Spaces of Experience Art Gallery Interiors from 1800 to 2000

"For me, artists are the most important people. I have always been obsessed by artists. But I also wanted a book about the world of museums. As co-director with Julia Peyton Jones at the Serpentine, we think constantly about what Charlotte Klonk calls these Spaces of Experience, about how we can make extraordinary experiences possible and accessible for everyone. I found this history of art gallery interiors from 1800 to 2000 very interesting. It demonstrates how the gallery designs of the 19th century were helped by scientific theories, by Goethe ’s discussion of colours, by Wilhelm Wundt’s stimulation experiments, where sameness was eliminated so the spaces were all different. Klonk considers how these scientific considerations were connected to social or political questions. It made me think how we could be inspired by science now: how could quantum physics and quantum mechanics inspire how we design museum shows? What would a superstring exhibition be like? Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The book also goes into the 20th century, when display strategies changed a lot because artworks had more space and the furniture was removed – in the 19th century you had all this furniture in galleries. Klonk’s book is mostly focused on Germany and the West so it is not complete, but it gives us a very interesting account of how we have changed. How the artists of the Bauhaus did designs for a collective experience of art and how that then inspired Alfred Barr in creating New York’s Museum of Modern Art. There is also the idea of seeing the impact on galleries of new fashions in interior decoration and department stores. When I started out, curating was a very obscure profession – I mean when I was signing hotel registers as a curator, this was seen as very weird. But now on the internet we come across it every day: blogs and websites are curated; even the high street is curated. Spaces of Experience is a good toolbox and also very good for somebody who is not in the art world. It is concise and precise and straightforward – I wish this book had existed when I started 20 years ago. Also this book is about the interior – because in the last 20 years all the thought has gone into the exterior of galleries. For example, all the conversation that centres on the Guggenheim in Bilbao [designed by Frank Gehry in 1997], which is obviously a fabulous building, but it is a sculpture, it is the façade. Exactly. It is the iconomania or the iconophilia of architectural experience in our times. And what Charlotte Klonk does is bring us back to more of a vision of interior. Although we have the park and the trees outside."