Editors’ Introduction
This issue of SEQUITUR explores a theme that is often omitted from discussion: the “oops!” moments in the history of art and architecture. Although history tends to ignore “oops!” instances in favor of successful outcomes, our contributors to this issue discuss error, failure, methodological quandaries, unrealized projects, and unexpected creative reuse. These themes illuminate the challenges that art and architectural historians face when seeking to bring clarity and reason to complex historical questions that are anything but clear-cut.
Roxanne Smith’s feature essay, “‘Keep Hands Off Them’: The Case of the Priapic Votives at the British Museum,” chronicles the history of five phallic votives at the British Museum, from their late-eighteenth-century bequest to their current broken state. Smith historicizes the likely mishandling of the objects against Enlightenment classification practices, noting how the museum’s failure to sufficiently record them may have stemmed from their censorship as obscene objects, along with the administrative troubles that plagued the nascent museum.
Kelsey Gustin, co-coordinator (with Tessa Hite) of the 33rd Annual Boston University Graduate Student Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture, reflects on this year’s conference, which was held on March 24-25, 2017 at the Boston University Art Gallery and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Titled “Trashed: Rejection and Recovery in the History of Art and Architecture,” the symposium inspired our issue’s theme. Keynote speaker Dr. Joanna Grabski, Professor and Chair of Art History and Visual Culture at Denison University, spoke about the techniques of contemporary Senegalese artists who rely on the creative reappropriation of products in Dakar’s Colobane Market. Graduate student papers addressed myriad topics relating to the repercussions of rejection and the possibilities of repurposing materials, ideas, and motifs throughout art and architectural history.
Two research spotlights highlight some of the methodological challenges that accompany the formation of architectural history. Chelsea Baumgartner discusses the difficulty of creating an online database that catalogues and connects buildings funded by women in the Islamic world. Meanwhile, Nicholas Pacula creatively reconstructs Adolf Loos’s unrealized House for Josephine Baker, using an examination of real estate holdings and architectural drawings to imagine where the architect might have built the dwelling within the city of Paris.
Continuing our expanded reviews section, this issue also includes six exhibition reviews covering a vast array of topics. Our contributors discuss New York exhibitions ranging from seventeenth-century Dutch prints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to a retrospective of the moving image at the Whitney Museum to design solutions for socioeconomic and environmental problems at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Exquisite examples of the Qur’an, on loan from Istanbul’s Museum of Turkish and Islamic Arts, are given the spotlight at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C. In Cambridge, MA, we find moving examples of Chilean avant-garde art arising from the political turmoil of the 1970s. Finally, in Paris’s old Mint, a solo show featuring the provocative work of contemporary Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan rounds out our exhibition review section.
We would like to offer a special thanks to our outgoing senior editors Jordan Karney Chaim, Sasha Goldman, and Erin McKellar. Their tireless work ethic and sharp minds have been essential to SEQUITUR’s continued growth as an experimental online graduate student journal. We hope to continue their legacy of rigorous standards, collegial collaboration, and effective leadership in the next issue of SEQUITUR.
Lydia Harrington and Joseph Saravo