about "Zooming into Focus"
by Hans Ulrich Obrist 2002

In trying to imagine the future of the museum we cannot ignore the past history of museums and exhibition practices except at great peril. For museums have always been paradoxical things: at once solid, immobile, historically rooted, preoccupied with the seemingly moribund acts of collection and preservation, and in the best of circumstances (as a handful of visionary curators and museum directors have shown us over the decades), potential laboratories for experimentation, bastions for reflection and change, loci of dynamic memory, and vital archives for the future. Looking closely at the paradoxes of this institution - which also means countering the prevalent amnesia about museum and exhibition history - allows us to reconnect the museum's possible futures to its past at the threshold of the present.
My own interest in art and artists has developed hand in hand with an interest in the experimental history of museums. I often mention Alexander Dorner, and I think his example bears repeating - and repeating again - not only because his writing inspired my own interest in art and exhibitions, but because Dorner's work at Hannover Museum in the 1920s suggests that from the very beginning, museums of modern and contemporary art (they did not bear that name then, but the Hannover Museum did already show the work of living artists) were places where radical experimentation was possible, even central. Dorner invented radical display features for the museum, collaborated with artists such as El Lissitzky and Malevich on exhibition rooms, and also developed extremely innovative models for mobile exhibitions and exhibitions of facsimiles. The fact that he envisioned the museum as a place where artists intervened and re-thought the displays was radical for its time. He defined the museum in terms of the process possible within it; he saw it as laboratory, as a "Kraftwerk," and emphasized in his writings The Way Beyond Art that he intended to dynamize the traditionally static museum and to transform the supposedly "neutral" white cube in order to help construct a more heterogeneous space.
Collaboration was one of the things Dorner already understood as vital to the museum decades ago. "We cannot," as he wrote in The Way Beyond Art, "understand the forces which are effective in the visual production of today if we do not have a look at other fields of modern life. "His lesson has not much been heeded in an epoch when the exterior spectacularity of museums (what has been called the "Bilbao effect") too often overrides an attention to the more subtle interior complexity of an exhibition. This interior complexity is the result of different elements, one of them being the openness to collaboration.


FROM INTERIOR COMPLEXITY TO MERZBAU
Merzspace

At the recent Merzbau conference in the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, which Stefano Boeri, Adrian Notz and I organized for Domus magazine, the Italian critic and writer Pierluigi Nicolin noted that the world of architecture has recently been taking an interest in Merz architecture, and attributed this to the new and irresistible fascination of the incomplete  the act of assembling a multitude of plastic forms and materials, found objects, 'spoils and relics' that were enclosed and partly walled up so that they could serve as records of previous states. Incomplete on principle, growing, changing constantly the theme of assemblage has become a basic condition of the new globalized world. Taken as components to be assembled rather than designed from scratch, the various frames, curtain walls, escalators, elevators, ceilings, floors, etc., and sometimes even pre-packaged models of buildings represent an archive of solutions for the designer of metropolitan megacomplexes composed of accidental patterns lateral motion, three-dimensionality, fortuitousness  emphasizing horizontal structures  creating symbols of centrality rather than aiming at convergence at a point, the new Merz architecture emphasizes tangents, vanishing points, twists and crossings, without renouncing the expression of a certain Piranesian drama in the predisposition of its new figures.
At the Merz Conference, the work of Gregor Schneider, Gabriel Orozco and the late Reto Flury (in an homage by Thomas Hirschhorn) and also Thomas Demand with his new visionary grotto piece were displayed as new aspects of Merz architecture. A very notable aspect is the continuity and persistence with which artists follow certain projects throughout their lives. (Schwitters worked for more than a decade on his Hannover Merzbau, and in 1937, when he emigrated to Norway, he started a second Merzbau there. Just before his death he started a third Merzbau in England, where he was living in his exile.) The urbanist Yona Friedman shows that individual inventions are the principal means for building Merz structures: Merz structures are unique, they do not follow the rules of geometry. As Nicolin showed us, Schwitters anticipated the end of the distinction between private and public space, and Merz proliferates with a pervasive and comprehensive diffusion, rendering space traversable by flows. These flows can be found in many recent museum projects such as Zaha Hadid's models of variety, the variety of space where complexity opens up many different leads and connections The question of the Merzbau in relation to museum spaces also leads us to a condition of smallness in the "age of museum extensions." I think it is important not to forget the notion of house museums. Smallness can also be related to in terms of homes or museums with very interesting examples of a "house-museum," where the actual experience of a work is enriched by very different circumstances, and where the situation is more like a conversation than a singular viewing experience. Here I am referring to the Sir John Soane's Museum in London or the Barragán House in Mexico, to both Big and Small.
So obviously this whole idea of bringing up small museums for consideration doesn't necessarily mean any opposition to big museums, but it does raise the question that, if we have big museums, how can we preserve within them the conditions of house-museums discussed earlier? How can we actually introduce, reintroduce, or re-inject the notion of smallness into "bigger" conditions? And that leads to the question of complexity, which I would like to address here. After having had long discussions about the exterior aspects of museums, which were all about the fa？ade, I think it is also relevant to talk about interior complexity, a new Merzbau condition, which will bring up urgent questions in the next few years about the future of museums. The situation of museums is obviously exceedingly complex and I think, when we try to work out how to deal with this complexity, it is important not to reduce our reflections to a single model of museum space but to study several different ones, both historical models and contemporary models, and to take an experimental approach with regard to this complexity.
One of the problems of globalization is the spatial and temporal homogenization of the world of museums, and it is urgent to actually generate a situation which is receptive to a kind of interlocking of spaces, or bridges between old and new - as exemplified by Rem Koolhaas's work Hermitage - while also keeping in mind the notions of acceleration and deceleration, moments of speed and moments of slowness, where there should be zones of noise and zones of silence, where there are also negotiations between private and public space.

*A longer version of this text was published in the Spike Art Quarterly 4 (Summer 2005).