Christopher Williams: Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna, Italy

"THE ACHIEVEMENTS of the Italian Communists are nowhere more evident than in the city of Bologna." Thus Donald Sassoon opened his introduction to the English version of the collection of essays Red Bologna (1977), which familiarized an international audience with the progressive policies of the Italian town's Communist government. Among Bologna's ambitious projects of the time was an impressive new building for the town's Galleria d'Arte Moderna, which was officially opened on May 1, 1975. Designed by Leone Pancaldi and situated in the industrial north of the city, the building appeared somewhat Brutalist; inside, the architect had fashioned open and well-lit areas for the display of art.

Over the years, however, the building slowly darkened. Fake walls were constructed over once-generous windows; existing walls were extended and the gaps that used to afford visitors fluid passage through the space filled in. Incrustations of white-painted Sheetrock facilitated expansive exhibitions by Anselm Kiefer, Julian Schnabel, and others. Visitors got to see more and more art, but certainly not under the conditions that Pancaldi had imagined. Finally, in the early 1990s, the decision to move GAM was made: Later this year, the institution will inhabit a much more tourist-friendly site in the center of town, where it is to be known as MAMBO (i.e., Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna). Pancaldi's building, meanwhile, will likely be used for trade fairs and similar events.

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To mark the end of GAM, curators Gianfranco Maraniello--also director of the institution--and Andrea Viliani had the inspired idea of inviting Christopher Williams to mount the final exhibition. Titled "For Example: Dix-Huit Lecons Sur La Societe Industrielle (Revision 5)," it largely involved the artist making interventions in the building itself. In recent years, visitors entered GAM through what had been intended by Pancaldi as a cinema and small exhibition space; Williams opened up the original entrance so that locals with some memory of the building would feel as if they were revisiting a former time. He removed false walls in the main gallery, revealing Pancaldi's windows and views over a small park, and uncovered elegant recessed spaces that had been shut off to maximize the available surface area. The expansive central atrium, which rises to some fifty feet and is illuminated by a large skylight, had typically been reserved for the centerpiece of any exhibition. In a move that evoked Robert Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" of 1951, Williams installed five large white mobile display walls in this atrium and left each completely bare. The gallery became a trap for shifting light, the empty walls changing tones as clouds passed by high above.

Not all the artist's interventions aimed to recapture the beauty of the building in the manner of a sensitive restorer, however. Sometimes Williams took down false walls only to reinstall them in another part of the building, which now appeared hastily boarded up. In one gallery, Williams removed sections of the display walls so that they again reflected Pancaldi's design. But rather than smooth them down following the demolition, he left them in a raw state, so it appeared that the galleries had been visited by the ghost of Gordon Matta-Clark. And although Williams's cuts here allowed visitors again to walk the routes over the marble floor plotted out by the architect, it remained obvious which sections had been polished over the years and which covered up by the wall extensions.

Toward the back of the exhibition space, Williams displayed the architect's original blueprints for the building on a low plinth. Nearby was a series of vitrines--also designed by Pancaldi--which Williams had retrieved from GAM's storage rooms. One contained material relating to international responses to the politics of '70s Bologna--copies of Red Bologna in English, German, and Italian were presented along with the Semiotext(e) publication Italy: Autonomia; Post-Political Politics (1980). Another vitrine held a doll-size replica of the puppet Topo Gigio, who first appeared on an Italian children's television show in the '60s, along with a children's photo-story book titled Das Apfelmauschen (The Little Apple-Mouse). Elsewhere, as a kind of exhibition-within-an-exhibition, there was a wall cabinet in which six tiny Asger Jorn ceramic sculptures, all from 1971, were on view. Some of these elements drew attention to the very activity of intervention itself: The inclusion of Jorn's works, for example, reminded one of Situationist precedents for Williams's maneuvers, and the image of a mouse living in an apple on the cover of Das Apfelmauschen suggested by analogy that Williams was a kind of intruder burrowing into the museum.

But what, taken together, did all these interventions achieve? They certainly succeeded in sensitizing viewers to the austere beauty of Pancaldi's architecture, a beauty newly revealed just before the move to a new site in "historic" Bologna. If the decision to relocate the institution can be thought of as a symptom of contemporary spectacle culture's attachment to a romanticized idea of history, Williams managed to resuscitate the memory of a more recent but less postcard-friendly past. Crucially, however, because his actions on the architecture resulted as much in ruination as restoration, he summoned the past without lapsing into nostalgia, without pining for Communist Bologna of the '70s as a lost utopia. The effect of both tidying and messing up the building simultaneously created a confusing sense of time within the exhibition. Some spaces felt like a throwback to the '70s, others like a premonition of what the building will soon become. With this collage of time periods, Williams insisted on the irretrievability of the past.