Presentation Is Everything
The Growing Importance of Exhibition Design
Last summer, the critics were adamant: the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale was a disappointment, a failure. With Opera Aperta/Loose Work, curator Guus Beumer and his collective of artists allegedly fabricated an incomprehensible intellectual puzzle that even the most dedicated art aficionados could not get a grip on it. The idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk, in which artists enter one another’s domains and all the parts together lead to a total experience, also went utterly unappreciated. Art lovers complained that the individual artists were unable to come into their own, and that this was primarily the fault of the overall design of the huge stage, which commanded almost all of the attention.Whether or not the experiment by Guus Beumer and consorts was a success, the criticism is in any case characteristic of the conservative attitude of the art world in regards to different forms of presentation. The artist is and remains sacred, and his or her work can best be seen in a neutral white space. Every attempt to break through the model of the white cube sooner or later runs into the barrier of the deeply rooted cult of the autonomous work and the individual maker. It is an old discussion and an old battle, but at the moment it is again in full swing, now that museums are under pressure from politicians to abandon their self-appointed isolation and engage in new relationships with society. As mediators in presentation, exhibition designers, architects and stylists are now being called on to help. They seem to be becoming the successors to the independent curators, who in recent times tried to pry art away from the classic museum model and bring it into connection with other disciplines, discourses, networks and groups of visitors.Are designers really usurping the throne of the art curator? What exactly is their role and how does that actually relate to the art objects, the artists and the public? What are their possibilities – and impossibilities – in terms of exhibitions of contemporary art? I put these questions to four exhibition designers: Herman Verkerk (architect, founder of the EventArchitectuur design and architecture studio, which he has run since 2003, together with artist Paul Kuipers), Siebe Tettero (architect, art historian, former head of exhibitions at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and head of museum design at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam) and Herman Kossmann and Mark de Jong (both architects and founders of the Kossmann.dejong exhibition design studio).
Tease and Please
Herman Kossmann and Mark de Jong explained that their work is regularly compared to that of the film or stage director – a comparison that is also often applied to curators – but they immediately add that this is by no means an adequate description. ‘In the same way that a good film requires a director as well as a scenario writer, cameraman, sound and light technicians, we take on different roles. We bring in a light design, dramaturgy or sound. Sometimes we even ask a composer to create a special soundtrack for an exhibition. We always try to add whatever is lacking and, in that way, create a total design that appeals to all the senses.’For more than 20 years, Kossmann and De Jong have operated their own studio, which has, amongst other things, been responsible for exhibitions at the Tropical Museum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute and the Jewish Historical Museum. While the average contemporary art exhibition in a museum only evokes a visual and primarily also an intellectual response, they specialize in multidisciplinary presentations that intend to generate a visual, physical experience. ‘We see an exhibition as a medium for telling a story, an unbelievably interesting medium, because you can walk through it and the experience consequently unfolds in time and space. There is often no awareness of the exciting possibilities that this offers in museums. Exhibitions as a profession is actually very underdeveloped.’ Siebe Tettero feels that, in the first place, an exhibition must be appealing. ‘The role of the designer is to make an exhibition attractive to the public. He has to tease and please the visitors. A good designer is capable of taking a subject that is apparently difficult to present, for example, an exhibition about the Vikings, and make it juicy and sexy, the way Studio Job succeeded in doing at the time at the Centraal Museum’. Tettero, who originally began as a designer of Ralph Lauren shops in New York and in 2005 designed the interior of the Viktor & Rolf shop in Milan, consistently speaks of ‘giving form’ rather than ‘designing’. He points out that attention to a more spatial, physical or narrative approach to an exhibition is influenced by shop design and luxury fashion brands from the early 1980s. ‘Their shop concepts were based on telling a story, on a complete lifestyle. It was an enormous success. After that, you see that the major museums, like the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), and the Guggenheim adopted the idea.’Today, Tettero is primarily active as a curator for a number of private collectors (whose names must remain secret), but now and then, he produces the design for a major exhibition, including last year’s Passie voor Perfectie/Passion for Perfection, the exhibition on Islamic art at the New Church in Amsterdam. There, it was clear to see that Tettero considered it his task to ‘perfectly accommodate’ the works of art, in order to allow them to optimally come into their own right in the midst of a large-scale setting. In the middle of the church, he created seven enormous installations of reflecting glass, with smaller niches, also made of mirrors, in which the 350 Islamic objects were presented as precious works of art. Unlike Tettero, Herman Verkerk is not a great believer in the ‘accommodating’ role of the designer, although he adds that he in any case does not approve of too narrow a definition for the role of the exhibition designer. ‘Our practice covers exhibitions of design and architecture, as well as art, so it shifts each time and with each discipline. In the case of exhibitions of design, the seductiveness of the display is what dominates, and we are given the assignment to bring all-too-fixed suppositions into question. In the case of architecture, the object itself is not present; we are primarily asked to use the exhibition design to evoke a spatial experience. For art, and certainly when the artist himself is involved, the issue of representation is almost always central, because both the object and its meaning are often instable, ambiguous. We try to ensure that art is brought back to its role of communicating, and sooner use the exhibition model to make the many layers and the complexity that are inherent to the representation of art visible to the public. The ultimate experience of this is by definition open, and it requires an interpretive role on the part of visitors.’In a model in which the artist, the curator and the designer are all on equal footing, like it was applied in the joint project for the Dutch Pavilion in Venice, Verkerk sees an as yet untouched potential for art and exhibitions of art. Based on dozens of conversations with the participants, Verkerk and his partner Paul Kuipers have a spatial interpretation of the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Verkerk claims that, ‘It is high time that the discussion about the importance of public space in regards to the market takes place not only outside the museum space, but also finds expression in a new working method within the museum space. A re-evaluation of the fetish of authorship and the object is once again relevant, and with it, the question of collaboration and collectivity’.
Artwork vs. Exhibition Design
The awareness of the importance of the manner of presentation, of embedding exhibitions in a more narrative or appealing structure, is slowly seeping through to the museum world. Museums are having to generate their own incomes and reinforce their bonds with the public. In turn, visitors want greater diversity, experience and interaction, of the sort that they come across elsewhere in our entertainment society. However exceptional a museum collection might be, however unique the assembled works of art, simply displaying them is no longer sufficient in a world where total experience holds sway. It is one of the reasons why museums are increasingly allowing their exhibitions to be designed by a designer, artist, stylist or architect, hired especially for that purpose.One characteristic example is the new design that Krijn de Koning and Anne Holtrop completed for the permanent exhibition of works by Mondrian and De Stijl at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. They designed various larger and smaller spaces, with in-between spaces which become increasingly narrow and turn into even more spaces, whereby the works of De Stijl are no longer represented as an isolated phenomenon, but in a broader cultural context. The fact that the assistance of an artist was sought for this indicates that this museum is indeed aware of the need for a special interface for the presentation of their collection, but they have trouble with the idea of letting it be made by a designer. The artist is sacred in the museum, and is allowed to do things with the collection that would never be tolerated from someone else.Kossmann and De Jong agree that because of their fixation on the autonomy of the art and the artist, museums of modern or contemporary art are way behind developments in heritage institutes, museums of architecture and natural history museums, where, in recent years, extensive staging has become commonplace. Information, entertainment and education go hand in hand, and the public is increasingly stimulated to take part. Kossmann and De Jong work almost exclusively for what they refer to as ‘thematic’ museums: museums in which the assembled objects sooner serve as ‘evidence’ that something really took place, rather than being assessed on their own. ‘Many artists also say that they have no need for a designer in order for their work to be able to communicate, because the work is already “finished”: it already communicates.’Herman Verkerk of EventArchitectuur understands the reservations or sensitivity on the part of the art world all too well. ‘The art itself has already intensely called into question all of its various forms and ways of being represented. Consider the attempts of the 1990s in which, with the rise of installation art, the idea of display was analyzed down to the bone. The work of art itself is thereby often transformed into the mediator with the public. Many of the experiments back then have since become the practices of exhibition designers, but now stripped of their critical component.’Siebe Tettero is also receptive to the argument that the work of art already communicates, and therefore doubts whether designers can play a role in exhibitions of contemporary art. ‘I often have to think of what Heidegger once said about art: “At the point when function disappears, autonomy appears.” The designer stands on the side of functionality, and the artist takes the side of autonomy. You must not put a designer in the shoes of an artist.’
Emancipation?
The struggle between the autonomy of the work of art and the context that gives that art meaning is not just a phenomenon of today. In recent years, curators were primarily the ones who were called to task if they reduced works of art to illustrations of their particular theories. Today, the same is true of the designers, and this can certainly be seen as an indication of their growing significance.Herman Verkerk confirms that ten or fifteen years ago, it would probably have been considerably more difficult for designers to present themselves as fully fledged participants at the Venice Biennale. ‘In that sense, we can speak of an emancipated practice. But the discourse is still behind the times. That may have to do with the dominant influence of the marketplace.’ One frequently-heard criticism of the Dutch Pavilion is that the artists only had a subservient role and were even completely upstaged. ‘But,’ says Verkerk, ‘it was precisely that expectation, in which it is demanded of the artists that they take a dominant position as an illustration of their autonomy, that was disqualified by the participants as a perverted expression of a marketing strategy. Instead of that, we chose a collaborative and multidisciplinary working method as an ode to the Dutch cultural infrastructure that is now under threat.’ In this regard, it is not so strange that ‘the designer’ of an exhibition is given a more important role. Designers are, after all, ‘environmental workers’. Unlike artists, designers are satisfied with a supportive role and remain relatively anonymous. While the curator still often starts out from the perspective of the work of art, the artist or the art context, the designer is more concerned with transference, with the public and the relationship to society at large. If art institutes want to appeal to a wider public, then they will have to give the context and the relevance of the exhibited works greater emphasis, in a way that increasingly engages that public. The big question is whether the art world can accept this wider perspective, or whether they continue to anxiously grasp onto the art object and to protecting its white cube, with the interests of the art market associated with it. ‘Museums are so slow!’ claim Kossmann and De Jong. ‘They cherish their traditional concepts about what an exhibition is or can be. They are unbelievably behind. Museums need to be much more critical. They could have a far greater role in society by picking up on certain subjects, by generating relevant and substantive discussions, by engaging in the debate. As a museum, you can give yourself an unbelievable presence by putting relevant subjects on the agenda. There are so many opportunities out there!’ Nina Folkersma is an independent curator and critic based in AmsterdamTranslated from the Dutch by Mari Shields
Nina Folkersma