No tags yet.
The One That Got Away: Goshka Macuga’s Kabinett der Abstrakten (After El Lissitzky) 2003
Goshka Macuga’s Kabinett was, for many of us, the work that got away. Try as we might to find ways of incorporating it, including considering giving it its own room, in the end it just didn’t fit. Literally - the panels were too large to make it into the gallery’s lift and too heavy to carry up the stairs safely.
Macuga’s cabinet is based on a simplified version of a Japanese curio cabinet. Visitors are invited to open it to reveal the objects within. Borrowing from various sources, Macuga gathers together her selection for the period of the installation, making subjective choices based on the interrelationships between the objects rather than their art historical ‘value.’ Items have included modernist artworks, contemporary outsider art, antiques and newly purchased objects. Crucially for us, when the Kabinett was installed in Leeds Art Gallery in 2012 she chose many of the artworks we were considering from the Arts Council Collection, works that involved artists deliberately playing on the work of another.
In many ways, Macuga was exploring the same issues that kept recurring in our thinking about the exhibition. She’s particularly interested in people who have had an influence on exhibition design, such as Alexander Dorner who commissioned EL Lissitzky to make his Kabinett der Abstrakten of 1927, from which Macuga’s gets its name. Lissitzky’s Kabinett der Abstrakten was a room designed to provide a sympathetic environment for the work of avant-garde artists like Picasso, Léger and Mondrian at the Landsemuseum in Hanover. The space was specifically designed for the works to be viewed in relation to each other. Changes in wall colour and materials allowed the appearance of the room to shift as viewers moved around, while sliding panels allowed visitors to cover or reveal particular exhibits. By the early 1930s, both abstraction and progressive art more broadly were considered ‘degenerate’ by increasingly powerful totalitarian regimes, particularly in Germany. Lissitzky’s Kabinett was destroyed in 1936 during the Third Reich.
In quoting El Lissitzky in this way, and through her choice of objects which often disrupt art historical narratives, Macuga explores the ongoing relationship between the museum, the artist, the curator and the value we place on works of art. Even though in the end we couldn’t have it, Macuga’s Kabinett was critical to the way our own thinking developed. It provoked questions about value and collecting, and what it is to be a curator. We too, have brought together an unusual, transhistorical, collection of artists in the hope that, in placing them together, we’ll learn something new.