Why Scenography and Art History?

It has to be noted that the longstanding and complex concept of scenography pertains not only to theatre and performance studies, but also to design, architecture, technology and – last but not least – art history. For example, in Sweden where I live and work, scenography studies has been a marginalized sub-field of art history since the 1960s.¹ This special issue of Journal of Art History explores scenography’s current relevance to art history more broadly and looks into ways in which art history and scenography can interact and vice versa. The “Scenography and Art History” session that gave rise to this special issue was held at the 2018 NORDIK conference in Copenhagen, and was co-organized by me, and my colleague Viveka Kjellmer, both art historians at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. While the individual contributions in this special issue emanate from the NORDIK session, I will here discuss the most recent developments within scenography theory, and propose approaches that can hopefully be inspirational and useful for art historians as well as scholars from related disciplines such as visual studies. What brings the diverse articles in this special issue together is their capacity to unpack and exemplify the significance of a scenographic approach to art and related occurrences.

In dialogue with scenography

The Greek word skenographia combines skēnē (a small building, hut or tent on stage) and graphia (writing, or perhaps drawing or painting) into a word that is commonly translated as “scenic writing”. However, as demonstrated by for example theatre historian Arnold Aronson and scenography scholar Rachel Hann, this translation remains obscure and does not grasp the complexities and critical potentialities of scenography.² Instead of being troubled by an unclear etymology, I suggest that scenography can better be embraced as a concept in motion, in becoming. Indeed, as expressed by art historian and theoretician Marsha Meskimmon:

Playful etymologies sometimes help us to work our way towards new forms of thinking about familiar phenomena. Conventional understandings of scenography lend themselves well to such critical revision, and to foregrounding scenography as active, rather than leaving it in the background, passive. Drawing scenography to the stage of writing to explore its agency raises significant questions around methodology and discipline. These are the self-same questions that have been asked about art and art’s histories, theories and practices, and the implications are profound in both cases.³

What emerges here is a productive space urging art historians and others to contribute to further developing scenography as an academic concept and scholarly domain. It must be emphasized that this has nothing to do with appropriating or claiming scenography solely for art history. Instead, engaging in dialogic, cross-disciplinary encounters that recognize and make use of difference, we can open up terminology, mobilize theoretical parameters, and develop new methods and models of inquiry enabling us to embrace as well as scrutinize the role of art and creativity in society.

This dialogic approach includes revisiting conventional art history topics, approaches and study objects, in resonance with new scenography theory. The art form of gardening provides an apt example of what a scenographic – multisensory and holistic – approach can contribute to art history. As gardens are eventful, durational occurrences, felt and experienced with all senses, it can be argued that the multisensory methods and theories provided by a scenographic approach would help countering the marginalization of the topic in art history.⁴ Other examples from art history are settings such as urban spaces (indeed multisensory occurrences including people, actions and architecture), churches (where smells, bodies, images and architecture create affective atmospheres), or installation art prompting co-creative durational and holistic experiences (such as exhibitions including smell).

In her article “Scented scenographics and olfactory art”, the above mentioned Kjellmer, mobilizes an expanded and multisensory understanding of scenography as a tool to explore olfactory events. Leaving behind traditional visual approaches to exhibitions, she moves into a smellscape, employing her whole body as a scholarly instrument. When air becomes an aesthetic and temporal medium, Kjellmer’s body, in particular her nose, observes, affects, and is affected by the scenographic occurrence. Her approach feeds into long-standing and ongoing debates on the sensorial within art history, visual studies and related scholarly domains.⁵ When re-imagining olfactory artworks as holistic scenographic events, Kjellmer’s article epitomizes one of the key objectives of this special issue: to exemplify the merits of leaving behind a stance of distanced visual observation and instead engaging in multisensory, felt, encounters with art or other events.

From representation to materialization

For art history, the multisensory stance, implies that scenography, that has long suffered from being understood as an object, a background in the theatre, or a lesser form of art, can now be (1) foregrounded as an active agent of all sorts of events and (2) as a way of thinking that is helpful for analysing multisensory, durational and holistic art occurrences. According to art historian and performer Amelia Jones, we need to develop approaches that can sufficiently account for the felt, and often “messy embodiment that constitutes our relationship to spaces and things.”⁶ This special issue suggests that multisensory and holistic scenography theory provides a useful model for exploring interrelatedness between bodies, objects and settings.

Leaving behind an understanding of scenography as a static representational “thing” thus opens up for explorations into what it does, how it actively matters, how resources are mobilized and meanings are forged and felt. In recent scenography studies as well as in art history, we find a turn from representation to materialization, meaning-making, and articulation. Meskimmon summarizes this shift in the following way:

Art can, of course, represent subjects and objects, concepts and worlds. But more than that, art can make subjects and objects, concepts and worlds. Its visual, spatial and material agency go beyond the logic of representation, where that implies that art is a mute mirror onto the world. Rather, art is one of the forms through which the world emerges, becomes meaningful, in the flux of intra-activity at the interstices of times, spaces and bodies.⁷

In recognition of this dialogic, situated, embodied and multisensory mind-set, I will present a selection of recently emerged ways of understanding and employing the concept of scenography.

Expanding the concept of scenography

In particular, artistic and practice-based research has contributed to moving scenography out of the theatre to encompass essentially any occurrence in any constructed or natural setting. Let us first look into the positive side of the expansion. Two pioneering proponents of this stance, dramaturg Sodja Zupank Lotker and performance scholar Richard Gough, express the liberating force of the expanded understanding of scenography as follows:

We perform scenographies and they perform us. Our roles change with these scenographies. Environments conspire and collude to construct scenographies for our actions, and sites, places and locations are subverted, co-opted, occupied, translated and mutated for the needs of our performances. Everything we do and almost everything comprehend scenic formation – landscape, site and setting – but also a way of constructing the physical, perceptual and emotional environment of/for the event.⁸

What underpins this account is the mobilization of theories that seek to move beyond binary thinking, to overcome the separation between “objective” as in distant and disembodied visual observation, and “subjective” as in situated and co-creative participation and experience of art and all sorts of events. One can speak of a whole new generation of artists and academics joining forces to look for and develop new and alternative ways of accounting for difference, positionality, and scholarly rigour. This stance is manifested in a recent key work, Scenography Expanded: An Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design (2017), an anthology edited by scenography scholars Joslin McKinney and Scott Palmer.⁹ Among the theoretical approaches found within it can be mentioned affect, new materialist and post-human theories, all utilized to emphasize material, multi-fold encounters and experiential – as in felt and co-produced – dimensions of scenographic occurrences.¹⁰

For art history, I suggest it can be particularly interesting to engage with McKinney and Palmer’s approach to situated and embodied experiences of art events. They emphasize that

the ways in which scenography engages the attention of spectators – through the organization and transformation of space, through the selection and manipulation of images and through the action of the scenographic materials themselves – are often indirect and oblique; an experience or a set of potentialities rather than a singular message.¹¹

Not only does Scenography Expanded provide useful applications of non-representational theory, but it also opens up for applying scenographic approaches to art history study objects, such as artistic interventions in urban settings or immersive installation art.

The applicability of this approach is exemplified in artist and critical heritage studies scholar Alda Terracciano’s article “Installation Art and the Issue of Gentrification: Exploring the expanded scenography of Zelige Door on Golborne Road” included in this special issue. While the immersive installation addresses gentrification issues in London, Terracciano looks into its scenographic dramaturgy, with a particular focus on participant involvement in the design process. It is demonstrated how participatory scenographic design not only manages to empower local community participants in a difficult time, but also can expose and help counter operations of gentrification. By mobilizing scenography theory, Terracciano constructively contributes to overcoming academic orthodoxies that divide insider and outsider perspectives, to argue for the crucial importance of art in contested societies. Terracciano’s positioning of herself as both a scholar and an artist is, in the context of scenography, not a disqualifying bias, but a strength contributing vital insider knowledge on engagement with art.

It is important to note that the notion of expanded scenography has been met with the criticism (much in line with what happened to the concept of performativity) that if a concept can be applied to everything it loses its academic clarity.¹² This problem was in fact addressed already in 2005, by art historian Magdalena Holdar, when she pointed out “if all the world’s a stage, all we see is scenography.”¹³ In the next section, I will introduce scenography scholar Rachel Hann’s recently developed scenography theory, which responds to the conceptual problems with expanded scenography.

Multisensory scenography theory

In her seminal Beyond Scenography (2019), Hann mobilizes thinking developed within the non-representational realm when setting out to make scenography a sharp academic concept. Combining new materialism, affect and assemblage theory, queer phenomenology, with concepts such as othering (rendering strange) and worlding (crafting worldly encounters), she makes an analytical separation between scenography as a feature of and for the theatre, and extra-daily occurrences – something that disrupts or enhances the normality of the everyday – beyond the theatre. Hann thus reserves the concept of scenography for the theatre, and develops the concept of scenographics to account for interventional qualities of felt assemblages, both in the theatre and in other settings and situations not crafted by theatre designers. One example of the latter can be when a strangely positioned curtain disturbs an otherwise perfectly ordered line of windows pertaining to a major institutional building.

For the art historian, perhaps studying architecture, scenographics can help accounting for how temporary interventional features – such as occupying the street actions or graffiti – reveal and expose the ideological charges and normativities underpinning the situations. Scenographics help moving beyond the monumentality of what Hann terms “slow architecture” to experience and explore the temporality of “fast architecture”.¹⁴ What is gained by Hann’s conceptual separation between scenography and scenographics, is that the interventional force of felt and experienced multisensory features as diverse as a lit Christmas tree, the smell of lavender in a garden, or an oddly positioned chair, can be critically examined without confusing them with scenography. As is further explained by Hann:

[…] scenographics point towards a methodology for investigating the place orientating techniques and political narratives that culturally position bodies and peoples within a spatial imaginary of world. To study scenographics is to study how world imaginaries are encountered through material cultures. From encounters with maps to media representations, scenographics account for the often seductive techniques for cultivating feelings of belonging, of country, of border, and, ultimately of world.¹⁵

I suggest that Hann’s concepts and theoretical framework are relevant for art history, as they help accounting for the critical complexities of felt, situated, bodily experiences of art and multisensory (never only visual) cultures. As art historians, we are trained to use our bodies – not only the eyes – as research instruments to describe, analyse and interpret art and related features. Therefore, I believe Hann’s academic way of acknowledging and problematizing positionality and feelings, can be interesting also for art historians.

Navigating between mis en scène and scenographic event

Hann’s theoretical thinking is foremost concerned with understanding and scrutinizing experiences of what happens in time and space. Striving to bring theoretical clarity between the creative process and the theatre event proper, Hann as indicated above, conceptualizes scenography as a durational, holistic and multisensory occurrence. By doing so, she distinguishes it from the mis en scène process, including dramaturgical strategies and designs for set, costume, sound, lighting etc. Consequently, in Hann’s view, the set designer or scenographer (the terminology varies depending on context), does not directly craft the durational scenographic event. Instead, together with the people responsible for costume, lighting, sound, video, theatre architecture, and technology, the scenographer contributes to an affective assemblage and atmosphere that happens in time and space.

As traces of the mis en scène process, such as designs for set and costume, belong to art history’s study objects, it can be productive for art historians to draw on scenography theory for acknowledging the difference between process and event. Importantly, the focus on the scenographic event, does not dismiss archival traces after the mis en scène process, and vice versa. In her article for this special issue, “From one day to another: A ballet scenario by Leonor Fini”, art historian Rachael Grew takes up an archival scrap describing the scenographic idea for a never-performed ballet. She demonstrates not only that designs can have agency without having to be realized on stage, but more importantly, that attention to the mis en scène process can contribute valuable knowledge about the role of artistic practice in society. In the case of artist-scenographer Fini, the scrap proved to be a valuable resource, bringing her profound interest in bodily transformation back onto a corporeal stage of mattering and meaning-making.

Importantly, Grew’s article takes on a cross-border quality that is key to this special issue, when showing how a classical art historical mode of inquiry, such as iconography, can be a vital asset for scenography studies.¹⁶ The reason for specifically bringing up iconography here, is that both theatre and art historians have targeted it as an outmoded approach to scenography.¹⁷ What I suggest, is a less hostile position, foregrounding updated theoretical clarity without dismissing art history’s rich methodological tradition, including formal analysis, semiotics, and the previously mentioned iconography. Indeed, separating scenography and mis en scène, opens up a productive space for making clear theoretical and methodological choices. By choosing to look into the mis en scène process, the merits of artistic work can be properly explored and valued. This is a realm where art historians can continue contributing valuable knowledge on the many scenographer-artists that tend to be forgotten because they fall between scholarly chairs, are positioned outside canon, or because their designs where never realized on stage.

While Hann does not explore past scenographic processes and events, I have tested her theoretical framework on a long gone theatre performance to explore affective ecologies or “felt relational interdependencies of material circumstances within and beyond the theatre.”¹⁸ As an art historian, in this particular case, I found that Hann’s multisensory approach helped me account for the transformative role of scenography in a theatre production aimed at countering Nazism.¹⁹ In Hedvig Mårdh’s article “The Artist/Scenographer and the Museum Exhibition”, in this special issue, a related multisensory approach to scenography proved to be helpful for accessing artist-scenographer Lennart Mörk’s sensory aesthetics. Seeking a historical understanding of museum engagement with scenography, Mårdh explores how artist-scenographer Lennart Mörk contributes to crafting emotionally engaging, multisensory displays. By activating what I would term multisensory echoes of past scenographic practices and occurrences, Mårdh reveals how Mörk could help the museum challenge a traditional, static and object-centred exhibition mode by focusing on sensory aesthetics and experiences. Drawing on a holistic understanding of scenography, Mörk combined lighting and sound with costumed actors and choreography, creating a multidimensional and durational scenographic artwork attracting much media attention and many visitors.

With this said, I welcome you to further engage with the impact and complexity of scenography in relation to art and its histories. What new scenography theory proposes are explorative models that help moving away from distant visual observations and toward embracing and scrutinizing multisensory experiences, including the acknowledgement of insider and artistic knowledge. By doing so, I think we can constructively challenge academic orthodoxies and offer new modes and methods of knowledge enquiry. Indeed, working outside the confines of a traditional representational approach to art opens up for reinvigorating older, disembodied and narrowly visual, methodologies.

Notes

1 The Swedish situation is explored in A. von Rosen, (2021). “Scenography: From Marginalized Study Object to Vital Theoretical Concept”, in Johansson B-I and Qvarnström, L. (eds.). Swedish Art Historiography: Institutionalization, Identity and Practice. Stockholm: Nordic Academic Press. [Not yet paginated. Accepted for publication].

2 A. Aronson, “Introduction: Scenography or Design?”, in A. Aronson (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Scenography, London and New York: Routledge, 2017, pp. 4–7. https://doi-org.ezproxy.ub.gu.se/10.4324/9781317422266 Accessed 2020-07-24. R. Hann, Beyond Scenography, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2019, pp. 2–3.

3 M. Meskimmon, “Foreword: The Stage of Writing and Drawing Art’s Histories”, von Rosen, A., and Kjellmer, V. (eds.), Scenography and Art History: Performance design and visual culture, London: Bloomsbury, 2021, p. xiii.

4 An instructive article on the marginalization of gardening and gardens in art history is Nolin, C. “From Gardening Manuals to Signum’s Swedish Art History: Approaches to the Historiography of Swedish Landscape Architecture,” Journal of Art History, Vol 85, No 1, 2016, pp. 126–140; see in particular p. 135 where Nolin addresses the multisensory character of gardens.

5 It is also interesting to note how a recent key work in critical media history mobilizes the “sensorium” as a means of exploring performance history. See P. W. Marx, and T. C. Davis, “Introduction: On Critical Media History”, in T. C. Davis, and P. W. Marx, (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Theatre and Performance Historiography, E-book, Routledge, 2020, pp. 6, 11–17.

6 A. Jones, “Unpredictable Temporalities: The Body and Performance in (Art) History”, in G. Gunhild Borggreen, and R. Gade (eds.), Performing Archives / Archives of Performance, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013, p. 56.

7 Meskimmon 2021, p. xiii.

8 S. Lotker, and R. Gough, “On Scenography: Editorial”, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 18:3, 2013, p. 3. DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2013.818306. Accessed 2020-07-24.

9 J. McKinney, and S. Palmer, (eds.), Scenography Expanded: Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017.

10 A recent publication, bringing together practice based and scholarly research, where some contributions witness to this theoretical shift is B. E. Wiens, (ed), Contemporary Scenography: Practices and Aesthetics in German Theatre, Arts and Design, London: Methuen Drama, 2019.

11 J. McKinney, and S. Palmer, S. “Introduction”, in J. McKinney, and S. Palmer, (eds.), Scenography Expanded: Introduction to Contemporary Performance Design, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2017, p. 10.

12 See, for example, D. von Hantelmann, How to Do Things with Art, Dijon: JRP Ringier/Les Presses du Réel, 2010, pp. 17–18.

13 M. Holdar, Scenography in Action: Space, Time and Movement in Theatre Productions by Ingmar Bergman, doctoral dissertation, Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2005, p. 118. Open access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-427 (Accessed 2020-08-12).

14 Hann, 2019, pp. 120–130.

15 R. Hann, “Foreword: At the Borders of Scenography”, in A. von Rosen, and V. Kjellmer, (eds.), Scenography and Art History: Performance Design and Visual Culture, London: Bloomsbury, 2021, xvii–xviii.

16 For an additional example where iconography is used to explore designs, see A. von Rosen, with E. Szalczer, “Scenographic Dialogues: Staging Carl Grabow’s 1907 Designs for A Dream Play [Part 1]”. Dokumenterat 51, 2020, pp. 4–42. Open access: https://musikverket.se/musikochteaterbiblioteket/arkiv/dokumenterat

17 This is summerized in M. Holdar, Scenography in Action: Space, Time and Movement in Theatre Productions by Ingmar Bergman, Diss. Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2005, p. 19. Open access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:su:diva-427.

18 A. von Rosen, “Scenographing Resistance: Remembering Ride This Night”, Nordic Theatre Studies, special issue Memory Wars. Vol 31, No 2, 2020, p. 76. Open access: https://tidsskrift.dk/nts/issue/view/8724. Accessed 2020-07-24.

19 von Rosen, 2020.