In the Frame
Drawing from the museological act of framing, the curator column “In The Frame” compiles images of objects, peoples, and architecture that are united by a common theme, project, or motif. The curator columnist, Delanie Linden is a PhD candidate in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture Department at MIT. She is inspired by the intellectual and creative happenings of the department and designs each column with the architecture community in mind. Her selection of subject matter is deeply motivated by her own artistic practice as an oil painter and her training as an art historian. The conditions of making, the contingencies of materials, and the artist's and beholder’s sensorial experience are the critical foundations of the column. Circumstances of making and materiality - from colonial trade networks and slavery to the fragility of matter - serve as the driving force of inquiry.
Memory
In this article, Linden interviews MIT HTC PhD candidate ElDante Winston, who discusses the role of architectural history in the preservation, making, and repositioning of cultural memory.
Memory is the yoke that binds history. It enjoins the experience of all organisms over time and space. Like the striations of archaeological layers, like the meeting of two people, like a footprint in mud, memory is the collision of past and present, many pasts and many presents.
From left: Philippe de Champaigne's Vanitas, c. 1671, oil on canvas, Musée de Tessé, Le Mans, France. Jean-Simon Berthélemy, Bust of Denis Diderot, oil on canvas, 1784, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Photo still from Christopher Nolan’s Memento, 2000.
Memory lives in numerous places: in the ruins of architecture, in the writings on walls, in pictures, and in our minds. It is both physical and immaterial, deeply buried and superficial, blurry and lucid. For the historian, remembering is twofold. As MIT HTC PhD candidate ElDante Winston asserts, “with the understanding that memory is shaped in the present time of recall, the historian must be aware of the temporal difference between the occurrence and the remembrance.” (1) Memory is reconstructive. Its very act is a process of editing the past. When, for example, one looks at the ruins of Rocca Galliera, the beholder of such history brings with them their own prior knowledge. It is a fusion of the old and new. As such, the temporal stance of the historian should play a larger role in the conversation of history. In other words, the historian’s past experiences are important when considering their version of history-making. One might conclude, following Winston’s suggestions, that the author is, in fact, not dead.
Image: Ruins of Rocca Galliera. A reminder of Bolognese Unity/The repression of Papal oppression.
Photo by ElDante Winston, MIT HTC PhD Candidate
Winston’s dissertation examines the role of memories in the history of architecture. More specifically, he is interested in the ways in which the collective memory of a given group of people is transmitted, be it oral, written and/or pictorial. He explores how “the contemporary architectural historian could reposition architecture associated with violence within the discourse of architectural history by thinking deeply about how the history of architecture relates to the memories and repressions associated with it.” Here, reposition is key. Memory is not only reconstructive, but it can be reconstructed. By recognizing the presence or absence of memories vested in architecture, historians of architecture can shed light on important facets of history and work to dislodge overarching narratives.
Graffiti on the inside walls of Église Saint-Paul in the Marais quarter of Paris, likely from c. 1870 during the events of the Paris Commune. Photos : ©Anaïs Costet from https://www.lemaraismood.fr/un-scandaleux-graffiti-eglise-saint-paul/
Memory links the ruins of Rocca Galliera, Revolutionary graffiti on the walls of Église Saint-Paul, the writings of Denis Diderot, memento mori paintings and Memento (2000) Polaroids. These physical vestiges speak. They ask us to continue to remember them. Most importantly, memories ask us to reflect on our own positionality within time and our own gravitational force within the warp of it.
(1). ElDante Winston’s PhD dissertation abstract.
Can the Artist Speak?
It all begins with an idea.
In his book Shadows and Enlightenment (1995), art historian Michael Baxandall states, “Académie lectures, with their axioms and arguments, are not very representational of the fabric of a painter’s operational reflection.”[1] Indeed, eighteenth-century art theory does not fully reflect the feelings, habits, or methods of artists who worked in the Enlightenment. Instead, it was common for scientists, philosophers, or art critics to speak for artists; theory concealed practice. Thinkers proposed formulas for how artists should draw, paint, or conceptualize their pictures. Though many artists published their own ideas about art methods, Baxandall’s statement points to a history in which an artist’s voice was overshadowed - pun intended - by the voices of others.
The discourse on “shadows” – the subject of Baxandall’s book – was one area in which an eighteenth-century painter’s “operational reflection” was neglected. Philosophers and natural scientists speculated shadow’s physical and visual properties, providing artists with epistemologically-backed suggestions on how to depict shadows on paper or in paint. From the 1740s to 1760s, the fascination for shadows as a perceptive phenomenon led to new discoveries about shadow’s color, shape, surface, reflections, and diffractions. In 1743, Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Intendant to the King’s Gardens, read a paper at the Academy of Sciences in Paris, in which he announced his observations of the variations of colored shadow throughout the day:
“I observed in the case of more than thirty dawns and as many sunsets that shadows falling on a white surface, such as a white wall, were sometimes green but most often blue, and a blue as vivid as the finest azure.”[2]
Buffon found that during dawn and dusk, a shadow was not devoid of light but rather reflected the color of the sky, leaving a dark blue tinge. As this example shows, Baxandall’s book interestingly traces conceptions of shadows in the Enlightenment. Yet, his book falls short in fully addressing the “fabric” of an artist’s process of rendering shadows in art. As an oil painter, I felt the best way for me to critique Baxandall’s book was to put paint onto canvas, to produce theory from practice.
My artistic training is admittedly from the twenty-first century. Yet, oil paint’s chemical properties today are similar to those two hundred years ago. Oil and pigment, now and then, require certain steps of application. Fundamental to such steps is the chronology of applying darks first, and then lights. This has to do with the qualities of oil paint in which it is easier to lighten, but much more difficult to darken. In order to not lose the richness and depth of a dark color, one must paint dark pigments first. When painting a landscape, as I show, the artist may draw with blocks of shadows – geometric shapes of positive and negative space – on to which they will slowly build layers of lighter pigments. Thus, shadows, in oil paint at least, are tools in constructing composition from the very beginning. They form the crucial foundations of a harmoniously balanced scene, from landscapes to portraits. For the artist, the science of shadows is not solely based on perception, an aspect which Baxandall mainly focuses, but also based in chemistry. Art is just as much controlled by the medium, and indebted to it, as it is by the senses. Materiality sways practice, chemistry inspires shadows.
[1] Baxandall, Michael. "V. Painting and Attention to Shadows." In Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Accessed November 13, 2020. A&AePortal,https://www-aaeportal-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/?id=-13761.
[2] Baxandall, Michael. "IV. Rococo-Empiricist Shadow." In Shadows and Enlightenment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Accessed November 13, 2020. A&AePortal,https://www-aaeportal-com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/?id=-13760.