Abstract
Avant-garde artistic experiments are unquestionably recognized as relevant to the museum field in the context of art and museum studies. This paper aims to reconfirm their relevance in the architectural context as well, selecting crucial cases and protagonists whose final products were not artworks or exhibitions per se, but new (concepts of) space. These new concepts of space were all treated as democratic and participatory new media capable of training and modernizing the whole of our human sensorium. In this way, a curious partnership is discovered between this “experiential” art museum and the discourse on architectural modernity. Imaginary space, expressionist space, correlational space, multimedia space and situationist space – these are the principal categories that this paper recognizes as five distinct productive devices for modernist perceptual reorganization.
Highlights
Contrary to the popular and populist outbursts of “museum-bashing” in avant-garde manifestoes, which saw the death of the museum as a precondition for a true and living art that reflects a new conception of life,[1] the museum in general, and the art museum in particular, represented a fruitful laboratory for the production of new modes of architectural space based upon the organization, and possibilities for reorganization, of the overall human sensorium as an a priori modern preoccupation
This paper aims to elaborate the main types of modernist space that were brought to light through experimentation in avant-garde art and art museums
We propose to organize them into the following categories: the imaginary space, the expressionist space, the correlational space, the multimedia space and the situationist space, recognizing them simultaneously as five distinct devices for perceptual reorganization. These main spatial concepts are further elaborated through the theories of their creators and exemplified by their spatial realizations in the museum field, with a special focus on their architectural representations, which in and of themselves demonstrate the extension of the human sensorium towards higher levels of the perception of reality
Summary
The present research is broadly positioned within the spiraling complexity of the phenomenon of modernity, the unfinished and unclear yet theoretically rich discourse on 20th century avant-garde art, and the cognitive and aesthetic character of architectural space as the locus of this art’s endeavors. In order to understand the revolutionary scope and nature of the art museum projects discussed below – each of which represents a new and unique concept of space – we must bear in mind that it was only in the 1920s, in the Museum of Society and Economy (GWM) in Vienna, that spotlights were first introduced as a technological provision to museum displays. We propose to organize them into the following categories: the imaginary space, the expressionist space, the correlational space, the multimedia space and the situationist space, recognizing them simultaneously as five distinct devices for perceptual reorganization These main spatial concepts are further elaborated through the theories of their creators and exemplified by their spatial realizations in the museum field, with a special focus on their architectural representations, which in and of themselves demonstrate the extension of the human sensorium towards higher levels of the perception of reality
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