_Art presented in galleries is impossible to overlook, but a Herzog & de Meuron exhibition at New York’s MoMA teaches visitors to see anew. Text by Shonquis Moreno Photography by Dirk Kuijt

Treasure Hunt

� Herzog & de Meuron ExhibitionNew York

Frame #53 2006

Frame #532006

Herzog & de Meuron ExhibitionNew York

�

Selected by Herzog & de Meuron, works of photography, painting, printing, sculpture, architecture, design are visible through slots in the sidewalls of the gallery.

ARCHITECTURE and DESIGN

PHOTOGRAPHY

PAINTING and SCULPTURE

FILM and MEDIA

There was nothing new about the content of Herzog & de Meuron’s summer show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art: included were popular works by Mondrian, Rothko, the Eameses. What was new about the event was the exhi-bition design. As the eighth instalment of MoMA’s ongoing Artist’s Choice series, for which guest curators compile a show comprising pieces from the museum’s permanent col-lection, Perception Restrained was unusual, in small part, because Basel-based Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were the first architects chosen to participate and, in large part, because instead of merely culling their favourites from the museum’s treasures, they designed a new way to view them. ‘The idea began,’ says MoMA director Glenn Lowry, ‘with Herzog and de Meuron wanting to evoke a specific chapel-like experience and an experience that provided an overall framework, from walls to ceiling to floor, that was both overwhelming and highly focused. The installation looks at ways in which restraining perception is a way of focusing attention.’

_ ‘The installation looks at ways in which restraining perception is a way of focusing attention.’ Glenn Lowry, director of MoMA

� Herzog & de Meuron ExhibitionNew York

Frame #53 2006

Frame #532006

Herzog & de Meuron ExhibitionNew York

�

Fragments of paintings visible through slot in sidewall. By obstruct and limiting perception, the architects believe the installation intensifies the viewing experience and makes it ‘more enduring, more selective, and more individual.’

The traditional ‘white cube’ swathed in darkness. Early design model of gallery showing the three main elements: rows of benches, ceiling grid of screens, and viewing slots in the sidewalls.

In a darkened gallery painted black, visitors were invited to sit on austere, pew-like benches to view film excerpts that looped on flat screens anchored to the ceiling. While some craned their necks uncomfortably, others gazed downwards into small, round, hand-held mirrors in which it was difficult to frame the entirety of each screen and impossible not to be seduced by adjacent, unrelated images. Lining three sides of the gallery and providing, along with the images moving overhead, the only illumination in the room were long, narrow, rectangular perforations in the walls through which visitors were forced to adjust and readjust their viewing positions in order to take in a painting by Bacon, a sculpture by Beuys, a photograph by Hiroshi Sugimoto, a chair by Thonet or a transcribing ma-chine by Raymond Loewy. In these cabinets of curiosities, to see everything – juxtapositions seemed more pragmatic than metaphorical – viewers shifted and shuffled, intoning apologies as they bumped into fellow viewers doing the same beside them. Herzog & de Meuron felt that their challenge lay not in selecting the greatest treasures from a collection rife with treasures, but in recalling our attention to works we’ve seen to the point of blindness. As the designers wrote in their exhibition statement, ordinarily in white-cube galleries ‘the art is there, spread out in a panorama, professionally illuminated, impossible to overlook – but it is not seen’. Tightly corseting their vision, the mechanisms of the exhibition design generated curiosity, a desire to rediscover familiar icons that we no longer register as living objects. Here, the top edge of a Balthus canvas was hung out of sight, high on the wall; there, a dinner service by Eva Zeisel was placed low at its foot, on the floor.

_ Herzog & de Meuron felt that their challenge lay in recalling our attention to works we’ve seen to the point of blindness

Former MoMA curator Terence Riley (now director of the Miami Art Museum) compared the experience to Howard Carter’s story about archaeologists excavating the tomb of Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamen. Their initial penetration of the chambers led them into what Carter described as a cramped space with only enough room for a single person to peer inside. He recalled a sense of great anticipation as the first viewer stuck his head through the narrow open-ing and everyone behind him asked breathlessly, ‘What do you see? What do you see?’ And the answer came: ‘Beautiful things.’ _

� Herzog & de Meuron ExhibitionNew York

Frame #53 2006

Frame #532006

Herzog & de Meuron ExhibitionNew York

�

Visitors can view the ceiling-mounted LCD monitors with the help of tiny mirrors lying on the benches. The architects culled excerpts from such film classics as Apocalypse Now (�9�9), Flesh (�9�8), Bonnie and Clyde (�9��), Taxi Driver (�9��), and Woyzeck (�9�9).