Exhibitions choreograph visitors; they produce a certain kind of social space. Herbert Bayer, quoted earlier, suggested that exhibitions were and are exciting to design because they could involve so many different media and materials in the production of new kinds of experience. Higgins, whose company, Land Design Studio, has designed many major museums and exhibitions, calls his chapter (14) “Total Media” as an appeal for a more collaborative, holistic approach to museum-making, but also in recognition of the complex, multisensory, multimedia aspects of exhibition design involving the use of light, sound, and the “tactile and olfactory” alongside audiovisual and graphic elements.
Discussing the practices of the Stapferhaus in Lenzburg, Switzerland, Beat Hächler writes that space can be understood not as a container but as an arrangement of relationships, as a means of engineering certain performative possibilities. Indeed, since the 1920s, artists and designers have conceived of the exhibition space as an environment that changes as visitors move around it. It was a means of creating new experiences, new ways of seeing and exploring space, that corresponded with artistic practices aimed at transforming perception. Some of these exhibition experiments can be viewed today. For example, at the Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz in Łódz in Poland, Wladysław Strzeminski’s Neoplastic Room has been restored. The gallery, which originally opened in June 1948, is both a container for various works of art by Strzeminski and his contemporaries, and an immersive abstract artwork itself. The paintings and sculptural constructions within it are not simply the subject of the exhibition but are part of the same field of practice: like many avant-garde artists, Strzeminski worked in design and architecture as well as painting (Szczerski 2012, 237).7
The Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in the Netherlands has made a point of collecting, or reconstructing, historically important exhibition spaces and multimedia installations such as Aleksandr Rodchenko’s Workers’ Reading Room of 1925; El Lissitzky’s Abstract Cabinet, originally commissioned in 1927 for the Landesmuseum in Hanover, Germany, by Alexander Dorner and destroyed in 1936; and Lászlo Moholy Nagy’s Room of Our Time (1930), which was never constructed in its entirety until its (re)construction in 2009 (see Elcott 2010). Haidee Wasson situates the avant-garde’s reinvention of exhibition space in relation to film and in the context of trying to “defy the static models that dominated in established museums” (Chapter 26). The artists themselves often expressed the aims of these innovative installations in more explicitly political terms, wanting to jolt the visitor from “passivity” into (implicitly revolutionary) “activity.”
This idea of using installation to reinvent visitor activity also informed British pop artist Richard Hamilton’s pioneering exhibitions from the 1950s. The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London recently exhibited a reconstruction of an Exhibit (1957), the result of his collaboration with another artist, Victor Pasmore, and the critic Laurence Alloway. It consists of a room full of rectangular sheets of Perspex, suspended at different heights and angles and ranging in color and translucency from completely transparent to semitransparent coffee brown, dark red, yellow, and opaque black. Hamilton and his collaborators described an Exhibit as a game for the artists, who construct it improvisationally on site, according to predecided rules but without rehearsal: “Once the rules were settled, a high number of moves was possible ... an Exhibit as it stands, records one set of possible moves.” They suggest that, by entering the exhibit, visitors also participate in a game.8 Conceived in this way, the exhibition still has a structure, and its explicit content becomes something that is an implicit content of every exhibition: the moves and decisions of the visitors. This is the exhibition medium stripped down to its bare minimum. Nevertheless, visitors to the ICA in 2014 played a different game from visitors in 1957: armed with camera phones, many (including myself) photographed and videoed the installation.
Today, exhibition designers tend to think in terms of narrative as the key element that gives an exhibition coherence. For designer Frank den Oudsten, the spectator, the audience, “completes the narrative environment” (2012, 21). This emphasis on the exhibition narrative is connected to the influence of film and theater. Since the 1970s, exhibitions have increasingly used techniques from these fields. In his chapter here, Higgins refers to his own career trajectory, “shifting from architecture to work in TV, film and theater” before establishing himself as a designer of exhibitions (Chapter 14). However, he sees “limited crossover” both in the organization of the production and division of labor, and in the different and medium-specific qualities of exhibitions, film, and theater. Unlike in film and theater, the exhibition designer must plan for the “personalized sequence” visitor experience.
For Higgins, the concept of scenography is very much associated with film and theater; in German-speaking countries, however, the term Szenographie has a wider meaning, although it has been applied to museums only since the millennium, according to Habsburg-Lothringen. Generally it tends to call to mind simulated, immersive environments along the lines of naturalistic film and theater sets – the highly atmospheric, immersive spaces described earlier. In Part III, Habsburg- Lothringen describes contemporary scenography in terms of the construction of “flexible, atmospherically dense, and interactive illusory spaces, in which the viewer is immersed temporarily” (Chapter 15).
Such “illusory spaces” might seem to be a logical, even inevitable, progression from displays such as dioramas and period rooms. However, Habsburg-Lothringen also discusses the 1980s rejection of this kind of naturalism or illusionism among German-speaking curators and designers of historical exhibitions who turned instead to a kind of Brechtian realism in which “alienating effects and distortions” disrupt the illusion of the exhibition and expose it as a construction (Chapter 15). A new critical and poetic approach to exhibition making led in the direction of more aesthetic, sensual, and atmospheric environments. From a present-day perspective, and in relation to the earlier discussion of atmospherics, this is perhaps unexpected: it suggests that, far from always being a tool for the construction of illusions or for the manipulation of visitors/consumers, atmospheric media could be used to produce what Habsburg-Lothringen refers to as a “productive shock” in visitors. In the context of a historical exhibition, this shock serves to disrupt any assumption of an objectively knowable past, seamlessly connected to the present, and unfiltered by present values and understandings.
For den Oudsten (2012), scenography doesn’t refer only to thematic, highly designed environments, but to a dramaturgy that takes place within a space between observer and observed. The idea that scenography does not have to describe only immersive exhibits is made clear in Beat Hächler’s chapter. Hächler refers to his practice at the Stapferhaus in Lenzburg as “social scenography,” a concept intended to capture “the performative aspect of exhibitions” (Chapter 16). In a social scenographic exhibition, the exhibition space is conceived of as a dynamic space, a space produced by action, by the activity of visitors. This requires rethinking the museum as “a space of the present,” which produces reflection in visitors because “what museum visitors are confronted with above all is themselves.”
Audience participation
New media curator and writer Beryl