No other context I know places as much importance on exhibition architecture as today’s Russia. The level of ambition is very high: walls and other complex structures are built and painted, carpets are laid, walkways are constructed, and the rooms are illuminated as in a theater performance. As a visitor, or (better) experiencer, you are enveloped. It reminds me of the nineteenth-century Gesamtkunstwerk, and of Boris Groys’s famous description of Ilya Kabakov’s characteristically dense and atmospheric environments as “total installations.” But with a major difference: while the Gesamtkunstwerk and the total installation rely on affinities and correspondences between the display structure and the displayed, creating synergistic effects, the style that predominates in Russia tends to run its own race.
Exhibition architecture can certainly highlight art on its own terms and give energy to what is exhibited, but it can also make it difficult to reach art. One example of elaborate and costly design that made that connection strenuous was the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art’s “Assuming Distance: Speculations, Fakes, and Predictions in the Age of Coronacene” (March 26 – August 1) where visitors were led around an illuminated “catwalk.” This created an unfortunate contradiction between a laudable initiative—to support artists in Russia with a generous production budget during the pandemic—and a superficial and spectacular lifestyle presentation. It was as if those responsible wanted the visitor to feel like a model at a fashion show by having the works of art installed outside the catwalk, at a proper distance from the audience. Indeed, it was perfect for selfies.
The kitsch prize, however, goes to Daniel Libeskind’s design for the multi-layered exhibition “Dreams of Freedom. Romanticism in Russia and Germany” (April 22 – August 8), an otherwise excellent and unique compilation of art and other objects, most of which dated from around 1800, at the New Tretyakov Gallery. The exhibition architecture was labyrinthine, complicating both the hanging of the works of art and the visitors’ movement, transforming the journey into a self-absorbed pirouette. Another aspect of this is economic; according to colleagues working at institutions, the budget for exhibition architecture, including the architect’s fee, is usually equal to or greater than the budget for art and artists. At the same time, the proper remuneration of artists by institutions, as a matter of course rather than an exception, does not yet seem to be on the local horizon.
But why is exhibition architecture so prominent in Russia right now? A friend suggests that it is a culture of representation with a long history; great importance is attached to how something is presented in public, and so tends to the grand and ceremonial. Another says that it can sometimes serve as compensation for contemporary art which is itself poorly executed or cheaply produced. A third points out that it is part of a new, hard-commercialized trade fair culture along the lines of global mega events where congresses and fairs in Russia invest heavily in form and looks. That has spread to the field of art.
In any case, the last did not apply to the brilliant and well-researched exhibition “VKHUTEMAS 100. School of the avant-garde” at the Museum of Moscow (November 10, 2020 – April 11, 2021): in a functionalist and airy wooden architecture, works by teachers as well as students of the legendary art school were presented. The various orientations, or departments, of the Soviet Bauhaus, including “space,” “volume,” and “color,” were accompanied with rich documentary material, in a space designed for the pleasure of discovery. Here, form and content went hand in hand, congenially adapted to the museum’s raw premises in an old arsenal.
Another interesting example is artist Anna Titova’s display of Vadim Sidur’s late-modernist abstract sculptures at the modest Vadim Sidur Museum in a not-yet-gentrified residential area of Moscow (“The Amazing Journey of a Mischievous Boy,” September 7, 2021 – February 27, 2022). With limited space at her disposal, she has created a circular structure with a long inserted shelf inside it for smaller sculptures made of bronze, stone, and wood which the visitors are welcome to touch—from the late 1980s, the Vadim Sidur Museum was the first museum in Russia to engage with multi-abled visitors, including the visually impaired. In the middle, she has placed a sculpture celebrating motherhood, which leads on to a monumental reconstructed assemblage consisting of discarded objects which Sidur found in and around his studio, a work pre-figuring Kabakov’s later total installations.
Then there is one more reason that exhibition architecture is so prominent: the narrative impulse. The palpable desire in Russia to tell a story is exemplified at Thomas Demand’s solo exhibition at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art (“Mirror Without Memory,” September 10 2021 – January 30, 2022), where the walls are reminiscent of huge piles of paper. “Spirit Labor: Duration, Difficulty, and Affect,” a parallel group exhibition looking at performance art in Eastern Europe and South East Asia at the same institution, with walls mimicking concrete, emphasizes the original sites of a number of the performances featured in the exhibition. These two cases speak to a wish, successful or not, for the exhibition architecture to dance with the art, rather than claiming the dancefloor for itself.
Category
Subject
