Interview with Pieter van Wesemael

The Aesthetic Debate and the Nation State in World Exhibitions

Professor Pieter van Wesemael is an urban designer and partner at Inbo Amsterdam, an architecture, consultancy and urbanism bureau. He is also Professor of Architectural Design and Urban Culture at the Technical University in Eindhoven. Van Wesemael’s research at the Faculty of Architecture at the Technical University of Delft presented the history of world exhibitions through a multiplicity of lenses.

[World exhibitions] played a role as an intermediary between high and low culture, between upper, middle and lower class, and between trade, industry, technology, science, and art on the one hand, and the lay person’s more direct world of experience on the other. In the rapidly changing world – in material, economic, and socio-cultural aspects – they made a fundamental contribution to the creation of a new consciousness of class or group, each with its own self-image and culture, and nourished the evolution of modern, capitalistic, democratic society with its mass culture.

This interview is in response to Van Wesemael’s agile approach, from the social scientific and urban planning to the art historical and economic, to the complex didactics of world exhibitions.

Clare Butcher: Your research focuses on the implication of world exhibitions in the context of technological and economic development, as well as the idea of increasing mobility. Can you tell us more about how you see the relation between these factors and the artistic fields at play within this same history?

Pieter van Wesemael: As a start, world exhibitions are about the emancipation of the world of technology and industry. At first you see a very strong technological approach as well as a strong and immediate artistic inclination, because there is a clear response to this emancipation of industry in the crafts, where [industrialisation] is seen as ugly, low-value and mass-produced. So it immediately becomes an aesthetic debate. That is why I think that from the start, in 1851, they have not only been exhibitions, but also a competition. I call it a didactic phenomenon, and within these didactics, there were at least three main focal points:

– The application of technology to industrial production,

– The aesthetic quality of bringing crafts into the world of industrial production,

– The importance of international collaboration; Between 1855 and 1975, there was in fact a pre-European Union in Europe, with Free Trade Zones between the major European economies. This is the core of the contemporary European Union: if you collaborate economically, this will lead to peace and mutual understanding, and all those other, more beautiful socio-cultural ideas.

Aesthetics and industrial production are the most important elements of the world exhibition and, despite some shifts, they never disappear. From 1855, the French, who had a long tradition of annual Art Moderne salons, incorporated high art into world exhibitions, and later, they stressed this as a means of getting a grip on national identity. Of course, the 19th century was a time of nation-building, which is also a very contemporary subject. [Exhibition organisers] saw high art and crafts as a means of coming to terms with these aspects of national differences. This is understandable when you realise that until the end of the 19th century, countries such as France, and even Germany, were not one state or one nation. The way societies functioned was local and regional, hardly national and certainly not worldwide. My article in the NEO catalogue is really focused on national and local history as a source for constructing national identity – not only aesthetically, as l’art pour l’art – but motivated by ideas about socio-cultural integration.

Remco de Blaaij: Your research begins at the end of the 18th century, with the first industrial exhibitions. Do you think this was where the relationship between the worlds of art, architecture and industry begins? This was also the same time that museums, as we know them, really started to exist.

PvW: Yes, in a way there is a parallel. For example, after the French Revolution, the first museums in France were organised along with the first industrial exhibition in 1798. Part of the revolutionary programme was about reinventing a new society and state, a new French nation. Within that revolutionary programme, there was a shift away from the traditional arts and crafts to a more industrial economy, which was then of course very embryonic. If you look critically into what was exhibited as arts and crafts at these early exhibitions, they were not industrial at all! What they called manufacteur was not necessarily to do with mechanisation, but was more about the rationalisation of the production process. It was no longer production by single family studios, but a lot of people assembled together, each doing a part of the production. It was more about rationalisation than mechanisation.

World exhibition didactics

CB: You use the phrase, “sugar-coated education” in your writing. Would you see that didacticism, or art, as being used to beautify the harshness of industrialisation? Or do you think art gained a status in its own right in the field of World Exhibitions?

PvW: The sugar coating has a lot more to do with the didactics themselves – demonstrations are much more fun than just mute objects! These didactics are heavily influenced by 19th-century ideas of how you teach people something. So you show the real objects, not books and texts, but a visual education that is practical. These were not mute objects being presented: they were always within a context. You would see machinery parts in production, with people explaining what you were seeing or were supposed to see. The designers also made silly objects – a giant tower of sugar cubes, for example – in the contexts of these exhibitions. What I mean is that it is not functional, it is not rational unless you look at it from the perspective of what we would call marketing or advertising. Architects and artists were asked to design the exhibition itself, using their artistic gifts to design a marketing campaign. They would also make trophies – which would be a kind of collage of national symbols, but these symbols were just everyday objects. For instance, Canada had one with canoes, lumber and deerskin, which everyone associates with Canada. This was designed by Gottfried Semper, a German architect. He was also involved in designing chambers, a kind of habitat where you would place objects in context. For example, he designed one for China, which he probably knew very little about…

There is a connection between art and architecture and this sugar coating of the exhibition: exhibitions brought high art and the qualities of arts and crafts together with industrial production. Academics from the universities were also involved in giving lectures about this and were judges on the exhibition juries. So, as always, it is hybrid.

Modernity and progress: “imagineering” societies through world exhibitions

The world exhibitions were also exhaustive and comprehensive encyclopaedic accounts of the world and times, furnished with explanations of the past and predictions of the future. In ideological terms, they invariably aimed at reconciliation or adaptation rather than radical alteration.

PvW: Art and architecture are always playing a role in industrialisation, mechanisation and rationalisation, making everyday objects something special – these were monuments to human capacity to master nature and master history. From the start, monumental dimension was created out of a world that is actually very banal in its everyday form. The French exhibitions, despite changes in ideology with each regime, kept focusing on getting people used to modern times and the advantages they brought. In the 19th century, that was very much about looking backwards – a historical perspective.
At the time, people could not imagine what would later happen in the 1920s and 1930s, when the world of science and planning enabled people to seriously plan 30 years in advance: through organisation and bringing various parties together. In the 19th century, this was inconceivable. All you could strive for was to extract the best lessons from history to create a better tomorrow, which was in fact, a better today!

Today, as much as the 19th century focused on history and the 20th century on the future, we are now coming to a more pragmatic realism of “today, tomorrow, but not too far”.

RdB: The title of the Shanghai World Expo is Better City, Better Lives. Do you think that this relates to the pragmatic turn? If we talk about “sustainability”, we should be thinking in terms of 40 or 50 years, not only today and tomorrow.

PvW: This is the first time that in the public conscience – worldwide – planet earth, our spaceship, is declining. You saw this notion forcefully injected into the world exhibition in Japan in 1970 and ever since then, this has been a recurring theme. Progress and Harmony (Osaka) was a theme, saying that we need to develop in accordance with what the planet can support.

I am not a social scientist, but as much as we believed in science and planning in the early 20th century, you see this notion [of sustainability] recurring in the way some Dutch politicians are responding to recent climate reports. This goes back to the early 20th century, when science represented ultimate truth and the idea that it is possible to translate scientific research and policy, one to one. This is the consciousness that has prevailed from the 1970s onwards, where in the world of policy and science, there is, as we Dutch would call it, de maakbare samenleving, the socially engineered or “makeable” society.

CB: You cite the 1970 Osaka fair as the moment when the exhibition shifts to the idea of “imagineering”. I am interested in how this comes back to the Netherlands and its concept of the makeable society, which seems to be quite unique to the Dutch context. In scanning over the project of the Philips pavilion in Brussels in 1958 and its relation to constructing a particular landscape of ideas, it is interesting how these examples relate to your statement that world exhibitions are always about societies in transition. The exhibitions reflect but also manoeuvre that change. I wonder, in your perspective as an urban planner, how these two ideas play off one another. You cite a number of examples where, in Paris, certain urban structures only exist as a result of the world exhibitions that took place there.

PvW: The fascinating thing about world exhibitions is their obvious ideological constraints. They are very much about a new elite, with a new worldview and a new ideology aspiring to take power – not necessarily political power, but also in an economic sense. Here, ideology and practice, the ideas and the banality, are coming very close together, and that is why, in my research, I put a lot of energy and attention on the genesis of each exhibition, where you see how this strong ideology meets reality. This is not necessarily formulating a history of decline, but rather one of creativity and improvisation. There were new ideologies, which were not lesser, but they made it different.

Indeed, what interests me is that these world exhibitions are manifestos of the new elite. For instance, in New York in 1939, you see clearly that sociologists of a modern society and new players in the world of technology – industrial engineers for example – were putting their heads together, having to find out where society was going and what role this exhibition might play in bringing a new perspective to the public. In the end, the world exhibition has to be made not only by these new elite, but [also] by the General Motors and Philips of this world, and this is a really interesting collision. I think this is both the exhibition’s weakness, because the manifesto gets corrupted, and its strength, because it is made so practical. In one way or another, almost every exhibition tries to give the impression of a world of tomorrow. This is not literary, like a Utopia, but very tactile. It is proven. It is a proven ideology because it is there. It is a city. It is functioning, it has cars, schools: it is all there.

CB: In 1939, there was the shift from Democracity, as one of the 1939 exhibitions was titled, to World War.

PvW: It was a tremendous deception. After World War II, there was a sense of avoiding imminent doom, scarcity of resources and the threat of the atomic bomb. Then, in 1970, in Osaka, there was this same approach again, where we can plan a better future.

Since then, I think it is safe to say that the didactic role of world exhibitions as a kind of instrument of the modernisation of society is becoming less important. This had a lot to do with the Cold War. There was a kind of stalemate between the First, Second and Third Worlds. In a sense, that stalemate is over, with the Second and Third Worlds becoming first and second. These are new dynamics.

Embeddedness: localisation of a global affair

PvW: This [shift in global dynamics] is the reason that since the turn of the new century, world exhibitions are again gaining popularity, for example in Asia, and I would not be surprised if Brazil plans to have one. The world exhibition is always primarily for the organising country itself, a motive for the local elite to get their population accustomed to another world view, which is not local, not traditional, but a lot more global, modern and open to international exchange and the meeting of art, science and industry. That is it. It has a lot to do with the land on which the exhibition is operating, of course, and various kinds of cultural constraints.

China is a totally different chapter when compared to the European, American or “Western” tradition, because it is an agrarian and industrial, service and knowledge economy all at the same time. I think that in that society, the elites have a completely different chemistry. I cannot imagine that any really Utopian idea, which has all but disappeared in Western exhibitions, would be present in a Chinese exhibition: what will be very strong in China is a practical fulfillment of “this” Utopia. For example, “We have a theme and this theme is so important because it is the message that we want to give our people.” It could then become a showcase of sustainable technology applied to urbanism, architecture, industrial design and mobility, as we have tried to do for decades. The last successful example of this was Osaka in 1970. In later exhibitions, there was just a lot of lip service. The world exhibition in Hanover in 2000 had exactly the same theme, but there was little sustainability displayed.
It has a lot to do with the eminent problem of world exhibitions, where there is no standing organisation. They do not have their own finances and are largely dependent on their exhibitors from industry to fill the exhibition. The thing is really to say, “We want a serious programme, not merely a touristic display, as most countries are doing.” Where that is the case, world exhibitions have no added value. How you embed it in local culture is extremely important.

RdB: Would you say that the importance of world exhibitions has shifted from a didactic to a more representative role?

PvW: I think what you see happening in the long term is that at the start, world exhibitions are about individual industrialists exhibiting with these countries to organise this representation. Over the years, this radically shifts to having countries representing themselves and using industrialists to do it. Unfortunately, this is true about most nations, in which after World War II, economic departments assumed the organisational role. They see the exhibition as a trade and tourism stimulus. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the format. Culturally, this is really a pity.

I think in a knowledge economy, creative economy and service economy, it is obvious that this notion of “economy” is much more than just about high-tech and tourism. It is crucial that this be presented properly. In Osaka, they paid a lot of attention to how their agenda could be shown, having the right people set that agenda and then fulfil it. You see practitioners, professors and artists collaborating. The Dutch display there in 1970 was made by young Dutch scientists, artists and architects, guided by older [practitioners].

John Körmeling is perfectly suited [to design the Dutch pavilion] for the Chinese context. He plays with cultural metaphors and icons, by estranging them. That is a very strong quality. It would be interesting if we were to succeed, through coming exhibitions, in reaching a better understanding of what this representation of Dutch culture means for China and a global economy. But you need to play these agendas out on a ministerial level. World exhibitions are in a way, museums of society. How we make these living and dynamic representations will determine whether we can sustain their format and their function.