The white cube and beyond Museum display

In the 1950s and 1960s life in the bungalow appeared quite open because the situation in the Federal Republic itself promised to be open and democratic. Then, however, people noticed that the neighbours were also building new houses, and that these were coming closer and closer to their property lines. Seeing as there was no need to be quite that o

You explain that the white cube was initially only a variance of a rich tradition of differently coloured rooms in museums around 1900.

On the one hand, of course, the conditions of perception are more consciously acknowledged in environments created by artists, but on the other hand the framework of the exhibition space itself is pushed further into the background. For functional reasons, the artistic interventions make the neutral museum-container even more necessary than before.

I think that the word museum triggers a specific cultural behaviour – devout, silent. I believe that exhibiting in a white cube is by now an exhibiting in both senses of the German translation, ausstellen – on the one hand a ‘showing’, on the other a ‘switching off ’ of aesthetic reviving energies.

And when does this cleansing process, leading us to the idea of the gallery as ‘white cube’, begin?

*Charlotte Klonk

*The disciplining began at an early stage with the design of reverential entrance halls and exhibition rooms. They were sumptuously decorated, but weren’t intended to distract from viewing the art.

What is important in my opinion is that the room is honest, so there is no patronising.

*Niklas Maak

*When is a room honest?

*Charlotte Klonk

*Well, as soon as what is being aimed for becomes obvious to the viewer. What remains too subliminal, for example, are the colour nuances in the new display of the collection in the Nationalgalerie. If visitors a

Our experience of visiting museums and galleries is traditionally characterised by the quasi-religious atmosphere: nothing is to be touched, one is rather quiet and reverent, nobody laughs, it is eerily still, nobody is allowed to talk loudly.

I don’t think that’s pathetic at all, because if you try to understand what a new kind of experience is created by doing so, then it is not a romantic but a revolutionary gesture. What had previously been enjoyed only by the king and his entourage was now suddenly made accessible to all.

Then in the 1920s discussions in which white received connotations of infinite space started to emerge, mainly among Constructivist artists and architects. This coincided with temporary exhibitions becoming increasingly important in the museum, and with them the moveable partition wall and flexible groundplan.