag carpeting, was magical and somewhat eerie or uncanny itself. Like the MAXXI, the space became one of the elements of the show. (Included in the gallery below is a shot from last Friday, when we went to Mason Bates’ “Soundscapes” at the American Academy of Rome, and the kids played some truly epic rounds of “Fire Water Ice… Something I forget what,” a game Daniella’s kids play at school in Berlin.)
