Populable Art Work

Definition

The populable art work is the coinage of Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, and Victor Pasmore for their 1957 ICA exhibition an Exhibit (August 13–24, 1957): an art work designed to be populated rather than viewed. Massey: "The exhibition, an Exhibit, was conceived by Lawrence Alloway, Richard Hamilton, and Victor Pasmore as 'A populable art work.'… 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." Its design medium is the temporary boundary and its design theory is game theory: "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." Alloway's formulation states the concept's stakes as participation: "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" (Architectural Design, August 1957, p. 789).

The concept has a material system: commercially standard Perspex sheets (1.2 × 0.6 m, eight inches) in red, grey, black, and white, hung at varying heights on nylon thread "in a loose grid formation of 16 inches," deliberately "not precious about how the sheets should be arranged" — "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." And a self-documenting register: the foldout A0 catalogue on translucent red-and-black paper (a Bauhaus legacy via Hamilton and Pasmore's "Basic Design" course at King's College, Durham/Newcastle — "the forerunner of the Foundation Course in Art & Design") prints the game's rules — "1. Preplanning decided on the rules of the game, to be called an Exhibit… 2. an Exhibit as it stands, records one set of possible moves… 3. Visitors to an Exhibit are involved in a game: the game is the structure of the Exhibit" — with a "self-conscious historicism"; "the artists are writing for posterity and for the future archive."

Key Thinkers

• massey-anne — the concept's historian: "Time travel" documents an Exhibit's conception, material system, catalogue-as-rulebook, and its place in the ICA's spatial culture (2018).
• Lawrence Alloway — the critic-coiner: the "populable" formulation and the exhibition-as-drama-of-space thesis; the show's diarist (not yet paged — see log).
• Richard Hamilton & Victor Pasmore — the artist-builders: the Perspex maze-hall, the Bauhaus-derived catalogue, and the "Basic Design" pedagogy that carried the construct into British art education (not yet paged — see log).

Related Concepts

• Play — the concept's activity: "the game is the structure of the Exhibit"; visitors "invited to play a game."
• Event Space — the concept's temporal class: an interior made for a thirteen-day population, dismantled, and rehung — the exhibition as event rather than dwelling.
• Participatory Museum — the concept's museum-theory descendant: Nina Simon's visitors who "create, share, and connect," prefigured in 1957 by the visitor-as-player.
• Ephemeral Interior — the concept's built form: translucent plastic hung "playfully over the period details," the installation that interrupts the everlasting order.
• Flexible Interior — the concept's mechanism: the rehung grid of panels, flexibility as endless redistribution of boundaries (the Perspex cousin of the Beechers' screen and the Schröder partitions).
• Boundaries — the concept's medium: "temporary boundaries erected by Perspex panels"; "new boundaries between past and present, then and now."
• White Cube — the concept's negative: no artworks, no neutral walls — the gallery itself dissolved into navigable environment.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Time travel (Massey 2018) — the concept's source: the "populable art work" coinage; the maze/hall-of-mirrors brief; the Theory of Games and behaviorism remodel; Alloway's participation thesis (p. 789, quoted); the standard-dimension Perspex system and its "endless distribution"; the A0 foldout catalogue's three numbered rules; and the mid-century context — "a moment in London when everything seemed possible."

Open Questions

• Is "populable" participation or choreography? The Theory of Games framing, the fixed panel dimensions, and the loose 16-inch grid suggest a designed possibility-space rather than freedom — where does the populable sit between the Situationists' constructed situations and the participatory museum's curated agency?
• The catalogue claims the work "records one set of possible moves" — can a populable art work survive its archive, or does the rulebook fix the game it was meant to keep open?
• Alloway contrasts the populable exhibition with "public monuments" the constructivist "dream[s] of" — is the populable the anti-monument, and does its thirteen-day life make it the 1957 ancestor of the ephemeral installation economy?
• an Exhibit is documented but not rebuilt. What would a contemporary populable interior architecture look like — and does the concept transfer from gallery to dwelling, office, or city?