No Comments Written by Robert on May 26, 2008 – 1:47 am

The diversity of media art, world expositions, thematic museums or collections, trade shows, and department stores that must be dealt with by an exhibition designer makes exhibition design a complex field.

It requires a wide range of skills encompassing pedagogy, marketing, the technical expertise needed to install exhibitions (museography), and the design skills involved in making and painting theater sets As a rule, exhibition design is an anonymous profession.

The exhibited works and facts must be the focus of attention and take priority over the designer’s own ideas or design ambitions. After salon exhibitions were replaced by gallery exhibitions, and along with the growing autonomy of art in the twentieth century (that may yet prove illusory), this attitude crystallized with the emergence of the “white cube”the term coined by Brian O’Doherty in 1976 for an unadorned, pure white exhibition space.

However, in The Power of Display (1998), a critical examination of exhibition practice at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, Mary Anne Staniszewski describes the white cube as only one specific development of exhibition design.

Nonetheless, the white cube managed to become so closely linked with the paradigm of art’s autonomy that it developed into a fundamental component of the twentieth-century art system a fact that made it difficult to recognize the white cube as a construct, and gave rise to Staniszewski’s justifiable theory of the “unconscious of an exhibition.” Much earlier, however, as the object emerged as a commodity, exhibitions had already become a generally accepted and widespread phenomenon.

Consequently, the unfamiliar history of exhibition design refers to a mechanism for producing and transforming the popular consumption of objects and information that is both driven and shaped by a multitude of social forces. Today, the “black box” and new media pose additional challenges to exhibition design, and the shifting varieties of tourism and the “blockbuster” phenomenon are changing the conditions under which exhibition designs are perceived.

Tracing the theory and practice of exhibition design reveals historical examples such as the cabinet of curiosities, dioramas, the theater and film stage, parks and panoramas, market squares and department stores, propaganda, and advertising. This variety reflects different forms of appropriation of data and facts and different ways for the public to access these; that is, there are many avenues for collecting and structuring, observing and differentiating, imagining and looking, constructing and strolling, and finally offering, negotiating, and consuming. Every degree of perception and reflectionfrom being involved to being deeply moved, from illusion to persuasioncan be a consequence of these forms and practices.

All exhibitions are based on a specific procedure and relationship of exchange that is made effective by the exhibition, and this unites the exhibited objects and facts with the curators and viewers by means of its unique mixture of agreements, conventions, and techniques. Exhibition design merges the displayed, spoken, and viewed elements on a primary universal level.

On a secondary and reflective level, exhibition design is responsible for rendering the events recognizable, logical, and publicly accessible. The term “display” requires an explanation: in the context of exhibition design, it describes an ensemble of spaces and objects that, through the process of exhibiting, communicating, and perceiving, becomes effective and functional.

A display is thus an effective system that adopts very different dimensions: from the museum itselfand not just the building, but also its context (the Guggenheim, the Louvre, museums of natural history, museums of local history, and so on)to structuring space and systems of orientation (using backdrops, color, pedestals, vitrines) or the graphic design used in wall texts and signs that convey information about the exhibition.

Moreover, the contexts in which the exhibits are seen vary according to the exhibition environmentmeaning that a sign provides not only scientific, historic, or artistic details of an object but also the “house style.” In this broad sense, the display implies the sum of conditions in which artifacts are presented.

The relationship between the exhibition and the exhibited works is defined by two categories of objects: firstly, those produced for the art system and thus considered artworks, and secondly, those from other contexts, such as historical or technical objects, facts, substances, and everyday objects that are placed in a display environment. The artist Marcel Duchamp completely and deliberately blurred the border between these two strictly defined areas by signing a pissoir in 1917 and presenting it as an artwork for exhibition. This single gesture marked the beginnings of the “ready-made.”

Duchamp had already worked as an exhibition designer, and the famous opinion that an artwork is incomplete without an observer is attributed to him. Friedrich Kiesler, a friend and contemporary of Duchamp, conducted groundbreaking research on the relationship between an artwork and the viewer. He developed his Correalismus theory and, as early as the 1920s, spoke of art being conveyed electronically in the future. He mastered the white cube for Peggy Guggenheim in 1942 with the extraordinary and seminal exhibition

Art of this Century, before the term “white cube” even existed. Kiesler, like Duchamp, considered the viewer to be more than a spectator, but an active element in each individual, open collection. A fundamental phenomenon of this collection is that the viewer experiences the exhibition by moving through it rather than looking at it from a static position, meaning that the viewer, the exhibits, and the context are in constant motion in space and time, with continually shifting points of reference and perception. Hence, the exhibition spaceeven if it is unusually concentrated or illusionisticis always part of a public, complex, and urban space, and it will become increasingly evident that exhibition design, besides designing context and spaces, also designs time.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Constructivists and Futurists adopted the emerging forms of mass media, advertising, photography, and moving image that constituted a new and urban mode of “living between words, images, and commodities” (Jacques Ranci›re). El Lissitzky and Rodchenko’s Constructivist spatial environments are as legendary in Soviet art history as Libera, Terragni, and Persico’s Futuristic constructs are for Italian fascism. The unconditional drive of exhibition design with a propagandizing agenda exploited the urban facade, yet also overemphasized the fragmentation of urban life to make a clear ideological statement.

How susceptible the design, the desire to inform, and the constructed environment configuration are to ideology and propaganda can be examined through historical exhibitions in the Bauhaus tradition: for instance, those by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich (“Samt und Seide,” 1927; “Deutsches Volk / Deutsche Arbeit,” 1934) or Herbert Bayer, who applied his theories of perception on all fronts from the Bauhaus to Nazi propaganda (“Road to Victory,” 1942, MoMA). Urban displays of propaganda became just as important as points of reference for exhibition design as Kiesler’s constructions and viewing apparatuses.

Of course, these had less an art context than a context of elaborate theme and science exhibitions, dedicated largely to the above-mentioned second category of exhibits. World expositions made these scenographies famous on a massive worldwide scale but even company presentations at, for instance, automotive trade shows were organized by event managers.

The relationship between display, artifact, and viewer varies greatly in the course of fully synchronized and spatially orchestrated scenographic events. Kiesler saw the display as a constructed third party which, along with the artifact and the viewer, was involved in an open, moving spatial design and thus, as an area, was open for reflection. In contrast, the display of scenography exists completely within the technical setting of an orchestrated production to ensure the illusion’s effect (Set Design).