Make a Wilderness: Miltos Manetas Miltos Manetas interviewed by Chiara Moioli Miltos Manetas, Preparatory drawing, 2019, MILANO at Torre Rasini, Milan, 2019. Photo: Lorenzo Piovella “Everyone’s updating their hardware Plugging in their new gear Upgrading to all-new components Replacing the things from last year […] The tools that we used to create them They’re no longer welcome ’round here Everyone’s re-routing their cables Creating paths that are crystal clear” —Joe Goddard, “Electric Lines,” from Electric Lines (London: Domino Recording Co. Ltd., 2017) Miltos Manetas (b. 1964, Athens) is a charming caractère and a real go-getter. A painter, yet also a pillar in the development of what will later be dubbed Post-Internet art, with the founding of the art movement known as Neen he, among many fellow practitioners across the world, captured the zeitgeist of a generation of artists working on- and offline, blurring the boundaries between the digital and the material world, shaping the mind frame of a newborn attitude toward the notion of art in the twenty-first century that he later sorted under the umbrella of “Ñewpressionism.” His memetic mantra, “Outside of the Internet There Is No Glory,”1 is somewhat of an oxymoron that fully exemplifies the symmetry of his seamlessly distributed practice. For MILANO, currently on view at Torre Rasini in Porta Venezia, Milan, the artist reunited his Cables paintings (1997–ongoing) portraying a “family group in an interior” in a world where technology itself has become “our” family. In the following exchange, Manetas retraces his career starting right from his arrival in Milan, mapping his movements around the globe—each one coinciding with a new stage of his work. “Milan is certainly not a city but a condition.”2 CHIARA MOIOLI: You surely know this town very well: this is where you lived; studied (at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera); fell in love (with Vanessa Beecroft); and started your career as an artist (your first paintings, the Sad Tree series, were realized here, in late 1995). Let’s start from this city, after which the show is titled, and from this building, Torre Rasini—a historic tower designed in the 1930s by Emilio Lancia and Gio Ponti—in which MILANO is staged. MILTOS MANETAS: I encountered Torre Rasini from the first days that I arrived in Milan in 1986. I had to be a student of art. When I came to Italy, I first went to Rome, following a Greek woman. There I realized that I couldn’t stay because Rome was south and there was not “the air of the north.” Now, what did I know of “the air of the north”? I was just a Greek southern guy. Later I understood that inside southern guys there is some kind of software, something that sends people from the south toward the north. I hitchhiked to Milan and met a Greek junkie, the first serious junkie of my life—I was into drugs, but I was not into heroin—who offered me [a place] to stay at his house, and I moved in immediately; there was only one record playing constantly in the apartment, The Cure—all day, The Cure. I was living with I don’t know how many Greek “architects,” who were all heavy heroin users and were selling drugs at the Giardini Pubblici di Indro Montanelli in Porta Venezia, here. I would go to the park to check out the situation, see their clients. So I was in the Giardini Pubblici, and as an ambitious young man I saw this tower, the Rasini tower, which I did not know at that time, but it has a history, and it’s the history of those years. I was in Milan, and I was a “painter.” I was wonderfully empty and living with these drug addicts, also using some drugs that emptied my brain, like ketamine. It was a completely different Milan: it was a very gray city, full of young people in the piazzas. The next year they were not there because “Operation Europe” already had programmed that Milan would be one of Europe’s capitals and had to be cleaned; but in that moment, it was piazzas, people selling drugs, people consuming drugs. At the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, I encountered Luciano Fabro, who was not my professor, but I would observe him and go to all his lectures. I was ready for something which I thought would be Conceptual art, because that’s what the cool people around me were doing. Then I started going to museums here in Milan, and I was in shock: it was the first time that I actually saw paintings, “real” paintings by “real” painters: Piero della Francesca, Raffaello, Mantegna, Tiziano, Tintoretto, Veronese, people like those. I felt like I was not prepared, since I came to the arts because I found a book on Jackson Pollock and thought, “Look at that. It’s so simple. It looks easy.” That kind of art had this energy, this easiness. But in Milan I encountered another kind of painting, which became my painting. Of course, I never imagined that I could actually be part of that, because I didn’t know if I had the talent. Moreover, showing painting at the academy was not welcomed as it was a school led by Luciano Fabro, some kind of “general” of Conceptual art. There I learned my first lesson about “What is art?” Art is a wall of separation between who knows and who does not know; and those who do not know deserve all the hammering, all the bad treatment they get. And the cool artists are the ones with the hammers. CM: How did you start painting in this context? MM: I did not. I went into the Conceptual thing, started making some of that and finished the art school. After having graduated, Diego Miltos Manetas, Satellites, 1993, MILANO at Torre Rasini, Milan, 2019. Courtesy: Collection Polla, Geneva. Photo: Lorenzo Piovella Esposito—my professor—said, “Okay, great. Now, you have finished the art school. Here is the number of Denys Zacharopoulos [who was curating documenta IX with Jan Hoet]—go there.” I went to Denys Zacharopoulos and got in touch with another type of artist and curator, people from an older generation, the generation after the Arte Povera. They gave me contacts, telling me that I was going to have a great career, that my work was great because everybody was doing stuff like that. A synchronized ballet of “That’s great! Everybody does that. Just continue like this.” I was in shock, and I wanted to destroy everything I did. I was in Greece, and from a window I observed some old ladies passing with their big bags and curved bodies, walking slowly. I saw them, and they looked like satellites. I started this project, Satellites (1990), which did not fit great in terms of Conceptual art. I took at least three thousand transparencies of old women and started making drawings, which later attracted the attention of Adelina von Furstenberg, who wanted to make a show at Magasin of Grenoble, but it never happened. To close the Satellites project, I staged a photograph where seven young men appeared as “Satellites”—dressed as old ladies—at the Galleria Fac-Simile in Milan, then made a video where I was going around Milan dressed always as an old lady but in red, a “red Satellite.” My vocation was painting, but I had even forgotten that that was my vocation: I had conformed to the Milanese style. Satellites was a project of rupture—a very important one, retrospectively. I was breaking with something. At the same time Vanessa Beecroft, my girlfriend at the time, was becoming rapidly a famous artist by displaying gorgeous-looking women in galleries, and this produced sadness in me, because my work and hers were kind of similar, but my women were completely not winning because they were old. Her artworks were beautiful, amazingly beautiful, colorful, and there was no way I could do something against her with my Satellites or with my other conceptual projects. Vanessa was doing fantastic art. You would look at it, and you would not want to stop looking at it. So where could I go? Nowhere. I decided to be a writer: bye-bye, art. I was defeated. But I had my discrete success: I had three exhibitions in museums and one solo exhibition in a gallery. One was with Nicolas Bourriaud, Traffic, at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux (1996), and defined what later became known as Relational aesthetics. Before closing with art, I thought: “At least I’ll try to do this one thing, this ‘painting,’ that I always liked. Can I make one of them, with oil, that actually is representative, is a representation, and it’s not abstract?” I called Vedovamazzei because I knew that Simeone [Crispino] knew how to paint; he gave me a series of instructions—which later I published on the website francescobonami.com3— and I tried my luck. I bought a projector because Simeone told me that if you don’t know how to draw, you buy one. I bought a projector and some trees used for architecture, and I made Sad Tree (1995). Inside this painting, there is me at that time, that sad tree: it seems weak, curved as if the wind is blowing; but it can come back. All my friends in Relational aesthetics movement were super angry as it was the only painting in the show, and nobody wanted that.