Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts (Writing Architecture)

254 Pages·2007·3.41 MB·English

by  Giuliana Bruno

WritingArchitectureseries
G I U L I A N A B R U N O

PUBLIC INTIMACY
ARCHITECTURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS
CHAPTER NAME
PUBLIC INTIMACY
ARCHITECTURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS
WritingArchitectureseries
A project of the Anyone Corporation
Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories
Bernard Cache, 1995
Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money
Kojin Karatani, 1995
Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture
Ignasi de Solà-Morales, 1996
Constructions
John Rajchman, 1997
Such Places as Memory: Poems 1953–1996
John Hejduk, 1998
Welcome to the Hotel Architecture
Roger Connah, 1998
Fire and Memory: On Arch itecture and Energy
Luis Fernández-Galiano, 2000
A Landscape of Events
Paul Virilio, 2000
Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space
Elizabeth Grosz, 2001
Public Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts
Giuliana Bruno, 2007
PUBLIC INTIMACY
ARCHITECTURE AND THE VISUAL ARTS
G I U L I A N A B R U N O
THE MIT PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS
LONDON, ENGLAND
© 2007 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
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tion, please email [email protected] or write to
Special Sales Department, The MIT Press, 55 Hayward Street,
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This book was printed and bound in Spain.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bruno, Giuliana.
Public intimac y : architecture and the visual arts / Giuliana
Bruno.
p. cm. — (Writing architecture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13 978-0-262-52465-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Art and architecture. 2. Art and motion pictures. I. Title.
N72.A75B78 2007
720.1—dc22
2006046723
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for Annette Michelson

CONTENTS
FOREWORD Anthony Vidler ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
RECOLLECTED SPACES
1.Collection and Recollection: 3
On Film Itineraries and Museum Walks
2.Modernist Ruins, Filmic Archaeologies: 43
Jane and Louise Wilson’s A Free and Anonymous Monument
SCIENTIFIC SCENOGRAPHIES
3.The Architecture of Science in Art: An Anatomy Lesson 87
4.Mind Works: Reb ecca Horn’s Interior Art 119
FABRICS OF TIME
5.Fashions of Living: Intimacy in Art and Film 163
6.Architects of Time: Reel Duration from Warhol 189
to Tsai Ming-liang
NOTES 215
INDEX 237

FOREWORD
Three-dimensional space, inhabited and set in virtual motion
by the body, has formed the material of modern architecture; its
representation in two dimensions, with the added dimension of
time, has been the work of film. Both arts have been inextricably
linked since the end of the nineteenth century: architects have
taken their cue from film, filmmakers from architects. Sigfried
Giedion coined the triplet “space, time, and architecture”; Le
Corbusier and Sergei Eisenstein served as the emblematic duo
in this cross-medium relationship; Walter Benjamin sealed the
marriage as a product of modern technological reproduction; and
psychology reinforced it with the concept of mental projection.
Architecture now operated as a psychic mechanism, constructing
its subjects in time and space. Film not only depicted movement
in space and space in movement, it also unpacked the modern
subject’s spatial unconscious and its layers of (repressed) mem-
ories. These are the arenas in which film theorist Giuliana Bruno
focuses her critical analysis of bodies, space, and the projection
of two-dimensional pictures, both moving and still.

While modernism in architecture and the then-new medium
of film have served as the leitmotif of the avant-gardes since
the 1900s, the intersection of mental-spatial experience and its
illusory depiction has a long prehistory in the phantasmagoria
of nineteenth-century panoramas, the anatomy theaters of early
medical presentation, and the memory theaters of the Renais-
sance that Bruno considers. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan
even traced it back to the very origins of architecture and painting
where, as he noted, architecture primitively “organized around a