Biographies & Space

Placing the Subject in Art and Architecture

Dana Arnold, Joanna Sofaer Derevenski, Dana Arnold, Joanna Sofaer Derevenski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134215355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Bringing together a collection of high-profile authors, Biographies and Space presents essays exploring the relationship between biography and space and how specific subjects are used as a means of explaining sets of social, cultural and spatial relationships.

Biographical methods of historical investigation can bring out the authentic voice of subjects, revealing personal meanings and strategies in space as well as providing a means to analyze relations between the personal and the social. Writing about both actual (architectural) and imagined (pictorial) space, the authors consider issues of gender, childhood, sexuality and race, highlighting an increasing fluidity and interaction between theory, methods and history.

Biographies and Space is an original and exciting new book, with direct relevance to both architectural and art history.

1
(Auto)biographies and space

Dana Arnold

I am interested in how discourse shapes our experience of architecture and the built environment as a visual object and as an agent in the formation of social identity. This essay seeks to investigate how the discourses of architecture work to perpetuate hegemonies, and to think about ways in which we can destabilise such norms.¹ Specific reference is made here to the autobiographical and the biographical trace, both of which overlap and intersect throughout this essay. My starting point is can architecture through its hegemonic discourses make me into/construct me as a woman – in other words do my (auto)biography and the spaces (both textual and physical) I inhabit intersect? The intention is not to offer a hermetically sealed argument about the (auto)biographical trace in architecture. Instead, it is to present a series of incremental position statements about our relationship to architecture and how the verbal and visual discourses around space and spatial experience work to form our identity. In thinking about an ontology or system of the built environment in this way it is necessary to try to think about theories of both subjects and objects (and here I include biography) and their ties – particularly in this case feminine biographies and space. And it is helpful to think about criteria for distinguishing various types of subjects and objects for instance: concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent and their ties in other words: relations, dependencies and predication. In addition, the notion of time is important as the (auto)biographical trace transforms itself and is transformed by time.

I think the following anecdotes are helpful in telling us something about subjects, objects, their ties and their relationship to both space and time. And, appropriately, they include elements of my own (auto)biography.

Strange bedfellows

I have been fortunate enough to hold visiting fellowships at Yale University, the Getty Research Institute and the University of Cambridge, where accommodation was generously provided. This continual turnaround of living space for the ongoing procession of international scholars made me think about how many members of the academic community had slept in the same bed. My apartment at Yale had been the residence of Henri Focillon, and I was reliably informed that he had died in the very bed in which I, and many other art historians, had subsequently slept. The wardrobes and cupboards contained some of his books that had never been removed, all containing his neat signature in the inside cover declaring both ownership and a (auto)biographical trace.

My puzzlement at this space–time phenomenon grew during my tenure at the Getty Research Institute. Here academics from across the world shared the same bed, so to speak (and in real time sat in the jacuzzi together – a very different kind of close encounter). Although all traces of the previous occupant were expunged from the apartment, remnants were sometimes to be found in the assigned mailbox. But most surprisingly an odd ritual had evolved of putting the unwanted contents of a soon to be vacated apartment, presumably too good to throw away – half-full bottles of olive oil, cleaning products, coffee or even hairdryers, on a table in the communal lounge for the remaining scholars to take as they wished. These relics, the material remains of occupation and existence, manifested to me not only choices made about what was worth keeping, but also about the nature of the legacy one left behind, as this pile of former belongings became a strange kind of epitaph. Although deracinated from the actual space of occupation, the biographical trace evoked by these objects was no less forceful. These two events prompted me to think about architecture, or rather the space it encloses, and the meanings and identities that can be conferred on objects within that space. The space and the objects do not change but our understanding of them does, and this can be influenced by social and cultural circumstances. Moreover, the fragments of material culture and of material identities – Focillon’s books or half-used bottles of lavatory cleaner made me think of a kind of archaeology in both the literal and Foucauldian sense.

It took my fellowship at Cambridge for me to fully realise how these events from my own biography could help me to think about the performative qualities of the built environment.² The preceding visiting fellow and previous occupant of my set (apartment) in King’s College had been Edward Said. Yes, same bed, and indeed same bath, but we’ve already been there … but in the bottom of the wardrobe was a pair of socks – not brightly plaid argylls in case you are interested, just plain grey ribbed wool. These became objects of fascination for me – were they Said’s, and perhaps more importantly were they clean? The meaning and importance of this abandoned or forgotten item of clothing ranged from cultural relic to evidence of bad housekeeping. Were they Said’s? Or did he look at them thinking they belonged to the occupant before him? The spatial location of everyday objects together with a narrative that could place them at a certain point in time made these socks potentially culturally significant in providing a biographical trace of Said. Indeed, during his stay at King’s, Said wrote a new preface to the edition of Orientalism published in 2003. Had this been drafted at the desk where I worked, and was he wearing these very socks to keep his feet warm?

In this opening section of my discussion of biographies and space I want to give a final word to the socks, or at least the anxieties that still rest within me about them. Even though I trained as an art historian, I did not take a picture. And I left them untouched, in situ, undisturbed. But did whoever occupied the set in King’s after me think they were my socks? And, would anyone really believe that I would wear grey ribbed woollen socks?

At one level my personal and perhaps initially frivolous-sounding anecdotes exemplify questions about being, and highlight the most basic problems in ontology: finding a subject, a relationship, and an object to talk about evoking questions such as ‘what am I?’ and ‘what is describing this to me?’ But these narratives also show how my biography intersects with those of others through specific spatial locations and ruptured temporal continuities. And here we begin to see the role time can play in this interaction. The spatial location of objects and subjects imposes a kind of performativity on them, as they enact or represent different biographical traces, and this is something to which I will return. I want now to extend this idea to see how the body responds to its spatial location. And conversely what kinds of performative identities can be imposed on bodies by the spaces that enclose them.

Everything round invites a caress

It is almost too obvious to state that the concept of space as it is used in this essay and indeed throughout this volume is not unproblematic. It is at once the virtual spaces of the text and the physical surroundings that are our environment. Theoretical models that foreground spatial concepts in metaphysics or more recently in spatio-temporal deconstruction are commonplace. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they have a distinctly masculinist bias. Female concepts of space, whether it be theorisation or experience, have a different grounding and now work towards dissolving the boundaries between the construction and deconstruction of theory.³ Theories of space produced by men can work to establish unities and totalities and have specific gendered contours – what better example than Gaston Bachelard’s assertion that ‘everything round invites a caress’?⁴ But is it the role of women/feminist theorists to shape masculine space into something feminine? Surely the maxim ‘everything straight deserves a caress’ only endorses the phallogocentrism that underscores masculinist theoretical models.

In a recent essay I asserted ‘if I say gender, you think women’.⁵ And in the field of the relationship between gender and space little work has been done on writing the male subject into the discourse – he is there by rights – not least as the linguistic predicate.⁶ Conversely, much important work has been done to reconfigure the canon by queer theorists and feminist architectural historians, and I have discussed this in more detail elsewhere.⁷ It is suffice to say here, in relation to questions about my own (auto)biography and space that the work of feminist scholars has repositioned women as users and producers of space, establishing new spatial locations for the interaction of feminine biographies and space.⁸ In this regard the domestic environment has become an object of scrutiny.⁹ For Laura Mulvey the middle-class bourgeois interiors of Walter Benjamin make no mention of a private sphere. Instead domestic space is an essential adjunct to the bourgeois marriage that associates women with the role of wife and mother.¹⁰ Women have also been shown to be proactive in the production of space. Alice T. Friedman demonstrates that an unexpectedly large number of the most significant and original houses built in Europe and America in the twentieth century were commissioned by female clients.¹¹ Friedman shows that these houses represent not only the epitome of Modern design, but also innovative approaches to domestic space. This was the result of the joint efforts of client–architect pairs, such as Sarah Stein and Le Corbusier, and Edith Farnsworth and Mies van der Rohe. The history of the Modern Movement is, however, usually told as a masculinist narrative – not least the case in the articulation of its aesthetic. Terms frequently used to describe modernist design include ‘clean, linear, rational, transparent’ and these personify (we are told) masculinity, and therefore the masculine way in which architecture encloses space. But if we are to follow Friedman’s argument do these modernist aesthetic qualities in fact do this, given the heretofore unacknowledged feminine predicates? The relationship between gender and the aesthetic is not confined to modernist architecture. Think, for instance, of the Palais Royal in Paris – an eighteenth-century building – but here I am thinking about its use nearer to our own time. Imagine visiting Colette in her rooms in the Palais Royal and seeing the outside as she saw it, and then imagine visiting Cocteau in his rooms. Neither the...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustration credits
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 (Auto)biographies and space
• 2 Living the Romantic landscape (after Deleuze and Guattari)
• 3 “Life as a ride in the métro”
• 4 ‘This scarlet intruder’
• 5 Amsterdam eternal and fleeting
• 6 Turner
• 7 Mapping the ‘bios’ in two graphic systems with gender in mind
• 8 Biography and spatial experience in contemporary diasporic art in Britain
• 9 The art of reconciliation
• 10 Disinter/est
• Index