ACCUMULATION physical composition

How the architecture of the contemporary art museum, as much an accumulation of spaces, can contain a collection of withdrawn interiors?

‘Cultural confinement’, a term coined by Robert Smithson in ‘72, exposes the issues that arise when the museum imposes its overarching limits on art through its architecture. As a result, Smithson claims, art “ends up supporting a cultural prison that is out of its control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells – in other words, neutral rooms called ‘galleries.’ ”

In this project we hope to argue that the inevitable frictions between art and architecture should not point towards a mode of confinement but rather of provisional containment; one in which the fragility and tenuous equilibrium of the museum as a collection, but also as an organism, embraces unanticipated affinities and logics between objects.

We accumulated a series of objects and produce scenes according to the following three conditions: - A still life - A Landscape of Objects - Transparency of Objects. Utilizing glass as a way of representation, we could discover the relationship between the vessels in terms of their spatial overlaps, the silhouette among each object and the overall compostion.

Collaboration with: Yunbin Wang

Instructor: Maxi Spina