Can Buildings Curate: An exhibition celebrating the commingling of art, architecture and curating
James Westcott
Study from Rem Koolhaas’s AMO for the Hermitage museum in St Petersburg
The absence of a question mark after the title of this exhibition, "Can Buildings Curate"–on display at the Architectural Association in London until May 27–is pointed: of course buildings can curate. And they already do, always. The problem is that after spending so much time in ice-white cubes, our minds have been refrigerated and we rarely realize–much less grasp or manipulate–the inevitable, but usually suppressed connections between art and the architecture that houses it.
The opening of the pristine new MoMA in New York last year seemed to typify the standard behavior of the gallery space: a nervous–cowering, actually, and rather self-loathing–retreat from the art in it. The architecture apparently mustn’t announce itself in any way, for fear of overpowering the delicate art.
Curator Shumon Basar, an architect, critic, and teacher at the AA, cites Lina Bo Bardi’s unprecedented painting hang at the Museum of Art in Sao Paolo in 1968 as an example that things haven’t always been this way. The Pinocateca displayed hundreds of gilt-framed oil paintings, each mounted in freestanding glass supports embedded in concrete cubes. These were arranged in an irregular grid throughout the huge, wall-free space, and all the paintings faced the same direction. Seen from a distance, the glass supports became invisible and the paintings appeared to hover. Could we ever see such a thing at MoMA?
While acknowledging that the white cube is not "inherently wrong or a failure–patently it is not," "Can Buildings Curate" champions historical efforts to dirty up these secular shrines a little bit in order to provoke dialogue rather than deference between context and artwork. The exhibition space itself is designed as "Un-Neutral Participation" with its contents: paintings will be made directly on walls, and the walls themselves will include sculptural, playful elements.
The exhibition comprises two elements, no doubt intermingled and perhaps indistinguishable: "commissioned artists," like Dee Ferris and Mathieu Copeland, and "indicative projects" from various artists and architects. Rem Koolhaas’s research for and proposed extention of the Hermitage in St. Petersburg will be displayed–he plans to preserve the decay of the museum as an antidote to white-cubeness–together with work from Diller+Scofidio, AS-IF, Hirsch/Müller and Zaha Hadid. Davide Bertocchi’s video animation, Limo (2002), perhaps sums up the exhibition’s thoughtful bravado: at the New York Guggenheim, a white stretch limo, curved to fit snugly in Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiral, winds its way elegantly, cheekily down the atrium.
"Can Buildings Curate" runs from April 29—May 27, 2005 at The Architectural Association, London.
