New Museum

(In production, 16mm, colour, sound, 10:00 mins)

New Museum is a 16mm film about the radical, modernist exhibition designs of Italian post-war architect Franco Albini and his collaboration with museum director Caterina Marcenaro in the early 1950s. The film is shot in the galleries of the Palazzo Bianco and Palazzo Rosso in Genoa.

Albini and Marcenaro’s desire was to literally ‘float’ art in the museum, and the film focuses on Albini’s unprecedented and extraordinary hydraulic lifting and rotating support for Giovanni Pisano’s 'Fragment from the Tomb of Margaret Of Brabant' (1313). This device, which now looks utterly eccentric, is one of the first examples of interactive museum sculpture display. It represents a landmark design in the presentation of sculpture in a museum context. The device was in fact adapted from a ‘found’ hydraulic car hoist, and was installed in the Palazzo Bianco in 1951 as part of the museums post-war reconstruction. It was subsequently de-installed and put into storage in the early 1970s in the Museo di Sant'Agostino, where the fragment is dsisplayed in a more conventional manner.

The appropriateness of Albini’s device was much commented on at the time of its installation, primarily because it was adapted from a ‘found’ hydraulic car hoist. In defense of Albini’s ‘eccentric’ display system Marcenaro claimed its mobility was central to ‘a new museum concept’ that emphasised an ‘atmosphere of purity and tranquillity’. In his important survey of post-war Museum design 'Neue Museen, Planung und Einrichtung' (1965) Michael Brawne indicates that Albini’s designs “were the first to question accepted methods of display” and “were to prove enormously influential later”. G E Kidder Smith in Italy Builds. L’Italia Costrusce (1954) suggests that the arrangement of the room that housed the Pisano fragment represented a landmark design in the presentation of sculpture in a museum context.

The film proposes that the device can be identified as one of the first examples of interactive museum sculpture display (the device could, in fact, be controlled by the viewing public). It examines Albini’s stated desire to “emphasise the atmosphere of purity and tranquillity that surrounds a real masterpiece” as a particularly explicit example of the modernist ideology of the museum to radically decontextualise art from its surroundings. As Catherine Marcerano suggests in an article from 1954 (Museum vol 7 no 4 1954): “In the interests of education, the Palace concept was abandoned and the museum criterion strictly adhered to. In other words, the works of art were treated not as the decorative part of a given setting, but as a world in themselves, sufficient to absorb the visitor’s full attention”. It is this idea of a museum criterion that appears to be central to Albini’s designs, the kinds of looking that they propose.

The film also refers to the remarkable relationship between Marcenaro, who also commissioned Albini to design an apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo Bianco for her own use. The apartment was the subject of a feature in Domus (June 1955) entitled “The Apartment of an Art Collector".

A limited number of black and white photographs of the installed mobile display device exist yet there appear to be no extant accounts or film footage of how it actually operated in the museum. One of the central interests of the film is to imagine what that could have been.

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