Martin Beck: An Organized System of Instructions

A published document and extension of the two-year exhibition Program by Martin Beck at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts.

Edited by James Voorhies

Sternberg Press, 2017
208 pages
10.25 x 7.875 inches

Designed by Practise

Contributions by Martin Beck, Keller Easterling, James Goggin, Alex Kitnick, James Voorhies

Made possible with funding and staff of Harvard University’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts; realized within my responsibilities as Director and Curator of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts

Martin Beck’s exhibition Program at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts comprised a sequence of interventions, installations, events, and displays that drew on the exhibition histories and academic pursuits of the famed 1963 Le Corbusier building at Harvard University.

The sequence of explorative strategies—each node of which Beck considered an “episode”—lent particular attention to the founding aspirations of the Carpenter Center, which sought to cultivate its position as simultaneously an iconic modernist building, school, and exhibition venue. Beck performed and critically reflected on the kinds of activity an institution uses to build, organize, and engage with its audiences, and, in the case of the Carpenter Center, how it performed a kind of exhibition of education in both its pedagogical framework and its public outreach. From its physical infrastructure to its communication strategies, from its foundational curricular principles to visitor tallies, from building usage to welcome rituals, “Program,” which transpired over two years, examined institutional behaviors that collectively form institutional identity and integrate audiences into a cohesive program of public address.

Exhibition, MIT Press