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between art and the everyday, and worked across both, producing gallery
art but also designing department store displays and utilitarian domestic
objects. They quoted from popular culture, lifting clichés from one space into
another space which they conceived of as quite separate. Footsteps and peep-
holes were not clichés in exhibition design but pieces of popular vernacular. To
journalists reviewing the Bauhaus show, however, the museums were in a con-
tinuum with the department stores – historically linked to them, they were
places one went to educate one’s taste, to learn about the latest thing. To
encounter there examples of the lowest forms of popular culture (that one was
supposed to be educating oneself away from) merely indicated a poor exhib-
ition design decision.
Differences between North American and European understandings of the
purposes of exhibition design are perhaps less significant than differences
within the design approaches that I have loosely classified as ‘avant-garde’. I
would like to begin to draw finer distinctions between them, specifically
between the ways in which the exhibitions staged their relationship to the vis-
itors. The most explicitly politicized and radical conception of the active audi-
ence can be found in the work of the Soviet avant-garde of the late 1920s and
30s. A number of Soviet artists attempted to reinvent the role of art in society
to enable it to address a mass audience without sacrificing the advances made
by modernism in its rejection of an older, bourgeois conception of art. The
artist and exhibition designer El Lissitzky is very influential in this respect. He
wrote,
Large international art shows resemble a zoo where the visitors are sub-
jected to the roar of thousands of assorted beasts. My space will be
designed in such a way that the objects will not assault the visitor all at once.
While passing along the picture-studded walls of the conventional art
exhibition setup, the viewer is lulled into a numb state of passivity. It is our
intention to make man active by means of design. This is the purpose of
space.
(Lissitzky 1984: 149)
Earlier, in 1923, Lissitzky had written that his organization of space involved
‘destroying the wall as the resting place for . . . pictures’ (1984: 140). Space was
not about the construction of representations, but about responding to human
requirements. Lissitzky’s notion of the ‘active’ visitor is informed by a Marxist
concept of self-realization. In 1930 he explained the purpose of Soviet workers’
clubs:

That in the club the masses should provide for themselves, that they should
not throng there from the outside merely to seek amusement, but that they