Piranesi Fever, Perspectival Unrealism, and Kapoor’s “Dud”
Investigating “Piranesian-ness” and more
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Memory Palace
What do we mean when we call something “Piranesian”?
We are in the middle of a groundswell of reappraisal of Piranesi’s work—much of it halted or delayed by the pandemic. In 2021, historians Heather Hyde Minor and Carolyn Yerkes mounted Piranesi on the Page at the Princeton University Library, a show that followed the publication of their Piranesi Unbound by Princeton University Press in 2020. I group these two works together because of their sustained, revisionist argument that placed books and bookmaking at the center of Piranesi’s practice. Revisionism also animated Piranesi and the Modern World, a show at the National Museum in Oslo that drew weak links between Rem Koolhaas and Peter Eisenman’s late modern architectural fantasies and artist Julie Mehretu’s cartographical paintings all as inheritors of Piranesi’s influence. Then there is Susannah Clarke’s acclaimed novel Piranesi (2020), which is not historical in any sense and yet still captures the kind of fantastical aura that we associate with the Carceri. Clarke’s Piranesi is a prisoner in his own architectural construction, a world-within-a-house that contains statuaries of figures of mysterious provenance. Piranesi is not the character’s name, but rather an assigned sobriquet that captures his, well, Piranesian-ness. And thanks to curator John Marciari’s recent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum, Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi, we have a better sense why “Piranesian” is no mere placeholder for architectural imaginations or, indeed, dalliances with the sublime. As the exhibition’s name suggests, drawings were the instruments by which Piranesi understood his world in all its shades and dimensions, a convention that disciplined all aspects of his practice.
Perspectival Unrealism
The architecture of the stage is neither purely image nor purely space, but rather something tenuous that falls in between.
Piranesi took up the Bibienas’ spatial explorations in order to render truly impossible spaces—spaces to be conceived and consumed as paper architecture. Yet for the Bibienas, the drawing remained instrumental for the construction of scenography. Drawing facilitated the creation of spatial effects that no longer followed directly from the actual space of the stage. In their designs, architecture is neither purely image nor purely space, but rather something tenuous that falls in between. This is what is so intriguing, so fresh, about their drawings. In a professional landscape pulled between the dubious realism of performance metrics and the blasé detachment of graphic image-making, the Bibienas’ visions offer a provocative combination of performance and image, one that accepts the impossibility of uniting form and effect.
Then as now, such a truce between reality and illusion offered no easy satisfaction. Ferdinando Galli Bibiena, the family patriarch, once remarked that the “constraints” of set production “much diminish the idea” first envisioned in a rough drawing. Viewing these drawings today, a designer might recognize a familiar struggle to craft an image realizable within existing conventions and technologies—even as the drawing’s ambitions stubbornly exceed the limits of its realization.
Kapoor’s Catoptricks
New York’s diminutive “bean” suggests that the city’s public sculpture is not in good health.
by Ben Davis
Proudly stuffed beneath a Herzog & de Meuron condo tower at the corner of Leonard and Church, Anish Kapoor’s decade-in-the-making squidge does not, as of yet, have a title. May I suggest The Dud?
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