Page 82 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Figure 3 El Lissitsky, design for the Soviet Pavilion at the International
Exhibition of Newspaper and Book Publishing (or Pressa) in Cologne, 1928.
Source: Photo courtesy Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne.

obedience’ (Buchloh 1988: 103). Buchloh shows how these techniques are dis-
seminated and put to use in various ways – in the totalitarian Soviet Union, for
Fascist exhibits in Germany and Italy, and in the United States in the service of
an ever-accelerating capitalism. This is not to say that the formal and material
characteristics of avant-garde exhibition design could be used for these
purposes without adaptation. Buchloh discusses the way in which Fascist exhib-
itions replace the photomontages of Lissitzky’s exhibition design with the
‘awe-inspiring monumentality of the gigantic single-image panorama’, as
exemplified in the German Werkbund Exhibition of 1933, The Camera