LIGA Book vol. 2 “Exposed Architecture”
Architecture Exhibited, Architecture Exposed
Isabel Abascal and Mario Ballesteros in conversation with Tina DiCarlo
IA, MB Tina, We are very grateful that you found the time for this conversation that will contribute to the constellation of practices we are putting together for LIGA’s book.
Regarding your idea of “exhibitionism” in architecture, as well as the subtitle of this book, what do you think the difference is between exhibited architecture and exposed architecture?
TdC This I think is a very difficult question but a provocative one. The main idea behind appropriating the term exhibitionism and using it as a provocation of sorts within what was the early contemporary discourse on architectural exhibitions —keeping in mind that this discourse has a long history in itself, and it has now been theorized within the contemporary context since about 1999—was to think of exhibiting architecture as an act that provoked, that did something, and yes, was bound to a moment of exposure. I have since moved away from the idea, but I think for me, at the time, it was very much tied to this idea of agency and the agency of objects that was being discussed at Goldsmiths.
As we have seen from this expanded discourse on architectural exhibitions, exhibiting architecture can take myriad forms, with myriad agendas. This can mean anything from advocacy, in which the exhibition is called upon to have some sort of agency that will contribute to the built discourse, to installation architecture, which takes place at a one-to-one level or invokes the building as a site for artistic installation. Alternatively, it may be a more traditional form of installation, using drawings, but which in some wayscould be seen to be more poetic, a truer, more demonstrable, more performative, more visually beautiful, if not something that somehow, more than a pavilion, inspires the imagination and discourse if done properly. Other possibilities include a traditional archival show that uses the exhibition to produce or display a body of archival and scholarly work, or more current formats, housed under the rubric of modern and contemporary art, in which a panel of contemporary practitioners, and which combines architects and artists whose work borders on the practice of architecture, or in any case, makes it somehow more legible, more understandable to the contemporary public.
In many ways, these various formats could be said to do something similar: that is, to show architecture. When I think of an exhibition that does something more than show, that it exposes, then it shows something heretofore unforeseen, unexpected. In this sense, an exhibition can do something more, provoke the imagination, border on the poetic, expose one to something that is yet to be seen, yet to be thought, so to speak, and thus lend unexpected insights, unexpected experiences. It is more than information gathering. Exhibiting as exhibition only, only goes so far. The idea here is that we must tap into the exhibition to do something else-call upon it as a medium and invoke various mediato, like architecture, transport us elsewhere, to create something and expose something we have yet to see, or cannot see, outside the scope of the exhibition. Here we call on the spatial, visual, temporal relation to do so, something that cannot be done in two dimensions, either on the web or in print.
IA, MB How has the mutual feedback between building practice and architectural exhibitions developed during the last decades?
TdC There has always been a link, a back and forth, between architectural building practice and architectural exhibitions. Exhibitions were always a major point of contact between the discipline and the public or even larger bodies such as the nation-state or the cultural and academic institutions. I am thinking, for example, of the 1931 building exhibition by Mies van der Rohe, that helped to forge the German national identity, and that Wallis Miller wrote about in her pioneering 1999 doctoral dissertation,
“Tangible Ideas: Architecture and the Public at the 1931 German Building Exhibition in Berlin.” Like Mies, architects have always thought of exhibitions as an integral part of their practice.
In recent decades, with the expansion of the discourse, and with the proliferation of architecture biennales, as well as new venues for architecture within existing institutions, and new institutions such as LIGA dedicated to the exhibition of architecture-an expansion that one could liken to the expansion of the institutions and galleries dedicated to architecture during the late 1970s and 1980s— we have witnessed an increase in the currency, circulation and hopefully the cultural value of architecture. This increase can be instrumental in not only getting things built-and generating good architecture-but also in expanding discourse. It also gives architects numerous other ways to practice and to realize their ideas, working in the myriad ways in which architecture can be produced.
IA, MB Can you share some insight into your Archive of Spatial Aesthetics and Praxis (ASAP) project and its relationship to curating and creating architecture?
TdC ASAP was really developed as an experiment out of a very early discourse that I saw developing in London and Berlin, in which the exhibition of architecture seemed to be expanding outside the arena of architecture per se, in which the idea of the hybrid object, existing somewhere between art and architecture, seemed to be more pertinent than ever. I saw these types of objects and exhibitions coming to the fore in 2002, harking back to practices in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
There was also the idea at the time of founding an archive of a critical spatial practice, again stepping outside of a pure building discipline to address social, political and environmental issues. The idea was to begin to collect architecture across disciplines, but also across all the media in which architects typically work-film, writing, installation, blogs, et. al. The idea was prescient at the time. We received a lot of support from architects and artists to participate. In fact, I think I gave the most succinct presentation and also critique of the project at Columbia in 2014.1
IA, MB Could you talk about you experience working on the Drive-In Marfa project?2
TdC The Drive-In Marfa project was actually initiated by Joshua Siegel, a curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art who brought me in to oversee an architectural competition. It was a very early project, but an important one, considering it responded to a particular landscape and a particular period within the history of art, both of which converge in Marfa. By this I am, of course, talking about Donald Judd, his works in the landscape and the Chinati Foundation, all of which have become defining aspects of the town and the atmosphere in which the Ballroom Marfa gallery took shape. The idea behind the project was to draw on a characteristic of the drive-in and something very uncharacteristic in the Marfa landscape: traffic. It was also to respond to this history of earthworks and to think of the parking for the Drive-In and driving on the earth as a kind of drawing in the landscape. And then to think of the screen as the architectural intervention, something tethered as it were. As it turns out, the project came in way over budget so it was not possible. But it was a very special time and a very special collaboration, and quite an honor to work with such a young gallery that had a defining vision over the cultural landscape of Marfa.
IA, MB Considering your work as curator of In collab-oration, what do you think is the current state of the relationship between architecture and other disciplines, and how this influences architectural exhibitions?
TdC I think there has always been a collaboration between architects and other practitioners, so in some ways, this very early article was a bit naïve. That said, I do think it is necessary and much more interesting to look at architecture’s proximity to other disciplines and to look at the exhibition as a construction across disciplines, that draws on the specialty and insights of each to bring something different to the exhibition itself. If you like, it infuses architecture itself with a kind of life, a discourse that it might not have elsewhere, and performs it somehow within the space of the gallery. On the other hand, in terms of design, architects bring a very important component to exhibitions, one that cannot be achieved either through the curatorial hand nor even perhaps through the artist’s hand. I think it is this back and forth that makes for a very rich dialogue, very rich exhibitions. There are some very effective examples, one being the 2008 Thomas Demand exhibition in the Nationalgalerie in Berlin for which Caruso St. John did the exhibition design, or another example, at the Barbican for the exhibition The Bride and the Bachelors: Duchamp with Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg and Johns, that did not call on an architect at all but where Philippe Parreno did the mise en scene. Another example could be a recent exhibition in Somerset [England], where artist Alexander Brodsky acted as one part of a curatorial team, in which the engagement was not with another architect but with the architectural drawing, alongside the architecture of the site itself. The list could go on and on: I recall a small exhibition that looked at juxtaposing the works of film —shown in analogue form, in which the dialogue of Robert Smithson directing Nancy Holt, the sound and light of the projector, the pacing of Holt and Smithson’s footsteps through the Swamp imbued sound, voice, life, movement, light-into what could otherwise be considered the static 1:1 pavilion of the architect. The film, in a certain sense, performed the architecture, activated it, in a way that the pavilion, nor the drawing, nor the text, could not.
IA, MB Lastly, what are the different approaches for curating a traditional exhibition space versus a virtual space?
TdC I think this is tremendously different and in fact, two different projects. I have a sincere love for the artefact and also for collecting. I strongly believe there is absolutely no replacement for the object and the exhibition firsthand, and that one should employ media and any sense of virtual space and the web for what it is good at, for what it can do that an exhibition or a printed publication cannot. This was very early on my position while at MoMA and one that I still adhere to.
A print catalog, a spatial installation, or the web are all different media and should be used to circulate work, discourse and information in very different ways. A website is essentially an exhibition and a curatorial space, the decisions here become about the hierarchy of information, a certain branding, mundane things like image quality, size and juxtaposition. Then there are other important questions about the scalability of the site: how much information is too much information, and so on. I do think there can be exhibitions on the web, but I still think it is a very different medium and cannot replace the primary experience of the artefact or exhibition. In some sense, for me, the virtual installation is more about information and exposure than it is about the experience of the work.
