Skins, tattoos, and susceptibility

Representations

Volumn 108, Issue , 2009, Pages 98-119

  Cheng, Anne Anlin ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350389952     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.98     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1993)
2. Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 225
3. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York, 1973), 5
4. Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America (New York, 2002), 35
5. Hazel Carby, "Can the Tactics of Cultural Integration Counter the Persistence of Political Apartheid? or, The Multicultural Wars, Part Two," in Race, Law, and Culture: Reflections on Brown v. Board of Education, ed. Austin Sarat (New York, 1997), 221-28
6. Twelve years ago, Wendy Brown had already cogently articulated the fundamental challenges and paradoxes of transforming self-reflective critiques of power into institutional forms. See her essay "The Impossibility of Women's Studies," differences 9, no. 3 (1997): 79-101
7. Ivan Goll quoted in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes et al. (Berkeley, 1994), 559-60. Originally published as "Die Neger erobern Europa," Die literarische Welt 2 (15 January 1926): 3-4
8. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York, 1967), 112
9. Adolf Loos, "The Principle of Cladding," in Spoken into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 66-67
10. For Semper, the first architectural space is the open pen, made of woven skins and other organic materials, and the first social institution is the open hearth. See Gottfried Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture and Other Writings, trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Wolfgang Herrmann (Cambridge, 1989)
11. Wolfgang Herrmann, Gottfried Semper: In Search of Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1984)
12. Joseph Rykwert, "Adolf Loos: The New Vision," in The Necessity of Artifice (New York, 1982), 67-73
13. Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime," in The Architecture of Adolf Loos: An Arts Council Exhibition (London, 1985), 100
14. The purifying "Law of Ripolin," named after an opaque white coat of paint favored by Le Corbusier, alludes to the imperative coat of whitewash that Le Corbusier believed would make people "masters of themselves" by cleansing the home of sentimental kitsch and the "accretions of dead things from the past." See Le Corbusier, "A Coat of Whitewash; The Law of Ripolin," in The Decorative Art of Today trans. James I. Dunnett (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 185-92
15. See also Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (Cambridge, MA, 1995) for a treatise on Le Corbusier's relationship to color and the gender politics therein
16. See Sigmund Freud, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" (1921), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Woks of Sigmund Freud (SE hereafter), trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London, 1955), 18:72
17. Also "Civilization and Its Discontents" (1930/1929), in SE, 21:5-246
18. While there is no direct evidence that Loos read Freud, there is still much to suggest that Loos was acquainted with Freud's work. Freud was quite visible in the print media beginning soon after the publication of "The Interpretation of Dreams" in 1899; see Marina Tichy and Sylvia Zwettler-Otte, Freud in der Presse: Rezeption Sigmund Freuds und der Psychoanalyse in Österreich 1895-1938 (Vienna, 1999)
19. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York, 2006)
20. Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses
21. Beatriz Colomina, "The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism," in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, 1992), 92
22. Alan Colquhoun, Modern Architecture (New York, 2002), 82-83
23. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903), in The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt Wolff (New York, 1950), 409-24
24. José Quetglas, "Lo Placentero," Carrer de la Ciutat 9/10 (January 1980): 2. Quoted and translated by Colomina, "The Split Wall," 92
25. Colomina, "The Split Wall," 94
26. A copy of the plans for the Baker House can be found in the Adolf Loos Archive in the Albertina Museum of Vienna
27. Diane Davis in "Signifyin' Josephine," Appendx: Culture, Theory, Praxis 4 (1999): 28-45, describes the skin of the Baker House as "fetishized" (34), while Farès el-Dahdah and Stephen Atkinson, in "The Josephine Baker House: For Loos's Pleasure," Assemblage 26 (April 1995): 72-87, also identify Loos as a fetishist and explain the "daubing" on the surface of the Baker House as a direct reference to Loos's writings on tattoos (77)
28. Susan R. Henderson in "Bachelor Culture in the Works of Adolf Loos," Journal of Architectural Education 55, no. 3 (2002): 125-35, describes that surface as "'tattooed' striations" that "express the tribal roots of its patroness" (131)
29. Elana Shapira, "Dressing a Celebrity: Adolf Loos's House for Josephine Baker," Studies in the Decorative Arts 11, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2004): 2-24, likewise links the Baker House facade to Loos's ideas on criminality and tattoos (6)
30. Finally, Ila Berman also references the connection between this facade and tattoos in "Civilized Planes, Sexual Surfaces, Savage Territories," Appendx: Culture, Theory, Praxis 4 (1999): 7-27
31. Ludwig Munz and Gustav Kunstler, Adolf Loos, trans. Harold Meek (London, 1966), 195
32. Joseph Rykwert, The Necessity of Artifice, 72; Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, trans. Marguerite McGoldrick (New York, 1994), 95
33. These critics describe the project as "African" without specifying what they mean by that assignation. What is clear is that they reflexively associate the house's exoticness with its proposed client. Contemporary criticism of the Baker House continues this assumption. See Karen Burns, "A House for Josephine Baker," in Postcolonial Space(s) (New York, 1997), 53-72, as well as Colomina, "The Split Wall."
34. Finally, the Baker House has also been associated with Orientalism, another strand of colonial projection; see Kim Tanzer, "Baker's Loos and Loos's Loss: Architecting the Body," Center: A Journal for Architecture in America 9 (1995): 76-89
35. Paul Groenendijk, Adolf Loos: Huis voor/house for/maison pour/Haus für Josephine Baker (Rotterdam, 1985), 36
36. For a large segment of feminist critics, Baker indubitably references the figure of the Venus Hottentot and the history of colonial ethnography. See bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Toronto, 1992)
37. Suzan-Lori Parks, "The Rear End Exists," Women: A Cultural Review 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 11-17
38. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, "Cinematic Venus in the Africanist Orient," in Black Venus: Sexualized Savages, Primal Fears, and Primitive Narratives in French (Durham, 1999), 105-18
39. See Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York, 1989), 18-25
40. Lynn Haney, Naked at the Feast: The Biography of Josephine Baker (London, 2002), 59-62
41. Pierre de Régnier, review in Candide (12 November 1925), quoted by Marcel Sauvage, Les Mémoires de Joséphine Baker (Paris, 1927), 11-12
42. Also quoted without documentation by biographers Jean-Claude Baker and Chris Chase, Josephine Baker: The Hungry Heart (New York, 2001), 5
43. Rose, Jazz Cleopatra, 19
44. and Haney, Naked at the Feast, 20
45. e. e. cummings, "Vive la Folie!" Vanity Fair (September 1926): Xx
46. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago, 2003), 137
47. William Rubin's "Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Modern and the Tribal (New York, 1988) and Marianna Torgovnick's Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago, 1991)
48. Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Boston, 2000), 60
49. Cesare Lombroso, introduction to Gina Lombroso-Ferrero, Criminal Man (New York, 1911), xxv
50. See also Allan Sekula, "The Body and the Archive," October 39 (Winter 1986): 3-64
51. Consider the Villa Karma (1904-6); the Steiner Store (1907); the American Bar (or the Kunster Bar, 1908); the Goldman Salatsch House (1911); the Manz Store (1912); the Knize Salon (1913)
52. Shapira, "Dressing a Celebrity."
53. Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (New York, 2000). If The Melancholy of Race can be seen as focused on tracing unseen patterns of grief, then my recent interest in "surfaces" may seem a movement in a wholly different direction. But one of the most gripping aspects of the notion of racial identity for me has always been its recognition of the fundamental instability between subject and object, between performance and essence. As such, my Baker project extends and explores the implications raised by my first book surrounding the challenges of reading a subject who is at once too visible; the difficulties of locating agency in the face of a compromised subject; and the critical need to understand the possibilities of what I called at the end of The Melancholy of Race an "ethics of immersion" in the face of melancholic incorporation. Primitivist Modernism seems to me a preeminent example of such immersion; a simply moralistic response would elide all the possibilities of creativity and coercion that in fact operated on both sides of that phenomenon