Description:
‘A Garden in Hell’ was the legendary fashion columnist and editor Diana Vreeland’s only pitch for her new living room. The interior designer hired for the job, Billy Baldwin, swiftly perused his options and settled boldly on a scarlet chintz with brilliant Persian flowers: “I raced home with yards and yards of it,” he later wrote, “and we covered the whole room — walls, curtains, furniture, the works.”
– Depiction of buildings and interiors is at the centre of the seminar.
“For Example”, writes Merleau-Ponty, “I see the next-door house from a certain angle, but it would be seen differently from the right bank of the Seine, or from the inside, or again from an aeroplane: the house itself is none of these appearances: it is (…) the house seen from nowhere”. – from Dorothee Elmiger’s essay ‘The Intimacy of the Proposal’ in Jürgen Beck’s books ‘Sun Breakers’ depicting a house of architect and designer Eileen Gray.
– We will visit a nearby house of “transformable dwelling” by Le Corbusier and study methods of documentation.
“The French Critic Gérad Genette speaks about how writers capture the intimacy of domestic space, slowing things down to a kind of shutter-speed that he calls the descriptive pause. (…) George Perec’s novel ‘Things’, is mostly a sequence of descriptive pauses inside the apartment of a young couple, their only ambition to afford all the things associated with life in a modern home. Perec said he wrote the book as a way to explore how the language of advertising is reflected in us. From the opening line the reader is ushered invisibly through the front door: ‘The eye, at first, would glide over the grey fitted carpet then give way to the woodblock floor of a living room about twenty-three feet long by ten feet wide. On the left in a kind of recess, a black leather sofa with pale cherry-wood bookcases on either side, heaped with books…’ Perec’s apartment is possessed by a spirit of predatory consumerism”. – from Paul Elimann’s essay ‘She wrote the word on the house with her finger’ in Nigel Shafran’s book ‘Dark Rooms.’
– The seminar will investigate historic visual fascination with biography and interior space.
Artist Marc Camille Chaimowicz was very interested in Eileen Gray’s work and personality. He installed one of her carpets and a lamp for his exhibition ‘Four Rooms’, and in his book ‘The World of Interiors’ a spread is dedicated to her. On the left page we see a portrait of Gray aged 92, sitting in a low armchair, dressed in a dark woollen skirt suit, near a cold fireplace in her Parisian apartment on Rue Bonaparte. Behind the chair, is her movable wall design: a black brick screen made from lacquered wood. On the right page Chaimowicz, has collaged a separate image of the screen onto an image of a bedroom.
– Production of interior objects is encouraged, so is studying the subject of interior design, in a wide spectrum spanning lifestyle magazines, floor plans, installation works, to the political potential of householding.
