Abstract
This chapter examines various ‘exceptions’ that were made by architectural theorists of surface, particularly Semper and Ruskin. Focusing on the trompe-l’œil or ‘imitation,’ which is frequently dismissed as unworthy of serious thought, the discussion of surface effect is broadened to consider theatricality, crowd experience and the provision of, and engagement with, illusion along the fair-line. It examines the tensions that illusion introduces between the body and the intellect, and how the good frontage might generate and sustain such tension. The chapter also discusses the contribution illusion makes to fairground atmosphere with reference to the work of Gernot Böhme, and the consequences this has on the unified subject or split spectator.
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Notes
- 1.
Robin Evans discusses an interesting counter-example to the particularities of the trompe-l’œil discussed in this chapter, where the physical presence of objects within a space was deliberately distorted and flattened onto the surface of the design drawings for those spaces. ‘It is a painterly architecture that compares with the developed surface, intent on illusion , but it is not the illusion of depth that is sought, it is the illusion of flatness’ (Evans [1989] 1997, 210). Evans is interested in these rooms as they become detached from an overall compositional logic of sequence that characterized previous stately homes: in his example, individual rooms were to be experienced in ‘any’ order, and each one was to be a surprise: not unlike the spaces or attractions at a fair.
- 2.
This is part of a sequence of chapters determining the kinds of ideas that can be received from art (Power, Imitation, Truth, Beauty, Relation), an approach that is echoed in his The Seven Lamps of Architecture [1849], which includes the Lamp of Truth (II), of Power (III) and of Beauty (IV).
- 3.
Ruskin generally condemns the artist who produces illusions, arguing that they only possess qualities ‘of moderate industry… [in] no degree separate from a pin maker or other neat-handed artificer,’ but then immediately adds ‘These remarks do not apply to the art of the diorama, or the stage…’ (Ruskin [1843] 1903, 103).
- 4.
Levine writes of the ‘double, ironic experience of the trompe-l’œil’ and of ‘its reputation as a low and vulgar art form’ which she wants to defy, arguing that it reveals something important about our involvement in the dynamics of spectatorship.
- 5.
The full English text is Semper ([1860–63] 2004).
- 6.
Böhme ’s final analytical section takes as its example ‘the theory of garden art, more exactly the English landscape garden or park, as it is presented in the five volume work of Hirschfeld’ (See Hirschfeld 1779–1785), and which is akin to theatre design.
- 7.
In this article, Dorrian discusses in particular Böhme ’s ‘The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmosphere.’ See Böhme (2013b).
- 8.
Elsewhere, Wigley remarks how Semper isolates carnival as the only architectural or theatrical effect: for Semper, ‘To construct architecture is simply to prop up a surface that produces an atmosphere … This hyper-charged surface actually wraps the atmosphere rather than the building. It is the outer visible layer of the invisible climate’ (Wigley 1998, 20).
- 9.
‘Central to the idea of theatricality is the communicative dimension of architecture’ (Hartoonian 2012, 25). Although Hartoonian makes much of theatricality, he borrows the connection from Harry Francis Malgrave, who in turn —in a tale that could itself originate on the fairground—confesses that this term has (only) been applied to Semper ’s work once in the past by ‘Professor Magirius.’ Hartoonian contextualizes the focus of his consideration of contemporary architectural practice with reference to the longer history of architectural surface, and to familiar discussions of stage sets and carnivals, from which he distances architecture. This work is an update and slight expansion of his Crisis of the Object (2006).
- 10.
Here, Stephen Halliwell’s translation is unusual in its emphasis of the material contrast to the poet’s art: the term is translated variously: as ‘extraneous aids’ by S. H. Butcher (Macmillan and Co. 1902), as ‘adventitious aid’ by W. Hamilton Fyfe (Harvard University Press, 1932) and simply as ‘the production’ by Malcolm Heath (Penguin Classics, 1996).
I am grateful to Maria Mitsoula for drawing my attention to the intricacies of opsis in both its ancient and modern Greek manifestations.
For an overview of the hierarchy of the senses in classical thought (and theatre ), see Jay (1993) Chap. 1. ‘The Noblest of the Senses,’ esp. 21–33.
- 11.
Ford admits that his is a ‘particularly minority interpretation’ of katharsis, that he ‘hope[s] to complicate the modern search for a solution’ (1995, 109).
- 12.
This also has a certain resonance and challenge for Böhme , and his valorization of the theatre as the exemplary situation within which atmosphere is produced.
- 13.
There are many other spectatorial doublings at the fair, of course, such as the turn-taking (watching others making fools of themselves, then taking part) as well as complex voyeurisms and illusions. Crary argues that the historical, carnival complexity of such swapping of roles remains legible in the fairground: ’we still get a tenuous sense of how the disorder of carnival overturns a distinction between spectator and performer, how it destabilizes any fixed position or identity’ (Crary 2002, 8).
- 14.
This situation is more akin (but not identical) to the optical illusions such as Rubin’s Vase/Faces Illusion [1915], Poggendorff’s Illusion [1860], the Necker Cube [1832], Hering’s Illusion [1861] and so on, where vision science has recently used accounts of ‘multistable’ perception to characterize the conflicting readings that can be brought about by these visually ambiguous patterns where both (or several) logics can be identified but not held at the same time.
- 15.
This work is an extension of his earlier book Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990), which addressed an earlier period of modernity running from the eighteenth through into the first half of the nineteenth century, despite the suggestion of the title. Suspensions of Perception focuses mainly on the last 20 years of the nineteenth century.
- 16.
On Crary (2001) page 188 there is a photograph showing a similar arrangement of a circus tent with a sideshow platform, taken in Paris during the late 1880s. The circus tent is as mute as the parade frontage is elaborate, repeating precisely the logic of the good frontage as Bostock expressed it.
- 17.
See also Jay (1993, 149–210) ‘The Crisis of the Ancien Scopic Régime: From the Impressionists to Bergson.’
- 18.
This point has been made by several writers. Developing the observation in ways that relate directly to discussion in the following chapter, Stallybrass and White note ‘the plebeian fair-goers were themselves part of the spectacle for the bourgeois observer. At the fair the subordinate classes became the object of a gaze constituting itself as respectable and superior by substituting observation for participation’ (1986, 42).
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Walker, S. (2018). Truth to Trompe, Theatre, Spectacle and Illusion. In: The Fair-Line and the Good Frontage. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-7974-0_5
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