Exhibiting and Collecting Ideas: A Montreal Perspective

Author(s): Mirko Zardini

Source: Log, No. 20, Curating Architecture (Fall 2010), pp. 77-84
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41765375
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Mirko Zardini
1. U.S. News, "Curator," December 28,
2009, http:/ /money.usnews.com/money/
careers/articles/2009/12/28/curator.html.
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Exhibiting and
Collecting Ideas: A
Montreal Perspective
According to U.S. News, the career of curator ("museum of-
ficials who select artifacts of artistic, scientific, and historical
value to be displayed in a museum or institution") was to be
"one of the 50 best careers of 2010" and "should have strong
growth over the next decade."1 The forecast indicated growth
of 23 percent over the next ten years, perhaps accounted for
by the "moderate" stress level that, again according to U.S.
News, such a position entails.
Curatorial practice as it emerged during the 20th century
is being extensively recast. The tremendous change in the
status of the object, of culture, of the various disciplines, of
information and education, implies an inevitable transfor-
mation of the curator's role and competencies. This process
of reflection and change coincides with that of the institu-
tions curators generally refer to: museums. Museums are
increasingly providers of high quality Web content through
the activities of publishing and broadcasting. Still, the Web
does not in itself represent the solution to any of the prob-
lems facing museums today. It is a new terrain in which
museums and institutions must also be present. They are
required to fulfill the role - paradoxical, with respect to
what is traditionally considered their mandate - of destabi-
lizing the rules, in particular the market forces that seem to
hold sway on the Web as well; of instigating new research
and reflection; and of promoting a deeper, more widespread
awareness, beyond the traditional concept of education. The
1960s and '70s were a period of critique and rethinking for
institutions. The Open University, established in 1969, was a
clear example of an alternative for the field of education.
Today, it is necessary for all institutions, especially museums,
to follow such a strategic course, considering the physical
and virtual realms simultaneously.
From now on, the curator's activities will be carried out
in parallel in two different places, each of which could pro-
gressively influence the other. Curators will now work both
in the material building that traditionally houses collections,
77
 exhibitions, and public and educational programs, and in the
digital building present on the Web, which should be a dif-
ferent place of learning, meeting, discussion, research, dis-
covery, and, above all, a brand-new territory of cooperation
between various institutions and audiences.

Changing Content

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) was fou

in 1979 by Phyllis Lambert as a new form of cultural in
tion dedicated to the idea that architecture is a public c
In the last years, through a series of exhibitions and n
programs, the CCA has refocused the discussion on how
perceive and understand the surroundings in which we
championing the need for a profound rethinking in ar
ture and contemporary urban planning. New problems
every day from the different contexts in which we liv
bringing into question our traditional perceptions, valu
tools, and priorities. The exhibition "Sense of the City
(2005) challenged the prevalence of the visual in our de
tion and perception of the environment at the expense
other forms of experience. It presented the urban envir
ment as the ideal setting for different sensorial experie
deeply marked by a culture of belonging and technolo
change and involved climate, sounds, and smells.
"Environment: Approaches for Tomorrow" (2006
recentered our attention on the landscape around the i
of climate and biodiversity; "Some Ideas on Living in
London and Tokyo" (2008) compared the lifestyles and
of thinking about private, semipublic, and public space
Japanese and English culture, questioning the assumpti
a completely homogeneous world; "Actions: What You C
Do With the City" (2008) proposed sweeping changes in
urban environment, launched from the bottom up by a
iad of mini-actions that could be combined so as to attain

critical mass; "Speed Limits" (2009) revisited the myths of

speed and efficiency that pervaded the entire 20th century
and still constitute basic requirements of our lifestyles today;
"Other Space Odysseys" (2010) reexamined our fascination
with outer space and, especially, technology.
These investigations have forced us to revisit events of
the 1960s and 70s. Topics like the environment, activism,
daily life, technology, and critical reflection on the role of
architecture surfaced at that time, only to disappear. Like a
subterranean river, after 40 years these topics have recently
reemerged. This interrupted thread is being renewed by
exhibitions like "out of the box: price rossi Stirling + matta
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2. Phyllis Lambert, "Archive as 'open site':
Documents, Knowledge, Interpretation,"
symposium presentation at Princeton
University School of Architecture, April
2-1 2004.
I Ibid.
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dark" (200?), "Take Note" (2009), and "Notes from the
Archive: James Frazer Stirling" (fall 2010). These exhibi-
tions were conceived as a journey into architects* archives to
explore the crisis of modern architecture and new research
conducted during the postwar period. "1973: Sorry, Out of
Gas" (2007), on the other hand, was a reinterpretation of
the first oil crisis, considered as a symbolic end to the mod-
ern century and a still pertinent lesson on the exploitation of
natural resources.
This critical reexamination was carried out using the CCA
collection. Initiated by Phyllis Lambert and conceived from
the start as a research tool made up of various media, the
collection was built to "emphasize the design process rather
than the masterwork."2 Over time, it added archives (from
Aldo Rossi and Arthur Erickson to James Stirling, Peter
Eisenman to John Hejduk, and Cedric Price to Gordon Matta-
Clark) and projects crucial to the understanding of the
thought, practices, and research of the second half of the 20th
century. Likewise, the exhibitions of more recent years, from
"Sense of the City" to "1973: Sorry Out of Gas," fuelled new
acquisition strategies responding to "new research needs as
they arise, and to . . . new trajectories as they are mapped out."*
Exhibitions?
Today, there are increasing signs of a profound change in
progress of contemporary architecture. This change con-
cerns not only the content, strategies, and form of a proj
but also architecture's very processes of production, disc
sion, and communication. The financial and economic cri
of 2008 made these signs more apparent by bursting the
iconic bubble in which architecture had been confined, a
"voluntary prisoner" for the previous 20 years. As a resul
attention has been redirected to neglected topics such as
housing and the environment, while the urban world, m
up in large part of slums, favelas, and shantytowns, has
presented more realistically.
Along with these changes in content, today we may a
observe a change in the means and tools museums and cu
tors use to carry out their mandate. Until now, permanen
and temporary exhibitions, together with their related c
logues, have served as the primary research and commun
tions tool for the audiences of museums and architectural
centers. Of course, an exhibition is only one means, one tool
- and certainly not among the most enduring - for con-
tributing to the formulation of a discourse on architecture.
Despite the constraints of space and time, an exhibition
79
 is still an efficient tool for reflection and communication.

Whenever an exhibition occupies a space temporarily,

installing it provides an opportunity to create a new archi-
tecture. And despite its limited duration, an exhibition can
strongly influence architectural discourse, from what is
commonly called the "International Style" exhibition at the
Museum of Modern Art in 1932 to "The Architecture of the
Ecole des Beaux- Arts" (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1975);
from "This is Tomorrow" (Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1956) to
"Architettura Razionale" (Milan Triennale, 197?); and from
"La presenza del passato" (Venice Biennale, 1980) to the
Internationale Bauausstellung (IBA; Berlin, 1987). A proper
understanding of modern architecture and the architecture
of the past decades would be impossible without considering
architecture exhibitions such as these, which, always in a
different way, have indicated, reinforced, and confirmed new
directions in research, either by presenting exemplary cases
of architecture, urban studies, and photo documentation or
through the rediscovery of archives and historical documents.
Nonetheless, exhibitions are changing.

Exhibitions as Context

An exhibition is a form of representation, a reading of th

world through architecture that oscillates between the
of pretending to show the object or the document and r
nizing that placing it in a new context will inevitably c
taminate it with a new discourse. It is a format, a way o
arranging materials (or sometimes actions) in a determi
space for a more or less limited period of time. It presup
the existence of a visiting public or various audiences.
While certain exhibitions place an emphasis on the d
play and interpretation of physical objects, others make
of various materials to create very different kinds of ex
rations. In fact, today the nature of the elements at play
changing, as are audience expectations. This occurs beca
of the ever greater production of multimedia and digit
materials, and because the culture of movement, built
through cinema over the last 100 years, and the culture
experience in the last 20 to 30 years have altered the vis
gaze. The relationships to the objects, real or virtual, h
therefore changed substantially. This calls for new way
engaging visitors in dialogue - for example, by conceiv
an exhibition more and more as a narrative or a cinematic

experience - as well as a display of cultural objects.

From this point of view, the exhibition space is increas-
ingly the object of a transdisciplinary practice, not unlike
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 that required by the curatorship of the material on display.
This space is created through a combination of architecture,
theater and scenery, visual art, and electronic media, which
are progressively changing the character and atmosphere of
exhibitions. An exhibition is thus a scenario, a dramatization,
a montage, a kind of postproduction that from time to time
creates a particular context for the presentation of cultural
objects in physical space.

Exhibitions of Architecture, about Architecture

Today it is increasingly necessary to insert this new discourse
on architecture, the city, landscape, and the environment
into a broader context, to show how architecture and urban
planning are interwoven with our daily lives, what they are
responsible for, and how they can contribute to defining
problems and lead, if not to their solution, at least to some
sort of improvement.
For this reason, the CCA's exhibitions have often been
constructed from a wide variety of materials drawn from
worlds outside of architecture. Because of their heteroge-
neous character, they can give us a better understanding of
the role of architecture in a larger context. Everything can
contribute to this goal. The character of CCA exhibitions is
driven by the character of the CCA collection. While the col-
lection may seem diverse and complex, it is coherent in its
task of presenting architecture in a wider frame. The presence
of very different media and heterogeneous materials is nec-
essary to document and understand a projecťs various com-
ponents and interrelationships: "site, program, and the design
process . . . urban and public policy, environmental and eco-
4. Ibid. nomical issues."4 In this sense, an architecture collection is
more like an archive than a fine arts collection. For the same

reason, it is necessary to take a transdisciplinary, or multi-

disciplinary, approach to this material. The solution is to
present exhibitions not of architecture but about architecture,
about the city, and about the landscape, using all available
material, including, but not exclusively, architecture itself.

Exhibitions about the Ideas of Architecture

It is frequently pointed out that architecture exhibiti

deal with another constraint: the physical absence of
work itself. By definition public art, architecture is a
somewhere else - in the city or the landscape, but n
the exhibition. According to this interpretation, an e
would be made up only of "stand-ins," elements that
a work - the project with its drawings, models, writ
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 various materials - or follow and document, describe, and
comment on it with photos, videos, and publications.
Still, it is this very material that arouses our particular
interest. An exhibition aims not to replace a work that is
elsewhere, but instead to comment on architectural ideas,
their relationship to the world around them, and the forma-
tion of a thought through the project. Designs, physical or
digital models, reports, letters, airplane tickets, videos and
photos, books and magazines are by no means inadequate
substitutes for something that is absent, but rather are pri-
mary sources - the specific, original material representing
the development of architectural ideas, their interpretation
and effect.

Not Only Exhibitions

Curatorial practice goes beyond amassing and organizing

cultural objects in a collection or producing exhibitions.
museum or architectural center is not only a place for th
classification, conservation, and presentation of objects
documents, but is also a place of production and a gener
of activities. It is concerned not only with the production
knowledge but also, and above all, with making this kno
edge productive. Curatorial practice must encompass all
museum's multifarious activities, from education to pub
ing. It should permeate and transform all of the medium
formats institutions use, bringing back into question the
ditional concept of education - for example, replacing it w
that of learning or conversation - and of the institution i
In particular, curatorial practice should take advantag
the new media made available by the digital communicat
and the Internet. Until now, exhibitions have often been
combined with a catalogue, a more or less faithful repre
tation of the objects exhibited accompanied by the voice
the author-curator and related apparatus. The exhibition
its catalogue are already part of a multimedia project th
aspires not only to leave a more lasting record of the wor
performed in selecting and interpreting the objects, but
to reach a broader public, overcoming geographical and t
poral restrictions.
Today, the Internet offers much richer possibilities f
achieving this goal and especially for establishing a diff
relationship in which the public can engage in a convers
tion and grasp content by means unrelated to traditiona
educational mechanisms. It is crucial that this new syste
of relations be allowed to permeate from the Internet in
the physical reality of the museum.
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 What You Have and What You Do

The Internet substantially alters the concept of what a co

lection is. Until now, museum collections consisted of phy
cal objects or achives held in storage reserves. The Interne
now makes it possible to conceive of archives and collectio
as a vast network of material accessible from anywhere at
any time, allowing different relationships to be established
between them and, at the same time, forcing museums to
initiate new forms of inter-institutional cooperation. Al-
ready, different forms of collections have emerged: alongs
traditional collections, it is now common to find parallel
online collections, consisting of images and information ab
the physical objects. If only a selection of objects is chosen
for this virtual presentation, they will constitute a collecti
within a collection. More and more collections are based on

digital-born projects.
The Internet provides an apt and accessible format for
presenting both physical and digital material. It subjects the
object to a transformative process that at times produces an
addition of qualities and potentials and at others subtracts
some of the original ones. Yet all of these objects and collec-
tions refer to (and are made up of) what a museum "pos-
sesses." In addition, the digital world offers the possibility of
creating and making accessible a collection that also includes
what a museum does - its activities. Through podcasts,
online publications, and videos, a museum's activities now
constitute a prominent part of its collection. While record-
ings of these activities have always been described in collec-
tion and library catalogues, accessibility through the Internet
makes them something different, giving them a new status as
new cultural objects.
The Internet introduces the possibility for a new kind of
process of collecting and cataloguing, one that transcends
the walls of the museum to involve a larger community. The
CCA exhibition "Actions: What You Can Do With the City"
(2008) presented 99 actions in the CCA galleries. The accom-
panying publication presented further investigations on some
of the themes raised. The Web site (www.cca-actions.org)
offered the possibility for a larger community to build a per-
manent, growing archive of actions that began with the
original 99. These submissions created a new, larger collection
of tools, offering more options for real actions in the urban
realm. The exhibition and the Web site became the 100th

action, which was created in turn to provoke new actions

while building a truly collective work.
What are the consequences of this kind of exhibition on
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 collecting? In 2007, a prominent part of "1973: Sorry, Out of
Gas" was built through a meticulous and persistent acquisi-
tion process, which lasted more than one year. This included
buying objects, such as board games, by regularly frequent-
ing eBay and other sites. As a consequence of the exhibition,
these materials then entered the CCA collection. In 2008,
"Actions: What You Can Do With the City" was only in a
small part based on existing objects. Because the exhibition
represented actions that took place elsewhere, in another
time and space, the curatorial work involved not presenting
existing documents but instead creating them, in printed and
digital forms. The exhibition created material that did not
exist before and is now part of the CCA's collection.
While the role of the curator remains to organize material
in collections, to present objects and ideas in exhibitions, and
to diffuse content to a wider public, the ways in which these
tasks are sequenced is under question. Is changing the tradi-
tional, linear nature of this process also changing the result?

Mirko Zardini, an architect, has

BEEN DIRECTOR OF THE CCA SINCE
2005. His research engages the
TRANSFORMATION OF CONTEMPO-

RARY ARCHITECTURE AND ITS RELA-

TIONSHIP WITH THE CITY AND LAND-

SCAPE.

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