“An Attempt at One”: The Scenography of Architectural Reconstruction and the Emergence of Curatorial Research

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the 1980s, numerous non-extant architectural exhibition pieces were reconstructed, often by curators seeking to metabolize the mediated and ephemeral history of modernist practices. This essay examines two examples commissioned by Harald Szeemann for the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk (1983), in which the act of reconstruction employed scenographic forms of display. The two case studies, Kurt Schwitters’ Hannover Merzbau and Antoni Gaudí’s catenary model for the Church of the Güell Worker’s Colony, involved radically different forms of research during their reconstruction, generating new archives and bodies of knowledge. Reconstructions within exhibition contexts required special management and terminology to avoid confusing viewers into thinking they were seeing an original work by the artist, and instead “an attempt at one” (Szeemann 1981-83, np.). The status and context of these reconstruction projects remain distinct in their approaches to the accuracy and intentionality of their original authors. These practices, which challenged the authority of documentary photographs and reflected the primacy of bodily experience, also raise questions about gaps in evidence, issues of fabrication that altered original measurements, and the problems of objecthood. Today, as design and art historians increasingly turn toward methods of exhibition practice to convey the narratives of their fields, this essay opens a critical dialogue on the stakes of reconstruction's scenographic techniques as they relate to the epistemology of research, archives, and documentation.