On Positionality: Postmodern Musings on Early Modern Art

311 McPherson, Kimberly 152 Medrano, Mariana 48 Merzaban, Mandy 122, 143 Mohan, Sahil 148 Moreau, Sacha 26 Moursi, Manar 202 Moyers, Ruth Blair 326, 332 Nahleh, Mohamad 312 60 Imprint Nguyen, Gary Nisar, Muhammad Hasan 303 Nwigwe, Alexandra 72 O'ladipo, Yesufu 32 Ocampo Aguilar, Chucho (Jesus) 160 Oh, Yoonjae 196 Ow, Inez 52 Pacheco, Antonio 98, 137 Pankhurst, David 16, 326 Papadopoulou, Athina 220, 297 Song, Alice Jia Li 322 Parsons, Olivia 322 Sonner, Jessica 176 Pearl, Natalie 224 Sun, Yutan 318 Pipitone, Vanessa 278 184 70 262 30 Sunder, Aarti 126, 139 Prachasartta, 194 Sunshine, Gil 17, 46 Jariyaporn 224 Swagemakers, Jitske Weber, Ramon White, David Williams, Susan Winston, ElDante C Wissemann, Emily 190, 332 Tam, Carolyn 220 Wong, Erin Rajkumar, Vijay 313 Tang, Sandra 256 Woo, Jaehun Rao, John 148 Tasistro-Hart, Benjamin 224 Wood, Ellen 278, 288 Rau, Lasse 314 Teichner, Nicole 338 Wu, Charles 120, 142 Reinhard, Ellen Marie 340 Then, Eva 204 Wu, Jie (Ryan) Roberts, Zachary 314 Timmons, Meghan 321 Wu, Melody 306 38, 180 317 322 232, 243, 326 Quinn, Hailey 156, 336 Wang, Yujie Rodrigues, Carol-Anne 128, 140 Titova, Alena 160, 338 Wu, Stewart Haotian Rogers, Marina 238 Torres, Lynced Rotman, Katie 312 Toye, Katherine 208, 247 Xu, Zhicheng 304 Rubin, Dana 308 Tumkur Mahesh, Prajwal 210, 338 Xu, Zhifei 310 Rutherford, Emma Ugorji, Amanda 145, 282 Xu, Ziyu 320 114, 140 24 164 17 110, 140 58 Šabanovic, Faruk SadeghiKivi, Ardalan Saha, Indrani Schnitzler, Jenna Scott, Brandon 180 Searight, Tristan 304 Seguin, Alexander 276, 286 Shi, Huiwen 130, 143, 326 Vasikaran, Sangita 216, 332, 335 Yacoby, Yaara 274, 292 VijayKumar, Mona 316, 326, 338 Yang, Catherine 84 216 338, 340 118, 141, 338 320 160, 338 Vlavianos, Nikolaos Waddle, Marisa Concetta Zanders, Gabriela Degetau Zareno, Kaitlin Zeng, Iris Wang-Xu, Mackinley 156, 338 Zhang, Daisy Ziyan Wang, Ashley 321 Zhang, Davide Wang, Chloe Yun 319 Zhang, Jenny Wang, Edward 332 Slater, Rebecca 306 Wang, Ivy 311 Smerekanych, Eva 332 Wang, Yiou MIT Architecture 307 134, 145 244 132, 144 274, 284 Waitz, Isabel Sim, Jinyoung Soltan, Meriam Wu, Wendy 309 198 50, 332 323 Wang, Yiqing 200, 290 96, 138 34, 326, 338 338 Zhao, Mengqiao Zhong, Calvin Zhu, Emma (Yimeng) Zhu, Ziyuan (Zoey) Volume 01 Issue 01 Volume 01 Issue 01 MIT Architecture Imprint 01 is a handshake—a first impression—that is simultaneously a memory. This inaugural issue, conceived of during a dispersed and mostly virtual semester, relies on a future commitment to transform into an ongoing archive. Although the Department is currently untethered to a single place, building or region, Imprint 01 is a reflection of a place in time. Collecting and binding together work from all five branches of the school allows us a vantage point that had remained inaccessible even when our hallways and studios were full of energy and conversation. It is a partial portrait of people illustrated through their work. Admittedly, our peers cannot be fully encompassed through the pages of this book, but still this issue is a purposeful supplement to the many interactions transmitted through the blue light of our screens. Sprinkled throughout this issue are traces of our usual circumstances, but more importantly, and in spite of everything, Imprint 01 is an impression of what we have built together. Imprint Imprint 01 Advisors Miko McGinty + Nicholas de Monchaux + Amanda Moore Designers & Editors Patricia Dueñas Gerritsen + Carol-Anne Rodrigues + Alice Jia Li Song + Emily Wissemann Fonts Designed By Contrast Foundry ISBN 000-00-0000000-6-5 Printed in Canada Printed in Italy © MIT Architecture All rights reserved. No parts of this book may be reproduced in any form of by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher. Course descriptions were provided by the instructor of the course or studio; project descriptions were provided by students. All text has been edited by the editorial team. Visual material was provided by the author unless otherwise stated. Contact Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture and Planning Department of Architecture 77 Massachusetts Avenue Room 7-337 Cambridge, MA 02139 [email protected] aflynn Art Culture Technology 4.323 4.362 History Theory Criticism 4.390 4.412 Building Technology 4.619 Aidan Flynn SMArchS Candidate ¶ HTC ¶ Independent Research On Positionality: Postmodern Musings on Early Modern Art What do you see in Domenico Cresti’s Bathers at San Niccolò? On the surface, most viewers encounter the same event: men swimming and lounging along the Arno River in Florence, Italy. Is this a snapshot of Renaissance bathing culture? Or, is this a gay cruising spot for my early modern predecessors? To me, the picture functions much like Alice’s looking-glass through which I happily and hesitantly fall through. It is a boundary between two worlds that are one in the same—time is almost meaningless, while the queer-identifying viewer’s affect means everything. I see two proleptic queer epochs: 1600 is 2021, and vice versa in an experiential, emotional sense for the queer viewer. A provocative statement, indeed, but this entry seeks to question, not answer, our queer experiences across time and space. Despite the historical fissures within our linear conceptualization of time, what is the difference between same-sex eros then and now? Do love and lust change over time? Is the premodern queer person’s experience— their anxieties and fears of public surveillance and punishment for ‘deviant’ sexuality—any different than now? Can my life experience today—a collective queer consciousness of the 1970's and 80s bathhouse raids—be reflected back through a painting completed over four hundred years ago? This personal essay seeks to abandon rigid historiography and discourse in an effort to highlight, embrace, and question issues of queer positionality that the academy often deems anachronistic. This is not to say that postmodern readings of early modern images are inherently sound and not anachronistic. Indeed, this subject matter is a thin line to traverse in the academic world and careful considerations, punctuated by explanatory footnotes, must be made. That being said, in this experimental essay I 042 Above: Domenico Cresti, Bathers at San Niccolò, 1600, private collection ask: can my positionality as a gay man contribute to a new, perhaps more generative reading of Bathers at San Niccolò? Cresti (called Passignano) invites us to join his bathers in a seemingly jovial moment. We can imagine ourselves splashing about on a hot summer’s day, enjoying the weather and company of friends. In the middle ground, we encounter a bathhouse with towels hanging to dry, and bathers moving up and down a staircase as they enter and exit the muddy waters. The built structures are contrasted with a lush, seemingly untouched landscape. Trees populate rolling hills that meet the horizon and a cloudy sky. Is a storm approaching? There are no women, only men. They move like dancers across a liquid stage. At the left foreground, men stack themselves on top of each other, feet supported by shoulders, bodies linked by holding hands, as if playing an early modern version of ring-around-the-rosie. Their counterparts on the far right also link arms, wading through the inky waters in a circular motion. These naked and nearly-naked bodies resemble antique statues, sculpted and beautiful—an ideal. Passignano carefully uses light and shadow to illuminate tantalizing musculature, revealing and concealing the buttocks, chiseled Computation 4.661 Architecture + Urbanism 4.s52 4.s33 biceps, triceps, calves and pecs. Male-male desire and intimacy is potent, beautiful, exciting. Was the premodern viewer to be aroused or revolted? The couple in the foreground emphasize this sexualized tension. The two are locked in ardent gaze: swimmer and sitter. The latter’s bright flesh draws in our attention. His skin contrasts with overcast skies, dark waters, and shadowy buildings. Seated on silky fabrics and crowned with a straw hat, the sitter is intimately met by his swimming counterpart. Their hands nearly touching, the swimmer shoots upward like a dolphin, gazing into the sitter’s face with his torso pushed up against his partner’s crotch. Does this moment of contact suggestively simulate the moments before oral sex, or is he simply saying ciao? The couple’s sensual encounter is disrupted, however, by the seated man’s gesture: he motions upward. Where is he pointing? Most art historians have suggested the sitter’s gesture as a guiding directive to his partner and the viewer: look toward the bathhouse. To me, however, the spatial motion is not so clear; rather, the sitter’s pointed hand suggests fear, silence, surveillance. I hail from Toronto, Canada. In February 1981 the Metropolitan Police arrested nearly 300 queeridentifying men in bathhouses within the same neighborhoods (‘gayborhoods’) that I frequent today. Here, the “bawdy-house” laws that proscribed sexual persecution were not overturned until 2019.1 When I see Bathers, I interpret the foreground figures as anxious queer men, questioning: are we safe here? Is there somewhere we can love in safety? These questions are magnified by Patricia Lee Rubin’s thoughtful connections between premodern Florentine bathing culture and the arrests made by the Ufficiali di Notte (the magistracy charged with prosecuting sodomites). A boy reported that his friend “taught him how to swim – and sodomized him many times during their lessons on the Arno.”2 Can we consider the sitter’s gesture as one of anxiety? Is he motioning to safety, as if to suggest that the two cannot express love in such a public space? The sitter clearly engages with his swimmer, but not as longingly as the latter. Does my positionality as a gay man remind me of this fearful Undergraduate Other gesture? I empathize to my own modern extent. I traverse the city with or without a partner constantly wondering, “are my jeans too tight? Do I look gay? Are my partner and I safe in this neighborhood? Can we safely hold hands? Will today be the end?” It is sad to ponder such questions, but these are my experiences. Seeking an understanding of such positionality, I defer to art historian James M. Saslow, a selfidentified gay man working on Renaissance art. Saslow, in an essay on an infamously ‘sodomitical’ Italian painter, writes, I have sought in Sodoma [Gianantonio Bazzi] not a mirror-image, but a family resemblance. He is ‘usable’ as our ancestor: someone with whom we share an identifiable lineage of desire and self-expression, in whose...life we can recapture the origins of an increasingly prominent familial trait [of the queer community].3 Is Passignano a ‘usable’ ancestor? Perhaps not with his identity but his subject matter. I encounter Bathers as a bather. That is to say, I behold the image as a descendant within a challenging queer lineage. Is this an early modern testimonial on queer love and persecution? Leaving identity politics aside, does this picture necessitate a queer reading? Can we productively invoke the writings of Foucault, Butler, Sedgwick in reading this object? Is 1600 Florence also 1981 Toronto? There are differences, challenges, huge temporal expanses, but in the end: is persecution and the viewer’s identifiable relationship with the image (then/now) any different? Let us converse, explore, challenge. 1 ''An Act to amend the Criminal Code and the Department of Justice Act and to make consequential amendments to another Act, SC 2018, c 29,'' https:// canlii.ca/t/53j9v. 2 Patricia Lee Rubin, Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 109; Michael Rocke, Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Ufficiali di Notte 30, fol. 61v. 3 James M. Saslow, ''Gianantonio Bazzi, called ‘Il Sodoma’: Homosexuality in Art, Life, and History,'' in Sex, Gender, and Sexuality in Renaissance Italy, eds. Jacqueline Murray and Nicholas Terpstra (New York: Routledge, 2019), 203. 043 MIT Architecture 164 176, 326 Abou Ras, Ous Alkhayat, Latifa 90, 136 Allen, Christopher 28, 152 AlMulla, Nada 66 19, 326, 332 94, 137 230 242, 250 Alvarez, Eduardo Gascón Alvarez, Xio Amstutz, Caroline Arenas, Ana Auriyane, Arditha 318 Avila, Mariana 319 Barakat, Layal 308 Basinger, Nathan 327 Bayomi, Norhan 332 Beltrame, Daniela 248 Benitez, Adiel 212 Boes, Taylor 164 Boscolo, Arthur 76 106, 138 236, 326, 336, 340 112, 141, 330, 332 92, 136 80 317, 338 Bowen, Lu Geltman, Julian Escudero 266 Konjicanin, Melika Brearley, Jonathon 100, 139 Gideonse, Lauren 172 Koskey, Katie Brice, James 102, 139 Giorgis, Adriana Brazier, Justin Carriker, Bella Carmelita 156 332 Chatzinikolis, Dimitrios Chen, Jacqueline 86 276, 298 Lan, Xuan González-Cervantes, 326 Landez, Daniel Marianna 256 Lee, Clarence Gonzalez-Rojas, Paloma 316 Lee, Dong Nyung Griffin, Danny 124, 144 Lee, Sesil 168 Gruber, Paul 116, 145 Lee, So Jung Chu, Chen 322 Guo, Xiangyu 206, 338 270 Cinalli, Sydney 276 Ha, Ji Ye 340 Levi, Eytan 212 Clement, Ryan 78 Haridis, Alexandros 305 Li, Diane 176, 340 Cousin, Tim 54 Heard, James 17, 19 Cobb, Dariel 322 307 Chen, Karen 192, 332 282 Chen, Yufei 252 256 D'Acierno, Charlotte 315, 340 234, 326 D'Agostino, Ginerva 168, 330, 336 254, 336 Dannin, Isadora 152 104, 142 212 56, 326 148, 246 180, 340 20, 330 Ismail, Mohamed Li, Sandra 82 315, 326 Li, Wuyahuang Li,Stephanie 321 Liu, Clare 68 Liu, Jingyi Iwasaki,Ibuki Donovan, Inge 268 Jhaveri, Nynika 338 Liu, Wa Door, Angie 305 Jones, Faith 338 Liu, Yanjun 264, 336, 338 Jones, Kailin 280, 294 Dubois, Samuel Dueñas Gerritsen, 220 Jurczynski, Emma Patricia 326 Kaadan, Rania Faber, Olivier 309 Kang, Terry 82 64, 326 Fang, Demi 44, 330 303 Idowu, Jola Li, Kwan Q 313 326 Fan, Zekun 42, 326 Huttemann, Nina 36, 82 DeGiulio, Zachariah 184 240 Hinkley, Ian Lee, Thaddeus Kang, Wonki 164 Lo, Kuang-Chun Loescher-Montal, Angela 108, 142 176 Ma, Jingyun Marshall, William Keller, Eliyahu 216, 332 Matthai, Charlotte Filiposyan, Nare 326 Kettner, Katharine 168, 296 May, Sam Flynn, Aidan 310 Kim, Christina 228, 332 McIntosh, Ana Gatta, Audrey 172 Kim, Jayson 172 McKinlay, Sasha