Hathor’s Temple, Darren Farrell

Hathor’s Temple - exhibition proposal

Darren Farrell Invited Guest Curator

d.farrell@chelsea.arts.ac.uk

Context Hathor’s Temple is a proposed curation for a exhibition comprised of a selection of texts, drawings and images that aims to identify established links between bodies of information and ideas. Combined, they communicate a rationale for current exclusivities in architecture and interiors education, as well as the broader industry. The discussion has a personal resonance for me because of my experience as a practitioner and lecturer from marginalised communities including former and existing territories of the United Kingdom that are rooted in key, pivotal, British imperial and colonial narratives.

‘I will always be very grateful to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust for the bursary and continued support that they have provided during and since my MA studies at the RCA.’ Who am I? I am a second generation, ex-patriot, African-Caribbean (Jamaica & Saint Kitts), working-class, Londoner. Having taught architecture and interiors at BA and MA level in a range of institutions including Ravensbourne, the Bartlett, the University of Bedfordshire, London College of Communication, the University of Northampton and Kingston School of Art; I am currently a Senior Lecturer, DRS4 Leader (Design Research Studio), Design Practice Coordinator and Year 3 Leader teaching on the BA (Hons) Interior and Spatial Design course at Chelsea College of Arts, CCW, UAL. I studied graphic design, illustration, furniture design, interior design, architecture and pedagogy at Central Saint Martins, Ravensbourne, the Royal College of Art and London College of Fashion respectively. I will always be very grateful to the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust for the bursary and continued support that they have provided during and since my MA studies at the RCA.

left: Baroness Doreen Lawrence of Clarendon, OBE. Available at: https://alumni.gre.ac.uk/yourstories/doreen-lawrence/ middle + right: The Stephen Lawrence Centre. Available at: https://www.dezeen.com/2008/03/04/stephen-lawrence-centre-by-adjaye-associates/

I have worked in architecture and interior design practices including Building Doctors, Alexander Architects, Volume 3, Desitecture and Paul Daly Design Studio. I am a member of GEMs UAL (the Group for the Equality of Minority Staff), the University and College Union Black Members Group London, the UAL LGBTQ Staff Network and I participate in a UAL reading group which focuses on the African-Caribbean, Asian & African Art in Britain Archive, a Special Collection at Chelsea College of Arts Library in collaboration with UAL Academic Support. Having started a PhD at the School of Architecture at the RCA my research interest is concerned with the investigation of sound-based synesthetic experiences and the related possibilities for interiority and the interior experience.

1

‘My parents were sent for from the Caribbean at 10 and 14 years of age. …my families were unprepared for the vehement opposition to their presence, regardless of its benevolent context and their invitation as British subjects and citizens at the time.’

My parents were sent for from the Caribbean at 10 and 14 years of age. During the period of transition they were cared for by my Great Grandparents, which in what was and remains a so called ‘third-world’ context, did not come without psychological tensions and social malignancies and malevolence. Unfortunately, similarly to their expatriate peers, my families were unprepared on arrival, for the fierce and vehement, verbal, physical and in many cases violent opposition to their presence, regardless of its benevolent context and their invitation as British subjects and citizens at the time.

Their experience was mirrored by my own decades later during the 80s. You needed to be aware of groups and related tensions. If you got it wrong you could find yourself escaping the viciousness and violence of neo-Nazis, fascists, members of the National Front and the British National Party, the UKIP and EDL of the day. Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech coursed through the minds of xenophobes and the effects of the speech are still felt.

left + right: Enoch Powell. Available at: https://www.expressandstar.com/news/voices/in-depth/2017/10/18/enoch-powell-did-wolverhamptonmps-rivers-of-blood-speech-create-an-anti-immigration-feeling/ + https://www.historytoday.com/archive/focus/enoch-powell-polls

‘The lack of exchange, understanding and cohesion and an unwillingness to accept the true role of previously, psychologically and physically enslaved people that resulted in [Stephen Lawrence’s] murder; forms the root that the Decolonisation of the Arts Curriculum movement seeks to discuss and address.’

While personally horrifying, Stephen Lawrence’s murder was unfortunately, therefore less than surprising. The seeds and social conditions for such an act to take place had been sewn some decades, arguably centuries, prior. The lack of exchange, understanding and cohesion and an unwillingness to accept the true role of previously psychologically and physically enslaved people that resulted in his murder forms the root that the Decolonisation of the Arts Curriculum movement seeks to discuss and address.

2

‘Part of the process is an attempt to complete the histories that we use in our educational canonical review. …In some ways Stephen Lawrence’s murder and subsequent events remind us of myriad threads of discrimination, scrutiny and bias in the arts and architecture and interiors in particular.’

Part of the process is an attempt to complete the histories that we use in our educational canonical review. In the arts, particularly in architecture and interiors and disciplines comprising and concerned with the built environment, we are challenged to acknowledge and address as much of human experience as possible. This includes reviewing and communicating a broader range of perspectives of accepted origins and moments in modernism. Stephen Lawrence’s murder and subsequent events remind us of myriad threads of discrimination, scrutiny and bias in the arts and architecture and interiors in particular. These points play key, central roles in the Decolonising the Arts Curriculum agenda and are mirrored in my educational, professional and social experience.

These factors underpin and formed bases for ‘Inegalitarian Egress’, a pedagogic paper co-written by colleague Cyril Shing, Senior Lecturer on the BA (Hons) Interior and Spatial Design course at Chelsea College of Arts and delivered at the Designs for e-Learning conference at Parsons New School, New York City in September 2016. We sought to identify a range of research on disparities and divisive elements in access to UK architecture and interiors education.

‘…the 20th anniversary of the forming of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, which was set-up to assist young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to study architecture.’ ‘…the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust has played a key, central role in tackling socio-economic divides in education related to subjects of the built environment; an especially poignant struggle on the Bauhaus’ centenary celebrations.’

We are at a point that observes a series of key points in the development of UK, ethno-cultural politics. 2018 saw the 25th anniversary of the senseless, racist, murder of Stephen Lawrence, a young, nascent, aspiring architect of African-Caribbean descent. 2018 was the 20th anniversary of the forming of the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, which was set-up by Doreen Lawrence in her son’s memory to assist young people from disadvantaged backgrounds globally to study architecture. It is twenty years since the Macpherson Report. Commissioned to review the way in which the case of the murder of Stephen Lawrence was handled, the report made 70 recommendations for the Government and police service, accusing the Metropolitan Police of institutional racism. Since then the Stephen Lawrence Trust has played a key, central role in tackling socio-economic disparities in education related to subjects of the built environment; an especially poignant struggle on the Bauhaus’ centenary celebrations.

As part of the Decolonising the Arts Curriculum focus group’s continued investigation and highlighting of issues of ethnic diversity in education, particularly in relation to emerging research in the field of Whiteness Theory, the objective of the exhibition is to identify and communicate existing relationships between exoticism, primitivism, modernism and architecture.

3

Central to the exhibition discussion is Adolf Loos’ ‘Lost House’ designed for Josephine Baker.

The bisexual, African-American chanteuse, French Resistance and vehement, American civil-rights activist and ‘Rainbow Tribe’ Mother of Indigenous & European-American heritage gained international fame early in her career in 1920s Paris. The project carries a particular poignance particularly because of Baker’s relationship with Loos, which was arguably framed by Loos’ European, academic, middle-class, social position and Baker’s broadly mixed, African-American diasporic heritage during a pre-multicultural, pre-ethno-pluralist period.

left: Josephine Baker. Available at: https://www.thoughtco.com/josephine-baker-biography-3528473 right: Adolf Loos. Available at: https://sancheztaffurarquitecto.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/adolf-loos-1870-1933/

‘…architect and polemicist Adolf Loos designed, but was never commissioned by Baker to build the Lost House in an effort, purported in part, to objectify and seduce the performer’ After meeting her at a party in Paris in the late 1920s architect and polemicist Adolf Loos designed, but was never co mmissioned by Baker to build the Lost House for her in an effort, purported in part, to objectify and seduce the performer. The proposal featured a top-lit, double-height swimming pool, located at the centroid of the building that was intended to frame views of Baker at its base for her guests. Despite Baker’s manipulation and commandeering of the exoticist gaze, using it as a vehicle to circumvent racism in a period of history in which social mobility and success was bound by ethnicity in ways that are now out of step with polite consensus, Loos’ proposal, along with those of other members of the Parisian Avant-Garde, arguably provides an expression of the relationship between the modernist movement and the primitivism at the root of the movement.

In Sexuality and Space, Beatriz Colomina describes this interplay stating, ‘As in Loos’ earlier houses, the eye is directed toward the interior, which turns its back on the outside world; but the subject and object of the gaze have been reversed. The inhabitant, Josephine Baker, is now the primary object, and the visitor, the guest, is the looking subject. The most intimate space-the swimming pool, paradigm of a sensual space-occupies the centre of the house, and is also the focus of the visitor’s gaze… But between this gaze and its object-the body is a scene of glass and water, which renders the body inaccessible… This view is the opposite of the panopticon view of a theatre box, corresponding instead to that of the peephole, where subject and object cannot simply exchange places.’ (Colomina, 1992).

4

Colomina elaborates stating, ‘But the architecture of this house is more complicated. The swimmer might also see the reflection, framed by the window, of her own slippery body superimposed on the disembodied eyes of the shadowy figure of the spectator, whose lower body is cut out by the frame. Thus she sees herself being looked at by another: a narcissistic gaze superimposed on a voyeuristic gaze.’ (Colomina, 1992).

The writer’s interpretation of the Loos’ proposal is analogous to the psychological wear experienced by Baker as a result of her use of the methods of social mobility available to African diasporic people during the period and place. The point might be further extrapolated through an examination of Loos’ writing. In ‘Ornament and Crime’ an essay contained in Trotzdem, the second of his two published works, Loos absolves ‘less developed’ cultures of responsibility for their use of ornament stating, ‘What cast the gloom was the thought that ornament could no longer be produced. What! Are we alone, the people of the nineteenth century, are we no longer capable of doing what any Negro can do, or what people have been able to do before us.’ (Loos, 1908).

‘In Negrophilia British artist, academic, art historian and curator Petrine Archer-Straw discusses Paul Colin’s description of Josephine Baker’s performance at La Revue Negre stating...’

left: Model, Lost House. Available at: https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/loos-and-baker-a-house-for-josephine middle: Plans + Sections, Lost House. Available at: https://www.metalocus.es/en/news/a-house-black-venus right: Axonometric, Lost House. Available at: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/54887689179859856/

In Negrophilia British artist, academic, art historian and curator Petrine Archer-Straw discusses Paul Colin’s description of Josephine Baker’s performance at La Revue Negre stating, ‘The language is flagrant and vivid, and it frames the black dancers in caricatures rooted in colonial thinking. The negro is portrayed here as childlike and playful, while simultaneously being animal-like and sexual. These identities were consistently promoted and ‘normalized’ by those who later wrote about Baker. Her personas ranged from merry and mischievous to savage and deviant’.

5

Archer-Straw continues, ‘She was ‘street-smart’ to the ways of Americans, but ill-prepared for the complex adoration of the French. Her willingness to pose naked for Colin and to dance topless on stage, however, transformed her into a mythical ‘black Venus’. On her debut, when she was dressed solely in a ring of bananas belted across her hip, her expressive dancing, combined with jazz, roused the audience…

Comparisons with African sculpture were not lost on the viewer… For most artists, Baker was a romantic fantasy from a Gauguin or a Henri Rousseau painting come to life.’ (Archer-Straw, 2000).

left: Josephine Baker. Available at: http://www.thesweetestlanguage.com/inmymind/2017/8/11/josephine-baker middle: Petrine Archer-Straw. Available at: https://nag-bahamas.squarespace.com/mixedmediablog?offset=1355244120000 right: Josephine Baker. Available at: https://www.gettyimages.ca/photos/josephine-baker?family=editorial&phrase=josephine%20baker&sort=best

Josephine Baker was in part accepted into a community of practice and ideology. It could be argued that given the race-politics of the time her acceptance into the fold necessitated a measure of dehumanisation. Baker’s experience can be seen as mirrored in the experiences of students and practitioners from marginalised backgrounds including those of African-Caribbean descent.

In ‘The Pedagogy of the Oppressed’ Paulo Freire (2005) alludes to this concept and one might argue that this mirrors my own experience as both a learner and a practitioner in the field of architecture and interiors. Among a range of attributes the role of ethnicity in access orientated processes we cannot divorce our deliberation of these processes from an analysis of the social and economic position and realities of marginalised communities in contemporary, Western cultures.

Learners and practitioners who approach the subject and community from a position of externally projected dehumanisation as well as internalised, assumed psychoses as well as those who involuntarily or otherwise assist in maintaining the culture of psychoses identified by Kehinde Andrews in his paper ‘The Psychosis of Whiteness’ (2016) will benefit from revisions and adaptations, a decolonising of the curriculum in order to complete the [his]stories of architecture and interiors and the broader art and design cannon.

‘Because it is a distortion of being more fully human, sooner or later being less human leads the oppressed to struggle against those who made them so. In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both.’ (Freire, 2005) ‘The same is true with respect to the individual oppressor as a person. Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed.’ Freire, 2005, Pg.45).

6

Hathor’s Temple, the title of the prosed exhibition, is an effort to take responsibility for and claim the role of the oppressed and transform the role from that of the victim to a positive model.

During her heyday Baker was dubbed ‘the Black Venus’. Since the Roman goddess Venus is descended from the Egyptian predecessor Hathor it seems fitting that Baker might be relabelled thereby adding to and transforming the narrative of this historical allegory.

Bibliography Andrews, Kehinde (2016) The Psychosis of Whiteness: The Celluloid Hallucinations of Amazing Grace and Belle. Journal of Black Studies, Volume:47 issue:5, page(s):435-453. http://jbs.sagepub.com/content/early/2016/03/19/0021934716638802.full.pdf+html Archer-Straw, Petrine (2000) Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s.

London: Thames & Hudson.

Freire, Paulo (2005) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Continuum International Publishing Group Inc. Gravagnuolo, Benedetto (1982) Adolf Loos: Theory and Works. Milan: Idea Books Munz, Ludvig & Kunstler, Gustav (1966) Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture. London: Thames and Hudson.

Colomina, Beatriz (1992) Sexuality and Space. New York: Princeton Architectural Press Masheck, Joseph (2013) Adolf Loos: The Art of Architecture. London: IB Tauris.

Mendus, Susan & Rendall, Jane (1989) Sexuality & Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century. London: Routledge Tournikiotis, Panayotis (1994) Adolf Loos. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

Acknowledgements

Rahul Patel: Co-curator, Decolonising the Arts Curriculum: Persepctives in Higher Education zines 1&2 and exhibtions curator & University of the Arts London Reading Groups - Reading Collections: The African-Caribbean, Asian and African Art in Britain Archive and most recently Decolonising Narratives.

Gustavo Grandal Montero: Head Librarian & Special Collections, Chelsea College of Arts.

Colin Priest: Course Leader, BA (Hons) Interior and Spatial Design, Chelsea College of Arts & UAL Academic Support.

Design and Layout: Rahul Patel Copyright: Darren Farrell