For: Exhibitions and the Canon of Modern Architecture, Art History Conference NORDIK 2012

Chairs: Wallis Miller and Mari Lending

Abstract: Terence Riley once told me that the question Philip Johnson always asked when mounting an exhibition was: “Who are you going to the make the man?” The attitude is telling, in more ways than canonisation. Leaving aside the gender specifics for the moment Johnson’s credo points to the phenomenon of the architectural exhibition and its doppler effect of fame, notoriety, and historicity. Johnson’s vision was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It reinforced its own making.

The purpose of this paper, however, is to explore in greater depth what is arguably Johnson’s last perceived major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art: Deconstructivist Architecture, co-organised with Mark Wigley with the assistance of Fredereike Taylor. While many of Johnson’s exhibitions, from the renowned International Style show to Deconstructivist Architecture, are commonly thought to hold a canonical role, the purpose of this paper is to take a longer, and more controversial, if not disruptive view.

The exhibition will be framed by two pivotal articles: Robert Somol and Sarah Whiting’s “Notes Around the Doppler Effect” (2001) and Michael Hays “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form” (1984). The transformative power of an exhibition as read against texts that follow and proceed it will be considered, as will texts and ideas that the exhibition itself constructed. At issue is the work within the exhibition and the exhibition as architecture. It will be argued that Deconstructivist Architecture works in and against the traditions of modernism to codify and change directions in architecture. Such changes are reflected within the contemporary, post-critical discourse and subsequently, within exhibition making. Dialectic terms such as disciplinarity and criticality, indexical and projective, praxis and form, autonomy and engagement as problematized in the articles, and reflected in the exhibition, will be challenged.

The exhibition will be situated with the socio-political-cultural context of the time when the architecture museum and exhibitions began to proliferate. The paper will not chart progressive histories, but consider the doppler effects within spatio-temporal margins of the exhibition on critical discourse. Subsequent changes in architecture exhibitions will be considered recurrent, as they reference modernist bauausstellung and architekturausstellung.

fields of architectural museums and archives, to exchange information, and to develop best practices. ICAM 16 will take place this year in Germany, at the beginning of September. The hosts of ICAM 16 are the M:AI Museum for Architecture and Engineering in North‐Rhine‐Westphalia and the DAM German Architecture Museum at Frankfurt.

Tina Di Carlo will present ASAP’s as a critical project during the session that deals with new strategies for architectural archives: whether by physical necessity, pressure from outside forces, strategic refocusing, or a digital mandate, archival collections and their stewards must adapt to new demands of patrons, political entities, and the market. The chair for this session will be hold by Dr. Irena Murray from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

The ASAP is a topic of much interest to ICAM, given that our responsibilities as access‐providers to architectural representation and information are currently in a state of rapid change. The idea of the ASAP is unique amongst the architectural archives. The conference offers the opportunity to present the ASAP to an international audience of specialists.

The event brought together practitioners and academics working in Helsinki and abroad to explore topical issues related to art, design and urbanism. Through a series of events and panel discussions the aim was to establish a dialogue that both challenges and opens up the city and its institutions. The discussions took place at a temporary pavilion between the Museum of Finnish Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki.

The series invokes the term exhibitionism as a spatial site of departure, a methodological angle and a point of view from which a whole series of events can be seen differently, a kind of site from which a critical gaze [of multiculturalism] becomes possible. Playing on the fetish of exhibition making over the last 25 years each session in this series will proceed through a different terminological frame from object to thing, apparatus-exhibitionism, represent-present, document-evidence, act-agency, collect-collectivity, archive-testimony, ending in the eighth session with profane-play. The idea here is textual, tied to language, written, spoken and uttered that once circulated and absorbed into discourse, can itself begin to shift the way in which curating architecture is practised and ultimately understood.

In this way this lexical work is set up as a mirroring device to distill a series of turns implicit in the way in which we speak about curating architecture and curating within architecture. This is a political project and the question of where the agency lies within Exhibitionism will form the base line of this measures framed by readings by Giorgio Agamben, Ariella Azoullay, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Jacques Ranciere, Alan Badiou, Walter Benjamin and paradigms by Tomas Saraceno, Eyal Weizman, Hito Steyerl, Jeremy Deller, Mirza Butler, Patricia Reed, Cyprien Gallard and Wolfgang Tilmans. The form and orchestration of each session will be considered as content and thus vary. The image will be considered as a spatial construct through a scripting of utterance and text.

DLDwomen will shed light on the “Female Decade” and its high-tech, high-touch approach. The conference identifies new opportunities, female markets, new lifestyles, and future developments in the role of women influenced by today’s digital age and social transformation. This year’s other topics will include cultural change, art & design, consumer behavior, (online) fashion, gender medicine, education, social entrepreneurship, future developments in tech and female markets. We are expecting 50 international high profile speakers and 400 opinion-forming, “by invitation only” participants – women and men – as well as more than 100 journalists from German and international media.

DLDwomen is an event of Hubert Burda Media (one of the key drivers in the European media world) and builds on the creative network and competence of the DLD conference, which brings together international leaders, disruptors, scientists, designers and artist. DLD also hosts global events in dynamic cities such as Palo Alto, Beijing, London, Tel Aviv, New York, Rio de Janeiro, and this year for the first time in Moscow!

Log 20, the tri-annual journal published by the Anyone Corporation, takes a special look at the expanding ideas of curating architecture at a moment when its traditions and trajectories can no longer go unexamined. The proliferation of museum architecture departments and architecture biennials since the 1980s and the broadened use of the term curating to encompass artistic, architectural, and academic practices have today influenced the very idea of cultural production: Everyone is a curator and everything is curated. What does this mean for the architecture curator and for architecture?

Published concurrently with the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, Log 20 assembles twenty-four of the leading and emerging curatorial voices to reconsider the definition of architectural work, to reexamine the problems of representation and display, and to project new directions for curating within architecture itself.

Edited by Cynthia Davidson with consulting editor and curator Tina Di Carlo, the issue includes articles by Barry Bergdoll, Sylvia Lavin, Henry Urbach, Mirko Zardini, Andrea Philips and Eyal Weizman among others, and about curatorial practices at OMA in Rotterdam and SANAA in Tokyo. Log 20 also considers the politics of the Serpentine pavilions, the idea of the exhibition as atmosphere, the influences of the Venice Architecture Biennale, and novel “displays” from Hong Kong to Moscow. In sum, the 168-page issue is arguably the first compendium of contemporary practices on curating architecture to propose future directions in this emerging discourse.

Contents
Barry Bergdoll, In the Wake of Rising Currents: The Activist Exhibition
Eve Blau, Curating Architecture with Architecture
Jean-Louis Cohen, Mirror of Dreams
Cynthia Davidson, Drawn In
Marco De Michelis, Architecture Meets in Venice
Tina Di Carlo, Exhibitionism
Manfredo di Robilant, Pippo Ciorra Takes A Job at MAXXI
Ole W. Fischer, In the Shadow of Monumentality
Kurt W. Forster, Show Me: Arguments for an Architecture of Display
Jeffrey Kipnis, Dear Paula
Sylvia Lavin, Showing Work
Paula Lee, Still Life, After Death
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Biennial Manifesto
Kayoko Ota, Curating as Architectural Practice
Andrea Phillips, Pavilion Politics
Alex Schweder, Exhibit Architecture
Felicity D. Scott, Operating Platforms
Robert A.M. Stern, From the Past: Strada Novissima
Léa-Catherine Szacka, A Conversation with Vittorio Gregotti
Henry Urbach, Exhibition as Atmosphere
Philip Ursprung, The Indispensable Catalogue
Eyal Weizman & Tina Di Carlo, Dying to Speak: Forensic Spatiality
Mirko Zardini, Exhibiting and Collecting Ideas: A Montreal Perspective

PLUS: New Canaan … Moscow … Hong Kong

Exhibitionism as a method and open project proposes a mode of praxis involved in the creation of the sensible. It proposes architecture and the architecture curator as a spatial practitioner within a broader spatial aesthetic discourse; that as architecture, the exhibition should not represent architecture within the space of the gallery but should presence or produce architecture within the space that is architectural; and that architecture is often best presenced through its alterity or other. It considers where and how the political enters as a common stage to hear the low man speak, in Ranciere’s terms, be it to elevate the value of architecture through reconceiving the thing akin to that of painting and sculpture, or to consider the exhibition and curator as somehow instrument and agent, beyond branding or even knowledge production. To look at architecture in this way is to posit architecture as part of a broader spatial-social-political-aesthetic discourse, at once inside and outside itself. It is also a reflexive position that argues the display of architecture should be congruent with the most recent practices. To say as much means that the exhibition is no longer contained in space, but is constitutive of, and constituted by, space. Exhibition as architecture, architecture as exhibition. A reflexive mirror that proposes what Foucault calls a heterotopic space. (Excerpted)