© UC Santa Cruz
Maintained by widener@ucsc.edu

Architect’s lecture kicks off ‘Museum Without Walls’ series

By Shelia Crane, History of Art and Visual Culture

The Executive Planning Committee of the proposed Center for Art and Visual Studies at UCSC inaugurated its new Museum Without Walls series on Wednesday, March 7 with a lecture by Elizabeth Diller. A principal in the collaborative, interdisciplinary studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York, Elizabeth Diller also holds the post of professor in the School of Architecture at Princeton University where she teaches architectural design. The recipients of numerous awards and honors, Diller + Scofidio received a prestigious MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999, the first ever awarded in the field of architecture.

Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s proposed Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology.

The proposed Center for Art and Visual Studies (CAVS) has been envisioned as a dynamic creative commons on campus that will offer a state-of-the-art exhibition space showcasing collaborations both within the arts and across other disciplines. The aim of the CAVS project is to build a living laboratory where artists and scholars can work together, curators can introduce new display practices, and students can explore culturally and historically diverse images, objects and practices. Ideally, the center will become a productive and provocative crucible where the latest research in the arts, humanities and sciences can intersect in pedagogically rich and visually stunning exhibitions.

The explorations of Diller Scofidio + Renfro across the fields of architecture, urban design, multi-media performance, curatorial practice, the visual arts, and new media, vividly described by Elizabeth Diller, provided stimulating fodder for further discussion about the proposed Center for Art and Visual Studies. The work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro asks us to consider how architecture and technology mediate our perceptions of space and actively structure our interactions with one another, questions perhaps most dramatically staged in their Blur Building that used thousands of high-pressure water nozzles to create a structure of fog for Swiss Expo 2002. Diller’s talk focused particular attention on three innovative museum projects designed by Diller Renfro + Scofidio: an unrealized proposal for a gallery of postwar Austrian art that dynamically addressed the relationship of museum and landscape, the proposed Eyebeam Museum of Art and Technology, a museum and educational facility in New York City dedicated to new media, and their recently unveiled Institute of Contemporary Arts in Boston. Given their experience as curators, as subjects of exhibitions in museums around the world, as collaborators with visual artists, and as designers for three recent museum projects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro have actively negotiated the delicate balance between institutional needs and artists’ needs in their museum projects while designing buildings that take an active role in raising our awareness and understanding of the spatial dynamics and social politics of viewing and display.

The Museum Without Walls series will continue this spring, with lectures by conceptual artist Fred Wilson, who will be speaking on creative curatorial practices on April 26, and John Weber on May 24. John Weber is the director of the Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College in New York where he encourages interdisciplinary collaboration between faculty, artists and the museum. (For more information, visit http://www.skidmore.edu/newsitems/features/tu041005.htm) Both of these public events will be held in the UCSC Media Theater and will start at 6:15 p.m.