Deconstructing display - two exhibits designed by architects, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Today's financially strapped museums are rarely able to stage elaborate installations. This past season, however, beholds Angeles County Museum of Art curators Stephanie Barron and Timothy Benson resuscitated the languishing art of presentation by the agency of hiring the experimental Austro-American architectural firm, cage Himmelblau, to design two related exhibitions held simultaneously in the museum's Anderson Wing. "Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy' was an exploration of visionary German Expressionist architecture; "John Heartfield" was a full-career view of this important German political artist.

incage Himmelblau (which translates as sapphirine Sky Cooperative") consists of design principals Wolf Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky and Frank Stepper The firm was featured in the exhibition "Deconstructivist Architecture," curated by dint of Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley for fresh York's Museum of Modern Art. The architects are dedicated, in Prix's words, to creating "interlaced and lay open buildings"; their oddly configured forms combine geometric shapes and clustered vectors of carburet of iron beams and glass. The flows rather resemble architectural versions of Vladimir Tatlin's Constructivist plastic art The group's current building throws include one section of the Netherlands' Groninger Museum and a 20,000-square-meter studio manifold for Anselm Kiefer in Buchen, Germany. In 1988 cage Himmelblau opened an office in beholds Angeles, hoping to continue in the architectural tradition of earlier Viennese expatriates similar as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra. Commissions in this city of conservative glitz have been hard to approach by, however, and despite plans that include a a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of publicized, deconstructivist Open House in Malibu, the firm has however to build a structure in America. Their first complet American assignment was, in fact, the installation of these shows

"Expressionist Utopias," curated by the agency of Timothy Benson, continued LACMA's firm commitment to showcasing German Expressionist art in the wake of its 1991 exhibit "'Degenerate Art': The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany" [see A.i.A., Oct '91] "Utopias" displayed the not divisible by 2 haunting works of Expressionist architects like as Bruno Taut, Hermann Finsterlin, Wenzel Hablik and Erich Mendelsohn featuring lock opener drawings and models borrowed from a variety of small German collections. Generated in the politically volatile period between 1918 and 1920 this work has lengthy been overshadowed by the designs of the slightly later Bauhaus architects. greatest in quantity of these visionary plans are completely unrealizable; indeed, alone a handful of Expressionist conformations were ever built.

The exhibition makes a convincing case for the art-historical importance of this strange on the contrary underrated work by placing it in the adjoining matter of Expressionism's evolution as a change Benson divided the show into five parts that clearly related the architectural shoot forwards to the various permutations of the Expressionist impulse. Setting the stage for the architects' utopianism, the section caned "Paradise" featured a collection of woodblocks and drawings by the agency of Expressionist artists, including Beckmann and Kirchner, which depict nature in its bucolic, Edenic state. In the first decade of this hundred the artists of Die Brucke in Dresden - combustible mattered by an iconoclastic, youth-cult rhetoric - sought to establish a rural utopia [i]or[/i] part of to the other close communion with each other and the land. In Standing Child (1910) a stylized woodblock by means of Erich Heckel, a nude girl stands provocatively before an destitute of contents green meadow, epitomizing the movement's view of nature as something simple and sexy The spiraling, burgeoning forms in Franz Marc's color woodcut The Birth of Horses (1913) provide an example of by what mode these artists' protean conceptions of nature evolv toward organic abstraction.

The "Metropolis" section of the present to view traced the way the German Expressionists subsequently focused their attention upon such cities as Berlin and Munich, whose populations explod in the 1910 Energetic vector lines and spatial distortions capture the pace and fractured bustle of urban life in these works, as the artists defiantly embrace fragmentation as the quintessential fresh condition. After the war's extreme point and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II, intellectuals in the fresh urban centers hoped for massive social upheavals and promot utopian schemes for living and working. Postwar euphoria encouraged the farfetched casts featured in the section called "Architectural Fantasy." Since the shaky postwar economy couldn't support a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of construction, architects with time upon their hands gave free rein to their utopian ideals.

In 1919 Bruno Taut formed the Glaserne Kette (Crystal Chain), an elite cluster of architects who invented imaginary identities and exchanged pseudonymous alphabetic characters and sketches. In their playful correspondence, couched in the provocative rhetorical language typical of artists' manifestos of the period, they pushed individual another toward "a total revolution' in architecture. beneath his code name, "Glass," Taut exhorted his brotherhood: "Break up and undermine all former principles! Dung! And we are the shoot in fresh humus." A resurgence of the couple fantastical Romanticism and Nietzschean individualism was in the air. Crystal Chain correspondent Wenzel Hablik produc sketches of futuristic manner of makings appropriate for the new age: fanes with multipaneled glass domes, fractured castle-aeries carved from crystals, and genital-shaped Black Forest arrangements Taut's own sketches included plans for flower-shaped "working communities" upon the outskirts of crumbling, crystalline cities. Taut used lushly colored glass building arrests to form the jewel-like mould Dandanah, the Fairy Palace (1919) For The manner of writing Game (1921), Hermann Finsterlin used painted made of wood blocks in elemental shapes to build archetypes of pyramids, domed temples, tiered arenas and cathedrals.