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Has the relationship between art and the buildings in which it is shown broken down? A new book argues for a radical reimagining of galleries as the only solution THE new Saatchi Gallery opens later this year at the Duke of York’s HQ building in Chelsea. And the gallery, as much as the art, will be under close scrutiny. Turbine halls, billowing folds of titanium, vast spaces that make Monet’s 42ft-long Water Lilies triptych look like a skinny greetings card... The way art is presented in London, Bilbao or New York is increasingly debatable: is it being overwhelmed or trivialised by architecture, or can it survive anything that dares to contain it? Calum Storrie’s new book on the subject, The Delirious Museum, argues that the curatorial interpretations that present art to the masses via architecture are failing to match the urban zeitgeist. He cites The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin’s legendary montage of recollections about the 19th-century arcades of Paris, as a key moment in identifying the mutation of fashion, advertising, progress, and boredom, into a modernist age in which the relationship between architecture and art has become complex. To Storrie, an architect and exhibition designer, the white-cube gallery is essentially bereft. "The delirious museum sits firmly within the city, that most complex of social spaces, and the language used here derives from certain urban theories and stratagems relating particularly to walking," he says. "Movement through the delirious museum is characterised by wandering, or drifting and getting lost. The associations generated by the objects in my imagined museum are open-ended; meanings are unfixed and transient. The city in flux is the model." Architects such as Sir John Soane in the early 19th century, and Carlo Scarpa and Daniel Libeskind in the 20th and 21st, have attempted to capture art’s volatility in museum design. But "the idea escapes, makes its own way, and scuttles into the New World of the late 20th century — the rampant capitalism of Las Vegas via the global art brands of Guggenheim and Getty. The delirious museum can lodge itself and grow in its various mutations — image, idea, architectural form, historical fragment, cemetery, department store, fiction, motel, museum, film or artwork. It makes its way into the crevices of many aspects of commodity culture; there it lodges and grows in all its forms". David Rosen, a partner at the gallery consultants Pilcher Hershman, has delivered architects and art spaces — including Saatchi’s impending Chelsea repository — for more than two decades. "There’s definitely a shift away from the previous white cubes," he says. "The new Max Wigram Gallery in New Bond Street is a great example of this. He had the vision to take a space that’s vertical rather than horizontal. Here’s a guy in his early forties who’s caught up in the Brit Art period, and he’s bucked the tradition of going for the white cube of space." But Rosen, whose early commissions involved architects such as John Pawson, and artists including Donald Judd, concedes that "gallerists and artists think that if the public come into anything other than a white space, they will be distracted from the art". Packaged, hyped, hung, lit, ready to rumble: the architectural presentation of modern art tends towards brand identity, and "ideal" galleries that people think they know. But ideal for whom? The artist, the public, or the impresario? Earlier this year, the young curator Shumon Basar and his Newbetter collective mounted an exhibition in a "violated" white cube at London’s Architectural Association. The show — titled Can Buildings Curate? — recalled 20th-century visionaries, including Marcel Duchamp, who breached the boundaries between art and its containers. Basar proposes art spaces that are not necessarily familiar, or even ideal in viewing terms; spaces whose physicality removes preconception. His vision recalls Hegel’s declaration that only the modern city offers the mind the field in which it can become aware of itself; in other words, consciousness — of art, of architecture — is found only in the streets. Rosen, who remains enthralled by monumental art spaces such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum and Marcel Breuer’s Whitney Museum of American Art, is intrigued by these riskier propositions. He described the transit containers of the Momart warehouse in Hackney as "the definitive [art] juggernaut. It would be great to experience art on the move in one of those containers". And that remark finds a place in the preferred delirium of Calum Storrie’s imagined museums and galleries; places where architecture — the capital A variety — cannot dominate. "What I want to do," he says, "is to reclaim the museum on behalf of the city, and vice versa. By shifting the perception of the collection and the container — for want of a better word, the architecture — it is possible to re-evaluate the relationship between museum and city in terms of shared experience." Museums, he says, "can be reinterpreted in terms of the breakdown of control and classification. An obsessive level of control can be self-subverting, while its opposite, a state of chaos, can upend perceived notions of the museum. It is as if some of the museums I describe are about to lose their grip on their contents and themselves. When asked by the curators of the Palais de Tokyo, ‘What do you expect from an art institution in the 21st century?’, one participant said, ‘Cheap, fast and out of control’. Half-noticed museums and galleries, of the street rather than of themselves? "I think it would
be fantastic," says Rosen. "Viewing art in something other
than four walls? Is it possible? Is it not possible? You need
guerrilla art buildings." (The Delirious Museum, by Calum
Storrie, is published by I B Tauris; New Museum Architecture:
Innovative Buildings from around the World, by Mimi Zeiger, is
published by Thames and Hudson) By arrangement with The Independent |
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