Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985

Abstract

As recent studies have shown,1 the history of exhibitions expands far beyond a disciplinary perspective of architectural, design, or cultural history. While scholarship on the history of international exhibitions between the 1850s and 1980s in the West is flourishing, the network of agents and institutions that has generated the consolidation of the global communication system still needs to be examined.2 This edited volume, entitled Exhibitions Beyond Boundaries: Transnational Exchanges through Art, Architecture, and Design 1945-1985, edited by Harriet Atkinson, Verity Clarkson, and Sarah A. Lichtman, is a major contribution to a research field that has remained on the margins of mainstream scholarship. In his important foreword, Jonathan M. Woodham highlights this essential book as a disciplinary turn within the historiography of exhibitions. Scholars have long recognized the possibilities and problems which lie in globalizing design history. Almost two decades ago, Christopher Bailey argued that ‘the need to develop a genuinely global field of enquiry has moved beyond being a challenge to becoming a duty’.3 Daniel Huppatz continues this trend, proposing design historians both ‘globalize history and historicize globalization,’ arguing that ‘there needs to be an understanding of the multi-directional nature of global flows - may require developing both new terms and new structures for analysis’.4 Applying the interdisciplinary approaches of design, art, and architectural history, but also social, economic, and political history, as well as cultural studies and curatorial studies, the book focuses on the ‘soft power’ of particular types of persuasion mediatized by exhibitions.