Oriental Interiors

Design, Identity, Space

John Potvin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781472596659
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architettura
• Subtopic: Storia dell'architettura

Since the publication of Edward Said's groundbreaking work Orientalism 35 years ago, numerous studies have explored the West's fraught and enduring fascination with the so-called Orient. Focusing their critical attention on the literary and pictorial arts, these studies have, to date, largely neglected the world of interior design. Oriental Interiors is the first book to fully explore the formation and perception of eastern-inspired interiors from an orientalist perspective. Orientalist spaces in the West have taken numerous forms since the 18th century to the present day, and the fifteen chapters in this collection reflect that diversity, dealing with subjects as varied and engaging as harems, Turkish baths on RMS Titanic, Parisian bachelor quarters, potted palms, and contemporary yoga studios. It explores how furnishings, surface treatments, ornament and music, for example, are deployed to enhance the exoticism and pleasures of oriental spaces, looking across a range of international locations. Organized into three parts, each introduced by the editor, the essays are grouped by theme to highlight critical paths into the intersections between orientalist studies, spatial theory, design studies, visual culture and gender studies, making this essential reading for students and researchers alike.

1

Inside Orientalism:

Hybrid Spaces, Imaginary Landscapes and Modern Interior Design

John Potvin

In his unsettling photographic series Breach from 2009, Irish-born photographer Richard Mosse set out to capture the effects of the US-led invasion of Iraq that began in 2003. At first glance, the direct frankness of Mosse’s photographs appear as straightforward documentation of war, an idea that the photographer himself shies away from. Rather, these unconventional pictures, in many ways, function as both a distillation of a well-rehearsed and yet current relationship between East and West as well as a provocation to see foreign occupation in different and novel terms, namely through the effects on the built environment and interior space. Mosse’s project does not set out to record the destruction of war on the landscape and people, but rather the devastation wrought on the interiors and poolside landscapes of Saddam Hussein’s stately residences as occupied by US armed forces. Although Mosse only managed to visit six of the eighty-one palaces that comprised Hussein’s impressive real estate portfolio, the resulting series is at once both ambivalent and ambiguous, precisely because it represents a modern Oriental despot’s (read: modern-day dictator’s) removal, rather than the homes of average middle- or lower-class Iraqi citizens. In these pictures, various forms of power inscribe themselves onto the surface design of the interiors. These grand palaces that visibly betray the effects of war are transformed through occupation to service as makeshift housing for foreign soldiers; a vivid reminder that the function, meaning and lived-in nature of interior space changes—sometimes quite rapidly and destructively—over time. Now in despotic opulence, American soldiers rest in opulent thrones or on the edge of jewel-toned tiled swimming pools [see Figures 1.1–1.3]. Through these pictures, our fervent fantasies of Oriental spaces are destroyed, buttressed only by sandbags and machine-guns. The fantasy of the sultan’s harem now replaced by a battalion of soldiers whose desert-storm colors are juxtaposed with gem-toned walls, ceilings and pools.

In these photographs, the Oriental picturesque (Nochlin 1989: 50–51) gives way to the Oriental sublime, where the mask of seductive surfaces and fantastical scenes is removed to reveal a more horrifying aspect of the West’s relationship with the East. The power of these images lay, at least in part, in the evocative way they juxtapose destruction and devastation with, where still visible, the opulence of a putatively decadent Orient. Inadvertently, they serve as the material and visual evidence of the overthrow of the enemy, of despotic rule, and in the absence of his body, the Oriental interior becomes indexical. In her ground-breaking essay “The Imaginary Orient,” Linda Nochlin sets out to explore a series of intersecting “absences” present in French Orientalist painting from the nineteenth century. Focusing largely on the work of Jean-Léon Gérôme, Nochlin argues that depictions of the Orient share in common:

FIGURE 1.1 Richard Mosse, Breach, 2009.

FIGURE 1.2 Richard Mosse, Breach, 2009.

1 a sense that time stands still, or in other words that history or temporal change have yet to impose themselves on these places and spaces;

2 that within the images of the Orient as spectacle, the Westerner functions as a dispassionate, disinterested and disengaged bystander outside the frame of representation;

3 the way artists, through the guise of realism, cloak the fact that these are aesthetic representations rather than born out of scientific certainty and authentic evidence; and

4 a denial that labor and industry comprise an integral part of the Orient.

In sum, Nochlin asserts that “[n]eglected, ill-repaired architecture functions […] as a standard topos for commenting on the corruption of contemporary Islamic society” (1989: 38). In Breach Mosse reverses and unsettles the order of things. In his pictures, absences are replaced by a tangible Western (armed) presence, labor is represented in the form of plebeian or crass interior design, documentary evidence is coupled with subjective disclosure, while history is made evident in the site-specific struggles over the built environment. For Mosse, the choice of subject was a way to reveal the sediments of history:

FIGURE 1.3 Richard Mosse, Breach, 2009.

Well you have Saddam’s palace, all of the marble, the artificial lakes, the grand columns, the plastic chandeliers, and the murals. Then the Yanks take over. You have the layers of US troops and their personal effects, their bits and bobs, baseball pennants, Wrestlemania posters, camouflage netting. You can see the military’s provisional plywood architecture within the gaudy vaulted palace domes. You can just see, very simply, the strata of history in front of your eyes, like archeology…. But the traces of people are there in the interiors and landscapes that I choose to photograph.

(in Birnir 2009)

In Mosse’s compelling photographs, in other words, we enter inside, or at the very center of, Oriental interiors.

Interiors, not unlike bodies, are never neutral, but sites and sources of morality, scrutiny and voyeuristic pleasures; they function, to borrow from Henri Lefebvre’s tripartite notion of space, as everyday practices (perception), representations (conception) or imaginary realms (the lived). This way of looking into space allows for the multiple possibilities that the study of the interior has to offer in its various and endless real and imagined forms. For, as Mark Crinson notes:

The more radically disjunctive notion of space, the emphasis on the multivalent use, appropriation, and co-optation of space that Lefebvre alerts us to, is consonant with the emphasis in postcolonial theory on culture as an active process of translation and interpretation.

(2002: 81)

This volume does not place more value on one part of Lefebvre’s spatial triumvirate, as all three aspects of interior space and design form an integral and defining component of the creation, promulgation and experience of the modern interior as it comes into contact with Orientalism. Interiors are at once prescriptive, descriptive and inhabited. This intersection between the protean modern interior and the various impacts and influences of Orientalism over time reveal much about how space creates knowledge and meaning for a given time, place and community. As both a volume and as a broad spatial project, the Oriental interior is necessarily transdisciplinary in scope, relying on the expertise, approaches and knowledge of numerous types of people. The chapters that comprise this volume take this into account, and, as such, a definition of the Oriental interior is necessarily loose and broad, especially when one considers the vast and differing influences and fascination the East has held in the West. Moreover, the spaces or representations of interiors each chapter considers might be characterized as “incomplete” in their Orientalist program. Rather, Oriental interiors as we present them here are products of hybridity, offering alternative spaces betwixt and between polarities associated with East and West. Each interior weds Oriental decorative idioms to a Western design syntax to create a unique and novel language for the modern interior.

Since the publication of Edward W. Said’s ground-breaking Orientalism thirty-five years ago, numerous studies have explored the West’s fraught, long-lasting fascination with the so-called Orient. These studies have largely focused their critical attention on the literary and pictorial arts. Additionally, they have more often than not neglected the importance interior design, space and material culture have played in the formation, performance, perception and reception of the Orient in the West. Oriental Interiors specifically seeks to explore the importations and adaptations of an expansive yet amorphous Orientalism into the far-reaching landscape of interior design. What these interiors (imagined or real) share in common is a desire to elaborate a commingling of East and West that at once subverts and maintains cultural stereotypes while offering something new. Notions of morality and difference, and their sustained impact on aesthetic and cultural forms, underscore the volume’s emphasis on hybridity and intersectionality. As a theoretical starting point, Oriental Interiors wishes to view these interiors and their authors beyond a moralizing template that has long portrayed the East as victim, with the West acting as its invasive and omnipresent oppressor. This is not to suggest that tensions, inequities and violence are absent from these exchanges. Importantly, if “we maintain a static dualism of identity and difference, and uphold the logic of the dualism as the means of explaining how a discourse expresses domination and subordination, we fail to account for the differences inherent to each term” (Lowe 1991: 7).

Rather, the purpose here is to rethink and dismantle polarizing perspectives and conceive of the various case studies as products that forge new spatial, subjective and conceptual possibilities. As Homi Bhabha posited in “The Third Space,” hybridity, the guiding principle of this volume, provides for “new positions to emerge. The third space displaces the histories that constitute it” (1990: 211). With its pitfalls and possibilities, Orientalism has always offered a different and differing alternative global landscape, far beyond the us–other scenario that has largely plagued East–West relations. Bhabha’s notional third space opts out of providing nothing short of “a liminal site between contending and contradictory positions. Not a space of resolution, but one of continuous negotiation” (Hernandez 2010: 95). The hybrid nature inherent in the modern interior in general, and the examples explored in depth in this volume more specifically, entertain some form of dialogical spatial and material practice. Interior design, this volume asserts, possesses the conceptual and concrete possibilities of a so-called third space, one to be explored beyond restrictive assumptions and cultural boundaries.

The notion of authenticity is a rather loaded and much contested concept, especially if one considers the equally loaded term of inspiration as it concerns cultural production. Nevertheless, I make brief mention of authenticity here as an important source of tension, as all too often it serves as a filter as much as a fulcrum through which objects, peoples and spaces are constructed, perceived and rendered meaningful. Authenticity is largely a product of perception and representational strategies rather than an expression of lived and lived-in experiences. In my own work on Turkish baths (hammam) in nineteenth-century London, for example, I was fascinated by the way the creation of a supposedly authentic space within a pre-existing British architectural structure allowed for a particular type of an enactment of gendered and racial performances. Rituals associated with proper towel use, for instance, in the British hammam may prove authentic while simultaneously pointing to a perceived effeminacy precisely because of its Oriental flavor (Potvin 2015). As a result, I suggest that Oriental interiors are the result of an ongoing, endless series of hybrid becomings, always in the process of taking place; they are the resulting flux of constant and ongoing tensions, negotiations, ebbs, flows, bursts, presences and absences. “By foregrounding heterogeneity,” Lisa Lowe suggests “to open spaces that permit the articulation of other difference—themselves incongruous and nonequivalent—not only of nation and race but also of gender, class, region, and sexual preferences” (1991: 29). This speaks to the twined topic of this book, Orientalism and interior design. In their own unique ways, both remain unfinished products and terrains, always changing, shifting and evolving, responding to the impacts and trajectories of global, regional and local economies, cultural forces, subjective needs and consumer impulses. This volume explores the interest in Orientalism by questioning how subjectivity and space are products of travel, fantasy and cultural exchange as much as colonial conquest, gender contest and prohibited sexual appetite.

The design and spatial landscape of Oriental interiors necessarily runs the full gamut of expression and experience. On the one hand, some interiors either deploy motifs as surface treatments or introduce furnishing accessories into a pre-existing aesthetic program or, on the other, fashion, design, bodies, music and/or food are deployed to aggrandize, attenuate, enhance or particularize the exoticism, authenticity and/or pleasures of so-called Oriental space and design, forming what we might liken to a Gesamtkunstwerk, that is, the interior as a total expression or work of art. At either extreme, the space’s culture is transitive, the product of a constellation of cultural translation and transnational communication. Interiors are rarely static, but evolve over time. They expose shifting tastes and trends, material conditioning and the moral implications of aesthetic interventions.

Oriental interiors are also tied into inchoate or particularized expressions of gender, race, class and sexuality; in these spaces, identities and interiors play off each other, each informed by and informing the other. This volume will, as a result, attend to the complex ways in which identities are performed, negotiated and designed, and subjectivities given spatial specificity. All too often, studies in the field rely too heavily on architectural approaches, obscuring the spatial, cultural and subjective dynamics of interior design as proscriptive, ideal and lived-in ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on the contributors
• Note on the text
• Acknowledgment
• 1 Inside Orientalism: Hybrid Spaces, Imaginary Landscapes and Modern Interior Design
• Part One: Representations
• Introduction
• 2 The Empty Core of Western Aesthetics (Versus the Aesthetics of Eastern Intimacy): A Reading of Interior Spaces and Literary Impressionism in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
• 3 The Exhibitionary Construction of the “Islamic Interior”
• 4 Orientalism and David Hockney’s Male-positive Imaginative Geographies
• 5 The Excessive Trompe l’Oeil: The Saturated Interior in Tears of the Black Tiger
• Part Two: Gendered and Sexual Identities
• Introduction
• 6 Oriental Interiors in Eighteenth-century British Women Writers’ Novels
• 7 Bachelor Quarters: Spaces of Japonisme in Nineteenth-century Paris
• 8 Coming Out of the China Closet?: Performance, Identity and Sexuality in the House Beautiful
• 9 At the Edge of Propriety: Rolf De Maré and Nils Dardel at the Hildesborg Estate
• Part Three: Spaces and Markets of Consumption
• Introduction
• 10 “Heraldic Fantasies in Blue and Red and Silver”: Orientalism, Luxury and Social Corruption in the South Sea Directorial Houses
• 11 Promoting the Colonial Empire through French Interior Design
• 12 Paradise in the Parlor: Cozy Corners and Potted Palms in Western Interiors, 1880–1900
• 13 Traveling in Time and Space: The Cinematic Landscape of the Empress Theatre
• 14 “Flights of Unpractical Fancy”: Oriental Spaces at Sea from the Titanic to the Empress of Britain
• 15 Posturing for Authenticity: Embodying Otherness in Contemporary Interiors of Modern Yoga
• Index
• Copyright