A stunning spirits and séance investigation into a Baroque palace

What is an artist? In 1957, Marcel Duchamp came up with an underrated answer: The medium exists. What he means is that the artist is more of a conduit than the master, channeling energy rather than controlling it. They have no idea at the outset what a work means—or even what it will be—and, in any case, it is never a stable thing.

The exhibition “Fata Morgana” at the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan takes Duchamp’s ideas seriously, inviting 78 artists, past and present, who channeled various forces. The exhibition is set in Milan’s Palazzo Morando, a Baroque palace once owned by Countess Lidia Caprara Morando Attendolo Bolognini, who also owned a vast and mysterious library. The exhibit features characters who might not call themselves artists at all: nuns, mediums, and those once confined to mental institutions. However, it also includes contemporary stars such as Marianna Simnett, Diego Marcon, Rosemarie Trockel and Kerstin Brätsch, as well as avant-garde icons such as Man Ray and Duchamp himself.

It sounds like a disorienting mash-up, and indeed, at first glance, the show seems chaotic and crowded. But I soon discovered that it was actually pretty tight, and I wanted more. In its diversity, Mirage closely follows Duchamp’s mediatist proposition, taking it to its literal and logical conclusion. It also raises the question: when is seeing symbols pathological, when is it spiritual, and when is it just creative?

Happily, curators Massimiliano Gioni, Daniel Birnbaum and Martha Papini ignore these distinctions. This is not just a curatorial stance; art history is full of interesting overlaps. One example in the exhibition is a painting by the Haitian voodoo priest Hector Hippolyte that was collected by André Breton and included in some of the Foundations of Surrealism exhibitions.

This merger also fortunately avoids the ableism of the Art Brut style, which would frame the work of pathological artists as more “pure.” Still, for self-taught artists, tricky power dynamics are inevitable. Madge Gill’s posthumous contribution is truly stunning, although it is not designed for our eyes: she created her work specifically for her spirit guides, Mininest (“Rest within me”). Gilles began making art while under psychiatric treatment, and her full-body paintings of women are reminiscent of the work of another luminary here, Aloïse. horror vacuum forcing her to fill every inch of the page.

The exhibition opens with a painting by James Tilly Matthews, one of the first people in the world to be diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Matthews feared a gang of “pneumatic manipulators” who used a complex machine called an “air loom” to inject harmful rays and magnetic fluid into his brain. In 1810 he drew an elaborate protective device – the plans are on display. Whether he considered the painting “art” or strictly dangerous design remains an open question, but the work is bizarre and deeply irreverent. Matthews’ paintings set the stage for an exhibition where creativity is the compulsion.

While the show has dozens of pieces dealing with alchemy, theosophy, spiritualism and the occult, you don’t have to believe in ghosts to have fun. On display are photographs from 1913 documenting the fraudulent séances of Stanisława Popielska, whose ectoplasm consisted of little more than rope and gauze. The more scientifically inclined will enjoy the recently discovered symbols drawn by analyst Emma Jung and her famous psychiatrist husband Carl, as well as Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, both a scholar and a spiritualist. Fröbe-Kapteyn’s mesmerizing geometries explore Jungian archetypes and are now in the collection of the Aby Warburg Institute, although they have only recently attracted the attention of the art world.

One moving clue is that there were many women here who turned to art or attended seances after losing their children, including Gill, Anna Hackel and Wilhelm Assmann. Upstairs, some 20 of Hilma af Klint’s original abstract works from her 1905-06 “Primal Chaos” series fill an almost sacred room, although the exhibition eschews Hilma hagiography to include more spiritualist women who created abstract works before and next to her. The music of Hildegard von Bingen – an 11th-century nun who was both morbid and spiritual – wails in a nearby corridor, while Georgiana Houghton’s spiritualist abstractions, which predate af Klint, greet the audience in the first room.

Paradoxically, a canon of these so-called “outsider” visionaries is beginning to emerge – admittedly riding the coattails of the af Klint phenomenon and Gioni’s own 2013 Venice Biennale. Familiar characters such as Minnie Evans, Madge Gill, Aloïse, Corita Kent, Anna Zemánková and Carol Rama make unforgettable appearances. Yet new treasure troves continue to surface in attics and archives: Emma Jung’s paintings were only recently discovered, and Madame Favre’s hypnotic pencil portraits – faces whose hair is carefully rendered to blend with other faces – were just discovered in a spiritualist library.

The most haunting thing, however, is the label on the wall. I found them informative and clear, only to discover that they were written by artificial intelligence and then edited by humans, as disclosed in the table of contents. The curators decided to join forces with artists to channel energy and embrace opportunity. These tags don’t always focus on the most relevant aspects of the work – something that hasn’t aged well for human editors like me! — but they’re clear and surprisingly engaging.

The only Duchamp work in the exhibition – a silver candy wrapper engraved with equations Guest + Host = Ghost——Artificial Intelligence is written unforgettably:

“For Duchamp, the creative process was a two-part collaboration between artist and viewer. The artist, as medium, worked in a trance-like state, creating without fully understanding the end result. The viewer’s role was to decode, interpret, and ultimately complete the work. This transfer of authority from creator to viewer is radical, asserting that the artwork is only a catalyst for deeper engagement.”

This is the show’s most audacious thesis, and one with which I strongly agree: The old dualism—the outsider artist is naive, the conceptualist is knowledgeable—is simply wrong. First-generation conceptual artists like Sol LeWitt viewed conceptualism as putting form in the service of thought and working with a clear plan. But Duchamp, the proto-Conceptualist magician, wanted art to reveal what the mind could not plan for: uncontrollable accidents and energies. “Mirage” sides decisively with the latter, showing that guidance is not about abandoning an idea but allowing it to take unpredictable, ecstatic forms. The result is a whole lot of joy.