Audience slaves: architecture and medium in El Lissitzky's Pressa

Charting the relationship between avant-garde processes and audience reception as mapped in the writing of Peter Bürger and Walter Benjamin, this paper will look at the specific example of Lissitzky’s Pressa installation, with a particular emphasis on the related categories of production and reception and their broader relationship to architecture. Recent American art-theory has drawn attention to the instrumental role that Pressa has played in framing a paradigmatic relationship between architecture and audience. This paper will focus on the nature of audience in Lissitzky’s project and the extent to which the disciplinary boundaries of architecture are challenged within it.