CORTEGE

Cranes at half mast in honour of Churchill's funeral barge

‘The [winding] sheet had traditionally been made of linen, like Jesus’ shroud, but a law of 1666 ordered that they be made of wool to help boost the textile industry’

Owen Davies, The Haunted (2007)

HISTORY IS MADE

R.B. Kitaj, After Rembrandt, 2000, pastel and charcoal on post-it

No more the humble post-it: Kitaj’s drawing on a post-it set a world record by selling for £640 at an internet auction in December 2000. The auction was held by post-it manufacturer 3M in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the invention of the post-it note. A happy birthday.

PASSING WATER, PASSING BY

Toilet, Brooklyn 2005

Of the sterile cleanliness of Western toilets, white and tiled, [Jun’ichiro] Tanizaki writes “what need is there to remind us so forcefully of the issue of our own bodies [?]”

In the toilet Tanizaki imagines, the body disappears, is absorbed into the architecture and environment determined by the liminality of the toilet… In the toilet’s intimate space, the place where the body performs its most essential activities, the body is lost….

Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light (Shadow Optics) (2005)

In order to contextualize the long and sometimes fierce battle to provide public conveniences for women, I’ve been trying to learn more about how and where British women relieved themselves before lavatories became a feature of the Victorian streetscape. Such information is hard to come by…

Barbara Penner (author of ‘A World of Unmentionable Suffering: Women’s Public Conveniences in Victorian London’), ‘Researching Female Public Toilets: Gendered Spaces, Disciplinary Limits’ (2005)

SEE THROUGH

Meret Oppenheim, X-Ray (1964)

Despite his sideswipe at the occultists, H.J.W. Dam’s article in McClure’s Magazine, which brought off the scoop of a visit to the laboratory of the retiring Röntgen, did its best to present his subject as a kind of magnetic magus, an adept of the force he has discovered: ‘his long, dark hair stood straight up from his forehead, as if he were permanently electrified by his own enthusiasm… His eyes are kind, quick, and penetrating’ (Dam 1896, 410). Dam was allowed to sit in the dark in Röntgen’s isolation box and see the effect of the X-rays for himself. His description evokes the thrills of the séance:

“The moment the current passed, the paper began to glow. A yellowish-green light spread all over its surface in clouds, waves, and flashes. The yellow-green luminescence, all the stranger and stronger in the darkness, trembled, wavered, and floated over the paper, in rhythm with the snapping of the discharge. Through the metal plate, the paper, myself, and the tin box, the invisible rays were flying, with an effect strange, interesting, and uncanny. The metal plate seemed to offer no appreciable resistance to the flying force, and the light was as rich and full as if nothing lay between the paper and the tube.” (Dam 1896, 412)

Steven Connor, ‘Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic’ (2008)

RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

Napoleon and the Sphinx (Jean León Gérôme, 1868)

ARCANE RITES

Il Casanova di Federico Fellini (Federico Fellini, 1976)

TWICE AS LONG

From Wilhelmsplatz an arriving diplomat drove through great gates into a court of honour. By way of an outside staircase he first entered a medium-sized reception room from which double doors almost seventeen feet high opened into a large hall clad in mosaic. He then ascended several steps, passed through a round room with domed ceiling, and saw before him a gallery 480 feet (150 m) long. Hitler was particularly impressed by my gallery because it was twice as long as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Hitler was delighted: “On the long walk from the entrance to the reception hall they’ll get a taste of the power and grandeur of the German Reich!” During the next several months he asked to see the plans again and again but interfered remarkably little in this building, even though it was designed for him personally. He let me work freely.

Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (1970)

FIRST COMMUNION

HISTORY OF THE CORRIDOR

‘The history of the corridor as a device for removing traffic from rooms has yet to be written. From the little evidence I have so far managed to glean it makes its first recorded appearance in England to Beaufort House, Chelsea, designed around 1597…. the introduction of the through-passage into a domestic architecture fast inscribed a deeper division between the upper and lower ranks of society… purposeful or necessary communication was facilitated while incidental contact was reduced’

‘[The corridor is] appropriate to a society that finds carnality distasteful, which sees the body as a vessel of mind and spirit, and in which privacy is habitual… [a society devoted to] reducing noise-transmission, differentiating movement patterns suppressing smells, stemming vandalism, cutting down the accumulation of dirt, impeding the spread of disease, veiling embarrassment, closeting indecency and abolishing the unnecessary’

Robin Evans, ‘Figures, Doors and Passages’ (1978)

FIVE PRECOCIOUSLY FASHION-FORWARD COMING OF AGE HEROINES

• Claudine, Claudine à l’école (1900)
• Veronica, Heathers (1989)
• Franny Glass, Franny & Zooey (1961)
• Cecile, Bonjour Tristesse (1958)
• Trilby O’Ferrall, Trilby (1894)