Mirror of Dreams

Author(s): Jean-Louis Cohen

Source: Log, No. 20, Curating Architecture (Fall 2010), pp. 49-53
Published by: Anyone Corporation
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41765368
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Jean-Louis Cohen
1. Paul Valéry, "Le problème des musées,"
Le Gaulois (April 4, 1923). Reprinted in
Œuvres Vol. II (Paris: Gallimard/La
Pléiade, 1960), 1,290. My translation.
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Mirror of Dreams
In a short essay titled "Le problème des musées," French
poet Paul Valéry stated in 192?: "I don't like museums. Many
are admirable, but none are delightful. Ideas such as order-
ing, collecting and public utility, which are both clear and
bust, have little to do with delight."1 The author of the So-
cratic dialogue "Eupalinos ou l'architecte," one of the few
20th-century literary writings dealing with the art of build-
ing, pointed to the main issue in the shaping of permanent
galleries and exhibitions; that is, the contradiction between
the didactic, knowledge-based, and often pedantic dimension
and the one of play and pleasure.
In the past four decades, exhibitions have been a signifi-
cant medium altogether expressing and allowing for the ren-
ovation of historical research and criticism in architecture.
Suggesting renewed considerations on the work of major
architects or bringing to light overlooked figures, pointing to
scenes or territories ignored by the main narrative, or signal-
ing the emergence of innovative design strategies, they have
contributed to the redrawing of the global map. In parallel,
and somewhat contradicting Valéry's pessimism, they have
sometimes proposed at natural scale exciting new architectural
concepts, challenging the staid layout of the hosting museums
or the unexpected venues in which exhibitions are staged.
The metaphor of the stage is a particularly efficient one
in this respect. Even when they deal with a closed, limited
corpus of objects, the quality and the quantity of which is
strictly established, exhibitions do not simply document his-
tory. Among many possible examples I could use to demon-
strate this, an obvious one could be the futurist drawings of
Antonio SanťElia - a closed body of materials, which can,
however, hypothetically be displayed according to widely
different narrative strategies, documenting their chronologi-
cal sequence, the typology of buildings imagined, the stylistic
change away from late Floreale, or even the way in which
they interpret American icons.
Exhibitions construct narratives, and they tell them
with spatial, visual means. Their genre can be considered, at
least when dealing with past episodes, much more as story-
telling than as history. Their homological relationship with
49

2. Sergei Eisenstein, "Montazh attrakt-
sionov: k postanovke 'Na vsyakogo
mudretsa dovol'no prostoty' A . N.
Ostrovskogo v moskovskom
Proletkul'te," LEF 1, no. 3 (June -July
1923): 70-75. My translation.
50
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performance art, and theater in particular, appears as soon
as one realizes that exhibitions deal with the celebration of
heroes, inscribed in a wider cast of characters, a defined set
of geographies, and within a specific historical moment.
Nothing could be more remote from the "true story" from
which Michel Foucault distanced himself when he proposed
to engage, alternatively, in a genealogical research, and in
which unfortunately the provincial subdiscipline of the hu-
manities known as "architectural history" usually indulges.
With the emergence of film in the early 20th century,
previous models used on theatrical stages became obsolete.
New paradigms appeared, productive in the realm of muse-
ums and exhibitions. The most intriguing and stimulating
one is probably to be found in the "montage of attractions,"
a theory of film editing Sergei Eisenstein exposed in a mem-
orable article published - like Valery's text - in 1923, but in
the third issue of LEF , the magazine of the leftist artists
directed by Vladimir Mayakovsky. He proposed translating
first to political theater, and then to cinema, the experience
of music halls and cabarets, where shows are based on a
rapid sequence of spiels contrasting violently in their rhythm,
their character, and their visual character: a bear following
an acrobat following four horses following a clown followed
by two elephants, and so on; Eisenstein describes this process
as "the free montage of actions (attractions) that are selected
and autonomous . . . but that share a precise goal: reaching
in the end a specific thematic effect."2
If one subscribes to such a cinematic model, aiming at
the sustained capture - or the rapture - of the audience's
attention in order to induce a certain response, exhibitions
can by no means be limited to the methodical and scholarly
correct unfolding of a "true story" following a biographical
or a typological thread. They are primarily dealing with the
selection, or the design, of attractions and their montage in
sequences provoking stimulating shocks. The range of these
attractions is potentially infinite, as soon as one breaks with
the fetishism of the "original" document, in order to con-
ceive what I would call meta-works, or interpretive exhibits,
inserted in the sequence alongside or in contrast to archival
materials. In this respect, if the early architectural exhibitions
followed the model of the art shows, with framed drawings
and models planted on pedestals, just like pieces of sculpture,
then contemporary programs respond to the innovations in-
troduced by shows in which the many postures of art coexist,
from painted canvases to readymade objects, from mockups
and assemblies to film and video. One particular project can

1. Jurgis Baltrusaitis, Anamorphic Art,
trans. W.J. Strachan (New York: Harry
N. Abrams, 1977). Anamorphoses ou
Thaumaturgus opticus (Paris:
Flammarion, 1984).
4. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental
Concepts of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-
Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
5. Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of
Dreams , trans. Joyce Crick (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999).
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be thus interpreted through a specific montage of media,
allowing sometimes for a spatial simulation of the space con-
ceived or built.
In this process, the job of the curator can no longer be
confused with the one of the archivist or the registrar. Se-
lecting, editing, mounting fragments become distinct phases
in the shaping of a personal narrative, based on what I would
call a fruitful distortion of reality. A canon for such a manip-
ulation can be found in the process of anamorphosis , a figure
at first sight undecipherable, and which becomes visible only
when viewed at a certain angle, or reflected in a cylindrical
or conical mirror. The vehicle for an anamorphic display can
be plainly material, dealing with the perspectivai organiza-
tion of shapes, unrelated at first sight, before achieving their
meaning only when revealed as an unexpected figure, when
the apparently random puzzle becomes visible. Discussed in
the arts by Jurgis Baltrusaitis,* anamorphic transformations
have also captured the attention of psychoanalyst Jacques
Lacan in his analysis of the glance,4 and can be mobilized in
a wide range of situations operating in the visual as well as
in the metaphoric realms.
In a gallery space, the perception of a pattern allowed by
the sequential viewing of apparently unrelated materials
achieved by the moving spectator could be considered as be-
longing to the order of anamorphosis. More broadly, the
entire process of curating could be called anamorphic, as it is
based on a willful distortion of episodes, projects, or figures
contrasting inevitably with the vision designers have of their
own work, its sequence and meaning. The primal distorting
structure - the curator's point of view - is transposed into
the montage. Thanks to this process, apparently meaningless,
unrelated, or unedited works and documents are articulated
into a sequence of significant fragments, intelligible only if
one assembles them using the problematic of the curator.
If one considers that anamorphic distortions also belong
to the range of figures through which dreams operate, one is
drawn to enlarge the consideration and consider that, in the
end, oneiric labor provides another possible homology for
the making of exhibitions. In his Traumdeutung, Sigmund
Freud based his interpretation of dreams on two key concepts
- those of condensation and displacement.5 According to his
theory, dreams can condensate in what appears to be a single
situation a series of experiences that have occurred over time,
and represent desire or censorship by the superego. The labor
of dreams also relies heavily on a process of displacement,
through which apparently remote situations represent or
51
 allude to apparently unrelated settings and persons. Although
identified by Freud as constitutive of the unconscious mental
operations characteristic of sleep, these processes can be used
in a self-conscious, designed manner in the making of exhi-
bitions. The reduction of the built reality of a given work to
a set of representations, or sometimes of minute material
fragments, in an exhibition can be called an operation of con-
densation, through which considerations decisive in practice
but distracting within the walls of a gallery have to be excised.
It is also true that such an operation could be seen as fetish-
is tic, as it inevitably reduces the complexity of the building
or the design process to a limited set of coded objects. And the
exhibitive process is without discussion based on the displace-
ment of objects and their constituting elements either from
their site-specific location or from the architect's studio,
sometimes achieving this other, disturbing, Freudian state:
the unheimlich . Interpretive fantasy is often missing from
historical and critical work today, and it is precisely where
the labor of exhibitions and the labor of dreams converge.
Exhibitions have operated since the late 19th century as
a major medium for the transformation of architectural
culture, thanks to a performative process through which ex-
hibiting as a group - as the futurist architects did in Milan
in 1914, the expressionists in Berlin in 1919, or the construc-
tivists in Moscow in 1921 - could be considered as the initial
step constitutive of a new movement. In parallel to shows
organized by the protagonists of emerging movements, or
by critics more or less autonomous but capable of detecting
a novel pattern and of conveying their discovery to a large
audience, exhibitions have become one of the major vehicles
of historical research. The rediscovery of forgotten or over-
looked architects and movements, the identification of local
or regional contexts, or the revelation of underlying, implic-
it positions at work in loosely related projects have been crit-
ical processes in which exhibitions have had a cathartic
function in the past half century. They have allowed a com-
plete revision of the tropes relative to the so-called "Modern
Movement," and significantly recast the interpretation of
architecture's ambiguous contribution to modernization.
At this point, a personal note needs to be inserted in this
rather impersonal narrative: curating exhibitions has, for
me, become a practice parallel to historical research, and, to
say it most candidly, a sort of therapy, allowing for the rec-
onciliation, or at least the negotiation, between one part of
myself - what I would call the defrocked architect - and the
other - the historian operating within the field of architec-
52

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 ture. By articulating historical knowledge, space, and graphics
in order to shape a narrative revealing interpretive patterns,
sequences, relationships, or conflicts, my split self seems
- sometimes - reunited.

A last consideration brings Valéry back into this discus-

sion. He wrote in 1923:
Painting and sculpture . . . are abandoned children. Their mother
is dead , their mother architecture. As long as she was still alive,
she used to assign them their place, their purpose, their limits.
Their freedom of wandering was negated. Thej had their space, a
well-defined light, their topics, their alliances . ... As long as she
6. Valéry, "Le problème des was alive, thej knew what they wanted.6
musées,"
1,29?. My translation.
Theeds.
7. Jean-Louis Cohen, Claude Eveno, feeling of loss expressed in this statement is under-
standable.
Une cité a Chaillot, avant-première (Paris: Yet I read this almost funereal message as an ex-
Editions de l'Imprimeur, 2001).
pression of Valéry's inability to perceive the new values and
principles embodied in the lively architecture appearing in
the 1920s in Europe and North America. It is true that, for
decades, architecture has remained a troublesome guest in
institutions founded for the celebration of the arts, and in
which the tyranny of the hegemonic painting and sculpture
departments has limited its presence. The resurrection of
architecture as a hospitable discipline was the main goal of
the programs I developed several years ago for Paris' s Cité
de l'architecture et du patrimoine.7 The shows in which visual
art, from sculpture to film, has been invited to participate in
the interpretation of design strategies have confirmed the
possibility of a renewed dialogue, which might allow for a
rediscovery of that lost "delight" Valéry was mourning.

Jean-Louis Cohen has been try-

ing FOR NEARLY 40 YEARS TO REC-

ONCILE HIS SPLIT IDENTITY AS AN

ARCHITECT AND AN HISTORIAN, USING

CURATING AS A THERAPEUTIC DEVICE.

5?

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