This text examines Siegfried Kracauer's unfinished final book, the posthumously published History: The Last Things Before the Last (1969). While Kracauer's Weimar writings have long been celebrated, History , apart from a few key early texts, has only recently been given critical attention. Written in English in New York in the 1960s, the book lies at the intersection of film theory and historical philosophy. One of the key contributions of History , I argue, is that it offers a filmic technology of historical thought that might intervene in the emergent systems of temporal management and control that haunted the 1960s and continue to condition our experience of time to this day. Kracauer's name for his counter-technology is “the anteroom,” and its function is to aid utopian thought and practice, what he calls “the emergence of something new, something beyond the jurisdiction of nature.”

At the beginning of the 1980s, Robert Morris took a decisive and shocking turn. Abandoning the strategies of agency reduction, abstraction, and indeterminacy that had guided his practice since the 1960s, he began to make paintings instead. Architectural in scale and gaudy in their depictions of eviscerated human remains and post-apocalyptic landscapes, the new paintings trafficked in those myths of painting that Neo-Expressionism was just then resurrecting as bankable signs for a consumerist decade: expressivity, figuration, and narrative, among them. What, then, could unite the theorist of anti form—maker of the process-based, anti-object folds, tangles, and mounds of felt and thread waste—with the painter of the baroque, Neo-Expressionist daubs? This paper argues that the paintings of the 1980s, despite their seeming reversals, provide a key for understanding Morris's way of working from his earliest lead and felt projects forward. What they reveal, in short, is an oeuvre guided by a baroque logic of “the fold,” an aesthetic of non-invention that aimed, not at creating but at commandeering and multiplying, for better or worse, existing aesthetic and discursive structures, be they those of Conceptual art, post-Minimalism, or Neo-Expressionism.

In 1978, Richard Hamilton mounted The artist's eye at the National Gallery, London, the second in the museum's series of artist-designed exhibitions. The result was a strange space in which Bosch and Velázquez commingled with an Eames recliner, an ironing board, and a working television. Five years later, Hamilton constructed Treatment Room (1983–84), in which painting's skillful gestures found themselves interrogated by Orwellian machineries of destruction and paranoia. This essay argues that Hamilton's remobilization of traditions of painterly imagination and skill held a critical spatial function: to equip spectators with cognitive tools for thinking through and imagining routes out of the traumatic “rooms” of a postmodern decade.

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.

The story, as Richard Hamilton told it years later, begins with something of an insult. Upon viewing Hamilton's 1955 exhibition Man, Machine, and Motion , Victor Pasmore, the Constructivist sculptor and Hamilton's then-colleague at King's College in Newcast le, delivered a snide quasi-compliment, dismissing the iconographical content (and main attraction) of the project only to praise the mere apparatus of exhibiting—the bracket and framing system that Hamilton had invented to exhibit his imposing photographic enlargements of men and their technical prostheses. “It would have been very good,” Pasmore is purport-ed to have said, “if it hadn't been for all those photographs.” 2 But clearly the exhibition intrigued Pasmore, who would approach Hamilton later in the hope of collaborating with the younger artist. Hamilton recalls: Remembering his comment on Man, Machine and Motion I proposed that we might make a show which would be its own justification: no theme, no subject, not a display of things or ideas—pure abstract exhibition. 3