Evolutional exhibitions

Hans-Ulrich Obrist

Cooperation
Classical exhibition history emphasized order and stability. Nowadays, what we are seeing is fluctuation and instability: the unpredictable. In non-equilibrium physics, we find different notions of unstable systems and the dynamics of unstable environments. Combining incertitude and unpredictability with organization is an important issue here. In the place of certitude, the exhibition expresses connective possibilities: evolutional displays, exhibitions with an ongoing life, exhibitions as dynamic learning systems with feedback loops, a concerted effort to revoke the unclosed, paralyzing homogeneity of the exhibition master-plan, and thus question the obsolete idea of the curator as the mastermind. As the questioning process gets underway, the exhibition is only emerging. Exhibitions under permanent construction, exhibitions within exhibitions. The eschewal or questioning of a master-plan also means that organizing an exhibition means inviting many various shows into the show, the effect not unlike a Russian Matrushka doll. An exhibition can quite easily conceal other exhibitions (temporary anonymous zones).
At a time when cooperation between museums and different exhibitions is more and more economically-driven, with a flurry of traveling shows, packed, shipped and available for rent, there has never been a more pressing need to turn our attentions towards non-profit-making, art-oriented hook-ups. As Indian economist Amaryta Sen points out, there is a need for empirical connections linking freedoms of a different kind, a mutually beneficial exchange to encourage connections linking different freedoms. This also means that rather than furthering favoring bigger and bigger museum conglomerates which inevitably become more and more homogenous, there is a need for more collaboration between different models which might cultivate a spirit of difference and allow disparate conditions “to thrive both through protection and exposure” (Cedric Price).

Evolutional Display
The whole notion of an evolving display, an exhibition with an ongoing life, is of utmost importance. This is the notion Hou Hanru and myself have been trying to develop with “Cities on the Move”, yet the show is but a blueprint for a project that merits further development. It is a complex idea and one which would necessitate more and more traveling exhibitions that come with their own sets of demands in terms of logistics, scale and budget. Traveling shows inevitably involve expenditure of energy on the part of the artist, and getting the show to the second or third venue is always a daunting task. How to go about making the exhibition’s third appearance exciting and keep it growing, all the while resisting the fly in, fly out mentality? Rather than view the exhibition as a product, it is important to consider it a process capable of exploiting the full potential of the museum hosting it, as if the museum were a laboratory or workshop.
Under these conditions, exhibitions would no longer be switched on and off, in a spirit of tabula rasa, before the next hosted outing, but would take on an almost life-like, organic valence, leaving seeds to grow, sedimentation to accumulate.
Three years of ongoing dialogue lie behind “Cities on the Move”. Proceedings became ever more interesting. Artists started to collaborate with other artists as the exhibition got underway. In some respects it was a fast process. Elsewhere things were slow. Dialogues and collaborations began to emerge as this show continued to undergo change following its first outing in Vienna, in an empty courtyard designed by architect Yung Ho Cheong. In London, Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren designed what they called an accelerated Merzbau for the Hayward Gallery. In a bid to be “economical with their imaginations”, they recycled the exhibition architecture of Zaha Hadid who had designed the previous exhibition at the Hayward, “100 Years of Art and Fashion”. Koolhaas and Scheeren opted for a form of interior urbanism.
The show eventually turned into a process of sedimentation. After London, “Cities on the Move” continued apace, and has never had a fixed list of participating artists.
Basically, with this show, we were trying to trigger positive feedback loops. It was set out as a learning system which would learn from every city in which it touched down. The exhibition also took in Helsinki, where it was designed by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, who used paper tubing in all its forms in an homage to Alvar Alto.

Interior complexity
(Learning From The Sir John Soanes Museum)
“Time of marathon visit; time of interior complexity”, as Patricia Falguières says as she forges a link between the Sir John Soanes Museum and the Merzbau: the time-scale of Schwitters’ marathon visits through the Merzbau, aimed less at objects than at events/intensities, the exhibition as a process of sedimentation rather than as an envelope. Uneven structural elements are involved, like the Piranesi’s Carceri staircases, mirrored into infinity, which open up non-linear, multi-directional paths where viewers are expected, over and over again, to find their own crossings.
These “Time Marathon” visits to the Merzbau lead us to think in terms of time-based exhibitions. The time-based exhibition also includes the amount of time a viewer spends in a museum. The presence of video and film in exhibitions would account for this.
Many of the changes I have witnessed are related not only to space but also to time. Toni Negri and Michale Hardt’s Empire was one of the most outstanding interpretations of globalization ever written. Their description of multitude designates new spaces as its journeys establish new residencies. Autonomous movement is what defines the proper place of a multitude. Multitude fights the homogenization of globalization; actually it constructs new temporalities, immanent processes of constitution.
Negri’s emphasis on different temporalities brings me back to Cedric Price. Price is a visionary English architect and town-planner who has participated in “Cities on the Move” at various points in its trajectory. To quote Price, “The first three dimensions are height, width, length. Time is the fourth dimension of an exhibition. In the Bangkok version of ‘Cities on the Move’, time was the key. The entire nature of the outing — not in terms of the presentation of materials but the consuming usage of  ideas and images — existed in time. The very reason for mounting this show was immediacy, an awareness of time that is not necessarily that of London or Manhattan.”
Cedric Price’s Fun Palace project from 1961 consisted of a building that was neither destined to last forever nor require renovation, but would disappear after a 10-20-year life-span. The Fun Palace, which Price developed following talks with Joan Littlewood, was to be a flexible structure in a large shipyard which could be added to according to changes in circumstance. The key idea here was that the building could undergo alteration whilst occupied. According to Price, this loose social pattern “would give the user freedom as to what to do next”. The Fun Palace was a responsive structure aimed at connecting disciplines and different practitioners within changing parameters.
Price further developed these ideas with his vision for a 20th-Century cultural center using uncertainty and conscious incompleteness to produce a catalyst for invigorating change whilst always producing a “harvest of the quiet eye”.

Against The Amnesia Of The Exhibition’s Laboratory Years
Observe the Bilbao effect and the whole focus on exterior spectacle. Today, there is a relatively strong amnesia regarding the interior complexity of experimental exhibitions such as those mounted by Bayer, Duchamp, Gropius, Kiesler, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe. In the words of Mary Anne Staniszewskis, who penned the excellent book The Power of Display (MIT), which actually illustrates this incredible amnesia using the example of the Museum of Modern Art in New York: “the importance of exhibition design provides an approach to art history that acknowledges the vitality, historicity and the time- and site-bound character of all aspects of culture. During a recent interview I held with him, Richard Hamilton pointed out: ‘Most of the great exhibitions since 1851 have produced display features of historic importance, a manipulation of interior spaces that commands respect to this day’.”

Time, Storage, Kraftwerk and Laboratory
(Alexander Dorner Revisited)
Alexander Dorner, who ran the Hanover Museum in the 1920s, defined the museum as a kraftwerk. He invited artists such as El Lissitzky to realize a contemporary, dynamic display of a museum on the move. In his writings, Dorner emphasizes Überwindung der Kunst (Going beyond art), and his intention to transform the neutral white cube in such a way that it assume the valences of a more heterogeneous space. Dorner succeeded in his pseudo-natural space back in the 19th century, an approach which is still at large today. Dorner’s legacy is at its strongest in the fact that he anticipated very early on the urgency of issues such as the museum in a permanent state of transformation within dynamic parameters:
-the museum as it oscillates between object and process: “The processual idea has penetrated our system of certainties” (Dorner);
-the multi-identity museum;
-the museum on the move;
-the museum as a risk-taking pioneer; Act! Don’t wait!;
-the museum as a setting for crossings of art and life;
-the museum as a laboratory;
-the museum based on a dynamic concept of art history: as John Dewey wrote, it is through Dorner that we are “in the midst of a dynamic center of profound transformations”;
-the museum as a relative, not absolute, truth;
-the elastic museum —  elastic in its displays, elastic as a building;
-bridges between artist, museum and other disciplines.
In Dorner’s own words: “Only by looking at other fields of life can we understand the forces which are effective in visual production today.”

Slowness/Silence
A moment of slowness and silence is a very important part of a museum visit. At a time when noise and the fast lane have taken precedence over the slow lane, it is important to consider ways in which to re-inject slowness and silence into current museum conditions. Rem Koolhaas has set out some possible ways in which noise and silence, speed and slowness can coexist. Describing his recent museum projects, he points to “the notion of creating a fast-track tourist route, a  kind of short-cut aimed at enabling the return of slowness or intensity. In the absence of a two-speed system, the museum experience is accelerated for all comers. We used to refer to the beautiful era of the MoMa, the Laboritorium years,… and, yes, it was a beautiful era, but I do not think you can have a Laboratorium visited by two million people a year. And that is why, with our libraries as well as our museums, what we are trying to do is organize an almost urban noise soundtrack alongside experiences that facilitate focus and slowness. As far as I am concerned, this is the most exciting way of conceiving of today’s incredible surrender to frivolity and how it could also be compatible with a seduction of focus and stillness. It is the issue of mass visit and the core experience of stillness and being together with the work of art that is at stake”. (Rem Koolhaas, from an interview with the author).