Alexander Dorner, The Way Beyond “Museum”

Abstract

In 1927 El Lisitskij makes his "second exhibition space" for the Landesmuseum in Hannover, the famous Kabinett der Abstrakten thanks to which Gropius wrote, "the visitor could contemplate and understand abstract paintings in a suitable architectural configuration". The installation - a work, an exhibition, a setting - was commissionated by the young director of the Landesmuseum, Alexander Dorner. He thought that art was a form of creativity and of creation similar to science and he chose to show in the museum rooms the cognitive meaning of artwork, firts of all its specific epistemological status. A critical perspective organically expressed in the essay The Way Beyond "Art" (1958), which Dorner had translated, since the twenties, in a revolutionary conception of museology, not based on the preservation and promotion of a single masterpiece and its aura, but rather based on reconstruction of cultural contexts (he invented the "atmosphere rooms") and education. The essay focuses on the complexity of Dorner’s theory about the museum, reconstructing the theoretical assumptions and highlighting the most heretical and innovative aspects - for example the use of the copies - which caused scandal and even censorship at the time. Dorner had an idea of a living museum, far away from the sacredness of the white cube imposed as a universal model by Moma. Today the Dorner’s idea is present in the debate about the new features of the museum and of exhibition practices of research, where the contribution of artists became increasingly important, as Dorner had early foreseen.