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Deconstructing display - two exhibits designed by architects, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Art in America, Oct, 1994 by Michael Duncan

Today's financially strapped museums are rarely able to stage elaborate installations. This past season, however, Los Angeles County Museum of Art curators Stephanie Barron and Timothy Benson resuscitated the languishing art of presentation by hiring the experimental Austro-American architectural firm, Coop Himmelblau, to design two related exhibitions held simultaneously in the museum's Anderson Wing. "Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy' was an exploration of visionary German Expressionist architecture; "John Heartfield" was a full-career survey of this important German political artist.

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Coop Himmelblau (which translates as Blue Sky Cooperative") consists of design principals Wolf Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Frank Stepper. The firm was featured in the exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture," curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley for New York's Museum of Modern Art. The architects are dedicated, in Prix's words, to creating "interlaced and open buildings"; their oddly configured structures combine geometric shapes and clustered vectors of steel beams and glass. The results rather resemble architectural versions of Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivist sculpture. The group's current building projects include one section of the Netherlands' Groninger Museum and a 20,000-square-meter studio complex for Anselm Kiefer in Buchen, Germany. In 1988, Coop Himmelblau opened an office in Los Angeles, hoping to continue in the architectural tradition of earlier Viennese expatriates such as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Commissions in this city of conservative glitz have been hard to come by, however, and despite plans that include a much publicized, deconstructivist Open House in Malibu, the firm has yet to build a structure in America. Their first completed American assignment was, in fact, the installation of these shows.

"Expressionist Utopias," curated by Timothy Benson, continued LACMA's firm commitment to showcasing German Expressionist art in the wake of its 1991 show "'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany" [see A.i.A., Oct. '91]. "Utopias" displayed the odd, haunting works of Expressionist architects such as Bruno Taut, Hermann Finsterlin, Wenzel Hablik and Erich Mendelsohn, featuring key drawings and models borrowed from a variety of small German collections. Generated in the politically volatile period between 1918 and 1920, this work has long been overshadowed by the designs of the slightly later Bauhaus architects. Most of these visionary plans are completely unrealizable; indeed, only a handful of Expressionist structures were ever built.

The exhibition makes a convincing case for the art-historical importance of this strange but underrated work by placing it in the context of Expressionism's evolution as a movement. Benson divided the show into five parts that clearly related the architectural projects to the various permutations of the Expressionist impulse. Setting the stage for the architects' utopianism, the section caned "Paradise" featured a group of woodblocks and drawings by Expressionist artists, including Beckmann and Kirchner, which depict nature in its bucolic, Edenic state. In the first decade of this century, the artists of Die Brucke in Dresden - fueled by an iconoclastic, youth-cult rhetoric - sought to establish a rural utopia through close communion with each other and the land. In Standing Child (1910), a stylized woodblock by Erich Heckel, a nude girl stands provocatively before an empty green meadow, epitomizing the movement's view of nature as something simple and sexy. The spiraling, burgeoning forms in Franz Marc's color woodcut The Birth of Horses (1913) provide an example of how these artists' protean conceptions of nature evolved toward organic abstraction.

The "Metropolis" section of the show traced the way the German Expressionists subsequently focused their attention on such cities as Berlin and Munich, whose populations exploded in the 1910s. Energetic vector lines and spatial distortions capture the pace and fractured bustle of urban life in these works, as the artists defiantly embrace fragmentation as the quintessential modern condition. After the war's end and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, intellectuals in the new urban centers hoped for massive social upheavals and promoted utopian schemes for living and working. Postwar euphoria encouraged the farfetched projects featured in the section called "Architectural Fantasy." Since the shaky postwar economy couldn't support much construction, architects with time on their hands gave free rein to their utopian ideals.

In 1919, Bruno Taut formed the Glaserne Kette (Crystal Chain), an elite group of architects who invented imaginary identities and exchanged pseudonymous letters and sketches. In their playful correspondence, couched in the provocative rhetorical language typical of artists' manifestos of the period, they pushed one another toward "a total revolution' in architecture. Under his code name, "Glass," Taut exhorted his brotherhood: "Break up and undermine all former principles! Dung! And we are the bud in fresh humus." A resurgence of both fantastical Romanticism and Nietzschean individualism was in the air. Crystal Chain correspondent Wenzel Hablik produced sketches of futuristic structures appropriate for the new age: temples with multipaneled glass domes, fractured castle-aeries carved from crystals, and genital-shaped Black Forest Settlements. Taut's own sketches included plans for flower-shaped "working communities" on the outskirts of crumbling, crystalline cities. Taut used lushly colored glass building blocks to form the jewel-like model Dandanah, the Fairy Palace (1919). For The Style Game (1921), Hermann Finsterlin used painted wooden blocks in elemental shapes to build models of pyramids, domed temples, tiered arenas and cathedrals.

Deconstructing display - two exhibits designed by architects, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Art in America, Oct, 1994 by Michael Duncan

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