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vigorous interaction produces mutual contrasts, intensification and lack of
relatedness.
(2002: 299)

The overabundance of things in the museum produced the problem of the
confused, disoriented spectator (Griffiths 2002). One response to this is to
enforce an illusory coherence. This is precisely what the great exhibitions of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did. As Simmel commented, ‘It is a
particular attraction of world fairs that they form a momentary centre of world
civilization, assembling the products of the entire world in a confined space as
if in a single picture’ (2002: 299). Nietzsche used the world exhibition as a
metaphor for the way that too much historical knowledge led to a jaded rela-
tionship with reality. He argued, ‘modern man who allows his artists in history
to go on preparing a world exhibition for him . . . has become a strolling spec-
tator and arrived at a condition in which even great wars and revolutions are
able to influence him for hardly more than a moment’ (Nietzsche 1997: 83). For
Nietzsche the very concept of the world exhibition is associated with history as
spectacle, and for Simmel the world’s fairs produce a fragile illusion of whole-
ness out of what is in fact very disparate material. Yet a detailed look at the
development of exhibition techniques suggests that it was at such international
exhibitions and trade fairs that new exhibition techniques were developed
which would eventually counter the impression of the museum as a site of
amassed but ‘dead’ stuff. These techniques, discussed in the final section of
this chapter, were first developed by the men and women of the Soviet avant-
garde. Avant-garde artists, designers and architects reinvented the exhibition
medium, but they also attacked the existing institution of the museum.
Like the writers already discussed, the Soviet avant-garde extolled ‘life’ as
opposed to the dead past preserved in museums. After the Russian Revolution
of 1917, the avant-garde argued for a new post-Revolutionary aesthetic, inte-
grated with everyday life. Instead of having a special place for aesthetic experi-
ence, all life should be aesthetically transformed. The museum had become
associated with the bourgeoisie and pre-Revolutionary art was seen as an
expression of an overthrown bourgeois social order (Groys 1994: 145). The
avant-garde believed that the new proletarian society would require an aesthetic
of its own. This notion found justification in the writings of Marx, who argued
that while earlier revolutions had needed to draw on the material of the past, a
communist revolution would have to reject ‘borrowed language’ and forge its
own ‘poetry’ (1968: 96–8).
The painter Malevich’s essay ‘On the Museum’ presented the destruction of
the museum and of all past art as a creative, life-affirming act. Malevich saw
the preservation of the great monuments of past art as a hindrance to life and