ART062000 Archives

Architecture of Memory

Architecture of Memory explores architectural disappearance, urban remembrance and functional change amid social upheaval. Using archival, architectural and artistic methods, Natalia Romik investigates the spectral architecture of former shtetls – predominantly Jewish towns in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. After the war, these towns were repopulated by people of other nationalities, who reused former Jewish properties. Today, traces of the Jewish populations have nearly vanished from urban reality and public discourse. Romik’s work seeks to discover new ways to develop abandoned shtetl architecture, focusing on Jewish heritage sites like synagogue ruins and ritual baths.

Through an interdisciplinary approach that merges architectural design, contemporary art and Jewish studies, Romik’s experimental research addresses the complex social issues of former shtetls by combining theoretical discussions with artistic performances and architectural interventions. The book documents projects ranging from subtle, mirror-clad interventions – such as the Nomadic Shtetl Archive, JAD, and Hurdy-Gurdy – to practical renovations that transform derelict synagogues and Jewish pre-burial houses into historical museums and cultural centres. These efforts confront the ‘present absence’ of these towns by merging theoretical discourse with archival research, artistic performances and architectural interventions, aimed at investigating the lost Jewish communities’ spectral architecture.

Early Civilization and the American Modern

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a particular story about the United States’ role in the long history of world civilization was constructed in public spaces, through public art and popular histories. This narrative posited that civilization and its benefits – science, law, writing, art and architecture – began in Egypt and Mesopotamia before passing ever further westward, towards a triumphant culmination on the American continent.

Early Civilization and the American Modern explores how this teleological story answered anxieties about the United States’ unique role in the long march of progress. Eva Miller focuses on important figures who collaborated on the creation of a visual, progressive narrative in key institutions, world’s fairs and popular media: Orientalist and public intellectual James Henry Breasted, astronomer George Ellery Hale, architect Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, and decorative artists Lee Lawrie and Hildreth Meière. At a time when new information about the ancient Middle East was emerging through archaeological excavation, ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia appeared simultaneously old and new. This same period was crucial to the development of public space and civic life across the United States, as a shared sense of historical consciousness was actively pursued by politicians, philanthropists, intellectuals, architects and artists.

Interpreting Art

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general and largely unspoken norms shared by interpreters of many kinds.

Ranging widely, though taking writing within the Western tradition of art history as its primary focus, Interpreting Art highlights the norms, premises, and patterns that tend to guide interpretation along the way. Why, for example, is the concept of artistic ‘intention’ at once so reviled and yet so hard to let go of? What does it really involve when an interpretation appeals to an artwork’s ‘reception’? How can ‘context’ be used by some to keep things under control and by others to make the interpretation of art seem limitless? And how is it that artworks only seem to grow in complexity over time?

Interpreting Art reveals subtle features of art writing central to the often unnoticed interpretative practices through which we understand works of art. In doing so, the book also sheds light on possible alternatives, pointing to how writers on art might choose to operate differently in the future.