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MediaTropes eJournal Vol III, No 2 (2012): i–v ISSN 1913-6005 www.mediatropes.c

MediaTropes eJournal Vol III, No 2 (2012): i–v ISSN 1913-6005 www.mediatropes.com INTRODUCTION ÉDITORIALE EXPOSITIONS EN TANT QUE MÉDIAS EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION EXHIBITIONS AS MEDIA JENNIFER CARTER The American art curator Walter Hopps once stated that installing a museum exhibition is a little like conducting a symphony orchestra.1 His analogy reminds us that exhibitions are indeed complex and poetic compositions, and that as the synthesis of content and design within a specific environment—be that environment physical or virtual, literary, musical or other—exhibitions are polyvalent media that challenge established relationships between objects and ideas by placing these into new spatial and conceptual paradigms. Les musées se distinguent de plusieurs autres formes de médias, nous rappelle l’historienne de la culture Michelle Henning, dans la mesure où ils reçoivent et, dans certains cas, fétichisent des objets, alors que d’autres médias font le contraire : ils “détachent les objets … de leur endroit fixe dans le temps et l’espace,”2 ce qui permet leur circulation dans des formes reproduites. En dépit de l’argument de Henning, une certaine dématérialisation a eu lieu dans les pratiques muséales, notamment avec l’usage croissant des technologies numériques et de scène, phénomène qui a rehaussé les capacités de communication des lieux d’exposition. Les théoriciens Jean Davallon et David Dernie ont proposé que les expositions sont tout autant une forme de média que les médias imprimés, radiodiffusés ou télévisés—avec la distinction importante que leur structure 1 Paola Marincola, Questions of Practice (Bookmark), in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paola Marincola (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives, 2006). 2 Michelle Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2006) 71. Translation J. Carter. MediaTropes Vol III, No 2 (2012) Jennifer Carter / ii www.mediatropes.com spatiale constitue un élément essentiel de la communication.3 Considérer les expositions comme média, donc, implique que le lieu est compris comme une pratique sociale, de la double perspective d’un espace riche en information ou objets et en expériences.4 As a field of theory and praxis, exhibition making and design is by nature multidisciplinary. It draws upon a variety of media, from art and installation to performance, retail, theatre and film, for its inspiration to put objects and material into narrative context, and furthermore to embody this context. Exhibition design, in this respect, is key to creating a total exhibition environment, a space that not only accommodates objects on display, but that conceives of this entirety as the medium itself. It is specifically in this situation that design becomes, in the words of Paola Antonelli, MoMA curator for architecture and design, “an extreme act of conceptualization.”5 Exhibitions operate on different valences, communicating on more than one register and appealing to different senses and learning styles. Toward this end, exhibitions incorporate atmosphere, narration, sensation, spatiality, décor, interactivity, itinerary, and mise-en-scène into the fold of their work. More than framing content, the exhibitionary apparatus epitomizes McLuhan’s dictum that media communicate messages. Exhibitions are media—they are the message— but what are the languages used to convey these messages, and what tropes guide their mise-en-scène? How do display conventions shape public subjectivity, and the public’s understanding and experience of exhibitions in didactic and embodied form? Ces questions sont au cœur des articles compris dans ce numéro spécial de MediaTropes, “Expositions en tant que médias.” Les essais dans ce volume examinent et analysent collectivement les expositions en tant que mode de communication en considérant les langages, les conventions, ainsi que les formes de réception employés par le dispositif de l’exposition tant de la perspective historique que contemporaine. Différentes habiletés sont nécessaires pour interpréter les paysages de l’information et développer les outils pour mieux comprendre comment les médias donnent forme aux messages est d’une importance capitale. Quoique l’on puisse comprendre le 3 Jean Davallon, L’exposition à l’oeuvre: Stratégies de communication et médiation symbolique (Paris: L’Harmattan Communication, 1999) and David Dernie, Exhibition Design (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006). 4 Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory 73. 5 Paola Antonelli interviewed by Bennett Simpson, “Design and Architecture,” in What Makes a Great Exhibition?, ed. Paola Marincola (Philadelphia: University of the Arts, Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiatives, 2006) 86. MediaTropes Vol III, No 2 (2012) Jennifer Carter / iii www.mediatropes.com concept de l’exposition dans son sens le plus large, les articles dans ce volume portent une attention toute particulière à une variété de pratiques d’exposition dans des genres aussi divers que les hôtels, les musées d’art, les centres de science, les musées d’histoire naturelle et d’architecture, et enfin, le paysage naturel, où des traditions radicalement différentes ont façonné les approches à la communication. “Exhibitions as Media” is a bilingual project. The French and English essays in this volume range in breadth and scope from an historical analysis of exhibition techniques in Western European traditions to the case studies of specific exhibitions and the contexts of their host institutions. All of the essays in this special issue are concerned with demonstrating McLuhan’s dictum that the medium itself communicates messages, by transcending the meanings conveyed through content. The essays included here remind us of the highly creative domain that is the exhibitionary apparatus, and of the complexity that an analysis of the emerging discipline of exhibition design entails. In their survey of exhibition practices, François Mairesse and Cecilia Hurley provide a timely and comprehensive contribution to the scholarship on exhibition history and theory—or expology. Their article situates the act of exhibiting beyond museum environments and within the broader context of human practices of collecting and “showing,” and thereby defines expology as a field of its own, distinct from the discipline of museology. This provides the authors with a far broader landscape from which to consider social and cultural influences on display methods, notably from the realms of iconography, law, advertising, television, and the Internet. Their genealogy both builds on previous studies while positing the direction for a new field of enquiry and its methods, a field that draws fruitfully on the concept of the dispositif, or the apparatus or network of elements that make up the exhibition environment. Plusieurs des collaborateurs ont concentré leurs analyses sur des expositions montées dans la dernière décennie au Centre Canadien d’Architecture (CCA) à Montréal, un établissement qui a innové dans le domaine du design d’expositions. Mon propre article examine les stratégies en évolution dans les expositions du CCA depuis 2000, où une nouvelle tendance de s’inspirer des traditions propres à l’architecture a mené à des environnements qui sont eux-mêmes l’incarnation de la pensée et de la pratique architecturales. De cette façon, l’exposition de l’architecture atteint à la fois de multiples niveaux de communication, ainsi que le plein potentiel du médium de l’exposition. Tracing the origins of immersive and sensorial practices within diverse exhibition venues is the subject of Alessandra Mariani’s essay. In her analysis MediaTropes Vol III, No 2 (2012) Jennifer Carter / iv www.mediatropes.com of the sensorial turn that has occurred in contemporary art and architectural exhibitions, Mariani positions the exhibition ground as its own sensorial universe, and documents the rise of immersive communication strategies in art and architectural production in a tripartite analysis of perception—sensation— and participation. The author provides a close analysis of three key works that take us from the museum to the national pavilion of a world exhibition and back to the museum. In these examples Mariani highlights and theorizes the roles that a museography of immersion plays in involving the senses in contemporary exhibitions and in constructing an ethical space, prompting critical engagement in visitors—as a critical spatial practice in itself. Communicating architecture is not only the purview of curators and exhibition designers, as Mariani and Laberge argue in their essays. Audiences are increasingly involved in making sense of exhibitions, and for this reason, reflecting on the nature of the material represented in exhibitions is an important step in the process of exhibition making. In her essay, “Communiquer l’architecture par le média exposition,” Marie Élizabeth Laberge considers the site of the architectural exhibition from the perspective of modalities of representation, and argues how a newer model of representing the discipline of architecture relies on both a material and interpretative approach— and this often in the absence of the architectural subject: the building. Documenting the many phases of the architectural project, in essence, documenting architectural practice, has become a viable alternative to previous traditions of documenting the absent building in architectural exhibitions. Inspirée par l’installation photographique de Meera Margaret Singh, Nightingale, au Gladstone Hotel sur Queen Street West à Toronto, l’auteur Kerry Manders aborde le sujet et site de l’exposition à travers la double lentille de la mémoire et l’oeuvre Hotel Theory de Wayne Koestenbaum pour fournir une réflexion poétique sur—ainsi qu’une performance de—l’œuvre provocatrice de Singh. Manders serpente à travers les couloirs de l’hôtel, examinant les paramètres du lieu d’exposition, ses espaces liminaux au seuil des chambres de l’hôtel, et l’intersection entre la vie, le travail, et les lieux d’exposition. Son article fournit de façon ludique une vue et une revue d’une exposition, encourageant ses lecteurs à habiter temporairement dans sa méditation sur les thèmes uploads/s3/ i-e-e-i-e-m-ntroduction-editoriale-xpositions-en-tant-que-medias.pdf