In the first half of the twentieth century, exhibition design served a central and multivalent function: As spaces of the public sphere, exhibitions offered sites for aesthetic experimentation, for the confrontation with new technologies, and for the dissemination of propaganda materials. Rather than elaborating a medium per se, artists who turned to exhibition design sought tactical, site-specific—even project-specific—interventions in the pressing questions of their present, and they did so by positioning their work within the terms, materials, and technologies then active. One need only consider the approaches articulated in such diverse texts as El Lissitzky's 1926 manifesto-like “Exhibition Rooms” or Herbert Bayer's 1937 treatise “Fundamentals of Exhibition Design” to appreciate the privileged role and cultural currency of this formal strategy through the middle of the century.

A motley grid of things set against clashing bands of homely wallpaper: The dense array was far from comfortable. This was Americana , Group Material's site-specific exhibition project for the 1985 Whitney Biennial in which it took over the museum's lobby gallery. Facing the entrance hung Laurie Simmons's Tourism: Las Vegas (1984), a large-format cibachrome print whose appropriated, rephotographed imagery bet on surface and illusion: A trio of plastic figurines strut toward the rear-projected neon glow of Vegas, wagering class aspiration in all its gendered trappings against the highs and lows of American consumer capitalism. A few paces to the left, five loaves of packaged sliced bread posed a strange rejoinder: Wonder, Arnold, Pepperidge Farm, pinned by their cellophane crests to form a graduated queue, brought out marginal differences in color scheme and logo design. (At left, Peter Nagy's depiction of a Pepperidge Farm industrial plant underscored the point.) Pop lurked; Andy Warhol's 1960s soup cans belabored brand to similar effect, registering the outstripping of substance by signs at the most intimate level of bodily nourishment.