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as an invisible or illicit observer (the trespasser or voyeur). Hands-on exhibits
acknowledge the visitor’s presence and even require it to activate them. Yet we
should not make too firm a distinction; the history of the two techniques also
shows plenty of crossover, from the origins of the diorama and panorama in
theatre sets, to the involvement of the modernist avant-garde in designing
department store window displays.
In the 1920s through to the 1940s, avant-garde exhibition, like hands-on
exhibits later, recognized the importance of tactility, of space and of engaging
the audience actively, but they emphasized these at the expense of the object –
especially the unique art object. Though these days the historical avant-garde
takes its place in the museum as a set of unique and highly valuable objects, its
aim, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, was to restore a social relevance to art,
which meant the destruction of art as a distinct category, and its merging with
everyday life. Whilst they may have seen existing museums as cemeteries for art,
artists, designers and architects saw the exhibition as a new and exciting form
of mass media. The exhibition promised to establish an unprecedented inter-
active relationship between media and audience (and, in the case of the great
international exhibitions, could reach huge audiences). In an era of rapidly
developing mass media, the fact that the world of exhibit design was not yet
professionalized gave great scope for experiment. Members of the European
avant-garde movements, especially the Dada, de Stijl, Bauhaus and Constructiv-
ist groups, devised new and innovative exhibitions. These are sometimes termed
‘ideological’ exhibitions as opposed to ‘theatrical’ exhibitions (such as the hall
of dioramas) (Barry 1996: 310; Kachur 2001: 4–6). However, this distinction is a
bit misleading, since all exhibitions are ideological in the usual sense of the
word, and since theatre itself is reinvented in this period. Exhibition designers
often doubled as set designers for the theatre, and avant-garde theatre trans-
formed the relationship between audience and performers, disposing of the
proscenium arch which separates actors from audience and using a range of
techniques to disrupt the flow of the narrative and break the theatrical illusion.
Interwar avant-garde exhibition design was also distinctive in its foreground-
ing of the installation itself, and the explicit incorporation of the viewer into
the exhibit. Exhibition designers, including Herbert Bayer, El Lissitzky, László
Moholy-Nagy and Frederick Kiesler, attempted to integrate the dramatic
organization of space in the theatre with graphic and typographic visual elem-
ents. They reconfigured the exhibition space to enable visitors to interact with
the display, using a number of different strategies. One was to make the exhibit
change with the visitor’s point of view. For instance, El Lissitzky’s 1927–8
‘Abstract Cabinet’, commissioned by museum director Alexander Dorner for
the Landesmuseum in Hanover, used vertical thin metal slats placed at an angle
to the wall. These were white on one side and black on the other, so that they