Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Anxious Dwelling / Postwar Spaces
Sessions Convenor:
Robin Schuldenfrei, Humboldt University, Berlin and University of Illinois at Chicago
Robin.Schuldenfrei@gmail.com or schul@uic.edu
Postwar dwelling was fraught with anxiety. The domestic sphere engendered certain expectations regarding social behaviour, modes of living, and forms of dwelling. This panel proposes a reappraisal of modern life as it was meant to be lived against concurrent realities and practicalities, welcoming new readings of modernism’s expectations and controls through its promoters and detractors alike. Offering a timely reassessment of commodity culture and the economic and political retooling of civilian life, this session features papers that examine the material content of art, objects and spaces in the context of postwar dwelling.
Seeking not just to excavate and explicate previously underexamined aspects of postwar spaces, it asks how we might interrogate them as discursive entities. The acquisition of domestic goods not only relieved the unease felt between neighbours struggling to keep up, but between political systems, each within its own ‘domestic’ realm. What role did material objects and architecture play in quelling or flaming the anxiety of mid-century modernism’s ordinary denizens, and how does this role figure in their contested legacy today? This panel invites investigations of dwellings as a means of soliciting critical insight into the political stakes of domestic culture and the domestic culture of politics.
Speakers:
Jane Pavitt (Victoria & Albert Museum and University of Brighton)
The Future is Possibly Past: The Anxious Spaces of Gaetano Pesce
Paolo Scrivano (Boston University)
'Those kitchens we cannot have:' America and the transformation of Italy’s domestic space during the 1950s and 1960s
Mary Lou Lobsinger (University of Toronto)
Domestic Objects, the Neo-Avant-Garde, and the Politics of Post-Materialist Consumption
Anne Toxey (University of Texas at San Antonio)
Pawns or Prophets? Postwar Architects and Utopian Designs for Southern Italy
Katharina Pfützner (National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Cultural Politics)
Industrial Design and the Home in the German Democratic Republic 1950 – 1965
Ana Miljacki (MIT)
The Allegory of the Socialist Lifestyle: The Czechoslovak Pavilion at the Brussels expo, its Gold Medal and the Politburo
Jennifer Hock (Middlebury College)
An American Dilemma: The Politics of Dwelling on New York's Upper West Side
Fredie Floré (Ghent University)
Modernizing the Homes of the Cultural Elite in Belgium: The Shaded Political Presence of Knoll International
Cammie McAtee (Harvard University)
Comfort in the Age of Anxiety: Eero Saarinen's Womb Chair
Christine Atha (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)
Dirt and Disorder: Taste and Anxiety in the Working Class Home
Christine Bianco (Oxford Brookes University)
Modern Art at Home: Collecting, Consumerism, and the Performance of Freedom in Postwar American Mass Magazines
Margaret Petty (Victoria University of Wellington)
Scopophobia/Scopophilia: electric light and the anxiety of the gaze
Scott Budzynski (Justus-Liebig-Universität)
Living Space as Representation: Cultural Self and Memory in Constructing the New
Iris Balija (University of Essex)
Inside Out: The Domestic Interior in Contemporary Art