BUNGALOW BLITZ

Speculative Practice: Deliberations on Architecture and Curating

by Aoife Mac Namara

Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture, Walter Phillips Gallery, 2004
(Photo: Andrew Kearney)

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits …once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement.¹ —Robert Smithson

The art of exhibiting is a branch of architecture and should be practiced as such.² —Philip Johnson

In 2001, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City commissioned a two-site exhibition of the work of Mies van der Rohe. The first chronicled the architect’s work in the United States, the second focused on his pre-war work in Germany. In January 2003, an abridged version of the MoMA exhibition, Mies in Berlin, opened to much acclaim at the Whitechapel Gallery in London’s East End as Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938.³ Curated by Terence Riley of the Museum of Modern Art and Barry Bergdoll of Columbia University, the exhibition was promoted as the definitive retrospective of his career in Europe and the first in the UK. It brought together documentation of thirty-eight of his most decisive projects dating from 1905 to his departure for the U.S. in 1938, a film about his life and work, some 3-D computer animated walkthroughs of his domestic buildings and l.m.v.d.r. — a series of newly commissioned photographic prints of photographs taken by Thomas Ruff of Mies’s work from this period.⁴

Fortuitously enough, Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 opened at the Whitechapel Gallery just as those of us working on the Bungalow Blitz project were trying to figure out — to make sense of — what the work on our project to date might be about. Three years and two exhibitions into the project, this questioning might seem a little behind schedule — especially now when so many of us are expected to work within the pseudo-scientific research models favoured by funding councils worldwide. And, while we certainly began with an idea of what the project was concerned with, part of the pleasure was finding ourselves redirected by that which we produced and encountered along the way: photographs, paintings, exhibitions, installations, conversations, books and so on. This exhibition was one such moment. Ostensibly, the project was concerned with how art and photographic practices might be able to lend hitherto elusive insight into the controversy that had erupted in Ireland when, in the 1970s, the popularity of Jack Fitzsimons’s book of house plans, Bungalow Bliss, sparked a proliferation of one-off suburban-style houses which spread along the roads and hillsides of Ireland, and particularly the west of Ireland with its much-vaunted untamed landscapes (there is nothing quite like the ubiquitous suburban-style lawn for rendering ordinary even the most exceptional environment). In reality, once the first exhibition had been produced at MoDA we soon became as concerned with issues of epistemology and historiography as we were with of the specifics of the bungalow debate.⁵ Accordingly, Jack Fitzsimons’s bungalows began to shift from being the focus of the research to acting as an organizing structure around which questions about how practice-based research in art, photography, video, curating or installation might open up knowledge about architecture and the built environment; the foundations, scope and validity of which might lie outside (and perhaps challenge) those produced out of conventional architectural or art historical discourses and their attendant methodologies.⁶

In the context of an exhibition about the architecture of a period of radically disruptive practices of display and presentation, Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 was, for many of us, a disappointing but nonetheless significant show.⁷ The exhibition was drawn from numerous studies of individual architectural projects, from the Riehl House (Potsdam-Neuabelsberg, 1907) to the Resor House (Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 1937-38), and included the traditional range of models, architects’ drawings, objects, archival photographs as well as a number of digital animation movies, a biographical film and l.m.v.d.r. (the photographic work by Thomas Ruff mentioned earlier).⁸

Arranged over two floors with a screening room in between, the exhibition charts the development of Mies’s career from designer of bourgeois suburbs to architect of modern America. For the purposes of the exhibition, the downstairs galleries were divided into three interconnected rooms. These spaces were used by the curators and designer to display two distinct bodies of material. The first was a collection of archival models, objects and drawings produced by and for the architect over the course of his work on his earliest commissions. The second displayed digital animations and photographs of these commissions by contemporary artists and designers responding to the work nearly eighty years after its conception.⁹ These are strikingly different strategies of display: the first explicatory, the second prospective, and, as such, they engender different sets of responses in their audiences. The displays produced out of the Mies’s archive suggest that his earliest work was comprised of unexceptional (that is to say traditional) suburban houses built for affluent middle-class clientele while the contemporary computer animations and photographic work invites consideration of the productivity of these spaces, and in so doing, directs the viewer more toward questions of experience than of intention. The large and sumptuous chromatographic photographic prints produced by Ruff of these (and other early Mies’s projects) not only confer an aura of exceptionality on Mies’s early respectable, but orthodox, bourgeois villas but, crucially, forge a striking connection between these “lesser” works and those other rather more prestigious buildings more often associated with Mies and part of the continuous interwoven story of architectural development organized by the exhibition. A story that begins in Weimer Germany, develops under the Third Reich and blossoms in the United States.¹⁰

Thomas Ruff’s photographs of these largely overlooked domestic villas, sandwiched between images of more acclaimed public projects, share with Andrew Kearney’s photographs of the figureless bungalows in southwest Donegal an understanding that in making photographs — even those of inanimate objects and buildings — one is always as involved in the process of making meaning as one is with the literal subject of the image.¹¹ In an interview about her work in graduate school at UCLA, the artist Uta Barth spoke about how this curiosity with photographic epistemology developed in her approach, “I was very interested in the analysis of how images make meaning in the world, particularly how images make meaning in relation to each other, in context.” ¹² Both Ruff and Kearney seem to share this fascination. Both artists use extended exposure times, a mildly synthetic colour pallet, artificial light and laboured anti-naturalistic print surfaces to confer on their (arguably unremarkable) subjects a measure of the formal power, glamour and authority ordinarily reserved for photographic representations of the outstanding — whether buildings, objects or people. Both artists employ a calm, cool and rigorous pictorial style that tends to privilege the building over and above its immediate, symbolically loaded, environment.¹³ In this way, their respective images arguably prompt the viewer to re-examine the architectural clichés associated with, on the one hand a great architect such as Mies, and, on the other, the much-maligned Jack Fitzsimons.

The Thomas Ruff display spread to the end of the first floor where a flight of stairs took the visitor to the displays on the second floor by way of a heavily curtained screening room, in which a short film about the life and work of Mies was running on a continuous loop. The upper galleries were devoted to displays produced out of the archives of his later and more highly regarded work, including Perls House in Berlin, the Barcelona Pavilion (1926-1928) and the Tugendhat House in Brno (1928-1930). Here, in the context of his already acclaimed and highly regarded work, the exhibition has reverted to type. Gone was everything the provenance of which could not be traced to the architect’s studio. In its place, a display comprised of (often exquisite) tabletop models, drawings and photographs, all of which were drawn from established Mies archives and collections.¹⁴ While the large-scale charcoal drawings included here gave some idea of the impact that these projects must have generated at the time, the greater part of these displays relied on objects and images which – unlike Ruff’s l.m.v.d.r. – were, in and of themselves, incapable of eliciting in their viewers the kind of responses normally associated with “overwhelmed” consumers of “great” architecture. Rather, I would argue, the power of these displays rested in their evocation of already established ideas and beliefs about Mies and his architecture¬ – Mies myths.¹⁵ So, the deployment of conventional architectural archives as objects of display effectively served to reproduce an already established claim for architectural greatness. However, this same range of material – architects’ drawings, models, examples of furniture – will probably struggle to establish a fresh case for architectural greatness, whether for Mies’s pleasant and bespoke bungalows, set in tidy little gardens, full of Arts and Crafts detail, or for Jack Fitzsimons’s more “rough and ready” self-build Bungalow Bliss.

The exhibition seemed premised on such an argument — making the case for Mies’s architectural greatness. Following this, the curators’ decision to commission a series of photographs by the German artist Thomas Ruff seems to have been a wise one, even if they did not quite have the confidence to let these photographs stand alone. They did not have to stand in opposition to, or in contrast with, much earlier photographs of these same houses, looking as they did when they were actually being lived in by the men and women who had commissioned them.¹⁶

A number of issues came out of our encounters with this exhibition: concerns that helped to restructure our collective work on the -Bungalow Blitz_ project. First, the productiveness of the Thomas Ruff photographs in the context of otherwise illustrative exhibition practice encouraged renewed confidence in the value of contemporary practices of representation as opportunities for prospective inquiry into architecture and the built environment.¹⁷ Second, from a brief clip in the film screened at the Whitechapel show, we were introduced to Mies’s own curatorial work: the 1947 retrospective he designed with the support of MoMA curator Philip Johnson, who wrote the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition.¹⁸

According to the film script, three years after he had been granted American citizenship, MoMA invited Mies van der Rohe to present a retrospective of his work at the museum. An auto-retrospective, if you like. There was nothing exceptional about this invitation — it was policy for MoMA to develop retrospective exhibitions in and around the work of those living, or mid-career artists, architects and designers seen to have profoundly impacted on their fields and disciplines.¹⁹ What was exceptional was that it extended to offering Mies — and not the museum’s curator — control over the design, content and display of the entire exhibition and the graphic and interpretive materials that accompanied it. Johnson limited his work to the production of the accompanying catalogue.²⁰ The images of this exhibition — Mies’s auto-retrospective — included in the film, stood in startling contrast to the design of the exhibition which surrounded the screening room.²¹ Whereas (perhaps borrowing from the structure of the original Johnson catalogue), the Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 exhibition was designed more or less as a chronological survey drawn from archival materials, the 1947 exhibition appeared to pay little attention to chronology. It relied not on archival material for its displays, but on objects, images and displays constructed specifically for the exhibition.

In his essay, “Making History: Mies van der Rohe and the Museum of Modern Art,” Terence Riley describes the 1947 exhibition as “a visual demonstration of a style rather than a chronology — even an edited chronology — of development” and suggests that the “large, in some cases huge photographs of the Barcelona Pavilion, the Tugendhat House and the glass skyscraper projects were juxtaposed in ways that took less account of dates than of visual effect.”²²

The distinctive, almost minimalist, character of the 1947 exhibition documented in the photographs of Herbert Matter and Charles Eames is perhaps most strikingly characterized by the oversized floor-to-ceiling photomurals fitted directly onto the gallery walls, often buttressed into its corners. Such a design strategy was to directly inform the installation of Bungalow Blitz at the Walter Phillips Gallery. Drawn from copy prints, negatives and studio photographs of models and drawings, the scale of these new photographic prints and montages not only recalled the large charcoal drawings he produced of Berlin skyscrapers in the 1920s, but, in conjunction with their situation in the gallery, gave what curatorial assistant Ada Louise Huxtable described as “the effect of actual buildings.”²³ According to Terence Riley:

Within the existing gallery space, an area roughly seventy by seventy feet, Mies designed a configuration of four freestanding partitions arranged in a pinwheel fashion. To one side of each of these partitions he attached a large photomural, edge-to-edge and floor to ceiling, so it appeared to float in space … Mies also used groupings of the furniture he had designed for the German Pavilion, Barcelona (1928-1929), and the Tugendhat House, Brno (1928-1930) to further delineate the space, much as he had in the projects on display (my emphasis)²⁴.

If today it is generally accepted that contemporary art practice precipitates transformations in the environment and its perceptions, in 1947, perhaps it was exhibition practices like this one that gave credibility to the argument that art, architecture and installation can make a positive contribution to how the significance of the built environment may be interrogated, researched and, of course, mythologized. Unlike subsequent exhibitions on Mies and other architectural work at MoMA, the 1947 exhibition made minimal use of conventional wall texts, detailed labels and other interpretive devices. Instead, the exhibition was presented — or appears to have been presented — as a single work: an installation that was as much a work of architecture and design itself as were any of the built and unbuilt projects represented in it.²⁵ The status of this exhibition as an original architectural design was reiterated during the retrospective by a text panel that read: “This exhibition, the first comprehensive retrospective showing of the work of Mies van der Rohe, is also the architect’s latest design. He is responsible for the nature of the display, its plan, and the appearance of the room in which you stand.” ²⁶

While Mies’s privileging of visual experience over conventional historical “accuracy” may have been most clearly asserted in his refusal of chronological narrative in the design of the retrospective, Riley is among a number of commentators who have suggested that this disruption of conventional curatorial practice was further reinforced by his use of new (as opposed to archival) photographic prints throughout the exhibition. “The effective ‘newness’ of all the material in the exhibition is evident in the installation photographs; no wear and tear distinguished the older prints from the newest.” ²⁷ In this way it is clear that, for Mies at least, the exhibition was less an historical overview of his work to date and more a project in its own right: a scheme of research with its own objectives, questions and outcomes. For those of us working on Bungalow Blitz, our encounter with Mies’s curatorial work was a productive one, prompting as it did a fundamental reconsideration of the role of the exhibition itself — and not simply its constituent parts — in the overall research scheme.

The same could not be said of the overall exhibition schemes in MoDA, Limerick or Letterkenny.²⁸ Informed by an understanding of site-specificity and installation practice in fine art, the design of the first exhibition at MoDA was developed in response to the challenging spaces of the museum.²⁹ However, no matter how attentive and responsive the installation at MoDA might have been to its immediate physical environment, it was, in retrospect, ignorant of its broader discursive context within the histories of architectural exhibitions and curating. Furthermore it was only superficially engaged with the histories of exhibition practice in the fields of photography and fine art. The archives and images generated in and around Mies’s 1947 exhibition pointed to some of these possibilities within exhibition practice. The photographs, plans and interviews included in the archive recall a model of prospective curatorial work — both material and intellectual. In so doing, they propose the production of exhibitions as a speculative practice where “artistic” outcomes (photographs, paintings, installations, video and so on) might promote reflection on the historical and material evidence from which they were generated, while at the same time opening up epistemological questions about how, and in what ways, knowledge is constituted in the field. In this case, questions surround the disciplines of architectural and spatial culture and their concurrent exhibition and curating practices. ³⁰

While the earlier versions of the Bungalow Blitz exhibitions had included — even relied upon — newly commissioned work by artists and photographers as both subject and object of display, the potential of the exhibition itself as an original text was underestimated, almost overlooked, an oversight partially accounted for by the challenges to authorship that this strategy generates for projects like this, one that draws on work by a number of artists. A consequence of this oversight was that while much thought was given to how Paul Antick and Andrew Kearney’s photographs, Jim Grant’s installation and painting and my own video work might operate as texts in their own right (as well as in relation to previous texts of this kind) the relationship between these outcomes and the physical and discursive spaces of the gallery was largely unexplored. In other words, while Antick, Kearney and Grant’s individual work was not literally “about” painting, installation or photography, it did — on a metaphoric level — explore these discourses as conceptual models for the representation of representation itself.

Thus refocused, the work on Bungalow Blitz became absorbed with trying to place our interdisciplinary art, curatorial and installation practices at the centre of a project that was also interested in understanding something of the animosity generated when areas of outstanding natural beauty are turned into private property by the building of houses. Therefore, while the first three exhibitions gave priority to the exploration of the cultural significance of a particular house for a specific group of people at a given time, our work now attempted to understand and articulate some of the ways in which practice-led research methods might generate a new set of knowledges, or, in relation to the bungalow debate in Ireland, an alternative set of myths. In short, the project’s post-Mies concerns shifted from historical and cultural to historiographic and epistemological.³² In keeping with this new dual research focus, a twofold approach to methodology was needed: one that allowed for the opening up of the archive in a number of different registers; empirical, experimental, experiential, theoretical, reflective and analytic; and one that would enable the practice-led outcomes — the photographs, sound work, installations, paintings and exhibitions — to promote reflection on the historical and material evidence out of which the archive was constituted.³³ Approached in this way, the research methods were — from photograph to exhibition, from review to installation and from exhibition to book — calculated to allow practice-led findings to be tracked against those generated by more conventional academic research and enquiry, and vice versa.

Consequently, while projects such as this — those that begin as research into the social and cultural history of particular building types — might conventionally find their home in the field of historical or spatial studies, this project was — not unlike Mies’s — involved in the production of its own archive of primary source material. Thus, one set of methods succeeded in opening up the collection of Bungalow Bliss drawings, plans, publications and documents produced by Jack Fitzsimons between 1971-1989 (and those histories of architecture and the built environment concerned with the development of domestic architecture in general and rural buildings in particular). The other set of methods focused on the production of new resources: texts produced in and through the experience of effecting research in photography, video, sound, installation and painting. ³⁴

If Antick and Kearney’s work included in Bungalow Blitz can be characterized by its close scrutiny of an eclectic range of photographic genres — architecture, newspaper images, portraiture, fashion and advertising — and Grant’s by its dialogue with contemporary sculpture, installation and painting practices, then the exhibitions developed for the Walter Phillips Gallery and Lighthouse can be summarized by their concern with exhibition practice as it has developed in the context of architecture and spatial culture. However, just as Mies’s exhibition in 1947 was more concerned with the production of a new, speculative design than with illustrating or explaining any preceding work, these exhibitions do not set out to provide a summary or overview of either the history of bungalows in Ireland or that of exhibition and curating practices in architecture. Rather, they were conceived as opportunities for the production of new and critical texts. Each borrows from Mies’s 1947 exhibition, both formal and conceptual devices that enable them to scrutinize not only their ostensible subjects (the bungalows) but also the very devices and strategies they have themselves deployed. Bungalow Blitz became, in other words, as much an exhibition about exhibitions as anything else.

The floor plans developed by Mies for the 1947 retrospective show a large, roughly square, gallery space broken up by two pairs of partitions arranged in what Terence Riley calls “pinwheel” fashion, and resembling, in many ways, the drawings of Piet Mondrian.³⁵ Each freestanding wall was allocated to a different project and each was designed to act as ground and structure for the floor-to-ceiling photomurals and montages Mies produced out of the records he held of the exterior, interior images, drawings and plans of the selected projects, both built and unbuilt. The smaller walls are each dedicated to skyscraper projects, while the larger ones are assigned to important examples of exhibition and monument work: the German Pavilion, (International Exposition, Barcelona 1928-29) and the Monument to The November Revolution (Berlin-Lichtenberg, 1926). Parallel to these walls and perpendicular to the skyscrapers, sections of the existing gallery walls were allocated to the Illinois Institute of Technology and Mies’s — as yet unbuilt — Mountain House in the Tyrol region of Germany.³⁶ Equidistant from the space allocated to the Mountain House, and on opposite corners of the room, Mies installed two additional oversized panels abutted into the corners of the existing space: murals depicting exterior images of the Concrete Office Building (1923) and a living-room view of the Tugendhat House (1928-30). The space produced out of the intersection of the Circular Skyscraper installation and the work on the Illinois Institute of Technology, was allocated to “full sized corner detail” of what he referred to simply as the “administration building.”³⁷ Finally, the design was completed by clusters of furniture designed for the buildings, minimal wall texts, labelling and a series of tabletop models. Together, the different elements of the design promised an exhibition that, in fusing the technological and the artistic means of its age, produced a text that was as disruptive of architectural history and the idea of the retrospective exhibition as it was productive of it. As Philip Johnson wrote in the catalogue for the exhibition,

“Mies’ exhibition work at MoMA challenged expectations of curatorial and exhibition design work in ways that forced stakeholders to reconsider the status of exhibition design. For, with this exhibition it was clear that far from the production of representations of the architecture of another place or space … Mies’s installation was a ‘branch of architecture’ in its own right ³⁸.”

Written nearly fifty years apart, catalogue essays by Philip Johnson and Terence Riley both agree that Mies’s decision to deploy the large photomurals, montages and full-sized installations that became the signature motifs of this exhibition was born, in the first instance, out of necessity: most of his original models and drawings had been left behind in Germany.³⁹ Whatever the beginning of this process, it was one that shifted — in significant ways — not only the “look” of architectural exhibitions, but, more significantly, the purpose of them. And in so doing, it acknowledged, albeit it in covert ways, some of the intellectual and political radicalism of earlier European avant-garde interventions in curating and exhibition design.⁴⁰ So, while the 1947 exhibition may have been my first encounter with such critical exhibition practice, it was not Mies’s.

In the late 1910s and 1920s (some twenty-five years before the MoMA retrospective), Mies’s association with Berlin Dada introduced him to concepts of art, architecture and design — including exhibition design — formed not as speculative refuges from reality in the way that their expressionist counterparts might have been, but as practices designed to force artists and their audiences into direct and immediate engagement with the here and now.⁴¹ The internalization of contradiction, chaos, flux and chance, central to Dadaist practice, could, with a leap of faith, also be read as the organizing principal around which Mies’s apparently rational and formalist exhibition scheme was organized. In this context, there is a significant argument that the 1947 exhibition was (like Mies’s earlier forays into exhibition work) as ambitious a statement as any initiated by the individual works therein.⁴² It was, in other words, an intervention not only in the world of architecture, but in the cultural politics of exhibition design. From this point of view, the very idea of a retrospective must, for Mies, have posed some serious conceptual challenges.

If a retrospective is generally designed to present, as a coherent whole, work produced by a single artist or architect at different periods of her life (her oeuvre), it also, and necessarily, privileges the artist as author not only of her life, but of the continuous interwoven story of her creative and stylistic progression from provisional and speculative to enduring and distinct. The retrospective is — almost by definition — backward-looking, traditional and nostalgic: the antithesis of the avant-gardist principals around which Mies had constructed his practice.⁴³ Moreover, if the necessary premise of the retrospective is the inimitability of the artist and her work, then it is no surprise that, in its traditional form, the retrospective pays little attention to the social, technological, cultural or historical conditions that underwrote her passage from obscurity to centre stage. There can be nothing common, ordinary or familiar about the subject of a retrospective. Instead, its conventions — its interpretive texts and panels, the chronology, the hang and so on — work together to produce and sustain an idea of the artist and her work as an exception to the ordinariness of the everyday. Understood in this way, the idea of the retrospective, as a form of practice, seems unsympathetic to Mies’s work in either architecture or exhibition design: work situated very much within an avant-gardist context, one dedicated to innovation, immediacy, modernization and revolution, not continuity or tradition.

In his essay, Montage and Architecture, Sergei Eisenstein wrote about the politics of this aesthetic intervention: “The long path from material through function to creative work has only a single goal: to create order out of the desperate confusion of our times.”⁴⁴ Mies’s apparent rejection of the form and practices associated with conventional exhibition display is, in this context, unsurprising and it may be seen to represent something of a renewed engagement with certain strategic practices championed by earlier innovators in the field, including Bayer’s innovative and influential design for the 1935 Building Workers’ Unions Exhibition.⁴⁵

In film, the term montage — as opposed to collage — is generally used, after Eisenstein, to refer to the transition from one shot or one sequence to the next one.⁴⁶ An approach to editing developed by the Soviet filmmakers of the 1920s such as Pudovkin, Vertov and Eisenstein, montage emphasizes dynamic, often discontinuous, relationships between shots and the juxtaposition of images to create ideas not present in either shot by itself. The second image may continue the theme of the first by a kind of visual metaphor (couple kissing to train entering tunnel) or ironic juxtaposition.⁴⁷ In art history, the term photomontage is associated with techniques that combine, on a single surface, the outcomes of a range of signifying practices from film and photographic negatives, to printed or handwritten text to — in Mies’s case — drawings. By sandwiching multiple negatives or layers under the enlarger’s light, and projecting from them a single photographic image — onto a photosensitive surface — the photomontage merges multiple images into one. The resulting image will thus include multiple points-of-view and perspectives and will reference many different modes of representation, not all of which will be lens-based. In this way, photomontage can be understood as the production of composite images where disparate elements inhabit a unified space. Together, these aesthetic strategies produce texts that are, albeit in different ways, epistemologically and aesthetically self-conscious. Montage and photomontage, as forms of spatial and temporal assemblage, draw attention to their own fabrication and, in so doing, ask a series of questions of their audiences: questions such as where the objects are located in relation to each other; to perspectival space; to us, (the viewers) and why (and how) the objects are put together in one frame or sequence.⁴⁸

I suggest that Mies’s 1947 exhibition did for the retrospective what montage did for continuity editing: it called attention to the dynamic, often erratic, relationships between the different elements of a text by juxtaposing images, objects and spaces in ways which not only shattered the idea of any necessary chronological continuity between his work, but created a text constituted of ideas not present in any of the original material.⁴⁹ In his essay “Montage and Architecture,” Eisenstein wrote that in cinema,

“the word path is not used by chance. Nowadays it means the imaginary path followed by the eye and the varying perceptions of an object that depend on how it appears to the eye. Nowadays it may also mean the path followed by the mind across a multiplicity of phenomena, far apart in time and space, gathered in a certain sequence into a single meaningful concept; diverse impressions passing in front of an immobile spectator.”

Here, Eisenstein contrasts the position of the spectator within this scheme with those assumed by spectators in the pre-cinematic era. “In the past, however, the opposite was the case: the spectator moved through a series of carefully disposed phenomena which he observed in order with his visual sense.”

In this passage, Eisenstein suggests that the practice of understanding our environment in and through mobile encounters (with its colours, movements, forms, rhythms, spaces and sensations) is best understood through a consideration of children’s drawings where bq. “not only has the movement of the eye been given back to the action of the child himself moving in space, but the picture itself appears as the path along which a number of aspects of the subject are revealed sequentially.”⁵⁰ Using the free-standing partitions and the floor-to-ceiling photographic murals in conjunction with models, life-size installations and objects, it could be argued that Mies’s design functions in a similar way. Where the cinematographer might use the camera to track a protagonist through real and imaginary space and an editor will cut and arrange the sounds and images from which the film is constructed, Mies chose instead to use architecture to move the spectator in, through and around the image. In “The Practice of Everyday Life”, Michel de Certeau argues that space is composed of “intersections of mobile elements” that are “actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it.” ⁵¹ For de Certeau, space, as opposed to place, is a concept without stability. It has no proper place. It is,

“in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it … it occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programmes or contractual proximities.”

In this way, montage, whether in film, photography or exhibition, can be understood as a form of spatial practice. ⁵²

In film, techniques such as the long take, jump-cut, establishing and tracking shots, camera-tilt, zoom, continuity editing, cross-cutting, voice-over and eyeline match are used to open up the text to a range of interpretative and representational strategies. In exhibition design and curating, such work is undertaken by spatial and visual interventions — partitions, oversized photographs, text panels and so on. The division of the space by partitions set at specific angles to the existing architecture, the entranceways and to each other, enables the construction of a range of different “shots” of the gallery and its contents. The passage of the viewer in and around, across and through these images and space is constantly disrupted by walls, partitions and other architectural structures which serve to obscure, exaggerate and distract as much as they unite, display or represent. Thus, removed from any traditional chronological sequence, it could be argued that these “montage installations” enable the production of a set of other knowledges and ideas that would remain inaccessible to those of us encountering these objects in other, more conventional exhibition environments. From carefully composed “establishing” views at each entrance to the confusion created by the juxtaposition of table-top models with blow-ups of architectural detail, this carefully considered scenario not only

“links montage technique with architecture; (it) vividly underlines the even closer, more immediate link within montage between mise en cadre and mise en scene. This is one of the corner-stones without which … there be no understanding of either sphere⁵³.”

In other words, this montaged exhibition scheme deliberately unfixed the quoted architectural work from any predetermined interpretation or historicized context. By this logic, the entire exhibition — and not just the elements within it — can be understood as a spatial and temporal montage: a text composed by the viewer as her movement through space causes the different materials, images and objects presented to assemble and overlap in such a way as to allow for the production of new meaning not conveyed by the constitutive parts.⁵⁴ Moreover, in its plays with scale, categorization and display such a scheme abolishes the usual operative distinctions between inside representation and outside experience that characterize exhibitions of architecture, particularly the architectural retrospective. In place of the authoritive retrospective, Mies’s exhibition (or certainly the archival records of it) produces architecture as a dynamic, contradictory and often confused practice: a field of confused activity in as much flux as the world out of which it has developed. The buildings, plans and designs included in this exhibition are articulated not as definitive statements of a particular period or practice, but, more modestly, as another distinct series of creative interventions.⁵⁵

In the early 1960s, the American conceptual artist Dan Graham used a snap-shot camera to photograph the suburban homes and diners that characterized his native New Jersey.⁵⁶ Unlike the bespoke and montaged prints used by Mies in his 1947 exhibition, Graham’s images were printed without adjustment and developed not with an exhibition in mind, but for publication in glossy or mass-circulation magazines. According to Graham, these photographs were intended as a critique of a particular mode of photo-journalism and of the architectural elitism that surrounded discussions of the tract housing that had fast become the dominant form of architecture in the working-class communities of America’s eastern towns and cities.⁵⁷

“In those days, Esquire was publishing sociological investigations like David Riesman’s ‘The Lonely Crowd,’ using photographs in the Walker Evans mode, photographs showing lower-middle-class, suburban clap board houses, but usually from a negative, humanist standpoint. I wanted to take all of the same components of meaning and empty them of their pejorative, expressionist connotations⁵⁸ .”

The subsequent project, Homes for America (1966), included instamatic photographs of these houses and text combined in a conceptual “magazine layout” piece in which was described the different types of mass-produced housing found in suburban developments: buildings that could – like other mass consumables – be ordered directly from a catalogue.

Like Mies’s work on the 1947 retrospective, Graham’s Homes for America served as a critical assessment both of the conventions of a particular genre (photo journalism for Graham, retrospective exhibition for Mies) and the ideas about art, architecture and design enabled by them. However, while Mies’s images focused on his work as an auteur architect, Graham — like Antick and Kearney — directed attention to the more anonymous buildings in which most of us live. For those of us working on Bungalow Blitz, both strategies were important, particularly because those representational strategies already deployed in the representation of Jack Fitzsimons’s bungalows produced little more than one-line, value-laden assertions of worth. If the significance of these houses was to be opened up to more productive argument, it was clear that more attention needed to be directed at the nature of those photographic, art and exhibition practices used in the structuring of the inquiry.

Obviously, there was nothing particularly unique in Mies, Ruff, Graham and the photographers working on Bungalow Blitz taking photographs of buildings. For many decades, photographs have been used for the presentation and representation of both amateur and auteur architecture. According to Terence Riley, this relationship is as old as photography itself, indeed bq. “since the earliest days of photography, architecture has been the artists’ most willing accomplice. The physical characteristics of building — unmoving yet animated by a daily wash of nature’s light — made them far more reliable as subjects than the human figure. Nonetheless, the early photographers’ attraction to architecture seems to have cooled when technical means allowed them to pursue more animate subjects.”⁵⁹

The decision to work with Antick, Grant and Kearney was based on a sustained interest in their work over (in the case of Kearney and Grant) a period of more than fifteen years. My proposal to them was that they should deal with some of the bungalows built in reference to the first edition of Jack Fitzsimons’s Bungalow Bliss (1971). Together, after a series of research trips, we settled on those bungalows built in and around the parishes of Kilcar and Glencolmcille in County Donegal. In the beginning, the end — the outcome — was open. None of us had any clear idea as to where, exactly, the research might lead. After the third trip to Ireland, the houses had already largely been selected and the place where the exhibition was to be first produced had already been decided: the Museum for Domestic Design and Architecture (MoDA). Beyond this, what was expected of the artists was left open. It was left entirely up to them how closely they would attach their work to the proposed topic — the controversy surrounding the popularity of Jack Fitzsimons’s bungalow designs in the west of Ireland. They were free to think of the book and its attendant controversy simply as a starting point, as a premise, or just as a background. The photographers already knew the houses; they were familiar with them from personal experience, as well as from the numerous images reproduced in the eleven editions of the book and the criticisms published of it.

As the overall research director on the project, one of the first things I did was to survey the existing images, to discover if there were any that might stimulate the artists’ interest in the subject matter. For unlike me, none of them were, at the beginning, especially interested in the house designs themselves or the debates spurred by their construction. For the photographers, and the oral history researcher working with them, the next phase took place on site, in Donegal. Here their low expectations of the buildings’ potential as photographic subjects quickly proved unfounded, as they explored unexpected perspectives, exposures, situations and details. The result of their research trips was the production of a large, relatively manageable body of raw material — transparencies, notes, diagrams and interview transcriptions. Material which, together with the eleven editions of Bungalow Bliss, the archival photographs of Mies’s 1947 exhibition and my historical and archival research material now constituted the much expanded project archive. ⁶⁰

The next steps were taken back in London in the studio, darkroom and on the desktop. There, together and individually, we sorted, sifted and otherwise worked our way through dozens of letters and articles, four-hundred or so photographic transparencies, nearly twenty-eight hours of video tape and over thirty-six hours of audio recording generated by our research.⁶¹ What, we wondered, was this material about? What questions emerge from it and how might they be addressed? It was at this stage that we committed to the development of a book and exhibition, both of which aimed to engage this archive and these questions at a number of¬ — often conflicting — registers, including empirical, experimental, experiential, theoretical, speculative and analytic programmes of inquiry.⁶²⁶³

Our plan followed Mies’s 1947 exhibition and Graham’s engagement with the magazine layout, in that the asymmetrical spatial arrangement “articulated by freestanding planes and columns … enhanced the sense of movement within the interior and, implicitly, acknowledged inhabitants or viewers moving within and through a structure.” Gallery floor plans and QuickTime movies in hand, we had to make decisions about which photographs and what material would constitute the exhibition and, in what relation to the architecture of the gallery. Borrowing, quite literally, from the treatment of photographic material in Mies’s 1947 show, we settled on producing wall-sized photographic prints — photomurals — rather than the “painting-sized” framed photographic prints included in the first three exhibition projects.⁶⁵ While eventually agreed to by all, this decision was not easy to reach. In using unifying aesthetic strategies (same scale, same ground, same surface) to collectively render what were individually authored images, we were blurring any distinction between them. Having settled on the form of the photographic material, we then shifted our attention to the subject and positioning of these prints. Which images would we use and where would they be installed? We knew that Jim Grant was planning to install a life-size sculpture — developed in response to the first edition of Bungalow Bliss — in the centre of the main gallery space. So, our decisions about which images to print and where to put them needed to be informed by the ways in which we imagined these images would be encountered by the viewer, specifically in relation to those architectural features within which they would be situated.

One of the widespread criticisms of Bungalow Bliss has been the insensitivity of their placement in relation to the areas of outstanding natural beauty in which they are frequently located. The houses have routinely been accused of forming “a bungalow blizzard,” which is rapidly obliterating the landscape, spoiling the view and otherwise contributing to the “ruination of the Irish landscape.”⁶⁶ Grant responded to our plan to have wall-sized photographs of the exterior of the bungalows and portraits of their occupants on the walls surrounding the gallery floor. As this was where he was planning to build his installation, Grant developed a proposal for a life-size bungalow sculpture — titled Plan Number 8 — that would begin as a single course of building blocks but which would, over the course of the exhibition, rise to upwards of twelve feet, and in so doing, partially obscure the photographs on the surrounding walls.⁶⁷ Toward the end of the exhibition period, Antick’s portraits and Kearney’s landscapes would be visible only as fragments seen through window openings, over half-built walls and from the uncomfortable angles produced by the asymmetrical relationship between Plan Number 8 and the gallery walls.

In this way, the ongoing construction of the bungalow acted metaphorically — it stood in for — both the history of the building of these houses by migrants over the course of many summers, and the criticisms of these houses in relation to the landscape mentioned earlier. While the steady development of the full-size bungalow sculpture from footprint to fully fledged structure, was the centrepiece of Grant’s installation, the work also included the installation of a couch in conjunction with the “establishing” sequence of the exhibition and a vitrine display including the first edition of Bungalow Blis_s and details from the first _Plan No. 8, the design used in the construction of Grant’s bungalow.⁶⁸ Together, the photomurals, furniture, vitrine and Plan Number 8, quoted from, and extended, the techniques deployed by Mies in his 1947 scheme. By juxtaposing the exhibition design of such a renowned auteur architect with images and objects from Bungalow Bliss, the exhibition called into question the distinctions between amateur and auteur (around which much of the bungalow debate had been structured). An outcome of Grant’s installation strategy was Antick’s decision to move away from the exhibition of group portraits, electing instead to install three larger-than-life portraits of individual men and an enormously enlarged detail from the interior of one of the bungalows.⁶⁹

In the essay “Architecture Without Shadow,” Gloria Moure borrows from Barthes’ the Rhetoric of the Image, to explore some of the challenges facing artists using photography as a practice through which to engage their audience in questions of architecture: bq. The artists, meanwhile, in spite of starting out from a subject matter that is extremely dense in terms of the sign (given that architecture — and especially creative, auteur architecture — is a pristine material and formal residuum of the linguistic codes), do not transfer this with strict and formal neutrality. Rather, its configuration oscillates to a greater or lesser degree, but always deliberately, between a cold and elementary documentalism and the creation of a composition of images rich in inflections and new relationships. In other words they develop a poetics and a critique of the image by way of the image⁷⁰ .

While clearly working outside the realm of auteur architecture, Antick, like Nan Goldin and Tina Barney, directly engages his audience with the previously distinct conventions governing both candid and tableau portraiture in the domestic sphere. Moreover, the compelling combination of characters, style and print formally adopted by Antick for this series makes our position as spectators socially and culturally ambiguous. On the one hand, we are transformed into “voyeurs peeping through the camera’s keyhole into another world,” where we experience the slightly guilty pleasure of social trespass. On the other hand, we are being placed in the uncomfortable position of having to judge that which we have vicariously seen — all of which is happening in and through the site lines opened up, crossed into and merged by the changing structure of Grant’s Plan Number 8.⁷¹

Following Antick, Kearney chose to attend to the impact of Plan Number 8 on available sitelines. The position of Plan Number 8 within the available space radically altered the sightlines produced by the original architecture — a design which, in its provision of uninterrupted space and long running walls and clear sightlines, allowed for entire walls to be seen, or taken in, as a series of long, panning and establishing shots visible without the distraction of architectural detail. Once Plan Number 8 was underway, it became impossible to “take –in” any of the walls (or whatever may have been hung on them) without first negotiating those paths that had been opened up, closed off or blocked by the sculpture’s walls, openings and shuttering. Working in floor-to-ceiling heights, Kearney combined three separate landscape images on a single wall-sized and highly glossy tarpaulin print, grommeted directly onto the walls. In this way, Plan Number 8 did for Bungalow Blitz what Mies’s pinwheel arrangement of freestanding walls did for the 1947 exhibition: it activated the constitutive elements of the exhibition as something other than representations of things that exists elsewhere. By disrupting the conventions of display that generally underwrite the production of exhibitions of this type, the overall installation drew attention to the conventionalized, and often constraining, language of exhibition form. ⁷²

Subordinating individual work to the formal and conceptual unity of the exhibition, those of us working on the Walter Phillips Gallery exhibition became more concerned with weaving the photographs, sculptures and found objects we were working with into the structures and spaces of the gallery than we were with telling — or attempting to tell — any truth about their meaning in Ireland. This is not to say that we had lost sight of Donegal, Ireland and the bungalow debates, but rather that we had come to think that, working as we were in the space of that particular gallery at that specific moment in time, we could no longer afford to ignore its physical, architectural and contextual specificity. Organized along the design of Mies’s 1947 retrospective, the exhibition was now able to open the project up to many of the questions absent from our earlier work: questions about the representation of a debate; the re-telling of an old story; and the reinvention of the Irish bungalow. In this way, the exhibition became a self-conscious acknowledgement of the way in which the architectural exhibition space can be used to represent not only that which exists prior to the act of representation itself (as in the conventional retrospective or thematic exhibition), but also how it can play a critical role in constituting the meaning of the object of representation. Thought about in this way, exhibition practice shifts its focus from summation to speculation: a practice designed to effect change in the kind of conversation that is to had about the subject of representation — in this case, the much maligned Irish bungalow. The fact that this is always arguably the case is something that Bungalow Blitz and its audience is, perhaps, bound to take into account.

REFERENCES

¹ Robert Smithson, “Cultural Confinement,” (1972) reprinted in by Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (eds.) Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 280-283.

² Philip Johnson, “In Berlin: Comment on Building Expositions,” New York Times, August 9th, 1931, reprinted in Philip Johnson: Writings, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979, p.49

³ Mies van der Rohe 1905–1938. Exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, December 2002–March 2003. The exhibition was curated by Terence Riley, Chief Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Barry Bergdoll, Professor of Art History, Columbia University, New York; and organized by The Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition was organized at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, by Andrea Tarsia, Head of Exhibitions and Projects. Exhibition design by Fern Green. For indicative examples of press and media coverage of this exhibition see John Winter, “Mies in Europe” in The Architects Journal (January 2003); Hugh Pearman, “Review of the Mies van der Rohe exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery,” Sunday Times (December 2002); Kristy Wark, “Mies Van Der Rohe 1905-1938,” Newsnight Review, BBC, broadcast (9 December 2002); Martin Gayford, “Review of Mies in Berlin” in Art in The Sunday Telegraph (5 January 2003).

⁴ Thomas Ruff, l.m.v.d.r. (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) series of eight chromogenic prints, 1999–2000. According to Julian Heynen, l.m.v.d.r began as a commission, “much as though the artist had been invited to make a portrait of a particular person … my proposal was that he should deal with some buildings by Mies van der Rohe constructed at the same time as Haus Lange and Haus Esters … in the course of one year an idea developed into a new series of works whose title, the initials l.m.v.d.r., only slightly conceals that it is also about a legend of modernism.” Quoted in Jones, Ronald. “Thomas Ruff talks about L.M.V.D.R.” Artforum. (Summer 2001), pp. 158-159

⁵ Aoife Mac Namara (curator) Bungalow Blitz: Another History of Irish Architecture, an exhibition including work in video, painting, installation, photography and spoken word by Paul Antick, Jim Grant, Meadhbh Grant, Andrew Kearney, Aoife Mac Namara and Michael Sherrin. Oral history research by Joanne Lacey. London: MoDA, September 13, 2001 Feb 7, 2002.

⁶ See Beryl Graham’s “Materials for Art-Practice-Led-Researchers”:http://www.sunderland.ac.uk/~as0bgr/learnmat.html for an overview of current debates in the UK pertaining to issues in and around the idea of research in art and design. For information on research events, conferences and projects in architecture and design see the website of the Academy of Practice-led Research in Architecture and Design

⁷ See Bruce Altschuler, The Avant-Garde in Exhibitions: New Art in the Twentieth Century (Berkerly: University of California Press, 1994).

fn8.See Exhibition History at MoMA for an account of the changing conventions of architectural display at MoMA.

⁹ For a study of photography of architecture as an art practice see Gloria Moure (ed.) Architecture Without Shadow, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2000. This study includes discussion of work by Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, Gunther Forg, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Balthasar Burkhard.

¹⁰ See Franz Schulze, “Mies van der Rohe: The Unabridged Version” in Art in America, October 2001, pp. 118-127

¹¹ Thomas Ruff is one of many highly regarded German photographers — including Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte, Candida Höfer and Andreas Gursky — to have studied under Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in the 1970s and 1980s. Prior to his work on the Mies commission, his approach to photographing architecture had led to a commission in 1990 by the Swiss-based architecture firm Herzog and de Meuron for their representation in the Venice Architecture Biennale. Jacques Herzog described Ruff’s photography at the Ricola Warehouse as being “like a passport photo,” linking it visually and explicitly to the portraits. Here, for the first time, Ruff employed the kind of image manipulation that was later to inform the work on l.m.v.d.r. — something that he had hitherto avoided. The photographs resulting from the Herzog and de Meuron commission produced a view of the building that cannot be perceived by the naked eye; viewers could never stand at such a distance that would allow them to see the entire building without incidental elements blocking their view. Again, it is possible to see in these earlier photographs the development of the strategies deployed in the context of the l.m.v.d.r commission. See Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Muron, Architectures of Herzog & de Meuron. Portraits by Thomas Ruff (2nd edition) New York: Peter Blum, 1995

¹² Matthew Higgs, “Uta Barth in Conversation with Matthew Higgs” in Uta Barth, eds. Lee Higgs and Gilbert-Rolfe (London: Phaidon, 2004), 12.

¹³ See Aoife Mac Namara “Bungalow Time: An Interview with Andrew Kearney”:/project/bungalow/gallery/show/Bungalow+Time%3A+an+Interview+with+Andrew+Kearney in this book for a further discussion of the artists’ use of foreground.

¹⁵ In Deyan Sudjic’s review of the twin Mies exhibitions in New York, “Clash of the Titians,” The Observor (27 May 2001), he suggests that — as much as any curator, collector or client — Mies attended to the production of his reputation with some care: “Like so many architects, Mies had always been as careful in creating the image that he presented of himself as he was with designing individual works of architecture. In the thirty-one years he practiced in Berlin, despite creating the impression of a ruthlessly consistent and unbending modernist, he had pursued at least three different careers in parallel. He was a sober traditionalist, building bourgeois villas. But he was also on the edge of the revolutionary avant garde. Between 1921 and 1923 he redesigned his personal and professional life.”

¹⁶ The German photographer Candida Höfer — a graduate of the same art school as Ruff — has produced a series of images of the interiors of Mies van der Rohe’s buildings. See Constance Glenn, “Candida Höfer: Absence in Context” in Candida Höfer, eds. Hiller and Glenn (New York: Aperture, 2004), 14–21.

¹⁷ The phrase “illustrative exhibition practice” is used here to distinguish between exhibitions designed as showcases to clarify, explain or provide examples of already existing works of art, architecture and design and those whose purpose is more speculative and prospective: exhibitions that are provisional inquiries rather than unambiguous assertions.

¹⁸ Mies van der Rohe,(designer/curator) Mies van der Rohe, retrospective exhibition, (New York: MoMA, 1947). Philip Johnson Mies van der Rohe, exhibition catalogue (New York: MoMA, 1947). Having charted his move from Germany to the United States and the development of his architectural and teaching practices in Chicago, the film turns its attention to the first retrospective of his work at MoMA.

¹⁹ See MoMA Archives “List of Exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art,” MoMA, New York. See also Alfred Barr, “Present Status and Future Direction of the Museum of Modern Art: Confidential Report for Trustees Only,” in Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Papers (New York: MoMA Archives, August 1933), 32/66;122.

²⁰ The second edition of the catalogue was produced in 1953, and in 1978, a further edition was published, this time with an epilogue in the form of a conversation between Philip Johnson, Ludwig Glaeser and Arthur Drexler.

²¹ The images used in the film were panning shots of photographs taken of the installation by Charles Eames and Hubert Matter, collection of the Lily Auchincloss Study Centre for Architecture and Design, MoMA.

²² Terence Riley, in Riley and Bergoll (eds.) “Making History: Mies van der Rohe and the Museum of Modern Art” in Mies in Berlin, New York: MoMA, 2002, pp.10-24

²³ Ada Louise Huxtable, “Memo to Miss Newmeyer from Mrs. Huxtable Re: Mies van der Rohe exhibition” (25 July 1947). Archives of the Department of Architecture and Design: MoMA, quoted in Riley, 12.

²⁴ Riley, 12.

²⁵ According to Riley, the seven principal photomurals were installed as part of this installation; two unbuilt projects from the 1920s — Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper (1921); Glass Skyscraper (1922); Mountain House Studies (1934)— and four realized works — Monument to the November Revolution (1926); German Pavilion, Barcelona (1928–1929); Concrete Office Building Project (1925); Tugendhat House (1934).

²⁶ Ada Louise Huxtable, label copy for Mies van der Rohe exhibition (1947), quoted in Riley, 11.

²⁷ Riley, 13.

²⁸ While the exhibition at MoDA was developed in response to the architecture of the galleries and display spaces of the museum, the exhibitions at Limerick and Letterkenny were less developed in this way. Rather, these exhibitions were formed of already existing exhibition prints, paintings and text panels, and while the context of each varied according to the available space, no new work was commissioned for either venue.

²⁹ Here I am specifically thinking about Constructivist, Dadaist, Surrealist, Situationist, and later conceptual interventions in the more traditional divisions between object and exhibition.

³⁰ The term “space” and the related phrase “spatial culture,” are used, following de Certeau, to mean that which “exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements … space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalise it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities.” Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1984), 117.

³² See for example Katie Macleod, “research in fine art: Theory, judgement and discourse” in Drawing Fire, Vol.2, Number 2, Winter 1998, 33-27. See also Katie MacLeod “The Function of the Written Text in Practice-Based Ph.D Research”: http://www.herts.ac.uk/artdes1/research/papers/wpades/vol1/macleod1.html

³³ The term “practice-based research” is enjoying considerable currency now that national and international research councils, and not simply dedicated arts councils, have begun to fund research in and through creative and performing art. Like many such emerging concepts, much confusion seems to surround its use, both by research practitioners and by those looking to assess and evaluate their work. An assumption that underpins the use of the term “practice-based research” throughout this book is that such research prioritizes experience arising through practice, “over cognitive content arising from reflection on practice.” The distinction between “theorized practice” and “practice as research” is important to this project, indebted as it is to both. The idea of theorized practice was secured as a convention in British and North American artist education in the 1970s when some of the more adventurous art schools introduced, through the pedagogical work of Mary Kelly, Terry Atkinson, Victor Burgin, Alan Sekula and others, curriculum shaped by structuralist and, more significantly, poststructuralist theories of representation, ideology, language, subjectivity, textuality, sexuality, and history. Broadly speaking in these terms, theorized practice refers to work in the visual and performing arts that has been — in its conception, production and dissemination — subjected to and formed by rigorous theoretical critique. Conversely, while practice-based research may be interested in questions of theory, there is nothing necessarily theoretical about it. Rather, the defining characteristic of practice-based research seems to be its reliance on experiential investigation and reflection. As such, it arguably owes more to the idea of reflective practice than it does do any conceptual tradition. In 2005 the Arts and Humanaties Research Council in Britain launched a Review of Practice-Led Research to “map practice-led research in our fields” and to reconsider the different ways practice-led research underscores research at both doctoral adn postdoctoral levels. The review is scheduled to complete in 2006.

³⁴ Writing about the “newness” of the material included in Mies’ 1947 exhibition, Riley stated “ Mies’s reworking of older designs, and his production of new collages from historical material, have caused confusion in interpretations by Johnson and by Mies’s other chroniclers. Yet his actions are far from unique”

³⁵ Riley, 15. For a more detailed analysis of Mies’ relationship with Modrian and other painters of the European Avant Garde, see Jean-Louise Cohen, Mies van der Rohe (London: E & FN Spon, 1996), 36–37.

³⁶ While Mies’ floor plan for the 1947 exhibition includes a provision for a mural called “Illinois Institute of Technology,” the mural does not appear in Herbert Matter or Charles Eames’ photographs of the exhibition.

³⁷ Mies van der Rohe, “Exhibition Plan, Museum of Modern Art, 1947,” The Lily Auchincloss Study Centre for Architecture and Design, MoMA, New York. Reproduced in Riley, 12.

³⁸ Johnson, 34.

³⁹ Riley, 13 and Johnson, 34 and 98–101.

⁴⁰ Dadaist and Surrealist artists, architects and designers claimed that photo collage, montages, and assemblages — techniques derived from modern technology and developed in opposition to the media of painting and sculpture — could transform the work of art into a piece of reality. So, too, could an argument be made for their challenge to the historicity privileged by the conventional architectural retrospective. See Richard Sheppard, dada,dada,dada: studies of a movement (St-Giles: Alpha Academic, 1979) and Helena Lewis, Dada Turns Red: The Politics of Surrealism (Edingurgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988).

⁴¹ See Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 1987).

⁴² Exhibitions and installation design were integral to Mies’ architectural work since the 1920s. He is perhaps best known for his design for the German Pavillion at the 1929 Exposicíon Internacional de Barcelona. See Mies van der Rohe: European Works, ed. Sandra Honey (London: Academy Editions, 1986).

⁴³ The distinction between Mies’ avant-gardist aesthetics and his politics is important, for as Richard Pommer has noted: “Not only was Mies monumentally indifferent to the formal politics of parties and governments: even more significant of his ideological position was his attitude toward social reform as manifested in his commissions and project.” Unlike Walter Gropius and other architects of his circle, he designed no theoretical housing projects, preferring to define cultural reform in aesthetic and spiritual form rather than material or social terms. See Richard Pommer, “Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology of the Modern Movement in Architecture” in Franz Schulze, Mies Van der Rohe: Critical Essays (New York: MoMA, 1989), 96–148.

⁴⁴ See Sergei Eisenstein, “Montage and Architecture” in Eisenstein: Vol 2 — Towards a Theory of Montage, eds. Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor (London: BFI, 1991) 59–60.

⁴⁵ In The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art, Mary Anne Staniszewski argues that exhibitions were central to the presentation and dissemination of the innovations of the international avant-gardes of the 1920s and 1930s. “In the famous four-page pamphlet published at the founding of the Staatliche Bauhaus in 1919 … Groppius listed under the Principles of the Bauhaus ‘new research into the nature of exhibitions, to solve the problems of displaying visual work and sculpture within the framework of architecture.’ Although the Bauhaus did not initially have a workshop for exhibition technique, the designing of aesthetic and commercial exhibitions developed as an area of experimentation within the printing workshop when it was run by Bayer from 1925 to 1928.” Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), 27.

⁴⁶ Ibid.

⁴⁷ In The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001), Lev Manovich speaks of this as an aesthetic of juxtaposition and dissonance, which he claims was the dominant aesthetic throughout the twentieth century “from the avant-garde of the 1920s up until the postmodernism of the 1980s.” (p. 144).

⁴⁸ de Certeau, 117-9 fn49. Here I am making a distinction between Mies’s work as an exhibition designer of trade, union or national exhibitions and his work as the designer of an architectural retrospective.

⁵⁰ Eisenstein 59–60.

⁵¹ de Certeau, 118.

⁵² Ibid.

⁵³ Eisenstein, 81.

⁵⁴ de Certeau, 117–119.

⁵⁵ Benson, 32.

fn56 According to Dan Graham, these photographs were conceived originally as part of a conceptual layout piece to be published in “a mass circulation magazine along the lines of Esquire,” which was a focus of the New Journalism in the 1960s.

⁵⁷ New Journalism was, according to Tom Wolfe, more or less structured on four attributes: scene-by-scene construction, real dialogue, status details, and point of view. Tom Wolfe quoted in R. Thomas Berner, “Preface”, in The Literature of Journalism: Text and Context. University Park: Strata Publishing, 1999, ii-iii.

⁵⁸ Dan Graham, quoted in Birgit Pelzer “Double Intersections: The Optics of Dan Graham” in Birgit Pelzer, Mark Francis, Beatriz Colomina, Dan Graham, London: Phaidon, 2001, p.38.

⁵⁹ Terence Riley, “Architecture as Subject” in Architecture Without Shadow, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2000).

⁶⁰ This research material included notes made during visits to the Mies van der Rohe 1905-1938 at the Whitechapel, magazine layouts and photographs that constituted Dan Graham’s Homes For America and Row Houses projects, my collection of Bungalow Bliss letters, articles and editorials from the Irish Times and copies of Irish legislative debates While most of the newspaper material was drawn from The Irish Times, a number of significant articles were printed in other journals, notably The Sunday Tribune, The Irish Press and The Cork Examiner.

⁶¹ The photographs were taken between 1999 and 2004 over the course of five different research visits to Ireland. The first, and most speculative of the trips, included stays on Achill Island, and in Clare, Galway, Sligo and Donegal. The final four visits were all to southwest Donegal. The oral history work was conducted midway through this process, on a separate visit to Donegal when, using the photographs of Antick and Kearney as reference points, Joanne Lacey conducted interviews with eight different homeowners.

⁶² Combine Design in Calgary designed the book which developed out of encounters with the exhibition at the Walter Phillips Gallery, archival material such as the newly commissioned work by Antick and Kearney, images from Bunaglow Bliss and cuttings from the 1970s DIY magazine Golden Homes — a series popular with many of the bungalow builders in the 1970s. The history of architectural monographs and exhibition catalogues in both art and architecture provided a further context for the development of the book’s content and design. An additional exhibition has since been constructed at the Lighthouse — Scotland’s Centre for Architecture and the City, from 26 January–1 March 2006.

⁶³ While Mies’s 1947 exhibition and Dan Graham’s 1966 magazine work served as concrete points of departure for the development of both exhibition and book, our respective art, curatorial and installation practices were informed by a much broader context, particularly the history of the exhibition in the context of the European avant-gardes and conceptual artists including Tatlin, Haacke, Piper, Latham, Beuys, Rosler, Smithson, Snow, Matte-Clark, Durham and others.

⁶⁴ Riley, 12

⁶⁵ While hung in quite different ways and in conjunction with different objects and images, the Limerick, Letterkenny and MoDA exhibitions all included the same three series of photographs. The first consisted of large (100 by 120 cm) framed c-type prints made from Kearney’s landscape-format transparencies of the exteriors of eight different bungalows. The second consisted of a series of four large (120 by 120 cm) portraits taken by Antick of the bungalow occupants in the interior of their homes. The final series included eight additional portrait-images by Antick. All three were mounted edge-to-edge, behind glass and with the same heavy mahogany frames designed to bring the images out about 15 cm from the wall.

⁶⁶ See Kevin Myers and Frank McDonald quoted in my essay “The House that Jack Built”:/project/bungalow/wiki/show/The+House+That+Jack+Built%2A in this volume for many and varied examples of these perspectives.

⁶⁷ The walls of the sculpture were designed to be randomly extended over the course of the exhibition. This strategy led to some of the walls reaching around 12 ft in height, while others remained at 3–4 ft. For a more detailed discussion of the development of this sculpture, see my interview with Jim Grant in this volume.

⁶⁸ While the overstuffed couch or sofa has been a recurring motif throughout Grant’s work on Bungalow Blitz, appearing as it did — albeit hung from a stairwell — in the first version of the exhibition at MoDA, he did not include any of the paintings and drawings he had exhibited at earlier stages of the project. It is also interesting to note that in the case of both exhibitions — Mies’s 1947 and ours in 2004 — provenance of the furniture lay with the occupants of the exhibited houses. Charles Eames for Mies, and Nuala Mac Devitt for Bungalow Blitz — although problems with shipping meant that Mac Devitt’s bungalow couch was, at the last minute, replaced by one from the collection of Mimmo Mialo.

⁶⁹ In the first three exhibitions in the series, Antick included photographs of couples, single-generation families and larger cross-generational family groups.

⁷⁰ Moure, 17.

⁷¹ A crucial difference between Antick and Barney’s photographs is that while Antick focuses on ordinary interiors of everyday houses, Barney’s images “transport us inside large rooms adorned with exquisite and expensive paintings and furnishings, and onto porches and yards that speak of carefree leisure and always balmy weather.” See Andy Grundberg, “Tina Barney: An Afterword” in Tina Barney Theatre of Manners (Zurich: Scalo, 1997), 250.

⁷² Photographs of Mies van der Rohe’s designs for The Dwelling of our Time (Die Wohnung unserer Ziet) at the German Building Exhibition in Berlin in 1931 were also important reference point for the development of the exhibitions at the Lighthouse and Walter Phillips Galleries. The documentation for this exhibition is held as part of the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Lily Auchincloss Study Centre for Architecture and Design, MoMA, New York. Two images from the exhibition are reproduced in Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll’s catalogue for the Mies in Berlin exhibition at MoMA in 2001. See Riley and Bergdoll, p.339.