Nora Wendl, Glass House (Bedroom) , 2013. 24 x 36” C-print
In a library, I might observe them studiously. But I am standing in wood shed, and here, I am not observing but physically reckoning with a series of photographs that comprise a largely unacknowledged architectural history. How might I inhabit such a history? How might I inhabit the space between an historian’s casual detachment and the interior perspective offered here, through the body of Dr. Farnsworth? The projected photograph flickers in black and white. The pixelated outlines of travertine, primavera, steel and glass travel through the scrim, which undulates lightly in the breeze drifting under and above the shed’s doors, and ultimately come to rest on the white wall two feet behind the scrim. This distance between scrim and wall, two projected surfaces, gives the photograph a false depth that begins to suggest space, a dimension that can be occupied. Is it possible? Within the shed are a few strange tools – a bucket, a stepladder, panes of glass, bricks. Using these, I work to align myself with the photograph. I stand on an upturned bucket to bring my feet to the height of the floor as shown in the photograph, as strewn in pixels on the scrim. I align myself against the glass of the Farnsworth House’s south elevation, and look out toward the Fox River – a world beyond the edge of this photograph and beyond the shed’s wooden door. I envision the Fox River in the summer of 1951 and assume the posture of a woman pausing on the edge of her glass house, contemplating walking the river’s edge. In the glow of the projector’s light, I work to know and to re-animate an architectural history that has never surfaced. I reach to rest my hand on the image of the cold glass wall of the kitchen, watching the horizon of an Illinois floodplain recede into
a pixelated line; I climb a short stepladder to stand at the same height as the terrace and tend to the sculptures and plants projected in that space; I walk toward the space that Farnsworth used as a bedroom, aligning my own body with the perspective presented in the photograph. I cannot occupy history, none of us can. But we can choose to engage historical artefacts on artefactual terms, to know them with our senses. Questions linger: for whom were these photographs produced? Did Farnsworth create them for personal documentation, or for a future, public presentation that was never realised? In her memoirs, she writes about the house as already and always mythic, dematerialised: ‘The simpler of those that came to look expected to find the glass box afloat, moored to mystic columns enclosing mystic space…all the walls turned to air.’ 2 Such has been the history of the house. Walter Benjamin warned that without a materialist engagement with history, the past could be absorbed by ‘the course of history’, a narratological fiction. Against this homogenous continuum, the forgotten or forsaken artefact – the photograph hidden in an unacknowledged archive – stands as a testament to other, equally true histories. Through the radical inhabitation of the archive, a chipping away of ‘the course of history’, we cannot inhabit history per se , but we can project new knowledge about it. To do this, we must in some way inhabit the voices, the eyes, of those that have authored these histories such that, as Farnsworth writes, ‘…once in awhile, by a fulminating ricochet…by another bound of paradoxes, ‘you’ may become ‘I’…’ 3 c
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