The Fate of Irrational Space in Art Exhibitions

Thesis Submitted in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the

Degree of Master of Arts

BOLIANG SHEN

Program in Museum Studies

Graduate School of Arts and Science
New York University
May 2016

ABSTRACT

The thesis aims to chart the generation, evolution, and the status quo of the
irrational space in modern and contemporary art and curatorial practice. The irrational
space is defined as an adversary to the rational space of traditional museums in which
knowledge is produced in an orderly manner and experiences are manipulated.
The thesis proposes a theoretical structure of the fate of irrational space from the
late 1930s through today. It starts with the analysis on how the traditional museum as
rational space works and how it reflects the symptoms of modern rationality. It then
puts forward the concept of irrational space by drawing on examples of early Surrealist
exhibitions, which took place between the two world wars when peoples belief on
rationality was in crisis and researches on dream and insanity gained considerable
importance. Then, it examines how the legacy of the Surrealist irrational space was
creatively inherited by post-war American artists by means of Environments and
Happenings, and how it was rationalized in major museum shows of Installation Art in
the United States after the 1970s. In the end, the thesis discusses how the spirit of the
irrational space resonates in the international biennials nowadays and how the 2013
Venice Biennale The Encyclopedic Palace suggests a new type of irrational space
that solves the crisis of contemporary art through activating the traditional exhibition
space with eccentric exhibition arrangements.

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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
1. The Genesis of Traditional Art Museums As Rational Spaces .......................................................... 1
2. The Crisis of Rational Spaces and the Genesis of Irrational Spaces ............................................. 3
3. Existing Materials on the Irrational Space and What I Am Going To Do ....................................... 8

CHAPTER 1: THE 1938 EXPOSITION INTERNATIONALE DU SURRALISM

AS THE FIRST IRRATIONAL SPACE .................................................................. 12
1.1 The Surrealists Exploring Irrationality in Respond to the Crisis in the 1930s ............................... 12
1.2 How the First Surrealist Irrational Space was Conceived and Implemented .............................. 15
1.3. Irrationality, Spatiality, and the Reality ............................................................................................. 21

CHAPTER 2: THE FATE OF SURREALIST EXHIBITIONS IN AMERICA

AFTER THE 1938 PARIS SHOW ................................................................................ 24
2.1 Salvador Dals Dream of Venus in New York Worlds Fair (1939-1940) ................................... 24
2.2 First Papers of Surrealism (1942) ..................................................................................................... 28
2.3 The Surrealist Gallery in Peggy Guggenheims Art of This Century (1942) ............................... 30

CHAPTER 3: THE INFLUENCE OF IRRATIONAL SPACE IN POSTWAR

AMERICA AND ITS RATIONALIZATION .............................................................. 34
3.1 The Irrational Space in Environments and Happenings ................................................................ 34
3.2 Spaces in MoMA and the Rationalization of Installation Art ................................................... 39

CHAPTER 4: BIENNIALS AND THE REVIVAL OF IRRATIONAL SPACE . 47

4.1 Biennials, Spaces, Territories, and Realities ........................................................................................ 47
4.2 The Ossification of Biennials and Its Discontents in Recent Years ................................................... 52
4.3 The Encyclopedic Palace and a New Type of Irrational Space ................................................. 55

CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 61
BIBILOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 63

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INTRODUCTION

This thesis aims to chart the evolution of the irrational space in art exhibitions. I
use the term irrational space to define a special category of exhibition space which
exists as an antithesis of the rational exhibition space of traditional museums. In
traditional museums, objects are displayed in an orderly arrangement in seemingly
neutral spaces, while knowledge is produced through classification. Such a rational
space fundamentally stems from the strong belief in rationality that originated in the
Renaissance and extended to the late Modern period, and it therefore represents both the
developments and the symptoms of modern thinking which still haunt us today.

1. The Genesis of Traditional Art Museums As Rational Spaces

Traditional art museums derive from private and royal collections of art, curious
natural objects and artifacts in the Renaissance. The Renaissance was defined by
historian Jules Michelet as a period in Europe that represents a drastic break from the
Middle Ages and featured the discovery of world, the discovery of man.1 This new
understanding of humanity and its place in the world led to great progress of mens
notions of space and knowledge. It resulted in unprecedented developments of
cartography, encyclopedia, and private collections, respectively reflecting mens
endeavor to make the world visible and understandable through maps, articles and entries,

1

Jules Michelet, Histoire de France au XVI ime sicle: Renaissance (Histoire de France, VII), (Paris,
1855), 14-15, cited from Johan Huizinga, Men ans Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, trans.
James S. Holmes and Hans van Marle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 255.

and objects. In the early Renaissance, those objects were thought to have power and
animation, which expressed mens curiosity about exotic art, artifacts and species.
However, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when those objects were displayed
through rooms of wonder or cabinets of curiosities, according to Michel Foucault in
Order of Things, what had changed was the space in which it was possible to see them
and from which it was possible to describe them. Consequently, what surreptitiously
came into being was no longer the desire of knowledge, but a new way of connecting
things both to the eye and to discourses that Foucault stated as a new way of making
history. And thus those early exhibition spaces spatialized an unprecedented system of
knowledge during the seventeenth century that, according to Foucault, marked the
disappearance of the old superstitious or magical beliefs and the entry of nature, at long
last, into the scientific order. 2
And, in particular, the empirical domain which sixteenth century man saw as
a complex of kinships, resemblances, and affinities, and in which language
and things were endlessly interwoven this whole vast field was to take on a
new configuration. This new configuration may, I suppose, be called
rationalism.3
Accordingly, the rooms of wonder or cabinets of curiosities in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries identified the earliest model of what we could define as rational
space. In those rational spaces things were classified and deployed according to a
plausible order, and thus knowledge was produced and opinions are manipulated. Early
museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries followed the same strategy to

2

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences (London and New York:
Routledge, 2002), 60.
3

Ibid.

produce knowledge and ideology through manipulating the ownership of artworks and
the plot of art exhibition.
The 18th century was the period when royal collections all over Europe were being
turned into public collections. Although it is widely considered that the Louvre was the
first public museum transformed from the royal collection after the French Revolution,
plans for a new museum were well under way before the revolution. The Louvre was
ideologically crucial since it declared the transformation of social relationships after the
revolution by demonstrating that the collections previously owned by the monarch were
now owned by the public through the medium of the state. It was highly visible in the
exhibition plots of the Louvre as The Museum of the French Republic that opened on
August 10, 1793, which was the anniversary of the fall of the Monarchy.4 In the center of
the Apollo Gallery located in the heart of the Louvre, a glass case displayed three royal
crowns: a medieval one, the coronation crown of Louis XV, and the coronation crown of
Napoleon. All those crowns now in theory belonged to French people. In the museum, a
new history was written through order making and space arranging, which considered the
French the true heir of the classical civilization:
No matter which route visitors take, within a few minutes they experience an
iconographic programme in which the heritage of antiquity and the
Renaissance leads to French art.5

2. The Crisis of Rational Spaces and the Genesis of Irrational Spaces

Carol Duncan and Alan Wallach, Universal Survey Museum, Art History, v. 3, n. 4, 1980, 457.

Ibid., 459.

Museums are spaces that are both inclusive and exclusive. They are inclusive
because they collect everything together and distribute them in appropriate sections
within its system of knowledge. However, for things that cannot be assimilated by the
system, or things that might cause harm to its rational order, museums are exclusive
spaces. In Of Other Spaces Foucault compares them to modern prisons and psychiatric
hospitals.6 Modern prisons and psychiatric hospitals were both the production of the
modern world. The modern world internalized rationality to an extreme extent that
criminals and mad people, who represented irrationality, had to be exiled to a space far
from the human society. In those spaces like a penal colony or a carceral archipelago, the
insane people could be disciplined through methods of cure and punishment.
This extreme exclusiveness culminated in the early twentieth century in the form of
holocaust and genocide. Six million Jews were annihilated by Germanys Nazi regime
since Jews had been marked for total destruction and allotted no place in the New Order
that Hitler intended to install. In Modernity and The Holocaust Zygmunt Bauman
observes that holocaust manifested how extreme rationality led to extreme irrationality in
the name of social engineering and Final Solution.7
In 1937, Hitlers favorite German painter Adolf Ziegler and the Nazi Party
organized a notorious exhibition called Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in Munich,
presenting 650 modern artworks by about 112 artists, confiscated from German museums.
The exhibition was staged in counterpoint to the concurrent Great German Art
Exhibition that inaugurated the first great architectural project of the Third Reich, the

6

Michel Foucault, Of Other Spaces, Diacritics, Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring, 1986, 26.

Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (New York: Cornell University Press, 2011), 8.

House of German Art (Haus der Deutschen Kunst). The art exhibition mirrored the
irrationality caused by the exclusiveness of extreme rationality. The modern works of art,
which were viewed as works that insult German feeling, or destroy or confuse natural
form or simply reveal an absence of adequate manual and artistic skill and thus labeled
as degenerate art were excluded from the dominant culture system and planned for
destruction due to Hitlers so-called merciless war on cultural disintegration.8
At almost the same time, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York
launched a historical major exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art organized by its first
director Alfred Barr in 1936. The exhibition reflected the inclusiveness, orderly
arrangement, and knowledge production of rational space. It systematically presented a
linear narrative of modern art as progressing primarily through Cubism to abstraction.9
Supplemented by a scholarly catalog and punctuated with explanatory panels and
diagrams tracking movements and artists from 1890 to 1935, the exhibition tried to draft
a genealogy of modern art within the museums modern version of rational space, the
white cube. The white cube creates a neutral, ideal context for each artwork, as it was
described by Brian ODoherty in Inside the White Cube:
() a simple, undecorated space with white walls and a polished wood floor
or soft grey carpet. Paintings are hung wide apart in a single row, sometimes
with only one large work on each wall. Sculptures are positioned in the center
of the gallery with ample space surrounding them. The works of art are
evenly lit, usually by spotlights hanging from the ceiling or by ambient neon
light. In this specialized viewing context, mundane objects may be mistaken

8

Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (New York: The Overlook Press, 2002), 151-168.

Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial: Exhibitions That Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959 (New York:
Phaidon Press Inc, 2008), 239.

 momentarily at least for works of art () 10

Early manifestations of the white cube were seen in European museums and
exhibitions after World War I, especially in Germany. Alfred Barr and Philip Johnson,
then head of MoMAs architecture department, encountered them on their extensive
travels through Europe during the 1920s and early 1930s and decided to adopt that
modernist display for MoMA, the first museum exclusively devoted to modern art.11
It was in this context that the earliest experiment of irrational space in art
exhibition, Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, took place in Galerie Beaux-Arts,
Paris in 1938. The exhibition was derived from the Surrealists interests on Sigmund
Freuds theory on dreams and the unconscious. It focused less on the individual works it
brought together than on its fantastic exhibition installation, which created a dream
space with disordered objects and confused senses in which the spectator found himself
irresistibly plunged.
Surrealists were not the earliest artists who value irrationality. In the mid-nineteenth
century, Romantic writers and artists celebrated the irrational, the subjective, the
imaginative and the visionary as a rejection of the ideas of order, harmony and balance of
Neoclassicism, the Enlightenment, and the eighteenth century rationalism. Surrealists
were not the earliest artists who transform the traditional space of art exhibition either.
The Dada-Early Spring exhibition in Cologne in April 1920 had been designed to cause
its audience maximum discomfort, which was only accessible by passing through a mens

10

Brian O'Doherty, Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press), 25.
11

Christoph Grunenberg, The Modern Art Museum, Contemporary Cultures of Display, ed. Emma
Barker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 30.

bathroom, presenting certain artworks that the viewers were enjoined to destroy, and
featuring a young girl wearing a communion dress and reading obscene poetry at the
exhibitions opening. Later in the same year, in June 1920, The First International Dada
Fair in Berlin created the first word-environment by providing placards and posters of
Dada paradoxes and/or political slogans with equal footing with collages and paintings,
packing every inch of the small space, and, what was most notorious, a militaryuniformed, pig-faced mannequin was hovered over the chaotic display and marked
Hanged by the Revolution.12
However, the Surrealists were the first artists who explicitly connected reflections
on irrationality to exhibition space experiments, and systematically applied Freudian
theory of the unconscious to explore the situation of the social and civilization crisis in
that special historical context. Therefore, notable Surrealist exhibitions from the late
1930s through early 1940s, including Exposition Internationale du Surralisme (Paris,
1938), Salvador Dals Dream of Venus Pavilion in 1939 New York World Fair, the
First Papers of Surrealism (New York, 1942), and the Surrealist Gallery in Peggy
Guggenheims museum/gallery Art of This Century (New York, 1942), marked the
genesis and early developments of irrational spaces in art exhibition. On one hand,
works, or objects, were deployed in a disorderly and irregular environment to trigger the
potential of the unconscious. On the other hand, the exhibition space as an environment
of total experience, of spectacular immersion, or of extraordinary situation, became the
new paradigm. In addition to that, elements of performative, participatory and interactive
practice started to take place.

12

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition
Installations (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), 6.

3. Existing Materials on the Irrational Space and What I Am Going To Do

Therefore, in this thesis I will chart the evolution of irrational space in art
exhibitions from the Surrealist exhibitions from late 1930s to early 1940s, through
various versions of irrational space applied to artistic practice started from 1950s, till
the status quo of its legacy in the contemporary art world. I believe it would help us to
understand how artists have been trying to solve the symptoms of rational modern
thinking, which still haunts us today, through artistic practice that relates to spatial
experiments and irrationality, and, reversely, how their artistic practices have been
frequently challenged by the constantly changing situation of the contemporary world.
There are a certain number of primary and secondary materials on the Surrealist
exhibitions from 1930s to 1940s. There are also scholarly works on artistic and curatorial
practices that concern experiments on space, no matter physical, social, or psychological,
from 1950s to 1990s. However, works that approach artistic and curatorial practices in
terms of the integration of space and irrationality are not yet seen in the field of museum
studies. Therefore, I will build a primary theoretical structure concerning the evolution of
irrational space with those existing materials in four chapters.
In the first chapter I will focus on how the earliest model of the irrational space,
the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, was conceived and executed in the
crisis-laden context between the two world wars. In the second chapter I will examine
how that model was succeeded and converted by the Surrealists who were sojourning in
the United States in the late 1930s and early 1940s when the social, economic, and

cultural scene was reviving in America while Europe was at war. I will conduct case
studies on Dals Dream of Venus, the First Papers of Surrealism, and the Surrealist
Gallery in Peggy Guggenheims Art of This Century. For both of these two chapters
the existing materials include Lewis Kachurs Displaying the Marvelous: Marcel
Duchamp, Salvador Dal, and Surrealist Exhibition Installations; Bruce J. Altshulers
Salon to Biennial - Exhibitions that Made Art History, Volume 1: 1863-1959 and The
Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century, as well as Ingrid Schaffners
Salvador Dals Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 Worlds Fair.
The first book offers comprehensive narratives on the causes and effects of every major
Surrealist exhibitions of that time period; the second contains abundant primary materials,
including exhibition files, artists correspondences, critics writings and newspaper
reports, of the exhibitions mentioned above. The third analyzes various Surrealist
exhibitions within the historical context of modern art exhibitions; while the fourth offers
an overall case study of Dals Dream of Venus project. With those materials I will
examine the notable moments of the history of Surrealist exhibition in their social and
political context with then prevailing theories on the unconscious, dreams, irrationality as
well their spatialization by Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung, finding the social and
psychological roots of the original irrational space in art exhibition and its intricate
relationship with the mechanisms of the rational practical world.
In the third chapter I will address how the legacy of the Surrealist irrational space
were inherited by the American artists who were associated with the Paris Surrealists
who were sojourning in New York, and how the irrational spatial concern has evolved
from a series of notable art practices from the Abstract Expressionism, through the

Environments and Happenings, to a considerably established model that now we refer to

as Installation Art. In parallel with this development, I will observe how the aesthetics
of the irrational space were falsified and assimilated by the traditional museums to
cause dazzling irrational feelings through highly rational mechanisms. The Museum of
Modern Arts 1969 exhibition Spaces, which is regarded as MoMAs first exhibition
on Installation Art, is selected as a key case. For this part, Julie H. Reisss From
Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art has been a comprehensive work that
charts how the term installation art became part of the vernacular of contemporary art
through phases of environments, situations and spaces. Besides that, Allan Kaprows
early writings on the Environments and Happenings, and the archives of MoMAs
Spaces exhibition are both useful resources for this thesis.
In the fourth chapter, I will explore how the international biennials have played an
essential role in examining the symptoms of the contemporary world from the late 1970s
till now, and how the biennials in recent years attempted to solve contemporary arts
crisis of homogeneity through questioning the rational mechanism of conventional
exhibitions. The chapter will end up with a case study of the 2013 Venice Biennale The
Encyclopedic Palace curated by Massimiliano Gioni. The title of the Biennale implied a
strong sense of early Renaissance exhibition spaces, but the curator regarded the internal
images, such as dreams, hallucinations and visions, as central concepts in the
exhibitions structure, including nontraditional materials including Carl Gustav Jungs
Red Book, and works by insane people, tribal shamans, and outsider artists. I will
interrogate both the concept and presentation of The Encyclopedic Palace in terms of
the current situation of the art world and the lineage of Venice Biennale. For this chapter

10

I will address not only the considerably informative catalogue of the 2013 Venice
Biennale, but also the catalogue of the 1976 Venice Biennale Environment, Participation,
Cultural Structures which included a retrospective of artistic spatial practices from 1915
to 1976, and Lawrence Alloways seminal book concerning the Biennales earlier history
The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl. In the end I will discuss
how The Encyclopedic Palace suggests a new type of irrational space of activating
the traditional exhibition space with eccentric arrangements of materials. Hopefully this
new type would be capable to save the irrational space from its fate of being
rationalized seen in the first three chapters.

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CHAPTER 1: The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralism As the First

Irrational Space

1.1 The Surrealists Exploring Irrationality in Respond to the Crisis in the 1930s
In November 1913, eight months before the outbreak of the World War I (19141918), Wassily Kandinsky made a non-representational painting of colored arabesque,
explosive and ballistic patterns, titled as War in the Air, and sent it as a gift to his artist
friend Franz Marc. One year later, when they both had become too familiar with bombs
and fighting planes in the war, Marc asked Kandinsky how he could foretell the war
through a painting. Not this war, Kandinsky replied, I had no premonition of that. But
I knew that a terrible struggle was going on in the spiritual sphere, and that made me
paint the picture I sent to you. 13
This terrible struggle in spiritual sphere marked the crisis of western civilization in
the early twentieth century. Prominent modern ideas such as reason, progress and
emancipation were seen relentlessly turning into the reverse side of themselves.
Subverted were not only the old ethics and notions of life, but also the notions of art and
culture. In Dada Fragments (1916) Hugo Barr accurately described an artists feeling of
powerless and lost in the era of overall crisis in Dada Fragments in 1916:
The bankruptcy of ideas having destroyed the concept of humanity to its very
innermost strata, the instincts and hereditary backgrounds are now emerging
pathologically. Since no art, politics or religious faith seems adequate to dam

13

Wall text reference material, The Artist Responds to Crisis: A Sketch for an Exhibition, Box 1140,
Folder 21-28, 236, Series 3. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York.

12

this torrent, there remain only the blague and the bleeding pose14

Surrealism was given birth at this crisis-laden epoch. It gained momentum after
Dada. After Andr Breton and his poet friends associated with the magazine Littrature
broke with the Dadaists Tristan Tzara and Francis Picabia in 1922, they started to entitle
themselves with the word Surrealist. The word was originally created by Guillaume
Apollinaire (1880-1918) to describe his play Les mamelles de Tirsias. For Breton and
his friends, Surrealism was essentially a state of mind, which manifests itself through
diverse genres including poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, theatre, and film.
In contrast to the Dadaists preoccupation on the concept of chance and negation, the
Surrealists were more interested in exploring the dream, the unconscious, and
irrationality. Breton served as a medical orderly in the French army during the World
War I. There he got a chance to read Sigmund Freuds The Interpretation of Dreams
(1900) and practice Freuds methods of investigation on the patients and himself. Back in
Paris Breton and his friends rapidly assimilated Freuds scientific idea of the unconscious
to their poetic interests. They applied the Freudian psychotherapeutic method of free
association to a new technique of automatic writing. By doing so the Surrealists
sought to achieve a pure state in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt
from any aesthetic or moral concern.15
Started as a literary movement, Surrealism attracted many visual artists into its orbit
as the 1920s progressed. Those visual artists, including Max Ernst, Andr Masson,

14

Hugo Ball, Dada Fragments, The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Second Edition, ed. Robert
Motherwell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 51.
15

Andr Breton, What is Surrealism? What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. Franklin Rosemont
(New York: Monad, 1978), 122.

13

Salvador Dal, Yves Tanguy, and Man Ray (just to name a few), pioneered a brand new
vision of art, exploring the unfathomable areas of human psyche through depicting dream
scenes with painting and photography. Those dream scenes were deeply connected to
Freuds theory of dream. According to Freud, some psychical materials have been cut off
from consciousness and repressed because of its base or filthy content, and has thus
become pathogenic. He believed that the dream is one of the passages through which
consciousness can be reached by those materials.16 Those distorted symbols and images
in dreams may have multiple and deeper meanings than they appear to have, so deeper
interpretation of them could revel the structures of the unconscious and cure the
dreamers neurotic or psychical symptoms.
In the haunting atmosphere between the two world wars, Freud found that human
society operates like the individual psyche. In Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he
discreetly discusses the possibilities that his method could reach the diagnosis that under
the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization possibly the whole of mankind - have become neurotic.17 Breton was obviously more
convinced of the Freudian methods effectiveness on individual and social improvement.
In the Surrealist Manifesto (1924), he gave the word Surrealism a definition related to
the solution of crisis:
Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of
previously neglected association, in the omnipotence of dream, in the
disinterested play of thought. It tends to the destruction of all other psychic

16

Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of A Case of Hysteria, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Touchstone,
1997), 8.
17

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 2005), 152.

14

mechanisms completely, and to the replacement of them with itself, in

solving the principal problems of life.18
In a similar claim on the Surrealist lifestyle Salvador Dal articulated that those
other psychic mechanisms that leads to the principal problems of life were the
mechanisms of the rational practical world.19 In this way, the Surrealists break with
reason was systematized and raised to a set of doctrines. As the world went more
politically volatile in the 1930s, those doctrines began to spread to other European
countries and other continents. Surrealism became an international movement.

1.2 How the First Surrealist Irrational Space was Conceived and Implemented
At the beginning of the movement, Surrealist exhibitions were solo or group ones of
small scale in Paris. As Surrealism took on a pan-European character beginning in the
early 1930s, larger shows were held in several capitals in Europe. For Breton, those
exhibitions concentrated more on the objectification and internationalization of
Surrealist ideas.20
In the summer of 1936, the London Surrealists staged the International Surrealist
Exhibition at the New Burlington Galleries, in cooperation with the Paris Surrealists.
The exhibition marked the first comprehensive exhibition overview of Surrealisms
history though its display followed very straightforward formats of traditional shows.

18

Andr Breton, What is Surrealism? 122.

19

Salvador Dal, The Secret Life of Salvador Dal, trans. Haakon M. Chevalier (New York: Dover
Publications. Inc,), 311
20

Andr Breton, What is Surrealism? 141.

15

In the winter of 1936, Paris Surrealists collaborated with Alfred Barr in Fantastic
Art, Dada, Surrealism, a blockbuster exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art, New
York. The exhibition was installed in spaces just previously devoted to MoMAs
historical exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art, and thus inevitably took some features
of the clean, strict lines of modern design. More bitterly disputed by the Paris Surrealists
was its broad focus. The exhibition was initiated with a Surrealistic tentative title Art of
the Marvelous and Anti-Rational. However, it turned out to be a more ambitious one.
The final exhibition was not solely devote to Surrealism, but included a large number of
historical forerunners and popular art parallels under the title of Fantastic Art, Dada,
Surrealism.21
The successes and discontents in London and New York triggered the Exposition
Internationale du Surralisme (January 17 February 22, 1938), a Paris retrospective of
Surrealism. The exhibition opened in the Galerie Beaux-Arts in Paris only one year after
the MoMA show closed. It included about 250 works by around 60 artists, which was
considerably modest compared with the London and New York shows. All three shows
had almost the same groups of artists, and even included some of the same artworks. All
these made Paris Surrealists feel obliged to distinguish the Paris show through
experiments of exhibition installation.22 The exhibition emphasized less the individual
paintings and sculptures it brought together than its fantastic approach of exhibiting them,
creating an irrational space with distorted objects and confused scenes. It embodied
essential principles of Surrealism, as Raymond Cogniat, the director of Galerie Beaux
21

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 11-30.

22

Ibid.

16

Arts, declared in its press release:

() the aim is not to show only a particular kind of painting or sculpture, or
to put forward new aesthetic theories. The Surrealist Exhibition is intended as
something more deeply disturbing, as the gateway to a world of mystery in
which burlesque looms less large than anxiety, in which the visitors laughter
conceals their disquiet and their anger is an expression of bafflement.
Surrealism is not a game, but an obsession.23
Almost everything in the exhibition was conceived and implemented by key figures
of the Paris Surrealist movement. Breton and Paul luard shared the title of organizers,
Dal and Max Ernst served as technical advisers, Man Ray as head lighting technician,
and Wolfgang Paalen designed the entrance and main hall with water and foliage. Marcel
Duchamp had never joined the Surrealist movement despite the coaxing of Breton.
Nevertheless, he collaborated with the Surrealists closely from the mid-1930s onwards.
Duchamp served as a pivotal figure in the 1938 exhibition, playing the most fascinating
role as the generator and arbitrator. It marked the climax of Duchamps collaboration
with the Surrealist.
The exhibition started with Dals taxi pluvieux (Rainy Taxi), a life-sized taxi parked
in the courtyard of Galerie Beaux-Arts. It was not remarkable when being viewed from a
distance, so most of the visitors did not realize it was the first artwork of the show. The
cars outside was bedecked with ivy; its headlights were full on, glaring with brilliant
lights uselessly into the day.24 While peeping into the car windows, visitors saw a half
23

Raymond Cogniat, LExposition Surraliste, Beaux-Arts: Revue dInformation Artistique (Paris, 14

January 1938), cited in Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 290.
24

Magaret Scolari Barr, Our Campaigns: 1930-1944, The New Criterion, special issue (1987), 44.

17

nude female figure sitting in the back seat, with some snails crawling over her body. A
sewing machine lay beside her, Pampas grass and other vegetation messed the floor, and
a continuous torrent of water kept dripping down from the cars ceiling. Those gave the
visitors a taste of the absurd and the uncanny caused by investigation of the inner
mechanism of something familiar, indicating the fantastic journey they would embark on.
After that, the visitors would enter the Galerie Beaux-Artss massive stone building,
passing sixteen mannequins through the corridor that lead to the central room, the main
body of the exhibition. Different artists dressed each mannequin in various eccentric
ways. The modern mannequin represented the fashion fever in France in the 1930s.
Breton in the Surrealist Manifesto Breton regards it as the incarnation of the marvelous,
the touchstone of any production of genius the marvelous is always beautiful, anything
marvelous is beautiful, in fact only the marvelous is beautiful.25
In the exhibition most of the mannequins were scantily clad, which suggests an
erotic encounter. There was also an implicit choice to be made by spectators among the
sixteen streetwalker-like mannequins. And then, when they entered the central room,
the next step of their selection was very obvious. The room has four beds in each
corner.26
Freud believed that neurotic symptoms were essentially substitutive satisfactions for
unfulfilled sexual wishes. Therefore those mannequins could be considered as
manifestations of the symptom of its time. The corridor was like the passage through
which those censored materials could approach consciousness in the form of

25

Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, Manifestos of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R.
Lane (University of Michigan Press, 1972), 14.
26

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 37-67.

18

anamorphic symbols in the dream. It was in a highly similar way that the visitors entered
the main body of the show the space of dream, where the irrational contents of the
human psyche converge on the spectators from its rational surface.
In the central room, the Galerie Beaux-Artss ornate carpets and furniture were
removed; graphic works, paintings and photographs were displayed on walls and
revolving doors; bright daylight was obscured with 1,200 dirty coal sacks made by
Duchamp hanging from the ceiling; dead leaves and bits of cork were scattered on the
floor; four beds were positioned in the four corners; next to one bed was a muddy pond
made by Dal surrounded with water lilies, reeds, moss, rosebushes and ferns, where
Hlne Vanel performed a ecstatic and risque dance titled The Unconsummated Act; a
coffee-roasting machine gave the whole room a marvelous smell, while a disquieting
recorded soundtrack of hysterical inmates at an insane asylum penetrated the gallery.27
The exhibitions spatialization of Surrealist ideas compensated for Surrealist
artworks incompetence of fully representing dreams. In dreams visual, auditory,
kinesthetic, olfactory, and gustatory senses are all at work, but artworks can merely affect
the visual sense. Moreover, dreams unfold in time and space, but paintings, photographs
and sculptures are almost apprehended all at once.
The exhibition was held in darkness in its opening night, which evoked a situation
without the surveillance of consciousness. Man Ray distributed flashlights for visitors to
negotiate their path around the exhibition in the dark. Visitors were cast into the double
role of psychoanalysts and patients. As psychoanalysts they illuminated the murky corner
of each artists psyche, looking for threads to diagnose the symptoms of time. As patients

27

Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 20.

19

they walked in the marvelous awful world of the unconscious, seeking substitutive
objects to satisfy their repressed desires.
The radical presentation of the exhibition evoked psychic disturbance in the
fashionable Paris society, but it was only an epitome of the ghost of irrationality that was
wandering in the whole world, especially Europe. It opened one year after the Nazi
Partys Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich and its concurrent Great German Art
Exhibition in the House of German Art, which was conceived to be the first great
architectural project of the Third Reich. During the exhibitions opening week, Nazi
Germany was moving forward and Fascist bombs were falling on Spain. On the opening
day socialites were spattered with mud during Hlne Vanels performance on bed, and at
the same time German military music was piped into the haute bourgeois gallery space.
It was like a bad omen, a fitting image for what soon was to come.28 The domestic
situation in France was alarming too, with the franc at its lowest point in eleven years and
the country besieged by strikes, there were rumors of a right-wing coup if the situation
did not improve. A new cabinet was formed during the week of the exhibition in an
attempt to resolve the political crisis. The Life magazine pointed out a meaningful
connection between the 1938 Surrealist exhibition and the turbulent political situation in
France in its February 7 issue featuring the exhibition: The news photographs on this
page give an almost surrealist picture of five days that shook the souls of Frenchmen.29

28

Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 281.

th
Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20 Century (New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers), 124.
29

20

1.3. Irrationality, Spatiality, and the Reality

The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme attracted a mostly bourgeois
audience, more than 3,000 people came to see the show on its opening night, and
averaged more than 500 people per day over the following days.30 Not everybody
approved but everybody felt the impact.31 Although it was criticized by some of the
contemporaries for its forced lunacy and over popularity with the high society, it
marked the Surrealists most significant experiment in the spatial feature of an exhibition.
Freud rarely discussed spatiality in his works, and neither did Breton. Nevertheless,
in the works of both we see descriptions of dreams that happen in specific, significant
spaces, including the home, the hotel room, the caf, the train station, the city street, the
forest, or the fanciful room. In those spaces the deployment of disordered symbols
implicated cryptic trails in the human psyche.
The 1938 Paris show incorporated the Freudian theory of dream and unconscious
with Surrealist ideas such as the marvelous and derangement. It created an initial
irrational space for an art show in a time when the condition of rational thinking was
precarious. The irrational space embodied the Surrealists diagnosis of the spiritual
condition of their time, concerning the civilizations repressive power toward human
nature, as well as rationalisms extreme discipline of reality.
The then critic of La Grande Revue, Guy Crouzet, pointed out that in the exhibition
the Surrealists highlight the fault lines of a civilization driven to deny the very

30

Wikipedia contributors, Exposition Internationale du Surralisme, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposition_Internationale_du_Surralisme (Accessed December 11, 2015)
31

Guy Crouzet, Actualit du Surralisme, La Grande Revue (Paris, Feburary 1938), cited in Bruce
Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 294.

21

intelligence that has created it and thereby stands out the most authentic and the most
lucid of the spiritual tendencies today.32 He even elevated Surrealism to a comparable
status with its contemporary social ideological trends such as fascism and communism:
There are two ways of escaping from Western reality. The first consists in
imagining that youre changing reality and, via forms of delusionary
fanaticism - fascism, communism, total economic planning - helping to create
a more just, more human world. The second consists in purely and simply
denying reality: this is the fundamental role of poetry, which Surrealism
emphasizes above all else.33

However, Breton would not agree that Surrealism is only a way of escaping from
the reality. In the Surrealist Manifesto he claimed that the surreality that he is working
on is a kind of absolute reality. He believed that it indicated the future resolution of
dream and reality, which were seemingly so contradictory.34
Freuds former disciple Carl Gustav Jungs polar model of the attic and the cellar
might be considered an appropriate interpretation of the spatialization of the Surrealist
ideas in the exhibition. It also demonstrates the Surrealists ambition toward the reality
between the two world wars. According to Jung, in the attic all our thoughts are clean;
it shelters us from the rain and sun that we fear, while the cellar is an irrational, murky,
obscene space that we rarely wish to explore. Jung pointed out that for most of the
modern rational men, the image is the following:
The conscious acts like a man who, hearing a suspicious noise in the cellar,
hurries to the attic and, finding no burglars there decides, consequently, that

32
Ibid.
33

Ibid.

34

Andr Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism, 14.

22

the noise was pure imagination. In reality, this prudent man did not dare
venture into the cellar.35
The Surrealists who made the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme were
those who dared to venture into the cellar when the attic was filled with the sound
and fury of political leaders, social reformers and activists. It resonated with the motto
that Freud prefixed to his The Interpretation of Dreams: Flectere si nequeo superos
Acheronta movebo If I cannot bend the gods on high, I will at least set Acheron in
uproar.36

35

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994), 19.

36

Carl Gustav Jung, Modern Man in Search of A Soul, trans. W.S.Dell and Cary F. Baynes (London and
New York: Routledge), 216.

23

CHAPTER 2: The Fate of Surrealist Exhibitions in America After the 1938 Paris
Show

2.1 Salvador Dals Dream of Venus in New York Worlds Fair (1939-1940)
The impact and notoriety of the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme
prompted a number of efforts to recreate or develop upon the Surrealist installation.
When the Paris show opened in January 1938, an international exposition was being
conceived in New York by a group of businessmen to lift the city out of the Great
Depression. It aimed to present a new and clearer view of today in preparation for
tomorrow. 37
New York gallerist Julien Levy was the first gallery owner to show Surrealism in
New York in 1932, and thus having many contacts with the Paris Surrealist group. He
decided to move quickly to import the marvelous display of Surrealist exhibition to
America. Levy proposed a Surrealist House for the much-expected New York Worlds
Fair (1939-1940). He wished to reconcile the disquieting, irrational space of Surrealism
with the carnivalesque aspect of American popular culture, proclaiming that it should far
excel in quality the present Surrealist Exhibition in Paris, and should be adopted and
modified to satisfy American taste.38
After a series of trials, Levy dropped the idea of the Surrealist House at some
point between late 1938 and early 1939 and decided to commission Salvador Dal to
construct a pavilion of Surrealist dream scene for the Worlds Fair instead. Among the

37

Bill Cotter, The 1939-1940 New York World's Fair (San Francisco, CA: Arcadia Publishing), 9.

38

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 106-108.

24

Surrealist artist Dal had the highest name recognition. His exhibition in Levys gallery in
the spring of 1939 achieved huge success. Dal was paid $2,500 plus 20 percent of the
profits to create faade and interior designs, costumes, incidental scenery and souvenirs
for the exhibition.39 As a single-artist project it was doubtlessly more fundable than the
ambitious plan of the Surrealist House.
The pavilion was initiated with a tentative title Bottoms of the sea, referring to the
deep abyss of unconscious. Later on Dal replaced it with a more fanciful and erotic one
Dream of Venus. It alluded to a closer affinity to the Freudian concepts of dreams and
the sexual impulse. He regarded the project as the symbolic conception of the maternal
complex, a dark safe watery place, like something between amniotic fluid and the deep
sea.40 One interpreter observed that the classical theme of Venus was also connected to
the castration of the authority, since she was born of the foam of the genitals of the
castrated Uranus.41
The pavilion was an architecture of accretion, a pile of pink an white stucco
sculpted into a profusion of niches and protuberances.42 A giant image of Botticellis
Venus was framed within its faade. Visitors purchased tickets at a fish-head booth under
her feet, and entered the grotesque pavilion through the spread legs of a gigantic woman,
like getting into the womb of Venus. Inside there were three chambers arranged in
garishly surrealistic ways and a corridor that served as a gallery in which diverse fantastic

39

Ibid., 113.

40

Ibid., 133.

41

Nissan N. Perez, Dali, Horst and the Dream of Venus, Isarel Museum Journal 3 (Spring 1984), 56,
cited in Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 116.
42

Ingrid Schaffner, Salvador Dals Dream of Venus: The Surrealist Funhouse from the 1939 Worlds Fair
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 10.

25

tableaus were deployed amongst surreal paintings and bizarre props in front of
spectacular murals.
The first chamber featured two water tanks in which seventeen hired topless sirens
and mermaids swam. More compelling was a rubber mannequin chained to a piano
underwater. The mannequins body was white with black stripes that mimic a keyboard.
Art historian Lewis Kachur believes that this suggests that her nude skin is to be played
like a fantasy of the (male) viewer, and in this way she simultaneously extends the
1938 Surrealist mannequins, prompts the desire of the spectator, and advertises the
lifelikeness of the commercial rubber mold display techniques.43
The theme of dream was more obviously seen in the second chamber, which was
occupied by a 36-foot-long bed where a beautiful girl was lying under a red satin sheet.
While visitors were watching her sleep, they could hear her dreaming: In the fever of
love, I lie upon my ardent bed. A bed eternally long, and I dream of my burning dreams
the longest dreams ever dreamed without beginning and without end Enter the shell of
my house and you will see my dreams.44 From the foot of the bed towards the corridor,
imageries resembling the components of the 1938 Paris show were seen, including small
beds of hot coals dotting the coverlet, hundreds of black umbrellas hanging openly from
the ceiling. In the final chamber Dal recreated his Rainy Taxi through decorating a New
York taxicab more foppishly with branches of ivy and giggling ladies and referring it to
the celebrated taxi of Christopher Columbus who discovered America. For him,

43

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 113-142.

44

Ingrid Schaffner, Salvador Dals Dream of Venus, 18.

26

America, especially New York, was the paradise of irrationality and creativity, the half
cut flower of heaven, and a place as mad as the moon.45
Dal successfully preserved Levys concept of a building that appropriates the dream
scene of the 1938 Paris show, while creating a fantastic spectacle that attracts public
attention in the reviving consumer society. The Dream of Venus was considerably
popular among the mass media for its novelty and originality, but almost all the art
presses kept silent, focusing only on the official exhibits in the main Fair area. Only the
Art Digest covered it, harshly calling it a Freudian version of what Broadway calls a
girl show. 46 There was little recognition among the artists either; many of them
participated in large group shows elsewhere in the Fair. As for the general audience of the
Fair, most of whom were middle-class males, The New Yorker critic Clifford Orr
observes that they dont know whether to be angry, be amused, or excited. They do
know theyre not bored.47
Although irrationality was still a key point, the Dream of Venus was closer to a
magnificent erotic dream where all sexual wishes of the booming society of commerce
were satisfied. It went far from the original version of irrational space in the 1938
Paris show where the symptom of the crisis-laden time was diagnosed. Visitors were not
enlightened to reflection upon their situation. Instead, they were like bemused masses
under the fantastic tyranny of one artists creativity. Moreover, this illusive world was not
exactly implemented according to the artists fantasy. The Fair bureaucrats made a

45

Ibid., 108.

46

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 159.

47

Clifford Orr, Around the Fair, Foreigners and Natives, New Yorker 15 (July 15, 1939), 40, cited in
Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 159.

27

number of major modifications to Dals original ideas, which was ironically similar to
the way that the materials in the unconscious were censored and distorted under the
surveillance of consciousness. Dal especially wrote a pamphlet Declaration of the
Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to His Own Madness to protest
against the corrupting influence of the lofty airs and superior quackings of middle-men
of culture.48

2.2 First Papers of Surrealism (1942)

In 1942, two years after the Dream of Venus took place in New York Worlds Fair,
nine of the artists who participated in the 1938 Paris show were in exile in and around
New York after the German occupation of France. They formed the core group of artists
in the most renowned classic exhibition of Surrealism in America First Papers of
Surrealism (October 14/15 November 7, 1942), which was named after the legal paper
filed in a citizenship application.49 The exhibition was organized by Breton and installed
by Duchamp. It included not only paintings by the Surrealist artist, but also those of
artists associated with other movements whose works share the fantastic characteristic of
Surrealist production, especially the younger American artists who were critically
influenced by them.
The show was staged at the Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies in a
mansion at 451 Madison Avenue, New York. It was a historical landmark designed as a

48

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 126.

49

Ibid., 166.

28

private home rather than an art space. Because of the limited funds available, there was
no possibility to create another compelling dream scene like the 1938 Paris show.
Duchamp simply bought 16 miles of string and installed it all around the exhibition space.
The cobweb-like strings evoked an effect of lightness and simplicity among the furniture
and the chandelier of the heavily ornamented mansion, and simultaneously created a
sense of intricateness and repression amidst the paintings mounted on the featureless
walls and panels. There have been many interpretations of this eccentric installation:
Marcel Jean imagined that the cobweb effect could symbolize either quality
or decay, reminding him both of old wine bottles and of abandoned rooms.
Harriet and Sidney Janis viewed the obscuring of the pictures to represent the
difficulties that must be overcome in understanding modern art. More
critically, Robert Coates in the New Yorker took the string to suggest the
current situation of European Surrealism, ideas once fresh being tediously
wound back and forth.50
However simple in form they were, the strings carried on the heritage of irrational space
of the 1938 Paris show in a low-key way to America. It formed an irregular labyrinth,
making an experience of seeing through the veils of reality into the epitomes of
unconscious, while blocking the visitors bodies from actually reaching them.
Also noteworthy in terms of the irrational space was that Duchamp gave up the
exclusive control of the stringing. He collaborated freely with Breton, Jacqueline Lamba,
David Hare, and Ernst without stressing the traditional notion of authorship. The sense of
unconstraint was enhanced by the presence of children playing at the exhibition site.
Duchamp carefully instructed a 11-year-old boy, who was the son of art dealer Sydney

50

Bruce Altshuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Inc., Publishers), 152.

29

Janis, to gather some friends, play ball, and not to cease if confronted by grownups.51 It
resonated with the Surrealism as a pure state of mind in the absence of any control
exercised by reason.

2.3 The Surrealist Gallery in Peggy Guggenheims Art of This Century (1942)

By the time that the First Papers of Surrealism took place in New York,
Surrealism had already become a recognized genre rather than a controversial art
movement. A review on the exhibition was published on ARTnews in which the writer
claims Surrealism is a word, which, like Communism, has lost its terrors for the average
person today. It may not be every mans medicine, but by and large we admit its right to
exist and admire its accomplishments.52
In October 20, 1942, less than one week after the opening of First Papers of
Surrealism, Peggy Guggenheim opened her legendary Art of This Century
gallery/museum in 30 West 57th Street, New York. Peggy Guggenheim had been
associated with the pioneers of nearly all modern art movements in Europe in the early
20th century, especially Surrealism, since she opened a gallery of modern art in London in
January 1938. After the outbreak of the World War II she went to Paris and decided to
save as many modern artworks as possible from the threatening Germans and bring them
to America. She believed that it was her responsibility to open the Art of This Century
and her collection to the public during a time when people are fighting for their lives and

51

Ibid., 195.

52

Anonymous, The Passing Shows, ARTnews (New York, 1 November 1942), cited in Bruce Altshuler,
Salon to Biennial, 308.

30

freedom, and claimed that this undertaking will serve its purpose only if it succeeds in
serving the future instead of recording the past.53
Art of This Century was divided into four distinct sections: the Abstract Gallery,
the Surrealist Gallery, the Kinetic Gallery, and the Daylight Gallery. The first three
showcased the Peggy Guggenheims private collection, while the last one served as a
commercial gallery that would bring crucial opportunities to young American artists until
it closed in May 1947. Peggy Guggenheim had closely witnessed the installation process
of the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme with Duchamp as her guide. With
a radical opinion on the exhibition installation, she invited Frederick Kiesler, then
director of the Lab of the School of Architecture in Columbia University, to conduct a
stunning design for her gallery/museum.
Kiesler had been productive as a theatre and exhibition designer in Vienna and
Berlin before he moved to New York in 1926. He was a collaborator with Adolf Loos
and a member of the De Stijl group that had little affinity with Surrealism. Although
Kieslers design of Art of This Century has been frequently regarded as a Surrealist
installation, it was to a larger extent an extension of the system of spatial exhibition
inaugurated by him in 1924 in Vienna. The system consisted in not using walls, frames,
and pedestals for paintings and sculptures, but of a free arrangement of these works
throughout the space using various methods of cantilever and suspension construction.54

53

Press release, Peggy Guggenheim to open Art Gallery Art of this Century (c. 20 October 1942), cited
in Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 313.
54

Frederick Kiesler, Press release pertaining to the Architectural Aspects of the Gallery (c.20 October,
1942), cited in Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 313.

31

The Abstract Gallery in Art of This Century was a representative model of

Kieslers spatial exhibition, all of the paintings and sculptures were suspended within
the room from either diamond-shaped or inverted-pyramid rope modules or from parallel
or V-shaped straps. Curves and angles were interlaced throughout the space, making the
gallery itself looked like a huge cubistic painting against a backdrop of rolling canvas.55
In the Surrealist Gallery paintings were jutting out toward the viewer on adjustable
arms that stretched out from curvilinear wall units. Spotlights illuminated the works in a
programmed random sequence. At times the gallery was plunged into complete darkness
accompanied by disturbing train noises. Kiesler regarded it as a new manner to correlate
the color, intensity and diffusion of the light and thus enhancing its effect upon the
paintings. He related the lights on and off to the fluctuation of human instinct Its
dynamic, it pulsates like your blood. Ordinary museum lighting makes a painting dead.56
Although the utilizing of darkness, lighting and sound suggested an affinity to the
1938 Paris show, Kieslers design was largely approached from a technical point of view
rather than the Surrealist interests on unconscious and irrationality. The anamorphic
dream-like images were replaced by clear, rigid structures with precise curves and angles.
Visitors could no longer use the light to freely explore their passages in the darkness. And
the exhibition designer could manipulate the visitors activities and perceptions through
controlling the sequence of the light. Lewis Kachur argues that it represents a new kind
of controlled, limited mode oriented toward the individual and the personal.57 The

55

Anonymous, Isms Rampant: Peggy Guggenheims Dream World Goes Abstract, Cubist, and Generally
Non-Real, Newsweek (New York, 2 November 1942), cited in Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 326.
56

Ibid.

57

Lewis Kachur, Displaying the Marvelous, 204.

32

Surrealists diagnosis of the rational world was taken over by a sort of praise to the
compelling mechanism of the modern system. Here the legacy of irrational space of the
1938 Paris show changed to something even more ordered than the exhibition
arrangement in traditional museums, as criticized by the New York Sun art critic Henry
Mcbride:
This scheme is too much like the ordered society of the Japanese. It
compels you to the correct thought at the correct time. It is not my idea of
aesthetic liberty. Like Emerson, I prefer to give my whims full play. At the
moment I come up with a picture and begin to respond to it, I hate to have the
lights shut off and be compelled to consider something different. Its too
harsh a system of picture-viewing. It might be all right if you timed your
entrance and went around like a puppet. But who wants to be a puppet?58

58

Henry Mcbridge, New Gallery Ideas: The Guggenheim Collection Shown in a Remarkable Manner,
New York Sun (23 October 1942), cited in Bruce Altshuler, Salon to Biennial, 324.

33

CHAPTER 3: The Influence of Irrational Space in Postwar America and Its

Rationalization

3.1 The Irrational Space in Environments and Happenings

In the 1940s, the burgeoning community of young artists in New York had frequent
contact with the Surrealists through Peggy Guggenheims Art of This Century and
other professional and social occasions. They absorbed the Surrealists fascination with
the unconscious and automatism that give precedence to intuitive process over rational
conception.59 Towards the end of the decade, after many of the Surrealists had left New
York or returned to Europe, those American artists, including Jackson Pollock, Mark
Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky, etc., began to move away from the
Surrealist dreamy imagery in favor of a more radical approach under the banner of
Abstract Expressionism.
The title was derived from the combination of the emotional intensity and
introspection of the German Expressionists with the anti-figurative aesthetic of the
European abstract schools, representing a rebellious and highly idiosyncratic force in the
post-war American cultural scene.60 Many of the artists were very thoughtful on the scale
of the canvas and the interaction between the artists body and the painting, which
suggested an extreme spatial concern. Mark Rothko even implied that the possibility of
spontaneous painting was to a large extent depends on the scale of the canvas:

59

Lisa Phillips, The American Century: Art and Culture, 1950-2000 (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1999), 12.
60

Wikipedia contributors, Abstract Expressionism, Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_expressionism (Accessed Feburary11, 2016)

34

To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look

upon an experience as a stereopticon view with a reducing glass. However
you paint the larger pictures, you are in it. It isnt something you command.61
For those artists, the Surrealists desired pure state in the absence of any control of
rationality could be obtained by the artists more direct connection to the painting working inside the work.
The so-called dance of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing, and whatever
else went into a work placed an almost absolute value upon a diaristic
gesture.62
In the 1950s a younger generation of artists, including Allan Kaprow, Claes
Oldenburg, Jim Dine, and Robert Whitman, etc., started to apply the aesthetics of
Abstract Expressionism to the making of environments, situations and live performances
under the titles of Environments and Happenings. In The Legacy of Jackson Pollock
(1958), Kaprow attributed his idea on the Environments to Pollocks huge-scale paintings.
He believed that the involving and overwhelming feature of those paintings could subvert
the spectators sense of reason.
His mural-scale paintings ceased to become paintings and become
environments. Before a painting, our size as spectators, in relation to the size
of the picture, profoundly influences how much we are willing to give up
consciousness of our temporal existence while experiencing it. Pollocks
choice of great sizes resulted in our being confronted, assaulted, sucked in.63

61

Mark Rothko, excerpt from A Symposium on How to Combine Architecture, Painting, and Sculpture,
Interiors, 110 (May 1951), 104, cited in Lisa Phillips, The American Century, 15.
62

Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 3-4.
63

Ibid., 6.

35

Kaprows work An Apple Shrine (1960) in the Judson Gallery, New York
excellently represented the essential values of the Environments. It was like a spectacular
labyrinth of junk. Visitors had to walk through the passages constructed of chicken wire,
ripped cardboard, rags, tarpaper, enormous quantities of torn and crumpled newspapers
stuffed into the wire from ceiling to floor,64 and at the same time shuffling them. They
were forced to interact with the work and other viewers. The using of junk represented
not only a radical and ephemeral aesthetics, but also Kaprows indifference towards the
class of objects and his enthusiasm towards the abundance of daily life:
() we must become preoccupied with and even dazzled by the space and
objects of our everyday life, either our bodies, clothes, rooms, or, if need be,
the vastness of Forty-second Street. Not satisfied with the suggestion through
paint of our other senses, we shall utilize the specific substances of sight,
sound, movements, people, odors, touch. Objects of every sort are materials
for the new art: paint, chairs, food, electric and neon lights, smoke, water, old
socks, a dog, movies, a thousand other things that will be discovered by the
present generation of artists () they will disclose entirely unheard-of
happenings and events, found in garbage cans, police files, hotel lobbies;
seen in store windows and on the streets; and sensed in dreams and horrible
accidents.65
Kaprow somehow succeeded the immersive and fantastic features of the Paris
Surrealists exhibition installation and brought them into his own work a dream space of
mutable daily objects, in the time when prosperity and consumerism were celebrated.
Like the Surrealists, he also claimed that the Environments had a high degree of

64

Theodore Tucker, Kaprows Apple Shrine, Village Voice 12 (January 1961), 7, cited in Julie H. Reiss,
From Margin to Center, 22.
65

Allan Kaprow, The Legacy of Jackson Pollock, 9.

36

associational meaning and were intended to stir the observer on an unconscious,

alogical level.66
Environments could be considered a new art in the 1950s and 1960s that criticizes
the rational social order through experimental spatial practice. Most of them were
presented in small, newly formed experimental galleries in New York including Hansa
Gallery, the Reuben Gallery, and the Judson Gallery in the basement of the Judson
Memorial Church. Those spaces were also the showcases of the Happenings started in the
late 1950s.
The first self-described Happening was Kaprows 18 Happenings in 6 Parts in the
opening of the Reuben Gallery in 1959. The long space of the loft gallery was divided
into three rooms by semitransparent plastic walls. In each room different groups of
people acted out different activities simultaneously in meticulously orchestrated
sequences bouncing a ball, playing records, performing simple body movements while
lights went off and on and slides were projected on the walls.67 The simultaneity and
irrelevance of the activities, the oddity and incontinuity of sounds and images, the lack of
focus and climax, all pointed to a brand-new engaging, de-centralized experience. Both
of its aspects of eccentricity and formality evoked a strong sense of anti-rationality.
Kaprow saw Environments and Happenings as interrelated. For him both were not
simply a fresh creative wind now blowing, but a moral act related to both the status
quo and the ultimate issue of being in the world - a human stand for great urgency,
whose professional status as art is less a criterion than their certainty as an ultimate

66

Allan Kaprow, Assemblage, Environments & Happenings (New York: Harry N Abrams Inc), 161, cited
in Claire Bishop, Installation Art, 24.
67

Lisa Phillips, The American Century, 100.

37

existential commitment.68 Spectator participation was a key concern in both of the two
art forms. Kaprow stated that he wasnt installing anything to be looked at but
something to be played in, participated by visitors who than became co-creators.69 In his
early Environments visitors were given the fully interactive role. The free activities of
their bodies exploring the Environment composed their ways of participation:
We have different colored clothing; can move, feel, speak, and observe others
variously; and will constantly change the meaning of the work by so
doing.70
In his later works, visitors were given a more scored responsibility to participate in
the work according to the artists instructions, like moving something or turning switches
on I offered him more and more to do, until there developed the Happening.71 That
was most noteworthy in 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. All of the movements of the
performers were meticulously rehearsed according to the annotated stick drawings that
Kaprow had made. Nothing was improvisatory. When visitors arrived in the gallery, they
were given a program sheet and three small cards with clear instructions. The program
admonished the spectator to be sure to follow the individual directions he had been
given and to change his seat at the specific times.72 Those specific times were signaled
by two strokes of a bell. It was like a controlled organic system rather than a chaotic

68

Allan Kaprow, Happenings in the New York Scene, Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff
Kelley (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 21.
69

Allan Kaprow, cited in The Hansa Gallery Revisited (New York, 1997), cited in Claire Bishop,
Installation Art, 24.
70

Allan Kaprow, Notes on the Creation of a Total Art, Essays on The Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff
Kelley (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), 11.
71

A statement by Allan Kaprow quoted in Michael Kirby, Happenings, (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co.,
Inc., 1965), 46.
72

Michael Kirby, Happenings, 71.

38

situation. The dazzling irrational space was substantially achieved through highly
rational mechanisms designed by the artist. This dichotomy once appeared in Frederick
Kieslers masterful design of Peggy Guggenheims Art of This Century, and would be
constantly seen in works of all forms concerning the issues of space, situation,
installation, and spectator participation from the 1960s till today.

3.2 Spaces in MoMA and the Rationalization of Installation Art

The idea of environmental work flourished in various forms of art practices in

America in the 1960s. Most of those works shared a temporary nature. For many artists
that temporary nature suggested a gesture of protest against the prestigious art museums
supremacy. At the end of the 1960s, the authority of the leading art museums was fiercely
questioned. Some of those major art museums were even seen by many in the art
community as politically evil. For example, the Museum of Modern Art, New York was
accused not only for its long being regarded as a bastion of elitism, but also because of its
board members perceived connection to the Vietnam War.
The late 1960s was also a time when major New York art museums began to
assimilate the idea of spatial practice into their projects. The Museum of Modern Art
launched its first exhibition concerning that issue Spaces (December 30, 1969
March 1, 1970). The exhibition was conceived and organized by MoMAs then associate
curator Jennifer Licht. It included six environmental projects created by five individual
artists and one art group: Michael Asher, Larry Bell, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Franz
Erhard Walther and PULSA. It was the first time when artists were invited to MoMA to

39

create works in situ at the museum rather than creating them in the studio where a curator
could select them beforehand.73 In this way the artist could have more spatial concern
than the curator and more freedom to interact directly with the museums spatial features.
However, this democratic cultural stance was a result of MoMAs reasonable
concession to political pressure. Jennifer Licht once revealed that during the period when
many pressure groups were active, the pressure from vocal sources in the art community
was a significant factor in enabling her to achieve an exhibition that departed from
traditional practices at MoMA and was artist-oriented.74 From its planning stages a
sense of systematic control and institutional management was apparently seen. As Licht
wrote in a memo to Walter Bareiss, MoMAs then director of operations: The exhibition
will really be a test of the flexibility of our working systems, and will need a strong
communal effort from everyone to succeed.75
The title of the exhibition was initiated as Environments. The final choice of
Spaces was related to the fact that 1969 was the year that Unites States astronaut Neil
Armstrong became the first man to walk on the moon.76 The cover of the exhibition
catalogue shows a starry sky, fair, mysterious, and deep. The artists temporary spatial
practices were connected to space exploration, in praise of the national project
concerning technical rationality.

73

Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,
2001), 87.
74

Ibid., 88.

75

Jennifer Licht to Walter Bareiss, 23 September 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.3, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York.
76

Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center, 88.

40

The aesthetics of Spaces was highly different than that of Allan Kaprows
Environments and Happenings. As the museum transferred its power to the artists, those
artists became an alternative authority that dictates the situation and regulates the
spectators. In an early letter to Franz Erhard Walther, Licht explicitly stated about 8
artists will be invited to create a work of their choice, each in a room under his control.77
In the introduction of the exhibition catalogue, the curator defines the spatial project as a
new art form through regarding the visitors as passive objects:
Working within almost unlimited potential of these enlarged, more spatially
complex circumstances, the artist is now free to influence and determine,
even govern, the sensations of the viewer. The human presence and
perception of the spatial context have become materials of art.78
This was self-evident in Franz Erhard Walthers work Instruments of Process. The
work was a room in which canvas covered the floor. The press release stated visitors
will be able to put on, climb into and pick up the canvas objects Walther has made for the
space. The artist and his wife will be presented at stated hours to assist.79 However,
when the artist and his wife were not there, the visitors were not permitted to enter the
space but only look into the room. Julie H. Reiss observed that even when the artist was
present, one could not just walk in: in order to avoid having the space too crowded, the
artist invited people in at his discretion. Reiss sharply argued that in this piece

77

Jennifer Licht to Franz Erhard Walther, 27 August 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.17, The Museum of Modern
Art Archives, New York.
78

Jennifer Licht, Spaces exhibition catalogue, 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.1, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York.
79

Spaces exhibition press release, 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.4, The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York.

41

participation was only under the explicit direct and supervision of the artist, who
controlled the action.80
The curators introduction charts the origin and developments of spatial practice in
art and curatorial practices. It does not mention the practices affinity to the Surrealists
exploration of the unconscious and its relation to the crisis between the two world wars.
In an early draft of the exhibition description, Duchamps strings in The First Papers of
Surrealism in 1942 was slightly addressed as away that practically uniting the works on
exhibition and obviating the structure of the room and the installation.81 Even that is
omitted in the final introduction, which nevertheless forges a more rational lineage from
Umberto Boccionis declaration in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture of 1912,
through El Lissitzkys spatially complex Proun paintings and Kurt Schwitterss artificial
environment Merzbau, to the Environments and Happenings and other mix-media
activities in the l950s. It also has a forceful inclination of relating the artistic spatial
practice to modern architecture as well as modern social and scientific thought. The
legacy of the Surrealism and the irrational space was disregarded to an extent that the
curator exclusively affirms that the Environments and Happenings of Kaprow, Dine,
Oldenburg and others were the direct inheritors of Schwitterss Dada application of
collage-assemblage techniques.

82

Moreover, she asserts that Environments and

Happenings largely overcame the distinction between the artist and the spectator by

80

Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center, 91.

81

An early draft of Spaces exhibition description, 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.4, The Museum of Modern
Art Archives, New York.
82

Jennifer Licht, Spaces exhibition catalogue, 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.1, The Museum of Modern Art
Archives, New York.

42

involving the later, but they are limited art forms since they concentrated on activity
within a situation rather than on characterizing the spatial volume.83
The spatial volume has been a definite manifestation of power for a museum in
traditional terms. With the rapid development of science and technology in the late 1960s,
the aggregation of the most advanced technological resources was another powerful
demonstration. PULSA, a collaborated group of artists, created a programmed
environment involving sound, light and temporary control in the museums Sculpture
Garden. Movements of people and trees in the Garden were translated by electronic
equipment into sound and patterns by means of a complex program. The visitors activity
was carefully regulated by the guards on duty. They had to make sure that public
interaction with the piece should be accidental and based on random movement and
sound, and stop the direct interactions such as yelling into the microphones.84 The
movements were transmitted to a central control booth inside the museum, which could
be observed by the public. Besides that, the viewer could also sense the museums
association with the technological power through the long, complicated list of industry
support on the exhibitions press release:
The computer, teletype and data-phone were donated by Agrippa-Ord
Corporation () The transistors were donated by Radio Corporation of
America, power conditioner lent by Ambac Industries, speakers lent by
Electro-Voice Incorporated and Bauer Electronics. Amplifiers were lent by
Bogen Division of Lear-Siegler Incorporated, microphones lent by ElectroVoice Incorporated, wire donated by Whitney-Blake Corporation, outdoor

83
Ibid.
84

April Kingsley to William S. Lieberman, February 3, 1970, MoMA Exhs. 917b.3, The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York.

43

infra-red heaters lent by Luminator Incorporated. The heater switches are lent
by General Electric, and the strobe light bulbs donated by Sylvania Electric
Producte, Inc.85
Thus Spaces was like a high-sounding comprehensive representation of what
Salvador Dal once called the mechanisms of the rational practical world. It
represented an adversary of the Surrealists 1938 show that featured anamorphic
imageries, deranged sensations, and invisible clues for the visitors to explore in the
darkness. The museum strategically assimilated the 1938 shows spectacular aesthetics
through a series of descendent exhibitions and art practices. However, the 1938 shows
initial diagnostic appeal was omitted or even falsified. Through showing off its
unbeatable capability to generate such spectacular effects, the museum enhanced its
weight as a hub of all dominant social, financial, and technological powers, as a center of
modern knowledge and rationality.
Nevertheless, Spaces turned out to be a well-acclaimed exhibition in its time for
its initiative of challenging the traditional role of the art museum through incorporating
the temporary, experimental installation into its neutral space, as was articulated by the
New York Times critic Grace Glueck:
In effect, the show, whose installations are temporary, adds to the museums
traditional pursuits of collecting, curating and exhibiting, the somewhat
radical function as [sic] aesthetic laboratory. And Mrs. Licht, aware that
museums and their interests in the dead past are increasingly called into

85

Spaces exhibition press release, 1969, MoMA Exhs. 917b.4, The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York.

44

question by younger artists, affirms that one of the shows primary purpose is
to find out if a museum can be used as a situation for live experiments86
However, from the mid-1970s until now, such spatial art practices have been wildly
accepted and critically acclaimed under the name of installation art both by the art
museums and by the art market. Although works of installation art were initiated to be
temporary, and were intended to be dismantled after the exhibition, their growing
popularity has eventually caused them to enter into the systems of the art institution.
They have been pressed into the standard modes of operation, not only of display, but
also of collection, concerning exact methods of registration, storage, and conservation. In
The Challenge of Installation Art, Glenn Wharton and Harvey Molotch observe this led
to the fact that some artists responded by shaping their works to better operate within the
boundaries of the art world, while the institutions stretched to the artworks exigencies.87
On the museums side an example is The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
which established a team media early on. It aggregated the museums staff
conservators, curators, registrars, exhibition technicians, and IT specialists to address the
complex needs of their media installations. MoMA and Tate have followed the example
of that model.88 On the artists side an excellent example is Bill Viola, who offers
museums highly definite artist kits or archive boxes that tightly specify physical
aspects of his video installations that deal with themes of spirituality and the sublime. He
decidedly regards his controlling over the exhibition details as creating a ritual:

86

Grace Glueck, Museum Beckoning Space Explorers, New York Times (January 2, 1970), 34, cited in
Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center, 100.
87

Glenn Wharton and Harvey Molotch, The Challenge of Installation Art, Conservation: Principles,
Dilemmas, and Uncomfortable Truths, ed. Alison Richmond and Alison Lee Bracker (London: Elvsevier,
2009), 210-222.
88

Ibid., 219

45

A prescribed, repetitive cycle of activities for people in the space which

ensures that the work, an experience created by changeable, flexible
components that shift over time, will be seen in the way it was originally set
up. This seems completely appropriate for an art form that exists only as a
duration, as a movement in time with no fixed material form.89
Thus in the rise of installation art we see the powerful return of the rational
space. Both the artist and the museum turn to fully rationalize everything in the
exhibition space, not only in terms of the exhibition arrangements, but also in terms of
the spectator participation. The essence of the irrational space has declined though
some of its dramatic features are seen being applied superficially to installation art
projects in museums today. Museums are wisely utilizing the aesthetics of irrational
space to reinforce their authority, demonstrating its power of disciplining the knowledge
and manipulating sensations. It enhanced its status as the traditional rational space
where the visitors are to be educated, supervised and overwhelmed. Even the feelings of
irrationality, such as anxiety, ecstasy, vertigo, and engulfment, can be created and
regulated through some highly rational technical devices. The museum is still a container
of the symptoms of modernity, but now those symptoms are tactfully veiled by those
seemingly wild, dazzling, and anti-traditional artistic spatial practices. The museums
stance of being more inclusive to irrational sensations as a matter of fact excludes the
diagnostic potentials of irrationality more completely. The alliance between the museum
and rationality seems to be unshakable.

89

Bill Viola, Permanent Impermanence, Mortality/Immortality? The Legacy of 20th-Century Art, ed.
Miguel Angel Corzo (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1999), 92.

46

CHAPTER 4: Biennials and the Revival of Irrational Space

4.1 Biennials, Spaces, Territories, and Realities

The legacy of the irrational space has been rationalized by means of an established
model under the category of installation art in the highly practical art system nowadays.
The irrational space today can no longer diagnose the symptoms of the current world
since it has become a signal of those symptoms itself. For prestigious rational museums
and galleries all over the world, the irrational space has been no more a diagnosis or a
possible solution of the crisis in its time than an option of demonstrating the museums
power and entertaining its audience through spectacular appearance and thrilling effect.
However, dramatically, the irrational spaces diagnostic function towards the status quo
has somehow been superseded by todays world biennials, which represent an intense and
ambiguous zone in which numerous political, cultural, geographical, and historical spaces
encounter each other.
The first and most celebrated biennial, the Venice Biennale, was instituted in 1895
and modeled on the world expositions that were popular in the 19th century. It was
initiated to represent the most noble activities of the modern spirit without distinction of
country.90 The Biennale has been centered in the Giardini where a number of pavilions
have been built by different participating countries under one theme appointed by the
Biennales artistic director. The styles of those pavilions reveal a vivid array of national

90

Lawrence Alloway, The Venice Biennale, 1895-1968: From Salon to Goldfish Bowl (Greenwich, Conn:
New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1968), 32.

47

self-images, while the spectators inter-gallery movement becomes an analogue of

nineteenth-century internationalism.91
After World War II, the theme of the Biennale has been more and more connected to
the idea of reconsidering the past in the service of the present condition of both the art
world and the world in general. The first edition of the postwar Venice Biennale, the 24th
Venice Biennale in 1948, was particularly significant due to its reconsideration of the
avant-garde. The Biennales interest in art history, especially early modern artists and
movements, was also attributed to the extraordinary shortage of materials because of the
war. The post-war organizers of the Biennale set out to remedy this situation and
achieved a highly vigorous atmosphere, in which a representative art history and the
spirit of liberty concurred.92 Interestingly, Surrealism became the central theme of the
1954 Biennale. The Secretary General requested participating countries to adhere to the
theme or at least to a subplot of fantastic art.93 The result was a heterogeneous mixture
regardless of the formal narratives of art history:
The Biennale itself put on shows of Arp, Ernst, and Mir; Germany included
Klee in its choice, England exhibited Francis Bacon, the Belgian pavilion
surveyed fantastic Flanders fro Bosch to Magritte and the French Pavilion
showed Courbet. If there is one artist basic to any definition of realism, it
must be Courbet.94
However, artistic spatial practices had been rarely considered in the post-war Venice
Biennales until in 1976 Biennale organizers proposed Environment, Participation,

91

Ibid., 51.

92

Ibid., 134.

93

Ibid., 136.

94

Ibid.

48

Cultural Structures as the theme of that edition. The Environment section aggregated
artists from 29 countries whose works focus on room-size scale. Besides that, the artistic
director Germano Celant organized a section titled Ambient/Art 1915-1976, which
revealed a broad attempt to historicize the artistic spatial practices. The exhibition was
constituted of 18 rooms, starting with the first three featuring the spatial experiments
created by the Italian Futurists, Russian Constructivists, European Dadaists, and Dutch de
Stijl artists. Then, in the fourth room, artworks by artists including Duchamp, Man Ray,
Pollock and Kaprow were presented together with photo archives of the installations of
the 1938 Surrealist Paris show, the 1942 First Papers of Surrealism in Paris and the
1947 International Exposition of Surrealism in Paris. And the rest of the 14 later
sections were occupied by environmental projects created by more recent artists
including Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Andy Warhol, Joseph
Beuys, Christo, Carolee Schneemann, Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Sol Lewitt, etc.
This spatialization of the genealogy of artistic spatial practice in one retrospective
exhibition reminds us the ordered exhibition arrangements in traditional art museums as
well as the genealogy of modern art drafted by Alfred Barr for MoMAs 1936
exhibition Cubism and Abstract Art. It could be seen as another example of how the
heritage of the irrational space was rationalized by means of historicization in an
established art institution. Nevertheless, it raised a significant claim to expand the scope
of artistic spatial practice to more complex and uncertain connections among different
disciplines and territories. In the introduction of Ambient/Art 1915-1976, Germano
Celant argues that in our contemporary world the concept of environment has acquired
numberless meanings and implications, ranging from biology to anthropology, from

49

geography to ecology, from sociology to economy, and art exists in relation to many
different environments which form a totality, built up on various levels: the level of
object, its surface or volume, the level of the building, the level of the town, and the level
of the territory. Therefore, he claims the urgency of defining the relationship between
artistic integrity and environmental situation, to clarify the field in question, and to
attempt to focus a territory for analysis.95
This claim has been resonated in the proliferation of biennials all over the world
since the 1980s. Here the word biennial generally refers not only to the global mega
exhibitions that recur every two years, but also to those that recur every three, four, or
five years. Most of those biennials have an explicit ambition not only to represent the
condition of artistic production in its own territory, but also to play a panorama of the
transforming pattern of the world. In them we have witnessed a diminishing concern on
artistic initiatives and simultaneously an increasing social and political interest. That is
especially true for those biennials originated in contexts of profound political and cultural
transition, as Elena Filipovic articulates in The Global White Cube:
For example, Documenta and German post-war reconstruction, the Gwangju
Biennial and the democratization of South Korea, the short-lived
Johannesburg Biennial and the end of apartheid, or Manifesta, European
Biennial of Contemporary Art and the fall of the Berlin Wall. These and
others have used the particularity of their historic, cultural, and geographic
situation to define an institutional focus, a striking example being the Havana

95

Germano Celant, Ambient/Art, La Biennale di Venezia 1976: Environment, Participation, Cultural

Structures, Volume 1 (Venice: Alfieri Edizioni dArte, 1976), 190.

50

Biennials ongoing engagement to offer a platform for artists from the Third
World.96
This social and political turn has also influenced biennials in the old cultural
metropolises. Since 1998 the Venice Biennale has reformed itself into a dual exhibition
model that is structured by two main pillars: an exhibition by national pavilions, each
with its own curators and project, and an international Exhibition organized by La
Biennale which appoints a curator for this specific task.97 The later has rapidly become
the main body and the most popular section of the Venice Biennale. It aims to reflect and
examine the most up-to-date world situation through one or a series of themes.
One of the best examples was its 50th edition directed by Francesco Bonami in 2003,
titled Dreams and Conflicts. The Dictatorship of the Viewer. It was actually an overall
project constituted by eleven exhibitions organized by curators and artists from diverse
backgrounds, including Delays and Revolutions curated by Bonami and Daniel
Birnbaum, Individual Systems curated by Igor Zabel, Contemporary Arab
Representations curated by Catherine David, The Everyday Altered curated by
Gabriel Orozco, and Utopia Station curated by Molly Nesbit, Hans Ulrich Obrist and
Rirkrit Tiravanija, etc. Bonami regards the Biennale as a polyphony of voices and
thoughts: it is a large body in which different and independent spirits of contemporary art
are shown.98 Although the architectural features of the exhibition space is relatively

96

Elena Filipovic, "The Global White Cube," The Manifesta Decade: Debates on Contemporary Art
Exhibitions and Biennials in Post-Wall Europe, ed. Barbara Vanderlinden and Elena Filipovic (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2005), 65-66.
97 Paolo Baratta, An Exhibition-Research, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Volume I, ed. Massimiliano Gioni

and Natalie Bell (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), 23.

98

The official website of Venice Biennale, The History of La Biennale - Recent years (2001-2015),
http://www.labiennale.org/en/art/history/recent.html?back=true (Accessed March 10, 2016)

51

normal, in effect it serves as an extensive space in which art responds to various social
situations, ideas originated from diverse territories, and methods in different disciplines,
converging through intricate passages that generate abundant possibilities.

4.2 The Ossification of Biennials and Its Discontents in Recent Years

In recent years biennials has been criticized as an ossified model of global art
exhibition. On one hand, the ghost of instrumental rationality has been sensed in
biennials highly intellectualized exhibits, narratives, talks, workshops, symposiums and
publications. The extremely specialized knowledge it produces turns to make itself
exclusive to the general public. On the other hand, the practical effect of such mega art
exhibitions has been rationalized in every detail. Developing nations and cities establish
biennials as instruments of economic growth and marks of cultural status.99 It has also
become an art world hotspot where artists establish international careers, dealers expand
businesses, and collectors and celebrities enjoy luxurious social lives. Many artists
choose to create a sort biennial art that is easy to be accepted by biennial curators, most
of which address hot biennial topics such as the globalization, geopolitics, regional
history, archives revisit, social criticism, or political activism. This is to say that they
make use of the symptoms of the world today rationally to promote their art rather than
examine them with their art.
At the same time, the homogeneity and vagueness of the biennials in recent years
represent a deadlock of contemporary art. The condition of art today has been described

99

Bruce Altshuler, Biennials and Beyond: Exhibitions That Made Art History: 1962-2002 (New York:
Phaidon Press Inc, 2013), 20.

52

as an eternal present in which all possibilities in terms of newness and progress have
been exhausted. In contrast to modernisms desire to surpass the present in the name of
realizing a rational glorious future, Boris Groys describes contemporaneity as a
prolonged, potentially infinite period of delay that reproduces itself without leading to
any future prompted by the fall of communism.100 Cuauhtmoc Medina also compares
the seemingly inclusiveness of contemporary art to a sanctuary for concepts, discourses,
practices and relations of the aborted modern utopian projects, a formless and poetic
space for broken lineages of experimental music, cinema, and literature, an asylum for
indefinable researches, dialogues, observations, and collaborations from every discipline,
as well as the last refuge in which leftist thought and political radicalism still circulates as
public discourse.101 It looms as a new overall crisis in the beginning of a new century.
Accordingly, no matter how informative a biennial appears to be, under such a condition
it could achieve little except of revealing the inability of culture and humanity towards
the situation on the ruins of modern rationality.
In 2012, several biennials attempted to address this issue through reconsidering the
function of exhibition and its relationship to the broader concept of space and territory, as
well as peoples activities within those realms. In the 7th Berlin Biennale Forget Fear,
the space of art exhibition was given over to stands for various political and Occupy
movements, intervening in the rational exhibition space with unexamined and
contradictory ideas and actions of collective resistance all over the world. With radical
slogans like This Is Not Our Museum. This Is Your Action Space, the curator, artist

100

Boris Groys, Comrades of Time, Going Public (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 84-101.

101

Cuauhtmoc Medina, Contemp(t)orary: Eleven Theses, e-flux journal #12, 2010, http://eflux.com/journal/view/103 (Accessed December 5, 2015)

53

Artur Zmijewski wished art could attain the power and social effectiveness as the
ungovernable Occupy movements in its time. In Documenta (13), the curator Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev considered the exhibition spaces in four different places, Kassel,
Kabul, Alexandria, and Banff as phenomenal spatialities that embody the conditions in
which artists and thinkers find themselves acting in the present of being on stage /
under siege / in a state of hope / on retreat. She also questioned the way
international biennial spaces define our relationship to many places that we only hear or
read about, asking: What does it mean to know things that are not physically perceivable
to us through our senses? What is the meaning of the exercise of orienting I thought
toward these locations?102 In Taipei Biennial 2012 Modern Monsters: Death and Life
of Fiction, the curator Anselm Franke focused on the problems of modern history
construction that incorporates all narratives, values, ethics, cultures and subjectivity into
the self-cognition and interpretation system in a highly simplified way in the name of
rationality. 103 The biennial was essentially an extension of Frankes well-acclaimed
exhibition Animism that had iterations in five cities from 2010 to 2012. The later more
explicitly connected the ossification of knowledge and sensation to the rational
mechanisms of museums:
The butterfly only enters museums or display cases when fixed with a needle
at a determinate point in the taxonomy of knowledge... As soon as an object
is taken out of its original context within a specific praxis and transferred to a
museum it necessarily loses its specific form of animation and enters another
field, which requires that it first be objectified, conserved and thus de
102

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Introduction, Documenta 13: Catalog III/3, The Guidebook (Berlin:
Hatje Cantz, 2012), 7.
103

Anselm Franke, Death and Life of Fiction or the Modern Taowu, Taipei Biennial 2012, http://
www.taipeibiennial.org/2012/en/journal.html (Accessed December 10, 2015)

54

animated. It is removed from the flow of time just as it is from praxis; every
form of change must be excluded.104

4.3 The Encyclopedic Palace and a New Type of Irrational Space

In the 2013 Venice Biennale The Encyclopedic Palace, the role that irrationality
plays in our system of knowledge and sensation was a core issue to be examined by the
Biennales artistic director, curator Massimiliano Gioni. Gioni chose to approach the
issue through dreams, hallucinations and visions, which, according to him, are internal
images. This was considerably similar to Andr Bretons obsession on the imageries in
dreams, the unconscious, and automatism. However, the crisis that Gioni wanted to
respond to was the deadlock of contemporary culture and the impotence of creativity in
the era of Internet and social media. Boris Groys regards those social networks that offer
global populations the opportunity to post their photos, videos and texts as the most
mysterious spaces of our contemporary democracy. He observes those networks are
characterized by the mass production and placement of weak signs with low visibility
instead of the mass contemplation of strong signs with high visibility, as was the case
during the twentieth century.105 In this context Gioni raised his central question for the
2013 Venice Biennale: what room is left for internal images () in an era besieged by

104

Ibid.

105

Boris Groys, The Weak Universalism, e-flux journal #15, 04/2010, http://www.eflux.com/journal/the-weak-universalism/ (Accessed March 11, 2016)

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external ones? And what is the point of creating an image of the world when the world
itself has become increasingly like an image?106
Philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Hubermans interpretation of the status
of images in art and culture was an essential starting point of Gionis project. Like the
Surrealists, Didi-Huberman considers images as symptoms, as the unexpected,
unfamiliar sign, often intense and disruptive, which visually declares something which is
not yet visible, something we do not yet know. Instead of seeing images like neutral
representations in a highly democratized cultural realm, he argues that the symptom of
image reveals a discontent in representation that indicates a future of representation, a
future that we know not how to read, nor even describe. The symptom is not to be cured
by means of rationality. Instead, it has a prophetic power that points to a future in
which images are unconstrained from the rational interpretation of human intelligence.
Didi-Huberman seems quite cautious about the risk of his theorys being transformed into
another dominant rational system of thinking. He emphasizes that the images prophetic
power is not messianic, arguing that the image is a hallucinatory interval that
irrationalizes the world.107
The title The Encyclopedic Palace derives from a never realized project of the
same name conceived by self-taught artist Marino Auriti in 1955 to house all worldly
knowledge. It resonates with modern mens chasing for a universal, all embracing system
of knowledge. However, the curator thought that such a system is different from the
rational cognitive system imposed by a dominant institution, because it reflected an

106

Massimiliano Gioni, Is Everything in My Mind? Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Volume I, ed.

Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), 23.
107

Ibid., 24.

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individuals eccentric dream to fashion an image of the world that will capture its
infinite variety and richness. He regarded those systems as personal cosmologies that
shed light on the constant challenge of reconciling the self with the universe, the
subjective with the collective, the specific with the general, which became more
necessary and desperate in a time with the constant flood of information.
The exhibition aggregated artworks and other forms of figurative expressions of
professional artists and outsiders from various contexts from the early 20th century to our
own time, including Hilma af Klints series of esoteric paintings produced after years of
spirit-guided preparatory work; Aleister Crowley and Firda Harriss exquisite paintings
that embodying a self-invented religion; Stefan Bertalans extraordinarily detailed
drawing records of environmental and biological processes; Peter Fischli and David
Weisss collection of small clay sculptures that represents the world through a seemingly
arbitrary selection of events, objects and concepts both historical and imagery; richly
decorated banners used in the Vodou ceremonies in Haiti; and drawing by a shaman from
the Solomon Islands who put down on paper his dreams, visions, and the demons and
deities in his societys pantheon, etc.
The Biennales resistance towards the rational cognitive system was not only
reflected through the selection of exhibits, but also through its exhibition arrangements.
The curator did not follow the ritual to present the exhibits in an ordered, or linear,
fashion, but constructed a web of associations through contrasts and affinities,
anachronisms and collisions.108 The heterogeneous images and objects were juxtaposed
within the web-like space, and the discordant ideas could reinforce, or adjust, or resist, or

108

Ibid., 23.

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destroy each other. It did not assume responsibility to provide any solid knowledge. Each
chamber in this maze-like palace offered an alternative way of understanding the outer
world through contemplating the inner world. Each constructed a dream scene in which
anamorphic images of the world were seen through covert passages out of the control of
the universal rationality. Each visitor could have his or her own way of visiting, or
intervening into, or interacting with this maze-like exhibition space, which, according to
the curator, illustrates a condition we all share, which is that we ourselves are media,
channeling images, or at times even finding ourselves possessed by images.109 The
curator points out in the exhibition catalogue that the irrational power of images is still
effective to us today, giving examples such as the fact that we still carry pictures of our
loved ones in our cell phones as a sort talismanic icon.110
The Encyclopedic Palace marks a dynamic new type of irrational space in our
time. The spaces destructive power against the rational order is no longer achieved
through marvelous display or spectacular installation, but through its eccentric way of
organizing materials and arranging narratives. The eccentric exhibition arrangement
suggests a brilliant approach of activating the traditional, regular exhibition space with
the central idea of irrationality. Also noteworthy was that the core materials concerning
this central idea were placed in the central rooms of the Central Pavilion of the Giardini.
The Biennale opened in the Central Pavilion with a presentation of Carl Gustav Jungs
Red Book, an illuminated manuscript containing Jungs visions along with their
interpretations. Jung once revealed that all his works and creativities had come from

109

Ibid., 25.

110

Ibid.

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those initial fantasies and dreams.111 Then the visitors would reach the second gallery,
which is the literally central room of the Central Pavilion. The room had four exhibits
that were related to the core ideas of irrationality and the cryptic power of images,
including Ren Ichs Mask of Breton in homage to the father of Surrealism; Rudolf
Steiners Blackboard drawings illustrating his esoteric philosophical system and spiritual
cosmology; Walter Pichlers life-long project of designing habitats for his sculptures as if
they were living creatures; and a work by Tino Sehgal, who, being skeptical about the
power of images, refuses to translate his works into images. And then, the visitors could
choose their own paths through the pavilions interlaced passages surrounding those
central rooms.
We could say that the inescapable destiny of former irrational spaces was to
evolve from a marginal experimental practice to a popular spectacular situation
controlled by highly rational means, which was a destiny of from the irrational margin
to the rational center. Instead, the 2013 Venice Biennale began with positioning core
materials of irrationality at its center. It was like dropping an explosive parcel to the
center of the rationalized world. All other exhibits in the surrounding chambers were like
ripples spreading out of the splash, from the center to the margin, disassembling those
fixed, ossified, rationalized joints and ordered arrangements. Again, we hear the voice of
Sigmund Freud who desired to set Acheron in uproar. There were not only works that
resonates with those central materials, but also those that conflict with them, including
works by Roger Caillois who broke with Surrealism after an argument with Breton
concerning the formers seemingly rational inclination of combining the web of dreams

111

Chris Wiley, Participating Artists Carl Gustav Jung, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Volume I, ed.
Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), 397-398.

59

with the chain of knowledge; 112 and Walter De Marias Appolos Ecstasy which
celebrates the mute, gelid purity of geometry through 20 accurately manufactured solid
bronze rods.113 The ripple effect triggered by the eccentric core materials and facilitated
by all the heterogeneous exhibits suggests an irrational journey of crossing the rational
borders, exploding the preconceived ideas, solving the crisis of homogeneity, and
unfastening the deadlock of contemporary time through activating our inner images. As
Massimiliano Gioni suggests in the end of the introduction of the Biennale:
As Joseph Beuys wrote in a piece that evokes many of the moods also
presented in this show, the most sumptuous palace in the world is the one in
each persons mind: we must enter ourselves to inhabit its rooms, and turn
our inner images into reality.114

112

Chris Wiley, Participating Artists Roger Caillois, Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Volume I, ed.
Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), 385.
113

Massimiliano Gioni, Is Everything in My Mind? Il Palazzo Enciclopedico, Volume I, ed.

Massimiliano Gioni and Natalie Bell (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2013), 23.
114

Ibid., 28.

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CONCLUSION
The 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surralisme initiated the earliest model of
irrational space. It was a space of marvelous display and fantastic installation featuring
distorted imageries and dark passages. It derived from the Surrealists applying of
Sigmund Freuds theory on dreams and the unconscious to examine the symptoms of the
spirit of men and the overall crisis of civilization between the two world wars. The show
revealed the Surrealists significant desire to challenge the ordered arrangements of
traditional museums that are core representations of modern rationality, and to correct the
crisis-laden situation through artistic spatial practices that explores the inner space of
human psyche.
New crisis replaces old ones, the fortune of time waxes and wanes. In the 20th
century, a century of rapid changes, the irrational spaces shared a similar life cycle
with all other modern productions. From the Surrealists fantastic 1938 show to the
technologically controlled dazzling Surrealist Gallery in Peggy Guggenheims The Art
of This Century; from the vibrant artistic spatial practices in the Environments and
Happenings to the meticulously manipulated situation in those magnificent installation art
exhibitions in the prestigious art museums, the ghost of rationality had been haunting like
the magical finger of the mythical king that turns every living thing into gold, luxuriant
but lifeless. It rationalized everything to the extent that irrational feelings could be
constructed through highly rational devices and programs within an exhibition space.
In our time, fantastic or spectacular installations and spatial practices have been
assimilated by powerful major museums, the hub of rational mechanisms, and thus no
longer deserving the title of irrational spaces. However, international biennials, which

61

have been playing the role of addressing the most urgent contemporary issues through
thematic approaches since the 1980s, in recent years have brought forward new types of
irrational space. The 2013 Venice Biennale The Encyclopedic Palace became the
most noteworthy one of them since it attained its destructive power towards rationality
through eccentric ways of organizing exhibition materials rather than constructing
marvelous installations. Materials about irrationality were patently positioned in the
center of the exhibition, like a bomb dropped into the center of the still surface of the sea
of rationality. The ripples spread out of the splash turned to be lines of forces that
disassembling those fixed, ossified, rationalized joints and ordered arrangements,
exploding the preconceived ideas, and unfastening the deadlock of contemporary time.
Through irrationality it activated not only the Biennales traditional exhibition space, but
also the inner world of our psyche. It could hopefully avoid the fate of being rationalized
at the end of its life cycle since it has banished the power of life cycle through its
heterogeneous web-like narrative rather than a clear, linear one. It resonates with Gilles
Deleuze and Flix Guattaris model of rhizome, a conceptual structure in which any
point can be connected to anything other, and must be. Deleuze and Guattari claim that a
rhizome is characterized by ceaselessly established connections between semiotic chains,
organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social
struggles. 115 The irrational space is expected to retain its persistence through
constructing rhizome-shaped exhibition narratives, since a rhizome has no beginning or
end: it is always in the middle, between things, inter being, intermezzo.116

115

Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Introduction: Rhizome, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7.
116
Ibid., 25.

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