A House for Josephine Baker

from Intumus: Interior Design Reader Edited by Mark Taylor and Juleanna Preston 2006 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Karen Burns

Art historian and cultural theorist Karen Burns raises questions about the presence of race and gender in architectural design and how they are disclosed through criticism that attempts to 'read' architecture. Reviewing the work of several feminist theorists, she takes up the challenge of theorising racial difference in relation to both Josephine Baker and Adolf Loos' Josephine Baker House. These issues are unfolded through an examination of texts and images, but more importantly through Burns' observations about the conflation of Baker's body and house in writings about the house. Careful to avoid repeating colonialist operations, Burns reviews existing criticism and comment on the house and its inhabitant, noting that costume, skin and interior space are all described as surfaces supporting a point of difference and otherness.

The Unreadable Interior

The interior cannot be guessed at by looking at the outside.

Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, 1966

In line with Loos's way of thinking, the exterior says nothing about the interior.

Benedetto Gravagnuolo, 1982

In this project for a house for Josephine Baker Loos uses a number of elements we find in his other work: the closed character of the facades.

Paul Groenendijk and Piet Vollaard, 1985

The compactness of the volume, the flat roof, the small, low openings, the vast blind surfaces and the bands of black and white marble created an exotic and mysterious image, vaguely evocative of African architecture, while providing no clues as to the interior.

Panayotis Tournikiotis, 1994 $^{1}$

If, as Beatriz Colomina has argued, writers have persisted in reading the architecture of the Baker House as attributes of Josephine Baker, $^{2}$ how might one understand these same writers' insistence that from the exterior the building's interior is unreadable, impenetrable by criticism?

Yet such a reading has been made. On the one hand the building's exterior veils the vision of the critic by sending the referent 'Africa' into a hazy and apparently unfocusable, imprecise reading (a smudge), and, on the other, the exterior presents a blankness, rather than a transparent path for criticism's line of sight. Vision fails criticism as insight.

Vision is often associated with mastery and assumed (but ultimately failed) distance.³ However, these readings of the Baker House suggest a form of critical insight based on a protected and limited way of seeing. The Baker House seems to be a project that confronts (or is read as confronting) critics, again and again, with their own fallibility.

It eludes the project of 'interpretation' that nominally guides architectural criticism. Current modish strategies of reading might write the house as a triumphant excess that can never be recuperated by criticism, or as the moment when architectural theory and history touch the limits of their own knowledge.

However, as Loos's biographers always strive to remind the reader, the failure of a facade's transparency is ultimately decipherable as authorial origin: the author decided to reverse the tried-and-true terms of criticism (exterior must reveal interior) and build a blank or blind wall. Criticism itself opens again, and closes, the problem of reference.

Perhaps the puzzle of the Baker House can be solved by looking elsewhere, to another discourse, to the biography of Josephine Baker. Since architectural writing continually attributed features taken to belong to Josephine Baker as features of the house, were critics narrating a story about Baker's own interior?

Is it that Baker's house and body possess an unreadable interior, or is it that they provide a different model of the body, one that can be described as all surface, one that radically confounds the surface/depth binary.⁴ Or does a conventional binary model operate in this text, against which Baker's house and body can be construed as lacking?

The figuration of the body as an inner/outer binary has featured in the recent reconceptualization of subjectivity. In Michel Foucault's analysis, the binary erases the social work of inscription. The interior is a privileged trope for the soul. Occupying the body's internal cavities, the soul is the interior space intrinsic to the substance of a particular body, the locale of that body's sovereign will.⁵ Foucault's reading of the inscription of an internal space on the body displaces the spatial relations assumed by the inner/outer binary. Rewriting Foucault's theorization of the soul as something produced by social inscription on the body, Judith Butler observes that acts, gestures, and desire produce the semblance of an internal core or substance on the surface of the body.⁶

Neither Foucault nor Butler in the texts I am citing address the question of corporeal

inscription as cultural difference, ethnicity, and race. $^{7}$ However, Foucault and Butler's location of the body's surface as the site for social inscription might assist in negotiating Spivak's criticism of the epidermal schema. Spivak argues against the ridiculously simple and singular nature of the epidermal schema's insistence on skin as the visible sign of difference. Locating all social inscription as a marking of surface, in the full complexity of that term (where does the body's surface begin and end?) places the skin, one organ, within a multiple network of corporeal organs, cells, and tissues. Reading, which is one form of social inscription, brings various parts of the corporeal to the surface. There is no natural, essential connection between skin and racial difference. But the intensity of focus on the epidermal schema conveniently ignores all the other work carried out by inscription on bodies.

Theorizing the importance of the fantasy of the internal, Butler explores the interior figure in psychoanalytic descriptions of the acquisition of a subject's identity. The structuring binary of surface/interior and its position in the description of psychic identity have a home, too, in architecture. While film and literary genres have rendered the domestic interior as an allegory of the psychic lives of its inhabitants, the architectural interior may be projected as a topography of the individual's own interior life. The inhabitants' sexual and psychic identities are worked by and within the spatial settings of the interior and its ritualized, sexual dramas.

Given these conventions, what are we to make of a house, interior, and inhabitant who are all surface? I do not believe that architectural commentaries rewrite the received terms of inner/outer body and subject as Judith Butler does. If the most commonplace meanings of these corporeal descriptions haunt the Baker House descriptions within this metaphysical binary, Baker cannot be the divided subject who is the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry. Without an interior, she has no possibility for an internal psychic space and no fantasized locale for the identity of self. This lack of interiority, or deferral, renders her not only as different from other inhabitants, but as someone whose interior is completely unknowable.

Ironically the Josephine Baker House was never built. All that remains is a model and plans whose interiors we are unable to inhabit. Within architecture, then, Baker's interiority is in one sense never realized; it is eternally deferred. $^{8}$

These theoretical moves of forever pointing out exclusion and failure often leads to a dead end. It assumes a particular reading of the subject as a problem for criticism (and, similarly, for feminism). In the end it does not explain how the logic of criticism works in the Baker House commentaries: what tasks it performs, what actions it enables. To keep retrieving Baker as an exemplum of alterity is to keep pinning her back against the wall, to that place already assigned to her by criticism.

Thinking again of the unreadable interior, perhaps it has another function, apart from the invocation of certain myths of unreadable Africa in the logic of criticism. To produce the interior as a secretive place, one whose secrets cannot be guessed, at this stage of the story, creates narrative suspense. This is a function of critical writing. It sets the stage for the final drama of the interior. If the critic’s dream of unimpeded visibility is blocked by the apparently mute surfaces of this place, it is recovered in the readings of the internal swimming pool, a place where criticism finds and flexes its own identity. (… p 65)

Notes

1 Ludwig Münz and Gustav Künstler, Adolf Loos: Pioneer of Modern Architecture, trans Harold Meek, Thames and Hudson (London), 1966, p 195; Benedetto Gravagnuolo, Adolf Loos, trans CH Evans, Rizzoli (New York), 1982, p 191; Paul Groenendijk and Piet Vollaard, Adolf Loos: House for Josephine Baker, Uitgeverij 010 (Rotterdam), 1985, p 34; Panayotis Tournikiotis, Adolf Loos, trans Marguerite McGoldrick, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1994, p 95.
2 Beatriz Colomina, 'The Split Wall: Domestic Voyeurism', Beatriz Colomina (ed), Sexuality & Space, Princeton Architectural Press (New York), 1992, p 97.
3 See for example, Griselda Pollock's 'Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity', which is prefaced by a quote from Luce Irigaray: 'More than other senses, the eye objectifies and masters.' The essay is reprinted in Norma Broude and Mary D Garrard (eds), The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History, Harper Collins (New York), 1992, p 245.
4 Theorists of the corporeal such as Vicky Kirby have argued (quoting Foucault's tracing of the workings of history as it is inscribed in the 'nervous system, in temperament, in the digestive apparatus'), 'The body's surfaces continue into the “interior”. Paradoxically the surface is both the thing which supposedly divides and secures inside and outside and the thing that holds them together. Foucault's notion of inscription, which implies a surface to be written on, is an extraordinary surface that includes the bodies' depths and questions the division between interior and exterior.' Vicky Kirby, 'Corporeal Habits: Addressing Essentialism Differently', Hypatia, vol 6 no 3, Fall 1991, p 21, note 20.
5 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans Alan Sheridan, Penguin (Harmondsworth, UK), 1982, pp 29–30.
6 Judith Butler, 'Gender Trouble, Feminist Theory, and Psychoanalytic Discourse', Linda J Nicholson (ed), Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge (New York), 1990, p 136.
7 Judith Butler has written several essays addressing questions of ethnicized, raced corporeality in her book Bodies That Matter, Routledge (New York), 1993.
8 This reading was suggested by Rose Lucas at a presentation of an earlier incarnation of this paper to a Women's Studies symposium at Monash University in November 1993.

Karen Burns, ‘A House for Josephine Baker’, Postcolonial Space(s), Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu and Wong Chong Thai (eds), Princeton Architectural Press (New York) 1997. © 1997 Gülsüm Baydar Nalbantoglu, Wong Chong Thai and the authors. Reprinted by permission of Princeton Architectural Press.