Jessica Schouela |
Jessica Schouela is originally from Montreal, Canada. She completed her BA in Art History and World Cinemas at McGill University in Montreal. She holds an MA from University College London in History of Art, where she wrote her dissertation on The Challenge for Change documentary films made on Fogo Island in 1967. She is currently pursuing her PhD in History of Art at the University of York (under the supervision of Professor Michael White), which looks at the documentation of modernist form, architecture and environment in Europe and America between 1910- 1940. She has presented at conferences in England and the United States. Other interests include: photography, documentary, artistic practices in remote areas, abstraction, feminism and film.
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in the peripheries of modernist foundations |
This paper will examine Amédée Ozenfant’s (a Cubist painter and writer who, together with Le Corbusier, founded ‘Purism’) 1928 book Foundations of Modern Art in an effort to circumscribe what kinds of people and objects were deemed at the time to be modern and, by extension, what was excluded from such a categorization. I will consider the 226 illustrations included within the book as comprising a wordless narrative and a juxtaposition of visuals that nuance and reinforce Ozenfant’s arguments. The images function to formulate Ozenfant’s discourse with regard to distinguishing the ‘modern’ agent from others presumed to be ‘pre-modern’ subjects (including non-Europeans, as well as women). With this in mind, and by examining the illustrations, their captions and their sequence as a method of argumentation, I will seek to clarify the system by which Ozenfant sought to appropriate certain cultural objects to fit within Western ideas of modernism and, often, to leave their makers in the margins. For example, insofar as modernism is often represented by the suited white man, it is curious that a book bearing the title Foundations of Modern Art should feature as its opening illustration a photograph depicting two black women reclining on the ground, sunning themselves, wearing only beads around their necks and hips. Moreover, in this work Ozenfant designates Congolese egg-shell constructions (shown in a photograph by Marc Allegrét), as a mode of architecture exemplifying modernist form, while at the same time he is resolved to excluding the Congolese people from his conceptions of the modern. Some other images I aim to discuss in this context include: Up-to-date Zulu Chief Leading a Tribal Dance, cubist paintings by Picasso (often of women), Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Postdam from 1920-21, African Pigmies, The Prehistoric Woman of Willendorf (circa 25000 BC.). Throughout my discussion, I will examine these images in conjunction with modernist architectural theory, articulated primarily by Le Corbusier and Adolf Loos for whom, by the 1920s, ornamentation was considered dated, feminine, marginal, and ultimately in opposition to the white washed walls that constitute modernist interiors. Moreover, I will argue that while Ozenfant’s project aimed to define modernism by way of positive examples, it also had an ethnographic agenda that sought to identify that which is not modern and, thereby, to keep Europeans at the centre of ideas around progress and evolution, while reserving the peripheries for women and people of colour. |