“Sometimes you gotta move. Why? Too much stuff.” That’s the opening riff for a George Carlin bit from 1984 that greets visitors to the exhibition On Storage within the Biennale’s Applied Arts Pavilion.
The exhibition is curated by Brendan Cormier of the Victoria and Albert Museum, with contributions from Diller Scofidio + Renfro. This year the institution opens two new sites in East London, including V&A East Storehouse, an open-archive facility that is designed by DS+R and curated by Cormier. The museum has, right now, too much stuff.
Preparing for the move led Cormier to explore the very notion of storage. “It is like a series of Russian dolls: things that contain things that contain things,” he said. “And because we are an applied arts museum, so much of our collection is itself storage: a dish, a box, a container. And once you begin to view architecture as storage, you can see the world as a system of nested and interlinked storage system.”
The Venice exhibition includes an elaborate study model by DS+R of the Storehouse and a heavy book of process drawings— including a precedent image of the military warehouse from Raiders of the Lost Ark and screenshots from DS+R’s server that reveal its own storage system. This witty presentation is accompanied by documentary photos of the V&A’s archives showing what’s in some of its archival boxes: a Walkman, street wear, thigh-high leather boots.
The centerpiece is a six-channel film directed by Liz Diller of DS+R, Boxed: The Mild Boredom of Order. It follows a toothbrush from its birthplace in Yangzhou, China—“the world capital of toothbrushes,” Cormier explained—to an apartment in Central Europe, then a vacation in Venice, and then a barge trip to the local dump. At each stage the toothbrush occupies some kind of storage: box, delivery truck, apartment, suitcase.
The film is inspired by the Eameses’ Powers of Ten, but it also occupies a favorite rhetorical mode for DS+R: a love of contingency and a playful testing of architecture’s disciplinary boundaries. The 172,000-square-foot storehouse will bring the same energy. Visitors can now move through stacks and archives and look down into a central atrium where objects (such as a chunk of facade from Alison and Peter Smithsons’ Robin Hood Gardens estate, now demolished) will rest on display. Guests will also be able to request up to five items for a custom up-close viewing, collaborate with curators on quick-build exhibitions, and witness impromptu demonstrations from conservators.
The installation in Venice is spacious and serves as a respite from the chaotic smorgasbord of the Arsenale. Here, the restraint is deliberate. For Cormier, the density of an archive like the V&A’s presents possibilities but also “the classic discovery problem: If you don’t know what you’re looking for, where are you going to start?” For that, you need curators.
Alex Bozikovic is the architecture critic of The Globe and Mail and the author of books including 305 Lost Buildings of Canada.
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