Editors’ introduction

Abstract

The Austro-American architect and scenographer Frederick Kiesler’s 1942 exhibition, Art of this Century, for Peggy Guggenheim’s New York gallery, shockingly (and maybe for the first time since the baroque Wunderkammer displayed polyphonic assemblages of quirky objects of desire) understood exhibition objects to be elements of an environment that was inseparable from the exhibition space itself. In Art of this Century, Kiesler not only curated the exhibits but rather reconfigured the gallery space and designed biomorphic seating and kinetic hanging constructions that enabled the visitor to view the exhibits from all angles. Kiesler’s spatial dramaturgy and exhibition scenography offered a heterogenous parcourse, a non-linear navigation and, overall, the visitor’s complete immersion into the world of surrealist and abstract artistic imagination. This special double issue, titled ‘Staged: Scenographic Strategies in Contemporary Exhibition Design’, shows that in today’s exhibitions, again, the scenographer holds a special place as the author of an environment rather than as the skilful ‘placer’ of objects. The articles in this issue, which is conceptualised and curated by UK-based academics Greer Crawley and Lucy Thornett, demonstrate that contemporary exhibition scenographers, while resisting harmonising narratives, nevertheless embrace the creation of distinct atmospheres by employing a wide range of strategies successfully tested over centuries of theatrical stagecraft and now reimagined with contemporary media, lighting and visualisation technologies and materials. Today, the scenographer enters the gallery, the museum or exhibition hall as dramaturg, architect, as product, light, audio and olfactory designer, not with the pragmatic aim to display and present individual artefacts but rather to create a composition of all the material and immaterial elements that make up what we call scenography in and beyond the theatre. In its totality, this composition – or better: this scenography – performs the action of a discursive staging of space that can critique both process and outcome. The concept of staging has been described as one of ‘presencing’, that is, a production of presence that, as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht posits, ‘endows the object of aesthetic experience with a component of provocative instability and unrest’ (2004, 108) as cited by Ken Wilder in this issue. Extrapolated from Gumbrecht, and with recourse to the articles curated by Crawley and Thornett, one may now see not only the individual object but conversely the environment as being productively destabilised by the act of staging, through scenography. Thus, we may conclude that in a staging specific to exhibition design, elements of the theatre, of architecture, media and installation, converge to form a complex narrative, transformative and immersive scenography that both envelops and, importantly, activates the visitor and opens the physical environment to a critical and discursive experiential reading. We are delighted not only by the quality of the articles that Greer Crawley and Lucy Thornett have brought together for this special double issue but also the diverse international reach of the journal that it represents, with authors from South America, Europe, India, Australia and the UK. We extend our thanks to our guest editors for suggesting this topic and for their diligence and excellent work in bringing it all together. In addition to the articles, our regular