The Meaning of Home in Covid Times: Part Five

As in Part Four, where we looked at ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, containment in an interior was similarly critical to Charlotte Salomon, a young Jewish art student from Berlin who hid from the Nazis in house in the south of France during the Occupation.

Charlotte Salomon

Self Portrait 1940 Jewish Museum Amsterdam

Salomon produced her major work Life or Theatre? under incredibly difficult conditions.  As a consequence of the trauma of the Holocaust, and also because of the work’s explosive contents, this work was hidden from the public for years until its first exhibition in Amsterdam in 1961.

Charlotte Salomon grew up in Berlin. In 1939 she was sent by her worried parents to stay with her maternal grandparents in the South of France where they were already settled in Villefranche-sur-Mer, near Nice.  Charlotte took with her nothing but a tennis racquet, some records and a small suitcase.

Salomon and her grandparents, Doktor and Mrs Lüdwig Grünwald

When she was only eight Charlotte had lost her mother to suicide. In 1939 during the first year of her stay her grandmother committed suicide as well. This prompted an impromptu confession from her grandfather that her aunt Franziska and her own mother had taken their lives, as well as several other family members.

Not only did Charlotte have this information to deal with, she had been briefly interned by the Nazis, along with her grandfather, but released due to his poor health. A cold and highly manipulative man, her grandfather was also constantly attempting to share her bed.

She said at this point she would either ‘end her life’ (like her mother, aunt and grandmother had) or she would undertake 'something really extravagantly crazy'.

Furious, disgusted and in fear of her life, Charlotte decided to let all the lies and untruths out of the family closets through a frenzied production of 1350 odd gouache paintings with cellulose overlays, over the course of one year. Edited down, these make up Life or Theatre?

In the summer of 1942 and determined to complete this project without interruption, she rented a room in a pension, la Belle Aurore in St. Jean Cap Ferrat, Here, cut off from everything she laboured intensely with paints and overlay, often humming to herself as she worked.

From Life or Theatre?

In an outpouring of immense scale she painted her life's story, giving the main characters alternative names. In 1943, as the Nazis intensified their search for Jews living in the South of France, and just before she was deported to Drancy, and then Auschwitz on 7 October, she gave the entire project to a non-Jewish friend known only as Dr Moridis. "Keep it safe," she told him. "It is my whole life."

Life or Theatre? features an extraordinarily inventive pictorial language, which draws on contemporary cinema and music, as well as on her training in modern art in Berlin. Taken together, the work was intended to be a singespiel, a play with music: Salomon indicated the accompanying songs on the back of the drawings or on transparent overlays.

Through these means Charlotte tells the tragic tale of suicides, and finally murder, in her family. The paintings show not only what happened, but also how she feels about these events. It’s a fearless engagement, which is far from comforting.

In individual images she was very much before her time in her use of an almost graphic novel structure. These also suggest the story-boarding technique that film directors use. Salomon also incorporated ‘cinematic’ framing and composition.

The interiors we see are sieved through memory, rendered as much for how they felt to occupy as for what scenes they illustrate yet there are critical to our understanding. The interiors areboth ‘real’ yet theatrical, they are the spaces of trauma re-imagined and re-constructed while Charlotte herself was in hiding.

Here for example below we see this remarkable rendering of the family apartment in Berlin from an aerial viewpoint.

Her family were wealthy, and their apartment most likely occupied two floors, which is why windows in the bedrooms don’t make much programmatic logic. Even so it’s almost as if we looking down into an architectural model, or a doll’s house with hinged roof that opens.

The perspective is dizzying, but the details are intensely accurate. Tiny figures occupy some of the rooms, in the kitchen we see ‘Augusta the cook, sitting and waiting for orders’. The apartment, so the accompanying text goes was ‘truly beautiful’, and she has rendered the drawing room, which her mother used as a music room, and intense vivid blue.

“Thank God she is not yet dead”.

Above is another important interior in the series that shows the bathroom of her grandparents near Nice. The text for this image is ‘She [Charlotte’s grandmother] tried to kill herself. “Thank God she is not yet dead”. This attempt would be repeated, this time successfully, not long afterwards. On this occasion Charlotte’s grandmother had taken poison.

The composition with its high angle view point and cropped edges, invokes the mechanical eye of the camera, rather than the wider view of the human eye. Perspective is skewed, and we glimpse what looks like a rolled up part of a pressed metal ceiling, or even an internal gallery corridor.

Charlotte herself is the tall blue figure, and bending creepily over the scene is grandfather, with what looks like either the tip of a mustache wing, or a smirk on his face. The words, in vivid red, seem to hover between the pictorial surface and the back wall of the bathroom itself, upon which they might almost have been graffittied.

In October 1943, at the age of 26, Charlotte Salomon was killed in Auschwitz. She was five months pregnant, and had just married to Alexander Nagler.

To view the entire work please click on the link below which will take you to the Jewish Museum Amsterdam: they have also included the prescribed sound track for each image as noted by Salomon on the back of each work.

https://charlotte.jck.nl/section

Thus as we’ve explored in Parts Four and Five, with ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ and here with ‘Life or Theatre?’ two significant women, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Charlotte Salomon, ‘took over’ the lock-down script and change it from within using the situation of being cut-off to work in deep, intense and concentrated ways.

Georgina Downey is an art historian and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her next project is a co-edited anthology with Mark Taylor and Terry Meade Domesticity Under Siege: when home isn’t safe to be published by Bloomsbury in 2021.

The Meaning of Home in Covid Times: Part Four

At the moment we are quarantining ourselves and to socially isolating at home. However as ‘social animals’ this experience of being physically apart from each other, of being consciously and deliberately isolated is punishingly hard.

To gain insight into how despite being in isolation we can remain both psychically and physically mindful, we are going to explore how the experience of ‘lock-down’ is mirrored in a 19th, and a mid 20th century art work. Specifically, we are going to look at two iconic female figures, one fictional, one real, for whom lock-down resulted in the creation of ‘diaries’ of the experience, both which express the madness of enforced containment.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Here in Part four our first ‘figure’ in lock-down, is ‘Jane’ the narrator of American author Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s iconic short story, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, first published in 1892. This is a very short story, a mere seventy-four pages, yet there is not a wasted word, and it remains a thoroughly chilling and creepy tale, still despite its age.

Jane is a young middle class American woman recovering from a mystery condition – described with typical Victorian era ambiguity, as a ‘nervous condition’. John, her physician husband has just rented a dilapidated grand country house to provide Jane with a rest cure for her ‘nerves’. Living with them is their baby, the baby’s nurse and John’s sister Jenny, though we don’t meet these characters in the story since John advises her, for the duration, to stay after from the child.

John has allowed Jane to take walks in the garden but she is forbidden to have visitors. Jane spends her time in an upstairs bedroom, resting, sleeping, and writing in her diary.

As the length of her enforced social distancing increases, Jane starts to fixate on the interior to her bedroom and the wallpaper in particular, begins to obsess her.

There are creepy clues that something awful has happened in the room, there a chew marks on the bed frame, holes in the plaster, and the wallpaper itself has been stripped off from the wall in various sections.

Jane describes the pattern on the wallpaper as ‘sprawling and flamboyant’ and the design, ‘invites and provokes’. Its contradictory, its colour is ‘repellent … revolting … a smouldering un-clean kind of yellow, more like a ‘sickly sulphur’. Yet staring at it for hours, she starts to believe that it’s coming to life and that its pattern is beginning to pulsate and shift under her gaze.  

Pretty soon she notices ‘a skulking figure behind the wallpaper’ a shadowy woman who gets out of the wallpaper and ‘creeps around’ the garden by day. Only Jane can see her and then only at certain times of the day. She declares, ‘there are things in that wallpaper that nobody knows but me’.

John responds to Jane’s fears for her own mental health by calling them ‘false and foolish fancies’. But its obvious Jane is becoming unhinged; she cries all the time and is ‘alone such a good deal’.

However for Jane lock-down is as transformative as it is painful; as the inner reality of her life begins to emerge, she gains a greater understanding of how people are controlling her, and in a wider sense, how women are spatially confined and constricted by the gendered codes of Victorian society. The wallpaper thus becomes an agent of both imprisonment and freedom.

On her final, tumultuous day in the house, Jane locks herself inside the bedroom and she ‘shakes and pulls’ [at the lines in the wallpaper pattern] tearing off a long strip of it that goes all around the room. 

As she tears the paper, trying to release the shadowy woman, mushroom-like tendrils emerge from the wallpaper and begin to ‘shriek’ in rage, yet Jane, on all fours now and ‘creeping’ around the skirting boards cries ‘I got out at last!’ ‘I am out in spite of you and Jane! [A reference to her old discarded self] And she proclaims, ‘I’ve pulled off most of the paper, so you can’t put me back!”

At this moment John breaks into the bedroom, and faints at the scene before him. In the last line of the story Jane writes ‘Now why should that man have fainted? But he did, and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!’

The relevance of this bizarre tale for our times is a paradoxically optimistic one. Though driven to the edge of psychotic breakdown by sheer loneliness and social isolation (distancing) Jane also ‘comes into her true self’ at the very end; she discovers her own powerful inner ‘rescuing’ urge, by successfully getting the ‘shadowy woman’ out of the wallpaper. Additionally, she develops a deep empathy for people especially women forced by circumstance or culture to live home-bound, controlled lives.

Through the pattern, Jane loses her old “perspectival point” and, to use philosopher Elizabeth Grosz’s terms, abandon herself to being spatially located by/as another.  

Quoted by Mark Taylor in ‘Pattern’, in Interior Wor(l)ds*, eds Luca Basso Peressut, Imma Forino, Gennaro Postiglione, Roberto Rizzi,  Allemandi & C. Italy, 2010, p233.

Georgina Downey is an art historian and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Adelaide who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her next project is a chapter 'Under Siege: the wartime interior in art' for her co-edited anthology with Mark Taylor and Terry Meade Domesticity Under Siege: when home isn’t safe to be published by Bloomsbury in 2021.

The Meaning of Home in Covid Times Part Three

The Meaning of Home in Covid Times: Part Three

Georgina Downey is an art historian who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her third book, Domesticity under Siege: When home isn’t safe [due 2021] with co-editors Professor Mark Taylor, and Dr Terry Meade, is under contract.

Today I’d like to look at the art of internment as it reflects our own current experiences. I hope that the process of re-seeing these images following will help sustain our morale and give us all, now also temporarily quarantined some ideas about how home might be made sustaining and how it might be used to create the inner worlds so necessary now.

We’re being advised under Covid quarantine to spend at least some of the day doing something creative; to pick up projects laid aside maybe due to ‘lack of time’. Artistic and creative tasks and pursuits are often turned to, in order to make sense of enforced inactivity – they are a means of travel both imaginatively and visually.

Thus we explore the work of Paul Dubotzki, a World War 1 ‘enemy alien’ – a German-born expatriate in Australia. This man, a photographer by profession before his arrival, recorded his experiences of three Australian internee camps, Torrens Island in South Australia, and Holsworthy, then finally Trial Bay, in New South Wales.

His photographic works give us a vivid account of life in internment and form the core of the The Enemy at Home, an online exhibition that showed at the Museum of Sydney in 2011. The curators sourced the works by tracing him back to Germany, where his cache of works were uncovered. Thus little was known about him until recently.

For us the Dubotzki’s camp photographs form an intimate picture of the difficulties of creating home under confinement. While different in many respects, the ‘enemy aliens’ in Australia during World War One endured some similarities of experience with our own. Theirs was an ‘open-ended’ confinement time-wise; they didn’t know how long they would be locked up.

Additionally, and like ours, the internment of the German born held no obvious association with a crime or misdemeanor. Dubotzki and his fellow German born internees (men, women, and children) were locked in camps for the reason that their presence in the community, while Australia was at war with Germany, was — in an almost virus-like sense, an ‘opportunity’ for them as loyal Germans to spread lies and propaganda, and generally to undermine Australia’s war efforts. They therefore needed to be ‘contained’. Some German South Australians, like Hans Heysen, avoided internment, but many didn’t and were placed in camps that didn’t ‘open’ until the end of the war.

Dubotzki was born in Munich. He arrived in Adelaide in 1913 aged twenty-two after working in South East Asia as a photographer. He settled in Rundle Street, and carried on his photography trade, but after only a year was imprisoned as an ‘enemy alien’ at the outbreak of the First World War in 1914.

Dubotzki’s time at the Torrens Island camp was difficult, as it was for all the men there. Torrens Island, adjacent to Port Adelaide, and near Outer Harbor and now the site of a major power plant, had originally been used to quarantine new settlers, arriving by sea of course and possibly carrying tuberculosis, and other diseases from Home. However in 1914, official preparations to turn it into an internment camp were inadequate, and the internees had to create their own camp out canvas tents. Conditions were cramped and unhealthy, yet Dutozki’s photos show the men ‘making home’ as best they could.   

Torrens Island c. 1914. Paul Dubotzki

Steamy in the summer and freezing in winter, it would have been a terribly hard life in the Camp. The photo above shows seven young Torrens Island Camp internees, including the photographer himself, (top middle) at the opening of a tent. Carefully posed to fill the space, the men are wearing a strange assortment of clothing that makes gauging the season difficult.

It could be summer, or so we might think from the bare chests of three, or maybe they’ve been doing manual labour. Is the man in the coat cold, or is he suffering from malaria, that was a huge problem on the Island? While they’re young and fit, the range of expressions on their faces tells the tale of the toll of imprisonment. Along a spectrum from cheeky to resigned, they look out at the viewer as if trying to reconcile themselves to the harsh hand fortune and Fate has dealt them.

Dubotzki’s other photographs of Torrens Island camp captured the camp’s appalling conditions and the abuses committed by Australian guards. Some of these were later submitted as evidence in official protests and a Defence Department inquiry.

In 1915 Dubotzki was transferred to Holsworthy Camp and then to Trial Bay, both in New South Wales. The latter camp was on a headland with a single access road and comprised a jail and outbuildings stretching down to the beach. Trial Bay was an ‘elite’ camp; and among the internees were professionals, academics, businessmen and the German Consuls from New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia.  

Here, the internees had the most privileges, including a prisoner’s committee through which they could negotiate with the Australian Army who had charge of the camp. Dubotzki’s photos reflect how at Trial Bay the internees worked together to construct what was essentially a fully functional ‘village, with its own street signs, and even a daily newspaper. The men built a coffee shop, a theatre (in which they made their own elaborate costumes and sets, and the womens’ roles were played by men), a bakery, and a blacksmiths. Sporting clubs offered boxing and athletics. An early ‘adult learning centre’ for languages and other subjects was set up. Dubotzki himself set up a small business selling prints of his photographs to his fellow internees.

Even so, life at Trial Bay was tough. This 1918 diary entry by an internee could almost have been a Facebook post from yesterday about being confined at home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Causes for friction are popping up everywhere and you have to pull yourself together all the time in order to avoid confrontations. Things get easily out of dimension and people become irritable and touchy due to the long imprisonment. You just can’t avoid it. Some days the mood is following the course of the war, one day there’s high tension and then again one is doomed to wait and wait.

W. Daehne, Diary entry Sunday 21 April 1918, ML MSS 261/3 Item 18.

What is striking to me in the few interior images we have is how organised the spaces are; reflecting how the internees used all their pent up energy and determination to ‘make home’ in the open ended ‘crisis’ in which they found themselves.

This beautiful portrait shows the photographer himself ‘at home’ in his hut.

Muslin curtains soften the light from the back window, and Dubotzki turns three quarter profile to the camera his features softly illuminated by the window over his desk. Our eye pours over the neat ‘ship shape’ interior, the carefully pulled bedspread, the spare bookcase, a framed art print on the wall, and comes to rest on the curiously pristine white table cloth that covers the desk. It reads as ‘blankness’ the blankness of days for a young man imprisoned for nearly five years for no crime except for having come to Australia from Bavaria.

The poignancy, (or ‘punctum’ – the emotional punch from a photograph detail, as Roland Barthes described) for me comes in this image from the freesias at the window sill. I see these as a heart-breakingly powerful symbol of Dubotzki’s simple human response to the beauty of natural things, and his use of fresh flowers as interior decoration as an indefatigable sign of his optimism, his capacity to ‘meet’ every day, and as an important means of seeing himself through years of incarceration.

A similar determined recourse to ‘normalcy’ to taste and the maintenance of the habits of home as a form of optimism, is also evidenced here in this above work by Dubotzki depicting fellow internees gathered in the private quarters of one in the group.

The room’s owner -- mostly likely the man reclining in the back corner on a stretcher -- has repurposed the v-shaped wooden wall braces to form a small library, and picture display area. To the left, he has hung photos in a symmetric display. Shelves are swathed in embroidered material, curtains have been placed, and the men sit in quiet comraderie, each with their newspapers and books, a bottle of beer on the table.

Along with some 7000 other German ‘enemy aliens’ Dubotzki was repatriated to Germany in 1919. Once there he married, and carried on working as a photographer and artist in Dorfen. He had three children, and it was contact with two of his now elderly daughters that led curators to discovering this cache of images from his time in Australia.

Some of his prints are held by the Migration Museum here, and the remainder, and his glass negatives and cameras, remain with his family. His photographic record of the camps, are vivid, humanist and of remarkable quality, and they show us in detail how he and his fellow internees ‘made home’ as a crucial part of their management of their day to day life in Australian prison camps.

My next posting for Part Four of ‘The Meaning of Home in Covid Times’ will explore the remarkable works of Charlotte Salomon, made during confinement when she was interned with her family for being Jewish in Southern France in WW2. Salomon was found and sent to Auschwitz in 1943, where she was murdered by the Nazis aged only twenty-six. The works she left behind leave a permanent record of her experience.

The Meaning of Home in Covid Times: Part two

Georgina Downey is an art historian who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her third book, Domesticity under Siege: When home isn’t safe [due 2021] with co-editors Professor Mark Taylor, and Dr Terry Meade, is under contract.

Safe at home?

Having explored the most powerful and pervasive ideas about home in Part one, today I will focus on how, under home isolation we might arrange, demarcate and order domestic private spaces. Humans have been ‘dwellers within’ for millennia. For us, defining enclosed space as ‘for this, or for that, for me, or for you’ is something we seem hard-wired to do, whether that space is a tent, or a thousand room palace. Defining space, giving it meaning, and associating it with various behaviors, attitudes and ideas, is also something we are increasingly having to do since spouses, children, flatmates and other co-inhabitants are spending dramatically more time together than usual.

Bringing a necessary humor to the difficulties of doing this, is the focus of [for me] particularly interesting subset of current ‘corona isolation’ memes, each of which turn on notions of demarcation of home into certain spaces. The following examples are only the tip of the iceberg, a small selection from a huge range of choices that are daily growing and being shared, so apologies if your favorites aren’t here; I’m an elderly Gen-X and probably not on the right platforms [‘what’s Tick Tock’] to get the latest ones!

How, you may ask, am I defining meme? Here? In the general agreed definition, that is, as a ‘self-replicating unit of culture’ created for and shared on social media. Memes are sometimes blamed for destroying democracy, in the way that they short-circuit political debate, by radically simplifying complex notions, but in any case, love them or loathe them; these are significant enough to have their own scholarly discipline now called ‘memetics’.

Picked out for today’s topic of defining enclosed space under the radical limits of coronavirus isolation, is ‘Where is your next travel destination’ This meme illustrated below gets its humorous boost from playing on the notion that during confinement different rooms at home become exotic. As we can see ordinary rooms in the house are enlivened by giving them dreamy and tantalizing names, such as the destinations in a glossy travel brochure.

The punch line is that since borders have been closed in nearly every country, and airline flights shut down, the only ‘travel’ we will be doing is through our own rooms at home.  Missing from this list but we can add them to our travels if we have them are those icons of the Aussie dream of the house on the quarter acre block; ‘Frontyardia’ and ‘Backyardia’.

The well-worked through idea this meme works on is well established in art, fiction, film and theatre. It draws on the notion that via the imagination of the captive or quarantined individual travelling, the self can travel where the body cannot. For precursors we need only think of Robert Louis Stevenson writing Robinson Crusoe from his invalid’s bed; we might cross continents, with prisoners in mind, and think of ‘Rubashov’, the prisoner in Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon,  determinedly tapping out a language of self-expression the stony walls of the prison to his cell neighbour, only known as Prisoner #402. 

But above all, we might think of Xavier de Maistre’s A Journey Around My Room (Voyage autour de ma chambre (1794).  

This is the late eighteenth century story of a young aristocrat, confined to his home in Turin for forty-two days as punishment for fighting a duel. Desperately bored and determined to keep himself occupied, Xavier looks at the furniture, engravings, etc. in his small bedroom, as if they were scenes from a voyage in a strange land. He praises this voyage because it does not ‘cost’ anything, and for this reason he recommends this kind of imaginative travel to the poor, the infirm, and the lazy. His room is a long square, and the perimeter is thirty-six paces.

Xavier writes "When I travel through my room,", "I rarely follow a straight line: I go from the table towards a picture hanging in a corner; from there, I set out obliquely towards the door; but even though, when I begin, it really is my intention to go there, if I happen to meet my armchair en route, I don’t think twice about it, and settle down in it without further ado."  Xavier’s story plays with the reader’s imagination, making the familiar, [the all too familiar], seem strange and wonderful.

This next meme similarly evokes the de Maistre idea, but gives us a floorplan to go with it.

The floorplan linked to wit, or at least to amusement, first came about with the invention of the game ‘Cluedo’ during the Blitz years of the Second World War in England. The civilian population at this time were quarantined, at least between certain hours, [the hours of curfew] at home, not only at home but in semi-darkness, in order to give no visual lead to the German bombers flying night raids overhead.

Under these terrible conditions, that were enduring for several years [1939-945] parents and guardians became desperate for new kinds of games and distractions with which to keep children happy, quiet, occupied, busy, and safe in cellars and bunkers. Serving this need, the inventor of Cluedo, an English musician named Anthony Pratt, developed the basics of the game with the help of his wife during the Blitz. The Pratts eventually sold the copyright to Waddingtons and Hasbro, after which it became one of the most popular board games of all time. With its much loved eight rooms, six characters and six weapons, Cluedo  over its lifetime has already earned over a billion dollars, which looks set to rise as sales of board games has tripled in the last month due to coronavirus quarantine around the world. It seems that under lock-down families the world over are buying old favorite games online. These also include Monopoly, Scrabble and Operation as well as chess and chequers.          

Before Cluedo, house floorplans were not considered as playful, cultural visual figures to be read by all of us, children as well, not only architects, builders and interior designers.

Such forms of spatial thinking how ever go back to even more interesting use of the floorplan as a trope or metaphor.

In 1917, in order to explain how the mind works, Sigmund Freud used the following analogy in which he basically relies on the notion of a floorplan. He said

“Let us therefore compare the system of the unconscious to a large entrance hall, in which the mental impulses jostle one another like separate individuals. Adjoining this entrance hall there is a second, narrower, room—a kind of drawing room—in which consciousness too, resides. But on the threshold between these two rooms a watchman performs his function.” (Freud 1917: 336–7)

Here the super ego is the ‘watchman’ or butler, ushering ‘mental impulses’ in and out of various rooms. Freud knew that his listeners at this introductory lecture would immediately conjure up internal mental pictures not only of their own entrance halls and drawing rooms but also the familiar uses and social activities associated with each of these rooms.

Through his analogy to a ‘chain of command’ between rooms, with the entrance hall, or ‘usher’, reporting to the drawing room, overseen by ‘the watchman on the threshold’, Freud made his points about how the tripartite structure of the unconscious (ego, super-ego, and id) related to each other. He knew that he only had to name the rooms and his comparison between actual domestic space and the spaces of the mind would be made clear.

So you see the seamless ease through these memes ‘turn’, ‘speak’ and entertain, which is because of our human facility in equating and extending ‘mental space’ into actual space. But perhaps Jean Piaget put it best when he said ‘We organize our worlds by first organizing ourselves’.

In Part three of ‘The Meaning of Home in Covid Times’ we will be looking at art about interment that shows shelter being decorated, organised, beautified and mapped as a means of fortifying the mind in times of crisis.

The Meaning of Home in Covid Times: Part one

Georgina Downey is an art historian who has published widely on the domestic interior in art. She is a Visiting Fellow at the University of Adelaide, and has received an Australian Academy of the Humanities Travel Grant (2006) and University of Adelaide small research grants. Her most recent books are Domestic Interiors: Representing Home from the Victorians to the Moderns, (2013) and Designing the French Interior: The Modern Home and Mass Media (edited with Anca Lasc and Mark Taylor 2015) both published by Bloomsbury. Her research interests are:  the interior in modern and contemporary art, design history, cosmopolitanism and critical animal studies and the creative arts.

By some bizarre fluke of temporal synchronicity, two colleagues and I have just signed a contract with an academic publisher to produce what will be my third book Domesticity under Siege: When home isn’t safe. It’s a multi-author anthology and I will be co-writing the Introduction with my fellow editors as well as contributing a chapter.

It’s about the agents, tangible and invisible, that undermine notions of home. Spookily, right from early days back in 2018, we were interested in the undermining of home by viruses, or what, pre-Pasteur/bacterial times, folk referred to as ‘miasmas’. So, we’re currently trying to think through the global effects of Covid-19 home quarantining on the domestic world, so we can incorporate these and make the book as timely as possible.

We never thought in our wildest imaginations we would be writing the book itself ‘under siege’ or in lock down. Now in Adelaide, Melbourne, and Brighton, England respectively, we editors are stuck without choice in the very space of our research, and our deepest interest. Suddenly, our elegant theoretical precepts get to be lived out.

The idea of ‘home’ we want to challenge is its age-old positioning as ‘as a refuge and place of repose for the family, a nurturing environment for children, and a safe place for visitors. There are worse places to be confined to, it would seem. Today however, with the world in lock down at home, the boundaries of nurturing domesticity are colliding confusingly with outside and inside agents.

We might start by asking what is ‘home’ when you are confined in it 24/7? Culturally speaking, in the democratized, post-industrial West, with its intense focus on the rights of the individual to move freely back and forth between public and private space, the usual connotations of being confined to home are mostly negative.

We use the term ‘home detention’ to describe the condition of prisoners – usually with electric monitoring devices attached to their bodies. We’re accept, as societies, for the need to support individuals with physical or psychological challenges to mobility so they can move with ease between registers of space. We are aware, even though social supports are inadequate and/or underfunded, of the need to ensure that those at home caring for a new-borns, and at the other end of the scale, the elderly, can exercise some choice in getting in and out of home.

However we have not been nearly aware enough, of individuals confined at home with violent partners.  Mandatory lock down to combat COVID-19 now means that they are effectively trapped at home with their abusers, isolated from the people and the resources that could help them. Some abusers are using COVID-19 to further isolate their victims. Hotlines and shelters in the US, UK and Australia are reporting an increase in calls. In China in February, according to one source, calls for help tripled as a result of lock down.[1] In Australia, authors of the 2016 Royal Commission into Domestic Violence are also worried. At the very least, their findings have to battle for news space, and that the ‘momentum for reform will be halted by the [COVID-19] crisis’.[2]

The notion of home as shelter is risible also for the stateless, for refugees in detention and for those who have been living under curfew in their homes in Gaza, in Syria, and other repressive and violent regimes. What can you do if the army patrolling outside won’t let you leave your house? And if you do, they will shoot you.

So you can see with just these few examples that while ‘home’ has had a good rap over the millennia; the idea we have of it as shelter, providing an almost mystical form of sanctuary, doesn’t always hit the mark. Yet most cultures are deeply invested in its myths. Home is where ‘mother’ is, its where our first memories are crystallized, it’s the place we go back, either in memory or reality; its extends to nation – to ‘home’ land, which consists of an inside, and a beyond, a notion political leaders from the beginning of recorded time have been quick to evoke during periods of perceived internal and external threat.

Governments around the world are now relying on the myths of home to activate new self isolating behaviors. Notwithstanding, the home is still a place where we can contract illnesses – from people, ‘miasmas’ and objects  – agents that need to go in and out in order for ‘home’ to function.  What we might gather from this collectively is that home is neither always ‘shelter, nor is it a fortress; it’s actually more like a kind of a permeable membrane.

Please stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow, where I discuss some of the more ‘viral’ memes that people are sharing on social media to keep morale up, and how these relate to our ideas of home.

[1] https://time.com/5803887/coronavirus-domestic-violence-victims/

[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-family-violence-surge-in-victoria/12098546

In praise of Alfred Stevens and plumbed-in women

I was absolutely thrilled yesterday to see Stevens's 'The Bath' 1867 in the flesh, so to speak at the Art Gallery of South Australia's 'Colours of Impressionism' exhibition.

https://www.artgallery.sa.gov.au/agsa/home/Exhibitions/NowShowing/Colours_of_Impressionism

This is a painting I've only seen in reproduction and it was the crux of a chapter I wrote in my first book, the edited anthology 'Domestic Interiors: Representing Homes From the Victorians to the Moderns' Bloomsbury 2013. In this book I considered the history in art of each room in a house.

Selecting the bathroom for myself -- [an obscure passion for plumbing] its titled "Bathrooms: Plumbing the Canon: the bath tub nudes of Alfred Stevens, Edgar Degas, and Pierre Bonnard". 

Here's what I wrote: 

'Alfred Stevens’s The Bath shows us a full-length French zinc tub filled to the brim. The Bath (see Figure 7.2) is a departure for Stevens, whose subjects are usually seen fully dressed in lavish interiors. Known for his paintings of Paris’s fashionable women, Stevens was interested in psychological interiority, and often caught his subjects in moments of frustration, boredom or longing. His were contemporary women, who liked precious objects and dwelt in luxuriously decorated salons or boudoirs. He painted both society women and cocottes or demi-mondaines , femmes both fragile and fatale, and his approach was sensitive and objective, sensual and almost documentary in style, leaving clues for his fashion-conscious audiences to pick up on—subtle narrative threads laid down in details of dress, décor, and pose. The woman in Stevens’s The Bath is in a state of interiority that is palpable, an idea conveyed by the novel placed half-finished on a stand by the bath (she has been doubly immersed, in bath water and text). But she has put the novel down, perhaps either because her reading has triggered a memory or because she’s been too distracted to concentrate on it. The water in the bath is clear (more on that later) and still, as might be expected from a scene in which the bather in a state of motionless reflection. She touches her left hand to the back of her head, and her facial expression is dreamy and absorbed as the warm water envelopes her and creates a Freudian sense of oceanic boundarylessness.

The white roses she holds in her right hand dangle over the edge of the tub and could be viewed as symbols of love and beauty; furthermore, the fact that there are two blooms evokes notions of being part of a pair, and the fact that she holds them pointing heads down indicated to knowing audiences that she is indeed ‘off the market’. The bath tap, in the shape of a swan’s head, is based on a classic Roman design that is still popular and available today from plumbing suppliers. The inclusion of the swan-shaped tap also refers to the classical myth of Leda and heightens the erotic subtext in the painting. The bathing woman wears the gold bracelet of the successful artist’s model, and her red hair, distinctive facial features and known friendship with Stevens suggests the model may have been Victorine Meurent, the model Manet used for his Olympia in 1863 and whom Picasso used for his Celestine in the 1900s.

The viewing dynamic Stevens established here locates the viewer as a desiring heterosexual male lover, placed at an almost intrusively intimate nearness to her. The Bath operates in a manner not unlike another work of that time, Fantin-Latour’s Woman Reading . Of this picture, Michael Fried has written that it functions within an absorptive framework and tradition. In this framework, the preoccupied face of the sitter is composed in such a way that our role as beholders is denied; a proposal is being constructed (through a range of conventions or effets de real ) that suggests that the scene before us is ‘real’ and that there are no barriers in our observational relationship with the sitter. We observe her state of mind in a manner that is as natural and as unmediated as it might be in real life, while at the same time appreciating this ‘effect’ as it has been mastered by the artist (Fried 1992: 52).

Here Stevens has turned the bathroom into a cloister, and the dreamy meditations of this bather have been encouraged by her access to endless hot running water. That she has been meditating for some time is gently underscored by the fob watch in the soap holder in the centre of the picture. Social historian Michael Adcock makes the astute point that the bathroom is now aspiring to the status of the boudoir. Moreover, for the first time, bathing could become a regular rather than an occasional occurrence, and the bathroom began to change form from being the site of rather awkward and makeshift ablutions to being a place of stylishness and comfort . . . The bathroom was now a place to tarry and to relax, and has taken on some of the intimate and romantic connotations of the boudoir. (Adcock 1996: 34)'

On seeing it in the flesh? Its bigger and more bravura than I imagined; the tones on the elbow and cheek are extraordinary; the swan on the tap has a more lecherous expression that even the largest file size images can convey, and overall its gorgeous. Kudos to the Musee d'Orsay for sending it as far as Adelaide. 

“A THESIS is something you have to organise!”

When I started my PhD my best friend gave me this Gary Larsen cartoon clipping. She’d inked out ‘posse’ and put in ‘thesis.

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The disorderly heap of men and horses that 'Mathews' has thrown together, bore a definite relation to the drifting, dreamy, pointless, and circular chapters I was writing.

So I organised my posse. Some of the advice and techniques I got from my mandatory Uni Study Centre sessions we had in first semester, helped me jump-start the project, organise my writing and my time, and to see the project through to the end. The advice must’ve worked because I did become 'Dr Downey', and am happy to share my knowledge of the basics here.

I will be talking about three kinds of writing plans today.  The first one is the 'bubble map' or balloon diagram.

How to do a Bubble map? Always do these on big A3 paper, using a chunky marker or 2B pencil or crayon so you can connect with your inner child and brainstorm freely. You also want to be able to see the distances you intuitively put between bubbles, because these mimic the hierarchy that will come later in the order that marshal your arguments.  

Your main research question goes in a big bubble smack in the middle of the page.  Then just start drawing in other bubbles containing everything else you think that bears on this topic. You can use as many arrows connecting these (one way or both ways!) as you want – as long as you feel by the end that you have diagrammed the ‘everything’ about your topic.

The Bubble map then becomes your guide to your literature search and may include several keywords for your online searches. So lets scroll forward a few days or weeks. Back again? Okay the next planning diagram is more detailed it’s basically your Writing Plan – these are easiest done first in pencil, on big paper again. You can transfer it to digital quickly enough.

Now you’ve done your reading and you know all about the previous academic 'conversations' that have been going on in your particular topic room and you know which of these are more, or less relevant.  The Writing Plan is also incredibly useful in ‘picking up the threads’ again if you’ve had to put your essay or chapter down for a while due to illness or other commitments. You can see at a glance, where you’ve been, and where you’re going.

Your Writing Plan headings are:

• Intro (perky quote or provocation)
• Background Statement (why is, and why has, this topic been broadly important)
• The problem? And then the Hero proposition (how I will address the problem - fill the gap)
• Aims Outline and Methods – a Brief survey of key thinkers’ viewpoints and approaches / as a lit review then your method/framework and why it’s best
• Topic (instance or exemplar of your argument) 1 – (or Case Study 1) / then Topic 2 / then Possible Topic 3
• Conclusion

Then all you need to do is type up the Writing Plan from the hard copy – and start filling in your paragraphs for each planned section! To get the ‘look’ of the pencil version of the Writing plan again – like a bird’s eye view so you can see the overall structure – just use Outline Tools to move and edit headings, change heading levels, and move text around. You can also control how much detail you see. See final illustration above.

Voilà – and you’re on the way to your Sheriff’s badge.

So go on, Bubble, plan, and birds ‘eye view your way into organised essay/chapter writing.