CCS READERS: PERSPECTIVES ON ART AND CULTURE

Interiors
Edited by Johanna Burton, Lynne Cooke, and Josiah McElheny

CENTER FOR CURATORIAL STUDIES, BARD COLLEGE

Frontispiece: Josiah McElheny, It exists rmly in the memory ofthrue wlw stood inside (After Blinlry Palermo in
Munich,l971), 20ll (detail); Gallery 4/5 of the exhibition "If you lived here, you'd be home by now,"
2011, Hessel Museum of Art, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College. STERNBERG PRESS
 CONTENTS II 178 Dialogue
Lynne Cooke andJosiah McElheny

9 Foreword 202 It Exists Only in the Memory of Those Who Stood Inside
Tom Eccles Susanne Kuper

12 Introduction 227 Foyerism: Agnes Martin Inside and Out

Lynne Cooke Naua Benway

18 Louise Lawler: Just the Facts 229 The EmptyComer

Helen Molesworth Theresa Choi

22 There Is a Void in the House 231 At Home with Carl Andre

Elisabeth Lebauici Amy Zion

32 Professions for Women 233 Living with Polke Dots

Virginia Woolf Jenny Jaskey

38 Atget's Interiors 235 PillowCase

Lisa Robertson Nathan Lee

44 Habitation Is a Habit 236 Floorplan andChecklist of the Exhibition, "If you lived here,
Photographs by Zoe Leonard jM" The Pliable Plane" you'd be home by now"
by Anni Albers

II
246 Testing Some Beliefs
54 C' est man plaisir Gregg Bordowitz.
Jennifer R Gross
250 Before and Mter Appropriation, There is Wonder ...
64 An Aesthetic Headache: Notes from the Museum Bench I Johanna Burton
lhanaFuss andJ�lSan�
264 LB,MP,MD
80 The Apartment
I

I MoyraDavey
Ge�Perec
288 Women, ChllTa, Dwelling
84 Two Bedrooms
I
Elizabeth Grosz
David Reed
300 The Poetics of Space
88 Sometimes We Say Dreams When We Want to Say
Gaston Bachelard
Hopes, or Wishes, or Aspirations
Doug AshjMd and Angelo BeUJatto I 302 Among Essential Fumishings
I RnniHorn
110 A House oflll Repute: E.1027
Beatriz Colomina I 310 Some Remarks on the Interior Design ofContemporary
Subjectivity and the Possibilities of Its AestheticCritique
120 Exquisite Function
Juliane Rebentisch
Dorit Margreiter
318 Contributors
131 A Woman, a House
Photo Essay by Moyra Davey
I
320 Credits

164 "If you lived here ..." A Guided Tour

Tom Eccles
 AN AESTHETIC HEADACHE: NOTES FROM THE
MUSEUM BENCH
DianaFuss andjoelSanders
Henryjames, The
1.
A.mca" (Boston: James
R. o.good. 1877).
2. Architectural manuals
for museum planning
include �raid Gwrge's
,_,;ng Right: A Basic Guide
"Mu.stum Planning
(WIInut Creek, CA:
AJtaMira Press, 2004),
Paul von Naredi-Rainer's
Museum Buildings: A Design
Manual (Basel: Birkhauser,
2004), and Walter L.
Crimm, Martha Morris,
and L. Carole Wharton's
flailing Succesfs ul Museum
.Btlilding Projects (Lanham,
MD: AltaMira Press, 2009).
Cultural histories are
much more attentive to
the full design aesthetic
inside the museum gallery,
though even the best of
these studies, Charlotte
Klonk's 5pau:. of Experience:
Arl Gallery lflleriorsfrum
1800 to 2000 (New Haven,
Cf: Yale University
Press, 2009) and Victoria
Newhouse's Art and the
l'lltiJer of Placement (New
York: Monacelli Press,
2005), mention the bench
only in passing. Both
cultural histories, however,
are invaluable resources
on th� history of display­
Josiah McElheny, Priwn benchfor Rnbert Gober (After Donald
judd), 2011, install�d opposite Roben
ing and viewing an, and
Gober, Prison Window, 1992, in th� Audrey and Sydney they make possible the
and CCS Bar d Galleries.
1rmas Atrium of the Hessel Museum of An
type of study we engage
in here.
64
PICTURE THIS: a gentleman, tired and o v
e heated, reclines at
� his
ease on a great circular divan. The co mInodio
us ottoman sits at the
ce nter of the Salon Garrc:! in the Louvre, our vi·
�I .
tor taking possession
of its softest spot. With hat, opera glass, ctnd
guidebook thrown down
beside him, the man lounges listlessly' hIs ' attenti
on stramed,· his vision
dazzled. His eyes wander from the paintt· ng
innumerable young f�male copyists sitt in 0
�
s foeu smg
.
· mstead
·
on the
g high stools and reproduc-
ing the masters. On h1s stroll through the
l..ouvre, our weak-kneed lover
of the fine arts suffers from Baedeker fati
gue, retreating to the museum
divan to relieve "an aesthetic headache."
So begins Henry James's 1877 novel The A .
171erican, set largely in 1868
Paris, where our wealthy if unworld ly he ro
has corne to fi
nd a wife.1
And where better to scope out the options
than from the great ottom
an
of the Louvre, where people come not just
�0 see but also to be seen
and where the art of seduction rivals any v . .
eiled eron· c1sm
. . of pamnng .
or sculpture, ob�ects servmg not merely t fram
to abet them. A museum, James in tuits 0LJ:ers · ·
� e romantic trysts but
•
VISitors more than an
opportunity to admire the high arts; it pr .
OVIdes an occasion to
satisfy
the baser instincts as well.
But if novels have long appreciated th fu
the museum gallery-its ability to engage �II dramatic potenti
dy as Well as mind-modern
al of
museums and art galleries themselves hav
not overtly hostile, to the demands and d S_ires
:
been largely indifferent, if
of the spectator s body.
Perpetuati ng a vvestern b'1as that dates ba ck.
. ur •
to the Renaissance, art crit­
ics view the spectatorial body as hardly a bo
dy at all but more disem-
a
bodied eye, associated with mind, imam nau _ o . .
. -o· n and VISI n-rarely an
O
a ctual body. Architects and designers are ore'
. . rn aware of the spectator's
body but grudging1y so; regardmg the bod
as a mobile receptacle for
the eye and the gallery as a fixed theater
arrange the space of museum or gallery t regul
:J
spectatorship, they prefer to
ate strictly the viewer's
range of motion and object of focus · And et .
Y there ·Is no spectator With-
out a body, a body that gets overheated' u· re .
d
th' bored or distracted, like
James's earnest American on his outing at
•
Enter the museum bench, a nearly ubiqu
�
Louvre.
itous but equently dispar-
fr
aged piece of furniture, as routinely overlOo
ked as ·It ·Is regularly used.
In discussion s of museum and gall er y, the hard
bench or upholstered
�
couch rarely makes an appearance. Insteaad . t ho
vers on the edge of
museum studies, always there but rarely
!
0 w e dged, its very
ence an irritating distraction from the re acnv � .
.ty at hand: appreciat-
pres­
ing art. Even in architectu r al man u als and .
. . CUltural h'Istones exp1'ICI'tly
devoted to gallery mtenors and their spatial
arrangement, the bench
finds itself sideline d in favor of frames wall
· colors, and lighting. In
scholarship on the history or desig n o publIc
.
f �art e��-.u.ll·b·Itl.on
· spaces, the
Jowly bench receives barely a nod.2
Hidden in plain sight, museum b enches
are ste alth o b' �ects,
just below the radar. So what might happen if
w e a knowledge the
elephant in the room? How might our Und �
e rstandm
g of aesthetic
spectatorship change if we take full account . .
. of the u u·l·Itanan f urmture
found m most museums? Our aim here is to
do rnore than simp
ly
65
 correct an oversight by adding the bench to the list of progra
mmatic entitled viewers, who appear almost as extensions of the gallery decor,
elements that comprise the gallery interior.We wonde
r why the
museum bench was excluded from this list to begin are free to move the furniture wherever they like.
with, and how it Concerns over art-historical categories, narrative flow, crowd con­
might challenge some of our fundamental assum
ptions about public
display and private spectatorship. trol, and proper viewing, which would all come to define the nineteenth­
The question we are thus chiefly concerned with century museum, are unimportant in the eighteenth-century gallery,
is this: exactly
why has the museum bench become an object which relied more on picture frames to shoulder the burden of isolat­
of curatorial, critical,
and cultural disdain? From the emergence of ing images, focusing vision, and disembodying spectatorship.How pre­
the museum in the
eighteenth century to today, museum furniture cisely the eye became figuratively disembodied is a complicated story,
(chair, stool, bench,
ottoman) has shaped viewers' engagement both but the picture frame clearly played a central role. Like the window
with works of art
and with one another.This seemingly inconspicuo frames from which they are derived, the decorative architectural mold­
us accessory regis­
ters shifting cultural attitudes toward subject ings that constituted eighteenth-century picture frames articulate the
and object, private and
public, mind and body, art and life. The bench transition from interior to exterior; the continuous perimeter of
's very presence, when
acknowledged, reminds us that the act of specta the picture frame forms a discrete margin that differentiates actual
torship may not be
nearly as disembodied, nor the gallery space from pictorial space and thus art from everyday life.Sharing the point
nearly as neutr al, as we
still commonly assume. To attend to the museu of view, or station point, from which the illusionistic representation was
m bench is to recog­
nize the material ground of aesthetic vision: its generated, the eye, liberated from the confines of the body, is invited
location in a real
body with real needs and real limitations. It is optically to cross the threshold of the frame and enter into pictorial
to appreciate what it
might mean to reembody vision while simultaneou space. In short, by allowing viewers to focus on individual images, the
sly reenvisioning
bodies as they move, linger, and relax in a lived earliest museum galleries, like the domestic galleries they were mod­
sensory encounter
with art. In the end, the museum bench tells eled after, could easily tolerate the visual cacophony of richly orna­
its own story of aesthetic
contemplation, offering up a counterhistory mented galleries crowded with art, people, and furniture.
to traditional notions
The shift in the nineteenth century from private to public gallery,
of disembodied spectatorship.
and the inverse shift from social conversation to individual contem­
plation that accompanied it, can be seen most clearly in the spatial
I
evolution of the National Gallery in London, as it moved from its first
temporary headquarters in a private home at 100Pall Mall (opened
Since the birth of the museum, furniture can be found in the halls of
to the public in 1824) to its permanent home in a new public building
the great galleries, remnants of the royal palaces, and private salons
on Trafalgar Square (opened in 1838).Frederick Mackenzie's 1824- 34
from which many museums evolved.In spaces designed more to facili­
painting of the National Gallery's initial residence in Mrs.Johnjulius
tate social interaction than to optimize individual spectatorship, the
Angerstein's house pictures only freestanding furniture: chairs, stools,
earliest museum furniture participates in the formation of what we
bench, desk.Such moveable pieces decentered artistic spectatorship
might call a private public.The Tribuna at the Uffizi in Florence exem­
by situating the act of contemplation within a larger matrix of copying,
plifies how galleries in palaces were adopted as templates for museums;
writing, resting, visiting, and conversing.This first home of the National
originally commissioned by Francesco I de' Medici as a private gallery
Gallery, an intimate domestic space, retained its town house character
for royal patrons at the end of the sixteenth century, the Tribuna's
and encouraged its visitors to see its collection, hung in neo-Baroque
design remained relatively unchanged when the Uffizi opened to the
frames that match the decor, at leisure and in comfort. However, by
public in 1765.In The Tribuna of the Uffizi ( 177 2- 77),Johann Zoffany
midcentury, in its final location in the heart of London, the New Room
painted not just a public museum interior but also a private group
at the National Gallery had no freestanding furniture, save a chair
portrait, an exclusively male assembly of European diplomats and
or two at the far end of the gallery.An 1 861 wood engraving from a
English tourists, clustered in conversational groups.The Tribuna's diz­
London newspaper shows a large room complete with picture rails and
zying array of paintings, stacked in tiers, mixes artistic styles, genres,
seating by the doors, though no central couch or bench.In this image
and mediums.Antique sculptures share space with Italian and Flemish
of the museum's later incarnation, nearly everyone is standing, most in
paintings, hung not to stand out from the room's sumptuous decor
small groups, some with children well in hand, and all looking at the
but to merge with it, their gilt frames echoing not only the heavy
paintings.Resting, reading, and copying have all been banished, as the
gilt cornice but also the gold ornamentation on the prominent and
act of spectatorship--the aesthetic appreciation of art-becomes the
plush red chair in the painting's foreground. The color scheme of the
room's central activity.
upholstered furniture further harmonizes with the soft Persian car-
Much transpired between 1834 and 1 861 to relegate the bench to
pets casually strewn on the floor and table, as well as with the red and
a more subordinate status, as curators and designers responded to the
gold brocade clothing worn by many of the fashionable visitors. These
newly defined mission of the nineteenth-century museum: to educate an

66
67
Frederick Mackenzie, The National Gallery at Mrs. J J Angmltin �House, Pall Mall, 1824-34; watercolor;
271-ii x 34% inches (69 x 85.5 em).
emerging middle-dass viewer. Offering spectators a narrative sequence
of single images arran ged by national style and historical period, the
nineteenth-century gallery significantly transformed conventions of
display. While the dependable picture frame still assumed primary
responsibility for focusing the viewer's eye as it navigated between actual
and pictorial space, hanging practices gradually became less crowded;
if before it was common for eight or nine paintings to be stacked, one
on top of another, new standards dictated less dense tiers, of two or
three. This shift from mixed multitiered picture displays to more linear,
chronological hangings demanded that everything in the gallery, includ­
ing the seating, orchestrate a larger narrative. No longer encouraged to
m�ve freely within the gallery, visitors were required to circumnavigate
the perimeter of the room. As museum attendance steadily increased
midcentury, the task of directing and managing the flow of bodies
through increasingly crowded galleries, protecting valuable works of
art from damage, became even more important For the first time,
stanchions, joined by horizontal bars or ropes and set three or four feet
from the wall, lined the peripheries of galleries, and the museum bench
as we now know it-a hard or soft stationary seat-replaced moveable
chairs. Freestanding furniture pieces that obstruct the peripheral flow
gave way to large sofas or benches in the center of the gallery, out of the
way of visitor circulation but too distant for close inspection of the art.
This historical and cultural transition was by no means a natural,
seamless, or universal one. Some museums continued to hang pictures
in tiers, and not all luxurious furniture was banished from the public
museum. The heavy sofas that often replaced freestanding chairs were
frequently more comfortable than their eighteenth-century predeces­
sors. Giuseppe Castiglione's 1861 oil painting of the Louvre's Salon
68
3. Otarlotte Klonk, in
"The White Cube and
Beyond: Niklas Maak,
Otarlotte Klonk and
Thomas Demand on
Museu m Display; Tate
lt
Etc., no. 21 (Spring 2011),
//www. tate.org.uk/
tc/issue21/
�display.htm.
Giuseppe Castiglione, Le Salon Cani au Musi!e de Louvro, 1861; oil on canvas; 27 I-ii x 40 � inches(69 x
101\cm).
Carre shows exactly the soft and commodious divan that so impressed
Henry James. Nearly as many visitors lounge on the great divan as wan­
der the gallery; seated individually or in groups, half a dozen men and
women read, rest, or socialize. A female copyist, standing prominently in
the left foreground, uses a stool for her paints, while low benches flank
each of the gallery doors. The ottoman does double duty as a central
source of heat in the cavernous and chilly hall, with the couch circling a
coal grate that provides comfort and warmth. Similar heated sofas were
popular in other museums; the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, for example,
used radiator seating as late as the early twentieth century, its oval sofas
floating off the floor on raised platforms, creating islands of rest and
tranquility. Rather than denying the needs of the body, such furniture
unapologetically catered to it, encouraging museum visitors to make
themselves at home as they quietly contemplated the art, closed their
eyes, perused their guidebooks, or engaged in intimate conversation.
What we see in these pictures of early museum galleries is ultimately
a growing uncertainty over the museum's priorities, a genuine unease
in which the bench became a central flashpoint: should the gallery
promote visual communion or physical comfort, individual freedom or
public decorum, private education or social entertainment? In the begin­
ning, a public museum was as much a rainy-day substitute for the park
as a solemn temple to art; after the National Gallery first opened on the
square in 1838, people frequented the museum on bad-weather days to
teach their children to walk or to have a picnic.3 The museum bench
is in many respects an outgrowth of the park bench; outdoor seating
moved inside as the new and expanding museums became ideal places
to take a stroll. Just as the type of benches first found in the private
gardens of palaces eventually migrated into the public parks, so too
69
 disrepute. The bench also fell victim to profound historical changes
did versions of this seating find a way into the public space of the new
in both perception and subjectivity, changes provoked, to a significant
museums. The new public parks and the new public museums (which
degree, by modernity's increasing preoccupation with the virtues of
were often built inside or next to parks and promenades--like London's
attention and the dangers of distraction. Attention, Jonathan Crary
Victoria and Albert Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum, or
has convincingly argued in Suspensions ofPerception, became a dis­
Chicago's Art Institute) shared a cultural identity: both were leisure
tinctly new kind of cultural problem in the late nineteenth century.5
destinations imagined to elevate the hearts and minds of the growing
Total absorption in the contemplation of an object or the comple­
middle class. The museum also offered the same kind of peaceful refuge
tion of an activity required an out-of-time, out-of-body experience,
from the noisy and bustling metropolis that the park offered, with the
protected from the sensory overload and accelerated pace of modem
added benefit of shelter and security. In both cases, circulation paths
life. Indeed, one definition of modernity is precisely a crisis of atten­
were strictly prescribed, as benches were placed with an eye toward the
tiveness, in which inattention is understood as a serious threat with
most artful view, whether the outdoor park's carefully designed tamed
injurious consequences. For Max Nordau inattention represented a
landscapes or the indoor museum's artfully composed pictorial land­
sign of moral degeneracy, for William James a suggestion of men tal
scapes. The museum bench thus performed a similar function to the
imbalance, and for Sigmund Freud a symptom of psychic hysteria.
park bench, providing not only a place for repose but also a platform
A failure to focus the mind, to attend selectively and exclusively to a
for viewing, a viewing that encompassed not simply objects but other
distinct point in a chaotic sensory field, could land you, quite literally,
spectators as well. Looking-at-others-looking was a feature as much of
on the couch.
the early museums as of the early parks, and in both cases strategically
Disembodied opticality continued to define spectatorship in
placed furniture facilitated this double act of spectatorship.
the twentieth century, as art critics viewed aesthetic attention as not
Yet it was this very furniture that provoked a backlash against what
just a spatial matter but also a temporal one: instantaneous visual
came to be seen as inappropriate uses of the museum gallery. Some of
perception. Figures like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried saw
the most striking primary source materials cited in Charlotte Klonk's
abstract paintings as flat canvases that instantly evaporated into opti­
useful survey of the nineteenth<entury museum document furniture's 5. See Jonathan Crary,
s...peruwns ofPeruptiun: cal mirages, eliciting from the viewer pure retinal responses.6 But the
prominent placement at the gallery's center, including an 1850 report Attmtion, spedac/e, more these large paintings resembled material objects, the more they
from the keeper of the National Gallery complaining of the visitors, and Moden Cullure
(Cambridge, MA: MIT occupied the same space as the spectator. Staging a more intimate
often "country people," who drew the chairs around, made themselves Press, 1999), es pecially
encounter with the body of the viewer, painterly abstraction strikes us
comfortable with their basket of provisions, and feasted in the middle chapter I, "Modernity and
the Problem of Attention, • as not the height of visual disembodiment but a concrete sign of spec­
of the gallery. Another critical portrait of the museums, a satiric image 11-79.
tatorial reembodiment.
from an 1885 German magazine, depicts a man flirting with a seated 6. Oement Greenberg
Contrary to Greenberg's claim that the picture plane displayed
young woman in a gallery, while her mother sleeps soundly on the outlined his aesthetics of
abstraction in numerous against the modem gallery wall optically dissolves, in actuality the
same ottoman.4 A site of considerable social tension around class and essa ys, including "Towards
frameless image--canvas on a stretcher covered with tangible traces of
sex, museum seating came to symbolize everything understood to be a Newer LaocoOn,"
in Cdl«ted Essays and applied paint-confronts the viewer with its physical presence. Before,
improper about the use of this new public space. Crilicism, vol. I, ed.
the frame valorized instantaneous opticality by concealing the thickness
- Flirting, playing, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, and napping­ john O'Brian (Chicago:
Utriversity of Chicago of the canvas, reinforcing a view of the picture plane as a dematerial­
activities suitable for the public park-were frowned on and even Press, 1988), �37, and
ized window inviting optical penetration deep into pictorial space. But
"The New Sculpture," in
explicitly forbidden in the public museum by the end of the nineteenth
Art and Culture: Critical now, evenly distributed skeins of pigment applied to unprimed canvas
century. There are many reasons why the museum bench became an &says (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1961), 139-45.
encourage the eye to scan laterally the surface of the image, thus forc­
object of institutional disdain, including, as we will see, changing per­
Michael Fried, •Art and ing an encounter with the picture's edge and ultimately the gallery wall
ceptions of art and its appropriate aesthetics of display. But one of the Ol!jecthood," in Minimal
Art: A Crilical A ntlwlogy, itself.7 In response, pictures are mounted on walls stripped of color,
earliest and most enduring motivations for the demotion of the bench
ed. Gregory Battcock moldings, and ornament (white surfaces that provide a backdrop for
is the furniture's ready association with the maddening crowd, the pub­ (New York: Dutton, 1968),
l l &-47. the images they come to resemble) and are spaced more widely apart,
lic masses whose very bodies, in all their messy materiality, threaten not
7. Brian O'Doherty dis­
hung on a discrete horizon line that coincides with average standing­
only to damage the actual artwork but to further undermine the emerg­
cusses the affinity between male eye height. The frameless artwork materializes the space of the
ing notion of the museum as a place devoted solely to the disembodied the abstract modem
canvas and the white
gallery and incarnates the body of the viewer, making the pretense of
contemplation of art.
gallery wall in chapter I an exclusively retinal relationship between spectator and object much
of his Inside the Mile Cube:
Tht ldeolcgy of the Gallery harder to sustain. Almost like a trampoline, the taut picture plane
II
5pace, expanded ed. (1976; deflects the spectator's gaze, a gaze that, ricocheting around the gallery
repr., Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1999),
space, encounters not just architectural surfaces but also actual bodies,
The intimate association of benches with unruly social bodies pro­ 4. See Klonk, spaces rf 1�34.
Experience, 43--44 and t. including its own.
vides only part of the story of why museum furniture slides into

70
 to transform bodily perception into disembodied vision, creating the
illusion of an unmediated spectatorial encounter with Pollock's heroic
abstractions. In the same way that the six defining surfaces of the
white cube perform the job once executed by the traditional picture
frame--dividing art from everyday life-the track lights replaced the
nineteenth-century guardrail and directed visitor circulation around
the perimeter of the gallery. Concealed behind a white baffle overhead,
MoMA's track lights projected a band of light around the periphery
·,.
•r
't ..
�
�./�
,. - ....
'-
·�--
..... w..�Nt,
� •,.:..�
· ��,
'\,o�,·-
I 't. I
i -+�1
...'..�4A.
� ..•..�• ·:[...· '
•.
of the white gallery wall and the edges of the dark reflective floor, dis­
tinctly illuminating a precinct for looking but not touching.
However, in the end, all these architectural innovations failed to
guarantee spectatorial attention. In the world of the modem museum,
the bench has remained a persistent reminder of the embodied self;
indeed, it signifies the very seat of distraction, the place where one
retreats when the eye is fatigued and can no longer attend to the art.
The museum bench thus physically marks the limits of attention, the
threshold at which concentration has been exhausted and the fiction
Installation view of the exhibition jackson Pollock," Aprii!>-June 4, 1967, at the Museum of Modem of the transcendent eye becomes undone.
Art. New York.
To counteract the pull of inattention, modem art museums like
MoMA sought to manage spectatorship by reducing the number of
seats within the gallery, entirely eliminating benches, or relegating
seating to spaces like lobbies and hallways, which increasingly come
The museum bench, which would seem to profit most from a
to function as rest stops. The visitor's need for rest is not denied alto­
historical reembodiment of spectatorship, actually finds itself under
gether but strategically relocated, as the modem successor to James's
even greater cultural erasure, as the modern gallery works overtime to
weary American finds greater opportunities for relaxing or social-
preserve the illusion of pure perception in the face of ever more vis­
izing in spaces outside the main galleries, like sculpture gardens and
ceral art. Examples of the white cube's discomfort with the threat of a
museum cafes. When benches are allowed to intrude into the exhibi­
reembodied spectator abound, but one museum exhibition strikes us
as particularly representative of the movement to eclipse the human
tion room, as they were at MoMA's 1967 Pollock exhibition, they are
notably less comfortable. The backless bench became the norm in the
body within the walls of the modem gallery. The Jackson Pollock retro­
modem gallery, making it impossible for visitors to lounge easily, nap
spective mounted by the Museum of Modem Art in 1967 illustrates the
soundly, or sit indefinitely. It might be argued that, by offering museum
extreme measures modernist gallery designers have often implemented
visitors a place to sit, strategically placed benches offer more than a
to compensate for the presence of the corporeal. In keeping with the
necessary concession to museum fatigue; they also enhance, rather
_tenets of the white cube, MoMA's installation designers sought to elimi­
than interfere with, the contemplation of art, offering a stationary
nate all traces of visual distraction by diverting viewers' eyes away from
platform for viewing those works curators deem especially significant.
their own and other bodies and concentrating their attention exclu­
To be sure, creating and reinforcing aesthetic value is one of the most
sively on the art.
common curatorial uses of the museum bench. In the Pollock exhibi­
Installed on the ground level of Philip Johnson's east and garden
tion, the vantage point of a central, axially placed bench not only seeks
wings, the Pollock exhibition began with a dramatic presentation of
to capitalize on the "energy and motion made visible" that Pollock
Mural (1943), neatly mounted on a freestanding panel, bathed in arti­
claimed for a large canvas like Mura� it also aims to signpost the paint­
ficial light, and displayed directly on axis at the entrance. A backdrop
ing as one of the artist's masterworks.8
of floor-to-ceiling drapes shut out both natural light and potentially
And yet, the bench in MoMA's Pollock show, an awkwardly placed
distracting views of the city beyond. This exceptional manner of dis­
minimalist black bench that almost disappeared into the black reflec­
playing Mural-hung on a freestanding wall whose dimensions echo 8. Francis Valentine
O'Connor and Eugene tive floor, reveals how, in reality, modem museum benches are not
the color and proportions of Pollock's unprimed canvas-underscored
.... Thaw, jackson ideally situated for viewing large works of abstract art Unlike tradi­
the curator's conception of the gallery wall as a nondistracting foil
�-A. Calalogtu tional framed easel paintings that can be observed comfortably within
for the immersive abstract image it both complements and resembles. ..... ofPaintings,
tJIIIJtng.,. and Other W"'*s, a close range of three feet, Pollock's mural-size canvases demand a
Exit signs and HVAC registers (intrusive reminders of the presence 10L 4(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1978), viewing depth of roughly twenty feet, a distance that approximates
of the all too biological body) are arran ged inconspicuously in a neat
253.
the space of their production at Pollock's own Long Island studio
grid on the darkened ceiling. Yet it is the track lights that do the most
workspace.9 Hans Namuth's famous Pollock photographs capture the 0
of sitting in front of a masterpiece for half an hour 'drinking it in. '"1
artist in the process of creating his action paintings,immortalizing his Klonk rightly argues in her research on "the spectator as educated con­
crouched stance and waving arm as he directly applies commercial sumer " that what we see in the large new modem museums are interior
paint to unstretched canvas spread on the bam floor.The spectator's layouts borrowed from advanced shop-floor designs.U As museums
actual experiential encounter with a Pollock painting contradicts become increasingly commercial,and as art becomes more overtly com­
Greenberg's ideal of disembodied opticality: these paintings,mapping modified,art's visual consumption owes much to the flow-management
the arc of the artist's own body,require viewers to inhabit a deep,acti­ philosophy of department stores,which rarely provides seating in the
vated space of reception that directly corresponds to the space of the main shopping areas.A seated patron,after all,is not likely to be a
art's full-bodied production-a charged zone that allows spectators to consuming patron; consumer culture requires bodies on the move,not
deviate from the normal circumscribed route around the perimeter of bodies in repose. Simply put,the bench is anathema to the capitalist
the gallery and instead move freely side to side,backward and forward, space of the modem museum.
to facilitate close inspection of the physical paint on canvas or dis­ But if the white cube owes much to the modem department store,
tanced immersion within the image as a whole. Building on Pollock's it also,as Brian O'Doherty memorably argued,owes a debt to the medi­
achievement,American art movements (Minimalism,Conceptual art, eval church: "The outside world must not come in,so windows are usu­
performance) exploit art's potential to implicate,simultaneously,the ally sealed off.Walls are painted white.The ceiling becomes the source
bodies of the artist and the observer,something the white cube itself of light. The wooden floor is polished .... The discreet desk may be
only reluctantly acknowledges.For it is precisely the active zone of the only piece of furniture. In this context a standing ashtray becomes
embodied spectatorship dictated by oversize abstract paintings that almost a sacred object. "12 By the same logic,when seats do appear in
falls outside the narrow band of light illuminated by museum track the white cube,they behave more like church pews than park benches.
lights; the spectator,along with the bench,is relegated to the shadows. Serviceable but not comfortable,modem museum benches offer sOme­
Losing the proximity it once enjoyed to the nineteenth-century gallery thing like the stations of the cross,directing individual worshippers in a
wall,the modem visitor bench becomes an isolated entity stranded in sacred encounter with art.
the dark center of the room. Making only the barest concession to the body,the white cube
Installation photographs that document the 1967 Pollock retrospec­ all but escorts the spectator from the premises.And yet like the exit
tive at MoMA and two subsequent Pollock exhibitions,at the Centre signs,HVAC registers,and air grilles that appear like blemishes on the
Pompidou in 1982 and again at MoMA in 1998, disguise the dilemma 10. Henry McBride, white gallery's pristine walls,the stripped-down bench operates as
"Opening of the New
of the awkwardly placed bench.Visually evacuating the gallery space of the most obvious sign that a living,breathing body-a body vulner­
Museum of Modem Art.
people,these archival documents fail to record how the view from the May 13, 1939," in TheF!uw able to temperature fluctuations,sensory distractions,and aesthetic
ofArt: Essays and Criticisms,
museum bench,frequently blocked by other spectators,is a decidedly 9. Victoria Newholllt headaches-is still present within the hygienic white cube.More than
ed. Daniel Catton Rich
compromised one, limited by both the bench's low height and its argues that the most (New Haven, Cf: any other element in the gallery,it is the bench that calls into ques­
successful installati ... of Alheneum, 1975), 371.
remote location.The Pompidou installation only exacerbates the pro� Jackson Pollock's woril; tion an entire Western history of ocularcentrism,in which vision and
lem; Mies van der Rohe's smartly elegant Barcelona bench-perhaps have been in, not the 11. Klonk,Sf1aas of
big museums, but more &ptriena. 148. vision alone,disassociated from a material body,serves as the privileged
-in witty allusion to a therapist's couch and Pollock's adventures in intimate spaces like the signifier of rationality.A historical product of the Enlightenment,the
12. O'Doherty, Inside tk
Jungian analysis-finds itself marooned in the center of an enormous Betty Parson Gallelj
White Cub<, 15. gallery bench is also one of its greatest philosophical challenges,subtly
( 1948-51) and Ben Hellet
gallery, throwing into high relief the difficulty of a space far too vast for residence (1960), both of reminding us that the transcendent,sovereign,roving mind's eye was
I�. See two lengthy
even Pollock's largest paintings.In its most recent iteration,MoMA's 1998 which encou � �,r.t footnotes in section
the artist's canvases froiBa always,in point of fact,a fiction.
4 of Sigmund Freud's
Pollock retrospective seems to have resolved the conflict simply by ban­ distance of CiviliuJtion and Its For a modernist thinker like Freud,the rational man is an upright
ishing the bench from the exhibition altogether. Dist:onlents (1930), vol. 21,
man.It is our ability to stay standing,to think on our feet,to be ambu­
in 17ot Slandmrl Edition of
The production of a restless spectator,a museum patron in con­ Newhouse latory,that marks the threshold between the animal and the human,
�hjclwlogical
tinual forward motion,defines and distinguishes the white cube from preheruive llwr ojSigmund Freud 1 The
the corporeal and the intellectual,the primitive and the civilized.3
many Pollock fllr7-I931), ed.James
its inception.When MoMA opened in 1939 at its West Fifty-Third Street in her Art
and the POUIIIQ Strachey (London: humble bench threatens to leave all these higher achievements behind
of PiaamenJ, 142-211. It
location,the most widely read art critic of the time,Henry McBride, Hogarth Press, 1961),
by upending the subject onto his behind,in effect reversing human
is difficult to judge the 99-100 and 105-107.
was quick to note the change: "Apparently,in the new museums, we precise distance n£ J)o·ru-b evolution and bringing our senses once again into closer proximity to
from wall in the 1967 14.1Dterestingly, toda
y
shall be expected to stand up,look quickly and pass on. There are lbe pendulum may the lower regions of the body. In an era that considers aesthetic specta­
MoMA show, howC'YIIllf thit be
some chairs and settees,but the machine-like neatness of the rooms 1hirting as some museums,
bench may be the least
in search of revenue,
torship no longer a leisure activity but an intense concentrated labor,
awkwardly situated in relll(
does not invite repose." To early critics of MoMA,its curved and angled are once again pro the erect body comes to stand in for the attentive body.14 Removed
tion to Murnl, as cnu151d1 mot·
ing themselves as plac
galleries,which propelled visitors along strictly prescribed routes, to those in later Poll<4 es from the modem museum bench are all traces of comfort,like soft
ofleisure, with mu
retrospective&, since the sic,
left little room for deviation,detour,or delay. Disdaining "coziness," fo,od cocktails, and even upholstery or supporting backs and arms,too closely allied with the
gallery itself was '""'P"'
modem art museums sounded the death knell for "the old-time habit tively smaller. lleq>overs.
enervating effects of home and hearth.Valorizing the upright and

74 75
the mobile at the expense of the seated and the stationary, the modem can be assembled alone or in groups, and they can be placed in differ­
gallery's disdain for the bench can be attributed, in part, to the bench's ent configurations to accommodate not just artworks but also bodies:
ability to pull the subject both back and down, into a position of not vertical pedestals or low platforms for sculptures, standing easels or
attention but abjection, not sovereignty but submission, not labor but stationary racks for single or multiple paintings, and upright chairs
leisure--all postures deeply associated, not coincidentally, with the or horizontal benches for visitors. The Correalistic Rocker further
taint of femininity and domesticity.15 transforms seated viewers into kinetic bodies that animate the space
of the gallery. Unlike much of the artist-designed con temporary fur­
III niture they prefigure by nearly half a century, these multipurpose
pieces are not static objects to be looked at but polyvalent and usable
As the twentieth century unfolded, the bench posed an even greater mobile armatures. As a consequence, they level distinctions not only
threat: not only could it distract museum visitors from contemplating between utility and art but also between object and subject. In Kiesler's
art, it could itself be mistaken for art. Today's museum benches have Correalistic world, the bench is no longer a necessary evil or negligible
changed little from those first documented in installation shots of prop but an integral part of the theater of spectatorship.17
the opening of MoMA's new building in 1939. The formula remains the No less innovative than Kiesler's famous biomorphic gallery furni­
same: unadorned wood or metal rectilinear legs supporting a solid or ture is his later cantilevered wall bench, designed in 1957 for the World
slatted platform, sometimes upholstered to add a modicum of comfort, House Gallery in the Carlyle Hotel, New York. Flowing seamlessly out
but often without supporting arms or backs. 16 In the same way that the from a curved wall, its seat covered in the same material carpeting the
picture frame was originally designed to blend in with its architectural floor, this continuous bench suspends the spectator from the wall as if
surroundings, the pared-down modem bench was designed to harmo­ the human body were a work of art. Collapsing the distance between
nize with the austere aesthetic of the white cube, facilitating spectator­ bench and wall , the bench itself became wall art while simultaneously
ship by itself receding from view. Ye t with Minimalism, artists including serving as a pedestal for the body and further dissolving the border
Donald Judd and Robert Morris abandoned painting and created serial between art and life. Reposing on Kiesler's cantilevered bench with sev­
objects that invade the space of the viewer-a development that made eral paintings mounted on the wall above their heads, viewers do not so
the museum bench even more potentially ambiguous. Stripped to much observe the art as occupy or become it.
Conealistic design doc­
their geometric essentials, these same benches risk competing with, or Almost seventy years after Art of This Century, the Hessel show
trine as the articulation
even being confused with, their sculptural counterparts. Complicating of"the interrelation of a actively promoted the same full-bodied interaction between art and
body to its environment:
matters further, artists ranging from Claes Oldenburg and Richard observer, inviting visitors to sit, sleep, or socialize on an array of artist­
opiritual, physical, social,
Artschwager to Andrea Zittel and Jorge Pardo have created art objects mcdlanical. • As Stephen designed furniture. Creative variations on the orthodox museum bench
Phillips explains, this
that deliberately elide the distinction between the aesthetic and the doctrine resulted in design instigate a three-way relay-a visual, visceral, and visionary dialogue
utilitarian. The Hessel Museum of Art's 2011 exhibition "If you lived �arch that explored between spectator, furniture, and art. In one gallery, visitors could
15. Female visitors were
architecrure, furniture,
here, you'd be home by now" showcased numerous examples of especially cen � the and bodies in motion, in peruse works by the contemporary artists John Currin, Glenn Ligon,
nineteenth<e 4 view � an effort to correlate visual
objects with an ambiguous status, between art and furniture, including the museum as a pra_.r and Sigmar Polke while relaxing in architect R. M. Schindler's Kings
and tactile information
_Artschwager's High Backed Chair ( 1988) , the only piece of fumiture in public space devotecl to
between mind, eye, body, Road Sofa, Sling Chairs, and Ottoman designed in 1922 for his Los
the cultivation and ed�
the show visitors were forbidden to touch. These works subtly remind and the built environment.
tion of a mass audienc6 Angeles home and studio; their stripped-down orthogonal forms pre­
See Frederick Kiesler,
us that, from the beginning of its history in the late eighteenth century, For more on gende-,< and
"Notes on Architecture: figure the work ofJudd, who later reconstructed them as platforms
the changing Lklll ..;•·.1jlb­
the museum bench has held subversive potential, and never more so The Spaco>-House,"
ics of museum attendalll for looking at painting in his compound in Marfa, Texas. In another
1'-"1. & Hunc (January­
see Tony Bennett. Tht
than in its capacity in the twentieth century to rival art. March 1934) : m; and gallery, museumgoers could study works by Imi Knoebel and Blinky
Birth of the MuseuliS: H.... Stephen Phillips, "Toward
If the design potential of the lowly bench has been ingeniously 1"/oeQry, Politics 1 L•�•·l·.n· Palermo as they sat in Scott Burton's Pair of One Part Chairs (1983) ;
a Research Practice:
Routledge, 1995).
and often whimsically embraced by artists, it remains the case that Frederick Kiooler's Design­ Knoebel's two-dimensional photographs of illuminated geometric
Correlation Laboratory,"
architects and exhibition designers have been reluctant to recognize 16. The original MoMA projections visually rhymed with the hard-angular contours of Burton's
Orr] Room, no. 38 (Winter
benches did ha.oe backlit
the importance of museum furniture. For them, the modem museum 2010): 91. For more on three-dimensional solid granite seating, fixed versions of the freestand­
providing more corn­
Kiesler's Correalistic
bench poses an aesthetic headache not merely because it repudiates fort than most modeJt
furniture in the context of ing chairs that once populated traditional galleries.
museum bencheo. OnlJ'
art but also, and more disruptively, because it threatens to become his numerous installations, In yet another gallery, John Chamberlain's Thardis' Barge (1980-81) ,
later did MoMA switdli to
.. S<e Cynthia Goodman,
it. The single most important exception to this architectural neglect less comfortable seati a huge four-sided urethane-foam couch, recalled the nineteenth­
"The An ti( .11-"Volutionary
perhaps because the soli
of the bench also found a prominent place in the Hessel exhibition: Display 'lechniques, " century central ottoman but expands it to fill nearly the entire room.
bench backs nh>u lln t·d in l'7rdnidc IGesler, ed.
Frederick Kiesler's Correalistic Instrument and Correalistic Rocker. interior views. si�
Lisa l'loillips (New York: Although more comfortable than any of the museum furniture that
everyday fumi � an� Whi-.:y Museum of
Designed by Kiesler in 1942 for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This simply resisted aesthe4 historically precedes it, this barge-like couch, covered in a single white
American An. in
Century gallery, these biomorphic units, made of ash but sheathed in abstraction. Mtociation with Non
on, cotton sheet, also conveys the impression of a house closed for winter,
1989), 57�3.
linoleum, could be put to use in a variety of ways. Individual modules 17. Kiesler defines his an empty and shrouded space evacuated of a living, breathing body. If
 John Chamberlain, Tlwrdis' Bargo. 1980--81. Jason Simon, Vern, 2003, andJosiah McElheny, Tempurary platformforfawn S imon (After Donaldjudd), 2011;
installation view ofGallery 15/16 of "If you lived here, you'd be home by now," 2011, Hessel Museum of
Art, ccs Bard.

there was a body in this room, it was virtual: a woman inspecting her some of the early museum interiors for ideas about how to blend color,
mirrored reflection in Chantal Akerman's 16 mm film Dans le miroir (In ornament, and furniture into more dynamic environments that stimu­
the Mirror) ( 1 9 71), projected onto the wall. Josiah McElheny's Tempqrary late all the bodily senses.
Platfurm forjasonSimon (AfterDonaldjudd) ( 2011), provides another There are many reasons a piece of furniture as seemingly innocuous
stage from which to watch video, this time jason Simon's Vera ( 2003).18 as the museum bench has become, over time, an object of suspicion
An unfinished bench composed of foam mattresses set on engineered and even derision: its association with unruly social bodies, its subver­
lumber platforms, it resembles nothing so much as a rustic daybed, as 18. In both galleti41 the sion of attention, its resistance to capitalism, its repudiation of rational­
subjects of the p...... t.. ism, and its rivalry with art. But none of these objections to the bench
practical, prosaic, and chaste as the Pompidou's Barcelona bench was
are women engage4l in
impractical, chic, and sensual. The placement of both the Chamberlain acts of ....- lf_.,·JJC(. Ldl•H''·hlJI are inevitable, inarguable, or insurmountable; indeed, they are heavily
women reflectiolli liter4 inflected by the anxieties and ambitions of their times. We believe that
couch and the McElheny platform suggested that benches in contem­
or figuratively, on their
porary museums-spaces often devoted as much to new-media art as own bodies or lives. it is high time, perhaps even past time, to treat the museum bench as
traditional painting and sculpture-need to evolve in keeping with not 19. Current debateuboal not an aesthetic headache but a creative opportunity.
- just changing notions of display but also changing definitions of art itself. contemporary mu.seulll
architecrure often find
Such new approaches to the museum bench, by literally reem­ themselves f'' c'>t.L'UI""-d
bodying spectatorship, provide a welcome opportunity to reimagine with iconic museum exllllflr
ors and mired in eva!WIII
aesthetic theory and practice. To acknowledge, finally and fully, the ing the pros and cons cl
importance of gallery furniture invites careful reconsideration of "starchitecture.• ·I\ l"'
these discussioos ,,f \f'
the museum interior as a whole. As the symbol of embodied spectator­ do no more than opJ>OII
ship, the museum bench challenges architects and designers alike to the bravura buildi"tt
of signature designal
invent more innovative alternatives to the restrictive vocabulary of the like Frank Gehry and
Daniel Libesltind with die
orthodox white cube. Shifting focus from exterior image and massing
restrained buildinlil! of
to interior design and display, architects could look beyond the mod­ architects like Renzo l'iaDI
and David Chippe
em gallery to provide more imaginative considerations of how all the
One way to break
smaller-scale components we now take for granted (walls, floor, light­ ground is to shift the
emphasis from the ext&"
ing, and especially furniture) might interact not only with each other
rior of the museum to ill
but also with the art on display to shape organically viewers' physical interior, consideris:l lhe
precise ways the ... se\111
encounters with the art and with the people around them.19 Designers,
gallery orchestra_.
for their part, could look to predecessors of the modem gallery, back to embodied !l-JJL"'CW,VT"�llp.

78 79