Time travel: Interior architecture and the exhibition space
(from The Interior Architecture Reader, edited by Gregory Marinic, 2018 Routledge)
Chapter 28
Time travel
Interior architecture and the exhibition space
Anne Massey
Interior architecture is a relatively new discipline which aims to explore and account for the design, construction, and use of interior space. Situated between architecture and interior design, writing on interior architecture oscillates between the physical shell of the building and the look and feel of the spaces within buildings. As a subject and approach, it is situated between architecture and interiority. As Christoph Grafe outlined in his introduction to the Interior Architecture series:
Interiors play a significant role in the patterns of changing use and meaning in contemporary cities. Often designed as short-term proposals in existing (and often former industrial or commercial) buildings, their designers are able to respond flexibly to larger developments on an urban and global scale, both following fashions and trends and establishing them … All volumes contain a series of critical articles … to illustrate both their place in the
history of design and the architectural solutions employed by their designers.1
Approaches to interior architecture, therefore, rely heavily on the concepts and historiography of architecture combined with methods of design history and the emerging field of interiors.2 Some writing on interior architecture tends to gravitate more toward an architectural approach, as the new field of interiors is perceived as lacking the prestige of architecture. As Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal argue in the “General Introduction” to The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, “Historically the subject of interiors has been perceived as a marginal pursuit, mostly vocational in bias and lacking intellectual gravitas.”3 Thinking about how writing on architectural interiors is illustrated, there is a tendency to adopt the architectural convention of a freshly constructed, shiny new entity, usually without inhabitants in a fixed moment of time, everlasting and unchanging.4 As Jeremy Till argues: “In freezing time, architects would have it that they can control time. It is a control that attempts to banish those elements of time that present a challenge to the immutable authority of architecture.”5
In addition to the architectural obsession with the pristine, perfect interior with a focus on the finished project, there can also be a tendency to present a “before and after” linear narrative of interior architecture. This notion of the “new and improved” is endemic in design theory. There is a neatly defined design problem, and the professional designer can solve it just as neatly. From healthcare to environmental waste, the discipline of design and its critically naïve offshoot, design thinking, can solve the problems of the world. As Lucy Kimbell has argued, this relies on a simplistic view of the design process.6 This chapter argues that a consideration of the interior, which looks not just at a single before-and-after moment but also at a plurality of befores and afters, will enrich the discipline. By acknowledging the dimension of time within interior architecture, the subject is opened up to new readings and interpretations introducing a broader understanding of social, political, and cultural contexts. Considering the passing of time, interior architecture is subject to a more critical reading of images and the
interiors they represent beyond styles, technical innovations, and authorial tropes. A consideration of temporalities supports a more critically engaged reading of the interior by adding a new dimension.
As a case study for this approach, this chapter will consider the same space and its use over sixteen years. The case study is the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), 17–18 Dover Street in the West End of London. The ICA was founded in 1946 using the model of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; however, the founders (surrealist sympathizers Peter Gregory, Roland Penrose, Herbert Read, and Peter Watson) soon realized that the ambition to create a permanent collection was misguided and unrealistic. The founding committee came to the conclusion that they personally owned most of the modern artwork located in Britain at that time, as no public institutions were actively building up a collection of the avant-garde. The idea was to create a modern arts laboratory for exhibitions of art, design, film, literature, and photography. Moreover, the Institute aimed to stage discussions and concerts to foster an atmosphere of critical inquiry. The ICA succeeded in its aims and was the first institution in London to show leading artists such as Jackson Pollock, Leon Golub, and Andy Warhol, while providing the intellectual home for the Independent Group during the 1950s and 1960s. The exhibitions were usually visited by approximately 1,000 members, non-members, and students. The ICA organized twelve exhibitions annually with a host of associated events.
The new ICA spent some time searching for premises, holding its first events and exhibitions in the basement of the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street and the Burlington Galleries. The search for a new premises came to an end when, in early 1950, the first floor of a nineteenth-century townhouse was secured. The interior was remodeled by modernist architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew in 1950, and the upstairs former drawing room was used as an exhibition space and events venue throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s. It measured approximately meters and was an exceptionally difficult space to house London’s avant-garde headquarters.
How was the space occupied and changed with the rolling program of
twelve exhibitions annually? In addition, the ICA’s public program was held in the same space. How was the stage and the audience accommodated?
This chapter draws on – but also presents – a challenge to exhibition studies, which does not take the spatial culture of the exhibition space sufficiently into account. The focus tends to be on the works of art themselves, the intertextuality of the exhibition as event, and the various networks of artists, curators, and visitors. The writing is largely informed by research in the ICA archives held at Tate Britain. The images have been selected to evoke a certain atmosphere, allowing us to travel back in time.
An exhibit
This is the past, a photograph, an image, a fleeting moment frozen in time, never to happen again (Figure 28.1). One afternoon, on the first floor of a nineteenth-century townhouse near the Ritz, a split second is captured, unique and ephemeral. It was taken by the British artist Richard Hamilton during the installation of the exhibition an Exhibit one hot August day in 1957. It was a moment in London when everything seemed possible, the moment of mid-century modern, when art education was freely available in Britain, when new buildings in a new style were being built as part of a shiny new future. New styles of music, art, and design still shocked; new approaches to exhibition design still grabbed the attention of the gallery going public. Here are Perspex sheets arranged in the nineteenth-century space, challenging the imperial past of traditional London with its wrought iron, Juliet balconies, and French windows. Here was a new future in translucent plastic, hanging playfully over the period details, mocking the heritage of the building, adding a new layer of understanding and provocation, erecting new boundaries between past and present, then and now – the here and now. The shimmering sheets reflect the ornamental ironwork, the flagpole outside, the mellow stones of nineteenth-century London. The peace and apparent tranquility of London at the height of empire is now disturbed by new technologies, by a new generation noisy with provocation, armed with new materials and a new perspective. Time is
interrupted and the everlasting, secure order of neoclassical architecture challenged by this ephemeral installation – the exhibition. The boundaries between past, present, and future become blurred. We are on the edge between London as the imperial city and London as the site of modernity.
The exhibition, an Exhibit, was conceived by Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, and Victor Pasmore as “A populable art work.” It took place during August 13–24, 1957, and was planned to be a combination of a maze and a hall of mirrors. An environment was created for the gallery visitor to navigate as they wished, passing around and between the temporary boundaries erected by Perspex panels. The gallery, on the first floor of 17–18 Dover Street, in the West End, was a semi-private and semi-public space. It was a members’ space, but visitors could buy a one-day membership. There was a members’ bar, but a program of public events. The place of the exhibition was a sedate drawing room, remodeled using the Theory of Games and behaviorism to challenge the ICA gallery visitor. The
viewer was invited to enter a maze with temporary structures and no artworks, in a space with new boundaries created by translucent sheets.
The exhibition catalogue was a foldout A0 sheet printed on thin, translucent paper in red and black, which echoed the legacy of the Bauhaus, which Hamilton and Pasmore translated into a British context in their “Basic Design” course at King’s College, Durham University, and now part of Newcastle University, the forerunner of the Foundation Course in Art & Design. When folded closed, the cover carried the name of the show, the three curators involved, the ICA logo, and a black rectangle inspired by Paul Klee and the Bauhaus. In the process of opening the map, the reader is introduced to “1. Preplanning decided on the rules of the game, to be called an Exhibit.” followed by “2. an Exhibit as it stands, records one set of possible moves,” and then “3. Visitors to an Exhibit are involved in a game: the game is the structure of the Exhibit.” There is a self-conscious historicism in the text; the artists are writing for posterity and for the future archive. The visitors are invited to play a game, to explore boundaries between and across the disciplines of art and design, interior architecture, and exhibition installation.
an Exhibit brought together two artists and one art critic. The tightly knit group worked intensely on the project. The show was first erected at the Hatton Gallery and situated in Newcastle College. The concept was then brought to London, the link between curating and education slightly lost with the transposition from art school to art institution, but as art critic Lawrence Alloway, who was the diarist of the exhibition, argued:
A fuller degree of physical participation than is obtainable with separate works of art tempts the constructivist to dream of public monuments. an Exhibit is a way of accepting the limited conditions of an exhibition and overcoming them to make a drama of space that involved the spectator.
The Perspex panels were used in the available, standard dimensions of 1.2 meters by 0.6 meters, eight inches, and the curatorial team were not precious
about how the sheets should be arranged. The sheets used were in the commercially available colors of red, grey, black, and white and were hung at varying heights using nylon thread in a loose grid formation of 16 inches. They were ordered differently for the Newcastle and London shows and could be reinstalled in an endless distribution of divisions and boundaries to create a myriad of mazes to challenge the exhibition visitor.
Paintings from Haiti This exhibition at the ICA in Dover Street opened in March 1951, and the installation shot reveals the same interior as an Exhibit, with the same long French windows and early-nineteenth-century fittings opposite the entrance (Figure 28.2). The similarities stop there. The paintings are hung on specially designed panels, designed by Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry “on the unit system so that they can be used singly in twos or to form groups of alcoves. The screens were double-sided and covered in blue fabric; they have individual adjustable light fitments and stand firmly on solid laminated legs.” Richard Hamilton, who installed many of the early ICA exhibitions, found the space a difficult one to work with:
one of the problems of the ICA in the early days from the exhibition point of view was that the architectural features and style of the place really was not conducive to hanging pictures successfully … The screens that had been made were covered with blue felt … and the end walls were glossy straw which wouldn’t take a picture. So most of the efforts after that were directed at removing all the disadvantages of the fact that the place had been turned into an exhibition gallery … and since there were such problems with the space and not really any hanging space, because the big problem with the ICA was not only the décor but the fact that one wall was entirely taken up with window.
The paintings were hung awkwardly on the blue felt screens, ordered logically in a sequence determined by the windows to the right of the image. This was March 1951 in London, with a chill wind and rationing still in place. Members of the public were dressed in overcoats over their suits, guarding them against the cold. This was before the faint air of optimism offered by the Festival of Britain, which took place in the summer before Hamilton’s Growth and Form exhibition and post-war reconstruction had made much of an impact. The floorboards looked bare; rubbish piled up to the left beneath the contemporary style table which doubled as an admissions desk. The gallery assistant organized the piles of information sheets and postcards against the backdrop of the brand new, straw-covered wall mentioned by Hamilton. To the left was the shelving and display
cabinets specified by Fry and Drew. Institutional, tubular steel chairs were grouped to the right of the image, perhaps left over from an evening event.
During the span of the exhibition from March 13 to April 6, 1951, a plethora of events took place in the space. The screens were moved into storage, and collector Mercedes Mackay discussed “The Indigenous Music of Nigeria” with examples of various instruments; the American choreographer Beth Dean discussed “Dances of Australasia-Aborigines of Australia,” and there was dancing for ICA members led by Ernest Berk with music by Peter Ury and the Sholanke African Band. This was London facing the devastating effects of the Second World War and the transformation of the British Empire into the British Commonwealth before the more self-confident installation of an Exhibit.
Parallel of life and art
The low autumn sun shone through the familiar French windows onto a collection of unfamiliar images. This exhibition was staged two years after Paintings from Haiti and held from September 11 to October 18, 1953. It was installed by Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Ronald Jenkins. These exhibition organizers, or curators as they would be termed today, called themselves editors of the photographic images. The black-and-white photographs of diagrams, art works, missiles, insects, and vegetables were blown up and printed on card. They were then propped up against the wall, hung from the ceiling with fishing wire, or pinned to the walls. The group moved the Fry and Drew screens out for the exhibition, clearing the space to allow for a more uncluttered view of the exhibits. The straw finish at the end of the room was still in evidence, although hung with an assortment of images. The chosen images were designed to be experienced as a whole, as a total environment, and so the fewer impediments the better. The tubular steel chairs remained, as did the desk placed at the entrance with a telephone.
Throughout the later 1950s and early 1960s, the space continued to be used in the same way with a rolling series of exhibitions and events.
Changes in the avant-garde were reflected with the inclusion of performance events; Yves Tinguely orchestrated a “Cyco-Matic-Evening” in November 1957, when two cyclists rode through paint and then on a one-mile-long piece of paper in a race. In 1965, Mark Boyle asked the audience to take over the performance in a Brechtian moment that was to be immortalized in the film, Oh What a Lovely Whore! Boyle also designed the light show for the ICA’s moving out party in December 1967, when the progressive rock band Soft Machine played. The ICA, with the help of Jane Drew, had been seeking new premises for nearly four years and the deal to move to its present location on The Mall took two years of delicate negotiations. The ICA had now outgrown Dover Street, as Art & Artists observed: “The Institute of Contemporary Arts, in its cramped Dover Street pad for the last twenty-odd years, had begun bursting at the seams.”13
The new location, designed by John Nash, offered extended gallery space, a cinema, and a theater with superior office accommodation overlooking Green Park and views of the Houses of Parliament. The change of venue created a new phase in the history of the ICA, with the older generation of surrealists and modernist supporters slowly withdrawing and a new generation of more obvious political activists taking the helm, led by the theater impresario Michael Kustow. For many years, the ICA regarded itself as a brand new organization and rarely looked to its past. However, with the more recent curatorial interest in history in the now, the ICA under the leadership of Gregor Muir has enjoyed visiting its past. He collaborated with this author on ICA 1946–68 (ICA, London) published in 2014 and a series of archival displays which showcase past ICA exhibitions. This impetus also led to the ICA revisiting its original Dover Street premises, now occupied by high-end fashion brand Comme des Garcons, and installing facsimiles of its archival remnants there. Inserted between and above the haute couture clothing were 1950s private view cards and blown-up ICA bulletin covers (Figure 28.3). The ICA once again managed to insert itself into Dover Street, and a new temporality was born.
Figure 28.3 Parallel of Life and Art, ICA (1953) Image credit: author
Notes 1 Christoph Grafe in Tom Avermaete and Anne Massey, eds., Hotel Lobbies and Lounges: The Architecture of Professional Hospitality (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 2. 2 See the journal Interiors: Design, Architecture, Culture published by Berg from 2010 and Taylor & Francis from 2015 for an informative cross-section of articles by the leading practitioners in the field. See also Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal, eds., The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). 3 Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal, “General Introduction”, in The Handbook of Interior Architecture and Design, ed. Graeme Brooker and Lois Weinthal (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. xvi. 4 See Anne Massey, “Ephemeral”, in Interior Wor(l)ds, ed. Luca Basso Peressut, Imma Forino, Gennaro Postiglione, and Roberto Rizzi (Torino: Allemandi University Press, 2010), pp. 161–165.
5 Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends (Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 2009), p. 79. 6 Lucy Kimbell, “Rethinking Design Thinking: One”, Design and Culture 3, no. 3 (2011): 285–306. 7 Anne Massey and Gregor Muir, eds., ICA 1946–68 (London: ICA, 2014), p. 38. 8 See Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial-Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863–1959 (London: Phaidon, 2008). 9 Massey and Muir, eds., ICA 1946–68, p. 184. 10 Lawrence Alloway, “an Exhibit: Richard Hamilton, Victor Pasmore, Lawrence Alloway”, Architectural Design (August 1957): 789. 11 Caption on back of photograph, RIBA Picture Library, APEXH1/76. 12 Richard Hamilton, interviewed by Dorothy Morland, undated, c1977, p. 6. Collection Massey. 13 “Briefly”, Art & Artists (January 1968): 3.
