by Diego Castro (sorry for the poor translation)
An
empty space can be thought of in two different manners. Try to think
of an empty space and yet another one. The first space is an empty
room, maybe a living room, in a new building, maybe social housing.
Traces of use everywhere, marks of furniture and pictures on a
mouldy, yellowed wallpaper. Stains on the carpet. Past life is still
noticeable. We don't know why nobody lives here anymore, but what we
perceive is absence, that, contrary to the supposed former life,
seems negative. We might perceive this emptyness as a consecution to
loss.
The
second room might be an art gallery, in which emptyness is an element
of planning, of what in architecture is called room allocation plan
or scheme, that encloses the object within it like a monstrance
(ostensorium). The austerity and the dazzling lighting directs all
attention towards the exhibits. With this it also draws the attention
towards the role of the visitor as a beholder, a contemplator or
admirer. The function of the room as a dispositive, it's room scheme
seems engraved in it. If you remember Tanizaki Jun'Ichiro's
description of a western lavatory; he pointed out that the
cleanliness and white porcellain would stress the room scheme of a
toilet, by aggravating the user's function as a mucky pup, as
producer of dirt.
Rem Koolhaas, former situationist, now working on the enhancement of consmuerist aesthetics
Try
to think of Rem Koolhaas' Prada flagship-store in downtown New York.
Emptyness here is an expression of a squandering spirit, of pure
luxury. In an environment, where space is luxury, you don't often
meet this particular use of space. It serves to stress the
cannonisation of a small selection of merchandise, representative of
an exclusive collection. This aims at a logic of representation of
commodities, where aspects of quality or value-for-money become
irrelevant. The criteria of appraisal are rooted in merely aesthetic
percetion and the narrative room scheme. The symbolic value of the
brand is to be brought into being by a culturalisation of
consumerism.
The
room-schemes of the Prada-Shop and the one of an art-institution are
in this sense comparable. The spacial expression of appraisal
commensurate with the auratisating dispositives of art-presentations.
At Prada's you will find a flamboyant use of space, where a
minimalistic set of spacial intervention lounges voluptuously. At
large, the use of space becomes a brutal, yet subtle element of
arrangement. With the aesthetic of reduced and flexible
representation, two central figures of neo-liberal management are
already set into place in this alignment: lean production and
flexibility. Not only does it point out an aesthetic of symbolic
capital, because empty space, if it is under control, it is also a
figuration of entrepreneurial ethos.
With
the increasing importance of museums for the self-manifestation of
corporations and brands, coming forward as sponsors, but also with
the new role of cultural institutions in urban planning, for
city-marketing, tourism and estate-agencies, the use of space has
become an important factor. Yet its representative physical planning
is intertwined with destruction of the urban continuum and social
segregation, the last one being a key aspect of the spatial structure
they are intended to impose. Koolhaas, by the way, who has build a
number of museums, has excelled at taking the rather problematic
aspects of urban planning into the use of space in commercial
contexts.
Richard Meier's MACBA
The
first thing that comes into perspective, when you approach Richard
Meier's Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA) is its
influence on the urban continuum. Not only the demolition of vast
parts of the socially mixed neighbourhood of “Raval” with its
secondary effects of the new spatial order, rise of rents and social
segregation, also known as gentrification, are remarkable. The most
conspicious part is the use of space itself. It is the central
element of the room scheme. Empty space has replaced the dirt, the
drugs, the hardship cases, the students, the old people, the jobless,
the prostitutes, the loafers, the small time criminals.
An
imminent quality of this empty space is the representation of order
in its interior, the emptyness is the method of order. Inside and
outside the art-museum, we have a room scheme procuring orderliness,
change and innovation.
"Barrio Xino", prositution in the Raval dstrict
Inside the museum there is this emptiness, wich has a structuring and
narrative quality to it. Showing art almost becomes an ostensably
secondary aspect within the dramaturgy of space. Mind you, the
staircase in Richard Meier's design takes up about one third of the
building. While smaller institutions would struggle for more space to
be used, the emptiness present here brings the representative
qualities of the building into the front line and installs a certain
hierarchy between the visibilities of both institution and the city
council, incorporated into a good choice of trademark architecture,
and artworks and visitors. Visitors who have ultimatly come to enjoy
submission to this hierarchy, not for its abstract political
structure, but for its aesthetics sake. The submission already starts
by merely crossing the forecourt of the museum until finally reaching
the vestibule and entering the atrium like entrance hall/ staircase.
But let's try to not be unfair: There actually are many good reasons
to enjoy empty space. Just think of the pleasant, solitary dialogue
with the art-works, one can sometimes get lucky to experience in a
half-empty museum. Besides this illusion of a Zen-Garden, there is
another, very specific reason for the enjoyment of limewashed
museum-arrangements: The planned emptiness of representative
architecture opposes structural order to a chaotic exterior, be it
inside and outside of a building or inside or outside of an urban
zone or sector. The key to the understanding of this juxtaposition is
that we have a space of protection against over-complexity and
overstraining in the exterior. The affirmative presence of
stipulation and order inside the white cube is on the same behalf an
absence of openness and alternative possibilities for interpretation.
inside MACBA
This
unambiguousness is a key note in museum-architecture. It has also
been made use of in political architecture. Minimalistic and
rationalistic style has helped subtle stagings of political and
economic power. In this connection, totality and exclusivity
fraternize in an ill-omened way. With decoration washed away by
minimalism and a decorum of false modesty and two faced asceticism,
with filigran ornamentalism countered by a gross ornament of the
masses and rationalistic brutalism, the enshrining presentation of
central objects and symbols calls the visitor to devotion. In other
words, the architectural dipositive humiliates the beholder, but also
offers sublimation. The fact that participative processes in form of
artworks or museums' educational services are booming in these
displays almost seems coercive. They are a direct result of the
spatial schemes and its anomies in terms of the spatial experience.
They seem to be a corrective for a developed deficit within the
desire for an overtly positive experience of space.
Another
question, you might want to ask when looking at art institutions as a
dispositive for activation, is if the architecture can ever be
considered as completed without the actual participation. To give a
rather harsh example, and please don't judge me on this one!, if you
take the Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg, you'll have a good
example of the solid architecture being merely a display, for what is
about to come later, which is the human architecture, that is,
architecture carried out through actual physical deployment. The
Nazis were probably the first ones to carry out architecture by
masses of bodies in this particular, political design.
Luitpoldsarena, Nuremberg
Although,
for many reasons you cannot compare the physical deployment used in
the national-socialist party's state aesthetics, still the society of
control has brought about new forms of representative architectural
strategies, using activation as a means to fulfil a highly
performative architectural concept.
Sir
Norman Foster's redesign of the Reichstag Building's copola is a good
example for the idea of a performative architecture, illustrating
administrative key figures of a western european, yet neoliberal
democracy: transparency, citizen-orientedness and public
participation. In today's representations and room schemes we find a
fashion for open structures and seemingly undefined room/ space
concepts. In the example of Sir Norman Foster's intervention, we have
the leitmotif of transparent parliamentarianism, the permeability of
power, as well as participation. While symbolising diaphanousness
(while power structures are become fuzzy and obscure) the copola also
is a showcase, in which activation becomes visible. Without this, the
architecture would stay incomplete. The deployment of human beings
and their animation inside the architecture becomes its central
element. The aim is to symbolize a dilution of the seperation between
citizens and decision-makers. At the core, it is crucial, that this
takes place on a symbolic level and not structurally. For as much as
we can state performative qualities, the ends to it are a
subscription to a pictorial regime.
Coming
to the architecture of art institutions, participation is usually
being staged against a dispositive of protestant white and the
minimalist form language of the white cube. But these formal
expressions are not only connotations, they are the manifestation of
the room scheme. Their aim is on the one hand the canonisation of the
artwork, the first contradiciton to an alleged neutrality of the
space. But, on the other hand, more and more often, the bigger and
more spectacular museum buildings are getting, what we find in it is
a dispositive of an obscurantistic power structure and hidden
agendas, masked by dehierarchisation.
We
are dealing with a space that is highly ideological. The activations
that we encounter here in form of participation, educational schemes
or interactivity, more than often meet with neoliberal work ethos and
affirmative acts for the educated bourgeoisie. Taste and distinction
on the one hand, key notes of achievment-orientation on the other.
The experience of art as a performative act, implies the staging of
an image-production as a cultural achievement and in terms of what
Max Weber called “social action” it becomes an act of distinction
(Bourdieu, Veblen).
Here,
assivity, refusal of performance and hence efficiency, and denial of
adventure, just like structural critique are out of place.
Formulations of critique are in accordance with the room scheme. They
are inscribed into the concept of space, the way the performance
goes, has been planned. The boundaries of the playing field cannot be
transgressed. The room program has to be approved. But where the
gratifications of passivity fail, the antagonism of artwork and the
beholder, the dichotomy of institution and citizen vanish.
As
we have just learned, the nature of the exhibition situation
conditions the visitor in a certain way, so his reaction will be
tinged in benevolence. This scheme is presupposed by the social art
work. Which is also the case with any kind of artefact to be
presented under this room scheme. But there is one difference.
Relational perfomativity emphasizes the physical act of submission to
the room scheme. But only from a safe distance the organisational
aspects, mind its ideologies become apparent. Imagine a documentary
on the Nazi-Party rally in Nuremberg: Black and white scratched film,
a long shot over the blocks of soldiers forming corridors, marching
in cohorts, saluting the Führer and responding to the discourses of
the minister of propaganda from the rostrum, filmed from a
distance of 500 metres. Now imagine a documentary of the same kind
about people at a Rirkrit Tiravanija show... What would you find? If you participate, you are compromised. What you need is
this 500 metre long shot.
There
is, though, a big difference (of course!) between fascist and democratic
room programming, especially after the transgression from the society
of discipline to the society of control. Where traditionally
disciplinatory forces come into place, like police, military, school
and penal system, in the society of control we have the aspect of
voluntariness. It has created an ever increasing zone in our society
and has opened up for many possibilities for supervision and
guidance. But just how is this voluntariness produced?
The
fact that socially determined room images ("Raumbild", space as
iconographic entity) are not a result of contingency, but of
planning, development and process, is something that has been
referred to many times in room theory.
“Iconographic space grants people with the possibility
to symbolically partake in a development model (Detlev Ipsen).”
Rirkrit Tiravanija, exhibition display at Dakar Biennial, 2004
In
this, developments can be invested in the dispositives in two ways:
first: the room image follows the development of space. Second: the
development is anticipated by the image, the last option being the
more interesting one, as it hints at the inherent, affective force of
undefined, open, transitorian, transparent and seemingly democratic
dispositives with their processual and at the same time minimalistic
attributes. Occasionally it is the work-in-progress, the
unaccomplished social sculpture, that offers lesser possibilities for
intervention or interaction as it might seem. On the contrary, it is
the accomplished and highly defined form, that allows us to draw
conclusions on the disciplining, controlling and ideologically
infiltrating room scheme. So again, in the transitorian, the
constraint of critique is manifested by the inherent difficulty to
delegate critique. This is one core aspect of critique in the
neoliberal age: The power is disseminated in a way, that its source
becomes invisible. Participation, outsourcing and transparency are
its strategies. As the dispositives give way to critique, and
de-hierarchize discourse, they might give expression to
co-determination. But with the steadily undefined and unfinished room
scheme and a multiplied and hence blurred authorship within
relational manifestation, it becomes hard to find the addressee for
critique, which is one of the reasons why today in participatory
democratic processes, the space of critique becomes a space of
emotional performance and very often stays behind expectations and
without any consequences. It becomes a sort of space for group
therapy, which aligns with the idea formulated by Alain Ehrenberg or
Eva Illouz, that therapeutic endeavours more and more seem to meet
with the anomies of capitalism. However, with an increased visibility
of discontent, here lies a reason why corporations and institutions
today do not seek any longer for a definition of space by branding it
with their corporate designs or aesthetics. Rather we have a
post-democratic quality to the creation of room schemes, which uses
democratic semiography, expressed through performative action, to
create acceptance in a, if I may say so, perfidious manner.
Christian Jankowsi's group therapy for artists and administrators of the Berlin senate:
