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from 1928 to 1930 and published a book Contemporary Art Applied to the
Store and Its Display in 1930 (Otwell 1997). He viewed the opportunities for
display in America (in the store window as well as the exhibition) as a way of
introducing contemporary art to a mass audience, thereby educating people as
consumers of ‘good design’ (Kiesler 1930). His was a very different approach to
Lissitzky’s, since for Lissitzky existing notions of taste and aesthetics had to be
overturned in response to the demands of a new collective society. The work of
Bayer, Kiesler and Johnson encourages the viewer to reflect on their own pos-
ition, and to inhabit the space. Yet, though they reinvented the exhibition space
along modernist lines, they held onto a belief in aesthetic value and a fetishistic
attachment to objects that was rooted in older notions of aesthetics and in the
world of goods (see Chapter 1, section 4). One of the reasons Johnson’s
Machine Art exhibition may have been well received by critics was that it
reinforced ‘an ahistorical understanding of culture’, finding a ‘timeless essence’
in the objects of industrial mass production (Staniszewski 1998: 158).
The exhibition design animates the object, like the show window, it brings
objects ‘to life’. If anything bridged Kiesler’s practice as an exhibition designer
for MoMA and Guggenheim, and his work on show windows for Saks Fifth
Avenue, it was the theatre. Stage sets provide the environment in which the
drama happens; they stage the encounter between actors (objects) and audience
(visitors). Oddly enough, in the art gallery this leads to the self-effacement of
exhibition design itself – the end of avant-garde exhibition design in art. In
1961, Kiesler wrote:
The traditional art object, be it a painting, a sculpture, or a piece of
architecture, is no longer seen as an isolated entity but must be considered
within the context of this expanding environment. The environment
becomes equally as important as the object, if not more so, because
the object breathes into the surrounding and also inhales the realities of
the environment no matter in what space, close or wide apart, open air or
indoor.
(cited in Staniszewski 1998: 8)
This anthropomorphic account of the ‘breathing’ art object is consistent with
the view in the 1950s and 60s that art needed space to ‘breathe’. In the 1970s
Brian O’Doherty argued that the blank whiteness and obligatory minimalism
of the ‘white cube’ art gallery was intended to liberate the art: ‘The art is free,
as the saying used to go, to ‘take on its own life’ (O’Doherty 1999: 15). Modern-
ist art gallery spaces are designed to distance the museum experience from
other kinds of experience outside, to heighten aesthetic contemplation of the
individual artwork by suppressing context. The white wall, is not – as it may
seem – the absence of display support but, as Mark Wigley has argued in his