"The
room-space is not there for the eyes alone, it is not a
picture; it must be lived in."
El Lissitzky: Proun Room, Great Berlin Art Exhibition, 1923
Demonstration
Room
Exhibitions are
systems of representation in which every aspect, from the
curatorial premise and choice of artists and works, to
the display and lighting design, has a specific meaning.
They are also instruments of cultural mediation between
the art on display and the public. In this sense, the idea
of making an exhibition on the subject of utopia and representation
demanded that the curatorial premise and exhibition design
itself deal self-consciously with the issue.
For Demonstration
Room: Ideal House, the choice of El Lissitzky's model
of exhibition design is representative of many of the
ideas we wished to address in the show; namely, utopia,
representation and architecture. Specifically because
it is the first work of art in a long tradition of museum-based
conceptual art which transcended its status as "work
of art" and posited itself as a curatorial and exhibition
design paradigm that fully acknowledged artists' concerns
for the conditions of production, exhibition and reception
of the work. El Lissitzky's Demonstration Room was
originally conceived, in its first and second versions
of 1926 and 1927, as a space in which to exhibit "the
new constructive art."
This "new art" called
for a revision of traditional forms of exhibition, and
not only in terms of spatial distribution of works. According
to Benjamin Buchloh, "contingency and particularity are
therefore the prime features of Lissitzky's design element
in the First Demonstration Room. The paintings and
sculptures on display in these exhibition/museum spaces
are no longer presented as epiphanic moments of supreme
aesthetic truth and universal validity, but as particular
objects of historical study, with which the viewer has
to actively engage in order to generate an exchange of
'reading' and 'meaning'." The idea of contingency has thus
been of particular importance in organizing this exhibition
in which we have tried to reproduce the operations by which
El Lissitzky's Demonstration Room conditioned the
spectator's experience and reception of the works via the
blurring of the boundaries between the exhibition space
and the works exhibited, and also by calling into question
the distinctions between project and object in the work
of contemporary art.
To this end we
proposed that our demonstration room take the shape of
an architect's office, in order to place the works in a
setting that is also discursive, specifically in terms
of establishing a reading about the practice of the architect,
the language of the blueprint and the particularities of
architectural representation. In this sense, Georges Bataille's
ideas regarding the "jobs" taken by words, and
in this case by the word "architecture," are
especially meaningful. As Denis Hollier states in relation
to Bataille in Against Architecture," when architecture
is discussed it is never simply a question of architecture.
"...architecture
refers to whatever there is in an edifice that cannot be
reduced to building, whatever allows a construction to
escape from purely utilitarian concerns. Architecture,
before any qualifications, is identical to the space of
representation." So, in a
way, Demonstration Room: Ideal House is an exhibition
about the different "jobs" of the word "architecture," which
is also one of the reasons why we invited a group of artists
to reflect upon the "domestic sublime," each
one in his or her own particular way, through the exercise
of "designing" a
house.
Ideal House
The house has
been the privileged site of experimentation of twentieth-century
architecture. The utopian ideals of the avant-garde such
as the Gesamtkunstwerk and the integration of artistic
disciplines found a haven in the house. Its scale increased
the feasibility of these utopian undertakings (which in
urban design remained, with very few exceptions, as mere
aspirations since it was so difficult to carry them out)
and steered them away from the territory of representation
and towards their concrete materialization. This exhibition
places the house, once again, as a laboratory for experimentation;
but instead of entrusting the task of "designing" the ideal
house to architecture, our objective was to invite artists
to respond to the particular issue of the house. In our
curatorial outline we suggested to the artists to consider
the aforementioned ideas and to confront them with our
own interest in utopian narratives and how they have developed
from romantic, classical and modern proposals, oriented
towards collective space, to more oblique proposals implicit
in our technologically driven era and its promotion of
individuality.
So the utopian
tone, both in relation to our context but also to other
utopian speculations currently taking place elsewhere,
is not a celebratory one since it entails the strange possibility
of looking at utopia from a historical point of view and
the paradox of looking backwards at the future. Moreover,
at the beginning of our research, we were interested in
the contrast between utopian promises of development and
our concrete urban reality (in Latin America). In this
regard this opened up one of the issues posited in the
exhibition: the coincidences between dreams of the contemporary
city and what the spontaneous architecture of the shantytowns
had produced in the second half of this century. It is
not so difficult to see in our concrete urban reality of
the shantytowns examples of such notions as mobility, community
emphasis, abolition of private property, and many others
that have been launched by a good a part of contemporary
urban theory. But what is more meaningful in relation to
the shanty is the fact that it is an anathema of utopia
and also of the house, and in spite of this and of its
archaic connotations, the shanty constitutes in itself
a possibility of rethinking the city. These ideas inform
our desire to reflect upon the house as simultaneously
the new locus for utopia and its anathema.
The artists
For Demonstration
Room: Ideal House we invited artists whose work denotes
a close interest in the theme of the house, which has
become so important to our comprehension of modernity,
and also a group of artists whose interests were more
diverse. But the common ground was the fact that in their
practices they all relate to twentieth-century art production
in terms of a critique of the very relations between
object and project that are at the core of our proposal.
And apart from the selection of existing work, we suggested
that they work on the idea of the project. The majority
has dealt with the project-oriented nature of contemporary
art practice, where the object has made room for the
idea, which can eventually be materialized or not. Others
have worked on the notion of the model as a material
representation of the "project," but that as a work of
art acquires sculptural qualities. In the context of
this exhibition, this functions as a critique of the
way some of the most notorious "experimental" houses
of twentieth-century architecture have become works of
art, and have ceased to be houses to become icons; images
void of their initial functional aspirations which, among
other things, render meaningless Louis Sullivan's modernist
dictum of "form follows function." In regard to their
approach to the theme of utopia, a group of artists has
chosen to work with issues of mobility and nomadism and
a denial of the house as a concrete architectural edifice,
while others have gone beyond this point in order to
posit the ideal house as only existing within the realm
of the text. Within this varied range of proposals we
also find allusions to ideas of communal housing, critiques
of globalization and market strategies which inform the
contemporary production of space, and also references
to the museum space as the "ideal place" for the "ideal
house." But more importantly, these artists instead of
making conclusive statements about the issues addressed--both
in the way they "theoretically" approach the subject
of the "ideal house" and the relations between utopia
and representation and in the "material" way these approaches
are carried out--leave room for speculation and open
up more possibilities in terms of the "jobs" the word "architecture" may
still have to fulfill.
©2000 Jesús
Fuenmayor Julieta González |