Avant-Garde Demonstrations: Radical Exhibition Culture from Fringe Experimentation to State Propaganda
1 December 2022 at 4:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Christian Rizzalli, University of Queensland
Associate Professor Anthony White, University of Melbourne
Session Speakers
Emeritus Professor Andrew McNamara, Queensland University of Technology
Jessica Spresser, University of Queensland
Christian Rizzalli, University of Queensland
The first half of the 20th century saw radical transformations in exhibition culture. While Greenbergian theories of modernism propose that the period followed a steady march towards the White Cube, various groups — particularly amongst the European avant-garde — took an approach entirely at odds with this narrative. Futurists, Dadaists, Constructivists and Rationalists (to name a few) reimagined the exhibition space, treating it not as a space of contemplation for the display of precious art objects, but rather as a dynamic and vital space for the demonstration of new political and cultural possibilities. In practice, this extended from fringe experimentation (the anarchic First International Dada Fair of 1920) to fully-fledged state propaganda (El Lissitzky’s Soviet Pavilion at the Pressa exhibition of 1928). A far cry from the purity of the White Cube, the avant-garde exhibitions of this period were often chaotic and overfilled with material, and many aimed to viscerally impact their viewers in one way or another.
Out of the frame: Erich Buchholz and the first walk-in picture
Emeritus Professor Andrew McNamara, Queensland University of Technology
In 1923 Kurt Schwitters left a business card at the door of Herkulesufer 15 in Berlin after he found no one at home. This was no ordinary Berlin apartment. Numerous visitors came to this apartment, and it became something of a meeting place for discussions about the latest ideas in art, particularly ideas relating to kinetics and movement. Behind that door, the artist Erich Buchholz had broken free of the picture frame the previous year (1922). He had transformed his modest family apartment into an abstract installation space. Half a century later, Heinz Ohff declared in Buchholz’s 1972 obituary that he had ‘remodelled his studio flat at Herkulesufer 15 into the first “environment,” the first abstractly designed three-dimensional space in art history.’ While Buchholz is well-known in Germany, he is largely obscure outside Germany except to specialists.
This paper seeks to place Buchholz’s transformation of his Berlin apartment in 1922 in the context of numerous avant-garde explorations aiming to redefine spatial experience by extending the intersections of painting, architecture, design, film, and even public billboards. In the process, these experiments offer us a quite different picture of the modern avant-garde to that handed down to us from American mid-C20th formalist vision of the School of Paris.
Structures of support: Early twentieth-century fixing systems and their role in the prevalence of experimental art exhibitions
Jessica Spresser, University of Queensland
The manner in which a piece of wall-based art is physically supported has taken many forms, particularly since the emergence of the easel painting in the seventeenth century. Using the exhibitionary environments of galleries and museums as a frame of reference, the paper will highlight the relationship between art, spectator and architectural space through a study of fixing systems. It will focus on the first half of the twentieth century as an era in which exhibitionary culture radically developed, and experimental exhibitions altered the way in which wall-based art could be perceived. Fixing systems can be defined as the support mechanisms used to display art, the most obvious example being hanging hardware attached to a frame. However there is a vast range of novel systems designed by architects, artists, exhibition designers and the like that mediate the literal and conceptual space between art and architecture: from the dynamic metal walls of Alexander Dorner and El Lissitzky’s 1927 Abstract Cabinet to Frederick Kiesler’s rods which suspended paintings in space at the 1942 Art of This Century Gallery in New York.
Rationalist Repetition and Transparency for Fascism’s Populist Democracy: Edoardo Persico and Marcello Nizzoli’s Photomontage Display for the 1934 Italian Plebiscite
Christian Rizzalli, University of Queensland
This paper offers a close analysis of a public photomontage display that the designers Edoardo Persico and Marcello Nizzoli (both associated with the Italian Rationalist movement) produced for the Italian plebiscite election of 1934. The display was erected in the heart of Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and took the form of an enormous scaffolding structure adorned with photographic and textual panels. In this moment, the expanded, architectonic photomontage techniques prized by the Fascist regime and their supporters in the Italian avant-garde moved beyond the interior exhibition space, and instead occupied a bustling thoroughfare in the very city where Fascism was born. Central to Persico and Nizzoli’s design were the Rationalist design principles of repetition and transparency, though in this instance the purely architectural significance of such principles was transformed into incisive political allegory. In this paper, I consider this transformation in depth, tracing the way in which Persico and Nizzoli reinterpreted central tenets of modernist design and deployed them in this photomontage display to reflect political ideas central to Fascism’s populist democracy.
Biographies
Emeritus Professor Andrew McNamara, Queensland University of Technology
Andrew McNamara is an art historian and writer, whose work largely focuses on the modernist legacy for contemporary art and culture. Another enduring topic of research interest is the question of how the arts and humanities are evaluated in modern and contemporary societies. Recent works include Undesign (2018); Surpassing Modernity (2018/19); Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond (2019), and the exhibition Bauhaus Now (2020-2021). He curated Bauhaus Now at the Museum of Brisbane, September 2020-April 2021 and is Emeritus Professor at QUT.
Jessica Spresser, University of Queensland
Jessica Spresser is a PhD Candidate at the University of Queensland’s School of Architecture. She is also an architect and director of SPRESSER, an emerging practice specialising in bespoke art-driven architectural projects. She holds a Master of Architecture from the University of Queensland, and has practiced in London, Tokyo and Venice. Jessica is a sessional tutor and guest critic at UQ and USyd, and is a regular juror for the Australian Institute of Architects awards program.
Christian Rizzalli, University of Queensland
Christian Rizzalli is a PhD candidate in art history, in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. His research is focused on the history of political photomontage in Italy during the first half of the 20th century. With this topic as a springboard, Christian is interested in the broader relationship between avant-garde art and radical politics, particularly at the intersection of art, architecture and graphic design. He is scheduled to submit his completed PhD in October 2022, and will be working towards publication over the months that follow.
Associate Professor Anthony White, University of Melbourne
Anthony White is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Melbourne. His research focuses on the history of modern and contemporary art. His current project, Recentring Australian Art, investigates artists who have been overlooked by mainstream art history. He is the author of Italian Modern Art in the Age of Fascism (Routledge, 2020); with Grace McQuilten, of Art as Enterprise: Social and Economic Engagement in Contemporary Art (IB Tauris / Bloomsbury, 2016); and Lucio Fontana: Between Utopia and Kitsch (MIT Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in Grey Room, October, Third Text, and Artforum.