“Art” so Damien Hirst supposedly said, “is anything you put in an art gallery”. And while there is a certain cynicism to his aphorism we also know what he means. Who hasn’t hesitated – for a moment at least – in front of something innocuous wondering if that fire hose, thermostat, might be an art thing? The very fact of the gallery changes things. It acts as a mechanism altering the nature of the material that is placed within it. It changes us too: We look, behave and think differently inside it. In the same way that, as Bernard Tschumi put it, “love in the street differs from the Street of Love”, the cultural framework of the space alters the meaning and significance of the things that occur within it.
Inside the White Cube, Brian O’Doherty’s 1986 book describes this phenomenon: ‘The ideal gallery subtracts from the artwork all cues that interfere with the fact that it is “art”. The work is isolated from everything that would detract from its own evaluation of itself.’ O’Doherty describes the essence of this art-space as a hybrid possessing ‘the sanctity of the church, the formality of the courtroom, the mystique of the experimental laboratory [joined] with chic design to produce a unique chamber of esthetics.’
O’Doherty’s model of the white cube describes the architectural condition of the gallery: a designated space, somewhere where a different set of rules apply, with different terms of engagement, where different value systems operate. In the time since publication, the white cube space has continued to crystallise and multiply.
Art space now forms an essentially continue space across the globe. From one polished concrete floor in Hong Kong to one in downtown Basel. Neon lighting above stretching from Chelsea to Beirut. These art spaces physically manifest a non stop monument to the global elites who populate this rarified space, the space of interaction between art and the global financial elite who consume it. Architecture is the medium that constructs this landscape.
It’s architecture’s shadow gaps and near perfect assemblages of material. Its ability to shrink away from the viewer even as it choreographs their experience so completely. The fact that its material presence does all it can to void itself from the scene, architecture that dissolves its explicit visible symbolism into a whited-out ambience that frames our experience of the art that is exhibited within.
For architecture itself though there is something inherently problematic in becoming the subject of exhibition. How can it reveal itself? How can it act as both frame and subject? If the art-ness of art is amplified by the gallery, architecture, it seems, is diminished.
As exhibit, architecture often is figured at one remove. Removed from its real site and the sun and wind, from the politics of context, from any functional or social purpose, from users and experience. Removed from scale, material so that it is seen through filters of representation: photograph, model, drawing conceived as widows towards the actual, authentic architectural artefact. To put it another way, this approach assumes that the exhibit can only gesture towards the architectural fact.
Alternatively, the architectural exhibit can simulate architecture as installation at scale, figuring architecture as a spatial, quasi-material, sensation. Here architecture is amplified as an experiential thing, heightened an idea of ‘feeling’. Simulating architecture though should not be confused with architecture itself, which though it may possess and impart sensations and feelings, it does so only as part of a broader spectrum of qualities. Architectural simulation tends to exaggerate these sensational qualities, amplifying them to make up for the lack of other frequencies. One might even regard an entire genealogy of architecture that exists within this framework. This ‘biennialist’ strain of architecture strand though are like orchids in a hot house, a fragile form of life dependant on highly specific environmental conditions.
The mechanism of the gallery that does so much to manufacture the possibility of art, works to dismantle architectures core when it becomes the subject. This is the perennial problem inherent in every attempt to display architecture.
O’Doherty’s White Cube was an institutional critique, not a blueprint. And even as the model he described continued to refine into ever whiter, ever more cubic (metaphorically speaking) spaces, alternative forms of practice emerged. Art as variously environmental, site specific, social forms of practice. This meant embedded in places, mechanism, scenarios other than the gallery. Art that imagined the possibility of the gallery (the site for art) without walls, the dissolution of the art object, the field of operation broadly expanded to the horizon.
At the same time, a certain strand of architecture did the opposite. It transformed gallery itself into an artwork, into a formal object in space as if the city were the gallery and the museum itself the thing in the gallery. It did this by borrowing the formal qualities of a particular kind of expressive sculptural form, asking a building to be read and to be experienced as a object-thing. In doing this particular architectural qualities were amplified at the expense of others. Assuming an approximation of an idea of sculpture – or at least performing an impersonation of one idea of sculpture-ness – necessitated the suppression of other fundamental architectural qualities.
In each of these cases, the act of display does not simply reveal architecture. Instead it transforms architecture, remaking it around a set of other criteria. The medium of self-conscious exhibitionism, in other words, becomes the message.
But we could imagine architecture’s own inherent capacity to display itself from an alternative point of view. Not by assuming other modes, but of the way that architecture already operates as both the artefact and the representation of that artefact simultaneously. Architecture as a medium tends to construct, but at the same time architecture itself is constructed. In these dual modes it comes into the world. Indeed, a history of architecture is not a history of buildings but a history of representation of buildings. And its here we see the idea of display as an inherent architectural mode.
To exhibit has two meanings. One, the demonstrable, extrovert showing – of which exhibitionism is the extreme form. On the other, the more medical term of exhibiting symptoms. Here the body reveals qualities through displaying feelings, qualities, forms of behaviour. In this kind of exhibit, there is no clear meaning. No direct narrative. Instead we must, like the doctor, observe qualities that hint at some causality further back, as yet unrevealed. These definitions perhaps articulate the difference in how art and architecture display themselves to the world.
Architectures own body is its form of exhibition. Its within itself that it reveals itself not as illustration, diagram or explanation, but in its own full form.
O’Doherty’s white cube describes how an external armature supports a particular culture that resides within. Architecture though is both armature and object. Its political, ideological, economic and cultural forces are held within its material and spatial form. Or rather are its material and spatial form. Indivisible, architecture is both the map and the territory, the thing that its displayed and the mechanism of display at one and the same time.
This then allows us to imagine architecture operating not in discrete moments, where drawing begets model both in turn providing the blueprint for the built work. Or, in terms of exhibition, as photograph, drawing or model representing the very thing that can’t be exhibited – the elephant not in the room. Instead we should rather picture architecture as a series of related modes, each equally ‘architecture’, each a version of the other. In this way of thinking drawing is building, building is drawing. Built form is simply one model of the architectural idea, exactly as model is building.
It is at this point that argument we construct for the primacy of one form representation begins to dissolve. After all, we can no longer assure ourselves that a drawing, for example, remains representational – not ‘real’ as it were. That a model is a three-dimensional representation of something else. Each is equally ‘real’, just as architecture in its built form is as ‘unreal’. The building is simply a model of the drawing.
The rhetoric of architecture’s built form is so convincing that it appears to us as if it were in fact real. Its representational qualities are suppressed as it assumes the authority of the world we inhabit. Exceeding the scale, complexity and site we assign to acts of representation we mistake architecture as undeniable fact. In doing so we overlook the efforts of construction – both real and conceptual – that hold its artifice in place. Its display, its own exhibition is not of something else, but only of itself.
Architecture’s is not something that must be translated or illustrated. It comes into the world through its own performance, a performance that consists of nothing less (but no more) than architecture itself.
First published in ArtReview