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Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
Art Bulletin, The, June, 2006 by Nancy J. Troy, Geoffrey Batchen, Amelia Jones, Pamela M. Lee, Romy Golan, Robert Storr, Jodi Hauptman, Dario Gamboni
At work within the institution and having already recognized the shortcomings of then-current curatorial practice, Hannover's Provinzialmuseum director and art historian Alexander Dorner invited Lissitzky to design his Kabinett der Abstrakten. This experience helped Dorner himself theorize an alternative to the traditional exhibition space--like Lissitzky, focusing on the experience of the viewer. In The Way beyond "Art," Dorner calls for galleries that would be both physically challenging and politically liberating. According to Dorner, Lissitzky's Kabinett der Abstrakten was "the first attempt to overcome the fixity of the gallery and the semistasis of the period room, and to introduce modern dynamism into the museum." (7) Such physical unmooring ("mobility exploded the room") reflected "the dynamism of modern life" and led to psychic, social, political, and civic freedom. (8) Exhibitions, he wrote, "could be turned into liberating incentives and productive energies for our public life." (9) For Dorner, Joan Ockman argues, works of art "were not idols to be worshipped, but points of departure for public discourse, catalysts to new ways of seeing and experiencing the world." (10)
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In linking space and experience, private and public, looking and liberation, Lissitzky and Dorner not only offer a way out of the museum-as-mausoleum bind but also show the potential of the exhibition to contribute significantly to the political sphere. "Once set to work in the practical context of life," Dorner writes, such exhibitions "might well influence life on a tremendous scale." (11)
