Place is the Space Preview

A Building, A Decade, An Exhibition

Contents

4 Foreword

Lisa Melandri 6 Acknowledgments

Dominic Molon and Brad Cloepfil 8 B uilding Anticipation

Brad Cloepfil 13

Line, Plane, Volume: Contrapuntal Spatial Composition in Brad Cloepfil’s Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Robert McCarter 17 OUTSIDE/INSIDE: landscape space & place

Bruce Lindsey 24 A Decade: A Selected Visual History of CAM Exhibitions

37 Place is the Space: A Building, A Decade, An Exhibition Dominic Molon 44 Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen 48 Jill Downen 52

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

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Virginia Overton

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Dominique Petitgand

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Exhibition History, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2003-2013

Foreword

Though the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) had an august history as an arts organization for many years prior to 2003, the construction of a permanent home at 3750 Washington Boulevard shaped a new identity and fashioned a new chapter for the institution. A true museum was born, complete with many of the definitions synonymous with all that the name implies— a function-specific space (architecture for art), commitment to the longevity and sustainability of an arts organization, and a physical manifestation of the significance of art.

On the auspicious occasion of the tenth anniversary of CAM’s building designed by Brad Cloepfil, founding principal of Allied Works Architecture, we are delighted to present Place is the Space, an exhibition that celebrates the anniversary in an unusual and profound way. The exhibition was co-organized

by Dominic Molon, CAM’s chief curator, and the architect. The curators commissioned new and site-specific works that reveal an extraordinary number of perspectives on the building itself. Through the artworks by Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, Jill Downen, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Virginia Overton, and Dominique Petitgand, CAM is discovered anew—the extraordinary volumes, materials, voids, and light that comprise the galleries are quite literally brought to our attention by these artists. It is a joy to experience art in a building that has extraordinary character and presence—and one that celebrates and supports a full array of contemporary art, rather than competing with or overwhelming it.

This exhibition and publication have allowed staff and visitors alike to understand the magnitude and lasting impact of the institution through its architecture. These are indeed hallowed halls created expressly for the display and elevation of works of contemporary art. It has been a distinct pleasure to be a part of CAM during the planning stages of this exhibition and celebration, as it was a means to appreciate the rich history of the museum and the artistic legacy of the City of St. Louis. Furthermore, through this exhibition and publication, I have had the privilege of becoming acquainted with CAM’s past leaders—both Board and staff. Bringing a building project like this to fruition was the result of extraordinary vision, time, ambition, and generosity, and we are exceedingly grateful to the full complement of people who shared their time, their wisdom, and their reminiscences—and, quite simply, who made it happen. I extend my warmest thanks and admiration to Dominic Molon and Brad Cloepfil, curators

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for this project, whose creative vision was only matched by their enthusiasm.

It is a rare occurrence to have an architect join the curatorial ranks—particularly in an institution whose building he himself designed. The result is thoughtful, engaging, and quite beautiful.

The artists, who have thoughtfully considered how to both elevate and intervene in the space of the museum, are owed our gratitude. They are responsible for doing the very best of what contemporary art can do to transform our perceptions. Arocha and Schraenen, Downen, Manglano-Ovalle, Overton, and Petitgand have labored tirelessly and with great care for many months and in conversation with the curators to make impactful, poetic, rigorous work.

Finally, I would like to thank the exhibition and catalogue donors for their generous financial support: the William Weiss Foundation; the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation; and the Flanders Ministry for Culture, Sports, Youth and Media, Kingdom of Belgium.

The publication for Place is the Space includes the subtitle “A Building, A Decade, An Exhibition.” As it suggests, this volume is not only a document for the show, but also offers critical analysis of the architecture and of the institution, including a visual and exhibition history of CAM over the past ten years. Molon and Cloepfil have included comprehensive acknowledgments, but I would add my gratitude to the catalogue contributors—writers, photographers, keepers of institutional memory—who have given us new insights and elucidated a context for CAM. Lisa Melandri, Director

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Acknowledgments

Place is the Space is the result of an unprecedented collaboration between a museum’s architect and its curatorial staff to create an exhibition that encourages artists to respond directly to the structural dynamics and character of the building.

Timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the opening of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis building, the exhibition and this publication attempt to look forwards and back simultaneously, assessing the museum’s architectural and institutional significance after the passing of a decade, while suggesting how CAM remains part of the future of contemporary art through its commissioning of new works and projects. We are grateful to numerous individuals for their assistance and generosity in helping us achieve this undertaking.

We are grateful to the staff at Allied Works Architecture for their help in locating and furnishing documentary material on the CAM building, including Keith Alnwick, Sarah Royalty, and Becky Schreiber. This catalogue features extraordinary and insightful texts about the building by Bruce Lindsey, Dean of the College of Architecture/Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design and E. Desmond Lee Professor for Community Collaboration, Washington University in St. Louis; and Robert McCarter, the Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, Washington University in St. Louis. It is a privilege to include their essays in this book. The publication was carefully and beautifully designed by Bruce Burton and Kiku Obata, and the texts were expertly edited by Mary Ann Steiner. We wish to thank photographer Victoria Sambunaris for providing photographs of the CAM site and the surrounding neighborhood.

The staff at CAM provided incredible and resourceful guidance and support, beginning with Director Lisa Melandri. David Smith, Exhibitions Manager and Registrar, worked closely with the artists to develop their projects and arrange shipping and oversaw our excellent installation crew. Further assistance on the exhibition was provided by CAM staff members past and present including Brie Alley, Assistant to the Director of Development; Alex Elmestad, manager of Public Programs and Interpretation; Alex Ihnen, Director of Development; Unitey Kull, Director of Marketing and Audience Development; Ida McCall, PR/ Marketing Manager; Louis Nahlik, Exhibitions Assistant; Tuan Nguyen, Director of Education; Carianne Noga, Assistant to the Director; Kelly Shindler, Associate Curator; Mary Walters, Director of Finance and Administration; and Curatorial interns Kate Goldkamp, Kate Lipton, and Anna Shaver.

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We were fortunate to have the generous input of those individuals who played a key role in developing the vision for what became the CAM building and who led the institution at perhaps its most critical juncture. Our gratitude goes out to former Forum for Contemporary Art Director, Betsy Millard; Founding Board member, previous Board president, and stalwart supporter of contemporary art in St. Louis, Emily Pulitzer; former Forum Board presidents Donna Moog and Terry Good; and former CAM Director, Paul Ha, all of whom shared their recollections of and insights on the building of the museum.

We wish to thank the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation, the William E. Weiss Foundation, and the Flanders Ministry for Culture, Sports, Youth and Media, Kingdom of Belgium for their generous support in helping to fund Place is the Space.

We are so thankful to be able to draw on the expertise, advice, and assistance of friends and colleagues and wish to thank Shannon Brown, Susan Cahan, Jennifer Draffen, Shannon Fitzgerald, Kevin Harris, David Mercer, and Elizabeth Smith.

Finally, an exhibition with such a unique concept and approach requires faith, trust, and dedication from its artists, and we were humbled to have exactly that from the artists and their support staff. Our sincerest and deepest gratitude is extended to Carla Arocha, Stéphane Schraenen, and their assistant Bram Bots; Jill Downen, Wayland Downen, Greg Downen, and Mariah Randell; Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, his assistant Brendan Meara, and the staff at Christopher Grimes Gallery, including Christopher Grimes, Stacie Martinez, and Julio Sims; Virginia Overton and the staff at Mitchell Innes-Nash, including Jay Gorney, Nicole Russo, and Mamie Tinkler; and Dominique Petitgand and the staff at gb agency, Paris, including Nathalie Boutin and Alexandra Delage.

Dominic Molon, Chief Curator, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Brad Cloepfil, Founding Principal, Allied Works Architecture

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Building Anticipation Brad Cloepfil

Fig. 1. Neighborhood surrounding the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. This and other images were shot by Victoria Sambunaris as part of a collaboration with Brad Cloepfil to represent the immediate and extended landscape context of the CAM building.

Fig. 2. Brad Cloepfil, Broken Spiral, CAM concept plan, 1999. Charcoal on vellum.

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Upon my first visit to St. Louis in April of 1999, I was utterly awestruck. Standing at the intersection of Washington and Spring, I found myself in a new and very American urban landscape­—an open field without a here or there, no distinction, no conventional discernment of place. Space rolled through the former blocks of brick homes now unimpeded by buildings, with streets and sidewalks mere etchings on the earth’s surface. I was confronted with a radical physical and experiential urban transformation encouraged by a tax policy of demolition, where abandoned buildings were replaced by meticulously mowed green lawns.

It was as terrifying as it was inspiring.

How then in this context to create a “place” for this new arts institution?

Where were the conventional forces of the city—its street fronts, built scale, and character? The internal forces of the shows at the then-named Forum for Contemporary Art, provided little internal direction as the scale and range of the work, with artists such as Doris Salcedo, Matt Mullican, and Stephan Balkenhol were as open and undifferentiated as the surrounding context. A survey of common building types for contemporary art spaces also proved limited, bound as they were to abandoned warehouses charged with the memory of lost industry.

Many were buildings of enormous scale, such as Mass MOCA; others, such as the Mattress Factory or the Power Plant, were impeded by the melancholy of masonry and iron. Beautiful as they were, they had an overpowering sense of economic absence and seemed more romantic than contemporary.

The nearby burned shell of a church, its remaining walls open to the sky, seemed to portend a solution within its tenuous presence of place. Perhaps a building in this city, of this time, to house unknown future art, could aspire only to “hold the site” for art. I set out to create the only kind of space that I thought possible for this project—a loose series of boundaries where none exist; walls and ceilings that roam and range to make space for the possibility of art; spaces with differing proportions, heights, and qualities of light—a charged new space for work unseen.

The early sketches of layered charcoal lines evolved into a woven structure of concrete, upper and lower walls that move across the site, converging, diverging, and intersecting to create ambiguously defined spaces with the most tenuous distinction of here and there. Incomplete spaces, spaces of anticipation, seemingly empty, awaiting the varied occupations of art. The building is a knot,

hinge and bridge mediating the undifferentiated urban landscape, preparing the ground for the unknown acts of the artists. A space that holds the infinite at bay, only for a moment, offering a charged void, requiring a connection from building to body that only the art can bridge.

Over the years, artists such as Jonathan Horowitz, Lauren F. Adams, Scott Benzel, Lutz Bacher, Maya Lin, Yun-Fei Ji, and many others have elevated, extended, amended, occupied, and ignored the building. In all cases the architecture provides the space of anticipation—a presentiment of something new, in both the artists who approach the installation of work in the building and the visitors who approach the specific space of the art.

In the past ten years I have had the opportunity to create a wide range of buildings for various collections of art in cities across North America. The more time I spend in the conversation of space for art, the more crucial the skills of the curator become. If the art gives voice to the architecture of museums, then it is the curator that conducts and directs that voice. The curator truly “plays the building” by choosing and installing the shows.

To be invited back to co-curate this show with Dominic Molon is unexpected and thrilling. It has afforded me the opportunity to see the building anew, certainly more than as the architect or visitor. Participating as co-curator provides the lens of the artists as a means to explore both their work and the space itself. The Virginia Overton piece travels the space of perception in the museum, forging a new path of experience, while Dominique Petitgand performs a similar operation of movement, creating a journey of sound. Jill Downen’s piece is an act of amendment, elevating the incidental to the honorific. The artists Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen juxtapose graphics and transparency, while Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle also employs juxtaposition, this time in scale and form.

It is one of the great pleasures of my work to see the buildings engaged in new and unexpected ways by the artists and the curators. The design of the building, begun some 13 years ago, has been a touchstone for my practice, its fundamental ideas evolving with each new project. I continue to learn from the art and artists that have occupied CAM, and I look forward to the many conversations of place and space that lie ahead.

Fig. 3. Installation view, Lutz Bacher: Split presented at CAM, September 12, 2008–January 4, 2009.

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A Building

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Line, Plane, Volume: Contrapuntal Spatial Composition in Brad Cloepfil’s Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis Robert McCarter

“ The museum is formed by two opposing walls of concrete, which intertwine and cantilever… The lower walls bound the museum…creating large interconnecting galleries. These serpentine walls touch the sidewalk and fold inwards… The upper walls span above the galleries, intersecting and dividing the volumes below… The ceilings float between these upper boundaries at varying heights, modulating the proportions and light… The two realms of space and structure converge and diverge, shifting the perception of enclosure and transparency in multiple directions.”1 —Brad Cloepfil, Allied Works Architecture: Occupation (2011) In the design of the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM), Brad Cloepfil arrived at what would prove to be his signature spatial-tectonic of interlacing, superimposing, and intersecting walls in section, resulting in the contrapuntal mode of spatial composition that has characterized all of his later works. With this building, Cloepfil synthesized the two signature elements of his previous designs—the meandering line and rotating surfaces. As a result, the meandering line is transformed into movement sequence, and planar rotation is transformed into interwoven spaces. The detail that allows this transition from line to volume is the pivoting plane, and the method of accomplishing that spatial transformation is the concept of point and counterpoint, a contrapuntal composition more related to the superimposed layering of weaving on a loom than to typical architectural construction of column and beam.

The visitor is aware that something is (quite literally) up even before entering the building. Walking into the strangely hovering entry court, we find that the outer bounding walls are lifted a full floor up off the ground, so that the urban space of the sidewalk expands into the precinct of the museum, and, at the same time, the space of the museum cantilevers out, overlapping the space of the street. At the entrance door, the concrete wall on the right suddenly stops, while, at the same moment, an identical concrete wall starts on the left.

Meanwhile, the concrete wall that sailed out over the street corner to frame the entry court now bends back inside above the doors, its place on the exterior faÇade taken by the wall of glass that illuminates the lobby. As we enter the doorway, the massive wall planes pivot over our heads, presenting us with the key detail of the building’s conception, composition, and construction.

Fig. 5. CAM front entrance; intertwined and cantilevered walls. facing page: Fig. 4. CAM lobby; contrapuntal spatial composition, pivoting planes forming interwoven volumes.

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The bounding walls that seemed so prevalent on the exterior appear to move away from us once we are inside, so that the ground floor galleries of CAM are experienced as remarkably open and expansive. At the same time, in the air over our heads, the elevated, elongated wall planes are intertwining and intersecting, touching the lower walls on one face as they pass over and seemingly are held in place only by surface tension. Like the de Stijl compositions of Theo van Doesburg and Gerrit Rietveld, to which it is related, the scale of the spaces inside CAM is hard to determine exactly, and the scale seems to shift, along with the perceived boundaries, when we change positions in the galleries. The surface tension created by the intersecting planes overhead is echoed in the more subtle topography of the stepping floors, which tend to slide through and overlap the boundaries established by the upper wall planes. In counterpoint to the intersecting walls, the dialogue of the horizontal planes of the floors and ceilings, though less dramatic in scale, has a greater impact on our experience.

The result of this contrapuntal spatial composition is arguably one of the most appropriate places for the exhibition of contemporary art realized to date.

To unravel the compositional method at work in the CAM building, we need to briefly examine three tectonic and spatial transformational moments in the design, which are related to the foundational concepts of line, plane, and volume.

Fig. 6. Allied Works Architecture, Maryhill Overlook, 1998; meandering line.

Fig. 7. Allied Works Architecture, Dutchess County Residence Guest House, 2007; meandering line.

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Twining Lines / Meandering Movement We begin where Cloepfil started, with projects such as the Maryhill Outlook of 1998, and even more explicitly in the Dutchess County Guesthouse of 2007, which are composed of intertwining or meandering lines in space. In both instances, the meandering line is formed of solid material, and the space of occupation is defined by its intertwining. While we cannot occupy the actual line, we can intertwine our line of movement in and out of it, our body moving in counterpoint to the architectural form. At CAM, the material line of form is transformed into a spatial line of inhabitation, a meandering line of movement through space. Paul Klee defined this conception as the “wandering viewpoint” and the “moving line,” noting the difference between line and surface: “Things in motion…are attached by a strong line and made into one. The longer the line, the more of the time element it contains… Distance is time, whereas a surface is apprehended more in terms of the moment.”2 Pivoting Planes / Eliding Lines Cloepfil first rotated or pivoted the planes in Wieden+Kennedy of 2000, where the concrete walls of the central cubic volume are hinged at their corners, with the upper wall section pivoting 90 degrees from the section below it, the two connected only by the small overlapping thickness of the walls. In a way similar to Wright’s conception of “breaking the box,” achieved by removing the corners, the spaces inside and outside the central volume are linked. In the building for CAM, the pivoting of the walls is more systematic, occurring throughout the interior, linking the galleries inside to the city outside, and, more importantly, interlacing and interweaving the interior spaces. This is made possible by the two “opposing” layers of walls, on the ground and in the air, which are

intertwined and interwoven, the lower walls running in one direction, while the elevated walls run in the perpendicular direction. The upper wall planes do not interlock with the lower wall planes, their lower and upper edges just touching as they intersect, the massive concrete planes standing one on top of the other, seemingly held together by surface tension. This right-angled intersection of the upper and lower planes is an architectural “turning point” (as in ballet), allowing the interior space to repeatedly change directions in the middle of the section.

In this pivoting of the planes, the line that connects the upper wall to the lower wall—the structural column—is quite literally erased or elided. The rotation of the two layers of superimposed concrete surfaces, and the eliding of the columnsas-lines that occur, is the key action that frees the walls of CAM to form the interweaving space that we experience.

Interweaving Volumes / Shifting Surfaces The pivoting of the wall planes results in what might be called (paradoxically enough, given Rietveld’s a-tectonic, seemingly joint-less furniture), a “NeoPlastic” tectonic, as it eliminates the column as an elemental part of the architectural composition. Without the vertical columns demarcating the spatial boundaries of our experience of the interior, the walls of the galleries appear to slip and slide with respect to those above or below, and the shearing and shifting surfaces fuse with the spaces they form, resulting in an interweaving of the two superimposed and perpendicular layers of space and structure. “The two realms of space and structure converge and diverge, shifting the perception of enclosure and transparency in multiple directions,” as Cloepfil quite accurately describes it. In the contrapuntal spatial composition of walls, floors, and ceilings at CAM, space is quite literally interwoven, the warp of the lower walls counterpointed by the weft of the upper walls. Yet the intersecting wall surfaces, while shifting rather dramatically in and out of alignment as we move around the galleries, nevertheless maintain a certain independence as a composition of planar forms. In this way, Cloepfil’s design answers Klee’s charge: “One of the artist’s basic problems is how to enlarge space. We do it by means of overlapping planes… Here even boundaries are spatial, and progression always produces the effect of depth.”3

Fig. 8. Allied Works Architecture, Wieden+Kennedy World Headquarters, 2000; pivoting planes.

Fig. 9. CAM; pivoting planes, elided line, interweaving volumes; "Here even boundaries are spatial."

Brad Cloepfil, Allied Works Architecture, Brad Cloepfil: Occupation (New York: Gregory Miller, 2011), 113.

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Paul Klee, Paul Klee Notebooks Volume 1: The Thinking Eye (London: Lund Humphries, 1961; originally published in German in 1956), 340.

2

3

Klee, op. cit., 49.

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OUTSIDE / INSIDE: landscape space & place Anecdotes about space, time, landscape, and place with interludes Bruce Lindsey

First, the conclusion: Space is fundamental to architecture and is reciprocal to building. Architectural space is a particular kind of space suggesting the likelihood of other kinds of space—landscape space, for instance. The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis designed by Brad Cloepfil is derived from a sensibility of landscape space more so than architectural space. This changes its relationship to its place, and the change facilitates the building’s participation in the renewal of the site and not just the reiteration of it.

Interlude One The architectural historian Charles Jencks declared that modern architecture died on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm with the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, a housing project designed by Minoru Yamasaki in downtown St. Louis. In 2003 the artist Olafur Eliasson demolished the final modernist distinctions between inside and outside with the opening of The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern in London.

“The space was so long that most people, when they entered Turbine Hall, saw the sun as an image, and the space was reduced to a two-dimensional thing for them. Yet by the time they got to the end where the sun was, they wouldn’t look at it anymore because the sun had completely emptied itself as an image and the engagement now was on the engagement with the space. The sun was just a flat screen, and there was nothing very interesting about it.”1 All space was now inside.

Fig. 11. Neighborhood surrounding CAM. facing page: Fig. 10. CAM, exterior view.

Architecture Space While the modern architect and designer of the Gateway Arch Eero Saarinen said that architecture “is the organization of space in space,” you would not have heard much about space in architecture before the late 1800s.

For the Italian Renaissance architect, artist, and mathematician Leon Battista Alberti, architecture was a product of representation using the newly discovered system of linear perspective to rationally relate the constituent parts of architecture to each other through a system of geometric (divine) proportion. “Every part is disposed to unite with the whole that it may escape from its incompleteness.” His Tertralogica described architecture as the platform (flooring), the compartition (walling), the covering (roofing), and apertures (opening). Buildings became a way to separate us from an outside and, in the

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Fig. 12. CAM, view of the performance space and main galleries.

Fig. 13. Brad Cloepfil, Single Ribbon, CAM concept drawing, 1999. Charcoal on trace paper.

case of Alberti’s churches, “relate them [floor, wall, roof, opening] to the creator’s procedures when making “the ordered universe out of chaos.”2 Architecture was not space; it was floors, walls, roofs, and openings.

While Eastern conceptions of space had a very different history as described in the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu: “the usefulness of a pot comes from its emptiness,”3 the Western development of space as an architectural concern had its beginnings in Germany at the turn of the 19th century. The German word raum translates as “room,” but it also expresses a philosophical concept. The room has tangible qualities, however, the space enclosed by the room is a part of limitless space. For the German architect Gottfried Semper the material elements of architecture were secondary: “the wall is that architectural element that formally represents and makes visible the enclosed space.” Semper went on to say that the future of architecture lay in “space creation.”4 Two essays published in 1893 expanded on the ideas of space. The German sculptor Adolf von Hildebrand (known for his monumental urban fountains) stated in his essay The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts that architecture was different from art because people could move around in it and the motion allowed for an experience. Space is the precondition of form, he said, “without space form is simply material.”5 Hildebrand also believed that space was the subject matter of art. Space in architecture could be perceived directly while art required “imaginative perception.” That same year the art historian August Schmarsow went a step further in his essay, The Essence of Architectural Creation, stating that space exists only as a product of our body.6 While he believed that form and space were interdependent, he thought space originated with our perception and projection of it on the world. He called this the art of creating space.

As modernism emerged in the 1920s and 30s and proliferated in the 40s and 50s, space became a primary issue in art, architecture, physics, and philosophy. Albert Einstein, who was born the year that Semper died, later said that time was the only way to say anything significant about space. Modern architects such as LeCorbusier worked to remove the hierarchical distinction between structure, enclosure, mass, and space, placing the person in a relational and dynamic position to space. Much of the rest of modern architecture from Frank Lloyd Wright on can be described in part as an effort to diminish the distinctions between spaces and between the inside and outside of a building.

Interlude Two Literally meaning a “portion of land which the eye can comprehend at a glance,” the word landscape in its early usage meant not the view itself but a painting of the view. Writer J.B. Jackson in his book Discovering the Vernacular Landscape writes about the etymology of the word. The “land” refers to the earth or soil and the “scape” refers to shape, which derives from the word sheaf, a binding of similar elements, or a collection. “Therefore landscape as a ‘collection of lands’ refers both to a distinct boundary, or plot, but ‘like an organization or a system.’ ”7 Jackson states that the collection becomes significant because it is shared. He offers the following definition: “…a composition of man-made or man modified

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spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence: and if background seems inappropriately modest we should remember that in our modern use of the word it means that which underscores not only our identity and presence, but our history.”8 Landscape Space In Design on the Land, one of the first comprehensive surveys of the art and practice of landscape architecture, author Norman T. Newton writes in the foreword, “…plants are of importance to landscape architecture mainly in their capacity to aid in forming and modulating spaces. …space must therefore be comprehended as the major medium of design.”9 The emphasis on space in landscape coincides with the development of the profession of Landscape Architecture through the work of the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmstead. Prior to that (in the English garden tradition of the late 1800s) “they merely arranged objects in ways that seemed pictorially pleasing.”10 Olmstead, who served as designer for Central Park in New York City, was building on the traditions of the picturesque and garden design traditions of England and Europe when he designed the park as a series of open green and closed forested spaces. Influenced by the writings of the 18th-century Swiss doctor Johann Georg von Zimmerman, Olmstead believed that nature produced a relaxing antidote to the urban environment and worked its powerful effect indirectly through the imagination. For Olmstead this meant that the “art” of the design should be subordinated to the overall unconscious impression, such that "Gradually and silently the charm comes over us; we know not exactly where or how."11 While Olmstead did not talk directly about space, Newton, commenting on Olmstead’s work for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, wrote that the Court of Honor, the main structure of the Exposition, “gave clear proof of the remarkable integrative capacity inherent in the landscape architect’s major material, outdoor space.”12 Contemporary landscape architect Patrick Condon, in his essay, “A Built Landscape Typology: The Language of the Land We Live In,” points out the important difference between designed landscapes and natural landscapes and says that space in landscape is any landscape that you can be inside.13 Condon suggests that landscapes (in contrast to nature) are dialectical and place the experience of a beautiful landscape in opposition to the sublime complexity of nature. He uses the work of artist Robert Smithson (Smithson considered his work to be in the tradition of Olmstead) to illustrate his point. The Spiral Jetty, a landscape art project on the edge of the Great Salt Lake, draws its power from its relationship to nature and its relationship to art. Without a geographical context, the art would have been isolated to “a metaphysical void, independent from external relationships such as land, labor, and class.”14 Space in landscape, while always referential to nature through the spatial archetypes of the forest and the clearing, is always constructed.

He goes on to describe other spatial types in landscape including the bosque, the orchard, the alleé, the back yard, the front yard, the square, the cloister, and most compellingly the single tree.

Fig. 14 and Fig. 15. Neighborhood surrounding CAM.

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Space in landscape is also dynamic. This is in part because landscapes are literally alive given the natural systems and processes that are a part of them (they remake themselves), but also because our conception of time in landscape is different. The artist Marcel Duchamp was known to call his paintings delays because they cause temporal distortions. While perhaps all things take time, landscapes affect time and allow us to see it. Buildings do this too, to some extent. The experience of some architectural space is made dynamic through the building’s relationship to the landscape and to the dynamics of light, wind, and weather. In the essay Landscape/space/politics, social scientist and geographer Doreen Massey provocatively suggests that landscape space can operate as a series of durations, countering the more typical understanding of its being continuous. Massey proposes that these episodes provoke a continually dynamic set of stories “that for there to be time, space must itself be imbued with temporality… not a surface but a simultaneity of stories-so-far.”15 This moving across landscape and time suggests a space (contrary to Condon) that you don’t have to be in to experience. If, as Einstein suggested, time is the only way to say something significant about space, perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that landscape makes time and that the result is space.

Fig. 16. Allied Works Architecture, Interlocking Volumes, CAM concept model, 1999.

Interlude Three How do we perceive space? Architects use drawings and models to experience space. They develop the ability to walk around in their drawings and look up as if they were in real spaces. Computer animations of building proposals are just the most recent manifestations of this exercise. It is common practice for architects to model and envision space as a solid. This is particularly true for classical architecture where space was often designed to be a figure. This technique is less useful where space is continuous or ambiguous. These techniques are facilitated through a connection with space and how we think.

We think with objects. We also think with spaces. Psychologist Julian Jaynes reminds us that, especially with difficult concepts, we cannot think about them without using spatial referents for them.16 Time, for example, is made spatial with the future being in front of us and the past behind us. Steven Pinker writes that spatial concepts pervade our language and appear to be something like a vocabulary of thought.17 We certainly experience space through sight, but given that depth in sight is learned through clues (because one leg of the table occludes the other, it must be in front) our experience of space must, to some degree, be learned. We also experience space through touch, perhaps more directly. We feel space. An extreme example of this is the feeling in your stomach standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Dancers respond to this feeling directly and emphasize the fact that time (and movement) is the first dimension of space.

Place / Space / CAM In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, the philosopher Michel de Certeau warned that the modern preoccupation with space has “deadened” our understanding of place and “social space,” as a productive part of our

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environment—the production of space always reiterating existing structures of power.18 Architects often approach the design of buildings explicitly in relationship to both immediate and more distant contexts hoping to contribute to an existing place or create a new one. The Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck thought that, “whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more, for the space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion.”19 Buildings can relate to context and place in several ways. The most pervasive is that a building needs to fit in or be compatible with its surroundings.

This often takes the form of similar materials, proportions, and the style of the

Fig. 17. Brad Cloepfil, CAM concept drawing, 1999.

Charcoal and pastel on vellum.

architecture. This fitting in, or affirmation of what is there, allows the building to be perceived as contextual. This can happen in other ways. Frank Gehry, who has said that he wants to make buildings that no one has ever seen before, believes that a building can relate to a site by how it works not only by how it looks. Buildings also contribute to the place by providing something that it needs but was not there before. This contributes to the ongoing renewal of the place, not just its reiteration.

Architect Stan Allen, in his essay “From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism,” provides a theory of space / place which is provocative. Field conditions are loosely related, different, but similar objects,

Fig. 18. CAM, view of main galleries.

which relate to each other not through traditional methods of axiality, symmetry, or hierarchy, but through serial aggregation across a field. He goes on to say that field conditions are bottom-up, emergent, and dynamic. I would add that they cannot be master-planned: “form matters, but not so much the forms of things as the forms [space] between things,”20 adding another definition of landscape.

While I believe that Allen’s description of a field condition provides some clues as to how the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, designed by Brad Cloepfil, works both internally and within its urban site and context, I also think the building works like another field as described by artist and critic John Berger, who describes an experience of crossing a field between his house and the city center. He says that not any field will do. It must be more or less flat, covered in grass, with discernible boundaries that are not necessarily regular but that maintain a minimum of order. It is not winter because the range of things about to happen is reduced, and it is not a hedged field with only a couple of gates.

Rather, it is open to events and has a number of ways in and out. Your perception of the field is peripheral, until an event occurs, which then calls the field to your attention and “almost instantaneously, your own awareness of the field then gives a special significance to the event.”21 The first event leads you to notice further events, and even though they may be unrelated they are connected by the fact that they happened in the same field. He describes one day in particular while waiting for the train, the sun, the color, and the blackbirds overlapped filling an area for just a moment such that they filled “a certain area of time which exactly fit the spatial area of the field… [that] gives birth to a happiness which is instantly recognizable as your own."22

21

A Decade

Fig. 19. CAM, exterior view.

22

1

Chris Gilbert, “Olafur Eliasson,” http://bombsite.com/issues/88/articles/2651

2

Joan Gadol, Leon Battista Alberti Universal Man of the Renaissance (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 106.

3

Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11.

4

drian Forty, Words and Buildings: A Vocabulary of Modern Architecture (London: Thames & A Hudson, 2000), 257.

5

Ibid.

6

Max Risselada, ed., Raumplan Versus Plan Libre Adolf Loos LeCorbusier (Rotterdam: 010, 2008).

7

J .B. Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, The Word Itself (New London, CT: Yale University Press, 1984), 7.

8

Ibid, 8.

9

Norman T. Newton, Design on the Land (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) xxiii.

10

Ibid, 220.

11

harles E. Beveridge, Frederic Law Olmstead, National Association for Olmstead Parks, C Olmstead – His Essential Theory, http://www.olmsted.org/the-olmsted-legacy/olmsted-theoryand-design-principles/olmsted-his-essential-theory.

12

Ibid.

13

atrick Condon, “A Built Landscape Typology: The Language of the Land We Live In,” in P Ordering Space, Types in Architecture and Design, edited by Karen A. Franck and Lynda H. Schneekloth (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994), 79.

14

Ibid, 82.

15

oreen Massey, Landscape/space/politics, Blog, The Future of Landscape and the Moving D Image, http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/

16

J ulian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1976).

17

Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, (New York: Norton, 1997), 355.

18

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).

19

Alison Smithson, ed., Team 10 Primer, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968), 101.

20

tan Allen, “From Object to Field: Field Conditions in Architecture and Urbanism” in Practice, S Architecture, Technique and Presentation, (London/New York: Routledge, 2008), 251.

21

J ohn Berger, “The Field” in Selected Essays, ed. Geoff Dyer, (New York: Pantheon Books, 2001).

Thanks to Buzz Spector for this reference.

22

Ibid, 357.

23

A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad September 20, 2003–January 3, 2004 The inaugural exhibition in CAM’s building was curated by Shannon Fitzgerald and featured 11 artists from Africa and the African diaspora. One highlight was Meschac Gaba’s burial of objects in the museum’s construction site that he collected around St. Louis in 2002 and then excavated just before the opening of the building a year later.

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25

Michael Lin April 23–June 27, 2004 Lin presented two projects in his CAM exhibition: a commissioned site-specific work, In Sickness and In Health, and Spring 2003, together comprising a dynamic installation of hand-painted floors, window designs, and furniture to create a chapel-like space in which a couple was married in a performance as part of the overall work.

I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol January 26–April 22, 2007 This exhibition explored shared affinities between the work of Andy Warhol and Jim Hodges, preeminent artists of their respective generations. More than 60 artworks ranging from wall paintings to silver balloons to wallpaper were played off with and against each other in a series of dynamic installations that juxtaposed intriguing samplings of both artists’ oeuvres to re-examine the American social fabric since the 1960s.

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Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes September 7–December 30, 2007 Organized by The Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington in Seattle, this exhibition of renowned American artist and architect Maya Lin featured three monumental installations that created distinct “geologic” encounters within the space, each working to engage the viewer's physical, psychological, and intellectual experience of the surrounding environment.

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Great Rivers Biennial 2008 February 1–April 20, 2008

John Armleder and Olivier Mosset May 9–August 3, 2008

Since 2004, CAM has partnered regularly with the St. Louis Gateway Foundation to present the Great Rivers Biennial, an exhibition featuring new projects by three artists based in this city who are selected by three jurors from the broader national and international art world. The 2008 Great River Biennial presented installations by Juan William Chávez, Corey Escoto, and Michelle Oosterbaan.

Swiss conceptual artists John Armleder and Olivier Mosset jointly conceived this exhibition, which proposed an active juxtaposition of parallel (and opposite) artistic approaches, where artworks acted as obstacles and obstacles acted as artworks. The work presented in this image is Mosset's Untitled (Twenty Toblerones), 19942008, cardboard copies of concrete anti-tank obstacles used by the Swiss army that merge the physical realities of war with the formal logic of abstract sculpture.

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30

Front Room: Fia Backström January 23–February 8, 2009

For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there September 11, 2009–January 3, 2010

The Front Room project series was established by former Chief Curator Anthony Huberman in 2008 as an opportunity to develop nimble and creative responses to the energetic pace and flux of contemporary art. New York-based Swedish artist Fia Backström actively engaged various CAM staff to determine the dynamics of her presentation as one of the many unconventional and experimental installations and performances held within and outside the small (14 x 22 ft.) dedicated gallery built into open space in the lobby area. Since 2008, the pace, content, and purpose of the Front Room has shifted based on changing curatorial perspectives.

This exhibition represented CAM’s most ambitious thematic presentation since its opening in 2003. Curated by Anthony Huberman, For the blind man… eschewed the premise that art is a code that needs cracking and celebrated instead the experience of not-knowing and unlearning as critical to both creative and aesthetic experiences. The featured artists included Anonymous, Dave Hullfish Bailey, Marcel Broodthaers, Sarah Crowner, Mariana Castillo Deball, Eric Duyckaerts, Ayse Erkmen, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Rachel Harrison, Giorgio Morandi, Matt Mullican, Bruno Munari, Nashashibi/Skaer, Falke Pisano, Jimmy Raskin, Frances Stark, Rosemarie Trockel, Patrick van Caeckenbergh, and David William.

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Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop January 22–April 11, 2010 American artist Stephen Prina presented richly painted monochrome window blinds alongside a white carpeted video lounge as a “movable stage spectacle” for this exhibition. It also featured the debut performance of his understatedly cerebral Concerto for Modern, Movie, and Pop Music for Ten Instruments and Voice (2010) with distinguished musicians from St. Louis in one of a number of live presentations that have activated CAM’s performance space.

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33

An Exhibition

Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting January 21–May 1, 2011 This exhibition featured 20 paintings whose uniform scale emphasized Aldrich’s radically inventive reconsideration of a painting as a material and structural experience as much as a visual one. The artist also presented four works by Edouard Vuillard, Pierre Bonnard, and the Irish portraitist Sir William Orpen from the Saint Louis Art Museum’s collection to underscore his own work’s relationship to painting in the 19th-century French tradition and especially its connection to social interactions between artists.

Rosa Barba: Desert — Performed September 7–December 30, 2012.

This was German artist Rosa Barba’s first solo exhibition in a United States museum. It featured films that explored new perspectives on the American desert while prompting greater appreciation of the essential properties of film. The show’s centerpiece was Barba’s 2010 installation The Long Road, which became a commanding presence within CAM’s performance space.

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Place is the Space: A Building, A Decade, A Exhibition Dominic Molon

Contemporary art museums that follow the European kunsthalle1 model in focusing solely on temporary exhibitions face challenges and enjoy advantages that distinguish them from their more conventional counterparts. Without a collection of art against which to contextualize art of the moment or the recent past, these museums justify the significance of new work based primarily on their own authority and credibility. In doing so, they take on the task of persuasively demonstrating how artworks of today will make relevant contributions to future understandings of our times. This endeavor is complicated in that they frequently take an active role in commissioning artists to produce new and original works, thereby conferring instant institutional validation and a kind of imprimatur upon these new creations. The risk taken by such museums in producing historically untested work is offset by the exciting potential to make, rather than merely follow or reinterpret, art history. Art institutions that pursue both courses—presenting only temporary exhibitions and dedicating themselves to the development of new works—require a special type of space, one that exudes an immediate sense of authority while exercising a flexible functionality that accommodates future artists’ changing visions and working processes. Architecturally, contemporary art museums bear an additional burden of expectation that the building be as innovative, unconventional, and compelling as the work presented within, while never compromising its essential use-value as a site for the presentation and experience of art.

The ever-expanding market for and interest in contemporary art in recent decades has prompted the construction, opening, and/or expansion of numerous museums across the United States dedicated specifically to the art of our time— many, if not most, of them outside of the recognized centers of art and culture.

The Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis (CAM) is one of the most prominent examples of this phenomenon. Like other recent museums of contemporary art, it is an institution with a pre-history—specifically, three previous incarnations in three different buildings: initially, as the First Street Forum (1980 –1987); then as The Forum (1988 –1992); and the penultimate Forum for Contemporary Art (1992 –2003.) The itinerant nature of the institution resulted in an unsurprising struggle to achieve an identity, particularly within St. Louis, prompting its Board of Directors and then-Director Betsy Millard to embark upon a new building project. With land generously donated by founding board member

Fig. 21. Installation view, Keith Piper: Crusade, presented at CAM, September 12, 2008– January 4, 2009.

Fig. 22. Forum for Contemporary Art, 1996. facing page: Fig. 20. Installation view, Place is the Space, presented at CAM, September 6– December 29, 2013.

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Fig. 23. CAM, exterior view.

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Emily Rauh Pulitzer on the corner of Washington Boulevard and Spring Avenue (just west of the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts designed by Tadao Ando and in its early stage of construction), the process of commissioning an architect began in earnest in 1999. From a shortlist of six architects—all of whom came to visit the site and make public presentations on their general practice at Washington University— Brad Cloepfil, founding principal of Allied Works Architecture, was chosen to design the museum. The resulting building is a two-level structure comprising intersecting concrete walls, stainless-steel mesh that covers exterior and interior portions of the building, ground-level windows on its east and west sides, clerestory windows on the Washington Boulevard façade, and an embrace of the arcing trajectory of its western Spring Avenue border. Since its opening, the museum has staged more than 150 presentations ranging from ambitious thematic shows, such as “For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there” (2009) and “A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad” (2003), to distinctive two-person exhibitions of Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol (2007) and John Armleder and Olivier Mosset (2008); and focused surveys of Richard Aldrich (2011), Leslie Hewitt (2012), Sean Landers (2010), AÏda Ruilova (2008), and Cindy Sherman (2005). Among these are CAM-specific initiatives such as the Front Room project series begun in 2008— a quickly rotating program of projects in a small space adjacent to the lobby—and the Great Rivers Biennial, a juried presentation of new works by St. Louis-based artists. The exhibition Place is the Space and this complementary publication celebrate the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the opening of the building and its philosophical shift from “forum” to “museum” as a site that had been associated with discussion and debate to one whose name presumes a status that is both more contemplative and more authoritative.

The title of the exhibition suggests the site-specific nature of the works by the five artists who were invited to respond to the architectural particularities of the museum, as well as the more general understanding of how a sense of place determines one’s experience of space. Any significant building is itself “site-specific” in its ability to respond to and redefine its surrounding location, and Cloepfil’s design for CAM addresses such preexisting considerations as the arcing curve of its Spring Avenue boundary to the west, Ando’s distinctive lines of the neighboring Pulitzer Foundation building to the east, and the relatively open

urban landscape on all sides. Place is the Space offered Cloepfil the opportunity to work directly with the museum by inviting artists to respond specifically to the volumes, surfaces, and structures that he built. The architect has previously noted that he “wanted a space that is energized on its own terms but also would be inspirational for artists,” and that “in a non-collecting context, you hope that artists are intensely motivated to create work for the space.”2 Cloepfil’s active participation in the curatorial process is notable for numerous reasons, not the least of which is his willingness to reengage with one of his finished buildings and to do so in a way that fulfills the generous prospect of the museum as being created first and foremost for artists. One often suspects that, despite repeated assurances otherwise, many architects practice a certain disinterest in terms of what actual work is done in and by the museums they design once they have opened and begin to live a life of their own. For Cloepfil to not only celebrate the ongoing use and function of the CAM building, but also invite artists to consider the building spatially, structurally, materially, and conceptually and reinterpret its experiential dynamics and purpose demonstrates his unusual and impressive investment in the structure itself and his faith in the institution.

The initial idea for Place is the Space was sparked by a conversation following a panel discussion at the museum between Cloepfil, CAM’s former Director Paul Ha (who oversaw the opening of the building as well as the first nine years of programming within it), and Bruce Lindsey, Washington University’s Dean of the School of Architecture. During that panel discussion Cloepfil’s comments about the original motivations for developing various details within the building— many of which, such as the open space between the museum’s main galleries and the performance space or the windows onto Spring Avenue, had been walled in or over for the very practical purpose of providing more running feet of wall space or containing natural light often harmful to sensitive mediums— prompted reflection as to how the space could and should be “re-opened.” When I broached this topic with Cloepfil after the panel discussion, he volunteered the idea of our co-curating an exhibition at CAM. Initial conversations centered on the notion of developing a thematic based on contemporary art’s often “parasitical”—although one might rephrase this as the less pejorative “symbiotic” or “codependent”—relationship to the “host” building it occupies. This concept grew into a more focused consideration of how the essential properties of both the design and experience of the building, such as surface, intersection, scale, transparency, and public functionality and accessibility, could guide the criteria by which artists would ultimately be invited to participate in the exhibition. The artists that were selected—Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen, Jill Downen, Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Virginia Overton, and Dominique Petitgand—were chosen based on their consistent production of work that incorporates the gallery or museum space as a vital component of how one experiences the art, the space, and the relationship between them.

Although various precedents exist for a work’s direct engagement of the architectural dynamics of the space within which it is presented prior to the 1960s and 1970s, those were pivotal decades for Minimalist artists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre, post-Minimalists such as Mary Miss,

Fig. 24. CAM, main galleries and performance space.

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Fig. 25. Installation view, Place is the Space, presented at CAM, September 6–December 29, 2013.

Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark.

The installations and architectural interventions by those artists, among others, established a new paradigm for understanding the experience of the art object as contingent upon the circumstances of its immediate surroundings. Over the past half-century, artists have increasingly created artworks that anticipate and respond to their presentation in gallery or museum contexts, demonstrating a keen awareness of the critical impact of commercial or institutional frameworks on both the production and experience of art. The museum especially is no longer regarded as a disinterested, neutral space, but rather a site shaped by specific economic, geographic, and historical conditions. (Artists practicing institutional critique, such as Michael Asher, Marcel Broodthaers, Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, and Fred Wilson, have been especially significant in this regard.) While the works commissioned for Place is the Space do not address particularities of CAM’s institutional history, their deliberate interface with the contours, volumes, surfaces, and voids of the building emphasize the structural rationale that determines the experience of art in the museum. At the same time it also reveals clues as to the priorities of the museum’s mission “to challenge [its audience’s] perceptions” and serve as “a site for discovery [and] a gathering place in which to experience and enjoy contemporary visual culture” and the decisions made to translate that mission into physical form.

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The multiple ways that transparency is understood often overlap metaphorically in art and culture. It is particularly relevant in the way that the word “transparency” describes public inclusion in and awareness of sociopolitical processes, discussions, and experiences. The public presentations given by the shortlist of six architects were previously noted as a critical component in the selection process for the design of CAM’s building—a gesture from the museum that demonstrated its a strong commitment to establishing a sense of shared purpose and openness with the community given the institution’s civic function. Transparency is also a key element in the conceptualization behind an experience of Cloepfil’s building, whose bank of windows on the west side provides a view into the main galleries to motorists and pedestrians along Spring Avenue. The east side of the museum is also fenestrated, offering a view into the courtyard shared by CAM and the Pulitzer Foundation and, on occasions when the space beneath the central north-south axis wall is left open, one can literally see through the building. This detail of the museum’s building not only underscores the public function and responsibility of the institution, it also creates a sense of visual continuity between the interior of CAM’s spaces and the immediate surroundings of the Grand Center neighborhood.

Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen’s installation for Place is the Space acknowledges and complicates the transparency of the building by covering the L-shaped bank of windows along the performance space and café with a concentrated, optically illusory pattern of spiral and circular forms.

The cut-vinyl covering allows for a modicum of light and visibility from the performance space into the rear courtyard and vice-versa, while simultaneously asserting a visual and physical presence. Despite its two-dimensionality, the effect created by the overlapping patterns on the external and internal surfaces of the windows impacts the viewer both optically and corporeally. The dense interplay of geometric forms also resonates with the distinctive woven stainless-steel mesh that provides a surface for broad sections on both the inside and outside of the building.

The sculptural installation Beauty Mark by Jill Downen explores the experience of surface from a radically different perspective by focusing on circumstantial rather than intentional aspects of the building’s structure. One part of the work features the filling in of a long crack in the concrete floor of the main galleries with gold leaf. This gesture possesses personal significance for the artist (her father and brother are both master gilders), while emphasizing a structural “flaw” that resulted from an ambitious single-pour of concrete intended to create one sustained, rather than compartmentalized, surface for the museum’s floor. The other part of Downen’s installation is a re-fabrication of the scars left by her own The Posture of Place when it was being deinstalled after its presentation in CAM’s 2004 Great Rivers Biennial exhibition. Both aspects of Beauty Mark extend the artist’s ongoing interest in the anthropomorphic potential of architectural spaces and structures, while providing an insight into the history of the building’s construction and subsequent function as an exhibition space.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s presentation in Place is the Space also comprises two parts and occupies the museum’s main galleries. It engages the building’s

Fig. 26. Jill Downen, de-installation of The Posture of Place at CAM, 2004.

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Fig. 27. Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, die Hütte / the hut, 2013. Digital rendering.

Fig. 28. CAM, lobby.

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development of scale through a subtle articulation of different spatial volumes in its placement of die Hütte / the hut (2013), a sixteen-foot square charred cedar cube, opposite Beehive Grid 5 x 6 (2012), a formation of 30 beehives constructed from stained maple. The former work was created specifically to fill the larger, taller half of CAM’s main gallery space. Its title refers to philosopher Martin Heidegger’s essay Building, Dwelling, Thinking, and to the thinker’s hut/ cottage in Todtnauberg, Germany where he wrote his most celebrated work, Being and Time. Manglano-Ovalle suggests that die Hütte functions as a sculptural/architectural intervention with Cloepfil's own museum project and as a dialogue between the work and the building, albeit one that takes place through the public's own phenomenological apprehension as they negotiate both the work and site, a negotiation that is in and of itself an embodiment of dwelling.3 The invocation of Heidegger’s considerations of “building” and “dwelling” not just as nouns but as verbs provides a curious and altogether unwitting link between the work and the very inspiration for the building itself, which was to resolve its lack of identity due to its nomadic existence in St. Louis and to, literally, dwell in one fixed place. The smaller white beehive sculptures provide a chromatic and proportional counterpoint to die Hütte, consistent with the reduction of space in the main galleries where the ceiling drops from 25 feet high to 20 feet and the space narrows from 55 feet across to 43 feet.

Virginia Overton was invited to address the void beneath the central northsouth axis wall that separates the performance space and the main galleries as well as the space above the low concrete wall separating the lobby and the performance space. Her project features an arrangement of long metal pipes extending in a diagonal from the south end of the central wall space and echoed on the perpendicular concrete wall behind the museum’s admissions desk. Overton’s sculptural installation demonstrates the unexpected potential of otherwise raw objects and implements to elegantly occupy and transform a space. Her subtle gesture draws attention to the network of intersecting walls that define CAM’s building while allowing the previously noted sense of transparency to be maintained.

A museum is defined not only by its bricks and mortar (or in this case, concrete, mesh, and glass) but also by a public that completes the institution’s civic and cultural function. Dominique Petitgand’s installation, Les liens invisibles (The Invisible Links), 2013, uses various sounds to prompt CAM’s visitors to become more actively conscious and aware of their participation in the physical experience of looking at and listening to art. Staged on speakers in the performance space and a video monitor and speaker on the mezzanine on the second floor, the work comprises a combination of “abstract noises” such as electronic pulses or objects interacting with glass, and voices making fragmentary statements in French. Petitgand’s project invokes principles of synchronism—deliberately achieved coincidence at a point in time—in the way that the sounds emerging from different parts of the building occasionally overlap at random. As with the artist’s previous works, The Invisible Links was developed specifically for the CAM spaces it inhabits and suggests how museums provide the opportunity for collective, synchronous experiences as a

direct result of their function as publicly accessible institutions—a condition that is exaggerated by Cloepfil’s deliberately open and inviting plan.

Museums encourage us to understand the present in relationship to the past through a rigorously considered and informed selection, preservation, and presentation of objects, images, and experiences. Institutions such as CAM St. Louis that are dedicated specifically to contemporary art face the intriguing challenge of having to simultaneously interpret the recent past, respond to the present, and anticipate the future. Place is the Space was developed to celebrate the decade-long history of CAM St. Louis in its now permanent home and to underscore its role as an institution that advances contemporary art into the future through the production of new works and programs. Opening alongside this exhibition are two new initiatives—a series of video projections on the building’s façade and a program of sound installations that will occupy the more fugitive public spaces such as the elevators and the restrooms—that carry the institutional rhetoric alluded to in Place is the Space’s premise into the future. These projects, and those in the exhibition, ultimately highlight the greatest triumph of Cloepfil’s building for CAM St. Louis—the fulfillment of that desire for it to truly become “a catalyst for new experience” and “a stage to be worked by artists and curators”4—a testimony both to the visionary flexibility of his design and the awareness and foresight of those who helped bring the structure to fruition.

1

“Kunsthalle” translates from German to English approximately as “art gallery.”

2

Brad Cloepfil quoted in James S. Russell, AiA, “Allied Works’ Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis,” (Architectural Record, January 2004), 125.

3

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Email correspondence with the author, July 16, 2013.

4

Brad Cloepfil, Allied Works Architecture/Brad Cloepfil: occupation, (New York: Gregory R. Miller & Co., 2011),113.

Fig. 29. Installation view, Jennifer Steinkamp: Orbit, presented at CAM, October 11– December 29, 2013.

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Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen

Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen have worked collaboratively since 2005 to create works in various mediums and formats that prompt greater awareness of the relationship between visual experience and space. They frequently use mirrored surfaces in a range of geometrical configurations with either the structures fabricated to house the work or the dynamics of their circumstantial architectural surroundings to cause optical effects that are physically and psychologically affective. In doing so, Arocha and Schraenen suggest how our experience of the world is shaped by both intentional and unanticipated confluences of natural phenomena and the built environment—particularly in the way that the impulse towards ornamentation and design may exceed a merely decorative function.

Key art historical precedents for their work vary from the abstract, optically illusory work of the 1960s by artists like Bridget Riley to Olafur Eliasson’s more recent explorations of the impact of visual perception on our social and phenomenological sense of being in the world. Arocha and Schraenen address similar concerns, yet they develop their works from a position more deeply informed by broader considerations of how perceptual complexities manifest themselves in our cultural landscape. Previous works have alluded to moments from a Rainer Werner Fassbinder film, an ornamental motif from the foyer of a corporate building, as well as familiar and everyday sources. The distillation and displacement of these visual experiences into singular works of art concentrate and exaggerate their effect. Viewers, in turn, are encouraged to perspectively reposition themselves not only towards the object or presentation itself but to the world outside.

Arocha and Schraenen’s project for Place is the Space incorporates the L-shaped bank of windows that enclose the east side of the CAM building and open onto the rear courtyard shared with the neighboring Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. The artists extend their ongoing use of the moiré pattern in which two identical (and usually transparent) patterns are overlaid on flat surfaces slightly displaced from one another. The moiré pattern is articulated there in linear and circular forms fabricated from cut-vinyl that has been applied to both the interior and exterior sides of the window-glass surfaces. The resulting effect of the layered shapes and lines is a dramatically engaging if disorienting spectacle that creates a sense of movement and volume despite the fact that it

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is static and two-dimensional. Arocha and Schraenen’s installation maintains a physical presence while eliciting a corporeal response, which is achieved through primarily optical means. As in Arocha and Schraenen’s previous installations that have incorporated windows, this work is not opaque but allows elements of light and silhouette to emerge through it: an effect that simultaneously frustrates and maintains the sense of transparency so critical to both the conceptualization and experience of the CAM building. The intertwining geometric pattern of the moiré suggests a further affinity with the distinctive stainless steel mesh found on the interior and exterior of the museum, and its kinetic dynamism engenders a visceral effect on the viewer, reflecting both the performative and social functions of the performance space and the café—the two spaces partially contained by the windows that the work occupies.

1

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2

3

Carla Arocha: Born in Caracas 1962; lives in Antwerp, Belgium Stéphane Schraenen: Born in Antwerp 1971; lives in Antwerp, Belgium Selected Solo Exhibitions 2012 After, Centro de Arte Caja de Burgos, Burgos, Spain; The Discrepancy Between the Pale and the Dark Zone, Ganes Pratt Mala Galerija, Slovenia 2011 Cabin Fever, Cabin, Antwerp, Belgium 2010 As if, moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL 2008 Hier Waak Ik, curated by Jesus Fuenmayor, Periferico, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Caracas, Venezuela 2006 Chris, FRAC Auvergne, Clermont-Ferrand, France Selected Group Exhibitions 2012 Spectral Metropole, City Museum (Mestni Muzej), Vzigalica Gallery, Ljubljana, Slovenia 2011 New Art from Belgium, Gallerie Christian Nagel, Berlin, Germany 2010 Into the Light, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, Belgium 2009 The State of Things, BOZAR (The Centre for Fine Arts), Brussels, Belgium 2008 Prospect 58, Hessenhuis, Antwerp, Belgium 1 & 2: Yellow and White (St. Louis), 2013, vinyl decal on glass. Installation views.

3: Yellow and White (St. Louis). Detail.

All work courtesy of the artists and Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

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Selected Bibliography 2013 Rossi, Rosalind. “Straphanger Art: Perusing the CTA Collection,” Sun-Times.com, June 12 2010 Weinberg, Lauren.

“Use Your Illusion.” Time-Out Chicago. Issue 295: Oct 21-27, p. 53. 2009 Benko, Susanna. “Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen Pereferico Caracas,” ArtNexus, Issue 73, p. 98. 2008 Pratt, Ken. “Carla Arocha & Stéphane Schraenen: Depth of Focus.” Wound Magazine, Summer, pp. 252-58.

2007 Martin, Courtney. “Critic’s Choice: Carla Arocha and Stéphane Schraenen.” Artforum.com

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Jill Downen

Jill Downen describes her work “as a focused investigation of the symbiotic relationship between the human body and architecture expressed in temporal installations, drawings, and models.”1 She often utilizes the existing details, boundaries, and flaws of a given space in building new forms that function almost like architectural prostheses. Downen’s aesthetic gestures underscore the profound yet often overlooked aspect of how buildings affect, and are in turn both affected and shaped by, direct human interaction. Conversely, she explores the degree to which architectural structures possess a history and a “life” independent of people and how they quietly shift and morph with the flow of time.

Curator and scholar Elizabeth A. T. Smith has identified a “neo-biological urge [that] animates the thinking and practices of many architects, designers, and artists, whose work manifests an urgent critical inquiry into the structure of our world.”2 Downen extends this ongoing cultural tradition of the “neo-biological urge” by recognizing and celebrating the potential that the intertwining forms and sensibilities usually associated with more organic and highly structured entities.

Thus, the smooth and nebulous contours of her sculptural objects suggest the somewhat amorphous shapes of internal human organs, yielding an intensely physical experience that is both familiar and unsettling.

Downen’s project for Place is the Space, titled Beauty Mark, comprises two parts: the re-visitation of a work that she created in CAM’s galleries for a previous exhibition; and a gold-leaf seam set in a long fissure in the concrete floor of the museum’s main galleries. The first part recreates the deinstallation of a portion of The Posture of Place, which she produced on the occasion of CAM’s first Great Rivers Biennial in 2004. In addition to transforming the museum floor with irregular “lumps” bulging from its surface, Downen installed a work in a corner of the main gallery that simulated skin-like white folds. When the latter portion of the second installation was removed at the end of the Great Rivers Biennial exhibition, it left a pattern of staggered elliptical scars. For Beauty Mark, Downen deliberately has re-introduced this structural residue to suggest how the presentation of other artists’ works, as well as hers, have left similar imprints on the museum’s surfaces to become a hidden part of the building’s history.

Her use of gold leaf to fill in the long crack bisecting the width of the main galleries’ concrete floor recalls the Japanese practice of golden joinery, Kintsugi,

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in which broken pottery is mended with a lacquer resin sprinkled with powdered gold. Just as that process redeems a perceived flaw with something precious, Downen’s use of gold leaf elevates a blemish in the otherwise seamless surface of the museum floor (ironically, the seam resulted from the ambitious single pour of concrete in order to eliminate the distracting appearance of deliberate and regular seams, an ambition the builders predicted would cause just such a fissure). While her project prompts consideration of the structural history of the building, her collaboration with her father Wayland Downen, and brother Greg Downen—both master gilders—to install the gold leaf adds a layer of her own personal history.

1

Tracee W. Robertson, Jill Downen: Dust and Distance, exhibition brochure, UNT Art Gallery, Denton, Texas, February 23 – March 24, 2012.

2

Elizabeth A.T. Smith, “On Growth and Form: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Organic in Recent Art and Architecture,” unpublished essay, p. 25.

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1-3: Beauty Mark, 2013, gold leaf, gypsum, polystyrene, and latex. Installation views.

All work courtesy of the artist and Bruno David Gallery, St. Louis.

3

Jill Downen: Born in Belleville, Illinois, 1967; lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri Selected Solo Exhibitions 2013 3x3: Restoration, Herron Galleries, Indianapolis, IN 2012 Dust and Distance, University of North Texas, Denton, TX 2011 Jill Downen, Counterparts, New Frontiers Series for Contemporary Art, Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma City, OK 2010 (dis)Mantle, The Luminary, St. Louis, MO 2007 Corps et Bâtiment á Paris, Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris, France 2004 The Posture of Place, Great Rivers Biennial, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, MO Selected Group Exhibitions 2011 Chain Letter, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Santa Monica, CA 2010 Art in Architecture, jurors Michael Graves, James Christen Steward, Sassona Norton, The Center for Contemporary Art, Bedminster, NJ 2009 Monochrome, Manifest Creative Research Gallery, Cincinnati, OH 2007 Perspectives, Brook Museum of Art, Memphis, TN 2004 Projects ’04, Islip Art Museum Long Island Carriage House, East Islip, NY Selected Bibliography 2010 Cooper, Ivy. “Jill Downen at the Luminary,” Art in America, December, p. 156. 2009 Bonetti, David. “Jill Downen at Bruno David,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 3 May, E3. 2007 Artner, Alan. “Paper Now,” Chicago Tribune, 21 September, Section 7, p. 23. 2006 Hughes, Jeffrey.

“Jill Downen,” Art Papers, July/August, p. 70. 2004 Harrison, Helen A. “Projects ’04,” The New York Times, 26 September, L1, p. 11.

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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle's work allows the unseen to be seen, gives the formless shape, and makes speculative objects or situations manifest. His thoroughly researched projects are presented on a seemingly grand yet precisely appropriate scale, pairing investigative rigor with an acute sense of theater.

Manglano-Ovalle's subjects range from natural phenomena like icebergs and clouds to iconic buildings such as Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House to the ultimately fictional truck purported to be carrying weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. These thematic shifts are grounded by an ongoing pursuit of the human quotient within such abstract systems and disciplines as science, architecture, politics, and technology.

For Place is the Space Manglano-Ovalle presents two interventions into CAM’s main gallery spaces: die Hütte / the hut (2013), a 16-foot square charred cedar cube produced specifically for the exhibition, and Beehive Grid 5 x 6 (2012), an arrangement of 30 white maple sculptures each in the form of a beehive. The former work—developed in direct relationship to the proportions of the larger of the two spaces into which the main galleries ostensibly subdivide—is inspired by philosopher Martin Heidegger’s identification of the relationship between “building” and “dwelling” in his 1951 lecture “Building Dwelling Thinking.” While “building” and “dwelling” are similar as nouns, their function as verbs diverge: the process of building assumes the development of a place within which one might dwell (although exceptions such as bridges and other functional structures do not apply.) Heidegger explores the degree to which one’s sense of being is inextricably linked to dwelling and occupying a particular place. This intervention by Manglano-Ovalle prompts consideration of how this particular museum functions not only as a temporary dwelling for works of art (given its status as a non-collecting institution), but equally, if not more importantly, as a permanent home for the very idea of providing a place for contemporary art to be selectively presented, discussed, and validated. It is perhaps a fitting, if unwitting, tribute to the fact that the motivation for the construction of the building was to establish a sense of fixed identity and home for an institution that had been habitually nomadic since its founding in 1980.

Die Hütte is presented in deliberate contrast to Beehive Grid in terms of scale, color and surface, and conceptual underpinnings. While the former work is constructed from charred cedar planks—a material frequently used in Japanese

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architecture that has a metallic black-silver appearance and a nuanced texture— the beehive works are fabricated from stained maple, providing them with a smooth pale sheen. This chromatic juxtaposition echoes a similar opposition between the clean white walls of CAM’s galleries and the subtle, fabric-like quality of the woven-steel mesh detailing its exterior and interior surfaces. ManglanoOvalle uses the dialogue between die Hütte and Beehive Grid to draw attention to the subtle differences in ceiling heights within CAM’s main galleries and how one’s relationship to the art and architecture within is affected by this shift in scale. Finally, while die Hütte imposingly looms as a dark, inert monolithic mass, the beehives represent more intimately sized structures associated with densely concentrated spaces and active social activity. Manglano-Ovalle’s pairing of the two works further underscores and reflects upon the ideals of public access and civic functionality that inform CAM’s building, prompting us to consider our own social behavior as part of the process of experiencing art in a/the museum.

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Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Born in Madrid, Spain in 1961; lives and works in Chicago, Illinois Selected Solo Exhibitions 2012 Hurricane Prototype No. 1, DataVis Beall Center, UC Irvine, CA 2011 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Phantom Truck and Always After, Power Plant, Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2009 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: Juggernaut, Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA 2006 Blinking Out of Existence, Rochester Art Center, Rochester, MN 2005 Focus: Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL 2001 Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI Selected Group Exhibitions 2012 Between Walls and Windows: Architecture and Ideology, Haus den Kultures des Welt, Berlin, Germany; More Real?

Art in the Age of Truthiness, SITE Santa Fe, NM 2011 Seeing is Believing, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany 2010 Yesterday’s Tomorrows, Musée d’Art contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Quebec, Canada 2007 Documenta XII, Kassel, Germany 1: die Hütte / the hut, 2013, charred cedar. Installation view.

2-3: Beehive Grid 5 x 6, 2012, stained maple. Installation views.

All work courtesy of the artist and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica, California.

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Selected Bibliography 2012 Smith, Elizabeth and others. Chicago Makes Modern. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (in cooperation with the Art Institute of Chicago). 2011 Diehl, Travis. “Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, The Power Plant Contemporary Art Center,” Artforum.com, May. 2009 Yood, James.

“Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle at Donald Young Gallery,” Artforum, February, p. 197. 2008 Haacke, Hans. October, no. 123, Winter, p. 79. 2003 Griffin, Tim. “Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle at Fundacio La Caixa,” Artforum, May, p. 69.

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Virginia Overton

There is something profoundly “American” about Virginia Overton’s transformation of materials and objects typically associated with construction and industry into sculptures, installations, and interventions of spare elegance and precise beauty.

Her work frequently negotiates the inherent boundaries and circumstances of the space within which it is presented: it has a sense of recalling the way that many structures, particularly in the Midwest or southern parts of the United States (Overton hails from Tennessee, which is somewhere in-between), are the result of an impulse to ”make do” with the resources available. Alex Gartenfeld has noted this ethos in Overton’s “interest in deploying vernacular forms to unpack issues of class that go deep in art” and how she “affects authenticity and localism.”1 Her refusal to transform the physical appearance and substance of her materials demonstrates a profound trust in their ability to function aesthetically, allowing them to talk “about the way in which [they] have been used” and also “about where and how they have been used and for what.”2 Overton’s straightforward approach extends from objects she uses to the space she engages as a key element of her practice. The manner in which she arranges her materials speaks to the history of the space she is working in as well as its time and function, and develops “an analogy between two different kinds of history—the more literal history that is inscribed on the materials during [the] process, and the cultural history of an institution.”3 Overton achieves this reflection through her work’s recognition of the phenomenon that voids are as definitively “present” as the structures that create them. Her Untitled installation at Mitchell Innes-Nash in 2010, for example, was subtly reminiscent of Ronald Bladen’s minimalist X sculpture from 1967—which spanned the great hall of Washington D.C.’s Corcoran Gallery—yet was less an attempt to dominate the space than an opportunity to draw attention to the two central pillars within the gallery, whose circularity was gently offset by the rectangular planks precariously assembled into a suspended triangle. Despite the rudimentary nature of the wooden boards, the reductive simplicity of Overton’s assemblage allowed them to feel both absolutely “at home” within their surroundings and to ostensibly “function” as a kind of problematic barrier.

A similar sensibility informs her project for Place is the Space, for which she suspends long metal pipes underneath and over two intersecting walls in CAM’s space. The longer of the two is the north-south wall, which separates the

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museum’s main galleries and its performance space, and features a distinctive, if often walled-in, void that exaggerates the sense of open, flowing space of the building. This sculptural gesture effectively “fills” that void, yet allows it to remain visually transparent and open to access between the two rooms, underscoring the themes of transparency and public accessibility for CAM’s building and mission. Overton continues the project on the perpendicular partial wall (with a void above) that separates the front lobby and the performance space, aligning pipes to diagonally span both sides. In doing so, she underscores another key facet of Cloepfil’s design: the use of intersecting walls not only provides support and structure but also creates the spatial volumes that shape the building’s interior and express the ideals of public accessibility and openness that define the institution.

1

Alex Gartenfeld, “First Look: Virginia Overton,” Art in America, April 2012, p. 33.

2

Virginia Overton, “In Conversation: Mai-Thu Perret & Virginia Overton,” in Virginia Overton: Deluxe, (Dallas: The Power Station, 2012), 66.

3

Ibid.

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3

1: Untitled (42'10"), 2013, steel pipes, rope, sandbags. Installation views.

2 & 3: Untitled (45' 6"), 2013, steel pipes, rope. Installation views.

All work courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.

Virginia Overton: Born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1971; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York Selected Solo Exhibitions 2013 Westfälischer Kunsteverein, MÜnster, Germany; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland 2012 The Kitchen, New York, NY; Deluxe, The Power Station, Dallas, TX 2010 True Grit, Dispatch, New York, NY; Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN Selected Group Exhibitions 2013 Empire State, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy 2012 Emergency Cheesecake, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 2011 Impossible Vacation, White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO 2010 Greater New York, PS1 MoMA, Long Island City, NY 2009 Portrait de l’artiste en motocycliste, le Magasin-CNAC, Grenoble, France Selected Bibliography 2013 “Virginia Overton,” The New Yorker, 25 March, p. 26.; Griffin, Tim. “Virginia Overton,” in Empire State: Arte a New York oggi, Milan: Skira, pp. 146-49.; Smith, Roberta. “Virginia Overton,” The New York Times, 22 March, p. C27. 2012 Johnson, Ken. “Virginia Overton,” The New York Times, April 6, 2012, p. C28.; Gartenfeld, Alex. “First Look: Virginia Overton,” Art in America, April 2012, p. 33. 2011 Lunn, Felicity. “Virginia Overton,” frieze d/e, Summer 2011, p. 136.; Rosenberg, Karen. “All Nooks, Crannies, Bedrooms and Trees Are Backdrops for Art,” The New York Times, August 8, p. C5.

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Dominique Petitgand

Drawing for Les liens invisibles (The Invisible Links), 2013. Courtesy of the artist and gb agency, Paris

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The use of sound as an artist’s primary medium has become increasingly familiar within an art context and has defined the practice of Dominique Petitgand throughout his career. His work typically comprises multichannel presentations of voices and/or abstract noises and sounds deliberately developed for a particular space. Petitgand’s installations negotiate the remarkably difficult conceptual prospect of transporting listeners into an imaginary elsewhere through the creation of fragmented narratives. At the same time he makes them acutely aware of their own physical and, given the circumstances of gallery or museum presentations, public presence. His work is reminiscent, in this regard, of legendary filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s experimental and unconventional use of sound in his films to both drive and develop a story and simultaneously disrupt and unsettle the spectator’s typically complacent and passive role in the cinematic experience. The nature of Petitgand’s practice allows him to pursue a more spatially expansive, and physically affecting, manipulation of sound, which can produce in the listener an act of reinventing the direction or perspective, and redefining what is close, far, central, or peripheral. The various listening spots can then become as many fragmented approaches of the exhibited work.1 In doing so, Petitgand invites visitors to a more active role in determining their experience and understanding of the work based on an engaged process of listening and re-listening in the space.

The use of silence is another key element in Petitgand’s sound installations.

The artist has stated, “each of my installations is the product of radical subtractions and the logic of it all—if I was not stopped by my desire to create narratives and tell stories—would be to reach the absence of everything, to reach silence.”2 Petitgand strategically uses silence to produce delays and voids that are temporal as well as spatial: “blank” aural sections correspond with the traversal through the space. His work frequently features words and phrases spoken or shown on a monitor in both French and English to create an additional layer of linguistic and cultural disruption. While the English is typically a translation of the French, it also suggests a dialogue or conversation, albeit a strangely repetitive and disjointed one.

Petitgand’s project for Place is the Space is Les liens invisibles (The Invisible Links), 2013. Speakers are placed in the main galleries, in the performance space, and in the mezzanine area on the second floor (a balcony space that along

with an open walkway creates an L-shaped bracket above the performance space). “Abstract” noises such as the sound of objects in glass containers and other nondescript effects that play intermittently on CAM’s first-floor speakers are synchronized with a spoken word presentation in French that is translated into English on a monitor on the museum’s second level. The vocal portion of the work features a woman’s voice uttering brief phrases along with what seem to be excerpts of a monologue or statement. Petitgand encourages the people traveling through the space and listening to the sounds to make synchronic connections between the noises and voices in their concentrated and attentive perambulation of the space. The literally “invisible” links between sounds in the installation suggest the more metaphorical associations that people develop with the objects they encounter in a given space, but it is also suggestive of the links that form between people (often silently) as part of the dialectic between the individual and the collective experience that defines one’s presence in a museum.

1

Dominique Petitgand, “Interview with Dominique Petitgand by Guillaume Constantin,” in Dominique Petitgand: Installations (documents), (Paris: Editions MF, 2009), 86.

2

Dominique Petitgand, “Interview with Dominique Petitgand by Vanessa Declaux,” in Dominique Petitgand: Installations (documents), p. 28.

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3

Dominique Petitgand: Born in Laxou, France in 1965; lives and works in Nancy, France Selected Solo Exhibitions 2013 gb agency, Paris 2012 Un tout, dont je fais partie, l’Aubette 1928, Strasbourg, France 2011 Domicile, dans le cadre de Récits & paysages, Le Pavillon, Pantin, France 2009 La tête la première, FRAC Haue-Normandie, Sotteville-lès-Rouen, France; Quelqu’un est tombé, Abbaye de Maubuisson, Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône, France; La porte ne s’est pas ouverte (The door didn’t open), Mudam Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg 2005 Ext 17, Swiss Institute, New York Selected Group Exhibitions 2013 L’image papillon, Mudam Luxembourg 2011 Une terrible beauté est née, Biennale de Lyon, France 2009 Stutter, Tate Modern, London, England 2007 Some Time Waiting, Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France 2005 Raconte moi/Tell me, Musée National des Beaux-Arts de Québec, Québec, Canada

1-3: Les liens invisibles (The Invisible Links), 2013, five speakers, video monitor. Installation views.

All work courtesy of the artist and gb agency, Paris.

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Selected Bibliography 2011 Khazam, Rahma. “Dominique Petitgand,” Flash Art, Issue 278, May/June, p. 161. 2009 Installations (documents), texts by D. Petitgand, interviews D. Petitgand with Vanessa Desclaux, Elodie Royer & Yoann Gourmel, Guillaume Constantin, Marinella Paderni, co-edition abbaye de Maubuisson / FRAC Lorraine / FRAC Haute-Normandie / Confort Moderne / gb agency, éditions MF, Paris.; Davies, Lillian. “Dominique Petitgand, Abbaye de Maubuisson,” Artforum, Summer, p. 352. 2006 Nicolin, Paola. “Architetture Invisibili,” Mousse, December, pp 56-58.; West, Kim. “Critic’s Picks: Quelqu’un par terre,” Artforum.com, December.

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Exhibition History, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 2003-2013

2006 Main Galleries Great Rivers Biennial 2006: Moses, Matthew Strauss, Jason Wallace Triefenbach; January 20–March 26 Contemporary Masterworks: St. Louis Collects; April 7– June 11 The Collectibles; April 7– June 11 Centering on the Grand; June 30 –August 20 Selections from the Contemporary’s Flat Files; June 30–August 20 Larry Krone: Artist/Entertainer; September 15–December 31 Janaina Tschäpe: Melantropics; September 15–December 31

2003

Special Project

A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad; September 20, 2003–January 3, 2004

Contemporary Project Series: Michael Paul Britto: Dirrrty Harriet Tubman; September 15–December 31

2004

2007

Main Galleries

Main Galleries

Yun-Fei Ji: The Empty City; January 23–March 27

I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol; January 26 –April 8

Polly Apfelbaum: Crazy Love, Love Crazy; January 23–March 27

Katie Holten: Paths of Desire; April 27–August 5

William Pope.L, eRacism: electronic; April 23–June 27

Shoot the Family; April 27–August 5

Michael Lin; April 23–June 27

Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes; September 7–December 30

Great Rivers Biennial 2004: Jill Downen, Adam Frelin, Kim Humphries; July 16–August 22

Special Project

New Video, New Europe; September 10–November 21 Keith Piper: Crusade; September 10–November 21 Yoshitomo Nara: Nothing Ever Happens; December 3, 2004–February 27, 2005 Laylah Ali: Paintings and Drawings; December 3, 2004–February 27, 2005

Contemporary Project Series 2007, Slater Bradley: Year of the Doppelganger & My Conclusion/My Necessity; January 26–April 8 2008 Main Galleries

Special Project

Great Rivers Biennial 2008: Juan William Chávez, Corey Escoto, Michelle Oosterbaan; February 1– April 20

Contemporary Project Series 2004: Danny Yahav-Brown: And Then They Danced, December 3, 2004–February 27, 2005

John Armleder and Olivier Mosset ; May 9–August 3

2005

Lutz Bacher: Spill; September 12, 2008–January 4, 2009

Main Galleries

Front Room

Dzine: Punk Funk; March 18–June 12

White Flag Projects; Evil Prints; Snowflake/Citystock; Boots Contemporary Art Space; Maps Contemporary Art Space; Homegrown; Apop Records; Olga Chernysheva & R.H. Quaytman & Josephine Pryde; Ei Arakawa; Alex Hubbard and Oscar Tuazon; Christopher Orr & J. Parker Valentine & Rezi van Lankveld; Gardar Eide Einarsson; Jan Estep; Max Schumann; Vlatka Horvat and Eva Weinmayr; Jia Zhang-ke; Ed Fella; Brent Green; Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT; Reena Spaulings; Wojciech Gilewicz; Chihcheng Peng; Claudia Wieser & Andrew Falkowski & Elad Lassry; Gregor Hildebrandt; Diego Perrone; Hany Armanious; Beatrice Gibson & Alex Waterman; Ian Burns; Roman Signer; Claire Fontaine; M. Ho.

Alexander Ross: Survey; March 18–June 12 Ruby Osorio: A Story of a Girl (Who Awakes Far, Far Away); March 18–June 12 Girls’ Night Out; September 16–December 31 Cindy Sherman: Working Girl; September 16–December 31 Special Project Contemporary Project Series 2005: Katharine Kuharic: The World Brought Low; March 18–June 12

Aïda Ruilova: The Singles 1999–Now ; September 12, 2008– January 4, 2009

Special Project Spencer Finch: Sunset (St. Louis, July 31, 2008); September 4–October 17

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2009

Front Room

Main Galleries Bruce Nauman: Dead Shot Dan; January 23–April 19

John Opera & Matt Sheridan Smith; Thea Djordjadze & George Maciunas; Margaret Salmon; Pavel Büchler; Scott King & Richard Serra; Jonas Mekas: Walden (DIARIES Notes and Sketches), Part 6, 1969; Scott Benzel; Yuki Kimura; Michael E. Smith; Aneta Grzeszykowska

Carey Young: Speech Acts; May 8–August 2

Special Projects

Chantal Akerman: Moving Through Time and Space; May 8–August 2

Tellervo Kalleinen and Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen: The St. Louis Complaint Choir; April 7–April 17

Gedi Sibony: My Arms Are Tied Behind My Other Arm; January 23–April 19

For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn’t there; September 11, 2009–January 3, 2010 Front Room Dexter Sinister (carte blanche); Fia Backström; Sean Snyder; Sung Hwan Kim & Clemens von Wedemeyer & Alix Pearlstein & Sven Augustijnen & Aurélien Froment; Susanne M. Winterling; Hayley Tompkins & Sue Tompkins; Florian Pumhösl; Between Beach Ball and Rubber Raft; Tris Vonna-Michell; Tom Johnson; Cezary Bodzianowski; Sam Moyer & Lesley Vance & Stan VanDerBeek; Douglas Ross & Philip Vanderhyden 2010 Main Galleries

2012 Main Galleries Christodoulos Panayiotou: One Thousand and One Days; January 27–April 22 Figure Studies: Recent Representational Works on Paper; January 27–April 22 Great Rivers Biennial 2012: David Johnson, Asma Kazmi, and Mel Trad; May 11–August 12 Rosa Barba: Desert – Performed; September 7–December 30 Leslie Hewitt: Sudden Glare of the Sun; September 7–December 30

Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop; January 22–April 11

Front Room

Sean Landers: 1991–1994, Improbable History; January 22–April 11

Robert Breer: 1957; Jesse McLean: REMOTE; Brandon Anschultz: Pacer; Oliver L. Jackson; Takashi Horisaki presents Social Dress St. Louis: Learning and Unlearning; Serena Perrone: Maintaining a Safe Distance and Living to Tell; Lauren Adams: Hoard and We the People (at EXPO CHICAGO); Anthony Pearson; Sreshta Rit Premnath: Folding Rulers

Great Rivers Biennial 2010: Martin Brief, Sarah Frost, Cameron Fuller; April 11–August 8 Elad Lassry: Sum of Limited Views; September 10, 2010–January 2, 2011 Richard Artschwager: Hair; September 10, 2010–January 2, 2011 Front Room Xavier Cha; Torbjørn Rødland; Greg Parma Smith & Zin Taylor; David Musgrave & Erin Shirreff ; Pablo Pijnappel ; Roman Schramm & Haris Expanimonda; Jochen Lempert; Leslie Hewitt: Untitled (Level); Machine Project; Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt; Claire Evans & Gemma Pardo & Raha Raissnia; Scott Hocking; Cellar Door: Alex DaCorte, Trevor Reese, and Justin Visnesky; RBMBKESHKM: Roy Brooks, Mikey Burton, Kelly English, Sibylle Hagmann, and Kindra Murphy; Nina Beier & Marie Lund; Zipora Fried & Margarete Jakschik & Saw Windett; Agency & Miriam Böhm; John Smith; Laura Riboli; Simon Denny 2011 Main Galleries Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting; January 21–May 1 Manon de Boer: Between Perception and Sensation; January 21–May 1 Cryptic: The Use of Allegory in Contemporary Art with a Master Class from Goya; May 20 –August 14 Emily Wardill: Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck; September 9–December 30 David Noonan; September 9–December 30

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Yoko Ono: Play it by Trust; September 9–October 9

Special Project Jonathan Horowitz: Your Land/My Land: Election ’12; September 7–November 11 2013 Main Galleries Jeremy Deller: Joy in People; February 1–April 28 Lari Pittman: A Decorated Chronology; May 24–August 11 Mika Taanila: Tomorrow’s New Dawn; May 24–August 11 Place is the Space; September 6–December 29 Anthony McCall: You and I, Horizontal (II); September 6–December 29 Front Room Bad at Sports; Kerry James Marshall: Garden of Delights; Josh Faught: Snacks, Supports, and Something to Rally Around; Thomas Bayrle: Chrysler Tapete; Ed Ruscha: Miracle Special Projects Audible Interruptions: Jessica Baran & Brett Williams; September 6–December 29 Street Views: Jennifer Steinkamp; October 11–December 29

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Board of Directors

Photography and Illustration Credits

Officers

Individual works of art appearing herein may be protected by copyright in the United States of America, or elsewhwere, and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the rights holders. In reproducing the images contained in this publication, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis obtained the permission of the rights holders whenever possible. Should the museum have been unable to locate the rights holder, notwithstanding good-faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights holders be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions.

Pat Whitaker, Chair

Jacob W. Reby, Secretary

David Gantt, Treasurer

Nancy Kranzberg Phyllis Langsdorf Katherine Lazar Sandy Lehrer Judith W. Levy Ann Sheehan Lipton Kimberly MacLean Joan H. Markow Susan McCollum Isabelle Montupet Dean H. Mutter Rebecca Nelson

David S. Obedin Lawrence K. Otto Dorte Probstein Emily Rauh Pulitzer Julian Schuster Thad Simons Rex Sinquefield Andrew Srenco Michael Staenberg Donald Suggs Gary Wolff Jackie Yoon

Board Members Bradley Bailey Susan Barrett Nanette Boileau Mark Botterman Dwyer Brown Sarah Carlson Alexis M. Cossé Arnold Donald David Drier Jamey Edgerton John Ferring Matthew Fischer

© Jay Fram: p. 37 (fig. 21) © Suzy Gorman: p. 26 Michael Lin wedding documentation © Wright E. Harris III: p. 25 Mescha Gaba documentation © David Johnson: pp. 12 (fig. 4), 13 (fig. 5), 15 (fig. 9), 18 (fig. 12), 21 (fig. 18), 34 Rosa Barba: Desert—Performed documentation, 36 (fig. 20), 39 (fig. 24), 40 (fig. 25), 42 (fig. 28), 45-47, 53-59, 61-63 Courtesy of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle: p. 42 (fig. 27)

Barbara Z. Cook Charles Cook

Terrance Good Joan Goodson

Eleanor W. Dewald

Marylen Mann

Vincent C. Schoemehl, Jr.

© Jurgen Bank: p. 26 I Remember Heaven: Jim Hodges and Andy Warhol documentation

© Dean Kaufman: p. 14 (fig. 7)

Emeritus

Ex-Officio

Courtesy of Allied Works Architecture: pp. 8 (fig. 2), 18 (fig. 13), 20 (fig. 16), 21 (fig. 17)

Donna Moog Ann Ruwitch

Courtesy of Dominique Petitgand and gb agency, Paris: p. 60, Dominique Petitgand drawing © Robert Pettus: pp. 24-25 A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad documentation © Victoria Sambunaris: pp. 8 (fig. 1), 16 (fig. 10), 17 (fig. 11), 19 (fig. 14 and fig. 15), 22 (fig. 19) © Sally Schoolmaster: pp. 14 (fig. 6), 15 (fig. 8) © Charles Schwall: p. 41 (fig. 26) © Richard Sprengler: pp. 29 John Armleder and Olivier Mosset documentation, 49-51 © Jennifer Steinkamp; artwork courtesy Lehmann Maupin, New York; ACME, Los Angeles; greengrassi, London: p. 43 (fig. 29). © Stan Strembicki: p. 38 (fig. 23) © Torno Brothers Photography: p. 34 Richard Aldrich and the 19th Century French Painting documentation © David Ulmer: pp. 9 (fig. 3), 27 Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes documentation, 28 Great Rivers Biennial 2008 documentation, 30 Front Room: Fia Backström exhibition, 31 For the blind man in the dark room looking for the black cat that isn't there documentation © Peter Wochniak: pp. 32-33 Stephen Prina: Modern Movie Pop documentation

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Place is the Space, organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Brad Cloepfil, Founding Principal, Allied Works Architecture, and Dominic Molon, Chief Curator.

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis September 6–December 29, 2013 This exhibition is generously sponsored by the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the William E. Weiss Foundation. Support for CAM’s exhibition program is provided by Jeanne and Rex Sinquefield, the William E. Weiss Foundation, and the Crawford Taylor Foundation.

Design: Kiku Obata & Company Editor: Mary Ann Steiner Printer: The Advertisers Printing Company, St. Louis, Missouri ISBN: 9780988997011 First edition © 2013 Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis 3750 Washington Boulevard Saint Louis, Missouri 63108 314.535.4660 camstl.org Available through D.A.P./Distributed Art Publishers 155 Sixth Avenue, 2nd Floor New York, NY 10013 212.627.1999 artbook.com All rights reserved under pan-American copyright conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, 3750 Washington Boulevard, Saint Louis, Missouri 63108.

Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis