1:1 Period Rooms
31 January 2015 - 5 April 2015
Interview with Andreas Angelidakis
Interview with artist and architect Andreas Angelidakis in which he talks about his installation 1:1 Period Rooms, the significance of the period room and why this exhibition model merits our renewed attention.
''Trained as an architect I am mostly interested in exhibitions and cities in the time of internet, or as some people call it now, post-internet. I treat both exhibitions and cities as places of experience and communication, with a strong touch of hallucination. The cerebral aspect of forgetting yourself in these environments allows for a re-reading of the conditions, perhaps a new perspective. By gaining new perspectives on existing conditions we move forward. I treat architecture as a set of tools for doing just this.''
What is a period room?
''As an exhibition device the Period Room re-created the interior that the art object was created for, so in a way it was a "natural" setting for the painting or object. And more than that, it presented the environment of the painting as an exhibited object in itself. The space of the exhibition was as important as the exhibited object, together they created an experience.''
What makes the period room an interesting subject to address at this moment in time?
''Period Rooms were devices for analyzing the past and inspecting the ways we used to live. As interiors in museums, they became an important exhibition device in the late 19th century, Period Rooms provided the context for the exhibited object back in the time when context was important. For decades now, art has depended upon the removal of context, an exhibition method that allows an everyday object to acquire the status of an art object simply by being alienated from its environment. So the Period Room has been replaced by the white cube; an empty, white, bright room that allows the object to stand out. This has been going on since the 50s, so by now it is interesting to look at the white cube as a period room itself, an example of how we used to look at art.''
For the installation 1:1 Period Rooms you made use of period rooms that were originally exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum. What is the history of these period rooms?
''The Stedelijk Museum is where this transition most famously took place, when Willem Sandberg (first as curator, later as director, ed.) painted the interior of the museum white, and shifted the role of the period room from exhibition device back to a room in a building, office room, study etc. Finally, in the 1970s, the period rooms were removed entirely from the museum, and put in storage, where they have mostly been until now. * So we chose these specific rooms, because they could be considered the ground zero of the shift in exhibition practices. At the same time, Amsterdam is one of these cities where preservation has taken a particularly strong step, with the historical center of the city becoming a brand new copy of it's previous self, to the point where when a building needs to be restored, it's shell is usually taken apart, a new frame is built and the shell is reconstructed from the original fragments. And this is exactly the method used for the period rooms themselves, only inside out. Amsterdam is a great example of the inside-out period room city typology.''
Why this reference to the city?
''Studying the story of Willem Sandberg, I discovered that when he began changing the Stedelijk, he spoke of "bringing the city street inside the museum". At this point, one can begin to hallucinate that the street Sandberg was referring to is not the street of the historical city around the museum, but the streets imagined by his contemporaries, architects such as Mart Stam and J.J.P. Oud; De Stijl facades painted perfectly white. So while the city was transforming into an inside-out period room, the museum began transforming into an inside-out city, it's white modernist facades turning into white cubes for hanging modernist paintings. It is really the perfect example for the type of hallucination that my work attempts to initiate.''
Can you tell us something about the installation you designed for 1:1 Period Rooms?
The installation consists of a series of rooms that explore the surreal loop between the period room, the museum and the city street. The rooms are freestanding in space, each one built upon the typical wooden frame that restorers use to assemble a period room. The installation is centered round a reconstruction of the Empire period room, whose re-assembly and dis-assembly will be in progress for the duration of the exhibition. The other rooms form pauses in the loop between the period room, the white cube, the city street and their various inversions. There will be inside-out white cubes and ghosted period rooms, reversed and reassembled, producing versions of exhibition spaces and spaces on exhibition.
What underlying theme are you addressing with this installation?
''We live in a time that periods don't really matter anymore, movements no longer exist, and so the white cube and the period room can both be contemporary, or ancient at the same time. The internet pretty much flattens any sense of time, so we are kind of floating in a constant present, news are old immediately, old is new when re-presented.''