On the Kunsthistoriches Museum

Kunsthistoriches Museum
Formally, if one is inclined to be moved by monolithic volumes, some in stone, others glazed in glass, graced by a rare beam of Berlin sunlight, or by the relentless dia-grid of a limestone floor pattern - then this building will hit the spot.
But personally it falls prey to creating only grand volumes, emulating in every way - but at 1/5 the scale - the diagonal movement, the floating bridges, the underground connections, the shifting stairways and the material palette of the Washington DC National Gallery of Art, leaving the galleries to fill the left-over periphery. The architecture, scaled down from the "Grand Projets" that Pei has been accustomed to, reads as an exercise in form, with the single-mindedness of a posthumous work. In this context, the galleries, then, become hostage to this diagram, that Mr.Pei has mastered so well in his 4 decades of museum building. Fortunately he has done better museums elsewhere, at the Miho in Japan (which we worked on), and more recently in Suzhou, where the public spaces and the relentless geometry have been overridden by other imperatives, stronger than the architecture: the site, nature and the process of getting to the museum in the first place. At the Kunsthistoriches, the circular cantilevered stairway seems so strenuously earnest for an entrance gesture, that you might as well just walk by it and down the side-street to Schinkel's plaza to enjoy the shade of the trees. The galleries and the "collection" are hardly worth the detour.

On the Prado Museum

A second favorite in terms of collection. Early on, we had signed up for the first open competition that was announced for the Prado expansion some years ago. So, we know the historical building well, the constraints of the expansion, having perused a very complete competition brief . We have not, however, visited Moneo's recently completed work. We did not feel the need to rush to make a visit: his architecture does not demand to be seen this way. One can only assume, knowing much of his work, that it will have a certain imposing confidence to it, classic spatial moves and use of materials and natural light, in dramatic ways - not necessarily recommended in a "museumscape" where drama and high contrast in lighting are to be avoided. In a good way, it will eschew, as much of Moneo's built work does, the risks of flamboyant public gestures. While we may appreciate the facilitated visitor flow, the expanded galleries, and the cafe, we will nevertheless visit the Prado, not for Moneo, but to be enthralled by the El Grecos , Murillos, Zurburans, Goyas and Velasquezes.

On the Hermitage Museum

A favorite. Not to be touched, hopefully, by the current interest in crowding-pleasing, or crowd-controlling expansions. The Hermitage does not need more space, so by default it may be saved from this potential defacing. Koolhaa's recent planning strategies with a group of local architects for the Hermitage, barely conceals the rhetorical strategies that are part of his expansionist practice. This is a bizarre mismatch of architect and museum, not unlike the unhappy marriage of Libeskin with Toronto, or Coop Himmel(b)au in Akron. We must expect that a self-declared ego-architect, offered to re-look at the mindbogglingly complexity and disorientation of the Hermitage, will not put ironic interventions to waste here.
So, we think of the Hermitage with melancholic nostalgia, as one can only assume the virus of museum architecture - minus the museography we like to champioin - will unfortunately infiltrate those palatial spaces. What the Hermitage does need, is more and better lighting - natural and artificial - upgraded conservation and visitable storage to rotate works, and a new vision on how media content is supplied so all types of visitors can find their way - and their own choices - in the viewing the works of art.

On the National Gallery in London

I would say, arguably the best museum in Europe to contemplate grand master paintings. The scale of the rooms, both in height and in plan, as well as the natural daylight, are almost perfect. Despite the ornementation of the spaces, the tired postures of the guards, the tired look of the velvet red walls, it remains the one place in the world where one can believe that the birth of the museum, the western 19th Century treasure house, was a well founded endeavor. The Louvre palatial rooms, are more like enfilades, for strolling. The National Gallery are proportioned for viewing, for the short hesitation to look at the art. For that, one never tires.
The format, the layouts and the proportions of other encyclopedic museums - the Metropolitan Museum in New York in particular - pale in comparison. And without all of the new tools at our disposal in designing new museums - the sophisticated sun-tracking models and computer aided simulations to create the optimal sky-lite galleries, from the great skylights of DeMenil Collection in Houston, to the more recent Baeyeler Museum in Basel, from the Kimbel Art Museum in Fort Worth to the Nasher Sculpture Court in Dallas (all, except for Louis Kahn's masterpiece, designed with the help of our friend Andy Sedgwick of Arup, London) - the NGA somehow still go it right: Just the correct dose of light levels, contrast, diffusion and an awareness of the time of day. It is in this light that Velaquez's Venus and Cupid, or Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors, enthralls the viewer, seen before being understood.

Now for the dated addition, by Venturi Scott Brown. One can be drawn to the light filled galleries perceived from the historic spaces, as another enfilade of rooms, and risk seeing more art in a post-modern installation. But for this visitor, I have always refrained - I just cannot bear the thought that Venturi did not live up to the lessons of the true NGA. So, the addition, has remained for me a theoretical expansion, seen only from the corner of your eye from Trafalgar; a period piece to be noted by an outdated architectural monograph. The more recent entrance reconfigurations, very sleek and minimal, equally do no justice to the NGA, nor do they set up an expectation for viewing the art. Lost opportunities in both design and visitor experience. Even worse to contemplate, as London is teaming with such creative force as to expect, even demand, otherwise. Nelson's Column did and got Rachel Whiteread's anemic, but beautiful clear, cast base.

Michel Foucault. Of Other Spaces (1967), Heterotopias.

This text, entitled "Des Espace Autres," and published by the French journal Architecture /Mouvement/ Continuité in October, 1984, was the basis of a lecture given by Michel Foucault in March 1967. Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault's death.

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world. The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermaldynamics- The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and far, of the side-by-side, of the dispersed. We are at a moment. I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein. One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space. Structuralism, or at least which is grouped under this slightly too general name, is the effort to establish, between elements that could have been connected on a temporal axis, an ensemble of relations that makes them appear as juxtaposed, set off against one another, implicated by each other-that makes them appear, in short, as a sort of configuration. Actually, structuralism does not entail denial of time; it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history.

Yet it is necessary to notice that the space which today appears to form the horizon of our concerns, our theory, our systems, is not an innovation; space itself has a history in Western experience, and it is not possible to disregard the fatal intersection of time with space. One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane plates: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all these concern the real life of men). In cosmological theory, there were the supercelestial places as opposed to the celestial, and the celestial place was in its turn opposed to the terrestrial place. There were places where things had been put because they had been violently displaced, and then on the contrary places where things found their natural ground and stability. It was this complete hierarchy, this opposition, this intersection of places that constituted what could very roughly be called medieval space: the space of emplacement.

This space of emplacement was opened up by Galileo. For the real scandal of Galileo's work lay not so much in his discovery, or rediscovery, that the earth revolved around the sun, but in his constitution of an infinite, and infinitely open space. In such a space the place of the Middle Ages turned out to be dissolved. as it were; a thing's place was no longer anything but a point in its movement, just as the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. In other words, starting with Galileo and the seventeenth century, extension was substituted for localization.

Today the site has been substituted for extension which itself had replaced emplacement. The site is defined by relations of proximity between points or elements; formally, we can describe these relations as series, trees, or grids. Moreover, the importance of the site as a problem in contemporary technical work is well known: the storage of data or of the intermediate results of a calculation in the memory of a machine, the circulation of discrete elements with a random output (automobile traffic is a simple case, or indeed the sounds on a telephone line); the identification of marked or coded elements inside a set that may be randomly distributed, or may be arranged according to single or to multiple classifications.

In a still more concrete manner, the problem of siting or placement arises for mankind in terms of demography. This problem of the human site or living space is not simply that of knowing whether there will be enough space for men in the world -a problem that is certainly quite important - but also that of knowing what relations of propinquity, what type of storage, circulation, marking, and classification of human elements should be adopted in a given situation in order to achieve a given end. Our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.

In any case I believe that the anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time. Time probably appears to us only as one of the various distributive operations that are possible for the elements that are spread out in space,

Now, despite all the techniques for appropriating space, despite the whole network of knowledge that enables us to delimit or to formalize it, contemporary space is perhaps still not entirely desanctified (apparently unlike time, it would seem, which was detached from the sacred in the nineteenth century). To be sure a certain theoretical desanctification of space (the one signaled by Galileo's work) has occurred, but we may still not have reached the point of a practical desanctification of space. And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and that of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.

Bachelard's monumental work and the descriptions of phenomenologists have taught us that we do not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well. The space of our primary perception, the space of our dreams and that of our passions hold within themselves qualities that seem intrinsic: there is a light, ethereal, transparent space, or again a dark, rough, encumbered space; a space from above, of summits, or on the contrary a space from below of mud; or again a space that can be flowing like sparkling water, or space that is fixed, congealed, like stone or crystal. Yet these analyses, while fundamental for reflection in our time, primarily concern internal space. I should like to speak now of external space.

The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives. our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light, we live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.

Of course one might attempt to describe these different sites by looking for the set of relations by which a given site can be defined. For example, describing the set of relations that define the sites of transportation, streets, trains (a train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by). One could describe, via the cluster of relations that allows them to be defined, the sites of temporary relaxation -cafes, cinemas, beaches. Likewise one could describe, via its network of relations, the closed or semi-closed sites of rest - the house, the bedroom, the bed, el cetera. But among all these sites, I am interested in certain ones that have the curious property of being in relation with all the other sites, but in such a way as to suspect, neutralize, or invent the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror, or reflect. These spaces, as it were, which are linked with all the others, which however contradict all the other sites, are of two main types.

HETEROTOPIAS

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places - places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description - I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and 'reading' (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories.

In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place "elsewhere" than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the "honeymoon trip" which was an ancestral theme. The young woman's deflowering could take place "nowhere" and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.

But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.

As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become 'atheistic,' as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead.

Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body's remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an 'illness.' The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.

Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time - which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these' marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the,, rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge,

Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.

There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family's quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.

Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign.

The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o'clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

MF
Translated from the French by Jay Miskowiec.

Read more, dossier heterotopia: http://www.foucault.info/documents/heteroTopia/

Notes/Quotes on Louvre-Lens Museography: The Art of Encounter

Not to forget: There is beauty and seduction to be found in this exhibit : « Beauty is a tool for seduction and a means of contestation » Nancy Spector on Felix Gonzales-Torres

A gift offered, in how we install the art

And of course: “meaning is contingent on context, how it is encountered”: NS

So, we could say, that by offering an open-ended sequence to some degree, not linear, we do this in a spirit of “generosity” by not being overly directive. The Louvre Palais is just this – directive and hierarchical; we must offer otherwise.

Perhaps, then the Jalons, could be time-based experience, connecting to our time, today with the interest in simultaneity (as in contemporary art practice). The viewer must become static to view the art differently – we are in fact fighting the “flaneur” experience, which the 19^th Century museum and the Grand Gallerie is all about – in order to hold the viewers attention.

The art become active. The art work is not isolated; it is the viewer that is momentarily frozen, at this point – at the Jalons – where a work and a gaze converge. How?: time-based color change, time-based lighting change makes the viewer aware of act of seeing – the foregrounded space of a painting, for example, will change in consequence. This is to be studied further, non unlike an Olafur Elliasson intervention where the viewer is made conscious of the act of seeing.

The Louvre Palais, with its long rectangular rooms, offer the flaneur the option to navigate many spaces on axis, scanning the art, almost never seemed in completion, or for long, as other visitors pass in front. The organization of the galleries and art in the Palais sets up a classic frontality with the works, as one would expect for a 19^Th classic institution. Many works, however, were not necessarily created to be viewed like this at all (sacred works were difficult to view high up in their cathedral settings; early pre-christian were not to be seen by anyone except for the deceased in an afterlife, etc)

For the Louvre Lens, what is important perhaps is not the spectator’s ability to repeat this “optimal viewing condition”, to allow for the visitor to circulate axially, as in the Palais, nor to circulate around the works individually (also a frequent condition there as well), but on the contrary to “challenge the spectatorship by focusing on the viewer’s frozen immobility”. The Jalon’s should serve, then, to freeze the viewer momentarily, making the object active in challenging in the same moment the aesthetics of frontality and the fixed condition of viewing. The slow-change of periphereal color rendering of the wall background (backlit from the painting itself, or from the surface it is mounted on – the newmat scheme), will infact require the visitor to stop, to experience it.

Pushing this idea further – may we investigate that some of the bases, rotate, or that large column/walls of artifacts, also rotate, undoing the concept of central perspective, of works to be viewed only from one single angle within the space. In such a cases, the viewer becomes active in the perspective, suggesting that the “world circulates around the eye of the observer”. Deleuze argues this point, in looking at Cinema – the opportunity to disrupt our self-centered perception, by providing competing viewpoints.

Can some part of the exhibit, as laid out in the rough sketch, reinforce this filmic aspect; will the rotation of works on an vertical axis illustrate this, without being tacky?(see p 167 by NO on Installation Art).

And on the gallery ending:

Will the Louvre team be open to a lack of closure of the exhibit? Will this be seen as a provocation, “this seeming open-endedness, and its refusal to assert closure of meaning”? NS

Despite the works of resistance or infiltration or undoing some expectations, in the early part of this text, the exhibit needs to be “optimistic” to entice, to challenge, to invest in beauty as well.

Quotes by NS, from Gonzales-Torres review 2007:

The works of various periods, artistic practice in the exhibition may “coexist, as in memory, in no particular order or sequence beyond that of our own active interpretative making”: (NS)

..”In their simultaneity, they distort linear syntax, undermining the very convention of communication and thus, lay the groundwork for a heterotopic environment”.

..”Repudiate any unitary notion of truth…expose stereotypes….undermine some of the conventional, complacent assumptions…

On the Gallery itself and its specificity:

Let us conceive of the gallery, in all of its hugeness, zenithally lit, as a “performative rather than a representational space” (HUO). This alone, would justify a different approach to the installation.

Do we require, really, to provide an axis of circulation, a direct route, as mentioned frequently, the “pendant” to the Grande Gallerie of the Palais? I think not.

This does not mean we cannot provide for a specific “trajectory” through the space(s) – however, experience is derived in some “meandering”, in the surprise encounters that are not scripted.

On the concept of platforms in a sequence that is not linear. They offer:

“(These)… narrative instances (that) depend upon each other. In the course of the chaining of these sequences, a narrative unfolds”. (P.Parreno)

On the concept of the walls, splayed, spread in thickness to allow for an in-between space. They offer:

Placed on these walls, slightly concealed, or compressed, we do not offer a “wholesome” view, but perhaps the view assumed (though not shown) of a Thomas Struth photo. The placement of the works is not gratuitous.

The background color and wall material is not to be an effortless white background, un-communicating, minimalist necessarily – it is to participate in the encounter and the reading of the work. “What I think is interesting about exhibitions is that they give a momentary take on something…there isn’t a singular vision about how these things could be shown.” (ZH)

“The re-descriptions of painting that seize on the pictorial event instead of the figurative anecdote end-up creating a new mode of visibility, which alone makes possible Impressionist painting and everything that follows.. (what is in fact excluded from this exhibit). So (we) are to be sensitive to the way the mediums act on each other, and in particular the way words act on images and images on words” (JR)

But a caution: “I don’t think that a device that changes images or the changes words necessarily has a critical effect. We tend to think a little too quickly that this restaging device will make you see things differently, understand things differently”. Italics mine (JR) Jacques Ranciere

“I believe the viewers have much more power than they are actually offered, so to speak. Museums too often pacify the audience, rather than activating them, often through what I mentioned earlier: not disclosing their own construction.” O. Eliasson

And finally a critique of the linear:

“It’s also interesting to bring in the viewer. What is visible in your drawings (ZH) for exhibition spaces is this real freedom of the viewer. And that relates back to the laboratory years (the early MoMA 1950) also, because at the beginning of the modern museums, the idea was that the viewer could move freely, in a non-linear way across the space. So it was exactly the opposite from the way it is today, where it reaches its highest point in linearity with the “audio-guide model”. (HO Oblrist)

And the position on contemporary installation art practice – not the object - by the artist themselves, for which we can, should, may take cue from:

“Let’s say it goes through the different forms of experience. That affects the work and its condition of realization. It helps me to understand what’s happening around an object, which means thinking in terms of chains, of scenarios. The movement of an object through the chain is a question of trajectories…” P Huyghe

....trajectory, “promendalogoly” as defined by Lucius Burckhardt in Kassel….

Exhibition ..”as something you cross, where you suspend your conclusions and resolutions, without loosing the dynamic (PH).

On time, the linear chronology, that seems imposed on us:

“It seems that the conception of time that you’re interested in is not that of measured time, which Francois Jullier, says is characteristic of Western civilization, but rather a Eastern conception, where time is determined by occasions, events, what occurs.” (PH)

“We are utterly aware that the perception of time isn’t identical in every culture….Some peoples also use space rather than time to identify actions. It is obvious as well that in every attempt to present things, and in particular when one makes a film or creates an image, a creation of time is involved” (LS).

Thus the notion of time is embedded in the object itself. How much sign-posting is thus required?

“Exactly. There is temporality or a duration (which does not necessarily mean a measured time) that is inseparable from the coming into being of form.” PH

Duration, the sequence in space of the platforms as configured or distributed in the gallery – the “espacement” is the device to establish this time factor. Not, solely, if at all, by sign-posted classic, historical eras. Is this possible? As Palermo’s quote offers above – our layouts may be subjective – they are not based on rigorous geometry, or rules – but they establish a rhythm, a duration, a “narrative instance” that depends on each other. Our work is to design the “chaining of these sequences”…to allow for multiple narratives to unfold, to unravel.

The plan does not show the espaces d’isolement. I have other drawings for these – circular, double-circular space, and square. Isolement, should be for 3 to 5 persons, not individual per se. The isolement is from sound (or new sound-scape/narrative offered) and a mediated presentation not in competition with any art works. I believe it is not an isolement in order to view an object alone – completely deconxeturalized.

Quotes of interest to me:

"It should be said right away that the issue of formal versus contextual presentation in museum display - the dilemma of how to include substantive explanations without overwhelming the visual and emotional presence of objects, admits of no obvious solution. It is compounded, in a time of reflexive museology and diversifying audiences, by the problem of which contexts to feature. There are always too many relevant possibilities. Every exhibition finds its own modus vivendi." James Clifford, October 127 June 07

"I try to build installations that let you see yourself rather than the installation" Olafur Elisasson

"I see and perceive, I comment and I evolve in a unique space and
time. Art is the place that produces a specific sociability."

"Like one of Gonzales-Torres' piles of candies, there can be an ideal
balance between form and its programmed disappearance, between visual
beauty and modest gestures, between childlike wonder in front of the
image and the complexity of the levels at which it is read."


"Art is a state of encounter."

"The aura of artworks has shifted towards their public"

All 4 quotesl by N. Bourriaud
In "Relational Aesthetics"

On Time, or “Temps”

The exhibit of l’homme dans son temps should not be about, defining how much "space" and number of objects can fit into the spaces allocated - much as they – the Louvre - clamor for this evaluation It should be about the time given to works, just as much as the space ("two minutes of time, rather than two square meters of space" – I think this comes from Matta Clark).

Another issue, is the translation of this exhibit title – “temps”. Time can be understood as either linear or cyclical, so the idea of chronology is not a given, in taking on the term time or “temps”.

There is also the simultaneity of time, in the sense of time as movement and place occurring at the same time in different spaces, that also is part of western thought (in Eastern thought, the concept of time is cyclical, temporal; in pre-Mesopotamia, where the core of the Louvre collection starts, time was seen quite differently, even if“experienced” the same as we experience it today: the past was before the present, as it was known, and not seen as after the present, a reverseal of Aristotle diagram of the arrows of the Chrono, past, present, future).

And so, this opens another large area, of how time is conceived, thought of, in philosophy, science, in modern thought, and now in post-modern thought – does this free us from being entrenched in a passé concept of time as linear movement, and thus a design as an established chronology?

Let us go on to design it.

An heterotopic site for art

I have an idea. Here is a rough sketch....