Afterword—gendering religious objects: placing them as agents in matrices of power

ABSTRACT

The articles in this special issue demonstrate how objects can be interpreted as agents, as gendered images that make a statement, and how their impacts can be understood and assessed by human actors. They are differentially placed in matrices of power, and they can be manipulated to shift genders, to play with gendered combinations, to expand the limits of a particular gendered domain, to creatively play with reproductive imagery, and even to sell commodities in new and enticing ways in the mass media. Gendered religious objects are “statements” addressed not only to the eye but to the emotions, and part of a complex cultural field in which things can play important roles in people's lives. The links that connect ritual power to other forms of agency and biographical significance are perhaps the most significant links that we need to examine to understand them better in a world of many diverse cultural forms.     

Architecture in the Art Market: The Max Protetch Gallery

During the 1970s and 1980s, new networks of galleries, collectors, and institutions arose that focused on architectural representations. These networks were integral to the emergence of architectural drawings as primary objects of interest, as they shifted the general perception of architectural drawings from useful objects to aesthetic ones. This essay examines the Max Protetch Gallery in New York, and the network that developed around it, and their role in the shift. Their promotion of contemporary and historical architectural drawings and the gallery's involvement with architectural archives were significant for their impact on rethinking the boundaries of architectural discourse and practice, as well as architectural history.¹1 While photographs of individual works displayed at the Max Protetch Gallery are held in various repositories, no gallery views of the early architecture shows have been found, even after eight years of searching. Protetch himself did not keep track of them, and, although he has been attempting to locate them since the date of his first interview with the author, he has had no success. The author has also contacted the extant firms of all the architects who showed their work at the gallery, and none of them could locate any images either; none of them were even certain that they ever had any. Likewise, archives of now defunct firms turn up nothing. It is extremely telling, perhaps, about how these exhibitions were thought of. At the time, they were not understood by the participants to be historically significant. Perhaps architects and firms saw them more as a way to promote their work than as a form of critical engagement in discourse. It is also reasonable to assume that the exhibitions were not experimenting with means of display or layouts; if they were, they certainly would have been well documented. A further reason for this lack was perhaps revealed in a recent conversation with Larry Qualls, who for thirty years (from 1988 to 2008) documented contemporary art gallery shows in New York City. His archive consists of over 100,000 images of individual works, including some from the Protetch Gallery. When asked whether he also took installation photographs of any exhibitions, he stated that he did not because slide librarians were not interested in them and would not purchase them for their libraries. Even those concerned with history did not see value in preserving more than the individual works. It is notable that while the gallery and its exhibitions would have had a significant effect on thinking about architecture, the gallery, the architects it showed, and librarians were seemingly indifferent to the preservation of their documentation. Attempts to contact Edwin Meulensteen, who acquired the Protetch Gallery papers when he purchased the entire Max Protetch Gallery, regarding installation images have thus far been unsuccessful. The images contained in this essay, of individual works, provide a range of the types of architectural drawings that were shown at the Max Protetch Gallery. It is hoped that, in the future, photographic documentation will be located, so as to enrich this history of the Max Protetch Gallery.View all notes     

Treacherous matters,or some notes towards a symptomatology of crisis

ABSTRACT

A stone surrendered by a Muslim to a Christian on an urban battlefield in Ambon (Indonesia), circulated with stunning effect in a Christian prayer group. Within no time it infected this core scene of Christian worship and community, triggering illness and possession, turning the group's prayers into a Qur'anic reading session and inserting the spectral presence of a North Moluccan sultan's daughter into its midst. This scene is only the most dramatic instance of the promiscuous traffic in poisonous and protective objects across religious boundaries during the war that racked the Moluccan city and its surroundings from 1999 until the 2002 peace. It also attests to the often carefully policed difference between magic and religion at the time. From rosaries flaunted by Protestants aiming to pass as Catholics, magical amulets worn alongside tiny Qur'ans or Bibles into battle, and Jesus billboards emerging as brandmarks for Christian neighborhoods, the war fostered and witnessed an explosion of religious and occult technologies along with the objects through which these technologies operate. Of particular interest is the tension and interplay between the deployment of amulets, which often functioned as boundary markers, and the war-torn terrain in which they appeared and occasionally went astray, betraying the intentions with which they were first set in motion. Attention to the capricious waywardness and mediating capacities of things as symptoms of profound crisis provides a point of departure for a larger symptomatology of crisis in which both the shape-shifting effects of objects and their taken-for-granted status as fixtures of everyday worlds are explored.     

展示设计与设计展示：维多利亚-阿尔伯特博物馆“创意中国”当代中国设计展

探讨了一次展览的展览设计和内容之间的关系。根据在V＆A“创意中国”当代中国设计展的工作经历,概述了从挑选设计师到展览开幕的展览设计过程,讨论了展览的叙述如何与空间设计的主题相互适应,细述了策展人和设计师的想法如何升华成最后的结果。目的在于梳理出展览叙事、展品与空间设计之间复杂而协调的关系,厘清展览背后的精细思考的层次,这对于有效地传达展览的主题和关键信息来说是至关重要的。希望阐明的是,展览设计对于历史上的和当代的设计作品的展示尤其不可或缺,并指出了其与美术作品展示（通常在白色的方盒子空间里）之间的不同。     

Exhibiting the Workaround

One way to question the nature of architectural work and the tasks of the architectural “worker” is to examine the specificity of a related group of practitioners. This was the approach of WORKAROUND: Women, Design, Action, an exhibition at RMIT University's Design Hub Gallery in Melbourne (July 25–August 11, 2018), which demonstrated an emerging movement of women working within an expanded field of architecture and education. In this paper, we explore some of the processes, conceptual frameworks, outcomes, and implications of the WORKAROUND exhibition, revisiting its central theme—the workaround itself—and its value for enabling change in architectural education and practice.     

Activating sacred objects in public space: Bernini’s angels on the ponte sant’angelo in early modern Rome

ABSTRACT

In 1667, Pope Clement IX commissioned Gian Lorenzo Bernini to design 10 sculptures of angels to decorate the Ponte Sant’Angelo in Rome. Contemporary accounts record that the faithful experienced Bernini’s statues as animated celestial figures at the heart of the city. The ability of the marble angels to persuasively move beholders fulfilled the aims of the papal commission to expand the reach of the Church into the urban space of Rome. This paper examines how these religious objects were activated in a public space, a setting composed of sacred and profane elements. In the early modern era, the Ponte Sant’Angelo connected Rome’s city center to St. Peter’s Basilica while also serving as a setting for civic processions, spectacular fireworks displays, and public executions. While angels were ubiquitous in the city’s sacred spaces, like church interiors, Bernini’s sculptures materialized a flock of angels at an outdoor, urban nexus of theology, spectacle, and justice. Drawing on theories of performance that conceptualize the profound religious encounter that can result from the simultaneous juxtaposition of sacred and profane elements, this paper argues that the public setting activated Bernini’s marble statues so that they were experienced as lively celestial figures by the faithful.     

Conversational grounding and visual access in collaborative design

The present study investigates the role of visual access in supporting the exchange of positive evidence of mutual understanding in collaborative design. Pairs of designers worked on two design problems differing in the mix of gestural and speech cues needed to signal mutual understanding, either in full view of each other, or within each others' hearing but without shared visual access to each others' design activities. Designers' use of conversational speech, gesture, and representational media varied systematically as they adjusted to the loss of visual access. Nevertheless, they did achieve acceptable design solutions under these conditions. The changing patterns of conversational and workspace activity we observed have the potential to inform the design and application of augmented reality interfaces that attempt seamlessly to blend real and virtual images and objects, and we draw out some human factors implications of these interfaces for helping designers think and share design ideas.     

Vodou Material Culture in the Museum: Reflections on the complexities of demonstrating material culture of assemblage and accumulation in a traditional museum environment

Abstract

Through experiences of two different museum spaces the nature of material objects of Vodou are considered. How can the complexities of ritual deposits, assemblage, and continued interaction that are present within a religious space, such as the Vodou altar, be demonstrated to outsiders via a curated space? The materiality of these objects and accumulations is considered and the question is posed as to their importance in the understanding of the nature of Vodou worship. Can a traditional museum setting that favours manufactured objects over the spontaneous ritual deposit and repurposed object convey the intricacy of the material culture of Vodou if it negates the inclusion of these artefacts?     

Simulation and perceptual evaluation of fashion shop lighting design with application of exhibition lighting techniques

Fashion shops employ visual merchandising strategies to display products through improvement of luminous environment, which can enable customers to better appreciate fashion products. Such a strategy can eventually increase sales. This study proposed a lighting plan for fashion shops that applies exhibition lighting techniques. First, a fashion shop lighting plan was proposed based on exhibition lighting techniques in museums, and a subjective evaluation was performed by simulation and visualising the design of fashion shop lighting considering various parameters. The characteristics of preference, perceptual clarity and visual attention were assessed for various lighting and correlated color temperature (CCT) conditions. Various display lighting methods in fashion shops for mannequins, tables and hangers were also evaluated. Then, an overall assessment for these objects based on the results of the subjective evaluation was discussed.     

Yale Art Gallery

Rarely does the first major work of an iconic architect face his last major work, in the same building type, open to the public, free of charge, and in excellent condition. Louis I Kahn's seminal, recently restored addition to the Yale University Art Gallery is just across Chapel Street from his Yale Center for British Art. Jayne Merkel describes the interiors of these mid-20th-century modern masterpieces and the recent Herculean efforts to return them to Kahn's intentions while making them suitable for the preservation, study and exhibition of art according to 21st-century standards. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Denaturalizing Life-size Displays of Architecture: 1:1 Period Rooms by Andreas Angelidakis

Abstract

In 2015 Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam programmed the exhibition 1:1 Period Rooms by Andreas Angelidakis, an environment featuring six evocations of historical period rooms, gradually evicted from the Stedelijk Museum as it adopted the white cube convention. This article interprets the exhibition, its six period room-white cube permutations, and Andreas Angelidakis’s multiple authorial identity as an architect–artist–curator by positioning them at the crossroads of three interlocking contemporary 1:1 exhibition practices. The show is first contextualized within a current trend of 1:1 exhibition structures in architecture exhibitions increasingly used to address tensions between image and construction in the representation of architecture itself. The second and third reference fields are the institution–critical interventions on the exhibition space in artistic and curatorial projects from the late 1960s onwards, and the more recent reconstructions of historical displays and re-exhibitions of significant exhibitions.     

Displacement and re-placement: the international friendship bell as a translocative technology of memory

ABSTRACT

The International Friendship Bell is a traditional Japanese bonshō bell that was installed in Oak Ridge, TN, in 1996 to mark the city's fiftieth anniversary. I interpret the bell as a highly ambivalent site of cultural memory, drawing on memory studies theory to analyze its multiple meanings. Its backers represented the bell as an elegant tribute to Oak Ridge's post-World War II scientific legacy, while its detractors interpreted it as offering an unacceptable apology for Oak Ridge's role in constructing “Little Boy,” the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Describing the bell as a translocative technology of memory, I argue that the selection of a Japanese Buddhist bell served two important functions. First, despite having appropriated the bell from its original ritual context, its designers used it to sanctify Oak Ridge as sacred space. The bell was thus secularized, precisely as it sacralized civic space. Second, the bell's alien nature enabled it to serve as a screen on which Oak Ridgers could work out their ambivalence and anxieties about their civic identity. The bell thus provides a lens for understanding how religious ritual objects acquire new meanings when displaced from their intended contexts.     

Museological Framings of Islam in Europe

ABSTRACT

This article discusses the evocation of the sacred in the realm of material heritage practice, drawing on the creation of Freedom Park, a monumental, state-driven post-apartheid heritage project, as a case of heritage formation. Heritage formation refers to the casting of material cultural forms as heritage through sacralizing practices that set these objects apart at the center of social relations and their maintenance as powerful registers of the past for the “hailing” of collective identities. Specifically, it shows how southern African indigenous knowledge systems (IKS) and religious concepts were appropriated, translated, and employed in the formation of three material elements at Freedom Park: the//hapo, or museum, as recounting a cosmogony of nation, the Wall of Names as generating a transcendent ancestry, and the Isivivane as focalizing a national sacred center. Overall, it serves to expand our understanding of the dynamics of heritage production in a transforming South Africa, the dynamic power and appeal of heritage as sacralized material culture, and the significance of a critical religious studies approach for interpreting the dynamism of contemporary heritage practice.     

Re-covering Mies van der Rohe's Weissenhof: The Ultimate Surface

Abstract

Conveying an image of anonymous modernity to the public, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe focused on the exterior surface of his own apartment block for the 1927Weissenhof housing exhibition in Stuttgart. Privileging external imagery over internal innovation, Mies' main facade advertised standardization and rationalization versus flexibility and creativity within the apartment units. Rather than display a new type of housing, Mies relied on a traditional Berlin apartment template, recycling it beneath a new thin skin. In relation to his previous glass skyscraper projects, Mies exhibited what Theo van Doesburg termed “the ultimate surface.”     

Apotheosis and memory: Ishii jūji,a savior for our times

ABSTRACT

This article examines the relationship between history, sacred architecture, and the production of meaning. In particular, it discusses the way in which the historical figure of Ishii Jūji (1865–1914), a renowned child relief activist and religious utopianist of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Japan, becomes constituted as a sacred symbol through the interplay of architecture, displays, and iconography at the Ishii Jūji Museum in the grounds of the Ishii Jūji Kinen Yūaisha (the Ishii Jūji Memorial Center of Loving Friendship; hereafter Yūaisha). Through its commemoration, the Yūaisha draws upon a complex historical legacy as the source of its present vision and attributes to Ishii a divine status through material representations in the form of texts, photographs, objects, and religious iconography. Moreover, the Yūaisha, propelled by Ishii as sacred symbol, has come to produce new material spaces, through the construction of buildings, fields, gardens, through which its vision of social care may be realized. As a result, history and material religion collide to produce new spaces of meaning in the present.     

Newer Plant Displays in Botanical Gardens: The Role of Design in Environmental Interpretation

New design approaches can be observed in an increasing number of botanical gardens due to a desire to improve the effectiveness of environmental interpretation. This paper presents a review of these recent trends in the display of plants based on a search of botanical gardens around the world and on both theory and previous research findings that have focused on understanding people's experience in botanical gardens and other environmental interpretation settings. Four design strategies of plant display were identified, which are referred to here as familiar frames, icons, imitations and manipulations of nature. These typological categories represent recent design approaches useful for establishing stronger relationships between people, plants and associated environmental issues. Further, the potential of such displays as environmental interpretation tools is discussed based on how people perceive them.     

Religious Materiality in Elizabethan Essex (1558-1603)

Abstract

Based on an analysis of over 11,000 Elizabethan Essex wills, this article presents the first systematic study of the everyday religious environment of Essex. While scholars of the English Reformation increasingly study the everyday behaviors, routines, and rituals which defined English Protestant life, this article articulates how smaller household objects expand our knowledge of religion, practice, and remembrance in post-Reformation England. It also reinvestigates the potential for using wills as a foundation for the study of objects. This, in turn, helps us better understand and appreciate the substantial role objects had as part of an English Protestant religious identity increasingly built around remembrance and memory and, more broadly, enables us to question our historiographical assumptions about the speed, spread, and efficiency of the Reformation.     

当代中国建筑展览现象的再思考

从《建筑展览的“厚度”》一文引发对当代中国建筑展览(集合设计)现象的再思考,强调全面理解当代建筑的多元属性价值,并以原创性作为先锋性的评判标准,由此透视了当代中国建筑展览背后的功利与浮躁。提出真正的原创主要体现在:①呼应生活,改良社会;②突破建筑自身局限(空间,材质,风格):③以建筑准确表达社会新思潮。通过对欧洲当代成功的建筑展览(集合设计)的借鉴,总结了建筑展览活动的关键因素如:有意义的选址选题,多角度参与的主办方,多类型的建筑师参与,全社会的动员与参与等。     

A Tale of Two Façades: Archaeology and the Secularization of an Islamic Past

Abstract

This article examines how certain forms of preservation work to recast the past in rigid terms of secular and religious. Focusing on a series of early Islamic period sites in the Levant, collectively known as the Umayyad qusūr (sometimes referred to as “desert palaces”), this essay traces the ways in which scholars signal the realms of the secular through interpretation of architectonics and iconography. This process of secularization is then further advanced through practices of preservation and display within colonial and nationalist museum contexts on a grand scale. At stake are ethical claims about the value of religion, specifically Islam, in larger discourses of culture and civilization. The paper explores the role played by these approaches to the material past of the early Islamic world for how they perform and police the boundaries of religious and secular materiality.