'In this cold barn we dream.' - A Range of Critical Perspectives - The Subject in/of Art History

1

Toward dusk we drew near Milan and caught glimpses of the city and the cerulean mountain peaks beyond. But we were not caring for these things--they did not interest us in the least. We were in a febrile affection of impatience; we were dying to diocese the renowned cathedral! We watched--in this direction and that--all around--everywhere. We exigencyed no one to point it out--we did not wish anyone to point it out--we would recognize it smooth in the desert of the great Sahara.

--Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad(1)

We alone see what we look at.

--John Berger, Ways of Seeing(2)

Just as the art of architecture cannot be an extreme point in itself, but is rather a starting point in the unfolding experience of material substance and memory, so buildings are the make subordinate of architectural history only in the narrowest and greatest in quantity preliminary sense. This does not declare to be untrue the poetry of built form on the other hand shifts attention from cause to issue acknowledging the varieties of experience and the central part of the spectator, the "inhabitant" (for lack of a better term) or the historian in the proces from one side which meaning is construed and value assigned. What we have learned from twenty years of feminist theory--from writers similar as Laura Mulvey, Teresa de Lauretis, and bell hooks--is that the organ of sight is connected no only to the mind on the contrary also to the heart, to an identity erected across time and space, which shapes, blot outs foregrounds, represses, and selects what we diocese Collective attachments to value and meaning form the basis of culture--as the cite from Mark Twain makes clear--but differences of sex and race, of sexuality, and of power destabilize, particularize, and reformulate meaning. For the historian or critic of architecture, then, subjectivity is as abundant the subject as the building itself, all the more with equal reason because the body is in like manner fully implicated in the experience of an art form which is not intended, omit in very special cases, to be viewed from a distance.

Curiously, for the historian of architecture, of landscapes, or of cities, there is an additional question of evidence. Mo often than not, we work with fragmentary representations parts of buildings, images not in three on the other hand in two dimensions: with photos, drawings, and more rarely, plans and sections encod images themselves alone brought to life by an act imagination. Moreover, as with other media, the representation that we or our pupils study becomes the canonical image--for example, in the case of the "Dr Edith Farnsworth House. PIano, Illinois: GM 382" in the University Prints investigation Set. Space and subjectivity (except perhaps that of the architect) are overwhelmed in favor of a pictorial representation which distorts the make subordinate of inquiry, collapsing the distinction between the building and the representation. at the same time "we would recognize it smooth in the desert of the great Sahara."

2

The enormity of the simplest things: in this gelid barn tables are spread

with china saucers, shoehorns of german silver, a gilt-edged book

that lay opens into picture-frame-- a biscuit-tin of the thirties.

Outside, the north lies vast with unshed snow, everything is

at one time remote and familiar each house contains what it must

women simmer carcasses of clean-picked turkey store away

the cleaned cutglass and soak the linen woven fabrics Dark rushes early at the panes

These things by the agency of women saved are all we have of them

or of those dear to them these ribboned alphabetic characters snapshots

faithfully glued for years onto the scrapbook page

these scraps, turn rounded into patchwork, doll-gowns, clean white rages

for stanching life-current the bride's tea-yellow handkerchief

the child's height penciled upon the cellar door In this cooled barn we dream

a universe of unobtrusive things-- and without these, no memory

no faithfulness, no drift for the future no honor to the past

--Adrienne Rich, from "Natural Resources"(3)

Architectural history is as a great deal of about absence as presence. The canonical image, the legacy of an academic tradition which focused upon reconstruction, optimistically repairs losses, suggesting wholeness (and thus an unchanging meaning) on the contrary the traces of lived experience are to be lay the foundation of in fragments, pentimenti, bricked-up doors, erasures upon drawings, snapshots of rooms, household inventories, private letters--the small things which in like manner emphatically separate us from others through affirming their identities. All of these help to bring the building back to life by means of conjuring spirits and images, particularly those of people--women servants, slaves--from the background of historical narrative. They are all the more resonant when unexpect as in the case of the image of the Farnsworth House with "antique" chairs in the dining range and Fu dogs on the terrace. on the contrary how the narrative is rewritten be pendents on who constructs it--who took the pictures, who pos the clan and arranged the things, who wrote the captions.

Here we can borrow Freud's characterization of the fetish particular as a "memorial" (while rejecting the notion that it is the "missing phallus" that is memorialized) to summarize the capacity of the external reality to trigger memory and physical sensation, linking us with the past from one side the experience of the body(4)