Decoration as a Romantic Orgy

"the tendency to degrade the wall with new decorative elements that flirts with the past and produces playboy fashions in a romantic orgy" (The Architecture of Fashion, p.198)

Ornamentation and Art

"art does not simply begin with the plane surface but with everything that might go on upon that surface, including and especially ornamentation." (The Architecture of Fashion p.236)

Conference: Veiled Constellations

The veil, critical theory, politics, and contemporary society.

A conference designed to problematize the prevailing discourses surrounding the veil while exploring its subversive potential.



Sponsored by the University of Toronto on June 3-5, 2010


"This conference offers a forum to problematize the prevailing discourses surrounding the veil while exploring the veil's subversive potential. The extent to which the veil can erode, or even invert power and oppression is, with the exception of various Islam-inspired positions, an overlooked and under-explored area of academic theorizing. We ask what new insights may be unearthed in moving beyond the impetus to repudiate, fear, or adore the veil. This conference is a unique opportunity to discuss those contested voices situated within the interstices of the liberal, conservative and Islamic constellations, and, in the process, to re-evaluate the veil in an entirely new light by intersecting multiple disciplinary perspectives...This event will highlight highly innovative and thought-provoking approaches to not only the Islamic veil, but the veil as such...Essentially, we seek a different kind of conversation and a different set of lexical and philosophical devices to navigate the many paradoxes that the veil represents"

http://www.veiledconstellations.com/index.html

Erotic Facade

"Fashionable ornament...the 'erotic facade' which must be stripped off buildings and abandoned to produce the 'impersonal, precise and objective spirit' of modern architecture." (The Architecture of Fashion, p.197-198)

"Ornaments are understood as sexual lures." (The Architecture of Fashion p.197)

Masculine Structure vs. Feminine Ornamentation

"Ornament is identified as a feminine principle which needs to be disciplined, literally domesticated, restrained if not actually contained within the interior by a masculine structure." (The Architecture of Fashion, p.195)

Banu-ye Ordibehesht

Through the mashrabiyya, it is the woman who controls the gaze so that, far from rendering her passive or invisible, the mashrabiyya in face enables her not only to manage her lover's gaze but also to communicate her feelings. Being veiled does not equate with being silenced, as Hamid Naficy notes in his discussion of the film Banu-ye Ordibehesht, where the voices of two lovers circumvent the stringent rules of Iranian film secors on what can be visually portrayed on screen.

-Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art, p.23