Curating Architecture || Pavilion Politics

Pavilion PoliticsAuthor(s): Andrea PhillipsSource: Log, No. 20, Curating Architecture (Fall 2010), pp. 104-115Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765378 .

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Jean Nouvel, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2010. Photo: Philippe Ruault. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.

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Andrea Phillips Pavilion Politics

In June the Serpentine Gallery in London unveiled its tenth

temporary pavilion, this one by Jean Nouvel. The annual event has come to punctuate the London summer, signaling, not least for the UK in 2010, a short period of quietude before the autumn budget is announced and ideas of such large-scale, publicly funded, privately sponsored, magnanimously placed projects are likely shredded, along with a frightening percen- tage of arts funding. In this context of debates about the future of state arts funding in the UK and its likely eradica- tion in favor of speculations on private sponsorship, novel

assemblages of cultural financing are very much to the fore. Thus, pavilions like those commissioned by the Serpentine each summer, which function as nexuses of public -private sponsorship, have come to represent a complex and often con-

tradictory set of values and concepts on the part of artists, architects, curators, and their audiences. These special, usually temporary and usually nonutilitarian environments assemble and disassemble certain types of acting, certain patterns of behavior. What is this acting, and how might it exemplify the new forms of subjectivity in production through differently scaled, sited, commissioned, and funded objects?

The Serpentined pavilion program affirms the combina-

tory and contradictory form of contemporary capitalism not

simply through its funding structure. It mixes public program with private fundraising functions, staging a branded and

unique commodity through modes that are affective and even- tual in nature, and, perhaps most importantly, it proposes a

psychological and physical form of spatialization that is at once

open to all and uniquely privatized; open for all bodies and at the same time disinterested in their forms of inhabitation. As such, it can be said that the Serpentine pavilions are emblema- tic of a broader debate about the paradoxical nature of many large-scale works of art, very contemporary in their contra-

dictory - or ambivalent - form of political suggestiveness. A viewer is encouraged to participate but at the same time under- stands that his or her participation is not entirely necessary; in this sense, to perform a contingent and partial subjectivity.

The Serpentine is not alone in this regard - over the past decade, many museums, galleries, and nearly all biennials

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Frank O. Gehry, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2008. Photo: Iwan Baan. © 2008 Gehry Partners LLP. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery. Top: Daniel Libeskind with Arup, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2001. Photo © Helene Binet. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.

have commissioned or staged pavilions or temporary structures funded and branded in a similar way. But the Serpentine has been pivotal for three reasons: first, for shifting the con-

cept of the pavilion from one of social experimentation to one of neat and transposable commodification; second, for

shifting the concept of the pavilion within the arts sphere from one identified with national branding to one in which the pavilion is understood as a transnationally significant object in which the viewer's presence is merely statistical and/or aestheticized; and third, for using the language of

public arts policy-making, in which funding is awarded to enable democratic participation, to develop spaces that actu-

ally privatize and internalize the experience of the public. What does the viewer do in this situation? How is he or she to act in such a context?

The Serpentine pavilion series was initiated by gallery Director Julia Peyton-Jones in 2000 with a design by Zaha Hadid, and a pavilion has since been sited every year on the

green outside the main gallery (itself a converted 19th-cen-

tury teahouse and thus an example of a developing Victorian leisure industry). The series is a good illustration of contem-

porary forms of making in which economic, aesthetic, and technical methodologies are brought together in both a struc- tural and conceptual sense. It has also commanded regular engineering expertise from Cecil Balmond of Arup (thus staging the engineer-architect relationship as one based on collaboration rather than facilitation). In this sense, making is not simply limited to that which the architect and engineer (or in the Serpentine's case, occasionally artist and engineer) design but to be understood as that which is produced by the

multiple factors of construction - commissioning, financing, programming, publicizing, visiting, etc. These temporary summer structures are enormously popular with Londoners and tourists and bring large audiences to the gallery itself. Intended to showcase the work of architects who, at the time of commissioning, have not yet completed a building in the UK, the series has produced an impressive list of designers: Daniel Libeskind, Toyo Ito, Oscar Niemeyer, MYRDY (the only design never realized), Alvaro Siza and Eduardo Souto de Moura, Rem Koolhaas, Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen of Sn0hetta, Frank Gehry, and SANAA, previous to Nouvel's commission this year.

The pavilions have no programmatic requirements; they are mostly decorative test sites and showcases for small-scale

engineering and design experiments with minimal content.

They conform to the conditions of earthworks or large-scale 106



Toyo Ito with Arup, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2002. Photo © 2007 Stephen White. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.

public sculpture rather than to the social experimentation carried out in pavilions built by Cedric Price, the Smithsons, and Archigram in the mid-20th century, which emphasized claims for new sociabilities through design. The pavilions are not built as lecture theaters or viewing spaces, though they house increasingly important cafe/bar facilities and a regular program of concerts, film screenings, and talks. As the pavilions have become established, the events staged within them have become more and more ambitious (this is accomplished through the interests of curator Sally Tallant and especially foregrounded since the arrival of Hans Ulrich Obrist as co- director of the gallery in 2006). Events range in endeavor and are often thematically curated. Serious curatorial proposals in which artists premier new films and performances sit alongside sponsorship events such as the annual Serpentine Summer Party, an important fundraiser for the Serpentined annual program. In 2006, Obrist, along with Rem Koolhaas, instituted the first Marathon event in the pavilion ( 24 hours of short talks with artists, architects, and commentators) at the end of the summer - an event that is now both fran- chised and mimicked globally in similar setups. Because the

pavilions are not designed as auditoria or galleries but rather as showcases of design expertise in themselves, attending and

participating in events is always an interesting (and often

physically challenging) experience. The term pavilion has a mixed history regarding the

dialectics of use and uselessness, temporariness and fixity, sociability and elitism. It is commonly used to describe a free-

standing or temporarily attached building used solely for the

purpose of viewing things/people - sport, art, social engage- ments. The pavilion tends to be seasonal for these reasons, and is in its associations an elite and privileged site of leisure. Pavilions are, historically, places of display resembling but

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differing from theaters, concert halls, stadia, museums, etc., through their lack of permanent infrastructure and depend- ence on other buildings (the Serpentine series can be said to

depart from this tradition in its pure focus on display of itself as a design object). They are in this sense opportunistic and theatrical - built for certain events such as expos, biennials, tours, competitions, or fairs. With roots in courtly and mili-

tary pageantry as well as the pragmatics of traveling for long periods before the industrialization of transportation, and enabled through the development of new, lighter, more flexible building materials through the 19th century, pavilions also retain their aesthetic and functional relation to tents. It is this paradoxical formatting that attracted Walter Benjamin to the European world's fairs to analyze the development of

capital as a fiscal and cultural procedure, literally built on novel forms of flexibility and movement within newly con-

figured city streets. Today pavilions have become locations of the display of architecture and design itself, using new materials, new forms - gigantic and miniature, spherical, vastly elongated, remote, floating, built of ice, built of air, built for one person, endlessly expandable and collaborative, etc. They act as both test sites and places built as trade pitches - adver- tisements for their authors' skills and ideas, intentionally and

necessarily ephemeral. Both Andreas Ruby and Beatriz Colomina identify the

root of pavilion in papillon - in Colombia's terms, unpinned down and open to speculation.1 But if views from within the architectural community suggest the pavilion as a viable zone of transitory experimentation, others, such as Penelope Curtis, suggest more contingent readings. Curtis, writing about the relation between sculpture and architecture, favors the Latin

etymology papilionem, describing a temporary awning used to protect the standard of the sovereign on the battlefield and in procession, migrating to more general usages as a semi-

protective space for sport and art viewing and facilitation. In

asserting that "[t]he pavilion gives us transparency, but also

protection," Curtis brings together its functions as a place for

(symbolic) display and a place from which to view.2 Her in- terest is in the changing nature of the relationship between art and architecture, specifically through the medium of

sculpture. She charts the shifting curatorial relations between

temporary (or otherwise) housing for sculpture in which the

viewing of the art object and the development of buildings as

sculptural artifacts are both privileged in their own right. Among her examples are Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion with its key staging of Georg Kolbe' s Morning in the

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1. See Andreas Ruby and Beatriz Colomina's essays in Your black horizon Art Pavilion: Olafur Eliasson and David Adjaje, Thjssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (Cologne: Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007). 2. Penelope Curtis, Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture (London: Ridinghouse Editions and The J. Paul Getty Trust, 2008), 8.



Aldo van Eyck, Pavilion for the 5TH International Sculpture Exhibition, Sonsbeek Park, Arnhem, Netherlands, 1966. Rebuilt in the Kröller-Müller Museum sculpture garden, Otterlo, Netherlands, 2005-06. Coll. Kröller-Müller Museum. Photos courtesy the museum.

water court; Eliel Saarinen's use of Carl Milles's sculptures on the Cranbrook campus (1934 onward); the MoMA sculpture garden by Philip Johnson (195?)> an(i pavilions by Gerrit Rietveld and Aldo van Eyck at the Sonsbeek Park open-air sculpture exhibitions 0955 and 1966). In van Eyck's pavilion, sculptures placed at turns in this concrete block construction are obscured by the directional nature of the building's shape, in which a series of narrow walkways are confused by strate-

gic semicircular bulges and containments. In such an envi- ronment the viewer might come across sculpture as part of an overall aesthetic and physical experience, but the sculptures themselves are not given privileged status. This exemplified van Ecyk's desire to create an "in between world" - a place where architecture "breathes in and out": Viewed from a distance, [van Eyck's 1966 Sonsbeek pavilion ] was very light in colour and in its radiance shone out against the high , dark canopy of foliage above . It was reminiscent of some kind of illuminated glade. Overall there are strong similarities with Rietveld }s [1955 Sonsbeek ] pavilion of a decade earlier - above all in the siting , texture, and colourwaj - and once again there is a sense that the sculptures detract from the pavilion itself . . . the

pavilion has become the artwork J If, as Curtis observes, the period in which architecture

and sculpture complimented each other in the pavilion is over, this is because they now, more than ever, approach each other's condition for conceptual, methodological, and economic reasons. By this I do not simply mean that the budgetary impera- tives of each are similar (although this is certainly the case: the budget for Anish Kapoor's Arcelor Mittal Orbital for the London Olympic Games site is in excess of a small housing development and is expected to "rival" the Eiffel Tower in

popularity) or that they approach each other in terms of scale

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l. Ibid., 125-6.



SANAA, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2009. Photo: Luke Hayes. © Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa / SANAA. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.

(although examples such as Kapoor's, or the Tate's Turbine Hall series, or Monumenta at Le Grand Palais, or Dia:Beacon, or Saadiyat Island, would testify to this), but that within a cultural-economic landscape, art and architecture, through discourses of social participation, interdisciplinarity, and economic impact, find themselves sharing similar languages and

bargaining tools. Much art is now expected to prove itself in terms of social and fiscal impact; much architecture is judged on its aesthetic impact on any vicinity. Both are governed by their transnational branding capacities. The pavilion is a neat - literally encapsulated - formation of this trend.

It could be said that this shift in pavilion politics rides

20th-century conceptualizations of the relation between

private and privatized, and public and democratized, life. If, in the 1950s and '60s, pavilions were a place to demonstrate new forms of sociability - rehearsals for a better socio-spatial life - they were premised on a belief in the transformative

powers of culture within a malleable and ameliorating public arena. This concept of the pavilion - Johnson's "urban room" at MoMA or the Smithsons' "site" for self-realization in the exhibition "This is Tomorrow" - was one in which such public instantiations or exemplars were underpinned by a belief in the potential of public life. A visitor to van Eyck's Sonsbeek pavilion could expect his or her body to be treated as part of an experiment in the way architecture might provide undefined open spaces for living and communicating -

spaces in which objects, walls, landscapes, and bodies might coexist in a harmonious and liberating milieu. If, as Curtis observes, the importance of the sculptural objects is radically reduced in this formulation, the viewer's body is privileged, becoming in itself proof of the potential of the subject to participate, literally, in the spaces and times of culture. This ambition can be contrasted dramatically with today's pavilions, a fact

uncannily prefigured by Walter Benjamin when he wrote in

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Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2007. interior AND EXTERIOR. PHOTOS © LUKE Hayes. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.

The Arcades Project , "The world exhibitions were training schools in which the masses, barred from consuming, learned empathy with exchange value. 'Look at everything, touch nothing.'"4

Not only are today's pavilions more often privatized and elite spaces in which the aspiration would appear to be moti- vated by privileged forms of taste-making and capital accu- mulation, but the concept of democratic involvement in social

experimentation for the benefit of a broader set of aspirations is no longer part of the project. These temporary buildings are

stages for the prototyping of a different kind of acting that mixes the requirement to participate with a lack of physical and somatic investment in public life. They have become participation machines - that is, temporary locations that provide the statistical and methodological fodder for our current

century's obsessive reformulation of participation as a guar- antor of quantified social impact. This curatorial-architectural reconfiguration is also a reconfiguration on the part of the viewing subject.

Eliasson and Thorsen, more than any previous Serpentine design team, emphasized the viewer's experience. Their 2007

pavilion was shaped like a centrifuge with a viewing platform at its pinnacle. Instead of looking out onto the grounds of

Kensington Gardens, however, this platform projected the view back down, into the center of the pavilion. As Eliasson and Thorsen confirmed in a conversation with Peyton-Jones and Obrist: The way in which we've organized the spiraling form is less about the form for its own sake, and more about how people move within the space. The building has the form it has because this supports a certain way of moving. The unusual thing is, the closer to the edge of the buildingyou go, the faster you move ; the further out on the

ramp you are, the more you move. In the centre, you're more likely to stand still. . . . There's something to this idea of drawing people to the centre, just as a vortex or funnel takes things and pulls them towards the centre, in terms of generating a momentum or participatory relationship with the pavilion. You feel you're a part of something: you're not just passing by

This literalization of participation is born out of an art/ architecture partnership in which conceptual ideas were

applied to space in practice, not via metaphor or suggestion. If much contemporary art desires participation but fails to be able to account for it, here architecture programs participation as part of its application in space. Eliasson's oft-quot- ed aspiration to enable his viewer to "see yourself seeing" is built into the framework of the pavilion. ill

4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, convolute G16,6, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 201. 5. Olafur Eliasson, "Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen in conversation with Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans-Ulrich Obrist" in Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007: Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen (Baden: Lars Müller and Serpentine, 2007), $0.



Olafur Eliasson and David Adjaye, Your black horizon Art Pavilion , Lopud, Croatia, 2007. Interior and exterior. Photos: Michael Strasser / Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary.

Pavilions such as these are founded on the instrumental- ization of experience - they are, in effect, experience apparati. While one narrative would see them firmly tied to histories of land and conceptual art as objects of contemplation (Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty being an obvious and regular reference, as well as works such as Walter de Maria's Lightning Field and

James Turrell's Roden Crater ), an alternative reading places them within the history of world's fairs and expos designed to promote and develop capital. This paradoxical placement is symptomatic of contemporary cultural production, and so the pavilions can be seen as exquisite and careful exemplars of a developing category. They are luxurious and time-con-

suming instantiations of the experience of looking, and as such belong as much to the 19th-century development of

public -private relations of capital as they do to contemporary requirements for the arts to prove their (financial and social) worth. They are an exegesis in the inventive and shifting de-

velopment of novel forms of sociable capitalism. But what might be meant by experience in this context?

How does the body really perform in Eliasson and Thorsen's machine, or Hadid's ballooning summer party pavilion, or

Gehry's gaping wooden platform? Caught between being an

object, being looked at, and feeling like a spare and distinctly unglamourous part in an otherwise exclusive space, we are

compelled to move, to act according to a set of rules that we have not quite learned.

Within this context two pavilions-as-sculpture offer alternative perspectives, one participatory and modernist, the other participatory and discursive. The former is exemplified by Eliasson's 2007 collaboration with David Adjaye, Your black horizon Art Pavilion. The work was commissioned by Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary and conceived by its commissioner, Francesca von Habsburg, as part of "a con- stellation of stand-alone art spaces dispersed across the world"

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that challenge the conventions of museological display and rethink formats of exhibition in the context of contemporary collections.6 Originally constructed on San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Yenice to coincide with the 5lst Biennale and then rebuilt on the island of Lopud, Croatia, the building is an installation with a strict circulation and clear experiential mechanism. In fact, just getting to the site of the pavilion entails dedication on the part of the visitor - it is, in effect, a

pilgrimage. Once there, viewers enter a narrow slatted corri- dor, walk through a passageway into a black room with only a thin, horizontal, mid-height line of visible light that changes according to weather and time of day. What is set up, at least in theory, is what Andreas Ruby calls "different modes of

relationship between art and the viewer," built on immediate and intimate encounter. What enables this is a large investment of private capital and the confident exclusivity of spatial arrangement that capital brings.

The second is the Office for Metropolitan Architecture/ AMO's circus tent, funded by the European Union for its 2004

"Image of Europe" exhibition. A temporary pavilion located on a traffic island in the center of Brussels, it proposes to intervene critically and rhetorically in a debate about EU

political image-making. The multicolored, busy urban canopy housed a cyclorama portraying a conflictual history of Europe and was intended to encourage Europe's "coming out": The creation of the European Union mil ultimately be recorded as one of history s quietest revolutions . Europe's reticence has clearly had its benefits .... But increasingly, as the EU grows in size and

importance, the ineffectiveness of its communication is proving to be a serious political liability that weakens its external manifesta- tions and has unnecessarily eroded its internal support ?

Your black horizon and the "Image of Europe" exhibition not only suggest contrasting uses of temporary pavilion structures, funded differently and arguably made for very different audiences, but they are also unusual in their relatively singular claims of form and content. If Your black horizon is a work that hopes to provide a synergy between form and experience, "Image of Europe" is a container for deliberately provoking debate. The former, as Ruby puts it, is organized to "incite a

displacement, to make people go out of bounds"; the latter is

organized to confront people with what they have supported, with what is on their doorstep.8

For most pavilions the requirement is to provide both

types of participation - isolated/immersive and social/immersive - hence the contradictory and ambivalent nature of the pavilion's contemporary politics. This is certainly the case

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6. Francesca von Habsburg, et al., "Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Pavilions: Home to Contemporary Statements," in Your black horizon Art Pavilion , 20. 7. http:/ / www.oma.eu/index.php?option =com_projects&view=portal&id=270&It emid=10 8. Ruby, in Your black horizon Art Pavilion, 22.



Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond with Arup, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, London, 2006. Photo © John Offenbach. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery.

at the Serpentine. More broadly, an increasing claim is made within the art and architecture community for the benefits of temporary building structures (stages, platforms) as aesthetic and discursive structures. Here, the viewer plays a different, though not necessarily more comfortable, role in the

scenography of democratic participation enabled through cultural institutionalization. Hans Ulrich Obrist described Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond's 2006 Serpentine pavilion (which continued the AMO tent theme with a spectacular inflatable balloon structure visible above the treetops) as a

building in which "content and form are inseparable in the sense that the architecture is a content machine." Now many institutions (museums, festivals, biennials) construct temporary spaces for talks and lectures; many artists propose such structures as part of a practice that works on the cusp of aesthetic invention between curatorial planning, design, social

networking, and cultural engineering. These inventive spaces suggest to any potential visitor that they may be at once part of the team, part of the spectacle, unnecessary, and/or com-

pletely "at home." As capsules of contemporary cultural production, pavil-

ions combine the democratic desires and capital aspirations of interdisciplinary aesthetic production in an exemplary fashion. They fulfill the promise of public art in that they literalize engagement at the same time as formalizing artistic ambition at an architectural scale, thus enabling artists and curators to imagine and participate in the production of what

appear as real, as opposed to fictitious or metaphorical, acts of political and social enablement. But within this framework

they must be understood as acts of theater, masques (and as such, returns to original forms of the pavilion identified by Curtis) designed to structure a type of social engagement that welcomes and avows capital development and its necessity for the instantiation of occasional public discourse in newly privatized space.

Liam Gillick suggests that the role of the artist has shift- ed, and, by implication, the role of the viewer. He locates this

argument within a critique of accusations that capital has subsumed an artisťs (and, it might be added, an architect's) ability to intervene critically into a situation: "With regard to the undifferentiated flexible knowledge worker who operates in permanent anxiety in the midst of a muddling of work and leisure, art both points at this figure and operates along-side him or her as an experiential phantom."9

While to be an "experiential phantom" is for Gillick a critical role, it might also describe a subjectivity that is not

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9. Liam Gillick, "The Good of Work," e-flux Journal , no. 16, May 2010, http:/ / www.eflux.com/journal/ view /142.



Andrea Phillips is reader in fine ART AT THE DEPARTMENT OF ART, Goldsmiths, University of London, and director of the Doctoral Research Program. From 2006-2009 she was Director OF CURATING ARCHITECTURE, A THINK TANK BASED IN THE Department of Art.

quite enabled to participate fully - a partial or coded subject. It might be said that pavilions make experiential phantoms of all of us, in the sense that our experience is spectral or

partial alongside (and in collaboration with) that of the desig- ner, indicating at once a shared or equitable capacity and a loss of equal part. This perhaps says more about the role of

experience within a wider cultural debate than simply the novel modes that are currently being invented by such partial and spectacular forms of art building, but it is a situation in which pavilions, and their expanded art/architecture family, share a role. If, in 1965, van Eyck aspired to build temporary, porous, and accessible buildings to surpass the simple show-

casing of sculpture in favor of the viewer's experience of the

building itself, this aspiration has now been returned in neo- conservative form.

Judged in light of consistent returns to architectural

utopias of the 1950s and '60s as models for novel contemporary artistic and architectural thought, the spaces invented by the Serpentine each summer propose a democratization of

space that reconfigures concepts of artistic value on a temporal and spatial axis, providing art with social definition on a lit- eral level. Judged against the procedures of contemporary capital, in which mixed-use, ambivalent, and transposable forms are prized equally highly, these pavilions aestheticize the economic values that underpin the cultural urban geog- raphy of which they are very much a part, drawing them closer to the aesthetic procedures of artistic process. So, a dis- similation of public space is enabled, along with a narrowing of the forms of acting to which we might aspire. It is clear with these pavilions that the viewer remains the viewer and the author remains the author, and the curator arranges the architecture as a microeconomic example of business as usual.

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Curating Architecture || Pavilion Politics