space.time.narrative

the exhibition as post-spectacular stage

Frank den Oudsten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351898812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Making exhibitions is a collaborative art, producing is a multi-layered unity of ideas and objects, of invention and manifestation, of content and form. However, there is an antagonistic dimension to it, because content and form are traditionally represented by the entirely different realms of curator and designer. Future successful developments in exhibition-making are dependent on whether this gap of antagonism can be bridged. space.time.narrative calls for a paradigmatic shift of focus. It puts forward a unique approach, breaking down traditional barriers and offering a wide-ranging theoretical context, redefining and expanding the parameters and the dynamics of the exhibition-format in terms of an open, narrative environment, which at its roots displays deep similarities with performance on stage, or installation in urban and rural space. The book breaks new ground by looking at the exhibition as a cultural format firstly within a great sweep of the arts in general, weaving a web of philosophical, museological, linguistic and media-theoretical references, which expands the contextual field of the profession. It then offers unique and important insights from within, in extreme close-up, by bringing together interviews with six of the leading exhibition designers who discuss the dynamics of the medium, its interactive dimensions, the soft parameters of the exhibition, and how to get to grips with the format as a complex narrative space, in which the public takes part. Curator and designer should reposition themselves professionally at the heart of the axis, which divides (or connects) content and form.

the battery

a device, consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is converted into electricity

1.1 The Renaissance of Narrative space

‘All the world’s a stage’, and every aspect of life, as Shakespeare foretold in As You Like It, now is part of an infinitely repetitive, global ‘ex-hibition’.¹ In Room 1 we witness the appearance of The Experience Economy by Harvard professors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in 1999 in which they proclaim a new economic value, which – in succession to the traditional raw produce of agriculture, the end products of industry and the services of consumer-based commerce – culminates in the staged experience of our hyper reality that eagerly absorbs the maxim ‘work is theatre and every business a stage’ across the globe.² In Room 2 we find the Mosaic web browser making the World Wide Web accessible for everyone in 1993, and the virtual revolution seizing the power of information from television, and television desperately turning to an everyday reality in which everybody can become a ‘star’.³ In Room 3, on the eve of the Internet boom, the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe designs a laboratory where the interplay between art and high-end technology will demonstrate the supremacy of virtuality and marginalise the future of the organic body; a target that Peter Weibel will obliterate in 1998 in the ‘Net_Condition’ exhibition shortly after having taken over the ZKM after Heinrich Klotz’s death.⁴ In Room 4 the artistic production of the ‘new machine age’, which was to be facilitated by the immensely expensive Silicon Graphics Onyx supercomputers, is deemed unaffordable and out of line, and subsequently the more democratic low-budget, high-concept interaction of web art takes its place.⁵ In Room 5 Peter Greenaway is invited to act as guest curator at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1991 and to exhibit his own cross section of the collection in the exhibition ‘The Physical Self’, which prompts him to show naked individuals of flesh and blood in classic showcases amid the artefacts on display. This in turn radicalises our view on the potential of museums and opens up a semantic field that focuses on the fascination for the human body, bestowing an unusual grace to every other piece in the exhibition and transforming, at least in my perception, Joseph Beuys’ maxim that every individual is an artist, by transferring its premise to the physical vehicle and declaring the body as an exhibitable work of art instead.⁶ Thus, ‘The Physical Self’ marks the dividing line between the problematic lack of direction of western reality on the one hand, and the frantic lack of fundament of the ‘experience economy’ on the other: every business may well be a stage, but not every stage produces interesting business. At the time, however, few people seemed to worry. If it hadn’t been for the virtual business’s proverbial sleeping dog of massive inflation, the dot-com industry wouldn’t have burst like a soap bubble during the very same decade.⁷ If it hadn’t been for the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001, worldwide optimism wouldn’t have been made to waver so dramatically.⁸ And, at the Exit just before the global stage exhibition closes, there is one final performance, in which treachery, intrigue and boundless ignorance produce the ultimate collective ‘experience’ of the worldwide credit crisis…⁹ Fin. Bravo! But, on a small scale, the meteorology of the world obviously produces signs that are of a more integrative nature; almost as a fractal principle, as an inconspicuous counter-movement without any predictable results, like the stroke of a mosquito’s wing on Madagascar that, according to chaos theory, may well cause a hurricane on Cuba.¹⁰

In other words, Hans Peter Schwarz’s 1992 initiative to create a Medienmuseum as a contemplative cornerstone of the ZKM is still very relevant today, in my view, for the very reason that it was pointedly dedicated to the world of ideas, not the world of things.¹¹ For it tried to avoid the display of media technological rarities and the well-trodden paths of canonical progress in favour of a new-style museum which, on the dividing line between the tendencies of our time, would use a 1:1 line-up of our reality and our image of that reality, so that the myth of looking, the intensity of seeing and the quality of our gaze would be exposed. Thus, for the first time a possible theory of scenography emerged within my field of vision in which the contours of traditional museum display would be widened and understood as a narrative environment, the staging of which would be dominated by an idea and would yield the potential of ‘a myriad’ of parallel stories, in a place that was charged with energy and that, like a battery, was only waiting to electrify ‘a myriad’ of visitors simultaneously.¹² In other words, an orientation emerged that was both Utopian and pragmatic; for the challenge may have been a dream, but its mission was very concrete, calling for a strategy that would stress the opposition between the relativism of the ambition and the intended openness of the end result on the one hand, and the complexity of the task on the other. Nothing seemed more exciting, more relevant, more radical, at the time than to have all mental and imaginative power turn into an ‘ideal’ concept that, with some subversive aid from outside, would explode like a cluster bomb and scatter its fragments of meaning across a whole field waiting to be minutely scrutinised in search of that one, ultimate semantic fractal with the expressive potential to transform into an exhibition. Having said that, it’s important to note that even the preceding impulse, which resulted from the research conducted by the Camini Foundation in Amsterdam in 1989 into the experimental development of exhibitions as an open format, is still relevant today as an act of transdisciplinarity.¹³ Altogether, both the discourse of the Camini Foundation as well as the development of the ZKM Medienmuseum provided the root concepts for the Scenographical Design course that I later set up and developed in Zurich when I was invited to do so by the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, and that made the curricular project of ‘scenography’ function as an interdisciplinary germ, connecting and absorbing like a parasite the idea that drama and exhibition, performance and installation would form one field of expertise and imagination, albeit a differentiated one, that would launch an all-out search for a place of identity, dedicated to an idea, and produce a new élan and a narrative environment of a pluralistic order.¹⁴ So, in other words, the conceptual nucleus of the Scenographical Design curriculum became the basis of the Narrative Environments research project that focused on the practice of the exhibition maker and as such intended to release him from his cultural isolation, while at the same time promoting a transdisciplinary approach for formulating an open theory of scenography that would sensibly reconcile thing and thought, fact and effect, and mythos and logos.¹⁵ So noted in the present book.

What is scenography? This question, which, at least in western Europe, has occupied many minds for quite some time now, can no longer be answered within the framework of classical theatre, and it has become increasingly problematic because of cultural factors and traditions that vary according to language regions. In the English region, for instance, the term ‘scenography’ appears to be interpreted in the context of the theatre exclusively and doesn’t seem to be so flexible as to allow use in other contexts. When Pamela Howard handed over the charge of the Scenography master course at the Central Saint Martins College of Art in London to Pete Brooks in 2000, the course took a slightly different direction and to support the broadening of the master curriculum a subsidiary program on bachelor level, called Design for Narrative Environment, was added.¹⁶ What is remarkable is that the concept of ‘scenography’ has vanished from the course directory of the Central Saint Martins altogether now, while in the German-speaking regions academies are en masse introducing programmes under that very heading. The movement is the same, but the terminology differs. What in German is now called Szenografie, is lectured in London in two postgraduate courses: MA Performance Design and Practice and MA Creative Practice for Narrative Environments. Both labels seem sufficiently flexible to incorporate the heritage of classical scenography. In the German region the notion of scenography doesn’t seem to suffice and the concept of Szenologie has been introduced to cover the theoretical discourse of scenography.¹⁷

Although Pamela Howard’s book What is Scenography? (2001) may deal with the practice of theatre exclusively, it nonetheless opens with a survey of some forty definitions of the term, given by theatre makers and designers from all over the world, some of which seem to include a broader orientation.¹⁸ I will list a few remarkable examples. In Suk Suh from South Korea defines scenography in very general terms as ‘the art of time and space’. Erik Kouwenhoven from Holland prefers the dramaturgical point of view in describing scenography as ‘the suggestion of space which transforms in the head of the spectator to anything possible’. Stavros Antonopoulos’ interpretation, which explains the term as ‘the visual intersection of the ordinary, with the imaginative’, is the one that I find most appealing. However, Howard’s book was published in 2001 and in the meantime many international conferences have enriched the expertise. What has become apparent is that with respect to technique and, even more so, in relation to the dynamics and the poetry of the site, both stage and exhibition need to be considered as one unified thematic field that is relevant not only within the walls of the theatre and the museum, but increasingly so in the urban and rural spaces of city and landscape. A crucial pointer appears to be the francophone development from muséographie to scénographie, which essentially relates the world of things to the world of thoughts, and establishes, also in the theatre, a fundamental equivalence of the expressive power of the dramatist’s text and the curator’s collection of objects.¹⁹ In the German region we find another tendency apart from the encompassing approach of installation and performance scenography. During the EXPO 2000 Hanover world fair, the notion of Scenographie was for the first time associated with the making of exhibitions.²⁰ After the Swiss national EXPO.02 exhibition, all exhibition makers called themselves Szenograf; and after the first International Scenographers’ Festival in Basel in 2006, not only exhibition makers, but also architects, graphic designers, curators and consultants – albeit to a lesser extent and with some hesitation – started to add the title of Szenograf to their business cards.²¹ The label of scenography apparently has a certain attraction to it. Scenography is an independent trade and the term ‘scenographer’ has no fixed reference. But what can scenography be in a wider context? What is the basis of such a wider scope?

Traditionally, scenography is concerned with the image of the theatre stage, the way the scene of the action is set, and the optical conditions that determine the way the action can be perceived. Nowadays many theatre productions back out of the classical hierarchies and through crossover dialogues try to ground open performative productions. Crossovers between stage and exhibition, performance and installation, direction and scenography, curatorship and design, execution and authorship, necessitate a reassessment; for scenography – or whatever we want to call this artistic no-man’s-land – is in a transdisciplinary sense a profession of increasing complexity. What is decisive for the description of its outlines and its tendencies is the way we look at scenography and what we expect of it. For instance, one of the hot issues in the scenography debate is whether scenographic interventions merely touch on the surface of things or rather deeply penetrate a given or an unfolding content? Depending on one’s position the scenographic expertise that is required will vary.

Two analogies. One expects a carpenter to be able to drive a nail into wood with a hammer. As such, this is a rather banal and rudimentary skill relative to the overall framework of carpentry. It remains essential, though, that the carpenter can fix the nail in the right spot in the right way in order to produce a constructive integrity and a house that will not collapse. Once the latter, broader issue is embedded in the consciousness of the carpenter, then we are dealing with an expert. Basically, a surgeon is someone who cuts a living body with a knife. Strictly speaking, such a definition is true, but it isn’t complete, because it could also apply to a murderer. So, what is essential for the definition is that the act of cutting is motivated by the intention to heal in the consciousness of the surgeon. Thus, there is this overriding principle that rules the aim of the act per se. The end literally justifies the means. As long as the end is fuzzy, the use of the means lacks precision....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Essay 1: The Battery
• Picture-Essay 1: Parallax
• Interviews: Dark Matter
• Picture-Essay 2: Afterimage
• Essay 2: The Envelope
• Select Bibliography
• Biographical Note
• Image Credits
• Index