MATERIALITY AND MEDIALITY: DISPLAY STRATEGIES IN WEIMAR EXHIBITION ENVIRONMENTS (1923-1930)

Sandra Karina Löschke

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW School of Architecture Faculty of the Built Environment May 2014

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PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Loschke

First name: Sandra Other name/s: Karina

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: Architecture Faculty: FBE

Title: Materiality and Mediality: Display Strategies in Weimar Exhibition Environments (1923-1930)

Abstract 350 words maximum:

The recent probing of display conventions and audience interrelations in contemporary exhibition venues prompted a renewed interest in the history of avant-garde exhibition design. Within this field of study, this thesis identifies a very narrow thematic and historic area of interest. It proposes that the rise of experimental exhibition models in 1920s Weimar Germany was intimately linked to a changed understanding of materiality inspired by the scientific and technological innovations of the time - a fact that has been disregarded in current exhibition scholarship. It demonstrates how ideas about materiality - the calculated layering of materials, colour, light, and text - informed display and engaged audiences. The exhibition environment, previously conceived as a representational backdrop, was not only foregrounded but assigned a central mediating role. These endeavours, I propose, capture the historic moment when traditional nineteenth century exhibition typologies began to be transfigured through novel experimental practices that reveal and develop vital links between material aesthetics and mediation. My original contribution to knowledge consists in the detailed analysis of a series of display models which emerged in Weimar Germany in 1923-30 and which are examined through the lenses of materiality and mediality. The selected display models are: Aby Warburg's Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek (Library of Cultural Sciences) in Hamburg; Alexander Domer's Provinzialmuseum in Hannover; El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstration Rooms; and Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and L!1szl6 Moholy-Nagy's 1930 Werkbund Exhibition in Paris. Together, these case studies offer a series of alternative concepts that represent a paradigmatic shift from representation to mediation, from formal display typologies to material experimentation, and from display spaces based on art historical principles to environments organised on th~ basis of the visitor's experience. The investigation draws upon archival,-material including photographs, drawings, reviews, and official and personal documents. It uses case studies as a prime method of investigation, developing its central arguments from a detailed analysis of the particulars of each case.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF FIGURES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER EXHIBITION, MATERIALITY, AUDIENCE 1

Thematic Matrix: Exhibition, Materiality, Audience 1 Theoretical Framework: Material Aesthetics and Psycho-physiology 3 Practice Context: Material Experimentation 8 Historical Context: Exhibitions and Audiences 14 Rationale for the Selection of Case Studies and their Interrelatedness 21 Object of Dissertation 22 Contemporary Relevance and Research Context 23 Aims and Significance of the Research 25 Methodological Approach: Indiciary Paradigm, Case Study, Interdisciplinarity 25 The Indiciary Paradigm 27 The Case Study 29 Interdisciplinary Approach 30 Description of the Chapters 32 CHAPTER 1 ABY WARBURG'S LIBRARY AS EXHIBITION AND LABORATORY 37

Materialising Knowledge: Libraries and Museums 37 Contemporary Context 39 The Library as a Collection of Evidence and Research Instrument 40 Scientific Inspiration 41 Affective Space and Reflective Space 42 A Question of Method 44 Systemization for a Wider Audience 45 The Central Reading Room: Spatial Experience, Collaboration and Demonstration 48 The Book Magazines: Vertical Organization by Topic 52 Colour Signification 54 Activating the audience 56

The Library as Laboratory 58 Conclusion: Audience and Mediation 61 CHAPTER 2 PARTICIPATORY AESTHETICS: ALEXANDER DORNER’S REORGANISATION OF THE PROVINZIALMUSEUM HANNOVER (1923-26) 65

The State of German Museums in the Weimar Republic 67 Dorner’s Raumbild Theory 72 Activating Exhibitions for the Public: Atmosphere Room and Information Material 75 Unframing Artworks: Dorner’s Reanimation of Historic Raumbilder 77 The Concept of Atmosphere 82 Colour as Activator 84 Back and forth: Atmospheric Experience and Intellectual Prompts 91 Presence of another, of self, and of material 95 A Transformative Mode of Art Reception 97 Dorner’s Curatorial Ethos 99 Dorner’s Reception 101 CHAPTER 3 IMMATERIAL MATERIALITY: EL LISSITZKY'S DEMONSTRATION ROOMS 107

The Adaption of Avant-garde Exhibition Models in Contemporary Curatorial Practice 109 Nicolas Bourriaud: The Exhibition as a "place like any other place" 112 Liam Gillick: The Exhibition as Material Reference or Decorative Backdrop 116 Faktura: The Constructivist’s Re-conceptualisation of Materiality 120 Utilitarian and Psychological Aspects of Faktura 123 Proun: A Material Vocabulary for a Techno-Aesthetic Paradigm 125 Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms: Proun and Irrational Space 133 Lissitzky's Demonstrationrooms: Immaterial materiality and Imaginary Space 135 The Demonstration Rooms: Various Perspectives 138 The Demonstration Room: A New Standard for Exhibition Architecture 140 Constructing with Light: The Tectonic Illumination Object 144 Immaterialising Architecture: The Iridescent Wall 150 Conclusion: Material Strategies for Exhibitions 161

CHAPTER 4 165 COMMUNICATION MATERIAL: EXPERIMENTS WITH GERMAN CULTURE IN THE 1930 WERKBUND EXHIBITION 165

The Werkbund Exhibition in Paris 1930: Background 166 Theoretical positions: Material Logic and Material Imagination 169 Innovative Materials 173 Visiting the Future: Gropius and Breuer’s Prototypes for Modern Living 177 The Capture of the Eye: Bayer’s Materialisation of the Spectacular 182 Multi-medial Distractions: Moholy-Nagy’s concept of materiality as medium 186 A guided tour of the future 189 The Purpose of Exhibitions: Staging Spectacles or Demonstrating Solutions 190 The Exhibition’s Socio-political Register: The Making of Images 193 A new Image of German Culture and German People 195 Conclusion 197 CHAPTER 5 199 SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND CONCLUDING REMARKS 199

Reflections on Method 200 Towards Alternative Exhibition Scenarios 202 The Mediating Power of Materials 203 Scientific Inspiration and Creative Experimentation 205 Engaging Audiences 207 Spaces of Transformation: The Exhibition as a Socio-political Instrument 211 Scientific Inspirations 212 Future Directions for the Exhibition 214 BIBLIOGRAPHY 217

LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Fritz Schumacher, Design for the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Section through the central reading room, second revision, undated. Excerpt from Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg," 56.

1.2 Gerhard Langmaack, Design for the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Sketch of central reading room showing the window elevation, undated. Excerpt from Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg," 71.

1.3. Reading Room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Photograph of central reading room showing the Mnemosyne Atlas panels in front of the book shelves, undated. Image: Warburg Institute London.

1.4 Reading Room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Photograph of central reading room showing the book wall and elliptical skylight above, undated. Image: Warburg Institute London.

1.5 Books at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Photograph showing the book spines with bleached colour signification code. Image: Warburg Institute London.

2.1 Detail of a photograph of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover (ca.1925) showing a reframed painting in the room for Dutch Baroque Art after its re-organisation. Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

2.2 Photograph of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover (early 1920s) showing the room for Flemish Baroque Art before its re-organisation. Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

2.3 Photograph of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover (ca.1925) showing the room for Flemish Baroque Art after its re-organisation. Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

2.4 Photograph of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover (ca. 1925) showing the room for Classical Art after its re- organisation with a low, black leather couch at the centre. Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

2.5 Illustration of the Plan of the Art Department on the first floor of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover after the re-organisation (1925). Illustration by author based on an original plan.

2.6 Alexander Dorner (mid-1920s) Poster fixed in door frame between exhibition rooms. Illustration by author.

3.1 A place like any other - Internal views of the Palais de Tokyo, published on its homepage, accessed 22 March 2014, http://palaisdetokyo.com/en/general-informations/palais-de-tokyo.

3.2 Internal views of the Palais de Tokyo after its reopening published in Wallpaper (18 April 2012), online version, accessed March 22, 2014, http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/paris-palais-de-tokyo- reopens/5749#62075.

3.3 View of Liam Gillick's A diagram of the factory once the former workers had cut extra windows in the walls, 2004/2005, powder coated steel. Shown as part of "A short text on the possibilities of creating an economy of equivalence," exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 26 January – 27 March 2005, http://www.airdeparis.com/liam/2005/pdt/liam_gillick.htm.

3.4 El Lissitzky, Proun 2C, oil, paper and metal on wood, 60 x 40cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection (Proun Inv. 14), ca. 1920. Photographic excerpt from El Lissitzky 1890-1941: Architect Painter Photographer Typographer, exhibition catalogue. Eindhoven: Municipal Van Abbemuseum, 1990, Plate 30.

3.5 Images showing an imaginary rotating surface ("Imaginäre Rotationsfläche") used by Lissitzky to illustrate his concept of immaterial materiality. The images show a strip of metal foil in a stationary state ("Ruhezustand") on the left, and in a rotating state ("Rotationszustand") on the right. Photographic excerpt from El Lissitzky's essay "K. und Pangeometrie," in Europa Almanach: Malerei, Literatur, Musik, Architektur, Plastik, Bühne, Film, Mode, eds. Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1925), 111. Photograph: author.

3.6 1968 Reconstruction of El Lissitzky's Raum der Abstrakten at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2009, photograph: author.

3.7 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room, showing the tectonic illumination object. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Fensterwand (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Window Wall), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 25.2x36.2cm, Image Number: 21467, Accession Number: BR61.40.B. Source: Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Lydia Dorner in memory of Dr. Alexander Dorner.

3.8 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room showing wall 1 and visual diagram of room. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Wand 1 (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Wall 1), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 24.9x36.2cm, Image Number: 21465, Accession Number: BR61.39.B. Source: Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Lydia Dorner in memory of Dr. Alexander Dorner.

3.9 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room showing wall 3 with stacked, sliding paintings. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Wand 3 (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Wall 3), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 24.9x36.5cm, Image Number: 21466, Accession Number: BR61.40.A. Source: Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Lydia Dorner in memory of Dr. Alexander Dorner.

3.10 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room, showing wall 2 and plan detail of wall. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Wand 2 (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Wall 1), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 25.2x36.2cm. Image Number: 21464, Accession Number: BR61.39.B. Source: Harvard Art Museums, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Gift of Lydia Dorner in memory of Dr. Alexander Dorner.

3.11 Optical effects – figure/background. Both the black and the grey stripes can be interpreted as figure. The figure ground relationship is ambiguous because the stripes are equal width (left). The narrower stripes are figure. The determining factor for the figure ground relationship is not colour but relative size, 2009. Illustration: author

3.12 El Lissitzky, copy of hand-drawn sketch of Nirosta steel band, undated, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 1.1.2.5.2, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover. Photograph: author.

3.13 El Lissitzky, Raum der Abstrakten, 1927, Provinzialmuseum Hannover. El Lissitzky letters and photographs, 1911-1941, Accession no. 950076, Series III. Photographs, ca. 1920-1931; Box 2 Photographic and printed reproductions, ca. 1920-1931. Getty Research Institute Archives, Los Angeles. Source: Kunstsammlungen des Provinzialmuseums Hannover, Photograph: Redemann, Plattennummer 878.

3.14 El Lissitzky, Raum für Konstruktive Kunst, 1926, Internationale Kunstaustellung Dresden. El Lissitzky letters and photographs, 1911-1941, Accession no. 950076, Series III. Photographs, ca. 1920-1931; Box 2 Photographic and printed reproductions, ca. 1920-1931. Getty Research Institute Archives, Los Angeles.

4.1 Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Design; Photo: Berliner Bild-Bericht; Werkbundausstellung Paris 1930, Saal 2: Blick in Saal 2 durch die Glaswand (View of room 2 through the glass wall), 1930, silver gelatin paper, 16,9x22,7 cm, Inventory no. 06751/040. Reproduced by permission of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

4.2 Corner Detail of glass display case – Werkbund Exhibition, Salle 2. Excerpt from "Neue Formen in Metall und Glass," Die Baugilde (30 September 1930): 1620.

4.3 View of curved glass screen and projector behind the "Kino-Box" in Salle 2. Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Design; Photo: L’Illustration Paris; Werkbundausstellung Paris 1930, Saal 2: Filmvorführapparat, 1930, silver gelatin paper, 22,4x16,6 cm, Inventory no. 06751/049. Reproduced by permission of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

4.4 View of the Werkbund exhibition captured through screen. Herbert Bayer, Design; Photo: unknown; Werkbundausstellung Paris 1930, "section allemande", Blick durch Konkavlinsen-Tafel vor Saal 4, 1930, silver gelatin paper, 16,9x22,7 cm, Inventory no. 06751/26. Reproduced by permission of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

4.5 Werkbund Exhibition Paris 1930, view of Salle 5 with Bayer’s chair display. Herbert Bayer, Design; Photo: Berliner Bildbericht; Werkbundausstellung Paris 1930, "section allemande", Saal 5: Ausstellung moderner Standardsitzmöbel, 1930, silver gelatin paper, 22,9x16,8 cm, Inventory no. 06751/053. Reproduced by permission of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

4.6 Diagram of itinerary/walking direction in Werkbund Exhibition. Excerpt from Herbert Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design." PM (Production Manager) 6, no. 2 (December 1939 –January 1940): 19.

4.7 View from Breuer’s apartment bathroom towards the Tezett ramp/walkway (Bayer’s display of architectural photographs reflected in mirror). Marcel Breuer, Design; Photo: L’Illustration Paris; Werkbundausstellung Paris 1930, "section allemande", Saal 3: Apartment eines Wohnhotels, Blick in das Bad, 1930, silver gelatin paper, 14,1x19,8cm, Inventory no. 06751/037. Reproduced by permission of Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Much of the work related to this dissertation has been completed with support from the University of Technology Sydney's Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building and the Centre for Contemporary Design Practices and I thank both for facilitating archive visits as well as my organisation of the 2012 Interstices Symposium on the related topic of "Immaterial Materialities: Materiality and Interactivity in Art and Architecture." Parts of this thesis have been published or presented at conferences and symposia since 2010. Particularly, the members of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand were generous with their observations at their annual conferences in 2011 and 2012, as were the participants of at the 2011 "Whose Participation?" Symposium at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zürich, and the participants of the Interstices Symposia in 2010, 2011 and 2012. A full list of publications and conference papers related to this dissertation is included in the bibliography. As part of my research, I consulted numerous archives and I am very grateful for the generous help and guidance extended to me by staff and scholars at the Warburg Institute London, the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, the Bauhaus-Archive Berlin, the Getty Research Institute Archives Los Angeles and the Busch- Reisinger Museum at Harvard. Amongst the many individuals, who have contributed to the dissertation, I must first thank my supervisor, Catherine de Lorenzo, whose wisdom and guidance were essential for this work. Catherine's intellectual generosity and fervour as well as her kindness and thoughtfulness mark her as the best Doktormutter I could have imagined – I am deeply grateful. Harry Margalit has also provided me with valuable guidance as my co-supervisor. I would also like to thank Kirsten Orr for her kindness and unfailing moral support and over the past years, and Maryam Gusheh for her generosity in providing detailed and lucid commentary on many chapters. Finally, I would like to thank my husband and family for their seemingly endless patience and unconditional support over all those years. I dedicate the dissertation to my grandmother Selma, an extraordinary individual, whose fascinating accounts of life in Weimar Germany have inspired this work.

ABSTRACT

The recent probing of display conventions and audience interrelations in contemporary exhibition venues prompted a renewed interest in the history of avant-garde exhibition design. Within this field of study, this thesis identifies a very narrow thematic and historic area of interest. It proposes that the rise of experimental exhibition models in 1920s Weimar Germany was intimately linked to a changed understanding of materiality inspired by the scientific and technological innovations of the time – a fact that has been disregarded in current exhibition scholarship. It demonstrates how ideas about materiality – the calculated layering of materials, colour, light, and text - informed display and engaged audiences. The exhibition environment, previously conceived as a representational backdrop, was not only foregrounded but assigned a central mediating role. These endeavours, I propose, capture the historic moment when traditional nineteenth century exhibition typologies began to be transfigured through novel experimental practices that reveal and develop vital links between material aesthetics and mediation. My original contribution to knowledge consists in the detailed analysis of a series of display models, which emerged in Weimar Germany in 1923-30 and which are examined through the lenses of materiality and mediality. The selected display models are: Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek (Library of Cultural Sciences) in Hamburg; Alexander Dorner's Provinzialmuseum in Hannover; El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstration Rooms; and Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Herbert Bayer, and László Moholy- Nagy's 1930 Werkbund Exhibition in Paris. Together, these case studies offer a series of alternative concepts, which represent a paradigmatic shift from representation to mediation, from formal display typologies to material experimentation, and from display spaces based on art historical principles to environments organised on the basis of the visitor's experience. The investigation draws upon archival material including photographs, drawings, reviews, and official and personal documents. It uses case studies as a prime method of investigation, developing its central arguments from a detailed analysis of the particulars of each case.

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER

EXHIBITION, MATERIALITY, AUDIENCE

With the growing literature on exhibitions in recent years, this might appear to be another timely addition. However, whilst Weimar exhibitions and their makers are cited frequently in contemporary debates, there are significant gaps with regard to architectural perspectives, the overlooked theme of materiality as a means of mediation, and the generalised, survey-style treatment of these precedents in current literature. The dissertation addresses these shortcomings and omissions in taking up a detailed architectural and historical examination of four Weimar exhibition environments. In this, the dissertation looks at the exhibition from a decidedly architectural perspective, and even more specifically through the lens of materiality and its capacity to mediate between exhibition architecture, exhibit and audience. The intention is to embed contemporary theories and practices on the topic of exhibitions, their architecture and their address of audiences in a historical and theoretical context, and to provide a well-informed platform to stimulate further discussion. To do so, it advances a specific methodological approach and this is part of the dissertation's unique contribution to the field. At the heart of this investigation then is a threefold thematic matrix – exhibition, materiality, and audience – and under scrutiny here, are the medial relations between these three elements.

Thematic Matrix: Exhibition, Materiality, Audience

A 1930 special issue of Das Neue Frankfurt, an international magazine dealing with the problems of cultural reform, thematised exhibitions as one of the most urgent debates of the day. Its editor, Joseph Gantner, left no doubt about the significant role assigned to them as an instrument of cultural modernisation that could effect change in all areas of life in the Weimar republic:

1

More urgently than ever we need those exhibitions that are appropriate not only for the present-day demographic composition, but even more so for the living standard of the present day. These conditions have changed radically since the war, and even more so in relation to the splendid development of a simpler and more straightforward way of life. What we need today, is no longer the aesthetic exhibition of former times with it splendid isolation, and especially not the randomly amassed mega-exhibition, but the exhibition that confronts the issues of contemporary life without compromise, and is meaningful not only for the educated but for everyone.1

In Gantner's mind, exhibitions had to be pertinent to the problems faced by Weimar audiences, and to fulfil this task they required means of mediation that were tailored to the emerging Weimar mass society rather than the bourgeois elites. Publicist Franz Roh, one of the contributors to the issue, spells out what this meant in concrete terms. In Roh's mind, there was "no subject that had to be kept away from a lay audience," and this meant that art exhibitions had to embrace "optical design in general," including photography, architecture, textiles, theatre and technology. To ensure the appeal of exhibitions to general audiences, he further insisted that "all new and most cutting edge technologies have to be put in the service of display."2 The impact new technologies exuded on modern architecture and everyday life is clearly reflected in the commercial adverts featured in this magazine issue: tubular steel furniture designs by the Werkbund and Le Corbusier; Keim washable wall paints in non-fading colours; modern lighting technologies for the home; and Luxfer glass prism blocks are just some of the product examples that underscore the importance assigned to new materials and designs as part of modern Weimar culture. These technological advances, as Roh demanded, had to be applied to the field of exhibitions, too. It is not surprising then, that in Weimar Germany, material aesthetics and technologies crystallised as strategic means of mediation in the rethinking of exhibitions and the spaces in which they were encountered. In fact, the rise of experimental exhibition architectures in the 1920s would not only be unthinkable but entirely incomprehensible without knowledge about the simultaneous revolutions that occurred in the understanding of the material word, which

1 Joseph Gantner, "Unsere Publikationen," Das neue Frankfurt: Internationale Monatsschrift für die Probleme kultureller Neugestaltung 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 141.

2 Franz Roh, "Ausstellungen von heute," Das neue Frankfurt: Internationale Monatsschrift für die Probleme kultureller Neugestaltung 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 145-46. 2 was at the core of not only intense technological, but equally psychological and physiological investigations. The development of new materials in industry went hand in hand with the exploration of their effects on the human body and mind, which had become increasingly accessible as a result of scientific advances in psycho-physiology. Whilst these developments had already commenced in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the more radicalised political climate of the Weimar republic, they assumed pivotal importance.

Theoretical Framework: Material Aesthetics and Psycho-physiology

In the past decade, material aesthetics have yet again claimed centre stage in architectural discourse and exhibition practice. Tropes like digital materiality, material responsiveness, and dematerialisation mark out a fuzzy field where scientific fact and artistic experimentation, much like art and architecture, interact, and where materiality itself is constantly re-imagined. These developments stand in contrast to the traditional conception of architecture as an absolute object – a static, solid form that delimits space by means of concrete materials – its walls, roof and floor. Architecture divides space and renders it perceptible by creating a material boundary that separates an inside and an outside world. This experiential dichotomy has been seen as the basis of the aesthetics of architecture.3 The nature of materiality and objecthood came under scrutiny at the beginning of the twentieth century – a crisis brought about by new discoveries in science and by the emergence of psycho-physiology. The discovery of magnetic waves, the atom and electricity lead to a critical examination of the physical boundaries between human beings and material objects. In 1926, German art critic Carl Einstein declared that art is nothing but "wrestling with optical experiments and invented space."4 To progress art one had to transform space, he suggested, and to transform space one had to first eliminate rigid objects and conventional containers and, consequently, scrutinize vision itself. Yet, he warned that object and gestalt (appearance) were not to be confused: it meant two different things to represent an object and its inherently physical and formal properties, and to generate a gestalt, which could be equated to mental processes. In other words, Einstein articulated the fundamental difference between traditional object-based approaches to art, which relied on the formally recognisable physical qualities of an object, and the gestalt concept, which emphasized the psycho-physiological experience of the object

3 Wolfgang Zucker, "Inside and Outside in Architecture: A Symposium," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 25, no.1 (Autumn 1966): 7.

4 Carl Einstein, "Aphorismes Méthodiques," Documents, no.1 (1929): 32. Cited in Daniel Naegele, "Object, Image, Aura: Le Corbusier and the Architecture of Photography," Harvard Design Magazine, no.6 (Fall 1998): 1. 3 and in this, acknowledged the audience as an authoritative element in processes of aesthetic reception.5 What is of particular relevance to exhibitions then, is the question of what was to replace the "rigid object" in the most concrete of the arts – architecture? What were the material and technical means that were required to create a dynamically-conceived exhibition architecture? The nature of the material object as the subject matter of architecture had already come under scrutiny with the emergence of nineteenth-century German aesthetics. Robert Vischer’s advancement of space-empathy relations under the heading of Einfühlung (empathy); August Schmarsow’s accentuation of spatial awareness emerging from the interplay between body and material elements; and Alois Riegl’s parallelism between Tiefraum (deep space) and Empfindung (sensation), to which he gave the name Raumwirkung (spatial effect),6 all represented attempts to intellectually capture the material world by reformulating its fundamentals on the basis of the interrelations between architecture, body and mind. These theoretic speculations have been of prime significance for the rethinking of aesthetic reception from the avant-garde until the present because it is here that we find the origins of a "reception aesthetics," which "confronts some of the most basic tenets of the bourgeois appreciation of art: the claim that the work can only be understood by or in itself, by the creative process, or by its producer," as Wolfgang Kemp judiciously acknowledges.7 The aesthetic reception of art and architecture in the context of exhibitions represents an important theme in this dissertation and warrants a brief overview of central ideas and historical developments. Robert Vischer's aesthetics of empathic relations elaborated different modes of spatial reception, for example, distinguishing between, on the one hand, sehen (seeing), which he understood as a calm, undirected sensory effort mainly influenced by our posture, position, colour and light, and on the other, schauen (viewing), which he regarded as a directed effort and as a dynamic and enlivening activity. Importantly, he believed that schauen, was also "more conscious than seeing as it analyses forms in a more dialectic manner … and brings

5 Carl Einstein, Die Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. 3rd ed. (Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag, 1931), 204.

6 Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom: Akademische Vorlesungen gehalten von Alois Riegl, aus seinen hinterlassenen Papieren (Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co., 1908), 43. Riegl's theories are discussed in more detail in the context of Alexander Dorner's museum model in chapter two.

7 Wolfgang Kemp, "The Work of Art and Its Beholder: The Methodology of the Aesthetic of Reception," in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Mark A. Cheetham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 184. 4 them into physical interrelations," and therefore entailed an intellectual component.8 Vischer's elaborations on the interrelations between architecture and human beings influenced the aesthetic theories of August Schmarsow and his phenomenology of space. Unlike Alois Riegl, who focused on the optical qualities of architecture and vision, Schmarsow advanced a more inclusive approach by considering the tactile and bodily qualities of architecture.9 Because of architecture's extensive presence in everyday life, it was not exclusively perceived from stationary positions, but in movement: only in walking, could the rhythmic sequence of spatial volumes unfold in front of the viewer. Due to its dynamic impressions, architecture was ideally positioned to capture the full range of psycho- physiological experiences that human beings captured in real space. Schmarsow's insistence on the introduction of space-time relations into aesthetic reception theories also inferred that the traditional notions of materials, enclosure and permanence had to be overcome. Yet he realised that these were deeply engrained:

Whoever insists that architecture should be primarily regarded not "as the art of solid objects" but as spatial design, and in fact, initially disregards the permanence of its means of production and the structural enclosure of its designs, will be exposing her-/himself to being accused of announcing "a subjective idea with the structure and permanence of a soap bubble" as an aesthetic revelation, when what seems more important is to offer scientific gains that built on the facts of the life of art.10

According to Schmarsow, the "creative engagement of the human subject with her/his spatial environment" occurred "according to the stipulations of her/his own dispositions," namely, the "constitutive uniqueness of the human intellect," which relied upon "mental as well as physical

8 Robert Vischer, "Über das Optische Formgefühl," in Einfühlung und Phänomenologische Reduktion: Grundlagentexte zu Architektur, eds. Thomas Friedrich and Jörg H. Gleiter, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2007), 40-41. Originally published as Robert Vischer, Über das Optische Formgefühl: Ein Beitrag zur Ästhetik (Leipzig: Hermann Credner, 1873). See also Harry Francis Mallgrave's discussion of the concept of Einfühlung, which he translates as in-feeling rather than empathy to underline the physiological origins of empathy, particularly in Vischer, who highlighted aspects such as the rhythm of bodily experiences and speculated about the capacity of colour to elicit auditory experiences. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. Empathy, Form and Space - Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 23.

9 Schmarsow further suggested that each art had the capacity to assume qualities of other arts depending on its particular style. Michael Podro compares this continuity between the arts with a colour circle, which features primary colours as well as transitions between them. For a discussion of Schmarsow and his critique of Heinrich Wölfflin, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 143-49.

10 August Schmarsow, "Über den Wert der Dimensionen im Raumgebilde," in Berichte über die Verhandlungen der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologische-Historische Klasse (Leipzig, 1896), 44. 5 organisation."11 The different modes of perception were mapped onto spatial zones – Gesichtsraum (literally translated as face space, meaning the space defined by our visual consciousness) and Tastraum (tactile space, meaning the zone within which converging vision makes us rely on tactile sense), thus allowing more differentiated and complex experiences.12 Schmarsow connected the viewer's superior sensory functions (immediate experience, full consciousness) to physiological functions (heart rate, in- and outbreath), which were the result of dynamic reception – that is the mode of walking and pace, encouraged and directed by the spatial organisation of the architecture.13 With this, Schmarsow set himself apart from Alois Riegl, whom he criticised for a narrow focus on the optical sense at the expense of other sensory impressions. Alexander Dorner, who as a student admired Riegl, later mounted criticisms of Riegl's work that were reminiscent of Schmarsow, finding that the simple mind-body duality of Riegl's theories was unhelpful when it came to dealing with the dynamic nature of modern art. There are also parallels between Aby Warburg's concept of Greifraum (grasping space) und Denkraum (thought space), and Schmarsow's Gesichtsraum and Tastraum, and these owe to the fact that Aby Warburg was one of Schmarsow's students at the German Institute of Art History in Florence in 1889.14 But comparable thoughts are also later voiced by El Lissitzky, who associated physical activity and human movement with increased awareness and sharpening of intellectual reception. In his introductory text to the demonstration rooms, Lissitzky suggested, that the rhythmic arrangement of the variously coloured wall sections, and other display elements shifted the visitor's "viewing axes," and "that way, an optic dynamic develops from the effect of human pace" and "this play activates the viewer."15 Schmarsow's own influences were to a great extent scientifically inspired. When he joined the University of Leipzig in 1893, he introduced himself to the collegiate with the lecture "Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung" (The Design of Space as the

11 Ibid., 45.

12 Ibid., 49. See also Andrea Pinotti, "Body Building: August Schmarsow's Kunstwissenschaft between Psychophysiology and Phenomenology," in German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism, eds. Mitchell Benjamin Frank and Daniel Allan Adler (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 13.

13 Schmarsow, "Über den Wert der Dimensionen im Raumgebilde," 55-56.

14 For a discussion of Warburg's studies with Schmarsow in Florence, see Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1986) 40-42.

15 El Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume," typescript, ca.1926, in Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 2.2.8, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover. 6

Essence of Architectural Creation).16 In its emphasis on space and experience, the lecture foreshadowed the emergence of psycho-physical considerations as the new subject matter of architecture. Amongst Schmarsow's colleagues was Wilhelm Wundt, who had set up his renowned psycho-physiological laboratory in Leipzig in 1879. Wundt's experiments focused on sensory stimulation by means of light or sound to probe human reactions to visual or auditory impressions.17 His investigations explored the quantitative relations between physical stimuli to the body and the psychological sensations they produced in the test persons. His laboratory reportedly entailed a "reaction chamber" equipped with electrical apparatuses "devoted to measuring the duration of mental phenomena," in a variety of subjects, including the researchers themselves.18 Notably, Wundt and his team did not solely concern themselves with empirical research; rather, their thinking was interdisciplinary in nature, touching upon philosophical and aesthetic concerns. This broad scope was evident in their publications but also in the importance that was assigned to their library, which formed an integral part of the facilities and comprised not only the "main technical treatises, dictionaries, practical handbooks" for essential information, but the "various special works … about the scientific evolution and the progress made in different countries in all the fields that are of interest to him."19 Thus the "purely philosophical works of Leibnitz, Kant, Herbart, Schopenhauer" could be found side by side with publications by "Fechner, Stumpf, Ribot, Preyer, Taine, Bain, Spencer, Delboeuf, Bucola," as well as the researchers' own publications, as a former student reported.20 Wundt's work was influenced by Gustav Fechner, one of his predecessors at Leipzig, who dedicated his later life almost solely to the application of psycho-physiological insights to aesthetics. Fechner's experiments endeavoured to formulate the fundamentals of an empirically-based aesthetics, for which he claimed universal validity. He rejected an aesthetics based on subjective perception in favour of a scientific model based on quantifiable data, whereby a rise of intensity in stimulation equated to a rise of intensity in sensation – a radical

16 August Schmarsow, "Raumgestaltung als Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung," Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, no.9 (1914): 66-95; originally given as a lecture at the University of Leipzig, 8 November 1893.

17 Nicolas Serge and Ludovic Ferrand, "Wundt's Laboratory at Leipzig in 1891," History of Psychology 2, no.3 (1999): 198. Translation and republication of original French article by Jules-Jean van Biervliet, "Experimental Psychology: Wundt's Institute at Leipzig," Revue de L'Instruction Publique (Superieure et Moyenne) en Belgique 35 (1892): 181- 190.

18 Ibid., 198-99.

19 Ibid., 201.

20 Ibid. 7 proposal at the time. His notion of beauty was formulated with equal pragmatism as everything that "has the property of immediately causing pleasure;" whereby he understood pleasure as the direct psycho-physical effect of an object rather than intellectual reflection upon it.21 Fechner's experimental aesthetics sought to determine, for example, which shapes and dimensions were most aesthetically pleasing by conducting actual measurements. The implications of such claims on art history and theories of aesthetic production and reception were significant as they questioned the status of the artist or architect as the creative genius, and aesthetic experience as the subject of expertise and intellectual refinement. Further, distinctions between everyday experiences and aesthetic experiences, and between the effects of objects of art and objects of nature came under scrutiny, as for example in Wilhelm Wundt's investigation of "aesthetic elementary feelings," a study which covered aspects such the aesthetic effects of the lower senses in nature and art; sound- and colour harmonies; form- and rhythmic feeling; association, assimilation and the fusion of various factors.22 At the interface between experimental physiology, psychology and aesthetics, the worlds of art and the realities of life increasingly intersected. Advancing a deeper awareness of processes of aesthetic reception, these scholars interrogated the interrelations between material arrangements, the human sensory apparatus and psychological states. The impression received from material objects did not necessarily derive from physical contact, but beyond that, from an understanding of human beings as in a specific psycho-physiological relationship to a material. It is precisely this intuitive relationship that was understood to mark the notion of materiality as distinct from physical materials in the sense of natural, artistic or construction materials, but also distinct from a purely formal-aesthetic reception in terms of style and fashion. These shifts in emphasis provide important transitory points towards abstract art and modernist architecture.

Practice Context: Material Experimentation

By the 1920s, psycho-physiological thought had spread beyond academic circles. Wundt's experimental laboratory had spawned a plethora of similar endeavours in other German cities,

21 Gustav Fechner, Vorschule der Aesthetik (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1978), 15.

22 Wilhelm Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie. 6 ed. 3 vols (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1908-11), Chapter 16, Section 2, titled "Ästhetische Elementargefühle," 115-186. It is worth noting that Wundt's brief introduction to this volume mentions this section as one of the parts that required more extensive reworking in comparison to previous versions, and he framed these changes very positively – "as a sign that the experimental psychology of the last years has dedicated itself increasingly to the central problems presented by mental life." 8 for example, the foundation of a psycho-physiological institute in Munich by Wundt's former student Theodor Lipps, but also further afield, as for example the laboratory of another of Wundt's former students, Hugo Münsterberg at Harvard University in Boston, and El Lissitzky's colleague Nikolai Ladovskij and his psycho-technical laboratory for architecture in Moscow.23 Psycho-physiology had infiltrated a wide range of disciplines and captured the imagination of the next generation. But most importantly, those following Wundt had recognised the potential of his thought for the application to real life problems: criminology, advertising, architecture and film are just some of the areas where these methods found fertile grounds. Many of these early ideas re-emerged transformed in the exhibition projects and theories of El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, and Gropius, but also in the practical and theoretical concerns of art historians such as Alexander Dorner and Aby Warburg. If the theorists before them analysed and theorised materiality, those who succeeded them, sought to unlock and apply its transformative powers to the problems of real life, adapting it for the pursuit of creative and socio-political aims. Their exhibition designs experimented with light, colour, surface and dynamic form – the same ephemeral and evocative elements that featured in the experiments and theories of their predecessors, but now these became the subject matter of art and architecture itself.24 Even if the terms "psycho-physiology," or its applied variant "psycho-technics," or indeed, the scholars associated with these, were rarely mentioned in the context of the exhibition designs investigated as part of this dissertation, it is productive to compare them on the basis of their underlying beliefs, methods and practices, as well as in terms of a shared rhetoric. In the 1920s, artistic production had evolved around ideas testifying to a dynamic conception of art and architecture, replacing the static, formal composition of objects promoted by traditional art and architecture. Moholy-Nagy's frequent use of psycho- physiological jargon is well documented in his writings. In his 1929 book Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture), Moholy-Nagy proposed a bio-centric design approach, which remained at the forefront of his work throughout his life.25 But if Schmarsow's

23 On Hugo Münsterberg's work,see Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion( Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), 26-34. On Ladovskij, see ibid., 35-50; and Milka Bliznakov, "Nikolai Ladovsky: The Search for a Rational Science of Architecture," Soviet Union 7, (1980): 170-196.

24 For a discussion of biological models in the Russian avant-garde's understanding of materiality, see Isabell Wünsche, "Organic Visions and Biological Models in Russian Avant-garde Art," in Biocentrism and Modernism, eds. Oliver A.I. Botar and Isabell Wünsche (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011) 142-43.

25 For an extended discussion on this topic, see Oliver A. I. Botar, "Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism László Moholy-Nagy's 'New Vision' and Erno Kallai's Bioromantik," PhD diss., University of Toronto, 1998. 9 interest in analysing the psycho-physiological impression of architecture led him to focus on space, Moholy-Nagy's practical endeavours in creating rather than analysing architectural scenarios led him to rethink the nature of materials required for this task:

Designing is a complex and intricate task. It is integration of technological, social and economic requirements, biological necessities, and the psychophysical effects of materials, shape, colour, volume, and space: thinking in relationships ... The designer must be trained not only in the use of materials and various skills, but also in appreciation of organic functions and planning.26

In fact, it is possible to see links between the electrical apparatuses used by Wundt and his colleagues, used for testing the psycho-physiological impact of light and tactile impulses in reaction chambers, and Moholy-Nagy's "light–space modulator" (1930), which deployed coloured light projected onto moving material elements. Moholy-Nagy felt that the complexity of his experiments went beyond regular sensory perception, and proposed that the audience needed to be gradually acquainted and schooled in these new ways of seeing: the first experiments for his light-space modulator, which was exhibited for the first time at the 1930 Werkbund exhibition in Paris, should be limited to "very simple light and movement processes because most people are not prepared, or even experienced in the perception of such appearances," Moholy-Nagy specified.27 By that time, a rapidly growing range of materials and technologies was available for experimentation and the fascination with these new products is amply documented in the art and exhibition projects of the constructivists, who thematised their interests under the heading of faktura (this is discussed in detail in chapter three). Moholy-Nagy, a central figure in constructivist circles, initially found himself forced to restrict experimentation with materials to his paintings, and stated somewhat resignedly:

It seems, for the time being, impossible to concretise our creative dreams by the fullest use of optical technique, (light architecture) … Nevertheless, I consider it necessary to continue my experiments with artificial substances such as galalith, trolit, aluminium, zellon, etc. and to retain them as media for my work, because the

26 László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald, 1947), 42.

27 László Moholy-Nagy, "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne," Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 5, no. 11-12 (1930): 297. 10

use of the materials in art will help to demonstrate their applicability in a wider sphere.28

However, many of these materials actually appear in his light-space modulator: trolit, translucent zellon, wire mesh and perforated metals are at the core of the apparatus, which bedazzled the audience with its dynamic and colourful light displays (this is discussed in chapter four). The discovery of phenol-formaldehyde resins and their development towards industrially-produced products had marked the beginning of the plastics era: Bakelite, patented by Leo Hendrik Baekeland in 1907, was marketed as the dream "material for a thousand uses;" and later, the Rheinisch-Westfälische Sprengstoff AG (RWS) in Troisdorf began with the mass production of Trolit, a nitro-cellulose based plastic with variable surface properties, which featured prominently in the 1930 Werkbund exhibition, stunning audiences with its mesmerising surfaces.29 In the field of metallurgy, German steel manufacturer Krupp Stahl developed composites that were highly decorative rather than structural. Nirosta, registered by Krupp in 1922 for a variety of uses, was a brand name for a chromium nickel composite first featured in an architectural application for the roof of the Chrysler building in New York. The fascination exuded by the optical qualities of its surface, which constantly changed in appearance depending on the observer's position, the changing light intensities and the weather conditions, was described by its architect William Van Allen as an architectural spectacle:

In the Chrysler building, the colour scheme selected was black and white, with grey ornamentation of white surfaces, the trim to be a silvery tone … with stainless steel the structural lines and the metal facings are intensified by the mirrored surfaces, reflecting the ever changing light from the sky. The splays get black and then brighter as the light reflexes occur, or the position of the observer changes, so that the entire building is constantly changeable, like a brilliant piece of silk waving in the wind. It has all the aspects of brilliant crystal in the sunlight, and a phosphorescent quality when reflecting in the moonlight.30

28 Excerpt from an unspecified text by Moholy-Nagy, reprinted in In Memoriam Laszlo Moholy-Nagy; exhibition catalogue (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. 1947), 33.

29 For the history of Trolit production, see: Matthias Dederichs "100 Jahre Kunststoffe aus Troisdorf" in Troisdorfer Jahreshefte 34 (2004), 38.

30 William Van Allen, "Architectural Uses" in The Book of Stainless Steels, ed. Ernest E. Thum (Ohio: The American Society for Steel Treating, 1933), cited in Harold M. Cobb, The History of Stainless Steel (Ohio: ASM International, 2010), 106. 11

It is not surprising that the dynamically changing appearance of the material also appealed to El Lissitzky, who used Nirosta strips in his second demonstration room in Hannover, albeit in surprising ways (this discussed in detail in chapter two). The avant-garde’s experiments explored ideas about new dimensions based on time- space relations, which were drawn from science, psychology and physiology. The practical and theoretical underpinnings for their material explorations can be traced back to earlier developments in technology and science: the technological advancements of steel, glass and plastics fabrication provided innovative materials which formed the basis for modern architectural designs; the discovery of x-rays, wireless telegraphy and film gave visibility to a world beyond the limitations of human sensory perception; and German aesthetics theories about the psychology of art and architecture provided the theoretical underpinnings for new models of aesthetic reception. To summarise, exhibition environments were believed to impact both psychologically and physiologically on the conscious mind of human beings, and their influence was thought to extend beyond the exhibition scenario by stimulating activity in everyday life. Initiating an epistemic shift in art and architecture, these exhibitions pointed to the connection between the concrete material properties of objects and their directed manipulation towards sensory interaction with the viewers. Thus the case studies discussed in the thesis include transformations of materials and space that offer an opportunity to broaden the interpretation of how the relationship between exhibition architecture and audience can be newly negotiated in contra-distinction to more traditional, object-based approaches. At the time, Walter Benjamin thematised material aesthetics under the heading of aura, taking the art object and its mode of production as a point of departure to discuss shifts in its modes of reception. New media, such as photography and film, Benjamin suggested, introduced the viewer to "unconscious optics" in the same way that psychoanalysis introduced us to our "unconscious impulses."31 The staging of art objects and materials in general possesses aesthetic and psychological powers that, whilst difficult to capture rationally, nevertheless can be directed in various ways to influence audiences. And this aspect represents another important theme of the dissertation that emerges, for example, in Alexander Dorner's atmosphere room concept and in Aby Warburg's library spaces. Similar themes and issues surface again in contemporary architectural theory and practices. In the past two decades, material aesthetics have gained new currency in the writings of German philosopher Gernot Böhme, summarised under the heading of

31 Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 500. 12 atmosphere. Böhme sees atmosphere as an aesthetic category. The notion of atmosphere, he points out, is not alien in aesthetic discourse – "it occurs frequently, almost of necessity in speeches at the opening of exhibitions, in art catalogues and in … references to the powerful atmosphere of a work, to atmospheric effect or a rather atmospheric mode of presentation."32 In all of his writings, he highlights the space between viewer and the material environment as a matter of material aesthetics. The presentation of materiality for the staging of our everyday lives, Böhme proposes, means that every product has a practical value and an aesthetic or stage value, and it is the latter that is the main focus of the thesis - the staging of materials in the context of exhibitions with the aim to impress particular effects upon the audience.33 Questioning the primacy of vision, Böhme asks, "Is seeing really the truest means of perceiving architecture? Do we not feel it even more? And what does architecture actually shape – matter, or should we say space?"34 Analysing the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron, whose works build upon material experimentation rather than pragmatic or functionalist design strategies, Böhme proposes that atmospheres stage human activities in relation to the surrounding world – including the environment, other people, objects, architecture and art. Atmospheres are "the shared reality of the perceiving and the perceived," and this shared reality, the medial space between exhibition architecture, exhibit, and audience, I suggest, is at the heart of all the exhibition models discussed in this dissertation.35 Considerations of our relationship with atmosphere have informed contemporary installation and exhibition projects, which deploy materials as mediators or activating agents and probe the relationship between users and the physical environment. For example, spatial investigations with phenomena-producing materials such as water, light, colour and temperature experiment with the viewer’s experience in Olafur Eliasson’s works.36 Digital technologies have given rise to responsive materials which are fluid and evocative rather than solid and permanent: for example in Lars Spuybroek’s HtwoOexpo Museum, real-time electronic sensors respond to users and alter the atmosphere of the building.37 And Diller and

32 Gernot Böhme, "Atmosphere as the Fundamental Concept of a New Aesthetics." Theses Eleven 36 (1993): 113.

33 Cf. Gernot Böhme, "Der Glanz des Materials: Zur Kritik der Aesthetischen Ökonomie,"(The Shine of Material: On the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy) in Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, 49-65.

34 Gernot Böhme, "Atmosphere as the Subject Matter of Architecture," in Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History, ed. Philip Ursprung (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2003), 399.

35 Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik, 34.

36 Cf. Madeleine Grynsztejn, ed. Take Your Time: Olafur Eliasson, exhibition catalogue (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 2007).

37 Lars Spuybroek, NOX: Machining Architecture (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004). 13

Scofidio’s Blur Pavilion, according to Peter Sloterdijk, proposes a "macro-atmospheric installation" or "immersive climatic sculpture" that technologically re-creates the experience of nature as aesthetic spectacle.38 The Venice Biennale has shown a number of projects that quite literally have constructed atmospheres, for example cloudscapes in the work of Transsolar and Tetsuo Kondo Architects in 2010. Material aesthetics are utilised by exhibition makers associated with Nicolas Bourriaud's relational aesthetics, where they are deployed to present exhibitions as counter venues to the white-walled, modernist exhibition space originally thematised as "the white cube."39 This is discussed in detail in the first part of chapter three. The dissertation embeds these contemporary endeavours in a meaningful context by providing a detailed, historically informed basis for contemporary theories and practices surrounding the material aesthetic of exhibitions.

Historical Context: Exhibitions and Audiences

All exhibition models discussed in the case studies are positioned as alternative solutions to traditional modes of display and mediation, which had evolved throughout the nineteenth century. Since then, not only the nature of exhibits and their owners had changed, but more importantly, we see a radical change in target audiences, particularly in the Weimar era. The new mass audiences of the burgeoning democracy harboured expectations and put forth demands that were often seen as incompatible with those of previous audiences, namely, the educated elites of the Wilhelmine Empire (1888-1918). If towards the end of the nineteenth century the increasing scientification of collections and displays along art historical principles was thought to make exhibitions accessible for everyone, later reformers found that the traditional distance between general audiences and culture had persisted. Although, under the scientific paradigm, the audience’s approach to the work of art was no longer solely via calm reflection or transfigured amazement, as in the Romantic or idealist conceptions of art fostered by the traditional museum types such as Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum in Berlin (1830), the meaning of displayed objects became exclusively accessible via knowledge and consequently, was reserved for those who possessed the social privilege of adequate education or expertise.40 Thus the scientification of culture in the nineteenth century, Tobias

38 Peter Sloterdijk, Sphären III - Schäume (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2004), 669-70.

39 The term "white cube" was coined in the 1970s by Brian O'Doherty in a series of essays later published as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986).

40 Krzysztof Pomian points out that the curiosity cabinets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries already contained aspects of a pre-scientific rationality, which was characterized by a predilection for the spectacular and unique and was "no longer controlled by theology and not yet controlled by science." Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500-1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 77. These cabinets represented an in- 14

Wall argues, lead to the formation of intellectual elites.41 It is precisely this intellectual exclusivity that created a new schism between audience and artwork and prevented the exhibition from becoming a modern and truly democratic space. Whilst often portrayed as insufficient, the reform efforts since the 1880s nevertheless established fundamental principles, which substantially informed Weimar exhibition models. In fact, the endeavours of Dorner, Lissitzky and others can only be fully understood against the historical developments preceding them. During the course of the nineteenth century, art exhibitions progressively dissociated themselves from the traditional art temple exemplified by Karl Friedrich Schinkel's Altes Museum (1830) and Leo von Klenze's Glypthothek in Munich (1830) and their close links to the art academies. These earlier display models were based upon master works, which served as ideal models for study by experts and the instruction of aspiring artists – the educated elites. Condemning this idealist and elitist approach to culture, exhibitions were increasingly organised along art historical principles and theories and endeavoured to portray the historic evolution of art and culture through a selection of representative examples.42 The scientification of collections and their display along encyclopaedic principles was equated to processes of rationalisation and democratisation occurring in other areas of life. Alongside state-driven changes to the public display of art, private patronage by art associations and collectors from the bourgeois élites of the industrial centres was flourishing. They provided support in the form of funding, donations and loans, which were integrated into federal museums in dedicated exhibition spaces. As a result, private and state efforts became increasing interconnected despite the tensions brought about by the progressive bourgeoisification and scientification of culture, which ran counter to authoritarian traditions of monarchic rule upheld by the old elites of government officials and aristocrats. The most elaborate museums emerged in the urban centres of Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, but also in the city-states of Bremen and Hamburg, and the free cities of Frankfurt, Cologne and Leipzig, where civic patronage was readily available and expert committees were appointed to administer collections.43 between stage and were superseded by the emergence of the science museum, which replaced the extraordinary and singular objects of the cabinet with the common and exemplary. For related discussions, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 94; and Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 40.

41 Tobias Wall, Das Unmögliche Museum (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006), 64.

42 Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880-1940 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001), 17-18.

43 For a discussion of the relations between German museum directors and the German Elites, see Dorothee Wimmer, "Bremen – Berlin – Weimar: Cooperation between German Art Collectors and Museum Directors c. 1900," Journal of the History of Collections 21, no.2 (2009): 203-12. 15

In early museum exhibitions, the material appointment of the spaces was still representative and precious. Up until the late nineteenth century, walls were covered with gallery-red fabrics framed by sockets and ornamental doorframes. However, multi-tiered hangings covered a significant portion of the wall area and rendered the wall surface barely noticeable. As a uniform background treatment throughout the museum, the wall surface played an insignificant role and had no didactic function.44 Museum reformers found this state of affairs not conducive to their mediation efforts. In his essay "The Berlin Renaissance Museum" published in London’s Fortnightly Review in 1891, the director of the Berlin museums, Wilhelm Bode (1845–1929), condemned contemporary museum displays that overcrowded rooms with artworks hung in close proximity to one another. In his mind, these arrangements only served to distract the audience and thus reduced the function of the museum galleries to that of a depository rather than an educational institute. Exhibits, Bode suggested, should be experienced in their original context:

The chief aim should be the greatest possible isolation of each work and its exhibition in a room, which in all material aspects, such as lighting and architecture, should resemble as closely as possible the apartment for which it was originally intended.45

Many of the views voiced by Bode represent the wider attitudes that became central to the agenda of reformers, and indeed, to some extent retained validity for the display strategies of later generations of exhibition makers such as Dorner and Lissitzky, who both condemned the overcrowding of walls and insisted on the isolation of works, yet explicitly rejected Bode's notion of the exhibition as a bourgeois living room, which was seen as an affirmation of elitism and an alienating environment for general audiences.46 To sum up, German museum reform efforts commenced in the 1880s, when under Wilhelm II, the recently founded German nation state began to evolve into a wealthy, industrial nation and increasingly promoted the role of museums, libraries and universities as

44 Cf. Julian Scholl, "Funktionen der Farbe: Das Kronprinzenpalais als farbiges Museum," in Museumsinszenierungen: Zur Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums - Die Berliner Museumslandschaft 1830-1990, eds. Alexis Joachimides et al. (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 206.

45 Wilhelm Bode, "The Berlin Renaissance Museum," Fortnightly Review 56 (1 October 1891): 506-15.

46 In a letter to his wife Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, dated 8 February 1926, Lissitzky explicitly states that his exhibition space for the Dresden Internationale Kunstausstellung in 1926 "should not be a living room." See El Lissitzky letters and photographs, 1911-1941, Accession no. 950076, Series I. Letters, most to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1911, 1923- 1941, undated. Box 1, Folder 4, Letters to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1925-1935. Getty Research Institute Archives, Los Angeles. 16 modern places for the mass production of knowledge.47 The programmatic focus of the museum exhibition progressed from a representational, stately or private character towards a science-based, institutional character, whereby contents were systematized and made available for pedagogical purposes.48 This paradigmatic shift towards scholarship and education was partly inspired by democratic ideals such as the improvement of opportunities and equality, but it was equally motivated by socio-economic and political reasons. The exhibition was put in the service of supporting the development of a shared German cultural identity after the foundation of the first German nation state in 1871. Concurrently, knowledge production assumed increased economic importance in terms of providing adequately qualified staff for research, administration and industry. Knowledge emerged as a fourth force of production in addition to the triad of capital, labour and land, and was regarded as essential for Germany’s thrust towards a modern, high-industrial society. During the Wilhelmine years, the political agenda of the unified empire and the economic success of the middle classes generated new audiences for exhibitions. Wealthy collectors from the new German bourgeoisie saw art as a tasteful way of displaying their status and frequently made their collections available as part of museum exhibitions. For the state and its elites, exhibitions provided an opportunity to promote the political and cultural values, upon which a new, harmonized German society was to be based. Museum exhibitions were frequently conceived as visual histories that steeped the museum in a semi-national aura and presented history and present, politics and art as identical and interchangeable. This approach permitted the new middle classes to draw prestige from a culture that they supported through donations and loans and satisfied their desire for participation.49 Pre-war figures, such as Wilhelm Bode, regarded the exhibition as a place for promoting aesthetic awareness and socio-cultural exchange with the educated, wealthy bourgeoisie – the Bildungsbürgertum. In this elitist model, the working classes were passive recipients of culture rather than active participants and the museum largely acted as an enclave for

47 Cf. Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung.

48 Gustav Pauli, "Das Kunstmuseum der Zukunft," in Die Kunstmuseen und das Deutsche Volk, eds. Gustav Pauli and Karl Krotschau (Munich: Deutscher Museumsbund, 1919), 4.

49 Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung, 81. Joachimides focuses on the period between the Wilhelmine Empire up until 1940, when many earlier ideas for reorganisation were executed. He does not acknowledge the exhibition prototypes developed as part of smaller exhibitions, or individual exhibition rooms, such as the Russian art exhibitions or Moholy-Nagy’s Salle 2 at the 1930 Werkbund exhibition. Walter Grasskamp criticises that Joachimides’ book focuses on the three urban centres of Berlin, Dresden and Munich only and overlooks the significant impact of museum reform efforts in provincial cities such as Alexander Dorner’s innovations at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover and Karl Ernst Osthaus’ work at the Museum Folkwang in Hagen. Cf. Walter Grasskamp, "The White Wall - On the Prehistory of the 'White Cube'," On Curating, no. 9 (2011), 12. 17 connoisseurship. The German Bourgeoisie’s perpetuation of pre-industrial ideals stood in stark contrast to their push for progressive industrialisation, which had caused drastic changes to everyday life. These contradictory attitudes were condemned by a new generation of museum directors and artists, who interpreted them as a deliberate attempt to distance art from modern everyday life by preserving its exclusivity.50 Even after WWI, many of the imperial or private art collections-turned-exhibitions were re-organised as domestic environments, where each art style was shown in a salon setting. In part, this was due to unsettled ownership rights that followed the expropriation of imperial property.51 But even exhibitions in newly founded museum buildings did not substantially vary from the precious representational modus of its aristocratic or stately predecessors and frequently imitated the appearance of palaces. Whilst Bode’s style rooms, which appeared as a synthesis of imperial and bourgeois salons, might have appealed to the elitist target audiences of the Wilhelmine years, with the founding of the Weimar republic a new, more democratic spatial representation had to be found that was appropriate for the modern, egalitarian-spirited society of the Weimar years. What was overlooked by many reformers, however, was the fact that the interests and expectations of new mass audiences often diverged from the assumptions that were made about them. As Sigfried Kracauer would later point out, Weimar mass society aspired less to educational or a socio-political goals, but to entertainment, glitter, novelty, distraction and the alluring life-style of the elites – none of these things would necessarily have featured on the agendas of serious reformers. Importantly, however, this dissertation highlights that these insights were acknowledged by Alexander Dorner and the 1930 Werkbund exhibition team, whose respective projects made links between consumerism, modern mass culture and exhibition techniques. They recognised that the development of the exhibition could not be seen in isolation as a purely artistic and art historical development, but as a public forum, had to be evaluated alongside the development of other places of modernity such as cinemas and department stores, which appeared from the 1850s onwards.52 These places were the first to connect technological progress with new forms of experiences, which required a complete re- organization of perceptual, communicational and behavioural competencies of their audiences. The integrative tendencies, sociability and ordering capacity of these places lead to

50 Cf. Walter Grasskamp, Museumsgründer und Museumsstürmer: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Kunstmuseums (Munich: C.H.Beck, 1981), 49.

51 Cf. Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 99; and Scholl, "Funktionen der Farbe," 211-13.

52 Tony Bennett, "The Exhibitionary Complex," in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 90. 18 their interpretation as mediators of progress. Yet they were equally regarded as places of chaos and alienation. Comparable to railway stations or department stores, exhibitions such the 1930 Werkbund show channelled and orchestrated the movement of masses along rational planning principles and established themselves as spaces that externally represented Weimar culture and its citizens, as the discussion in chapter four demonstrates. Arcades, department stores as well as modern exhibitions brought together different strata of society in a condensed space and transformed them into actors in the spectacular display of a conjunction of commerce and culture.53 These places were rarely based on technological inventions alone, but on radically new spatial configurations and materials associated with their activities and experiences. In 1908, Leo Colze’s report on Berlin’s large department stores described these as captivating public displays:

When one shopping palace after another lines the thoroughfares of the imperial capital today; when light-infused display windows not only tempt [us] with the most amazing manufactured goods from around the civilized world, but also appeal to our aesthetic senses; when even today’s little man is in a position to come into the possession of luxury items at trinket prices – then it is the sole doing of the modern department store.54

Along with their unprecedented novelty, department store displays instilled new modes of sensory perception and behavioural patterns through their material and spatial arrangements, as Colze’s observations illustrate:

An abundance of lights surges towards us. Right and left [there is] one display window after another, teeming with masculine and feminine elegance. A well- dressed stream of people moves along the street, laughing, flirting, full of vitality, with leisure on their hands, flâneurs, idlers. Further up at Wittenbergplatz, [there is] a magic spectacle of lights, sparkling treasures, silks, gold brocade, bronze statues, ostrich-feathers, display windows equal jewellery boxes – the new department store. Densely packed, people ceaselessly stream inside; the ruler calls – they gladly oblige.55

53 Cf. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch, "Einleitung," in Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, eds. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005), 10.

54 Leo Colze, "Berliner Warenhäuser (1908)," in Die Berliner Moderne 1885-1914, eds. Jürgen Schutte and Peter Sprengel, (Stuttgart: P. Reclam, 1987), 104.

55 Ibid., 108-109. 19

Despite his appraisal of department stores as social unifiers with a broad appeal, Colze explicitly discriminated between department stores for the "little men," the "middle-classes" and "moneyed circles," replicating the social divisions of Weimar Germany, which were no longer based on birth into a certain social class but on capital. For Colze, department stores are commercial hubs that are fundamentally modern and unrelated to the old existing city; they represent no mere extensions of the old Berlin, but the beginnings of an "independent, elegant, refined but no less bustling Berlin" which creates new possibilities for the satisfaction of its needs.56 The distinctions visible in the world of modern commerce were equally applied to the categorisation of exhibition audiences. As the projects of Dorner, Lissitzky and Gropius demonstrate, the desire to create fundamentally modern exhibition typologies, which were independent of the historic architectural shells that housed them, is a central theme highlighted throughout the dissertation. It should be noted that the question about the suitable appointment of exhibitions for particular audiences emerged along with the first museum foundations at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In a letter to the Bavarian King written 11 October 1815, Johann Martin von Wagner, who was an adviser on the organization of the royal art collections, argued against the heavy ornamentation of the Glypthothek's exhibition halls, suggesting that "all ornamentation, everything colourful or shiny, causes damage to the ideal works of art."57 Criticising the elaborately crafted stands that architect Leo von Klenze had proposed for the Glyptothek’s sculptures, Wagner pointed out that informed visitors were not interested in seeing marble pedestals, but were concerned and content with the value and beauty of the individual sculptures themselves. These should be set up in such a way as to emphasize their individuality and uniqueness. Any form of excess was a disturbance – "the less distraction the visitor experiences during the enjoyment of the works, the more pleasant and welcoming it will be form him," Wagner argued. Ornate display practices were not tasteful and representative, but represented the showiness and vulgarity desired by the general public, who had no claim to the high culture presented in museum exhibitions, and in Wagner’s mind, were only interested in the spectacle of aristocratic wealth articulated in the material choices of the exhibition architecture. He put this succinctly when he appealed to the king that "for the

56 Ibid.

57 Letter from Wagner to Ludwig I., reprinted in Winfrid von Pölnitz, Ludwig I. Von Bayern Und Johann Martin Von Wagner: Ein Beitrag Zur Geschichte Der Kunstbestrebungen KöNig Ludwigs I., (Aalen: Scientia-Verlag, 1974). Author’s translation. 20 common plebs … who are accustomed to stare at the floor or the shiny marble walls rather than the sculptures, the museum is not intended."58 Throughout the historic development of the exhibition, the concern for audiences and their acknowledgement as a determining factor for the material and spatial organisation of exhibitions has grown in importance. It is precisely the recognition of their desire for sensory pleasure and entertainment on one hand, and the socio-political drive for mass education on the other hand, that represents a pivotal challenge for the exhibition makers discussed in this dissertation. The challenges of this task are exacerbated by the fact that audience profiles became increasingly diversified, representing wider strata of society. Today, in an age of global migration, the question of audience is as pressing as ever, a fact illustrated by large research projects such as MeLa (European Museums in an Age of Migrations), which demonstrate that exhibitions require constant rethinking for evolving audiences.59

Rationale for the Selection of Case Studies and their Interrelatedness

This dissertation invites the reader to imagine the importance of the material aspects of exhibitions for the mediation of cultural experiences and insights relating to art, architecture, and design. In light of the endemic proliferation of exhibitions during the Weimar era, it seems there is an abundance of exhibition environments that could have been chosen for investigation. The reason for selecting the specific case studies discussed in the thesis are fourfold: firstly, they all recognise specific audiences as a constituent part of the experience of art, architecture, and culture in general – be it the mass audiences of Weimar Germany, a select circle of intellectuals, or the complete audience spectrum ranging from the expert to the uneducated; secondly, they deal with mediation strategies that build upon an expanded understanding of materials including the use of colour, light, and innovative materials; thirdly, they approach the exhibition from different disciplinary and professional perspectives; and fourthly, they represent a snapshot of cultural experiences available to Weimar citizens between 1923 and 1930. Together, the exhibition makers provide a diversity of perspectives thereby painting a multifaceted picture of different disciplinary approaches and thoughts: Aby Warburg, cultural historian and director of a library/research institute; Alexander Dorner art historian and museum director; Lissitzky, artist and architect; Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer and Breuer, a multidisciplinary team of former Bauhaus educators. In many ways, Alexander Dorner

58 Ibid.

59 See http://www.mela-project.eu/ 21 represents a key figure, who was familiar with the standpoints of all auteurs: as a friend of Erwin Panofsky and former student of Adolph Goldschmidt, he was connected to important figures within Aby Warburg's Hamburg circles; as a provincial museum director and avid collector, he promoted the work of Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky and other international avant-garde artists; and as a lifelong friend of Walter Gropius, and later, champion of Herbert Bayer's work, he was knowledgeable in related fields such as architecture and advertising. More importantly, his work represented a confluence of art historical exhibition models still largely informed by nineteenth century thought and progressive avant-garde exhibition concepts, and reveals the frictions and opportunities that emerge at their juncture. The case studies also represent a range of different architectural typologies, or hybrids: private home, library, art museum, and temporary exhibition hall. Despite their diversity, the case study exhibitions are marked by a shared emphasis on materials and a belief in their medial capacity, and these convictions run like red threads through all the exhibition projects.

Object of Dissertation

The object of this dissertation is the exhibition. To be precise, exhibition here is understood as the public display of art and design at a museum, fair or alternative settings such as a libraries, or even homes. Seen from the perspective of materiality, the exhibition is understood as consisting in the interrelations between audience, the exhibits and the exhibition architecture. In an extended sense, it also includes the entire framework that influences the interactions between exhibition architecture, exhibits and audiences, for example, information material such as catalogues, guidebooks, posters and so forth. The dissertation is particularly interested in the transformations that occurred across the exhibition landscape in Germany in 1923-30, both in terms of the practical implementation of display models as well as the theoretical considerations surrounding these. It approaches the exhibition as a theoretical and practical construct, but also scrutinises the beliefs that underlie its design, the techniques that inform its construction, and the reactions that are elicited from users. The transformations occurring in exhibitions during the Weimar period are illuminated from two directions: as responses to social, political, and technological changes, and vice versa, as initiatives conceived to control and direct the development of these changes. Thus the wider field of the dissertation is the history, theory and practice of exhibitions and its technological reciprocities with materials and architecture, its socio-political reciprocities with democratic principles, and its sensory and psychological reciprocities with

22 audiences. It is also concerned with aesthetics in terms of investigating modes of art reception, and questions of autonomy in relation to art objects and architecture, and specifically the space-time dimensions of aesthetic experiences.

Contemporary Relevance and Research Context

The relevance of the investigation can be attributed to two facts: it is timely, in the sense that it revisits Weimar exhibitions at a time when they are widely debated as exemplary precedents for contemporary exhibition practices by well-known auteurs such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist, yet without an adequately informed historical basis, a fact highlighted in the first part of chapter three; and it is topical, in the sense that it thematises materiality as a particular approach to exhibition architecture – a topic whose contemporary currency is at the centre of debates surrounding material aesthetics in architecture.60 The literature surrounding exhibitions seems to have exploded in recent decades. Exhibitions, their staging of objects and spaces, their manipulation of audiences and their attempted construction of social, cultural and political meaning, as well as the changing role of the curator have been discussed extensively in recent years.61 Charlotte Klonk's wide-ranging historic survey on the exhibition traces the interface between private and public space, and subjective and collective experience in the European and North-American gallery interiors of the past three centuries.62 Alexis Joachimides' detailed account of the museum reform movement in Germany 1880-1940 analyses museum exhibitions that occurred in larger German cities but omits temporary exhibitions and regional centres.63 Mary Anne Staniszewski's epigrammatic discussions of Weimar exhibition environments, including El Lissitzky's Raum der Abstrakten and the 1930 Werkbundausstellung, mainly serve to frame the history of exhibitions at MoMA in New York, which is the main subject of her enquiry.64

60 See, for example: "Immaterial Materialities: Aspects of Materiality and Interactivity in Art and Architecture," special issue of Interstices Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, no. 14 (2013).

61 One of the most important contributions is Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions (London: Routledge, 1996). Others notable publications are: Emma Barker, ed. Contemporary Cultures of Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999); Julia Noordegraaf, Strategies of Display: Museum Presentation in the Ninteenth- and Twentieth-Century (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen-Nai Publishers, 2004). Publications which thematise the exhibition more narrowly from the perspective of curatorship are: Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012); Rugg, Judith, and Michèle Sedgwick, eds. Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Bristol: Intellect, 2007); On Curating, no. 9, special issue "Curating Critique" (2011); originally published in 2007 as a collection of essays by Revolver, Frankfurt am Main and ICE, Institute for Curatorship and Education.

62 Klonk, Spaces of Experience.

63 See Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung. 23

Interestingly, Staniszewski's book is frequently cited to highlight the need for revisiting earlier exhibition designs, which according to her, have been supressed in the collective historic consciousness. In this line of thought, Paul O'Neill's discussion of the more recent histories of exhibitions, highlights changes in curatorial discourse and practice since the 1980s and introduces the discussion against the background of early avant-garde exhibition models.65 Hans-Ulrich Obrist repeatedly cites what he portrays as suppressed historic exhibition models and curatorial practices as important examples for his own work, referring to Aby Warburg, Alexander Dorner, El Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy and others. However, whilst Obrist draws inspiration from these historic models, the lack of in-depth knowledge about them has led to misinterpretations. For example, Dorner's atmosphere concept is cast as an endeavour "to transform the neutral white cube" and to overcome the "pseudo-neutral space of the nineteenth century which was still prevailing" – an assumption that overlooks the fact that white gallery spaces were the exception rather than the rule at the time.66 In the particular case of Dorner's exhibition model, detailed investigations of his work have emanated from German scholars, most importantly Monika Flacke's discussions of Dorner's work in Hannover.67 Whilst detailed, Flacke's study does not address the uniqueness of Dorner's approach in comparison to his contemporaries, and more importantly, does not address the importance of spatial conceptions for his re-organisation work, a theme that represents the focus of this dissertation.68 What is also missing is a discussion of productive links and unresolved tensions between exhibition architecture and curatorship. This topic still requires investigation, in particular in light of contemporary advances into curatorial territory from architects and architectural historians, and vice versa from curators and artists into architectural territory, for example, by Liam Gillick and Nicolas Bourriaud. To sum up, whilst

64 See Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display – A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA:: The MIT Press 2001).

65 For a discussion of changes in curatorial discourse and practice see Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

66 Hans-Ulrich Obrist cited in Sans and Sanchez, What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century?, 9- 10.

67 North-American scholars have focused on Dorner's work after his emigration to the U.S., see Joan Ockman, "The Road not taken: Alexander Dorner's Way beyond Art," in Autonomy and Ideology: Positioning an Avant-Garde in America, ed. Robert E. Somol, 80-121 (New York: Monacelli, 1997); Curt Germundson, "Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room: The Museum as Experience," Visual Resources 21, no.3 (September 2005): 263-73.

68 Monika Flacke-Knoch, Museumskonzeptionen in der Weimarer Republik – Die Tätigkeit Alexander Dorners im Provinzialmuseum Hannover. (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1985). The oversight of the importance of spatial concepts to Dorner's work has also been pointed out by Annegret Hoberg in her review of Flacke's book, see "Endpunkt des Museums oder künstlerische Alternative?" Kritische Berichte, no.2 (1988): 114. 24 the importance of Weimar exhibition models has been recognised, they are mostly dealt with in historical surveys rather than in detail, and are approached from art historical or curatorial perspectives rather than specific architectural positions. A more detailed overview of diverse perspectives covered in current literature is interwoven into the argumentation of each case study.

Aims and Significance of the Research

The aim of this dissertation is to build up a historically-informed discussion platform for the development of architectural exhibition concepts that support the meaningful mediation of cultural insights and values in museum exhibitions as well as temporary exhibition contexts. It analyses the changing relationship between the exhibition, its objects and audiences, and discusses the architectural implications and potentials inherent to these changes. The dissertation is founded on original research in the form of case analysis and interpretation and uses a range of material: primary literature, architectural drawings and photography. It approaches the subject of exhibitions from the position of architecture and its use of materials, and analyses the resultant implications on the presentation and mediation of cultural artefacts. These implications are revealed to be profound in terms of their impact on the development of exhibitions within the timeframe of the investigation. In highlighting architectural and material aspects, the dissertation unravels exhibitions from a perspective that is outside customary approaches to the topic emanating from within the museological, curatorial, and art historical fields. It explores the overlap between architectural forms and display and in that, probes disciplinary distinctions. In summary, the significance of the thesis lies in its revaluation of the exhibition through the lens of architecture and materiality, and the illumination of fundamental changes, which occurred in its underlying concepts during the Weimar era. The provision of insights into the terms of these changes – what motivated them and what kind of impact they were intended to have on fields outside the exhibition's confines – are equally of profound importance.

Methodological Approach: Indiciary Paradigm, Case Study, Interdisciplinarity

The case studies take the reader on an imaginary journey through these diverse exhibition environments in all their peculiarities and particular details – yet none of them exist anymore. In distinction to the black and white photographs through which we know them, the dissertation allows them to emerge as colourful and sensuous spaces, which aspire to cultivate deeper cultural understanding. The exhibition spaces considered in this thesis were designed

25 to plunge the visitors into immersive, even bedazzling, spaces only to pull them back out; they invite active physical participation and yet prompt intellectual consideration through intimate spaces, labyrinths, and journeys into the past, present and future, whether staged in commercial halls, provincial institutions or homes. Their creators' diverse perspectives cover a wide range of disciplines – architecture, art history, art and museology. All of them converge not only in the exhibition, but also in the endeavour to find better ways of mediating art and culture for the benefit of diverse audiences, and to do so by rethinking the exhibition through the lens of its materiality. The projects share another characteristic – each has been lost, destroyed, or was intended as temporary in the first place. But how do we analyse spaces that no longer exist and solely survive in fragments, namely, notes, reviews, drawings, photographs, or visitor reports? Some of the case studies have been reconstructed, but in different locations and contexts: reconstrued versions of El Lissitzky’s Raum der Abstrakten have emerged in 1969 and

69 2009, and Moholy-Nagy’s and Dorner’s unrealized plans for adapting Salle 2 of the 1930 Werkbund exhibition for the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover have finally been realised in 2009, based on interpretations of original drawings and writings.70 Yet in the absence of definitive information, none of these constructions can be considered a straightforward replica because works of historical imagination are coloured by their narratives, the myths surrounding them, and the imagination of those who remade them. Another problem is posed by the lack of interconnections between theoretical and practical works, as well as the often deliberate suppression of references to projects and theories, which might have served as inspiration, or were competing. The modern avant- gardes, for example, generally made little reference to the works or theories of others, declaring their works novel, original and without historical relations instead. Their frequent references to science in this case, represent a rare exception. This disconnection raises the question of appropriate interpretive frameworks, which rise above a merely formal analysis. How do we discuss the projects and the theories, on which the exhibition projects of this dissertation have been founded, when links to ideas that might have gone before or co-existed are consciously avoided? What methods of analysis and interpretation can be applied when references are deliberately suppressed? Is it possible to discover subtexts in the works themselves? Is it possible to strike meaningful relations between texts and experiments?

69 Ines Katenhusen, "El Lissitzky and Alexander Dorner: Kabinett der Abstrakten: Original and Facsimile." In Displayer 03, exhibition catalogue, 1-31. (Berlin: Museum of American Art, 2009).

70 For a discussion of the reconstruction see Noam M. Elcott, "Raum der Gegenwart (Room of our Time): The Raum der Gegenwart (Re)constructed," Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 69, no.2 (June 2010): 265-69. 26

And finally, difficulties are posed by the adaption of scientific and technological paradigms in the fields of art and theory, for example Aby Warburg’s art historical adaption of Richard Semon’s "engram," or the quasi-scientific aspects of Lissitzky’s work. Despite their apparent lack of scientific bearing, the study endeavours to trace the values inherent in the creative interpretation required for the transfer of ideas from one field to another, speculating that these cross-overs might have given new directions disciplinary fields. To address the issues raised here, the dissertation uses a combination of methods which evolve from the unique difficulties posed by the works and theoretical writings themselves, and the problems of analysis and interpretation inherent to them. These issues call for a specific framework of reasoning and methods of interpretation.

The Indiciary Paradigm

In the light of these problems, the thesis focuses on the use of an interpretive historic method outlined by Carlo Ginzburg – the "indiciary paradigm."71 It is important to explain its working in some detail. The significance of this method lies in the idea of the clue or symptom, which, as Ginzburg explained, emerged as an investigative model at the end of the nineteenth century in the art historical methods of Giovanni Morelli, the psychoanalytical methods of Sigmund Freud, and the criminal investigations of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fictional characters Dr. Watson and Sherlock Holmes, all of which can be seen to represent "an attitude tending to an appreciation of details rather than of the work as a whole."72 Writing under the pseudonym of Ivan Lermolieff, Morelli wrote the book Delia pittura italiana: studii storico critici – Le gallerie Borghese e Dona Pamphili in Roma (Critical Historical Studies in Italian painting: The Borghese and Doria Pamphili Galleries in Rome), which was published in Milan in 1897. In it, he laid out a method of investigation, which allowed him to identify the artist behind incorrectly attributed or non-assigned paintings as well as distinguish between copies and original artworks. Dismissing established art historical methods, which concentrated on the evident features and stylistic characteristics of paintings, Morelli focused on minor, seemingly immaterial characteristics instead – fingers, earlobes, and toes. Unlike most art historians, who were educated in philosophy or law, Morelli’s background was in medicine and this permitted him to draw on the empirical methods of natural science. He believed that artists would change their individual styles by changing the most prominent features of a painting, yet the details, which were painted unconsciously and in an almost automated way, would endure with

71 Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of a Scientific Paradigm," Theory and Society 7, no.3 (May 1979): 273-88.

72 Ibid., 274. 27 consistency throughout an artist’s body of work and could not easily be repeated in copies. Morelli’s method thus can be seen to represent a kind of "hyper-empiricism in the service of historical attribution," as Mike Gubser suggested.73 Whilst Morelli's concerns were primarily with connoisseurship, or "the good eye,"74 he draws on models that uncover the materialisations of the artistic unconscious for his approach:

As most men who speak or write have verbal habits and use their favourite words or phrases and sometimes even most inappropriately, so almost every painter has his own peculiarities which escape from him without his being aware of them ... Anyone, therefore, who wants to study a painter closely must know how to discover these material trifles and attend to them with care: a student of calligraphy would call them flourishes.75

Ginzburg highlighted that Freud himself had drawn attention to correspondences between his psycho-analytical methods and Morelli’s art historical approach, suggesting that Morelli's "method of inquiry is closely related to the technique of psychoanalysis" and that "it, too, is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from despised or unnoticed features, from the rubbish-heap, as it were, of our observations."76 Ginzburg saw the basis for this approach in medical semiotics, or symptomatology – "the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs, often irrelevant to the eye of the layman."77 Ginzburg's approach seems particularly relevant to the problems posed by the projects investigated in this dissertation: the fragmentary nature of the information; the variety of formats (visual, textual, oral); and diversity of media require attention to detail and imaginative interpretation. Thus, as Ginzburg further speculated, the indiciary paradigm's interweaving of seemingly marginal and immaterial details, might effect an erosion of the dichotomy between hard facts and interpretive argumentation. It should be noted that Ginzburg spent time as a fellow at the Warburg Institute in London in 1964, and his intuitions about the indiciary paradigm were inspired by Aby

73 Mike Gubser, Time's Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de- Siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 107.

74 For a discussion of connoisseurship and visual methodologies, see Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials (London: Sage, 2001), 35.

75 Cited in Gubser, Time's Visible Surface, 107-108.

76 Sigmund Freud, "The Moses of Michelangelo," transl. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955), 222.

77 Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method." The History Workshop Journal, no. 39 (1979): 10. 28

Warburg’s methodological approaches, which are discussed in Ginzburg's essay "From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method."78 Indeed, Warburg’s intense scrutiny and attention to detail are frequently likened to both the work of a detective or psychologist: Matthias Bruhn, for example, referred to Warburg as "a detective of cultural history in all its details,"79 Marco Bertozzi called him a "melancholic detective,"80 and Georges Didi-Huberman highlighted his self-understanding as a Psychohistoriker (psycho-historian).81 Warburg’s approach, Didi-Huberman suggested, explores the clues provided by details as a critical category, and with that he means that clues must be considered in their full complexities, contradictions and ruptures, and without seeking to resolve their paradoxical nature. It follows that the symptom or clue needs to be imaginatively interpreted and not "rationally deciphered," and this represents the approach that will be taken towards the evaluation of the material for the exhibition projects under investigation here.82

The Case Study

Ginzburg's insights into the reading of clues are quoted as an inspiration for recent efforts in the methodological rehabilitation of the case study instigated by Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel.83 They suggest that the humanities have been intimidated by the standing of the exact sciences and therefore have sought to replicate their scientific rationality. In the exact sciences, reasoning points from the general to the singular (deduction) or, attempts to formulate the general by drawing from an enumeration of occurrences of the singular (induction). The humanities found it difficult to claim this scientific rationale.84 In search for alternatives, Passeron and Revel propose that the case study, as an indexical model, has the

78 Carlo Ginzburg, "From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method." In Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, 17-59. Baltimore, Maryland and London, England: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.

79 Matthias Bruhn, "Aby Warburg (1866-1929). The Survival of an Idea," in Enciclopédia e Hipertexto, Universidade de Lisboa website, http://www.educ.fc.ul.pt/hyper/resources/mbruhn/

80 Marco Bertozzi, Il detective melanconico e altri saggi filosofici (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2008), 95 – 137.

81 In a comparative analysis of Warburg's approach and Sigmund Freud and Charcot's methods, Didi-Huberman identified Warburg's main endeavour as the understanding of the relations between externalized movement (as depicted) and internal movement (emotion). Georges Didi-Huberman, "Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm," Art History 24, no.5 (November 2001): 621-45.

82 Ibid., 641.

83 Jean-Claude Passeron and Jacques Revel, "Thinking by Case, or Reasoning from the Singular," in Penser par cas, eds. Jacques Revel and Jean-Claude Passeron (Paris: Éditions de l'Ehess, 2005).

84 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the exact sciences were defined as "those sciences that seek to solve their problems in a mathematically precise manner (Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy)." Brockhaus' Kleines Konversations-Lexikon, 5th ed. Volume 1. (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1911), 546.

29 potential to bridge the gulf between objective examination and subjective observation, or in other words, between the loss of the specific in favour of the general. Acknowledging the impossible difficulties involved in an attempted definition of a case, they approach the case study expounding its identifiable characteristics. These can be found in three aspects, all of which correspond to the investigative stages of a case study and this proceeding is intended to inform the ways in which the exhibition models of this dissertation are tackled. Firstly, the case poses a problem. A case study is not an afterthought to a problem, or an example or illustration of general rules or universal laws. On the contrary, it is from the case that the problem emerges in the form of an incident or a situation that confronts us and interrupts our ordinary perceptive experience. This problem represents a disturbing aspect, which is seemingly irresolvable. In the context of the thesis, examples for problems posed by cases shall be drawn from several scenarios: conflicts between theoretical rules and their practical application, difficulties arising from interdisciplinary adaptations, and resistance to formal categorizations, to name but some of most significant. More specifically, some of these problems are presented in El Lissitzky’s theoretical writings and their practical application in his works, or in concerns arising from Warburg’s adaption of Ewald Hering’s physiological models in his own art history. Secondly, the case requires in-depth description – because it demands "attention to detail" and it requires "indefinite description." This open-endedness denies inferences of a more general nature and inductive reasoning; that is the formulation of broader theories on the basis of specific observations, or a "bottom up" approach. Thirdly, its argumentative treatment is uneasy. In this respect, Passeron and Revel make a point similar to Didi-Huberman's definition of a "contradictory simultaneity," which he sees as a characteristic inherent to psycho-analytical methods.85 This term implies that the methods traditionally deemed specific to humanities and the sciences respectively, namely theoretical concepts and experimental testing, are no longer seen as separate considerations in the case study. Case thinking juxtaposes them in a state of constant tension. In doing that, the case study embraces both reflection and experience as dynamic interrelations and proposes an alternative approach to discipline-specific methods.

Interdisciplinary Approach

The challenge of working with case studies as part of this dissertation is to recognise and expose the specific meaning of each exhibition project, whilst simultaneously isolating insights

85 Didi-Huberman, "Dialektik des Monstrums," 634. 30 common to the other exhibition projects and faciltating meaningful links.86 It can be said that the profound originality of case studies lies in the production of knowledge through linking singularities, or in other words, by interweaving cases with other cases, rather than with generalities or universal rules. This approach seems particularly relevant to exhibitions, whose curators find themselves negotiating several disciplinary divides and thus occupy a place in- between. Particularly, in their architectural aspects, exhibitions require methodological approaches drawn from both the arts and the sciences. Although one might argue that architecture's position between art and science does not exist in principle, in art exhibitions, there is little escaping the significance of interior architecture and exhibition design to the success of the displays – even though a recent survey of students at the Courtauld Institute London indicated that architecture has been almost excluded from their perception of it as a fine art.87 But from the perspective of architectural theorists, architecture is frequently deemed to exist in what has been repeatedly termed an "expanded field."88 Under this heading, which was first introduced as a concept by Rosalind Krauss in relation to the practice of sculpture, Jane Rendell recently highlighted the blurriness of the zone between art and architecture, particularly in the shared territory of public art.89 In the light of the multiple definitions and categorizations of public art across multiple disciplines, she suggested that binary modes of thought based on oppositional disciplinary models have become inappropriate and an identification of particularities between practices rather than disciplines has to be sought. To achieve this, public art projects have to be understood "as products of specific processes of production and reception that operate within a further expanded and interdisciplinary field, where terms are not only defined through one discipline but by many simultaneously," she concluded. 90 With respect to appropriate methods of practice and investigation, Rendell suggested that artists who operate between and across different

86 For a discussion of a wider range of case study approaches, see also Pascal Vennesson, "Case Studies and Process Tracing: Theories and Practices," in Approaches and Methodologies in the Social Sciences: A Pluralist Perspective, eds. Donatella Della Porta and Michael Keating (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 226.

87 Eric Fernie highlights that architecture is entirely severed from the fine arts in the perception of English students. Whilst traditionally, the fine arts were understood to comprise architecture, sculpture and painting, this is no longer the case. Asking university-bound students visiting the Courtauld Institute which terms they associated with art, Fernie finds the group made no mention of architecture, preferring the terms painting, sculpture, artist, genius, and decoration instead. Eric Fernie, "The History of Art and Archaeology in England Now." in The Art Historian: National Traditions and Institutional Practices (Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, MA: Yale University Press, 2002, 160-61.

88 Anthony Vidler, "Architecture's Expanded Field," in Architecture between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown, MA: Yale University Press, 2008), 143.

89 Jane Rendell, Art and Architecture – A Place Between (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006).

90 Ibid., 43. 31 disciplines do so by adopting methods that question commonly accepted disciplinary distinctions. Rendell's emphasis on connections between disciplines, the adaption of supra- disciplinary methods and her emphasis on particularities highlight some of the central characteristics of case study work. In the widest sense of the term, exhibitions entail many aspects of public art and share the same interdisciplinary issues; it therefore seems appropriate that Rendell's insights are relevant for this investigation.

Description of the Chapters

To open the discussion, the introductory chapter elaborates the thematic matrix of the dissertation – exhibition, materiality, audience – by providing a brief outline of their interrelatedness in theoretical, practice-based and historical contexts: German aesthetics and psycho-physiology, the development and reform of exhibition models during the Wilhelmine Empire (1888-1918), and the changing audience profiles and mediation strategies. Against this background, the rationale for the selection of the four case studies is explained, highlighting their commonalities, differences and particularities, which together illuminate the theme of the thesis in a multi-facetted and highly differentiated manner. The guiding question arising from the discussion of the case study exhibition spaces is their treatment and thematisation in current literature and the shortcomings and omissions to be taken up in the case study chapters of the dissertation. These gaps hinge around the lack of architectural perspectives, the overlooked theme of materiality as a means of mediation, and the survey-style treatment of the case studies in current literature. This in turn leads to another question: the contemporary relevance and wider significance of the thesis: the intention here is to embed contemporary exhibition theories and practices, the materiality of their architecture and their address of audiences in a historical and theoretical context in order to provide a well-informed platform for further discussion. The introductory chapter concludes with an overview of the specific methodological approach advanced by the thesis, in which, I argue, resides part of its unique contribution to the field. Namely, this is its focused corroboration of seemingly irrelevant details drawn from a wide range of sources: firstly, visual material such as architectural drawings, photographs and sketches; secondly, textual sources such as theoretical essays, guides, catalogues, official and personal correspondence; and thirdly, user feedback in the form of reviews, reports and witness statements. Chapters one, two, three and four discuss the individual case studies. They are represented in an order that reflects the degree to which they impact on the erosion of traditional exhibition models, although it must be noted that they do not represent a linear

32 development and they tackle questions of display from different perspectives. In chapter one, the analysis of Warburg's display model represents a first rethinking of display targeted at mediating his interdisciplinary working methods and concepts as a spatial model based on a colourful, multi-media approach. It shows how his organisation of spaces and objects erodes the separation between different categories of objects in traditional museum and library environments. Furthermore, the chapter highlights his establishment of a display model based on work in progress rather than the representation of final outcomes, creating productive links between the architectural typologies of laboratory, library and museum exhibition. It equally reveals Warburg's detailed consideration of audiences and his customisation of displays, which aimed at a mutual exchange of knowledge. His attitudes were informed by psycho- physiological insights, and these also provide the framework for the discussions in the subsequent chapter, where exhibiting becomes the central theme in itself. Chapter two opens a new way of understanding the exhibition's turn away from traditional conceptions of audiences and display by investigating Alexander Dorner's re- organisation of the Provinzialmusuem Hannover in 1923-26. The discussion of Dorner's mediation approach deepens issues raised in the discussion of Warburg's work, in particular, the duality of experience and reflection, the interactions between word and image, and an interest in the medial power of materials and space.91 It illuminates the didactic dimension of Dorner's exhibition paradigm, which applies insights from avant-garde art, including an interest in mass media and communication techniques, in addition to nineteenth century German aesthetics and psycho-physiology. In this respect, Dorner's case is shown to go beyond Warburg's mediation approaches by increasingly focusing on audience experiences, and thus launches the discussion of the subsequent chapter, which illuminates the exhibition from the perspective of avant-garde art and architecture with the discussion of El Lissitzky's demonstration rooms. Chapter three concentrates intently on material aesthetics as a crucial element of staging exhibition architecture and proposes a new approach to the discussion via the comparative analysis of material strategies used in contemporary and avant-garde contexts. It proposes that exhibition architecture is a crucial mediator between exhibits and audience, and that its potential, whilst of central importance to avant-garde exhibition makers, has not been fully recognised by their contemporaries. The central concept examined is Lissitzky's concept of "immaterial materiality" and its practical application in his two demonstration rooms. These

91 The interrelatedness of Warburg and Riegl's theories is discussed in the introduction to Kurt W. Forster, ed. Aby Warburg - The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 50-52. 33 rooms illustrate the generation of psycho-perceptual effects of film with the means of modern materials, light and colour. Lissitzky's strategies focus primarily on the interaction between exhibition architecture, exhibit and audience as a constituent element of the exhibition experience. If the medial power of modern materials represented the focus of the discussion in the previous chapters, in chapter 4, I argue that these materials are staged in unprecedented ways as a technologically-inspired, multi-media spectacle. The discussion identifies a dual focus on material technologies and innovation on one hand, which provides an applied dimension connecting to the issues faced by audiences in everyday life, and a spectacular and experiential dimension on the other, which serves as distraction and entertainment. This techno-aesthetic spectacular reveals the complex issues behind exhibitions and the role assigned to them in the final years of the Weimar republic, bringing to a full circle the discussions around the educational role of exhibitions commenced by Gustav Pauli and other reform-oriented exhibition makers in the early years of the Weimar republic, as discussed in chapter two. The final section of the dissertation in chapter five pulls together the various thematic strands in a comparative analysis of the case studies. It highlights differences and commonalities in the conception and address of audiences, the mediating power assigned to materials, and the balancing of scientific interests and creative experimentation. By way of this analysis, it fleshes out and summarises the main arguments of the thesis – that together, the case studies capture the historic moment when traditional nineteenth century exhibition typologies began to be transfigured through novel experimental practices that advanced vital links between material aesthetics and mediation to engage audiences in productive ways. In evaluating the findings, the chapter also reflects upon the problems and opportunities encountered in its methodological approach. Overall, the chapter argues that the alternative concepts proposed by the various auteurs paint a multi-facetted picture of transformations in exhibition models occurring in the Weimar era – in the full glory of difficulties, contradictions and successes. In tracing paradigmatic shifts from representation to mediation, from formal display typologies to material experimentation, and from display spaces based on art historical principles to spaces organised on the basis of the visitor's experience, it advances proposals for future directions in exhibition design.

34

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CHAPTER 1

ABY WARBURG'S LIBRARY AS EXHIBITION AND LABORATORY

In the work of art, Warburg saw a balance between affective energy and rational appropriation, both of which, in his mind, corresponded directly to modes of perception: the first was associated with the haptic, unconscious and immediate, whereas the second represented the visual, abstract, and distant. For Warburg, the space experienced by the viewer was in a state of constant dynamic tension between what he termed "Denkraum" (thought space), in which the viewer experienced a contemplative distance from the material object, and its opposite, "Greifraum"(grasping space), which represented the effectual collapse of this distance, allowing more immediate impressions on body and mind. These ideas were reflected spatially in the colour-coding of the books and the shape of the oval reading room of his library, which Warburg used as a kind of pictorial laboratory and quasi-exhibition space for the shifting constellations of the Mnemosyne Atlas panels. Using the library reading room as a case study of a laboratory-style exhibition space targeted at the delivery of rational insights and emotional experiences for his audiences, the chapter explores larger questions about the hybrid status of the building as a working laboratory and exhibition space. It focuses on the particular methods advanced by Warburg and his team in the design and appointment of the library building that, I suggest, mediated Warburg's ideas both through the provision of experiences and the delivery of rational content.

Materialising Knowledge: Libraries and Museums

The cultural institutions of the museum and the library are intimately connected through their patterns of activity – collecting, archiving and presenting – but also through their architectural

37 and social identity as places for the production and the transfer of knowledge.92 Through processes of acquisition, classification, comparison and analysis, new insights are generated when collections are organised spatially and exhibited to present and communicate these findings to wider audiences. To a certain extent, museums and library collections and their display can be regarded as spatial materialisations of their specific ordering systems whose selection reflects the views of curators, librarians, and architects, who in turn configure and contextualize objects to demonstrate particular meanings. Paula Young-Lee describes the museum not as "a collection of things but a body of scientific and literary knowledge."93 She draws attention to how contents are organised, expanded and presented, and focuses less on what they contain. Knowledge is always constructed in relation to things and human beings and not in isolation; whether noticed consciously or registered subconsciously, material and aesthetic contexts contribute to the demonstration of all kinds of causal, historical and social relationships. This point is underscored by Donald Preziosi, who sees the museum not as a "cultural artefact made up of other cultural artefacts" but as pedagogical or political "performances" – theatres for staging cultural narratives or fictions, or laboratories where experiments artificially simulate and scientifically demonstrate relations.94 These performances lend visibility to previously unseen relations and point towards the interrelations between the object and its context. And variations in context have the capacity to produce multivalent associations. With the call for the democratisation of knowledge at the beginning of the twentieth century, institutions such as museums, libraries and universities, were expected to popularize knowledge whilst simultaneously addressing issues of quality and excellence. But how was it possible to communicate meaning to audiences who were not necessarily equipped with the necessary educational pre-requisites? The difficulty that posed itself for Warburg was how to mediate the often complex observations and theoretical insights obtained by way of academic

92 On the history of the idea of the museum, its typological and programmatic fluidity in relation to the library and other building typologies, see Paula Findlen, "The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy," Journal of the History of Collections 1, no.1 (1989): 59-78. On the origin of the library and museum in the Library of Alexandria see Jan Assmann, "Libraries in the Ancient World - With Special Reference to Ancient Egypt," in Building for Books, eds. Susanne Bierei and Walther Fuchs, transl. Robin Benson, 50-67 (Basel: Birkhauser, 2001). Assmann distinguished between three basic functions of storing the written word: 1) Repository: Knowledge required to perform certain activities. They relate to the future; 2) Archive: to stock things for possible re-use. They relate to the past; 3) Representation: preserving and presenting a particular identity. They relate to the present.

93 Paula Young Lee, "The Musaeum of Alexandria and the Formation of the Muséum in Eighteenth-Century France," The Art Bulletin 79, no.3 (September 1997): 386.

94 Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, introduction to Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (Farnham: Ashgate, 2004), 4-5.

38 research so that by staging these objects and improving their navigability could make them available to sensory experience. As part of these educational reform efforts, it is possible to identify a kind of material turn whereby space, materiality, and sensory experience were intended to act as aids to explanations that were articulated in an increasing interest in the material aspects of knowledge transfer and the performance of cultural and social practices. Materiality – the material condition of the museum or library and its contents – has to be understood as a fundamental condition of all attempts to construct and convey knowledge.

Contemporary Context

With the advent of the internet, the discussion of how we produce, store, disseminate and utilize knowledge has assumed prime importance. New digital media and global networks have eroded the primacy of script, which had dominated knowledge transfer since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in 1455 and have made knowledge readily accessible to a global audience. These developments have wide-ranging implications for the ways in which knowledge is mediated in cultural institutions and necessitate a rethinking of the notion of audience. The hope for a total democratisation of knowledge through the internet, and a culture for all that addresses an inclusive audience are now being critically re-examined. Systemizing knowledge and making it accessible is not enough to provide meaningful educational experiences and alternative models for the mediation of knowledge are required. In contradistinction to the progressive globalisation of knowledge through projects such as the World Digital Library (WDL) and the European Library (EL), Hans Ulrich Obrist recently suggested an "archipelago model" – clusters of smaller types of libraries or archives, where users are navigated by a number of highly prolific individuals acting as guides. These are personal archives made available to a wider public and tested through exhibitions, publications and other collaborative projects. Together these small institutes are envisaged to function as one very big institute with a polyphony of knowledge guides.95 Obrist cites Dorner’s "living museum model" and Aby Warburg’s library as exemplary precedents. Against this background, the chapter examines Aby Warburg’s Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (K.B.W.) as a discussion platform for contemporary approaches to libraries such as Obrist’s, which rejects the idea of the library as a neutral storehouse and the elimination of the individual in the production of knowledge. The K.B.W. includes

95 Obrist, Interview with Hans Ulrich. "Museo Obrist or the Library of the Future." Volume 15, no. 1 (2008): 102-6.

39 transformations of traditional modes of knowledge production and organisation that offer a broader interpretation of how the relationship between library (both as a system and as a building) and audience can be reconfigured. As the first modern library of this kind, the K.B.W. assumes paradigmatic importance. This study focuses on two aspects of Warburg’s library, each of which addresses the topic of library/audience in a different way. The first considers the transformation of Warburg’s private library into a custom-designed research institute and the conceptual demands his organizational system posed on the audience. The second examines Warburg’s understanding of the library as a laboratory and represents a shift from knowledge storage to knowledge production, and from readers to participants. In both instances, Warburg challenges the idea of the library as a storehouse of frozen facts whilst simultaneously reconfiguring the library as an open system of potential relations.

The Library as a Collection of Evidence and Research Instrument

When still a student, art historian Aby Warburg began to systematically collect books. On 7th January 1889, he wrote to his mother that he must lay the foundations for his library and photographic collection, and both, he suggested, cost a great deal of money and represent lasting value. Yet the K.B.W. was to transcend the narrow definition of the library as a place that housed books. Warburg’s collection of documents is to be understood as a compilation of diverse pieces of evidence accumulated around specific case studies. Textual sources such as books, journals, correspondence, and diaries stood alongside pictorial material in the form of photographs, photographic reproductions, drawings, maps and other manifestations of cultural production such as magazine clippings, stamps, sketches, invitation cards etc., which were catalogued in card index boxes. Art works, objects of everyday life, texts and collective activities were all regarded as constituting factors of human culture. Areas of life that had previously been treated as distinct, in so far that they were assigned to a variety of disciplines (anthropology, art, biology etc.) and housed in geographically separate locations (museums, libraries, private collections etc.), were now located in one building and could be compared. On the basis of clues detected in these materials and the networks of interrelations that emerged, Warburg attempted to formulate opinions about man and society. Carlo Ginzburg draws parallels between Aby Warburg, Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud whose methods, Ginzburg says, are equally reliant on the acute observation of seemingly irrelevant details or

40 subconscious indicators.96 It emerges that it was not only the sheer diversity of its materials that distinguished the K.B.W. from ordinary libraries, but the owner's pursuit of potential interrelations that could be made between these collections – the circumstantial evidence that could be accumulated for one of Warburg’s case studies (or the diagnosis, to maintain Ginzburg’s analogy). Given the specific nature of both its contents and Warburg’s working methods, existing systems such as Melvil Dewey’s Decimal Classification system (DDC) were adjudged unsuitable for training a new generation of specialist researchers in Warburg’s method and familiarizing them with his research topics.

Scientific Inspiration

The purpose of Warburg’s library and research was to discover the functions of collective memory in the history of human culture. In his notes, he stated:

Memory is but a collection of stimuli, which have already been responded to through vocal utterances (loud or hushed). Therefore, I envisage as a description for the aims of my library the formulation: a collection of documents relating to the psychology of human expression. The question is, how do the linguistic and pictorial expressions originate, what are the feelings or points of view, conscious or unconscious, under which they are stored in the archives of memory? Are there laws according to which they are formed and force their way out again? 97

In his search for answers, Warburg had briefly enrolled for medicine in Berlin in 1891, and he found that Ewald Hering, one of the most distinguished German physiologists, had already formulated the research problem for him – "memory as organised matter."98 Hering’s theories had been further developed by zoologist Richard Semon and Warburg based his art history on Semon’s biological model – the engram. 99 In Semon’s engraphy, memory and heredity are two aspects of the same organic function. Every stimulus that acts upon an organism leaves in it an

96 Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method," transl. Anna Davin and Susanna Graham-Jones. The History Workshop Journal, no. 39 (1979): 5-36. Originally published in Ombre Rosse (Red Shadows) 39 (June 1979).

97 Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, England: Phaidon Press, 1986), 222-23. Originally published by the Warburg Institute, University of London, 1970. I have used my own translation of Warburg’s text as cited in Gombrich, staying closer to the original German text.

98 Ewald Hering, Über das Gedächtnis als eine allgemeine Funktion der organisierten Materie, Vortrag gehalten in der feierlichen Sitzung der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien am 30. Mai 1870, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft, 1921).

99 Richard Semon, Die Mneme (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1904). Later published in English as The Mneme, transl. Louis Simon (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1921) 41 engram, a physiological trace in the form of potential energy. All future reactions of the organism are dependent upon the sequence of these engrams – or what Semon termed the "engram complex." Under certain conditions these potential energies can be re-activated and this constitutes the act of remembering. Applying this model to the history of art, Warburg located the generative forces of the engram in the experience of extreme emotional states – mania and melancholia, ecstasy and fear – which are connected to the primary experience of forces of nature. These stimuli are then embodied through both ritual and artistic practice in the form of religious rites, festivals and art objects.100 Through an unspecified process of unconscious inscription, the affective potential of the stimulus would be transferred by the artist onto the artwork and, in turn, would be reactivated by spectators of a later period and in a different cultural setting, frequently in times of crisis or change. In Warburg’s opinion, this physical transcription of the original stimulus into the human body as an engram is an act of creating distance between subject and object. In other words, the creation of a distance between man and his milieu forms the very basis of cultural formation and the progress of humanity, but this distance has to be constantly renegotiated and sustained to determine for each culture and period where the line between affect and reflection is drawn. Primitive man responds to external stimuli with immediate reflexes, Warburg said, whereas civilized man consciously recalls the stratified formation of his memories and creates literary responses – detachment through naming.

Affective Space and Reflective Space

The ritual or artistic reproduction of the stimulus renders it not dangerous by keeping it at a distance, but also makes it graspable both literally and metaphorically by bringing it closer.101 The affective trace and its rational abstraction directly corresponded to distinct modes of perception, whereby affect is associated with the haptic, unconscious, and immediate, and reason represents the visual, abstract, and distant. Space, for Warburg, was in a state of constant dynamic oscillation between the thought space (Denkraum), which was created through reflective distance, and its opposite affective space (Greifraum), which represented the effectual collapse of this distance. The artistic condensation of an affective presence into

100 Cornelia Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern: Symbol und dialektisches Bild in Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas und Walter Benjamins Passagen-Werk (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2004), 216-17.

101 Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, 216. 42 an abstracted absence thus explains the transhistorical values of art based on the universal validity of a scientific law. The space between the viewer and the artwork can be conceived as an energetically- charged atmosphere. It represents the spatial impossibility of both distance and proximity – a space of "contradictory simultaneity."102 In one of his notes, Warburg remarked:

Kinetic energy (energy of movement) and potential energy (energy of position or location). An oscillating pendulum contains in its most extreme point of movement a potential energy and in its point of balance a kinetic energy.103

In the light of Röntgen's work on the high-tension electricity of cathode rays, the discovery of x-rays in 1895 and finally, the theoretical association of all energy with mass made by Albert Einstein in 1905, it is not surprising that Warburg writings frequently conjured up the image of energy. These developments in science had captured the imagination of scientists, artists and the general populous. The scientific metaphor of materialised energy is reflected in the library – a storehouse of engrams – where the researcher activates the latent energy in the books and learns to direct their power.104 By disturbing the relative positions of objects and thoughts, the reader could question their identity, origin and the equilibrium of forces or energies between them. This mind-set is as much a testimony to Warburg’s restless intellect as to his mental health – factors that he felt were inseparable. His personal medical history written by his physician, Heinrich Embden, on 19 Mai 1921 hints at the influence of his personal life, which found expression in his obsession with ordering processes:

The acquisition of books, the reading of catalogues becomes more and more extensive, but never assumes uncontrolled dimensions. Nevertheless, the physician is under the impression that the patient flees from actual scientific production into the acquisition of books, just as his constant re-arrangement of his work

102 Georges Didi-Huberman, "Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm," Art History 24, no. 5 (November 2001): 634.

103 Aby Warburg cited in Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, 124.

104 Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, "On the Warburg Humanities Library," in Building for Books, eds. Susanne Bierei and Walther Fuchs (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), 255. 43

mechanism, desk, quills, pencils, note boxes, lecterns, assume an inappropriately significant role in his actions and conversations.105

This spatialising of his thought constellations – whether at the scale of diagrams scribbled across a pieces of paper, objects and books arranged on his desk or the order of books in the library – was primarily a working method rather than simply the venting of his restlessness. Warburg’s desire to articulate the development of ideas spatially through the reconfiguration of objects is comparable to museal practices such as Alexander Dorner’s, who was well known for frequently rearranging and exchanging paintings and leaving temporary annotations and notes next to paintings thus documenting his latest thoughts concerning his developmental narrative of art. In other words, Warburg’s restless rearranging should not be reduced to his medical condition.

A Question of Method

It is in the area of orgiastic mass seizure that we must look for the mint which stamps the expressions of the extreme intensities of emotion onto the mind, as far as these can be translated into gesture language, with such intensity that these engrams of the experience of passions survive as a heritage stored in the memory.106

Warburg’s appropriation of Semon’s work is problematic if understood as an attempt to literally translate ideas from science into art historical models because art historical constructs are not easily reducible to laws of nature. Warburg’s theorisation is not without contradictions; rather these are a testament to the difficulties of crossing between science and art. But while he subscribed to the idea that an affective stimulus can be inscribed in the actual matter of the human body, and interlinked processes of artistic production and reception with the universal laws of biology, his actual methodologies are based on the specificity of case studies and subjective associations. Andrea Pinotti identifies Warburg’s studies as image chains. The chain method, he proposes, can be described as a construction path representing a causalistic-deterministic approach. Akin to a genealogical family tree, there is an origin and a chain of derivatives,

105 Heinrich Embden, "Anamnese Warburg, 19 Mai 1921," in appendix to Chantal Marazia and Davide Stimilli, eds. Ludwig Binswanger Aby Warburg: Die unendliche Heilung (Zürich: diaphanes, 2007), 261.

106 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 245. My own translation of Warburg’s text as cited in Gombrich, staying closer to the original German text. 44 where every new element results from the previous degrees of influence in relation to form, style and so forth, emphasizing the cause-effect aspect.107 But depending from which perspective the chain is seen, it can also be represented as a re-construction path underscoring the interpretative act of the art historian. The loose, temporary arrangements of the images and books do not appear as fixed chains but informal clusters around one or more themes. They are represented as interrelated case studies grouped around a set of affinities and associations, which cannot be construed as linear evolutionary models of a continuous art historical development. Warburg’s model is an interpretive historic method based on indiciary evidence rather than historical proof – visual clusters construed as clues, often through the detailed examination of historical contexts. In this, Warburg’s approach is akin to symptomatology, "the discipline which permits diagnosis, though the disease cannot be directly observed, on the basis of superficial symptoms or signs, often irrelevant to the eye of the layman," and as such can be compared to the work of the detective, as Carlo Ginzburg points out.108 It should be noted that the methodological and practical bases for Warburg’s linking of art and science was not a matter of a simple non-directed flow of ideas or cause-effect relations, nor should it be understood simply as reflecting the Zeitgeist of his period. His enquiry into biological models was part of a lifelong mission, a directed personal and intellectual pursuit, whereby Warburg actively sought out answers across a variety of disciplinary fields. It is in the question of method that the problems of translating a scientific model into an art historical one become most evident. But the even more pressing question for Warburg was how to translate his theoretical model and working methodologies into a spatial format for a library that could be used productively by his students and other scholars.

Systemization for a Wider Audience

In a lecture about the library, Warburg hints at the scale he envisaged for his library when he said: "Since 1905 … a laboratory with cultural-scientific test instruments developed into an organisation which resolved to examine the problem of cultural exchange at an extended scale."109

107 Andrea Pinotti, "Memory and Image." Paper given at the Italian Academy Fellows Lunch at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, 8 October 2003, accessed 10 August 2010, http://www.italianacademy.columbia.edu/publications/working_papers/2003_2004/paper_fa03_Pinotti.pdf

108 Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes," 12.

109 Tilmann von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg: Architektur, Einrichtung und Organisation (Hamburg: Dölling und Galitz, 1992), 109. 45

But it was not until 1919 that Warburg’s library and research institute assumed a more official character by opening it up to designated scholars and younger researchers of the recently founded University of Hamburg.110 The library appeared on the university’s lecture schedules as a location for seminars by Erwin Panofsky, but also by Fritz Saxl and Aby Warburg himself.111 This transformation was not without problems: Warburg had acquired and organised his books around specific themes or problems that were of concern to his research without taking into account the much broader needs of an extended scholarly audience. Saxl, his librarian and collaborator, described his initial impression of Warburg’s personal library as baffling:

… any young student like myself may have found it most peculiar, perhaps, that Warburg never tired of shifting and re-shifting them. Every progress in his system of thought, every new idea about the inter-relation of facts made him re-group the corresponding books. The library changed with every change in his research method and with every variation in his interests. Small as the collection was, it was intensely alive, and Warburg never ceased shaping it so that it might best express his ideas about the history of man.112

It is important to note that Warburg never intended his library to be a place where the reader could obtain looked-for documents with ease. Fritz Saxl, Warburg’s librarian and collaborator, remembered that "for pedagogical reasons Warburg had always been against making things technically too easy for the student," believing that the book one knew was often not the book one needed and that the intellectual familiarity gained by browsing was eroded by restricted access to magazines and an exclusive reliance on catalogues that had become increasingly popular at the time.113 However, the continued growth of the collection and its association with the University of Hamburg necessitated a systemization of its contents. And when in 1921, during Warburg’s institutionalisation in Kreuzlingen, Saxl turned the library into a research institute, he endeavoured to make Warburg’s principle of a "problem library" more comprehensible for its prospective audience.114 In a text written for a handbook on research institutes, Saxl defined the goals of the K.B.W. as follows:

110 For an overview of the history and organisation of the K.B.W., see Perdita Rösch, Aby Warburg (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 108-117.

111 See Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 26-27.

112 Fritz Saxl cited in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 327.

113 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 333.

114 Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 76. 46

The Warburg library is a library as well as a research institute. It assists in the elaboration of a problem, in such a way, that through selection, collection and organization of the books and pictorial material, it represents the problem it wishes to advance, and secondly, that it publicises the results of the research, which relates to this problem.115

In the library's opening lecture series in 1921, Fritz Saxl further alluded to the importance of the specific organisation and display of the material, elaborating that "what especially lends the library its specific character is that it is a problem library, and that its exhibition is in this way oriented to the problem … of the Survival of Antiquity."116 In other words, the library was comparable to an exhibition, whereby diverse materials (images and books) were spatially organised in a didactic manner to make the larger questions that underpinned the collections not only visible but also comprehensible to the visitor.117 Through the provision of standard reference works and periodicals, Saxl improved the usability of the library and his systematic purchases aimed at the completion of Warburg’s existing collections. Despite the association with the University of Hamburg, the K.B.W. was by no means a public institution. Its highly specialized contents pre-supposed a distinctly interdisciplinary knowledge on the part of its users. In addition, in its advocacy of a unique classification system that operated along Warburg’s conceptual framework, the library prescribed particular working methods: the arrangement of the library and the photographic collection according to topics, and not to author’s or artist’s names, made it possible to corroborate text with image or vice versa. However, without further guidance, it was very difficult to understand the reasoning behind the different groupings and this rendered the library "unusable" to most visitors.118 Von Stockhausen points out that the majority of library visitors were students from the University of Hamburg’s art historical seminar as well as a number of philosophers, anthropologists and ethnologists. With the exceptions of Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, few of the Hamburg University professors were regular library users, and scholars from other

115 Fritz Saxl quoted in: Dieter Wuttke, "Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Großbritannien," in Aby Warburg, Akten des Internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, eds. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, transl. Birgit Schneider (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1991), 148-49.

116 Fritz Saxl cited in: Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 158.

117 Barbara Maria Stafford recently compared Warburg's library to Sir John Soane's home and museum, erected between 1792 and 1824 in London. Barbara Maria Stafford, "Reconceiving the Warburg Library as a Working Museum of the Mind," Common Knowledge 18, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 180-87.

118 Dorothea McEwan, "From Event to Memory," Journal of the Graduate Society Department of English University College London, no. 3 (2007): 27-29. 47

German and European universities often visited because of their interest in the library system itself rather than the material.119

The Central Reading Room: Spatial Experience, Collaboration and Demonstration

The newly founded research library soon required more space and in 1924, under Fritz Saxl’s supervision, architect Felix Ascher drew up plans for a new library building adjacent to Warburg’s residence. When Warburg returned from Kreuzlingen in 1924, the project was abandoned, primarily, because Warburg felt that the rigid spatial organization of the library design was unsuitable for his method: his comparative working techniques required sufficient layout space for evaluating books alongside visual material, and his interdisciplinary approach relied on the availability of a large multi-functional space for collaboration – a kind of laboratory or arena of science. After securing financing from his brothers, Warburg commissioned renowned Hamburg architect Fritz Schumacher to develop plans for a new building.120 Schumacher’s initial design dated 9 December 1924 showed an elliptical auditorium with eight tiers and only a small central reading area that did not satisfy Warburg’s and Saxl’s requirement of a large multi-functional space. Schumacher subsequently revised the plans (se fig. 1.1). By reducing the number of tiers to two, he created a significantly enlarged central area that permitted the space to simultaneously function as a reading room, auditorium and as Warburg’s work place – a multi-functional arena. But the theme of the ellipse was only partially articulated and a large straight wall delimited the back half of the room. In 1925, Schumacher withdrew from the project and upon his recommendation a young architect was commissioned with the final planning and construction stages – Gerhard Langmaack (see fig. 1.2). The design of the room continued to attract Warburg’s undivided attention and, in discussions with Langmaack, the central reading room underwent subsequent reiterations before it attained its final, completely elliptical plan.

119 Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 28-29.

120 For a brief overview of Schumacher's theoretical position in the context of Wilhelmine Germany, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 210. 48

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Fig.1.1 Fritz Schumacher, Design for the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Section through reading room, second revision, undated. Excerpt from Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg," 56.

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Fig.1.2 Gerhard Langmaack, Design for the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Sketch of central reading room showing the window elevation, undated. Excerpt from Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg," 71.

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The shape of the room had remained Warburg’s main requirement throughout the duration of the project and the relevance he assigned to it was both allegorical and practical. Associating it to Kepler’s planetary system, Warburg believed the ellipse articulated "progress from the pictographic to mathematical, sign-based thinking" and represented the "drama of how the ellipse overcomes the circle, as a highlight of modern man’s struggle for enlightenment," as he explained in a letter to his brothers.121 In Warburg’s obituary, Cassirer proposed that the ellipse demonstrated the psychical universe.122 But, maybe more importantly, it also had a kind of psycho-technical role. Unlike the static centeredness of the circle, the form of the ellipse unified two opposing conditions: at the ends the narrow radii offered the audience the experience of a tight spatial enclosure, but the wide radii along the sides mediated a sense of expansiveness. The elliptical room plan was repeated in the ceiling where a roof light consisting of twelve flower segments made of translucent glass provided the visual counterpart to the experience of the elliptic space below. The roof light was framed by a decorative stucco band, which contained twelve lights. Its directionality and bipolar nature evoked associations with electricity, energy, and movement. Warburg believed that the elliptic shape created a spatial dynamic: the polar points of the room created an atmospheric energy field that would result in a feeling of intense concentration in the users of the reading room. All the elements of the room – the books (Handwerk), the Mnemosyne Atlas panels, the desks, the projection screen, Warburg himself and his audience – were tied together by the elliptical band to allow for greater proximity and audibility between audience and speaker (see fig. 1.3). The reading room was the library’s energy centre, where Warburg used the latest in technology to stage his lectures – most notably a slide projector together with a large retractable projection screen. When the blinds were pulled across the elliptical skylight above, the screen emerged from the floor cavity and life size projections of artworks emerged from the semi-darkness evoking the mood and providing the visual setting for Warburg’s words (see fig. 1.4). On a more regular basis, Warburg used the room as a pictorial laboratory – a demonstration space for work-in progress on the shifting constellations of the Mnemosyne Atlas panels.

121 Warburg cited in Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 37-38. Fritz Schumacher also remembered that Warburg regarded the elipse with its two poles as a symbol for life. This belief was founded in the omnipresence of dual poles in all areas of life: electricty, gender, day/night cycles etc. For Fritz Schumacher's memories of Warburg, see "Aby Warburg und seine Bibliothek," in Mnemosyne: Beiträge zum 50. Todestag von Aby Warburg, eds. Klaus Berger and Stephan Füssel (Göttingen: Gratia-Verlag, 1979), 42-46.

122 Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 37-38. 50

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Fig.1.3 Reading Room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Photograph of central reading room showing the Mnemosyne Atlas panels in front of the book, undated. Image: Warburg Institute London.

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Fig.1.4 Reading Room of the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Photograph of central reading room showing the book wall and elliptical skylight above, undated. Image: Warburg Institute London.

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The Atlas represents an attempt to condense the "fragments of a pragmatic science of expression" which he had collected throughout his life, into a "history for the psychology of human expression" in the form of a pictorial account.123 Photographs, reproductions of books, magazines, newspapers and everyday objects like stamps were pinned on large moveable boards covered with black fabric.124 The image clusters were arranged in such a way that they illustrated a single, or sometimes multiple, thematic area/s. 125 Warburg had accumulated a collection of around two thousand reproductions of pictures since 1924 and by the time of his death in 1929, he had completed sixty-three tableaus for the atlas. Like the books in the library, the visual groups of images were often reconfigured for lectures or exhibitions, for which specific Atlas panels would be selected and lined up in a particular order in front of the elliptical walls of books. The design of the reading room was guided by pedagogical purposes and intended to link the rational reflective mode of traditional book culture with the pictorial unconscious of the audience. Accordingly, the atmosphere of the space was characterised by intense concentration when used as a space for collaboration and reading, but during Warburg’s lectures, projections and the large image panels of the Atlas created a kind of immersive atmosphere.

The Book Magazines: Vertical Organization by Topic

With Warburg focused on the design of the reading room, Saxl concentrated his efforts on the design of the magazines, or shelves. He described the floor-by-floor organization as such:

The books were arranged on four storeys. The first began with books on the general problems of expression and on the nature of symbols. From here one was led to anthropology and religion, and from religion to philosophy and the history of science. The second floor contained books on expression in art, its theory and

123 Zumbusch, Wissenschaft in Bildern, 216.

124 Matthias Bruhn sees Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a project which pushes the boundaries between different media: "The attempt to visualize the formal backgrounds and contextual interrelations between visual research objects with the help of simple and flexible demonstration boards (Schautafeln) represents an endeavour to overcome boundaries between different media, which were based on conventional working procedures with noteboxes, photo collections and library." Matthias Bruhn, "Der Bilderatlas vor und nach dem Zeitalter der Digitalisierung," in Der Bilderatlas im Wechsel der Künste und Medien, eds. Inge Münz-Koenen, Sabine Flach, Marianne Streisand (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005), 181.

125 Schoell-Glass points out that the use of double projection in art historical teaching was still uncommon at the time and that the Atlas panels allowed for the comparison of multiple images. Heinrich Wölfflin was the first art historian to use double projection in his art history classes and lectures in Berlin since around 1900. Charlotte Schoell-Glass, " 'Serious issues': The Last Plates of Warburg's Picture Atlas Mnemosyne." In Art History as Cultural History - Warburg's Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), 184. 52

history. The third was devoted to language and literature, and the fourth to the social forms of human life – history, law, folklore and so forth.126

However, in his 1932 essay "Die Ausdrucksgebärden der bildenden Kunst," he described the contents in a different order and introduced themes:

The first story contains materials for a psychology of the image, the second floor begins with a small collection of psychological works, that section of psychology which concerns the problem of the symbol in general, of expression, palaeography and mimesis, as well as the function of the mind. Then follow materials for psychology of religion and its individual problems, ecstasy, mysticism, etc. and historical material for a history of religion, cosmology, natural science and philosophy. The third floor contains the word (language, literature, history of traditions and classical educational material). The 4th floor finally [contains] the action - that is, political history, history of social forms and in particular of festivals.127

It is difficult to say whether the classification system of image, orientation, word, and action was used by Warburg prior to the design of the new library building and informed its spatial organization, a view supported by Salvatore Settis, or, as Tilmann von Stockhausen suggests, the stratification of the new building over four levels had prompted Warburg to find a corresponding and sensible order for the classification of his books.128 The significant difference between this systemisation and other library systems, such as Melvil Dewey’s decimal system, is the inference of an evolutionary development governed by natural transitions from the visual image (Bild) as the first stage in man’s awareness, to language (Wort) as a product of man’s research for orientation (Orientierung) which influences the patterns of behaviour, performance of rites and actions (dromena) and which in turn is superseded by reflection, all of which leads back to the crystallization of image symbols and linguistic formulation and thus completes the cycle. Ernst Gombrich asserted the enduring relevance of the library as a kind of open system, an instrument that is more alive and essential than any theoretical publication could have been and one that continues to function

126 Gombrich, Aby Warburg An Intellectual Biography. (p.334)

127 Excerpt from Fritz Saxl's 1934 essay "Die Ausdrucksgebärden der Bildenden Kunst," cited in Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 86.

128 Cf. Salavatore Settis, "Empfehlungen für eine Heimkehr," in Aby Warburg, Akten des Internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, eds. by Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass (Weinheim: VCH, Acta Humaniora, 1991). 53 even though the ideas of its users may no longer be those of its founder. The order of every section of the library, Gombrich stated, still reflects Warburg’s conviction that no "border police" should deter him from crossing the conventional orders of "academic fields."129

Colour Signification

Whilst the four themes of image, orientation, word and action were reflected literally as different floor levels and represented a vertical journey through regions of interest, the actual systematisation of the books was a far more complex undertaking that required careful negotiation between meaningless chaos and the plurality of relations. A cataloguing system had to be developed which permitted the mobility of the books to reflect developments in Warburg’s thoughts, the allocation of new acquisitions, and the introduction of new thematic interests whilst also providing orientation for the users. To this end, Warburg's librarians, Gertrud Bing and Fritz Saxl, devised a system of colour signification with three different bands: the first colour band referenced scientific areas, the second colour band referenced the methodological approach, and the third colour band indicated an additional subdivision. The last subdivision was created through numbers that were spaced at large intervals to leave enough space for expansion. When an additional subdivision did not appear practical, the books were not differentiated any further. The last subdivision thus formed a unit that could contain only a few books sharing the same code, but sometimes also hundreds of books. The colour signature facilitated the attribution of the book to a new area, for example, when a scientific area was subdivided into to new areas. I am not aware of any information pertaining to the criteria for the attribution of specific colours to thematic areas. These are examples of colour attributions: dark green for philosophy; light green for religion; burgundy for the history of art; brown for history; dark blue for history up until 1917; light blue for linguistics; dark blue for sciences and folklore; black for archaeology; yellow for natural sciences; and orange for newspapers.130 As a point of difference to conventional numbering systems, the colour code did not identify the book as belonging to a single category, nor did it pinpoint to a singular location within a sequence of books. A book was always marked as part of several areas of interest that overlapped and thus interconnected with other thematic areas. This principle was translated spatially by the

129 Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 323.

130 For a detailed description of the colour signature, see Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 76-79. 54 arrangement of books, not in a rigid linear order, but as part of an ideatic cluster sharing the same colour code. Regular visitors to the library would have been able to read the colour stripes as visual clues that evoke interrelations, for example, between philosophy and natural science (yellow and green). It connected the rational system of classification with the unconscious opticality of the code. Since the colours were read downwards in accordance to their significance, the order of the colour bands would also imply greater and lesser affinities to areas. Conceived spatially, a book would assume an imaginary position, suspended between floors, shelves and ideas, ready to be shifted with every thought, closer to one area and further away from another. The researcher’s physical immersion into an ocean of books and colours that would have been intelligible equally as sea of ideas would have added a captivating experiential dimension to the library, where the materiality of the books themselves functioned as a visual aid for orientation. In correspondence with Warburg, Fritz Saxl described the library shelves as "papageienartig bunt" (parrot-like colours).131 Yet the library also contained the potential for disorientation, something to which Ernst Cassirer alluded when he described his first visit to the library as entering a labyrinth, but also as a prison.132 Regaining orientation requires the meaningful construction of points of reference, the setting of a space of thought in order to progress in the right direction, or in any direction at all. In this point, the system of the library called for the active acquisition of knowledge by placing additional perceptual and conceptual demands on the researcher and making him aware – either painfully or enjoyably – about the active and subjective nature of the attainment of knowledge. It is possible to say that the colour signification unsettled traditional, reflective modes of orientation and displaced these with an habitually acquired understanding of relations: that is by striding between the rows of books, browsing through shelves dominated by one or many colours which set the predominant mood, or atmosphere – i.e. scientific, religious etc. Sadly, the library’s wider audience never had the opportunity to experience the spatial impact of the colour signification in the magazines. Von Stockhausen reports about inexplicable last minute alterations: access to the magazines was finally restricted to staff and researchers – their low ceiling height, bad connectivity to the main reading room and the narrow stairwell prohibited open access by the general users. Consequently, the desks that had been allocated along the window areas in the architectural plans were also suddenly

131 Fritz Saxl cited in Dorothea McEwen, Fritz Saxl: Eine Biographie (Vienna: Bohlau Verlag, 2012), 55.

132 Settis, "Empfehlungen für eine Heimkehr," 118. 55 omitted and working amongst the books, as originally intended, was no longer possible.133 The system was finally given up after the library’s move to London, because the coloured paper stripes began to bleach and became indistinguishable (see fig. 1.5). They are still visible on many books today – reminders of a missed opportunity to communicate Warburg’s ideas on the level of a general sign language that could have linked the library with the art of advertising and popular culture that he had always ranked as documents of human expression that were of equal importance (gleichberechtigt) to art but not of equal value (gleichwertig). In the Mnemosyne Atlas as well as in the library, Warburg staged works of "freest art and applied art" together with classical art works, staging the development of the psychology of human expression across all fields of cultural production.134

Activating the audience

Through the selection of specific books and images and their grouping as clusters, Warburg set the thematic field and provided scaffolding for researchers around which a diverse mass of ideas could be organised not as a static formation, but as a network of possibilities. The dynamic organisational principle of the library not only reflected the thought of humanity in its enduring and shifting aspects, as Warburg intended, but also served as an active device - an instrument encouraging the users to actively discover new interrelations between previously unconnected facts through browsing, collaboration and demonstration. The problem that presented itself is that every possibility for new connections also resulted in a simultaneous disconnection whereby items were severed from their previous reference cluster. Even after the completion of the building in 1926, the diary entries testify to the fact that the order of the library was still a major subject of daily discussions and that shifting and rearrangement of books took place on a substantial scale.135 In this sense, the model of the library testifies to the aliveness of ideas and objects whose potential meanings and resonations are constantly evolving through social interaction on part of Warburg and his collaborators, but also through changes in processes of exchange and technical developments in media.136

133 Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 72-74.

134 Cf. Stanislaus von Moos, "Modern Art Gets Down to Business," in Herbert Bayer: das künstlerische Werk 1918- 1938, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Bauhaus Archiv, 1982), 94.

135 Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 81-82.

136 Alleida Assmann, "Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory," in The Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature: REAL/The Anthropological Turn, ed. Jürgen Schlaeger (Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1996), 51.

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Fig.1.5 Books at the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, Photograph showing the book spines with bleached colour signification code. Image: Warburg Institute London.

Kurt W. Forster points out that "Warburg associated the physical location, the ubi, of books with the irreducible rightness of things and their significances - as is clearly shown by the converse, the agonies he suffered when that order was disrupted."137 But it should be noted that shifting and questioning the relative positions of objects and thoughts meant also testing their latent potential for new identities and meanings.138 In the case of the library, the line between chaos and meaning is largely determined by the guidance afforded to its users: lectures and tours formed integral part of Warburg’s pedagogical approach. The library’s diaries painstakingly record all visitors and pay particular attention to visits by scholars of related disciplines. Warburg together with Bing and Saxl, took these visitors on tours of the library to explain its organizational structure. But these tours,

137 Kurt W. Forster and David Britt, "Aby Warburg: His Study of Ritual and Art on Two Continents," October 77 (Summer 1996): 11.

138 An entry dated 19 May 1921 in Warburg’s personal medical history, written by his physician Heinrich Embden, noted Warburg’s obsession with ordering processes: "The acquisition of books, the reading of catalogues becomes more and more extensive, but never assumes uncontrolled dimensions. Nevertheless, the physician is under the impression that the patient flees from actual scientific production into the acquisition of books, just as his constant re-arrangement of his work mechanism, desk, quills, pencils, note boxes, lecterns, assume an inappropriately significant role in his actions and conversations." Heinrich Embden, "Anamnese Warburg, 19 Mai 1921," in appendix to Chantal Marazia and Davide Stimilli, eds. Ludwig Binswanger Aby Warburg: Die unendliche Heilung (Zürich: diaphanes, 2007), 261. 57

Tilmann von Stockhausen suggests, were quite distinct from ordinary tourist tours where things were paraded past a passive audience. They tested the visitor’s responsiveness to the different requirements posed by the library’s intellectual order. One could describe them as experiments that allowed Warburg to collect data about his impressions of the visitors, their responses to the library and their capacity to understand its organization.139 Some visitors were afforded customised tours, tailored to their particular interests. For philosopher and psychologist Erich Rothacker, Warburg arranged a special picture wall. The diary entry from Tagebuch 8 of 14 June 1927 specified:

For Rothacker, I need to have prepared a picture wall [Bilderwand] (world view in the slide [Weltanschauung im Lichtbild]). Quos Ego – Barbados – Fasces of the lictors and Mussolini. This would also entail a general contemplation on the preconditions for the perception of images within the cult – loss of the consciousness of the limits of the self through instrumental objects and through carrying and being carried.140

But the main objectives behind these personalised tours were to obtain the visitor’s feedback on the organisational system of the library and on particular problems that were relevant to Warburg’s research at that time. In that sense the library and all its contents acted as a laboratory setting for live experiments whereby the visitor became both user and used. One can imagine such a tour as an itinerary through the library spaces, along which the arrangement of written and visual material and the sequence of spatial scenarios are carefully orchestrated to correspond to specific developments and problems. Warburg did not offer knowledge, but he exchanged knowledge. It has been said that he always expected "something back," even when only lending a book to a student or colleague. A book could never be simply returned without also providing a comment, a question, or an observation.141

The Library as Laboratory

Warburg’s letters from 1908/09 show that he had intended the gradual transformation of his private library into an "institutsmäßig arbeitendes Laboratorium" (institute-like working laboratory) destined to produce high quality work by bringing together a circle of experts

139 von Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 16-18.

140Ibid., Note 13, 206.

141 Carl Georg Heise reports that it was an unspoken rule that "he always had something important to report or ask" when visiting Warburg. Carl Georg Heise, Persönliche Erinnerungen an Aby Warburg (New York: Eric M. Warburg, 1947), 8. 58 focusing on his interdisciplinary research problems.142 Whilst the German universities of the new Weimar Republic were concentrating their efforts on the democratisation of education and the mass dissemination of knowledge, Warburg’s institute counter-acted this tendency – it concentrated on the cultivation of expert knowledge and emphasized quality over quantity. Warburg imagined "achieving things with young post-doctoral students that the administrative machinery of the present-day public-service-stamping-apparatus (university) does not permit."143 The nature of Warburg’s material was explicitly experimental and did not fit into the German schemata of libraries at the time – the small private library and the universal storehouse of books. Warburg repeatedly referred to his library as a laboratory, "where information was assembled and processed and worked with just as in a chemistry or physics lab."144 The allusion to the science laboratory was not intended in a purely metaphorical sense: the use of modern documentation and recording processes (notebooks, diaries, camera etc.) and technical equipment (telephones, slide projectors) indicates closeness to scientific working methodologies. Although Warburg certainly was a bibliophile – he collected a large number of rare books and manuscripts – his extensive annotations and scribbling in many other books bear witness to the fact that he valued books predominantly as research instruments. Books are not understood as precious objects, but as hands-on working materials, which form the basis for further research. The laboratory of course had become a significant metaphor in the early twentieth century, and there are few modern places that have not been likened to laboratories by artistic or intellectual avant-gardes. Warburg’s idea of the library as laboratory thus posed new conceptual demands on the architectural typology of the library: understood as space designed to promote interaction with the audience, the library’s role as a pedagogical instrument and research instrument was foregrounded. A library was no longer a storehouse where knowledge was collected and archived; it became an integral part of the technicised modern world, a place that actively produced and disseminated knowledge to wider audiences. Put simply, the early twentieth century brought about a paradigmatic shift away from the library as a depository of objects and towards the library as a place for knowledge production and invention.

142 Wuttke, "Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg," 145.

143 Ulrich Raulff, "Von der Privatbibliothek des Gelehrten zum Forschungsinstitut: Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer und die neue Kulturwissenschaft," Geschichte und Gesellschaft 23, no.1 (January - March 1997): 33.

144 Schoell-Glass, " 'Serious issues,' " 186. 59

Philipp Felsch points out that "as an interface for artificial intensification and processural openness, the experiment and the laboratory became an influential projection surface for modernity at around 1900."145 Laboratories served as spaces of refuge, where natural processes were suspended. They opened up a space for experimental practice independent of nature and permitted the controlled interaction of elements in artificial milieus without certain outcomes, Felsch suggests. Warburg’s collection methods correspond to the ideas of intensification and purification inherent to laboratory environments. The aim of his library was not the completeness of collections: he did not collect volumes of magazines, but magazine clippings, thus carefully eliminating all unnecessary and superfluous information. Together with other pieces of information pertinent to his research, these clippings were often bound as books with an intense topical focus, or classified under keywords in his card index boxes. Charlotte Schoell-Glass assesses the proportion of Warburg’s publications to unpublished material at the time of his death as follows: every published page faces 100 handwritten manuscript pages, 100 books in his library (many of them annotated by Warburg himself), 100 letters and at least 200 notes categorized in around 100 card index boxes.146 At first sight, this conglomeration of seemingly random things might evoke the impression of a Wunderkammer or curiosity cabinet, but Warburg’s fragments were not isolated phenomena, their significance lay not in their singularity but in their potential for forming ideatic groups, which demanded to be configured by Warburg and the library’s users.147 Fritz Saxl pointed to the importance of this pre-normative material when he said that the only access to the books in Warburg’s library was via his card index boxes, which provided evidence for Warburg’s reasoning behind the grouping of books and photographic collections. Without these, Saxl felt, the library would have been completely unusable.148 Gertrud Bing makes a similar point with regard to Warburg’s publications. She attributes a vital role to the plethora of unpublished fragments, which she says provide necessary clues to make actual sense of the publications;

145 Philipp Felsch, "Das Laboratorium," in Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, eds. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005), 30.

146 Charlotte Schoell-Glass, " 'Contakt bekommen': Warburg schreibt," in Schlangenritual: Vom Tsu’ti’kive der Hopi zu Aby Warburgs Kreuzlinger Vortrag und zurück, eds. Cora Bender, Thomas Hensel and Erhard Schüttpelz (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2007), 283.

147 Guiseppe Olmi argued that in the diverse range of cabinets and collections of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, scientific or instructive purposes are not present, but that is not to say that these collections were devoid of ordering principles in general. Guiseppe Olmi, "Science-Honour-Metaphor: Italian Cabinets of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum, eds. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2004).

148 Stockhausen, Die Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, 76. 60 but she also bemoans the difficulties arising from the breadth of Warburg’s scholarly curiosity that was "so wide as to obscure the red thread of a leading interest."149 In a certain sense Warburg’s library reveals parallels with what Umberto Eco discussed as "open works." These reflect, as Eco claims:

our culture’s attraction for the ‘indeterminate,’ for all those processes which, instead of relying on a univocal, necessary sequence of events, prefer to disclose a field of possibilities, to create ‘ambiguous’ situations open to all sorts of operative choices and interpretations.150

Eco regards these works as literally unfinished: the author offers the audience more or less the components of a construction kit and demands their intense involvement. But Eco also warns that the line between chaos and unlimited potential meanings has to be renegotiated.

Conclusion: Audience and Mediation

Warburg’s audience was a small circle of initiates and experts, who were not passive recipients but who took on the part of active collaborators, and at times also that of test objects. Warburg’s appropriation of the library as a laboratory indicates a shift in the understanding of the modern library’s role – not as a universal storehouse of knowledge but as a place for the production of knowledge. In a certain sense, the K.B.W. and its users constitute a variation of what historian Brian Stock terms a "textual community."151 The identity of this community is formed upon the importance of the library as a place and as a materialisation of an intellectual concept. Its structure of authority and leadership results from the members’ capability and competence in handling the images and texts, adding new interest areas and producing new knowledge by running "red threads" through the material. But unlike traditional textual communities, whose identity is centred solely on text, the K.W.B is a real location - a building that made the new discipline of cultural sciences tangible. As such, the K.B.W. assumed canonical importance. The selection of books, writings and images staked out a territory of knowledge by including and connecting some fields whilst excluding others. The organisation of these materials together with activities and events structured around it were intended to make Warburg’s cultural science comprehensible.

149 Richard Woodfield, "Warburg's 'method,' " In Art History as Cultural History - Warburg's Projects, ed. Richard Woodfield, 259-93. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001), 269.

150 Umberto Eco, The Open Work, transl. Anna Cancogni (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 44.

151Assmann, "Libraries in the Ancient World," 66. 61

Ulrich Raulff notes that it is no co-incidence that Warburg developed the programme of his cultural science in the course of developing its institutional counterpart, the library. Warburg’s significance lies in his simultaneous roles as a theoretician or historian and as a developer of institutions, a dual role that prompts Ulrich Raulff to characterise Warburg as a "builder of systems" (Systembauer).152 I would like to add to Raulff’s assessment that Warburg was not only a "builder of systems," but a "builder of open systems" in which knowledge was understood to be preliminary, ready to be inscribed, become dormant, reactivated and transformed at any time. Warburg's library thus has to be understood as a place of unlimited potential relations rather than a storing place of frozen facts - and as such, I conclude, it is an ultimately modern library. In this chapter I have examined the idea of the library as a laboratory-cum-exhibition space, where the very design of the space and the arrangement of contents were thought to mediate Warburg's ideas as much as generate new ideas and insights its users. A not dissimilar goal was pursued around the same time by Alexander Dorner, a younger art historian and museum director, who considered similar ideas, but this time in relation to the hanging and organisation of art collections in a museum context. In what ways, Dorner appeared to ask, might the collective display of art objects within a discrete room provide the audience with new insights that close attention to each of the individual art objects could not match? In order to understand how the gallery space might function medially so as to convey meaningful insights for the viewer, the next chapter examines Dorner's reorganisation of art collections and his reappointment of museum rooms in the next chapter. Crucially, Dorner's engagement with avant-garde ideas and his keen interest in new media and commercial art, led him to interpret the German aesthetic theories and psycho-physiological insights that had also captured Warburg's mind in quite different ways.

152 Raulff, "Von der Privatbibliothek des Gelehrten zum Forschungsinstitut," 28. 62

63

64

CHAPTER 2

PARTICIPATORY AESTHETICS: ALEXANDER DORNER’S REORGANISATION OF THE PROVINZIALMUSEUM HANNOVER (1923-26)

With catch phrases such as "living museum," or "the museum as laboratory," the work of Alexander Dorner recently re-emerged on the contemporary art scene when it was appropriated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist as an exemplary precedent for his own curatorial practice.153 Dorner had come to prominence as the Director of the Art Collections at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover, when he commissioned El Lissitzky to design a room for contemporary art (the Raum der Abstrakten) in 1927. The design of this room was a ground- breaking move received with widespread acclaim at the time and a major influence on the comparatively better known curatorial models of Alfred H. Barr and Philip Johnson at MoMA in New York.154 After emigrating to the U.S.A. in 1937, Dorner's curatorial work at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover was overshadowed by allegations of Nazi sympathies and was generally not widely recognised until recently. Dorner’s earlier re-organization of the Provinzialmuseum’s art collections and museum spaces since 1923 has received less attention than his commissioning of the Raum der Abstrakten. Despite the importance he assigned to exhibition architecture as part of his re- organisation work, it has been examined only from art historical perspectives. Central elements of Dorner’s museum concept are considered not entirely original in light of earlier reorganisation efforts by his peers, and his introduction of Atmosphärenräume (atmosphere rooms) arranged according to a sequential itinerary are regarded by some scholars as indebted

153 Jérôme Sans and Marc Sanchez, What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century? (Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2002), 5.

154 See Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display - A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 21; and Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002), 181-186. 65 to Romantic and Enlightenment traditions respectively, their simultaneous deployment representing a grave inconsistency in his curatorial approach.155 Counter to these arguments, we might regard these seemingly contradictory strategies as the actual innovation in Dorner’s curatorial practice - a practice that demanded simultaneous emotional and intellectual participation from its audience. At stake for the museum in the early 1920s, as Alexander Dorner reflected towards the end of his life, was much more than art historical erudition and connoisseurship: museums had to adequately resolve the only thing that mattered, namely, "ourselves and our vital problems."156 Seen in this light, the museum’s mandate was to generate a deeper understanding of the present situation for the general public, and this could only be accomplished if "the energies … surging up from the past" were uncovered and appropriately mediated, Dorner insisted.157 He suggested that for the realisation of this aim, the museum would have to utilize "all possible sensory and intellectual resources of representation."158 The particular challenge identified by Dorner appeared to be one of method - how could historical content be mediated effectively in order to become relevant to the general public of Weimar Germany and without alienating existing expert audiences? Something beyond scientific organisation and representation was at issue – something that materialised intellectual capital that lay dormant in our cultural heritage, and deployed it towards a wider and deeper historical understanding, where the ultimate impact would be on the harmonisation and democratisation of German culture as a unified whole. It is Dorner’s own curatorial response to these challenges that is under investigation in this study, which focuses on his early reorganisation of the art collections at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover 1923- 1926. In distinction from the re-organisation efforts of his colleagues, Dorner’s approach enlivened historicism with psycho-technical interventions that made use of linguistic and material manipulations towards calculated ends. In doing so, he transformed the way the audience perceived the art objects presented to them. In generating a participatory aesthetic that provided emotional experiences whilst simultaneously encouraging active reception and reflection, he provided an integrated approach to mediation in the museum.

155 Cf. Monika Flacke, "Die Neuordnung der Deutschen Museen in der Weimarer Republik," in Überwindung der ‘Kunst‘ - Zum 100. Geburtstag des Kunsthistorikers Alexander Dorner, eds. Ines Katenhusen and Renate Reuning (Hannover: Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1993), 137.

156 Alexander Dorner, The way beyond Art (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 147.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid., 146. 66

The State of German Museums in the Weimar Republic

Having spent his early years at the Provinzialmuseum cataloguing the drawing and painting collections as a research assistant, Dorner had formed a comprehensive idea of the museum’s holdings, by the time he took over as director in 1923. The museum collections were in a state of disarray. Being more reminiscent of a curiosity cabinet than an art collection, the Provinzialmuseum represented a panoptic showcase of aristocratic and upper middle-class life and was described by staff as a "trash room" where one could find an altar next to a stuffed boar and a painting.159 This state of affairs had not gone unnoticed. In October 1920, shortly after Dorner had commenced in his position as a research assistant, two visiting art historians from Bielefeld launched a scathing report that appeared in newspapers across Germany.160 The museum’s art department was accused of leaving important art treasures to decay on its shelves, whilst in the galleries, important and unimportant works alike were indiscriminately stacked on top of one another. The museum’s "high walls," as Dorner later observed, "threatened to collapse under the load of the good and the bad."161 This unsatisfactory situation was not the product of curatorial ignorance, but reflected the fact that the majority of the museum inventory consisted of private collections on loan to the museum on condition that the display of the entirety of the loaned works be in dedicated rooms.162 As a consequence of these complex legal agreements, a scientific ordering in

159 Interview conducted by Monika Flacke with Bianca Claus, Dorner’s secretary at the time, cited in Monika Flacke- Knoch, Museumskonzeptionen in der Weimarer Republik - Die Tätigkeit Alexander Dorners im Provinzialmuseum Hannover (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1985), 36.

160 Cf. Ines Katenhusen, "Zwischen Lob und Tadel: Zur Beurteilung der Arbeit Alexander Dorner's in Hannover," in Überwindung der ‘Kunst’ - Zum 100. Geburtstag des Kunsthistorikers Alexander Dorner, eds. Ines Katenhusen and Renate Reuning (Hannover: Alexander Dorner Kreis and Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1993), 71. It should be noted that the administration of the Provinzialmuseum was well aware of the issues raised by the newspapers and used the negative publicity to add weight to their own requests for change. These focused on extended negotiations with the Dukes of Cumberland for more autonomy in the arrangement of loaned art works, and funding requests to local government bodies for the modification of museum spaces to meet latest standards. In a letter to the Directorate of Lower Saxony dated 12 August 1922, Wilhelm Behncke, Head of the Provinzialmuseum (1912-1924), vividly described his frustration with the then-state of affairs, calling for the immediate approval of financial support:

"It is not only my own opinion that the current situation, which has endured for 20 years, is an impossible one. As far as the inappropriate architecture of the building is concerned, there is little room for improvement. But to the extent that the organisation of the collection and the appointment of the rooms are concerned, significant improvements can be achieved. The visitor receives a confusing impression from a colourful jumble of non-coherent and accumulated objects, and the dull appointment of the [exhibition] rooms and the tasteless design of the display cabinets and other display material impairs the just appreciation of the individual objects seen by the visitor." See Wilhelm Behncke, Letter to the Landesdirektorium Niedersachsen, 12 August 1922, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.1, 265.

161 Cited in Katenhusen, "Zwischen Lob und Tadel," 71.

162 The five collections loaned to the Provinzialmuseum were the Cumberland Trust (comprising paintings by Holbein, Cranach, Poussin, Tintoretto); the Guelph Museum (comprising medieval altarpieces, Gothic embroideries, Medieval and Renaissance sculpture); the Hannover Society for Public Art Collections (comprising paintings from seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); Hannover State Art Collection (works from medieval times to 67 accordance with art historical criteria was impossible: the Provinzialmuseum functioned essentially as a depository for an array of diverse historic objects that were exhibited as singular items without meaningful interrelations - a "loose aggregate," as Dorner termed it.163 Visitors found themselves not only overwhelmed by the plethora of objects on display, but also entirely left to their own devices in engaging with the diversity of exhibits. Apart from the state of the collections, the museum’s unfortunate presentation of art, its badly lit and cold exhibition halls and the overflowing and unattractively coloured gallery spaces, was unacceptable to Dorner from practical and aesthetic perspectives. More importantly, he felt that the existing state of affairs was irreconcilable with the museum’s educational mandate – it alienated visitors and obstructed the mediation of art historical content.164 Worse still, the Provinzialmuseum’s technological and scientific obsolescence rendered it non-comparable to other German museums and resulted in its relative isolation. Not surprisingly, visitor numbers were low and the museum played only a minor role in the flourishing culture of the city, shaped as it was by the diverse activities of art associations, artists and other initiatives rather than its larger public institutions.165

the present); and the Municipal Picture Gallery (comprising more than two thousand paintings from German Late Romantics and Impressionists, and recent artists such as Lovis Corinth). Cf. Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum: Experiences of an Art Historian and Museum Director - Alexander Dorner (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 30-31. With around 800 works, the Cumberland Trust was the Provinzialmuseum’s most significant patron. Official correspondence provides a detailed picture of the difficulties involved in re-negotiating the then-existing legal agreements. At the centre of these discussions were: first, the separation of the collection into a display collection (on permanent exhibition) and a study collection(in storage but available for research purposes) to facilitate a scientific ordering of the museum collections according to quality and artistic category; second, permission to display works from the Cumberland Trust collections together with works from third parties to facilitate the filling of ‘gaps’ in the desired chronological arrangement of the Provinzialmuseum’s holdings; and third, the proposed sale of less important art works to free valuable display and storage space. Cf. Schatzrat Hartmann, Minutes, 30 April 1923, meeting with the Dukes of Cumberland and Hannover and their representatives regarding the organisation of the paintings of the Fideikomiss-Galerie, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.1, 374-77. With the termination of the loan agreement by Cumberland Trust in July 1924 and the subsequent sale of the collection, the Provinzialmuseum used the opportunity to acquire some of the most important works whilst freeing itself from the burden of having to display the entire collection in discrete rooms.

163 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 16.

164 Cf. Alexander Dorner, untitled typescript, 7 December 1922, discussing the reorganisation of the Provinzialmuseum, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.1, 292.

165 According to Karl Hermann Jacob, Director of the Prehistoric and Ethnographic Collections at the Provinzialmuseum, Hannover’s public institutions were of minor importance in comparison to museums in other Lower Saxon cities such as Hamburg, Bremen and Celle. Jacob believed that the reason for Hannover’s reputation at the time as "the graveyard for art and science" was the fragmentation of the city’s museum collections. He proposed to re-organise these on a grand scale with a co-ordinated exchange of art works between institutions. Increased specialisation according to collection areas, Jacob hoped, would provide a clear focus of interests and facilitate the provision of "the best possible educational facilities." See Karl Hermann Jacob, Printed Manuscript, 1919, titled "Denkschrift über den Plan einer Neugestaltung der Museen der Stadt Hannover," Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.1, 3 and 16 (numbering refers to the page numbering of the printed manuscript). 68

Caught between tradition and change, conservation and experimentation, the situation in Hannover was symptomatic of the wider museum landscape in Germany after the end of World War I and the fall of the Wilhelmine Empire.166 Pre-war concerns over changing political and social circumstances and the resulting desire to preserve traditional structures had been at the very heart of many nineteenth century museum foundations. As a reaction to the radical transformations brought about by progressive industrialisation and modernisation, museums were primarily intended as "asylums for the rescue and safe-keeping against the deterioration, displacement and dissipation of cultural and art historical antiquities" and "fortified repositories against all hostile influences that threaten our cultural and artistic monuments," as the then-Head of the Provinzialmuseum Jacobus Reimers (1890-1910) declared in the museum’s 1909 yearbook.167 But in the early years of the Weimar Republic, the hostile influences cited by Reimers became the very ones that a younger generation of museum leaders sought to embrace. Now driven by a desire to democratise culture, they embraced socio-political changes and steered their museums towards pro-active engagement with new audiences. Although museum reform efforts had commenced in the 1880s,168 in the more radicalized political climate of the early Weimar republic, quite different strata of society now laid claim to their active participation in German culture. Newly-formed and politically- motivated groups such as the Arbeitrat für Kunst (Working Council for Art) demanded "the activation of museums as educational establishments for the people" - a fundamental point in their program, which was signed by influential German museum reformers such as Julius Meier-Graefe, Karl Ernst Osthaus and Wilhelm R. Valentiner.169 The museum, now increasingly regarded as a predominantly educational institution, had to leave behind its passive position and engage in what Dorner described as an active museum practice - a practice that explored

In contrast to Hannover’s public institutions, private initiatives flourished. Under the patronage of the Kestner Gesellschaft (founded 1916) and the Galerie von Garvens (founded 1920), Hannover developed into an important centre for Dadaism and Constructivism with regular exhibitions by avant-garde artists such as Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitzky, and Carl Buchheister. Cf. Dietrich Helms, "Die Zwanziger Jahre in Hannover," Das Kunstwerk 17 (März 1964): 12-19. For an extended discussion of cultural life in 1920s Hannover, see Ines Katenhusen, Kunst und Politik: Hannovers Auseinandersetzungen mit der Moderne in der Weimarer Republik (Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung, 1998), in particular, the section "Städtische Kunst- und Kulturpolitik," 53-305.

166 Cf. Ekkehard Mai, Die Deutschen Kunstakademien im 19.Jahrhundert: Künstlerausbildung zwischen Tradition und Avantgarde (Cologne: Böhlau, 2010), 365.

167 Jacobus Reimers, "Einleitung," in Jahrbuch des Provinzial-Museums zu Hannover umfassend die Zeit 1 April 1908- 1909 (Hannover: Provinzial-Museum Hannover, 1909), 3.

168 Cf. Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880-1940 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001), 187-196.

169 Bruno Taut, "Arbeitsrat für Kunst in Berlin," Mitteilungen des deutschen Werkbundes, no.4 (1918), 14-15. 69 new methods of presenting art to the general public and intended to make art historical developments not only visible but comprehensible to audiences previously unfamiliar with art. In his 1919 article "Das Kunstmuseum der Zukunft" (The Art Museum of the Future), Gustav Pauli, director of the Hamburger Kunsthalle and co-founder of the democratically- oriented Deutscher Museumsbund, described the status quo of German museums as the appalling consequence of a fusion of different historic museum typologies (the princely museum, the scholarly museum, and the public museum).170 According to Pauli, these hybrid museum types sought to complete their highly diverse collection areas with new acquisitions, and the ensuing drive for constant growth led to overlapping collection areas and rivalry. As a result, "the systematic utilisation of the cultural goods" entrusted to museums for the benefit of the public remained largely unaccomplished.171 Pauli suggested that "the scope of a museum reduce[d] the intensity of its impact," and at the point where an overview was no longer possible, the overall effect on the visitor became "numbing and confusing" and remained "largely representative."172 Yet, Pauli levelled his sharpest criticism at his colleagues and their acquisition committees, whose blatent disinterest in their lay audience, he asserted, led to their spectacular failure as mediators of knowledge:

[Museum] directors saw their main tasks in collecting and administrating; they opened the doors of their institute and left the artworks to speak for themselves … They invoked the voices of illustrious individuals, who explicitly warned not to desacralize the enigmatic relationship between viewer and the artwork with education.173

Pauli perceptively recognised that apart from the scientific organisation and specialisation of collections, the auratic presentation of art in traditional museum environments encouraged passive modes of art reception that were incompatible with the educational goals of the new republic and only served to perpetuate the exclusivity of art by not making it accessible.174 Yet

170 Gustav Pauli, "Das Kunstmuseum der Zukunft," in Die Kunstmuseen und das Deutsche Volk, eds. Gustav Pauli and Karl Krotschau (Munich: Deutscher Museumsbund, 1919), 4-5.

171 Ibid., 10-11.

172 Ibid., 11.

173 Ibid., 7.

174 At the turn of the century, empathy and emotional modes of art reception were positioned in opposition to the rational positivist sciences and the seemingly contingent conceptions of historicism were countered by the idea of a more immediate connection between art and life. Authentic knowledge of art was less associated with intellectual understanding but with a physical encounters that linked experience and empathy. Against this background, Gustav Pauli’s article "Das Kunstmuseum der Zukunft" criticised the issues entailed in relying on the communicative power 70 how change could be effected in practical terms had yet to be resolved: what conditions could induce an audience with average education and frequently little or no prior experience of art to partake in the aesthetic enjoyment of objects whose meaning was only accessible to those with adequate knowledge and expertise, namely, art experts and the cultured upper middle classes? As Pauli had highlighted earlier, opening the museum doors, extending opening times and reducing admission fees was not sufficient to create a meaningful involvement of the general public with the museum.175 Dorner underlined many of Pauli’s arguments in his own writings. Reinforcing earlier criticisms about out-dated modes of art presentation and reception, he likened museums to monadic temples of "tranquillity and peace" whose stifling effect was comparable to "a dead hand reaching forward into our lives and stopping them."176 In Dorner’s opinion, the "quantitative accumulation" of an ever-increasing amount of artworks represented an idealistic basis that stood outside the "materialistic practical life of the day" and prevented audiences who were largely unfamiliar with a cultural heritage shaped by aristocratic society from developing an interest in cultural life.177 To initially overcome this alienation, Dorner shrewdly looked to advertising campaigns and educational events that used an accessible language to capture the interest of visitors:

More strongly than before, the large masses must be drawn into the museum with advertising in factories, schools and shops. Similar previous attempts, to attract the worker (adult education centres etc.) have resulted in failure. These kinds of attempts, however, were doubtlessly misdirected. We therefore will have to consult with experienced men from industry. Guided tours and events in the art collections must consider the educational level of the worker. Only in this way can the widespread dangerous opinion that art museums are luxury institutes for a few experts and scholars be seriously opposed.178

of the art object alone, which were regarded as a means to perpetuate the exclusivity of art by ensuring its inaccessibility to inexpert audiences.

175 Pauli, "Das Kunstmuseum der Zukunft," 7.

176 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 147.

177 Ibid., 148.

178 Alexander Dorner, Internal Communication, including appended manuscript titled "Programm für die Weiterarbeit in der Kunst-Abteilung des Provinzialmuseums", 15 October 1924, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.1, 428. This communication represented Dorner’s response to Jacob Friesen's proposal for the development of the art department, 9 February 1924. Friesen was the then-Head of the Provinzialmuseum at the time and Dorner’s superior. 71

Dorner acknowledged that communication with the masses required expertise and that the museum had to fine-tune its language, mediation strategies and educational offerings to match those of this specific target group. With a reorganisation of the museum collections along clearly comprehensible art historic principles, a contemporary presentation style, and a network of information campaigns and publications, Dorner hoped to attract and subsequently involve lay audiences, with the ultimate goal to reinvent the Provinzialmuseum as a relevant player in the cultural life of the Weimar Republic.

Dorner’s Raumbild Theory

When Dorner began to restructure the collections and gallery spaces of the Provinzialmuseum in 1923, he could draw on countless examples of museum re-organisations that had already been implemented across Germany. The uniqueness of Dorner’s re-organisation approach lay in his emphasis on changing spatial conceptions and their impact on artistic production. His central idea was the "Raumbild" (literally translated as both "spatial image" and "image of space," or more loosely as "conception of space").179 According to Dorner, art and culture were primarily manifestations of prevalent images of space and thus represented immediate expressions of how people conceived of themselves as being in space and time, and of their relation to objects and to one another at given moments in time. Thus for Dorner, the history of art and architecture mapped the history of our relation to space and the image of the self that we form in relation to it. With the concept of the Raumbild, Dorner seemed to acknowledge the emergence of an increasing pre-occupation with the psycho-physiological aspects of space. These were first theorised in nineteenth century German aesthetics and subsequently became the subject of practice-oriented experimentation by the modern avant- gardes.180 Dorner’s concern for these ideas can be traced throughout his writings in which he cultivates an extensive vocabulary around the theme. For example, in his 1923 publication Die Romanische Baukunst in Sachsen und Westfalen (Romanesque Architecture in Saxony and Westphalia), he traced the changing interrelations between "Baukörper" (built object) and "Raum" (space), and their equilibrium in what he termed "Raumbau" (space building). Dorner observed that the accentuation of the built object customary in Romanesque architecture was reversed in Westphalian Gothic, where "the built object recedes into the background as

179 In his later writings, Dorner translates "Raumbild" more loosely as "reality concept." Cf. Dorner, The way beyond Art, 17. This study uses the original term, acknowledging the importance of the German composite of "Raum" (space) and "Bild" (image) to Dorner’s curatorial approach.

180 Cf. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds., Empathy, Form and Space - Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for History of Art and the Humanities, 1994). 72 subservient" and space assumes an all-embracing unity. In his view, the movement from object to space was paralleled in the sensory impressions imparted by Gothic architecture, where "intensity and movement" replaced "expansion and calm."181 Dorner’s linkage of spatial and empathic conditions can be traced back to Alois Riegl.182 Dorner was a self-confessed "partisan" of Riegl—an enthusiasm he developed during his studies in Berlin under Adolph Goldschmidt.183 Riegl never used the term "Raumbild," however, ideas about space and the desire to intellectually capture it permeate his writings. Countering, what he believed to be a preoccupation with the physical composition of architecture, Riegl observed that buildings also had a psychological effect upon us. In other words, architecture’s capacity to impart sensory impressions pointed to correspondences between composition and reception. In a series of lectures on the origins of Baroque art in Rome, Riegl vividly illustrated his ideas about "Raumwirkung" (spatial effect) by advancing a parallelism between "Tiefraum" (deep space) and "Empfindung" (sensation).184 The idea of Raumwirkung responded to the main artistic problem of Baroque art - the formal resolution of connecting the singular figure with surrounding space. This connection was technically produced by means of light and shadow and characterised by a growing plasticity and spatial depth, and ultimately resulted in an inversion of figure/ground relations, whereby "the space between figures is as important as the figures themselves, and even more important," as Riegl noted.185 These ideas can be recognized in Dorner’s art historical writings, museum guidebooks and indeed, in his Raumbild idea.186 However, according to Dorner, his admiration for Riegl could not be extended to his practical attempts to re-organise the exhibition spaces because Riegl’s art philosophy and its exclusive focus on historic art could not be brought into alternate relations with the art and life of the present.187 As Dorner frequently stated, when it came to

181 Yet the central problem of Raumbau (space building), Dorner suggested, was only addressed in the architecture of the Italian Renaissance, which resolved "the problem of the equal confluence of Einheitsraum (unified space) and Einheitsmasse (uniform mass)." Alexander Dorner, Die Romanische Baukunst in Sachsen und Westfalen (Leipzig: E.A.Seemann, 1923), 9-10.

182 Cf. Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom: Akademische Vorlesungen gehalten von Alois Riegl, aus seinen hinterlassenen Papieren, eds. Arthur Burda and Max Dvořák (Vienna: Anton Schroll & Co., 1908).

183 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 15.

184 Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, 43.

185 Ibid., 4-5.

186 One such example is Dorner’s discussion of spatial depth in altar pieces from the German and Italian Renaissance periods. See Alexander Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover (Berlin: Julius Bard, ca.1930), Part I, 7-8.

187 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 16. 73 dealing with the integration of contemporary art, he had to look elsewhere for a theoretical basis to inform the curatorial challenges at hand. Not surprisingly, he turned his attention to the ideas of avant-garde artists and architects, with whom he was in regular contact through his involvement in Hannover’s Kestner Gesellschaft, and his private networks. As someone with an astute sense for public relations and advertising, Dorner appeared to recognise the currency that avant-garde ideas would attribute to his curatorial work and their appeal to audiences. Increasingly inspired by avant-garde theorisations and rhetoric about dynamic time-space relations, Dorner’s writings charted the history of art as a history of space.188 This began with the two-dimensional medieval Raumbild, its transformation into the three- dimensional perspectival space of the Renaissance, and finally, the next major stage that addressed the dynamic time-space conceptions of the art of his own time. Dorner’s history of art was not a positivist account but a personal interpretation that was subject to development and change along with Dorner’s own perceptions. With it, he intended "to show that there are much more profound forces of change at work in life, which unite past and present in a much intenser[sic] way, than we are accustomed to see."189 In interweaving past and present (for example, by formulating comparisons that uncovered commonalities between Italian Renaissance and Abstract art, both of which, he insisted, captured intellectual ideas in a sensory perceptible form), Dorner hoped to instil in his lay audience a deeper historic understanding that simultaneously provided the lens for a clearer perception of the present situation. To summarize, with his brand of an interconnected "dynamic history"190 Dorner wanted to provide an informed platform for the evaluation of the then-present situation for his audience that would enable them to garner new intellectual "energies for [the] conduct of all life, artistic and otherwise."191 If Dorner’s interest in avant-garde theorisation of space found its ultimate target in his art historical publications, then avant-garde experimentation with spatial perception manifested itself in his staging of the exhibition experience. For Dorner, avant-garde painting and film represented efforts to forge a new dynamic image of the environment. Already

188 Similar ideas are developed around the same time by avant-garde artists, for example El Lissitzky, who outlined the history of space as a succession of stages, leading from "planimetric space" to "perspectival space," and finally via "irrational space" to an "imaginary space." Lissitzky’s ideas are inspired by the interrelationship between art and mathematics, and in particular, geometry. Cf. El Lissitzky, "K. und Pangeometrie," in Rußland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution, ed.Ulrich Conrads, 122-29 (Berlin Frankfurt/M Wien, 1965), 122-129.

189 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 18.

190 Alexander Dorner, typescript, ca. 1926, titled "Die Abstrakte Kunst ist in ‘2‘ fachem Sinne keine Malerei von Bildern" and intended as a text for the Abstract Cabinet, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 1.1.6.1.1, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

191 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 18. 74 scientifically registered by x-ray and radio waves, this image exploded perspective and seized what he interpreted as the poly-directional "expansiveness of the space in which we move."192 In abstract art, Dorner believed, the viewer experienced the unconstrained space of the modern world in motion, that is "in time," and this constituted what he understood to be "four-dimensional seeing."193 This seeing on the move and from multiple perspectives – both physical and intellectual – essentially informed Dorner’s reinvention of the museum as an interplay between identification and disassociation, sensory experience and rational reflection, moving along and being arrested, as will be shown in the subsequent analysis of his curatorial method.

Activating Exhibitions for the Public: Atmosphere Room and Information Material

To modernise the art department of the Provinzialmuseum, Dorner reviewed holdings as well as spatial arrangements. The traditional museum’s inactive character and its incompatibility with dynamic modern life, as Dorner often stated, was inbuilt into its historic spatial systems— a "Baroque component, represented by the picture and sculpture gallery" and "a component from the Enlightenment or Romanticism, represented by the period room."194 Dorner’s condemnation of outmoded spatial and presentational practices was shared by many of his peers, who highlighted the intimate connection between museum architecture and modes of art reception - a connection they thought was largely ignored. Paul Valéry felt that museums often provided little guidance with regard to conduct and appropriate modes of engagement. Variously evoking the atmosphere of "a temple, a salon, a cemetery, or a school," they induced a strong sense of disorientation in the visitor.195 In his view, art objects amounted to an "mélange inexplicable" (incomprehensible jumble) when not submitted to a logic that was simultaneously spatial and intellectual.196 However, Valéry also warned that science "substitutes its hypotheses for sensation," and therefore art presented in a purely rational

192 Dorner, typescript, ca. 1926, titled "Die Abstrakte Kunst ist in ‘2‘ fachem Sinne keine Malerei von Bildern." For a discussion of four-dimensional space in the work of Dorner, Sigfried Giedion and others, see Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "Four-Dimensional Space or Space-Time? The Emergence of the Cubism-Relativity Myth in New York in the 1940s," in The Visual Mind II, ed. Michele Emmer, 349-397 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998).

193 Dorner, typescript, ca. 1926, titled "Die Abstrakte Kunst ist in ‘2‘ fachem Sinne keine Malerei von Bildern."

194 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 148.

195 Paul Valéry, "Le problème des musées," in Oevres II, Pièces sur l’art, ed. Jean Hytier (Paris: Gallimard Pléiade, 1960), 1291.

196 Ibid., 1290. 75 manner, without an experiential dimension, becomes "dead knowledge."197 Experiential and intellectual knowledge had to be fully synthesized. Pursuing comparable goals, Dorner sought to overcome the divisions of knowledge embedded in previous museum typologies, and reconnect architecture and exhibits. He was convinced that scientific order and sensory experience had to be synchronously mapped onto the body of the neoclassical Provinzialmuseum’s spaces in order to provide stimulating encounters with art for lay and expert audiences alike. In response to suggestions for a re- organisation of the art department made by his superior Jacob Friesen, the then-Head of the Provinzialmuseum (1924-1953), Dorner asserted the leitmotifs of his own curatorial vision: "labelling that stimulated the intellect and spatial design that appealed to the emotions" - both had to be of equal importance without impairing one another.198 Dorner resolutely argued that the provision of labelling was more than a technicality. Information material worked at several levels and had to explain: first, individual artworks in terms of their provenance, subject matter, and uniqueness of style; second, art periods and their historical facts and stylistic achievements; and third, the history of art as a developmental sequence of styles presented as a survey of human progress.199 If the provision of highly differentiated information material might have more than satisfied Friesen’s very basic educational agenda, for Dorner the emotional enlivening of the exhibition spaces represented the counterpart required to complete his vision of a fully mediated educational experience. The "colouration of the rooms as Ausdrucksräume (expression rooms)," as Dorner suggested in a program attached to his response, was needed to bring individual art works and periods to live. Again, the application of colour was considered with care. It had to be: simple, to allow the individual images to exert a pronounced effect; varied between rooms, in order not to bore; and finally complimentary and meaningful, to enhance the nature of the respective art periods.200 In his article "Was sollen heute Kunstmuseen?" (What is the purpose of art museums today?), published in the same year, Dorner mapped out his curatorial vision in a condensed and systematic manner by outlining three main objectives of his active museum practice that were to be addressed through the creation of specific sensory experiences:

197 Ibid., 1293.

198 Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 420.

199 Ibid.

200 Ibid., 420-21. 76

1. To display the individual artwork in its context in such a way that it exerts the greatest possible emotional effect. 2. In addition, the individual periods of art development should be mediated to the visitor emotionally. Through this uniformity he receives the impression of clarity and through that the feeling of stability and calm. 3. Finally, this clearly-represented sequence of art periods shall be experienced as a whole - in their transition and in the consequences of their change. 201

As indicated above, these sensory experiences had to be intellectually framed with textual information in the form of labelling and other information material. To stress the rigour behind Dorner’s planning, it must be noted that he not only interrelated experiential and informational aspects, but also envisaged their implementation across correspondingly scaled spaces: wall, room, and museum itinerary. He generated a matrix of spatial, emotional, and rational principles. Thus, Dorner matched art experience to art objects: intensity (individual work), calm (period) and harmonious overview (collection). He gave a similar reading sequence to space – label (wall), poster (room), and guidebook (itinerary). The two central elements – the explicit knowledge gained in reading and the implicit knowledge acquired with experience - had to be co-ordinated as effectively as possible to mediate a new, deeper and intensely integrated understanding of art, as he later announced in a 1925 article published in Der Cicerone.202 In focusing on specific examples, the following analysis uncovers Dorner’s material realisation of the intended effects and his co- ordination of space, art and text to a common end as a fully mediated exhibition experience.

Unframing Artworks: Dorner’s Reanimation of Historic Raumbilder

The idea of historically evolving spatial concepts delivered the theme for the reorganisation. Dorner believed that every period had its own Raumbild, which was subject to regional and personal variations. To bring out its uniqueness and achieve the greatest emotional effect, each artwork was isolated. Primarily, this meant a significant reduction of the number of paintings to be hung on the wall either as single-tiered hangings or in other discrete

201 In this article, Dorner publicly voiced his views on the provision of information material and emotional engagement in the museum. Its publication predated Dorner’s formal response to Jacob Friesen’s proposal for an extension of the art department. Cf. Alexander Dorner, "Was sollen heute Kunst-Museen?," Der Sammler Wochenzeitschrift für alte und neue Kunst 14, no.17 (15. September 1924).

202 Alexander Dorner, "Erwerbungen neuer Kunst im Museum der Provinz Hannover," Der Cicerone 17 (1925), 1157- 62. 77 arrangements – a form of uncluttered display already practiced in Germany at the time.203 Widely spaced and mounted at eye level, generally only one artwork occupied the visual field of the viewer so that, as Dorner desired, "each painting, surrounded by a generous amount of [empty] wall area, effectively receive[d] its own atmosphere."204 Besides being isolated, paintings were re-framed. Extensive reframing efforts had been undertaken previously by Wilhelm Bode and Ludwig Justi at the Berlin museums, where both abandoned elaborate, gilded frames in favour of more fashionable, modern ones.205 In contrast, reframing assumed a decidedly instrumental role in Dorner’s practice. He treated frames as conceptual devices, which materialised historic conceptions of space by evoking architectural effects. His sophisticated framing strategies used well-considered details for spatial and empathic impact, aiming to distinctly set art styles apart from their predecessors, or to highlight regional differences. This translation of artistic concepts of space reflected in a period’s Raumbild into spatio-perceptual arrangements is exemplified in his treatment of paintings from the Italian Renaissance and the Dutch Baroque. Importantly, the historic transformations in the Raumbild are made explicit in the museum guidebooks, which represented an important counterpart to the viewing experience. Italian Renaissance paintings are discussed at the beginning of Part II of Dorner’s guide, which covers the period "From the Renaissance to 1800."206 Focussing on "the registration of external appearance," Dorner suggested that these works represented a decisive break with the medieval desire to reflect what was spiritual and hence beyond sensory perception.207 To him, Renaissance art almost signified a reversal of medieval practice, in that "the capture of space became the artistic objective [and] the invention of perspective … made it possible to portray bodies and all other objects clearly delimited in space in their full plasticity and in their

203 Dorner aligned his reorganisation proposal for the art department of the Provinzialmuseum with a number of recent museum modernisations, listing the Kunsthallen Hamburg, Bremen, Mannheim; the museum in Lübeck; the Städel in Frankfurt; the museums in Dresden, Cologne, Darmstadt, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Weimar, Breslau, Düsseldorf and Essen. Cf. Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 422 (footnote).

204 Dorner. Untitled typescript, 7 December 1922, 300.

205 During his relatively short time as Director of the Städel in Frankfurt, Ludwig Justi reframed extensively. He had learned this practice during his time at the Berlin Museums as an assistant to Wilhelm Bode. It should be noted that Bode’s reframing at the Altes Museum in Berlin represented a significant change as it superseded the uniform frame type introduced by Friedrich Schinkel. Cf. Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880-1940, 87. Bode’s reframing practice is also mentioned in Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 238, endnote 68.

206 Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover, Part II, 1.

207 Alexander Dorner, Meisterwerke aus dem Provinzial-Museum in Hannover (Berlin: Werner Kube Verlag, 1927), 10. 78 relations to one another."208 The increasing importance of space and nature during the Renaissance, as Dorner understood, was clearly articulated in its documentation of "the factual matter of the visible world with sharp outlines and hard and clear colours."209 The absolute viewpoint of the Renaissance Raumbild captured space as the homogenous expansion of three-dimensional volumes – clearly defined solitaires layered and overlapping – and this, Dorner claimed, not only instigated a break with medieval spatial imagination, but more importantly, represented the prevalent conception of space that had not been fully overcome as yet - even in then-present day. In this illusory Renaissance Raumbild "the image is a view out of a window; the picture frame represents a window frame; the segment of [depicted] space lies in front of us like a stage seen from a fixed viewpoint."210 To translate the illusory quality of the Renaissance Raumbild at the level of the exhibition space, Dorner selected frames that literally looked like window frames (albeit modern ones).211 Appearing to be cut into the walls of the room, the paintings were treated as architectural elements, integrated as part of the museum architecture. As a consequence, the viewer was submitted to the illusion of looking out through a window onto a stage set, and thus became part of the scene.212 The formal ordering of the exhibition space along geometric principles and the statically defined position of the viewer in front of the frame transfigured the rational and constructive aspect of the Renaissance Raumbild as a spatial experience. In contrast to his emphasis on frames and illusory space in the Italian Renaissance rooms, Dorner abandoned frames almost entirely for the Dutch Baroque paintings in selecting a black-brown frame colour to match the edge colour of the canvases (see fig.2.1). In Dutch Baroque, as Dorner’s guidebook informed the visitor, the perspectival frame of the Renaissance was "fused together … to form a total unity of space and physical masses,"

208 Ibid.

209 Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover, Part II, 1.

210 Alexander Dorner, "Die neue Raumvorstellung in der Bildenden Kunst," Museum der Gegenwart Zeitschrift der deutschen Museen für neuere Kunst 2, 1931-32 (1932): 30. It should be noted that there were plans by Dorner and Erwin Panofsky to publish an extended version of this essay with the Warburg Institute, however, the plans remained unrealised.

211 It should be noted that in principle this treatment reflected Renaissance practices whereby frames were "invariably designed as parts of an architectural interior and were frequently meant to harmonise with door and window surrounds." Paintings were often mounted in tabernacle frames that were in keeping with the architectural styles of Gothic cathedrals and elevated the picture from the wall. Styles ranged from elaborate to simple depending on the specifications of clients. Later, Renaissance paintings were frequently re-framed to match the interiors of their owners. See George Bisacca and Laurence B. Kanter, "Introduction," in Italian Renaissance Frames - Exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 5 June - 2 September 1990, eds. Timothy J. Newbery, George Bisacca and Laurence B. Kanter (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1990), 11.

212 Cf. Flacke-Knoch, Museumskonzeptionen in der Weimarer Republik, 52; Cauman, Living Museum, 89. 79

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Fig 2.1 Detail of a photograph of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover (ca.1925) showing a reframed painting in the room for Dutch Baroque Art recorded after its re-organisation. Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

producing a homogenising spatial effect that began to erode the geometric Raumbild of the previous period.213 According to Dorner, "tone is one of the means with which Dutch art achieves its new, big effects ... light-dark contrast is the second."214 The paintings of the Dutch Masters synthesized these techniques to achieve maximum impact, whereby forms of figures

213 Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover, Part II, 12.

214 Ibid., 8. 80 and objects only emerged through a variation of the degree of tonality within the brown overall colour of the painting which could be lightened completely to attain white, or darkened to attain black, as Dorner observed in the guide.215 In the resulting fusion of spatial layers, objects in the foreground gradually disappeared in darkness towards the edges, leaving behind the tripartite structure of foreground, middle ground and background. For Dorner, this "synthesis of plasticity and spatiality" gave rise to the idea of "something unbounded and infinite."216 And by matching frame and edge colour of the painting, it was not only Dutch art which stepped from the "stage set to unbounded scenery," as Dorner put it, but by implication, also the viewer.217 When read in conjunction with the guidebook descriptions, the logic behind Dorner’s reframing efforts emerges as an endeavour to reanimate the Raumbilder of diverse periods as corresponding spatial experiences for the viewers, which targeted their sensory stimulation and subsequent emotional identification with that art. Reframing subtly manipulated the relationship between painting, wall and viewer allowing the effortless transfer of spatial concepts present in art into the actual space of the museum. By extending the Baroque techniques of contrast (dark and light) and spatial fusion, as well as the geometric and visual systems of the Renaissance to the exhibition spaces, painterly concepts were reproduced as room-embracing aesthetic systems. In Dorner’s practice, curating became a spatially-informed practice that worked with "building materials" drawn from those of its subject: colour, light, tonality, contrast, volume, geometry, etc. To summarise, in blending the colour of the frame with the colour of the painting’s perimeter, Dorner unframed the Dutch Baroque paintings, extending the pictorial space beyond the frame and into the sphere of the viewers.218 The stimulating effects caused by the immediate encounter with the unframed works cancelled the visual distance between viewer and painting and the dissolution of boundaries between viewers and their environment would have produced a sense of boundlessness.219 We can speak of unframing equally when

215 Dorner’s description of Dutch Baroque art owes much to Riegl. Cf. Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, 45.

216 Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover, Part II, 8.

217 Ibid., 6.

218 It is possible to imagine Dorner discarding frames entirely and matching the dark edges of the paintings with a black wall colour to achieve an even greater sense of unboundedness. However, in the absence of electrical lighting at the Provinzialmusem at the time, a black wall might have darkened the rooms to an unacceptable degree.

219 This effect has recently been thematised by Peter Sloterdijk under the heading of "artificial immersion." Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, "Architecture as an Art of Immersion," Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, no. 12 (2011): 105. The effect is also not unrelated to Freud’s notion of the oceanic, which brings about "a sensation of ‘eternity’, a 81

Dorner dissociated the Renaissance frame from the artwork and re-associated it with the exhibition architecture, transfiguring it into a window frame and effectively turning the painting into a view. Retranslated into space, the Raumbild could now be experienced by the visitor at an architectural scale and without perceiving anything in detail – that is at an atmospheric level. And this is precisely what Dorner pursued further in the colour treatment of the Provinzialmuseum’s exhibition rooms, which he formalized as atmospheric environments.

The Concept of Atmosphere

Despite its central importance to Dorner’s work, the concept of "atmosphere" is never theoretically defined by him. His initial use of the word "Ausdrucksräume" (expression rooms) rather than "Atmosphärenräume" (atmosphere rooms) in his 1924 museum reorganisation program simply described his intended "gefühlmässige Belebung der Säle" (emotional enlivening of the galleries), which he defined as the combined effect of the spatial placement of art objects and colouration.220 The term "atmosphere" received a parenthetic mention only in the description of the empty space surrounding each art work. What is clear is that Dorner, would not have understood this atmospheric space as the aura of the original artwork. Dorner’s attitude towards art was marked by his non-distinction between originals and reproductions, and he claimed that a good reproduction would be preferable to a bad original, if this meant that it facilitated the wider availability of art to the masses.221 If Walter Benjamin observed with concern the erosion of aura brought about by the "desire of contemporary masses to bring things 'closer' spatially and humanly," and their tendency "toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction," Dorner embraced this idea, feeling of something limitless, unbounded - as it were, ‘oceanic.’" See Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W.Norton & Company, 1961), 10.

220 Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 419.

221 In an article titled "Das Lebensrecht des Faksimiles"(The Facsimile’s Entitlement to Existence) printed in Hannoverischer Kurier (9 Juni 1929) which contributed to a larger discussion about original art works and technical reproduction techniques, Dorner fundamentally questioned the aura of the original, advocating the wide use of facsimiles to democratise art by making it available as widely as possible. In this, he rendered the museum as a place for art redundant and thus caused a major controversy involving Georg Heise, Max Sauerlandt and Erwin Panofsky amongst others. See also Erwin Panofsky, "Faksimilereproduktion," Der Kreis: Zeitschrift für künstlerische Kultur, no.7 (1930): 3-17. Dorner’s radical views led Max Sauerlandt’s to refuse Dorner’s membership application for the Museumsverband. A subsequent meeting with Sauerlandt and correspondence between the two men reflect Dorner’s endeavour to moderate his position and avoid isolation amongst his peers. Cf. Alexander Dorner, Letter to Max Sauerlandt, 8 August 1929, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann. 152 Acc. 2006_013 Nr. 53, 176. Several months after the appearance of his controversial article, Dorner revised his position towards a more moderate view with a new article, now more neutrally titled "Original und Faksimile" which appeared in Der Kreis: Zeitschrift für künstlerische Kultur no.7 (1930): 156-58. Despite this, Dorner entertained the idea of a facsimile museum without originals even after his emigration to the U.S.A., where he planned to found an "Institute for Constructivist Art History." Cf. Alexander Dorner, Manuscript titled "Exposé über ein Institut für konstruktive Kunstgeschichte," undated, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Walter Gropius, Korrespondenz 1937-1969, D 975 - U 986/2. 82 making the endeavour "to brings things closer spatially and humanly" part of his program.222 It seems that Dorner understood the atmosphere surrounding the artwork as the physical space within which the viewer could perceive the material aesthetic of the artwork most intensely. This atmospheric space included the interrelations between painting, framing, and wall colour and required the curator "to display the artwork in such a way that it exerts the greatest possible emotional effect," Dorner prescribed.223 Dorner’s atmospheres then can be described as essentially spatial and intense in character. This is supported by Gernot Böhme, who observes that atmospheres "pour out over everything, they tinge the entirety of the world or of a sight, they make everything appear in a certain light, they concentrate a multiplicity of impressions in one general feeling."224 To approach atmospheres, he proposes two distinct perspectives: one focuses on the perception of atmospheres, which occurs primarily via "originary affect," that is empathically; the other draws on an analysis of their production, for which practical expertise can be found in scenography, interior design and advertising, Böhme suggested.225 It is from the latter, the observation of the practical endeavours of these fields, that Dorner draws his inspiration, rather than theoretical models as will be shown in the analysis of his reorganisation of the museum spaces.226 From a historic perspective, it is important to distinguish between Dorner’s concept of "Atmosphärenraum" and the relatively better-known model of the "Stimmungsraum" explored by Wilhelm Bode in the Berlin Museums.227 Often loosely translated as "period room" rather than "mood room," the Stimmungsraum is an established display typology in museum studies

222 Walter Benjamin, "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit," in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 479.

223 Dorner, "Was sollen heute Kunst-Museen?."

224 Gernot Böhme, Atmosphäre. Essays Zur Neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 102-3.

225 Ibid., 208.

226 It should be noted that many of the artists and architects who were working in the fields of advertising and commercial art and who were known to Dorner at the time, were influenced by the idea of atmosphere as the space of the invisible that was transcended by waves of energy and other forces. Their work can be seen as an effort to capture and direct these invisible forces. This is certainly the case for El Lissitzky, who worked on campaigns for Hannover stationary manufacturer Pelikan, but also Moholy-Nagy’s work for theatre stage sets and his light-space modulator. These avant-garde ideas find their origin in the scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century that shaped new ideas about the interrelations between physical and psychological forces. Cf. Marina Warner, "My Airy Spirit," in Vorträge aus dem Warburg-Haus, Vol. 9, eds. Uwe Fleckner et al. (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005), 71-74; Linda Dalrymple Henderson, "The Image and Imagination of the Fourth Dimension in Twentieth-Century Art and Culture." Configurations 17, no. 1 (1990): 131-60.

227 Wilhelm Bode’s interest in the intense integration of painting, sculpture and architecture is exemplified in his arrangement of the Cinquecento gallery at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in 1904 where floor, ceiling and wall finishes were modelled on the precedence of Florentine high-Renaissance style. Cf. Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880-1940, 91. 83 and usually entails the arrangement of historically-charged art objects in pseudo-historic environments that aim at a truthful reconstruction of historic spaces that correspond to the prevalent historical style of a period.228 In distinction, Dorner’s notion of "Atmosphäre" represented a distinct break with the concept of "Stimmung." His choices were unrelated to the preferences of period interiors (although sometimes these coincided).229 Instead, he abandoned attempts of historical registration in favour of an interpretive history that calcified around the experiential structure of the individual rooms and their compound effect along the museum itinerary. Consequently, the distinguishing feature between atmosphere room and period room is to be seen in their relations with the artworks and the viewer: whereas in the atmosphere room the material aesthetic of the environment of which the artworks formed an integral part was foregrounded, in the period room, the materials were a function of the background which supported the artworks. To summarise, it can be noted that Dorner’s atmosphere rooms no longer aimed to convey the sensations of spaces where art works might have been originally displayed (aristocratic residences, churches etc.) as was customary in period rooms. Rather, his rooms intended to illicit sensations that spatially mediated the experience inherent in a period’s Raumbild by means of a material display language.

Colour as Activator

On a substantially larger scale than his reframing efforts, Dorner used room-specific wall colours to create the subjective setting against which all other elements were to be staged. Steeped in a uniform hue, the colourfully appointed rooms were intended to intensify the effects imparted by the artworks and reflected what Dorner regarded as the latest developments in museum design. Dorner requested 400 m2 of new wall screens for this undertaking and also he used these screens to hide unsightly hanging rails that were replaced with discrete fixings or wires.230 This eliminated unsightly distractions and allowed him to keep the coloured walls bold and simple (see figs. 2.2+2.3). By organizing spaces and artworks as harmonized displays, each period or style was formally represented as a unified and distinct atmosphere. Apart from the formalizing function of colour, Dorner assigned an activating

228 Cf. Berit Schweska, "Museum Constructions of Reality due to Stimmungsräume," Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften (ÖZG) Special issue on Historische Wirklichkeitskonstruktion und künstlerische Gestaltung im Museum, no. 1 (2007): 91-114.

229 Cf. Monika Flacke-Knoch, "Das Museum in der Weimarer Republik: Alexander Dorner im Provinzialmuseum Hannover," in Beiträge zur deutschen Volks- und Altertumskunde, ed. Jörgen Bracker (Hamburg: Verlag Hamburger Museumsverein, 1986/1987), 135.

230 Alexander Dorner, Letter to the Landesdirektorium, 21 February 1923, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.1, 330. 84

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Fig 2.2 Provinzialmuseum Hannover: Room for Flemish Baroque Art before its re-organisation (early 1920s). Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

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Fig 2.3 Provinzialmuseum Hannover: Room for Flemish Baroque Art before its re-organisation (ca. 1925). Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

85

effect to it and wished to employ it as a sensory aid for the instruction of inexpert viewers, whilst at the same time acting as a provocation for the expert:

A more passive attitude is seen in galleries where works of art are allowed to "speak for themselves" through being placed, in all their wealth of stylistic variety, against neutral backgrounds. This treatment is more satisfying to the scholar or specialist, who often resists intrusion of a museum director’s philosophy, than it is to the general public, which welcomes such intervention as a help towards understanding. But the work of art isolated by its neutral background is a fish out of water. The more passive the attitude, it appears, the more likely the museum to revert to the uniform enfilades of the academic galleries.231

It can be assumed that he was familiar with the widely-discussed artistic and scientific colour theories at the time: Malevich’s suprematist palette; Kandinsky’s colour theory; Ewald Hering’s opponent theory with its four elementary colour sensations or psychological primaries; and Wilhelm Wundt’s colour cone with its psycho-physiological colour transition from yellow to blue (from liveliness to rest).232 Against the application of rigid scientific models stood the importance Dorner assigned to his own role as a visionary and expert interpreter of art and culture. Dietrich Helms points out that Dorner was aware of the risk inherent to his personal interpretations and the criticism this might earn him from art historical circles, but he insisted that, at a pinch, dissent was also a means of activation, and that was preferable to passivity.233 Helms highlights that Dorner’s idea of a participatory aesthetics did not solely rely on consensual or top-down mediation of cultural knowledge, but equally invited dissent as a form of productive engagement – and maybe this was inevitable if he wanted to address the often conflicting requirements of his diverse audiences. Whilst Dorner appeared to prefer his personal interpretation for matching colour with spatial perception, he did so not without care. To stress the value that Dorner assigned to the reception of his displays, it must be pointed out that he frequently requested feedback from visitors about the effectiveness of his curatorial interventions. In a letter addressed to poet and critic Theodor Däubler, who had visited the remodelled museum rooms, Dorner enquired about the perceived success of his aim "to pull out the organisation of the rooms and in

231 Cauman, Living Museum, 83.

232 Cf. Stephen Gage, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (London: Thames & Hudson 1993), 171.

233 Dietrich Helms, "Die Zwanziger Jahre in Hannover," Das Kunstwerk 17 (März 1964): 12. 86 particular their colour from the usual neutrality, and make them actively support the feeling of the respective art period." 234 In the same letter, he also somewhat apologetically conceded that his enquiry might remind of a commercial company testing a new product. Clearly, Dorner consciously projected commercial attitudes onto art and was aware that this might be regarded critically by some of his peers.235 For Dorner, without any doubt, the staging of objects ascended in importance over the qualities of the objects themselves – a tendency that emerged in commercial displays at the time. As Janet Ward points out, the Weimar display window was highly organised whereby every element of the display space was painstakingly analysed and subordinated to the scripting of a total performance in which the goods where subjugated to the overall image of the display. This performative arrangement gaged height, depth, width, materials, colour, surface texture, and architectural detail against field of vision, peripheral vision, viewing in passing or promenading.236 In other words, we witness a reorganisation of the material world according to the psycho-technical laws of perception and desire. These glassy displays were, as Walter Benjamin stated, free of aura and mysteriousness and reflected changes in the valorisation of short-lived sensations over tradition and experience that he saw as symptomatic for post-world war Germany.237 There is substantial evidence that the exceptional importance Dorner assigned to colour and display exceeded his esteem for art objects. In 1922, when he drafted the criteria for the reorganisation, he succinctly stated that the plan for the colour distribution across the gallery spaces determined which paintings were to be selected for display – those that did not fit the atmosphere and colour concept of the room were simply "out of the question," he advised.238 In his acquisition strategy, the colour scheme also prevailed at the expense of the art works: Selecting paintings to complement the colourful environment rather than the reverse, Dorner

234 Alexander Dorner, Letter to Theodor Däubler, Berlin-Wilmersdorf, 26 March 1927, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.55/68 No.163/2.

235 Dorner assigned equal cultural importance to both art and economy – a fact that bears witness to his close ties to the Bauhaus and in particular to his close friend and Bauhaus director Walter Gropius. Cf. Stanislaus von Moos, "Modern Art Gets Down to Business," in Herbert Bayer: das künstlerische Werk 1918-1938, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1982), 94-95.

236 Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), 216.

237 Cf. Walter Benjamin, "Erfahrung und Armut," in Illuminationen. Ausgewählte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977), 291-96.

238 Dorner, Untitled typescript, 7 December 1922, 300. 87 was known to have rejected paintings because their colours were deemed "too dark" for their intended location within the museum.239 The use of colour in the context of exhibitions was not unusual at the time, and Monika Flacke suggested that it is possible that Dorner was inspired by comparable efforts at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg by Max Sauerlandt, who had introduced colour to represent a period’s predominant attitude towards life.240 The colourful appointment of the Hamburg rooms intended to translate the specific weight of the period’s spiritual timing (geistige Zeitabstimmung) into immediate sensory experience. Thus, medieval art was shown against a dark blue background, accentuating religious seriousness, and Baroque art against deep red brown to emphasize its splendour. In these instances, correspondences between Sauerlandt’s and Dorner’s respective colour schemes can be observed. According to Cauman, Dorner used deep purple and darker colours to evoke the warm overall tone of the low-lit mystic spaces of medieval churches, and deep red velvet to convey the "deeper levitational quality" of Baroque.241 In other instances, substantial differences can be detected, particularly in their respective treatments of rooms for Renaissance art, where Dorner used cool whites and greys to represent its sober, geometric character,242 which contrasted with Sauerlandt’s use of an energetic, golden yellow to represent manly, worldly joy.243 Colour was a popular didactic tool at the time, but it is in its deployment as part of an overall mediation strategy that important differences in intent and method between Dorner and Sauerlandt can be detected.244 Dorner’s main theoretical concern lay in the mediation of the spatial concepts underlying the paintings and other artworks that reflected enviro-cultural relations. In that, he differed from Sauerlandt’s spiritually inspired approach that regarded art as the result of the artist’s "urge to plastically shape inexpressible feelings" to which Sauerlandt assigned a larger

239 Alexander Dorner, Letter to G. Pfaffrath at Galerie Pfaffrath Düsseldorf, 4 August 1925, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.50, 332.

240 Flacke-Knoch,"Das Museum in der Weimarer Republik," 145, note 95; and Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 94. It should be noted that Dorner was aware of numerous museum reorganisations that deployed colour (for example, the Städel in Frankfurt am Main) and made reference to these in his program. See previous footnote (203).

241 Cauman, Living Museum, 88-89.

242 Ibid., 89.

243 Klonk, Spaces of Experience, 94.

244 Julian Scholl argues that at the beginning of the twentieth century the colourful decoration of walls in German museums assumed a didactic rather than representational role. Cf. Julian Scholl, "Funktionen der Farbe: Das Kronprinzenpalais als farbiges Museum," in Museumsinszenierungen: Zur Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums - Die Berliner Museumslandschaft 1830-1990, eds. Alexis Joachimides et al. (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 206-208. 88

"symbolic significance for the feeling of an epoch."245 Whilst Sauerlandt’s plans for the addition of fragrances and classical music might have provided an initial inspiration for Dorner (Dorner proposed Bach concerts to be held in the medieval exhibition rooms in his 1924 re- organisation program), he soon moved on to the more pragmatic idea of introducing radio broadcasts transmitted by loudspeakers to popularize the museum.246 Dorner’s striking arrangements of a few paintings against a continuous colour surface created a saturated ambiance that pervaded the room allowing the visitor to experience an immediate image of an art period. This idea of providing the visitor with immediacy is evident in Dorner’s resolve to minimize distractions so that nothing would disturb the overall impression of the space. All elements of the room were subordinated to the atmospheric image. Black linoleum floors minimized the reflection of daylight and improved acoustics. Simple custom-designed benches and chairs executed in a dark colour visually merged with the linoleum floors (fig.2.4). Designed as low as possible and positioned at the centre of the rooms at maximum distance from the paintings, these furnishings minimized any interference with the viewing experience. Thus the entire horizontal plane was dematerialised and in its blackness almost receded from appearance. In the vertical plane, windows were covered with opaque curtains in wall colours to regulate the light, avoid glare and keep out distracting views to the outside world as much as possible, so that the latter would not compete with the paintings.247 Curtains were also installed in door openings to separate rooms with different art styles or to emphasize historic changes. Between rooms with art from related styles curtains were omitted in order to convey continuity. Most importantly, these curtains demanded the viewer’s activity in that they had to be drawn open to enable movement. More than simply book marks at the end and beginning of art historical "chapters," the door curtains enforced Dorner’s systematisation of narrative, spatial movement and activity.248

245 Max Sauerlandt, Emil Nolde (Munich: K. Wolff, 1921), 11.

246 For a reference relating to the installation of loudspeakers, see Flacke-Knoch, "Das Museum in der Weimarer Republik," 125. Dorner had initially envisaged events with music and had suggested small Bach concerts in the rooms for medieval art. See Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 427-28.

247 For some of the rooms, protective window curtains were required to avoid light damage to sensitive exhibits, for example, textiles on loan by the Dukes of Cumberland, whose representative expressly requested protective measures. See Kammerherr v.d. Busch to the Landesdirektorium, 3 November 1924, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.2, 81. However, it should be noted that the Provinzialmuseum did not have electricity at the time and opening of curtains would have been necessary under low daylight levels. See Cauman, Living Museum, 90-91.

248 The opening and closing of curtains or doors is a highly effective means of emphasising differences in curatorial concepts, themes or narrative as the author observed during a December 2011 visit to the Bode Museum in Berlin, where doors still separate many of the rooms. 89

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL

Fig 2.4 Provinzialmuseum Hannover: room for Classical Art after its re-organisation with a low, black leather couch at the centre (ca. 1925). Reproduced by permission of Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover – Landesgalerie.

Fig 2.5 Illustration of the Plan of the Art Department on the first floor of the Provinzialmuseum Hannover after the re-organisation (1925). Illustration by author based on an original plan.

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With the manipulation of wall surfaces and openings, Dorner attained complete control over the exhibition environment, permitting him to implement an experiential structure that attempted to direct the emotional responses of the viewer. But emotional engagement alone was not sufficient; in fact, it would have served to reinforce modes of romantic art reception with modern means. Ultimately, Dorner’s goal was to transform the museum into a school for democracy that instigated intellectual insights into human cultural development and in turn, lead to better understanding of the issues and opportunities of everyday life in the nascent Weimar Republic. And therefore, even if his efforts to stimulate the visitor’s perceptual apparatus with striking spatial scenarios seem enormous, they are insubstantial without Dorner’s subtle and clever linguistic manipulations that transfigured experience and emotional engagement into reflective thinking and critical understanding.

Back and forth – Atmospheric Experience and Intellectual Prompts

Remarkably, Dorner’s endeavour to keep wall colouring "simple" within the room was countered by his ambition to achieve the highest possible colour diversity between individual rooms to keep the audience mentally alert and avoid boredom along the 45-room itinerary (fig.2.5).249 It was the visitors’ attention and thoughtfulness, to which Dorner assigned prime importance. To attain this, the atmospheric environments of the gallery spaces were punctured with Dorner’s engaging rhetoric, which appeared in a variety of formats, variously directing the viewer’s attention to objects, reminding him what he had just seen, making links, highlighting transformations, or in less subtle ways, jolting him out of illusory or immersive experiences and back into the present. These often barely noted linguistic devices are what made the actual spectacle of Dorner’s museum experience possible by offering resistance to the one-dimensional bathing in atmospheric environments. Through rupture, Dorner sought to create a sequence of well-defined and critically illuminated experiences. Dorner’s guidebooks, posters, and notes opened up a critical dimension that asserted his own voice and expertise as an integral part of the mediation experience. As a primary measure, factual information in the form of labelling was introduced which indicated every artwork’s provenance, content and style - a small intervention that nevertheless formalized the collections as a unified body of work. Cauman reported that these labels were printed on coloured paper to match the respective wall colours in order to be as inconspicuous as possible. "Placed on the wall at eye level," the visitor could "read along with little effort,"

249 Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 420-21. 91

Cauman asserted.250 This is surprising given that Dorner’s 1924 program for re-organisation outright opposed wall labels between paintings, cautioning that these would entirely destroy the harmonized overall impression of the rooms. Even worse, the visitors would be constantly forced to very rapidly switch between empathic engagement and rational discernment so that the effect would be confusing and neither form of reception could be fully effective. Brief factual information about individual artworks was to be provided on small signs discretely mounted on the art objects themselves (frame or pedestal), Dorner instructed, and photographs taken after the reorganisation confirms this.251 Additionally, more extensive information material about the respective period was to be made available only before the visitors were about to enter the next room. In the typescript of his 1924 program, Dorner explicitly underlined the section referring to the provision of information sheets within the openings of the exit doors. "The summary text for each style must be carried out at the end, after the visitor has acquainted himself with the respective style-period, and before he enters the space of the next art period," he wrote.252 According to Dorner’s directives, larger information sheets were to be mounted within the door reveals between rooms for that purpose. Standing in the door, still captivated by the spectacle of sensory impressions, the viewer was forced to reflect back upon his experiences, Dorner imagined, but now in light of the information provided on the sheets. If reflection represented a principal agency of acquiring knowledge, it found its counterpart in the mental conditioning of the viewer for what lay ahead. In addition to information sheets, Dorner installed small, coloured posters with slogans in the door openings that addressed the viewers directly and gave instructions to prepare them for the subsequent room (see fig.2.6).253 Together with the door curtains that separated different rooms as discrete environments and that had to be drawn open to leave or enter, the posters and information sheets would have prompted the viewers’ consciousness of being in the present.

250 Cauman, Living Museum, 93.

251 Photographs of the gallery spaces after the re-organisation show that small frame-mounted labels as described in Dorner’s 1924 program were the norm. Only when works had no frame or pedestal, labels were mounted on the wall.

252 Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 420.

253 Cauman mentions this poster text as the last page of a colourful "gallery book" that replaced an earlier guidebook and provides a very lose translation of the poster text that translates the German bedenken (consider) as get up, thus conflating physical activity with mental engagement. See Cauman, Living Museum, 93. In contrast, a more recent exhibition catalogue identifies this text as an example of a poster hung into the door openings of the atmosphere rooms. See Ines Katenhusen and Renate Reuning, "Ausstellung - Überwindung der ‘Kunst’ 1 Dezember 1993 bis 13 Februar 1994," in Überwindung der ‘Kunst’ - Zum 100. Geburtstag des Kunsthistorikers Alexander Dorner, eds. Ines Katenhusen Ines and Renate Reuning (Hannover: Alexander Dorner Kreis and Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1993), 27. I have followed the latter and used the original German text here, which I translated. 92

Fig 2.6. Alexander Dorner (mid-1920s) Poster fixed in doorframe between exhibition rooms. Illustration by author.

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By pulling them out of the atmospheric experience of the exhibition room, and demanding consideration of what lay behind and ahead, Dorner enforced reflexive thought and intellectual closure as well as intellectual attentiveness. The short poster slogans intermitted the "sequential locomotion" necessitated by the consecutive arrangement of rooms and offered a form of immediate reading that was informed by the format and popular language of mass media rather than art historical terminology.254 The direct address of the viewer and the appearance of Dorner’s name underneath the poster text, almost imparted the impression that Dorner was speaking to the visitor in persona, asserting his presence and expertise. Similarly, the critical catalogue of the elitist art temple was replaced by decidedly populist guidebooks in small, portable and user-friendly formats. Generously illustrated, these guides were made available to the visitors throughout the museum and represented a vital, easily legible counterpart to the visitors’ viewing experience. The exhibits within each room served as a starting point for the narrative and were explained in their style and relation to developments in other arts such as architecture. Their practical purpose, religious significance and economic context would equally form part of the information and Dorner envisaged that this facilitated comparison with other periods.255 If the atmospheric arrangements of the gallery spaces provided a sequence of highly differentiated and at times deliberately contrasting experiences, the guidebooks were instrumental in making these experiences comprehensible. To eliminate any potential feelings of ambiguity, the texts made the visitors aware of the intended juxtapositions in creating historical links between rooms that housed related art, but at the same time setting other rooms apart to amplify regional variations of styles and stylistic innovations. For example, directly upon entering the first room of the art collections, the viewers were alerted to the antagonistic relationship of Antique and Romanesque art in metaphoric language: "With the memory of a Greek marble statue, we enter the Romanesque hall (1); here we are face to face with a spirit that relates to antiquity like fire to water."256 And similarly, the fundamental differences supposedly found in regional variations between Dutch and Flemish Baroque art were evoked together with the contrasting colours and atmosphere of the respective exhibitions spaces: "When we move from the red

254 Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 43.

255 In his introduction to an edition of Johann J. Winckelmann’s writings, Dorner described his own idea of art historical development as "wave-like" because "it oscillates between similar polarities again and again, and continually upward because it becomes progressively more complex and rich." Cited in Flacke-Knoch, "Das Museum in der Weimarer Republik," 133.

256 Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover, Part I, 2. 94 room of the Flemish into the light grey room of the Dutch, we come from a magnificent festivity to a silence that is solemn but not gloomy. There are rarely more striking contrasts, and yet both are Baroque."257

Presence of another, of self, and of material

To summarise and better comprehend the effects of Dorner’s linguistic and material manipulations, a more qualified understanding of the term "presence" seems important. Another’s presence, presence of self, and presence of material are three reference points for understanding how the experiential structure of the Dorner’s exhibition model is constructed. These points represent organisational systems as much as levels of engagement through which the exhibition forms its didactic structure. At the Provinzialmuseum, the visitors received the impression that they intermittently encountered the presence of another: this is the presence of the curator - Dorner. In this context, Paul O'Neill noted a development in 1920s exhibition making from the "curator as carer," whose presence remained largely invisible to the audience, towards what I would call the "curator as expert mediator," who assumed a "more central position on a much broader stage."258 This is precisely what Dorner did. He stepped out of anonymity to appear to the audience as an expert authority who navigated the visitor through cultural knowledge.259 As demonstrated earlier, his presence as a mediator occurred across several levels: in his guidebooks, Dorner repeatedly spoke in the third person plural, taking the viewers by the hand and asserting his co-presence; with posters, Dorner addressed the viewers imperatively and unexpectedly, causing a small shock or surprise to triggered the viewer’s consciousness of being in the present; and with informal notes left on paintings, Dorner intimated both that he had been there and the sharing of what appears to be his intimate knowledge. A similar effect was achieved by the regular changes of the hangings. In particular of contemporary works, which Dorner borrowed for short periods from artists for temporary display.

257 Dorner, Amtlicher Führer durch die Kunstsammlungen des Provinzial-Museums Hannover, Part II, 7.

258 Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 9. O’Neill’s distinction echoes the sentiment of Karl Hermann Jacob, Director of the Prehistoric and Ethnographic Collections at the Provinzialmuseum, who very much understood museums as places for safe-keeping. See previous Footnote (13).

259 It should be stressed that whilst museum directors might have largely remained anonymous to the general public, they were well-known to experts and benefactors. Museum reformers such as Wilhelm Bode cultivated public relations with the educated German elites to attract funding, loans and prestige. Cf. Dorothee Wimmer, "Bremen – Berlin – Weimar: Cooperation between German Art Collectors and Museum Directors c. 1900." Journal of the History of Collections 21, no.2 Special Issue: The art collector-between philanthropy and self-glorification (2009): 206-8. 95

The manipulative power of Dorner’s mediation becomes most evident when he abuses it. In 1933, he rewrote the texts for the rooms containing modern art to align his art history with Nazi ideology.260 Apart from changing the official position of the museum with these formal texts, he also asserted his personal voice using the same small notes which previously provided his expert commentary, but now to censure artists, as Kurt Schwitters noted, not without bitterness.261 The second important reference point is the presence of material, which can be understood as the physical arrangement of the exhibition. Dorner’s aestheticisation of the reality of the exhibition as atmosphere rooms is fundamentally a matter of material aesthetics. In other words, Dorner built the exhibition experience upon the extensive presentation of materiality which neither consisted in form nor style but found its place in space and the atmospheric – a phenomenon that Gernot Böhme observed about material aesthetics more generally.262 Dorner’s material aesthetic (colour, framing, furnishings, lighting) did not grow from the visitor’s material study or tactile experience with material but was sensed atmospherically. Böhme explains this succinctly: "We feel the presence of the materials in so far that we find ourselves in a particular fashion when in their presence."263 This particular fashion of being in the presence of the exhibition’s materiality was unfolded by Dorner across several planes, which he described in his article "Was sollen heute Kunstmuseen?" (What is the purpose of Art Museums today?). The first plane is the proximate subject-object relation between viewer and artwork, marked by an anticipated emotional intensity. In the Baroque rooms, for example, this intensity is instigated by the erosion of boundaries between subject and object through the skilful manipulation of the relationship between painting, frame and wall, as I described earlier. The second plane is the material presence of the exhibition room: the height, width, length of its walls, floors and ceilings; the texture and colour of its surfaces; the organisation of furnishings, artworks, labels and posters; and lighting and technical equipment – in short, the setting in scene of the exhibition itself and the stage management of the viewer as integral part of it. In anticipating the spatial synchronisation of viewer and exhibition, Dorner sought to achieve total homogeneity that resulted in "a feeling of stability

260 Ines Katenhusen, "Ein Museumsdirektor auf und zwischen den Stühlen - Alexander Dorner (1893-1957) in Hannover," in Kunstgeschichte Im "Dritten Reich": Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken, ed. Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters and Barbara Maria Schellewald (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), 162-163.

261 Ines Katenhusen, "1937 – 2007. Auf Spurensuche in Hannover" (Lecture given at the Sprengel Museum Hannover 06 October 2007), 3. Katenhusen, Ines. "1937 – 2007. Auf Spurensuche in Hannover" (Lecture given at the Sprengel Museum Hannover 06 October 2007), 1-14.

262 Böhme, Atmosphäre, 51.

263 Böhme, Atmosphäre, 54. 96 and calm."264 The third plane is an alternation of the first two planes, which shaped the basic experiential structure. Dorner’s clever staging of atmospheres as exhibition environments manipulated the consciousness of the viewer and finds its equivalent in the world of commercial aesthetics. As Böhme more recently observed, "the aesthetic of the world of goods only differs from the presentation of materiality in art in the first instance only so far that it the former abides by the trivial identification of aesthetics and the beautiful."265 Correspondences between art and commercialism not only informed Dorner’s ideas about the materiality of the exhibition but also about the prescription of specific modes of reception.

A Transformative Mode of Art Reception

Critics observed a fundamental conflict in Dorner’s curatorial model: on one hand, the audience’s empathic identification with an epoch precluded the possibility of a continuous consciousness along the itinerary; on the other, it was precisely the cognition of a historic continuity that Dorner sought to evoke with the realization of a concept of historic development. The empathic identification pursued in the atmosphere rooms is seen as the reflection of a romantic consciousness that cannot be reconciled with the enlightenment- influenced concept of a developmental history pursued in the museum itinerary.266 These tensions between empathic identification and immersion on one hand and rational recognition of historical change and awareness of reality on the other, I suggest, are the actual innovation of Dorner’s curatorial ethos. In conditioning the viewer to move between various forms of consciousness and art reception, Dorner seems to respond to what could be described as museum flâneurism. In fact, it could be argued that he invented his own particular brand. Flâneurism was described by Walter Benjamin as a past time of the leisure classes and a product of the nineteenth century arcades. For Benjamin, it entailed a journalistic component, that is to say a target-oriented mind-set that could lead to reflection and reaction – a kind of investigative flâneurism. In distinction, Gernot Böhme described another form of flâneurism, which can be characterised as the uninvolved viewing of the exhibition environment as a detached image.267 This type of

264 Dorner, "Was sollen heute Kunst-Museen?"

265 Böhme, Atmosphäre, 52. On Dorner‘s commercial orientation and his cooperation with Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer and Moholy-Nagy amongst others, see also von Moos, "Modern Art Gets Down to Business."

266 Flacke-Knoch, "Das Museum in der Weimarer Republik: Alexander Dorner im Provinzialmuseum Hannover," 137.

267 Böhme highlights that Walter Benjamin’s descriptions of the flâneur focus on external appearance, and Benjamin’s anchoring of flâneurism in journalism proposes a functional orientation of consciousness. Böhme 97 consciousness is based on two preconditions: firstly, the viewer remains dispassionate and at a distance from what he has seen, and secondly, the viewer is not expected to act.268 Here we have two paradigmatic forms of reception; the first related to investigation, the second related to leisure. Both have their own form of being in the present, but whereas in the first, the experience could be potentially transformative, in the second, it remains inconsequential. Following this logic, Dorner can be seen to have combined both forms of reception to great effect: allowing the viewers to freely "rove" around the atmosphere room, he afforded them the freedom to form an open-minded image based on their impressions; but upon leaving, their free-floatation was countered with the invitation to "consider," as Dorner’s poster so succinctly instructed. At this point, Dorner stimulated an investigative mentality in the viewer that potentially lead to their (re)action and potential transformative experiences. To recapitulate, Dorner did not believe that linguistic explication restricted the genuine potentiality of artworks and led to a reductive, pre-mediated reception by the audience, but that it was precisely at the interface between words and objects that powerful ideas unfolded. This conviction was at the heart of his curatorial practice. Importantly, he saw the integration of image and word, to which he aspired, realised in commercial art. For him, the poster was an early example of "a product of free enterprise," which demanded "a stirring appeal to the emotions" and reflected the "cooperation of Enlightenment and Romanticism" in a form of intensified integration.269 The importance he assigned to commercial art forms is reflected in his collection of advertising posters.270 Beatrix Nobis highlighted Dorner’s double-edged approach to curating when she referred to his curatorial model as a "useful Gesamtkunstwerk" that acknowledged the "perils of the object," knowing that visibility and legibility are not the same.271 This "useful" display paradigm was not only inspired by the integration of word and image in the poster, but more generally oriented towards popular art forms that had begun to manipulate modern materials and formats to psychological ends: architecture, commercial display, graphics, and advertising. contrasts this model of the flâneur with the dispassionately roving protagonist in Natsume Sosēki’s Graskissenbuch (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1996). Cf. Gernot Böhme, Bewusstseinsformen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2014), 90.

268 Ibid., 91-92.

269 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 122.

270 Records show that Dorner requested prints of a large-scale poster he had seen on a Litfassäule (advertising column) from a local advertising company for his museum collection. Alexander Dorner, Letter to Dr. Edler of Edler & Krische, 27 November 1927, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann. 152 Acc. 2006_013 Nr. 55, 376.

271 Beatrix Nobis, "Das nützliche Gesamtkunstwerk – Alexander Dorner und El Lissitzkys ‘Raum der Abstrakten," in Überwindung der ‘Kunst’ - Zum 100. Geburtstag des Kunsthistorikers Alexander Dorner, eds. Ines Katenhusen and Renate Reuning (Hannover: Alexander Dorner Kreis and Sprengel Museum Hannover, 1993), 83-84. 98

Drawing the full register of inventions and insights from related disciplines, Dorner can be seen to orchestrate the exhibition as a performance. Bold block colour, integration of space, art object and text, direct address of the viewer in texts, and minimization of secondary elements, were all visual phenomena with which visitors were increasingly familiar through the everyday experience of the sensory spectacles and overstimulation provided by advertising, neon signs and the commercial displays of businesses and department stores. Dorner seemed to draw these elements together and reorganised them towards a focused and meaningful experience that stood in contrast to the random visual excess of their original scenarios.272 Dorner’s ambitious museum management thus made recognizable links to the language of consumerism, engaging viewers to highly calculated ends. Looking back at this strategy later in his life, Dorner would observe: "I can see quite clearly today that my innovations, which involved the arrangement of objects, lettering, etc., were designed to introduce the concepts of modern science into the humane study of art history."273 Whilst his methods do not represent a single system, but rather a lose coalescence of ideas, experiments and personal beliefs, what they share is the central idea of a participatory aesthetic, that is an aesthetic that is accessible, meaningful and, in its ultimate consequence, potentially life-changing.

Dorner’s Curatorial Ethos

In a subtle and clever way, Dorner used a variety of techniques to stimulate intellectual involvement and to more permanently change the consciousness of his audience. "A walk through the art collections of the museum," Dorner advised the reader of a catalogue, "unrolls the almost complete development of art from the year 1000 up until our day, and in beholding the artworks, we experience the great transformations that have occurred in such profound ways."274 At the end of the forty-five-room itinerary, the visitor was expected to clearly recognize the processes of historical transformation and feel incited and "morally compelled to productive activity in the present."275 It is evident that Dorner hoped to effect larger social

272 Leo Colze’s discussion of the stylised displays of Berlin department stores highlights their transformative impact on the appearance of the urban environment. See Leo Colze, Berliner Warenhäuser (Leipzig: 1908), 9-13. Uwe Spiekermann sees department stores as intrinsically connected to a wider network of places of modernity, where everyday activities where turned into spectacles. See Uwe Spiekermann, "Das Warenhaus," in Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, eds. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005), 209.

273 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 17.

274 Dorner, Meisterwerke aus dem Provinzial-Museum in Hannover, 9.

275 Excerpt from an introduction to a catalogue of the Provinzialmuseum cited in Cauman, Living Museum, 205. Translation based on German Edition: Cauman, Samuel. Das lebende Museum: Erfahrungen eines Kunsthistorikers und Museums-direktors: Alexander Dorner. Hannover: Fackelträger, 1960. 99 transformations that went beyond mere art historical instruction: his new museum practice sought to intellectually and psychologically stimulate visitors to contribute to the life of the new German republic. In that, the museum was recast as an instrument for social change that prompted visitors to leave behind their traditional role as recipients of culture and assume the role of active participants and contributors to the cultural life of the emerging democracy. The capacity to consciously position oneself as part of a historical development played an important part in this activation process, Dorner proposed. In his article "Was sollen jetzt Ausstellungen" (What is the purpose of Exhibitions now), published in Das Neue Frankfurt in 1930, Dorner suggested that art exhibitions of old masters could be reactivated for the present if reframed by a new philosophy, then "they could help to explain our present position in the course of historical development and the significance of present controversies." Such insights could them have the effect of " a liberation or an incitement, and in this way exhibitions can generate productive forces useful for our community."276 Their explanatory value, he would add later, fostered a wider understanding of a shared cultural history that could direct "our conduct of all life, artistic and otherwise" and function as a potential "life-improving factor."277 This task could not be fulfilled with a one-off re-organisation alone but required a constant and ongoing effort on the part of the museum and its staff. Dorner understood that the traditional practice of minimizing changes in exhibits largely ignored the audience and had led to their alienation. To attract both an elitist circle of benefactors and experts, but also wider strata of society with no previous interest in art, he was convinced that a constant change of exhibits, special exhibitions, events and lectures was required to attract and engage a broad spectrum of visitors on an on-going basis. Alternation and variety, as Dorner stated in his program for the re-organisation, were of great importance for a large museum in order to avoid boredom and communicate with audiences.278 At an intellectual level, alternations motivated comparisons and critical judgment, and, in generating a more profound rather than a cursory understanding of historic developments, they countered what Dorner saw as the tendency amongst museums to submit to prevailing fashions and tastes.279 The lively participation strategy pursued by Dorner, facilitated a kind of sensory-intellectual participation that sought to awaken audiences from the lethargic adulatory mode of reception induced by

276 Alexander Dorner, "Was sollen jetzt Ausstellungen," Das neue Frankfurt: Internationale Monatsschrift für die Probleme kultureller Neugestaltung 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 144.

277 Dorner, The way beyond Art, 17-18.

278 Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 427.

279 Ibid. 100 the traditional presentation styles. In that regard, Dorner’s participatory aesthetics recast traditional assumptions about the reception of art as either rational (via distanced contemplation) or empathic (via immediate experience). Most importantly, Dorner highlighted the museum’s responsibility to prepare new audiences towards active participation in a democratised culture.

Dorner’s Reception

In the preceding analysis, I have concentrated on Dorner’s programmatic agenda for the re- organisation of the Provinzialmuseum and his democratic aspirations.280 Despite the fact that some of his innovations have only been partially implemented, as for example, the posters which were hung in the doorways, and that other ideas were realised only later after his emigration to the U.S.A., for example, the introduction of audio material, the reception of his curatorial work in Hannover was overwhelmingly affirmative. Particularly, the reviews of local and national newspapers were almost exclusively positive – a fact, as Ines Katenhusen revealed, owed much to Dorner’s excellent social networks and contacts to the German press.281 An article that appeared in the Hannoverischer Anzeiger 12 December 1929 particularly lauded Dorner’s initiative and his active engagement with the public, acknowledging the Provinzialmuseum’s effectiveness as an educational institute:

In contradistinction to many other museum directors, who – probably through a lack of initiative and sense of responsibility – deemed it beneath themselves, to consciously engage the audience, Dorner energetically and systematically worked towards ripping the art collections out of their literal museal lethargy and turning an almost dead educational institute into one that was alive and proved effective for its time. By means of lectures, courses and regular guided tours provided for free or as good as free, he has successfully realized the insightful thought to make the museum useable for the public.282

Although there are no detailed visitor records, personal correspondence from eminent German museum directors, art historians and artists collected by Dorner (and edited to his

280 For a discussion of his museum work in the U.S.A., see Curt Germundson, "Alexander Dorner's Atmosphere Room: The Museum as Experience," Visual Resources 21, no. 3 (September 2005): 263-73; and Cauman, The Living Museum, 125-196.

281 Katenhusen, „Zwischen Lob und Tadel," 75.

282 Cited in Katenhusen, "Ausstellung," 10. 101 advantage) reflect the perceived success of his re-organisation work.283 This is not surprising - Dorner was a cross-bencher participating in progressive private initiatives in the contemporary art world on one side and the more conservative, historically-oriented institutional world on the other.284 His personal and professional engagement embraced the full spectrum of

Hannover’s cultural life: As a close ally of avant-garde artists (El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, Hans Arp, Walter Gropius), one-time president of the internationally-oriented Kestner Gesellschaft, board member of the Hannover Kunstverein,285 Professor at the Technical University of Hannover, and Director of the Provinzialmuseum, he was in a pivotal position to instigate dialogue and effect change within Hannover’s art world by synthesizing the often incompatible agendas and objectives of highly diverse interest groups. Not unlike contemporary curators like Nicolas Bourriaud, Dorner sought direct engagement with the artists of his time on the design and organisation of exhibition spaces for contemporary art at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover, most notably with El Lissitzky on the design of the Raum der Abstrakten, and later with László Moholy-Nagy on a design for a Raum der Gegenwart (Room of the Present). Chapter two has shown that more important than the collaborative efforts, for which he is so frequently cited today, was his relentless search for "spatial design that appealed to the emotions."286 As one of the first museum directors to collect and exhibit contemporary art, he insisted that its inclusion in the Provinzialmuseum required a simultaneous rethinking of the exhibition environment in order to overcome what he saw as a disconnect between dynamic modernist concepts and the formality of the neo- Renaissance spaces.287 Dorner had initially approached Theo van Doesburg to model a room for abstract art. However, van Doesburg’s proposal for coloured glass windows was put on

283 Dorner assembled excerpts from letters and newspapers reviews which testified to the quality of his curatorial work at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover. Cf. Sammlung Urteile, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 1.3, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

284 Ines Katenhusen points out that Dorner seemed willing to change his political orientation to further his own interests and he even applied for membership of the National-Socialist Party in 1933, but his application was rejected. Ines Katenhusen, "Ein Museumsdirektor auf und zwischen den Stühlen," 160.

285 The Hannover Kunstverein was founded in 1832 as an association of well-respected citizens for the "advancement of the plastic arts through expansion of participation in the same as well as encouragement and support for artists" as stated in the first charter. www.kunstverein-hannover.de/ueber-uns/kunstverein- hannover.html, accessed 11 August 2012.

286 Dorner, Internal Communication, 15 October 1924, 420.

287 Maria Gough proposes that Dorner misunderstood the dematerialising effects of Lissitzky’s demonstration room as correspondent to the effects of the art contained within when he reinterpreted it as part of his historic development of spatial conceptions from the illusory space of the Renaissance pictorial space to the infinite space of abstract art. Cf. Maria Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume," in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk Berlin Moscow, edited by Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 108. 102 hold by Dorner in 1925 - for financial reasons, as Dorner explained in a letter.288 More likely, as Dietrich Helms recounted is that Dorner was not content with van Doesburg's proposal. "Doesburg added only one more work of art to those already existing, namely stained glass windows," Helms recounted, "Dorner, however, looked for a new milieu in which abstract compositions could function."289 By 1926, it seems, Dorner had found a solution when he saw Lissitzky’s Raum für Konstruktive Kunst at the Dresden Internationale Kunstausstellung in 1926 and commissioned him to adapt the concept for Hannover.290 Dorner’s concern with advancing the design of exhibition environments found expression in a further endeavour to engage with artists on the design of museum spaces with the assignment of Moholy-Nagy to adapt his design for Salle 2 at the 1930 Werkbund exhibition for what was to become a Raum der Gegenwart (Room of the Present). As the latest development in art and thus the last room of the itinerary, the Raum der Gegenwart was envisaged to supersede the Raum der Abstrakten. If realised, this room would have no longer contained original artworks but only reproductions in the form of modern media (photography, film, graphics) and its exhibition design would have relied on the effects of colourful light projections, large-scale panoramic image strips and film – what we would call today a multi-media environments.291 Dorner's continuous search for appropriate exhibition designs, clearly demonstrates that for him, it was not sufficient to simply showcase contemporary art in the museum, or to engage with contemporary artists on exhibition designs. He assigned prime importance to corresponding physical frameworks that communicated the same concepts in space that were pursued by the artworks in the pictorial plane. Dorner’s insistence on correspondences between exhibition architecture and art objects sprang from his conviction that the "abundance of new phenomena across the most diverse areas of artistic creation" testified to a "changed imagination of space and material" – an imagination that had its roots in the

288 Alexander Dorner, Letter to Theo van Doesburg, 2 September 1925, Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Hannover, HSTAH Hann.152 Acc.2006_013 No.2, 365.

289 Dietrich Helms and Lydia Dorner, "The 1920's in Hannover: An Exhibition in Hannover, Germany." Art Journal 22, no.3 (Spring 1963): 144.

290 Dorner referred to the room initially as Raum der Abstrakten. After a certain time, the name Abstract Cabinet established itself. I use Raum der Abstrakten throughout the text, because the term room more adequately reflects Lissitzky's aspirations for a modern exhibition space, whereas the term cabinet implies a closer association with the Neo-baroque architecture of the Provinzialmuseum. See Alexander Dorner, "Zur Abstrakten Malerei (Erklärung zum Raum der Abstrakten in der Hannoverschen Gemäldegalerie)," Die Form - Monatsheft für Gestaltende Arbeit 3, no.4 (April 1928): 110-14.

291 For a detailed description of Dorner and Moholy-Nagy’s plans for the Raum der Gegenwart, see Jakob Gebert and Kai-Uwe Hemken, eds. "Der Raum der Gegenwart: Die Ordnung von Apparaten und Exponaten," in Kunst Licht Spiele: Lichtästhetik der klassischen Avantgarde, eds. Ulrike Gartner, Kai-Uwe Hemken and Kai Uwe Schierz (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009). 103 actualities of modern life.292 Whether abstract painting, sculpture, film or architecture - all were linked to "a new experience of reality," Dorner observed, and therefore contemporary artistic phenomena could not be presented in isolation but needed a correspondingly contemporary context.293 Sigfried Giedion’s review of the Provinzialmuseum applauded Dorner’s spatial transformation of the Provinzialmuseum, arguing that it demonstrated that "museums do not have to be dead affairs; it only depends on the hand that has the grasp to enliven the material."294 For Giedion, a radical rethinking of the nature of museum buildings was a necessary step and Dorner had been the first to take it. The increasing standardisation of museums along rigid architectural typologies which followed more or less Schinkel’s Altes Museum in Berlin, Giedion argued, could not be reconciled with the radical and dynamic concepts of the avant-gardes:

It is no longer sufficient to arrange objects in cultivated ways … We also demand from the museum what remains: The enlivening of art possessions! In the 19th century museums had easy game because the aesthetic value was appreciated in its isolation … Today, when these views are waning, we demand of all things a certain integration into life ... 295

Thus counter to the assertions of contemporary curators like Hans Ulrich Obrist, the importance of Dorner’s precedence for the museum exhibition only partly rested in his collaborative efforts. In fact there is very little evidence of a true collaboration between Dorner and Lissitzky. More importantly, as Giedion acknowledged, Dorner’s endeavour to continually add the most contemporary art and to continually rethink the manner of art mediation signified a shift in typology - from museum architecture to exhibition architecture, from the museum’s "nostalgic inclination to imbibe the past" to spaces of experimentation with materiality and perception, informed by science and industry.296 Beyond that, this approach also revealed a significant reversal of orientation: from looking at the past to anticipating the future. Whereas museums as an architectural typology were places designated

292 Dorner, "Die neue Raumvorstellung in der Bildenden Kunst," 35.

293 Ibid., 37.

294 Sigfried Giedion, "Lebendiges Museum," Der Cicerone 21, no.4 (1929): 106.

295 Ibid., 103.

296 Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Ferro-concrete, transl. J. Duncan Berry (Los Angeles: The Getty Center for the History of Art, 1995), 36. 104 for the eternal safe-keeping of artistic treasures, "exhibitions not only summarized the results of the development but they also anticipated it," Giedion discerned. Museum and exhibition not only had a different purpose, their respective architectures also conveyed a different sense of being in space: "in the history of exhibitions one can trace directly the transformation of the old static feeling of load and support into a new system of suspended equilibrium," Giedion further noted. 297 He recognised that the necessary material and spatial changes could be introduced "more easily for collections of contemporary art," but predicted that in future, "every public institute of this kind," would have to establish an "experimental laboratory," and with this he meant "a department that provides a stage for art movements that are currently discussed."298 As I argued in detail throughout chapter two, Dorner's association of artworks with the material context of the exhibition fostered a mutual enhancement designed to support connections between the conceptual space of art and the actual space of the viewer. In that, he recast the museum as a place of physical encounter rather than mystical absorption. Importantly, this was understood to be an encounter with art in the context of life and for Dorner this required an understanding of history. To conclude, this chapter provides a detailed analysis of Dorner’s curatorial strategy, its intended participatory and educational effects, which, as I argued, principally relied on his clever play with linguistic and material devices. What follows is the analysis of a later addition to the Provinzialmuseum, which stood at odds with the atmosphere rooms – Lissitzky’s 1927 design of a Room for Abstract Art, later known as the Abstract Cabinet. This room was part of a typology Lissitzky had developed for commercial art exhibitions and which he termed "demonstration rooms." In distinction to Dorner’s curatorial ethos, Lissitzky rejected the use of linguistic means favouring mediation via the "immaterial materiality" of exhibition environment – a curatorial concept that will be explored in the following chapter. While both men acknowledged the audience as a constituent part of their curatorial ethos, they did so in quite different ways.

297 Ibid., 120.

298 Giedion, Lebendiges Museum, 103. 105

106

CHAPTER 3

IMMATERIAL MATERIALITY: EL LISSITZKY'S DEMONSTRATION ROOMS

This chapter enters the discussion of material aesthetics in exhibition environments from a contemporary perspective, taking current curatorial discourse and its frequent references to early avant-garde exhibition models as a starting point. The most evident transformation within contemporary exhibition making is the staging of venues that offer alternatives to the modernist white-walled gallery space so ubiquitous today. Instead of a comprehensive survey, the chapter will focus on three key contemporary exhibition makers: Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Nicolas Bourriaud, and Liam Gillick whose combined rhetoric has now become default accessory for the framing of such venues. In this chapter their rhetoric is investigated through the lens of their practices - specifically, their use of materials for the presentation of contemporary art. In the surrounding discussions, the material aesthetics of their productions are alternately understood as historic and stylistic references, or as backgrounds, which are deliberately designed to appear aniconic. Amidst these contradictory assertions, the role of the exhibition architecture remains notably elusive. The second part of the chapter, examines precisely those avant-garde theories and exhibition models, which are frequently cited by contemporary exhibition makers to substantiate their claims, namely, the exhibition theories and practices that for the first time were formulated as a distinct field of enquiry by EL Lissitzky’s in his two demonstration rooms: The Raum für Konstruktive Kunst (Room for Constructivist Art) at the 1926 Internationale Kunstausstellung (International Art Exhibition) in Dresden and the Raum der Abstrakten (Room for Abstract Art) at the Provinzialmusem Hannover commissioned by its director Alexander Dorner in 1927. The emergence of exhibition theory in the 1920s was a development that was expedited by a growing understanding of materials: scientific insights into their composition, technological advances in their production, and an increasing awareness of their interrelations

107 with human beings opened up by psychology and aesthetics. As a response to these changes, a proliferation of material experiments sprung up in avant-garde art marked by the common ambition to probe the potential of materials to stimulate and broaden sensory perception. None of them were more dedicated to this cause than the Russian Constructivists who thematised these endeavours under the heading of faktura - an umbrella term that bracketed a wide spectrum of approaches to materials, ranging from rational, utilitarian to psycho- perceptual and aesthetic methods. Rather than attempt a survey of avant-garde theories and exhibitions, the chapter will trace the development of faktura in El Lissitzky’s proun project and examine the key implications of his theorisation of materials in the discussion of a landmark exhibition environment – the second of El Lissitzky’s demonstration rooms, the Raum der Abstrakten at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover. With the demonstration room concept, Lissitzky proposed an exhibition paradigm based on what he designated an "immaterial materiality," a concept that reformulated the principles for the construction of a new kind of "imaginary space" designed on the basis of materials and their perception by the viewer.299 The demonstration room proposed a material aesthetics for exhibitions that was mediational rather than representational or sustentative; but most importantly, it was an aesthetic informed by and oriented towards the audience. In summary, this second section traces the avant-garde fascination with materials in three correlating historical developments: its beginnings in painting with the application of actual materials in abstract art; its theorisation as a set of supra-disciplinary principles in the concepts of faktura and proun; and its spatial manifestation in Lissitzky’s exhibition design and his concomitant instituting of a discrete theoretical model for display that defined the interrelations between material, viewer and art. Using Lissitzky’s Hannover demonstration room as a case study, the chapter identifies an inventory of techniques and materials deployed for the construction of what has been considered the first relational exhibition environment. It intends to establish a platform for the discussion of trans-historical correspondences that can be detected in contemporary exhibition models – particularly those associated with relational aesthetics.

299 El Lissitzky, "K. und Pangeometrie," in Rußland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965), 129. The essay was originally published in Europa Almanach: Malerei, Literatur, Musik, Architektur, Plastik, Bühne, Film, Mode, auβerdem nicht unwichtige Nebenbemerkungen, eds. Carl Einstein and Paul Westheim (Potsdam: Gustav Kiepenheuer, 1925). In this text, Lissitzky used "K." as an abbreviation for "Kunst"(art) and "G" as an abbreviation for "Gestaltung" (design). Thus the English translation of the title is "Art and Pangeometry." 108

The Adaption of Avant-garde Exhibition Models in Contemporary Curatorial Practice

The past two decades have seen the early avant-garde’s laboratory paradigm and associated exhibition practices re-appropriated by relational art. Historically, the laboratory paradigm is linked to the experimental work of the Russian Constructivists in 1919-21 and their use of the laboratory metaphor reflected their desire to introduce a scientific dimension into artistic practices. This historic phase was marked by experimental, formal explorations that established the principles and goals for the subsequent productivist work of post-revolutionary Russia. In much of Western literature, as Maria Gough points out, the laboratory paradigm has been interpreted as an architectural aesthetic characterised by a "set of shared stylistic features (such as geometric clarity, abstract volumes, economy of material and surface homogeneity)" which were recast as an international artistic tradition.300 Thus laboratory work along with Constructivism is widely understood to include European artists such as Moholy- Nagy and Hans Richter who shared some of the socio-political goals and whose work displayed similar formal features. In the context of exhibition environments, the term laboratory designated spaces for artistic experimentation with materiality and perception rather than formal rooms for the presentation of historic art objects.301 In the context of contemporary European art venues, the metaphor of the "laboratory" has become synonymous with a tendency to stage situations that encourage social exchange in the form of meetings, collective engagement and other activities that represent an extension of the everyday world. Claire Bishop points out that in contemporary art the laboratory concept is generally understood to denote key themes such as environment, interactivity, and openness.302 Whilst a number of curators associated with the adaptation of laboratory-style practices have consciously re-appropriated avant-garde precedents to suit their specific aims, others have done so unknowingly or on a historically uninformed basis. When asked about the influence of avant-garde curatorial practice upon her recent projects, Maria Lind, former director of the Kunstverein München, concedes that

300 Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 9-10.

301 This shift in emphasis from the display of art in representational museum buildings to the staging of material experiments in temporary exhibitions is noted by Sigfried Giedion, Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete, trans. J.Duncan Berry (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Research Center for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1995), 120. Originally published in German as Bauen in Frankreich, Bauen in Eisen, Bauen in Eisenbeton (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928), 36.

302 Cf. Claire Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," October 110 (Fall, 2004): 52; Nicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction. (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2002), 9. 109

Most of us haven’t really been aware of these things and have partly re-invented the wheel again. On the one hand this is sad, on the other good not to know everything because that can inhibit you and create a lot of anxiety. However, I think we need to look more at these older projects. 303

If Lind regards her lack of historic awareness as partly liberating and partly ignorant, Hans- Ulrich Obrist consciously frames his curatorial approach as a re-evaluation of the avant-garde models. In an endeavour to differentiate himself from the formal "white cube" display model of mainstream institutions, he proposes that

the truly contemporary exhibition should express connective possibilities and make propositions. And, perhaps surprisingly, such an exhibition should reconnect with the laboratory years of twentieth century exhibition practice, unearthing the "repressed" history of experimental exhibition design provided by such people as Herbert Bayer, Marcel Duchamp, Walter Gropius, Frederick Kiesler, El Lissitzky, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy ... 304

Collaboration and interdisciplinary appear at the centre of Obrist’s agenda. Highlighting the need for "bridges to be built among artists, the museum, and a variety of scientific disciplines,"305 Obrist cites Alexander Dorner’s curatorial example and, in particular, his collaboration with El Lissitzky as a precedent for his own approach:

Alexander Dorner, who ran the Hanover Museum in northern Germany in the 1920s, defined the museum as an energy plant, a Kraftwerk: he invited artists such as El Lissitzky to develop new and dynamic displays for what he called the "museum on the move.306

The importance of Dorner’s exhibition paradigm is repeated by Obrist many times. In What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st Century?, 307 a publication that served as the

303 Maria Lind in an interview with Paul O’Neill. "Going beyond display - the Munich Kunstverein years," On Curating, no. 9 (2011): 40.

304 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, "Battery, Kraftwerk and Laboratory," in Words of Wisdom: A Curator’s Vade Mecum on Contemporary Art, ed. Carin Kuoni [New York: Independent Curators International, 2001), 128.

305 Ibid., 128.

306 Ibid., 127.

307 Jérôme Sans and Marc Sanchez, eds. What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century? (Paris: Palais de Tokyo, 2002), 5. In the introduction, the co-directors of the Palais de Tokyo, Jerome Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud, state that they intended this publication as a forum to all those who "dream of institutions that are different: venue-laboratories, places of adventure, open to all questions, contradictions, risks, "seeking answers from "certain 110 theoretical framework of the Palais de Tokyo, Obrist summarises his vision for the future art institution simply as: "THE MUSEUM AS TIME STORAGE, KRAFTWERK AND LABORATORY (Alexander Dorner revisited)".308 In a subsequent publication, Obrist amplifies Dorner’s importance to contemporary art more generally with the slogan "ESWD (Everything started with Alexander Dorner)."309 The reference to Dorner testifies to Obrist’s desire to validate his own practice through historic precedence. The legitimacy of Dorner’s curatorial position and that of artists such as El Lissitzky, whom Obrist also frequently cites, is strategically recast to align with the models of contemporary artistic production and theory with which Obrist is involved – those practices which Bourriaud groups under the rubric of "relational aesthetics" and subsequently under "postproduction" art. In Postproduction, his follow-up publication to Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud observes a tendency of "re-working" existing models amongst a group of contemporary artists, which he summarised under the heading of postproduction. This concept explains artworks "created on the basis of pre-existing works," whereby artists "interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products."310 Hal Foster distinguishes between two particular approaches to "reworking" in his critical examination of these contemporary works: the first, he suggests, can be understood as "an informal probing into a specific figure, or event in history or politics, fiction or philosophy," as in the work of Liam Gillick, and Thomas Hirschhorn; and the second is to be seen as "somewhere between a public installation, an obscure performance and a private archive," a characteristic that Foster identifies in Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Rirkrit Tiravanija’s work.311 Seen in this light, Obrist’s probing of Dorner and the proposed "unearthing" of Lissitzky’s avant-garde exhibition designs neatly aligns with the informal practices of the artists with whom he frequently collaborates. Paul O’Neill observes that Obrist interest might be related to his desire to connect "curatorial innovations from the past to his own curatorial practice" and to position himself "as their logical successor," rather than an intellectual interest in raising

protagonists of contemporary art and culture" with regards to their expectations from the art institution of the 21st century. It seems worth noting that there is a certain irony in the fact that the authors sought answers from those traditionally involved in the production of art - curators, artists and other creative professionals - but not the general public whose participation they purport to desire.

308 Hans-Ulrich Obrist cited in ibid., 9–10.

309 Hans-Ulrich Obrist, "Preface: Participation lasts forever," in Did someone say participate? An atlas of spatial practice, eds. Markus Miessen and Shumon Basar (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 14.

310 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 13.

311 Hal Foster, "Chat rooms," in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 190. 111 awareness of historical examples.312 Indeed, Obrist appears to reinvent the past through the lens of his own contemporary practice, for example, when he maps his own efforts to overcome the white cube display model onto Dorner’s display strategy. According to Obrist, Dorner intended "to transform the neutral white cube in order to assume a more heterogeneous space" in order to overcome the "pseudo-neutral space of the nineteenth century which was still prevailing."313 Yet the "white cube" display model, from which Obrist claims Dorner wished to differentiate himself, was not common in the nineteenth century, when colourful displays such as Dorner’s atmosphere rooms were de rigueur rather than the exception.314 If Hans-Ulrich Obrist and others have "re-worked" the avant-garde’s laboratory paradigm by enmeshing it with current debate and practice, they have done so by tactically appropriating parts of previous concepts to suit their own agenda. What they have not fully taken into account is material experimentation and its vital role in producing interactivity and relationality - a central programmatic point of Dorner’s and the avant-garde’s exhibition-as- laboratory model. It is this aspect of contemporary and early avant-garde exhibition design that will be investigated in this chapter.

Nicolas Bourriaud: The Exhibition as a "place like any other place"

The majority of contemporary works produced under relational and post-production practices converge on strategies of interactivity and audience participation set in laboratory-style venues. Architecture and its material conditions seem to form a significant part of the curatorial ethos of such stagings, as Claire Bishop notes in her examination of the Palais de Tokyo - the former Japanese Pavilion of the 1937 World Fair that was converted into a contemporary art venue in 2002 under the co-directorship of Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérôme Sans. The aesthetics of its stripped, unfinished walls played a significant role in the reconceptualisation of the exhibition building from a "white cube" model to an "experimental

312 Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 41.

313 Sans and Sanchez, What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century?, 9-10.

314 In the 1920s, white museum walls such as Peter Behrens’ off-white textile screens for the Deutsche Jahrhundertausstellung at the Nationalgalerie Berlin in 1906, were still uncommon. The use of white walls in art institutions only established itself in the 1930s. For a discussion of the origins of the white walled display model in German museums, see Julian Scholl, "Funktionen der Farbe. Das Kronprinzenpalais als farbiges Museum," in Museumsinszenierungen: Zur Geschichte der Institution des Kunstmuseums - Die Berliner Museumslandschaft 1830- 1990, eds. Alexis Joachimides, Sven Kuhrau, Viola Vahrson, and Nikolaus Bernau, (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1995), 206-8. 112

‘laboratory,’" Bishop notes.315 The unfinished character of the interior was not only a key aspect of the building’s curatorial concept but also designated the nature of the art that it was intended to accommodate: open-ended, temporary works with interactive aspects that produce social encounters intended to compensate for the fragmentary effects of modernity and mass media. Rather than seeing it as a desire to enhance the informality of relational art works, Terry Smith regards Bourriaud’s stripping of the Palais de Tokyo’s interior as an attempt to generate a likeness to event sites of the most contemporary kind - "a concrete warehouse or abandoned factory of the kind used for raves."316 In laboratory-style exhibitions, the "spaces meant for the performance of everyday functions (playing music, eating, resting, reading, talking) become artworks, objects," Bourriaud further suggests.317 In other words, "the meaning of the exhibition is constituted by the use its ‘population’ makes of it," and in the process, the spaces themselves are temporarily transformed from architecture to art though their particular use.318 In this totalising tendency that merges everything into a single scenario, Smith catches a glimpse of "a Gesamtkunstwerk," which he translates in more contemporary terms as "an analogy to a glam-rock show."319 This description resonates with Sans and Bourriaud’s branding of the Palais de Tokyo as a "venue-laboratory."320 Imagined as "an open stage somewhere between décor, film set, and information centre," the co-directors regard the exhibition no longer as "a medium in and of itself" but as "a place of production like any other," that is situated within the "vaster systems of production" (see fig. 3.1).321 Palais de Tokyo’s architecture, its materiality, its raw walls and make-shift aura represent a designed ordinariness that supports the equally ordinary social activities that are scheduled to unfold against its background. This architectural indistinctiveness is intended as a digression from the formality of the modernist white-cube – a common ambition amongst contemporary curators.322 Architectural informality is deployed to

315 Bishop, "Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics," 51.

316 Terry Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating (New York: Independent Curators International, 2012), 129.

317 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 47.

318 Ibid.

319 Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 131.

320 Sans and Sanchez, What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century?, 5.

321 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 69-71.

322 Walter Grasskamp notes that the term "white cube" became a synonym for a specific modernist display aesthetic after it was first used by Brian O'Doherty in a series of essays published in Artforum in 1976, which were later published as Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Santa Monica: Lapis Press, 1986). Yet, as Grasskamp points out, central questions regarding the origins of the white-walled exhibition space remained 113 liberate the exhibition space from any formal association with a specific building typology, thus allowing it to accommodate all kinds of functions that are outside the norms of what would be acceptable in a conventional museum or a gallery. Along with the venue, the visitor, too is recast as some kind of art adventurer as is indicated on the Palais de Tokyo's homepage, where it presents itself as "a territory offering present-day explorers the modest but crucial opportunity to sample the pulsation and flavours of what is emerging."323 The space of the exhibition forms "an integral part of a vaster ensemble: public space," Bourriaud proposed.324 Terry Smith noted that artists associated with Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics chose to stage their exhibitions "in whichever settings seem most appropriate," be it "at a remote site (Jeremy Deller)" or "in brand-space (Huyghe and Parreno)."325

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Fig.3.1 A place like any other - Internal views of the Palais de Tokyo, published on its homepage, accessed 22 March 2014, http://palaisdetokyo.com/en/general-informations/palais-de-tokyo.

unaddressed in O’Doherty’s work. See Walter Grasskamp, "The White Wall - On the Prehistory of the ‘White Cube,’" On Curating, no. 9 (2011): 78-90.

323 "Palais de Tokyo," general information on the Palais de Tokyo's official website, accessed 22 March 2014, http://palaisdetokyo.com/en/general-informations/palais-de-tokyo.

324 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 71.

325 Smith, Thinking Contemporary Curating, 129. 114

When returning art to the museum, this attitude necessitates the transformation of gallery space into "just one potential place amongst others where an exhibition might be staged," Smith further explained. Thus the museum or the gallery are "reworked" as intentionally aniconic backdrops for spectacular scenario-based events. Yet this everyday aesthetic comes not without problems. Amy Verner's review of the reopened Palais de Tokyo noted an amorphous conjunction between construction site and installation art. "A massive suspended sculpture by Peter Buggenhout, incorporating twisted bits of metal and other industrial materials, appears as if it's a remnant from the construction, preserved for posterity," she noted at one instance.326 This vagueness between construction in progress, architectural aesthetic, and art was latent throughout, as Verner observed: "walls are still unpainted and it was unclear whether a pile of timber, cordoned off by caution tape, was rubbish or an art installation" (see fig. 3.2).

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Fig.3.2 Internal views of the Palais de Tokyo after its reopening published in Wallpaper (18 April 2012).

326 Amy Verner, "Paris' Palais de Tokyo reopens," Wallpaper (18 April 2012), online version, accessed 22 March, 2014, http://www.wallpaper.com/architecture/paris-palais-de-tokyo-reopens/5749#62075. 115

Ann Lacaton, one of the building's architects, observed that the building itself might provide experiences that would be of equal value to those of art, expressing the wish "that after every exhibition, it would become empty and then recomposed again."327 The problems inherent in this vagueness were highlighted by Jacques Rancière, who warned about un-intelligibility in "the blurry zone between art and other spheres." In order to remain critical, he observed, art must make connections and "negotiate the tension that pushes art toward ‘life’ and which, conversely, separates aesthetic sensoriality from other forms of sensible experience."328 The blurring of spheres, however, seems to be of little concern to the Palais de Tokyo's directors, who welcome its indistinctness, advertising it as "a place that was born from its contradictions, is inhabited by them and has grown up among them."329

Liam Gillick: The Exhibition as Material Reference or Decorative Backdrop

The perception of the exhibition environment as a non-spectacular background also marks the work of British artist Liam Gillick, a frequent collaborator of Bourriaud, Sans, Obrist and Lind. Gillick uses materials and architectural elements that reference the universal modernism favoured in corporate interiors, lobbies and commercial architecture. His use of materials such as "plexiglas, steel, cables, treated wood, and coloured aluminium," was interpreted by Bourriaud as a forging of connections between "the project of emancipation of the avant- gardes and the protocol of our alienation in a modern economy." 330 According to Bourriaud, these connections prompted the viewer to reflect on a range of potentially conflicting environments. Emphasis on materials as referents of historic and contemporary scenarios was also underscored by Marcus Verhagen who regarded Gillick’s structures as instructive prompts for reflection. Despite titles like Discussion Island: Project Think Tank, Dispersed Discussion Structure, and Prototype Conference Room, which foreground interactivity and interpersonal engagement, Marcus Verhagen read these works "not as the settings for new encounters but as partial images that call to mind a range of other moments and environments," implying that

327 Interview with Ann Lacaton by Amy Verner, ibid.

328 Jacques Rancière, "Problems and Transformations in Critical Art (2004)." in Participation, ed. Claire Bishop (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 84.

329 "Palais de Tokyo," general information on the Palais de Tokyo's official website, accessed 22 March 2014, http://palaisdetokyo.com/en/general-informations/palais-de-tokyo.

330 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 58. In fact, Gillick has accepted invitations to design the same structures that he references in his work: an ornamental façade screen for the entrance of the Home Office London (2002–2005), a tasteful interior for the Whitechapel Gallery Café titled Adjustment Filter (2002) and Fitting Room (2004), a design for the Dior Homme Shanghai store, are just three examples amongst similar commissions. These projects are discussed in Liam Gillick and Lilian Haberer, eds., factoriesinthesnow (Zürich: JRP Ringier, 2007). 116 these material fragments invite the viewer to reflect (rather than simply interact) and therefore in addition to their function as background or stage set, also fulfil a didactic function.331 Along similar lines, Bourriaud highlighted that Gillick’s "archaeology of capitalism" manipulated non-primary materials, in other words, materials that are already imbued with meaning:

It is no longer a matter of elaborating form on the basis of a raw material but working with objects that are already in circulation on the cultural market, which is to say, objects already informed by other objects. Notions of originality (being at the origin of) and even of creation (making something from nothing) are slowly blurred in this new cultural landscape marked by the twin figures of the DJ and the programmer, both of whom have the task of selecting cultural objects and inserting them into new contexts.332

The materials of "postproduction practice" are existing objects which are re-contextualised, whereby aspects of originality and invention are side-lined in favour of creating stage sets for reflection and collective engagement. Gillick himself stated that his interest in "the politics of the built environment" focused on the "moment of early dynamic capitalism when people started replacing fundamental materials, using plastic instead of glass, say, or aluminium wall structures rather than wood."333 Yet his concern was less about "appropriating found objects, nor in using basic, fundamental materials, like stone or glass," he explained. Rather, he was captivated by the "incomplete" state of some materials:

LIAM GILLICK: I am not interested in appropriating found objects, nor in using basic, fundamental materials, like stone or glass, but I often use partly-made, partly finished things, like Plexiglass. I like to work with additive elements – cladding, wall paint – the means of surface alteration … 334

Gillick’s attraction to processes of addition and surface modifications indicates that his material constructs sometimes do not "necessarily function best as an object for consideration

331 Marcus Verhagen, "Conceptual Perspex," in Meaning Liam Gillick, eds. Monika Szewczyk, et al. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009), 52.

332 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 13.

333 Interview with Liam Gillick in Liam Gillick: Renovation Filter: Recent Past and Near Future, eds. Catson Roberts, and Lucy Steeds (Bristol: Arnolfini Gallery 1999), 10.

334 Ibid. 117 alone" but simply acts as a "backdrop or décor rather than a pure content provider." 335 His attitude towards materials almost represents an antidote to the modernist prioritisation of visuality and perfection: firstly, any potential iconic value ascribed to materials is countered with the accentuation of their de facto banality – they are architecturally insubstantial add- ons, superficial extras, and thus optically receding from the visitors’ attention; and secondly, the part-finished state of some materials is understood verbatim and presented as an opportunity "to test out some ideas" within "a laboratory or workshop situation," where only partly-made material opens up possibilities for the audience to participate in a process of continual interaction with the work.336 The repeatedly emphasized banality of materials – their status as décor, add-on, backdrop – is used to distinguish relational and postproduction practices from previous art movements, which at times used the very same material palette but in an iconographic, or critical manner. As Bourriaud explicated:

From Pop art to Minimalist and Conceptual art, the art of the sixties corresponds to the apex of the pair formed by industrial production and mass consumption. The materials used in minimalist sculpture (anodized aluminium, steel, galvanized iron, Plexiglas, neon, and so on) reference industrial technology and particularly the architecture of giant factories and warehouses. The iconography of pop art, meanwhile, refers to the era of consumption and particularly the appearance of the supermarket and the new forms of marketing linked to it: visual frontality, seriality, abundance.337

But if the art of the sixties exposed the political dimension of materials and their deployment by capitalist powers as a means of control - as for example Dan Graham’s exploration of glass, mirrors and steel in his sculpture/pavilions which functioned as "an analogue to the surrounding city," and relied on "’cinematic special effects" - in postproduction concepts, materials are staged as so commonplace that they become almost invisible.338 As Gillick commented on the function of his work - "if some people just stand with their backs to the work and talk to each other," then this is fine for him, too (see fig. 3.3).339

335 Liam Gillick, The Wood Way (London: Whitechapel, 2002), 84.

336 Gillick, Renovation Filter, 16.

337 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 85.

338 Dan Graham, "Two-Way Mirror Cylinder Inside Cube and Video Salon: Rooftop Park for Dia Centre for the Arts," in Two-Way Mirror Power, ed. Alexander Alberro (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 166.

339 Gillick, Renovation Filter, 16. 118

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Fig.3.3 View of Liam Gillick's A diagram of the factory once the former workers had cut extra windows in the walls, 2004/2005, powder coated steel.

By way of concluding this section, it is worth noting that although the material context of the exhibition is not explicitly accentuated in contemporary curatorial and artistic practice and theory, it is possible to discern that it nevertheless plays an important role in the staging of art experiences: curatorial strategies and art works involve quasi-architectural systems that constitute an integral part of the viewers’ art experience. Regardless of their diverse functions, whether as deliberately an-iconic backdrops, historical references to architectural typologies, or fictional scenarios, they are architectural formats that are recognisable as part of the wider network of familiar places such as factories, kitchens, or warehouses and can be clearly recognised as distinct from the formality of museum or gallery spaces. The contemporary interest in pre-existing material and strategies of appropriation differ from the early avant- garde precedents that are cited as a frequent reference. El Lissitzky and Dorner’s work was informed by constructivist concepts of materials, which emphasized interrelations between materials, the physical world and people. These considerations were captured in the Constructivist concept of faktura, a term that was equally subject of theoretical speculations as well as practical experimentation.

119

Faktura: The Constructivist’s Re-conceptualisation of Materiality

The Constructivists' concern for faktura as a design principle can be seen as a notion that brought together the arts and other forms of creative production on the basic premise of a shared understanding of materials. By linking ephemeral elements such as light and colour with industrial materials, the Constructivists fundamentally redefined the notion of materiality under the heading of faktura. The term faktura considered sensory aspects of materials and their effects on the human unconscious en par with physical qualities and their functional and economic logic. This dual emphasis drew upon the major scientific insights of the time. In physics, the discovery of electromagnetic waves, the electron and the atom all had offered a radically changed image of matter and space and promised insights into a superior reality outside immediate sensory perception.340 In the areas of physiology and psychology, Wilhelm Wundt’s psycho-technical laboratory in Dresden, Ivan Pavlov’s physiological laboratory in Leningrad, and Freud’s psychoanalytical experiments opened up insights into the interrelations between the material world and the unconscious mind. The potential implications of these findings on art and architecture were soon tested in avant-garde projects, and particularly those of the Constructivists, for example, in Nikolaj Ladovskij’s Psychotechnical Laboratory for Architecture founded in Moscow 1926.341 The first appearance of the phrase faktura can be traced to an article titled "Faktura" in David Burliuk’s futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (1912). Only one year later, Mikhail Larionov formulated the theoretical premises for his new style of painting in his 1913 Manifesto of Rayonists and Futurists. Abandoning any attempts to create objects that represented reality, Larionov’s Rayonist paintings directed the viewers’ attention to the actual substance of painting instead. The subject and matter of painting, according to Larionov, consisted in its colours – their various combinations, saturation, depth and surface texture. The optical effects achieved by the materiality of the paint, Larionov argued, gave "the sensation of existing outside of time and space," an impression to which he alluded as "the fourth dimension."342 A profound knowledge of the laws of colour enabled the painter to

340 The influence of scientific discoveries on both the collective and artistic imagination is discussed in Linda Dalrymple Henderson, Duchamp in Context - Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1998), 203.

341 Nikolaj Ladovskij was Lissitzky's close friend and collaborator. His experiments are discussed in detail in Margarete Vöhringer, Avantgarde und Psychotechnik: Wissenschaft Kunst und Technik der Wahrnehmungsexperimente in der frühen Sowjetunion (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007), in particular, the book section titled "Ladovskij’s Psychotechnisches Labor für Architektur," 35-50.

342 M.F. Larionov, "Luchism" in Oslinyj Khvost i Mishen, ed. Munster (Moscow, 1913), 13-15. Cited in Magdalena Dabrowski, "The Formation and Development of Rayonism," Art Journal 34, no.3 (Spring, 1975), 200. 120 control the surface qualities of paint, its faktura, which stimulated the senses of the viewers and mediated enhanced impressions based on reality of the material.343 Substantiating Rayonism on scientific knowledge, Larionov suggested that the surface of the paint produced the reality of coloured light. Paint as a material was transformed to become both medium and content. With these pseudo-scientific allusions, Larionov clearly differentiated his painting from previous styles, which to his mind, were essentially representing the world of objects rather than meaning in themselves. In the following years, more experimental approaches emerged in Constructivist paintings which moved away from the medium of coloured paint altogether and instead constructed surfaces with actual materials to achieve a higher degree of surface variation and plasticity. Ordinary, industrially-produced materials such as metal, glass, nickel, textiles and paint were methodically explored across an extensive range of fields including architecture, painting, sculpture, industrial design, photography and film. If Larionov dedicated himself to exploring new styles of painting, a new generation of Constructivists, amongst them Lissitzky and Rodchenko, contributed to its erosion by engaging in forms of material experimentation, which disregarded medium specificity and unreservedly integrated other forms of creative production from the fields of industry, craft and media. This task required the formulation and testing of distinct principles and methods. Of equal importance to the physical properties of these materials, were their perceptual qualities because these could be manipulated to convey meaningful experiences by stimulating the viewer's sensory perception. The main objective behind these endeavours was to bring art into life by forging meaningful connection points with the cultural and social values of modern mass society to ultimately overcome the representative material language of imperial Russia and Germany that was only culturally relevant to the educated elites. In their enthusiasm for advanced materials and technology, the Constructivists set themselves apart from Larionov's concept of Rayonsim and Malevich’s Suprematism, which they regarded as primarily concerned with aesthetic and formal questions. Herbert Schuldt explained the crucial distinction between these earlier styles and those that followed. The practical extent that Malevich assigned to his works was limited to an increased familiarity with potential artistic concepts and his architectural models were about ideas and intellectual

343 With respect to scientific models that might have informed Rayonism, Magadalena Dabrowksi cited Larionov’s early interest in French Impressionism and the colour theories and optical research of Helmholtz and other scientists. Dabrowksi, "The Formation and Development of Rayonism," 205. 121 values, Schuldt discerned.344 In distinction, the new generation of Constructivists (Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy and others) took a decidedly more realistic stance: they were interested in materials and production processes that lead to the development of models with a realistic potential for application. If Malevich was still mainly concerned with the visual and artistic qualities of easel painting, his followers introduced a tactile dimension into painting by using material fragments - a first step towards their subsequent endeavours to expand the virtual space of painting into the actual space of architecture. The logical consequence of this spatially-oriented practice was a clear distinction between the technical device of facture in traditional painting and faktura as an understanding of a new material-based artistic practice. In a text written in 1916, Nicolai Tarabukin declared material as the focal point of all artistic activity and outlined the artistic principles and competencies required for the Constructivists’ spatio-material practice:

The form of a work of art derives from two fundamental premises: the material or medium (colours, sounds, words) and the construction, through which the material is organised in a coherent whole, acquiring its artistic logic and its profound meaning. Consequently, the notion of form should be understood as the real structure of the work, its structural or compositional unity ... The material dictates the forms, and not the opposite. 345

Margit Rowell notes that in this definition of faktura, material is understood both as medium and production technique: the artist had to acquire an advanced sensibility for materials – a material logic that required intellectual capacities in place of the traditional artist’s craft and manual skill. 346 Along similar lines, Benjamin Buchloh registers the quasi- scientific and systematic manner with which faktura was theorized and pursued in Constructivist art. 347 For the Constructivists, the term faktura referenced the integration of aesthetic criteria based on psycho-perceptual insights and functional criteria derived from material properties and corresponding production processes. This integrated logic superseded the masterly stroke of the ingenuous hand as the core competency of traditional easel

344 Herbert Schuldt, "El Lissitzky's Photographische Arbeiten," in El Lissitzky, eds. Wieland Schmied and J.Leering (Eindhoven: Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, 1965), 29.

345 Nikolai Tarabukin, Le Dernier tableau (Paris: Editions Champ Libre, 1972), 104. Cited in Margit Rowell, "Vladimir Tatlin: Form/Faktura," October 7, Soviet Revolutionary Culture (Winter, 1978): 91. Rowell notes that Tarabukin’s original text was written in 1916 and published in 1923.

346 Rowell, "Vladimir Tatlin," 91.

347 Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," October 30 (Autumn, 1984): 87. Buchloh maintained Tarabukin’s definition of faktura remained essentially valid throughout the period of laboratory constructivism. 122 painting. Over the course of the Constructivist period, the importance of material in painting shifted from a signifier of the craft person or artist’s individual style and manual dexterity to a manifestation of a material’s physical and aesthetic properties. Faktura, Maria Gough summarises, in this sense can be seen as a "broadly modernist conception of art as a mode of production rather than expression."348 Whilst the Constructivists were not the first to explore new means of artistic expression based on sensory effects - they were preceded by the synaesthetic experiments of Kandinsky and František Kupka - Buchloh credits them for being the first to develop a discrete and rationally structured artistic language.349 However, the particulars of this language proved difficult to be agreed upon.

Utilitarian and Psychological Aspects of Faktura

Whilst the significance of faktura as a principle of production in Constructivist work was generally undisputed, the degree to which aesthetic and utilitarian criteria were to be calibrated was by no means understood consistently. Christina Lodder points out that in this respect, a precise definition of faktura was highly contended within Constructivist circles, particularly in discussions evolving around the interrelations between material, form and function.350 In this context, Victor Margolin describes a polarisation of positions around two central directions that evolved from Kasimir Malevich’s idealist Suprematism on one hand, and Vladimir Tatlin’s production art and engineering-inspired counter-reliefs on the other hand.351 These positions were also acknowledged by Alexei Gan in 1922. Summing up the artistic efforts that had occurred in the first two decades of the twentieth century in the leftist "intellectual- material production," Gan identified two "vague but nevertheless persistent tendencies" towards industrial production: firstly, texture "as a form of pictorial display for visual perception," and secondly, "constructional laws as a form of surface resolution."352 This experimental phase of artistic activity included "suprematists and abstractionists, and nonidealists" and their main achievement, according to Gan, consisted in their transcendence of "traditional art’s aestheticising professionalism" which represented a "dead end." 353 The

348 Gough, The Artist as Producer, 12.

349 Ibid., 87-88.

350 Christina Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art 1914-1937 (London: The Pindar Press, 2005), 280-81.

351 Victor Margolin, The Struggle For Utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 12-13.

352 Alexei Gan, "Constructivism," in The Tradition of Constructivism, ed. Stephen Bann, trans. John Bowlt (New York: Viking Press, 1974), 41. Originally published as Konstruktivizm (Tver: 1922).

353 Ibid., 42. 123 challenge ahead lay in effecting the transition towards a production-oriented phase which aimed at the "purposeful realization of the new tasks of artistic activity in the field of emergent Communist culture," Gan announced.354 In other words, the early artistic endeavours of supremacist and abstract art had to be channelled towards a production-oriented art committed to the advancement of the Communist state. Gan described a three-stage development from intellectual ideas about materials, colour and surface (suprematism and abstraction) towards their practical investigation in experimentation with real materials (constructivism) and finally the application of the innovative principles elaborated in these experiments in the design of useful things (productivism). What precisely established usefulness, however, was a topic frequently raised in discussions at INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture, Moscow) in 1921-22 and the related question about which aspects of materials should determine the design of objects remained a controversial issue. The different voices heard in these deliberations reflected a variety of technological, psychological or socio-economical positions that covered the spectrum between conceptual idealism and functionalist utilitarianism.355 In one of these debates, as Lodder reported, Alexander Rodchenko insisted that the design of an object should be based upon its intended function and he consequently demanded that one had to begin with the purpose of the object which for him meant a design’s appropriateness for everyday use. This pragmatic stance is revealed in his manuscript "The Line," commissioned by INKhUK in 1921. In it, Rodchenko highlighted not only a vital shift in painting from skilful craft to scientific technique, but in distinction to Tarabukin’s earlier definition of faktura, he moved artistic production decidedly closer to industrial production by explicitly introducing mechanical and engineering aspects:

The craft of painting is striving to become more industrial. Drawing in the old sense is losing its value and giving way to the diagram or the engineering drawing. Faktura in painting is being forced out by mechanical techniques … which make it possible to analyse colour, form and material scientifically. 356

Many of Rodchenko’s colleagues did not support his distinctly utilitarian approach. Architect Alexander Vesnin, for example, agreed that a move towards industry was important, but

354 Ibid.

355 Buchloh highlights the transition from faktura and related material and pictorial concerns, to factography and its focus on objective registration and montage. This transition represents a paradigmatic change that aligned artistic production to industrial production and mass audiences, he observes. Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," 95.

356 Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art 1914-1937, 280-81. 124 underscored the importance of considering psychological aspects as an essential part of Constructivist practice. In his Credo, delivered at INKhUK in April 1922, he outlined his understanding of "usefulness" by presenting an alternative model:

It is unimportant whether the object is useful (tselesoobraznyi) and utilitarian (like engineering structures and everyday objects), or only useful (as laboratory work for the task of solving the problem of new contemporary form). Every object created by a contemporary artist must enter life as an organising force, organising man’s consciousness, influencing him psychologically and arousing in him an upsurge of energetic activity ... Since the construction of every object consists of an exact combination of basic plastic elements (material, colour, line, plane faktura – the treatment and resultant texture of the surface) the study of these elements must be given priority by the artist. I view all these elements as materialised energy, as possessing dynamic properties (movement, tension, weight, speed) which must be effectively regulated by the artist.357

Vesnin suggested that the "psychological and physiological action of a thing on the human consciousness" was the organisational basis of all design and therefore material and form of an object could not be arbitrarily changed without destroying its effective operation.358 Inscribed in the object was a "materialised energy," which consisted in an equilibrium of potential psychological effects and physical properties - a symbiotic relationship that that could be designed to create predictable links between materials and human beings.359

Proun – A Material Vocabulary for a Techno-Aesthetic Paradigm

Beyond the design of everyday objects, this line of thought reached its greatest impact in the exploration of psycho-perceptual effects in space. Spatial practices required constructional principles that were distinct from the principles of painting. Nikolaj Ladovskij explained that the main feature of construction was that "there must be no superfluous (lishnikh) materials or elements," whereas in traditional painting "the chief distinguishing mark of composition - is

357 Alexander Vesnin, "Credo," lecture given at INKhUK in April 1922, cited in Lodder, Constructive Strands in Russian Art 1914-1937, 347-48. Originally reprinted in Mastera sovetskoi arkhitektury ob arkhitekture (Masters of Soviet Architecture on Architecture) 2, (Moscow: 1975): 14.

358 Ibid.

359 Patricia Railing highlights that the idea of energy or force was a common among all the definitions of faktura. Patricia Railing, "The Idea of Construction as the Creative Principle in Russian Avant-Garde Art," Leonardo 28, no. 3 (1995): 194. 125 hierarchy, coordination."360 Lissitzky’s attitude regarding the use of materials along either compositional or constructional principles was comparable to Ladovskij’s position. "Construction represents the endeavour to create special and concrete things, objects," Lissitzky reasoned, "in contradistinction to composition, which only discusses different formal possibilities, construction confirms and accentuates."361 Lissitzky further illustrated this point by distinguishing between the tools of construction and the tools of painterly composition. In claiming that the making of his constructivist paintings required the precision tools of modern science rather than paintbrushes, he clearly implied that he wished for his works to be regarded as part of the wider world of modern everyday objects rather than individual artistic creations.362 Margit Rowell fleshes out the crucial distinction between Constructivist and Cubist approaches to materiality, which were well-known in Russian constructivist circles at the time. Picasso’s experiments with non-artistic materials, Rowell contends, remained largely painterly, because for him, the medium or material was in the service of the pictorial and as such disconnected from its own material reality. Picasso himself drew attention to this distinction, as Rowell points out:

The sheet of newspaper was never used to make a newspaper. It was used to become a bottle or something like that. It was never used literally but always as an element displaced from its habitual meaning into another meaning.363

In distinction to Picasso, Lissitzky emphasized the autonomy of materials, proposing that they should be deployed in a factual sense whereby their specific substance and surface qualities should be foregrounded. For him, the medium of painting consisted of actual materials and surfaces used in accordance with their capacity to redirect and transform light and colour. His theoretical reflections on material and space converged in an on-going project, which he called

360 Nikolaj Ladovskij, cited in Maria Gough, "In the Laboratory of Constructivism: Karl Ioganson's Cold Structures," October 84 (Spring 1998): 97. Originally printed in Selim O. Chan-Magomedov, "Diskussiia v INKhUKe o sootnoshenii konstruktsii i kompozitsii," Tekhnicheskaia estetika (Trudy VNIITE) 20 (1979): 47.

361 El Lissitzky, "Proun," in Proun und Wolkenbügel Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, eds. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky, transl. by Lena Schöche and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 31.

362 For a discussion of Lissitzky’s position in relation to craft and manual skills on one hand, and industrial production and mechanical know-how on the other hand, and the articulation of this duality in his 1924 self-portrait The Constructor, see John E. Bowlt, "Manipulating Metaphors: El Lissitzky and the Crafted Hand," in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk Berlin Moscow, eds. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 129-139.

363 Pablo Picasso quoted in Rowell, "Vladimir Tatlin," 94. Originally quoted in Francoise Gilot and Carlton Lake, Life with Picasso (New York: McGraw Hill, 1964) 77. 126 proun - an acronym of a Russian phrase "Proekt utverzhdenia novogo" meaning "project for the affirmation of the new."364 Selim O. Chan-Magomedov notes that Lissitzky's training as an architect, enabled him to re-engineer Malevich’s Suprematist forms into architectonic figures. More precisely, Chan-Magomedov describes Lissitzky’s prouns as "highly individual models for a new architecture, experiments in architectonic design, a landmark in the search for new spatial-geometric ideas, a kind of compositional preparation for future buildings."365 In his lecture "Proun" held at INKhUK in Moscow 23 September 1921, Lissitzky formally outlined this architectural re-engineering process as based on material science:

The forms with which the proun tackles space are made from material – they do not emanate from aesthetics. The material for the first stages of the "prouns" is colour … If we seriously intended to engage with pure, absolute painting, then we would not need to paint the canvas with colour, but could treat its surface chemically or physically in such ways that it would reflect only those colours of spectral rays, which we need.366

Lissitzky’s insistence on the treatment of actual materials and surfaces announced a move away from abstract art and its rejection of reality. Instead, his prouns pursued an intensification of reality through the manipulation of material surfaces (etching, galvanization, patina etc.) and the physical traces of manufacture (cutting, bending etc.). Evidence for this ambition is clearly legible in the earlier prouns – "painted" in 1920, Proun 2C, for example, deployed amongst other elements, paper and metal on wood (see fig. 3.4). For the further advancement of the prouns, the colours and textures afforded by primary materials were no longer sufficient to achieve the desired impact on the viewer and Lissitzky believed that completely new materials were required.

364 Alan C. Birnholz noted that Lissitzky conceived of the term proun already in 1919 to signify his move towards non-objective art, but more importantly, as a kind of credo that testified to Lissitzky’s revolutionary fervour. Alan C. Birnholz, "'For the New Art': El Lissitzky's Prouns Part I," Artforum 8, no. 2 (1969): 66. For a comprehensive discussion of El Lissitzky’s work, see also Alan C. Birnholz, "El Lissitzky," PhD diss. (Yale University, 1973).

365 Selim O. Chan-Magomedov, "A New Style: Three dimensional Suprematism and Prounen," in El Lissitzky 1890- 1941: Architect Painter Photographer Typographer, exhibition catalogue (Eindhoven: Municipal Van Abbemuseum, 1990), 42.

366 Lissitzky. "Proun," 31. 127

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Fig.3.4 El Lissitzky, Proun 2C, oil, paper and metal on wood, 60 x 40cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, A. E. Gallatin Collection (Proun Inv. 14), ca. 1920.

128

Lissitzky explained:

Timber consists of cells, which are arranged in specific ways depending on the different kinds of timbers and the external conditions to which these are exposed. This structure is not sufficiently firm for our intentions. From timber we produce paper (a regrouping of cells), from paper we press boards and masts. The cells are compacted - a new timber has emerged. The material is transformed.367

The invention of novel materials in industry could also be emulated in artistic production, Lissitzky further explained, and open up further possibilities for the advancement of his prouns, which demanded specific materials that "corresponded to the static or dynamic requirements of their forms."368 Innovative objects such as the prouns, he continued, either necessitated the transformation of existing materials such as "iron into Bessemer steel or tungsten steel, or into a material that has to be invented from scratch, because it has not been required previously."369 Punctuated with concrete references to colours, materials and textures, Lissitzky’s "Proun" lecture formulated material strategies, which in both scope and outlook targeted architectural territory rather than painting. Throughout, references to magnetic waves, spectral rays of light, colour intensity, and innovative materials were used to substantiate his claim that the ultimate intention of the prouns was "the mastery of space" by means of "the creative design of form." Crucially, this had to occur "by means of the economical construction of the transformed material," that is on principles, which synthesized the perceptual qualities and physical properties of materials.370 The theoretical considerations elaborated in "Proun" were put to a practical test in Lissitzky's artistic practice. Hungarian critic Ernst Kállai assessed the material strategies presented in Lissitzky’s prouns as a mapping of the tactile onto the visual: "The colours are sober white, grey and black. Cutting, steel-hard precision in their fabrication [Fakturverarbeitung] and their linear delimitation show how vividly they are experienced."371 Kállai’s analysis praised the vivacity and sensory effects of the prouns and explicitly linked their experiential impact with an industrial aesthetic – a conjunction that hinted at the prouns’ potential for further development towards actual products, or what he regarded as a

367 Ibid.

368 Ibid.

369 Ibid.

370 Ibid., 28. My emphasis.

371 Ernst Kállai, "El Lissitzky," Der Cicerone 16 (1924): 1058. 129 relevance to real life. Yet this step had not been taken. As Kállai saw it, the dilemma was that Lissitzky aimed "to make objects" whilst, in fact, he was "painting complex forms that look like objects but can clearly be recognized as fictions." Lissitzky, Kállai cautioned, should not see the "objectivity of new art in a simply newly-dressed formalism," and if he did not want his works to be "thrown into one pot together with the oil paintings of the museums and the monuments of the generals," then he had to give his objects "the concrete, real and useful significance through which they distinguished themselves from the category of aesthetic stimulants."372 If the Constructivists’ call to produce useful objects was brought to its ultimate conclusion, Kállai argued, this meant producing real objects for daily use such as chairs, houses and machines - or exhibitions projects, something Lissitzky had already accomplished with the 1923 Prounenraum in Berlin. Usefulness, evidently, was not understood consistently at the time. Victor Margolin, for example, highlights differences between Lissitzky’s understanding of "usefulness" which rejected purely technological or functional approaches, and that of product-focused artists like Rodchenko. Margolin notes that Lissitzky feared the later position might result in a "primitive utilitarianism" that had very little to do with creative effort at all. 373 Even worse, these purely functional approaches perpetuated the divisions between "soul" and "body" promoted by traditional art, Lissitzky warned.374 Instead, the usefulness of art was to be found in its instrumental nature and this, he believed, was exemplified in his prouns, which were less the direct application of scientific criteria to art than "the fundamental elements of three- dimensional design through a process of analysis."375 In positioning the prouns as instruments for the analysis of space, Lissitzky asserted his move away from the suprematist canvas which he claimed was "like all other paintings in a museum" because it "had one specific axis perpendicular to the horizontal," and when it was hung in a different orientation "it appeared to lie on its side or upside down," in short, it remained anchored in the pictorial plane.376 By contrast, the prouns substituted Suprematism’s purely artistic approach with a multi- disciplinary one, which had the ability to capture the dynamic reality of modern life in a holistic manner, Lissitzky proposed. Because new forms of space were explored synchronously across

372 Ibid.

373 Margolin, The Struggle For Utopia, 33-34.

374 Lissitzky, "Proun," 29.

375 El Lissitzky,"Wechselbeziehungen der Künste," in Rußland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution, ed. Ulrich Conrads, (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965), 10.

376 Lissitzky, "Proun," 27. 130 both art and science, the method of the proun could not "take the line of singular, strictly scientific disciplines."377 Instead, proun was multi-disciplinary in its approach and spanning the realms of artistic experimentation and scientific research. In other words, for Lissitzky, the prouns were physical investigations that were not directly aimed at the design of a functional end product but at thinking through material experimentation towards a multitude of potential applications - they informed material production indirectly.378 Whilst the prouns were not literally schemes for future developments, they pointed beyond art, towards architecture and real environments. Their preliminary status is clearly expressed in their definition as an in-between stage – a "changing station from painting to architecture" - as Lissitzky termed it.379 If Lissitzky regarded his own project as an interim, Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, director of the Mannheim Kunsthalle (1923-1933) speculated that this was valid for abstract art more generally. In a text written for a catalogue titled Wege und Richtungen der Abstrakten Malerei in Europa (Ways and Directions of Abstract Art in Europe), an exhibition shown at the Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim 30 January – 17 March 1927, Hartlaub evaluated abstract art as a phenomenon of transition:

Such painting and sculpture is located in a peculiar, unprecedented way between figurative art in the traditional sense and applied ornamental art. In essence, it is neither one nor the other, but a novel interim stage. It is also an interim stage in another aspect, for example, in so far that in lieu of the coloured paint that imitated objects, it occasionally utilises innovative combinations of relief and painting, or in so far that it attempts to utilise real materials such as glass, timber, varnish, paper etc. for amplifying material aesthetics [Materialreiz].380

Hartlaub highlighted that abstract works were "in-between" in a double sense: firstly, in a disciplinary sense in so far that they led from traditional, figurative painting towards a "new architecture that is carried by the unity of the engineer and the artist" – in his mind, the most

377 Ibid., 29-31.

378 For Lissitzky, each proun represented a proof of principle from which infinite numbers of potential designs could be developed - an understanding which contrasted the open-endedness of experimentation with the dead- endedness of utilitarian design. Lissitzky was well aware of the perils inherent to his experimental approach and acknowledged that experimental processes are not necessarily linear, conceding that at times it happened, that "one sets off to India and discovers America." Ibid., 32.

379 Hans Arp and El Lissitzky, Die Kunstismen (Erlenbach-Zürich: Eugen Rentsch Verlag, 1925), 11.

380 Gustav Friedrich Hartlaub, "Kunst im Zeitalter der Abstraktion und der Technik," in Wege und Richtungen der Abstrakten Malerei in Europa, exhibition catalogue (Mannheim: Kunsthalle Mannheim, 1926), 4. Hartlaub’s general statement about abstract art, particularly the reference to an "interim stage" (Zwischenstufe) are reminiscent of Constructivist rhetoric. His interest in Lissitzky was evident in the great number of his works that he presented at the Mannheim exhibition - 28 proun paintings and water colours. 131 forward-looking creative field because its interdisciplinary approach fused art and technology; and secondly, in the sense of a new material aesthetics which used hybrid forms of painterly, sculptural and architectural media.381 The understanding of proun as a preparatory phase for a new techno-aesthetic paradigm is also underscored by Herbert Read, who describes proun as a staged development, culminating in "a conscious effort to create an architecture" based on "scientific methods," paired with the simultaneous development of "precise aesthetic effect."382 As they advanced towards architecture, the prouns increasingly moved away from evoking the appearance of architecture and towards prescribing architectural modes of viewing. Dietmar Elger observes that initially architectural links were registered in the titles of early prouns such as Proun 1A "Die Stadt"(The City) and Proun 1E "Die Brücke" (The Bridge), which resembled aerial views of cities or urban architectural models. Yet these suggestive titles and similarities disappeared in later prouns such as Proun 30t, which instead focused on reproducing the modes of perception that were particular to architecture – that is, Elger notes, spatial perception from multiple perspectives and in movement.383 In summary, then, the proun series amounted to Lissitzky’s prognosis for an artistic development that linked the imaginary space of painting to the real space of architecture; the colours of the palette to the material aesthetics of real, technologically-advanced materials; and the modes of reception which captured of the viewer by means of multi-perspectival, dynamic experiences. Mart Stam remembers that Lissitzky was convinced "that the next generation would build really new cities, new houses, new palaces."384 Yet Lissitzky’s own desire to ultimately produce architecture found few outlets. Besides a small number of unrealised designs, for example, the high-rise building project titled the Wolkenbügel (sky stirrup), and his 1930 publication Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion (Russia: The Reconstruction of Architecture in the Soviet Union), which discussed

381 Hartlaub, "Kunst im Zeitalter der Abstraktion und der Technik," 8.

382 Herbert Read, "Introduction," in El Lissitzky – Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, transl. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 8. In distinction to Read, Daniel Herwitz assigns a pedagogical importance to Lissitzky’s prouns, understanding them as didactic lessons about life rather than preliminary experiments for a future architecture. He regards the prouns as embedded in the present situation rather than a prognosis for the future. For Herwitz, they present "apt pictures of the way life is" and they "make you see things as they really are," and thus amount to a "scientific diagram of life" that provides lessons in perception. Daniel Herwitz, Making Theory/Constructing Art - On the Authority of the Avantgarde (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 64.

383 Dietmar Elger, "Proun 30t," in El Lissitzky "Proun 30t" von 1920, eds. Dietmar Elger and Joachim Fischer (Hannover: Kulturstiftung der Länder in Verbindung mit dem Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2000), 12.

384 Mart Stam, "El Lissitzky’s Conception of Architecture," in El Lissitzky – Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky- Küppers, transl. Helene Aldwinckle and Mary Whittall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), 394. 132 theories and practical work in Soviet architecture, his most architectural outputs were his exhibition designs.385 But how precisely did Lissitzky bring his theoretical conjectures and his material investigations to bear on his exhibition designs? Could an understanding of materials developed around abstract painting be applied to architectural settings, or, did the exhibition designs require the development of their own specific theoretical models and practices?

Lissitzky's Demonstration Rooms: Proun and Irrational Space

Boris Brodsky attributes paradigmatic importance to Lissitzky’s exhibition designs, maintaining that "all subsequent experiments in modern art that include the viewer in relation to an environment derive from this first attempt devised by Lissitzky in Berlin in 1923" – the Proun Room.386 Far from being seminal elements, Lissitzky’s demonstration rooms at the Dresden Internationale Kunstausstellung in 1926 and at the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover in 1927-28 represent the most developed stage of his concerns for material aesthetics and the viewer, as well as his attempt to establish a new standard for exhibitions. Ensuing designs, such as the 1928 Pressa exhibition (the Soviet Pavilion for the International Press Exhibition in Cologne) represented a radical shift of his interests towards photographic imagery and propaganda – a cause to which he would dedicate the rest of his life.387 Thus the two demonstration rooms stand out as Lissitzky's ultimate experiment with materiality. Taking his clue from abstract film and optic phenomena such as stereoscopic effects and polarisation, Lissitzky constructed a space that when viewed from a fixed position provided a static impression, but when seen whilst moving, emerged as a dynamic, flickering spectacle set in motion by the viewer. If Lissitzky’s material choices for the second demonstration room (steel composites, aluminium, glass, light) recognised an increasingly technological culture and its potential rationalising effect on art and architecture as he

385 El Lissitzky, Rußland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965). Originally published as Rußland: Die Rekonstruktion der Architektur in der Sowjetunion (Wien: Verlag Anton Schroll & Co, 1930).

386 In this instance, Boris Brodsky refers to Lissitzky’s "Proun Room" at the 1923 Great Berlin Art Exhibition, which was his first exhibition design and developed his proun principle further towards space and architecture. See Boris Brodsky, "El Lissitzky," in The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives, exhibition catalogue, eds. Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980), 93. In the late twenties, Lissitzky abandoned work on proun and turned his attention to propaganda work for the Soviet State - according to Yve-Alain Bois, this represents the last creative phase of Lissitzky’s life, which Bois interprets as consisting of three distinct phases - Chagallian, Suprematist and Stalinist. See Yve-Alain Bois, "El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility," Art in America 76, no. 4 (April 1988): 160-81.

387 The move away from the prouns and towards photographic work is discussed by Margarita Tupitsyn. She observes that the Pressa exhibition was a turning point in Lissitzky’s career - it was the first time that he worked with Soviet propaganda material and together with a group of artists in an exhibition context. Margarita Tupitsyn, "Back to Moscow," in El Lissitzky: Beyond the Abstract Cabinet, ed. Margarita Tupitsyn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 34. 133 prognosticated in his "Proun" lecture, the psycho-perceptual strategies for the treatment of these materials are found elsewhere, namely in his 1925 essay K. und Pangeometrie. In this text, Lissitzky introduced the viewer as a third element in the interrelations between materials and space with the presentation of an historic evolution of spatial conceptions: first, the two- dimensional "planimetric space" comparable with simple numerical progression; second, the three-dimensional "perspectival space" based on Euclidean geometry which was static and finite; and thirdly, an "irrational space" which, he described as a positional system based on elements of variable intensities and colours, akin to irrational numbers in its illusion of an infinite extensibility. The latter, Lissitzky advised, was the space conquered by Suprematism and the spatial ambiguity cultivated in his prouns, in which the viewer witnessed the pictorial plane extending both backward and forward simultaneously.388 Lissitzky's interest in reverse perspective might have been instilled during his time at VKhUTEMAS (Vysshie gosu- darstvennye khudozhestvennye tekhncheskie masterskie), the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops in Moscow, where it was intensely debated. In part these debates were prompted by Pavel Florensky's lecture course on the theoretical analysis of perspective. Florensky traced the origins of perspective to the stage sets of Greek theatres, in which he found "an external likeness" and "the imitation of life's surface."389 In particular, Florensky's talk on reverse perspective seems to reverberate with Lissitzky's notion of irrational space. Lissitzky’s model of irrational space and the associated reversibility of spatial perception received considerable attention and were frequently construed as a manifestation of Lissitzky’s interest in science and mathematics.390 The most notable in this vein of scientifically-oriented investigations is Yve-Alain Bois’ analysis of a number of Lissitzky’s works displayed at a 1987 Harvard show curated by Peter Nisbet. Finding that "the question of the ambiguity of perception is fundamental for all his [Lissitzky’s] exhibition designs," Bois decides to focus on the architectural drawing techniques used for the exhibition documentation rather than the

388 Yve-Alain Bois compellingly suggests that Lissitzky’s reference to Suprematism should be understood as a reference to his proun project rather than to Malevich’s Suprematism. Bois argues that Lissitzky used a diagram of an axonometric drawing to illustrate irrational space – a mode of drawing rarely used by Malevich, but a key mode of representation in Lissitzky’s prouns. Bois, "El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility," 172.

389 Lissitzky's essay K. and Pangeometrie reflected some of the discussion that took place in relation to Pavel Florensky's lectures on perspective. Pavel Florensky, "Reverse Perspective, "in Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art, ed. Nicoletta Misler, transl. Wendy Salmond (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 210. Originally given as a series of lectures at Vukthemas in 1920.

390 For example, Esther Levinger, "Art and Mathematics in the Thought of El Lissitzky: His Relationship to Suprematism and Constructivism," Leonardo 22, no. 2 (1989): 227-36; Manual Corrada, "On Some Vistas Disclosed by Mathematics to the Russian Avant-Garde: Geometry, El Lissitzky and Gabo," Leonardo 25, no.3/4 (1992): 377-84. 134 exhibition spaces themselves.391 Maria Gough's study of the demonstration rooms also draws on the concept of irrational space, which she contrasts with Lissitzky's interest in modern principles of standardised production. She argues that the visual imbalance of the exhibition designs aimed at the "sensory disorientation" of the viewers by introducing an irrational element into the rationalised industrial context.392 The duality of rationality and irrationality is also thematised by Reyner Banham who points to what he sees as Lissitzky’s acceptance of conflicting ideas within the proun concept: on one hand, Lissitzky emphasised "space manipulation," an interest that might owe to the influence of his associate Nikolai Ladovskij’s psycho-technical laboratory; and on the other, he took a decidedly rationalist approach concerned with economy and revaluation of materials.393

Lissitzky's Demonstrationrooms: Immaterial materiality and Imaginary Space

Beyond the widely discussed "irrational space," there is a fourth and final model in Lissitzky’s progression of spatial conceptions with which Lissitzky concluded his historic survey, namely the imaginary space:

Our visual perception is limited with regard to the capture of movement and the complete state of objects more generally. For example, an abrupt movement with a duration of less than 1/30 of a second evokes the impression of a continuous movement. This feature is at the basic element of film … This is the first step towards the construction of the imaginary space, but film is no more than a dematerialised surface projection and only utilises one feature of visual perception. But we know that a material point can form a line, for example, that a glowing coal, when set into motion, can leave the impression of a luminous line; that the moving of a material line can evoke the impression of a surface and an object. Here we

391 Ibid., 174. For a more general history of the use of axonometry in modern art and architecture and its ideological implications, see also Yve-Alain Bois, "Metamorphosis of Axonometry (Metamorphosen der Axonometrie)," Daidalos, no. 1 (1981): 40-58. Another study by Leah Dickerman also deals with Lissitzky’s axonometrics by revealing links between the theories laid out in K. und Pangeometrie and his photographic work of the mid-1920s. Dickerman investigates Lissitzky’s camera techniques alongside his drawing techniques and theories arguing that his photographic work is "as much about irrationality as rationality." She distinguishes between Lissitzky’s photographic works, which, in her opinion, concentrated on the tactility of the body itself, and his prouns, which critique perspectival space by means of technical drawing. Leah Dickerman, "El Lissitzky's Camera Corpus," in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk Berlin Moscow, eds. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 154.

392 Maria Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume," in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk Berlin Moscow, eds. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 77-78. Arguing for the irrationality of Lissitzky’s design, Gough endeavours to dissociate Lissitzky’s demonstration project from its immediate museal context - the Provinzialmuseum Hannover, reorganised under Dorner as a series of colourful atmosphere rooms, which Gough regards as the product of a rationalist art historical approach.

393 Reyner Banham, Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1980) 194. 135

have an indication, how to construct a material object by using elementary bodies in such a way that when in a static state, it forms a uniform object in our three- dimensional space and, when set into motion, it produces a completely new object, that is, it generates a new spatial expression, that only exists for the duration of the movement, and hence is imaginary.394

Lissitzky’s proposition of an imaginary space was noted in Erwin Panofsky’s 1927 essay "Die Perspektive als Symbolische Form" which charted the history of perspectival systems. For Panofsky, these historic systems represented more than a simple succession of outmoded scientific models. Instead, he suggested that each model could be interpreted as evidence of a distinct understanding of our relation to the material world and thus, beyond its scientific accurateness, had a symbolic value. Seen from this perspective, Panofsky assessed Lissitzky’s dynamically-conceived model of space as a contemporary attempt to overcome the restrictions of perspectival space. However, Panofsky remained fundamentally critical about Lissitzky and his "conquest of 'imaginary space' by means of mechanically motivated bodies, which by this very movement, by their rotation or oscillation, produce precise figures."395 Lissitzky’s proposition to elevate art "to the standpoint of a non-Euclidian pan-geometry," Panofsky argued, was "most instructive," precisely because it was also "disputable."396 After all, Panofsky concluded, "the space of those 'imaginary' rotating bodies is no less 'Euclidian' than any other empirical space" and remained, just as previous perspectival models, fundamentally illusory in nature – despite the fact that it was based on the latest psychological insights into perception (see fig. 3.5).397 With considerable attention centred on Lissitzky's concept of irrational space represented by Suprematism and proun, his proposal of an imaginary space as the final and most contemporary concept of space is largely overlooked. However, it is of vital importance for this investigation because Lissitzky posited imaginary space as a kind of materiality: summing up his survey of spatial conceptions, he concluded that in pursuing "the variability of spatial recognition and the corresponding constructions of art," he had "arrived at an immaterial materiality."398

394 Lissitzky, "K. und Pangeometrie," 129.

395 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 153-54, Endnote 73. Originally published as "Die Perspektive als symbolische Form," in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924-1925, ed. Fritz Saxl, 258-330 (Leipzig and Berlin: B.G.Teubner, 1927).

396 Ibid., 154, Endnote 73.

397 Ibid.

398 Lissitzky, "K. und Pangeometrie," 129. 136

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL

Fig.3.5 Images showing an imaginary rotating surface ("Imaginäre Rotationsfläche") used by Lissitzky to illustrate his concept of immaterial materiality. The images show a strip of metal foil in a stationary state ("Ruhezustand") on the left, and in a rotating state ("Rotationszustand") on the right. Photographic excerpt from El Lissitzky's essay "K. und Pangeometrie" (1925).

His explanation of immaterial materiality fleshed out the variable interrelations of material, space and dynamic perception, proposing a material strategy that set out to achieve the effects underlying modern film and optics (the immaterial) with the tactile means of architecture (the material). The countless effects that could be realised by means of this concept, in Lissitzky’s mind, had only just begun to be explored, for example in stereoscopy and abstract film. However, film was "no more than a dematerialised surface projection" and what he had in mind were real objects, in real space, which would affect the "destruction of the old understanding of art as monumentality" and replace it with a relational model of material, space and viewer.399 Lissitzky's immaterial materiality entailed psychological strategies and techniques deployed in modern media, and these became increasingly established as departure points and central drivers for his exhibition designs in 1925-27. These links are identified by Herbert Schuldt, who recognises that the material/immaterial duality provided a reality principle that informed Lissitzky’s work at that time and thus permitted connections, for example, between the concrete materiality of exhibition prototypes on one hand, and the immaterial qualities of his photograms on the other hand. Schuldt explains:

The commitment to materiality in constructions, paintings, montages can be recognised in the photograms in a sublime, transfigured form. In front of the then

399 Ibid. 137

usual palpability of structures, it is easy to forget that this was only one side of the medallion (and nothing is more suitable than this two-sidedness to demonstrate that in practical manufacture, the most subtle effects were in fact wrestled for). Connected to the expansion and refinement of material processing and material culture were those works oriented towards an immaterial, pure facture of comparable reach and diversity. 400

A similar point about the latency of material concerns in Lissitzky's photographic work is made by Peter Nisbet, who maintained that his "venture into photography shows his acute sensitivity to the medium’s intimate connection to the material world of light and objects."

The Demonstration Rooms – Various Perspectives

The demonstration rooms have been extensively discussed in art historical contexts, as the logical continuation of Lissitzky’s proun paintings. Benjamin Buchloh, for example, observes that with move into exhibition design Lissitzky realised his "earlier claim for his Proun-Paintings to operate as transfer stations from art to architecture."401 For Buchloh, the Hannover and Dresden demonstration rooms were not fundamentally original – they only "fully confirmed" the principles already tested out in the 1923 Prounenraum for the Grosse Berliner Kunstaustellung.402 Similarly, Alan C. Birnholz positions the demonstration rooms as an extension of Lissitzky’s proun project by drawing a linear progression from the proun paintings, which guided "the spectator’s mind and eye;" via the Prounenraum, which directed the spectator’s "physical actions" and "brought him into "physical and intellectual contact" with the art works; to the two demonstration rooms, which in his opinion, simply further "expanded" this format.403 In contrast, art historian and curator Germano Celant draws a clear distinction between the Prounenraum and the later demonstration rooms. For Celant, the Prounenraum represented an exercise in spatial "phenomenology" and epitomised "the ultimate art installation object" in so far that it controlled every aspect of the exhibition environment with its continuing profiles, which erased the corners of the room and gave the viewer the impression of a totally homogenous environment. In distinction, the wall treatment of the demonstration rooms raised the viewers' awareness of a direct link between their movement

400 Schuldt, "El Lissitzky's Photographische Arbeiten," 29.

401 Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," 91.

402 Ibid.

403 Alan C. Birnholz, "'For the New Art': El Lissitzky's Prouns Part II," Artforum 8, no. 3 (1969): 71. 138 and the appearance of the individual paintings, Celant argues. The insertion of cassettes, movable panels, and illuminated elements disassembled the space into individual wall segments, whereby each provided a detailed focus on individual paintings and de-emphasized the architectural environment as a whole.404 Importantly, Celant acknowledges that the demonstration rooms already presupposed an exhibition theory that was "a study and an analysis of the nature, the function, and the limits of the installation issue, distinct from issues of creativity," and therefore exemplified a new "ideal" exhibition space or a "show."405 In this regard, Lissitzky’s demonstration concept instigated a paradigmatic shift, ringing in "the decline of the masonry enclosure" and opening up "a world of exhibition possibilities," Celant concludes. Revealing a "novel intersection of exhibition and graphic design," Maria Gough highlights links between Lissitzky's editorial work on the magazine Vesch/Object/Gegenstand (with Ilja Ehrenberg) and his designs for the demonstration rooms – both the visual space of the magazine as well as the physical space of the exhibition, she argues, were demonstration spaces that visually, physically and intellectually guided the viewers.406 Kai-Uwe Hemken approaches the demonstration rooms from the perspective of technical changes and their impact on visual perception, arguing that Lissitzky captured the characteristics of this "new technicised seeing" in two "aesthetic constants" which pervade his proun project, namely, "abstraction" and "space-time dynamics."407 Both are recognisable throughout his paintings, exhibitions and architectural projects up until his propaganda phase, Hemken contends. Kai-Uwe Hemken also highlights the conjunction of aesthetics and politics in the demonstration rooms. He suggests that Lissitzky’s exhibition concept was characterised by an internationalism aimed "at cultural exchange" and "at the conveyance and demonstration of artistic ideas" intended to contrast with the competitive showcasing of national art at the Internationale Kunstausstellung Dresden in 1926.408 Lissitzky’s opposition to the thinly

404 Germano Celant, "A Visual Machine: Arts Installations and its Modern Archetypes," in Thinking about Exhibitions, eds. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 379.

405 Ibid., 379-80.

406 Peter Nisbet, "El Lissitzky in the Proun Years: A Study of His Work and Thought, 1919-1927," PhD diss. (Yale University, 1995), 289; Maria Gough, "The Abstract Environment," in Inventing Abstraction, 1910-1925: How a Radical Idea Changed Modern Art, eds. Leah Dickerman and Matthew Affron (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), 312.

407 Kai-Uwe Hemken, "Proun, Proun und nochmals Proun. El Lissitzky - die Technik und die Mittel der Kommunikation," in El Lissitzky 1890-1941, exhibition catalogue, ed. Norbert Nobis (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein 1988), 51.

408 Kai-Uwe Hemken, "Pan-Europe and German Art: El Lissitzky at the 1926 Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden," in El Lissitzky 1890-1941: architect, painter, photographer, typographer; eds. Jan de Bout et al. (Eindhoven: Municipal van Abbemuseum, 1990), 55. 139 disguised commercial agenda of international exhibition is also underscored by Nicole Murphy Holland and her discussion of Lissitzky’s exhibitions in the context of cultural diplomacy.409Other museum and exhibition studies discuss the demonstration rooms in the context of contemporary debates relating to questions of audience and participation, in part prompted by the renewed interest in Alexander Dorner’s work. In much of this literature, they are dealt with in a largely sweeping manner, primarily as early examples of interactive exhibition and installation design.410 Seen through the lens of what Lissitzky termed "immaterial materiality," an investigation of the architectural elements of the demonstration rooms will reveal that they were more than the application of the proun principles to the real space of architecture. Nor did Lissiztky's material choices simply invoke a rationalised, industry-affirmative approach - we will see that Lissitzky treated advanced construction materials and lighting in noticeably non-utilitarian ways. Rather, attention will be directed to how these elements represented a re- territorialisation of materials from the realm of industry and economy into the realm of culture and mediation – a move anticipated in the discussion of the an imaginary space in K. und Pangeometrie. By elaborating the ways in which Lissitzky transformed materials imaginatively, this study will show how he acknowledged the viewer’s experience as the determinant of material usage. With this exhibition strategy, Lissitzky signalled the beginning of a new creative phase marked by a conjunction of material tectonics and the material aesthetics, more broadly speaking between architecture and film – a concept captured in the term immaterial materiality.

The Demonstration Room: A New Standard for Exhibition Architecture

El Lissitzky’s Raum der Abstrakten can be described as experimentation with materials and spatial recognition – a play with rational structures and irrational perceptions, which evoked a limitless and fluid space, set in motion by the viewers. Designed more than 80 years ago as the most contemporaneous addition to Alexander Dorner’s art department at the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover, it used the latest materials and technology only to transfigure

409 For a brief discussion of the political and social motifs of Lissitzky’s exhibitions and his rejection of international exhibitions as places for the purely commercially-motivated exchange of art, see Nicole Murphy Holland, "Worlds on View: Visual Art Exhibitions and State Identity in the Late Cold War," PhD diss. (University of California, 2010), particularly the chapter "Soviet Export Exhibitions, 1920s-1930s," 89-106.

410 For example, Tobias Wall, Das Unmögliche Museum (Bielefeld: Transcript, 2006), 206-13; Charlotte Klonk, Spaces of Experience: Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 114-20. Klonk credits Lissitzky for introducing interpersonal viewing experiences into the museum; Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display - A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2001), 21. 140 these artistically in order to make us conscious of the dynamic spaces of modern life. It was set up in a playful way, as an interactive, sensory spectacle that disguised its claim to be built upon scientific premises. One could say that the Raum der Abstrakten was a prototype of an imaginary future – an artificial world contained within a room. The project was designed in 1927/28 and subsequently constructed in Lissitzky's absence with alterations, before it opened to considerable acclaim from the German museum world.411 Although the Raum der Abstrakten is comparable to the first demonstration room, designed by Lissitzky for the Internationale Kunstausstellung Dresden in 1926, it received notably more attention than its predecessor.412 After Alexander Dorner’s emigration to the United States in 1936, the National Socialist Regime dismantled the room and many of its contents were destroyed, lost or scattered.413 For more than 30 years, it survived solely in photographs, reports, letters and Lissitzky’s drawings and notes until it was brought to life again in its original location in 1968 (see fig. 3.6), following a long campaign by Dorner’s widow Lydia.414 A recent exhibition of another reconstruction, exhibited in Lüneburg in 2009, testifies to its continuing relevance.415 Unlike Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion, which was lost on its shipment back to Germany, the Raum der Abstrakten was not an independent exhibition building and, some would say, it appears to have been no more than a piece of interior decoration, or a provisional display. But its reception testifies to its importance as ground-breaking exhibition architecture. In his 1928 introduction to the Raum der Abstrakten, Dorner presented it as a milestone in exhibition architecture, identifying Lissitzky not as an artist or curator but as "the

411 A notable review was written by Sigfried Giedion, who credited Dorner for commissioning an appropriate room for contemporary art – what Giedion termed a "Versuchslaboratorium" (experimental laboratory). Sigfried Giedion, "Lebendiges Museum," Der Cicerone 21, no. 4 (1929): 103.

412 The first demonstration room - the Raum für Konstruktive Kunst in Dresden – had caught the attention of Alexander Dorner, who immediately commissioned Lissitzky to develop a similar room for his collection of abstract art. For a discussion of the Dresden room within the context of the 1926 Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden and Lissitzky's aspirations for an international art, see Kai-Uwe Hemken, "Pan-Europe and German art."

413 Ines Katenhusen discusses Dorner's changes to the modern art department of the Provinzialmuseum during the Nationalsocialist period. In response to politic pressure, Dorner removed paintings, rewrote the museum guidebook and even mounted an advertising poster for Arthur Moller van den Bruck's controversial 1923 book "Das Dritte Reich" (The Third Empire) in Lissitzky's Raum der Abstrakten. See Ines Katenhusen, "Ein Museumsdirektor auf und zwischen den Stühlen - Alexander Dorner (1893-1957) in Hannover," in Kunstgeschichte im "Dritten Reich": Theorien, Methoden, Praktiken, eds. Ruth Heftrig, Olaf Peters and Barbara Maria Schellewald (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2008), 166.

414 Initially, the reconstruction of the Raum der Abstrakten was housed in its original room at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover, by then renamed to "Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover." The room has since been moved to a new, location in the adjacent Sprengel Museum Hannover. Lydia Dorner campaigned extensively to gain support for the project. Amongst others, she wrote to Philipp Johnson enquiring whether he would be willing to write "a few lines" for a short publication. See Lydia Dorner, Letter to Philip Johnson, 23 March 1968, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 2.4.4, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

415 "Kabinett der Abstrakten - Original and Facsimile," exhibition at Halle der Kunst, Lüneburg/Germany, 24 January - 8 March 2009. 141

Fig.3.6 1968 Reconstruction of El Lissitzky's Raum der Abstrakten at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, 2009, photograph: author.

142 architect, who created this museum room (Prof. Lissitzky)."416 Other museum directors concurred – Alfred H. Barr, the first director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, visited the room during the late 1920s and was fascinated by the ingenious architecture of its walls to which he ascribed the room's importance as the most famous room of twentieth century art in the world.417 For architect Phillip Johnson, the room was the most exciting and unforgettable event of Weimar Germany which triggered his own interest not only in the Bauhaus, as he maintained, but in modern architecture in general.418 Together, these assessments recognize the room not as a turning point in curatorship but as a new kind of exhibition architecture.419 Trained in Darmstadt as architect, Lissitzky frequently demonstrated his affinity to the discipline, promoting architecture as the "material concatenation of all arts – literature, music, plastic and painting, in which the accomplishments of a period are articulated."420 The architectural aspirations of his exhibition work emerged in his written introduction to the demonstration rooms, in which he cautioned that the room was not to be regarded as "a private salon decoration" but that its ambition was the development of "a standard for rooms in which new art is shown to the general public."421 The literal reference to private salons and their decoration appeared not by accident in Lissitzky's text. It served him to announce the introduction of a new type of exhibition architecture intended to erode the then widely popular salon-style display settings cultivated by leading museum figures such as Wilhelm Bode, who drew their inspiration from the lavish domestic interiors of the German upper-middles-class.422 The positioning of the demonstration room as a modern, standardised

416 Alexander Dorner, "Zur Abstrakten Malerei (Erklärung zum Raum der Abstrakten in der Hannoverschen Gemäldegalerie)," Die Form - Monatsheft für Gestaltende Arbeit 3, no.4 (April 1928): 114. It is possible that Dorner deliberately positioned Lissitzky as an architect to allow himself, as the Director of the museum's art collections, to take credit for the curatorship of the room.

417 Samuel Cauman, The Living Museum: Experiences of an Art Historian and Museum Director - Alexander Dorner (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 116. Ines Katenhusen suggests that beyond his admiration for the Raum der Abstrakten, Barr might have been also impressed with Dorner's museum organisation as such and she pointed to parallels between Dorner's atmosphere room series and Barr's organisation of MoMA. See Ines Katenhusen, "El Lissitzky and Alexander Dorner: Kabinett der Abstrakten: Original and Facsimile," in Displayer 03, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Museum of American Art, 2009), 6-8.

418 Anonymous author, "Aus Bemerkungen über das Abstrakte Kabinett," typescript, undated, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 2.2.8, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

419 Kenneth Frampton highlights Lissitzky’s importance for the discipline of architecture. Kenneth Frampton, "The Work and Influence of El Lissitzky," Urban Structure, Architect's Yearbook 12 (1968): 253-68.

420 Lissitzky, "Proun," 33.

421 El Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume," typescript, ca.1926, in Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 2.2.8, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

422 For a discussion of key moments leading up to the entry of artistic modernism into the institution of the museum, see James Sheehan's study of major German museums models and figures. James J. Sheehan, Museums in 143 counter model to these lavishly-appointed and exclusive spaces revealed another side along which we not only trace the formalisation of new style of architecture but also the emergence of new audiences to whose requirements it was modelled. Lissitzky exhibition model was not only geared towards the art it contained, but more importantly, it recognised the specific needs of those expected to view it: whilst the salon model directly referenced the architectural preferences and personal tastes of the connoisseurs and experts who supported museums with donations and loans, the name "demonstration room" flaunted the didactic aspirations which underpinned the term "demonstration" and thus hinted at an audience from quite different strata of society – one that required instruction in order to become culturally activated and involved.423 It should be pointed out that the new standard for exhibition architecture was not to be understood as an ideal or as a rigid norm. With the demonstration rooms, Lissitzky did not wish to realise "an individual, ordinary object of applied arts;" rather he believed to have elaborated the "exact principles" for "a type that awaits further standardization."424 Put differently, the demonstration rooms were not envisaged as unique designs, or as rigid standards, but represented the first types in a series of exhibition prototypes, which were fundamentally open for progressive development. This insistence on openness restricted the potential for industrial serialisation and mass production of elements – a direction, which differed from the approaches promoted by many of his architect colleagues at the time, particularly those involved with the Werkbund or the Bauhaus, whose members used exhibitions to promote standardised industrial materials.425

Constructing with Light: The Tectonic Illumination Object

The Raum der Abstrakten occupied a small corner room on the second floor of the Provinzialmuseum in Hannover. Since his appointment as director of the art department in 1923, Alexander Dorner had re-organised the museum's art collections as a visual account of the German Art World from the End of the Old Regime to the Rise of Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), in particular Section 4 on "Museums and Modernism 1880-1914," 139 -184; and on Wilhelm Bode, 157-59.

423 Until the present day the German word Demonstrationsraum (demonstration room) denotes a space suitable for practical presentation usually within a university context.

424 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume."

425 It seems that for Lissitzky the use of the word "standard" did not represent a conflict with his simultaneous emphasis on open-endedness and invention in other contexts: "For us," Lissitzky observed in a 1928 essay, "the goal exemplifies something which we leave behind. The creative process generates the fact, which becomes the goal." See El Lissitzky, "Die Architektur des Stahl- und Stahlbetonrahmens," in Proun und Wolkenbügel Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, eds. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky, transl. Lena Schöche and Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden, Germany: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 32. Originally published in Bauindustrie, no.1 (1928). 144 the historic development of art, mapped on a circular itinerary consisting of 45 galleries and cabinets (see fig. 2.5). The visitor found that each style or period inhabited a discrete space with a distinctive interior aimed to evoke the period's unique mood and world view by means of visual devices: wall colours, interior furnishings, frames and lighting were orchestrated to achieve an overall emphatic effect, which, so Dorner desired, would promote the visitor’s comprehension of the art works when considered in conjunction with information material. Dorner referred to these rooms as atmosphere rooms. Within this museal framework, the Raum der Abstrakten was specifically designated for showing abstract art and thus destined to become the first permanent custom-designed room for contemporary art in Germany. As the last room in the museum’s historical narrative, Dorner envisaged it as a kind of culmination of artistic evolution – the ultimately developed. However, as we will see, the room remained fundamentally disconnected from the museum because Lissitzky’s interest was neither in forging links with Dorner's art historical narrative, nor with his exhibition model, but in developing an unprecedented architectural standard for exhibitions. The central aim of this standard was the active engagement of the viewer, as Lissitzky stated in his introduction to the demonstration rooms.426 But how precisely could viewer activation be achieved with architectonic means and materials? In this respect, the tectonic illumination object and the striated walls of the Raum der Abstrakten stand out as the key innovations of his exhibition model: firstly, because they almost literally correspond to Lissitzky's definition of an immaterial materiality – they represent material objects that are constructed in such ways that they temporarily generated imaginary, spatial expressions; and secondly, because they are designed to highly calculated ends – they aim at simultaneously captivating, guiding and activating the viewer. The visitor reached the cabinet that housed the Raum der Abstrakten via Room 44 – a large gallery space dedicated to Expressionism. A second door connected the Raum der Abstrakten to the neighbouring cabinet, Room 43, which also contained Expressionist art. The two entrance door openings were covered with black fabric curtains and when the visitor pushed aside the curtains, he found himself face to face with a luminous object, which extended across the entire opposite wall.427 Lissitzky described the intended effects of this

426 For a discussion of interactive spectatorship in Lissitzky’s work, see Alan C. Birnholz, "El Lissitzky and the Spectator: From Passivity to Participation," in The Avant-Garde in Russia 1910-1930: New Perspectives, exhibition catalogue, eds. Stephanie Barron and Maurice Tuchman (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980), 98-101.

427 This represented a change from the white curtains used in the Dresden room. Curtains were introduced in German museums as part of the museum reform movement, often in order to avoid glare or as a didactic means to separate rooms that showed artworks of different periods or styles. Alexander Dorner used curtains throughout the Provinzialmuseum. It should be noted that Lissitzky reported Malevich's use of a curtain as part of stage set design, 145 installation: "My aim was to transform the window opening into a tectonic illumination object that only admits the amount of light necessary."428 Bringing the natural daylight entering through the windows into contact with other materials, he altered its quality and redirected the rays using in three distinct methods, which corresponded to three horizontal zones as indicated in the specification drawing (see fig. 3.7). The upper part of the object consisted in a lightbox made of glass, which extended over the full width of the wall. The glass was blinded with a screen of tensioned, white muslin fabric to conceal the windows beneath and block any views to the outside. The lightbox provided even, general illumination for the room from above and permitted the deep penetration of daylight. Similar to the Dresden room, a suspended muslin stretch ceiling was used to lower the room height and create a more intimate scale. Across the middle zone, Lissitzky installed white, vertical fabric blinds. These were recessed so that the lightbox above assumed a floating, weightless quality thus distinguishing it as an autonomous architectural element. The blinds were a standard product at the time and generally used to control light ingress relative to external conditions. Irrespective of their conventional function, it seems that Lissitzky's interest in the blinds only partly related to their capacity to block light. A closer inspection of the specification drawing prepared for the window wall reveals that the vertical louvres were tilted in opposite directions – 30 degrees to the right and to the left respectively, so that the incoming light was redirected at the walls either side. Enhancing the light/shadow contrast of the wall recesses, the blinds functioned as a kind of optical amplifier, which drastically enhanced the material aesthetic of the walls. This was done with detailed consideration and precision: the shallow angle of 30 degrees targeted the exposed side elevation of the steel bands and brightened their respective colour, whilst the depth of the wall recess (the background elevation) remained in the shadow. Below the fabric louvres, a third zone was formed by a backlit benchtop with two glass display cases containing horizontally rotating cubes for the display of water colours.429

where it represented an element of suprematist painting – the black square. Lissitzky wrote: "Malevich painted the decoration (the curtain=black square)." El Lissitzky, "Die plastische Gestaltung der elektromechanischen Schau ‘Sieg über die Sonne,’" in Rußland: Architektur für eine Weltrevolution, ed. Ulrich Conrads (Berlin: Ullstein, 1965), 118.

428 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume."

429 Whilst the typescript of Lissitzky’s introduction to the demonstration rooms stated that the rotating cubes in the glass cases were intended for the display of watercolours, Dietrich Helms remembers that the cases contained text and images for a developmental history of architecture, presumably written by Alexander Dorner. Dietrich Helms and Lydia Dorner, "The 1920's in Hannover: An Exhibition in Hannover, Germany," Art Journal 22, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 144. The content description of the reconstruction of the Raum der Abstrakten, titled "Das Abstrakte Kabinett," dated August 1979 and held at the Sprengel Museum Archiv in Hannover, also describes the display cubes as containing "texts by Alexander Dorner for the original Abstract Cabinet, 1927." 146

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL

Fig.3.7 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room showing the tectonic illumination object. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Fensterwand (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Window Wall), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 25.2x36.2cm.

The backlighting lent extra intensity and brilliance to the watercolours – a type of painting that responds well to light. More importantly, the cases provided a horizontal display surface that was only revealed once the viewer moved closer towards the tectonic illumination object and thus represented one of the methods by which Lissitzky wished to avoid the overexposure of viewers to visual stimulation. In his introductory text to the demonstration rooms, he remarked "in my room the [art] objects should not assault the viewer all at the same time."430 The gradual revelation of the watercolours achieved precisely this effect. Lissitzky's use of fabric as a light-transmitting material is of great importance – real materials (including natural daylight) had to be transformed artistically for their immaterial aspects to be brought to life. "The light," Lissitzky wrote in his introduction to the demonstrations rooms, "which is only generated through the effects of colour, shall be controlled."431 Richard Kostelanetz reported that Moholy-Nagy formulated a similar methodology for his light-space modulator shown at

430 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume." At the same time its horizontal display surface provided a viewing experience that contrasted with the customary vertical beholding of wall-mounted paintings.

431 Ibid. 147 the 1930 Werkbund exhibition in Paris, insisting that "light, if rendered into art, must first be transmitted and transformed through materials – not projected directly at the viewer."432 To sum up, whilst often ignored or devalued as a further development of the Dresden precedent (see fig. 3.13), Lissitzky actually introduced significant innovations in Hannover. By staging a complex interplay between light, wall colours and perceptual effects, the tectonic illumination object replaced the lighting strategy deployed in the earlier Dresden demonstration room, where the full expanse of the ceiling was covered with stretched muslin and back-lit to provide general illumination, with a highly differentiated use of light: firstly, by directing rather than diffusing light, the optical effects of the walls became a site for the interaction of light and material; secondly, the lightbox materialised light as a tectonic object; and thirdly the backlit glass cases further customised light to enhance the luminosity of the specific paintings it displayed - watercolours. There was, however, an innovation that Lissitzky explored in Dresden and then abandoned, and this is the use of colour filters. In Dresden, Lissitzky had experimented with coloured light by overlaying the ceiling along one end wall with blue and the other with yellow so that one wall was "coldly lit, the other warmly."433 Initially the colour choice of blue and yellow may seem surprising as it represented a divergence from the very constrained colour palette of black, white and red, to which Lissitzky rigorously adhered in the colouring of all other elements of the room, but also because it diverged from his earlier theories on colour. In his "Proun" lecture, Lissitzky vigorously objected to "the individualism of green, orange and violet colours," favouring what he believed to be the more energetic range between "black and white."434 This spectral range occupied the zone where "infrared heat rays change to black and finally transform into the cold white," he explained, and this supercharged colour zone was the space of Suprematism.435 However, Lissitzky distinguished between the use of colour in painting and the use of coloured lighting. In a letter to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, written during the early planning stages of the Dresden demonstration room, he laid out his preliminary ideas about lighting:

I am thinking about letting the daylight stream through moving, coloured filters so that the impression of the paintings also changes in intervals. And in addition, it

432 Richard Kostelanetz, Moholy-Nagy - Documentary Monographs in Modern Art (London: Allen Lane, 1971), 160.

433 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume."

434 Lissitzky, "Proun," 30.

435 Ibid. 148

would be nice to design the object for artificial light in the evening. We generally have more time in the evenings and the modern paintings and their colour spectrum can have a more intense effect with electric [light].436

It should be noted, however, that blue-yellow was one of the colour pairs of Ewald Hering’s Gegenfarbentheorie (colour opponent theory), one of the most widely known colour theories of the time. According to Hering, the perceptual effects of blue and yellow cancelled each other, and when seen together, produced white light – the colour of space in Suprematism. Black and white, according to Hering, represented an opponent pair that accounted for brightness.437 Another potential source of inspiration for Lissitzky is Wilhelm Wundt's research into colour perception, which had a considerable influence on reform-oriented museums in Weimar Germany, where, as briefly discussed in the previous chapter, Wundt's findings provided inspiration for practical experimentation with different wall colours. The colourful appointment of exhibition spaces was thought to enhance the impact of the paintings, or to convey the general mood of a period, aiming to make art more widely accessible.438 Wundt equated yellow with liveliness and blue with calm – a pairing that represented a unique contrast of feeling that is equally evident in Lissitzky's interpretation. Although Lissitzky provided no explanation of his sources, his association of blue with cold and yellow with warm can be seen to register his attempt to redefine cutting-edge psycho-perceptual insights in artistic terms – a vein of investigation he hoped to advance with plans for periodically varying electric lighting, which doubtlessly, would have provided increased opportunities for directing the attention of visitors to various parts of the room and animated both space and viewer even more intensely.439 Because electrical connections were unavailable, as Lissitzky noted with disappointment in a footnote to his introductory text, his scheme remained unrealised.

436 El Lissitzky, Letter to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 8 February 1926, El Lissitzky letters and photographs, 1911-1941, Accession no. 950076, Series I. Letters, most to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1911, 1923-1941, undated. Box 1, Folder 4, Letters to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 1925-1935. Getty Research Institute Archives, Los Angeles. Lissitzky, Letter to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 8 February 1926.

437 Ewald Hering, Zur Lehre vom Lichtsinne: Sechs Mitteilungen an die Kaiserliche Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien (Vienna: C. Gerold's Sohn, 1878).

438 Cf. Klonk, Spaces of Experience:" 91-105.

439 Wilhelm Wundt's physio-psychological research was received with interest in post-revolutionary Russia. On the influence of German psycho-physiological research on the Russian avant-garde, see Luka Skansi, "What is Artistic Form? Munich – Moscow 1900-1925," in Russian Émigré Culture: Conservatism or Evolution?, eds. Christoph Flamm, Henry Keazor and Roland Marti, 69-88. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). 149

Immaterialising Architecture: The Iridescent Wall

When Lissitzky wrote his 1926 introductory text "2 Demonstrationsräume" (2 Demonstration Rooms), he cast architecture as a central instrument for not just guiding but simultaneously activating the viewer as an important participant in the generation of art experiences. "In order to present all artworks equally effectively," he argued, "one had to create the best optical conditions for this showroom," comparable to designing the best "acoustics in a concert hall."440 However, whereas for acoustics, the physical properties of a material were decisive (its surface, density and structure), the optimisation of optics required material qualities of a different kind. What these might be had already been indicated in K.und Pangeometrie, where Lissitzky described a fusion between actual materials and the means of film, which were to the building elements for an immaterial materiality. In specifying the materials for this task, Lissitzky resorted to the already familiar rhetoric of modernist architecture, namely the metaphor of skin and bone construction.441 "Colour is an epidermis covering a skeleton," he explained, and "depending on the construction of the skeleton, the epidermis is pure colour or tone. Both demand distinct illumination and isolation."442 With skeleton, he did not mean the solid walls of the Provinizialmuseum's brick architecture. Understanding the walls not as load-bearing or perimeter walls, he emphasized that he thought of them as "optical backgrounds" instead. With all pragmatic architectonic functions eliminated, he was free to "dematerialise the wall surface as such" and to explore a highly amorphous material aesthetic.443 In a letter to his Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, he outlined his plans for a stage set informed solely by material aesthetics:

The room should be a kind of display stage [Schaukastenbühne] on which the images appear as actors in a drama (or a comedy). It should not imitate a room for living. Everything should not be built upon colour, but upon the properties of the material – then the colour of the images, of painting will roar (or sing) without restraint.444

440 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume."

441 Mies van der Rohe referred to skin and bone construction initially in the context of his 1922 glass skyscraper project for Berlin in 1922 and, as Peter Blake noted, "the description has stuck." Peter Blake, Mies van der Rohe (Harmodsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1963), 28.

442 Ibid.

443 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume."

444 Lissitzky, Letter to Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers, 8 February 1926. 150

Later, he described the actual construction of the stage, namely, the exhibition room wall and its contribution to the viewing experience in relatively sober terms:

I have positioned thin slats perpendicular to the wall / 7cm deep / spaced at a distance of 7cm and painted the white on the left, black on the right side and the wall itself grey. Such you see the wall as grey from the front, white from the left, black from the right. The images appear on white, black, or grey depending on the perspective of the viewer – they receive a three-fold life.

There is a pragmatist sensibility in Lissitzky's plain description of the wall as a simple architectural construction system with elevations in three different colours. If Lissitzky's earlier colour theories interpreted black, grey, and white as an intensely energetic colour range, which represented a further heightening of infrared rays, his description of the wall colours betrayed none of their alleged vigour.445 Rather, the shimmering colour changes of the walls were portrayed as a static three-stage variation. Eminent critics also restated the description of the walls' “three-fold life”. Sigfried Giedion's review of the Raum der Abstrakten almost literally reiterated Lissitzky's description. His adherence to Lissitzky's version was even more evident in the choice of photographic illustrations. Featuring three photographs, which, as Giedion informed the reader, were made following instructions by Lissitzky and showed a proun painting "on a novel background, seen from three sides."446 In contrast to the pragmatic descriptions that focus on the relation between the wall and the paintings, stand the reports that recount the viewer's experience of the wall. Conrad Buchwald described his impressions of the Dresden exhibition as reminiscent of a "padded cell," hinting at a duality of optical and tactile effects and reminding us of its seductive and playful impact on the viewer. Summa summarum, Conrad Buchwald saw in the room "an object of dalliance."447 Other reviewers noted the calculated approach that could be detected behind what initially appeared as "madness."448 To be sure, the iridescent wall, both in Dresden as well as in Hannover, delivered captivating experiences for the viewers that were not signposted in Lissitzky's introduction with its architectural specifications and epigrammatic

445 Lissitzky, "Proun," 30.

446 Giedion, "Lebendiges Museum," 103. It should be noted that the majority of paintings were mounted within the display cassettes which interrupted the wall cladding, rather than on the wall itself.

447 Conrad Buchwald, "Die Internationale Kunstausstellung in Dresden," Schlesische Zeitung (19 June 1926).

448 Walter Schmits, "Internationale Kunstausstellungen II," Kölnische Zeitung (18 July 1926). 151 text.449 More than a background for the paintings, the wall was noted for its direct physical impact on the viewer. The variation in colour corresponded to a variation in depth perception, whereby black receded from the viewers, white advanced towards them, and grey occupied the middle ground. Since the wall's appearance changed with the viewer's every step, the space seemed to fluctuate, making the viewer conscious of links between his movement and the optical dynamic of the space. In distinction to the proun paintings, where the viewer had pictured the ambiguous spatial compositions as movement in his mind, now this was experienced in physical terms as a kind of sensory training in space. Situated at the nexus between the demonstration of optical facts and the staging of material aesthetics, the wall was equipped with a "didactic and informative function," as Beatrix Nobis points out – an interplay between the material and the immaterial.450 Most would agree that the Dresden and the Hannover demonstration room share a number of basic features. Maria Gough argues that the overall effect of the Hannover design was really no more than "an intensification and refinement of the Dresden lath system," whereby "Lissitzky shifted his construction metaphor from open lath to steel frame."451 However, I would question whether this portrayal of Lissitzky's wall design for Hannover is entirely accurate. What has been described as improvements, can be seen as innovations that disapprove claims that the Hannover wall was simply an adaption of its predecessor and hence not original. If understatedly represented by Lissitzky as a "second room," the wall composition in Hannover generated spatio-sensory transmutations that were experienced as highly amorphous and thus distinct from the simple backward and forward play with depth perception that could be witnessed in Dresden. If we are to believe Dorner's portrayal of the Raum der Abstrakten, then the viewers were dropped into a space that virtually lifted them off their feet. The surface of an ordinary museum wall had a flattening effect on the experience of space – to Dorner, it appeared to be somewhat "ironed out."452 To overcome the perception of the wall as "a graspable plane," Dorner continued, the architect (Lissitzky) "applied a metal strip cladding," which conferred to

449 The introduction to the demonstration rooms was rigorously structured under subheadings – assignment, place and purpose, requirements, execution and tasks, solution, outcomes. The main body of the text described the Dresden room, and only an addendum provided a comparatively short summary description of the room in Hannover. Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume."

450 Beatrix Nobis, "Das Abstrakte Kabinett in Hannover und andere Demonstrationsräume El Lissitzky's," in El Lissitzky 1890-1941, exhibition catalogue, ed. Norbert Nobis(Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein 1988), 222.

451 Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented," 98.

452 Alexander Dorner, "Zur Abstrakten Malerei," 114. I have translated Dorner's description of the wall as "greifbar" quite literally as "graspable" rather than "tactile" to reinforce the contrast between "graspable" and "swimming" described by Dorner. 152 the wall "something swimming."453 Dorner acknowledged the shift in emphasis from considering the wall as a load-bearing architectural element that literally supported building and paintings, to judging the wall in terms of the viewers' movements in relation to it and their spatial experiences. This paradigmatic change towards the immersion of the viewers into something "swimming" resounded with Dorner's own concept of the atmosphere room. Announcing the experience of a museum space that was no longer intelligible as physical but energetic, Dorner further enforced his explanation of Lissitzky's design by drawing comparisons with film. For Dorner, film was a medium that could effortlessly accomplish a "fluid change of perspective" and with that, "four-dimensional seeing."454 What he meant by four-dimensional seeing was the perception of compositions "in which there was constant movement" and where this "new expanse of space" is experienced dynamically; in short, "to the experience of three-dimensional space, time is added as a fourth dimension." 455 Therefore, what the viewers would encounter in Hannover, in Dorner's mind, was nothing less than ground-breaking – the viewers would witness "first advances into dark virgin soil."456 But how precisely could the system initially tested in Dresden be transformed into one that made the viewers feel as though they were in a room were all elements were swimming? Or, to go back to a direct comparison with the Dresden space – how could the painterly stripes of the timber wall be transformed into an entirely amorphous effect? There were a number of significant differences, and the first was the sequencing of the wall colours. In response to the different lighting conditions in Hannover, where the major source of light came from the side and not from above as in Dresden, the walls were divided into different sections and the sequence of colours was varied, stimulating the visitors to move around. The colour palette remained identical – white, grey and black. Entering the space from the gallery for Expressionism (room 44) and moving towards the tectonic illumination object, visitors noticed the change in the coloration of the wall sections either side. Seen from this perspective, the colours of the first section of wall 3 on the left initially appeared grey, gradually darkened to black when viewed in elevation, and finally emerged white when seen from the opposite direction and thus represented a complete inversion of the tonal scale. The colours of the second section on wall 3 followed a different pattern – after initially appearing

453 Ibid.

454 Alexander Dorner, typescript, ca. 1926, titled "Die Abstrakte Kunst ist in ‘2‘ fachem Sinne keine Malerei von Bildern" and intended as a text for the Abstract Cabinet, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 1.1.6.1.1, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

455 Ibid.

456 Dorner, "Zur Abstrakten Malerei," 114. 153 black, they gradually lightened to white when seen in elevation, and then turned grey when viewed in the reverse direction. On the visitor's right hand site, wall 1 initially appeared grey, then white and when turning back, black. Standing at this entrance, the brightness of the tectonic illumination object contrasted with the comparatively dark black and grey wall surfaces, which framed it on either side. But in very close proximity to the illumination object, when viewed in perfect elevation, the wall on either side appeared white surrounding the viewer in brightness and presented the viewers with an experience that contrasted their initial expectations (see figs. 3.8 and 3.9). By far the most significant innovation in Hannover was the replacement of the timber slats of the Dresden room with steel bands.457 The specification drawings show that these were 40 mm deep, set at right angles to the wall at 3 mm centres, and recessed by 10 mm into a painted timber panel, which formed the visual backdrop (see fig. 3.10).458 Lissitzky used a staggering 1288 linear metres of what was a highly innovative material at the time, Nirosta steel.459 As a chromium nickel alloy, Nirosta was not suitable as a structural material and its manufacturer Krupp Stahl advertised it as an architectural cladding panel for both interior and exterior applications.460 By turning the steel sheet on its edge and using it in an explicitly non- functional way, Lissitzky disaffirmed its role as a cladding panel and a construction material. Even worse – if he had fantasized about working with innovative materials like Bessemer steel and the invention of entirely new materials with unprecedented properties in his "Proun" lecture, now when given the opportunity to work with such material, he decided to paint its innovative surface. There was an undeniable irony in painting a material, which was famed precisely for not requiring painting.

457 The Dresden demonstration room was frequently omitted from historical accounts of Lissitzky’s work, as Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out in his letter to the editor of Art Journal. See Nikolaus Pevsner, "The Lissitzky Room," Art Journal 31, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 128. Dorner did not mention the Dresden precedent and incorrectly pre-dated two photographs of the Hannover room as 1925, implying that it would have preceded the Dresden Room, which was constructed in 1926. Cf. Alexander Dorner, The way beyond 'art,' (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 115.

458 The 30mm spacing refers to the dimension indicated in a plan detail shown on Lissitzky's specification drawing of wall 2 (see fig.3.10.) Monika Flacke described the spacing as "approximately 2cm [20mm]," see Monika Flacke- Knoch, Museumskonzeptionen in der Weimarer Republik - Die Tätigkeit Alexander Dorners im Provinzialmuseum Hannover (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1985), 64. Maria Gough also noted a 20mm spacing with reference to Flacke, see Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented," 98, and note 73, 122.

459 This figure was derived by adding up a list of differently lengths of Nirosta bands noted on Lissitzky's hand- drawn sketch of a Nirosta steel band (see fig. 3.11)

460 Maria Gough discusses the uses of Nirosta steel in detail. Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented," 101. For a description of the Düsselfdorf Nirosta showroom, see Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces: Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 210-11. 154

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Fig.3.8 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room showing wall 1 and visual diagram of room. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Wand 1 (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Wall 1), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 24.9x36.2cm.

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Fig.3.9 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room showing wall 3 with stacked, sliding paintings. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Wand 3 (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Wall 3), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 24.9x36.5cm.

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Fig.3.10 Specification drawing for the Hannover demonstration room, showing wall 2 and plan detail of wall. El Lissitzky, Entwurf Schaukabinett Hannover, Wand 2 (Design of Display Cabinet Hannover, Wall 1), 1926, graphite, gouache, metallic paint, black and red ink and typewritten labels, 25.2x36.2cm.

As Lissitzky himself noted, Nirosta was a "non-corrosive Krupp steel" and its exclusive surface had clad objects ranging from the top of the Chrysler Building to high-end household goods.461 This seeming contradiction has not gone unnoticed. Critics have expressed their perplexity at the fact that Lissitzky decided to paint the steel bands, arguing that "in themselves, along with the clefts of shadow cast by them, they would have produced a comparable effect of spatial destabilisation."462 Yet, Lissitzky’s interests seem to have been less in the surface qualities of the steel than in its ultra-thinness, and less in the material aesthetics of novel surfaces than in more complex optical phenomena. Despite the perceived playfulness of the wall, it is possible to discern design principles that allude to insights in optical science.

461 Lissitzky, "2 Demonstrationsräume." Nirosta presumably was a word play with the German phrase "nie rosten" meaning "never rust."

462 Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented," 123, note 81. Gough further noted that she regarded Lissitzky’s use of Nirosta – "the very latest metallurgical invention" – as a "blurring, of the otherwise strictly demarcated realms of industrial production and luxury consumption" and thus as a "certain critical reconfiguration – or at least an inflection – of the Constructivist standard on Lissitzky’s part." Ibid., 101. Against her argument, would speak the fact that the painted steel bands were no longer intelligible as Nirosta and thus could not be seen a statement that blurred luxury and industry. 156

In K. und Pangeometrie, Lissitzky declared his interest in optical science and acknowledged that advances into this imaginary space had already occurred. "V.Eggeling and his successors," he conceded, had made "decisive achievements" in this direction with abstract film.463 Yet, whilst crediting Eggeling with initiating these explorations, he simultaneously announced his own intent to go further. After all, film remained a "dematerialised surface projection," Lissitzky cautioned, and "only utilised one property of our visual faculties," thus representing no more than "the first step advancing towards the construction of an imaginary space."464 There were other possibilities, which went beyond the testing of "an entire series of properties of our visual faculties" in film, and these were: "the stereoscopic effects generated by movement when passing colourful media" and "the colour impressions generated through the superimposition of coloured light beams," he continued. However, Lissitzky did not enter novel territory by exploring optical phenomena – such as stereoscopy (namely adding an illusion of depth to a flat image). These too, had been tested by Eggeling in his film Diagonal Symphonie for example, in the deployment of "different shades of grey in time to create the effect of fading in and fading out," or the use of Kontrast-Analogie (contrast analogy), a method which traced the formation of a symmetrical image with an inbuilt contrasting element in time by first representing one part of the image and the its other part.465 For what Lissitzky must be credited, is the translation of these themes into space, and with that, from the visual faculties to the entire sensory apparatus. In many ways, there is an evident parallel between the sequential revelation of different images of the demonstration room wall and the fade-out effects of film and the overlay of images in stereoscopy, although in this instance, it is the visitor who generated the movement. Whilst he did not explicitly reference specific optical phenomena in the context of the demonstration rooms, themes such as figure/ground relationships, chromatic augmentation and assimilation can be readily identified in the walls. The Dresden and Hannover spaces share a number of optical phenomena but the change of the colour sequence on the steel band in Hannover and its thinness have a highly exacerbating effect that has been largely overlooked. In Dresden, the timber slats in were painted white on the left, black on the right, and grey at the front edge to match the grey background of the wall. This meant that the vertical colour banding was either seen as an

463 Lissitzky, K. und Pangeometrie, 128.

464 Ibid.

465 R. Bruce Elder, Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008), 448.

157 alternation between either the grey edge against a white side elevation, or a grey edge against black side elevation – whilst both combinations represent a tonal gradient they also display the optic phenomenon of chromatic augmentation: the grey appeared lighter against the black side and in reverse, darker against white side because the eye augments the difference between the edge and what appears to be its background. Thus the different colour sequences and view angles entailed subtly varied optical sub-effects. A more amorphous visual phenomenon presented in the walls were figure-ground relations: if seen from an angle where the black/grey or white/grey striation consists of different widths, the narrower stripes appear as figure because the determining factor for the figure-ground relationship is not colour but relative size. But if seen in such a way that both of them appear to have the same width, the figure-ground relationship is ambiguous and either could be alternately seen as figure or ground – a visual destabilising effect comparable to Eggeling's concept of contrast analogy (see fig. 3.11). In addition, because in Hannover Lissitzky decided to paint the front edge either black or white, and not grey, the high-contrast- banding of black and white exacerbated the effect of striation – an effect quite different to the comparatively softer gradation of colour in Dresden (see figs. 3.13 and 3.14). Crucially, in contrast to the Dresden timber slat, this front edge was now ultrathin. The use of an industrially-manufactured material as opposed to traditional timber permitted a high degree of exactness: Nirosta sheets could be produced in a very thin sheet size, effectively reducing the edge of the steel band to the optical thinness of a line. In an annotated detail sketch of the steel bands, Lissitzky specified their size as 40 mm x 1 mm, but added in brackets "or 0,8," indicating his desire to reduce the already minimal width of the steel even further (see fig. 3.12).

Fig.3.11 Figure-ground relations. Both the black and the grey stripes can be interpreted as figure. The figure ground relationship is ambiguous because the stripes are equal width (left). The narrower stripes are figure. The determining factor for the figure ground relationship is not colour but relative size, 2009. Illustration: author

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Fig.3.12 El Lissitzky, copy of hand-drawn sketch of Nirosta steel band, undated, Nachlass Alexander Dorner, 1.1.2.5.2, Archiv Sprengel Museum Hannover.

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Fig.3.13 El Lissitzky, Raum der Abstrakten, 1927, Provinzialmuseum Hannover.

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Fig.3.14 El Lissitzky, Raum für Konstruktive Kunst, 1926, Internationale Kunstaustellung Dresden.

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When visiting the reconstruction of the room at the Sprengel Museum, the thinness and blade- like quality of the steel bands stands out. Particularly when seen in front elevation, the sharpness and precision of the material is clearly articulated, adding a tactile dimension to the optical spectacle. But what crucially distinguishes Hannover from Dresden is Lissitzky's mediation of a highly amorphous phenomenon: the effects of figure-ground relations, it appears, are exacerbated by the ultrathin edge and the resulting effect could be described as an electric flickering. This occurs at the point where neither the front elevation nor the side elevation can be clearly distinguished as stable figures and the eye constantly switches between them. The visual impact of the Raum der Abstrakten significantly differs from the one witnessed in the Raum für Konstruktive Kunst in Dresden, where the width of the timber slats and their wide spacing retained a calm painterly effect that stands in contrast to the harsh flicker in Hannover. The later was reminiscent of the irregular flicker of early films, or the neon lights of commercial advertising– common visual phenomena of modernity in the Weimar era, which, as Lissitzky had indicated earlier, had already begun to explore "imaginary space" by means of their "immaterial materiality."466

Conclusion: Material Strategies for Exhibitions

No more than a small corner room (5260mm x 4470mm), the Raum der Abstrakten represented an interior space that was nested inside another building – the Provinzialmuseum. Yet it remained a foreign object: a space of the future in a building that belonged to the past; a room of intimate dimensions that contained an infinite world; made of construction materials that appeared sharp in one instant, and fluid or electric in the next. In other words, the Raum der Abstrakten represented a space of temporal, geometric and material impossibilities that exploded and transformed the traditional notion of space as visually contiguous and of a uniform depth.

Lissitzky’s exhibition designs elevated materiality from a mere background function to the actual thematic focus of the exhibition. The materials and their rhythmic sensory effects stimulated the viewers' movement and gave rise to intense and at times conflicting sensory experiences that were intended to engage the visitors intellectually by making them reflect about their place in the modern world, where tactile and visual senses were no longer

466 Lissitzky, "Proun," 130. 161 opposed. Lissitzky thus translated the sensory experiences of an industrialised and media- dominated modernity into an architectural prototype; not with the intent of creating chaos, but to acquaint the viewer with an intensely technicised future and its possibilities. As a trained architect and a practising artist, he understood that his task was more than providing functional objects or sensory spectacles, rather his designs had to provide transformative experiences that were intellectual as much as physical. For him, it was "the eye of the architect that shows us a series of known objects in such a way that we are prompted to reconsider these more profoundly."467 While the frequent references to avant-garde exhibition makers in the rhetoric surrounding contemporary art practices is used to claim trans-historic correspondences, a closer analysis of both hints at fundamental differences in the ways in which materials are understood and utilised. What sets the avant-garde projects of Lissitzky and Dorner apart from contemporary models is their foregrounding of materiality as an activating element that directs and shapes audience experiences. Their positions were based on an understanding of the material world as central to human experience and progress, and most importantly, marked by an aesthetic fascination with materials and their effects on the human psyche and behaviour. Despite their use of common materials, they distinguished between everyday and aesthetic experiences by providing scenarios which provided familiar reference points to the sensory realities of everyday, whilst at the same time not leaving these realities unaltered; rather they were artificially intensified as experiential spectacles. This approach differs from Gillick’s use of architectural references in so far that it does not literally use physical fragments to represent other spaces; rather it evokes their sensory reality. Lissitzky's demonstration rooms simulated the experience of modernity in an intensified form: perception in motion, flickering lights, and the visual harshness of industrial environments. To an extent, the contemporary approaches almost appear to reverse the avant-garde’s fascination with exhibition architecture as an instrument of mediation by demoting it as décor and backdrop. And by simply considering the material condition of venues as an inconspicuous background for visitor activities, the stagings of Gillick, Bourriaud and Obrist appear to be deliberately designed to recede from appearance. As Bourriaud repeatedly states, for him, the exhibition is "a place like any other place."468 Thus, if the repeated citation of the avant-garde’s

467 El Lissitzky, "Das Auge des Architekten," in Proun und Wolkenbügel Schriften, Briefe, Dokumente, eds. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers and Jen Lissitzky (Dresden: VEB Verlag der Kunst, 1977), 69. A translation of El Lissitzky's 1926 review of Erich Mendelsohn, America: Bilderbuch eines Architekten. Lissitzky concluded the text with "Architekt El Lissitzky."

468 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 71. 162 exhibition-paradigm in the context of relational art might intimate close aspirational and methodical links, the importance of the exhibition architecture and its materiality is in fact understood quite differently. With the discussion of Lissitzky's concept of an "immaterial materiality" and its practical translation in his Dresden and Hannover demonstration rooms, this chapter has opened up a new way of understanding material manipulations of the exhibition architecture as a means of mediation. Lissitzky's exhibition model goes beyond Dorner's decidedly immersive and static atmosphere concept in so far that it conceives of mediation as a dynamic process that occurs in movement. This emphasis on movement is explored in more complex ways at at a larger scale in the analysis of the 1930 Werkbund exhibition, which follows in the next chapter. With its flickering lights, slide projections and rotating objects, the Werkbund exhibition appears to be in constant motion. And this perpetual dynamic is matched by the movement of the viewers, who are also moved along in a manner that is more direct and controlled than Lissitzky's psycho-perceptual enticements: namely across pathways, boardwalks and bridges that literally transcribe the means of modern traffic control onto the exhibition. If this chapter demonstrated, how Lissitzky translated the dynamic effects of abstract film into a material strategy for his architecture, the next chapter shows how the exhibition team of the 1930 Werkbund exhibition (and particularly Moholy-Nagy) take this idea one step further by using image projections and lighting technology to create a truly "immaterial" interplay between innovative materials and filmic effects. In the developments between Warburg, Dorner and Lissitzky's exhibition approaches, the previous chapters demonstrated, how the exhibition architecture itself continually increases in importance over the exhibits themselves. With the Werkbund exhibition, this reaches a climax, whereby the material aesthetics of the exhibition become the main means of mediation rather than the exhibits themselves; and more than that, they also assume an ethical dimension reflecting the psyche of the Weimar populus.

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CHAPTER 4

COMMUNICATION MATERIAL: EXPERIMENTS WITH GERMAN CULTURE IN THE 1930 WERKBUND EXHIBITION

If there are architectural investigations that centre on the 1930 Werkbund Exhibition, they tend to direct our attention to standardized designs of modern buildings and everyday objects that deployed the mass-produced dream materials of the time: various kinds of plastics, glass and aluminium were celebrated as the achievements of an emerging high-industrial society. The exhibition’s compelling economy of function and material conjured up a vision of rationalisation, mass production and unstoppable progress made possible by "the practical interpenetration of economy and technology with the world of art," a theme which had been advanced by the Werkbund and the Bauhaus over the past decades.469 "From stationery to chair, from cup to furniture covering, from theatre to sports field, and from the newest Hanomag locomotive to the serially-produced car," the exhibition represented outstanding examples of German design as part of a new, all-embracing techno-aesthetic system.470 Counter to the survey nature of the exhibition, there is, however, a second consideration that looks beyond the particularity and material logic of the individual designs. Instead, it considers materiality at the level of the exhibition, which, with its intense atmosphere and innovative display techniques, can be seen as an edifice in its own right. Lined up, stacked, and suspended mid-air, the exhibition material generated patterns and rhythms across walls, ceilings and rooms that structured the visitor’s experience. Together with dynamic illumination, reflective materials, and colourful neon signs, the staging of material

469 Walter Gropius, "Architektur auf der Deutschen Werkbundausstellung in Paris, Grand Palais, Mai bis Juli 1930," typescript, 1 August 1930, Gropius Walter (1889-1969), Werkmanuskripte, GS20: Aufsatz- und Vortragsmanuskripte, Mappe 62, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1.

470 Alexander Dorner, "Gedanken zur Französisch-Deutschen Ausstellung in Paris," Hannoverscher Anzeiger (6 Juli 1930). 165 appears to have aimed at the production of architectural experiences, which translated the concepts of modernity as sensory impressions. The aim of this chapter is to pursue the way in which the Werkbund Exhibition signified a shift away from the technical representation of objects through the usual records (drawings, images, models, etc.) and towards the aesthetic translation of the modernist concepts inherent to these objects (dynamism, variation etc.) as material sensations and experiences. The five exhibition spaces can be construed as a series of discrete perceptions which constituted the actual building material of the exhibition – "blocs of sensation" to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term.471 In mapping the modernist logic of innovative materials onto the aesthetics of display, the curators made the audience believe in simultaneity between technological progress, social ideals, and modern life experiences. Focusing on a detailed analysis of the exhibition spaces and their reception, this chapter argues that the material imagination of the curators – Walter Gropius and his former Bauhaus colleagues Marcel Breuer, László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer – significantly shaped the exhibition’s international impact. In the diverse approaches of the curatorial team, the momentum of a convergence between material technology and material aesthetics was building up towards a display paradigm that significantly transfigured curatorial practice of the Weimar period and informed later curatorial approaches such as those developed by Alfred Barr, Peter Blake, and Arthur Drexler at the MoMA.472

The Werkbund Exhibition in Paris 1930 – Background

Germany’s participation in the 1930 Werkbund Exhibition signalled a positive development in the re-establishment of Franco-German relations, which had been severely affected by the traumatic events of World War I. In its aftermath, France had not extended invitations to Germany for previous exhibitions and thus Germany’s participation under the organisational leadership of Walter Gropius and the Werkbund elicited high expectations on all sides.473 In his

471 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (London: Verso, 1994), 164.

472 Mary Anne Staniszewski discusses the MoMA’s full-scale proto-type exhibitions in the museum garden, which were initiated by Peter Blake with the construction of Marcel Breuer’s 1949 "House in the Garden" and followed by a series of similar projects. The provision of full-scale architectural experiences was a response to the audience’s perceived disinterest in photographs and small models. Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display - A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press 2001), 199-202.

473 The Deutsche Werkbund Exhibition was highly controversial at the time, both in relation to divisions within the French design world as well as national differences between France and Germany. Le Corbusier, Auguste Perret, Robert Mallet-Stevens and other representatives of the French modern movement had either severed their links with the Société des Artistes décorateurs entirely or did not participate in the 1930 exhibition, which made it difficult to draw direct comparisons between the German and French sections. See J. Grünberg, "Die Gropius Ausstellung in Paris," Berliner Tageblatt (31 May 1930). Paul Overy elucidates the different implications the 166 script for the exhibition, Gropius declared that the exhibition would not only present Germany’s recent advancements in design but also convey an image of a new German mind- set:

The German section at the "Exposition de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs" will be a demonstrative show that shall testify to this kind of mental attitude in Germany today; it will present methods and results that will register the development of direct connections to today’s social and technical world in the areas of architecture, living, theatre and individual objects from furniture to jewellery.474

In a bid to reduce the distance between economy and culture, cutting-edge discoveries from industry and technology were transcribed into the realm of art, domestic architecture and living in general. The "practical interpenetration of economy and technology with art," Gropius further suggested, had overcome the national and personal emphasis in art practices that had dominated the Wilhelmine era – a sentimental, decorative, and academically-rooted tradition. The same individuating tendencies were still reflected in the emergence of numerous splinter movements, or "isms" during the past decade, Gropius argued. However, these had now been replaced by the Werkbund’s singular vision and innovative attitudes, which had not only experienced a dramatic rise in interest over the past decade but had indeed "captivated the entire country," he continued.475 Thus Gropius presented the appointment of the Werkbund as the logical consequence of historic developments in Weimar Germany. The spaces assigned to Gropius and his team were less than ideal for an exhibition. The "Section allemande" was located at the far end of the neo-baroque Grand Palais building in Paris, with almost no opportunities for natural illumination. One room was squeezed under a staircase, and the other rooms also relied almost solely on artificial lighting, as Sigfried Giedion

exhibition carried for the Germans and the French. Whereas the Germans regarded it as a very limited selection of German design and mainly a representation of the Bauhaus ideology under Gropius’ directorship, the French saw it as a unified representation of German design and culture as such. See Paul Overy, "Visions of the Future and the Immediate Past: The Werkbund exhibition, Paris 1930," Journal of Design History 17, no. 4 (2004): 337-57. Others highlighted the Werkbund’s "tabula rasa" approach to art that proposed an abstract, anonymous language envisaged not only as a German standard but, as Gropius had indicated in his text for the exhibition, an international one. The radicalism of the proposal was not only at odds with French adherence to traditions of high- quality craftsmanship but also caused concerns about Germany’s claim to international authority in design and industry. See Yvonne Brunnhammer and Suzanne Tise, Decorative Arts of France 1900-1942 (New York: Random House, 1990) 179.

474 Walter Gropius,"Die Deutsche Abteilung auf der 'Exposition de la Société des Artistes décorateurs' in Paris, Grand Palais, im Mai 1930," typescript, 1930, Gropius Walter (1889-1969), Werkmanuskripte, GS20: Aufsatz- und Vortragsmanuskripte, Mappe 63, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 3.

475 Gropius, "Die Deutsche Abteilung auf der ’Exposition de la Société des Artistes décorateurs’ in Paris," 3. 167 reported.476 Gropius provided the overall concept: a series of five seamlessly interconnected exhibition spaces, each thematising a particular aspect of German cultural production. Whilst Gropius assumed responsibility for the first room, he assigned the planning of the other four rooms to his former Bauhaus colleagues, ensuring a consistent approach that represented the Bauhaus ethos under his directorship 1919-1928. Salle 1, the first room, showed a full-scale mock-up of the communal areas of a 10-storey residential building designed by Gropius for his "Genossenschaftsstadt" project. It included a wide range of facilities for social and leisure- related functions including swimming pool, exercise area, dance floor, café bar, and gramophone niches, and finally, a library for education and intellectual engagement. In the adjacent space (Salle 3), Marcel Breuer demonstrated what a model apartment for a couple without children in an apartment hotel could look like.477 Sleek steel furnishings and gleaming materials demonstrated an ideal of rationalized, hygienic living. The elegant appointment and generosity of these spaces reminded one of a luxury resort rather than collective living. Both rooms showed 1:1 prototypes and together represented a model of community-based living and reflected the technological advances social changes which had occurred in Germany over the past decades. These changes were also amply documented in a variety of media across the entire exhibition. Occupying the great double-height hall, Gropius’ and Breuer’s rooms formed the centre of the exhibition from which the visitor entered the three side rooms curated by László Moholy-Nagy and Herbert Bayer. In Salle 2, Moholy-Nagy presented developments in photography, lighting, and theatre; and Salle 4 and Salle 5 were dedicated to serially-produced goods and architectural projects organised by Herbert Bayer. With a wide range of themes and display strategies, ranging from the display of 1:1 mock-up environments to the staging of small-scale objects, the five rooms were formally unified by a select palette of innovative materials. As an important means of communicating the underlying attitudes of the exhibition, these materials were not only present in the exhibited design objects but were equally explored as part of the exhibition architecture.

476 Sigfried Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," Der Cicerone 22, no. 15/16 (August 1930): 429.

477 Gropius’ emphasis on communal living and the inclusion of sports and leisure facilities is comparable to ideas discussed in Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture. Yet Le Corbusier’s vision of a future leisure society foresaw that chores such as communal cooking, washing and childcare would be taken over by servants. Gropius’ model reflected societal changes that had eroded family living in favour of apartment living reflecting amongst others in the increased number of single women who had joined the workforce after WWI and the small core family. Cf., Claudius Torp, Konsum und Politik in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2011), 210. 168

Theoretical positions: Material Logic and Material Imagination

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, advances in science and technology brought forth new industrially-produced materials that replaced traditional materials such as wood, steel and stone, or combined these with materials previously used in other fields. In parallel, speculations about the affective nature of the relations between man and materials emerged in nineteenth century German Aesthetics, in particular in relation to the concept of Einfühlung (empathy). These theories instigated a shift from philosophical and physiological questions about how we perceive materials and space towards the psychological aspects of how we understand and value materials and space. It is the interest in our psycho-physical relations with materials that inspired the work of the avant-gardes who explored the theme in conjunction with practical experimentation.478 In the 1920s, materials had rapidly moved from the realm of craft to that of serial prefabrication: if previously manual and technical skills were required, now intellectual consideration was the key. Walter Gropius compared designing with prefabricated standard elements to playing with "a building set at a large scale," which, he believed, offered the opportunity to combine perfectly fitting elements in endless variations.479 Modern design depended on "spatial conception and the massing of its parts," as much as on "the limits of mechanics, statics, optics and acoustics," Gropius explained in a typescript for the Werkbund Exhibition.480 This quasi-scientific outlook was also noted by critics who observed that in the exhibition "the engineer-like is transformed into a serious play with form fantasy."481 The result of this attitude was neither purely technical nor purely aesthetic as French critic Paul Fierens remarked in his exhibition review in Le Journal des Débats.482 Material logic and material imagination were the driving forces behind the curatorial concepts of the exhibition, if in distinctly different ways: part of the exhibition pictured materials as the key to modern design, which, as Gropius proposed, was no longer based on the "external addition of decorative ornamentation and profile" but on the interrelations

478 See the introduction to Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou, eds. and transl., Empathy, Form and Space - Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for History of Art and the Humanities, 1994), 1-2.

479 Walter Gropius, "Nichteisen-Metalle in der Bauwirtschaft," typescript, October 1930, Gropius Walter (1889- 1969), Werkmanuskripte, GS20: Aufsatz- und Vortragsmanuskripte, Mappe 69, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1.

480 Gropius, "Architektur auf der Deutschen Werkbundausstellung in Paris," 3.

481 Max Osborn, "Gropius und die Seinen - Die Deutsche Ausstellung in Paris," Vossische Zeitung (22 May 1930).

482 Paul Fierens, "Le 'Deutscher Werkbund' au Salon des Artistes décorateurs," Le Journal des Débats (10 Juni 1930), cited as a German translation in Gropius, "Architektur auf der Deutschen Werkbundausstellung in Paris," 7. 169 between material, mass, and colour.483 These interrelations constituted an object’s unique material logic and provided a design concept that could be extended towards the " 'design of life processes' and thus the uniform shaping of the entire spatial world on the basis of its social, aesthetic, technical and economic preconditions," as Gropius stipulated in an exhibition text.484 In this text, he further outlined a techno-aesthetic paradigm, which substantiated the modernist fiction generated by the Bauhaus that the material logic of technology also possessed its own aesthetic appeal. The Werkbund Exhibition and in particular, his and Breuer’s designs for the great hall (Salle 1 and Salle 3), were intended to deliver the empirical proof for this hypothesis – it was to be a "demonstrative show," Gropius insisted. 485 Other parts of the Werkbund Exhibition recognised the powerful mediating component of materials that existed independent of utilitarian considerations. If Gropius focused predominantly on the techno-aesthetic advantages of new materials, Moholy-Nagy imagined the mediating power of materials by linking them directly with sensory and corporeal effects and their impact on human consciousness. His arrangements testified to an expanded understanding of their meaning and agency.486 For him, materials included spatio-temporal phenomena, which had to be considered holistically across multiple disciplinary realms including art, architecture, advertising and psychology. To some extent distancing himself from the subjective expressionist conjectures of the pre-world war years and the early Bauhaus period, Moholy-Nagy’s work was inspired by scientific ideas, which explained the interrelations between human beings and the material world biologically and in a dynamic manner.487 In part, his writings recall Wilhelm Ostwald’s energetism that interpreted perception as an interaction of energies between the human organism and materials, as well as Futurist

483 Walter Gropius cited in Wilhelm Lotz, "Ausstellung des deutschen Werkbundes in Paris," Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 5, no. 11-12 (1930): 281.

484 Gropius, "Die Deutsche Abteilung auf der ’Exposition de la Société des Artistes décorateurs’ in Paris," 3.

485 Gropius,"Architektur auf der Deutschen Werkbundausstellung in Paris," 2.

486 On the social value of Moholy-Nagy’s work and its reception in Weimar Germany, see Victor Margolin’s book chapter on "The Politics of Form: Rodchenko and Moholy-Nagy, 1922-29," in The struggle for utopia: Rodchenko, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy 1917-1946 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997), 123-62.

487 Artistic references to modern science were a common feature of avant-garde theorists. Sigird Schade suggested that their knowledge was characterized by a discursive contextualisation of fragmented scientific facts which circulated in intellectual circles at the time. Despite the lack of a scientific basis, these ideas had a significant influence on the formation of theories about aesthetic production, mediation and reception. Moholy-Nagy’s work was no exception and also interpreted these insights imaginatively. See Sigrid Schade, "Zu den ‚unreinen’ Quellen der Moderne. Materialität und Medialität bei Kandinsky und Malewitsch," in Grenzgänge zwischen den Künsten: Interventionen in Gattungshierarchien und Geschlechterkonstruktionen, eds. Jennifer John and Sigrid Schade (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008), 45. 170 concepts, which conceived of the world as traversed by interconnected energy fields.488 In a text titled "Dynamisch-Konstruktives Kraftsystem" (dynamic-constructive force-system), Moholy-Nagy registered what he understood to be the underexploited mediating power of materials:

... we have to replace the static principle of classical art with the dynamic principle of universal life. Practically: instead of the static material-construction (material- and form-relations) the dynamic construction (vital constructivity, relations of forces) must be organised, where material is deployed as a mediator of energies only.489

For Moholy-Nagy something beyond a purely technological aesthetic was at stake, something with much broader cultural potential. Dynamically conceived elements such as spatial installations and film, he envisaged, could intensify perception and mental alertness and thus catapult the viewer out of a passive mode of reception. In contrast to Gropius, Moholy-Nagy was not interested in the material object itself. Material was of importance only insofar that it offered sensory experiences, which had the power to expand the viewer’s vision of the world and of ourselves as an integral part of it. To probe the dynamic interrelations between audience, material and space Moholy-Nagy developed the light-space modulator – a light projection machine that transformed its environment by means of colourful light effects. This was shown for the first time at the Werkbund Exhibition, where it was installed in Salle 2. The apparatus represented Moholy-Nagy’s move towards an art that was quasi objectless and purely medial – a staging of spatio-material phenomena rather than the mechanical construction with materials. The knowledge required for its development was twofold. It had to be technical in order to achieve these effects, and psychological in order to direct and calculate their influence upon the viewer. Compared to the investigation of physical laws in engineering and science, Moholy-Nagy felt that "research into psycho-physiological laws of optical effectiveness [was] far behind," and had just begun to be explored in American advertising.490

488 Wilhelm Ostwald’s colour theory was highly influential in constructivist circles and was introduced to de Stijl by Moholy-Nagy’s fellow constructivist and Hungarian Vilmos Huszar. Moholy-Nagy’s own use of boldly coloured light also brings to mind Ostwald’s theories. Cf. Stephen Gage, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism (London: Thames & Hudson, 1999), 244.

489 László Moholy-Nagy and Alfred Kemény, "Dynamisch-Konstruktives Kraftsystem," typescript, June-July 1922, Moholy-Nagy, Mappe 1, Werkmanuskripte, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

490 László Moholy-Nagy, "Die Photographie in der Reklame," Photographische Korrespondenz Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche und angewandte Photographie und die gesamte Reproduktionstechnik 63, no. 9 (1 September 1927): 257. 171

The psychological impact of exhibitions on the visitor also formed the focus of Herbert Bayer’s work, which was informed by his very robust engagement with graphics and advertising. For Bayer, the relationship between exhibition and visitor was regulated by the criterion of vision. Because "the exhibition space is available to the individual eye," Bayer determined that it "should obtain its forms from the qualities of the eye itself."491 As a temporary space, the exhibition was not subjected to the design criteria that applied to permanent buildings, he speculated. Free from such constraints, the exhibition could solely focus on what was central for its success – the intensity of experience and its control:

The theme should not retain its distance from the spectator, it should be brought close to him, penetrate and leave an impression on him, should explain, demonstrate, and even persuade and lead him to a planned and direct reaction. Therefore we may say that exhibition design runs parallel with the psychology of advertising.492

Whatever form an exhibition might take, whatever its theme, audience, or order, Bayer believed that it was never innocent or objective. More accurately, it was a venue where impressions and reactions were carefully planned and staged according to the psycho- technical laws of advertising. If in nineteenth century exhibition practice, the arrangement of objects was informed by scientific criteria (chronology, geography, artist, medium etc.) in other words, by the academic discipline specific to its objects, Bayer’s curatorial approach mapped the organisation of objects in accordance with what he believed to be the visual psychology of the viewer. This sense of an expanded understanding of materiality that was not object-oriented but based on its mutual relation with the human body and psyche pervaded the majority of Bauhaus curatorial practice and design. Oskar Schlemmer’s observations about the interrelations between the dancer and his "material" – the stage set – can be regarded as a general statement in this respect. Written only months after his figurines were exhibited in Salle 2 of the Werkbund show, his article "Gestaltung aus dem Material" (Design on the Basis of Material) presented the material structure of the environment as a fundamental value of spatial experience: "Centre, corners, partition, height, width and depth, and emanating from this, the invisible net of lines ... Material! In the same sense material can be and can become:

491 Herbert Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," PM (Production Manager) 6, no. 2 (December 1939 – January 1940): 23-24.

492 Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," 17. 172 colour, structure, surface qualities of the floor area, wall area (timber, textile), and incidence and brightness of light etc."493 For Schlemmer, the human assimilation of material surroundings allowed the development of an intensified "Raumgefühl" (feeling for space). Consequently, "a point in space, a surface, a coloured surface, a plastic object, a shining moving object, a light space, a dark, low, divided, symmetric, asymmetric space, stairs, maps, furniture," all these were "injections into the body" and effected "the most diverse corporeal reactions," Schlemmer proposed.494 In summary, the re-imagination of materiality as relational and based upon psychological control, provided Moholy-Nagy, Bayer, and Schlemmer with the enabling assumptions for an expanded curatorial model that focused on the skillful mediation of ideas. Their mediation techniques sought to establish the exhibition as a venue for wider cultural, social and political debate by making it accessible. What remained subject to debate, was how precisely effective mediation was to be achieved and how the interaction of the general visitor, not only with the objects on display, but also with the material environment of the exhibition as such could be successfully stage-managed to exacting ends.

Innovative Materials

Eager to be seen as affirmative of technological progress, Gropius and his colleagues demonstrated their preference for the most advanced industrial materials. When Paul Wertheimer visited the exhibition, he identified ultimate novelty as the prime theme of the show. "The most modern of all that even exists," and "uncompromisingly the very latest, the best of the new," were his dominant impressions.495 Composite or chemically treated metals, diverse types of glass and plastics promised previously unimaginable design possibilities for the entire field of artistic production, and an infinite range of potential applications seemed to be waiting to be explored. The curatorial teams’ adhesion to a material palette appeared to aim at a formally unified impression rather than a confusing assemblage of diverse approaches. Many links to industry were already established. With a view to his collaboration with the metal industry for the upcoming 1931 Deutsche Bauausstellung (German Building Exhibition), Gropius promoted non-ferrous metals as part of the Paris show.496 These were

493 Oskar Schlemmer, "Gestaltung aus dem Material," Das neue Frankfurt: Internationale Monatsschrift für die Probleme kultureller Neugestaltung 4, no. 10 (Ausstellungen, October 1930): 223.

494 Schlemmer, "Gestaltung aus dem Material," 223.

495 Paul Wertheimer, "Deutsche Kunst in Paris," Acht Uhr Abendblatt Berlin (17 August 1930).

496 Anonymous author, "Die Deutsche Werkbundausstellung in Paris," Metallwirtschaft 9, no. 28 (July 1930): 599. 173 used for the glass display elements, but various profiles were also displayed by Herbert Bayer in the section for serial products in Salle 4. Aluminium profiles from Wieland Werke in Ulm featured extensively, as did aluminium wall panelling. At the time, metal composites had been frequently associated with notions of luxury and exclusivity: Nirosta, a new metal-composite by German steel manufacturer Krupp Stahl was promoted in its own lavish showrooms as a corrosion-free metal whose surface properties offered a new aesthetic appeal (Nirosta no longer required painting). Its known applications spanned the fields of architecture, industrial design and art. It was used to clad the top of the Empire State building, deployed for the manufacture of luxury household goods, and adapted by El Lissitzky for the shimmering walls of his Hannover demonstration room, the Abstract Cabinet.497 Gropius did not fail to praise the functional and aesthetic preferences of metal composites: their practical advantages – "their homogeneity, weather-resistance, water-repellence and rust freeness, furthermore, the possibility to attain a precise fitting of elements" – found their aesthetic correspondence in attractive surface qualities – unlike iron, non-ferrous metals did not require a paint coating, and the "desired effects" could be achieved "with the natural colour and surface of the material itself."498 Advanced chemical processes lead to the production of plastics such as Trolit – a panel that could be produced with reflective, matt or varicoloured surface qualities, and was intended to replace gypsum board and traditional wallpapers. An exhibition review by Max Osborn described Trolit as an "excellent material" that comes as glazed sheets which "can be produced in any size or form" and can assume the appearance of "giant tiles, or stucco lustro, or even real stone whilst all the same retaining its specific texture."499 When left unglazed, he continued, Trolit displayed "an epidermis much like biscuit porcelain;" and whilst most of the tiles he saw in the exhibition were of a "milky coloration," he was impressed with the occurrence of sheets in "strong colours" that calmly floated like "airy ornaments" within the pale walls. Trolit featured across the entire exhibition in variety of scenarios - Gropius’ cost plan listed 150m2 Trolit panels for exhibition Salle 1 alone.500 Moholy-Nagy specified it for a thin, u-shaped screen enclosing the "Kino-Box" (cinema box) in Salle 2, where the panels

497 Maria Gough discusses the use of Nirosta by Lissitzky. See Maria Gough, "Constructivism Disoriented: El Lissitzky's Dresden and Hannover Demonstrationsräume," in Situating El Lissitzky: Vitebsk Berlin Moscow, eds. Nancy Perloff and Brian Reed (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 101.

498 Gropius, "Nichteisen-Metalle in der Bauwirtschaft," 3.

499 Max Osborn, "Gropius und die Seinen."

500 Walter Gropius, "Kostenzusammenstellung für den Raum I der Ausstellung Deutscher Werkbund Paris," typescript, 1930, Gropius Walter (1883-1969) GN Kiste 6, Mappe 318: Deutscher Werkbund 1930, 79. Exhibitions, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. 174 appeared in a patchwork of colours on the external side, their high gloss finish generating an almost fluid appearance (see fig. 4.1). On the inside of the box, the surface finish was more restrained and the choice of a matt black surface avoided reflections and created a darker environment for the slide projections. Progress in glass manufacture brought forth diverse types of glazing and increased sheet sizes with ever slimmer frames lent maximum transparency to display windows and buildings. An article titled "New Forms in Metal and Glass" published in Die Baugilde credited the glass display cases at the Werkbund Exhibition for pushing the boundaries of what seemed technically conceivable in the field of glass technology: "The free-standing glass display case, [that is] the show box which is viewable from all sides and made from metal and glass with a maximum of transparency, had to become even more transparent. We want to see even more glass and even less metal."501

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Fig.4.1 Werkbund Exhibition Paris 1930, view of Salle 2 through the glass wall (Trolit screen of "Kino-Box" on the left).

501 Anonymous author, "Neue Formen in Metall und Glass," Die Baugilde (30 September 1930): 1620. Press Clipping from Findbuch Harvard College Library, Walter Gropius, Papers II, Press Clippings 1930, 29/1 bis 18, Ausstellung Deutscher Werkbund, Paris 1930 (Copy at Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin). 175

The cases featured a metal three-corner profile designed to receive a bevelled glass edge. The patented detail achieved a completely flush transition between metal and glass creating a smooth external skin that appeared to wrap almost seamlessly around the display (see fig.4.2). The mandate of technological innovation carried by exhibitions is explained by Bayer:

In addition, different materials require different methods of handling and constructive and special effects. Here, too, important experience was gained in the practical construction of commercial buildings and exhibitions. A new "industry" was being developed. Craft organisations sprang up to specialize in the use of all kinds of materials. Entirely new techniques were discovered and investigated. In this field of exhibitions, the fruits of universal education were apparent: familiarity with many different techniques and materials and their possibilities in design.502

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Fig.4.2 Corner detail of glass display case – Werkbund Exhibition, room 2.

502 Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," 24. 176

Whereas industry conceived the minimisation of material as an attempt not to "distract the visitor with details" and instead "focus his gaze on what is offered within in the glass-and metal-enclosed space," the photographs of the exhibition testify to the opposite.503 In their interplay with artificial light, reflections, transparencies etc., the glassy display cases were the actual stars of the exhibition and appeared in a number of variations – with solid sheet infill, colourful bases, variances in steel framing, size and height. Bayer’s enormous glass display for serial products, for example, outsized and upstaged the small objects it contained, tipping the balance between exhibit and exhibition architecture in favour of the later. Into this larger display case, Bayer inserted a small jewellery display case – according to Max Osborn "a particularly beautiful" item - turning it into a box within a box and blurring the line between exhibit and display even further.504 In Salle 2, Moholy-Nagy installed a curved glass screen made with profiles from the Wieland Werke. This strategically placed dividing screen amplified the brightness produced by the serial display of lighting fixtures along the opposite wall, as well as the colourful light play of the light-space modulator and the on-off effects of the automatic slide projections in the "Kino-Box" (see fig. 4.3). Not all experiments with glazing attained the desired effect and some were dismissed as "entertaining" and "not to be taken seriously," as was the case for a matt glass sheet with concave lenses that showed the space on the other side "in little pictures," as Parisian architect and critic Durand-Dupont somewhat sarcastically remarked.505

Visiting the Future: Gropius and Breuer’s Prototypes for Modern Living

If the play with modern materials and technologies unfurled real, and at times patentable solutions, the other "material" of the exhibition was visual in nature and produced spectacular images rather than showcasing technological or practical outcomes. One of these material showcases was a ramp and elevated walkway made of galvanised Tezett metal grids. Sigfried Giedion described it as part of his first impression upon entering the exhibition: attention was immediately directed to a swimming pool and exercise area, above which rose a stair and elevated walkway made of Tezett metal grids, leading the visitor up and on to subsequent exhibition rooms.506 For Wilhelm Lotz, the Tezett construction was a "material demonstration."

503 Anonymous author, "Neue Formen in Metall und Glass," 1620.

504 Osborn, "Gropius und die Seinen."

505 Durand-Dupont (alias Roger Ginsburger), "Der Deutsche Werkbund im Salon der ‘Artistes-Décorateurs‘, Paris," Das Werk, no. 7 (Juli 1930): 198.

506 Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," 430. 177

However, he questioned whether the material was really a practical choice for this purpose. At a combined cost of 24.000 Reichsmark, stair, ramp and elevated walkway were certainly the most expensive exhibition items.507 If the novelty value of the material caused great astonishment, this effect was upstaged by the provision of unusual experiential dimensions: filtered views through the metal grid floor from above and below caught the attention of the visitors – if not always for the right reasons, as Giedion observed.508 The high visual transparency of the material stimulated the visitor both physically as well as visually: walking across the open Tezett grid would have increased the visitor’s awareness of height, and downward or upward views through the grating would have revealed almost photographic images. The Tezett flooring, it seems, reconstructed spatially the optics of contemporary photographic experimentation which used visuals grids and unusual perspectives from below or above – features which were distinctive for the work of Moholy-Nagy, Man Ray and others and which can be seen in the photographic documentation of the exhibition itself (see fig. 4.4).509 Apart from its materiality, the elevated Tezett construction functioned as a crucial element in the formation of graphic impressions. From the bird’s eye perspective a panoramic overview of the exhibition spaces unfolded in front of the visitor. The aerial view enabled beholding at distance, eliminating the detail of exhibits and the onslaught of distracting sensory impressions, to which the visitor was exposed on the ground. The change in elevation revealed the rhythmic structure of display elements, colour distribution and other visual phenomena that could not be detected from the ground and therefore enabled the viewer to distil a pure image of the exhibition spaces – an abstraction of geometries, colour and light.

507 The cost for the library bridge (4.800 RM) and the ramp (19.000 RM) are listed in Gropius, "Kostenzusammenstellung für den Raum I der Ausstellung Deutscher Werkbund Paris." With the average blue/white collar salary ranging between 40-45 Reichsmark per week in 1930, the Tezett metal grid clearly was a costly building material at the time – a fact that contrasted with the image of a mass-produced, affordable product that it was intended to convey. 1930 Weimar Republic salary figures are available at http://hsr-trans.zhsf.uni- koeln.de/hsrretro/docs/artikel/hsr/hsr1981_32.pdf, accessed 01/11/2010.

508 Giedion noted that women in particular felt uncomfortable being subjected to the gaze of other visitors standing below. Cf. Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," 430.

509 For Moholy-Nagy photography focused on an entirely "new way of seeing" which worked with optical effects such as "unusual perspectives [achieved] through angled positions, up- and down-photography" and also the probing of the "structure(faktura) of different materials," as he suggested. László Moholy-Nagy, "Die beispiellose Fotografie," Das Deutsche Lichtbild (Jahresschau 1927): 10. 178

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Fig.4.3 View of curved glass screen and projector behind the "Kino-Box" in Salle 2.

179

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Fig.4.4 View of the Werkbund exhibition captured through screen.

If elevated viewing underscored the conceptual aspects of the exhibition, the arrangement of materials at ground floor level was directed at immediacy and intensity of impression. To provide an adequate setting for the full-scale prototype spaces in Salle 1 and Salle 3, Gropius had ordered large quantities of muslin fabric and linoleum to screen existing walls and floors, and create a neutral background for the actual displays. The original mosaic floors were covered with white linoleum, possibly in part to reflect light back up into the space and enhance the gleam of the materials. Linoleum in beige and terracotta was deployed for colourful accents.510

510 In a protocol written during a visit to the Grand Palais, Marcel Breuer reported that the existing mosaic floor was not to be damaged. Ideally, the exhibition objects, Breuer suggested, should either be fixed to walls, placed on the floor, or, fastened to metal openings in the floor - although the latter restricted the possibilities of the layout. See Joachim Driller, "Bauhäusler zwischen Berlin und Paris: Zur Planung und Einrichtung der ‘Section Allemande‘ in der Ausstellung der Société des Artistes décorateurs Français 1930," in Das Bauhaus und Frankreich, Le Bauhaus et la France, 1919-1940, eds. Isabelle Ewig, Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Mathias Noell (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2002), 264. 180

With the background set, a variety of feature materials were ordered, as Gropius’ cost plan for Salle 1 indicates: 511 crystal glass, mirrors, rippled glass sheets for the pool basin, and luxfer prism ceilings to bring light from the library balcony into the niches below. 512 In distinction to the monochromatic photographs of the exhibition, the material list testifies to the richness of the materials and colours. If the aesthetic and novelty of new industrial materials figured prominently in the coverage of the exhibition, it was its application in the context of domestic environments that constituted the main cause for astonishment. The shock value of applying the same materials and design principles equally across previously distinct domains resided in a conflation of the home with typologies belonging to the non- private sphere (commercial, industrial etc.). Indeed, Gropius’ design of communal areas and Breuer’s apartment spaces could not have been more different from regular domestic spaces at the time. "No more wall paper, dust-collecting curtains and heavy, space-consuming timber furniture," Hans Heilmaier announced; instead the visitors found "steel, glass, Trolit and linoleum" all arranged systematically on Marcel Breuer’s "ideal" space plan. In Heilmaier’s mind, these materials addressed all criteria for modern living – "durable, rational, hygienic and affordable."513 The industrial aesthetic was deemed appealing by many reviewers, yet was also rejected by others: La Liberté (20 May 1930) found them "horriblement dépourvu de charme" (horribly depraved of charm); Daily Mail Paris (2 May 1930) conceded that they might be "hygienic but not beautiful;" and L‘Opinion (7 June 1930) believed they represented "la sécheresse de la machine" (the dryness of the machine).514 If the futuristic palette of materials elicited a range of reactions, the opportunity for testing these environments was received with general enthusiasm. In the full-scale exhibits, movable desks, bouncy cantilevered chairs and other technical gadgets "gave the audience the opportunity to engage with this form of living as a whole" and this "happened not without appreciation," as Sigfried Giedion noted.515 The de facto testing of the apartment prototypes

511 Gropius, "Kostenzusammenstellung für den Raum I der Ausstellung Deutscher Werkbund Paris."

512 Some of the suppliers for the materials were members of the Werkbund, or had cooperated with Gropius and other Werkbund members previously, as for example the Deutsche Luxfer Prismen Syndicat, or the supplier for the linoleum floors, who had also supplied flooring for the Bauhaus. The Deutsches Luxfer Prismen Syndicat in Berlin, founded in 1899 as a daughter of the American parent company in Chicago, sponsored Bruno Taut’s 'Glashaus' pavilion at the 1914 Werkbund Ausstellung in Cologne. For a detailed discussion, see Dietrich Neumann, "The Century's Triumph in Lighting: The Luxfer Prismen Companies and their Contribution to Early Modern Architecture." Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 54, no. 1 (March 1995).

513 Hans Heilmaier, "Deutsche Raumkunst triumphiert in Paris," Neue Pariser Zeitung (24 May 1930).

514 Newspaper excerpts from Walter Gropius’ collection of press commentaries. See "Pressestimmen zur Deutschen Werkbundausstellung Mai-Juli 1930 im Grand Palais in Paris," typescript, undated, Gropius Walter (1889-1969), Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

515 Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," 431. 181 thus not only offered immediate experience with innovative materials and technologies but beyond that, communicated the impression that one had indeed encountered the future – "time here becomes space," as Dr. Gutmann recapitulated in the headline of his review.516 The idea of simulating a different time and space might have drawn on earlier exhibition practices, however, the positioning of the visitor as an active participant within this scenario went beyond the passive-receptive mode of art reception postulated previously. As much as the historical narratives and period rooms of Wilhelmine museums hijacked the visitors and carried them across to the past, the 1:1 exhibits provided by Gropius and Breuer catapulted the visitor onto the stage-set of an imaginary future.

The Capture of the Eye: Bayer’s Materialisation of the Spectacular

In distinction to Gropius and Breuer’s pragmatic approach, Bayer’s display strategy drew on the latest tactics of visual communication to realise what he regarded as the central challenge of the curator – "making non-visual ideas visible."517 In a bid to overcome the "never-ending attack of influences, messages, and impressions" assailing the visitor in the modern world, the exhibition displays were designed to correspond to "a desired sequence of impressions" that was matched to "the visitor’s abilities of perception," Bayer advised.518 Based on a convergence of advertising and artistic practices, his curatorial ethos proposed a complex language of interrelated spatial and visual criteria. Bayer imagined this form of communication in the following way:

… language as visible printing or as sound, pictures as symbols, paintings, and photographs, sculptural media, materials and surfaces, colour, light, movement (of the display as well as of the visitor), film, diagrams, and charts. The total application of all plastic and psychological means (more than anything else) makes exhibition design an intensified and new language. 519

Apart from combinations between individual "linguistic" elements, Bayer envisaged a high degree of synthesis between them, whereby graphics became architectural, advertising- psychology spatial, and colour dynamic. Trained as an architect, Bayer recognized that the

516 Dr. U. Gutmann, "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit (Zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung des Deuschen Werkbundes in Paris)," Königsberger Hartungsche Zeitung (20 May 1930).

517 Herbert Bayer, "Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums," Curator: The Museum Journal 4, no. 3 (July 1961): 268.

518 Bayer, "Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums," 268.

519 Ibid. 182 exhibition offered opportunities to transfigure the primarily visual experiences of painting, graphics, photography and advertising into spatial experiences – "in exhibition design," he had come to see "a new and complex means of communication," in which "all other known means of design" could be strategically recast to coagulate as the "apex of all collective effects, of all powers of design."520 Conceived on the basis of intermediality, his displays bundled multiple fields of reference to converge upon the exhibition theme to lend it a maximum of intensity. A particularly relevant example is his display of serially-produced chairs in Salle 5 of the Werkbund Exhibition (see fig. 4.5). In mounting chairs vertically across the wall, Bayer evocatively positioned them according to the modernist logic of industrial production and standardisation promoted by the Werkbund – as a mass display, and arranged in rows.521 Whilst the display exposed references to associated notions of anonymity, it simultaneously mediated these: firstly, by featuring several variations of colour and material for each chair model, the display hinted at variety and personal choice; and secondly, by highlighting the individual designers of the various chair series (e.g. designers were reflected in the product names "Marcel Breuer series," "Mies van der Rohe series" etc.) historic continuity between the individual style of the craftsman and the individuality of the serial designer were intimated – a gesture that added artistic credibility and thus economic value to what was in essence a serial product. Timber and tubular steel furniture were further categorically distinguished by being arranged against different coloured backgrounds.522 Most importantly, Bayer’s chair exhibit contained visual techniques that were of pivotal importance to his display rationale – "the material," "the perspective of the individual," and "the movement of the individual."523 Removed from its habitual association with the floor and re-associated with the visual plane, the chair was seen, quite unnaturally, at eye level or from below. The showing of the chairs from unfamiliar perspectives destabilized their familiar appearance, whilst their repetition as rows transfigured them into abstract patterns, visual

520 Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," 17.

521 Mary Anne Staniszewski suggests that Bayer’s chair display provided the model for the hanging of chairs in Alfred Barr’s Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition. Here, however, the emphasis on serial production was eliminated by using only one model of each chair type. See Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display, 75-78.

522 It is possible to imagine that aesthetic reasons might have determined Bayer’s colour choices for the wall background. Another possibility is raised by Arianne de la Belleissue Lourie, who regards Bayer’s chair display as a didactic attempt to highlight "the formal relationship between Gebrüder Thonet’s mass-produced bentwood and tubular steel furniture." Arianne de la Belleissue Lourie, Mass-Produced Aura: Thonet and the market for modern design, 1930-1953, Doctor of Philosophy (New York: Institute of Fine Arts, New York University: January 2008), 129.

523 Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," 22-24. 183 structure and material effect.524 Bayer consciously considered materiality as a display technique, suggesting that its effects extended above and beyond the physical material of the objects themselves and possessed the "same psychological and physiological functions as colour." Under the logic of perception, Bayer believed wall, colour, lighting and chairs coalesced as a singular material consideration that communicated the concepts of modernity in its own compelling ways – "a psychology of effect" constituted upon a "discipline of the feeling for material" that, he believed, was "especially fostered at the Bauhaus."525

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Fig.4.5 Werkbund Exhibition Paris 1930, view of Salle 5 with Herbert Bayer’s chair display.

524 Maurice Merleau-Ponty highlighted that our gaze favours predetermined perceptual routes when it moves over familiar objects. Thus a face see "upside down" is recognisable to us as "thinking subjects," but not as "perceiving subjects," he suggested. We do not recognize an object unless its details are perceived in a specific order, and thus every object is linked to its particular orientation. To re-establish the correct orientation between an object and ourselves, we sometimes even do so physically by tilting our head. The avant-gardes made extensive use of this insight, particularly in photography. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, transl. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 252-53.

525 Bayer, "Aspects of Design of Exhibitions and Museums," 240. 184

When seen as part of the itinerary, the chair display interrupted the visitor’s natural movement through the fluidly connected spaces. The panoramic perception in moving along was altered with stationary, vertical perception necessitated by the floor-to-ceiling display, which disrupted the visitor’s horizontally-attuned gaze and directed it upward. Harbouring aesthetic conceits that expanded the modern logic of design and production toward new ways of seeing and experiencing, Bayer clearly felt that his displays could not simply be understood as a representation of modern product design and materials but that they provided a glimpse of the infinite possibilities of dynamic perception, attuning the visitor to see the world anew. The arresting nature of his exhibit was widely noted. Sigfried Giedion felt that the arrangement stood out: stacked in vertical rows reaching all the way up to the ceiling, the serially-produced chairs, he noted, appeared to be "semi-levitating." This "capture of the eye," as Giedion termed it, was repeated "in the arrangement of the beautiful enlargements of new buildings, by arranging the images in a curvilinear fashion and at an angle that corresponded to the spatial perception of the eye."526 Like the chairs, the architectural imagery and the serial objects arranged by Bayer were entirely attuned to the visitor’s perceptual capacity. To facilitate viewing, Bayer used coloured flooring as a means of way-finding to differentiate the pedestrian path from the display platforms. For Giedion, these displays exemplified Bayer’s exceptional skill in the "suggestive arrangement of serially-produced objects." 527 What appears to be suggested by Bayer’s strategy is the presentation of everyday objects not as art, but as seen with the modern eye. By mounting the chairs on the wall, much like paintings, the everyday was transfigured and aestheticised. This is distinct from previous display models, which included everyday objects. At the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Wilhelm Bode had placed chairs, vases and other utilitarian items on display stands or raised pedestals in order to distinguish them as art exhibits and set them apart from the period interiors of the exhibition rooms. With this strategy Bode also sought to reinforce distinctions between architectural typologies – the visitor was reminded that this was not a private space, but a museum. 528 In the Werkbund Exhibition, Bayer’s chair display achieved this distinction in a more radicalised manner, jolting the visitor out of casual viewing and raising awareness of vision itself.

526 Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," 431.

527 Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," 432.

528 Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880-1940 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001), 88-89. 185

Multi-medial Distractions: Moholy-Nagy’s concept of materiality as medium

Moholy-Nagy’s 1922 text "Dynamic-constructive force-system" had formulated the parameters for his practical explorations of the interrelations between material, audience and space, which he proceeded to test in a variety of environments with custom-made apparati. The most famous of these is the light-space modulator, originally called "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne" (light requisite for an electrical stage) and shown in Salle 2 of the Werkbund Exhibition. The apparatus drew on the latest in lighting technology and had been developed in collaboration with AEG’s (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft) theatre department since 1922. It contained three moving platforms that rotated at different speeds to each other and was constructed with the same modern materials that were used throughout the Werkbund Exhibition: transparent materials (zelon, matt and clear glass), materials pervious to light (transparent gauze, wire netting) and perforated materials (perforated nickel-plated brass plates). Yet in distinction to other exhibition displays, the materials of the light-space modulator were not deployed for their aesthetic appearance but for their capacity to mediate – they reflected, deflected and transmitted light, shade and colour in a dynamic manner, transforming the surrounding space. In contemporaneous reviews the machine was not described in any detail – Grünberg made reference to it in his article "Die Gropius Ausstellung in Paris" which appeared in Berliner Tageblatt (31 Mai 1930); and Hans Heilmaier briefly discussed it in "Deutsche Raumkunst triumphiert in Paris" published in Neue Pariser Zeitung (24 May 1930). Because of the lack of commentary, it has been speculated that it might have been hidden behind a fabric screen.529 Yet descriptions by visitors indicate its impact: a review by Dr. Gutmann recalled the lasting impression that the exhibition’s colourful light made upon the visitor, admiring "the precision of forms, and the white, denuding light," and further noting that "when there are colours – strong and luminous – they are not harmonically resolved and relaxing, but, with joyful force, alive and enlivening."530 Max Osborn’s review described the intense sensory stimulation he experienced in vivid detail: "Dynamics are offered instead of rigidity … theatre models … rotate, flicker disquietingly through little lights … it glints and sparkles all around."531 In the near windowless spaces of the exhibition, Moholy-Nagy recognized the opportunity for elevating light as a key element for intensifying the visitor’s

529 The possibility of the requisite having been concealed is mentioned in Jakob Gebert and Kai-Uwe Hemken, "Der Raum der Gegenwart: Die Ordnung von Apparaten und Exponaten," in Kunst Licht Spiele: Lichtästhetik der klassischen Avantgarde, eds. Ulrike Gartner, Kai-Uwe Hemken and Kai Uwe Schierz (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2009), 150.

530 Gutmann, "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit."

531 Osborn, "Gropius und die Seinen." 186 experience - both as an essential requisite for illuminating the displays and as an instrument for creating transformative spatial effects that integrated the visitor as part of the work. Yet, the possibilities for the light requisite’s applications outside the theatre were not acknowledged by any of the reviewers, and it was left to Moholy-Nagy to explain the full range of anticipated uses in a subsequent article, which he wrote for the Werkbund publication Die Form shortly after the exhibition.532 In the introductory paragraph, Moholy-Nagy called attention to the design possibilities opened up by electricity: "Adjustable, artificial, electric light permits us to create rich light effects without much effort," he explained. These are not random effects – "with electric energy pre-calculated movements can be performed, that can be repeated precisely again and again."533 In other words, these effects can be controlled and directed to specific ends and can be generated serially. Light and movement were becoming elements of design again, Moholy-Nagy predicted, but now considered in relation to the present situation: the festivities of the Baroque with their water fountains and stage sets could be re-invented in a contemporary context as light fountains and dynamic mechanic-electric plays, he envisaged. Baroque festivities, of course, have been seen as the original Gesamtkunstwerk, as Aby Warburg had already observed in relation to Bernardo Buontalenti’s intermedii – spectacular public performances that blurred the boundaries between high art and low art, and audience and actors in what Warburg characterized as "the transfigured staging of an original chaos."534 Warburg’s interest in Baroque festivities as the collective re- animation of suppressed primary emotions was far removed from Moholy-Nagy’s ideas, which were a kind of synthesis between visual education and entertainment. Moholy-Nagy predicted a variety of applications for his electro-mechanic spectacles: as advertising, as popular entertainment at fairs, or as a means to create moments of suspension in the theatre. But, he also expanded the use of dynamic lighting from collective experience of public venues to the privacy of everyday life: in domestic applications, light requisites could be remote-controlled via radio, he imagined, or regulated by the owners with a set of

532 László Moholy-Nagy, "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne," Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit 5, no. 11-12 (1930): 297-98. The intended nature of the light-space modulator as a "requisite" had not been fully comprehended at the time, and even in subsequent decades, it was been frequently misunderstood as a "mobile sculpture," "three-dimensional object" or "half sculpture and half machine," as Moholy-Nagy’s first wife Lucia Moholy pointed out. See Lucia Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy (Krefeld: Schrepe Verlag, 1972), 41.

533 Moholy-Nagy, "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne." 297.

534 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, transl. Sophie Hawkes (New York: Urzone, 2004), 170. 187 exchangeable cardboard templates. These would be received as supplements in newspapers and provide patterns for dynamic light plays in yellow, green, blue, red, and white.535 The wider implications of Moholy-Nagy’s ideas appear not to have been fully understood by visitors and critics alike, who did not recognise the potential for the use of light outside the theatre and mainly regarded the light requisite as a machine for stage illumination. Yet in light of urban desolation and poor living conditions at the time, it is possible to see the potential of lighting for the affordable and instant transformation of space in the context of collective spectacles or private enjoyment.536 Oliver A.I. Botar describes the potential application of the requisite in a domestic environment as "a kind of disco ball for the home."537 Whilst this was one of its possible uses, for Moholy-Nagy, the significance of the apparatus resided in its capacity to be developed towards a system.538 Testing its potential for different applications, Moholy-Nagy variously adapted the machine for the transformation of spaces, the generation of photographs and the production of film.539 As he had already announced in his 1922 manifesto, "the development of the dynamic individual construct results in the DYNAMIC-CONSTRUCTIVE FORCE SYSTEM." The system replaced the artwork, he continued, and the viewer "who was receptive in the beholding of previous artworks, now with all his capacities amplified, becomes himself an active factor in the unfolding of forces."540 The requisite’s capacity for the systematic aestheticisation of everyday reality represented the erosion of the boundaries between art and life towards a total work of art. A visitor, who astutely recognized the potential of Moholy-Nagy’s light-space modulator as well as other filmic and visual displays installed in Salle 2, was Alexander Dorner, Director of the Art Collections at the Provinzialmuseum Hannover. Whilst the Werkbund Exhibition was still showing, he commissioned Moholy-Nagy to rebuild a smaller version of the space as the

535 Moholy-Nagy, "Lichtrequisit einer elektrischen Bühne," 299.

536 Moholy-Nagy critically examined urban life during the economic crisis in a short film made in Berlin: see László Moholy-Nagy, "Berliner Stilleben" (Berlin Still Life), 1932. The dating follows Jeanpaul Goergen’s chronological listing of László Moholy-Nagy’s film projects: "Filme, Projekte, Vorschläge: Annotierte Filmografie 1921-1934," in Kunst des Lichts: László Moholy-Nagy, eds. La Fabrica (Berlin: Hirmer Verlag, 2010), 246.

537 Oliver A.I. Botar. "Gesamtkunstwerk ohne Kunst." in Kunst des Lichts: László Moholy-Nagy, eds. La Fabrica (Berlin: Hirmer Verlag, 2010), 165.

538 Lucia Moholy underlines the continuity of ideas that lead to the on-going development of the light-space modulator. The basic idea for the apparatus had already been formulated in Moholy-Nagy and Alfred Kemény’s 1922 manifesto "Dynamisch-Konstruktives Kraftsystem." See Moholy, Marginalien zu Moholy-Nagy, 38.

539 In 1930, he produced a film capturing the light and colour effects of the light-space modulator – "Lichtspiel Schwarz-Weiss-Grau" (light play black-white-grey), which was shown for the first time in Berlin, 4 March 1932. The dating follows Jeanpaul Goergen’s chronological listing of László Moholy-Nagy’s film projects: "Filme, Projekte, Vorschläge: Annotierte Filmografie 1921-1934," 245-46.

540 Moholy-Nagy, "Dynamisch-Konstruktives Kraftsystem." 188 last room in the Provinzialmuseum’s itinerary, which was to represent the very latest developments in art. The project never proceeded beyond early planning stages and was finally abandoned. If it had eventuated, it would have been the first multi-medial museum space pre-empting post-war experimentation with multi-medial environments. Moholy-Nagy had recognised that his initial designs were only an early "investigation of the relations between matter, force, space," which would be further evaluated for "the design of free (free of mechanic-technical movement) moving artworks."541

A guided tour of the future

If large windows, openings and glazed partitions instituted a high degree of visual interpenetration and a sense of boundlessness between the individual rooms, this fluidity was counteracted by the careful control of the visitor’s movement and perspective. Flâneurism, that is purposeless drifting, was discouraged. Yet this happened, as Bayer suggested, "without conscious compulsion."542 Curved glass screens, differences in floor finish, stairs, elevated walkways and the rhythmic arrangement of displays prescribed paths and moved the visitor along on a self-guided tour (see fig.4.6). One critic noted the occurrence of decidedly dynamic means of way finding, recounting "luminous arrows that point towards a new subsection protrude brightly, recede in the dark and push forward again."543 Together these devices prescribed an itinerary that was correlated to the viewing experience. According to Bayer, the exhibition concept matched movement with reading, and exhibits were arranged to be viewed from left to right.544 This was particularly important for the continuous display bands, where photographs, text and objects were aligned in panoramic strips. Boredom was avoided by the changes in display tactics, which oscillated between the simulation of futuristic environments where the viewer could move around and participate (Gropius’ and Breuer’s rooms), the mediation of everyday objects as visual spectacles (Bayer’s rooms) and the viewer’s integration into colourful, dynamic light spaces (Moholy-Nagy’s room). The visitors, who were largely accustomed to the highly decorative French spaces of the time, reacted with amazement and alienation, or sometimes both, as Max Osborn reported. 545

541 Ibid.

542 Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," 18.

543 Osborn, "Gropius und die Seinen."

544 Bayer, "Fundamentals of Exhibition Design," 23.

545 Max Osborn described the reaction of the visitors and the French press in Max Osborn, "Zwei Werkkunstausstellungen - 1.Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," Bauwelt, no. 24 (June 1930), 2. 189

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Fig.4.6 Diagram of itinerary/walking direction in Werkbund Exhibition by Herbert Bayer.

The Purpose of Exhibitions: Staging Spectacles or Demonstrating Solutions

In his article on the Werkbund exhibition, Wilhelm Lotz observed that despite the uniformity of style and the homogeneous material palette that pervaded the exhibition, there were discernible disparities in method. He noted crucial differences between curatorial approaches that propositioned a uniform material logic as a programmatic solution to actual problems, a strength he attributed to Gropius and Breuer, and those speculating about captivating ideas without a concrete task to follow through, a deficiency seen in Moholy-Nagy and Bayer:

The greatest effect has the big hall, which comprises the rooms marked 1 and 3 as marked in the catalogue. Its uniform impression is mainly due to the fact that the design was based upon a task, a building program so to say … In comparison with this space, all other spaces have to fall behind, because they are missing a concrete problematisation, and this again proves that an exhibition which only wants to show objects, not only fails to arouse the same strong interest as an exhibition that resolves concrete tasks, but also lacks the strong impression and inner attitude of the later. With due respect for the liveliness with which the most interesting problems are raised in these secondary rooms [rooms 2,4, and 5], you can not shed the feeling, that all these questions are touched upon only and represented in interesting ways, but that there is a lack of thorough examination …546

546 Lotz, "Ausstellung des deutschen Werkbundes in Paris," 282-83. 190

Other critics were less sympathetic to Gropius and Breuer’s demonstration of modern living and dismissed their prototypes as a misconstrued conjunction between techno-aesthetic prophecies and social ideals. In his detailed review of the Werkbund Exhibition, Durand- Dupont criticised his German colleagues for staging a spectacle rather than offering solutions. His hopes of finding "good mass-produced goods and product types for Mr. Everyman" were frustrated by what he regarded as an equation of modernity with luxury and the primacy of the exhibition over its objects. His criticism targeted the scale of the Gropius and Breuer’s 1:1 models as well as their material choices. Whilst recognising the "Spezialaufgabe" (special task) of the exhibition and the aesthetic appeal of the gleaming, expansive spaces, Durand-Dupont questioned whether the room dimensions were realistically affordable and whether the applied materials (Trolit, Opakglas, Chrome) were not in fact still too expensive for general use. In his final judgment, he concluded to have found "luxury materials … luxury workmanship … and luxury dimensions," which represented an ideal rather than a practical solution.547 Worse still, he found that in Moholy-Nagy’s and Bayer’s exhibition rooms, the objects themselves were subjugated to the logic of modernist display: unfortunate choices of wall colour for the exhibited objects, their illogical orientation away from the viewer, and excessively deep display cases for serial products, in Durand-Dupont’s view, all pointed to the fact that the ultimate goal was exhibiting itself, "practiced for its own sake - independent of the exhibits."548 A letter of complaint from a German tie producer about the dissatisfactory display of their goods, which, they criticised, were oriented away from the viewers rather than towards them, underscores Durand-Dupont’s point, as does Gropius’ rather dismissive response: the purpose of the exhibition, Gropius instructed, consisted in the formal exploration of innovative display methods and hence the customary display window style could not be adopted.549 The authority for generating a public image for the product, in Gropius’ mind, had been consigned to the curator – even if the overall exhibition strategy required it to be presented it in a way that was at odds with the original intentions of the manufacturer or designer. Whilst taking a more sympathetic position towards the curators, Wilhelm Lotz recognised similar shortcomings. In particular, he commented on the jewellery display case, as an example of a dysfunctional exhibition element that disregarded the very objects it was intended to show. He further mentioned the small print and rotation of texts for the

547 Durand-Dupont, "Der Deutsche Werkbund Im Salon der 'Artistes-Décorateurs,' Paris," 198.

548 Ibid.

549 This incident is mentioned in Driller, "Bauhäusler zwischen Berlin und Paris," 267. 191 diapositives – a graphic arrangement that forced him to turn his head when reading.550 Yet these shortcomings, he argues, were "minor deficiencies" and had to be accepted for the sake of stylistic unity and to strengthen the impression of the exhibition as a whole.551 In principal, Lotz advised, he expected exhibitions to offer solutions to the concrete challenges of the time - those that contented themselves with investigating objects in interesting ways did not deserve to be supported. And this, it seems, was Durand-Dupont’s position, too. The acuteness of the two men’s thoughts on exhibition practices was not incidental. Rather, the fundamental purpose and methods of exhibitions were at the centre of public debate at the time. Simultaneous with the Werkbund Exhibition, the German journal Das Neue Frankfurt published an issue on "Ausstellungen"(exhibitions) that scrutinized the value of all such undertakings and provided commentary from numerous specialists in the field. The editorial written by Joseph Gantner portrayed the immediate socio-political context for the journal issue:

The fact that German and foreign cities have done way too much in terms of large, officially decked-out exhibitions in the past years, is agreed upon by all involved, especially the heads of finance departments. Of course it would be wrong to conclude from the fiasco of such grand undertakings that today’s exhibitions miss their point under all circumstances. On the contrary, more urgently than ever we need those exhibitions that are appropriate not only for the present-day demographic composition, but even more so for the living standard of the present day.552

In Gantner’s view, major exhibitions had the potential to figure prominently as a part of modern life in Weimar Germany - provided the majority of society could be attuned to the visions they endeavoured to propagate. If the question of adequacy in relation to present day issues represented a moderate challenge for architectural, science- or industry-related exhibitions, the case of contemporary relevance was decidedly more difficult to argue for museum exhibitions and their core task of preserving the cultural inheritance of the nation. In late 1930, when millions of Germans were living at the margins of subsistence, the government came under pressure to justify the state’s expenditure of millions in financial support for art. The Prussian Minister for Science, Art and

550 Lotz, "Ausstellung des Deutschen Werkbundes in Paris," 282.

551 Ibid.

552 Gantner, Joseph. "Unsere Publikationen." Das neue Frankfurt: Internationale Monatsschrift für die Probleme kultureller Neugestaltung 4, no. 6 (June 1930): 141. 192

Education, Adolf Grimme, appealed to the collective conviction that "except for religious awe, there is no other power that has the capacity to shape the individual and an entire people like the experience of great art." As "a gate to a deeper awareness of reality, a source of joyful energy to control this reality, and an essential tool for the development of men’s own nature and that of the people," the sustainment of art, he continued, was the democratic German citizen’s co-responsibility.553 Grimme’s statement was made in the context of a controversy surrounding the monumental museum projects on Berlin’s Museum Island – a legacy of the Kaiserreich and Wilhelm Bode’s elitist museum model. The opposition Grimme experienced in selling nineteenth century eclectic museum architecture and formerly imperial art collections to a democratic mass society is to be seen as the rejection of an imperial culture that alienated the masses and is not to be misunderstood as the population’s exclusive affinity for the purely material, the functional and pragmatic. The opposite seemed to be true, Sigfried Giedion observed. He detected a growing desire for a kind of democratic splendour that could fulfil mass society’s aspirations for "joy, pride and excitement" and that arose as a counter-response to the very technocratic and functionalist ideals of Weimar modernism that were postulated by Gantner and others. These democratic monuments were to go beyond "functional fulfilment" in expressing "the feeling and thinking" of the collective with "the new means of expression," Giedion claimed.554 Envisaging Gesamtkunstwerke (total works of art) made with "modern materials and techniques," and variable, mobile elements, which generated shadows and other animating effects such as intensely colourful projections and displays, Giedion’s ideas on the staging of collective spectacles as temporary spaces neatly aligned with the kinds of viewing that the Werkbund exhibition spaces solicited from their audience.555

The Exhibition’s Socio-political Register: The Making of Images

The differences between curatorial approaches in the Werkbund Exhibition observed by Lotz - one based on material logic as a solution to actual problems, the other based on material

553 Grimme defended the expenditure of government funds for the Berlin museums on the "Museumsinsel" (museum island). Adolf Grimme, "Die Museen und die gegenwärtige Not!," Das neue Frankfurt: Internationale Monatsschrift für die Probleme kultureller Neugestaltung 4, no. 11 (November 1930): 235.

554 Sigfried Giedion, José Luis Sert, and Fernand Léger, "Nine Points on Monumentality," written in 1943, published in Architecture, You, and Me: The Diary of a Development, edited by Sigfried Giedion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 47-48.

555 Giedion et al., "Nine Points on Monumentality," 49. 193 imagination but without a concrete task – seem to be neither by accident, nor the result of an unresolved incongruity. Their conjunction appears to be a curatorial attempt to project visual practices upon functional considerations and to sensationalise otherwise technocratic principles. Siegfried Kracauer regarded this kind of sensationalising image-making – be it in magazines, advertising, or exhibitions – as a response to the middle-class desire to have "access to higher things." Yet these higher things were not of any social, political or ethical substance, as proposed by Gropius exhibition agenda, rather Kracauer regarded these as superficial "glitter," and a general aspiration to the lifestyle of the elites. Seriousness, Kracauer suggested, was "ascribed a distracting effect," shifting attention away from the glamorous objects the masses wished to enjoy to escape from the reality of the present.556 In short, these glamorous images were supplied by the commercial environments of modernity – department stores, cafes, casinos and exhibitions. These places and their imagery were not intended to address the actual problems of the day, but were to

numb the people with the pseudo-glamour of counterfeit social heights, just as hypnotists use shining objects to put their mediums to sleep … [their] constantly recurring pictorial motifs function like magical incantations to plunge certain substantive matters forever into the abyss of pictureless amnesia … The flight of images is the flight from the revolution to death. 557

It is precisely the "pseudo-glamour" highlighted by Kracauer, that was also at the centre of Durand-Dupont’s critique: the Werkbund Exhibition, with its layering of shining surfaces, floating objects and colourful spaces, its expensive materials and luxurious dimensions, appeared to stand in contrast to the serious socio-political agenda and the wider educational values it purported to uphold – its potentially revolutionary edge had been subverted by a tendency towards "formal-constructive gadgetry and an addiction to the new."558 Durand- Dupont’s main case against the rooms was that they could not practically be built and represented "an ideal solution" that was not firmly grounded in reality. Yet to trivialise the exhibition’s imagery, is to overlook its actual power. What was at stake was not art or life, image or material reality, spectacle or use, but the dynamic interrelations between these and

556 Siegfried Kracauer, "Asyl für Obdachlose," in Die Angestellten (Frankfurt: Societätsverlag, 1930), 91-101. Republ. and transl. as "Shelter for the Homeless," in The Weimar Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 190.

557 Kracauer, "Asyl für Obdachlose," 191.

558 Durand-Dupont, "Der Deutsche Werkbund im Salon der 'Artistes-Décorateurs,' Paris," 197. 194 the recognition that, as Terry Smith judiciously points out, "all imagery … is embedded in real relations" and the "raising of icons … is consequential."559

A new Image of German Culture and German People

Beyond addressing the German people’s desire for optical spectacles, the Werkbund Exhibition’s imagery operated at an ethic-political register. Clean, hygienic, gleaming, futuristic, it presented a new material sensibility as proof of an altered German national conscious directed at the Germans themselves, their French hosts and the international community. Thus, as suggested by Gropius in his accompanying texts, and as was frequently repeated by the press, the show delivered an externalised image of the collective psyche of the German people and their nascent democracy. French critics such as Grünberg, reported to have sensed a "strong mental energy" emanating from the exhibition, and described the spaces as "clean, clear and illuminating," and the works as "of refreshing simplicity." To support his argument, Grünberg quoted from a review that had appeared in Temps:

It is no exaggeration to say that the German section of the Grand Palais truthfully mirrors the face of the new Germany … The interest in this exhibition is so great because it does not only give us an understanding of the new German aesthetic, but also insights into the collective psychology of the Germany of today.560

This ethic-political dimension was underscored in Grünberg’s closing comment that interpreted the success of Gropius’ exhibition as a victory of the "Germany of the future." Connections between national identity and curatorial strategy were highlighted also by Siegfried Giedion’s review, which attributed the success of the exhibition to Walter Gropius’ artistic authority. The power of the curatorial concept, Giedion observed, went "beyond the sensory appeal of the objects on display" by imparting the idea of a "collective spiritual attitude" to the visitors.561 In other words, it was not the aesthetic or practical value of the exhibits themselves but Gropius’ and his co-curators’ skill in systematically staging these. Giedion appears to point to something that resides in the staging of the exhibition material alone and that is difficult to determine, and this excess value of the exhibition can be

559 Terry Smith, "Spectacle Architecture Before and After the Aftermath: Situating the Sydney Experience," in Architecture between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler (Williamstown, MA: Yale University Press, 2008), 3-4.

560 Grünberg, "Die Gropius Ausstellung in Paris."

561 Giedion, "Der Deutsche Werkbund in Paris," 430. 195 described as a matter of material aesthetics – that is the self-presentation of Weimar culture.562 The systematic organisation of complex sensory impressions along an undulating itinerary – the views from unusual angles and elevations, the layering of space through openings, the perceptual effects of innovative materials, the spatial experiences of colours and dynamic lighting – all mediated a total image of absolute luminosity and lightness (see fig. 4.7). The energetic impressions reported in the reviewer’s testimonies appear to have emerged from the temporariness and sequencing of distinct viewing experiences, their language matching the vigour of their experiences.563 This dynamically-conceived image corresponded to the sensory experiences produced by modern urban environments, which were dominated by traffic, commerce and advertising. As Alfred Gellhorn noted in his article "Reklame und Stadtbild" (Advertising and Urban Image), change is the most decisive element in the applied psychology of advertising, and its rate was only restricted by the limits of human cognition.564 Facades, displays, periodically changing signs, illumination, movement and rhythm – all of these were neither the task of representation nor of the arts, he asserted, but that of advertising. In its organisation as a dynamic unity of different approaches, the exhibition reflected the conditions of the contemporary modern world in all their complexity – the exhibition theme (living) and its scientific inspiration (technology and economy) dealt with pragmatic needs, whilst the staging of materials gratified the emotional desires of the public - distraction and glamour. If Gropius’ brand of modernism initially alienated French visitors because it was so distinct from their own endeavours towards modernisation, the majority of media soon mirrored the general admiration that surfaced after the initial astonishment.565 For critics and visitors, the experiences of the exhibition environment signified ethical and political connotations that were transferred with ease to German culture and its people.

562 Gernot Böhme suggests that the progressive aestheticisation of our reality is primarily a matter of material aesthetics, which he understands as an extensive presentation of materiality for the staging of our everyday lives. He proposes that every product has a practical value and an aesthetic or "stage" value (Inszenierungswert). The later has become an independent value system in late capitalism that he thematises under the heading of "aesthetic economy." See Gernot Böhme’s chapter on "Der Glanz des Materials: Zur Kritik der Aesthetischen Ökonomie,"(The Shine of Material: On the Critique of the Aesthetic Economy) in Atmosphäre. Essays zur neuen Ästhetik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 49-65.

563 Gutmann, for example, uses an almost telegram-style language to capture the plethora of objects and rapid sequence of spaces and impressions. See Gutmann, "Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit."

564 Alfred Gellhorn, "Reklame und Stadtbild," Die Form: Zeitschrift für gestaltende Arbeit, no. 1 (1925/26): 134.

565 Osborn, "Zwei Werkkunstausstellungen," 2. 196

COPYRIGHT MATERIAL

Fig.4.7 View from Breuer’s apartment bathroom into the main hall (Tezett ramp/walkway in background)

Gropius’ curatorial direction proposed a material aesthetic that resulted from a synthesis of the different co-curated spaces, their different media and modes of reception, and presented them as one absolute vision. In the imagination of the audience, his Gesamtkunstwerk successfully positioned aesthetics and politics, art and reality as interchangeable and identical.

Conclusion

The rhetoric of Gropius’ exhibition agenda announced a potent economy of function and material – "the practical interpenetration of economy and technology with the world of art" which had been advanced by the Werkbund and the Bauhaus over the past decades.566 Yet, once we redirect our attention away from the material logic of the designs, we find that the potency of the exhibition and its impact on audience and critics rested not solely in the material logic but rather emanated from the material aesthetics communicated by the spaces themselves. The curators considered materiality at the conceptual level of the exhibition and in relation to the viewer. Innovative display techniques generated stimulating experiences:

566 Walter Gropius, "Architektur auf der Deutschen Werkbundausstellung in Paris, Grand Palais, Mai bis Juli 1930," typescript, 1 August 1930, Gropius Walter (1889-1969), Werkmanuskripte, GS20: Aufsatz- und Vortragsmanuskripte, Mappe 62, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 1. 197 semi-levitating, amassed, lined up, the exhibition material generated abstract visual patterns across walls, ceilings and rooms. Seen from unusual angles and perspectives, the staging of the material structured the visitor’s experience and redirected attention to perception itself. This expansion of curating as a mediating activity between art and reality signified a shift away from the exhibition as a formal representation of objects towards the translation of the concepts associated with these objects as a material aesthetic. In other words, here we have a kind of materiality that did not reside in the objects themselves but represented a surplus value that these objects received in their staging. This paradigm change occurred during the Weimar years – in Alexander Dorner’s atmosphere rooms, El Lissitzky’s demonstration rooms and the temporary exhibitions of Walter Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Herbert Bayer and his Bauhaus colleagues. The exhibition began to establish itself as a mode of cultural production that integrated its immediate environment and the viewer. At the core of this practice remains the ability to systemize a series of objects and activities within a framework of givens – social, political, economic and cultural – and to do so not single-handedly but on a broader platform and in conjunction with others.567 As part of this development, attention not only migrated from the representation of exhibits to the staging of environments but also from the artist/designer to the curator. This transfer entailed significant fluidity between roles, whereby architects, museum directors, artists and other designers assumed a variety of functions in the production of exhibitions that were previously resided outside their core disciplines. Increasing the scope of their tasks and their frames of reference, they began working in what has later been discussed as the "expanded field" of the spatial arts.568 Gropius’ typescript for the Section allemande, initially announced a "small demonstration show." However, in the reworking of his script, he discreetly crossed out the word "small" – modesty was not his intention. Rather, as Giedion would observe years later, Gropius and his collaborators recognised that "the architect had a part in forming the spirit of his times," and that required his engagement on a much bigger stage.569

567 Paul O’Neill examines the changing interrelations between curator, artist and the production of different types of exhibitions, particularly focussing on developments from the 1960s onward. Paul O'Neill, The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012).

568 With reference to Rosemary Krauss’ article "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," Anthony Vidler explores recent architectural developments and their programmatic excursions beyond the traditional disciplinary framework into related fields – primarily landscape and sculpture. See Anthony Vidler, "Architecture's Expanded Field," in Architecture between Spectacle and Use, ed. Anthony Vidler, 143-154 (Williamstown, MA: Yale University Press, 2008). For Krauss' discussion of the overlap between sculpture and architecture, see Rosalind Krauss, "Sculpture in the Expanded Field," October 8 (Spring 1979): 36-43.

569 Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 481. 198

CHAPTER 5

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND CONCLUDING REMARKS

With the detailed analysis of a series of important exhibition models realised in Weimar Germany between 1923 and 1930, the thesis demonstrated how materiality crystallised as a decisive driver in the rethinking of display environments. By facilitating mediation rather than representation, materials and their presumed interrelations with human beings not only provided the impetus for reconsidering traditional models of aesthetic reception but simultaneously informed design strategies with which these alternative models could be implemented in practice. Key concepts that testified to a material-informed psychology of exhibition architecture such as El Lissitzky's "immaterial materiality," Dorner's "atmosphere room", Warburg's "affective and reflective space," and Moholy-Nagy's understanding of material "as a mediator of energies"570 are more than simply affirmations of the enlivening effect that materials were thought to have on spaces and their inhabitants; rather they outline the theoretical bases for integrating the real space of the viewer as part of the exhibition experience, however speculative these theories might be. The forging of links between theoretical considerations and practical implementations has proven to be less than straightforward. Often display models could not be linked to one particular theory and had to be interpreted in relation to an array of material comprising journal articles, guide books, catalogues, letters, notes, programs as well as drawings, sketches and photographs. The analysis and crosslinking of this diversity of material had both limitations as well as benefits, each of which required particular methods.

570 Moholy-Nagy, "Dynamisch-Konstruktives Kraftsystem." 199

Reflections on Method

The thesis used case studies as a main method of investigation. This is to say that the main problems were developed from the particularities of each case. Each case was analysed in detail, and it was precisely from those details that arguments were progressed to reveal new interpretations and insights. In chapter two, the detailed analysis of Dorner's architectural manipulations of the exhibition rooms is read in close conjunction with official guidebooks and informal interventions. It is through the conjunction of different data and the cross-referencing of these details that it becomes possible: firstly, to reimagine the audience's experience of these spaces and their material and atmospheric qualities; and secondly, to reconsider Dorner's achievement holistically, based on a breadth of documentation of the time rather than his post-war publications which reassessed his re-organisation work from a historically- tinged perspective after his emigration to the U.S.. In chapter one, Aby Warburg's new library building is reimagined as a colourful display of books and a captivating demonstration space for visual material. The rarely acknowledged introduction of a colour code for the library's holdings as well as diary entries reporting the customisation of display panels for visitors, allows us to visualise the library as a vibrant and dynamic exhibition space for the demonstration of Warburg's concepts. Similarly, the scrutiny extended to Lissitzky's use of materials in the demonstration rooms revealed a disturbing aspect in his painting of the Nirosta steel bands – a material famed for not requiring paint. Upon closer examination, this seemingly irresolvable detail hinted at links between the demonstration room and his concept of an "immaterial materiality" – a conjunction of a theoretical and practical model that revealed a different understanding of these environments based on materiality and mediality, rather than Lissitzky's proun project or irrational space. And finally in chapter four, Gropius' material lists and cost plans are read in conjunction with photographs and visitor reports to open up perspectives that go beyond the modernist designs on display. It reveals a language of communication based on material and psychological means that imprinted experiences upon the imagination of the visitor that are as powerful as the exhibits. In all the case studies, the questions emerge from the specificity of the case: either from an incoherent detail or a situation, which provokes alternative narratives by interrupting our preconceived perception of the case. It follows that none of the case studies can be seen as examples or illustrations of a pre-existing problem. On the contrary, the key arguments and insights of the thesis directly materialise from the study of these particulars and their interrelations. The narrative that emerges from the interweaving of different data and facts injects colour, texture and life into historic spaces that previously were known from black &

200 white photographs only. Visual material such as photographs, drawings and sketches provide valuable clues when read in conjunction with textual material: Lissitzky's interest in the thinness of the Nirosta sheet, for example, emerge from a seemingly unimportant note on a sketch, which inquires about the possibility of obtaining an even thinner sheet width. Although, I would not refer to it as a discrete methodology, the interrelation and detailed comparison of visual and textual material plays an important role in my investigation. Specifications, drawings, agendas, visitor reports and programmes are read in conjunction to reimagine the effect that exhibition spaces had on the sensory apparatus of the Weimar citizen. With respect to conveying the aesthetic and psychological effects of materials, the photographs are more successful in some cases than in others. Whilst yielding detail about Dorner's framing techniques and other manipulations, the images of the Provinzialmuseum provide few clues with regard to the actual atmosphere and feel of the spaces. In contrast, a number of photographs of Lissitzky's Raum der Abstrakten captured the same flickering effect of the walls that I observed on my visit to the reconstruction at the Sprengel Museum Hannover. And finally, although the photographs of the 1930 Werkbund exhibition in Paris captured the gleam and glitter of the materials, they failed to betray the strong colours, which only emerge from the vivid language and descriptions of visitor reports and reviews and provide a quite different picture to the monochrome aesthetic portrayed in the photography. Textual analysis was used not only in conjunction with visual material, but language and its particular use often yielded important insights into its instrumentality. For example, Dorner's use of popular language in guide books and his direct address of the viewer in his posters substantiates his desire to provide links with general audiences rather than with circles of experts and connoisseurs. This leads me to the difficulties encountered in the gathering of archival material. The events of the Second World War led to the destruction, removal, scattering or loss of not only the spaces discussed in this thesis, but also their documentation. Material is frequently dispersed between numerous archives. For example material on Dorner can be found at the Sprengel Museum, the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover, and the Niedersächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, and the Bauhaus-Archive Berlin. Often, I discovered valuable material by scouring related holdings, for example, Gropius' correspondence at the Bauhaus Archive contained material on Dorner and Moholy-Nagy. The lack of cross-referencing between holdings added further challenges. Another notable issue is the unintelligibility of Warburg's handwriting, which forced me to largely rely on documents that had already been transcribed. Although translations of many of Warburg’s better-known texts are available, I found that these are frequently translated very loosely and at times inaccurately. Therefore I

201 have preferred to use my own translations, endeavouring to adhere very closely to the original German texts.

Towards Alternative Exhibition Scenarios

Much of the thesis engages with revealing the crucial importance that materials assumed at the precise historical moment when the enabling assumptions on which the traditional exhibition was based came under scrutiny, and its legitimacy and purpose was challenged altogether. While the exhibition's central importance as a materialisation of culture remained unchallenged, it was becoming increasingly uncertain who in fact was entitled to make decisions about its preservation, production and mediation, and calls for reform became louder. If the overview of German museums developments at the beginning of this thesis has brought to light the different voices heard in the discussions surrounding reform efforts since the 1880s, towards the end the Weimar Republic a widening of the discussion to include questions about the purpose of exhibitions more generally is revealed. This expansion is shown to broaden the understanding of exhibitions, which now thematised the interstice between exhibits and their material context and thus challenged the boundaries between exhibition and reality. The devaluation of institutional settings in favour of alternative exhibition scenarios is made explicit in the selection of the case studies and their architectural strategies: in Warburg's semi-institutional hybrid of museum, library and domestic studio, emerges a conjunction of architectural typologies which are combined as a powerful instrument of mediation, accommodating functions such as display, presentation and study; Dorner's explicit obscuring of the Provinzialmuseum's neo-classical museum interiors by means of colourful wall screens, modern furnishings and posters progresses new atmospheric contexts for the exhibition of historic art; Lissitzky's assault on traditional museum architecture dematerialises solid museum walls by means of industrial materials, light and colour to pilot exhibition models for contemporary art; and finally, the 1930 Werkbund exhibition's complete transformation of the Grand Palais' architecture by means of shimmering industrial materials and gleaming lights presents a futurist scenario for both exhibitions and domestic life. If this paradigmatic shift away from the traditional museum exhibition began with the first international exhibitions such as the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace, when art was shown outside the institutional confines of the museum, during the Weimar period we see the erosion of the static museum space by experimental approaches. As is demonstrated throughout the thesis,

202 these endeavours were fuelled by a fascination with materials and their presumed capacity to mediate between human beings and their environment. This development dramatically accelerated in pace against the background of socio- political changes that occurred during the Weimar era. The paradigmatic shift in exhibition architecture, which is traced in the case studies, is mirrored in the thematic headlines of public debates. For example, if in 1924, Dorner still asked "Was sollen heute Kunst-Museen?"(What is the point of art museums today?), in 1930, the question that Dorner put to his audience was "Was sollen jetzt Ausstellungen?" (What is the point of exhibitions at present?).571 And if in 1923 Lissitzky's "Proun" lecture envisaged the possibilities of novel materials in artistic production, in 1926 his concerns for materials were refocused on the creation of a new type of exhibition architecture intended to replace the setting of the traditional museum. Furthest of all went Moholy-Nagy's material experiments, which completely abandoned the idea of creating an exhibition setting with physical means and focused on the immaterial, space- generating powers of light, film, and photography instead. These material strategies not only to transformed museum and exhibition spaces into multi-media environments, but were envisaged to spread to the domestic settings of common homes. If all these initiatives took on the challenge to rethink the traditional environment of the museum exhibition along the lines of materiality, they have done so from different disciplinary perspectives: Warburg as an independent scholar; Dorner as a museum director; Lissitzky as an artist/architect; and Gropius, Moholy-Nagy, Bayer and Breuer as an interdisciplinary team. But they can be seen as unified in their progression of fundamentally critical positions towards the representational and commemorative functions inherent to traditional forms of exhibition, and beyond that, in proposing and practically implementing viable alternatives geared towards mediation rather than representation.

The Mediating Power of Materials

The analysis of the case studies shows that the rise of experimental exhibition models in the 1920s would be incomprehensible without an awareness of the simultaneous revolutions that occurred in the understanding of the material world, which was at the core of intense technological, psychological, and physiological investigations at the time. The argument made throughout the thesis is that these were not separate investigations, occurring in parallel, or by chance; but rather that they consciously drew upon and fuelled each other. As discussed, the growing recognition of advances in visual science and spatial perception by Ewald Hering and

571 Cf. Dorner, "Was sollen heute Kunst-Museen?;" and Dorner, "Was sollen jetzt Ausstellungen." 203

Wilhelm Wundt prompted speculations about the influence of the material environment on the reception of art and architecture. This understanding of materials included immaterial elements such as colour, light and texture. More importantly, it linked the aesthetic appearance and sensory qualities of materials with the agency of psychological power. If these ideas had already influenced nineteenth century German aesthetics and informed historical models of cultural development, the thesis now traces their translation into practical models for display propositioned by museum directors, artists and architects and set against the socio- political context of the Weimar period. When Lissitzky stated in his "Proun" lecture "the relationship of form to material is the relationship of mass to energy," I suggest he captured a belief that is at the basis of all case studies and their discrete efforts to reconceive the exhibition through the lens of materiality. Namely, this is the belief that the interrelations between all material objects, including human beings, are fundamentally energetic. It follows as a consequence that through the manipulation of materials, human behaviour can be directed and transformed. In short, the underlying aesthetic and sensory aspects of materials – their materiality – implicated specific reciprocities with the human psyche. At this point, materials were conferred an inherent mediality. Within the context of this study, mediality has been technically understood as the capacity of materials to directly communicate with the human sensory apparatus. This has been the case for certain aspects of faktura or colour, where material is understood in primary terms in-so-far as its inherent properties directly mediate the reality of light and the tactility of surface textures. However, since the Weimar exhibition auteurs' fascination with materials was intrinsically linked to their susceptibility for manipulation, they are predominantly used as a secondary medium in-so-far as they serve as a technical device for the exhibition maker. They are deployed in a variety of ways: firstly, to raise awareness of our interconnectedness with material surroundings by stimulating the visitor's perceptive apparatus, as for example, in the striated walls of Lissitzky's demonstration rooms; and secondly, to support the rational mediation of knowledge by means of text with more immediate impressions on the body, as in Dorner's antithetical conjunction of information material with immersive spatial experiences, or the combination of rational survey and spectacular staging as seen in the 1930 Werkbund exhibition in Paris. Whilst Warburg's material strategies for his library continue this list of occurrences in which materials are used as a medium of communication, he further technically distinguished materials (including the human body itself) as a storage medium, an idea engrained in his concept of engram, whereby the transmission or non-transmission of meaning is relative to changing cultural contexts. What emerges in the case studies is a combinatory

204 aesthetic which is at the heart of these mediation techniques and that allows the structuring of more complex intellectual, aesthetic and psychological experiences. However, not only was the exhibition experience reconfigured through material experimentation, but vice versa, the materials themselves were equally reimagined through the medium of the exhibition. In particular, the 1930 Werkbund exhibition used innovative materials to develop a new exhibition model and in doing so, simultaneously reimagined and staged these materials in unprecedented ways, at times leading to patentable outcomes welcomed by industry, as for example the patented three-corner profile of the Werkbund exhibition's glass display cases briefly discussed in chapter four (see fig.4.2).

Scientific Inspiration and Creative Experimentation

If the rhetoric surrounding material investigations has been shown to be scientifically inspired, its translation into practical exhibition models took the form of creative experimentation rather than purely exacting efforts. In short, whilst these experiments were executed with rigour, the translation of scientific findings into material conditions was nevertheless understood as a creative rather than a scientific endeavour. The degree to which the protagonists of the case studies were scientifically informed also varies considerably. For example, whereas there is little evidence for in-depth engagement with science by Dorner, Warburg's interest in the psycho-physiological parallelism advanced by German physiologists Ewald Hering and Richard Semon was much more serious and is well-documented in his library acquisitions and theories. The real value of the case studies, as I have proposed in the thesis, is not their scientific exactitude, but the resourcefulness and vision with which the interplay between human psyche and material objects was imagined; and each case study does so in its unique way. Chapter one analyses the hybrid space of Aby Warburg's institute of cultural sciences – a conjunction of exhibition, library and laboratory that testifies to Warburg's fascination with energy, which he understood to be inscribed in material objects and human beings. It shows how this interest was encapsulated in the design of the building and how Warburg hoped that this would support the mediation of his concepts to audiences. The central reading room is revealed as a stage for art historical narratives, featuring spatial and material characteristics believed to heighten concentration and apprehension. Simultaneously, the reading room functioned as a private laboratory where shifting constellations of objects, books and images artificially simulated their interrelations. But it was the colour-coding of books which transformed the subdued material palette of the library spaces into a multi-coloured cosmos.

205

In these endeavours, Warburg's institute provided impulses on how the interrelations between audience, objects and architectural settings could be reconfigured to enhance the mediation of knowledge and provide orientation for the visitor. In examining Warburg's mediation strategies, the first chapter pinpoints fundamental issues related to the collecting, categorising and staging of objects and thus introduces the basic parameters for their further discussion in subsequent chapters, where these issues reappear, albeit in different contexts and considered from different perspectives. Chapter two investigates the practical implementation of insights into the mediating capacity of colour and the psycho-spatial effects of architectural detail in Dorner's atmosphere room architecture. Forging links between architectural strategies, information material and interventions, the chapter reveals the antithetic structure underlying Dorner's mediation concept. Rather than seeing the conjunction of immersive strategies pursued with material manipulations and their disruption by intellectual stimulants as a conceptual conflict, I have argued that the effect of the atmosphere rooms can be imagined in quite different terms; namely, as a montage that contrasts aesthetic experience with critical reflection. This chapter illuminates the didactic importance of Dorner's display paradigm by detangling the multitude of different ideas at work in Dorner's reorganisation of the museum spaces. These diverse ideas are drawn from Alois Riegl and nineteenth century German aesthetics, but equally drew inspiration from the methods of modern art and advertising. Dorner's transformation of the Provinzialmuseum's traditional architecture to support the connection of historic material with the more radical agenda of contemporary modernism traces issues raised by Warburg: in particular, one notes the duality of emotional experience and reflective distance as well as the powerful interactions between word and image. Dorner's attention to architectural detail is comparable to Warburg's, and this might be explained with their shared interest in art historians such as Alois Riegl and August Schmarsow, whose attentiveness to the psychological effects of aesthetic criteria such as colour and surface texture offered a departure point for both men.572 However, unlike Warburg, who never dealt with the abstract art of his time, Dorner's methods are appear to be increasingly influenced by the ideas of the modern avant- garde, including an interest in mass media and communication. In that respect, Dorner's case goes beyond Warburg, and launches the discussion of the following two case studies, which represent more radical approaches to mediation, namely, Lissitzky's demonstration rooms as well as the 1930 Werkbund exhibition. Both have their origins in a fascination with materials

572 The interrelatedness of Warburg and Riegl's theories is discussed in the introduction to Kurt W. Forster, ed. Aby Warburg - The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 50-52. 206 and the sensory manipulations offered by the modern optics of film and innovative materials. In short, they approached the exhibition not from institutional and art historical perspectives, but from the more practically-oriented perspectives of design and architecture. Whilst didactic in intent, both exhibition models have less interest in literal explication. Instead, they encourage the audience to navigate the exhibition under the guidance of perceptual clues such as light and the rhythmic arrangement of objects. Illuminating the development of the exhibition during the 1920s from the diverse perspectives of the case studies has made it possible to identify a shared concern, and this concern is the consideration of audiences as a determining factor.

Engaging Audiences

So far, I have focused largely on the formal and aesthetic development of new display models, where the curators strove to overcome outmoded forms of display, which were still substantially informed by nineteenth century exhibition paradigms. In doing so, they changed our understanding of the interrelations between human beings and the material world. Their models might appear to be at the expense of a socio-political dimension, which constituted the historical context against which these developments unfolded. On the contrary, I would contend that to a large degree social and political aspects are implicit in the very move from exhibition strategies based on representation to ones informed by mediation. That is to say that there is a certain reversal in orientation away from those who collect, own and loan the objects that are displayed, towards those who view them. In this respect, it cannot be overlooked that all case studies converge in their basic socio-political motivation, and this motivation is the explicit consideration of audiences as a crucial aspect in exhibition design – a theme that has been elaborated throughout this thesis. As pointed out at the beginning of this study, the first moves that acknowledged audiences as a determinant factor in exhibition conceptions occurred as part of the German museum reform movements, which commenced in the 1880s under Wilhelm II. The prospering German nation state increasingly promoted its museums, libraries and universities as modern places for mass education. The programmatic focus of the museum progressed from a representational, stately or private character towards a science-based institution – a process that necessitated the systematisation of contents and their being made available for pedagogical purposes.573 However, those who owned many of the exhibits belonged to the same social strata than those who came to see them – the German middle-classes and elites.

573 Pauli, "Das Kunstmuseum der Zukunft." 207

What is clearly signposted in all the case studies is that the perpetuation of the traditional exhibition's exclusive character was no longer acceptable in the budding Weimar democracy.574 In that sense, all of the case studies represent a "populist" position in so far that they explicitly manifest an interest in audiences through a variety of spatial or material strategies modelled on audience needs. Annulling the requirement for prior cultural knowledge and expertise, the case studies introduce mediation strategies that communicate both via sensory and intellectual pathways: Warburg facilitated the active participation of students and scholars by opening up his private work environment to publicise and share his work. His endeavours to articulate his personal ideas in ways that allowed for them to be shared is materialised in the appointment and organisation of library spaces. Opposing the mass-education promoted at larger German universities, it has been shown in chapter one that Warburg targeted a highly specialised audience drawn from experts within his field. In contrast, chapter two reveals that Alexander Dorner, part of a younger generation of art historians, harboured no such qualms. In fact, I have argued that his endeavours were angled at mass society as much as they were inspired by it – its penchant for new media, its thirst for corporeal experiences and its desire for constant change were all acknowledged in his museum programme. Portable guide book formats, a markedly populist language, colourful spaces, changing exhibits and campaigns in schools and factories were intended to attract large numbers of visitors to the museum. His rhetoric relentlessly underscored his social agenda and his desire to communicate high culture to those still largely unfamiliar with it. However, he equally acknowledged the elites and experts, who supported him with loans and donations and for whom, as he suggested, the populist, colour-saturated spaces should act as a provocation. Counter to his oratory, the commentary from artists, collectors and scholars, which Dorner so meticulously collected, demonstrates that his expert audience actually appreciated the material aesthetics of the newly-appointed exhibition spaces. Despite the emphasis Dorner placed on his mass-educational ambitions, neither his personal documents nor the Provinzialmuseum's records reflect the voices of the general public, whom Dorner professedly courted. What is extraordinary, however, is the semi-formal rapport he struck with visitors by leaving handwritten notes on paintings and addressing visitors directly in posters and guides – an aspect that I have argued is a pivotal part of Dorner's mediation strategy. This is supported by Dorner's constant rehanging of art works and changing of exhibits facilitated

574 Joachimides provides a detailed discussion of the museum reform movement in Germany from the 1880s onward as discussed in earlier sections. See Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880-1940. 208 by short loans from contemporary artists – activities which notified the viewer that Dorner had been there and wished to present new work or new ideas to them. In Dorner's restless rethinking and rehanging of the collections, it is possible to trace a parallel with Warburg's person-based approach, his constant changes of books clusters and image constellations on the atlas panels. Although, to my knowledge, neither Dorner nor Warburg ever made reference to one another, they must have known about each other through joint friends and colleagues such as Erwin Panofsky, or Adolph Goldschmidt.575 Lissitzky's concern for audiences transpires clearly in his introduction to the demonstration rooms. Contemporary audiences, he felt, were literally assaulted by an overload of exhibits, a scenario he compared to visitors confronted with roaring beasts in a zoo. In distinction to Warburg and Dorner, who dealt with specific exhibits and had equally specific conceptions of their audiences, Lissitzky did not imagine customised solutions; rather, he presented a claim for an exhibition standard adequate for contemporary art and audiences in general. In the specific case of the demonstration rooms, these were the mass audiences of Western Europe, attuned to ever more dynamic, urbanised environments and sensory experiences.576 While Dorner and Warburg used both word and experience to guide and educate their audiences, Lissitzky demonstrated a preference for guiding the visitor solely with sensory means. Yet in comparison to the more demanding, yet therefore also more exerted endeavours of Dorner and Warburg – their use of note boxes, posters, and books which subscribed to textual modes of instruction – Lissitzky relied on the rationalising power of architecture alone; namely, the optical laws, material aesthetic and psychological insights, which promised to physically guide viewers through the space. He left visitors to their own devices when it came to reflecting upon their experiences, providing few clues on how to connect the dazzling impressions of the exhibition room with the art historical narrative of the Provinzialmuseum or the nationally inspired art at the 1926 Dresden Internationale Kunstausstellung. Lissitzky never considered text, labelling or the like in the meticulous

575 Dorner and his friend Erwin Panofsky met as students in art history seminars given by Adolph Goldschmidt - a close friend of Aby Warburg. As Professor of art history at the University of Hamburg, Panofsky later became part of Warburg's intimate circle. On the personal relations between Warburg, Panofsky and Goldschmidt see Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 123-25. For a detailed account of the friendship between Warburg and Goldschmidt, see Christine Kreft, Adolph Goldschmidt und Aby M. Warburg: Freundschaft und kunstwissenschaftliches Engagement (Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2010).

576 His target audience fundamentally changed in the later exhibitions that were commissioned by the Russian government and geared towards the mediation of post-revolutionary Russian values to Western European countries, but also to Russian society itself, which at the time was largely agrarian. 209 drawings he produced for the demonstration room designs, preferring to retain the autonomy of his architecture and exhibits. The 1930 Werkbund exhibition was designed to astound French and German audiences and addressed the problematic of cultural mediation in the form of a multi-media spectacle. As a survey exhibition, its accumulation, categorisation and sequencing of material impressed the visitor with exhaustive documentation. But the thesis shows that the effort to rationally convey Germany's advances in art and science was then powerfully reinforced with the skilful staging of the exhibition material. The later aimed at the production of experiences that translated the concepts of German modernity, which were so amply documented in the survey, as sensory impressions. If the exhibition's contemporary reception highlighted a division of opinion about its value as a source of information on modern German design and equally its value as a source of bedazzling imagery and entertainment, I have argued that both are of equal importance and represented a double strategy intended to communicate with audiences on a multiplicity of levels. Combining the rational documentary style of the survey and technological design achievements with the evocative staging of exhibition material, Gropius and his exhibition team achieved a more intense mediation by impressing sober facts through stimulating "the most diverse corporeal reactions."577 Throughout the case studies, the question of audiences, who they are, what method of mediation they require, to what ends they benefit, and to which degree they participate, is revealed to be as diverse as the exhibition models of the case studies themselves – specialist audiences, lay audiences, expert audiences, national audiences and general audiences. What has been shown as a common aspect throughout is the desire to decrease the distance between those who organise and sustain exhibitions and those at whom they are targeted. However, the proposed purposes of exhibitions remained diverse. As exemplified in Durand- Dupont's critique of the 1930 Werkbund exhibition, serious educational goals levelled at tackling the socio-political problems of the day and the desire for distraction by pseudo- glamorous experiences to supress these very issues were frequently deemed to be irreconcilable. But I have argued in all case studies that some of their seeming contradictions were in fact co-productive: if staged systematically and in a didactic manner, exhibitions could deliver information and critical discernment together with engaging experiences. Particularly, the analysis of Dorner's atmosphere concept has shown clearly that the deliberate contrasting of atmospheric experience and its disruption with informative interventions represented an attempt to enhance learning by co-ordinating physical and intellectual stimuli.

577 Schlemmer, "Gestaltung aus dem Material," 223. 210

As the case studies demonstrate in a variety of ways, the staging of the exhibition as a captivating spatio-material experience can potentially enhance mediation, rather than blunt the exhibition's revolutionary edge. However, it should be noted that the troubled question of whether exhibitions avert critical modes of reception by feeding the audience's desire for alluring encounters, or whether in fact such encounters augment intellectual discernment and cultural edification, can only be answered by attending to the particulars of each case.

Spaces of Transformation: The Exhibition as a Socio-political Instrument

As mentioned above, as much as the case studies demonstrate, how ideas about materiality informed display, and how these in turn endeavoured to engage audiences, these aspects cannot be considered in isolation from the socio-political background against which they unfolded. This investigation reveals that during a short period of time, spanning less than a decade, exhibition architecture was elevated from its passive role as a representational background to a central medium considered of equal importance to the displayed objects. The exhibition emerged as a crucial element in the mediation, critique and harmonisation of culture and attracted curators, museum directors, artists, and architects, who increasingly forged alliances to develop engaging exhibition designs that assisted the transformation of viewers from passive recipients into active participants. What differentiated discussions about the democratisation of cultural experiences in exhibitions during the Weimar period from those preceding them, is the emphasis on mediation strategies: the failure of museum exhibitions to attract a wider audience made clear that a progression towards an egalitarian culture could no longer be understood as the simple provision of public access. As part of a new social contract, an explicitly educational mission had to be embraced. Exhibits had to be made comprehensible and this required didactic forms of engagement that provided experiences that simultaneously led to consideration and critical reflection. Beyond aesthetic pleasure and entertainment, the exhibition visit had the mission to transform the culturally uneducated members of the public into culturally active citizens. What forms of engagement were pursued by various auteurs and what kinds of methods were deemed suitable, varied widely throughout all case studies. However, the enabling assumption underlying all approaches was that if the interrelations between humans and their physical environment could be intellectually captured, then they could also be influenced. As a public forum, the exhibition offered a fertile testing ground for the cultivation of display models that were not only based on the viewer's experience but beyond that aimed to predict, direct and control human behaviour. In one of the fervent public debates surrounding

211 the purpose of museums in 1930, Alexander Dorner presented exhibitions as potential instruments for social transformation. For him, their crucial task was to provide deeper insights into the significance of the "controversies of the present" – insights, which could provide potentially liberating, and activating effects for the viewer so that eventually "exhibitions could cultivate productive forces for the community."578 Many progressive exhibition makers from that time agreed the ultimate aim was to effect long-term changes in the consciousness of audiences. Changes that were intended to counteract the individuating tendencies of modern urban life, its passivity, indifference and lack of discrimination, as Georg Simmel had astutely diagnosed.579 The socio-political harmonising potential of culture – low and high – promised the active involvement of Weimar mass society towards the advancement of the young democracy. In this respect, the case studies show the problematic of advancing socio-political objectives, whilst at the same time meeting various other commitments. This is certainly the case for Warburg's attempt to share his personal knowledge by trialling ways of mediation that would make subjective findings comprehensible to a wider audience with related interests. It is even more explicit in Dorner's negotiation between his role as a museum director and several other competing interests: especially, adhering to the scientific systems of art history on one hand, and satisfying demands for the integration with socio-political arenas and institutional settings on the other hand. Lissitzky, in distinction, had little or no interest in art historical continuity and juggled concerns affirming industry and technology on one side, and modern media and creativity on the other. Unlike Dorner and Warburg, whose commitment to history lead them to seek productive connections of past and present, Lissitzky's endeavours were closely focused on connecting present and future – a future marked by socialist ideals. Gropius and his curatorial team of Moholy-Nagy, Bayer and Breuer had diverse positions and interests which they put in the service of conjuring up a multi-facetted and gleaming image of Germany's post-war history and a modern Weimar society by means of what could be called a balancing out of the techno-aesthetic spectacular.

Scientific Inspirations

In multiple ways, the case studies demonstrate that the ascendancy of the exhibition during the Weimar years as a potential nexus for socio-cultural mediation and discourse was enabled by assumptions about previously unacknowledged interrelations between viewers and their material environment. In other words, exhibitions, whatever form they adopted, almost

578 Dorner, "Was sollen jetzt Ausstellungen?," 144.

579 Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," 54. 212 always entailed experimentation with materials including the evocative appointment of spaces with colours and light, the use of innovative materials, and architectural detail. Crucially, these experiments were no longer guided by ideas about style and representation, but a keen interest in perception and psychological effects. Informed by scientific ideas and data, the arrangement of exhibition elements and art objects now acknowledged the viewer and his experience as a key aspect of organisation. It was at the conjunction of scientific awareness and social ideals that the exhibition was elevated from an invisible background to an active foreground function. Its material composition, aesthetic appearance and detailing were carefully staged and made explicit as an environment that not only accommodated art objects but enhanced, and even stipulated, their relative meaning. Thus Aby Warburg's library Alexander Dorner’s atmosphere rooms, El Lissitzky’s demonstration rooms and Gropius' 1930 Werkbund Exhibition must be seen as meticulously planned environments, designed to intensify viewing experiences towards a pre-calculated psycho-physiological impact. Their status as key Weimar-era exhibition models relied on: firstly, the systematic manner, with which materiality, sensory and intellectual experiences were explored, and secondly, the staking out of a controlled space, within which these encounters could unfold uninhibited from the influences of outside life. It is not by co-incidence that all of them were labelled as laboratory-style exhibition spaces both by their creators as well as by critics. The quasi- scientific nature of their practices resonates with Philipp Felsch’s description of the modern laboratory as a place of modernity at "the interface between artificial intensification and processual openness" – a conjuncture, which, Felsch claims, became an "influential projection screen for the imagination of modernity" when it first emerged at around 1900."580 Modern laboratories functioned as "refuges, in which the natural course of things was suspended," Felsch asserts, and thus they opened up a space of freedom for experimental practice that permitted "the controlled interaction of isolated variables in a more or less artificial milieu."581 And this description, I suggest, equally holds true for the exhibition environments discussed in this thesis, which represent a confluence of different objectives, ideas and methods that are co-ordinated and subjected to intense experimentation. Logic and method are interwoven with creativity and subjective interpretation.

580 Philipp Felsch, "Das Laboratorium," in Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, eds. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2005), 30.

581 Felsch, "Das Laboratorium," 30. 213

Future Directions for the Exhibition

Art tends to give shape and weight to the most invisible processes. When entire sections of our existence spiral into abstraction as a result of economic globalization, then the basic functions of our daily lives are slowly transformed into products of consumption (including human relations … ) it seems highly logical that artists might seek to rematerialise these functions and processes, to give shape to what is disappearing before our eyes. Not as objects, which would be to fall into the trap of reification, but as mediums of experience: by striving to shatter the logic of the spectacle, art restores the world to us as an experience to be lived.582

In the detailed examination of the case studies, the paper has identified an inventory of techniques, materials and beliefs, which informed the construction of intellectually and physically engaging exhibition models. In doing this, it has established a platform for a more profound and informed discussion of trans-historical correspondences piloted within contemporary exhibition approaches. If the citation of Weimar era exhibition makers has largely become synonymous with the contemporary probing of display conventions and audience engagement, the findings arising from the case studies shine a more critical light on such analogies. The slippages and cracks that appear in these trans-historic comparisons are both crucial as well as numerous. The substantial characteristics of Weimar exhibition models that have been elaborated as part of this study are: firstly, the importance of the material context of the exhibition architecture as a means of mediation and engagement; and secondly, the related endeavour to use the mediating power of the exhibition architecture to effect long term cultural, social and political changes. These were the fundamental drivers at the heart of the Weimar period exhibition enterprise and they can provide central strategies to inform artistic and curatorial practices of today. Contrary to this potential, it has become apparent that precisely those exhibition paradigms that seek links to the exhibition models of the Weimar period discussed in chapter three, in fact, miss opportunities to instrumentalise the material context of the exhibition architecture, or do so in inconsequential ways. At best, they can be seen to query the white walled modernist exhibition space, but only to replace it with the celebration of different places of modernity - the architectural ethos and aniconicity of abandoned warehouses, factories and similar. In the staging of art as everyday events, aesthetic and everyday experiences are conflated, when their interrelations could easily be intensified through the creation of correlations and links. If the exhibition scenarios of the

582 Bourriaud,"Postproduction," 32. 214

Palais de Tokyo are stylishly understated as "spaces meant for the performance of everyday functions" or, as in some of Liam Gillick's work, serve as trivial backgrounds, the question remains whether more could be done to revitalise or rethink some of the important aspects of Weimar exhibition models that have been discussed in this dissertation.583 Such a rethinking might serve to engage viewers in better ways and also to more meaningful ends. What has emerged in the case study exhibition models is that the transformative powers assigned to materials are not so much rooted in the intention of the artist or designer – they are not symbols, referents or representations – but that their agency resides in the intellectual engagement and physical interaction with audiences. The staging of materials is therefore attributed an important role as an activating agent and social catalyst. What it tells contemporary exhibition makers is that there are also significant opportunities to extend the experimental approach applied towards contemporary art to the exhibition settings that house it, and with that, offer more differentiated experiences to visitors – namely, encounters that are based on more self-aware, reflective, informative or critical modes of reception. In providing a historically-informed discussion platform for transhistorical approaches proposed in contemporary art practices and highlighting alternative directions, it should be clear that the significance of the thesis is its fundamentally optimistic diagnosis of the interrelations between the material staging of the exhibition and the provision of culturally consequential experiences. I would like to conclude with the voices of a contemporary and a historic figure. Both concur on the value of devising exhibitions as spaces for affective and intellectual stimulation, and critical insight. Pondering the question as to whether exhibitions should provide reflective or sensational experiences, Hans Belting insists that these terms need to be qualified in relation to what in fact happens in exhibitions rather than what is exhibited. What is of enduring importance to Belting is the recognition that the exhibition experience has to remain the main catalyst when it comes to offering the audience a stimulating forum rather than stunning them into "loyal passivity" with sensational events. 584 The idea that the self-understanding of the exhibition has to be constantly recalibrated to retain its stimulative power was also at the core of Dorner's thought. Every era has to find an exhibition paradigm that corresponds to the art and life of its time, Dorner insisted. And Dorner was very serious about this – in a manuscript written after his emigration to the U.S.,

583 Bourriaud, Postproduction, 47.

584 Hans Belting, "Orte der Reflexion oder Orte der Sensation," in Das diskursive Museum, ed. Peter Noever (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2001), 91. 215 he detailed plans for a future museum, stipulating that "it would be decisive and timely that in this institute the senses will be stimulated as much as possible, so that the visual impression will support the rational understanding;" it would contain "no originals" and would materialise not only past and present ideas but demonstrate "projections into the future."585 Such an institute, he later stipulated, "would be constructed functionally and flexibly of light modern materials," and "would rely primarily on the imagination and leadership of its staff."586 Materials and their immaterial effects play a vital role in the mediation of exhibition experiences. Their power has to be utilised and directed to improve the ways in which culture is mediated to audiences. They cannot be ignored, if effective exhibitionary practice is the goal.

585 Alexander Dorner, "Exposé über ein Institut für Konstruktive Kunstgeschichte," typescript, undated, Walter Gropius, Korrespondenz 1937-69, D 975/1 - 986/2, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

586 Dorner, The way beyond 'art', 148. 216

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