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seemed to change shade as the visitor moved through the space (Lissitzky 1984:
151). As the art historian Benjamin Buchloh has argued, this exhibition strategy
discouraged traditional practices of aesthetic contemplation and demanded a
new kind of behaviour in the presence of the work of art (1988: 86).
A closely linked strategy was to make the exhibit dependent on manipulation
by the visitor. In the Hanover cabinet, El Lissitzky placed artwork on sliding
panels and rotating drums. Also in Dorner’s museum, Moholy-Nagy’s ‘Room
of Our Time’, begun in 1930, contained the Licht-Raum Modulator or light
machine, which projected abstract patterns of light onto walls and ceiling when
visitors pressed a button. Kiesler’s adaptable ‘L and T system’ (Leger und
Träger), first used at the International Exhibition of New Theatre Technique in
Vienna in 1924, placed images on display racks that visitors could adjust to
view. The exhibition designs Kiesler created for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of
This Century gallery (New York) in 1942 allowed visitors to swivel or raise and
lower paintings by hand.
These art exhibitions often abandoned the traditional arrangement of art on
the wall and in frames. The release of the picture from its frame is connected
with the development of abstraction and the rejection of older artistic conven-
tions (such as perspective) which had made each picture a self-contained space
(O’Doherty 1999: 13–34). With his ‘L and T system’ Kiesler removed two-
dimensional art into the middle of the display space itself, while the walls of the
building were left bare. The Dadaists, particularly Marcel Duchamp (who
worked with both Dadaists and Surrealists), had already experimented with the
disruption of the traditional salon style of hanging pictures. The First Inter-
national Dada Fair in Berlin in 1920 included slogans interspersed with the
pictures, and a model of a Prussian officer with a pig’s head suspended from the
ceiling. Duchamp hung coal bags from the gallery ceiling at the 1938 Inter-
national Exposition of Surrealism, and wove a mile of string across the exhib-
ition space at the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism exhibition (see O’Doherty
1999: 67–76 for more on these). His approach was far more confrontational
than Kiesler’s, not least because his exhibits were seemingly hostile toward the
viewers and the other works in the exhibition.
Another device Kiesler and Duchamp both used was the peephole. On
Duchamp’s instructions, Kiesler installed a peephole at the 1947 International
Exposition of Surrealism in Paris. Through it, visitors could view Duchamp’s
Le Rayon Vert (The Green Ray). In Kiesler’s ‘Kinetic Gallery’ at Art of This
Century, visitors could use a lever to reveal Breton’s ‘poem object’, while
Duchamp’s La Bôite-en-Valise could be viewed by peering into a hole and
simultaneously turning a very large wooden spiral. Herbert Bayer also used a
peephole in the Bauhaus 1919–1928 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,
New York in 1938–9 (Kachur 2001: 201; Huhtamo 2002: 8). In these examples,