Display as Experience
1964. Three teenagers are running through the Louvre, passing famous artworks by David, Da Vinci and Gericault. They see the paintings flash by, but do not see them at the same time, mainly occupied by setting a new world record for running to the other side of the museum. An older man, quietly contemplating before one of David’s paintings, is rudely disturbed by the three restless teenagers. This scene of Jean Luc Godard’s Bande à Part (see cover image), in which the main characters see the whole Louvre in nine minutes and 43 seconds, has apparently nothing to do with the way we are used to experience art.
When looking at art, most people want to experience something that temporary lifts them up from their rushed daily life. When making exhibitions, evoking a memorable experience is therefore an important goal. Curators look for ways of integrating this in their display. But contemporary exhibitions that take up whole spaces, or that are in some way a ‘designed’ environment, composed by an artist or other people, are often dismissed as being spectacular or theatrical. Some critics even claim that the museum has turned into an amusement park, losing space for contemplation and debate in favor of quick fun and ‘snack art’. They fear for an audience that only sees exhibitions like Odile, Arthur and Franz do while running through the Louvre in Bande à Part. Is it possible to make a display of artworks which evokes an intense aesthetic experience without losing the intellectual depth we like to find in contemporary art?
In this essay I will be looking at three concepts which I think are intrinsic to the process of creating experience in display; embodiment, unity and space. Although these concepts imply much more than can be shown in this short essay, I want to use them to illustrate my starting point together with two examples. These two examples were paying a lot of attention to the evocation of experience in the way they were curated.
Embodiment
Aesthetic experience plays an important role in the phenomenological theories of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He was interested in the way that human consciousness is an embodied experience. The world is the ground of experience. His position is that subjectivity is something of the world, not apart from it, and it is provided by the “primacy of perception”. Our access to the world is through the body and not through (or not only through) the mind. Al thinking is embodied; it comes from consciousness, which develops from the subject’s bodily perceptions. Embodiment signifies the role of the body in how we experience the world. The artworks we perceive as objects in the world are the result of how our bodies experience them, not just our consciousness recognizing the object. "Our body, to the extent that it moves itself about, that is, to the extent that it is inseparable from a view of the world and is that view itself brought into existence, is the condition of possibility, not only of the geometrical synthesis, but of all expressive operations and all acquired views which constitute the cultural world.”
Merleau-Ponty had a problem with the philosophical tendency to reduce every object and phenomenon to nothing more than collected data. He saw his task in philosophy to return to relating to the world directly as it was viewed, not as science described it. The direct aesthetic experience of a work of art is utterly important for him: content and form, what we say and the how we say it, cannot exist apart from each other.
Unity
Experience is something that occurs continuously. Things are experienced but not in such a way that they are composed into an experience. We have an experience when the things experienced runs its course to fulfillment. For example, we are finished writing a book, solving a problem, playing the game, or go home after a party. Such an experience is a whole and carries with it its own individualizing quality and self-sufficiency. It is an experience. What I mean by this in this context is what people often call real experience; situations that you remember. This experience has a continuous flow. In a work of art, different occurrences fuse into unity, but still keep their own character. An experience has a unity, constituted by a quality that pervades the entire experience, in spite of the different parts it is made of. An experience is like a train, made up of many different wagons. As a spectator you see the train as a train, not as a collection of wagons. This unity is not practical or emotional, nor intellectual, for these terms are adjectives of interpretation, distinctions that reflection can make within it; we make use of these in discourse about an experience. In thinking of an experience after it has occurred, we may find that one quality rather than another was more dominant, following that this one property characterizes the experience as an entity. We therefore do not often think of an experience as being intellectual and emotional at the same time; however this is probably very often the case.
Space
Apart from embodiment and unity, the last concept I want to discuss as the most important parts of experience in exhibitions is space. When the whole environment participates in the viewing of a work of art, the exhibition becomes an immersive surrounding. As the actor Ben Whishaw declares in his role as John Keats in the film Bright Star: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought.”
The risk of creating an environment is that the viewer will become isolated. This is very likely to happen in current displays of new media. Video installations often take up whole rooms and are entirely cut off from the world through thick black curtains. When we sink into the carpet we forget the immediacy of our bodies. The spectators are cut off from each other; also the possibility of creating a dialogue with other works in the museum is eliminated.
An example in which this isolation was prevented is the exhibition Touched of the Liverpool biennale of 2010. For the biennale, a lot of different spaces were used throughout the city of Liverpool. Old warehouses, shop windows and even the cathedral participated in the exhibition. A video installation showing people in the streets throwing stones through the windows of an old industrial building was on display in the same building as it was filmed. The visitors watched it standing up, with some light coming through the shattered windows. One almost expected a stone to fall through the window with loud noises any time soon.
Another work in the exhibition was a seven meter long sword by Kris Martin that hung from the dome of the Liverpool Black-E church (see image 2). The sword would have acted in a different way if it was not hung from the church dome. The space was far from neutral; a huge sword in a church immediately and inevitably evokes a large number of references. When standing underneath the sword, we are grasped by a Lacanian gaze, feeling threatened like Damocles. This was true for most artworks in the biennale; the environment was crucial for the complete experience of the work, and since almost all the works were commissioned for the specific spaces you could say the space was a direct part of the artwork.
1. Kris Martin, Mandi XV, 2007
The biennales main exhibition, Touched, heavily depended on the emotional impact of artworks. In the biennale guide, artistic director Lewis Biggs writes: “What defines art that has this ability to communicate directly, this width of crosscultural appeal? Emotional experience is common to all humanity. Art that evokes emotion in one individual, despite all the cultural specifics that determine that person’s reactions, will reach out to many other individuals with varied cultural backgrounds. Touched presents art with emotional impact. Art that not only can gain our attention but that can move us, motivate us, allow us to find a way to change ourselves.”
The Liverpool biennale’s Touched exhibition was a collection of experiences. All the different spaces created a fragmented collective. Instead of laying emphasis on active engagement and debate, the core was emotional experience. The main goal of The Liverpool biennale was not to create discussion between people, but still did so through the very direct emotional impact of the artworks. Because of the different locations, the audience had the opportunity to focus upon a single work, being drawn into it, and to have a personal experience.
An exhibition with an often very similar starting point took place in 2009 during the Venice biennale (see image 3 and 4). In-finitum, an exhibition on show at the Grand Canal bordered Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, was created by Belgian interior designer, antique dealer and art collector Axel Vervoordt. Because of its extraordinary beauty, the exhibition attracted huge crowds to the palazzo, despite all the numerous other satellite exhibitions next to the biennale. In-finitum consisted off works from all ages; from antique Egyptian sculptures to unfinished Cézannes to commissioned contemporary works. Vervoordt put all these works together in the unusual spaces of the large fifteenth century gothic palazzo, designing the environment for the works. This resulted in dark cellars with dramatic lightning, heavy decorated ballrooms including lounge furniture and bare, light wooden spaces (see images 2, 3 & 4). In his profession as an interior designer he consciously created new homes for artworks that were not very often seen so close to each other. He gave them a chance to communicate with each other, to become new things.
In-finitum was about the infinite, the universe, but also about the mysterious and unfinished. The a-historical character of the exhibition contributed to this theme, taking the visitor on a journey through the ages. In one of the catalogue texts, Italian art historian and curator Francesco Poli writes about the hyphen in the title In-finitum: “the hyphen can be seen as a symbol of union as well as separation, which opens up the space of vision and imagination to the deeper and more inaccessible dimensions of the aesthetic experience of physical and spiritual reality.” Because of the designed environment, visitors could experience the concept of the exhibition without a necessary need for explanation.
2 & 3: Two exhibition overviews of In-finitum, bottom image showing work by Anish Kapoor and Lucio Fontana, top image showing work by Hans op de Beeck and Antonio Canova.
In contrast to the Liverpool biennale, which was under the artistic directorship of Lewis Biggs, also director of Tate Liverpool, In-finitum was curated and designed by someone from a different field. Some people might regard this non academic background as a disadvantage, but Vervoordts longtime experience with collecting, antique dealing and interior designing enabled him to put together works from different eras in a building that was very specific. His selection of art and objects displays a richness of centuries of treasures. The thing that attracted most people so much to In-finitum was the intuitive quality the exhibition possessed. It did not desire a thorough intellectual insight, but relied more on immersion in the artworks. There was no signage, labeling or printed information except for the catalogue. Respecting the histories of all the works, Vervoordt laid out an emotional territory that embraced the context of the exhibition, weaving all the works together. Negative remarks that could be heard on the exhibition were that the exhibition resembled a stage set too much. The theatricality is omnipresent in In-finitum. The different floors and rooms of the palazzo all had a different feel and look, like the subsequent acts of a play. The clear routing of the exhibition sent you in the right direction, to make sure you were reading the story in the correct order. Every work was carefully lit with a spotlight, leading you from the almost entirely dark vaults of the palazzo to the light flooded wooden attic.
This dramatic narrative might seem restrictive. The feeling of a staged exhibition would close the curtains, leaving no space for the audience to contemplate their own stories. But on the other hand, the dramatic set of In-finitum is as much curated as a show in a more ‘white cube’ environment. The only difference is that we are so used to the structure of white walls and light from above that it does not strike us as being designed anymore. With the staged environment being so explicit in the exhibition, the structure is laid bare, enabling the spectators to find their own way through the play.
Returning to Merleau-Ponty, content and form cannot be seen loose from each other. In the case of In-finitum, it is therefore vital that the surroundings of the artworks in the exhibition are completely adapted to the art, to help in the creation of new dialogues. The experience is carefully constructed. As the critic York Lethbridge writes in his review for Magenta Magazine: “the quality of the experience in seeing In-finitum is a reminder that encounters with art can be powerful and deeply personal”.
Both In-finitum and the Liverpool Biennale depart from the idea that an exhibition should be an experience. Although both exhibitions have very different content (it is hard to equally compare contemporary works with an a-historical collection of almost everything), both rely heavily on the bodily experience we have as a visitor. Whereas the biennale is a more fragmented collection of different experiences, In-finitum reaches a high level of unity in its theatrical ways of display; many different artworks, objects, things, become one in a new context. Both exhibitions would not have been the same, would maybe have been almost nothing, without their surroundings. Space is a crucial part of the means they use to reach their goal. If this is a decayed warehouse, a slightly kitsch church or a fifteenth century palazzo with its feet in the water does not really matter, as long as these spaces are used as strength and not as a burden. Spectacle and theatricality has been given a bad taste. But when used in the right ways it can add value to the way we see art. It can create new dialogues, a sense of universal oneness. As the Liverpool biennale’s artistic director writes in the catalogue: “Art without emotional force is without intellectual power.”
4.Overview of the first floor of Palazzo Fortuny during In-Finitum.
Bibliography
Books
Biggs, Lewis, ed. Liverpool Biennial, International Festival of Contemporary Art - The Guide. Liverpool: Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art Ltd, 2010.
Cherry, Deborah. “A Sea of Senses,” in Right About Now, edited by Margriet Schavemaker and Mischa Rakier. Amsterdam: Valiz, 2007.
Dewey, John. Art as experience. New York: Perigee, 2005.
Emerling, Jae. Theory for Art History. London: Routledge, 2005.
Miki, Tatsuro and Axel Vervoordt, “About In-Finitum”, in IN-FINITUM, edited by Axel Vervoordt. Gent: Vervoordt Foundation, 2009.
Meijers, Debora. “The Museum and the ‘ahistorical’ exhibition,” in Thinking about Exhibitions, edited by Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Narine. London: Routledge, 1996.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London:Routledge, 2002.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. London:Routledge, 2004.
Klonk, Charlotte. Spaces of Experience. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009.
Poli, Francesco. “Traces and Mirages of the Infinite in Contemporary Art,” in IN-FINITUM, edited by Axel Vervoordt. Gent: Vervoordt Foundation, 2009.
Magazines
Lethbridge, York. “Mapping the Studio & In-Finitium: Fortuny & Pinault Collections”, Magenta Magazine, Fall 2009, Volume 1, No.1. Accessed 3 December 2010. URL: http://www.magentamagazine.com/1/reviews/fortuny-pinault
Exhibitions
IN-FINITUM, Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, 6 June – 15 November 2009
Touched, part of the Liverpool Biennial, International Festival of Contemporary Art, Liverpool (several locations), 18 September – 28 November 2010
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