by Alvaro Velasco.
ATM in the sacred space
Douglas Spencer Architecture and its Mediations
1 As quoted in Newhouse, Victoria. 2001. Chapter 6. The Museum as Entertainment. 2 From the competition proposal of Centre Pompidou by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in Rattenbury, Kester, 2011. 3 The project was very influenced by Cedric Price and Joan Littlewood´s Fun Palace project(1961), from which they brought the ideas of playfulness and leissure, amongst others. To see these ideas in depth see Matthews, Stanley, 2007. 4 Interview with Richard Rogers in Rattenbury, Kester, 2011. 5 Newhouse, Victoria, 2001. Chapter 6. The Museum as Entertainment. Victoria Newhouse traces the evolution of the public museum from educational spaces, nunciatures of new secular religion, to vehicles of entertainment. 6 For seeing new tendencies of events in museums, see Laura Parker(curator of Victoria & Albert Museum) interviewing Bettina von Hase(art adviser to Selfridges) in Blueprint. June 2006. p.85-86. 7 In fact, as Karl Sabbagh narrates in its book, the promoters of Tate Modern critically visited Guggenheim Bilbao during the time of projecting the new building in Bankside. cf. Sabbagh, Karl, 2000. 8 cf. Conversation. Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Rowan Moore. August 1999. in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond, 2000. 9 In his essay “The Future of the Museums: The Gugghenheim, MoMA and the Tate Modern”, John Loughery affirms that a new pattern can be traced through these three institutions. “A pattern, as they say, emerges”. cf. Loughery, John, 2001. p. 631.
“The museum is there in order to create a kind of ideal meeting point between an audience and an artist´s work.” Lars Nittre, founding Director of Tate Modern, ‘Pocantico Conference: Building the future’. MoMA, New York. 1998.
“It´s cheap. It´s fast. It offers great shopping, tempting food and a place to hang out. And visitors can even enjoy the art.” New York Times, 19971.
populist visits to its rooms, a joyful guide-less tour through
Introduction
Chilled beer after Bacon´s oils, a hundred postcards of Constable´s soils, three pounds replicas of Hirst´s skull, a tea-cup in front of Turner; Joseph Beuys´ background is the City´s scene, temptation of a hot dog from the Pop Art rooms, joyful laughs of children playing with tickets for Matisse, hang around with Pablo Picasso; fortuitous encounters with Dali in a mis-led tour in a labyrinth, connections of expressionism and metaphysical realism eased through the flow of the escalator...what can we expect in a visit to a museum nowadays? As Lars Nittre put it, one of the big questions that the museum as institution has to face in our time is how to be a platform of encounter between work of art and audience; how to make Art accessible? The museum has been struggling with it for more than fifty years. Attempts to democratize the experience of Art have been crystallised in many different proposals. Following this question, in 1977 a significant kind of “seed of new typology” was brought in with the opening of Pompidou Centre in Paris. In the core of the plan there was a desire to break through the old doors of the classic museum, transforming the institution into an egalitarian “place for people, all ages, all creeds...a place for all people.”2, 3 The Parisian gallery inaugurated a strategy of playful
the works of art, i.e. “a great free ride”4 as Richard Rogers put it; with the escalators in the main façade constantly insufflating city into the building in a perpetual loop. Through the escalators of Pompidou, the realm of leisure was introduced into the galleries. And so, the public museum, in its search for being a headspring of cultural knowledge, “is now perceived as a vehicle for entertainment”5 In addition to the attempts to open up the institution, nowadays the threat of digital reproduction puts the museum to the test. The virtual visits to “web-museums” challenges again the trips to exhibitions. And so, the institutions are reaffirmed in the idea of providing a total experience. The works of art are not enough, the museums offer music in the galleries, late night bars, DJ´s sessions in front of the works on Friday night, live performances6...In the last decades, the big “fathers of Modern Art displaying” started to feel constrained in their old garments and a series of extension projects have taken—or are still taking—place. In 1997, the Guggenheim Foundation opened one of the most controversial museums in recent times, Frank Ghery´s Guggenheim Bilbao7. In 2000, The Museum of Modern Art triggered a series of expansionist movements with its affiliation with PS1. The strategy continued with Yoshio Taniguchi´s enlargement of the main building in 2004. And currently, Diller Scofidio + Renfro are designing the new extension of MoMA that will be one of Manhattan´s cultural attractions to come, together with Renzo Piano´s new Whitney Museum of American Art by the side of High Line. Europe´s hottest new museum opened in 2000.Tate Modern tried to face the hegemony of American modern art museums; but the strategy followed was very similar to the pattern of ‘museum as leisure centre’. In the words of Jacques Herzog: “We conceived the building as something permeable, something you walk through, and as something that literally attracts people, a public plaza.”8 Even apparently stripped from any imposed narrative, the pattern9 of “museum of modern art” is becoming more and more a leisure centre, and it is increasingly mediated by spatial strategies of commercial spaces. How are these tools of commercial venues incorporated into the rooms of the museums?
A Free Ride into Tate Modern
“Twenty years ago, Bankside was a gap point in the city. An hermetic fortress disconnected from the flow of London by an inaccessible precinct.”10 I was wondering about this when crossing the Millennium Bridge. And the impression of facing the “decaying old abandoned derelict megalith”11 of the brick wall did not help that much to change that first prejudice. But the flow of tourists in the plaza reminds that things have changed. Following one of these “art lovers”, armed with his camera, we gently descend through the slope crossing the plinth of shadow. The change is striking; from an enclosed envelope to a permeable public plaza.12 The Turbine Hall surprises in its sublime scale, echoing the aura of a gothic cathedral13 by its light and proportions. A first idea of sacred space to conserve Art. But the children running down the ramp take you back to the fact that the hall is a “street that runs through the building”14 from floor to ceiling and from west to east. Herzog relates this concept with the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.15 A magnificent space between the city and the shops. In that sense, the Turbine Hall is not far from Benjamin´s idea of the Arcades of the Paris of the nineteenth century, in which “art enters the service of the merchant”16. A space where art is made commercial and a natural promenade for the flâneur17. Tate Modern, thought as an accessible, permeable space, becomes a “total circulation”18. But in the turbulence of the tour the flux of the city is mixed with other uses: an improvised café on the bridge, ticket stands at the end of the ramp and “the largest museum gift shop in Europe”19 that follows your track down the slope. The city is introduced in the realm of the museum but by means of leisure mechanism. A space apparently accessible to all peoples following a democratic gesture of freedom in an institution that was elitist in the past20. But this movement is only apparent. The public goes through the building but enveloped into a controlled scenario. And following the stream we end up immersed in the flux of visitors moved through the space by the easy loop of the escalator. Without more cicerone than words like “poetry and dream” or “transformed vision”, effectively our sight gets blurred through the fluctuations of masses of visitors. Our only hope: get lost21 and look for unexpected encounters with some work of art.
A Free Ride into Selfridges22
Probably one of the most effervescent spaces of displaying in London is found in Selfridges. A blasé walk through Oxford Street may unexpectedly put you in front of striking experiences. The elaborate storefronts of the shopping mall open up windows to utopian worlds. Marmoreal mannequins of perfect finishing inhabit these spaces of splendour. The extravaganzas of fashion protected by bullet-proof glass resemble what paintings used to do in the past: offer an illusory vision of the world. A walk into the corridors of a streetgallery. And the width of its room—Oxford Street— enable the beholder either to close views or to distant perceptions; with the theatrum mundi running in-between. The set of theatre is complete. Glamorous figures floating without pressure over romantic backgrounds illuminated by spotlights. Maybe Selfridges has not introduced the city into the building in an attempt to gain permeability, but at least it has put “art” into the public realm. This follows the idea of Bettina von Hase—art adviser to Selfridges23—of inviting artist to intervene temporally in the storefronts of the emporium. Anyway, the only gate to enter into these fascinating worlds is through the guard protected entrances. They perceive that we are not coming to buy anything, and so the expressionless face with which they receive us; but even with it, it is still a “free ride”. Once in, in front of us the escalators hall. A gigantic floor-to-ceiling space of continuous dynamism of customers and money. A mechanism based on the equation “MAXIMUM CIRCULATION= MAXIMUM SALES VOLUME”24, converting ‘accessibility’ into an economic problem. But, somehow, in the last years, they have integrated ‘theatricality‘ at some point into the mathematical problem, and now they look for the maximum profit by means of maximum pageantry. Every floor comprises a field of jumbled stands that generate its own self-contained capsule-worlds; like pavilions of an expo, designed by ephemeral art experts. Creators like Fashion Architecture Taste(FAT), Yayoi Kusama et al. have intervened in the interior of this shop, with flamboyant ‘booths’. The customer is left to the drift, in a kind of odyssey through different worlds of sophisticated ‘buy-me!’ temptations. However, in the end, the allure of the exclusive cloth is lost in the architectonic paraphernalia. A ride into Selfridges is a trip to many charming artificial environments, maybe the new ‘sacred space’.
A Free Ride into Tate Modern
10 To see more on the polemic of the selection of the site for Tate Modern cf. Nightingale, Richard, 1997, p.96. Also the chapter Transformation by Raymond Ryan in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond, 2000. 11 Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. p. 278. 12 It could be argued the similarity between Tate Modern´s wall and the envelope of shopping malls. Zizek considers that “a shopping building is like a box with a world inside, separated from the outside by a plain grey wall or by dark glass panels which just reflect the outside, providing no insight or hint of what goes inside”. Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. p. 279. In fact, the “main façade” of Tate Modern could be considered to be the interior elevation that looks to the south in the Turbine Hall. 13 Gilbert Giles Scott, architect of the original Bankside Power Station is also knowing for his design of the Liverpool Cathedral. Or, as Jacques Herzog points out “Those cathedral windows are the best kind of windows to have. You get light from the side which goes from the floor to the ceiling...” Conversation. Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Rowan Moore. August 1999. in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond, 2000. 14 Nicholas Serrota in Conversation. Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Rowan Moore. August 1999. in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond. 2000. 15 Conversation. Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Rowan Moore. August 1999. in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond, 2000. London. 16 Benjamin, Walter, 2008. p. 96. 17 Benjamin notes that the space in between of the arcades, in-between in and out, becomes “the last promenade for the flâneur.” cf. Benjamin, Walter, 2008. p. 104. 18 Term used by Raymond Ryan in his essay Transformation, resembling the idea of “a great free ride” of Rogers in the Pompidou Centre. cf. Ryan, Raymond. Transformation in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond, 2000. 19 As Loughery notes talking about Tate Modern, “the largest museum gift shop in Europe (the latter fact provided by a Tate press release)”. Loughery, John, 2001. p. 634 20 However, Zizek notes that in the new performing-arts venue “far from making the exclusive temple of high art more accessible, it is the very surrounding of expensive cafeterias, etc which is effectively exclusive and ‘elitist’.” Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. p. 287.
“Twenty years ago, Bankside was a gap point in the city. An hermetic fortress disconnected from the flow of London by an inaccessible precinct.”10 I was wondering about this when crossing the Millennium Bridge. And the impression of facing the “decaying old abandoned derelict megalith”11 of the brick wall did not help that much to change that first prejudice. But the flow of tourists in the plaza reminds that things have changed. Following one of these “art lovers”, armed with his camera, we gently descend through the slope crossing the plinth of shadow. The change is striking; from an enclosed envelope to a permeable public plaza.12 The Turbine Hall surprises in its sublime scale, echoing the aura of a gothic cathedral13 by its light and proportions. A first idea of sacred space to conserve Art. But the children running down the ramp take you back to the fact that the hall is a “street that runs through the building”14 from floor to ceiling and from west to east. Herzog relates this concept with the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan.15 A magnificent space between the city and the shops. In that sense, the Turbine Hall is not far from Benjamin´s idea of the Arcades of the Paris of the nineteenth century, in which “art enters the service of the merchant”16. A space where art is made commercial and a natural promenade for the flâneur17. Tate Modern, thought as an accessible, permeable space, becomes a “total circulation”18. But in the turbulence of the tour the flux of the city is mixed with other uses: an improvised café on the bridge, ticket stands at the end of the ramp and “the largest museum gift shop in Europe”19 that follows your track down the slope. The city is introduced in the realm of the museum but by means of leisure mechanism. A space apparently accessible to all peoples following a democratic gesture of freedom in an institution that was elitist in the past20. But this movement is only apparent. The public goes through the building but enveloped into a controlled scenario. And following the stream we end up immersed in the flux of visitors moved through the space by the easy loop of the escalator. Without more cicerone than words like “poetry and dream” or “transformed vision”, effectively our sight gets blurred through the fluctuations of masses of visitors. Our only hope: get lost21 and look for unexpected encounters with some work of art.
22 In the last decades, there has been a boom of relevant figures of the architectural panorama designing showrooms and stores for big fashion firms: Koolhass´ shops and catwalks designs for Prada, Piano´s Maison Hermès in Tokio, Toyo Ito´s Tods store, Hadid´s Roca showrooms...Selfridges is an icon of large retail shopping, stablished in 1909. The building in Oxford Street was designed by Daniel Burnham, who some years before built the main store of Marshall Field´s in Chicago. 23 See the interview of Laura Parker(curator of Victoria & Albert Museum) with Bettina von Hase(art adviser to Selfridges) in Blueprint. June 2006. p.85-86. 24 cf. Harvard Project on the City, 2001.
A Free Ride into Selfridges22
Probably one of the most effervescent spaces of displaying in London is found in Selfridges. A blasé walk through Oxford Street may unexpectedly put you in front of striking experiences. The elaborate storefronts of the shopping mall open up windows to utopian worlds. Marmoreal mannequins of perfect finishing inhabit these spaces of splendour. The extravaganzas of fashion protected by bullet-proof glass resemble what paintings used to do in the past: offer an illusory vision of the world. A walk into the corridors of a streetgallery. And the width of its room—Oxford Street— enable the beholder either to close views or to distant perceptions; with the theatrum mundi running in-between. The set of theatre is complete. Glamorous figures floating without pressure over romantic backgrounds illuminated by spotlights. Maybe Selfridges has not introduced the city into the building in an attempt to gain permeability, but at least it has put “art” into the public realm. This follows the idea of Bettina von Hase—art adviser to Selfridges23—of inviting artist to intervene temporally in the storefronts of the emporium. Anyway, the only gate to enter into these fascinating worlds is through the guard protected entrances. They perceive that we are not coming to buy anything, and so the expressionless face with which they receive us; but even with it, it is still a “free ride”. Once in, in front of us the escalators hall. A gigantic floor-to-ceiling space of continuous dynamism of customers and money. A mechanism based on the equation “MAXIMUM CIRCULATION= MAXIMUM SALES VOLUME”24, converting ‘accessibility’ into an economic problem. But, somehow, in the last years, they have integrated ‘theatricality‘ at some point into the mathematical problem, and now they look for the maximum profit by means of maximum pageantry. Every floor comprises a field of jumbled stands that generate its own self-contained capsule-worlds; like pavilions of an expo, designed by ephemeral art experts. Creators like Fashion Architecture Taste(FAT), Yayoi Kusama et al. have intervened in the interior of this shop, with flamboyant ‘booths’. The customer is left to the drift, in a kind of odyssey through different worlds of sophisticated ‘buy-me!’ temptations. However, in the end, the allure of the exclusive cloth is lost in the architectonic paraphernalia. A ride into Selfridges is a trip to many charming artificial environments, maybe the new ‘sacred space’.
Mediation
The current condition of the museum on its search for being a space of encounter between the work and audience is not very clear. The pattern of ‘museum of modern art’ employs a lexicon brought from debates whose traces can be tracked up to the beginning of the 1920‘s with the rejection of the museum by the Dadaist as “authoritarian” institution. A discourse verbalised with ‘democratization’, ‘permeability’, ‘accessibility’, ‘public circulation’ et al., shows contradiction when is mediated by mechanisms of ‘leisure culture’. A space apparently stripped from any narrative is in fact moderated by commercial strategies. Art venues are incresingly being commercialized25, running the risk of establishing money as the main mediator of art creation. Money has always played an important character in artistic creation, but elevating it as the main protagonist will transform Art only in a commodity, reducing considerably its cultural value. Of course, it is not the time to arm ourselves with a whip and drive the “money changers from the Temple”, as Jesus did.26 But it is necessary to acknowledge that museum space is mostly mediated; and that apparently informal, democratic spaces, are in fact controlled realms. That mediation is not only produced in one direction, from shopping mall into museum rooms. The spatiality of the retail shop is also utterly influence by the museum´s way of operating. Shops become more and more spaces of artistic atmosphere, with a designed ‘artsy’ aura. The mediation produces an interchange between both realms, museum and retailing. The two elements are modified into a new code.27 Displaying spaces are not simply considered as something different to what they used to be, introducing mechanism of commercial spaces—and the other way arround with retail—,they are a new spatial conception. This ‘new spatiality’ has different characteristics. One important aspect is its suspension of the dichotomy between public and private. They are interventions in which the city is introduced into the building, the public cross the interior. But the interior is still a controlled setting of shops, cafés and “unexpected” encounters. Its appearance of informality conceals a mediatic control. Linked to that, the idea that the building is part of the city. A space gifted to the citizens for their enjoyment. But in fact, each building constitute its own “capsule-worlds.” Tate Modern ences this movement, keeping the ‘secluding’ brick façade, modernizing its interior as a new world of events. Another characteristic is its amalgamation of sacred and profane. The ‘spiritual aura’ is materialised in striking spaces, elaborate paraphernalia and theatrical compositions of light, movement
and circulation of visitors. But, at the same time, the profanity of a product that becomes more and more consumerist is intertwined with this sacred language. In other words, they are like secular-cathedrals or sacrosanct-emporia. The relation is ambigous: “is it High Art whose temples they are or capitalist Corporations which stand behind them?”28 Jacques Herzog stands that in their intervention they looked for a space in which the city can simply walk through, but at the same time generate “an atmosphere of art.”29 These qualities of space in-between public-private, sacred-profane, interiorexterior is what turn this buildings into “exceptions: artificial islands of meaning in our meaning-less existence, utopian enclousures sticking out from the ordinary reality of our cities.”30 Ultimately the question of meditation can be traced up to a problem of epistemology. In Architectural Parallax, Slavoj Zizek argues that with the mediation, there is not only a change of perspective of the object—with which we could say that our knowledge is subjective. For him, “subject and object are inherently ‘mediated’, so that an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject´s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.”31 From this statement, it could be inferred that the museum has failed as “ideal meeting point between an audience and an artist´s work.”32 The meditation does not only produce a change in the point of view of the beholder, but also it transubstantiates—modifies the essence of33—the work of art. Mediated by codes of leisure culture, the work of art is converted into one more commodity whose ultimate value is a marketable one. From Zizek´s words it could be implied that the artistic value of the work, following its ontoligical shift, remains in-accessible to the eyes of the beholder. There is no possibility of an encounter between art and visitors. Is the work of art absolutly lost in the mediation? I do not think so. Reyner Banham narrates in his trip to the Mojave that it is a boring old cliché that “we see new experiences through the filters of the culture we bring with us.”34 For him, this filters were not only metaphorical but in fact physical, and so, the experience of the light in the desert was mediated by “Zeiss, Bausch & Lomb, Correna, Sundym and Polaroid”, balanced forgotten on his nose. But the “true light”35 of the desert can still be perceived, simply putting down his lenses. Even if we skitter across the rooms of the museum in leisure clothes and casual shoes, in one hand the audioguide, the camera in the other, and anxious for having a beer at the roof terrace, there is still something large and mysterious about the experience of Great Art.36 Even Zizek affirms in the same essay that.“Great Art is by definition universal-emancipatory, potentially addressing us all.” 37 You only have to take off your sunglasses.38
Bibliography
26 Jn. 2, 13-25. 27 As Jameson conceives ‘mediation’: “New theoretical discourse is produced by the setting into active equivalence of two preexisting codes, which thereby, in a kind of molecular ion exchange, become a new one. What must be understood is that the new code (or metacode) can in no way be considered a synthesis between the previous pair. . . . It is rather a question of linking two sets of terms in such a way that each can express and indeed interpret the other.” in Fredric Jameson, 1991, p. 394–395. 28 Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. p. 286. 29 As Herzog continues: “It should not be like a station or a shopping mall.” In Conversation. Jacques Herzog, Nicholas Serota and Rowan Moore. August 1999. in Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond. 2000. 30 Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. p. 286. 31 Ibid. p. 255. 32 In the intentions of the founding director of Tate Modern. Nittre, Lars, 1998 in ‘Pocantico Conference: Building the future’, Imagining the future of the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Modern Art, New York. 33 Following the ‘ontological’ change pointed by Zizek. 34 Banham, Reyner, 1982. p.6. 35 Ibid. p.7. 36 cf. Banham, Reyner, 1982. p.226. 37 Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. p. 287. 38 As he concludes the book, “What I have truly found, however, is something that I value, in some ways, more than myself. Beauty may indeed lie in the eye of the beholder, but that eye must have an object of vision, a scene on which it can fasten, and I have found that scene, and appropriate objects of scrutiny within it, and that light and that color. And all this I knew (I belive) from the very moment that my eye was taken by the vision of that ethereal luminous mist on that first morning in the Mojave. The desert hath me in thrall, and I am happy to say that I am still astonished to discover that this is so.” Banham, Reyner, 1982, p.228.
-Banham, Reyner. 1982. Scenes in America Deserta. Salt Lake City, The Peregrine Smith Book. -Benjamin, Walter, 2008. Paris, the Capital of the Nineteeth Century, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writing on Media. London, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. -Fredric Jameson, 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, Duke University Press. -Harvard Project on the City, 2001. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Köln, Taschen. -Laura Parker(curator of Victoria & Albert Museum) interviewing Bettina von Hase(art adviser to Selfridges), June 2006. Blueprint. pp. 85-86. -Loughery, John, Winter 2001. “The Future of the Museums: The Gugghenheim, MoMA and the Tate Modern” in The Hudson Review, Vol. 53, No. 4, pp. 631-638. -Matthews, Stanley, 2007. From Agit-Prop to free space: The Architecture of Cedric Price. London, Black Dog. -McClellan, Andrew, 2008. The Art Museum. From Boullée to Bilbao. London, University of California Press. -Moore, Rowan. Ryan, Raymond, 2000. Building Tate Modern. London, Tate Gallery Publishing. -Newhouse, Victoria, 2001. Towards a New Museum. New York, The Monacelli Press. -Nightingale, Richard, 1997. Sacred Cows. In Perspectives on Architecture. n. 29, June/July. p.96. -Rattenbury, Kester, 2011. Richard Rogers: the Pompidou Centre. New York. Routledge. -Sabbagh, Karl, 2000. Power into Art. Creating Tate Modern, Bankside. Middlesex, England, The Penguin Press. -Storrie, Calum, 2006. The Delirious Museum. A Journey from the Louvre to Las Vegas. New York, I. B. Tauris. -Weaver, Thomas, Fall 2005. Rumble In the Jumble. In Log. No. 6, pp. 10-17. -Zizek, Slavoj, 2011. The Architectural Parallax in Ed. Lahiji, Nadir. The Political Unconscious of Architecture: Re-Opening Jameson´s Narrative. Farnham. UK., Ashgate. p. 255-297.
Douglas Spencer Architecture and its Mediations. History and Critical Thinking, MA. 2014