Ab die ecke und schäm dich

It's physically impossible to see all the exhibitions in today's global art world. Therefore much of the goings-on at exhibition venues are photographically documented and distributed on websites like contemporaryartdaily and contemporaryartlibrary.org, which gives people the impression that they have seen all there is to see and are in the know. I've personally disliked the widespread prevalence of this practice for over a decade now, because the installation views used on these websites tend to give an illusion of an overview, the art equivalent of omniscient narrator, where works are depicted in relations that are impossible for any physical visitor to encounter.
In this method it is forgotten, or ignored, that a visitor to an exhibition space is a physical entity, and one that takes the world in with their eyes. Eyes that are different from a camera lens because they have a wide field of view, but a narrow and continuously shifting focus. The body has ears, it has a nose, it has legs that walk and arms that reach. 
And so a picture hung at a height of 110 cm appears completely different from a picture hung at a height of 155 cm. Navigating through a room that is 4 by 5 meters is very different from navigating a room that is 16 by 20 meters. Yet the prevailing standard of documentation has the camera at the height level of the pictures and depicts the room from corner to corner, making such marked differences appear identical.

A recent example of this that I encountered was the show Day for Night by João Maria Gusmão at Sies+Höke. I had seen installation views of the exhibition on the gallery's website, showing the works neatly arranged in a single line and in a clean space, like one is 'supposed' to hang a proper gallery show:

When I visited the exhibition, however, the installation of the works was strikingly peculiar to me, with all the works being hung very low. The top of works were hung slightly below shoulder height for me, being 186 cm tall. I therefore took the following photo with the camera at my eye level:

This snapshot is much closer to the reality of my experience in the exhibition. The works no longer appear as grand statements like in the gallery's documentation, but rather as small and humane hand-made experiments, full of flaws and imperfections.
And this is just one example of when 'good and proper' documentation leads to a distorted view of what the exhibition factually is. Such practices undermine the intellectual honesty of art, and so debase the entirety of art as a noble pursuit.

At the same time, this practice of showing an, at times physically impossible, overview has influenced on how artists and curators alike install their exhibitions. When photographing exhibitions, the camera is often placed in the corners of the room in order to obtain such an overview. Consequently, I've seen many curators, and artists, 'instinctively' walk to the corners of a space while installing exhibitions.
There is little rhyme or reason to this practice, as I've never seen any visitor to any exhibition voluntarily stand in the corner like a punished child, so what the exhibition looks like from that vantage point should be of little concern.

Yet this is a common occurence to the detriment of all exhibition making. I personally encountered a very clear example of this practice in the 2023 exhibition Channeling at the MMK in Frankfurt am Main.
In one room of this exhibition the very wide spacing of the works made no sense to me as a visitor walking inbetween the works. It was then that I realised that the curators must have only considered the show from the corners of the room. I then proceeded to take photographs from all four corners and indeed the placement of the works appeared to make more sense from there.
I later compared these photographs to the official documenation found on the MMK's website and this confirmed my suspicions. In the following images the official documentation is overlaid on my own documenation from two opposite corners of the room:

As you can see, both of the official documentation photographs are simply two narrow views of what can be seen from the corners of the space. The compression that's especially present in the first photograph also shows that their photographs were taken with a short telephoto lens. Thus the experience the curators were apparently aiming towards in the exhibition was for the visitor to stand in the corner of the space and look at the works with a pair of binoculars...
The wall I was leaning against was also empty in a bad way. This can be clearly seen in a photograph taken from where the security guard was standing in the first photograph:

Instead of a short telephoto lens, the official documentation is now all of a sudden shot with a wide angle lens with a larger field of view than the human eye. It's physically impossible to see both works simultaneously like in the MMK's documentation. Their photograph therefore presents a view of the exhibition that no visitor to the space has factually experienced.
But of course, in todays art world the 'proof' of the documentation is more important than any physical reality, so one of the clearly incompetent curators of the exhibition has since moved on to become the chief curator at the MUMOK in Vienna.

I personally believe that documentation of an exhibition should attempt to capture the experience of walking through the exhibition as accurately as possible.
Unfortunately, few institutions attempt to adhere to reality, prefering the polished and standardised appearance that provides them with greater opportunities founded on ever greater falsehoods.

A good photograph of a table and a chair is a good photograph of a table and a chair.

 Sometimes it's difficult to photograph a table.

 

Storyboarding

 

When I document exhibitions, I attempt to illustrate the experience one has as a physical visitor with a body, walking through the space. Of course, this will always be at best be an approximation, but I nevertheless find this approach is more representative than the bulk of disembodied installation views one sees today. Those tend to highlight the individual qualities of the works or the space, but rarely provide an adequate sense of the spatial relationships between the works in the exhibition and therefore the exhibition as a whole.

As this walk-through is subtly different for every exhibition, I therefore document every exhibition like it's a new challenge to figure out how the relationships between the works can accurately be captured in photographs. In order to do this, I tend to make a number of photographs and figure out their order in the storyboard-like arrangements seen above. This arrangement usually makes it clear where there are gaps that need to be filled, or if the already taken photographs need to be adjusted in some way. 

Although this has been a very natural way of working for me that has proven to be effective in conveying the exhibitions at a distance, it nevertheless is something I have never seen anybody else do. But perhaps it's possible that I simply am not privy to the working methods of other photographers.

Please (don't) take a seat

 At the recent solo-exhibition of Sung Hwan Kim at the van Abbe Museum I encountered the following set up:

In case my low-quality phone photograph isn't clear enough, what we have here are two rectangular black objects made of wood. They are of near-identical height and placed on the floor about 1,5 meters in front of a screen that is showing a video.
What is strange about this is that one is marked 'Please take a seat', while on the other it's written to 'Please don't sit'. The first is meant as a bench to sit on and watch a video, the second is a box that houses a projector.
To include two almost identical objects with opposite functions is such an absurdly stupid decision that it could have easily been the premise for a Monthy Phython sketch.

Heel erg filosofisch werk

However you might feel about it, this is a simple show:

It has a front and a back, and everything you need to know about this exhibition can be found in how those two things relate to each other.

With the following three works, one can also make a simple show:

It's clear that these works are connected by a coloured rectangular element and a white, rounded, rectangular element. Each of them are also mounted on the wall at a slight angle. It then becomes an interesting search where these works deviate from this basic 'rule'.

Yet by showing these two groups at the same time, one can make an multifaceted exhibition that doesn't have any clear singular resolution:

At the surface these two groups of work appear to be very similar. They are both painted wooden objects of a similar size, in almost, but not quite, geometrical shapes.
Yet beyond that first impression, they share very few similarities. The crux of each of these works lies within their individual peculiarities, of which there is little to no overlap.
So when looking at these works altogether, there is a disconnect that you try to resolve by searching for more characteristics of these works that might tie them together. While you'll find more things that could unite them, you also encounter more individual traits that separate them. Together these two groups thus become an unsolvable problem of universals. Even if it was possible to do so seperately, once these two groups are put together, no combination of individual members is able to define the larger set.

Quality Assurance

During the last decade or so I've spent quite a bit of time setting up exhibitions, most of them by artists other than myself. And I have thus also spent a great deal of that time watching people set-up those exhibitions and see them make decisions about how works are placed in the space. This was almost always done with many strong ideas about what a work needs, or what decisions are 'best', and invariably involved a lot of impenetrable minute changes to even smaller details.
Yet in all that time I've never seen anybody actually having some visitors walk through their exhibition in order to observe those visitors and check if all the important adjustments made any difference in how people respond to the works.
This is incredibly odd to me, as some kind of audience testing is done in all other art forms and quite a lot of other industries as well, in the form of quality-assurance. Texts are proof-read, films are screened for test audiences, video games are play tested from very early on in their production and comedians perform try-out shows to see if their jokes get any laughs. This is deemed a necessary and vital step in order to make sure that the thing is actually perceived in the way its meant to be perceived, or sometimes even to make sure it functions at all. Yet this doesn't go for exhibitions. The curator or artist simply make their decisions, decisions they often can't logically justify, and then god saw it was good.

 
However I think that in art there is a lot of value to be gained by observing people walk through an exhibition to see how the exhibition functions. Simply noting where people pause, which directions they are facing and how they generally move between the works, gives you a great deal of information. By observing how an audiences behaves there is a lot you can infer about what your audience takes away from the works on display and if they are able to create a cohesive picture in their mind. 

In my two years of manning a gallery I've spent quite a bit of time watching people walk through exhibitions and only by watching a bunch of people walk through your shows you can see what is wrong with them. Not only can you see what's wrong with them, in most cases it actually becomes painfully obvious what's wrong with them. Yet curators and artists alike rarely, if ever, test their work, so they are blissfully unaware of how flawed that work really is.

 

To give a clear example lets look at the posthumous 2022 show of works by Philippe van Snick at the SMAK, Ghent. Co-curator of this exhibition was Luk Lambrecht, who is a very well-respected curator from Belgium. Yet in the exhibition there were some absolute basic mistakes that should and would have been noticed if anybody had actually taken some time to observe people make their way through the exhibition.

What follows is a photograph and a floorplan of one of the rooms in the exhibition:

During the show there was a forced walking direction through the various rooms, to comply with the covid-19 guidelines that were active at the time. So all visitors entered the space at (1). The most logical choices for works to examine are then (2) and (3). After inspection of (3), the vitrine of (4) is right behind you. So you turn around to look at the various documents in the vitrine, only to find that they are all oriented to be viewed from the position at (5). So in the visitors' most natural path, they first encounter a vitrine full of works in the wrong orientation, which means they have to either walk around or backtrack to able to see the works. Furthermore, if they chose to do this and look at the works in the vitrine, they were then in turn with their backs to the next works at (6) or the vitrine created artificial distance between them and the work at (7).

This is exactly what happened to me when visiting this show and two people right behind me did the same thing, except that they just kept walking to the works at (6) or (7), not even bothering with correcting the mistaken viewpoint and looking at the works in the vitrine at (4).

This anecdote demonstrates a clear shortcoming in the creation of this exhibition that could've easily been fixed if anybody had actually bothered with verifying if their work is functioning as it should, instead of simply assuming it does.

Park Meerstad

'Conventionally, neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them. This is more nearly in accord with reality, for people do confer use on parks and make them successes--or else withhold use and doom parks to rejection and failure.'

That is how Jane Jacobs introduced the chapter on the uses of neighbourhood parks in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This book gave me the first spark for an enduring interest in the workings of parks and landscape architecture.

So when I found out that the newly built neighbourhood Meerstad in the Dutch city of Groningen realised 'the first park in the Netherlands that has been designed in conjunction with an artist' last autumn, I of course was curious to see the results.

This is the aerial photo that is used on the website of the project and shows the park when the primary landscaping was finished. It shows a good overview of the design principles of the park. The design by Jeroen Doorenweerd was based on a tablecloth that was scrunched together somewhat during a pitch meeting and then meticulously copied to scale in the final park. This idea is an appealing one and it does make for a great bird's eye view, which is probably what convinced the committee during the design stage of the park.

I was excited about the project, as we don't have many of these ambitious park projects in the Netherlands. When I visited the park last spring, however, I could only conclude that the park is a failure.

While the aerial view of the park might be a stunning sight, a park is experienced by its users on the ground, moving through its landscape and reacting to the cues in this landscape. The above photo was what I was first confronted with when entering the park. This view is already quite a strong indication that the design of the park isn't aimed at its potential users.

The primary way to enter the park is through this thoroughfare for cyclists and pedestrians that runs through the park and connects two different areas of Meerstad. I call it a thoroughfare instead of a path, because the users of this path, the only path in the park, are encouraged to stay on this path through the design of said path. That means that the most common impression users will have of this park is a 600 meter long straight grey road, without any points of interest that they will encounter along the way to sway them from this path and actually use the park.

On each side of the path there is a concrete barrier that varies in height, roughly in accordance with the flow of the grass hills that surround it.

The placement of these barriers are somewhat inconsistent and strangely serve to separate the primary access for the park with the park itself. There is physical barrier between the path and the rest of the park.

On a few occasions this barrier has a gap in it, freeing up the possibility for pedestrians to cross over into the greenery.

Which begs the question why the low barrier is needed at all. The likely answer to this question can be found when this barrier is looked at from the other side.

As you can see, on the other side of the path, there is a roughly 40 centimetres deep ditch. This is higher than a step on staircase and besides forming a physical barrier, it thus also forms an additional psychological barrier for venturing off the path and into the greenery. These aren't great obstacles to overcome for those who wish to venture onto the grass, but they will nevertheless keep a less determined user from loitering in the park and thereby populating the park to let it function as it should.

The gaps in the barriers also occur where there isn't a direct possibility to walk into the greenery, as can be seen in this picture of this recently planted and quite steep hill. By the time of writing this hill is likely populated with some shrubbery, which makes the gap all the more mysterious.

During my visit I also noticed some parts of the path were additionally fenced off with wire fencing, further decreasing the possibility for people to enter into the park areas of the park. I thought perhaps this fencing was temporarily in place to protect the recent plantings. On the other side of the path there were however similar plantings, but no fence, so this theory doesn't seem to hold any ground.

It should also be noted that this fencing was likewise present around the park's perimeter at the car park, forcing visitors to walk around and use the concrete path to enter into the park. Perhaps ad-hoc decision making is the most straightforward explanation for these otherwise inexplicable choices.

To come back to the psychological barrier formed by the minuscule physical barrier surrounding the path, let us take a look at one of the entrances. Here a very common Dutch bicycle- and footpath design transitions into the path designed specifically for the park. These commonplace paths actually are far more inviting for getting off the path than the path designed especially for the park. It can thus be clearly seen that this design was chosen for aesthetic rather than functional reasons and that is one of the hallmarks of bad design.

Inside the grassy areas of the park I only found one bench, which surrounded a tree.

As can be seen from this picture, this 'recreational area' seems quite far removed from the path that the user of the park is most likely to be walking on. Unless one thus has a specific need to sit on a bench, it is unlikely that one stops to do so and enjoy some time for themselves.

There was also exactly one long bench placed along the path in the park. This bench actually showed some signs of use, despite being not even a year old at that point, thereby indicating that there is some kind of demand in the public for a natural resting place inside the park where they can relax as well as congregate with others without planning to do so.

Moving on from the accessibility of the park, there are also some concerns regarding the implementations of the water management. Much of the park is designed and built in such a way that water will accumulate at the the edges of the grassy areas, which are thus precisely the areas one has to cross to enter them. 

I have already mentioned the trenches next to the path that are likely made to serve exactly this purpose in what is still a generally rainy and wet country. The presence of actual drains and patches of standing water doesn't bode particularly well for the usability of this park. If you have to cross a muddy section of eroded grass to get to a little dry spot, that is going to be a serious deterrent to anyone but the most avid picnic-enthousiast.

These drainage problems are also present on the outer edge of the park, where the grasslands meet a public road.

Once again the ground is lowered where the park comes into contact with a road, in essence creating a part-time moat surrounding the parklands. This area is thus nearly completely unsuited for the recreational use it's intended for.

There is also a two-fold problem with this outer edge and the way it connects to the surrounding area. On the one hand it's too closed off, with the lack of clear paths to the neighbouring houses preventing easy access to the park. 

On the other hand it's simultaneously too open. There is nothing closing off the park, even though its directly adjacent to a road that's open only to motor vehicles. If the park is thus used in the way it was meant to be used, chances are extremely high that at some point a football or even a child unexpectedly ends up on this road, resulting in an accident with possibly grave consequences. Granted, the speed limit on the road is 30km/h, but the nature of the road makes it tempting for motorists to drive much faster than this. I therefore wouldn't be surprised if this edge was fenced off at some point or other, further reducing the usability of the park as its grassland will essentially function as a cul-de-sac.

 

As a water management related aside, the short canal running perpendicular to the road that is bright blue in the promotional photo was murky brown during my visit, although I don't know what the reason for this could be.

Additionally there is a small play area inside the park that I haven't touched upon here. Besides the awful water management and poor accessibility, its main problem is that all the play structures in the area can only be used in one way and in one direction. In order to stay engaging to a child over a longer period, a plaything must be able to provide a way for multiple and even unintended uses. This is once again a violation of some of the basest principles of playground design that the designers were unable to implement in an appropriate manner.

The failures of the Park Meerstad are manifold and I've personally found it telling that on the sunny spring day I visited the park, I was the only visitor who wasn't simply passing through. 

At the same time, not even 100 meters away from the entrance, there was a small and not particularly appealing playground that nevertheless had a grandmother playing with her two grandchildren, as well as a father playing with his child.

It shouldn't ever be forgotten that parks should be judged on how its users (inter)act within it and not how beautiful it looks from an impossible vantage point. With this in mind Park Meerstad is closer to a glorified path through a field than the park it purports to be.

Update on 27-8-2023:

After a recent revisit of the original plans for the park as created by MDL in 2015, it has come to my attention that some of the criticisms I put forward here have since been alleviated by the execution of further construction that more closely resembles the original plan. Especially the drainage issues seem to have been solved and the addition of multiple paths provide more entry and exit points to the park, which will presumably be used in different ways once the surrounding area is further developed.

Criss Cross

One of the particular features of the space of lxhxb is that the lighting is installed diagonally between a repeating set of concrete U-shapes.

The aim for the lighting of the space was to follow the implicit mandate as set by the existing architecture, as well as to illuminate the space as evenly as possible. In order to achieve this, I installed the fluorescent lighting at equal distances and under a slight angle. Angling the lighting was a solution that counteracts the shadows cast by the concrete beams. These beams would otherwise create a repeating pattern on the wall, as can be seen in the following photograph:

 

By placing the lamps under a slight angle the unwanted effect disappears completely, as shown by the following computer renderings of the two situations:

 

However, after some I time I noticed that the very front of the space had some degree of fall off in the intensity of light towards the facade.

 

 

As you can see in this photograph which exaggerates the effect, the wall gets darker further towards the right of the image. The principal reason for this is that there is no further lighting coming from the right to add to the overall amount of light hitting the wall.

However, I also thought that perhaps this uneven distribution of light over this section of wall could be attributed to the angle of the fluorescent lighting, as the part closest to the wall is directly blocked by the concrete beam on the ceiling.

Additional computer simulation would nevertheless suggest that mirroring the placement of the fluorescent light would have only a minimal effect.

 

Original:

Mirrored:

The Influence of Anti-Trust Legislation on the Rise of the White Cube

Brian O'Doherty's series of essays on the concept of the white cube are now considered seminal texts on the subject, most famously for coining the term. At the very beginning of these texts O'Doherty writes: 'An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space that, more than any single picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth century art; it clarifies itself through a process of historical inevitability usually attached to the art it contains.'

His analysis frames the white cube largely as a result of historical movements, most of them related to philosophical ideas about art, and describes its influence on the viewers ability to perceive the work that is shown within it. While he does touch upon the economic reality of art being sold at a gallery in his description, ultimately his focus lies on the presentation of paintings and changes in how works are framed, together with their 'pictorial expansion'; 'Abstract Expressionist paintings followed the route of lateral expansion, dropped the frame, and gradually began to conceive the edge as a structural unit through which the painting entered into a dialogue with the wall beyond it. At this point the dealer and curator enter from the wings. How they - in collaboration with the artists - , presented these works, contributed , in the late forties and fifties, to the definition of the new painting'.

While his insights are not unseemly, if perhaps a bit dated at times, there is a far simpler possible explanation for the rise of the empty white exhibition space. One that furthermore has no direct relationship to any artistic vogue or interpretation.

In an earlier post, I already outlined how, and why, art dealers moved from buying and reselling individual paintings to an agent-like representation of artists in a more formal gallery structure. One of the largest economical differences for the dealer is a shift in his financial risk from one of acquisition of paintings to one of overhead in storing and presenting them. 

For a dealer who buys artwork directly from artists with the intention of selling them on to others, it's advantageous to have as much of that work on hand to show to potentially interested clients. We can thus his imagine his gallery to look like a stockroom, with many works hanging close together on racks and others being stacked close by, so that the dealer is quickly able to show these works to anybody who might be interested. After all, the dealer already paid for these works and has already incurred the largest cost for all of them. The greatest risk for this kind of dealer is thus that there are works that remain unseen to the public and therefore can't be sold, as a public has to know something exists before it's able to buy it.

 

Compare this to the art dealer who doesn't directly buy the works from the artist, but acts as a broker, or representative, receiving a commission on the sale price of a painting if and when it is sold.

For this dealer it's beneficial to have as few works on hand as possible, as there are costs involved in storing works as long as they haven't been sold. These works also aren't part of the dealers assets, making any painting that isn't sold contribute a net loss to his balance sheet. This is different for a dealer who bought and owns the works that don't sell, as they could rise in value in the future, be used as leverage in negotiations, or brought up as collateral for loans. As such, they posses some value to him even if they aren't sold.

So if the dealer-representative only wishes to have a few works in his custody, then it's also important that he sells these works as quickly as possible, as he will only receive a commission on the sale if he helped to make that sale. This means that whatever works the dealer wishes to sell should get the largest amount of attention from the buying public. A crowded amalgam of many different styles and artists of course isn't beneficial to focus the public's attention, so the dealer decides to do something different. He presents only the works of one artist at a time and in such a manner that each painting is shown somewhat isolated from the others in a neutral space, giving the public the best possibility to notice the particular qualities of the works and imagine them in the setting in which they wish to keep the work themselves. Over time this naturally leads to a refinement of the exemplary empty hangings we have come to know and love (to hate) today.

Getting to Know a Space

In 2020 I opened the gallery lxhxb in my home town of Eindhoven. It's a space where exhibitions will be organised and like any space you have to make exhibitions in, it has its peculiarities and you have to get to know those peculiarities in order to make effective exhibitions.

When I signed the lease and received the keys, the space was about as empty as it could be.

There wasn't even a single lightbulb present and the only fixture consisted of a small but permanent kitchenette.
In this space I set two new walls at a right angle, so as to create a small office space as well as having a bit more wall space for the gallery.
The resulting space left for exhibitions, about 35 square meters in total, at first seems like near perfect square, with a small recess breaking up this rigidity.
After installing the first exhibition, I actually realised that the space works much more like a t-shape, with the bottom left corner of the floorplan not really being viable for showing work in.

This has two reasons. The first is that the entrance to the space is located there, so it is obvious that you aren't able to place any work there if you want people to be able to enter the rest of the space. The second is a combination of a heater and a big closet that houses the fuse box and other such essentials, which takes up what little wall space that might otherwise be available.
As the space was completely empty, I had to design and install the lighting myself and I had already somewhat anticipated this dead space around the entrance by not putting a lamp directly over the entrance. This darker corner receded quite subtly and naturally in the empty space, but perhaps it is now accentuating the dynamics of the space a tad too much when the placement of the works is already sign of this situation.

Altogether the distribution of light in the space has a stronger impact on the experience of the space than I had anticipated. The facade of the space consists of one large window, so there is quite a lot of light coming in from one particular angle. On a sunny day the spread of this light reaches far enough to provide a decent amount of light even on the far end of the space and in more typical overcast days the tl-lighting does a good job of compensating for the more uneven distribution of light.

Nevertheless, these changing lighting intensities bring about some difficulty that I had hardly anticipated, most notably in some shadowy corners on some of the walls. Next to the permanent closet is a small gap before there is part of a column protruding from the wall. I had anticipated to be able to use the space around this column for hanging small works, but when seeing the space in different conditions is became clear that the shadows cast by the both the closet and the column itself will make this a less-than-elegant option in most cases.
Additionaly, the light coming in through the large window also interacts with the artworks I bring into the space.

For a series of drawings by Henri Jacobs in the first exhibition, I built a presentation table with a mirror that allows both the front and the back of the drawings to seen simultaneously. Initially I had placed this table near-parallel to the front window. When I arrived the next day, the sun had come out and cast a big ray of reflective light coming from the table. In response I turned the table at a slight angle, so there was only a minimal amount of sunlight still reflecting on the other works in the exhibition. The picture above shows the situation at dawn, when a streetlight still casts a strong light on the table and thus the wall.

Most of these things affect the experience of the whole space, but some peculiarities are more trivial, effecting only some small aspects. Nevertheless, those need to be taken into consideration as well. I already spoke before of the impossibility of placing things on the walls next to the entrance. There is an additional difficulty for showing sculpture there as there is a slight hump in the floor. This hump makes it difficult to place sculpture in such a position, further limiting the options of the space.

And then there are the more banal qualities of the walls and how good they are at receiving nails and other fasteners. In my particular situation I have four different varieties. First there is the standard double-lined plasterboard, which works well for nails, but is awful for anything small that requires a screw. The opposite wall is concrete, which is awful for nails, but with the right tools allows for straightforward attaching of screws. The walls I've built myself are plasterboard, but with a plywood backing, which is the perfect solution as it takes both screws and nails without any problems. Then for some corners there are a few parts that are concrete but reinforced with some kind of metal structure that proves impossible to work with and thus simply have to be avoided.

So that's a short overview of the pecularities I have noticed in my own space so far. At the time of writing this I'm only this I'm only a few weeks into the first exhibition and so I haven't quite figured out the entire space yet, but there has already been plenty to learn.

An Infallible Exhibition Space

Voorlinden floor plan for temporary exhibitions, route from entrance

This is the floor plan of the space reserved for temporary exhibitions inside the private Voorlinden Museum in Wassenaar, the Netherlands. It is a space that is almost infallible in guiding the visitor through the exhibition in a perfect pace.
Let me give you a small walkthrough of the exhibition experience:
The entrance to the rooms which are reserved for the temporary exhibition sits right across from the entrance to the museum. One thus has immediate access to the space of the exhibitions, while they are still clearly distinguished from the entrance hall.
When one enters the exhibition area there is a small space, about six by seven meters, if I had to estimate from memory. This space commonly houses one or two, fairly large, works from the museum's own collection and serves as an introduction to the artist on show.
Next up is a large room, about double the size of the previous. This room really allows for several works to be shown together and a large ensemble to be created. In this room there is also a secondary entrance, that allows the visitor to skip the 'introductory' room when revisiting the space from elsewhere in the museum.
After this larger room there is again a smaller room, allowing for some intimacy with smaller works and a less overwhelming overview, giving a feeling of peace, quiet and intimacy, to what in most cases can only be described as blockbuster exhibitions.
This is again followed by a large room, similar in dimensions as the second room, that tends to focus attention on one single aspect of the work, particularly in a somewhat later stage of the artist's career.
The room that follows is again a smaller room, repeating the small-large rhythm from the previous rooms. It's also worth noting that the entrance to this room lies in extension to the previous room, allowing a very direct visual connection between the two. It is therefore unsurprising that this smaller room often offers a kind of footnote to offset the works shown in the previous space.
The visitors' journey culminates in the last room, that is the biggest of all, and therefore allows for a real crescendo of some very impressive, large-scale work, ending a route of a perfect ebb and flow on an almost overwhelming high.
With this information in mind, compare the original design with the final floor plan:

Voorlinden floor plan for temporary exhibitions, original design

Voorlinden floor plan for temporary exhibitions, final design

The differences between the two are small. In fact, the only difference is the inclusion of one separating wall in the middle of three nearly-identical spaces.
While the original design allows for visitors to weave in and out of the space, with each of those spaces being very similar, the final design is much more balanced. Where the original houses 1 small room, 3 medium-sized rooms and 1 large room, the final design as 3 small rooms, 2 medium-sized rooms and 1 large room, creating a near-perfectly balanced pyramid of space.

It could be argued that this is an extremely boring set-up for a museum as it is an almost guaranteed hit with a very satisfying experience for the visitor and it is telling that this kind of lay-out is used for the largest private museum in the Netherlands, in which a private collection is made public by a member of the public that will most likely reflect the public's taste in a predictable manner.

Nomenclature

Installation art is said to have its discreet origins in the 1960's, with the environments of Allen Kaprow and later with the minimal interventions of people like Donald Judd.
Although this does not seem to make any historical sense, as one could say that all the common elements of what is called installation art are already present in Marcel Duchamps Twelve Hundred Coal Bags Suspended from the Ceiling over a Stove from 1938, or Kurt Schwitters Merzbau from earlier in the same decade. Before that, there is El Lissitzky's Proun Room and before that there exists the Peacock Room, finished in 1877 by James McNeill Whistler. But the retracing of installation art's history doesn't stop there. If one is willing to accept the definition of installation art as dealing with the specifics of space, then Bernini and Michelangelo did this all the time, most notably in L'Estasi di Santa Teresa and the Sistine chapel, respectively.
But why stop at the specific western history of art? The famous terracotta army of Qin Shi Huang seems to perfectly fit the description, as does the pyramid of Giza and even the cave paintings in Lascaux. In fact, 'installation art' in the commonly attributed definition is hardly novel at all and seems, if anything, to predate any other kind of art.

Yet it is also true that the term installation art didn't surface until the late 1960's and early 1970's. So the rise of installation art must not be linked to a change in art, but a change in something else. I believe this something else is the practice of publishing art. Up until the 1950's and 60's, it was common for publications on art to mask out unwanted background clutter and print only the singular object. This means that for a painting the frame would not be shown and a sculpture would seemingly float in mid air. This practice works fine for something like Degas' Petit Danseuse or Lissitsky's Proun room, where the structure is equal to the work, but it is wholly inadequate to correctly interpret a stack by Donald Judd.

As you can see, environmental cues are absolutely necessary to make sense of a Stack in print. Yet to make clear that the work was not part of the architecture a caption was also needed: Installation view.
This period of the late 1960's was the first time when the word installation was directly linked to a certain kind of sculpture, one that could not be reproduced without including the geometry of the room it was presented in.
In the following decades, this original connotation was lost and all that remained was the idea of a 'new' art, installation art.

The persistence of this term without any associations to its reproductive origins seems to lie in the fact that in that era there was hardly any distinction made between an object and its representation. The inability to reconcile the two has since been given much more attention, but by then a strong belief in the false pretenses that surround the term had already been established.

The Beach Principle of Exhibition Design

Imagine an empty beach. A family arrives to enjoy their day in the sun. As the beach is empty the spot they choose to sit down is chosen in a quasi randomly fashion. They may have some preferences, but in the end a beach is an empty space where everything is homogeneous.
After a while another family arrives. They don't want to sit too close to their neighbours, because that is considered weird, but most likely they don't want to travel too far either. So they settle on a spot that stands in some arbitrary relationship to the previous occupants. A third group arrives and they choose a spot that stands in the same arbitrary relationship to the two groups already there. This goes on for a while and the beach fills up in this manner, evenly, naturally and seemingly randomly distributing the space between the occupants.
Then after a longer while some people start to leave, after which the spots are filled up again, or left empty, until a certain point late in the afternoon where the beach doesn't really change anymore till the sun sets and everybody goes home together.

Østre Anlæg, Copenhagen

Galerie du Temps, Louvre-Lens