Pun(k) Deconstruction

Experifigural Writings in Art&art Education

jan jagodzinski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781135458294
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

In Postmodern Dilemmas: Outrageous Essays in Art&Art Education and Pun(k) Deconstruction: Experifigural Writings in Art&Art Education, jan jagodzinski presents a series of essays covering a timespan of approximately ten years. These essays chart the theory and practice of art&art education as it relates to issues of postmodernity and poststructuralism concerning representation, identity politics, consumerism, postmodern architecture, ecology, phallocentrism of the artistic canon, pluriculturalism, media and technology, and AIDS. As a former editor of The Journal of Social Theory in Art Education and a founding member for the Caucus on Social Theory in Art Education, the author attempts to deconstruct the current art education paradigm, which is largely based on modernist tenets, and to reorient art education practice to social issues as developed in both media education and cultural studies. Part of the intent in these two volumes is to undertake a sustained critique of the 1982 Art in the Mainstream (A.I.M.) statement, which continues to be considered as the core value for art education. The distinct intention of this critique is to put forward a new value base for art&art education in these postmodern times. Many of the essays raise the need to be attentive to sex/gender issues in art&art education and the need to read the artistic discourse "otherwise." There is a sustained critique of the art programs developed by the Getty Center for the Arts, whose arts curriculum presents the paradigm case of late modernist thinking. Some essays are written in a provocative form that tries to accommodate such content. This is particularly the case in Pun(k) Deconstruction, where architectural discourse is deconstructed, and which includes an "artistic performance" given by the author in 1987. This singular set of volumes combines scholarship in the areas of gender studies, aesthetics, art history, art education, poststructuralism, and cultural studies in a unique blend of theory and practice for rethinking the field of art education.

Section I
Questioning Representation

1
Learning From Sal(I)ad: Redressing the "Story" of Architexture

A version of this paper was first presented at the National Art Education Association's 23rd Annual Conference in Dallas, Texas, in 1985, Since that time I have greatly expanded the section under postmodern architecture to include issues of deconstruction. Its current version was finished in 1987 and was never published, perhaps because of its book-length status. Reflecting on this essay today, I realize that it quoted the claim that architecture is the paradigm art form of the postmodern paradigm. There have been a number of books and essays written since this essay where such a theme is developed (see Kolb, 1990; Habermas, 1987). Christopher Norris and Andrew Benjamin (1988) have examined Derrida's impact on architecture. It becomes more and more obvious that Derrida's deconstructive philosophy is informed by the metaphorics of architecture. Mark Wigley (1993, 1994) in particular has shown the close interrelationship between Derrida and Heidegger in this regard. Derrida, after all, takes the term "deconstruction" from him. The language of "building" and "dwelling" in Heidegger fbauen, Ab-bau) is translated into construction and deconstruction. Both "ground" and "foundation" are privileged metaphors which escape metaphorization in philosophical self-apprehension. Kant had also used an architectural rhetoric to develop his Critiques, Hegel used the exemplar of the tomb, while Descartes' Meditations also used an architecture of foundations (Benjamin, 1991). But this use of architectural metaphorics is no less true of Derrida than it was with Heidegger, whom Derrida deconstructs by identifying his metaphorical privileging of "house" as another veiled "presence."

Inside-outside, or house-property, familiarity-unfamiliarity remain a privileged topos within deconstruction, hence I take Derrida's deconstruction of Heidegger's "house" as exposing the eviction of time and the privileging of space. This is a violence that necessarily institutes the interior from the exterior. There is no space without violence. Metaphysics is the production of this pure and proper interior space divided from an improper interior. This is the privileged realm of presence uncorrupted by representation. If metaphysics is disrupted then the interior is as well. In this sense the interior is a "domesticated" space. I maintain in this essay that the domesticated space in architecture is occupied by a paternal logos. In Heidegger the erasure of time happens when the "house" is both dismantled and built up again at the same instant. It may not look like the same "house" but a stable ground remains over the abyss. This is not unlike Lacan's notion of the sinthome, i.e., there are fundamental fantasies which cannot be unraveled without going mad and falling into the abyss ourselves. In this sense Derrida already occupies the interior of the "house" in order to displace it. But he does this by showing how the house is an effect of representation (of that which is outside the house—the improper exterior). The "house" (interior) is produced by what is excluded.

Deconstructive discourse, in this sense, is a rethinking of inhabitation. In this essay I take Heidegger's metaphysical architectural conception as the "House of Being" to be foundationally patriarchal. The domesticated space of architecture as a representational discourse does systematic violence to another "domesticity." There is domestic violence in Heidegger's House of Being, and I take that to be the difference (or alterity) that "women's space" brings. Such a space refuses to be totally domesticated. Since women's space cannot be excluded, yet it doesn't belong in the interior paternal logos, it remains "undecidable" but, at the same time, indispensable for the metaphysics of architecture to maintain itself This undecidable, for Derrida, belongs to the uncanny (unheimlich—not belonging to the home, strange, foreign). The familiarity and comfort of the home is upset when an element that was in the home all along, but which was not seen because it lay outside the comfort of the home, all of a sudden is exposed. There is a shock. The interplay between time and the recognition of this uncanny element is like Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit. These uncanny undecidables point to the domestic violence in the house, an alienation in the midst of familiarity. Such violence is exposed, for instance, in the case of Islam where the Satanic Verses of Salman Rushdie exposed the privacy of the patriarchal house of the haram. The Arabic root hrm means "forbiddenness." That which is "sacred" or "prohibited" is haram; the harem is an area of the palace set aside for women, it can also be a sacred area. As a category of belief or behavior haram is applied to holiness, impurity, and sexuality (Easterman, 1993: 217). The uncanniness dwells in the haram and is never questioned.

Metaphysics in this sense veils over the domestic violence which represses the traces of strangeness of the house. To expose the "domestic violence" and sickness in the architectural discourse I have tried to do two things: first, to identify women's spaces which have inhabited the patriarchal house of architecture all along, but are continually repressed to maintain the discourse of architecture, and second, that architecture's domesticity has always belonged to the privileged of society. To do this I have tried to examine historical paradigm, shifts in architecture from the forgotten space of women so that this reminding might avoid a repetition of the Same for the teaching of art in the built environment (ABE).

In this essay I still stand behind my criticism as to why its pastiche style is something not to be celebrated; rather I try to show what is "outside" of architecture. This I argue is the domestic space of woman and feminized space in general which was there all along, inside the discourse of architecture as its limit. This Other of architecture has made it possible for the story to parade itself as the unfolding of a particular form of masculine culture. I have added appropriate footnotes to thoughts I have had since the writing of this text.

The idea of story, not narrative, in the title alludes to the grand narrative told by Gombrich in his Story of Art. It is meant as a disrespectful aside. One might follow the feminist trend and call Gombrich's treatment a his-story of art. I have added a large section as a "postscript" in two sections which basically review two influential books since written on postmodern architecture: Sharon Zukin's ( 1991 ) Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World and Edward Soja's (1989) Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Both authors make use of spacial metaphors that they claim form the postmodern moment. Supplemental to these two authors I will include Celeste Olalquiaga's (1992) Megalopolis: Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities, whose thesis might be read as an update of Paul Virilio's (1986) "The Overexposed City," where space has been imploded into time and distance transmuted into speed by the instantaneousness of communication changing our perceptions of the city once again. These books are reviewed from the basic thesis maintained in this 1985-87 paper. Since then, Sexuality & Space: Princeton Papers on Architecture, edited by Beatriz Colomina (1992), who organized a 1990 symposium by the same name at Princeton's School of Architecture, comes closest to what I have attempted to say: that the politics of space is always sexual. In this regard the essay by Mark Wigley is especially important. He writes: "As she is the house for man she does not have one herself other than the one she constructs with her own decoration. Lacking a 'proper place,' 'it would be necessary for her to re-envelope herself with herself [Irigaray] by wearing another decorative layer, a supplementary mask that at one produces and houses her own identity through a blurring of the tactile and visual" (387).

Pretext

Frame(d) Architecture

It seems somewhat inconceivable that the history of Western architecture and the study of the urban environment as it is currently taught in schools and art departments in Canada and the United States has largely ignored a growing body of literature by feminists who have tried to redress what they perceive to be a his-story of a patriarchal capitalist class who wish to reproduce the current architectural reality with its embedded gender and class relations. In the mid '80s there was a concerted attempt to introduce Art and the Built Environment (ABE) into the art education curriculum. Most of its curriculum development was generated in England through the efforts of Eileen Adams and Colin Ward (1982), some of which spilled over into Canada and the U.S. But Thatcherism soon put a stop to some of its impetus. Money that was being directed to urban reform began to dry up, and enthusiasm for the programs eventually waned.

The ABE movement in England, by and large, was not a "critical movement." Housed in the visual arts, its curriculum materials and workshops for teachers stressed the "aesthetic" decisionmaking processes of urban reform. A formalist visual language was introduced which examined buildings and neighborhoods as aesthetic objects, often emphasizing their pure physical form. ABE drew its philosophical base from the architectural grand narrative as presented by architectural criticism in newspapers and magazines, by studying architectural guidebooks to a city or town's hidden pleasures, by following real estate developments, and by listening to the outrage spouted by historic preservationists—like Prince Charles! Resource people such as architects and urban planners presented "briefs" which allowed teachers and students to examine and propose new solutions to urban design problems they were given; however, these explorations and proposals often avoided the more difficult ideological issues. Yet social, political, and economic dimensions to such aesthetic decision making were often exposed and laid bare. Formalist analysis and a distant objective view were often abandoned. Many teachers took advantage of this exposure and pushed their students to initiate more social-action-type projects.

For art teachers to enter into this more critical political approach to the "built environment" there has to be a historical remembering as to how cities have arrived at their current "postmodern" state of architectural renewal, gentrification, and displacement of people. This essay undertakes such a historical remembering by exposing aspects of gender and class through an examination of architecture's grand narrative. The conclusions reached are hypothetical, rhetorical, and inconclusive, nevertheless the given "story"¹ is re-read from the position of a gendered subject. This reading questions architecture as a privileged male signifier in the public domain: as the root "arche" signifying an overriding dominance of a transcendental signifier hovering over the horizon, looking down and over its dominion, and thereby oppressing the private-domestic marginalized feminine space. The metaphors of towers, skyscrapers, turrets, and spires are the order here. This binary opposition between public/private-domestic space repeats itself continually throughout this story in the guise of verticality/horizontality, sun/moon, open land/cave, center/periphery. I take this typological opposition as the way exclusion is maintained. This phallogocentric (cocksure) bias, as Derrida (1981b) has argued, has always privileged the first term of these oppositions, the second term remaining supplementary, inferior, and defined by the first. This cocksure bias of the first term is blatantly obvious with the Vitruvian interpretation of the origins of architecture based on the theory of "double imitation," that is, the imitation of both the primitive hut (or feminine) and the "well-built" human male figure. The feminine is, therefore, subsumed by the male organ in this origin myth. I try to displace these binaries onto another plane by pointing to moments in the story where there may have been ruptures to this opposition. This study summons a chorus of voices who have tried to redress such oppositions. It ends with a comment on the city of Dallas, Texas. In light of my argument, this city is a paradigmatic example of architectural phallocentrism.

A Beginner's Guide to Gendered Architecture: Through Thirteen Frame(d) Events

We begin the story by noting the roots of the phonetic alphabet with a long quote from Rykwert's (1982) observation;

In the Western Semitic alphabet—and therefore in all alphabets, since they are all derived from it—the first two letters, A, B, show the essential acquisitions of civilized man, the domesticated animal, and the house: aleph, beit.

Aleph: written as A, its origin isn't that obvious. But write it the archaic Phoenician or Moabite way,

and garnish it further with eyes and ears,

and its pictographic nature will show itself. It is a head of cattle, an ox or a bull; it is also the essential unit of counting, one. And it is male.

Beit is female; coming second in the alphabet, it stands for the number two. And its original meaning, as well as its shape, was house. The oldest Phoenician form, a closed shape with a tail, presumably represented a plan of a room and an enclosing wall. Since the earliest alphabetic inscriptions date from somewhere between 1500 and 1000 B.C. it should not be thought beyond the ingenuity of their devisers to have reduced the house to calligraphic plan-form. The earliest scale plans found up to date are more than a millennium older. The Egyptians had already nearly two thousand years earlier turned the house plan of the simplest form into a letter, or more properly, a hieroglyph: h, hwt:

is the form of the plan of an enclosure and is usually translated as home or mansion; it is most commonly used in combinations to suggest palace, temple, and so on. But the hieroglyphic repertory was much richer than any alphabet, and provided another character for house, nht, nat:

meaning a shelter home, abode. The inevitable euphemism for the sky was of course house of the sky goddess:

The sky-goddess was called Nut, and her name, like that of her male equivalent, NU (not her husband though) was related to the simple character nu:

, fluid vessel. It may be that the near identity of the goddess' name and the word for house was accidental: after all the sound had many meanings, some quite unrelated. Nut's consort was not Nu, a sky-god, but the earth-god, Geb, whose image she is often shown overshadowing. She straddled him, supporting herself on her hands and feet, while he held up her midriff, and her starry body was a canopy over him. Through her body, the sun traveled at night, entering at her mouth and being reborn the next morning through her genitalia. But she straddled also, painted on the inner lid of almost every mummy coffin, the body of the dead person, who traveled to his resurrection as the sun did through the sky: . . .

The image of Nut made the coffin into the mummy's dwelling, as well as its guarantee of immortality. It indicates the feminine nature of the house as a female thing. The sense of it seems confirmed by the transformation, almost imperceptibly operated from the Western Semitic

into

whose true nature as a pictogram is indicated by the soubriquet "the provider, the nourisher" which it received from some hermetic authors; an implication which becomes obvious if you turn the letter on its side, like this:

(p. 85; italics mine)

Is it possible to rethink the first two letters of the alphabet from their current alphabetic linearity—first male and then female? As Rykwert maintains, the theme from womb to tomb, from birth to death, is reconciled through the very structure of the home. The cellar, undercroft, basement, crypt was the place of irrationality—dark, mysterious, hidden. The dead were buried there. It was a repository of the family's past and its worldly goods. The roof, in contrast, pointed to the sky, to life and birth. Their dialectical interplay, metaphorically presented as the copulation between earth and sky, formed the cosmological primal scene, a culture's origin myth. The sexual politics o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Section 1: QUESTIONING REPRESENTATION
• SECTION II: Experlfigural Writings
• SECTION III: THE QUESTION OF YOUTH IN THE POSTMODERN?
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index