Art Factories: Museums of Contemporary Art and the Promise of Artistic Production, from Centre Pompidou to Tate Modern

Wouter Davidts

In 1966, the Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers made the sculpture entitled Building (Les Yeux). It consists of a structure of four iron bars and five floors made of different glass plates, loaded with a collection of jam jars filled with cut-out images of eyes. Relative to similar gazing structures of that year, such as La camera qui regarde or La Tour visuelle, Building (Les Yeux) is undoubtedly the most architectural. It reads as a model of a modernist structure, almost paraphrasing Le Corbusiers Domino project. However, Building (Les Yeux) is no direct translation of the modernist paradigm of la machine habiter. As the title suggests, it acts as a total seeing device, as une machine regarder. Broodthaerss building embodies the promise of total transparency and multidirectional visibility. It has no exterior, and its floors are made of glass. The centrifugal gaze of Jeremy Benthams model of the panopticon is transformed into an omnipresent spatial condition: one is not only constantly seen, one permanently sees everything, in every direction and from every possible position. Such comprehensive visibility makes any place in Building (Les Yeux) interchangeable and the gaze radically unspecific. The seeing device is so indeterminate that, ultimately, there is nothing to see. Broodthaerss work is consequently not only une machine regarder but, above all following Baudrillards description of the Centre Pompidou une machine faire le vide or a machine to generate emptiness.1 It presents us with the mere promise of absolute presentation, suggesting that the pledge for total surveyability is a complete nightmare: it produces nothing but a pellucid vacuum. Building (Les Yeux) can be read as a critical anticipation of those architectural projects that pay tribute to the ideology of total flexibility and transparency. With its boxlike volume, large plateaus and rigid carcass, the sculpture shows remarkable affinities to one of its most famous referents, the Centre Pompidou of Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers.
Figure 1, overleaf, top: Marcel Broodthaers, Les Yeux (Building) and La Tour Visuelle, 1966. Source : Susana Martinez-Garrido (ed), Marcel Broodthaers, Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura, Museo Nacional Reina Sofia, 1992, p 86. Figure 2, overleaf, bottom: Renzo Piano & Richard Rogers, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1977. Source: Architectural Design 47, 2, 1977, p 111.

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Centre Pompidou (1977)

Its a real monster. But I think a good monster. Basically, its not at all a bad idea. Pontus Hulten 2

When the project for a large cultural macro-organism in the centre of Paris was drawn up in 1970, the concept of a classical building was wilfully abandoned. The competition brief for Le Centre National dArt et Culture Georges Pompidou asked for an integrated cultural infrastructure or framework. The winning design had to propose a solution for the unpredictable development and hence spatial and exhibitionary requirements of the contemporary work of art, and express the image of a popular and iconoclastic art institution. The key concepts of the architectural programme are flexibility ( flexibilit) and porosity (permabilit).3 The centre needed to function as a living organism, to grasp the present and to stimulate contemporary artistic production. This generated demand for a supple architecture embodying the unlimited and perpetual possibility of anything, anywhere, at any time. The concept of delimitation is therefore constantly and deliberately weakened in the Architectural Program: the notion of a room or gallery (salle or galerie) is replaced by the less determinate concept of space (espace).4 Although the necessary area requirements for certain primary functions are precisely indicated, the programme anxiously avoids any further formal or spatial specificity. While the museum section of the Architectural Program states the necessity for a series of galleries, facilitating a chronological exhibition scheme, it then explicitly refrains from determining the design of these galleries. The galleries need to be as flexible as possible in order to allow any possible mode of presentation.5 The interior of the Centre was imagined to surmount every spatial and, by extension, institutional division or demarcation by means of an architectural continuum, an agglomerate of spaces and surfaces. When the design of the architects Piano & Rogers was awarded the first prize in the competition, it was praised by the jury for having met the desire for a functional, flexible and polyvalent construction.6 The high-tech framework with its stack of large open platforms effectively evoked the institutional agenda of topicalization, democratization and demystification. The structure promised to allow both anticipation of and adaptation to the changing and unpredictable needs, means, and tastes of future users. This belief was further enhanced by the standard rhetoric of the architects, describing the building as a giant meccano set that would take a stand against the traditional static transparent or solid dolls house.7 In the Centre Pompidou, the marriage between architectural and institutional flexibility was to be fully attained. The successful evocation of this promising image can undoubtedly be traced back to the fascinating synthesis of different architectural idioms of flexibility that the building achieves, made evident by the three different metaphors that continually reappear in descriptions of both the institution and the architecture: the machine, the factory, and the supermarket. This diverging vocabulary represents the ambiguity of the Centre Pompidous strategies for architectural and institutional flexibility.

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Centre Pompidou is a dramatic example of the Late Modern idiom of isotropic sandwich space.8 The space between the vertically stacked platforms is, spatially as well as technically, equipotential and identical in every direction (except for differences in length). The building corresponds to the logic of a typology that Reyner Banham has aptly described as the serviced shed, but in reverse. It is a big shed inside out.9 All structural, architectural and mechanical elements, such as stairs, columns, pipes or ducts, have not been hidden in a shell around the interior as in Foster Associates Sainsbury Centre, another paradigm of isotropic space. They have been manifestly and clearly placed on the outside, to such an extent that the entire internal works of the Centre have been promoted to forming the faade of the building. Although this structural carcass reveals the infrastructure necessary to realize a flexible interior, it brings a metaphor to mind that, in a certain sense, belies it. Whereas the interior applies the premises of the isotropic factory hall, the eye-catching grid of the exterior, with its manycoloured ducts and escalators, creates the illusion that it is a machine. This is evident from the buildings nickname the Pompidou refinery coined after its extravagant ductwork.10 A refinery is exactly that type of factory where the space and the machinery coincide. The Centre Pompidou compensates for the structural emptiness and the apparent inactivity of a well-serviced shed with the image of a factory machine.11 To achieve this, Piano and Rogers design openly referred to an earlier paradigm of flexibility, the Fun Palace (1961-64) by the British architect Cedric Price.12 This project for an infinitely flexible, multiprogrammed, twenty-four-hour entertainment centre on the outskirts of London bearing such nicknames as the university of the street or the peoples workshop was intended to reconcile the possibilities of industrial building mechanisms with those of communication technology in order to arrive at an architectural machine that would be, as Reyner Banham lyrically stated, less a building than a 'facility', a 'service', a 'space-mobile', a 'giant toy'.13 Entirely in line with Prices Philosophy of Enabling, the non-deterministic structure of the Fun Palace embodied his ambition to anticipate every cultural use, to accommodate the unavoidable change and growth of the project and to adapt to all the wishes and needs of its users.14 The architecture distanced itself from classical servility, acting rather as a dynamic medium or interface for a farreaching emancipatory and participatory cultural consumption. The Fun Palace was not designed as a building, but as an infinitely manipulable infrastructure, or, as Price once put it laconically: its a kit of parts, not a building.15 However, the word factory is equally unsuitable. The Fun Palace makes no space for machinery, as a traditional factory does by means of a hall or shed; rather, the structure is the machinery. The Fun Palace possesses as befits a raw machine neither interior nor exterior. It creates a technological continuum between, around and within the infrastructure and its mobile elements. The classic role of the representational faade is exchanged for the image of a fully automatic, changeable machine. But the big difference with the Centre Pompidou is that the Fun Palace not only looks like a machine, but was above all conceived as a machine. The Fun Palace subverts the clichd modernist machine metaphor by merging its architecture with the machine apparatus. Its flexibility is therefore not of a spatial, but of a programmatic nature: it does not reside in an enclosed space, but in the presence of machinery that generates a programmatic condition

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of unlimited use. The structure of the Centre Pompidou, on the contrary, does circumscribe a space, situated on the vast and empty plateaus. It is rather reminiscent of one of the most important examples of the spatial flexibility paradigm: Ludwig Mies van der Rohes Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin (196268). In this glazed exhibition platform, Mies realized his idiom of a unitary, universal space, as had already appeared in the collages for the project Museum for a Small City (1942), the Concert Hall (1943), or the Chicago Convention Hall (1953-54).16 The spaciousness and versatility of the Berlin container, in their turn, recall the 19th-century tradition of large exhibition palaces made of glass and steel, and in particular John Paxtons famous Crystal Palace in London (1850-1851). The latter structure, erected for the first World Exhibition in 1851, also consisted of one large exhibition floor, covered by a modular steel structure of prefabricated elements, upon which the exhibition of objects (in this case, merchandise) could freely be pursued. Both the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Crystal Palace offer a similar promise of spatial flexibility, namely within the emptiness that they generate. Their shared ambition to create an open, amorphic interior, leads in both buildings to a space that is manifestly experienced as empty. Whereas the Fun Palace generates its flexibility through presence a well-serviced structure they both bathe in absence: an emptied-out space. In its capacity as a machine, the Fun Palace is never experienced as empty, but merely as disused, whereas the Neue Nationalgalerie and the Crystal Palace are never experienced as operating, but only as filled in. They both enclose an intrinsically modernist space, which by its unitary and vast character embodies the promise of flexibility, but does not actively encourage it. They deliver even literally, for the Neue Nationalgalerie an exhibition platform, but nothing beyond that. Their flexibility resides in the gesture of the space they liberate, and not in the optimisation of the possible forms of usage by means of any machinery whatsoever.17 The architecture of the Centre Pompidou intelligently succeeds in reconciling the significant differences between the three aforementioned paradigms of flexibility. At first, the faade offers the eager visitor-consumer the promise of dynamic cultural production. But the fun and flexibility evoked by the exterior machinery appears to be that of an empty and transparent box, much like a supermarket.18 The Centre Pompidou doubles the spatial emptiness of a factory with that of a supermarket, thereby acting simultaneously as a platonic loft and as a platonic bazaar.19 The promised high-technology interior appears to evaporate in stacked emptiness. The machine is as hollow as the Crystal Palace. Furthermore, the Centre Pompidou is not only an empty machine, but, to cite Baudrillard again, a machine to generate emptiness.20 The interior cannot uphold the promise that everything will be possible anywhere at any time, except by withdrawing itself and, to put it another way, by producing a void. This architectural vacuum however conceals an institutional hoax or phantom operation. To keep pace with contemporary cultural production, the institution is obliged to reinvent itself, day after day, exhibition after exhibition. The quasiabsence of architecture is the direct translation of the desire of the Centre Pompidou to be nothing, institutionally, more than a servile platform, a neutral

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framework. The phantasmagorical identification with cultural production is doubled ideologically with institutional self-denial. Yet the building itself crushes the idea of cultural productivity. The isotropic plain of the Centre Pompidou results in a negative and abstract promise of freedom. It is, as a journalist of the French newspaper Libration remarked at the opening, nothing but a tautological nightmare: everything is possible, hence nothing really efficiently.21 The phantasmagorical desire that everything must be possible anywhere at any time reveals its tautological character: nothing is never possible nowhere.22 In the Centre Pompidou the dream of unlimited potential is confronted with an indeterminate architecture an edifice of the zero degree. The building does not perform like a dynamic play thing but offers itself instead as a well-equipped but empty playground. The drive to maintain a situation of infinite possibilities implies that nothing is possible, unless one ceaselessly creates or constructs new conditions. The radical flexibility of the Centre is consequently nothing but a postponed task of creating new architecture, albeit a pseudo-architecture of moveable walls and partitions. The curators are stimulated to become exhibition architects: for every mise-en-vue they must conceive an adjusted mise-en-scne. The Centre Pompidous platforms act as a permanent construction site, a literal work-in-progress that continuously gives birth to ruins.23 Moreover, this constant building activity is doomed to remain arbitrary. Behind a faade that frames every activity as a form of unlimited productivity, and within an exterior that provides every creative act with a suitable decor, all actual creativity is experienced as a gratuitous game, ludicrous theatre. No wonder that the Centre Pompidou is frequently branded as the archetype and supreme example of everything that a museum should not be.24 As Kenneth Frampton once stated, it simply delivers too much flexibility.25 This paradoxical assertion indicates the ambiguous role that the notion of flexibility plays generally in museum discourse. The Centre, in particular, provides the clearest proof that flexibility does not fulfil the museums desire for a topical role, but instead reveals its unfeasibility. As Reyner Banham rightly remarked, the institution came eye to eye with a building that had taken this question more than seriously, and elliptically handed it back.26

Temporary Contemporary (1983)

I think Beaubourg's a mess. Flexible space works sometimes at the Temporary Contemporary it's absolutely sensational. Most of the artists I know love that space. Alex Katz27

Although the programme of the museum as a site of cultural and artistic production remains very popular, it has more recently become subject to a completely different architectural translation. Rather than erecting purpose-built, factory-like buildings, thought of as machines-to-exhibit-art-works-in, it is in vogue to convert former factories into museums of contemporary art.28 One of the earliest and probably most influential examples of this architectural shift of museums from built to reconverted factories is the Temporary Contemporary in Los Angeles (1983), an abandoned warehouse that Frank Gehry reconverted into an exhibition space. Gehry, whose fame would later escalate with such

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architectural extravaganza in museums as the Guggenheim Bilbao, kept his interventions here to a minimum. My job, as he put it, was not to screw it up.29 He simply joined the two separate warehouses, cleaned them up, and introduced the necessary spatial, functional and technical facilities and museum amenities. The only architectural surplus he added was a canopy of steel and chain at the entrance.

Figure 3: Frank Gehry , Temporary Contemporary, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1984. Source: Douglas Davis, The Museum Transformed. Design and Culture in the Post-Pompidou Age, New York: Abbeville Press, 1990, p 147.

When the Temporary Contemporary (or TC as it is more commonly known) opened to the public in November 1983, it was a huge and instant success. John Russel praised it in The New York Times as a prince among spaces, while Pilar Viladas in Progressive Architecture labelled the building as [a] world class museum [that] challenges our notions of how best to house contemporary art. 30 As much post-war art was created in lofts, many works were believed to be encoded with a sense of these spaces, leading Joseph Giovannini to state in Artforum that many pieces in the inaugural exhibition seemed simply to be returning to their birth space.31 The most remarkable comments, though, related to the flexibility of the space. The fact that Gehry did not divide the space, but rather simply installed a system of moveable white walls, was highly appreciated. According to art critic William Wilson, the TC seemed to have it all: a copious and highly flexible space, impressive enough to enhance anything that goes in it. However, he mostly appreciated the picturesque aura of do-itourselves Post-Modernist recycling.32 It somehow restored the credibility of the

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isotropic promise of flexibility. The space not only possessed a flexible infrastructure, it succeeded in making that flexibility tangible through its raw and unfinished character or patina. Its unpretentious and improvisatory outlook distinguished it from other architectural icons of flexibility. The building embodied the promise of untamed productivity purely by evoking it. A comment in the magazine Baumeister is exemplary in this respect. On the one hand, the magazine remarked upon a strange similarity between the interior of the hall of the Temporary Contemporary and that of Mies Neue Nationalgalerie, identifying that both buildings share a vast space and a flexible system of exhibition architecture. On the other hand, Baumeisters correspondent remarked that the architecture of both suggests a totally different approach: there it is an imposing artefact, here just a raw structure, there it may hinder such exhibitions, here it invites to continue building.33 Merely the fact that the space of the Neue Nationalgalerie has been designed seems to undermine its flexibility claim. The spatial organization is the same, only the look makes the difference: the conscious design of an architect on the one hand, the casual do-it-yourself outlook of a loft on the other. The space of Temporary Contemporary may be isotropic, but it is not finished. The raw character of the space extends the promise that anything is possible anywhere at any time to anything stays possible anywhere at any time. To achieve flexibility, the shed no longer needs to be well-serviced, but undecorated, to the extent that it looks like a construction site or a building in progress.34 The specificity of TC was further played out once more when Arata Isozakis new Museum of Contemporary Art on Bunker Hill opened in 1986. Isozakis building is fundamentally different: thought of and designed as a museum. The exterior obviously carries the architects signature; the interior evokes noble serenity and calm grandeur. Again, according to Giovanni, the difference is purely a matter of aura, a direct result of the degree of architectural design: Isozakis MOCA is a highly finished building; Gehrys Temporary Contemporary is raw.35 Yet this difference was immediately played out by the Museum of Contemporary Art on an institutional level. The distinct character gave way to a bi-partite program.36 In the inaugural exhibition of the museums collection, entitled Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 19451986, artworks made between 1945 and 1965 were presented in the spaces of Isozakis building, while later works were accommodated in Gehrys warehouse. Abstract Expressionist, Colorfield and Minimalist Painters were hung in MOCA on Bunker Hill, while more recent works, starting with Minimalism and Pop Art, were installed in the TC a division that Peter Plagens rather jokingly characterized as the historic, Clean Gene stuff in Isozakis edifice and the contemporary floorscratchers down at the TC. 37 Elaborating on the divergence between the two spaces, the museum commissioned site-specific works by artists Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Richard Fleischner, Chris Burden and Richard Serra, obviously for the TC. In relation to Isozakis building, it was experienced as the ideal museum facility for the exhibition of environmentally-scaled situational works.38 Giovannini even went further, as he believed that artists could get carte blanche in the Temporary Contemporary, while certain interventions were simply not done in Isozakis MOCA: It would be difficult

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to see the Serra that so confidently occupies Gehrys space chopped into Isozakis maple floors one wouldnt have the heart to break the buildings serenity with such a violent gesture. Gehrys space can take it.39 The absence of architectural design combined with the spacious and raw character of the building result in an inspirational context: it just invites artists to mess about. 40 What makes the Temporary Contemporary unique is, above all, its metaphorical flexibility. It is not the spatial organization but the informal identity that makes the museum into a workspace.41 The ad-hoc character and off-site location makes it a very popular venue for artists. As Peter Plagens put it in Art in America , it was a space where Chris Burden, Vito Acconci, Paul McCarthy and Barbara Smith could have a post-studio jamboree on the same weekend. 42 This belief is however marked by a severe critical deficit, as became evident in the site-specific work Exposing the Foundations of the Museum that Burden realized for the 1986 exhibition in the TC. Burden did not intervene in the new museum on Bunker Hill, but dug into the concrete floor of the existing warehouse. He thus did not expose the foundations of the museum but dug up the floor of the wing in which the museum allows itself to be alternative, where so-called subversive interventions are simply part of the program. It is simply unthinkable that Burden would have touched the genuine museum, or that wing where MOCA profiles itself architecturally and institutionally as a museum. His freedom is the result of a fallacious operation. An architecture that is supposed to be alternative by nature is used by the MOCA Los Angeles as a simulacrum of productivity and freedom, underwritten by a belief that an alternative packaging guarantees an alternative programme.

Tate Modern (2000)

What kind of new museum for the 21st century can be considered serious architecture if it is just an adaptation of an old power station, of another former industrial space as a place for the display of art? Cynthia C. Davidson 43

With Tate Modern in London one of the major players in the international league of museums of modern and contemporary art the trend of reconverting former factories into museums undeniably reaches its institutional and architectural climax. For this new wing for modern and contemporary art of the Tate Gallery, the architects in the architectural competition were no longer asked to develop an operational form for the institutional programme to design a museum-as-culture-plant from scratch but rather to transform a former factory, the Bankside Power Station, into a museum.44 The main argument for this choice was based upon the outcome of a questionnaire sent to artists worldwide as the project was being drawn up.45 Asked which spaces they preferred to exhibit in, most favoured day-lit conversions of existing buildings, where architectural intervention was minimal. Very few cited recent purpose-built museums, except as models of what to avoid. It is therefore surprising that the section on The Display Spaces in the Tate Modern Competition Brief does not allude to the (vast) industrial structure of the Power Station. The design of galleries is presented as the elaboration of new and autonomous entities.46 Tate Modern must have rooms of neither infinite flexibility nor identical neutrality. The goal

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is to create elegant, well-proportioned and varied rooms with substantial walls rather than temporary screens. Paradoxically, the industrial interior is continuously advanced as the most important feature of the project in the many interviews and essays that announced the building campaign. In a rather demystifying interview by Cynthia Davidson of the magazine ANY, Director Sir Nicholas Serota is captured in quite a contradictory discourse. Asked what ideas he had on what the museum building had to be, he postulates that they were not looking for an architect that would give them what is commonly regarded as a neutral solution. They were looking rather for strong architecture, for spaces that are not neutral white cubes but that have identity.47 The paradigm of neutrality, which Serota identifies with the white cube, has too often led to a schizophrenic architecture, where the architectural pyrotechnics of the exterior and the entrance hall are opposed to sterile and anonymous exhibition spaces. Simultaneously, Serota disapproves of the flexible box. The highly equipped volume with moveable partitions results, in his estimation, in a very transient, temporary feeling which does not allow art to sit comfortably.48 A flexible exhibition space risks being ultimately as characterless as a white cube. While Serota finds the precarious combination between identity and aloofness, or variety and standardization, difficult to achieve in an entirely new building, he considers it characteristic for converted industrial spaces, since they offer an alternative to each of the three common presentational models: the white cube, the flexible container and the architecturally expressive room. An industrial space is neutral, but not as aseptic as a white cube; it is flexible, but it avoids the volatility of a flexible box; it has identity, but does not lose itself in architectural caprices. An industrial building has identity and history and therefore forces the architect to assume a respectful attitude. To argue this further, Serota cites the outcome of the questionnaire, stating that [w]e know from the experience of the last 20 years that some of the best installations of contemporary art have been made in converted warehouse buildings.49 While initially speaking about museum space in terms of a showcase spaces in which we want to focus on the objects he suddenly switches to the museum as a workplace as artists have responded very positively to working with these former industrial spaces. 50 When Davidson asks if the typology of the industrial space is parallel to work thats being developed since the 1960s, he immediately agrees.51 As the museum needs to be an instrument that can be played by artists, the building needs to offer a context in which the artists like to move in and get to work.52 And for this, new buildings do not suffice, because they do not have patina. Existing buildings posses a gloss of the past and an aura that new flexible, neutral as well as gaudy museums lack. With an almost cynical ease, Serota reads the artists preference for existing rather than new architecture from the vantage point of a romantic fantasy of an alternative, raw and mysterious site: I think that art and artists are deeply involved with memory, and they sometimes have a tough time moving into a brand-new house and making it sufficiently dirty. There is sufficient patina on this building for the art to be comfortable rather than simply on show.53 Serota wants us to believe that the aura of the artistic workspace or studio, inextricably bound to the dirty character of the loft, grants every artwork a surplus of authenticity. Staging an artwork in a loft-like space always surmounts the condition of pure presentation. Solely by means of

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grubby architecture, as suggests Serota, the art can feel comfortable, really at home in the museum. Unrefined, and preferably industrial architecture is invoked to revive or reanimate the authentic moment of production and, ultimately, to undo the displacement inherent to every exhibition. The architects vanishing from the reconversion of industrial spaces into museums however reveals another form of institutional self-denial. By recovering and mimicking those spaces in which art is believed to feel at home, the museum tries to veil the fact that it cannot programme or stage a natural biotope for artistic production, since it inevitably intervenes. The loft or industrial space in general serves as the prototype of what Sharon Zukin has called an avant-garde mise en scne or dcor.54 It delivers the perfect setting to reroot artistic production within the walls of the museum. Contrary to Centre Pompidou, the architecture of Tate Modern is no longer required to deliver a framework for the institutional programme of the museum as a site of production or as a culture-plant. Rather, the architecture has to restyle the museum after the model of those spaces regarded as paradigmatic and, above all, vernacular for the artistic production of recent decades.

Figure 4: Herzog & De Meuron, Tate Modern, London, 2000, photo Jean-Pierre Le Blanc

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Alternative Spaces
The manifold presence and the seemingly heroic activities of artists in industrial spaces the SoHo lofts of New York during the sixties and seventies being undoubtedly the most notorious examples have indeed imbued them with an unmistakable aura of authenticity. Art belongs there.55 Besides this so-called natural bond with postwar art, industrial or loft-like spaces also symbolize the artistic urge to break out of the institutional frame. At the end of the 1960s and the early 70s, SoHo was also the cradle of the Alternative Spaces Movement, a movement to which the ode to the loft ceaselessly refers.56 Spaces such as 112 Greene Street Workshop, 98 Greene Street, 10 Bleecker Street, or the different buildings and urban sites that the Institute for Art and Urban Resources occupied, have undoubtedly generated and enforced both the adventurous and romantic image and reputation of the loft as the paragon of alternative space. Consequently, the popularity of industrial or loft-like spaces originates in the envy of the museum of these manifold artistic adventures on extra-muros or offcircuit locations. This envy runs through the Tate Modern Competition Brief as the major motivation for reconversion. It acknowledges that some of the most significant presentations of new art have taken place outside the traditional gallery, and thus at all costs wants to align the museum with these spatial alternatives or elsewhere. Yet it directly equates the policy of unconventional or disconcerting exhibitions with spatial alterity: In creating a new museum at the end of the twentieth century we have the ambition to provide an institution in which the present can be set against the past in a manner that sometimes allows for dislocation and even disruption. It will sometimes involve the presentation of art in raw spaces. 57 A historical outline of the use of space whether industrial or other in New York of the 1960s and 70s, and within the Alternative Spaces Movement in particular, reveals that the concept of alternative space goes far beyond spatial roughness or rawness. Alternative spaces were predicated by artists attempts to develop, in correspondence with their artistic production, individually conceived frames or formats of public appearance or publicness. It was no longer the classical, Cartesian exhibition space for which the alternative spaces movement sought to deliver an alternative. The significance of the alternative spaces deserves assessment within a broader framework of artists' publications, community projects and other forms of alternative public intervention.58 They offered a public stage fundamentally lacking for those practices that, because of their ephemeral, performative, processional or site-specific nature, no longer occupied traditional art spaces, but continuously operated somewhere else. They consisted of lofts, urban spaces, radio broadcasts and books.59 The focal point was the artistic activity or the creative process that called time and again for a proper format in which to be exposed, to be made public: in other words, to get the work done, presented and seen or experienced. According to Gordon MattaClark, one of the key figures of the movement, the most important result of the activities in the lofts and the urban territory of SoHo was spatial ingenuity: If you're given the freedom of developing the kind of place that you want, then I think that that is the most interesting formula that has come out of the so-called

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SoHo, New York art ghetto environment, is really people struggling to invent their own spaces. 60 The Alternative Spaces Movement comprised a fundamental questioning on a phenomenological, institutional and discursive level of the traditional art framework. Artists acknowledged the importance and the unavoidability of that frame and came to understand that each particular frame is different, even makes or produces a difference. And it is precisely within this growing consciousness that the loft finds its artistic, architectural and, most of all, its theoretical significance as a biotope for the avant-garde of the sixties and seventies. Lofts did not deliver a quasi-generic context, but a very specific environment in which art could no longer blindly count on its context to gratify its status as art. As Jene Highstein remarked about the space of 10 Bleecker Street, every artwork had to be recognized in its own moment of presentation to mark, by itself, its own difference from the presentational frame or context. 61 The context no longer functioned as an empty or servile platform, but as an obstinate frame. One after another, these spaces offered art the possibility of simultaneously connecting with the world and differing from it; they were sites where the art itself could perform its difference with the world.62

An Empty Image of Production

Despite all the rhetoric, Tate Modern has missed out on the theoretical and phenomenological potential of the artistic strategy of reconversion. While the interest of artists in industrial or other existing spaces precisely resulted from their not being made for the art, from not being neutral at all, Serota and his colleagues ultimately opted for an art-friendly combination of character and neutrality, for discreet spaces in which the art would come to the fore.63 In Tate Modern the structural spatial confrontation is replaced with a peaceful and tailormade encounter between space and art. Ironically this happens, as Serota in the end needed to admit, in completely new, architect-designed exhibition spaces. 64 Neither the industrial character nor the beloved patina of the industrial structure surfaces in the exhibition spaces. They are, one after the other, refined white cubes. Yet, to nonetheless bring to mind the industrial past of the building, Serota asked the architects to invoke the rigour and industrial character of Giles Gilbert Scotts building.65 They opted for a raw finishing of the floor and a cast-iron grille that was supposed to be a response to the fact that this was originally an industrial building. 66 The paradigm of production is nothing more than a simulacrum that meets the visitor on the exterior and in the monumental entrance hall. The emptiness of that hall delivers nothing but an overwhelming spatial experience; its huge empty space is, as Briony Fer rightly remarks, completely useless, literally as well as metaphorically: its just a space for being in.67 The promise of artistic production resides merely in the iconic brick shell of the former factory. The factory halls raw character and its simulated version in the exhibition spaces are nothing more than an abstract sign, an empty promise of a productivity unfulfilled. After all, it may not be so improper that Tate Modern has appropriated a relict of the post-industrial era. As a museum, it truly captures an era in which production is reduced to an empty and paralysed image.

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Notes
1

Jean Baudrillard, L'effet Beaubourg. Implosion et dissuasion, Paris: ditions Galile, 1977, p 18. 2 Pontus Hulten, The New Yorker (29 April 1974): 29. 3 The architectural programme (Programme Architectural, in Centre du Plateau Beaubourg Paris. Concours international d'ides un degr, Paris: Le Ministre des Affires Culturelles de la Rpublique Franaise, 1970-71) is, relative to other architectural competitions for museums (eg Tate Modern), a very elaborate document. It was composed under the guidance of Franois Lombard, a young architect-engineer. For a description of the function of the (architectural) programme in the conception of the Centre Pompidou, see Claude Mollard, The Georges Pompidou National Center for Art and Culture, Paris, Museum (UNESCO), 31, 2 (1979): 77-87. For a severe critique on the technocratic nature of that programme, see the article by the Cultural Affairs Committee of the Parti Socialist Unifi, Beaubourg: the containing of culture in France, Studio International, 194, 988 (1979): 2736. For an extensive analysis of the architectural competition, see Nathan Silver, The Making of Beaubourg: A Building Biography of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1994, pp 19-56. 4 Programme Architectural, pp 10-11. 5 Programme Architectural, p 17. 6 Concours international pour la ralisation du Centre Beaubourg. Rapport du Jury, Paris: tablissement Public du Centre Beaubourg, 1971, pp 95-96: tout est fait pour y attirer, y stimuler, y retenir la vie. 7 Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, Centre Georges Pompidou. Piano & Rogers: A Statement, Architectural Design, 47, 2 (1977): 90. 8 Charles Jencks and William Chaitkin, Current Architecture, London: Academy Editions, 1982, p 128. The notion of isotropy originates from material sciences and refers to the even distribution of material characteristics. It is therefore appropriate for the manner in which the intrinsic programmatic possibilities of a machine a three-dimensional organism are transformed into a uniformly distributed material characteristic of a building a twodimensional layer or skin. 9 Sutherland Lyall, The State of British Architecture, London: Architectural Press, 1980, p 128. 10 The Cultural Affairs Committee of the Parti Socialiste Unifi, Beaubourg: the containing of culture in France, p 31; Donald Judd, On Installation, in A A Bronson and Peggy Gale (eds), Museums by Artists, Toronto: Art Metropole, 1983, p 198. Reyner Banham even uses the nickname Pompidolium as the title for his article in Architectural Review, 963 (May 1977): 277: Not for nothing does local humour call it the Pompidolium it does look like an oil refinery. 11 The combined image of a factory and a machine is nothing but a pose, see: Benjamin Buchloh, Daniel Burens Les Couleurs/Les Formes, in NeoAvantgarde and Culture Industry. Essays on European and American Art from 1955 to 1975, Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2000, p 124. This

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double metaphor for an institution of cultural production is encouraged by Renzo Piano. In an interview with Antoin Picon (Le Centre Pompidou: du btiment-jouet au monument. Entretien avec Renzo Piano et Richard Rogers, in Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers (eds), Du Plateau Beaubourg au Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris: Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1987, p 16) he first characterizes the building as une machine tout faire, and then states that the metaphor of the factory does not bother him either: De toutes les ralisations contemporaines, lusine est peut-tre lun des rares espaces sans concessions, o lon ne fait ce qui est absolument ncessaire. De plus, le Centre Pompidou a t conu dans lide de produire de la culture, et de ne pas se contenter de la prsenter. 12 Piano and Rogers openly refer to the Fun Palace as an inspiration, see Picon, Le Centre Pompidou, p 15. 13 Reyner Banham, Megastructures, Urban Futures of the Recent of Past, London and New York: Thames & Hudson, Harper & Row, 1977, p 85. 14 Royston Landau, A Philosophy of Enabling: The Work of Cedric Price, AA Files, 8 (January 1985): 3-7. 15 Cedric Price, as cited in Mary Louise Lobsinger, Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price's Fun Palace, in Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Rjean Legault (eds), Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Montral and Cambridge: Canadian Centre for Architecture and MIT Press, 2000, p 121. 16 An early example of Miess idiom of universal space by means of large-span structures is already present in his design for the German Pavilion for the 1934 International Exhibition in Brussels. Other projects that can be read as precursors of the Neue Nationalgalerie are, among others, the Bacardi Building in Santiago Cuba (1957) and the Georg-Schfer-Museum in Schweinfurt (1960), see Werner Blaser, Mies van der Rohe. The Art of Structure / Die Kunst der Struktur, Basel, Boston and Berlin: Birkhuser, 1993, pp 190-219. 17 And yet, strangely enough, both the Crystal Palace and the Neue Nationalgalerie are named within the typological analysis of museum architecture as machines exposer, see: Helen Searing, Hypothesis on the development of the typology of the museum, Lotus International, 55 (1987): 121. 18 Banham, Megastructures, p 211. 19 The Centre Pompidou is able to join the aura of the factory space to that of a World Exhibition pavilion. For a description of the Centre Pompidou as platonic loft, see: Rem Koolhaas, Bigness or the problem of the large, in Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau (eds), S, M, L, XL, Rotterdam: 010, 1995, pp 504-505. For a description of the pavilions of the World Exhibitions as platonic bazaars, see Lieven De Cauter, Archeologie van de kick, Amsterdam and Leuven: De Balie and Halewijck, 1995, p 128. 20 Baudrillard, L'effet Beaubourg, p 18. 21 Jean-Franois Foget, Lusine culturelle Beaubourg, Libration (31 January, 1977): On peut tout y faire. Donc rien de vraiment efficace. 22 Baudrillard, Leffet Beaubourg, p 18: Nul ny peut rien.

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23

In this respect, the building activities within Centre Pompidou would befit the concept of ruins in reverse or buildings [that] don't fall into ruin after they are built, but rise into ruin before they are built of the American artist Robert Smithson, see Robert Smithson, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey (1967), in Nancy Holt (ed), The Writings of Robert Smithson. Essays with Illustrations, New York: New York University Press, 1979, p 54. 24 Robert Hughes, as cited in Suzanne Stephens (ed), Building the New Museum, New York and Princeton: The Architectural League of New York and Princeton Architectural Press, 1986, p 31. 25 Trans. [personal] from Kenneth Frampton, Moderne Architectuur. Een kritische geschiedenis, Nijmegen: Sun, 1988, p 351. 26 Banham, The Pompidolium, p 278. 27 Alex Katz, as cited in Stephens (ed), Building the New Museum, p 30. 28 Already in 1994, on the opening of the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, Helen Searing (The Brillo Box in the Warehouse: Museums of Contemporary Art and Industrial Conversions, in Fannia Weingartner (ed), The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh, New York and Stuttgart: Andy Warhol Museum, DAP and Cantz, 1994, p 39) labelled this development the hottest trend in museum design. 29 Frank Gehry, as cited in Pilar Viladas, The Undecorated Shed, in Progressive Architecture, 3 (March 1984): 82. Describing his interventions in an interview (The Museum as Sculpture. Interview with Frank O. Gehry on the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in Gerhard Mack (ed), Art Museums into the 21st Century, Basel: Birkhuser, 1999, p 24). Gehry said: I did not do anything there. I swept the floor. 30 John Russel, The New York Times (12 December 1983). 31 Joseph Giovannini, On Architecture, Artforum , 17, 6 (February 1987): 6. 32 William Wilson, Temporary Contemporary: Its Time is Now, Los Angeles Times (20 November 1983). 33 MoCA. Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, Baumeister; 81, 8 (August 1984): 46: Dort is sie imponierende Baukunst, hier Rohbau, dort ist sie fr solche Ausstellungen oft hemmend, hier einladend zum Weiterbauen. 34 The German word Rohbau or the Dutch word ruwbouw would suit best here, as they, in describing a construction site, both combine the words rough and building. 35 Giovannini, On Architecture, p 6. 36 In an interview with Reesa Greenberg (The Los Angeles MOCA: From temporary to permanent and vice-versa. Interview with Richard Koshalek, Parachute, 46 (1987), p 37) Richard Koshalek, director of the MOCA in 1986, describes both buildings as a different dcor. Both thus ask for an appropriate scenario: The Isozaki building was designed to be a museum, its much more formal. Its got a more predictable circulation pattern to the galleries. The galleries are clean, well-lighted spaces like Hemingway would say, and its got a very sophisticated skylight system. So theyre very different buildings. We felt we wrote a very good script for the Temporary Contemporary. We looked at it more like an artists studio, that we could actually do projects that are large scale installations, that relate to the

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building and the spaces of the building. This building is much more classical in presentation and what were going to have to do here is write as good a script as we wrote for the Temporary Contemporary. 37 Peter Plagens, Los Angeles: Two for the Show, Art in America, 75, 3 (May 1987): 157. 38 Kate Linker and Howard Singerman (eds), Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945-1986, Los Angeles and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art and Abbeville Press, 1986, p 3. 39 Giovannini, On Architecture, p 6. It is quite remarkable that in the literature, both spaces are always coined by the name of the architect. This is exemplary for a trend that Reesa Greenberg has aptly described as a possessive nomenclature. (See Greenberg, The Exhibited Redistributed. A Case for Reassessing Space, in Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p 362.) Museums are always personalized and attached to the name of the designing architect, even if the signature, like in Gehrys Temporary Contemporary, is barely apparent. 40 When Michael Heizer was invited in 1984 to do an installation in the TC as part of the series In Context, he was literally encouraged by Koshalek to go ahead. See Michael Heizer, as cited in Robin Green, The Temporary Contemporary Museum, American Arts (July 1984): 32: Its an incredible building. When Koshalek first talked to me about this show, he said, I want something big. Do you know how unusual this is? No one wants anything big. Who else does shows like this anywhere in the United States? 41 According to Viladas (The Undecorated Shed, p 81), Gehry realized that the buildings, which already looked much like many artists studios, jangled with the same raw energy marking the art the museum was meant to show. Gehry on the other hand (Frank Gehry, as cited in Patricia Failing, MOCA: Los Angeles Gets its Long-awaited Museum of Contemporary Art - or at Least a Temporary Contemporary, in ARTnews, 82 (October 1983): 107) stated that, as he recognized that the structure would function as a showcase for the work of contemporary artists, his approach stemmed from the arrangement of the biotope of contemporary artistic production: Some architects might have been inclined to redo the space I was inclined not to. I guess my inspiration for this is the artists themselves, who, when they buy or rent old commercial spaces, just clean them up and put their work in and the places are beautiful. So Ive taken my cue from this and tried not to DEsign it. 42 Peter Plagens, Exemplary Contemporary, Art in America, 72, 3 (March 1984): 133. 43 Cynthia C Davidson and Luis Fernndez-Galiano, Exquisite Corpse. New York / Madrid, ANY, 13 (1996): 42. 44 The referential frame employed by the Competition Brief (Tate Gallery of Modern Art. Competition to Select an Architect, London: Tate Gallery of Modern Art, 1994, p 2) to underpin the reuse of the power station is, however, rather limited. According to the Tate Modern, there are three important models for the museum of modern art in the twentieth century,

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two of which are labelled as essentially urban: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, established in 1929 and since the 1930s in its present location in a series of quasi-domestic artificially lit rooms, and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, conceived in the late 60s, as open floors of space, each infinitely adaptable to the new technologies and new uses over time. The third model, epitomized by both the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek and the Rijksmuseum Krller-Mller, is by contrast rural, humanist and naturally-lit. Given the location on Bankside, the challenge was to create a new urban model, on the scale of, but nonetheless distinct from the two dominant models. Kitty Scott (From Palaces to Powerhouses: The Conversion of Bankside Power Station and the Production of the New Tate Gallery of Modern Art, MA, Visual Arts Administration, Royal College of Art, 1995) correctly argues that Tate Modern launches a very subtle attack on purpose-built museums. By keeping the explanation about and the examples of workable and successful new museums very short, it immediately seeks to validate its decision to convert the Bankside Power Station. As such it fails to recognize the fact that there are, at least a few, interesting examples of purpose-built museums. 45 Although the decision to use the Bankside building had already been taken, the Tate eagerly grasped at the results of the questionnaire not only to legitimate the choice of an existing building, but also to underpin the scheme ideologically. See Nicholas Serota, as cited in Daniel Birnbaum, Tate Show. Daniel Birnbaum on Tate Modern, Artforum , 38, 8 (April 2000): 39. 46 This is understandable, as the scale of the Bankside Power Station does not correspond at all with the scale of an exhibition space. The available space is nothing more than a large-scale steel skeleton enveloped by a brick skin. Although Serota acknowledges in Casabella (The New Tate Gallery of Modern Art, Casabella, 62, 661 (1998): 13-19) that while the Bankside project [at first sight] reads as a conversion of an industrial building [and that] examination reveals that the opportunity offered by Giles Gilbert Scotts skeletal structure clad with brick skin is one of transformation rather than conversion, he nevertheless keeps on stressing in an interview with Cynthia Davidson (An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, ANY, 13 (1996): 35) the fact that the industrial character of the building needs to be taken in account in the design: I certainly wanted an architect who would respond to the existence of the power station and who would take on some of its history and weave that some way or another into his or her construct about the building rather than simply regard it as an empty box of bricks that could just be filled up.Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 35. 47 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 39. 48 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 48. 49 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 43. 50 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 44. 51 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 45. 52 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, p 48. 53 Davidson, An interview with Nicholas Serota and Richard Burdett, pp 45-46.

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54

Sharon Zukin, Loft living. Culture and Capital in Urban Change, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982, p 2. 55 See eg Hal Foster (Illuminated Structure, Embodied Space, in Richard Gluckman (ed), Space Framed: Richard Gluckman Architect, New York: Monacelli Press, 2000, p 184) who reasons that, since much art, from Minimalism onwards, has been produced in industrial spaces, it is fitting to exhibit it there as well. The presence of artists in the lofts of SoHo is often used as a reference. For an overview of the transformation of SoHo from a derelict industrial district to an artistic Bohemia and centre of the post-war art world, see eg Special SoHo Section, New York Magazine (20 May 1974): 52-78; Ren Block (ed), New York - Downtown Manhattan: SoHo, Berlin: Akademie der Knste and Berliner Festwochen, 1976; Jim Stratton, Pioneering in the Urban Wilderness, New York: Urizen Books, 1977; Alanna Siegfried and Helene Zucker Seeman, SoHo: A Guide, New York: Neal-Schuman, 1978; Alexandra Anderson and B J Archer, Anderson & Archer's SoHo: The Essential Guide to Art and Life in Lower Manhattan, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979; Charles R Simpson, SoHo: The Artist in the City, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981; and James R Hudson, The Unanticipated City: Loft Conversions in Lower Manhattan, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. 56 For a good survey of the Alternative Spaces Movement, see e.g. Julie Ault (ed), Alternative Art, New York, 1965-1985: A Cultural Politics Book for the Social Text Collective, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002; Jacki Apple and Mary Delahoyd (eds), Alternatives in Retrospect. An Historical Overview 1969-1975, New York: The New Museum, 1981; Kay Larson, Rooms with a Point of View, ARTnews, 76, 8 (October 1977): 3238. 57 Tate Gallery of Modern Art. Competition to Select an Architect, pp 2-3. 58 Sandy Nairne, The Institutionalization of Dissent, in Greenberg, Ferguson and Nairne (eds), Thinking About Exhibitions, p 388. 59 Ranging from the experimental workshops, such as 112 and 98 Greene Street, the discovery and occupation of the public space of the street as a platform in the Streetworks events, the broadcasting of artists videos and performances on SoHo Television or Manhattan Cable TV by organisations as The Kitchen , Global Village or Jonas Mekas Anthology Film Archives, to the cataloguing and distribution of artists books by Martha Wilson and her Franklin Furnace Archives, Inc., each of these spaces offered a platform on which the most variant art forms could either develop or find their own parameters of publicity. For a description of the activities of organisations like The Kitchen, Global Village and Anthology Film Archives see eg Phil Patton, Other Voices, Other Rooms: The Rise of the Alternative Space, Art in America , 65, 4 (July-August 1977): 80-89; Josephine Gear, Some Alternative Spaces in New York and Los Angeles, Studio International, 195, 990 (1980): 6368; Books play an important role in the development of the Alternative Spaces Movement. For an analysis and an overview of the book as alternative space, see eg Kate Linker, The Artist's Book as an Alternative Space, Studio International, 195, 990 (1980): 75-79; Martha Wilson, Artist's Books

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As Alternative Spaces, in The New Artspace, Los Angeles: Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, 1978, pp 35-37. 60 Judith Russi Kirshner, Interview with Gordon Matta-Clark (1978), in Corinne Diserens (ed), Gordon Matta-Clark, Valencia: IVAM Centre Julio Gonzalez, 1992, p 393. 61 Jene Highstein, as cited in Apple and Delahoyd (eds), Alternatives in Retrospect, p 43: It was a situation where the exhibition space itself was so violent that you had real competition between the work and the environment. To try to put something that was contemplative in that space was a real challenge. That was generally the nature of the alternative space context. Highstein made a similar statement about the space of 112 Greene Street (ibidem, p. 37): It was the funkiest place in the world so beautiful and impossible at the same time. The floor was terrible, but the space itself was so strong that whatever went on there had to be at least that strong to work. Some very powerful things happened in that space. 62 In the catalogue of the exhibition Rooms in PS 1, Alanna Heiss (Rooms PS 1, New York: The Institute for Art & Urban Resources Inc, 1976, p 3) remarks that there was no way to escape the architecture of the dilapidated school that the institution had just occupied: all had to deal with the space instead of ignoring it; all had to acknowledge it instead of avoiding it. 63 Conversation. Nicholas Serota, Jacques Herzog, Rowan Moore, in Rowan Moore and Raymund Ryan (eds), Building Tate Modern. Herzog & De Meuron transforming Giles Gilbert Scott, London: Tate Gallery, 2000, p 42. The existing envelope however by default failed to offer a scale related to that of the exhibition spaces, thereby short-circuiting the literal possibility of reconversion. 64 Conversation, p 55. 65 Conversation, p 43. 66 Conversation, p 43. 67 Briony Fer, Antony Hudek, et al., Round Table: Tate Modern, October, 98 (Fall 2001), p 16. In so doing, the reconversion concept is specifically concentrated on the very space in which the representational aspect and spectacular nature of the architecture of many new museums is invariably at its best. Nonetheless, the winning scheme of the Swiss architects Herzog and De Meuron gives the illusion that it has done something with the existing construction. The bay next to the entrance hall has been neatly filled up right up to the ridge with a stacking of floors with a pattern of traditional exhibition rooms, in this way disguising the enveloping character of the structure. The new steel frame, supporting the whole structure, is situated exactly behind the existing steel columns. Only the tall windows recall the existing structure, but then in such a way that they seem to be part of the new architecture. It is not clear where the new architecture starts, where the existing building ends, or where the two meet; Herzog and de Meuron blend them together almost seamlessly.

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