space.time.

narrative
 for those
who unite the curiosity of the inventor
with the adventure in design
space.time.narrative
the exhibition as post-spectacular stage

Frank den Oudsten

First published 2011 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2016 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2011 © Frank den Oudsten

Frank den Oudsten has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented,
including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notices:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only
for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Oudsten, Frank den.
Space, time, narrative: the exhibition as post-spectacular stage.
1. Exhibitions – Design. 2. Arts – Exhibitions. 3. Interprofessional relations.
I. Title
700.7’4–dc22

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Oudsten, Frank den.
space.time.narrative : the exhibition as post-spectacular stage /
by Frank den Oudsten.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Art – Exhibition techniques – Social aspects. 2. Exhibitions – Social aspects.
I. Title. II. Title: spacetimenarrative.
N4395.O93 2011
707.4--dc22 2010048103

ISBN 9780754676553 (hbk)

acknowledgements

This book is the sediment of a still ongoing research project, called narrative
environments, which started in the fall of 2005 with the organization of a
series of seminars on the art of exhibiting. As head of the scenographical
design course at the Zurich Academy of Art and Design in Switzerland, I
was in the position to initiate this seminal event, whose realization wouldn’t
have been possible without the unlimited help of my colleagues at the
time, Christoph Lang and Stefan Kreysler, not to mention the entire class
v
of graduate students who took care of the staging and technical support
of the four successive and now memorable Wednesday-evenings in the
lobby of the Museum Bellerive. That lobby had been put at our disposal
by its director Eva Afuhs, who generously welcomed the happening within
the venue of her museum. All of this, however, would have remained an
illusion without the financial help and intellectual support of Sigrid Schade,
head of the Institute for Cultural Studies in Zurich, which adopted all of
the hotel and travel expenses of our international guests and provided a
budget for me to visit these scenographers at their home bases and record
the marathon-interviews, which the reader may find in the middle section
of the present book. This stage of the interviews proved to be crucial as it
allowed me to extensively test my hypotheses in deep conversation with
the succesive experts of exhibition-making. I am in great debt of Herman
Kossmann, Mark de Jong, Dinah Casson, Roger Mann, François Confino,
Ruedi Baur, Barbara Holzer, Tristan Kobler and Uwe Brückner for their time
and their shared insights. This book couldn’t have been written as it is,
without their open-minded attitude. However, the research project would
never have turned into a book without a confident publisher and I owe a
great deal of gratitude to Dinah Casson, who kindly introduced me to Nigel
 space.time.narrative

Farrow of Ashgate Publishing Ltd, who made me feel at home right from
our first conversation. Nevertheless, Space Time Narrative was damned to
remain a ghost image without the financial coverage of all translations by
the Zurich University of the Arts, for which I am particularly grateful to its
president Hans Peter Schwarz at that time. It marked a phase of reflection
and writing from which I could personally and professionally benefit a great
deal. I enjoyed working with the two excellent translators, Alex Skinner
and Pieter Kiewiet de Jonge, who respectively turned the German and
Dutch original texts into the eloquent Englisch versions, which shape the
body of the book. Not after Abigail Grater thoroughly copy-edited all bits
and pieces of text and took care of the consistency of the whole, for which
I would like to express my deep appreciation. At the same time overall
visual consistency was achieved with the basic layout of the book by Pieter
Kiewiet de Jonge, who was so much more to me than a translator and
really appeared to be a great companian in the successive stages of this
expedition. Together we developed the concept of the cover, of which the
clarity expresses more than words. Another great companian was Valerie
Rose, my editor at Ashgate, whose optimism and unbreakable mood gave
vi serious business a touch of great joy. She, and her assistants Sarah Horsley
and Emma Gallon who excellently guided the book towards its stage of
final production, safeguarded the project from the pitfalls of any complex
production, which is driven beyond mainstream by the utopian ambition
of its author. I am eternally thankful for that, not to mention the fact that in
the end, all material landed on the desktop of Kirsten Weissenberg, who
dedicatedly turned the manuscript into a real book. And here again, I have
to express my gratitude to Sigrid Schade of the Institute of Cultural Studies,
as well as Ruedi Baur and Clemens Bellut of the Institute Design2Context,
both in Zurich, who financially supported the two picture-essays, which
seemed indispensable compositional components to me. Finally, I shall
always be grateful to my companian in life, Lenneke Büller, who generously
set me free from all sorts of duties in order to safeguard the mere process of
writing.

Frank den Oudsten

November 2010
contents
foreword: hans peter schwarz ix

introduction 1

essay 1: the battery 9

1.1 the renaissance of narrative space 9

1.2 the paradox of scenography 15
vii
1.3 the interval of the open arts 20
1.4 the blink of an eye 30
1.5 space, time and narrative 38
1.6 the dramaturgical hinge 51
1.7 the camera lucida of savage thought 59

picture-essay 1: parallax 83

interviews: dark matter 103

Introduction 104
Interview with Herman Kossmann and Mark de Jong 107
Interview with Dinah Casson and Roger Mann 151
Interview with François Confino 191
Interview with Ruedi Baur 225
Interview with Barbara Holzer and Tristan Kobler 273
Interview with Uwe R. Brückner 319
 space.time.narrative

picture-essay 2: afterimage 371

essay 2: the envelope 391

2.1 a space full of time 391

2.2 reframing scenography 407
2.3 media hot and cold 416
2.4 the architecture of everything 430
2.5 a northwest passage 440

select bibliography 461

biographical note 469

image credits 471

index 473

viii
foreword
Routes to a new scenography

‘People only go to the museum because they’ve been told that’s what a
civilised person has to do, not out of interest. People aren’t interested in art.
At any rate, ninety-nine per cent of humanity has absolutely no interest in
art.’1 While it is rather unlikely that Thomas Bernhard would ever have been
a friend of scenography, in his acerbic comedy Alte Meister the Austrian
writer nonetheless takes aim at the Achilles’ heel of the traditional culture
ix
industry of the 1960s. He accuses it of lacking a public with the self-under-
standing, formed in the nineteenth century and of educated middle-class
provenance, that still dominated the official institutions of cultural mediation
in the mid-twentieth century. However unintentionally, Bernhard provides us
here with an excellent explanation of why scenography is necessary as inter-
mediary between past and present, between the understanding of experts
and the general public, between everyday experience and the production
of visionary ideas.
In January 2010, Peter Greenaway gave a lecture entitled ‘Neue
Möglichkeiten: Film, Architektur, Szenographie’ (‘New possibilities: film,
architecture, scenography’) at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (Zurich
University of the Arts – ZHdK).2 He was asked, given his transdisciplinary
inclinations, which of the disciplines mentioned in the title of his lecture
was his first love. Instead of a response – or in response – he presented
the latest version of the interface for his mammoth project The Tulse Luper
Suitcases.
With the help of 92 suitcases, this multimedia installation presents the
adventurous biography of his (fictional) colleague Tulse Henry Purcell Luper.
What makes this installation, which extends into cyberspace, so special, is
 space.time.narrative

that it not only presents a biography but makes the action into a sensory
experience in both real and virtual media spaces.
In fact, for me the Tulse Luper project is a paradigm of what the new
potential of scenography might actually mean: the hybrid narrative envi-
ronment, which truly comes into its own only through a crossover between
virtual and real space, an environment that extends the boundaries of the
staged space into new realms, that imbues the idealised ‘white cube’ of the
exhibition designer with the potential for real experiences and shifts the
chronological filmic space into the analogue here and now.
It is of course rather more than a coincidence that I begin my fore-
word to Frank den Oudsten’s in-depth investigation of the scenographic
space by summoning as witness and protagonist none other than Peter
Greenaway, who started out as a painter, architect and graphic artist,
achieved worldwide fame as a filmmaker and, since presenting his project
‘100 Objects to Represent the World’ at the close of the twentieth century,
has provided the scenography of the twenty-first century with entirely new
perspectives. As an individual, and in his truly transdisciplinary oeuvre,
Greenaway unites all the key qualities I believe characterise the develop-
x ment of scenography – a term used for some time now to refer to the over-
arching disciplinary home of endeavours such as stage design and exhibi-
tion design, set design and urban design. These qualities are: an interest in
and capacity to engage in transdisciplinary projects; the unique collision of
time-based and space-oriented media; and the rediscovery of the narrative
potential of the architectural space.
At the beginning of the last century – perhaps as a necessary re-
sponse to the fictionality of the architectural concepts of space typical of
historicist academicism, which were felt to be aesthetically and morally
dishonest – various avant-garde figures of modernity emptied space entirely
of its narrative capacities, at least in their theoretical polemics. Towards the
end of the twentieth century, postmodern discourse – whose interest, if one
looked beneath the surface, clearly went beyond the merely visual potential
of the facade – certainly reinvested conceptions of space with a genuine
expressive power: ‘fiction not function’ was the rather simplistic motto.
Yet there was always something static about a notion of fictionality – rarely
expressed with much precision in postmodern theories – that was meant to
capture the tension between the haptic and visual reception of the archi-
tectural space, as Andrea Gleiniger shows in her study of the relationship
between fiction and narration:
 foreword

Postmodernity ‘developed’ concepts of fictionalisation in which, each

in its own way, history and narrative, as contextualising points of refer-
ence, were given architectural form and quite consciously staged. In
contrast to the rather static concept of fiction, that of narration opens
up a perspective on the processual dimension of narrative, a narrative
that becomes manifest not so much through images as architectur-
ally.3

In order to avoid rashly imposing the streaming dimension of narrative

(as opposed to fiction) and the concept of the narrative space (which was
developed out of a narratology heavily focused on the discipline of literary
studies) on the operation of the architectural space, Gleiniger introduces
the concept of the code, which points beyond the traditional boundaries of
pictorial and verbal languages:

So when people refer today to ‘storytelling with code’, they mean a

new quality of architectural narration, which no longer consists solely
of a semantic, metaphorical understanding of code, but of a physical,
operational field of sheer scenographic possibility as well.4 xi
What Gleiniger claims for the architectural space of the twenty-first-century
present, in other words a kind of operative narration, was already foreshad-
owed by the twentieth-century Raum der Gegenwart or Room of Today
planned by the Hungarian Bauhaus virtuoso László Moholy-Nagy in 1930
as an alternative to El Lissitzky’s Proun Rooms of the preceding decade,
though the tools available to him were primitive in comparison with con-
temporary media technologies. Both concepts aimed at a more complex
understanding and awareness of the space–time phenomenon, but their
difference lies primarily in the materials and media applied. With Proun,
Lissitzky still entirely relied on wood and paint as the components of his
construction; while Moholy-Nagy went considerably further in his his Raum
der Gegenwart by using film projections, photographs, kinetic walls and
the now famous light–space modulator. This not only brings out the highly
ambivalent, often covert relationship of the early-twentieth-century avant-
garde to the narrative capacity of the architectural space, but also lays bare,
at least conceptually, the major role played by the then new media in the
modern notion of time-based space. In his works of film theory, Gilles De-
leuze goes so far as to state that the century of space has been superseded
by the century of time.5 Over the course of the last century, through the
 space.time.narrative

collision with film and television, and later above all with virtual spaces, the
breakdown of the rock-steady relationship between space and time took on
quite new dimensions as a result of the lightning succession of perceptual
shifts caused by media technology, from expanded cinema through cyber-
space to the omnipresent World Wide Web.
As fine artists, architects, filmmakers and practice-oriented media
theorists worked together across disciplines, they developed concepts for a
new space–time continuum that began to place a new question mark over
Deleuze’s dictum that the age of space was giving way to the era of time
– people such as John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg, Coop Himmelb(l)au
and Archigram, Stan Vanderbeek and Peter Greenaway, referred to above,
and of course Marshall McLuhan were the key exponents of these concepts
in the early days, a period marked by the dictum of crossover, while latterly
the media artists and architects of the 1990s pioneered and cultivated inter-
active space as a streaming phenomenon.6 Tellingly, this entailed the revival
of the panorama – an aesthetic conception of space that had dominated
the notion of the narrative space before the triumph of film as an early mass
medium. Hence, leaving new media technologies aside for the moment, it
xii was always the oscillating relationship between space and time that deter-
mined the eloquence of the skene, of the site of dramatic action, whether in
the theatre, film or the exhibition.
However, within these different spheres of the artistic appropriation of
space, the need to refocus on the narrative capacities of space was empha-
sised to very different degrees. As early as the mid-twentieth century, the
exhibition space in particular, which began to suffer under the dictum of
the ‘white cube’, developed a need to be more than a mere casing for the
auratic artefact.7 In the context of world fairs, thematic exhibitions saw the
first attempts to intoxicate space by the use of a mix of time-based media.
The Pepsi-Cola pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, developed by engineer Billy
Klüver in collaboration with E.A.T., or the IBM pavilion in New York in 1964
by Charles and Ray Eames were milestones in an experimental period that
was ultimately central to the – highly ambivalent – notion of the (exhibition)
space as ‘event’.8
Making exhibitions no longer consisted merely of assembling, re-
searching and presenting historically striking, aesthetically accepted and
hopefully interesting artefacts, while generally leaving the hermeneutic
process entirely to the artefact’s auratic emanations – especially in exhibi-
tions of contemporary art – or relegating it to the interpretive diatribes of
ever-more-comprehensive information panels and exhibition catalogues.9
 foreword

In the field of the fine arts, it was the exhibition maker Harald Szeemann,
with his obsessive exhibition scenarios, who became the leading hero for us
young exhibition designers or museum curators. And with a critical take on
one of the quintessential visions of artistic modernity, he provided a tem-
plate for the new notion of a unity of time and space, or to be more precise
of analogue spatio-temporal experience, namely the Gesamtkunstwerk.10 In
his great Zurich exhibition of 1983 – ‘Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk’ or
‘The proclivity for the total work of art’ – he brought out both its potential
for aesthetic fascination as well as the risk of its being deployed to socially
deleterious ends.
Perspectives on the Gesamtkunstwerk were of course different in the
second half of the twentieth century than in the first half of the nineteenth
century, when the term was introduced to artistic discourse by Karl Friedrich
Eusebius Trahndorff in the second volume of his Ästhetik oder Lehre von
der Weltanschauung und Kunst from 1827, popularised by Richard Wagner
in his Zürcher Schriften zum Kunstwerk der Zukunft from 1849 and to some
extent internationalised shortly afterwards by Charles Baudelaire.
Now, in the 1970s and 1980s, it was of importance to the re-evalua-
tion of the Gesamtkunstwerk that it does not represent an object, however xiii
complex, but a process whose complexity varies according to its degree
of transdisciplinarity. Rather than its formal aesthetic aspects, the idea here
was to investigate the production of aesthetics and interrogate the total
artwork’s aesthetic reception in light of its impact on participants, as both
producers and recipients.
In the context of this commentary and in keeping with the new
relationship between space and time elaborated above, the relationship
between unity and fragment inherent in the Gesamtkunstwerk must be de-
scribed more as a constant oscillation than as a finely tuned balancing act.
And as Anke Finger highlights in her study Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Mod-
erne from 2006, the new pleasure taken in and the quest for the Gesamt-
kunstwerk is anchored in the very fact that

[it is] actually the degree of cooperation and dedication to the art-
work under construction that, even today, fascinates and captures our
attention. It is the quality and intensity with which the arts have fused
together and separated out again over the centuries, in parallel to the
diversification and development of the disciplines, regardless of the
marking of
 space.time.narrative

But another paradigm is also being expressed here, one that accom-
modated the new interest in the Gesamtkunstwerk: transdisciplinarity.
When Fluxus artist Dick Higgins published his Statement on
Intermedia in 1966, the ecstatic reunion of the arts under the influence of
happenings, pop, performance and action art was at its peak.12 Open-air
concerts, spectacular quadrophonic environments and mass happenings
were the settings for this exhilarating multimedia frenzy, which, despite
internal resistance, also impacted on the established institutions of theatre,
concert and exhibition.
But critics, trained to remember Guy Debord’s warnings about the
‘society of the spectacle’, were soon to emerge from within, reminding us
of the dangers of unthinking attempts to realise dreams of synaesthetic fu-
sion.13 As Peter Weibel, for a time the head of Ars Electronica, the outstand-
ing festival of media art, asserts:

An emphatic, ecstatic fusion of the arts, pounding simultaneously on

every sensory organ, is […] an illusory and false act of reconciliation.
In fact, art’s true task should be to develop subversive strategies of
xiv difference, absence, unsealing and dissolution, in order to recognise
the things of which society is unconscious, to see through the masks
of the social text and media dramatisation.14

I know from my own experience – including through supervising the scenog-

raphy for the ‘Wissen–Information–Kommunikation’ (knowledge, informa-
tion, communication) pavilion at EXPO 2000 in Hanover, realised by a group
of artists around German ‘machine performer’ Olaf Arndt – the addictive
qualities of the spectacle, in which the visionary organisation of a major
event can all too easily become bogged down. Yet, at least since they have
expressed their cultural ambitions through so-called theme parks, the expos
have been extremely important in sounding out the possibilities of a new
scenography.
However, in the face of justifiable suspicions about the idea that
intermedia or interdisciplinary media linkage is always the best way to
proceed, a process was soon set in motion that was intended to expand
on an intermediality or interdisciplinarity of merely aesthetic significance to
produce a socially effective transdisciplinarity. In the 1960s and 1970s, with
their faith in planning and enthusiasm for participation, there came the first
interdisciplinary attempts, beyond the arts, to relate disciplinary fields more
strongly to one another. This was especially true of those fields intended
 foreword

to reconstitute public life: urban and regional planning, social policy and
technological innovation and, following the first oil crisis, resource planning.
Later, as a product of the risk society of the 1980s and 1990s, the fields of
ecology, technology assessment and sustainability were most vigorous. Now
it’s globalisation. It was the emotionally charged slogans of natural scientific
and, with some reluctance, humanities research networks, that took on the
great questions of the day with transdisciplinary élan – with no lack of visible
successes. The arts – with the above-mentioned intermedia exceptions,
which had in turn run out of steam towards the end of the 1970s – remained
strangely uninvolved, stuck in escapist and later postmodern marginality.
Yet what used to be merely the fine arts can potentially make an
enormous contribution to the highly complex challenges thrown up by a
globalised communication-based society. The challenges of globalisation
affect the very heart of the aesthetic experience. These challenges arise
from intercultural structures of perception, they reconstitute the problem of
gender, and their aim is the sensory appropriation of the world – deploying
all the senses – in both a negative and positive sense. Global communica-
tion technologies entail both the opportunity to extend our sensory powers
so that we can engage in communicative action, and the risk of reducing xv
sensory experience to passive consumption, the standard mode of behav-
iour in Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’. And in this crisis situation we
once again need to cross the dividing lines between the artistic disciplines
and between the arts, sciences and economy: in the transdisciplinary atelier
of today.
Attempts to imagine a new space–time continuum through innova-
tions in media technology, the rediscovery of intermedia crossover in the
more respectable guise of transdisciplinarity and, not least, the dangers of a
‘society of the spectacle’ as attested by the Situationists, constitute the sys-
tem of coordinates underlying the notion of a new scenography, which has
been tried out for real in various exhibition and museum projects, though at
the time in experimental form.15
The key characteristic of the practical museum setting in which I had
the opportunity to carry out scenographic innovations in collaboration with
Frank den Oudsten and other partners – the Deutsches Architekturmuseum
in Frankfurt am Main in the 1980s and the Medienmuseum in the Karlsruhe
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in the 1990s – was the need to
begin by virtually reinventing, or at least mediatising, the various fields of
interest; in other words, tailoring them to the museum space. I happened
to be in a position to make the most of this opportunity as curator of the
 space.time.narrative

former and founding director of the latter, by way of numerous temporary

and permanent exhibitions. And from the furnace of these endeavours,
whose dynamics certainly resulted in part from the kind of productive failure
that has always accompanied pioneering efforts, there emerged the basic
elements of a course of study originally conceived as ‘Museum Studies’
by Frank den Oudsten. Adapted to the university setting as ‘Scenographi-
cal Design’, this was then introduced to the curricula of the Hochschule für
Gestaltung und Kunst (School of Art and Design) in Zurich early in the first
decade of the new millennium. On the basis of a very similar, quasi-sce-
nographic framework, I was later able to merge the local departments of
design, art, music, film, dance and theatre to create a genuine ‘university’ of
the arts in 2007: the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.
In the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM), which owed its exis-
tence to the massive museum building boom that gripped West Germany
in particular in the 1980s, the agenda was dominated by so-called ‘multivi-
sions’. This tallied with the technological capacities of a period in which
computers had certainly learnt to produce images, but of a generally poor
quality, and film/video and slides were the key visually compelling exhibition
xvi media. As audiovisual projects enriched by sound and language – awkward
media for exhibitions which achieve their impact primarily through visual
means – these multimedia installations, which later grew into genuine total
art works in the early-1990s exhibition ‘In der Tradition der Moderne’, not
only produced an impressive reconstruction of historical realities.16 They
also offered a wide range of routes to intellectual and sensory engagement
with the exhibited artefacts and introduced the kind of authentic experience
that brought museums and exhibitions in the 1980s visitor numbers that
had been considered impossible in an age dominated by the mass medium
of television. The visit to the exhibition became the exhibition experience,
and the exhibitions produced by DAM, staged in such places as the Centre
Pompidou in Paris and national museums of architecture from Barcelona to
Tokyo, served as models for the presentation of architecture in museums,
actually the medium most resistant to exhibition.
While the scenography of architectural exhibitions was generally
a matter of temporary displays, an entirely new conception of space was
– and indeed had to be – created for the permanent exhibition of the
Karlsruhe Medienmuseum, as the interactive, digital media art installations
presented there would have been out of place in the classical ‘white cube’
(or its inversion, the ‘black box’) of the twentieth-century museum. Like the
Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) as a whole, its ‘showcase’,
 foreword

the first museum for interactive media art, was not reacting to the twentieth
century but anticipating the twenty-first. And as we have said, the intention
was for it to do so not only in its artworks, but also in its scenography.
In the early 1990s, designing an entirely new type of museum meant
first coming to terms with the discourse on the alleged ‘museumisation’
of (post)modern society. During the 1980s, this discourse was carried on
beyond museological circles and their associated theorists. In 1978, Jean
Baudrillard had already pithily remarked that ‘the museum now exists every-
where as a dimension of life’.17 At the same time he laid bare, on a theoreti-
cal level at least, the dangers of dissolving the boundary lines traditionally
drawn around the museum vis-à-vis the society of the spectacle, though his
concept of the museum was very broadly conceived. And there was good
reason for his concern. Theodor W. Adorno began a 1953 essay entitled
‘Valéry Proust Museum’ with the observation that the expression ‘museal’
in German had an ‘unpleasant hue’. Here he was alluding to the generally
negatively charged relationship between avant-garde and museum evinced
in numerous impressive polemics from Herder through Romanticism to the
Museumsstürmer of Modernism.18
When Henri-Pierre Jeudy published his study Die Welt als Museum xvii
in 1987, this relationship had changed markedly.19 Large swathes of the
public had reacted to the intimidating complexity of the risk society, which
Ulrich Beck sees beginning with a second modernity in the late 1970s,20 by
developing a consciousness of history, albeit a rather imprecise one. The
great stagings and fictionalisations of historical and art-historical events at-
tracted hundreds of thousands of visitors, and contemporary art celebrated
its Olympiad at the Documenta exhibitions in Kassel. ‘History on its own was
contemporary (again)’, and the revival of historicism kicked off a frenzy of
nostalgia at the aesthetically sensitive and dominant architectural projects,
as well as in urban planning and the mass media.21 The number of people
in Germany visiting museums matched the entire population of the old
West Germany; in other words, statistically, every West German visited one
exhibition a year. It is in this social milieu, which was not limited to Germany
but was particularly well developed there, that Jeudy begins his diagnosis.
Much like Baudrillard’s thesis of the duplication of the world through simula-
tion, he asserts that history is being duplicated through museophilia: ‘Be-
yond the system of remembering, another reading of what has happened to
modern societies is emerging – a second reading of a collective and public
character.’22
It was above all two key motifs from Jeudy’s at times rather cryptic
 space.time.narrative

critique of museumisation that influenced the concept of the Karlsruhe Me-

dienmuseum. Firstly, his deconstruction of the staging of historical or artistic
realities so popular in the museum of the 1980s. He points out how these
construct a fictitious context that culturalises history as the ‘theatre of re-
membering’, destroying it – or ‘fossilising’ it, as he puts it – as a productive
legacy for the individual. The second key influence is Jeudy’s compelling
examination of how the new apparatus of media and communication tech-
nology increasingly risks the ‘disinheritance’ of the museum, most notably
through the comprehensive museumisation of its history, present and future.
So the aim of a truly novel conception of the museum, in both curato-
rial and scenographic terms, had to be to provide a field of experimentation
for a public that is critical (of media), a field of experimentation that enables
the visitor, as interactive participant, to take part in that process of collec-
tive remembering that re-establishes history as a living legacy and opens up
the arts to a process of (inter)active decoding by visitors. And this required
novel media strategies. As I noted in 1998, only if we go beyond the mere
buying-in of ready-made media packages developed by the multimedia
industry and come up with museum-specific concepts for the presentation
xviii of interactive media artworks or interactive information systems can we
ensure that the visitor, rather than degenerating into a pure user, actively co-
creates the specific medium of the museum.23 We may have overstated our
case a bit back then. But in any event, in its initial stages – which as with any
decent reform project seems to be limited to around a decade – the media
museum was an appealing place for a host of visitors to grapple with the
new, and not only within the sphere of the digital.
The scope for experiments in museum practice is of course always
contaminated to some extent by that ‘scorn of implementation’ which Swiss-
German author Max Frisch ascribed to every attempt to give practical form
to the conceptual.24 So it was fortunate indeed that the experiences gained
from the practice of making exhibitions and museums found expression in
the curriculum of an art school, which was subject to major reforms at the
time. Indeed, the scenographic impulse, with its border-crossing ambitions,
may even be seen as the dynamic centrepoint around which those fields
of art taught, explored experimentally and produced at the Zürcher Hoch-
schule der Künste revolved. For the ‘house of art’ established in Zurich in
the first decade of the new century is meant to be an open house with lofty
rooms, enabling the development of that unique sense of individual artistic
purpose through which virtuoso artists mature. But above all, it has gener-
ously apportioned connecting routes and points of contact where artists
 foreword

come together as researchers, learners and teachers. Here they may col-
lectively bring their particular capacities, their particular engagement, their
disciplinary dynamism as well as their transdisciplinary curiosity to projects
which lead to practicable visions of the future and necessarily always extend
beyond the arts. From this point of view, this house of art has a good deal in
common with the vision of just what a new, other scenography might offer,
to which the contributions in this volume bear such striking witness.
Increasing numbers of European art schools have introduced variously
labelled courses of ‘new’ scenography in recent years. This demonstrates
the growing importance of this form of cultural mediation – which addresses
both the sensory and intellectual receptors – to a society which wants and
needs to face up to the consequences of the global reduction in autono-
mous cultural expression. But it also points to the fact that what I here call
‘new scenography’ has long since attained classical status. Intensive and
comprehensive investigation of its methods, results and the motives of its
leading lights are overdue. This publication asks the right questions and
provides some important answers.

xix
Hans Peter Schwarz
 space.time.narrative

Notes

1 See: Thomas Bernhard, Old Masters: A Comedy, University of Chicago Press, 1992,
pp 1–4. Bernhard (1931–1989) was an Austrian playwright and novelist, often criticised
for his provocative texts. Alte Meister: Komödie was published in German in 1985 and
translated into English by Ewald Osers in 1989. Its opening is situated in the Kunsthis-
torisches Museum (Museum of Art History), where the cynical art critic Herr Reger and
the attendant, former policeman Irrsigler keep a conversation going for more than 30
years, in which Tintoretto’s White Bearded Man and the Bordone Room where it hangs
play a central role. The relationship between the two protagonists is that Irrsigler is the
mouthpiece of Reger, and every sentence Reger ever spoke – like the opening quote
here – has been appropriated by Irrsigler word for word.
2 Peter Greenaway (b.1942) is a British artist and film director. For his Tulse Luper Suit-
cases project, see: http://www.tulselupernetwork.com/basis.html. See also: essay 1,
‘The Battery’, note 6, p.67.
3 Andrea Gleiniger, ‘Stil oder Code – Von den Paradigmen des architektonischen
Ausdrucks im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung’, in: Andrea Gleiniger and Georg Vrachliotis
(eds), Code: Narration und Operation, ‘Context Architektur: Architektonische Grund-
begriffe zwischen Kunst und Technologie’, vol.4, Basel–Boston, 2010; translation: Alex
Skinner. Andrea Gleiniger (b.1957) is a German architectural historian, specialising in
the relationship of modern architecture and new media.
4 Ibid.
xx 5 See: Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, Columbia University Press, New York,
1994. For a profound analysis of the streaming film medium, see Deleuze’s essays
‘Cinema 1: the movement-image’ and ‘Cinema 2: the time-image’, both published
in English by the University of Minnesota Press, in 1986 and 1989. For a reflection on
these essays, see also: Ronald Bogue, Deleuze on Cinema, Routledge, London–New
York, 2003.
6 John Cage (1912–1992) was an American composer, Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008)
an American artist, Coop Himmelb(l)au an architectural design firm founded in 1968 in
Vienna, Austria, and Archigram a British avant-garde group of architects, based at the
Architectural Association in London in the 1960s. Stan Vanderbeek (1927–1984) was
an American experimental filmmaker. Cage, Rauschenberg and Vanderbeek met at the
famous Black Mountain College in Asheville, North Carolina, USA, in the 1950s, where
the former was teaching and the latter two were students.
7 ‘Auratic’ relates to the notion of the aura. See the Introduction, note 3; see also the
interview with Uwe Brückner, note 41, p.367.
8 Billy Klüver (1927–2004) was a Swedish engineer who worked on laser systems for Bell
Laboratories in the 1950s and founded the now legendary E.A.T. (Experiments in Art
and Technology) in 1966. E.A.T. encouraged the collaboration of artists and engineers
in interdisciplinary technology-based art projects. His efforts to bridge the divide
between the arts and the sciences was driven by a desire to nurture the collaborative
spirit through which the scientist would increasingly engage with issues critical to soci-
ety and culture. Charles (1907–1978) and Ray (1912–1988) Eames were American archi-
tects and artists, who are famous for their industrial and modernist furniture design.
 foreword

9 ‘Hermeneutics’ is the study of interpretation theory, and can be either the art of inter-
pretation, or the theory and practice of interpretation. For ‘auratic’, see note 4 above.
10 For Gesamtkunstwerk and Gesamtwerk, see the interview with Ruedi Baur, note 51,
p.270.
11 Anke Finger, Das Gesamtkunstwerk der Moderne, Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, Göt-
tingen, 2006, p.12; translation: Alex Skinner.
12 Dick Higgins (1938–1998) was a British composer and poet who studied composition
with John Cage in New York and became part of a neo-Dadaist network of artists, com-
posers and designers in the 1960s, known as Fluxus. Fluxus owes its interdisciplinary
profile largely to the famous ‘Statement on Intermedia’, written by Higgins on 3 August
1966 and published in: Wolf Vostell (ed.), Dé-coll/age, no.6, Typos Verlag, Frankfurt am
Main and Something Else Press, New York, July 1967. See also: http://www.artpool.
hu/Fluxus/Higgins/intermedia2.html.
13 Guy Debord (1931–1994) was a French critic, filmmaker and leading figure of the Inter-
national Situationists. The first chapter, ‘Separation Perfected’, of his 1967 publication
The Society of the Spectacle, contains the fundamental assertions on which much of
Debord’s influence rests, and the very first thesis – that ‘the whole of life of those soci-
eties in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense
accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly lived has become mere repre-
sentation’ – establishes Debord’s judgment. In thesis 2 and 3, he warns of a ‘pseudo-
world’, ‘an object of mere contemplation [...] where the liar has lied to himself’, a condi-
tion which turns it into an ‘instrument of unification’ of a society in need of control.
Thesis 4 offers the fundamental shift of insight, that ‘the spectacle is not a collection of xxi
images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images’. See: Guy Debord,
The Society of the Spectacle, Zone Books, New York, 2004.
14 Gottfried Hattinger, introduction to Ars Electronica, exhibition catalogue, Linz, 1988,
n.p..
15 For the Situationists, see: Stefan Zweifel et al., In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur
Igni, JRP-Ringier Kunstverlag, Zurich, 2006.
16 The exhibition ‘In der Tradition der Moderne: 100 Jahre IG Metall’ was a gift of the city
of Frankfurt am Main to the metalworkers’ union IG Metall on the occasion of its 100th
anniversary in 1991. The exhibition was first shown in Frankfurt am Main (2 June to 23
August 1992), then travelled to Stuttgart (3 October to 15 November 1992) and ended
in Berlin (19 December 1992 to 14 February 1993).
17 Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was a French sociologist, cultural critic and philosopher,
known for his theory of the ‘simulacrum’, which is questioning the fundamentals of
our knowledge of the world, focused on the role mass media play in our collective
imagination. In Baudrillard’s view, our cult(ure) of the image creates an illusion of reality,
which is diametrically opposed to the true reality of our life. The museum, or rather the
tendency of museumisation, is part of this illusion. See: Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and
Simulation, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1996. See also: Wolfgang Zacha-
rias (ed.), Zeitphänomen Musealisierung: Das Verschwinden der Gegenwart und die
Konstruktion der Erinnerung, Klartext Verlag, Essen, 1990. And: Eva Sturm, Konservi-
erte Welt: Museum und Musealisierung, Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 1991.
18 Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) was a German philosopher, a poet and a
central figure in a unifying Germany in the age of Enlightenment. Romanticism origi-
 space.time.narrative

nated in the second half of the eighteenth century in Western Europe and may partly
be understood as a revolt against the scientific rationalisation of nature, which was
embodied in the Industrial Revolution. Visual arts, music and literature in the Romantic
Era therefore expressed a profound passion for natural history and the natural environ-
ment. ‘Museumsstürmer’ could be understood as a special breed of iconoclasts, like
Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) for instance, who declared found objects (objets trouvés)
to be pieces of ‘readymade’ art: Duchamp signed a urinal with the name ‘R. Mutt’ and
labelled it Fountain (1917), a statement which broke through all the conventions of the
classical bourgeois art museum.
19 Henri-Pierre Jeudy is a French sociologist, writer and researcher at the Centre National
de la Recherche Scientifique [CNRS] in Paris. Jeudy teaches Aesthetics at the École
d’Architecture in Paris and has written numerous essays on panic, fear, catastrophes,
collective memory and cultural heritage. See: Henri-Pierre Jeudy: ‘Der Komplex der
Museophilie’ (‘Le complex muséophile’), in Wolfgang Zacharias (ed.), Zeitphänomen
Musealisierung: Das Verschwinden der Gegenwart und die Konstruktion der Erinner-
ung, Klartext Verlag, Essen, 1990, pp 115–121.
20 See Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Suhrkamp,
Frankfurt am Main, 1986. Ulrich Beck (b.1944) is a German sociologist, well known for
his 1986 essay on the Risikogesellschaft (risk society), which Beck defines as a system-
atic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisa-
tion itself. See: Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publishers,
London, 1992.
xxii 21 The postulate ‘history on its own is contemporary’ refers to the nineteenth-century
German painter of history Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805–1874) and was given new life
as the title of an influential publication on historicism, which reflected the major theses
of the so-called critical art history of the 1970s. ‘History on its own is contemporary’
became the battle cry in the agitated debates for and against Post-Modernist design
and Post-Modernist architecture of the 1980s. See: Michael Brix and Monika Steinhaus-
er (eds), Geschichte allein ist zeitgemäss: Historismus in Deutschland, Anabas Verlag,
Lahn-Giessen, 1978.
22 Henri-Pierre Jeudy, ‘Der Komplex der Museophilie’, in: Wolfgang Zacharias (ed.), Zeit-
phänomen Musealisierung, Klartext, Essen, 1990, pp 115 ff.
23 Hans Peter Schwarz, ‘Vom Besucher zum User’, in: Harald Krämer and Hartmut John,
Zum Bedeutungswandel der Kunstmuseen, Verlag für moderne Kunst, Nuremberg,
1998, p.101.
24 Max Frisch (1911–1991) was a Swiss architect, playwright and novelist. In 1954 he
published his first novel I’m Not Stiller, which pivoted around the problem of identity,
alienation and individual options of self-realisation, as did his 1957 tale Homo Faber
and his 1964 novel Wilderness of Mirrors / Gantenbein.
introduction
The theatre and the exhibition both construct an island of the extraordi-
nary, a situation where physical presence is essential. For that reason, both
require moving to a place that has been charged with meaning for a specific
occasion. This loop, away from ordinary life and back again, full of anticipa-
tion, transects a locus of discourse and constitutes the fundamental condi-
tion of narrative space. The theatre and the exhibition invite the visitor to
their worlds. The Internet and television bring the world to his or her home.
The distinction is a matter of who or what is moving. Both the Internet and
1
television dwell on the periphery of the commonplace. The theatre and the
exhibition derive their transformative potential from the intensity of a well-
considered HERE in which two movements join, a physical and a mental
one. This is what Bazon Brock was referring to when he spoke of the unity
of ‘course’ and ‘discourse’: on the waves of the course, the mind focuses on
the discourse.1 Peripatetically. Herein lies the difference: the Internet and
television deconstruct totality into singularities, whereas the theatre and the
exhibition create a totality out of singularities. In the fabric of experience the
Internet and television mark an end point, while the theatre and the exhibi-
tion establish a crossing.
The theatre and the exhibition are poetic places in the landscape
of our culture. They are the refuges for our words and objects; the forums
where memory and imagination form a critical alliance and put society in
its place. This alliance is grounded in language, in the interpretation that
encodes the words and objects on stage, making them readable and un-
derstandable for the audience. The theatre and the exhibition bring forth
unity, for as long as it lasts. During this interval, time contracts and past and
present merge into a NOW, the metaphysics of which will be the subject of
our present inquiry. This NOW is a place of a narrative nature. The theatre
 space.time.narrative

and the exhibition are the mirror of society. Their history is tinged with ten-
dencies of the informal, the anarchic and the discursive, although accents
of the institutional, the propagandist and the mercantile have never been
foreign to it. The theatre and the exhibition share a common rudimentary
form which had its origins on the marketplace of old, where the convincing
merchant would display his articles with just that extra bit of flair, and the
orator or the comedian would get on his soapbox and find himself a tempo-
rary stage. The action of each of these ‘performers’ was ephemeral. But as
everything revolved around the decisive attention of the audience, just as it
does today, the intensity of the message became the foremost subject mat-
ter of a mise en scène, to be perfected in the course of time both in form
and in content.
What I find interesting is what happens in that empty square, when,
with minimal ‘scenography’, the merchant or the orator, the poet or the
comedian presents his articles, thoughts, poems or jokes through words and
gestures. In the topology of the square we witness the formation of a centre
of gravity and a condensation of attention, which, for the time being, trans-
forms the identity of the place. The well-geared ‘performance’ brings things
2 and thoughts, poems and jokes to life in such a way that a field of intensity
emerges in which the audience is seduced or persuaded. The keyword here
is attention. Immersion. Amid the ephemeral, a narrative space comes into
being, either as a play or as an exhibition, depending on the circumstances.
Despite its rudimentary characteristics, the dynamic process of seduction
and persuasion is essentially just as complex as any form of high-tech spec-
tacle in multimedia opera production today. The only difference is that the
scene of the action has moved from the platea of the town square to the
programmed, formal locus of the theatre.2 In both cases, however, every-
thing revolves around the potential and the poetics of the place. Now, if the
historical ‘happening’ of the market square is indeed the origin of both the
theatre and the exhibition, then the subsequent history of their respective
institutionalisations makes clear just how fundamental the chasm between
thing and thought has become in the development of our culture, and how
with time two specialisations or playgrounds have developed which, despite
their common historical contexts, have failed to manifest most of their inter-
relations. The one playground became the principle domain of the auratic
word, the other the domain of the auratic artefact of the museum.3
It is interesting to note that with the increasing demand for trans-
parency, coherence and context the institutional demarcation has become
more and more diffuse since the end of the 1960s. As the relation between
 introduction

thing and thought transformed, a different view of reality emerged in which

context and coherence had a different, more critical emphasis. Urged on by
the modernist avant-garde for whom transdisciplinarity meant an act of radi-
cal curiosity, at a time when Dada and Duchamp, Artaud and Meyerhold,
Lissitzky and Kiesler were playing both grounds as a matter of course, John
Cage’s post-war ‘chance operations’, Alan Kaprow’s ‘happenings’, Fluxus’
‘post-dadaist actions’, the Situationist ‘interventions’, Robert Wilson’s ‘the-
atre of visuals’, The Living Theatre’s ‘rituals’, The Wooster Group’s ‘narrative
complexity’, the Needcompany’s ‘object theatre’, the Station House Opera’s
‘machinism’ and Jan Fabre’s ‘harshness’ have bridged the gap between text
and thing, drama and object, performance and installation, the ordinary and
the obscene, the trivial and the extraordinary, and in doing so have brought
the stages of the theatre and the exhibition closer together. To be sure,
the other side also sought rapprochement. Without the ‘Dylaby’ exhibition
(1962) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Harald Szeemann’s ‘When
Attitudes Become Form’ (1969) and Documenta V (1972) in Bern and Kas-
sel, Jean Leering’s experimental exhibitions ‘Bouwen 20/40’ (1971) and ‘De
Straat’ (1972) in Eindhoven, Jean-François Lyotard’s ‘Les Immatériaux’ (1985)
in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Jan Hoet’s ‘Chambres d’amis’ (1986) in 3
Ghent, François Confino’s ‘Cités-Cinés’ (1987) in Paris, and Peter Green-
away’s ‘The Physical Self’ (1991) in Rotterdam – to name but a few – the
stage of the exhibition wouldn’t have been ready to accommodate far-
reaching interpretations and the exhibition maker wouldn’t have been able
to appreciate the growing significance of the exhibition format within the
overall cultural discourse. Still, the situation of the exhibition stage is radi-
cally different from the theatre.
While presentations with performative aspects have become estab-
lished in museums, objects and installations as supports of the narrative
have become accepted as parts of the hierarchy of signs besides the spoken
word in the theatre. This tendency, of the decline of text as the dominant
propelling force of drama in favour of a richer tapestry of dramatic signs,
has been coined ‘postdramatic theatre’ by Hans-Thies Lehmann.4 It refers to
a type of theatre that uses a multitude of languages and signs to address an
open field of associations and interpretations in a parallel and synchronous
fashion. Lehmann explores the ‘aesthetic logic’ of this development in which
the text as the main establishing agent of dramaturgical unity gives way to
semantics that are open to multiple interpretations. This turning point in the
practice of performance, sometimes called the ‘Copernican turn’ of the the-
atre, occurs in the practice of exhibition making as well, but in the opposite
 space.time.narrative

direction.5 While in the theatre the dictate of the text is being replaced by a
semantic experiment by all manner of means, the narrative space of the ex-
hibition calls for a propelling tale to enhance the coherence and the identity
of the place.
After and alongside the exposition-spectacle, which gratifies the
commercial aims of the entertainment industry, we see how, in the imagina-
tion of designers especially, another type of exhibition makes its entry. Not
because enough is enough. On the contrary, because it isn’t enough. Be-
cause the spectacle fails to differentiate a subject according to content and
only scratches the surface of form. Because it is so loud that it is incapable
of any subtle exploration of what is other, unknown or hidden.
As economic demand cannot provide valid criteria for the maker or the
medium in the end, the present book will focus on alternative dimensions
of exhibition making, beyond spectacle. space time narrative is about the
‘conceptual logic’ of the ‘post-spectacular’ exhibition. The post-spectacu-
lar exhibition deals with the relations between things rather than with the
things themselves. The fabric of these relations and associations forms a
narrative potential that structures the interdependence of things from a
4 withdrawn position – backstage – that was once the skene: the hidden ref-
uge from where the dynamics of the performance were driven.
Faced with the apparent cultural isolation in which many exhibition design-
ers were operating, exhibition architect Herman Kossmann and I decided to
survey the above-mentioned defects and fuzzy outlines of the profession in
a kind of roundabout way in the course of 2005.6 The initiative paid off right
away because of the overwhelming response of the professional community,
which was simply: the wish to take part in the discussion. To meet this need,
we decided on a long-term inquiry with an open approach. The substantive
basis for the project was to be the assumption of regarding both the theatre
and the exhibition as ‘narrative environments’. The range of this approach
allowed an analysis of the exhibition as a stage with a dramatic charge, and,
conversely, an analysis of the theatre stage as a place with the potential to
exhibit. These two dimensions of ‘showing’, of the theatre and the exhibi-
tion, of the world of words and the world of things, of the performative and
the installational moments in art, were considered as two sides of the same
coin.
We called the project ‘Narrative Environments’ to stress univocally the
connecting aspects of our interpretation, the identity and the characteristics
of the place, the narrative nucleus as a propellent for materialisation, and
the dramaturgy of the assignment. By stressing these aspects we also made
 introduction

clear that the point wasn’t about design exclusively and that we intended to
address the exhibition fully as a format involving a complex unity of content
and form.
We were well aware that the matter had been raised before. Take the
experimental expositions in the Centre Pompidou that won Jean Dethier
an award in 1988. Or the Frans Hals Award for exhibition design that was
established by the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem (1988). Or the debates,
the publications and the workshops initiated by the Camini Foundation in
Amsterdam (1989–90). Or the ‘Design Ausstellen / Ausstellungsdesign’ sym-
posium organised by the Institut für Neue Technische Form in Darmstadt
(1995). Or the World Fair in Hanover in 2000, where project manager Martin
Roth introduced the term Szenographie. Or the Swiss exhibition Expo.02,
where every exhibition maker was by now presenting himself as Szenograf
and the notion of arteplage became the denominator for a new encompass-
ing stage for the theatre, the exhibition, performance and installation.
But however valuable and significant the initiatives may have been at the
time, they failed to have a lasting impact for several reasons. Firstly, they
remained too isolated in time and space to be truly effective. Also, the
initiatives lacked sufficient theoretical basis. Moreover, the publications 5
on the subject remained one-sided for the most part, albeit with a more
up-to-date terminology, because they concentrated exclusively on matters
of design and the material aspects of the exhibition. Finally, the numerous
symposiums that universities and schools started devoting to the subject
kept the fundamental dichotomy between the curator and the designer
intact, even though the profession has come to accept the richer concept
of ‘scenography’ in the German-speaking regions. The notions of ‘scenog-
raphy’ and ‘dramaturgy’, both originating from the language of the theatre,
have certainly brought about a turn in the discussion, but it remains to be
seen if these neologisms (coined mainly by designers) will yield any new,
more fundamental positions in the integral practice of both the curator and
the scenographer.
The very first public manifestation of the ‘Narrative Environments’
project presented four seminars in the Museum Bellerive in Zurich in early
2006. These were organised and staged by professors and students of the
Scenographical Design department of the then Hochschule für Gestaltung
und Kunst (later to become the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste – Zurich
University of the Arts). As a homage to the trailblazing work in the field of
museum presentation of Jean Leering, director of the Van Abbemuseum in
Eindhoven in the Netherlands, we named the series ‘Museum in Motion’,
 space.time.narrative

after the publication of the same name edited by Carel Blotkamp and pub-
lished in 1979, in which Leering’s thought is central.7
The Zurich seminars had a consistent set-up of one public double
presentation on Wednesday night followed by a closed colloquium with
the students the next morning. Eight design studios were invited in pairs
to present their views and works in the context of their profession and to
exchange with the students afterwards. In the course of the seminar the fol-
lowing designers made their appearance: Uwe Brückner of Atelier Brückner
in Stuttgart and François Confino from Lussan; Xavier Bellprat of Bellprat
Associates in Winterthur and Frans Bevers of Opera Ontwerpers in Am-
sterdam; Ruedi Baur of Intégral in Paris and Tristan Kobler of Holzer Kobler
Architekturen in Zurich; Dinah Casson and Roger Mann of CassonMann De-
signers in London; and Herman Kossmann and Mark de Jong of Kossmann.
dejong exhibition architects in Amsterdam.8
The meetings in Museum Bellerive drew large audiences and pointed
to the idea of forming an international network of professional designers.
Locally, the western European situation of exhibition making had been
mapped to some extent, but the designers themselves hadn’t actually met
6 except for the occasional pairs. So the next step had to be a true meeting,
a closed-circle conference tailored to explore fully the issues that had been
touched on only briefly at the seminars.
The expert meeting took place on 2 and 3 June 2006 in Amster-
dam, in the new Dutch centre for design, fashion and creation – Platform21
– where the panoramic room on the top floor had been staged with projec-
tions of the works of the participants for the occasion.9 We had 24 hours to
survey the burning issues of the practice of design and to tackle the ques-
tion of how we could perpetuate the discussion among professionals and
how, in what format, we could effectively report on the results and the pro-
cess. The initial suggestion, to publish a ‘book of essentials’ together, was
abandoned almost straight away. The need for flexible exchange, recording
and continuity pointed to a magazine that would have both the substance
of a book and the versatility of a journal.10
As the feasibility of the undertaking appeared uncertain, by the end
of 2006, I decided to develop the theoretical ambitions of the ‘Narrative
Environments’ project in the form of an open-structured book that would
explore narrative space in a varied and associative way on two stages: one
‘abstract’ stage which would demarcate the first intellectual ground formed
by the conceptual triangle of space, time and narrative; and one superim-
posed ‘concrete’ stage demarcating the second intellectual arena formed by
 introduction

the perceptual triangle of potential, process and packaging. I imagined the

relation between the concrete stage and the abstract stage to be as a surfer
is to a wave. The stage of the surfboard rides the surface of the wave for as
long as it lasts. The surfer looks for an elegant trajectory and his course is
the integral of a series of free positions. It is like that: space time narrative is
an open search for a theory of narrative space in which the theatre and the
exhibition, performance and installation, landscape and urban environment,
physics and metaphysics, the arts and the theory of media are the guiding
lines along which the discourse unfolds. This discourse is transdisciplinary
and covers all categories related in any way to the concept, the execution or
the use of narrative space.
In developing the book I used the metaphor of the stage. I imagined
a stage on which my own guiding motives would figure as the ‘conceptual
personae’ of narrative space.11 These ‘extras’ have a present or past back-
ground in the arts or the sciences, in theory or practice, in the theatre or the
exhibition. They are present, but passively so. I enter the stage and move
my own protagonists into the ever-changing constellations of a dialogue
that they would probably never have held themselves. The fabric of this
exchange of thoughts forms a libretto for a theory of narrative space, solidi- 7
fied in two essays: ‘The Battery’ and ‘The Envelope’. These two essays, the
one about the potential of narrative space and the other about its pack-
aging, flank a collection of six in-depth interviews with leading European
scenographers, or exhibition designers, or exhibition architects, or créateurs
d’exposition, or Autoren-Gestalter, or however it is that they prefer to pres-
ent themselves. They are all designers with a common preference for the re-
lationship between things as opposed to the things themselves. This section
of the book is entitled ‘Dark Matter’. It is dark, because in the very shadows
of everyday practice a terra incognita of research and development is being
explored. The interviews ground the essays in practice and they enabled me
to test the validity of their initial hypotheses. The border region between
the essays and the interviews is occupied by two picture essays –
‘Parallax’ and ‘Afterimage’ – in which the condition of the gaze and the
cycle of memory and imagination are the central themes. Thus, the con-
struction of the book is like a hut, a place for thought, where the speculative
theory of a discursive scenography can take shelter.
 space.time.narrative

Notes

1 See: Bazon Brock, Lustmarsch durchs Theoriegelände: Musealisiert Euch!, Dumont

Buchverlag, Cologne, 2008.
2 See: Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theater, The
John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1978. The Online Encyclopedia Britanni-
cadescribes platea as: ‘In medieval theatre, the neutral acting area of a stage. In medi-
eval staging, a number of mansions, or booths, representing specific locations, were
placed around the acting area. The actors would move from mansion to mansion as
the play demanded. The platea would assume the scenic identity of the mansion that
was being used. The platea was also used as the acting area for places not specified
by individual mansions, such as streets and open country.’ (http://www.britannica.com,
accessed May 2010.) Much of the play was staged on a scaffolding: usually referred
to as the ‘locus’, like the formal stage in the theatre building of today. Sometimes the
action was (and still is in experimental stagings) diverted to street level, off the stage,
amidst the public. This open ground, which is governed by fundamentally different
laws and dynamics, is usually referred to as ‘platea’, being a construction plane of a
different order.
3 For a thorough understanding of the notion of ‘aura’ (auratic) in relation to a work of
art, see the essay of the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Penguin, London, 2008 (originally published in 1935
as Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit). See also the
8 interview with Uwe Brückner, note 41, p.367.
4 See: Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, Routledge, London–New York,
2006.
5 See: Patrice Pavis, Vers une théorie de la pratique théâtrale, Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, Villeneuve d’Ascq, 2007.
6 Herman Kossmann is an architect and partner of Kossmann.dejong, exhibition archi-
tects in Amsterdam. From 1987 to 1992 he was a member of the Board of the Camini
Foundation, an organisation committed to the research of the boundaries of the
exhibition medium.
7 Carel Blotkamp et al., Museum in Motion? The Modern Art Museum at Issue, Staat-
suitgeverij, The Hague, 1979.
8 ‘Museum in Motion?’ Seminars, Museum Bellerive, Zurich, January to February 2006.
9 ‘Exhibiting Now!’ expert meeting, Platform21, Amsterdam, 2–3 June 2006.
10 Topos, proposal for a magazine dedicated to the survey of narrative environments.
11 The term ‘conceptual personae’ is derived from Gilles Deleuze. See: Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Verso, London–New York, 1994, chapter 3:
‘Conceptual personae’.
 the battery
a device, consisting of one or more cells, in which chemical energy is
converted into electricity

1.1 the renaissance of narrative space

‘All the world’s a stage’, and every aspect of life, as Shakespeare foretold in
As You Like It, now is part of an infinitely repetitive, global ‘ex-hibition’.1 In
Room 1 we witness the appearance of The Experience Economy by Harvard
9
professors B. Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore in 1999 in which they
proclaim a new economic value, which – in succession to the traditional
raw produce of agriculture, the end products of industry and the services
of consumer-based commerce – culminates in the staged experience of
our hyper reality that eagerly absorbs the maxim ‘work is theatre and every
business a stage’ across the globe.2 In Room 2 we find the Mosaic web
browser making the World Wide Web accessible for everyone in 1993, and
the virtual revolution seizing the power of information from television, and
television desperately turning to an everyday reality in which everybody can
become a ‘star’.3 In Room 3, on the eve of the Internet boom, the Zentrum
für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe designs a laboratory
where the interplay between art and high-end technology will demonstrate
the supremacy of virtuality and marginalise the future of the organic body;
a target that Peter Weibel will obliterate in 1998 in the ‘Net_Condition’
exhibition shortly after having taken over the ZKM after Heinrich Klotz’s
death.4 In Room 4 the artistic production of the ‘new machine age’, which
was to be facilitated by the immensely expensive Silicon Graphics Onyx
supercomputers, is deemed unaffordable and out of line, and subsequently
the more democratic low-budget, high-concept interaction of web art takes
 space.time.narrative

its place.5 In Room 5 Peter Greenaway is invited to act as guest curator at

the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1991 and to exhibit
his own cross section of the collection in the exhibition ‘The Physical Self’,
which prompts him to show naked individuals of flesh and blood in classic
showcases amid the artefacts on display. This in turn radicalises our view on
the potential of museums and opens up a semantic field that focuses on the
fascination for the human body, bestowing an unusual grace to every other
piece in the exhibition and transforming, at least in my perception, Joseph
Beuys’ maxim that every individual is an artist, by transferring its premise
to the physical vehicle and declaring the body as an exhibitable work of
art instead.6 Thus, ‘The Physical Self’ marks the dividing line between the
problematic lack of direction of western reality on the one hand, and the
frantic lack of fundament of the ‘experience economy’ on the other: every
business may well be a stage, but not every stage produces interesting busi-
ness. At the time, however, few people seemed to worry. If it hadn’t been
for the virtual business’s proverbial sleeping dog of massive inflation, the
dot-com industry wouldn’t have burst like a soap bubble during the very
same decade.7 If it hadn’t been for the collapse of the Twin Towers in 2001,
10 worldwide optimism wouldn’t have been made to waver so dramatically.8
And, at the Exit just before the global stage exhibition closes, there is one
final performance, in which treachery, intrigue and boundless ignorance
produce the ultimate collective ‘experience’ of the worldwide credit crisis
...9 Fin. Bravo! But, on a small scale, the meteorology of the world obviously
produces signs that are of a more integrative nature; almost as a fractal
principle, as an inconspicuous counter-movement without any predictable
results, like the stroke of a mosquito’s wing on Madagascar that, according
to chaos theory, may well cause a hurricane on Cuba.10
In other words, Hans Peter Schwarz’s 1992 initiative to create a Medi-
enmuseum as a contemplative cornerstone of the ZKM is still very relevant
today, in my view, for the very reason that it was pointedly dedicated to the
world of ideas, not the world of things.11 For it tried to avoid the display of
media technological rarities and the well-trodden paths of canonical prog-
ress in favour of a new-style museum which, on the dividing line between
the tendencies of our time, would use a 1:1 line-up of our reality and our
image of that reality, so that the myth of looking, the intensity of seeing and
the quality of our gaze would be exposed. Thus, for the first time a pos-
sible theory of scenography emerged within my field of vision in which the
contours of traditional museum display would be widened and understood
as a narrative environment, the staging of which would be dominated by an
 the battery

idea and would yield the potential of ‘a myriad’ of parallel stories, in a place
that was charged with energy and that, like a battery, was only waiting to
electrify ‘a myriad’ of visitors simultaneously.12 In other words, an orientation
emerged that was both Utopian and pragmatic; for the challenge may have
been a dream, but its mission was very concrete, calling for a strategy that
would stress the opposition between the relativism of the ambition and the
intended openness of the end result on the one hand, and the complex-
ity of the task on the other. Nothing seemed more exciting, more relevant,
more radical, at the time than to have all mental and imaginative power turn
into an ‘ideal’ concept that, with some subversive aid from outside, would
explode like a cluster bomb and scatter its fragments of meaning across a
whole field waiting to be minutely scrutinised in search of that one, ultimate
semantic fractal with the expressive potential to transform into an exhibition.
Having said that, it’s important to note that even the preceding impulse,
which resulted from the research conducted by the Camini Foundation in
Amsterdam in 1989 into the experimental development of exhibitions as an
open format, is still relevant today as an act of transdisciplinarity.13 Altogeth-
er, both the discourse of the Camini Foundation as well as the development
of the ZKM Medienmuseum provided the root concepts for the Sceno- 11
graphical Design course that I later set up and developed in Zurich when I
was invited to do so by the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, and that
made the curricular project of ‘scenography’ function as an interdisciplinary
germ, connecting and absorbing like a parasite the idea that drama and ex-
hibition, performance and installation would form one field of expertise and
imagination, albeit a differentiated one, that would launch an all-out search
for a place of identity, dedicated to an idea, and produce a new élan and a
narrative environment of a pluralistic order.14 So, in other words, the concep-
tual nucleus of the Scenographical Design curriculum became the basis of
the Narrative Environments research project that focused on the practice of
the exhibition maker and as such intended to release him from his cultural
isolation, while at the same time promoting a transdisciplinary approach for
formulating an open theory of scenography that would sensibly reconcile
thing and thought, fact and effect, and mythos and logos.15 So noted in the
present book.
What is scenography? This question, which, at least in western Eu-
rope, has occupied many minds for quite some time now, can no longer
be answered within the framework of classical theatre, and it has become
increasingly problematic because of cultural factors and traditions that
vary according to language regions. In the English region, for instance, the
 space.time.narrative

term ‘scenography’ appears to be interpreted in the context of the the-

atre exclusively and doesn’t seem to be so flexible as to allow use in other
contexts. When Pamela Howard handed over the charge of the Scenog-
raphy master course at the Central Saint Martins College of Art in London
to Pete Brooks in 2000, the course took a slightly different direction and to
support the broadening of the master curriculum a subsidiary program on
bachelor level, called Design for Narrative Environment, was added.16 What
is remarkable is that the concept of ‘scenography’ has vanished from the
course directory of the Central Saint Martins altogether now, while in the
German-speaking regions academies are en masse introducing programmes
under that very heading. The movement is the same, but the terminology
differs. What in German is now called Szenografie, is lectured in London in
two postgraduate courses: MA Performance Design and Practice and MA
Creative Practice for Narrative Environments. Both labels seem sufficiently
flexible to incorporate the heritage of classical scenography. In the German
region the notion of scenography doesn’t seem to suffice and the concept
of Szenologie has been introduced to cover the theoretical discourse of
scenography.17
12 Although Pamela Howard’s book What is Scenography? (2001) may
deal with the practice of theatre exclusively, it nonetheless opens with a
survey of some forty definitions of the term, given by theatre makers and
designers from all over the world, some of which seem to include a broader
orientation.18 I will list a few remarkable examples. In Suk Suh from South
Korea defines scenography in very general terms as ‘the art of time and
space’. Erik Kouwenhoven from Holland prefers the dramaturgical point of
view in describing scenography as ‘the suggestion of space which trans-
forms in the head of the spectator to anything possible’. Stavros Anto-
nopoulos’ interpretation, which explains the term as ‘the visual intersection
of the ordinary, with the imaginative’, is the one that I find most appealing.
However, Howard’s book was published in 2001 and in the meantime many
international conferences have enriched the expertise. What has become
apparent is that with respect to technique and, even more so, in relation
to the dynamics and the poetry of the site, both stage and exhibition need
to be considered as one unified thematic field that is relevant not only
within the walls of the theatre and the museum, but increasingly so in the
urban and rural spaces of city and landscape. A crucial pointer appears to
be the francophone development from muséographie to scénographie,
which essentially relates the world of things to the world of thoughts, and
establishes, also in the theatre, a fundamental equivalence of the expressive
 the battery

power of the dramatist’s text and the curator’s collection of objects.19 In the
German region we find another tendency apart from the encompassing ap-
proach of installation and performance scenography. During the EXPO 2000
Hanover world fair, the notion of Scenographie was for the first time as-
sociated with the making of exhibitions.20 After the Swiss national EXPO.02
exhibition, all exhibition makers called themselves Szenograf; and after the
first International Scenographers’ Festival in Basel in 2006, not only exhibi-
tion makers, but also architects, graphic designers, curators and consultants
– albeit to a lesser extent and with some hesitation – started to add the title
of Szenograf to their business cards.21 The label of scenography apparently
has a certain attraction to it. Scenography is an independent trade and the
term ‘scenographer’ has no fixed reference. But what can scenography be in
a wider context? What is the basis of such a wider scope?
Traditionally, scenography is concerned with the image of the theatre
stage, the way the scene of the action is set, and the optical conditions that
determine the way the action can be perceived. Nowadays many theatre
productions back out of the classical hierarchies and through crossover
dialogues try to ground open performative productions. Crossovers be-
tween stage and exhibition, performance and installation, direction and 13
scenography, curatorship and design, execution and authorship, neces-
sitate a reassessment; for scenography – or whatever we want to call this
artistic no-man’s-land – is in a transdisciplinary sense a profession of increas-
ing complexity. What is decisive for the description of its outlines and its
tendencies is the way we look at scenography and what we expect of it. For
instance, one of the hot issues in the scenography debate is whether sceno-
graphic interventions merely touch on the surface of things or rather deeply
penetrate a given or an unfolding content? Depending on one’s position the
scenographic expertise that is required will vary.
Two analogies. One expects a carpenter to be able to drive a nail into
wood with a hammer. As such, this is a rather banal and rudimentary skill
relative to the overall framework of carpentry. It remains essential, though,
that the carpenter can fix the nail in the right spot in the right way in order
to produce a constructive integrity and a house that will not collapse. Once
the latter, broader issue is embedded in the consciousness of the carpenter,
then we are dealing with an expert. Basically, a surgeon is someone who
cuts a living body with a knife. Strictly speaking, such a definition is true, but
it isn’t complete, because it could also apply to a murderer. So, what is es-
sential for the definition is that the act of cutting is motivated by the inten-
tion to heal in the consciousness of the surgeon. Thus, there is this overrid-
 space.time.narrative

ing principle that rules the aim of the act per se. The end literally justifies
the means. As long as the end is fuzzy, the use of the means lacks precision.
A scenographer designs semantic spaces. Spaces that are charged
with meaning, such as the ones we find on stage or in exhibitions, and
more and more in rural and urban spaces as well, are usually hybrid com-
pounds. An exhibition, for instance, is materially composed of space, light,
colour, objects, text, sound, audio-visual and interactive media, in an infinite
number of variants. These are the granules of scenography from which the
vehicle of the content arises. Given the array of elements, any successful de-
sign of such a vehicle demands a well-coordinated transdisciplinary process.
The control of this process largely depends on the expertise of the maker,
of whom an equal mastery of the means is required as one expects from
a decent carpenter. But is that sufficient? Not at all. It takes more to be a
good scenographer, just as mere anatomical knowledge won’t make a good
surgeon. A scenographer is concerned with the identity of a place, which
involves themes of a cultural nature, and only a meaningful interpretation
of it and an adequate staging will produce the presentation that will convey
new insights. The scenographer thus turns into an author whose skills lie in
14 another area: where the syntax of the exhibition medium sustains the se-
mantics of scenography. Just as a person who is cutting a body with a knife
doesn’t necessarily meet the description of a ‘surgeon’, thus we can only
call someone who is staging a ‘scenographer’ if the design of the means is
propelled by the intention to realise a semantic space. This particular view is
one of the most topical trends in the current western European scenography
debate. It promotes the image of a new type of scenographer, which in the
German region is now commonly referred to as the ‘Autoren-Gestalter’ (au-
thor-designer). Within the traditional framework of the exhibition trade the
scenographer as author-designer principally takes a position in the middle
of the axis that connects, or separates, curating and design.
It must be noted, however, that not only the profession of scenogra-
pher is transforming. The transdisciplinary format of the exhibition itself is
in a state of revolution. This is the other important trend. The boundaries of
the medium are under scrutiny and various experiments are already yield-
ing a different set of expectations vis-à-vis the potential of the exhibition.
This trend traces back the origins of museum display, analyses the historical
development of the format and questions the traditional curator-designer
paradigm. Besides the author-designer we see the emergence of another
type of exhibition maker: the artist-curator. When viewed in terms of the
form–content axis, we still find a direct opposition of the two, which is trag-
 the battery

ic, because while there is still no sign of a willingness to develop a shared

language or theory of scenography, even the most confirmed curator will
have to resort to it sooner or later. Curators meet and scratch each other’s
backs at curator congresses. Scenographers do exactly the same at sce-
nographer festivals. In seclusion all preach for the converted and this docta
ignorantia is what obstructs the perspective on new avenues.22

1.2 the paradox of scenography

‘The world is all that is the case’, and in the experience economy the busi-
ness stage is where everything necessary is being staged and every aspect
of mercantile strategy is being carefully planned and orchestrated in order
to coerce the consumer’s pattern of spending in one’s own direction.23 This
is, in Wittgenstein’s sense, the ‘totality of facts’ of – let’s call it – ‘mercantile
scenography’. I, the other, the meeting of the two, society, the visibility of
things, the authenticity of occurrences, the obscuration of facts, indeed
life itself is staged from beginning to end. With a purely mercantile objec- 15
tive. Marketing and advertising have embraced scenography because its
principles are so simple and its means are so simple to employ; because
its appearance is so enticing, at least as long as the message is skin deep
and the myth being conveyed doesn’t reach beyond the condensed ‘buy
this’ or ‘choose that’. The problem of scenography is its very success. Mer-
cantile scenography has no alternative but to reduce the variety of social
phenomena to a one-sided message, the emptiness of which is masked by
an appealing scenographical wrapping – atmospheric lighting, enchanting
media, erotogenic music and the eternal beautiful women who are bred by
the dynamics of idiosyncratic cycles, such as Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model
competitions.24 There is no problem with that, as long as it isn’t supposed to
be all; as long as besides satisfying our material needs there is a heart-felt
attempt to revive the increasingly stagnant discussion of our basic values.
So, as opposed to the glamour of mercantile scenography, here we need
to consider its counterpart: the versatile searchlight of ‘discursive scenogra-
phy’. While mercantile scenography announces and speaks with one voice,
discursive scenography asks questions. While the message of mercantile
scenography is a monologue, discursive scenography initiates dialogue.
Discursive scenography is polyvalent, multi-faced, ambiguous, motivated
by a deep-rooted cultural commitment and has a dialogical nature which
 space.time.narrative

questions every statement with indigenous scepticism even as it is unfold-

ing. The point is this very quality, this implicit awkwardness, which I would
like to label as the ‘obscenographic factor’. The obscenographic dimension
of scenography entails just about everything that is unfitting or maladjusted,
rationally impractical or vulgar; the dark matter that is usually filtered out of
our concepts or the decisions we make; the irrelevant, the ugly, the sordid,
the repulsive, indeed everything that can be considered obscene without
any dominant sexual overtones. What is obscene is what is rejected by
morality. It points at a certain non-conformism that has a meteorological
nature, as it shifts with the prevailing views. In this respect, obscenography
is also contrary: the dark side of scenography, its inconspicuous double,
like Antonin Artaud must have envisaged it in The Theater and its Double
– as a spectre that haunts the outskirts of the story, somewhere between
thought and gesture.25 Paradoxically, discursive scenography has to rely
on obscenography for the splendour of its own essence and for making
its narrative potential pervade all layers of staging. The obscenography is
a critical agent, an intelligently correcting factor, as unpredictable as the
weather, that either stabilises or destabilises depending on the field of ac-
16 tion. It comes and goes, contingent as fate. Obscenography is the eternal,
fundamental other; the primordial counterpart. Scenography relies on the
dark to shine its light. Orientation relies on the light and dismisses whatever
is irrelevant to darkness. As the ugly has the power to unmask the myth of
beauty, thus beauty has the ability to mark the myth of ugliness. It is always
there, that dark factor of interference on which discursive scenography de-
pends. Obscenography is the embedded advocatus diaboli of scenography
that guarantees the indispensable instability and the parasite dimensions of
our stagings.
Each staging is ephemeral, volatile and unstable. Each drama passes
by and we experience it as it passes. Each staging is based on an idea, an
inventio. Each staged idea manifests as a fluent potential in space and time.
In every scenography the idea materialises as staged narrative space. This
expanding space, in which the idea unfolds, is the manifestatio of scenog-
raphy. Now if we take inventio to be the narrative nucleus of a staging, then
manifestatio must be the material condition for its effectiveness. Inventio
has a half-life; it expires.26 Narrative unfolds through time and essentially has
a limited potential. Accordingly, each manifestatio has only limited effec-
tiveness and sustainability. The scenographic gamma rays, to stick with the
metaphor, are active only temporarily, during a limited interval, the length of
 the battery

which is directly proportional to the coherence of the means, the bandwidth

of the contents and the social relevance of the themes.
Now, although a convincing scenographic work – the manifestatio – is
always derived from a consistent idea – the inventio – the final realisation of
it in a meaningful form in terms of means can never be perfectly unequivo-
cal. The transformation will always be a critical process that is highly contin-
gent, and inevitably it will manifest conceptual shifts, undesirable positions,
dark matter, inaccessible domains and parasite dimensions – noise, in short.
This is the obscenographic accent, the uncontrollable element, or, if you
will, the parasite, that is significant because of its function in the cycle of
drama: ensuring that the staging maintains the open, proactive nature that
is needed for the visitor or the spectator to participate. Every scenographic
piece of work, be it an exhibition or a play, an installation or a performance,
will evoke a certain narrative space that is essentially unstable and that will
cease to exist through time. Two things may happen: either the central idea,
the inventio, will run out, or the cultural context, as a phenomenon in space
and time, will lose its social, discursive relevance. Exhibition and theatre can
only blossom once all internal and external conditions are met, once both
materials and means are in delicate balance, and the staging is activated in 17
the right cultural interval. A hell of a job. Scenography is unstable and its
context is meteorological – per se. Only the most acute intuition and a ver-
satile intellect can synchronise the work with the spirit of the times. Kairos.27
Every drama exists in an interval, it unfolds in time passing and it manifests
in an in-between space.
To make for a theory of narrative space I would like to experiment
formally with a basic view vis-à-vis mercantile scenography by associatively
presenting the frame of reference and the conceptual outlines of a discur-
sive scenography. In doing so, I will assume the position of the obscenogra-
pher in order to question the seeming stability of the cornerstones and the
anchor points of established scenography, and to destabilise its conformist,
socially acceptable, respectable programme. To be sure, obscenography is
a pun. Or is there more to it? The paradox of discursive scenography lies in
its need for the destabilising nature of obscenography, its counterpart. For
without it, it cannot coherently become apparent in the right interval. With-
out the hurricane, it cannot be the eye.
Scenography derives from the Greek notions of skene and graphein.28
Skene can be interpreted as ‘hut’ or ‘tent’. It suggests space and alludes
to shelter. Graphein, on the other hand, means ‘to write’, but also ‘to etch’
or ‘to engrave’. It suggests time, implying that the syntax of fleeting signs
 space.time.narrative

carries the semantics of the message. So, the concept of scenography thus
entails an n-dimensional space-time, charged with narrative potential, that
gives shelter to the mythologies of our tale. The common goal, or the com-
mon task, that scenography and obscenography share between them, lies in
this individuating narrative upgrade of space. Always. The implicit objective
of discursive scenography is the sheltering of the idea, something that is
taken care of by its explicit objective. What speaks in the space of scenog-
raphy is the voice of the idea. That space is an enclave in a world of noise.
Scenography is an intelligent filter, which by intervention allows for a more
articulate message to be received.
To understand the principle of scenography we could introduce a
metaphor depicted in an etching of the German mathematician Caspar
Schott, who in 1657 at the court of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm was commis-
sioned by Otto von Guericke, a scientist and the mayor of Magdeburg, to
conduct and report an experiment with two hemispheres to which vacuum
was applied, in order to demonstrate both the existence of the atmosphere
and the effects of atmospheric pressure.29 Many of us remember being
fascinated by the intriguing story of the Magdeburg hemispheres, from
18 classes in physics at high school. The story had the potential to become
part of myth because the event and its account had an enigmatic, puzzling
dimension for both laymen and professionals, for both the ignorant and
the educated. The enigma lies in the drama of the historical event itself, in
the staging of the scientific experiment and the scenography that aimed at
rendering the invisible visible and that acquired mythological proportions by
equating scenographically the visually inconspicuous compacting force of
atmospheric pressure to the disruptive power of two times eight workhorses
that, as the story goes, were unable to separate the two 51-centimetre cop-
per hemispheres, which were loosely assembled by a thin greased leather
ring. We imagine the scene. The scenography strongly evokes the drama
and engrains the narrative potential in everyone’s memory. Caspar Schott,
who not only conducted the experiment but was also in charge of Otto
von Guericke’s marketing strategies, was well aware of the importance of a
convincing depiction. The centre of the engraving obviously shows the sec-
tion of the two hemispheres, which is the heart of the staging. Two teams
of eight horses are rearing up and are steadying themselves, sweating.
The two-part sphere is shaking frantically, but it won’t come apart. Visu-
ally, the physical strength of sixteen horses is equalled to the perfection of
the greased leather ring that is maintaining the underpressure in the inside
void of the copper sphere. What an impressive scene: we see the convinc-
 the battery

ing demonstration of a scientific idea of which both the materialisation and

the aesthetics were chosen with a great sense of drama. For Guericke and
Schott could just as well have selected half of the amount of horses to attain
the same effect, for instance by attaching one of the hemispheres to a rock
or a robust tree. But no, two teams of horses, working in opposite direc-
tions, is the better scenographic solution from a dramaturgical point of view.
A physical abstraction is being demonstrated by a scene of flesh and blood
and the smell of sweating horses. The performance is situated outdoors.
The spectators form a circle and become part of the event. If the sphere
yields, the horses will come storming apart and endanger everybody: the
staging encompasses it all. The form is intense, it entails risk and it is com-
pletely convincing.
In December 2007 an international colloquium about the theory of
scenography was organised in Dortmund, Germany, at the Fachhochschule
(University of Applied Sciences and Arts), and its leitmotif was the allegory
of the Magdeburg hemispheres.30 The organising committee envisaged a
science that would participate in the scientific discourse in just as evoca-
tive and appealing a fashion as Guericke’s demonstration of the working
of vacuum and the corresponding effects of atmospheric pressure. In his 19
keynote address Ralf Bohn describes the staging of Schott and Guericke as
a spatium imaginarium, as a mental space that is associated with an idea
and that underlines the notion that speculative science knows no truths
unless its abstract dimensions are reduced to sensory proportions.31 Such
a space of the imagination could by and large serve as a model of scenog-
raphy if weren’t for the fact that our tale of the Magdeburg hemispheres
hasn’t finished yet. Guericke’s scientific experiment has another side to it
that is crucial for our understanding of scenography and very relevant as
such. The allegory of the sixteen horses is extremely graphic, obviously, in
its sensual presentation of the force of pneuma, and surely we could only
wish for similarly dramatic, intense staging of the dominant themes of our
time.32 However, the staging of Schott and Guericke only concerns the outer
appearance of things, the eloquent conveyance of the outcome of the ex-
periment. For scenography, though, the scientific content of the experiment
is just as relevant, metaphorically significant, in referring to a fundamental
condition and confronting us with the question of whether scenography is
something that merely scratches the surface of things or, rather, something
that is deeply concerned with the core content.
The scientist Otto van Guericke had, with the aid of the air pump he
had invented, demonstrated the working of vacuum: the underpressure that
 space.time.narrative

he had created in the interior of the empty spherical volume was so much
smaller than the external pressure of the atmosphere, that even sixteen
horses couldn’t separate the two halves.33 At least, for the time being. For
how long, may we ask, did the experiment last? How long did the horses
actually pull at the copper sphere? Ten seconds? A minute? Half an hour?
Exactly how perfect was the air pump? And what about the mathematical
accuracy of the hemispheres? Was all the air pressure directed exactly at the
centre of the sphere? Was the greased leather ring completely airtight? Was
the vacuum inside the sphere a perfect vacuum? We simply don’t know. All
we know is that there is no such thing as an absolute, permanent vacuum.
In quantum physics the vacuum even appears as a dynamic medium with
contingent fluctuations and so we can safely assume that the vacuum of
the Magdeburg hemispheres wasn’t perfect, but was rather an unstable
and impermanent one, marked by a half-life.34 Even without knowledge of
quantum physics, Schott and Guericke knew this very well. They had con-
ducted the experiment many times with varying numbers of horses and with
varying success. Even the accounts from the seventeenth century report that
after ‘some’ time the hemispheres would separate with a loud explosion.
20 The duration of the interval is unknown today, but surely one could wait
for it to happen. Now, this very fact of the vacuous sphere remaining intact
under the influence of atmospheric pressure only ‘for the time being’ makes
the Magdeburg experiment such an apt metaphor for scenography. Just as
the interior of the twofold copper sphere was infused with a vacuum that
for an undefined period of time would guarantee its unity, and just as the
inherent geometric and material imperfections of the execution, or indeed
other external contingent factors, would dissolve this unifying force again,
thus the nuclear idea of each staging generates a narrative potential that is
impermanent and that, like a necessary underpressure, lends coherence and
effectiveness to the staged narrative for as long as it takes.

1.3 the interval of the open arts

In November 1994 the Charter of Transdisciplinarity was published to nar-

row the gap between science and the humanities specifically, but its stimu-
lus also affected the domain of the (applied) arts.35 Disciplines of design
which traditionally used to operate in their own isolated areas, but which
were nonetheless oriented towards integration, are now coming apart at
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the seams, be it out of necessity or curiosity. Both the necessity and the
curiosity to look beyond the horizon of one’s own existence have somehow
exceeded a threshold value in the arts in western Europe and have caused
a true wave of inter- and transdisciplinary interaction. The volcano of the
imagination has erupted and in the solidifying lava streams new alloys, new
islands and archipelagos have come into being, the cultural fertility of which
still remains to be recognised and acknowledged.
Scenography is one of those new transdisciplinary areas that has its
roots of expertise primarily in traditional disciplines. Its migrants necessar-
ily search this new archipelago of the unknown for significant anchor points
and new orientations. This state of heightened versatility is very interesting
because the challenge of choosing a direction forces one to be alert and
aware. Now that the gaze is turned towards the horizon, towards what is
different, the readiness to investigate and to experiment – in other words,
to abandon long-time positions – creates a climate of renewal in which we
can discern a number of tendencies. One of these tendencies is that those
who dwell in the interdisciplinary wasteland recognise themselves in the
notion of ‘relative’ or ‘open’ art, which refers to the relationships between
things and the structures of the connecting chains rather than to the things 21
themselves. ‘Relative’ here is opposed to the absolute, to the notion of an
‘absolute’ art in which the work of art, the thing, is the result or the culmina-
tion of a more or less isolated, individual process of artistic invention and
manifestation. This isolation of the process is the crucial borderline that
marks the difference in the basic attitude. In absolute or ‘closed’ arts the
thing is the dominating, public factor; the process is subsidiary and private.
Relative, open arts on the other hand are characterised by a basic attitude
that equally values product and process while emphasising the interaction
between both realms. The process is an open one and the product is never
finished – at least not when it leaves the seclusion of the studio or the work-
shop. The completion of the work manifests in the confrontation with the
audience or the listener or the visitor, who participates in the authorship of
the work in actio.36 In his Opera aperta, Umberto Eco describes the poetics
of the open work of art as an unstable field of interpretative options, as a
configuration of implicit impulses that will prompt the recipient to a series of
varying interpretations.37 Because of these properties, both the completion
and also the genesis of the open work of art will occur along different lines.
Both process and product are open. Open like in ‘open source’. Open in
reference and in orientation. Open in the extent of resolution. The product,
or the result, lives on external influences and organises itself in dialogue, as
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a dynamic entity. This process goes far beyond the horizon of immediate
relevance and is open in all directions, even in the forward and backward
directions of time. In What is Philosophy?, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
introduce a ‘plane of immanence’, which we can easily take as an equivalent
of the concept of skene in scenography. On the open and unstable stage
we see new orientations and role models appear as ‘conceptual personae’
as if they were the actors in a theatre of the mind.38 The basic condition of
this plane of immanence is governed by fundamentally different dynamics,
which are luminously described by Deleuze and Guattari in terms of some
modern variants of sports.
A runner builds up the energy that is needed for his record on the
100 metres from scratch. Regardless of some minor external factors, such a
process is self-contained and the result is the merit of an individual. When
we look at a surfer, however, we see that for his ride he is completely de-
pendent on the energy of the wave to which he adds, during a mere inter-
val, his own energy, attuned to the characteristics of his board. The product
becomes a tour de force when both energies perfectly coincide within the
temporal unity of ‘surfer + board’. Just as the open sports require different
22 skills and a different kind of intelligence, the open arts require a different
basic attitude and development. The dynamics of invention and manifesta-
tion that are typical of all arts become intensified and multiplied in the open
arts; they rely entirely on dialogue and are deeply influenced by the degree
of participation of the visitor, the spectator, the reader or the listener. It is
precisely this parallax of work and working, of fact and effect, that makes
the approach more complex. Still, there is more to the distinction between
open and closed. Just as the surfer can only consistently unite the energies
of body and wave during a limited interval, thus the open work of art will
only open itself for the energy (i.e. the attention) of the audience during an
interval as well. The temporary character of this confrontation is quintes-
sential. Just as the in-between space is an essential quality of urban constel-
lations, thus the in-between time, the interval, determines the dynamics of
open art.
Such a temporality implicitly addresses the question of social rele-
vance. Not as we know it from the past, but as a more fundamental issue; in
search for a relative and relevant art which draws on the origins of western
rhetorics, and which is driven by a very productive notion from the theatre:
dramaturgy. Dramaturgy, or the knowledge of how things work, fundamen-
tally requires a multiple perspective.39 In Aristoteles’ Ars Rhetorica the nar-
rator, the story and the listener form one indivisible whole – like a hinge that
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cannot function with one part missing.40 There is no story without a story-
teller. There is no listener without a story. Without a listener there is nothing,
EMPTINESS, a monologue in dead space. The law of the hinge again pres-
ents us with the central issue of transference, regardless of mode or grada-
tion, style or composition. Still, different from before. Not in a moralistic,
condescending sense, but rather instigated by the dialogical character of
the open arts, like in the question: what can effectively be conveyed at what
time and in what way? The open arts are like a window, a frame, a portal, a
stage, a mental space that, like an inverted camera obscura, generates the
snapshots of our culture.
The open arts have a meteorological nature and they manifest in tem-
porality. They are the double helix of invention and manifestation, arising in
conjunction with other cultural tendencies, transforming and transporting
them, and then disappearing again. What remain are an altered outlook and
a recollection. The open arts address the interaction between process and
product, between storyteller and listener, between performer and audi-
ence. The centre of attention lies where the world of things and the world of
thoughts overlap. Here we find the imaginative energy of our culture. Here
memory and mnemotechnologies come in. Here virtuality and imagination 23
abound: in the camera lucida of open art. Now, ‘Camera Lucida’, the Light
Room, of course refers to Roland Barthes’ text in which he describes his
fascination for photography from the point of view of the spectator, i.e. after
the images have left the apparatus, the camera obscura, of the photogra-
pher.41 What is interesting in our context here, is that ‘camera lucida’ sug-
gests an apparatus as well; an apparatus for the viewer, or at least a state,
an exceptional condition of a mental space in which the focus, the framing
and the diaphragm of perception and reflection can be regulated, so that
the cycle of memory and imagination is activated. In terms of systematics
such a light room perfectly corresponds to staging in the theatre or to the
mise en espace of exhibitions. Both the theatre and the museum, or rather,
both drama and exhibition offer this exceptional condition. They are the
mnemomedia of our culture. Mnemomedia principally manifest as open
arts. Drama and exhibition may each draw on a different expertise, but they
are very similar when it comes to dynamics and format. Because of that,
they tend to approach each other in certain respects. Especially where fact
and effect of a production are concerned: the design of the vehicle on the
one hand, and the principle of dramaturgy on the other. Also, in theatre, we
notice a growing interest in the domains of the artefact and the physical di-
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mensions of a performance, while in exhibition making it is rather the active

psychological dimensions of a presentation that are gaining momentum.
But what is an exhibition? At one time it used to mean: to exhibit
something. Usually this ‘something’ was part of a collection of artefacts
that was sometimes consistent, sometimes eclectic, but always made up of
objects which had been extracted from their original context – had been
decontextualised. Exhibitions have gradually evolved from being a bla-
tant display of valuable things, via academically sound recontextualising in
museums, to a form of presentation that does indeed include objects but
primarily concentrates on context and some central idea or narrative. It was
André Malraux who provided a decisive impulse in publishing Le Musée
imaginaire.42 What is interesting is that such a trend will eventually bring
the museum of cultural history closer to the art museum again in a round-
about way, for the latter, relying highly on the critical charge of works of art,
assumed it could afford to stay away from recontextualisation and take on
a different, superior status. But in the era of cultural migration and hybrid
open art forms, even the art museum cannot stay behind, unless it wants to
become a fossil.
24 Hybrid, nomadic, transcultural expressions, be they artistic or not,
have changed the terrain of exhibitions and stretched the contours of the
medium. In this expanding universe there lies a vacuum at the heart of
aesthetics that is dying to be filled with content. For the present discussion
of scenography, the theoretical work of Marshall McLuhan provides us with
some interesting analyses, which attribute a dominant transformative po-
tential to the medium completely irrespective of what it actually conveys.43
McLuhan’s adage ‘the medium is the message’, coined in his most widely
known book Understanding Media, was at some point clarified by media
critic Neil Postman when he reasoned that one cannot make philosophi-
cal statements by means of smoke signals, simply because the medium of
smoke lacks the argumentational sophistication required for philosophical
debate.44 The medium is dominant and poses limitations to the message
because of its intrinsic capacity. In the case of a hybrid super medium like
the exhibition, McLuhan’s maxim may well work the other way round: ‘the
message makes the medium’. In making an exhibition the scenographer
has the complete array of different media characteristics at his disposal,
and in designing the ensemble, each and every contour of the overall
characteristic appears to be feasible. And here lies the actual problem. For
the simple, but priceless fact of apparent feasibility of any medium-based
curve of conveyance is at the same time the central point of criticism when
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curators scorn the ‘exposition spectacle’ of the scenographer.45 So here we

have the dilemma. On the one hand: how may or should a complex super
medium like an exhibition be charged with meaning in a sensible way? On
the other: how may or should we produce a sophisticated translation of a
complex content into a multimedia form that is expressive? If the medium
has the capacity to transport any message, then we need to focus all of our
attention on the structure, the meaning and the relevance of that message.
McLuhan’s ‘law’ may work very well in the case of single media, but it needs
to be reversed with increasingly complex multi-dimensional and automated
mediatechnological processes. This dilemma forms the axis that connects
the curator and the scenographer and there is only one position on that
axis that will enhance both views: right in the centre. Once an exhibition
becomes essayistic in nature and reaches beyond the mere display of
authentic works of art that have been conceived especially for the occasion
– by which the necessary critical charge is imported, as it were – then the full
bandwidth of potential authorship opens up and the notion of authorship
takes on a whole new meaning for both the curator and the scenographer.
Whether the exhibition is a collection of works of art or is considered to be
a Gesamtkunstwerk, as long as the multimedia vehicle of space and time, 25
colour and light, text and image, objects and media fails to SPEAK or fails
to be original or to capture the spirit of the times, the interpretation of the
‘author’ will have failed.46 What is crucial here is the consistency of concept
and scenography. Authorship, which has the potential to realise this qual-
ity, thus transcends the traditional mono-disciplinary artistry. That is why the
authorship of the open work of art will probably involve a team rather than
a single person. It is versatile and nomadic, and it generates interpretations
with philosophical, journalistic, scholarly, literary, even essayistic and evi-
dently scenographic overtones. It is the authorship of the nomads of art.
An exhibition is a narrative space – a space with a narrative potential.
This doesn’t mean that the narrative will necessarily unfold completely in all
its dimensions. For it to do that, one should define all of its components,
and structure them in space and time. That is one of two mechanisms:
the degree of definition of an exhibition that will eventually determine its
reception. In the second chapter of Understanding Media, McLuhan points
out that the degree of audience participation is inversely proportional to
the degree of definition of the conveying medium.47 The other mechanism
concerns the structure of our narratives. Do they evolve in linear time? Or,
rather, does the raw narrative potential generate a multitude of overlap-
ping times and do the individual chains of association only get activated
 space.time.narrative

once the visitor formally enters the exhibition and mentally participates in
the cycle of recollection and imagination? If so, time will stop functioning as
linear, mathematical and objective clock-time, and will become a subjective,
personal time that is curved just like Albert Einstein imagined space to be
curved under the influence of gravity.48 Here the concept of space and time
in Henri Bergson’s metaphysics is of major importance.49 Exhibitions with
some narrative significance work like a battery, full of energy, aimed at acti-
vating the raw, undefined energy of the public in the form of inspiration and
reflection in order to establish an optimal time curve (immersion). The task
of scenography is all about this, and could be read as a sign of our times.
Our society needs latently entrancing semantic spaces where the bigger
and smaller explosions of life can occur.
Making an exhibition is a form of applied or open art. When we say
‘applied’, we don’t mean the functionality we find in architecture or fashion
for example, although these disciplines too are characterised by a multiple
aim at the heart of the profession: both buildings and clothing create or
maintain an identity on the one hand and offer physical shelter on the other.
To do that, both the building and the clothing need to function properly
26 and speak an aesthetic language that enhances the properties, the image
or the self-image of the user. Architecture and fashion aim at making the
user of the building or the clothing feel – more – comfortable. That is what
McLuhan referred to when he called clothing the ‘second skin’, and by infer-
ence defined housing as the third, the city as the fourth and our electronic
media as the fifth skin.50 The tailor makes the man and our house is our
status. Likewise, the city manifests our culture and our media personalise
our signs. It is the thing that makes dreams come true and the importance
of that fact can take on mythological proportions.
Yet, both an exhibition and a play or the performance of a symphony
address a different area of reality and operate where the world of things
and the world of ideas overlap. An exhibition opens collective memory
and it activates the individual imagination. Meaningful clusters of objects
generate meaningful clusters of words, and vice versa. Grains of memory.
Thought particles. Imaginat-ions. The world of things, to which the exhibi-
tion in its final form belongs, is the vehicle of an extremely vulnerable world
of thoughts; of an idea, an interpretation, which like everything precious is
helpless and needs shelter for that reason.51 This vehicle, the material and
medial condensation of staging and design, should ultimately be under-
stood as a form of shelter. Of course, it is a display as well; be it a Wun-
derkammer,52 or design per se, or just a ‘mounted book’, a stamp collection
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or simply a market place. In the scenography of a discursive exhibition, how-

ever, the shelter – as in skene – of an idea is the central notion.
It goes without saying that this type of functionality, that is the goal
of the open art of exhibition making, is essentially a complex one. So how
does this complexity affect the design? Let us look again at clothing. Once
a jacket is supposed to do more than merely preserve bodily warmth and
confirm a certain status – let’s say that it is also required to stop bullets, to
function as an on-line computer and as a mechanical interface for a mobile
drum set – then what is needed is a multiple type of functionality that ad-
dresses the object not merely as a product, but rather as an organism with a
corresponding type of intelligence. We see the same analogy in architecture
where different types of expertise are called for depending on the complex-
ity of the design and the intelligence of the building required. There is a
certain correlation. The more functionality is required, the more intelligent
the expertise that is needed; the result of which is an ongoing differentia-
tion of the design, which no longer manifests as an object in space but also
as a process in time and thus enters into another set of space–time depen-
dencies. As such, the ‘skin’ of exhibitions can only fully be understood as a
complex tissue, as an intelligent interface between idea and experience or 27
an osmotic membrane between the vehicle and the audience, more or less
like the ‘fourth wall’ in the theatre.53 An exhibition is a collection that can be
read, a space that provokes dialogue, an interval that entices the visitor, a
story that unfolds along the various axes of time. It is a semantic space that
has been conceived to facilitate the initial fantasy and expectation, the im-
mediately present experience, the reflection a posteriori and the long-term
recollection. Exciting stagings commence long before their actual starting
point and they continue to the same extent after their actual conclusion.
Making an exhibition is always a ‘relative’ art. An exhibition is about
the relations between things. On top of that, it is about the relation be-
tween the visitor and the web of associations that the exhibition brings out.
Or: about the relation between the memories and the imagination of the
visitor on the one hand, and the narrative immersive potential of the place
on the other. Or, more complex: about the relation between the collective
memories and associations of a cluster of visitors on the one hand, and a
semantic space manifesting as a unitary design of matter and media on the
other. Of course, an exhibition is a product, but at the same time it is also
a process; an open art form with a whole array of alternative dimensions. It
is a substantive organism; software that is initialised and activated through
the participation of the visitor, with both an instant effectiveness on the spot
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and a long-term, continued effect elsewhere. These dimensions of effec-

tiveness, of relatedness between now and later, between fact and effect,
between thing and thought, are the domain of dramaturgy and they form an
integral part of the development of a concept. Because of this very relativ-
ity an exhibition is never finished. The vernissage on the opening day is just
a cut in the overall editing, a single caesura in a process that introduces a
new state of aggregation of the semantic space, after which the exhibition
belongs to the visitor.
Like the theatre, exhibitions are a medium of memory: a place where
the cycle of recollection and imagination both absorbs and generates all
kinds of cultural impulses. Leon Battista Alberti already mentions it in his
1485 discourse on architecture, De Re Aedificatoria: a house is like a small
city and a city(-state) is like a big house.54 As an analogy we could say that
an exhibition is a simple memory and that memory functions as an ultra-
complex exhibition. Two images dawn. One is the image of classical mne-
monics, in which memory is presented as a building whose various rooms
contain certain significant mnemonic images called ‘icons’.55 The function of
memory would be like an imaginary walk through the building during which
28 the confrontation with the successive icons was supposed to provoke the
right string of associations. The second image is one of extreme mnemonic
sophistication: the Ars Memoriae – as it was realised in the Renaissance in
the memory theatres by Giulio Camillo and Giordano Bruno in Italy, and
later by Robert Fludd in England – the aim of which, regardless of mate-
rial and conceptual differences, was to evoke instantaneous deeper insight
on the part of the spectator by confronting him with an elaborate staging
or classification of universal knowledge.56 In fact little is known about the
memory theatres. Thanks to the pioneering work of Frances A. Yates, we
know that Giulio Camillo was inspired by the Teatro Olimpico of Andrea
Palladio in Vicenza (1584), and that Robert Fludd systematically modelled
his art of memory after the spatial organisation of the Globe Theatre of Wil-
liam Shakespeare and his ensemble on the bank of the Thames in London.57
We don’t have any spatial studies by Giordano Bruno, but what we do have
is all the more interesting and abstract: a number of linguistic, recombina-
tory analyses based on a so-called ‘memory wheel’ (see p.372), that James
Joyce is likely to have used to generate the labyrinthine semantics of
Finnegans Wake.58
Why a memory theatre? Why did Camillo, Bruno or Fludd never
consider a memory exhibition? Surely, the methodology of classical mne-
monics, which inherently suggested an imaginary walk through the ‘building
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of memory’, suggested as much. The answer lies in the objective. What the
art of mnemonics aspired to was the capacity to serve, for instance, kings
and others sovereigns by generating a deep insight into the hidden logic of
the world. To do so it arranged a well-considered, meticulously orchestrated
confrontation with the classified knowledge of that world. To achieve this
strategy, it used a format of communication that had already proven its val-
ue and was easy to adapt in as far as its medial conventions suited the new
functionality. The format, of course, was the theatre – albeit with an inverted
spatial organisation in Camillo’s case. Systemised fragments of knowledge
were distributed along the layout of the amphitheatrical auditorium, and the
stage – which was usually the scene of the action – now became the loca-
tion for the Ladies and Gentlemen, in this case King François I of France,
who sponsored the undertaking.59 Such a one-man theatre made sense
because it all revolved around the intensity of the gaze and the ideal per-
spective with which the encoded, ‘exhibited’ knowledge could be perceived
from the stage through the window of the proscenium. Regardless of the
fact that the exhibition as a format of communication was almost unknown
in the Renaissance, Camillo, Bruno and Fludd could never have designed a
memory exhibition because of the radical difference in dramaturgy. In order 29
for it to work, the axis of observation was crucial, and, according to theatri-
cal convention, it had to be static, unequivocal and governed by the laws of
central perspective, i.e. the ideal viewpoint was centred at the front of the
stage. Given the right lighting, the right concentration and the right dura-
tion of the event, a complete immersion in the secrets of the world would
occur and the king would see the light, for which he had paid so dearly.
It never came to that, however, nor would it have along the lines of our
proposed memory exhibition, simply because the format doesn’t match with
the intended immersion. From the visitor’s point of view, exhibitions offer a
multitude of positions with a multitude of perspectives. What is more, mne-
monic processes are of a highly discontinuous nature and follow the path of
associations, led by external stimuli and suggestions. Which is exactly what
an exhibition is: an orchestrated path of associations through a landscape
of things and thoughts. The visitor walks along this path and perceives it
through a kaleidoscope of ever-changing perspectives during a random
interval. Submersion, or immersion, is a complicated notion in this context.
Memory and imagination surely form a cycle that is propelled by a narrative
and its potential, but immersion goes much deeper than that. The experi-
ence of being immersed is no less than the degree of narrative or ritual
density at which memory and imagination begin to oscillate and become