Editors’ Introduction
by İkbal Dursunoğlu
This issue of SEQUITUR reflects upon the “Interiors” of our architectural and psychological boundaries, and witnesses how the overlap of these physical and mental spaces creates both shelters of intimacy and sites of estrangement. Despite writing on one of the most durable, and yet most flexible, features of human existence, and around diverse temporalities from antiquity to the present and covering a global scope, there is a remarkable thematic consistency to the explorations of our authors. Subjectivity and access emerge as the two central sub-themes of this issue, which perhaps tells us as much about our current shared condition as it does about the specific subject matters covered.
Human subjectivity and indoor space appear mutually constitutive of each other, at present as in the past. But this subjectivity is always contingent upon the level of access and control that one has to a space, to its knowledge, to its resources, and to the world external to it. The examinations presented here, of varying configurations of access and denial in diverse temporal and cultural contexts, provide incredibly rich glimpses of the myriad ways in which our relationships to interior space have taken shape. Sometimes human subjectivity has organically developed in tandem with indoor space and, while designing it, we also gave form to our own selves. At other times, a discovery of space parallel to our existence has thrown new light on and changed the ways in which we defined our identity. And at yet other times, we have had to build subjectivity against the restrictions imposed in the spaces we have inhabited.
In a fascinatingly varied array of feature essays, these questions are explored in full range and nuance. Rachel Bonner situates the eighteenth-century portrait of Ramona Antonia Musitú y Valvide Icazbalceta by Juan de Sáenz in the broader tradition of New Spanish representations of the American territories. She radically analyzes Musitú’s portrait through politics of racially defined land-ownership, arguing that the portrait both lent and denied agency to its sitter at the same time. In her thoughtful contemplation of Edward Krasiński’s employment of a blue Scotch Tape to circumscribe the walls of his Warsaw studio apartment in the 1970s, Nadia Gribkova contends that while this gesture placed the artist within a larger twentieth-century avant-garde abstract art movement, his positionality as the citizen of a post-Stalinist country was reflected in a hesitation to participate in an all-encompassing, exhaustive universalism. In a truly interdisciplinary study, Katie Ligmond traces the formal and intellectual links between Wari urban and tomb layouts and Inka textiles. In doing so, she reveals that the adoption of similar grid structures, which the Inka possibly inherited from the Wari, point to analogous patterns of obfuscation and control. In both societies, the elites had seemingly exclusive access to the logic underlying these patterns at the expense of the commoners, indicating the parallel mechanisms of imperial power they employed. Tyler Rockey presents a richly textured account of the Renaissance discovery of an ancient Roman palatial ruin, and the subsequent artistic recreation of this space in the Logetta of Cardinal Bibbiena in the Vatican. Rockey interprets this transposition within the context of humanist endeavors to revive the city of ancient Rome in the sixteenth-century present, and argues that, by this gesture, the Logetta and its ancient source became heterotopic spaces where multiple temporalities collided and accustomed norms were altered.
The research spotlights featured in this issue offer notes on exciting work in progress on completely different subjects that nevertheless resonate well with each other. Mew Lingjun Jiang present their preliminary findings on a portable bodhisattva shrine, currently located in Sannohe, Aomori, Japan, dedicated to the Deity of Gambling and covered with Portuguese-inspired playing cards. Jiang’s report reflects on how the cult of this deity bridges the seventeenth century to our day through continuous practice, and a remote rural Japanese town to the rest of the nation even during the pandemic. In their research spotlight, Amelie Ochs and Rosanna Umbach analyze how postwar German lifestyle and home-decoration magazines participate in the formation of modern national subjectivities by shaping notions of the ideal dwelling, and, by extension, the ideal citizen, via strategic employment of design elements such as layout, imagery, and typography.
Both of the book reviews featured in this issue reflect on the ways that art offers strategies of resistance to repression under restrictive environments. María de Lourdes Mariño reviews two independent art catalogues, Iter Criminis and El Parque Horizontal, curated by Isel Arango and Anamely Ramos respectively. Both of these catalogues grew from a Cuban alternative cultural movement that seeks to create and maintain art spaces independent from central state institutions of culture, radically claiming the private space of the home as a site of underground artistic gatherings in the face of criminalization by the state. Michael Rangel reviews Nicole Fleetwood’s Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, focusing on artists imprisoned by the United States prison system, heavily biased along racial and class lines. Fleetwood identifies a carceral aesthetics, emerging from within the prison system, which brings both “invisibility and hyper-visibility to those incarcerated and their art,” to quote Rangel.
Against this grim landscape, the exhibition reviews in this issue offer brighter prospects, though perhaps only to those of us who are able to enjoy them. Shannon Bewley examines Jessica Burko’s exhibition at Shelter in Place Gallery, Boston—a gallery space creatively designed to enable local artists to reach their audiences even under quarantine conditions through social media. In her tiny exhibition of found furniture and photographic material, Burko explores the ramifications of a socially distanced life wherein the home space is discovered anew. Alice Quaresma’s exhibition at HOME, displayed at Pablo’s Birthday in New York City and also online, presents a much warmer view of the home, as described by Josephine English Cook. Through a series of photographic mixed-media works, the artist ruminates over displacement, restrictions on travel, and the intimacy of feeling at home.
The image of interiors that rises from this collection of writings might be imagined as reminiscent of the illustration that accompanies this introduction. In the scene, Alexander the Great of the Persian tradition visits the court of Nushaba, the Queen of Barda’, in disguise; yet the latter wisely succeeds in identifying him from his portrait. After a long conversation followed by convivial feasting, Alexander leaves the court, which he had visited to spy, as a more enlightened man. The painting captures the moment of recognition: under the spy’s nervously watching eyes, Nushaba gracefully points at his portrait. This resonates with the essays presented here, where our authors observe that human subjectivity often takes form in interior space through the agency of art. In the illustration, the restricted space of the court serves as the stage where Alexander’s identity is discovered and his personality subsequently reshaped—humbled but bettered—in this elegant conversation around a painting. The rarified nature of the gathering ensures that Nushaba’s knowledge is available only to a select few.
Thus, issues of access, like those that haunt the accounts of our authors, demarcate the levels of this painting and define the reach of its figures. The gathering takes place exclusively behind the shut gates of a castle beyond unreachable mountains, but in open air, in a courtyard that connects to the garden that we see on the right. As the host, Nushaba is seated on a dais in an iwan, a rectangular vaulted hall walled on three sides, with one side entirely open to the outside. This central space of authority is inaccessible to any other figure in the painting. Movement through the doors to different spaces of the palatial complex is possible, but highly regulated. Inside the folds of the complex, seen in the upper parts of the illustration, various figures perform their duties or direct their gazes downwards from above at the happenings of the court, their view not as readily available from below, with a distance both endowing and denying them access to knowledge at the same time.
We hope that this issue of SEQUITUR performs as a welcoming virtual space of interiority with open access to knowledge and inspiration, helping to build positive agency and empowerment in the never-ending process of selfhood construction.