ABSTRACT
In his manifesto for the Proun Space installation at the Great Berlin Art Exhibition of 1923, El Lissitzky related his function as an exhibition designer to his artistic practice and to his desire, in the Proun series, to establish an ‘interchange station between painting and architecture…to treat canvas and wooden board as a building site.’ From these early investigations (later somewhat transformed by the Revolution), Lissitzky developed an approach to exhibition design that sought to problematize the role of the spectator, to create ‘by means of design’ an active participation rather than a passive viewing. In one of his most famous exhibition designs-the Demonstration Room for the International Art Exhibition in Hannover and Dresden in 1926-Lissitzky was faced with the problem of how to display an overwhelming amount of work in a rather small and intimate space. His solution involved the use of thin wooden strips attached to the wall at 90° angles and in vertical rows; these strips were painted white on one side and black on the other and mounted against a grey wall. From one vantage the wall appeared white, from the other side it appeared black, and when viewed from the front it seemed to be grey. Thus, according to Lissitzky, the artworks were given a triple life. In addition, the paintings were double-hung on a movable panel system so that while one of the two was visible, the other could be partly seen through the perforations of the sliding plate. In this way Lissitzky claimed to have achieved a solution whereby the specially designed room could accommodate one and a half times as many works as a conventional room. At the same time, only half of the works could be seen at any one time.
