Carte d’Arte

Spring 2006  
Carte d’Arte Internazionale, “The Sicilian Issue”
Guest edited by Cornelia Lauf
Art concept and photography by Christian Philipp Müller
Contributors: Jan Avgikos, Hide Bouchez, Marella Caracciolo, Susan Hapgood, Elizabeth Helman, Volker Kaul, Elisabetta Povoledo, Nancy Spector, Susan Yelavich.

Edited by Cornelia Lauf and conceived as an artwork by Christian Philipp Müller, this issue of Carte D'Arte focuses on the Italian town of Sicily as an organizing theme. Saturated images of local color by Christian Philipp Müller provide the visual content with musings on the culture of Sicily by curators and critics, such as a recipe for Sicilian Anchovy Pasta by Nancy Spector.

Editor's Note:

This is a magazine.

It is also an artwork. It's a print-based work by Christian Philipp Müller (Biel, Switzerland, 1957), an artist who lives in New York and uses media, often in a collaborative and sociological way.

I invited Muller to work directly on the structure of the publication, in the time-honored manner of Conceptual art and its aftermath, of groups such as Art & Language, Fischli & Weiss, or Group Material, and individual artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Hans Haacke. In this case, Muller has used the conventions of publishing, with a nod to travel magazines, as his artistic material. His voyage through Sicily, in the footsteps of J.W. Goethe, yielded the following rich harvest of images.

Many of Muller's works are site specific and adapted not only to the physical but to the political, economic, or cultural peculiarities of a given commission. His material can include the annual report of a media conglomerate (Ringier, Zurich) or an institution that wishes to craft a corporate identity for itself (University of Lüneburg, Germany). He is interested in cultural self-representation, in topics such as biodiversity, and in the role of food and nature in our lives.

With this issue of Carte d'Arte, I decided to honor the magazine's mandate and make an international magazine, but keep it resolutely local.

Sicily. It is here that Carte d'Arte is conceived, edited, and printed.

Sicily. A mythic place that all of us have thought about at one time or another.

Let us stretch what an art magazine can he, what artists can do, and how cultural producers might be able to interact. Open up the discussion of terroir. Let's work creatively with enterprise. I think of Robert Smithson, and his desire to collaborate with mining companies and reclaim post-industrial wastelands. Let us cast a sharp eye on municipal masterpieces and on civic follies. On unfinished temples that were built to impress other nations, and on gargantuan projects that already fall into ruin.

By isolating words, colors, textures and patterns of representation, Carte d'Arte #15 wishes to capture, even for a moment, the essence of Sicily. We believe Sicily can still resist commodification, despite centuries of colonization, cross-fertilization and the glittering eye of outsiders, eager to rob what was once called "the breadbasket of Rome."

This is a sensitive moment in Sicilian history. Traditional ways of speech, lifestyle, architecture, and agriculture risk being subsumed by the rush to fling open doors to the rest of Italy and world — most evident in the massive plan to bridge island to mainland. But the opening of Sicily does not lie in reinforced concrete or steel cables.

We think that the answer lies in the molecular support of culture, Sicily's historic trump card. Now, more than ever, one must reach past traditional notions of nation and place — while remaining firmly rooted in the local.

Carte d'Arte #15 is an artwork is a magazine about Sicily. Through the lens and in the language of our own time.

Cornelia Lauf