lusotropicalism production class culture ti les
material culture colonial migration by stephanie white
One of the most enchanting things about Lisbon is all its tiled houses – whole façades entirely covered in 5 x 5 ceramic tiles that range from arab geometries to art nouveau flowers. Tiles had been used throughout the Iberian peninsula since the 1400s under the influence of the Ottoman Empire – an early migration that locates Portugal as the western end of the Silk Road. There are patterned tiles all over Spain and the old Spanish empire. They aren’t rare, but it is Lisbon’s fully tiled house fronts that are unusual – the domestic realm, the narrow time frame, the effects of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the Brazilian connection, the means of production. In art history it is the exceptional that has value: the artist, the art object and its unique and unrepeatable singularity. Lisbon house tiles occupy a slice right at the beginning of the age of reproduction, between vision and skill with the brush, the glazes, the historicism of the medium, and mass-production. What precipitates art into material culture? Accessibility, desire satisfied by a simulacrum of the original, modes and means of production. Even today in any of the books on azulejos, nearly 80% of the history deals with the vast hand-painted baroque panels and panoramas done by well-known and documented artists, and found in churches, convents and palaces. Azulejo historians then leap to nineteenth century transfer methods. By the early twentieth century when tiles were used mostly in industrial installations – metro stations and public works buildings, tiles were silk screened and later photo-lithographed, the hand eliminated completely.
The late twentieth-century consists of revisitations to this artistic ceramics tradition and precisely zero time is spent on the eighteenth century stencilled tiles of Lisbon which constitute most of what we actually see in the public domain. Stencilled tiles are, of course, anonymous, not particularly ‘artistic’ and were mass-produced in an artisanal way.
On Site review 24
74
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator