Resumen de « Musees sans murs » et document La spatialisation de la photographie dans les expositions des années 1950
In the beginning of the 1950s, a series of exhibition-manifestos, by Gyorgy Kepes (The New Landscape, 1951), Ernesto Rogers (Architettura, misura dell'uomo, 1951), Alison and Peter Smithson, Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi (Parallel of Life and Art, 1953), worked to reactivate and displace the canons of modernism dating from between the two wars. While redefining the ideals, they also reconfigured the modes of communication. Rather than hammering home their message as in the historical avant-garde writings, the organizers of the exhibitions invited the spectators to a confrontation with a fractured hanging of heterogeneous photographic documents, which each visitor was called upon to place in relation to the others in a way that changes according to his own movements and his own interpretive choices. Thus crossing the infinite semantic opening of the photographic document and the multidirectional dynamism of the modernist architectural space, these hangings transform the exhibition into an exercise in spectatorship, in which each one became, to a certain extent, the co-author of a manifesto in action, rewritten at each visit.
