The contextual relocation of Maria Eichhorn's Relocating a structure in Open for Maintenance - Wegen Umbau geoffnet, German Pavilion, 18th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia (original) (raw)
Our presentation will treat a particular class of "spaces of exhibition." Briefly stated, these spaces were temporary exhibitions; art, architecture, urbanism, or design were their content; they were installed in museums in North America; their designers were architects, and they date to the period after 1976. We chose the topic because architects over the past twenty-year period have made important contributions to the history of display and interpretation, and also to the creation of new cognitive and experiential realms in the museum. In these exhibitions, architects collaborated in the project of historical representation, generating evocative spaces that mediate between objects and beholders, and between reality and abstraction. We will show many images, because the exhibitions were ephemeral and, unfortunately, rarely published as built works.
unplace: a museum without a place
anti-utopias, 2015
Presentation text and interview with Helena Barranha and Rita Xavier Monteiro by Sabin Bors, for anti-utopias contemporary art platform
Over the course of 2019, Hito Steyerl produced and presented more exhibitions, videos, and installations in one year than at any previous stage of her career. Two solo shows were mounted in institutional settings in Berlin, first when the Käthe Kollwitz Prize was awarded at the Akademie der Künste and then, six months later, at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n. b. k.); the exhibition The City of Broken Windows at the Castello di Rivoli near Turin had opened in November 2018 but ran through to September 2019; Power Plants was on show at the Serpentine Galleries in London in the spring of 2019; in the summer, Drill-her largest solo exhibition to date in the United States-could be seen at Park Avenue Armory in New York; and in October Hito Steyerl. This is the Future opened at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. This cluster of solo exhibitions, in combination with Steyerl's involvement in the main exhibition at the Venice Art Biennale, suggests that she had a prescient sense of what the following year would have in store: an enforced break in the functioning of the art industry precipitated by a major pandemic, in the process of which museums and galleries, at the very least, would be closed for months and only offer limited access for some time thereafter. Now it seems natural to assume that removing the option of experiencing her work as a physical presence in an exhibition space would have less of an impact on an artist and theorist like Steyerl. Is she not essentially focused on working with and in the media of text and the digital image, both of which are perfect for publishing, posting, and streaming on the Internet? Doesn't this also involve bypassing the architectural structures built by the institutions, which may not in the end be as vital for a full-on experience of art as we have always tended to assume? To refute such an assumption, I will argue here that the real architectural space of an exhibition room is a key ingredient in Steyerl's work that cannot simply be jettisoned and substituted with digital spaces. I will also contend that the meaning the installations accrue when built into the space is in turn connected to a critique of the architectural and the digital that runs through her work on a variety of levels, both conceptual and visual. It is this connection and the juxtapositions and contrasts created-the configuration of spaces and types of physical environment represented by the exhibition, the installation, and the screen-that articulate a pervasive interest in designed and built architecture, be it material or immaterial. As 2019 drew to a close, this tightly packed sequence of transatlantic premieres and revivals of individual works formatted as solo exhibitions concluded with the replica of a replica, bookending the space and a year that had been immensely productive for Steyerl. The exhibition at n. b. k. had opened in late November (and received a steady stream of visitors right through to January 2020)-the walk through the show culminated in the miniature reconstruction of the plenary hall of the European Parliament. Built in the 1990s to plans drawn up by the Architecture Studio in Paris, this monumental structure-known as the
Unconventional exhibition spaces as an example of the synergy of architecture and art
2020
The article pertains to the relationship between an artwork (painting) and architectural space, as well as the issue of adapting unconventional architectural spaces for an exhibition function in relation to the author’s exhibitions presenting the paintings from the same painting series. Different exhibition concepts of each of the exhibitions emphasize the role of a painting in shaping the architectural space and the quality of this space. An artwork becomes a tool that organizes space and influences its quality. At the Faculty of Architecture of Poznań University of Technology, as part of the research project of Professor A.M. Łubowski and J. Stefańska, D.Sc., titled “Artwork in Architecture”, there has been research conducted on the correlation of architecture and art. The author was invited to participate in three exhibitions carried out as part of this project. The experiences connected with the project have been described in this article. The problem of using the interiors of b...
AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, 2023
The state of architecture being exhibited and (re)exposed through formats of public display does not present the central framework of architectural production. However, the condition of exhibiting architecture is opening a set of valuable prospects for the discipline-it creates a specific temporal form of displacement for architecture in which a multifaceted set of connotations and views of this discipline is being provoked. The exhibition and its structure are understood here primarily as a point in time; a specific temporal form with its own tactics of appearance that make the notion of contemporaneity occur. Taking the context of the Venice Biennale of Architecture as the most prominent platform for global overview of architectural practice, this paper will reflect on today's relevance of architecture as an aesthetic discipline related not only to designing (projection and production of architecture), but to its post-production (exhibiting architecture) as well. Claiming that architectural contemporaneity is motivated primarily by the urge for actuality-setting the new emerges as the formative property of the discipline. This paper aims to prove that the specific temporal form of exhibition reveals a proposition for regenerating the competency of architectural discipline. This proposition about being present manifests itself as a prospect for the immediacy of the discipline, as the qualitative evidence of architecture's immanency to continuously reconstitute and actualize, maintaining the passage to keep its influence in shaping our world.
Conference Paper, 2020
In the 1960s, the emergence of performance-(or action-) based art movements such as Fluxus and Happening led to the questioning of the dominant forms theatre buildings had taken (up to this point). German theatre and architectural journals of that time discussed the idea of mobile and movable, adaptable spaces for all kinds of cultural performances and activities. In 1964, Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price presented their concept of FUN PALACE, a space which was planned to be adaptable to all kinds of user's desires and activities-a highly variable 'house' for the arts and culture in a broader sense. These proposals remained unrealised. But we find similar ideas and concepts not only in monumental adaptations such as the Centre Pompidou, but also in temporal practices of artists, curators and cultural activists who 'stage' their work in the movable spaces of abandoned (industrial) buildings, e.g. the 'squatting' of the former Palast der Republik in Berlin in 2004/5. The paper discusses these examples as part of a conceptualization of thinking about modelling new spaces for performance-based arts and cultural activities which overrides the tradition of separated architectures for different art forms.
2019
The relations between literature and architecture are so complex that, from an epistemological and methodological perspective, a great variety of approaches can be adopted in order to study them. And, actually, the rather chaotic bibliography that already exists on the mapping of those relations is a reflection of this complexity, crystallized variously within the fields of architectural theory, urban theory, semiotics, and literary theory. Firstly, sometimes authors from the discipline of architectural theory use expressions such as "architecture as a language", or "architecture as a (literary) text" or "the city as text", to create a kind of loose "analogy" between the two disciplinary fields. On the other hand, from the viewpoint of textual poetics or narratology, we can find similar, vague metaphors such as "narrative as a space", "narrative spaces", "the space of language", the "architecture of the text", or even "textual space". There seems to be another, second, family of approaches, that tends to establish a parallelism or a quasi-structural correspondence between space and narrativity, architecture and narrative, or building and narrativity, that goes beyond mere metaphors. The cases of Philippe Hamon's studies on the French realist novel or of Paul Ricoeur's famous article on "architecture and narrativity" immediately come to mind. In this paper I will argue that there is another, third, epistemological possibility of relating literature and architecture that is deeper, more significant, and may prove rather fruitful if we would wish to extract design or creative principles from such a comparative procedure. I would like to call such an approach a functionalstructural correlation that focuses on the roles and the conceptual content of the elements used to construct the above relation. The aim of the paper is to outline this possibility by organizing and typifying the bibliographical field under three distinct epistemological models usually at work when investigating the relation between literature and architecture, or between narrativity and space. Those models are conceived of as ideal types, in Max Weber's sense. In the exposition, I will specifically analyse the spatial literary theories of Gérard Genette, Elrud Ibsch, Genealogy and Prehistory of the Relations between Space and Narrative/ Language Postmodern theory played a major role in revisiting the problem of the relation between architecture and language, long after the early discussions and musings about the "architecture parlante" of the 18th century. Charles Jencks, George Baird, and Geoffrey Broadbent were some of the protagonists of those debates during the late 1960s and early 1970s. This era was exactly the heyday of semiology or semiotics. What Jencks and others tried to do is simply copy and transfer some models from linguistic and semiotic theory into architectural discourse. Jencks's argument in favour of a triple articulation (form-function-technic) of architecture, in direct relation to the famous semiological triangle developed by Ogden and Richards, is such an attempt (Jencks and Baird, 1969: pp. 13-17). And despite Gillo Dorfles's hesitation on the epistemological validity of such transfers, due to the complexity and "stereognostic" texture of architectural codes and their irreducibility to those of common spoken languages, people like Broadbent and even Christian Norberg-Schulz went on. They wanted to investigate how meaning was created by architecture, how signifiers were related to signifieds, how material buildings created "symbol-milieus" (according to Norberg-Schulz's catchy phrase) (Jencks and Baird, 1969, pp. 40-48, 51-56, 223-226), and they wanted to know whether architecture is a language or speech, following Saussure's famous dualism (Terzoglou 2018, pp. 121-123). The quest for meaningful form was a kind of heroic dimension of postmodernism, despite the fact that the protagonists themselves were supposed to nurture suspicion towards "grand narratives". This fervour attracted the attention of famous semioticians such as Umberto Eco, who started addressing the specific problems of a semiotics of architecture. Eco significantly added a flavour of scientificity to the whole debate. In his article on the architectural column, he claimed architecture's double function, the signified one being types of possible functions, but, most importantly, introduced the problem of the specificity of architecture as a discipline. The fact that when addressing spatial contexts we have a mixture of synchronic and diachronic "languages", an array of hybrid morphological and historical features that persist in time, makes the semiotic analysis of architecture not an easy task (Eco 1972, pp. 98, 113-115). My point of view, developed in a recent article, is that facing architecture, if we aspire to adequately analyse it from a semiotic perspective, we have to adopt an interdisciplinary methodological stance, merging literary theory, modal narratology, architectural theory, urban theory, and semiology, at the least (Terzoglou 2018: pp. 123-124). Juri Lotman's idea of a "semiotic continuum" could be useful for such an endeavour. Moreover, Lotman introduces the concept of "the space of the semiosphere" (2005, pp. 206-208), which is diachronic, related to cultural memory, and therefore more relevant to architecture, which addresses, basically, social values, cultural hierarchies, existential distinctions, and collective memory, through the articulation of space within a temporal continuum or framework. Note Ideal Type Two: Critical Epistemological Models There seems to be a different family of approaches, a second ideal type that articulates the relation between space and narrativity, architecture and narrativity, or building and language. This second type tends to establish a parallelism beyond mere, vague metaphors: a kind of quasi-structural correspondence between the two disciplines, architecture and linguistics, or architectural theory and literary theory. I claim that this second type of relations is based on an external comparison between two fields of inquiry, based, however, on abstract concepts. This comparison is no longer a collation but a sort of abstract but strict analogy or correspondence, making use of expressions based on "like", "such. .. as", or "between" to institute a parallelism or homology among distinct disciplinary frameworks. I would like to call such approaches, from an epistemological perspective, critical or representational conceptualisms. "Critical" because they transcend mere empiricist epistemologies using only vague metaphors, "representational" because they tend to assume a kind of one-to-one correspondence between the elements comprising each discipline, and, "conceptualism" in order to account for the fact that this family of models actually makes use of concepts in the articulation of the comparison between the disciplinary matrices at hand. Therefore, if I could compare the second ideal type with the first, the differences are striking, but, however, there is one, common element in both of them: the relation between the two parts of the comparison, architecture and language, or space and narrativity, is always assumed to be external. That is, it is presupposed that those disciplines are already readymade entities, so to speak, and then they come into contact or dialogue. To give some examples of this second ideal type, I will briefly analyse the major works and articles by Gérard Genette, Philippe Hamon, and Paul Ricoeur. Genette, in his 1966 article on the relation between space and language, already notes that "il y a toujours de l'espace dans le langage.. .. Tout notre langage est tissé d'espace " (Genette 1966, p. 107) [there is always space within language.. .. All our language's tissue is spatial]. Since language spatializes itself (1966, p. 108), we would expect why poets such as Hölderlin, Baudelaire, Proust, Claudel, and Char are obviously fascinated by place and space, claims Genette (1969: p. 44). Therefore, in his other seminal text from Figures II, on "Literature and Space", published in 1969, Genette tries to unravel the complex relation between the two concepts. The interesting feature of this article is that it somehow avoids the pitfalls of the general and vague metaphors pervading the 1966 article, inaugurating a methodology resembling ideal type two. Genette asks the crucial question of whether "space" is only one "subject" of literature among others, therefore just an object of representation for the temporal mode of existence of literary narrative (Genette 1969: pp. 43-44). If that were the case, then space would be something passive and external, and literature would only speak about space, in a kind of empiricist
The mobile spectator is a familiar figure in theorisations of moving image installation, recurring in various accounts of the differences and continuities between the cinema and the museum as spaces of exhibition and reception. Some of these accounts are concerned with the role of mobility in enhancing, or undermining, critical reflection. Jeffrey Skoller, for example, rejects the notion (advanced by several curators) that the mobile viewer's "critical awareness is heightened by choosing his or her own degree of attentiveness", claiming instead that transience undermines the modes of reflective engagement potentially enabled by cinema. 1 Others envisage mobile spectatorship in the gallery or museum as a point of connection with historical or contemporary modes of spatio-temporal experience. Giuliana Bruno, for example, argues that the forms of mobile recollection elicited by moving image installations in the museum are crucial to understanding the historical, cultural and architectural linkages between the museum, cinema, and many other sites of public intimacy, ranging from the memory theatre of the Renaissance era to the picturesque landscape, panoramic and dioramic stages, window displays and painting. 2 John Osborne, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of exhibitions that, instead of seeking to block out distraction, actually engage with new configurations of attention and distraction through the exploration of spatio-temporal rhythms, including those associated with the prevalence of the computer screen. 3 Hito Steyerl's research offers a somewhat different perspective on mobile spectatorship, as it emphasises the labour of moving image consumption. Noting that several former factories (as well as churches, train stations etc.) have been repurposed as art museums, Steyerl highlights the work performed in these spaces by "crowds" of people "bending and crouching in order to
The exhibition as medium: artist, space, artwork and viewer in dialogue
This paper explores the notion of the exhibition as an opportunity to reveal and enhance meaning thus creating a reflective space where viewer and artwork dialogue and relate with each other. Using as example the practice of Portuguese sculptor Alberto Carneiro (b. 1937), it will analyze key features of his work and suggest ways to expand them into the exhibition space. The work of Alberto Carneiro can be described as highly conceptual while grounded in a strong materiality. Carneiro’s work is often site-related and his installation pieces are usually preceded by what the artist himself designates by project-drawings. The graph paper sheets that Carneiro uses for his project-drawings are filled with records that elucidate about the concepts inherent to the origin of the work as well as about its installation in the exhibition space: drawings of details from the work, references to the materials used, schemes of the spatial distribution of the elements, possible trajectories for the viewer, dimensions of some parts, sentences and thoughts of the artist. All aspects in these complex project-drawings concur to reveal the profound thinking process behind them. The subsequent installation artworks, which typically bring natural elements such as trees, rocks or fruits into the museum, are, then, the materialization of that deep investigation about space and its relations with each element of the artwork and the body and mind of both the artist and the viewer. One of the common aspects between the two devices, project-drawings and installation artworks, is the use of the word as a means to establish a dialogue with the viewer: not only in the titles which directly address him/her, but also annotations in the project-drawings or sentences present in some installation artworks. All call upon the presence of the viewer in the space shared by him/her and the artwork, as well as the viewers’ experiences in nature (walking, lying in grass, picking up fruit). It is this communicability inherent to the genesis of both project-drawings and installations that I believe can be potentiated with the simultaneous exhibition of the two. However, although obviously connected, project-drawings and installations are independent works: they belong to different collections and as a rule are exhibited separately. By taking the exhibition as a reflective space, this paper analyzes how the confrontation between the project-drawings and the installation artworks can potentiate new dialogues and perspectives about them, enhancing that communicability which was one of the artist’s goals in the first place. I will start to present the works which will be used as examples, and then explore the potential new readings that using the exhibition as medium could create. Taking the exhibition as a privileged space where to materialize the concepts explored in the project-drawings, the artist himself renders each re-installation as a new experience. If, as Carneiro states, “The drawing is not made as something which prepares sculpture, but as a means which favors its developments” , then their simultaneous exhibition will always create a new space for reflection and deeper understanding of the artist’s concepts, intentions and artistic processes.
Installations Everywhere: Disorientation and Displacement in Jan Hoet’s documenta IX
OnCurating Journal, 2017
Referred to by its artistic director Jan Hoet as the ‘documenta of locations’, documenta IX (1992) was a colossal show. Amid the art, an extensive public program – which included jazz, boxing, and baseball, among other events – pervaded the city of Kassel during its periodic stint as a ‘Museum of 100 Days’. Any attempt to view all that comprised documenta IX would have resulted in a grueling, disorienting experience for the visitor. There was 'almost everything available' for Hoet’s show, and this meant a cacophony of works so loud it could easily drown out the individual voices of the artists involved. But were the artworks subservient to documenta IX’s labyrinthine spectacle?