Page 81 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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should arrive at a realization of their own potentialities by their own
efforts. The club’s role is to become a University of Culture.
(Lissitzky 1984: 44)

Lissitzky’s approach to space, whether the architectural space of the club
or the space of his ‘demonstration rooms’, was informed by a rejection of
pictorial, perspectival space (including the voyeuristically viewed space of the
diorama or tableau) in favour of a concept of space as something to be lived in
(1984: 138–9). As the first section of this chapter suggested, amongst the avant-
garde in this period the notion of ‘life’ and ‘living’ was closely tied with notions
of presence and agency – the ability to act on the world and change it. The
museum – and especially the art museum – represented its antithesis. Lissitzky
declared, ‘We reject space as a painted coffin for our living bodies’ (1984: 140, his
emphasis). Along with other members of the Soviet avant-garde, he shifted
priority away from the unique art object and the practice of aesthetic contem-
plation, both of which were central to the art museum, and neither of which
seemed to have continuing relevance for a mass, proletarian society. In the
process he reinvented the exhibition and by implication, the museum as a space
for action.
Lissitzky’s most well-known, and most influential, exhibition design was one
he collaboratively produced (with 38 designers, the majority of them graphic
designers) for the International Exhibition of Newspaper and Book Publishing
(or Pressa) in Cologne in 1928. The Soviet Pavilion at Pressa was very different
from his ‘demonstration rooms’ insofar as it was crammed full with pictures –
iconic photographs rather than abstract compositions. The space of the exhib-
ition became theatrical or even cinematic, using blown-up photographs and
typography and centred around a huge ‘photofresco’ which juxtaposed images
in a way reminiscent of Soviet film montage techniques. The reproductive tech-
nologies and materials out of which the Pressa pavilion was constructed were
also the exhibited objects, and in this respect as well as in terms of its appear-
ance, it became a paradigm for avant-garde exhibition design (Staniszewski
1998: 47). The Pressa pavilion condensed the artefact and the display support
into one. It marked the beginning of a disappearance of the artefact, which
becomes itself the walls and ceiling of the space. This was one reason why the
exhibit resembled a stage set. Lissitzky was disappointed that the exhibition
had ended up looking like a ‘theatre decoration’ (Lissitzky cited in Buchloh
1988: 102–3). Yet this aspect of the design, along with the innovative use of
materials and scale, was to become very influential.
By the 1930s, under the restrictive conditions of Stalinism, Lissitzky’s mont-
age techniques, intended for educating and consciousness-raising, had become
a resource for exhibitions and designs ‘prescribing the silence of conformity and