The Stettheimer Dollhouse, Anne Imhof
This week for TCT I wrote about Carrie Stettheimer’s Dollhouse at the Museum of the City of New York. It’s hard to describe what an honor it was to have exclusive access (yes, that’s right) to its recent cleaning, to watch the removal, dusting, and reinstallation of its artworks and furniture. (I was invited on the basis of my previous writing about the Stettheimers here and here.) It took me forever to write this piece because I have maybe book-length ideas about it. I wanted to write about Julie Becker’s Interior Corner series; the gender politics and historicizing force of the 20th-Century salon; searching for the “dollhouse within the dollhouse;” mise en abyme and modernity…
As Susan Stewart writes:
“Transcendence and the interiority of history and narrative are the dominant characteristics of the most consummate of miniatures—the dollhouse. A house within a house, the dollhouse not only presents the house’s articulation of the tension between inner and outer spheres, of exteriority and interiority—it also represents the tension between two modes of interiority […] the dollhouse’s aptest analogy is the locket or the secret recesses of the heart: center within center, within within within. The dollhouse is a materialized secret; what we look for is the dollhouse within the dollhouse and its promise of an infinitely profound interiority.”
From On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 1984. (Thank you to Jarrett Earnest for telling me about this book!)
Ultimately, my piece in TCT today is about the images. MCNY’s new photography of the dollhouse (which has just undergone extensive conservation efforts) is incredible. And I was allowed to get very close to the house, no case, and take pictures of the rooms, emptied of their furniture, in bright light, in the dark, etc. A dream come true. Some of what I captured on my phone is almost paranormally beautiful to me: exactly what I want to look at. A few of those pictures accompany the article, others are weirder and I’ll print them for myself. (Also, I can’t really publish any of my own photos that include the Duchamp or the Albert Gleizes works, so my series of the Ballroom wall filling up, painting by painting, must be secret.) There’s no free link today, and maybe I won’t do that for a while, because if people don’t subscribe, stuff like this—which takes the labor of a few people—is unsustainable, obviously.
BUT I wrote the (unpaywalled) cover profile on Anne Imhof for CULTURED’s CULT100 issue. Spoiler: I basically liked DOOM.
