The Artist's Creation Space

The Prague Quadrennial, or “Quadriennale” as the international world says it, is a place for sharing the scenography of visual and performing arts. In the 1988 exhibit from America, the exhibit designers John Conklin, Douglas Schmidt, John Lee Beatty, Carrie Robins, and Jennifer Tipton, chose studio spaces as their theme for the background of the artwork, including video, being displayed. The staff and students at the North Carolina School of the Arts executed the design.

This was a most effective creation of a world by design. It was even more than that. It was a world within a world for the display of yet even other worlds. "It was in part a gentle parody of official exhibits of official design," explained Conklin in American Theatre. It was also "an attempt to show design as process, not an end in itself." (Arnold, Aronson. “PQ 87: Stimuli and Responses,” TD&T: Theatre Design & Technology 23:4 Winter, (1988) p. 17.)

The creation of this world was so believable that attendees actually took designer's research books off the shelves of the exhibit, sat in the designer’s chairs or stools in the exhibit and read them. They obviously felt right at home. Indeed, most of the research books “were stolen over the course of the PQ by information hungry viewers from Eastern-bloc countries.” (ibid: p. 16.) Clearly the created and the real worlds collided through the exhibit.

The website of the 2010 PQ exhibit is http://www.pq.cz/en/. It is a dense and exciting website available in several other languages. The photo of the exhibit above was supplied courtesy of TD&T, Winter 1988, photographer unknown.