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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
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016
Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905–2016
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
October 28, 2016 – February 5, 2017
In the ambitious and stimulating exhibition, Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905 – 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art continued to flex its curatorial muscles thanks to its adaptive and technologically proficient galleries designed by Renzo Piano. Surveying artistic experimentation with moving images since the invention of film technology at the dawn of the twentieth century, with forty works and installations by thirty-eight artists (not including the extensive list of theater screenings and expanded cinematic events off-site), curator Chrissie Iles installed a remarkable breadth and variety of works throughout the museum’s record-sized fifth-floor gallery.
Interview: Martine Gutierrez and Jordan Karney Chaim
Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) is a Brooklyn-based performance artist who documents her personal transformation through film and photography. Borrowing from various pop culture idioms, she produces elaborate narrative scenes in which she stars. Smart, seductive, and sincere, Gutierrez’s imagery heightens awareness of our own expressions and perceptions of identity—particularly gender identity—by elucidating how each is informed by the visual tropes we are exposed to as we move through the world. Her work is invested in the construction of identity, self-fashioning, and refashioning—matters central to this issue’s theme, Self + Portrait. Martine Gutierrez: True Story is an exhibition I curated at the Boston University Art Gallery’s Stone Gallery. On October 13, 2016 Martine and I had a public conversation in the gallery to discuss her work and process. That conversation is included below.
Martine Gutierrez & Jordan Karney Chaim
This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today
This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today
Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine
June 25, 2016 – October 23, 2016
No faces appeared on the wall of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art’s landmark exhibition, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today. A pioneering exploration of symbolic portraiture in America over the last hundred years, this thoughtfully organized installation re-conceptualized notions of facial likeness with works by preeminent American artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, Glenn Ligon, Roni Horn, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Jim Dine, and Yoko Ono. Through a chronological arrangement that accentuated art historical moments such as the 1913 Armory Show or 1960s minimalism, This Is a Portrait If I Say So historicized a specifically American method of abstract portraiture.
Editors’ Introduction
Our newest issue of SEQUITUR, which takes as its theme two separate yet related ideas, Self + Portrait, explores ideas of identity, representation, and discovery. Although the genre of self portraiture dates back to antiquity, how we read and understand images and constructions of selfhood, personality, and identification has changed and developed over time. The essays and interviews in this issue reflect such evolutions in creative expressions of individuality. Our contributors explore the ways that artists have uncovered social constructs of identity, investigated how the self might be reflected in space and place, and creatively questioned the relationship between representation and identity.
Kathryn Kremnitzer’s featured essay, “Privately Public: D. Appleton and Co.’s Artistic Houses (New York, 1883-4),” investigates the ways in which domestic interiors can reflect the likenesses of their inhabitants’ characters. In so doing the essay showcases how photographed dwellings were styled to communicate their owners’ achievements during the American Gilded Age.
Senior Editor Jordan Karney Chaim’s interview with artist Martine Gutierrez deals with many of the issues relating to the theme of Self + Portrait, including how gender and identity function as social constructs and how we present, define and invent ourselves. The interview was conducted on October 13, 2016 at the opening of the exhibition Martine Gutierrez: True Story, mounted at the Stone Gallery at Boston University and curated by Chaim.
This issue’s research spotlight by Emily Watlington considers how the reception of a video trilogy by David Maljković can be a useful entry point for a researcher looking to understand the effects of their own Western gaze. Her investigation of representation and misintepretation in the video work comments on how trans-cultural art history can and should be written, and furthermore on how identity and selfhood figures into the role of the art historian.
In her visual essay "Vault Skirt: A Notion for Play," artist Elizabeth Galvez modifies the skirt of Mexican folkloric dance to return the dancer to the unrestrained movements of childhood. The artist’s series of photographs communicate how notions of selfhood change with age and through her performative gestures and movements, her work leads viewers to contemplate their own relationships to play and amusement.
The issue includes eight outstanding exhibition reviews, which survey exhibitions from all over the world. For this issue we have expanded our review section, including reviews that do not fit within the issue’s theme, which we will continue to do in the future. Our reviewers analyze four exhibitions from Boston, two at the Museum of Fine Arts, one at Brandeis University's Rose Art Museum, and one at the Harvard Art Museums. These exhibitions present work from a broad range of time periods and locations, surveying work from the Renaissance to the Present and include artists from Asia, Italy, the United States and Colombia. Reviews of recent exhibitions at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal address the evolving role of the portrait in American identity and the place of architecture in historical memory, respectively. Finally, two analyses from Europe round out our lengthy review section for this issue. One is from London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, which examines the career of an architectural engineer, and the other, from the Zacheta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, surveys artistic reflections on the effects of travel and migration.
Although our authors take varying approaches to the theme of Self + Portrait, all address the relationship between selfhood and representation; in the process our contributors demonstrate how these intertwined concepts can be challenged and redefined. As an online journal we too are constantly redefining ourselves. We are delighted that SEQUITUR is growing as a venue for the publication of exhibition reviews and that we are continually able to exploit the myriad features of our online format. Ultimately, what this issue of SEQUITUR shows is that identity and medium are fluid, and should continue to evolve as such.
Sasha Goldman
Notes about Contributors
Sasha Goldman is a doctoral student studying Modern & Contemporary art at Boston University. Her research focuses on Italian art and exhibition histories, with a particular interest in national heritage, humor and curatorial practices.
Kathryn Kremnitzer is a PhD student at Columbia University in the Department of Art History and Archaeology.
Martine Gutierrez received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2012. The Brooklyn-based performance artist draws from eclectic media, acting as subject, artist, and muse. Using photography and film, she documents her personal transformation by embodying various imagined personas. Gutierrez’s recent solo exhibitions include We & Them & Me at CAM Raleigh, North Carolina, and Can She Hear You at Ryan Lee Gallery, New York. This is her first solo exhibition in Boston.
Jordan Karney Chaim is a doctoral candidate and Raymond and Margaret Horowitz Foundation Fellow in American Art at Boston University where her research focuses on the changing institutional landscape of contemporary art in Los Angeles since the 1970s. Before attending Boston University, she was the Assistant Director at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York. She is currently based in San Diego, California.
Emily Watlington mediates contemporary art as a writer and curator. She is currently pursuing her master’s degree in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art + Architecture at MIT, and serves as a curatorial research assistant at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Her art criticism has appeared in publications such as Mousse and Art Papers.
Elizabeth Galvez received a Master of Architecture with a concentration in History Theory and Criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning in 2016. She is currently an architectural designer at MERGE Architects in Boston, MA and teaches Visual Thinking at the Boston Architectural College.
Hannah Braun is a second year MA student at Boston University. Her research focuses on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American art history, looking at visual representations of urban life. In her spare time she enjoys exploring Boston’s art scene, hiking, and cooking.
Jackson Davidow is a doctoral candidate at MIT, where he studies modern and contemporary art, with an emphasis on its historical and theoretical entanglements with politics, science, and technology. He is currently at work on a dissertation manuscript titled “Viral Visions: Art, Epidemiology, and Spatial Practices in the Global AIDS Pandemic.”
Ewa Matyczyk is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture at Boston University, studying Modern and Contemporary Art. Her dissertation “Public Transformations: Intervention, Memory, and Community in Warsaw, 1970-2010” examines the role of art and architecture in the changing context of the public sphere during late communism and after 1989.
Erin McKellar's research focuses on the design cultures of the 1940s. Her dissertation, “Tomorrow on Display: American and British Housing Exhibitions, 1940-1950,” investigates how the rhetoric and display strategies of exhibitions of town planning, dwellings, and furnishings in the two nations revealed the Allied Forces’ political goals.
Magdalena Milosz is a doctoral student at McGill University where her research focuses on the historical uses of architecture in the Canadian government’s attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples. She is also an intern architect and holds a Master of Architecture and an Honours Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo.
Erin Hyde Nolan is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art and Architecture Department at Boston University. She will defend her dissertation on the international circulation of Ottoman portrait photographs in February 2017. Most recently, she has held fellowships at the Max-Planck Society’s Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and the Boston University Center for the Humanities.
Catherine O’Reilly is a Ph.D. candidate at Boston University, focusing on Italian Renaissance art. Her dissertation project is entitled “Last Supper Refectory Frescoes in Fifteenth-Century Florence: Painting, Performance, Senses, and Space.” She received her M.A. in Art History from Tufts University and her B.A. in Art History from Union College.
Sarah Parrish is a doctoral candidate in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University, where her research focuses on contemporary fiber art in a global context. Her writing has been published in The Journal of Design and Culture in addition to several exhibition catalogues and art magazines.
2016-2017 SEQUITUR Editorial Team
Senior Editors: Sasha Goldman, Jordan Karney Chaim, Erin McKellar
Junior Editors: Lydia Harrington, Joseph Saravo
Faculty Advisor: Professor Ross Barrett
Special Thanks to Susan Rice and Chris Spedaliere
Privately Public: D. Appleton and Co.’s Artistic Houses (New York, 1883-4)
If a portrait photograph can capture the likeness of a person in both appearance and character, so too can a photograph of an interior, such as those that appear in Artistic Houses, preserve both the form and feeling of a room. Published by D. Appleton and Company of New York in two volumes, each comprising two parts with 203 plates total, Artistic Houses was printed in a limited run of five hundred copies for preselected subscribers in ten sections over a two-year period between 1883 and 1884.[1] The subscriber’s name appears printed on the secondary title page of volume 1 part 1 of each numbered copy as a personalized supplement to the half-title leaf in black and red type (Fig. 1).[2] Lest we be fooled by the book’s printed publication into thinking it was widely available, we should understand the audience of patrons that constitute the readership, or rather ownership, of Artistic Houses as private. The interiors photographed, the photographs themselves, and the publication as a whole were highly controlled in design and distribution according to the combined ambitions of the publisher, author, photographer, and owners.[3] Predetermined in form and function, Artistic Houses maps the people and things propelling America’s Gilded Age by and for a particular public.
The Travelers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe
The Travelers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe
Zachęta National Gallery, Warsaw
May 14 – August 21, 2016
During the summer of 2016, a five-ton marble column greeted passersby on the sidewalk in front of the Zachęta National Gallery. Flanking the main entrance, the horizontal form was at once humorous in its uselessness and confusing in its dislocation. Was this a sculpture? Or perhaps an unfinished and abandoned renovation? In fact, it was part of almost forty artworks featured in The Travelers: Voyage and Migration in New Art from Central and Eastern Europe, curated by Magdalena Moskalewicz. Adrian Paci’s Column (2013) consisted of not only the puzzling behemoth outside, but also a video chronicling the process of commission, creation, and transportation of this architectural icon. Literally “made in China,” Column questioned authenticity and cultural identity in the context of today’s accelerated worldwide exchange of goods, labor, and capital.
Architecture as Evidence/La preuve par l’Architecture
![Installation view of Architecture as Evidence, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, 2016. © CCA, Montréal [Featured image]](/sequitur/files/2016/11/milosz_2016_06_16_MB_027-e1480441385254.jpg)
Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal
June 16, 2016 - September 11, 2016
A letter to a contractor stresses the urgency of a previously placed order for a hatch to be added to a roof. On an architectural plan, the hinges of a door have been reversed. Photographs show crowds of people, or an aerial view of a building. These fragments add up to an archive that attempts to answer a question: without the witness, how do we determine truth? Architecture as Evidence / La preuve par l’Architecture, a recent exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), was based on archival material collected to demonstrate the historical reality of engineered death at Auschwitz. A 2000 legal trial in which this material was entered as evidence was an opportunity to answer the question above. No survivor-witnesses were called to the stand. Instead, the evidence had to speak for itself, just as it did in this exhibition.[1]
Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design
Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
June 18 – November 6, 2016
From May 18 through November 6, 2016, the Victoria and Albert Museum staged its Engineering Season—a new museum program that celebrated the field of engineering design from small-scale projects to the large-scale infrastructure that transforms today’s cities. As part of this larger program, the V&A organized Engineering the World: Ove Arup and the Philosophy of Total Design, on view from June 18 through November 6, 2016. Co-curated by Zofia Trafas White and Maria Nicanor, the exhibition focused on the Danish-British engineer Ove Arup (1895-1988), often cited as the most influential architectural engineer of the twentieth century.