Surrealism and the metamorphosis of life and death according to David Cronenberg

Milan. But how far-sighted the Grand Duke of Tuscany was Peter Leopold of Habsburg Lorraine? We are talking about a man born in 1747 who just over twenty years later, at the height of his powers, decided to make an important distinction between the artistic and scientific heritage of many assets accumulated by the Medici onwards, conserved in the grand ducal galleries . His idea – perfectly successful – was to make them accessible to even the most, thus allowing popular acculturation and the possibility for anyone who felt the need or was just curious to enter places inaccessible up to that moment. The first to be opened was the Uffizi Gallery in 1769, in 1775 it was the turn of Palazzo Torregiani with the Imperial and Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History. Between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, in that place called La Specola, around 1,400 pieces were made with the aim of obtaining a real didactic-scientific treatise which, without the need for direct observation of a corpse, illustrated the anatomy of the human body.

Such a museum – currently closed for renovations – could not fail to attract the attention of David Cronenberg, director who is a symbol of body horror, as most define him, who with many of his films has disturbed the already prepared and strong minds and stomachs of many people. With his Crashes (1996) did not invent anything, it is true, because the film is based on the homonymous novel by Ballard, but in recounting the love felt and manifested between James Spader and Holly Hunter by hearing and seeing bodies devastated after road accidents, he gave life to a genre, obviously receiving criticism and praise as often happens in similar cases. A body was already transformed into his Kafkaesque The fly (1996) with Jeff Goldblum who from that moment became a sex symbol and also in his most recent film – Crimes of the future (2022) – talking about prostheses and technological devices for a distant future, manages to blend the aesthetics of his first you work with the psychoanalytic elements of the latter. With the Florentine museum, therefore, which houses a large zoological collection and the largest collection in the world of eighteenth-century anatomical wax models, “it was love at first sight”, declared, and his ability was in being able to bring part of those works to Milan, to the Prada Foundation.

Until July 17, Anatomical Waxes: La Specola in Florence, will make you lose and excite you in a tangle of bodies, veins and other human organs “of figures created as a teaching tool”, explains the Canadian director, “but so beautiful as to seem real”. “In looking for some partially dissected whole figures with faces and gestures that did not express pain or agony and that did not seem subjected to torture or surgery – he adds – however, we ended up giving life to vivid characters in the throes of ecstasy. It was this unusual choice of sculptors that sparked my imagination. I asked myself just this: what if the dissection itself induced the feeling of ecstasy, that almost spiritual rapture?”.

Our advice – if you decide to visit (we recommend it) this exhibition which follows a Meat and sand by Alejandro G. Iñárritu et al Wunderkammer by Wes Anderson and Juman Malouf – it is just this: go with no prejudice and no expectations, just letting your senses enrapture you, because the ecstasy and beauty that Cronenberg tells us about will manifest themselves at any moment, leaving you in amazement more total.

You will start from the podium, where the short film titled is looped Four unloved women, Adrift on a purposeless sea, Experience the ecstasy of dissectionand that space, if you look closely, will remind you of the anatomical theaters where the dissections of cadavers were performed. Only in this case you will be there, as in a Greek theater with a 2.0 addition, to observe, to close or open your eyes, to hold your breath. Resisting is useless, recited the book with which Walter Siti won the Strega Prize in 2013, but in this case, yes. Because Cronenberg managed to bring attention to those female bodies, to aspects related to the image of women, sexuality and pleasure. If in the anatomical collections they are kept inside a casket/coffin and exhibited on the first floor of the Foundation, in your video they are comfortably laid on plastic mattresses in a swimming pool which could be in Bel Air or Venice Beach, in any case with a Hollywood scent. “The sculptors – he continues – did not want these figures to appear suffering or under torture, imprisoned or lifeless, but they wanted to make them seem alive and somehow fully part of the experience of exposing the inside of their bodies”. You will have confirmation of this, for example, by looking carefully at the Recumbent female statue known as ‘Venus’from 1782, lying well in life size on a silk drape and mattress, enclosed in a bois de rose showcase finished in gold. She has a pearl necklace around her neck, a rosy complexion on her face and brown hair that runs down her body to the sides. Seen like this, nothing strange, you might say, but there’s more. The portion of the trunk of the body can be disassembled and inside it is possible to admire the different levels of viscera, the uterus with a fetus, also removable. We could continue with the description, but we’ll end it here, so as not to spoil the pleasure of discovery and surprise.

“In death there is life or in any case a new one can be born from it”, is the subtle message that the artist/director gives us, who recently made a one-minute short film entitled The Death of David Cronenberg auctioned on SuperRare by daughter Caitlin in which she imagined her death. Still bodies, therefore, also in Milan, unregulated, dissected, divided, opened and shown, “my magnificent obsession”, he told us in Matera two years ago. “Man has never stopped modifying his body through tattoos, mutilations, scars and even plastic surgery is part of this process, without forgetting that the human body is also made up of microplastics absorbed in the environment. All bodies change and one of the universal mutations is old age: it affects us all, even if we put our resources into play to slow it down”.

Those thirteen bodies, those thirteen sculptures that you will find on the first floor of the Prada Foundation – to which are also added the drawings, also in display cases, illuminated with sensors (the only flaw: the continuous beeping of the alarms which disturbs and ruins concentration) – attract and disorient. There will be disgust for everyone, it’s inevitable, but it will only be at the beginning, because then, going further, you forget. Truthfulness is enchantment in this oneiric yet realistic exhibition which can be – depending on how it is interpreted – an exhibition on art or on desire, an anatomy lesson or a didactic operation, the one with which Prada intends to continue to narrate the value of a collection and its history, revealing the contribution of creative thinking to knowledge and promoting interest in scientific studies. A Foundation where each field has its own autonomy, this is true, but with a single purpose: to expand the scope of knowledge, a territory of free thought in which everyone can find his own.

Before concluding, another tip: if you are in Milan these days (you will still have plenty of time because it lasts until next September 25), between MiArt in progress and the Salone del Mobile at the starting points, at the Observatory of the Foundation Prada in Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, there is an exhibition of the American artist Dara Birnbaum curated by Barbara London with Valentino Catricalà and Eva Fabbris. Her videos and her photographs will offer you different perspectives to understand the journey of an artist who has constantly challenged the canons of art and mass media.

Images from the exhibition “Anatomical waxes: La Specola in Florence | David Cronenberg” Fondazione Prada, Milan – Photo: Roberto Marossi – Courtesy: Fondazione Prada