James Taylor-Foster
Selected writing 2015 – 2020
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  • 〰️ To Speak As If In Capital Letters
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James Taylor-Foster
editor & writer of essays & reviews,
architectural designer,
maker of exhibitions
Selected writing 2015 – 2020
  • 〰️ To Speak As If In Capital Letters

In 1966 Hon – en katedral (She – A Cathedral) opened at Moderna museet in Stockholm. Only a matter of weeks prior, no one involved had any clue as to what would be presented to the public that summer. “The idea was that there would be no preparation,” Pontus Hultén recalled in a 1997 interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Hultén, the museum’s director who later became the founding director of the museum of modern art at the Centre Georges Pompidou had, however, convinced the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle and the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely to make a trip to Sweden. Triangulating them with the Swedish artist Per Olof Ultvedt, his plan was to have no plan. They would improvise.

This eccentric collaboration between curator and artists—often ambiguous and, by all accounts, particularly so with Hon—resulted in something extraordinary. Their meeting conceived the figure of a recumbent woman, roughly twenty-three metres wide and six tall. Occupying the museum’s main gallery, a former naval drill hall that today forms part of ArkDes, Hon was a serene yet dominant ‘building’ in a building. Over the course of three summer months, visitors walked around and between its spread legs into an otherworldly, entirely habitable space. A steel skeleton and papier–mâché skin accommodated a milk bar in its right breast and a planetarium, depicting the Milky Way, in its right. There was a cinema, a slide, a gallery of imitation “fake masters” made by Ulf Linde and, protruding from its pregnant belly, a peephole offering the disoriented visitor an apex view over the whole affair.

Hon Moderna Museet Stockholm
Fig 1. Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt. Sketch of Hon – en katedral (She – A Cathedral), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1966. © Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt. Courtesy Moderna Museet.

With a tight grip on the ‘publicness’ of the museum, Hon offered all of the ingredients for a fun weekend excursion. As a sculpture, or a structure, or a piece of public art, it carried as much critique as it received. Through Hon, its creators gave symbolic and substantial life to the idea of the dynamic museum, a territory inexorably entangled with the world it was a part. It was as challenging as it was unaccountable, engineering an inclusive bodily experience for visitors and asserting the local controversies that beleaguered it. As a project, it represents an unexacting attempt at unifying space, art and performance, proving that these overlapping spheres really can make for excellent bedfellows. (Although, perhaps, complex lovers.) Hon was as much a piece of infrastructure as it was a humanoid resplendent; as much an architectural intervention as a collaborative work of art. It dwelled in the museum with sincere intent – but without taking itself too seriously.

Fig 2. Hon – en katedral (She – A Cathedral), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1966. Photo: Hans Hammarskiöld / Moderna Museet © Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt

The most serious of topics are best framed in a playful way. The lighthearted does not always equate to the frivolous and can provide a point of access to otherwise challenging topics. In 2017, Fondazione Prada presented The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied. The title, referencing Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson’s 1988 hit Everybody Knows, only hinted towards the darker themes that the exhibition explored. In an eerily similar framework to Hultén and Hon, and almost precisely five decades later, the German curator Udo Kittelmann chose to embark on an intensive collaboration with the stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock, the sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand, and the writer, philosopher and filmmaker Alexander Kluge. When they began the project some years earlier, none had a clear vision of what the exhibition would ultimately say or contain. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation and cultural disenchantment, the only thing they did know is that they wanted to play with the more shambolic aspects of contemporary life. In an interview published in Mousse shortly after the exhibition opened, Kittelmann described the show as a panorama in excerpts and scenes that describe a world caught up between storms and calm, threats and hopes, standstill and transitions, and truths and falsehoods. “Don’t expect a white cube,” he declared. “It will be the very reverse.”

Fondazione Prada Venice The Boat is Leaking The Captain Lied
Fig 3. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. Installation view at Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2017. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

In the intricate choreography between ideas, people and their work that followed, the group claimed the grand and uneven rooms, corridors and stairways of the foundation’s Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, as an uninterrupted scenography. Among the film, art and theatre media on display, a visit to the show unfolded the dialogue that had led to their seamless, or consciously fractious, interactions. The arrangement of the works within the rooms, their proximities, and the interplay between built ‘sets’ and the palazzo-proper conveyed a very real sense of unease. Encounters with image, space and sound oscillated between the background and the fore, demanding your attention for a moment before appearing to dissolve entirely. This yawning, see-sawing performance of curatorial control and spatial spontaneity was disarming and disorienting experience.

Fig 4. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. Installation view at Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2017. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

Hon and The Boat is Leaking… both attest to the notion that exhibitions happen as much to your body as they do to your mind. As regimes of attention, and in different ways, they dealt holistically with the interplay between space (a room), things (an object), and audience (a body). This idea is not mine; I have borrowed it from Kieran Long, my colleague and the current director of ArkDes – Sweden’s national centre for architecture design, the museum now responsible for the space in which Hon resided. In 2013 Long, alongside colleagues at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, published Curating for the Contemporary: 95 Theses – a series of straightforward statements that questioned the received wisdom of curators, and curatorship, in public institutions. The concluding statement—that “a museum is not a refuge” but “a place to encounter the world in a state of heightened attention”—is an observation that rings ever truer as my understanding of what exhibitions have been, and could be, evolves.

Andrea Fraser Little Frank and his Carp Guggenheim Bilbao
Fig 5. Andrea Fraser, Little Frank and His Carp (still), 2001. © Andrea Fraser. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Cologne. [In 2001 the U.S. performance artist Andrea Fraser created Little Frank and His Carp, a six-minute-long single-channel video that followed the artist as she walked around the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao while listening to the institution’s official audio guide. Frank Gehry’s great billowing building is the protagonist, and Fraser is instructed by the guide to touch a sinuous limestone-clad pillar. In the words of Tate Modern, which owns the work: “She lifts her dress to rub herself against it in a sexual manner, revealing her white underwear, as cutaway shots show a crowd of people watching with surprise. Fraser then composes herself and walks away.”]

I do argue, however, than the exhibition is performative. At a basic level, it comes to a visitor as much as a visitor comes to it, and this reciprocity constitutes a valuable relationship. Curatorial work should therefore focus on cultivating conversations and then seek to maintain their energy. “Storytellers,” Walt Disney was purported to have said, “restore order with imagination.” At some negligible level, the generation of an exhibition—that commonly represents the distilled, visible tip of an iceberg-sized collection of flotsam and jetsam—is not dissimilar from the work of a Disney-bred Imagineer. Exhibitions instrumentalise ‘things’ from history and the now—ideas, words, objects, individuals and groups, etc.—to tell and trigger stories that ripple outward or resonate forward. At their best they are immersive and inclusive, having whisked ‘things’ in motion out of the ether, or unearthed them from beneath the ground, and then contextualised them into a narrative. An exhibition that is simply an interface, or an attempt to provide a window onto a different world, misses the point. An exhibition should not anaesthetise the complexities that they deal with, but act as a vehicle to understand the world as it exists.

2016 Nordic Pavilion Venice Architecture Biennale sketch from memory by Gabor Gallov
Fig 6. Sketch from memory of the 2016 Nordic Pavilion at the 15. Biennale Architettura di Venezia by Gabor Gallov (2016) [The central installation of the 15th Nordic Pavilion (Finland, Norway, and Sweden) at the Biennale di Venezia was a truncated step-pyramid, or ziggurat, built from Swedish pine. Designed by Marge Arkitekter (Stockholm), it occupied Sverre Fehn’s iconic C20 exhibition hall as an inhabitable display. Throughout the course of the Biennale, visitors climbed its steps to meet the building’s concrete lamellae face to face. The London-based architect Gabor Gallov penned this sketch from memory during the vernissage of the Biennale. (It found its way to me by way of Laura Iloniemi.) As a rendition of a memory much is lost and much is gained but, at the core of the illustration, is a bodily experience.]

I once heard someone remark that in order to write the briefest of labels for an object in an exhibition requires research on the scale of a book. I then jotted down the following words: TO SPEAK AS IF IN CAPITAL LETTERS. While it might seem hazy or obscure at first glance, it’s a sentence I return to time and again. Capital letters were the written format of telegram transmissions, for example, in which messages sped around the world often in fewer than fifteen words. Today we might use capital letters when we’re filling out a form. Writers might use them emotively in a script to emphasise a voice. Sometimes they can indicate a raised voice and, when taken out of context, might appear wholly rude. But capitals equal clarity. Like the marks of an editor’s red pen across a manuscript they are self-edited and concise, unambiguous and clear, and still embody all the gradation in and complexity of language.

There is not a great distance between an emphatic approach and a didactic one, of course; the latter runs the unproductive risk of alienation. With that in mind, an exhibition is at its best when quivering between emphatic and nuanced communication. (In different ways, Hon and The Boat is Leaking… trod this tightrope deftly.) At a time largely defined by a tender self-obsession, in which it is increasingly difficult to avoid feelings over things or facts, the exhibition has a role to play in bridging and clarifying, prompting and responding and, ultimately, inspiring. Any idea that they can change the world, however, is an illusion. They should be capsules, not monuments.



This essay has been amended from the original.
Read at source. Read on Medium.
First published in Mousse 68. © James Taylor-Foster (2019).

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James Taylor-Foster
editor & writer of essays & reviews,
architectural designer,
maker of exhibitions
  • CuratorialI.
  • ProjectsII.
  • PublicationsIII.
  • SpeakingIV.
  • WritingV.
I.Curatorial
  • WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD2020
  • Architecture Projects: Skeppsbron2019
  • Cruising Pavilion2019
  • The Craft of Swedish Videogame Design2019
  • Sigurd Lewerentz: Freestanding2018
  • Space Popular: Value in the Virtual2018
  • Boxen at ArkDes2018
  • You Are Not Alone2017
  • In Therapy2016
  • Keeping Up Appearances2015
II.Projects
  • Plug-in Poesi2020
  • Pillow Talks2020
  • 〰️ Interdependence, a portrait of Stockholm2020
  • exhibiting architecture, exhibition models2020
  • Future Architecture Rooms2020
  • SOFT GOSSIP2020
  • alvedon series2020
  • asmrology2020
  • Mukbang Veneziano2020
  • Körper2019
  • Architecture on Display2018
  • Planetary Protocols2018
  • The Stones of Venice: A Kimono2017
  • Misunderstandings (A Reliquary)2016
III.Publications
  • Living on Water2017
  • Faith2016
  • Elemental Living2016
  • Abundance2016
  • Clairvoyance2015
  • People, Place, Purpose2015
  • Defiance2015
IV.Speaking
  • Future Architecture CEx2020 Focus Talks2020
  • ASMR at ArkDes: a Virtual Vernissage2020
  • Modevisningar är den flyktigaste formen av arkitektur2018
  • Attention, Accelerated2017
  • Exhibition Models2017
  • Conversation with Kenneth Frampton2017
  • Interview: “Profil” (RTV4 Slovenia)2017
V.Writing
  • What’s Mine Is Theirs: an interview with Max Lamb2020
  • No Time to Stand and Stare2020
  • 〰️ Screen Glow Sedation2020
  • 〰️ Don’t Fear a Snowflake2020
  • Making Believe with Charlap Hyman & Herrero2019
  • Foreword: On the Manifesto2019
  • On Practical Futurology2019
  • 〰️ To Speak As If In Capital Letters2019
  • In Riga, A Conference On Architecture and Migration2019
  • Baltoscandia: A Complex Utopia2018
  • On the Cruising Pavilion2018
  • 〰️ A Weak Monument2018
  • A Diary of Virgil Abloh’s First Louis Vuitton Show2018
  • 〰️ The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied.2018
  • 〰️ Virgil Abloh, Editor in Brief2018
  • Sigurd Lewerentz: Villa Edstrand2018
  • 〰️ On Liquid Modernity2017
  • 〰️ #003399, #FFCC00; The Meaning of a Flag2017
  • Pillars of Society: “Jantelagen”2017
  • Exhibiting the Postmodern2017
  • Future Architecture and the Idea of Europe2017
  • Domains of Influence2017
  • Concrete Mountain2017
  • Ingress: Black Rock City2017
  • In Dialogue With Gravity2017
  • Rem, Redacted2016
  • Media States, Or The State of Media2016
  • A Piece of England to Call One’s Own2016
  • Upon This Rock (I Will Build My Church)2016
  • The Design of the Species2016
  • Venice Isn’t Sinking, It’s Flooding2016
James Taylor-Foster
editor & writer of essays & reviews,
architectural designer,
maker of exhibitions
Selected writing 2015 – 2020
Writing
  • 〰️ To Speak As If In Capital Letters 2019
  • for Mousse #68
Back

In 1966 Hon – en katedral (She – A Cathedral) opened at Moderna museet in Stockholm. Only a matter of weeks prior, no one involved had any clue as to what would be presented to the public that summer. “The idea was that there would be no preparation,” Pontus Hultén recalled in a 1997 interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist. Hultén, the museum’s director who later became the founding director of the museum of modern art at the Centre Georges Pompidou had, however, convinced the French-American artist Niki de Saint Phalle and the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely to make a trip to Sweden. Triangulating them with the Swedish artist Per Olof Ultvedt, his plan was to have no plan. They would improvise.

This eccentric collaboration between curator and artists—often ambiguous and, by all accounts, particularly so with Hon—resulted in something extraordinary. Their meeting conceived the figure of a recumbent woman, roughly twenty-three metres wide and six tall. Occupying the museum’s main gallery, a former naval drill hall that today forms part of ArkDes, Hon was a serene yet dominant ‘building’ in a building. Over the course of three summer months, visitors walked around and between its spread legs into an otherworldly, entirely habitable space. A steel skeleton and papier–mâché skin accommodated a milk bar in its right breast and a planetarium, depicting the Milky Way, in its right. There was a cinema, a slide, a gallery of imitation “fake masters” made by Ulf Linde and, protruding from its pregnant belly, a peephole offering the disoriented visitor an apex view over the whole affair.

Hon Moderna Museet Stockholm
Fig 1. Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt. Sketch of Hon – en katedral (She – A Cathedral), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1966. © Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt. Courtesy Moderna Museet.

With a tight grip on the ‘publicness’ of the museum, Hon offered all of the ingredients for a fun weekend excursion. As a sculpture, or a structure, or a piece of public art, it carried as much critique as it received. Through Hon, its creators gave symbolic and substantial life to the idea of the dynamic museum, a territory inexorably entangled with the world it was a part. It was as challenging as it was unaccountable, engineering an inclusive bodily experience for visitors and asserting the local controversies that beleaguered it. As a project, it represents an unexacting attempt at unifying space, art and performance, proving that these overlapping spheres really can make for excellent bedfellows. (Although, perhaps, complex lovers.) Hon was as much a piece of infrastructure as it was a humanoid resplendent; as much an architectural intervention as a collaborative work of art. It dwelled in the museum with sincere intent – but without taking itself too seriously.

Fig 2. Hon – en katedral (She – A Cathedral), Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 1966. Photo: Hans Hammarskiöld / Moderna Museet © Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Per Olof Ultvedt

The most serious of topics are best framed in a playful way. The lighthearted does not always equate to the frivolous and can provide a point of access to otherwise challenging topics. In 2017, Fondazione Prada presented The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied. The title, referencing Leonard Cohen and Sharon Robinson’s 1988 hit Everybody Knows, only hinted towards the darker themes that the exhibition explored. In an eerily similar framework to Hultén and Hon, and almost precisely five decades later, the German curator Udo Kittelmann chose to embark on an intensive collaboration with the stage and costume designer Anna Viebrock, the sculptor and photographer Thomas Demand, and the writer, philosopher and filmmaker Alexander Kluge. When they began the project some years earlier, none had a clear vision of what the exhibition would ultimately say or contain. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation and cultural disenchantment, the only thing they did know is that they wanted to play with the more shambolic aspects of contemporary life. In an interview published in Mousse shortly after the exhibition opened, Kittelmann described the show as a panorama in excerpts and scenes that describe a world caught up between storms and calm, threats and hopes, standstill and transitions, and truths and falsehoods. “Don’t expect a white cube,” he declared. “It will be the very reverse.”

Fondazione Prada Venice The Boat is Leaking The Captain Lied
Fig 3. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. Installation view at Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2017. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

In the intricate choreography between ideas, people and their work that followed, the group claimed the grand and uneven rooms, corridors and stairways of the foundation’s Venetian palazzo, Ca’ Corner della Regina, as an uninterrupted scenography. Among the film, art and theatre media on display, a visit to the show unfolded the dialogue that had led to their seamless, or consciously fractious, interactions. The arrangement of the works within the rooms, their proximities, and the interplay between built ‘sets’ and the palazzo-proper conveyed a very real sense of unease. Encounters with image, space and sound oscillated between the background and the fore, demanding your attention for a moment before appearing to dissolve entirely. This yawning, see-sawing performance of curatorial control and spatial spontaneity was disarming and disorienting experience.

Fig 4. The Boat is Leaking. The Captain Lied. Installation view at Fondazione Prada, Venice, 2017. Courtesy: Fondazione Prada. Photo: Delfino Sisto Legnani and Marco Cappelletti

Hon and The Boat is Leaking… both attest to the notion that exhibitions happen as much to your body as they do to your mind. As regimes of attention, and in different ways, they dealt holistically with the interplay between space (a room), things (an object), and audience (a body). This idea is not mine; I have borrowed it from Kieran Long, my colleague and the current director of ArkDes – Sweden’s national centre for architecture design, the museum now responsible for the space in which Hon resided. In 2013 Long, alongside colleagues at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, published Curating for the Contemporary: 95 Theses – a series of straightforward statements that questioned the received wisdom of curators, and curatorship, in public institutions. The concluding statement—that “a museum is not a refuge” but “a place to encounter the world in a state of heightened attention”—is an observation that rings ever truer as my understanding of what exhibitions have been, and could be, evolves.

Andrea Fraser Little Frank and his Carp Guggenheim Bilbao
Fig 5. Andrea Fraser, Little Frank and His Carp (still), 2001. © Andrea Fraser. Courtesy: the artist and Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin / Cologne. [In 2001 the U.S. performance artist Andrea Fraser created Little Frank and His Carp, a six-minute-long single-channel video that followed the artist as she walked around the atrium of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao while listening to the institution’s official audio guide. Frank Gehry’s great billowing building is the protagonist, and Fraser is instructed by the guide to touch a sinuous limestone-clad pillar. In the words of Tate Modern, which owns the work: “She lifts her dress to rub herself against it in a sexual manner, revealing her white underwear, as cutaway shots show a crowd of people watching with surprise. Fraser then composes herself and walks away.”]

I do argue, however, than the exhibition is performative. At a basic level, it comes to a visitor as much as a visitor comes to it, and this reciprocity constitutes a valuable relationship. Curatorial work should therefore focus on cultivating conversations and then seek to maintain their energy. “Storytellers,” Walt Disney was purported to have said, “restore order with imagination.” At some negligible level, the generation of an exhibition—that commonly represents the distilled, visible tip of an iceberg-sized collection of flotsam and jetsam—is not dissimilar from the work of a Disney-bred Imagineer. Exhibitions instrumentalise ‘things’ from history and the now—ideas, words, objects, individuals and groups, etc.—to tell and trigger stories that ripple outward or resonate forward. At their best they are immersive and inclusive, having whisked ‘things’ in motion out of the ether, or unearthed them from beneath the ground, and then contextualised them into a narrative. An exhibition that is simply an interface, or an attempt to provide a window onto a different world, misses the point. An exhibition should not anaesthetise the complexities that they deal with, but act as a vehicle to understand the world as it exists.

2016 Nordic Pavilion Venice Architecture Biennale sketch from memory by Gabor Gallov
Fig 6. Sketch from memory of the 2016 Nordic Pavilion at the 15. Biennale Architettura di Venezia by Gabor Gallov (2016) [The central installation of the 15th Nordic Pavilion (Finland, Norway, and Sweden) at the Biennale di Venezia was a truncated step-pyramid, or ziggurat, built from Swedish pine. Designed by Marge Arkitekter (Stockholm), it occupied Sverre Fehn’s iconic C20 exhibition hall as an inhabitable display. Throughout the course of the Biennale, visitors climbed its steps to meet the building’s concrete lamellae face to face. The London-based architect Gabor Gallov penned this sketch from memory during the vernissage of the Biennale. (It found its way to me by way of Laura Iloniemi.) As a rendition of a memory much is lost and much is gained but, at the core of the illustration, is a bodily experience.]

I once heard someone remark that in order to write the briefest of labels for an object in an exhibition requires research on the scale of a book. I then jotted down the following words: TO SPEAK AS IF IN CAPITAL LETTERS. While it might seem hazy or obscure at first glance, it’s a sentence I return to time and again. Capital letters were the written format of telegram transmissions, for example, in which messages sped around the world often in fewer than fifteen words. Today we might use capital letters when we’re filling out a form. Writers might use them emotively in a script to emphasise a voice. Sometimes they can indicate a raised voice and, when taken out of context, might appear wholly rude. But capitals equal clarity. Like the marks of an editor’s red pen across a manuscript they are self-edited and concise, unambiguous and clear, and still embody all the gradation in and complexity of language.

There is not a great distance between an emphatic approach and a didactic one, of course; the latter runs the unproductive risk of alienation. With that in mind, an exhibition is at its best when quivering between emphatic and nuanced communication. (In different ways, Hon and The Boat is Leaking… trod this tightrope deftly.) At a time largely defined by a tender self-obsession, in which it is increasingly difficult to avoid feelings over things or facts, the exhibition has a role to play in bridging and clarifying, prompting and responding and, ultimately, inspiring. Any idea that they can change the world, however, is an illusion. They should be capsules, not monuments.



This essay has been amended from the original.
Read at source. Read on Medium.
First published in Mousse 68. © James Taylor-Foster (2019).
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