Dining in Art: Bar Luce at Fondazione Prada in Milan

Photos of Bar Luce present a fanciful vision of 1950’s and 1960’s Milan. Pristine plastic chairs gleam and swank film-themed pinball machines beckon. This is the Italian bar filtered through director Wes Anderson’s meticulously fantastical lens. But the reality appears less pristine.

Bar Luce, which opened earlier this year along Milan’s industrial Largo Isarco, is a fully functional café that Anderson designed in collaboration with Fondazione Prada, the contemporary design museum founded by fashion-authority Miuccia Prada. Every detail in the bar evokes a chic Milanese hangout from the boom economico. Maybe Prada imagined it not only an antidote to the rote bars that dot Milan’s vie and viali, but also a watering hole for the Milan’s contemporary cognoscenti that signals a return to the city’s primacy in the realms of style and culture. Or maybe not.

The diner at Bar Luce never forgets they are in a re-imagined museum cafeteria. Rather than gaze onto the street, a wall of windows runs down the left side of the café, opening onto the museum’s courtyard. Yet the windows also frame the café, positioning Bar Luce as an art installation with which individuals may interact. Visitors enter the café from the courtyard as if approaching another exhibition hall. From the street, only a thin neon sign advertises the bar, dissuading those unaware of Bar Luce’s from entering. Through controlling the entrances, Fondazione Prada ensures Bar Luce’s community of diners experiences the space as another exhibition room.

Yet the visitors must interact with this exhibition, making it seem like a performance piece in constant development. They must choose whether to sit or stand at the bar; whether to eat or drink. There’s generic menu with offerings identical to those found at every bar in Italy: sandwiches with prosciutto and mozzarella, aperitivi, coffee. These bland options suggest that the food isn’t Bar Luce’s focus. The focus is fantasy. Customers indulge in it through entering the menu, absorbing the faux-typewriter font and chatting with waiters dressed to appear in Anderson’s next film. While the preparation and consumption of food and drink give Bar Luce its social function, locating the bar in a museum restricts its purpose to cultural consumption. Whether they choose to play pinball, eat breakfast at the bar, or chat with friends over a sandwich, community members interact with Anderson’s vision of prosperous Milan, reinforcing Bar Luce’s status as art piece rather than restaurant.

Although Fondazione Prada presents Bar Luce as an exhibition, Anderson describes another side to the cafe, “I think it would be an even better place to write a movie … I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in.” While it may seem that Anderson’s ideal writer-creator customer opposes Fondazione Prada’s preferred culture-savvy clientele, words such as ‘would’ and ‘want’ suggest that Anderson realizes his projected diner differs from the actual patrons. The people who frequent Bar Luce would like to write movies on the formica tables. They would want to pass afternoons playing pinball. But they are visiting Fondazione Prada so instead they refuel with a coffee and a sandwich before consuming more art.

Bar Luce can’t escape its function as a museum cafeteria and as an installation art piece. The design may highlight Anderson’s famously quirky sensibility, but Fondazione Prada directs the space’s use. Entering, ordering, and consuming builds an experience that allows visitors to momentarily live as a glamorous Milanese from a Wes Anderson film. Within Bar Luce a hybrid past-future fantasy comes alive where Milan retains a perfectly orchestrated glamour lost in the chaos of Italy’s current contemporary woes. Unfortunately, the characters are visitors who will soon leave both the bar and Italy, taking home only their experience of art.

The Twelfth Floor Heterotopia

The other day I was in a government building and asked a guard where I could find the bathroom. ‘On the twelfth floor,’ she grunted. Then she disappeared, turning on her rubber heel, keys clanking. Right, to the twelfth floor.

The twelfth floor signalled my entrance into a heterotopia of first world bureaucracy. Michel Foucault, the 20th century French intellectual, describes a heterotopia as an enacted utopia that expresses a vision of a societal ideal. A secular higher power directs meaning within these spaces. The power may be cultural or political or social as long as it illustrates the operation of a group. Some may enter the area while others are prohibited. These spaces reveal how we structure our world and respond to taboos. They possess both intellectual and practical functions. As I examined the limbo-esque twelfth floor, I better understood my community.

In addition to public rest rooms — so-called public, I had to show an appointment confirmation and passport to pass security and access them — the twelfth floor boasted a café (aptly named Café on Twelve) and empty locked rooms. I saw a man on his phone and a woman waiting for the elevator. The emptiness evoked the distance the building put between its functions and visitors. Although the visitors had been chosen to enter, they were shielded from the bureaucracy’s inner workings. Shades of pale and mossy green covered the walls like an alien’s living room. After seeing this sinister hue, the tenth floor’s plastic pink felt like the cheery. Whereas the public amenities floor intimidated me with closed doors and strange colours, the tenth floor distracted me with a bright, false cheer. Openness and restriction characterise government bureaucracy.

Foucault argues that access to space and spatial relations dictate modern life. The sites we visit define us. Frequenting a museum or being admitted to a hospital gives us a distinct social identity through which to perpetuate culture as reflected in a given area. Government buildings accomplish a similar function. Entering one of these guarded edifices associates the individual with a specific ideology, defines them according to the law and asserts their role as an ordinary citizen. The government building is a heterotopia in that it mirrors society and social relations while existing separately from the daily orbit of most citizens.

Myriad citizenship identities were being formed and performed during my visit. There were the deviants; arguing with the guards over phones and restrictions. Others acted as enforcers, upholding social norms. Some played the atemporal: they were waiting when you arrived and waiting when you left, casting them in a separate orbit from the standard 30-minute appointment. Our purposes impacted our roles. Some sought citizenship, others green cards renewals and others foreign visas. Although the heterotopia echoed the country in which we lived, our respective sections of the mirror corresponded with our social identity.

Despite our unique roles, we were all social others — individuals seeking to alter our citizenship status — in this heterotopia of deviation. A heterotopia of deviation collects individuals whose actions, and consequently identities, digress from the social norm. Foucault argues that the heterotopia of deviation has largely replaced the heterotopia of crisis (at least in modern cultures), which dominated in centuries when knowledge directed relations between groups and individuals. A heterotopia of crisis collected individuals in a critical mental, physical or emotional period. Foucault cites boarding schools, old-style honeymoons and military service as heterotopias of crisis that separated people in compromised states from routine life. Rather than cast out people in difficult periods, we rebuke people who exhibit a strange identity.

Time impacted the social and governmental interpretation of my national identity. Defining my identity as ‘deviant’ as opposed to ‘in crisis’ was a product of the 21st century’s loosened borders. Whereas immigrants to the US during the early 20th century were processed en masse on an island, modern migrants are processed in varying degrees of public view. Migration is no longer solely the product of a crisis — of money, of religion, of food, of family — that brings migrants to a new space. While contemporary migrants may be undergoing crises, the motivations are varied. I was a deviant: I was deviating from the path my country had set for me and, accordingly, entered into spaces that delicately pushed me away from others. They pushed me toward the desolate twelfth floor.

Crossing the threshold of the heterotopia ushered me into alternate temporal realms. My time within the building was sectioned: there was my appointment time; the queues, waiting for my number to be called; and my brief appointment. Time’s regimentation within the heterotopia foreshadowed the new demarcations I’d experience upon leaving: there would be the time to send my application; the window of time during which I could enter the country; the days when I’d be permitted to pick up a residence permit; the years for which I’d be allowed to stay within the country; the hours I’d be permitted to work; the day on which I’d be required to leave. My new experience of time within the heterotopia anticipated how I’d experience shared cultural time upon leaving.

But even as this heterotopia acted upon us visitors, it also acted with us. This was how I arrived at the twelfth floor. Although the building could have been closed in a fortress of hidden governmental rules, society’s insistence on viewing itself as a democracy required it to be at least partially open. So I had the terrace café and a toilet amidst an alien-green hallway of closed doors. My heterotopia of bureaucracy asserted that my society was open, even as it partitioned my time, directed my identity and determined my movement.