When modern fashion and models are placed among medieval objects, the exhibition format and architectural arrangement in turn form a new interpretation of the exhibits.
For most contemporary art museums, “seeing” must be complementary to “acting”. The naturalistic art tradition, which began with the Greco-Romans, has been exploring the hallucinatory drawing space that “makes you want to walk in”, and for contemporary art museums, the desire to “move” has exploded.
“Contemplation” and “Motion”
If you walk into an art gallery in New York or Zurich, you will find that the movement of the mind is often accompanied by physical activity when viewing artworks. Sometimes, this physical activity often causes accidental damage to the exhibits, especially, In order to prevent those curious viewers who are “is this really drawn”, the museum will inevitably add a “do not touch” sign. In this way, there are still occasional “performance art” that smashed the exhibits and combined performance and venting of anger. In 2012, there was an incident in which the famous works of modern painter Rosenko were destroyed in the British National Gallery. Coincidentally, when it was exhibited in Avignon, France, the white triptych “Phaedrus” created by the American painter Cy Twombly was destroyed by a lady named Sanrindi, who claimed that she was fascinated by the painting. , eager to “kiss” the painting.
In the film and television works, the lifeless art gallery has also been made into the stage of “action films”, “Night at the Museum” which makes all the exhibits come alive, and “The Da Vinci Code”, which begins with a murder in the Louvre. “, so aggressively “moving” is also appalling.
”Walking” was originally meant for “seeing”. For most people, an art gallery isn’t “home” after all, it’s not a place to go to see it once a week, and, for those who come all the way, if you don’t put all the exhibits into one place it can be very effective. In the spatial sequence of “traversal”, it is really unreasonable. Therefore, the “visiting flow lines” in the standard art museum textbooks in the 1970s and 1980s were all connected in parallel, in series or radially. Once you reach the starting point, there is no turning back.
Because of its built-in functions, the museum building has another special contradiction when it is “virtual” inside and outside “real”, that is, it is not only a static temple, but also implicitly and gradually highlights “” movement” feature.
At the Antwerp Museum of Contemporary Art, an installation attracts a small audience to dance, and the “activity” that takes place in the museum becomes part of the exhibition, but also challenges the principle of “quiet museum”.
Antonello’s oil painting “Saint Jerome in the Study” is an excellent example of the juxtaposition of “contemplation” and “movement”: St. The viewer’s interest is not only in his room, but also with the two windows that seem to open inadvertently leading to a distant landscape that, although somewhat symbolic in the artist’s case, inspires different faculties of the eye and the body. , the different sight lines and movement directions also intersect with each other.
Unlike three-dimensional statues, the painting plane is meaningful only when viewed from the front. The direction in which people actually view the painting is not consistent with the direction of travel. Due to the different display concepts, different architectural arrangements are caused, and these arrangements are reversed. Came here to form a new understanding of the exhibits.
The building uses the interior decoration to form a modal that the exhibits and the space are integrated. Sanssouci Palace, located in the northern suburbs of Potsdam City, was a German palace and garden in the 18th century. Sanssouci Palace has three-stage columns running through the eaves to form a niche-shaped space aggregation, in which works of art can be placed. This technique is used in books. It can often be seen in the pavilion that these architectural elements actually act as part of the “picture frame”, which makes the audience’s viewing form certain certain paragraphs, and the paragraphs are linked into meaningful movements.
At the same time, the early “gallery” also had quite a few paintings densely covered on the wall, making them almost form a completely continuous surface, the “paragraph” and rhythm of the space became blurred, and the tendency of “movement” made the Bits give a static feeling of wholeness.
The strength and size of the “picture frame”, the size of the steps and Xu Ji, coupled with different streamlines, always mean different directions of action and mutual relationships. The actions in the art museum will not be private, but A “Symphony”.
Sometimes, physical activity often causes accidental damage to the exhibits, especially in order to prevent those curious viewers who are “is this really drawn?”, the art museum will inevitably add a “do not touch” sign.
Unlike a three-dimensional statue, a painting plane is meaningful only when viewed from the front.
Excellent exhibition spaces always give this tune extra meaning, which should be in keeping with the museum’s characteristic theme. Speaking of which, it is reminiscent of Frederick Schinkel’s famous Old National Gallery in Berlin. Coincidentally, German architects not only helped to complete the expansion project of the National Museum of China, but also played a pivotal role in the history of the development of the “National Museum”. The type of architecture, but because German humanists, including architects, had explored the cultural function of museums with extraordinary enthusiasm. At the critical stage of the development of Western architectural types at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the formation of the German state was this This exploration provides a well-timed impetus.
Schinkel’s pioneers were already thinking about the concept of world culture beyond a single nation. Therefore, the “collection” of art museums not only includes paintings, sculptures and other works of art classified by “chronology” and “style history”, but also includes everything. Objects that can be included in “natural history”, and the exhibition space named “country” has also become a miniature “world”.
Antonello da Messina’s “Saint Jerome in the Study” is an excellent example of the juxtaposition of “contemplation” and “movement.”
In fact, both cultural and natural worldviews have influenced the space design and display concept of the Old National Gallery. The famous naturalist Humboldt put forward his own opinions on the structure of art museums, focusing on whether the arrangement of artworks should be according to “theme” or “time”, the former corresponds to the acquisition of “information” and “knowledge” by naturalists curiosity, while the latter is indicative of the strong narrative nature of the Rijksmuseum’s displays. Eventually, both “exposition” and “story” found their way into the museum’s textbooks.
Absolutely “dynamic”
When you walk into the Guggenheim Museum, what catches your eye is not the exhibition works, but such a huge white vortex: a ring-shaped slope spirals through the interior space of the 7th-floor museum from top to bottom. The works are displayed in shallow, windowless display walls around the central spiral. The niches in the wall are neither vertical nor flat, and sculptures are usually placed only on the floor of the spiral walkway.
Why use the spiral ramp as the main exhibition space? This construction method is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also makes the museum full of controversy. In fact, architect Frank Lloyd Wright has been seeking to enclose a space with a three-dimensional spiral structure, rather than a circular plane structure, so that people can truly experience the movement in the space. When people walk along the spiral ramp, the surrounding space is continuous and gradual, rather than fragmented and folded. The spiral structure of the Guggenheim Museum is like a flowing, continuous space-time, which breaks the structure of the square box of the traditional museum.
The traditional exhibition flow line is always interrupted by individual exhibition halls, forming a fragmented exhibition experience. The spiral ramp space brings a single and continuous viewing flow-visitors take the elevator to the top floor, walk continuously around the atrium along the huge spiral ramp, and slowly descend to the bottom floor. Admire all the exhibits in their entirety from start to finish.
”Dynamic” is not only a mental but also a physical challenge. The Mixiu Art Museum in Japan designed by I.M. Pei is not that big, but the meaning of physical exertion is the same. It is located on the outskirts of Kyoto city center 90 minutes by car. After getting off the bus, you have to take a battery car to reach it. Visitors pass through the Taoyuan Mountain Tunnel and climb three stone steps with 12 steps each. Such a trek is not the designer’s negligence, but turns the journey to the exhibition into a pilgrim’s journey.
“Accidental” Action
The action of “contingency” is an important issue for contemporary art museums. Some famous big art museums, such as the Louvre or the Metropolitan, are like a big market because of their large sites and crowds. There are permanent displays of grand narratives, and they have to take into account the diverse needs of audiences with different backgrounds, so a collection-style “action plan” has emerged as the times require.
As a result, the fixed relationship between “action” and “seeing” in traditional art museums is facing a serious crisis. In such a space, a viewer may not necessarily walk around and have a look, but may also follow the reins without any clue. Most art spaces still have a potential “streamline”. The existence of such a streamline tries to make organized “views” the core activity in such spaces, and unconstrained “actions” are just accidents.
However, the disparity between these two behaviors reveals a crack in the art museum culture today, that the “action” that is slowly coming to life is not a dimension encouraged by classical art practice, but a new contemporary change. In the final analysis, art is a personal thing. In this sense, we can talk about what the ancient Chinese called “contemplation”. “Action” and “seeing” may indicate the unique social situation of contemporary art museums: art of privacy. Losing its status, the dynamic experience of space becomes a way to the “public”, an alternative way of social communication.
This is how the “installation” art lights up the “space”, not only because of “seeing”, but because of the active participation of the audience’s various senses. So “space” overwhelms “art”.
There is a lot to be said about the “public space” that has arisen under the influence of Western democratic concepts, but there is one thing that makes its relationship with art exhibitions more awkward. The so-called public space is not only a static container for the public to talk about, but it often turns abstract social relations into concrete and dynamic expressions. The “movement” of “dynamic expression” determines that it has no established formula and is temporarily presented by the relative situation of people in space. Because of this temporary randomness, there is no obvious order and no image.” “Plaza”, on the contrary, is the most appropriate, there is no pre-hierarchical prototype of public space – the set architectural program that is difficult to change in ordinary art museums, but more or less contradicts this dynamic tendency.
Some people say that the way of experiencing oriental art may alleviate this contradiction. For those who advocate “contemplation”, “action” is only a supplement to “seeing”, and exaggerating the meaning of “action” in the art space is undoubtedly putting the cart before the horse, because the real “action” can only be the movement of thinking. The gist of “action” is the expression of space through time, and it is the active participation of people in the artistic process, not just the change of the place. The dynamics presented by the physical structure is only the result of the change or one of the reasons for the change; On the other hand, “seeing” does not necessarily come down to a flat, flattened space. Some ancient Chinese displays, such as “heavy screens”, can often mobilize the viewer’s vast and far-reaching spatial awareness, because images are attached to the In a tempting “reciprocating” dynamic space framework, this happened to be the effort of scholars such as Erwin Panofsky to break the concept of static visual perception since the 20th century.
Panofsky’s masterpiece “Perspective as a Symbolic Form” pointed out that even the classical order is not just a balance of compositional proportions as we imagined, and the symmetry of the Greek temple can only be estimated by estimating the dynamic viewer’s feelings. It can only be realized afterward, so the columns are not absolutely equidistant. Considering the difference between looking up and looking up, their top and bottom are not even of general thickness.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York looks like a huge white vortex, and inside it, there is a ring-shaped slope spiraling through the 7-story building space from top to bottom. The building’s spiral structure breaks with the traditional square box structure of a museum.
The Guggenheim Museum in New York looks like a huge white vortex, and inside it, there is a ring-shaped slope spiraling through the 7-story building space from top to bottom. The building’s spiral structure breaks with the traditional square box structure of a museum.
The history of the American Art Museum is an excellent example of the “market” and “temple” working together.
The unique architectural language and innovative garden landscape of the Red Brick Art Museum provide a variety of possibilities that are different from traditional art museums for the generation, collision and presentation of contemporary art and culture.
Controlling the way people behave is unrealistic in today’s museums, but for most works of art, a noisy and disorderly environment is still not conducive to “seeing”. The design of most exhibition buildings is ultimately a “deliberate” expression, which requires calculation and presupposition, excluding flexibility and accident. Architects have more or less such “selfishness”, that is, the final order of artworks should be formulated by them. Under their covert domination, watching is not indiscriminate wandering, and action is not unrestrained carnival. The Japanese architect Tadao Ando, known for the quietness and purity of his work, couldn’t help but tolerate the unexpected disorder when he built an art gallery for children.
After talking about “action”, what cannot be forgotten is rest. In the interval of “exhibiting exhibitions” with a large amount of exercise, it is necessary to set up many comfortable seats. In the art circle, the seats are described as: to temporarily get rid of the heels of high-heeled shoes from the inevitably stiff, cold and slippery ground of high culture The soft sitting surface that comes out, usually without backrest, because the walls of museums are often reserved for artworks first.
Forgot who said it: According to the mind and body of the average person, the upper limit of time to “endure” an art museum is 65 minutes.
