Slamming the MACRO on the front page: how to make the museum a magazine. Interview with Luca Lo Pinto

After five years, it’s time to take stock for Rome’s MACRO, directed by Luca Lo Pinto. In a few months, Rome’s contemporary art museum, born a little more than 20 years ago in a former brewery in the capital, will have a new director. Lo Pinto’s MACRO in numbers? 250 artists involved, 65 exhibitions, 5 solo shows, including two anthological ones by Nathalie Du Pasquier and Elisabetta Benassi, at least two retrospectives between Arte Povera and Transavanguardia by Italians Salvo and Prini, 2 large group shows called “Editoriale” and “Post-Scriptum” at the opening and closing of his museum-magazine. The publications? Two exhibition catalogs that Lo Pinto legitimately calls “books,” the second and last still in the works that will close his exhibition program by February 2025. Has Lo Pinto succeeded in his goal of making a museum-magazine? Or rather: how much does this original museum format actually distinguish it from general cultural offerings? Which goals have been achieved and which have not? We try to figure that out in this interview done in the MACRO offices.

REF. You split your time between curatorial and editorial activities, since 2020 between MACRO and Nero Magazine founded 20 years ago with Lorenzo Gigotti, Francesco de Figuereido and Valerio Mannucci. Did you make sure that your two activities were interconnected?

LLP. I remain the co-founder of Nero, which has also become a publishing house in the meantime, although I have been less directly involved in it in recent years. Certainly the publishing business is a passion that also in my curatorial activity continues to influence me.

Your contract at MACRO expires in February 2025. What are you devoting yourself to in these last months at the museum in Rome?

We are working on the catalog of the last exhibition of my programming, Post Scriptum, a museum forgotten from memory. At MACRO I have never done exhibition catalogs. For my first exhibition at MACRO five years ago, entitled Editorial, I had invited a series of writers to visit it and asked each one to contribute to the catalog, a publication of only texts without images. For Post Scriptum on the other hand, my latest exhibition at MACRO, we are preparing a book with only images as if it were a fashion magazine. I asked stylist Francesca Cefis and two photographers Lukas Wassmann and Alassan Diawara to make two editorials inside the exhibition, two photo shoots, one in collaboration with Adidas and the other with Armani. A selection of these shoots is now on display here at the MACRO museum. The classic idea of the exhibition catalog for me is irrelevant.

By mixing the two languages you get a hybrid of art magazine and fashion magazine, plus you invite two fashion photographers to exhibit at MACRO among the artists in the show.

That’s right, with the resulting short-circuit.

So with both your first catalog and your second, you wanted to subvert the format of the exhibition catalog.

Yes, it is a choice that in the case of “Editorial” brought the book [catalog] into wider circulation. Not surprisingly, it sold out.

You gave carte blanche to the writers you commissioned to write your first catalog, instead of commissioning articles and reviews from critics or journalists.

Each of the writers had complete freedom to write what they wanted after seeing the exhibition. Emanuele Trevi’s new book begins with the very text he had written for this catalog. The text starts from his relationship with art: he recounts the exhibition at MACRO through the memory of his first visit to the Venice Biennale with his father.

A narrative but also cinematographic technique called mise en abîme by André Gide, in Italian messa in abisso, that is, a story within a story.

There was no obligation to mention the works in the exhibition. Magrelli for example wrote poems. This was done during Covid where in my opinion there was an overproduction of images by the whole art system. I thought it was useless to add more images and preferred to concentrate on words.

Were the graphics for this catalog decided together with your team at the MACRO?

Again, I work with graphic designer Marco Campardo whom I involved from the beginning as art director of the museum.

So you didn’t just transfer your entire Nero Magazine team to MACRO with you?

No, I never did anything with them here or even in Vienna, not only to avoid a conflict of interest, but also as a matter of opportunity.

What is it like working in Rome after Vienna?

In Austria there is strong economic support, public and private, and politics is much less intrusive than in Italy, institutions are less subject to political changes. When I worked at the Kunsthalle in Vienna, which is not a museum, I had three times the budget we have here. There if a junta or government changes, it doesn’t disrupt the institutions.

In this case, here the government has changed for a while already, and you still had an extension of your contract at MACRO.

The change of government has a direct impact on state museums like the Maxxi and the National Gallery, which is not the case with the MACRO, which is a municipal museum. I had a three-year tenure, extended by one year because of Covid (and the lockdown). Then when the new CDA of Azienda Palaexpo came in last year, there was an extension for another year.

Would you have preferred that the CDA renew your term? Do you feel like you are leaving MACRO with an unfinished project?

The decision of the last extension was made in July 2023, we had only five months to plan the work of a full year, 2024. Abroad in museums, you schedule exhibitions three years in advance.

Are you saying that this last Post Scriptumexhibition was not on the agenda from the beginning of your term or that you would not have done it now?

Certainly I was planning to close my programming in a consistent way.

What would you have liked to have done at the MACRO if you had more time?

I would have kept the structure of the museum as a magazine relying on a mechanism that by now the public had made its own, and then ended with Post Scriptum.

So you would have kept your program of exhibitions spread out over the course of the year and in the various sections of the museum rather than one big collective like Post Scriptum?

Editorial was also a single exhibition throughout the museum space. It was a bit of a manifesto, to share our idea of the museum with everyone. Right after that, the idea of the museum as a magazine was applied with its 8 “columns” or sections from architecture to design and so on. But MACRO, somewhat because of the conformation of its architecture, has always inaugurated more than one exhibition at the same time since its creation.

Why wait until the end of your contract to reintroduce this kind of exhibition, which is certainly more engaging? Is it a challenge from a logistical point of view?

Because they are very large spaces, plus with very difficult architecture. It’s no coincidence that in museums like the Pompidou, you never see these kinds of exhibitions that take up the whole space of the museum. The approach was to do different exhibitions in each section just like the different content or articles or columns that you find in each new issue of a magazine.

Have you ever thought of patenting this format of a museum-magazine?

No. Actually, I wouldn’t know who would be interested in it.

Could you apply it to any other museum you can think of?

This idea came up at the MACRO because it has a suitable architecture, in the old wing it has rooms that are all identical which therefore lend themselves to the idea of magazine sections. At the Maxxi you could not apply the same idea, it would be a stretch.

So this idea opens and closes with the MACRO, unless someone imitates you later. Tomorrow, who knows some committee might directly choose a magazine editor to run a museum.

I don’t know!

Unlike a magazine that one can reread, however, it lacks a clear view, a “summary” (to stay on topic) of all the exhibitions you have done or “published” between Editorial and Post Scriptum.

The exhibitions in all are more than 60, in five years is indeed a lot. We have a list that I also need from time to time to look back.

This format works if a museum needs to break an exhibition record in terms of numbers.

It was not born out of breaking records, nor out of a neurotic or frenzied desire to “make numbers,” but out of the need to give new energy to the museum’s identity and a rhythm that would allow it to attract audiences again each time.

And the response of the public came eventually, at the opening of Post Scriptum there was a great turnout.

Yes we were going at a good pace in the last two years, partly because we invested a lot in communication. Being able to compact the audience and reach this cruising speed was not easy.

Were you clear right away how you were going to apply this museum-magazine idea or was it all experimental?

It was first an intuition. The rest, how to put this idea to use from scratch, was the result of the work done with Marco Campardo and the whole team. I didn’t know if this would work, there was a risk. Some aspects I adjusted along the way. For example, at the beginning I had imagined opening one section at a time and having eight openings in a month, so that all the attention would not be focused only on the opening. I wanted it to be a museum that people go to regardless of the opening.

Do you think you achieved this goal with the (deliberate) dispersiveness of the programming? My personal feeling was, in regularly attending the MACRO, that you could no longer tell which sections had just been inaugurated and which had been seen before. It creates an anachronistic or otherwise alienating effect.

The important thing is that, for those coming for the first time, nothing seems to exclude the rest of the programming.

Given how you set up the museum structurally, how did you instead choose the artists for whom you did the equivalent of solo exhibitions within the MACRO?

Eighty percent of the programming was devoted to solo exhibitions. The goal was to create a polyphony of voices without cacophony. So our avatar was an octopus, one head and many tentacles.

Would the head be you?

No, the museum.

Didn’t you think instead of doing a special issue on one artist, and then dedicate the whole museum to one artist who is capital to you?

The funniest thing about this museum-as-magazine approach is just being able to imagine various options. I haven’t thought about a particular artist, but how to set up this exhibition eventuality. Maybe I would do it with an artist who is living anyway.

So you don’t have a reference artist or aesthetic?

I would think of an artist who can read this space. I reason according to the peculiarities of the artists to narrow the field. The problem today is not to run a museum according to a taste: anyone can do an exhibition on William Anastasi or Pippa Garner. For me, it is not enough to choose works and put them in a space. Of course I would never do an exhibition on an artist I am not interested in, but I think about many aspects, the evaluations I make are other.

What are the evaluations you make?

First I think about the history of this city without necessarily putting the Roman artist in it. For example, Simone Carella was one of the first ones I wanted in the exhibition here, a figure of some weight here in Rome but unknown to most.

And this was a very appreciable choice and gesture. To include a figure from the Roman avant-garde, by the way, who died recently, like Simone Carella, and to somehow enable him.

This section on Simone has been a bit of a lens to look at the avant-garde in theater and writing, an absolutely unique and specific page in Rome. My goal has always been to bring multiple disciplines together; I find it debasing to force cultural producers into categories as they do in certain institutions. The freedom of a person like Simone is something that institutions must learn to see. Everything I have done at MACRO has been inspired directly by the artists, by what they have told me or what I have learned about them.

What surely your MACRO or your idea of a museum forces us to do is to change vocabulary. Meanwhile, because more than making solo or group exhibitions, you are publishing content.

If the programming was simply a succession of exhibitions, it would stop at a matter of taste. Instead, the goal I think I have achieved is to have shifted the focus to something else, here everyone creates their own way of looking at programming.

What are your other personal satisfactions?

One of the most famous artists in the world, Richard Serra, had his first exhibition at the Salita in Rome, nobody knew about it. So we presented unpublished images from that exhibition at MACRO, which were then bought and included by Richard Serra himself in his catalog raisonné. Is it necessary to have another Serra exhibition? If it allows you to discover new things about Richard Serra and moreover in Rome, yes. Americans are very good at self-historicizing. We unfortunately forget our own of history. Simone Carella was a figure to be historicized. That is the function of the museum: to produce History.

What you have done with the Retrofuture section, however, is more daring. Instead of pulling works in the collection out of storage and showing them to the public as contracted, you commission an artist to do a photo reportage directly in the storage rooms of works mostly still wrapped in bubble wrap. Backstage images then, printed in wallpaper that served as a backdrop for your private collection of artists throughout your five years at MACRO.

The attempt - completely anti-museum - with the Retrofuturo room, was to build a collection of the future with young Italian artists, forty in all. In these twenty years MACRO has not made any more acquisitions or enriched the collection, which one must specify is the responsibility of the Superintendency of Rome. The last works that entered the collection I think date back to the direction of Bartolomeo Pietromarchi, with some of the works produced with Enel Contemporanea. Even before that there was MACRO Amici, which shaped the support of some collectors and is now gone. The forty works in Retrofuturo were almost all produced for MACRO in the form of donation or loan for use, from Diego Marcon to Monia Ben Hamouda, Davide Stucchi, Sagg Napoli, Alessandro Cicoria, Gabriele Silli, Riccardo Benassi, Michela De Mattei, to name a few. A few months ago, I asked the Superintendence to renegotiate the loan agreement and extend it but they did not accept this possibility.

Perhaps the Superintendency is not interested in acquiring your collection. Beyond the official reasons, is this not a decision you should have expected? Do you consider it a failure?

The failure is not mine, but for the museum, for the city. For me it is very serious. Two of the three finalist artists for the MAXXI Bulgari Prize, Monia Ben Hamouda and Riccardo Benassi, produced ad hoc works for Retrofuturo. Diego Marcon is perhaps the most successful artist of that generation. By now the MACRO would have in its collection works by the most relevant young Italian artists today.

So if it does not make acquisitions, we can say that it is since Pietromarchi’s direction that MACRO is technically not a museum.

MACRO is definitely a fragile museum because it does not have autonomy either on the collection, architecture, or governance because it is run by Azienda Palaexpo and before that by Zetema. A museum must have its own continuity or else it loses its identity. It is like an orphan that is continuously given to different families. Or like a restaurant that starts out as a trattoria then becomes a sushi restaurant.

And with you, has MACRO been more of a trattoria or a sushi restaurant?

I don’t know, I tried to give MACRO a strong identity again and bring it back to an international scene.

You arrived at the MACRO after the controversy of the non-renewal of the mandate of anthropologist Giorgio De Finis, your predecessor, and when artist Cesare Pietroiusti, whom in a press conference you had declared you considered as your teacher, was president of Palaexpo. What do you wish for your successors?

I wish that the plurality of looks will always be connected to high-level cultural offerings.

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