Positions - Julian Rose - Machines for Looking

Machines for Looking

Julian Rose

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Video still from Peter Chermayeff, Design for a Fair: The United States Pavilion at Expo '67 Montreal, 2010. © Peter Chermayeff.

Positions
September 2019










Notes
1

Solomon’s career was cut short by an early death in 1970. An overview of his accomplishments can be found in his New York Times obituary: “Dr. Alan Solomon Dies at 49; Ex-Director of Jewish Museum,” New York Times, February 19, 1970, 47.

2

The catalog was published by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, which arranged for the exhibition to travel to that city after the expo: Alan Solomon, American Painting Now: Horticultural Hall, Boston; December 15, 1967–January 10, 1968 (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1967).

3

In addition to his design of the “radomes,” some of Fuller’s first dome prototypes had been constructed for the US Marines in 1954. The marines were interested in deploying them as lightweight structures that could be flown into remote areas by helicopter, fully assembled. See Sidney Rosen, Wizard of the Dome: R. Buckminster Fuller; Designer for the Future (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969), 104.

4

As historian Robert H. Haddow has pointed out, “The geodesic dome with its expressed structure was itself a vast symbol,” and for that reason American exhibition designers often “did not want to clutter it up with objects that would only detract from its emotive power.” Robert H. Haddow, Pavilions of Plenty: Exhibiting American Culture Abroad in the 1950s (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 219. Haddow’s book also includes a detailed discussion of the domes Fuller built for the International Trade Fair held in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1956; for a US trade fair exhibit in Poznań, Poland, in 1957; and for the American National Exhibition in Moscow in 1959. The last included a film by Charles and Ray Eames, and so could be understood as a kind of early multimedia environment, but it was not conceived as an exhibition space for visual art per se.

5

American Painting Now was one of four individual exhibitions, each housed on a separate platform within the dome, and all conceived in relation to the pavilion’s overall theme of “Creative America.” The other exhibits were devoted to the American space program (“Destination Moon”); to Hollywood (“American Cinema”); and to pop culture and vernacular crafts (“American Spirit”). Cambridge Seven Associates was founded in 1962 by a collective that included architects, graphic designers, and industrial designers, and quickly received acclaim for a range of projects that included the graphic identity for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, designed in 1965, and the New England Aquarium in Boston, which was designed in the early 1960s and opened to the public in 1970. Both Fuller and Cambridge Seven were commissioned by the US Information Agency (USIA). For an excellent overview of the USIA’s role in planning the pavilion and the exhibitions it contained, see Asa McKercher, “The Art of Soft Power at Expo 67: Creative America and Cultural Diplomacy in the US Pavilion,” Journal of Curatorial Studies 5, no. 3 (2016): 369–389.

6

Ada Louise Huxtable, “Fair, Fairer, Fairest,” New York Times, May 7, 1967, 27.

7

Solomon was selected by Jack Massey, who was the chief of design and operations of the USIA. Massey was able to make this bold selection in part because Expo 67 marked the first occasion on which the USIA was given full control over a US pavilion, rather than having to answer to the State and Commerce Departments, which had drawn criticism in the past for pushing for US pavilions to be too explicitly tied to foreign policy and too commercial, respectively. See McKercher, “Art of Soft Power,” 369–374.

8

At the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, Pollock’s Cathedral, 1947, was shown together with Frederic Remington’s Fired On, 1907; the exhibition’s planners had chosen to temper Abstract Expressionism with a healthy dose of manifest destiny and frontier mythology. In contrast, Solomon emphasized that his show was a true survey of contemporary practice by explaining that he had chosen his examples in order to represent “at least three major tendencies: geometric painting, pop art, and shaped canvasses.” For the full list of the twenty-two artists included, see Solomon, American Painting Now.

9

Because of various schedule constraints and logistical challenges, only thirteen of the artists were able to produce new works for the show. See Solomon, American Painting Now.

10

“U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 Opens with Space and Art Displays,” New York Times, April 24, 1967, 18.

11

While there is general agreement that the US pavilion was the most popular destination at the fair, there is some disagreement about the total number of visitors. Eleven million is the official figure given by the Canadian government: “United States Pavilion at Expo ’67,” .

12

Elizabeth Kolbert, “Dymaxion Man,” New Yorker, June 9, 2008. It is worth noting that Kolbert also combines Solomon’s show and the other three displays into a single “exhibit.” American Painting Now was similarly overlooked in the Whitney show and the scholarship that accompanied it, receiving only a single mention in the catalog. See K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller, eds., Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe (New York: Whitney Museum of Art, 2008), 35–36.

13

In addition to the 2016 article by McKercher cited above, recent scholarly analyses of the project include Jonathan Massey, “Buckminster Fuller’s Cybernetic Pastoral: The United States Pavilion at Expo 67,” Journal of Architecture 11, no. 4 (2006): 463–483; Daniela Sheinin, “Kookie Thoughts: Imagining the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bubble),” Journal of Transnational American Studies 5, no. 1 (2013), ; and Rebecca Dalvesco, “R. Buckminster Fuller, the Expo ’67 Pavilion and the Atoms for Peace Program,” Leonardo 50, no. 5 (2017): 486–492.

14

McKercher, “Art of Soft Power,” 369.

15

“For some reason the press fastened on the idea that this was a pop art show, although only about nine of the twenty-two artists in the exhibition have been associated in any way with that movement.” Solomon, American Painting Now.

16

Massey, “Buckminster Fuller’s Cybernetic Pastoral,” 811.

17

Claes Oldenburg’s piece was made of soft vinyl and could conceivably be considered a kind of hanging sculpture, but it was absolutely not Abstract Expressionist. Oddly enough, this last description is from the studio that actually designed the exhibition and the rest of the dome’s interior architecture, Cambridge Seven Associates. See Chermayeff, Sollogub & Poole, Inc., “United States Pavilion, Expo ’67, Montreal, Canada,” .

18

Modern Architecture: International Exhibition: New York, Feb. 10 to March 23, 1932, Museum of Modern Art (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932), 19.

19

Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (London: Faber & Faber, 1936), 121. Pevsner’s book is particularly interesting from a historiographic perspective because (despite being beaten to the punch by Hitchcock and Johnson) he self-consciously conceived of his book as “the first to be published” on what he called “the development of the modern movement.” See Pevsner, Pioneers of the Modern Movement, 15. The book remained highly influential and was published in new editions under the title Pioneers of Modern Design in 1948 and 1968.

20

Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1941), 251–252.

21

An internal USIA memo cited by Sheinin, “Kookie Thoughts,” 46.

22

Arthur Drexler had in fact recognized the connection years before the Montreal Expo. He told the author of a Time magazine article on Fuller in 1964 that he lamented the fact that Fuller had not been invited to construct a dome for the New York World’s Fair that year because “it would have had the same impact on the world of design as the Crystal Palace at London’s great exhibition of 1851—probably more so, because the Crystal Palace prefab pieces had classical roots, whereas Bucky’s dome is totally new.” See “The Dymaxion American,” Time, January 10, 1963, 50.

23

Massey, “Buckminster Fuller's Cybernetic Pastoral,” 795.

24

Johnson, “Historical Note,” in Modern Architecture, 19.

25

Given that the Great Exhibition was staged by the United Kingdom at the height of its colonial power, and that many of the exhibition’s contents were directly or indirectly related to colonial exploitation and violence (raw materials from colonial territories were one highly popular attraction, for example), the prominent place of the Crystal Palace in the historiography of modern architecture reveals underlying links not only between modern architecture, industrialization, and the emergence of commodity capitalism, but between modern architecture and colonialism as well. The fact that Fuller’s architecture was itself entangled in the US military-industrial complex suggests that the connection between modern architecture and imperial power is an enduring one. For a critical examination of the Great Exhibition’s political context as well as its contents and reception, see Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).

26

Modern Architecture, 13.

27

Hitchcock used this formulation not in the Modern Architecture catalog but in a slightly later article, discussed in more detail below: Henry Russell Hitchcock, “The Place of Painting and Sculpture in Relation to Modern Architecture,” Architect’s Yearbook 2 (1948): 12.

28

The idea that painting was less constrained, and therefore more radical, than architecture was most explicitly expressed by Hitchcock, who went so far as to argue that “the central meaning and basic value of abstract art … is that it makes available the results of a kind of plastic research that can hardly be undertaken at full architectural scale.” See Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Painting Toward Architecture (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1948), 54.

29

Pevsner, Pioneers, 72.

30

Ibid., 74–75.

31

Ibid., 72.

32

Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture, 432–34. Intriguingly, Giedion went even further, seeming to position painting not only as a historical precedent for modern architecture but as a kind of heuristic necessary for its subsequent interpretation: “No one can understand contemporary architecture … unless he has grasped the spirit animating this painting.” Ibid., 433. Pevsner implied something similar when he told his readers that they must understand the evolution of painting before he could explain that of architecture: “An account of the revolution in painting has to be given before we can continue the discussion.” Pevsner, Pioneers, 72.

33

“Abstract art {was} a major influence on modern architecture.” Hitchcock, Painting Toward Architecture, 54.

34

Ibid., 54.

35

Indeed, given the fact that they were cable-tensioned to the space frame struts, it could almost be argued that they had actually become part of the dome’s structure. For a full description of the installation, see Solomon, American Painting Now.

36

Hitchcock, Painting Toward Architecture, 54.

37

Jack Massey, in a brief documentary film produced by Cambridge Seven Associates, the exhibition’s designers: Pchermayeff, “Design for a Fair: The United States Pavilion at Expo ’67 Montreal, Canada,” YouTube . In this video, Cambridge Seven also take credit for suggesting that the dome be a three-quarter sphere in shape, but this assertion does not seem to be accurate based on a review of existing scholarship.

38

Solomon, American Painting Now.

39

For a thorough investigation into Wright’s thinking about the art that would be shown in his museum, see Jack Quinan, “Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum: A Historian’s Report,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 52, no. 4 (December 1993): 478. For the history of Kiesler’s design, see Susan Davidson and Philip Rylands, eds,. Peggy Guggenheim & Frederick Kiesler: The Story of Art of This Century (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2005). Kiesler’s space is but one example among a number of important attempts to create new kinds of exhibition environments combining art and architecture, several of which were attempted by European avant-gardes in the interwar period. The German curator Alexander Dorner, for example, invited El Lissitzky to create his famous “Abstract Cabinet” at the Hannover Museum in 1927, and Dorner was working on another exhibition project with Lazlo Moholy-Nagy when he fled Germany for America in 1933. For an overview of Dorner’s career, including his influence in the United States, see Sarah Ganz Blythe and Andrew Martinez, eds., Why Art Museums? The Unfinished Work of Alexander Dorner (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018).

40

Mary Anne Staniszewski, The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 66, 74. Staniszewski’s book offers a comprehensive study of the evolution of MoMA’s exhibition design.

41

The Upper East Side was then, and has remained, one of Manhattan’s wealthiest residential neighborhoods. Castelli did eventually open a white cube space in a former loft building in SoHo, but not until 1971.

42

Hitchcock, “The Place of Painting and Sculpture,” 14.

43

Ibid., 12.

44

Ibid., 13.

45

The article was originally published in three parts: Brian O’Doherty, “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part I,” Artforum, March 1976, 24-30; “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part II,” Artforum, April 1976, 26–34; and “Inside the White Cube: Notes on the Gallery Space, Part III: Context as Content,” Artforum, November 1976, 38–44. It was subsequently republished as a book with a subtitle that underscored its critical bent: Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

46

It is worth noting that the Expo Dome was both taller—at just over 200 feet—and enclosed more total floor area: a total of nearly 40,000 square feet on the ground level alone, not including the additional floor area provided by the platforms.

47

Rem Koolhaas, “The Museum Revisited,” Artforum, Summer 2010, . Solomon, American Painting Now.

48

Each individual tank contains roughly 8,000 square feet of floor area.

49

Tate Modern, “The Tanks,” .

50

Solomon, American Painting Now.

51

Ellie Stathaki, “OMA’s Lafayette Anticipations in Paris Is a ‘Curatorial Machine,’” Wallpaper, June 15, 2018, .

52

“Machine Age: Liz Diller Talks with Julian Rose About Museum Architecture,” Artforum, November 2017, . In a presumably inadvertent recapitulation of Solomon’s boast, a climactic moment in the widely circulated animation DS+R created to promote their design features a truck driving straight into the Shed to offload an artwork. Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, “The Shed,” Vimeo, July 8, 2016, .

53

As a perceptive (though anonymous) writer put it in a roundup of Expo architecture published in the Architectural Review, “The mini-rail passes right through the middle: a delightful idea, both from the point of view of the rider in it and the spectator below it.” “United States of America,” in “Expo 67,” special issue, Architectural Review, August 1967, 160.

54

These are the words of one of Cambridge Seven’s designers. Cambridge Seven, “Design for a Fair,” .

55

Solomon, American Painting Now.

56

Again the words of a Cambridge Seven designer. Cambridge Seven, “Design for a Fair,” .

57

Ibid.

58

John Canaday, “Exorcism in Montreal,” New York Times, April 30, 1967, 133.

59

Ibid. Interestingly, Huxtable herself came to a similar conclusion but was far more sanguine, perhaps because she chafed against a cultural hierarchy that still tended to value painting over architecture. She celebrated the “exhilarating spectacle” Solomon had produced by “playing objects, shapes, and colors knowingly against the structure’s soaring space and the geometric patterns of its transparent skin.” Huxtable, “Fair, Fairer, Fairest.”

60

Quoted in Sheinin, “Kookie Thoughts,” 6.

61

Foster argues that “this encounter is now a primary site of image-making and space-shaping in our cultural economy” and details the troubling ways in which “the capitalist subsumption of the cultural into the economic often prompts the repurposing of such art-architecture combinations as points of attraction and/or sites of display.” Hal Foster, The Art-Architecture Complex (London: Verso, 2011), vii, xii. Writing that “a kiss is the coming together of two similar but not identical surfaces … a union of bedazzling convergence and identification,” Lavin proposes that the kiss is the ideal theoretical model for a moment in which producing sensation and affect is more important than respecting traditional disciplinary roles, and when “the mutual attraction between architecture and other forms of visual practice has never been more intense and more varied.” Sylvia Lavin, Kissing Architecture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 5, 22. Identifying the (increasingly digital) surface as “a site of mediation and projection” that reaches “across art, architecture, fashion, design, film, and new media,” Bruno describes her fundamental concern as “what passes between the canvas, wall, and screen.” Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3.

62

Cedric Price’s Fun Palace is a favorite precedent claimed by such projects.