Peter Zumthor, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011. Photograph: Walter Herfst

Peter Zumthor, Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011. Photograph: Walter Herfst

Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘The Mirror of Judgment.’ Photograph: courtesy of the Serpentine Gallery

Inner garden by Piet Oudulf at Peter Zumthor’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2011. Photograph: Hufton+Crow

Pavilion 2011
Peter Zumthor
1 July – 16 October 2011
The Mirror of Judgment
Michelangelo Pistoletto
12 July – 17 September 2011
London, UK, Serpentine Gallery

In the Serpentine Gallery’s recent summer series both Peter Zumthor and Michelangelo Pistoletto were grappling with Eden, although in Zumthor’s case it was the lost garden, and in Pistoletto’s an ascent to a ‘third paradise’ that is spread across four, if not five, religions. For its part, the Serpentine Gallery seems to be grappling with its own spatial imperatives, creating a garden of sorts, or at least a cornucopia, that could be seen as the positing of a spatial aesthetics by the gallery’s programming and architecture.

For the Pavilion series, every year directors Julia Peyton-Jones and Hans Ulrich Obrist invite an architect whose work is not yet represented in the United Kingdom. Over the twelve years of the series’ history, Pavilion participants have included Oscar Niemeyer, Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jean Nouvel. Peter Zumthor, the most recent, gained recognition in the mid-1990s for his Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland. As a master of minimal yet transformative architecture, he often crafts a sublime environment from a single material through the mere precision and transformation of its iterative form. So what do we find here? A trace that speaks silently to the quintessence of Zumthor’s work: a hortus conclusus in which the garden is privileged and in which architecture creates a gentle refuge from the bustling world of London outside. For Zumthor, who recently authored Thinking Architecture (1998/2006), one needs to say little more than the title of the book itself. The soberly, monochromatic, black-walled pavilion—a rectilinear structure, in the middle open to the sky and circumscribed by four long, narrow corridors—is monastic in form, conjuring the cloistered spaces of interior worlds. Here, however, the visitor happens upon the lush and the fecund: a seductively over-grown garden by the renowned Dutch landscapist Piet Oudulf. The black skim-coated walls seem at once apt if not a tad oppressive, setting off the garden and framing the sky, while somehow amplifying the summer’s heat and the bunker-like effect of the pavilion itself.

While greeted by the privileged Eden of Zumthor and Oudolf outside, inside the visitor is confronted by Pistoletto’s Last Judgment. As one weaves through the labyrinth of cardboard—a plethora of material that paradoxically belies Pistoletto’s Arte Povera origins—one encounters Pistoletto’s name-sake mirrors, each of which form a backdrop to a series of metaphorical altars, from the trumpets from his Last Judgment (1968) to a Christian prie-dieu and an Islamic prayer mat. Pistoletto became renowned for his mirror works in the early sixties, not only tearing art away from objecthood and prying open Renaissance perspective but launching the temporal and psychological dimensions of art and the viewer into the space of the gallery. Pistoletto acknowledges that the Renaissance governed the evolution of his work and underlies its broader mission of placing religion at its centre during a time when the avant-garde had made art autonomous. He did not, however, seek to return religious or political power to art but to ‘take possession of those structures, such as religion, which rule thought’ through art.

Yet if Pistoletto’s work seemed angry when it was launched onto the scene in the sixties, in the Serpentine it seems cautiously symbolic and, despite its push toward the spatial, a bit flat. The mirrors fall short of reflecting, and the multi-denominational altar pieces fall short of appeasing a world that has become prone to religious turmoil and political strife (think of the recent riots in London and the bombings and massacre in Oslo and Utoeya by a Christian evangelist). Art, even the art rooted in the socially engaged and Arte Povera past of Pistoletto, can do little to recover, or even little to change. What, then, are we to make of Zumthor’s Eden and Pistoletto’s plea that in a certain sense all religions, though perhaps labyrinthine in their relationships, reflect each other, and that in fact we, as viewers, are both implicated and take part in them all, our lives forming the common thread as we wander through space and time?

No doubt, Pistoletto and Zumthor are each responding to the need for art and architecture to engage with the real. Does Zumthor’s Eden provide an antidote to Pistoletto? Or Pistoletto to Zumthor? Or is it perhaps the third space of the Bidoun library and even the Serpentine itself that oscillate between the sanctity of art and architecture’s profanations?

In his treatise Profanations (2005) the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben defines profanation as the apparatus that appropriates and returns to the everyday sphere what was once sacred, and likewise separates and sacrifices to the sacred what was once part of the everyday. Zumthor attempts an escape into Eden through architecture. Pistoletto attempts to reconcile our fall from grace by creating a ‘third paradise,’ where the earthly and the artificial are united within the sanctity of the gallery, and objects, as he confesses in Minus Objects (1965), become not ‘constructions, but liberations’—those things through which one can free oneself. Could it be, then, that here, within the spaces of art, it is architecture that liberates us by co-opting the systems, forms, and practices of art to more effectively address pressing issues and open up new ways of thinking and doing? Perhaps Zumthor’s pavilion not only liberates us through cloistering us but becomes paradigmatic for an expanded spatial practice of architecture, one which, facilitated by the apparatus of art, has the potential to expand territories and negotiate labyrinthine borders to offer different discursive systems.

Pistoletto takes on religion within his art not to replace the structures that rule thought but rather to substitute them with a different interpretative system, a system intended to enhance people’s capacity to exert the functions of their own thought. Could architecture as an expanded spatial praxis and aesthetics that paradoxically profanes the sanctity of art, offer such a system? It seems that the Serpentine might be suggesting as much. On their website they count as ‘architecture’ anything from Zumthor’s pavilion to the programming of events that occur inside the pavilion under the now renowned Marathon series, an accumulation of discourses from science, literature, film, astronomy, economics, politics, art, and architecture—an interdisciplinarity that Pistoletto advocated and practiced almost forty years before. Moreover, the Serpentine’s new Sackler Gallery (formerly the Royal Parks’ Magazine Building), which will open in 2012 and include a Zaha Hadid extension, will ‘present the stars of tomorrow in art, architecture, dance, design, fashion, film, literature, music, performance and technology,’ appealing to diverse audiences ‘to engage with every aspect of contemporary culture through exhibitions, installations, performances, and special commissions.’ If, as they say, ‘new partnerships will be forged between the arts, creative industries, sciences and education in this test-site for new ideas,’ perhaps it is just this fall from grace that will offer us a so-called third paradise.

Tina di Carlo
[Occas/The Oslo School of Architecture and Design]
Oslo, Norway