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Notes about Contributors
J. Cabelle Ahn is a PhD Candidate in History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University and the current Samuel H. Kress Predoctoral Fellow at the Drawing Institute of the Morgan Library & Museum, NY. Her dissertation is titled “Multiple Exposures: The Exhibition of Drawings in Eighteenth-century France.
Shannon Bewley was the Provenance Research Fellow in the departments of American and European Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art prior to entering Boston University as a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture. Her research areas include photographs of conceptual art, modernist sculpture, and exhibitions histories.
Kristina Bivona is a first-generation college graduate. She is currently enrolled as a doctoral student at Columbia University and holds a MFA and BFA in Printmaking. She uses critique formats informed by lived experience to enlighten the bridge between art practice and scholarship.
Kristina Centore is a writer and artist based in Philadelphia, PA, USA. She is a May 2020 graduate of the Master's program in Art History at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. Her research focuses on technology, temporality, and political non-alignment in art during the Nasser years in Egypt.
Danielle Ezor is a doctoral candidate in the RASC/a: Rhetorics of Art, Space and Culture Ph.D. Program in Art History at Southern Methodist University. She received her B.A. in art history and studio art from Wellesley College and her M.A. in art history from the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art. Her research focuses on eighteenth-century French visual and material culture with a concentration in race, gender, and materiality, and her dissertation addresses the construction of white femininity through women’s vanity items in eighteenth-century France and the French Caribbean.
Kate Hublou is Research Associate of Applied Arts of Europe at the Art Institute of Chicago. In May 2019 she graduated with an M.A. in Art History and Museum Studies from Case Western Reserve University where she focused her studies on modern British and Scandinavian art and design.
Joonsoo (Jason) Park is a PhD candidate in art history at Binghamton University. His research traverses the late twentieth century, particularly focusing on the intersections of art, environment, and ecology in the postwar period.
Elizabeth Rankin is an Australian artist born in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. She is interested in drawing both still and moving and in the importance of visual narrative in the genre of noir. She studies at the National Art School in Sydney where she completed her MFA in 2017.
Francesca Soriano is a PhD student in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her research focuses on late nineteenth to early twentieth century American Art, with a particular interest in acknowledging artistic ecological sensibilities and cross-cultural understandings.
Manuel van der Veen is a PhD candidate in art science at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied arts and philosophy to work at the intersections of practice and theory. His research focuses on the confrontation of traditional procedures, like trompe-l’œil and sculptural relief, with the more recent one of augmented reality.
Chahrazad Zahi was an independent curator before she joined the department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Since 2012, she has been concerned with stimulating the publishing of art histories of the MENA region, beyond the western canon.
Unnatural Return: The Feminist Uncanny
by Elizabeth Rankin
In a recent publication, Alexandra Kokoli explores the concept of the uncanny in feminist thought and in contemporary art practice.1 My doctoral research employs Kokoli’s theories to re-conceptualize representations of women in crime narratives through a close reading of the murder coverage of Linda Agostini in Albury, Australia, 1934. For Kokoli, the uncanny addresses an aggressive defamiliarization of the familiar and is redefined by a range of art practices that resist patriarchal social reproduction. Kokoli delineates the relationship between the abject and the uncanny and argues that each may be present in the actions of the other. According to Kokoli the uncanny profoundly displaces the viewer by recalling the hidden, but may fall short of the utter revulsion felt in confronting the abject.
My painting series, The Pyjama Girl: Imaging the Violence in Narratives of Crime Against Women, investigates how photographs of Linda Agostini’s body that circulated at the time of her murder amplified already existing social codes. These codes objectified the female body within a representational politics of abjection. Abjection when used in this context refers to a projection of taboo and revulsion, one focused on a leaking puerile state of bodily contaminants—the blood of violence and menstruation, urine, decomposition—where the contamination is associated with sexual presence.
Photographs of Agostini’s mutilated body were published locally, nationally, and internationally. This visual display conjured images of her dead body as well as the archival remnants of the crime, in particular the yellow pyjamas she was wearing during the incident. Her identity at this point was unknown, contributing in part to the level of mystification around the case. Her body operated merely as a symbol in the public discourse. The circulation of these symbolic representation operated in conjunction with a performative display of her body in a large container of formalin at the University of Sydney from 1934 to 1944 in the hope that visitors might identify the corpse. Visitors who came to gaze over the preserved corpse were often photographed, furthering this spectatorial archive of her body.
As a child, I was exposed to the archive of this case, including photographs of the victim, facsimiles of her clothes, and death masks of her face, at the Sydney Royal Easter Show’s Police Tent. This evidentiary diorama terrified me. Much of the impetus to develop this project emerges from that tangible fearful memory.
My work considers how the circulation of these images, as well as my own memory of the archive, constructs a visual discourse over the female body as abject within crime. Through the materiality of painting, I unravel the archival power of that childhood moment at the Easter show and the continuing spectacle of abject representations. My process uses strategies of the uncanny to invert the semiotic codes that underwrite the visual order, particularly those embedded in the initial crime photographs and early carnival representations. Using lurid complementary colors, I deconstruct the male body into a visceral state of castration. The violence of this palette allows me to enact an aggressive gaze over the patriarchal lens of what I term “archival power”, the way that artifacts and archives inform societal values and shape collective thought.
Based on a 1944 newspaper image, my painting Anthony and the Dicks (2019) depicts Linda’s husband standing with detectives after he was arrested for her murder. He is wearing Linda’s pajamas like a gruesome skin. He and the detectives are painted with ambiguous genitalia in a symbolic act that undermines the gaze of masculine police surveillance. This image also underscores the relation between the arrestor and the arrested. Both represent the patriarchal formula that continues to define and confine the female victim as an abject sexual object. In Underpants (2019), I reverse the codes of control, embedded in the representational archive, by transforming the male body into an abject, leaking body. Here on display, his body leaks the semiotic codes that define him. The man’s presence remains menacing in his abject state of decay, though stripped of power. This confusion re-orders the symbolic codes that have defined the archival position of the female victim in Western media.
The Pyjama Girl works were shown at Articulate Project Space, Sydney (2020) and MAMA Regional Gallery, Albury (2019).
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Elizabeth Rankin
Elizabeth Rankin is an Australian artist born in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney. She is interested in drawing both still and moving and in the importance of visual narrative in the genre of noir. She studies at the National Art School in Sydney where she completed her MFA in 2017.
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Footnotes
1. See Alexandra Kokoli, The Feminist Uncanny in Theory and Art Practice (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).
The Occupation of the Natural by the UnNatural: About the Operation of the Superimposition in Augmented Reality and Trompe-l’œil
by Manuel van der Veen
This brief research report concentrates on the operation of visual superimposition, which today attains an unexpected topicality through the technology of augmented reality (AR). My doctoral research project relates the art-historical procedure of trompe-l’œil to AR.1 Both techniques want to embed images naturally into the real environment, and subtly make the natural unnatural.2 It is important to note at the outset, that in many exhibitions and reproductive representations of trompe-l’œil, the pictures are ripped out of their constitutive context, making this effect hard to see. In this text, I will focus on three examples in which objects from the real surroundings are superimposed by an interior.
I begin with a trompe-l’œil of Cornelis Norbertus Gjisbrecht, An Open Cabinet of Curiosities with a Hercules Group from 1670 (fig. 1). Its frame is camouflaged with a wooden edge, which physically attaches the trompe-l’œil into the real wooden wall. Then there is a small door, slightly opened, which integrates the space in front of the picture, but also refers to the space behind. The door creates a three-dimensional space. Therefore, the surface of the picture plane, as indicated by the wooden edges, is only the core level within a total of three spatial layers. With the door slightly open the trompe-l’œil invites viewers from the physical space in front of the picture to see what is visible in the depicted space behind the wall. While the frame is camouflaged, the inside of the cabinet is an ordinary illusion. Here, the trompe-l’œil takes advantage of its connection to the real environment to centrifugally amplify the center until it immerses into reality. Since it is not obvious where the picture begins or ends, the reality outside is also centripetally transformed into a pictorial being. Perhaps the boundaries arise with the hinges as thresholds, which mediate between the picture world and the real environment, but this remains uncertain. As theorist Bernard Siegert notes, “It is this oscillating between the transparency of the imaginary pictorial space and the opacity of the material carrier, and more importantly, it is the re-entry of the latter into the former, that keeps generating the trompe-l’œil.”3 The picture object concurrently appears as a ripped reality; as a flat surface (the wood, the glass, and the lead bars); as a real opaque object in the room (the open door, the hinges, the folded note); and finally as a picture superimposed upon the real environment to cave a fictitious interior into the solid wall.
My research pursues the theory that these strategies of trompe-l’œil are reactivated in contemporary art, and simultaneously investigates their relationship to the phenomenon of AR. The artist Cayetano Ferrer continues the tradition of trompe-l’œil by focusing on the entanglement of object and environment. In the series Western Imports, he affixes high-resolution photographs of an environment onto cardboard boxes placed in the space (fig. 2). The photographs have been processed in such a way that the surface of the package intermittently disappears but the fonts and logos printed on them are still visible. Subsequently the logos seem to float in space, while also marking the surface of the box. Hence, the object itself seems to be semi-transparent. As if seen through water, the materiality of the package itself is liquefied. As such, we observe an object that can assert itself as an object but is caught in the moment of its own disappearance. As in trompe-l’œil, the surface is maintained on the one hand and denied on the other.
A popular strategy within AR is to superimpose real objects with their own inside—visualizing the actual but also invisible interior. This is used in various applications, including the next example which is drawn from industry (fig. 3). The internal structures of the machine are superimposed upon its surface in order to make its functionality transparent and more comprehensible.4 A dynamic image of the inside is therefore etched into the machine. If one touched this representation, they would clash with reality. The semi-transparent quality of a digital screen (which allows both touching and looking through it) is transferred to the now semi-transparent object. Consequently, reality is mediated but not dissolved as such. AR makes use of different evidence production processes, like the fixed position of the animation above the machine, calculated light incidence, or interactive communication, to imply presence but it does not guarantee the reality of the image.
The techniques employed in each of these case studies make visible a layer of reality, which could not be seen without them. However, this superimposed multiplicity of events, all now located at one place and time, reduces them to a singular one in relation to the present.5 These superimpositions are in a way so excessive and immersive that they occupy the natural with the unnatural.6 Images cave themselves into reality, liquefy its consistency, or etch themselves into the material. Therefore, one of the most important challenges we encounter with AR is to constantly point out its very narrow boundaries. Since our field of vision is ripped apart, natural and unnatural are interwoven.
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Manuel van der Veen
Manuel van der Veen is a PhD candidate in art science at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, Germany. He studied arts and philosophy to work at the intersections of practice and theory. His research focuses on the confrontation of traditional procedures, like trompe-l’œil and sculptural relief, with the more recent one of augmented reality.
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Footnotes
1. The working title of my PhD project is “Augmented Reality. Trompe-l’œil and Relief as Technique and Theory.”
2. This is also the case with the image below, which is all the more important because the trompe-l’œil does not want to show up as a work of art. Instead its goal is to show up as a thing beside other things.
3. Bernhard Siegert, Cultural techniques: grids, filters, doors, and other articulations of the real (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2015), 191.
4. The visible inner structure is also used for maintenance work. This allows one to refer to invisible parts and additionally enrich the field of view with references, instructions, and annotations.
5. In her text about AR applications, which register historical data and images into the real field of vision, Edith Blaschitz also emphasizes the reduction produced by this superimposition; Edith Blaschitz, “Mediale Zeugenschaft und Authentizität. Zeitgeschichtliche Vermittlungsarbeit im augmentierten Alltagsraum: Augmented Realities—Augmented Spaces. Digitale Texturen sozialer und kultureller Räume,” Hamburger Journal für Kulturanthropologie (HJK) no. 5 (2017): 3–13.
6. A term used by Louis Marin as excessive mimesis; Louis Marin, “Representation and Simulacrum,” in On Representation, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 316.
Editors’ Introduction
Our newest issue of SEQUITUR explores ideas around historiography, representation, and canonization through the theme “re/vision.” The essays and exhibition reviews in this issue reflect on varying tactics that expand the thematic and temporal variety in art and architectural history. Moving from gender politics to mass-housing policies, environmental crisis to archeological reproduction, the range of topics explored reflects the commitment to rebuild narratives prevalent in current trends of art and architectural history.
In the first of two feature essays, Maria V. Garth investigates the ways photography and photorealist painting reveal their radical potential to represent gender expressions. Through the works of Franz Gertsch and Lissa Rivera, the essay problematizes the dichotomous understanding of fact and fiction, and seeks tactics to subvert normative power structures. The next essay explores the 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial’s contextualization of design as a reverse operation of archeology. In this essay, Ecem Arslanay centralizes design to examine the contemporary condition of human experience and environment. By bridging the gap between organic and synthetic systems and futurism and nostalgia, Arslanay offers a design-centric view on death and destruction.
In his research spotlight, Stephen Kerr challenges the methodologies in looking at interwar mass housing developments in architectural history. Through oral histories, Kerr reveals the political significance of interior decoration in shaping collective memory, adapting an integrated research methodology for architectural historiography.
Naz Onen’s visual essay utilizes the cyanotype photography printing technique to communicate the plastic-waste problem in the marine environment. By utilizing photography’s indexical capacity to preserve the past, the artist articulates the plastic evidence as the fossils of the Anthropocene.
This issue includes four reviews that survey exhibitions covering a broad range of temporalities and geographies. Laura Stowell reviews an exhibition of body-oriented sculptural works by Alina Szapocznikow, held at Hauser & Wirth gallery in New York City. Chloe Lovelace discusses spolia, noting the different forms of reproduction and reuse of archival material in an exhibition held at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Constanza Robles and Althea Ruoppo review an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which seeks to revisit the narratives of 20th century American art by elevating the work of women artists, offering an institutional framework towards a more inclusive canonization of art. Lastly, Kimberly Windham weaves a connecting thread through David Levinthal’s varying photographic practice and critiques the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s institutional position as perpetuating the myth of the American West.
In this issue our authors bring a spectrum of perspectives to the concept of re/vision while reminding us of the urgent need to provide multi-temporal, inclusive, and diverse strategies within art and architecture historiography and canonization practices. At SEQUITUR, we are delighted to hold an open platform where dominant institutional narratives are challenged, and histories are multiplied, becoming more porous and mobile, inviting participation in a discourse that is as varied and inclusive as possible.
-Defne Kırmızı
Notes on Contributors
Ecem Arslanay is an interior architect with a focus on stage and production design. Having completed the History, Theory, and Criticism in Architecture MA program at İstanbul Bilgi University, she is now a Proficiency in Arts student at Yaşar University, Izmir. She also writes essays, short stories, and poems for various publications.
Maria V. Garth is a Ph.D. student in Art History at Rutgers University studying modern and contemporary art and the history and theory of photography. She works at the Zimmerli Art Museum as a graduate curatorial assistant (Dodge Avenir Fellow) in the Department of Russian and Soviet Nonconformist Art.
Stephen Kerr is a doctoral researcher at the University of York, England. Based in Frankfurt, Germany, his research is focussed on modernist interiors and the material culture of the Weimar Republic.
Chloe Lovelace is an M.A. student at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, studying Roman and Late Antique art history, architecture, and archaeology.
Naz Önen works as a Research Assistant in Başkent University's Communication and Design Department. Program, After graduating from Bilkent University’s Media and Design MFA Program in 2018, she is currently a Ph.D. student in Hacettepe University's Communication Sciences.
Althea Ruoppo is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. She studies postwar and contemporary art, with a particular interest in German art, collective memory and memorialization, and artworks that reflect notions of precariousness and destabilize visual perception.
Constanza Robles is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Boston University. Her primary focus is American Art of the Twentieth Century, particularly Latin American art and its relation to North America and Europe through world fairs.
Laura Stowell is a Ph.D. student in Art History at the University of Washington where she focuses on post-war and contemporary feminist art. Her dissertation explores the work of artist Alina Szapocznikow in relation to issues of gender, performativity, affect, and the body in Poland and France during the 1960 and 1970s.
Kimberly Windham is a Ph.D. student of American cultural history at Florida State University. Trained as a visual-arts librarian, she is the former head of the Florida A&M University Architecture Library and past president of the Art Libraries Society, Southeast Chapter. Her research for this article was supported by a fellowship from the Library of Congress.
Fauxssilles for the Future: Cyanotype Expressions on Plastic Waste
This project focuses on the emerging plastic waste problem in the marine environment through a photographic series. In order to create a visual reflection, the project highlights the relationship between found plastic objects and cyanotype photography. Cyanotype is most commonly known as technical “blueprints” and was also the technique of the first photographic book, made in 1843 by Anna Atkins. The photographed objects in this series were selected based on the Ocean Conservancy 2017 report, which details the most commonly found items on ocean shores. In my studio, plastic objects floating in cyan-blue spheres mimic the marine environment as a result of the Anthropocene.
The title “Fauxssilles” emphasizes the dual faux states of being. It refers both to the falseness of plastics’ expansion within the marine ecosystem around them, and to the fakeness of the photographed objects compared to real and natural fossils. In order to conceptually merge the photographed objects with their destined marine environment, digital negatives have been used instead of creating photograms. Thus the photograms illustrate floating, instead of the abstracted forms of two-dimensional exposure.
The photographs function as fossils conceptually since they both create and preserve traces. The project approaches the plastic objects with the consideration of a photograph as a “transparent window” to, or as an “evidence” of, reality. Considering the presence of a photograph is indicative of its subject’s absence, the project moves towards the concept of a fossil, where object and image portray one complete presence. “Fauxssilles” also refers to the object-subject parallelism of durability on a chemical level, as the cyanotype technique makes these prints (which are chemically durable for long periods) as resistant to decay as the photographed plastics (which are also highly durable unlike the biological organisms sharing the same marine environment). Both the print and the plastics can last up to thousands of years, merging the image and the material of a “Fauxssille” into one totality.
The creative process is inspired by Gestalt's figure-background principle, which also refers to this relationship. In this photographic series, fossils are referred memory carriers and the storytellers of the past life, echoing that there would be more plastic than fish in the oceans by the year 2050. Through these visually informative and chemically durable cyanotypes, “Fauxssilles” highlights the inevitable fate of plastic waste in the marine environment. The project tries to visualize the “faux” transference of memory. Photographs as souvenirs have the function to envelop the present within the past. Accordingly, by encapsulating lived moments of today for the archeologists of the future, the series offers a new way of visualizing the plastic waste problem in order to be critically evaluated.
Naz Önen
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Living Inside the White Box: Dweller-arranged Interiors in the Earliest Modern Mass-housing Developments
Known collectively by the name of their lead planner and architect, the eighteen Ernst-May-Settlements are residential developments containing almost 15,000 houses and apartments around Frankfurt, Germany (fig. 1). Constructed mainly between 1925 and 1930, they were a response by the recently-elected socialist government of the city to a housing crisis triggered by rapid population growth due to urbanisation, wartime industrialisation and the neglect of the housing stock during and after World War I. Being amongst the first modern mass-housing developments, they moved beyond the individual projects by collaborative groups such as Bauhaus into the practical business of providing decent-quality homes for the poorly housed working people of Frankfurt. May led a team of architects working for the city who were responsible for the process from town planning and domestic and public building design and construction through to the smallest details of fixtures and fittings and furniture design.[1]
These settlements are unique in the history of domestic interiors. For the first time, residents in a modern mass-housing environment had access to modern furniture; serially produced, designed with the size, layout and style of the houses in mind and made available at affordable prices by using the financial power of the city government (fig. 2).
For art and architectural historians, the starting point for the analysis of domestic interiors has been an examination of images supplemented by a connoisseurial examination of objects considered significant by the researcher. This approach has inevitably led to a focus on noble and wealthy households, whose interiors have been recorded in paintings and from which there are extant inventories and valuable objects. Only in the last quarter of the twentieth century did sociologists and anthropologists move beyond this class barrier to examine the links between identity and domestic interiors in mass-housing contexts.
There has still not been a scholarly examination, however, of the intersection of the earliest developments, modernist design, and mass-housing; and the literature produced so far has focused on external design rather than the interiors. Initially, I sought to close this gap by interviewing families who had lived for many years in these early mass-housing settlements. I hoped to find photographs of family celebrations or special occasions for which the background would be as significant to my research as the individuals themselves. Locating long-term residents was not simple, but by attending residents’ association meetings, forum discussions, and exhibitions, I gradually built up a network of contacts. This group directed me to their friends, relations, and neighbors, who were early occupants of the developments. With a list of about fifteen, I felt confident that there were enough to go ahead with the project on this basis.
To date, I have interviewed ten residents, ranging from those in their nineties who have spent their whole lives in the settlements to others who remember their parents’ or grandparents’ houses. My work has been helped by the existence of a substantial group of residents whose families have remained in the same house for three or more generations, fostered by a strong sense of community and the introduction of inheritable tenancy rights after World War II.
While these interviewees have indeed provided me with some photographs, I was able to tap into a much richer seam of information about family connections to the location and about the provenance of objects still in their possession. Our discussions usually open with a description of the house in which they grew up--which is sometimes still their home--and how the space used to be furnished, as they remember it.
Residents also reveal attitudes and approaches to the interior arrangements of the interwar period, suggesting a broad spectrum of ways in which furnishings were acquired, inherited, crafted, re-worked and disposed of. An example can be found in the frequent references to furniture which had been hand-crafted by the interviewee’s fathers or grandfathers. As some of these makers were not trained carpenters, this indicates a longer tail of the tradition of handiwork found amongst the families of manual labourers than might be supposed in a modern, urban environment. Conversely, there has been little to suggest that boundless consumption, an issue which has been at the heart of the discourse on domestic interiors since the middle of the twentieth century, had an antecedent in these settlements.
The accounts of the residents have also drawn out a particular characteristic of domestic interiors which is central to their accounts of lived-in interiors; that they are in a constant state of flux but also offer a historical continuity between present and past generations. My revised research approach now draws on oral history methodologies, as a means of collecting information and to provide a critical framework to deal with issues such as the unreliability of memory and the extent to which interviewees can ever be objective observers in their own homes.
The domestic interiors of interwar mass-housing may seem to have passed into collective, rather than individual, memory. However, my work reveals that we are just on the cusp of that change and still have an opportunity to capture valuable art and architectural historical data, provided we are ready to act now and to employ a wider range of research and interpretative methods than have been adopted in the past.
Stephen Kerr
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[1] For those interested in these lesser-known settlements in Frankfurt, I recommend reading Susan R. Henderson’s Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926-1931 (2013) and viewing the settlements, as they were and as they are now, on the website of the Ernst-May-Gesellschaft, www.ernst-may-gesellschaft.de.
“A West That Never Was”: David Levinthal at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
The work of photographer David Levinthal is notorious for its “moral indeterminacy.”[1] For decades, Levinthal has photographed dolls, toys, and collectibles, using playthings to depict controversial themes. In 1996, Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art cancelled a planned exhibition of Levinthal’s “Blackface” (1995–98), a series of large-format Polaroid photographs depicting racist memorabilia. While the cancelled show was exhibited at an alternate location in New York City, no gallery or museum has ever mounted shows of Levinthal’s similarly controversial series “Porno” (1975–76) or “Mein Kampf” (1993–94).[2] Exclusion of the most problematic of Levinthal’s works from the exhibition American Myth & Memory: David Levinthal Photographs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) not only elides some of the difficult conversations surrounding the photographer’s work, but also presents a truncated view of his oeuvre. The vision at SAAM represents not that of the artist, but that of the curator, Joanna Marsh.
In this exhibition, Marsh succeeds in locating both conceptual continuity and formal contrast in the artist’s oeuvre. When Polaroid ceased to produce instant film in 2008, Levinthal transitioned from instant to digital photography, creating a formal rupture of medium. Still, his conceptual vision has remained remarkably consistent over time. This is particularly apparent in the photographer’s insistence on inserting himself into his images. In digital prints from the “History” series (2010–18), Levinthal is present not only behind the camera, but also within the frame. In Dallas 1963 (2013), the photographer appears twice, both as an outsize figure in the green background and as a reflection in the toy car’s front hubcap (fig. 1). In Washington Crossing the Delaware (2013), Levinthal’s first initial, a cursive “D,” is unmistakable on George Washington’s plastic cloak (fig. 2). The photographer’s presence within the frame allows him to function like the toy figures themselves, both observing and performing in the narrative. By juxtaposing these later works with the artist’s early Polaroids in which rückenfigur dolls contemplate their surroundings while still performing within them, curator Joanna Marsh skillfully reveals a theme that runs throughout Levinthal’s work. The pairing suggests the toys and their nuanced interaction with image-making serve as stand-ins for the artist (fig. 3).
Despite this curatorial coup, the signage framing the seventy-four Levinthal photographs on display invites visitors to do what the show itself ultimately does not (fig. 4): disentangle memory from myth, truth from legend, and fact from fiction.
American Myth & Memory claims to dismantle inaccurate and distorted national myths by closely examining them, blown up by many times their typical size. Instead, the exhibition perpetuates the accretion of myth about the American West at SAAM. Hegemonic visions of the West hang throughout the institution: George Catlin’s portraits of Native Americans, numbered as if specimens; Thomas Moran’s sublime western landscapes, asserted in luminous oils and devoid of indigenous inhabitants; Levinthal’s Hollywood-inspired cowboys, all white. These imperial visions act as “cultural filters,” images that shape perception.[3] Rather than successfully pointing out these filters, David Levinthal’s vision of the American West at SAAM perpetuates the image of “a West that never was,” ensuring that it “always will be.”[4]
Kimberly Windham
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[1] Sarah Boxer, “Hardly Child’s Play: Shoving Toys into Darkest Corners,” The New York Times, January 24, 1997, https://nyti.ms/2IYqwas.
[2] David Levinthal, “Exhibitions,” accessed November 11, 2019, http://davidlevinthal.com/exhibitions/.
[3] Anne F. Hyde, “Cultural Filters: The Significance of Perception in the History of the American West,” The Western Historical Quarterly, no. 3 (1993): 351–74.
[4] David Levinthal, “Conversation with Artist David Levinthal,” interview by Joanna Marsh, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., June 7, 2019.
Revisioning the Dead Body: Green Death
Are we human? With the aim of observing the invention of the “human” category in historical layers, the Third İstanbul Design Biennial (2016) regarded the simple yet bizarre question as simultaneously urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, curators of the Biennial, conducted an archeological excavation that extends from the smallest subatomic level to the furthest point in outer space, where Voyager—the probe advancing one-million miles every day since 1977—has reached. As their archeological site, they have selected that of “human,” and all that it touches. This infinite stretching of the human sphere was the subject of the iconic 1977 Powers of Ten video by Ray and Charles Eames, zooming 1016 meters inwards and 1024 meters outwards. The Powers of Ten are actually the powers of the human, with all its ascending (and descending) skills.
As Colomina and Wigley point out, design is the reverse operation of archeology: it looks forward for all possible futures, whereas archeology tries to retain the possible pasts. [1] But to compile an anthology of all possible futures ever dreamt of, one must consult archeology. Instead of focusing on the last two years of design, this biennial focused on the phenomenon of design—which is the same age as Homo sapiens. It examined the human as an entity who lives in its own design “like a spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body.” [2] Stretching from the human’s two-second-old social-media representations of itself to its two-hundred-year-old industrial design adventure, the biennial contained the entire two-hundred-thousand-year-old human experience on earth. By becoming a multimedia documentary of the human, the 3rd İstanbul Design Biennial was liberated from biennials’ two-year protocol. Perceiving design as a geological layer on earth, the biennial indicated that our daily lives consist of the “experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains.”[3] All is designed, “from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes.”[4] There is no place design hasn’t touched. It has permeated the everyday circulation of organic and synthetic systems. The heat, movement, and chemistry of all water has been affected.[5] Even the most ordinary breath taken in a city has an “ingredients” list, one likely containing pasta-water vapor, deodorant, fly-repellent spray, and smoke.
In the little book published as a part of the biennial by Lars Müller Publishers, there is a photograph by Chris Jordan of a dead bird body washed up onto the shore on a reef in the North Pacific.[6] It also has an ingredients list: plastic-bottle caps, plastic-fork pieces, dowels, and plastic-bag remnants. It comes as no surprise that many species face habitat loss and extinction due to environmental pollution and overhunting—realities designed by humans. As the biennial manifesto attests, “design is even the design of neglect,”[7] and this type of design can take interesting forms. There are, of course, more explicit forms of human-designed domination. Like other omnivorous species, the human feeds on animals. Unlike other omnivores, it also turns dead animal bodies into products. In other words, the human designs them. With a toolset it has perfected, the human even designs alternatives to the operation of hunting. Homo sapiens breeds the animal it utilizes, conserving time and energy in food production, while designing operations to prevent other animals from hunting those bred animals. It even breeds different animals to herd those to be utilized and develops chemicals to harm animals that might in turn harm the food production.
The newest operation designed by the human is artificial intelligence to manage all its other operations. Farms have turned into digitized and even digitalized industrial settings that use the animal body as raw material. That body might have to go through genetic modifications in order to become a desirable product with a high profit margin—the process of designing the dead animal body starts before it is born. Once born, it receives love and heat from incubators. But while growing up, the animal body is also exposed to artificial illumination that stimulates its pituitary gland and speeds up the process of reaching sexual maturity and fertility, tricking the body into utilizing its full genetic capacity. After reaching sufficient growth, it is killed, plucked, broken into pieces, and packaged. Robots (humans’ faithful terminators) then create schnitzel packages out of dead chicken bodies. For those few tasks that robots can’t accomplish, “unqualified” human workers are used, who then imitate the robots with their bodies and souls. For many city dwellers, besieged by human artifice and fed by grocery products, the first image that the word “chicken” alludes to is this packaged version of its dead body, or even just the body after it is cooked.
What about the dead human body? In an age of maximum efficiency, dead humans turn into something to be utilized as well: bio capital. (Or bio waste?) In a rather concealed area of the biennial’s large installation “Going Fluid: The Cosmetic Protocols of Gangnam” (2016), the architect duo Common Accounts placed a small-scale model of the LT-28, or the Alkaline Hydrolysis System for Human Disposition. This system dissolves the human body in a lye solution into a nutritious mixture for plants, leaving otherwise only bone fragments. By replicating the normal decay of the human body within just a few hours, this new technology goes beyond just introducing a new death custom—it presents a brand-new understanding of time after death. The sudden transmutation of the dead human body into a fertile object asks questions about the status of that body at a pivotal moment in humanity’s history of exchanges with nature. Originally an animal-waste service, alkaline hydrolysis is now employed by Homo sapiens to dispose of the human body not just for its own benefit, but for the benefit of all organisms. Also known as resomation, bio-cremation, or green cremation, alkaline hydrolysis has a far smaller carbon footprint than regular cremation. It is the eco-friendliest post-mortem option yet—except, perhaps, Buddhism’s sky burial, where the body is broken up and fed to vultures until there are only bones left, or Zoroastrianism’s Tower of Silence, a structure designed for bodies to be left to decompose and be consumed by scavengers. Compared to these options, the modern alkaline-hydrolysis process is perhaps quieter and cleaner, although only based on the sterile contemporary conceptions of hygiene. Regardless, whether under the soil, above in the sky, or encased in steel machines, human bio capital is food for other organisms.
The limited capacity of current burial and cremation practices and the rising anxiety regarding the adverse environmental effects of most traditional body-disposal methods has pushed humans to consider alternatives like this one. If the alkaline-hydrolysis process becomes prevalent, there will be nutritious liquids systematically flowing and spreading everywhere, leaking into the terrestrial globe, into our space and our living beings—a brand new layer of design, still in flux, demanding interrogation in varied spheres of meaning. This is exactly why Common Accounts used the phrase “Going Fluid” for their installation title. It explored the alkaline-hydrolysis process but also the growth of body-designing in the titular Gangnam neighborhood. As the home base of South Korea’s thriving plastic-surgery industry, Gangnam’s urban texture is being redesigned in order to accommodate a human population that is also being surgically redesigned. As another method of body processing, alkaline hydrolysis is similarly redesigning its immediate environment, changing how humans dispose of dead human bodies and how we organize the spaces of our cities.
If cemeteries are considered as functionless spaces that contradict with the hygienic ideal of the modern city, it is also possible to think of alkaline hydrolysis as a continuity of the “good design” tradition. A world released from religion makes it possible. Theorist Michel Foucault claimed that the category of time was released from its religious sanctity in the nineteenth century, though the desanctification of space has been more obstinate.[8] Cemeteries remain contested, semi-sacred spaces—or, as Foucault terms them, heterotopias. This partial desanctification allowed for cemeteries to be moved from the heart of the city, next to churches, and into the periphery, as death increasingly becomes viewed as a disease, something that could be transmitted to the living.[9] Is alkaline hydrolysis the final stage of this desanctifying process? Still—it must be acknowledged that our world faces an increasing lack of space. Even Foucault draws attention to the practical problems of body classification, storage, and circulation in modern cities.
The increasing obsession with hygiene, the expanding metropole population and corresponding lack of space, the dissolution of certain spaces as sanctified, over-industrialization, the obsession with maximum productivity, and ever-growing ecological concerns might explain why a design like the alkaline-hydrolysis process has emerged. Nonetheless, potent criticisms remain: From a religious standpoint, is the process disrespectful to human bodies? The consideration of human bodies as waste, excess, or disease is also controversial in secular schools of thought, which place the human body at the center of the universe. A thousand years before Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, done in 1490, there was Vastu Shastra, a scientific piece in Sanskrit, which viewed the human body both as microcosm and macrocosm and took it as a base to decide on the location, function, height, and construction order of the construction elements.[10]
When considered as part of the “human-centered” design approach, alkaline hydrolysis is radical. The human’s newest design might be an important sign of a paradigm shift regarding the status of the human body. Can turning fresh human corpses into plant food supplant the transformation of fossils into petroleum-based products? If design is indeed the reverse operation of archeology, it should keep excavating for better futures, no matter how gloomy the contemporary setting might be.
A longer version of this essay was published in Turkish at Istanbul-based online publication Manifold on April 4, 2017: https://manifold.press/olu-beden-tasarimi-yesil-olum
Ecem Arslanay
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[1]Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2016), 10.
[2]Ibid., 9.
[3]Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, “Theme: The Design of the Species: 2 Seconds, 2 Days, 2 Years, 200 Years, 200,000 Years,” Are We Human?, 3rd İstanbul Design Biennial, accessed November 7, 2019, http://arewehuman.iksv.org/exhibition/.
[4]Ibid., 9.
[5]Ibid., 12.
[6]Ibid., 14
[7]Colomina and Wigley, “Theme: The Design of the Species," http://arewehuman.iksv.org/exhibition/.
[8]Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, (October 1984): 1–2.
[9]Ibid., 5–6.
[10]Colomina and Wigley, Are We Human? (Zürich: Lars Müller, 2016), 146.
“Spolia: Transcripts of the Stones of the Little Metropolis”
Makryiannis Wing of the Gennadius Library, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Athens, Greece
September 10, – November 2, 2019
Housed in the Gennadius Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Nora Okka’s “Spolia: Transcripts of the Stones of the Little Metropolis” (Fig. 1) brings new life to the relief sculpture on the church colloquially known as the Little Metropolis, so named because of its towering neighbor, the Metropolis Church.
The Little Metropolis (also known as the Church of Agios Eleftherios or the Panagia Gorgoepikoos) was built sometime between the 12th and15th centuries. Although Athens is full of monuments both grander and more ancient, the Little Metropolis boasts a unique architectural quality – it is built entirely out of spolia, or reused materials (Fig. 2). Okka, an artist and architect currently based at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, highlights these reused materials as the focus of her artistic enterprise. For this exhibition, Okka made what are called “squeezes” of the church reliefs, which are displayed throughout the gallery space (Fig.3). Traditionally used to document epigraphy at archaeological sites, squeezes are made by hammering layers of paper against stone to create a copy of the relief. There is a tenderness towards the church that is evident in Okka’s careful documentation of the reliefs. A close observer will notice smatterings of surface dirt and rocks from the church on the squeezes themselves, brushed across the peaks and valleys of the reliefs. One can easily imagine the diligence and care that Okka had to take to create successful squeezes. It is an arduous process that requires a great deal of strength in order to properly hammer the paper; focus as to not damage the original stone; and a sensitivity to the object itself so that the artist can reproduce its relief in an honest way.
At first glance, the exhibition strikes the visitor as a repetition of white: each squeeze appearing plaster-like in its white mount and wooden frame, reflected upon the marble floor of the I. Makryiannis Wing. The surprise comes when you look closely at each individual squeeze. Each has its own texture, covered in relief both high and low, and allows the visitor to think about the reliefs on their own merit, divorced from the architectural program of the church for the first time since the Little Metropolis was built (Fig. 4). Being able to process the reliefs as distinct objects is a transformative experience, allowing one to think about the life of the spolia prior to its inclusion in the church: as part of a funerary stele, temple, or doorway. Simultaneously, the viewer also is faced with the competing idea of the squeeze as an original work of art. It copies the relief, but does not exactly reproduce it, as it shows the work in negative.
In the center of the room, visitors can look at archival material from both the ASCSA’s own archives and from the Benaki Museum, which shows images of the church from the 19th century onward, ranging from architectural plans and photographs to an 1890 watercolor by artist Mary Hogarth (Fig. 5). These images serve to both place the visitor within the context of the church and as a tool to place the reliefs, seen in negative on the gallery walls, on their Byzantine building. More than that, the archival material functions as a lens, illuminating how this building has been seen over time. Often these images have the same perspective on the Little Metropolis—a slightly askew picture of the front of the building, surrounded by either people or plants or construction. Sometimes, they show independent spolia, prompting an eagle-eyed visitor to find its imprinted counterpart in the exhibition. Consistently, however, they are able to demonstrate both the persistent, if sometimes repetitive, nature of interest in the church and the durability of the Little Metropolis. as a living monument in the center of Athens.
