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Abstract
This paper reflects on an interior design practice developed within the specialist area of exhibitions and museums. Re-examining discussions around the contested territory of interiors, the paper argues for taking up perspectives and processes outside of the familiar, being unfixed whilst remaining inherently ‘of the interior’. Using exhibition design as a distinct lens, ‘the collection’ and its mediation are examined through a personal creative research project Mitteleuropa: A Story of Lust & Furniture. The project’s ‘design fiction’ nature expounds ‘what I’m drawn to, what I do, and how I do it’ within the context of the discipline. This is a personal journey constructed through a process of assembling learning and seeking to disrupt settled conditions, in which ‘collecting’ has come to be understood as a research technique that underpins an expansive interior design practice.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jim Colquhoun for taking both the project and myself in unplanned directions. Patrick Macklin and Drew Plunkett for starting me on the journey. And Alex Milton for the conversations and encouragement along its navigation.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 In the same issue Joanne Cys (Citation2009, 21) reflects upon extensive significant recent interior design publications and international conferences on the state of interior design and reports a body divided: “one position celebrates the lack of territorial boundaries and embraces the opportunities this offers, while the other view calls for a tighter definition and therefore a more bounded identification of interior design’s field of education, research and practice.”
2 Cys goes on to argue that in the cited publications and forums “the discussions of interior design territory rarely make reference to examples of actual interior design practice” and goes on to note that few of the key contributors are interior design educated or identified as interior design practitioners.
3 Whether conceptually, in the understanding of the interior as something necessarily responding to an exterior or, more prosaically, in the architecture contracts and work stage deliverables that frame interior design projects and define the client-designer relation (most often ill-fittingly).
4 A question constructively raised in peer reviews of an earlier draft of this text.
5 The paper concludes with a survey of ‘Territorial Practice’ - projects selected from the annual Australian Interior Design Awards program that “represent the identity and future of interior design (…) excellence in practice and the discipline itself” - as an opportunity for “critical consideration of the ‘how’ of interior design as opposed to consideration restricted to the ‘who’ or ‘what’.”
6 Attiwill sets out a study of interior design practice ‘reinvented through exhibition design, curation and writing’ drawing a parallel between the activity of the exhibition design specialism and that of its parent discipline, seeing “ways of thinking about objects, subjects and space” as contiguous.
7 On use of the French to English translation of assemblage as ‘arrangement’, Buchanan notes that it critically “implies a temporal and spatial aspect”.
8 Interiors have always been involved in the shifting and transgressive area of culture, and the interior designer’s foray into (or reclamation of) the space of the exhibition has given rise to specialist activity - within scenography, production, interaction, media and communication. Whilst such areas of enquiry struggle to locate at depth within interior design education - instead often remaining separate areas of specialist or vocational study - the emerged profession of exhibition design goes some way towards collecting these concerns within the territory and practice of interior design.
9 Stewart and Sherringham (Citation2010, 15) discuss how “the emergence of a new mode of engagement with the world radically shaped the design spaces, objects and communications of the 20th Century.”
10 “It is not because of [collected objects’ singularity nor distinct historicity] that we see the time of the collection as diverging from real time, but rather because the setting-up of a collection itself displaces real time. Doubtless this is the fundamental project of all collecting - to translate real time into the dimension of a system” (Baudrillard 1994, 16).
11 In Towards an Interior History, Attiwill (Citation2004, 4) considers history as a practice, as ‘a particular set of actions brought to bear on particular material’. “History is understood as an activity involving a process of selection, collection and arrangement to construct an encounter with material and produce meaning. Museums are a wonderful example of three-dimensional histories in this sense - where visitors encounter history through processes of collection, organization, arrangement and juxtaposition (…) [In museums we see] a shift from displaying the object as the thing to be known and the subject as the knower to the event of encounter as the space where knowledge is produced.”
12 Cited projects: Wonderlab, National Science and Media Museum; Digital Revolution, Barbican Centre then touring; SHOWstudio: Fashion Revolution, Somerset House; Richard Rogers: Inside Out, The Royal Academy of Arts; Screen Worlds, Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
13 On use of the word “thing” to describe content - “The trouble with “things,” as philosophy soon discovered, is that they seem to combine two contradictory properties: stability and change. Identifying a thing as a table entails both the recognition that the object possesses some kind of permanence but also that it is also subject to modification.” (Adkins Citation2015, 10)
14 “Exposing an agent, or subject, puts ‘things' on display, which creates a subject/ object dichotomy. This dichotomy enables the subject to make a statement about the object. The object is there to substantiate the statement. It is put there within a frame that enables the statement to come across.”
15 Bal works with, “the notion that gestures of showing can be considered discursive acts, best considered as (or analogous to) specific speech acts (…) The central claim is that display is so rigorously constative that its syntax confirms the structure of the affirmative sentence only.”
16 Counter the classical - read fixed and limiting - idea of what makes for authentic and effective display context as put forward by historian Victoria Newhouse in “Art and the Power of Placement. On development within modern institutions Sara Knelman (Citation2005, 158) suggests “he shift in display misplaces or subdues the earlier historical resonance of the objects (…) ‘[content becomes] individual, self-sufficient objects divided from original associations (…) The recreations [contemporary displays] substitute functions for fact and, in so doing, replace content with context.”
Elsewhere, reviewer Marlene Chambers (Citation2006, 403) comments on the statement that ‘context has replaced content’ as being, “well worth closer scrutiny since it betrays an unexamined, widely held assumption that context and content exist as distinct, dichotomous elements of display. To insist on a strict separation between the two is to define context in terms of physical setting alone and to overlook both the original emotional and intellectual context embedded in the art object and semiotic content implicit in physical placement.”
17 On audience research collated ahead of the V&A’s landmark British Galleries project, Gallery Co-ordinator Nicholas Humphrey reported, “What is well established is that some people prefer to learn in museums from a practical 'hands-on' approach while others are more interested in starting from a theory and applying it. Traditionally the V&A has presented displays for analytical learners - those who learn by thinking and watching, and who look for facts and intellectual comprehension - but has offered less for others, such as those who like to try things out for themselves or who look for personal meanings in objects. The new Galleries will attempt to provide for all learning styles.” (Citation1998, 5)
18 Attiwill writes of Claire Bishop’s “Installation Art” as, “a stimulating account of contemporary art from the 1950s to present as one of experimentation with different kinds of viewer/art relations. Installation art (…) sought ‘to provide an alternative to the idea of the viewer that is implicit in Renaissance perspective: that is, instead of a rational, centered, coherent humanist subject’ (…) It is also interesting, and thought provoking, how this exposes much interior design discourse which implies, and relies upon, a subject as centered and stable in an unquestioned and implicit way.” Attiwill frames her focus: “A process of interiorization as one of design and one of mediation involving design tactics (…) A process which constructs ‘a temporary and virtual arrangement according to casual, logical and temporal relations”. (2011, 5)
19 “The parts that are fitted together are not uniform either in nature or in origin (…) the assemblage actively links these parts together by establishing relations between them.” (DeLanda Citation2016, 2)
20 Disappointingly, in an age of risk-management, exhibition project clients look increasingly for a ‘one-stop-shop’ creative consultant over the independent composite team- dialogue and serendipity taking up too much time and money.
21 Describing contemporary artists’ response to such cities (the likes of Jane and Louise Wilson, Nicolas Grospierre and Cyprien Gaillard) Hatherly observes a tendency for the work to be “devoid of much in the way of context” and rather “present the fascinating relics of a civilization, which just happens to be at the same time an actual civilization where hundreds and millions people live and work” (2015, 8).
22 The term ‘artifact’, “suggests a man-made object charged with cultural meaning, which can, if studied carefully, offer us information on the society in which it has been created. It offers indications on a larger cultural situation, and it only has interest if we are able to ‘read’ it.” (Bal Citation1996, 7)
23 The Central European spirit, wrote György Konrád in “Der Traum von Mitteleuropa” (“The Dream of Central Europe”), “is a view of the world, an aesthetic sensibility that allows for complexity and multilingualism, a strategy that rests on understanding even one’s deadly enemy. The Central European spirit consists of accepting plurality as a value in and of itself; it represents ‘another rationality’ (…)
(Rider 2010, 40).
24 The diffusion of the ‘Herderian theoretical system [philology, linguistics and vocabulary] among the the peoples of Central Europe constitutes an essential stage in the formation of the cultural Mitteleuropa [taking in] Hungarian, Romanian, Polish, Czech, Serb, Croatian, Slovenian, etc.”
(Rider 2010, 40)
25 The use of a literary construct as basis for ordering the collection (both the narrative generated in response to the collection and the title Mitteleuropa in reference to its philological spirit) unconsciously plays with a “nineteenth-Century view of museums as ‘texts’ using classification practices to map knowledge seen as objective and universal” (Psarra Citation2009, 11).
26 “There’s nothing inevitable, nothing sacred about the art museum. Three centuries ago, they didn’t exist. This year, for a while, they ceased to be. It might – will – happen again.”
(Hollis Citation2020, “The Street Outside”)
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Louise Martin
Louise Martin is an interior designer working for near to two decades in design studios that have been leading enquiry into the interior, in all its myriad forms - from Casson Mann and Ben Kelly to Ab Rogers Design. Exposure to a range of expertise, approaches and influences has led to the development of a creative practice that is cross-sectoral, but also advanced within the area of culture - exhibitions and in the design of content experiences. Recognizing this specialism as becoming ever more relevant to the creation of any engaging and high-performing environment, she is interested in the possibilities of scenographic, content and narrative-led approaches within interior design. This interest is expanded through her associated creative research activities and in her role as Visiting Lecturer in Interior Design at The Glasgow School of Art. Email: [email protected]