5U FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S DARK GAZE.

surrounded by a Plexiglas box to shield it from the elements, and this Plexiglas Sanctuaries and Architectonics
box made of the work an uncamny picce, articulated as too fragile 10 sustain
display.
Recalling Mira Schor’s “Patrilineage” (1991), one cannot help but ask
where Woodman’s Blueprint for a ‘lemple lands in imheritance from and
placement in the Western canon. For Blueprint for a Temple addresses Western
aeslhetics with its allusion to the Acropolis, even as it addresses the problem
of the posthistorical in its disintegrative materiality. On the one hand, the
work faithfully places ilsel im a lineage of classical aesthetics, suggesting
Winckelmann and Schelling by invoking a damaged Acropolis. But the
women photographed as caryatids who are inhabiting Blueprini for 2 Temple
also stand strangely apart from the ideologies of Romantic, posthistorical, and
even classical aesthetics, cast apart from these masculinist systems. Without a
matrilineage referenced, it is a work by, of, and for daughters, exemplifying The whole of reality bears on its face its own allegory.
—FEmmanuel | evinas, “Reality and its Shadow”
the daughters’ isolation from the protection of patrilineage—that which,
ultimately, the work rejects—and the solaces of matrilineage that the work
Blueprint for a Temple exemplifies the melancholy late afternoon light of East
mournfully exposes as insufficient to protect the risked body of the nubile
Village apartments. These apartments, rented on the cheap and sparsely
young woman. For such protection we need a Plexiglas box.
fumished represent a kind of fugitive skirmish fought by young women
Woedman’s absorplion and subversion of the terms of the postwar
together at the boundary of the domestic, working against some tropes of
aesthetic, that Blanchot ([1942] 1981) describes by the metaphor of Hurydice,
the feminine (refusing marriage and domesticity) while emphasizing other
manifest in this work. Rather than casting herself as Eurydice, she creales the
aspects of the feminine (stripping to pose as curyatids to articulate images
exemplary work of art for Blanchot’s theory of the aesthetic—her blueprint of the feminine). The creation of Biueprint for a Temple was a local event in
temple is that which she leads into the light and also that which will be
the sense that Woodman presented the piece at the Alternative Museum in
destroyed by light. For the morc it is exposed to light, the element. of vision,
1980.* Moreover, Francesca Woodman took the architectonic gesture of the
the more it becomes illegible. She creales the image that becomes, through its
caryatid not only from the Parthenon to which Blueprint for a Temple alludes
materiality, mythopoetic, thus engaging its audience through her turning of
but also from the many nineteenth-century buildings in Greenwich Village
Orpheus’s gaze—a postvisionary picce.
(lower Manhattan, although more around Fifth Averme than the East Village)
near where she lived. She translated this local gestural architecture of the
caryatid into the artwork presented at the Alternative Museum in Manhattan:
a work, then, doubly lacal and yet extravagantly allusive toward the far away
Acropolis and Porch of the Caryatids and the ruined caryatids before the
Siphnian Treasury at Delphi.
Blueprint for a Tensple records young women working together to create an
installation? The images of Woodman’s models shaw the temple as a place
where young women work together privately, beyond the gaze of the rest of
the culluze, ever as they perform for cultural consumption. This exposure of

1 As noted, the original exhibit of Blueprint for a Tenapla would have covered twa walls.
The second section of the wors is still a pussession of Woodman’s estate and has not been
publicly viewed since the Alternative Museum showing, when Woodman was still alive. The
sections were placed on intersecting walls as she originally displayed it, creating a sense of
spatial depth that is mosély lost in the one panel display of the work now in conservation at
the Melropolitn.
2 On Woodaian’s project, see Somerville (2020, 74-91)
 SANCTUARIES
AND ARCLUFCTONTCS «= 53
52 FRANCESCA WOODMAN'S DARK GAZE

point towards which art, desire, death, and the night all seem to lead. She is
the place where Woodman’s friends allow her to photograph them is one of
the instant in which the essence of the night approaches as the Other night”
sublime trust. For the young women whuse photographed bodies make up
((1942] 1981, 99). The box created by the Metropolitan lo make it possible to
Blueprint for a Lemple reflect not conscription as artist's models but a queer
Project that troubles and celebrates the edge of adulthood. The photographs show Woodman’s work bevames itself par of the work, that which preserves
the encounler of the “Other night” allowing it, for brief periods of time, to
bespeak a willingness on the young women’s part to submerge themselves
exter daylight. Blueprint for a ‘lemple cannot be kept on permanent display
into the project that, presented 1o the public as Woodman’s, records visually
crotic interplay between the young women whose bodies’ images build the because of its fragility. The encounter with the “Other night” is that from
which the public is somewhat sheltered by the Plexiglas, protecting us from
crepuscular blue temple.
the unbearable vulnerability, translated to materiality, that defines Ihis work.
The substance, the material, of the work is potently allusive, signifying
Woodman’s invocation of architectural practice, connecting her photographic
collage with the architectonic: by its medium the photographic collage
Blueprint for a Tersple claims its queer place in architectural practice.’ And if The Essence of Night
the decision to use cheap, ready-to-hand materials (blueprint) reflects her
status as a young and unknown artist, it is also important to recognize that Standing before Blueprint for a Temple at the Met, one has an overwhelming
sense of the fragility of the object that needs such intense curatorial care: to
her choice of diazotype as medium was not accidental and to see the way
survive being seen. Even enclosed in the Plexiglas box, it has been altered
that this material of blueprint invokes architecture.? For the invocation of the
architectonic register is one of the most important gestures made by Blueprint by exposure ta light during its time on view; the original blue color that had
becn tuening purple over the years has gone even more toward purple, and
for a Tentple. As the title makes clear, the image is intended to function as a
blueprint—a plan for that which is to be built. And that means, for this work,
the work's white spaces have yellowed.’ Light and moisture would render
a plan for what cannot be built. Not only does the plan suggest thal which it completely illegible were Lhe collage not protected and its time on view
carefully limited. In this way, the work approaches the essence of night, the
cannot be built but, to some degree, that which cannot be seen; Blueprint for a
imypossible-to-see indigo that yet is there. Itis nota work about disappearance
Temple suspends between allusion and deconstruction.
but a work about night, the unreadable.
Eleven years alter its initial acquisition by the Metropolitan Muscum of
Woodman has not survived to discuss her work, so my purpose is to
Art, one section of Blueprint for a ‘lentple was prescuted to the general public
there in February 2012. AsT’ve discussed, the original work's material porosity
read what is recorded in the work, the extraordinary [rapility of medium.
compelling the work toward whal Blanchot calls the “Other night,” the place
and fragility was pronounced, and the work had to be covered in a Plexiglas
where the work is lost in exactly the material that provides its existence ([1942]
shield to be displayed. It underwent a transition, then, from a porous, iragile
1981, 99). The dark gaze of Francesca Woodman in part reflecls Lhe mark of
architectural blueprint paper to a light-reflective object; persons viewing it at
gender (Wittig 1992), for the fragility she evokes in choosing the diazotype,
the Mel. would see their own images reflected by the Plexiglas box that encased
ar blueprint, medium is a way of establishing the feminine as the boundary
the work. In this newly transfigured state, the materially [ragile Blueprintfor a
of the architectonic. Blueprint for a Temple dramatizes and arliculates multiple
Temple has gone from that which absorbs and is ruined by light to that which,
with notable specularity, reflects light, mirroring the viewer. A surface created
forms of linait and boundary: the photograph as the death mask, the female
body as the abject or the limit of culture, and, of course, monumental art itself
by Woodman as highly vulnerable is now metamorphosed —for purposes of
as that which often rests on the use of the female form to represent national
protection and preservation. into an object encased in an impervious surface
identity in modemity. Woodman’s use of diazotype reflects the iragility of her
that deflects ligh! and reflects the image of the viewer, not the artist's original
position as a very young woman artist: she needed access to cheap materials
intention. And yet precisely this transfiguration, a conservalorial necessity,
because she could not afford expensive matcrials. In effect, Woodman’s social
speaks to the darkness in the work, as Blanchot theorizes it: “Orpheus has
or positional vulnerability is reflected in the material vulnerability of the
gone down to Eurydice: for him Eurydice is the limit of what art can attain;
medium she chose for her temple.
concealed behind a name and covered by a veil, she is the profoundly dark

3 Woodman used the blueprint medium for other images, many af which have some * “Nora Kennedy (Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge at the Me-opolitan
architectural derivation, bul aone is quite as unmistakably architectonic as Blueprint for a Museum of Art, New York City) in zelephone and personal communications with the author,
Tainiple (Marian Goodman Gallery 2012) February and August 2012.
+ On Woodman’s media, see Keller (2011).
 SANCTUARIES AND ARCHITZCIONK'S = 38
Fd PRANCESCA WOODMAN'S DARK GAZE

Outsiders,” the trope of the painter looking in at the harem is highly and
Her method was to photograph her friends and herself as caryatids and even violently gendered. Woodman tightens her photographic metaphor by
affixed
then project each photograph as a slide onto a wall to which she had bringing the problematic of gender to bear on the question of ilegibility,
blueprint paper, crealing the images positive to positive. The exposure exposing the submersion of the feminine in the architecture of cultural
image
would last virtually all day—a long, slow burn. When the enlarged production. Woodman’s temple, even as it does represent young women
would then
of her friend as caryatid was imprinted on the paper, Woodman
in an uncannily private space, also presents this space as impenetrable.
take the imaye to a developer for commercial architecture, plentiful in New
exposed She dispatches with the idea of the interior space as feminine space into
York City before computer imaging, and have her image developed,
which the viewer-voyeur may gaze. Instead, Blueprint for a Temple encodes
to ammonia gas. She then created the collage from those images on paper the feminine architectonic, thus indicating both the emptying of the
backing by using tape and rubber glue.
a possibilities of entrance into ils deep space and a refusal of the penetrability
The daylong development of the images that make up Blueprint for
of the feminine. It positions the feminine as the limit to space, rather than
Temple would have imposed a meditative pace. Danto’s (1998) proclamation
the end of art, the foreclosing invitation to enter. In this sense, Woodman’s responsiveness to historical
that in the later twentieth century we reach
interpretations of the feminine as interior space, the chora, is one of refusal
of the sacred, and the posthistorical echoes extends the erasure of whal
or deconstruction?
Walter Benjamin ({1936] 1969) famously calls the aura of the work. Blueprint
Tn the shadow of the Acropolis, Woodman’s Blueprint stands: or rather
for a Temple both emblematizes and mourns these erasures and foreclosures
Blueprint for a Temple is the shadow af the Acropolis, the “night” that is made
by choosing a medium that cannot sustain them—paradoxically, together
into the “work” (Blanchot [1942] 1981). It positions itself at the boundary
with a subject matter that alludes to the sacred anid a process that includes
between the depths and the work, an image that performs posthistoricalily,
a meditalive slowness, an all-day exposure as the shifting daylight crossed
the room. Staging the falling away of the aura of the work of art, Woodman’s
insofar as it is made to never be recuperated by future audiences. And yet it
has been recuperated, by the Metropolitan Museum of Art curatorial staif.
blueprint collage hauntingly mournsand also challenges the loss of the auratic,
its Tt positions itself between evanescence and stasis, between transience uf an
insofar as the collage claims a sacred space—a temple—and also insists in
very fragility on ils own nonreproducibility. In a way, to see Blueprint for
a extreme degree (its fragile medium) and the relalive stability of the Porch of
the Caryalids to which Blueprint for a Temple alludes (although it also alludes
Temple is a cullic experience as one recognizes the impossibility of the work's
lo the ruined, fragmentary caryatids of Delphi). Choosing architectural
slasis ona museum wall and the necessity of returning it Lo the basement of
out of sight: it needs blueprint paper, Woodman locates her material practice in the quotidian.
curatorial security, The work belongs in the basement,
this blindness to survive. Choosing the quotidian medium, she subverts expectations of the sacred
Nevertheless, it performs ephemerality in such a way as to open the door character of a temple.
to Waodman’s survivors’ remaking of the work into a form mare permanent. A temple is a sacred space, the term deriving from “templon.”* The
The preservation of Blueprint for a Temple is itself a narrative, involving etymology of the English “temple” derives from the Greek tépevoc, a place
in his
Francesca Woodman’s father, George, preserving the work rolled up cut off. The temple is the place cut off, set apart, sacred. The defimct nature
New York City studio from 1981 until 2001. ‘he preservalion continued with of the sacred, in postmodemity, is at least as important to Blueprint for a
the acquisition of the piece by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2001 and Temple as is its commentary on the posthistorical work of art. But indeed
in an expensive creation of a honeycomb aluminum backing, there are many ways to conceive of a temple, a sanctuary, a space cut off,
culminated
Plexiglas fronting, and delicately enveluped magnets to support and protect Although Woodman indicates thal her model for the temple is Greek, the
7-
the work during the Met's exhibition Spies in the House of Art (February word “temple” in the work’s title also encodes other allusions. Recalling the
August 26, 2012). deep historical associations between the words “temple” and “destruction,”
one may place in relation to Blieprint for a Temple a lew of the vast possibilities
of play on the meaning of the word “temple.” Pushing beyond the allusion
Architectonics to the Porch of the Caryatids that the work emphatically makes, we might
consider her title’s allusion to Solomon's Temple or, as it was later known, the
One may consider Blueprint for a Temple as part of a response fo voyeuristic
On the chora and for feminist interpretation of the chore, please see Julia Kxistova
works viewing the feminine. As Amira Jarmakani (2011) argues in “Intimate (1984).
8 For a discussion of the templon, please ser Fliade (1957)
> Kermedy, in personal communication with the author, December 2017.
 SANCTUARIES AND ARCHITECTONICS = 57
56 FRANCESCA WOORMAN'S DARK GAZE

in the 2009 exhibition of women surrealists, Angels of Anarcity (Manchester

consider the word “temple” as itis
Temple af Jerusalem; from there we could
that this allusion to other
‘Art Gallery, Manchester, UX), positions her among women artists wilh
used in the New Testament? Certainly one could say whom she did not have direct relationships (surrealism, of course, is a
’s background as a
temples is merely associative, but note also that Woodman movement that reached its apogee well before Woodmamn’s era) but with
and the other parent raised as a
child of une parent raised in the Jewish faith whom she shares the practice of crealing art in conjunction with other
other nonclassical references
Christian brings forward the possibility of these women. As Sue Gilbert (2010) and Kate Kellaway (2009) have pointed out
imbricate the work,
to the temple. Regardless of how such associations may in reviews of the exhibition Angels of Anarchy, in which Woodman’s work
of the temple was in its
Woodman’s avowed association with the concupt is included despite her lack of historical association with the other artists
function as a sanctuary."*
s, as the structure represented, the common thread running through most of the women’s
One may also consider the templon, that flat iconustasi work in the surrealist canon is work produced in community with ather
yet also her choice of title here
that Woodman’s temple formally follows. And
Firsl, the Temple of Jerusalem, destroyed last in AD 70 women.
is widely evocative.
stands as a temple of ideals, Here, | do not forward the chestnut that whereas inen seek individual
{afler having becn destroyed twice previously),
a temple that has already glory, women are happier just working logether. On the contrary, I suggest
evoking an ideal time that is always already lost,
a space that would not have that Blueprint for a Temple can be read as Woodman’s masterwork precisely
been destroyed. The Temple of Jerusalem is also
would have been kept in because it plays through, deploys, and in some key ways mourns the collective
admitted women lo the sanctum, inslead, women
Blueprint for a Temple—a aspect of women’s artistic production, a situation reflective of women’s
the Court of Women, the outskirts of the sacred.
only suggests but never cultural position. In Blueprint for a Temple, the bodies of young women friends
temple that cannot be entered because it is flat and
this marginalizing force are given formal expression: here they are, all the girls together, standing to
is habitable space—may reflect and also challenge
of gender. uphold a temple not of flesh nor of marble but of photography in its most
ion of the communal aspect ephemeral vulnerable state, on architectural blueprint paper. This key gesture
Blueprint for a Temple functions as a culminat
which the connection
of much of Woodman’s work: a visual artifact in of production—the decision to use diazolype—exaggerales photography’s
shaped into a temple.”
between the young women is shown, exposed, innate transience. It is not a feminist utopia bul an evocalive reckoning with
between young women, gender in aur cullure
The temple is the holy space of this connection
culture. Here, the Court Woodman’s gesture of using blueprint paper implicitly states that
however marginalized they may be in the broader
’s inclusion, for example, something will be built—that an intention for Blueprint for a Temple would
of Women becomes itself the sanctum. Woodman
be, in fact, to build a temple from these images. Indeed, she designs her
as a temple, whereas it temple with a poignant, purposive literalness. Rather than sketching two-
? Inthe book of John 2:13- 22, the body of Christ is described
faitiful as a temple. In. 2 Corinihians, St dimensional drawings that will be projected inte three-dimensional objects,
Corinthians 3:16, St. Paul describes the body of the
Paul expiicitly associates the lempie with sacredness theandauthor, purification Woodman photographs threc-dimensional human figures—young women,
and August 2012.
vw ennedy, in personal communication with metaphor byFebruary St. Paul when he instricts her friends, sometimes herself. The process of photography translates these
"1 The body as the temple is also used as a dramatizes the temple
against fornication (1 Cor. 6:18). Blueprint jor 2 Temple, necdless to say: three-dimensional forms lo two-dimensional images and, as the structure of
of the body —each young woman photographed enshrined as embodied subject. It’s useful
the. cvocalive representat ion of the young female body in Blueprint for a Blueprint for a Temple, pulls the three-dimensional to the two-dimensional only
here to corsrast works. Now housed in the Tate and
‘emple with Woodman’s self-represeniation in. other to gesture back to the three-dimensional. :
image of herself given to her bovfriend in
National Galleries of Scotland, for example, is an ing caption she cails The Porch of the Caryatids that provides this uncanny blueprint project’s
which she crawls, parily unclathed, across a mirtor;dogs.in the(Seeaccompany online at the Tate: hllp fiw.
herself ’Spot,” alluding to a common pet name for .) Woodman’s represental ion of young
three-dimensional potential is overlaid with an upper level that evokes the
tate org ak/astiartworks/woodmar-untifi ed-ar00347 Parthenon. Blueprint for ¢ Temple sports a vertigo-inducing jumbled half-ruin
topes of degradation; it does not
women’s bodies in Blueprint for ¢ Temple dacs nol play at image epparently
on all fours, 2s she appears in this of a peaked root. Not only in conversation with the avsthetic of the ruin
suggest girls should be kare bottomed
meant ata gifl for her erstwhile beau, I's interesting
they are also
that in Bhieprint, where yourg women
shown upzight (Toewenber g 1799). and with the ond of (the work of) art but also in crealing portrails of young
are show. in connection with each ofrer,
Woodman often worked. with women in a medium destined to become illegible, Blueprini for a Temple
As Sloan Rankin (Chandes et al. 1998) describes, snapped. the shot.
images that she would plan and model for while Sloan
Rankin by creating gtadnating from the Rhode Island
frames a conversation belween the image of the ruin and with what Teresa
Woodman, working without institutional support after relalionshi ps with women who de Lauretis (1987) evocatively has called the trauma of gender, a further
School af Design, seems to have developed intense working
as if bofore a [riendly
supported her creation of “seli-porleaits” —phatographing herself encoding of ruin.
mizcor,

5B WRANCTCA WOODMAN’S DARK GAZE
Geometry and the Sacred
The young women’s curved forms, not plotied and not graphed, resist the
geometrical precision of usable architectural drawings. These figures defy the
use for which blueprint paper is designed, and in that gesture Blueprint for a
Temple also uses the blueprint’s transience to comment obliquely on gender.
Given Woodman’s obsession with geometry (her only book published
during her lifetime is titled Some Disardured Interior Geometries [1981]),
it seems imperative to give some attention to just what it is that she does
with geometry —the geometry implicit in architectural drafting practice —in
the production of Blueprint for a Temple. 1 do not wi sh simply to argue that
geomelry with subversive feminine
Woodman displaces masculine
that cannot plot the diagram of a buildable inhabitation or monument.
Instead, Twish to point to the way that she radicalizes geometry by displacing
the technical rules of architectural drafting that, for a building sketched to be
buildable, must follow geometry that will translate to the third dimension.
Lhis radicalization of Blueprint for a iemple—its use of architectural blueprint
paper to hold an image that is neither plotted nor gridded—charts the vector
of gender since the images appear as women’s bodies. ‘hose bodily images
resist traditional architectonics and chart their own course—one impossible
to fulfill and foreclose—but poised with great beauty on the edge of their
foreclosure.
And yet the poignancy of the images would seem to hew close to Blueprint
for a Temple's evocation of de Lauretis’s (1987) theory of gender as that which
connects femininity with trauma, a position of stalled initiation. ‘his trauma
is not essential to femininity, argues de Lauretis, but rather trauma
feminine often cohere in our culture. Lhe young women caryatids are
up a jumbled peaked roof of chaolic but geometrically evocative
chipped triangles, freakishly enlarged spheres (of claw tect), and the
square pattern of the meander ot Greek key. The lop of Blueprint for a Temple
looks almost like potsherds- fragments lain together, amournful fragmenting
of the gcometry of the Lriangle—as if someone had swept together a bunch of
beautiful broken pieces to imitate the Parthenon roof, but with a difference.
Blueprint for a Temple evokes the plan, the blueprint, of a building that cannot
be built, a building that derives from fractures, fragments, and lhe elusive
curves.” And so Woodman erects the temple as il were ex nihilo, by fiat, a
house of girls in spectral ccho held by diazotype, a medium never intended.
for permanence, pasted by rubber glue onto backing paper.
3 One can relate Blueprint for a Temple to Woudman’s habit of self-portraiture but
only insofar as she is pesfarming, through the duration of her career, a consideration of
the meaning of the nubile female body in culture. To consider her in. relationship to the
conditions of slfpurtrailure, please see Loewenberg (1999).
SANCTJARIES AND ARCHITECTONICS 59
Asymptotic Curve
T note Woodmar’s fidelity to geometry, her interest in the geometrical in
most of her photographs, and her avowal of this inturest in the lilling of Some
Disordered Interior Geometries because the strictures of architectural blueprint
drawitigs would restrict plotting by the fluent curves such as are represented
in Blueprint for a Temple, And yet these curves I align wilh the function in
calculus of the asymptote, that numerical formula that continuously, by
smaller and smalicr fractions, comes closer to but never attains the curve
exactly. Mathematically the blueprint plans for a temple that Woodman
phatographed, images of young women and the curved podia of bathroom
curves, pedestal sinks and claw feet of bathtubs, present the elusive asymptote, the
curve instead of the grid. We cannot extrapolate fram her blueprint how to
build a temple; her blueprint is the iemple. And yet Woodman chose the
work's title Blueprint for a Temple, implying that she intends for this edifice
to somchow be built. From Woodman’s Blueprint for a Tempie one cannot
build habitable space. She offers a visual and mathematical pun here: her
impossible-to-build blueprint as metaphor for the house of woman, a virtual
Womanhouse that cannot be inhabited but instead can only be faced, her
temple as image."*
The chemival trealment of diazotype as well draws my attention: the
fumes of ammonia gas are toxic, stinky, and painful tv work with. Tr seems
important, therefore, to fuld this chemical into one’s interpretation of this
project, a fragile, collapsing, boundary of blue girls. Through her chvicc of
archilecinral blueprint paper, Woodman significs not just ethereal Marian
blue but also gestures toward the grotesque and the common—ammonia
and the
reeking like a household cleaning solution, thus steeping her images in this
holding
element to create her temple.
shapes,
Whereas Blueprint for a Temple is responsive to performance art trends of
angular
the 1970s, and fittingly so for a work at the brink of the 1980s, Woodman’s
fidelity lo the materiality of architectural practice alsu subverts the terms
of performance art by gesturing toward the archileclural and monumental
register: what could be more monumental than the Acropolis, the ultimate
yeference of Blueprint for a Temple? Unlike Ana Mendieta’s earth works,
Woodman’s Temple suggests materiality through the feint of a-materiality
and suggests permanence and monumentality through evanescence and
crumpling: a paper house. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the piece
carries monumentality, taking up an entire wall, and yet the delicate quality
(even flimsiness) of the collage makes the monumentality vertiginous.
4 Notably, the claw feet enlarged as part of Bluevvint for a Tempie are taken from a
detail of a photograph Woodman took of africnd in a bathtub, increasing the extent to which
the temple may be read ag a collage of images of her (ends,

60 FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S DARK GAZE
Woudman, then, moves beyond her era, in which the production of art as
commodity was being both questioned and wildly exploited, with the end
of art in sight. She invokes transience, yes, but her oeuvre has posthumous
staying power. For the temple has nct crumpled in all these 30 years since
it was first exhibited at the Alternative Museum. Kar from disappearing, it
has held its ground. Projecting an ubject al Ihe edge—at the end of art—it
positions itself to turn back and look at what is lost.
Is there a contradiction, insolvable, between the permanence that her
blueprint has achieved through its fate of conservation and Woodman’s
concept of embedding monumentality in a deteriorating medium? Or can we
say that the contradiction is reconciled in the work itself, this risky and on-
the-edge exhibition hedged against mournful permanence? Blanchot’s notion
of the dark gaze in the work allows us to leave the unreconciled unmended, to
suspend in rich and luminous ambivalence the work in blueprint.
Sanctuaries at the Edge
Not created to stand as a building, Blueprint for a Temple acis as iconostasis, a
shicld that divides the sanctuary from the nave. Now that ithas been mounted
on aluminum honeycomb backing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, itis all
the more like an iconostasis. | use the word carefully here, for T do not want
to infer that Woodman makes explicit reference to the iconostasis found in
Greek Orthodox churches." Instead of making a religious claim, I want to
emphasize the way that her flat two-dimensional Blueprint for u Temple encodes
a concept like that of the iconostasis, which is intended to separate different
levels of veneration (only those who are in some sense considered sacred—
the priest, the altar attendants, male infants on the day of their churching—
are allowed to pass behind the iconostasis). In the Greek Orthodox church,
the iconostasis developed from the templon. However, the iconostasis is not
directly linked to the kind of pagan temple that Woodman clearly denotes
in her Termple. And yct the striking correspondence of the formal gesture of
Biueprint for a Temple—its gesture of flat screen—cannot fail to suggest the
iconostasis, demarcating levels of the sacred. Subversively, behind
altar, no interior. Here the space of worship has been evacuated,
Rlueprint for 2 Temple withholds the space of worship, or it grants a space of
such rigorous interiority as to be accessible only to the young women who
participated in the project and whose memories of building the temple would
Asa practicing Greek Orthodox Christian, I do recognize the tradition-bound stalus
af the iconostasis. Even so 1 cannot help but see the parallels between Woodman’s two-
dimensional temple and the ladilional iconostasis that in the Greek Orthodox Church
furictiuns precisely as a temple, cordoning the sacred from the profane
SANCTUARIES AND ARCHITECTONICS = 61
imbue their looking at Blueprint for a Temple with mnemonic interiorily, the
memory of the event of the work’s making.
It ig mutable also that Blueprint for a Temple, in practicing the art of the
iconostasis, invokes pre-Renaissance art—space without depth. It invokes
ark created before the use of linear perspective, even as the photographs of
which the collage is built, like all photographs, present linear perspective.
The Orthodox Christian icon (a flat-paneled painting of religious figures) uses
inverse perspective to create the saints’ severe faces while space is suggested
by the application of gold paint, and the flat structure of Woodman’s ‘lonple
connates Lhe iconostasis (Panofsky [1927] 2005). Blueprint for u Tereple as it was
displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art does not create a sense of depth
but of flatness, a temple we cannot reach into but from which we are always,
ineffably, cast out. However, the original collage was displayed corner to
comer: the original work covered two walls. This original presentation may
have created a sense of structural depth that would alter the formal torque of
Blueprint for a Temple as it is now kept in the collection of the Met.
Architectures
Trancesca Woodman’s photographs’ emblematic merging of flesh with
walls has led critics to educe in her a wish to seliefface (Davison 2000) or a
wish to hide, to camouflage herself against walls (Leach 2004).* Apart from
speculative metaphors, what is mosh clear about the self-portrait images of
her nude body positioned as if merging into architecture is the visual and
conceptual parallel Woodman draws between the nubile female body and
these structures of architeeture. This structural parallel does not necessarily
have truck with disappearance or even camouilage. Her self-portraits evoke
the threshold condition of being bound in built space as well as bound by
gender, mutually reinforcing regressive tropes.
Woodman’s work in Blueprint for a Tempie also lays bare the architectural
structure of the bady. The most obvious aspect of the caryatids of the Parthenon
is that they hold up the flat stone roof of the Porch of the Caryatids, In studies
it is no
for it, she gave her models cardboard boxes to hold up like entablatures over
their heads when she photographed them. (hese images did nat make it into
emptied.
the final version on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) [ler Biveprint
for « Temple makes use, in a pronounced way, of the images of the bodies of
other women as stractural keys. In this sense, Blueprint for 2 Temple moves
decidedly away from any kind of self-exploralion that might be attributed
to her earlier work (notably, many of her photographs from Rome include
images of other women). The solipsism that much of Woudman’s work could
8” See also Tatter (2011).
 ClACA WOODMAN'S DARK GAZE
seem to reflect—a densely interior landscape of a young woman taking many
self-portraits, mostly in the nude, from ages 13 until 22—belies the hislory of
her close working relationships with other young women, intimacies of art
recorded in Blueprint for a Temple, She does not record in these photographs
an intense engagement with herself but rather her connection with other
women. Woman-to-woman conneclion generates this art, thus combining as
it does portraits of friends with identities translated, shifted, and transposed;
in Blueprint for a Temple, this translation of identity is perfurmed through
the invocation of the motif of the caryatid. The caryatid bears the “Other
night” that Blanchot ([1942] 1981) describes: on this figure’s anonymity and
recessional pull, the darkness that Woodman’s work brings to vision is borne.
the arehiteetural is feminized in the other night of her blueprint.
The Visual Field of the Sanctuary
As we have seen, then, Woodman uses the structural motif of the nubile
female body by setting it parallel to derelict architectural motifs found in city
bathrooms, thereby exemplifying and criliquing what Danto (2003) meant by
the phrase the “abuse of beauty” as the postmodern idiom. For in her Blueprint
for a Temple project, the body of the young girl, draped to suggest a caryatid,
stands in the context of apparently ruinous cily bathroom fitments. When.
Woodman photographs these young women and sets their images parallel
to the photographs of bathroom fixtures—images that if neoclassical are also
evocative of the dilapidation of the apartments from which they are culled
(not to mention the obscene, or off-scene, cultural space of the bathroom)—
she implies femininity’s risk, its position at the boundary of culture, and its
status as that which is subject to ruin.
Woadman mixes beauty and obscenity (that which is off-scene, the
bathroom) to build a temple that cannot be entered, that even in its nearly
diaphanous, blue architectural paper substance resists entry. One cannot
step inside for all the vulnerable defenselessness of the medium of the work.
In the very fragility of the work inheres its refusal to be broached. Blueprint
for a Temple mounts representation as an act set aparl from all other acls by
invoking the bathroom as the obscene architectural space set apart from other
formally articulated habitable spaces and by presenting it as sacred. Within
this melancholy sacred, Blueprint for a Temple not only positions gender as a
form of haunting but also troubles the status of the work of art in the era of
the posthistorical. There is no stable object. The stability of the work has been
provided through curatorial verve and dedication. Blueprint for a Temple is
built to return io the origins of pholography, to the impossibility of holding
the image, and to the origins of Enlightenment aesthetics in the lauding of
the Acropolis. In those returns, Woodman deconstructs and decomposes the
SANCTUARIES AND ARCHITECTONICS 63
origins of photography and the origins of aesthetics; she defaces and honours
ihe origins in this work of sublime power.
Punning the Acropolis
The visual pun of photographing a young woman’s living body and using the
image as if it were a sculpted caryatid is immanent and for the taking; bul to
claim its repetition massively, as Blueprint for a Temple attempts, requisitions
the image of the nubile woman’s body not for the use of holding up a structure
but rather for the use of performing a structure that by design refuses lo slay
put, to stand up, ur to da its part in the edifice of the Western canon. The
visual vocabulary that builds Blueprint for a Temple invokes the history of
representation that stands at the base of one version of Western aesthetics: the
Acropolis of Athens and the Porch of the Caryatids. The Caryatids before the
Erechtheion are the most obvious reference point for Woodman’s Temple, yet
(here are also comparable figures uncovered at Delphi. Standing as a mythic
signifier of the foundation of Western aesthetics, ihe Acropolis bears scrutiny
as a young womans choice of an object of reference in the massive collage,
which she creates at age 22—the brink of adulthood.” Her compression of
the caryatids bencath a tumplelike peaked roof (like the pediment of the
Acropolis’s Parthenon, and unlike the Porch of the Caryatids) is bold. She
does nat place her art in the minor key. She implicitly expresses an insistence
on placing herself at the center of the Weslern canon, or at the root of it, the
Acropolis. As well, the figures at Delphi, which apparently influenced her
plan for the temple, carry the idea of the visionary, placing Blucprimi for a
Temple in a kind of fractured visionary mode.
Blueprint for a Temple argues for its entrance into the register of the
architectonic even as it cannot stand up and perform as architecture, as built
space. ‘this sense of the collage being always unlinished, as much a ruin
as a blueprini, haunts the piece, One must say that this haunting does not
occur after the fact—after the suicide—but irom the beginning of the work.
Woodman chooses material (blueprint) that could not be farther from marble
in ils transience. Why repeal the Acropolis, a foundation of one branch of
Western aesthetics, in diazotype that cannot stand up? If Winckelmann
([1764] 2006), and the Jena Romantics gencrally, valorized the ruin as Lhe
ideal aesthetic form, one might say she is showing her colors as a Romantic
artist by choosing to reference the most esteemed ruin (the Acropolis) in a
% “As Yaiouri (2001) makes the claim that the Acropolis carries the symbolic weight
of standing for Greece, likewise, Wincklemann ((1764] 2006) argues that Greek art and
architecture were che highest form and example of the aesthetic. The Acropolis, therefure.
stands as a symbol of thia aesthetic achievement, which Wincklemarn placed al the
begining of what he saw as the Wester canon
64° FRANCESCA WOODMAN’S DARK GAZE
work effectively already ruined from its inception because of the fragility of
its material. [ler Temple suggests the “end of arl” has been encoded in art since
the classical era.
Woodman’s paradoxical Blueprint for a ‘lemple is the perfected classical
sanctuary of the aesthetic, cool blue, remale, and anlithelical 19 confession or
diary; itmounts its aesthetic onto transience and the kind of disappearance that
is not vanishing but is becoming illegible, hence risking its own readability.
The work exemplifies the twentieth-century end of art and also refuses that
end, through its fragility it refuses to cede its seriousness of purpose to irony
alone. In its more covert allusion to the caryatids at Delphi, the work
invokes a derelict oracular, placing its art at once outside and within the
visionary.
Blueprint for a ‘lentple hauls the classical to its end in the dissolutive twentieth
century. For one set of images for caryalids available to Woodman would
have been New York City architecture, structures such as the Cable Building
at the comer of Broadway and Houston Street and Corn’s late nineteenth-
century lofts al 91 and 93 Fifth Avenue, buildings that she lived near and may
have walked past during her time in New York City.”* Blueprint for a Temple is
not simply an exercise in conjuring the classical caryatid. Woodman’s Temple
is buiil to evoke space and objects’ resistance to time’s erosion, even as it
shoulders that erosion as its central gesture.
Blueprint for a ‘lemple would epitomize the sacred object—set apart not
only by name but also by fragile materiality. And yet because one cannot
enter its photographic flat surface, it resists fulfilling the function of the
sacred. I suggest the melancholy of the form, against earlier reads of
Woodman’s personal melancholy, is not driven by her own grief but by
her interpretation of the aesthetic in the lale twentieth century and the loss
of the sacred (Simon 2010). By the sacred, I mean the term in the way that
Benjamin ([1936] 1969; [1931] 2011) uses it in his discussion of twentieth-
century art and photography in A Short History of Photography. Benjamin uses
the term “sacred” not to conjure any one specific religion's definition of the
tetm but rather to denote some spacc outside the quotidian, that is, the anti-
ironic. The loss of the sacred, the sanctuary, is given place in Blueprint for 4
Temple—a blueprint that can never tell us how to build a temple. This depth
of mourning is strongly linked to trends in late twentieth-century aesthetics,
even though Woodman’s approach is against the grain. Just because her
work is against the grain of her time does not mean it expresses personal
pathology. On the contrary, it bridges the loss of sanctuary, the loss of the
link between the sacred and the work of art, in the late twenticth century. It
is nothing personal.
= See Walsh (2006, 51).
SANCTUARIES AND ARCHITECTON:CS 65
Afterimages
The unsalvageability of Blueprint for a ‘lemple, or rather its need to be salvaged,
encodes in the bones of the piece Woodman’s understanding of the later
twenticth cenlury as a period in which art as the concept of the sacred is
defunct.” In keeping with this self-positioning as pensive and backward
gazing, Blueprint for a Temple's afterlife as a museum piece for slightly more
than a decade made of the project a literally sacred object—a thing set
apart, sacra, sanctum —in the sense of its being such a tragile object as to be
also impossible to display until conservation al the Melropolilan Museum of Art
saved the piece, materially.” The piece sat in the Met unseen for more than
a decade, a literally sacred, set apart, object. ‘he ambivalence inherent in the
work is dramatized by its history of being salvaged and by being salvaged,
preserved, and turned against its own movement into illegibility.
Between 2001 and 2011 it was stored in the Metropolitan Museum oi Art
but not shown te the public. For years after Woodman’s death, no one could
see Bluevrint for a Temple in its original state, because the object could not
bear the process of being displayed: it became a temple, sacred in the strict
etymological sense of housing the interior (cf the museum) known only Lo the
initiate, hat is, known to her parents and to the photographic conservators
al the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who kept the relic. Blueprint for a ‘lemple
uncannily became a temple, housed in the inner sanclums first of her father’s
studio and then of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The work becomes a character in itself, a metaphor carrying a supplement.
That is, as Derrida ({1970] 1998) argues, the supplement is an “inassimilable
residue” in the text, so also one may say that the “inassimilable residue” in
Woodman’s visual text—her Blueprint for a Tentple—is the degradation into
illegibility that the photographer built into the work through ils maleriality.
And yet, fo see and to know this residue, lhe work has to be preserved. In that
sense, it is truly an inassimilable residue.
As an object privileged and also for decades an object set apart, the
peusive sclf-positioning of the work makes it almost illegible culturally. As
Barthes (1974) argues in S/Z, the pensive text is that which sets itself in the
place of enigma. After its sojourn of many years rolled up safe and dark,
the diazotype made ifs way inlo the holdings of the Metropolitan Museum
3 Mircea Eliade (1957) adumibrates some key shifts in concepts af the sacred.
2 After its display at Manhattan’s Altema-ive Museam in 1980, the piece was kept
fur almost 20 years by Francesea Woodman’s father, the painter and phologcaphe: George
Woodi:an, in his studio, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has records of acquiring the
work in 2001, while conservator Kennedy notes that the piece was acquizec by the Met as
a partial gift‘ 1999. These records mean that Blueprint jor a Temple was apparently in the
museum from 1999 but not displayed until Febraary 2012, at which poin: it was displayed
in the exhibition Spien in the House of Art: Photography, Film, md video. ‘he author's personal
communicalion wilh Kennedy, February and August 2012.
 66 FRANCESCA WOODMAN'S DARK GAZE
of Art. So the sacred, sel-apart life of Blueprint for a ‘lempie is extreme. One
panel of the original installation is still “sacred,” still set apart; il is kepl yet
in the possession of her estate, and to my understanding it is in her parents’
New York City studio.
But what different kinds of sacredness does Blueprint for a Temple rehearse
and revise? ‘Ihe referent of it, the Acropolis—by surviving wars, shelling,
looling, and Athens’ corrosive twenticth-century pollution—itself marks an.
uncanny visual edifice. It preserves a religion consigned to the past, a temple
hallowing deities no longer generally considered sacred; but the visual object
itself functions as sacred, its iconicity is the sacred of Western acsthetics. If
Woodman also visually references the Siphnian Treasury al Delphi, the theme
of ruin is even stronger, as is the theme of the oracular. As Yalouri (2001)
argues, the Acropolis has been absurbed into the Greek thought as a symbol
of the sacred. To the European Romantic philosophers (and poet Friedrich
Hélderlin), the Acropolis signified the purity of the aesthetic, the aesthetic as
that which supplanted religion. Woodman’s Temple then returns also to this
seminal place in Weslern aesthelics where the function of form is theorized
by the European Romantics to supplant the ritual meaning for which the
Acropolis originally was ouilt. For the Romantics, the ruin—the fragment—
was the perfect aesthetic form; the Acropolis as a ruin stands as a foundation
of Romantic and post-Romantic aesthetics (Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy
1988). ‘he ruins at Delphi, explicitly reterenced in her titling of a draft toward
her temple (plale 2), sland as exemplary fragments, fragments to which her
fragile temple returns. The delicate beauty of the lemple—the caryatid girls
are holding up a jumble of collapsing bathroom architecture—showcases a
derelict inheritance: of the classical.
Developing from and against the Romantic tradition, Walter Benjamin
([{1936] 1969) in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
articulates this terrain not only of the ruin but also ofits precursor, the sacred—
the ritual or cultic or religious becoming the merely aesthetic and ultimately
the photographic—charting a shift from ritual use of the art object (statue
or icon) fo the desacralized replication of the aesthetic object. Woodman’s
Temple concerns the loss of ritual in lale twentieth-century culture. Blueprint
for a Temple could be interpreted as a ritually produced object, produced by
the ritual interaction between a group of young women who posed for her.
And whereas it would be inaccurate to say Ihe young women’s images are
ritually described as sacred by this work, it is worth noting that Woodman’s
status as un artist is often typified as a cult phenomenon,
Calling up the terms “ritual” and “cult” that Benjamin ([1936] 1969)
uses to such central effect in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction,” I am aware of the slippage in time of the meaning of this term
“ritual.” Tek me clarify, then, that when I say Blueprint for a Temple was built
by the ritual of photographing friends and their bathrooms, I refer to the term
SANCTJARIZS AND ARCHITECTONICS 67
“ritual” in an anthropological sense of rituals as rites of passage (Geerlz 1973).
Woodman, in building Blueprint for a Lemple, photographs her friends and
the East Village’s dilapidated bathrooms inhabited by girls who cannot pay
much for rent. One might press the term “ritual” and suggest that her ritual of
photographing herself anc her friends as caryatids functions as a kind of ritual
of communion belween the young women, or as Blisubeth Bronfon (2010)
implies, a form of encounter. She photographs her friends just at the juncture
as they assume the cultural burden of no longer being girls but young women
and as they shoulder, in the fin-de-siécle light of East Village apartments, the
cwtural work of upholding with their bodies that which nubility encodes—a
kind of vanishing point of desire and use, sexual pleasure and reproductive
function—cades that attach to the woman-as-caryatid. But she alsa evokes a
sideslepping of the burden of the caryatid. Blueprint for a Temple shows the
young women's burden as utterly light—paper blueprint, giving them no
weight to have to hold up a weight that’s not there.
Unlike the busty stone caryatids that they would have seen at the Cable
Building or. Broadway and the Corn lofts on Fifth Avenue, the living caryatids
captured by diazotype are anti-heroie and evocatively tender. ‘the light,
coming, from the side, sculpts the forms of the young women and suggesis
the cost of holding up the aesthetic edifice. A crepuscular mood holds the
blue-tinted Blueprint for a Tempie. The dark curves where the etymology of
the images’ history as slides (she creates the images first agains| her wall) is
shown in the work as a shading-in of dusk light. The Blanchotian dark gaze
is performed here as she shows her audience how it is that the sacred space
of the aesthetic disappears inlo posthislory, disappears into blueprint paper.
Woodman’s project by its title and structure evokes the space of worship,
the space of the sacred, the displacement of the quotidian, the rejection of
the profane, a space that is built to function as elegy insofar as her medium
{architectural blueprint paper) could scarcely have been less physically stable.
‘the title Blueprint for a lemple invokes the sacred, even it such an invocation is
troubled by her blueprint temple’s melancholy.
Ina study for the temple, Woodman’s friends hold up cardboard boxes for
capitals, graphically describing a feint of weight, the trompe l'oeil architecture
thal her photography inscribes in the collage Bluepract jor a Temple. Weight
as the cultural backstory of the caryatid as well invokes displacement, loss,
and servitude, inasmuch as the original caryatids were captives of the Greeks
(women ‘rom Caryae). Likewise, Rodin’s Fallen Caryatil Carrying Her Stone
performs as a damned woman and connotes a hellish burden (plate 10).
Although Rodin’s tortured and contorted sculpture does not chime with
Woodman’s graceful and light photugraphs, the allusion cannot be entirely
misplaced. She is responding to Rodin’s rhyming of female nubility with
servitude and burden insofar as Blueprint for a Temple marks a poignant
projection of an always hypothetical space within which her girlfriends are
 68 — PRANCESCA WOODMAN'S DARK GAZE
untouchable as they playfully hold up a debased subversion of terms—for
Doric columns, we get pedestal sinks and claw-footed bathtubs.
Whereas Rodin poses the caryatid as a figure of torment, a woman borne
down by the weight of the stone she bears, Waodman’s caryatids, in their
impetus to translate the sculptural, overturn an evocation of the three
dimensional. Thus they throw off the burden of weight and gravity in favor of
paper images that deploy the female form as a syntagm of a gendered lexicon.
She preserves cach individual young woman’s body, each friend pictured,
with details intact—despite having no face in the image—her work relains
the touching vulnerable individuality of each specific body, as it meditates
ideniily as enbodied trace. Her caryatids, steeped in blue, at once deploy
the reference of the emblematic caryatid and break down such iconicily,
replacing it with each specific, vulnerable, individual body. The darkness of
the project is this reworking without resolving the original merging of the
captured female bady into a cornerstone of Western aesthetics.
The Edge of the Work
In this question of permanence, T want to think further about not only
architectonic but also the sculptural aspects of Blueprint for a ‘Temple, its feint
toward the statue. It depends on ambiguity and elision of expecied boundaries
and depends on the playful and mournful transposition of stone to photograph,
rather like the work of another 1970s artist who barely survived into the 1980s,
Robert Mapplethorpe (Danto 1995). But Woodman takes this plaving with the
edge between sculpture and photagraphy in a direction different from thal of
Mapplethorpe, with his close photographs of replicas of Greek statues." By
mapping her photographs of living caryatids onto life-size images on papers
(architectural blueprints) thal are the building blocks for built structures,
she uses photography as the limit of slatuary. As Lynda Nead (2007) has
argued, pholography and statuary were linked in the nineleenth century by
the tableaux. Tlowever, by fusing portraits with sketches for building plans,
Woodman shows the transience and the fallible code of embodiment that is
the photographic merging photography and statuary. Against the grain of
the monument in marble, she Positions the image's loss, a loss not to erasure
but to bhunring and becoming illegible—showing the way that ruins happen,
compressing that path of dereliction,
The Acropolis itself was long circulated in the public imagination as a
plundered space, a wounded icon, damaged. by wars and pollution, and the
& The phrase “playing with the edge” is drawn fom Danto's (1995) book on
Mapplethorpe. By using (he concept of playing with the edge to describe Woodinan’s jaler
works, I suggest that she, like her conlemporaries, was well aware of and responded to
curtent frends questioning the place use and topic of fine art photography.
SANCTUARIFS AND AZCHITECTONICS 69
caryatids were often the popular focus of this imagination of the Acropolis
as a wounded site of the Greek nation (Yalouri 2001). The popular myth of
the weeping caryatids is evoked by the lines of a pro-Greek nationalist poem,
“They touk the caryatids away from you. / They did not ask you whether you
felt pain” (Yalouri 2001, 64). The poem creales the notion ot this architectonic
space as both wounded and feminine, a conceptualization that Woodman
translates and expands, creating acsthctic space as wounded and, if feminine,
impossible to either inhabit or preserve.
The grace and ease with which she accomplishes those wrenching
conceptual shifts between the sacred and the quotidian, the classical and the
posthistorical, habitation and heterotopia, nalional symbol and the defunct
nation, gives the work an uncanny power. Tor the fluency of her caryatids—
the diaphanous quality of the images —indicates the theme of loss in precisely
the place where ils rebuff might be expected: where we expect stone, we get
flimsy blueprint paper. The caryatids from the Erechtheion are solid, each
figure holding up not only her entablature but also the weight of the building’s
suof. The strictares imposed on the feminine form are rendered dramatic in
the Porch of the Caryatids, but her caryatids refuse to hold up: her caryatids
refuse to function as useful architecture. They are antiheroic. They deflate
the American dreams of conquest and surveillance. ‘he images evoke refusal as
a space that shimmers in endless recess: where is the temple? There is only
an image.
A formal gesture of looking back is inscribed into Blueprint for ‘Lemple. OF
course, the act of looking back, in time, is inscribed into every photograph. But
the difference is that Blueprint for a Temple places this gesture of looking back,
an inescapable habit of all photugraphs, in the place of looking forward—the
blueprint from which the architect aspires lo draw. Bul there is no temple that
can be built from this blueprint; the visual temple in all its flatness, openness,
and fragility is all there will be. This building cannot be built not because
Woodman died before she could go further with the project, but because the
project is entirely about this suspended visual meditation on the conditions
of morlal loss and its relationship to architecture, statuary, photography,
and time.” Blueprint for a Temple goes beyond claiming gender, or femininity,
as its topos, for the project’s meditation on evanescence and loss does not
end with concerns of gender. ft encompasses questions of the relationship of
space and time to art’s suspension between mimesis and transcendence. The
blueprint phrases its visual turn as a backward glance, Orpheus’s turning to
see Eurydice who vanishes when he sees her.
= Harrison asks “What does jt mean for a wall that no longer houses aaything to be
at home in a poet who is essentially homeless” (2003, 471. Blueprint
for a Tenrule, Y suggest, is
a wall thal does not house anything but is at nome in a photographer who was essentially
homeless.
70 FRANCUSC:A WOOLIMAN’S DARK GAZU
Simulacrum and Darkness
The simulacrum that Baudrillard (1987) argues takes over late modernity,
Woodman encounters through Biteprint for a ‘lempie. The loss of the real,
effected by a photograph, a simulacrum, would seem to be unrelated
to whatever ritual impelled the original creation of the caryatids of the
Acropolis. The loss of the real, however, has long been a problem for art, as
Levinas ([1948] 2009) describes the problem of the mimetic in “Reality and
Its Shadow.” Blueprint for a Temple built of photographs will only be able to
survive insofar as devoted conservators attend and keep up the work, and one
may compare this cxaggerated transience to the temple lamp in the Acropulis
that had to be kept burning by being attended. The preservation of Blueprint
for a Temple is a kind of keeping the lamp burning in the temple. What will
unfold from Woadman’s two-dimensional Blueprint for « Temple is not a three-
dimensional stricture that can be built and can sustain itself, but rather a
forceful engagement of audience and history—the project can only continue
to exist by inspiring its audience to preserve it. Audience, then, is the third
dimension of Bluepritt for a Temple. With audience, the work hecomes almost
three dimensional conceptually in that it is in the decision of the audience
to preserve this fragile temple. Photographs will not stand up to marble in
anduranee: but diazo is pointedly geared toward vulnerability to light, the
condition of seeing. The mournfulness of this gesture of production is central
to Blueprint jor a Tentple all the more because it enshrines young women
friends together.
Maybe, then, one thing thal she is mourning, with diazolype being a
material chosen for its vulnerability, is young women as such. Gitls—
Woodman and her friends —build this temple that will quickly fall, or would
have fallen had it not been for the efforts of preservationisls. Blueprint for a
Temple has been held up by the careful attentions of Nora Kennedy’s team at
the Mctropolitan Muscum of Art. But this carefulness that preserves the work
(which T salute) is not necessarily reflective of the work's original mode thal
leans against monumental art, suggesting its ruin.
‘Lhe absorption into the simulacrum that Blueprint jor a Temple stages is
planned as a complete absorplion, for the young women photographed
not only fold into the photographs but also the blueprint disintegrates into
illegibility when exposed to light.” This progressive movement into illegibility
3 Dana Hemmenway (2002) explains: “Usually eonditiun problems foundir diazotypes
derive in part from inherent vice and their sensilivity to envizonmenl, Delerioralion is
manifested in three ways: background yellowing and darkening, discoloration of dye, and
increased brittleness of hase layer” Novahly, Herumenway indicates that he: research on.
Wondman's process of diazotype was originally dene as a student research project (2002,
ii}. Thal is, Woodman’s great collage was initially, upon acquisition by the Met, treated
as suitable for a gifted student to cut her teeth on, a acl tha! in ilself suggesls the shilling
cultural value attached to Woodman’s work.
SANCILARIES AND ARCEOTECTONICS 71
enters mournfully into ils terrain of the “hither side” (Levinas [1948] 2009).
Diazotype is still visible when it degrades; it is just flegible. The hy‘perreal
theorized by Baudrillard (1987), almost conlempotaneously with Woodman’s
late work, is the domain toward which her blueprint images press, taking their
aesthetic cues from classical forms and melding these forms into paper that
will blue out, becoming illegible. Her caryatids are icons for the posthistorical
era, not out of step wilh her era but so subtle in the use of its idiom as to have
been overlooked, at least while she was alive (Dantu 1998).
These figures at risk in the diazotype images are women, placing front and
center the problemalicof femininity as that which, culturally, stands vulnerable
to musprision, to misreading, and to misinterpretation (as indeed Woodman
herself so often has been misinterpreted as a study in psychopathology). It is
uncanny that prominent among those who preserve the temple—Francesca’s
mother, the artist Betty Woodman, and the conservator Nora Kennedy—
are women. Not to push the point too far, but one could say that behind
the risked bodies uf young women photographed in the late 1970s, behind
these nubile young women holding up the temple, metaphorically sland
Belty Woodman and Nora Kennedy, women whe survived the era, Not that
Trancesca Woudinan could have foreseen this fate of her blueprint temple.
But in creating, Blueprint for a Temple, she plays with the terms of fate and the
aesthetic; plays with the idea of the photograph as infinilely reiterative, and
infinitely detrital; and uses her understanding of the photographic medium to
construct the aesthetic event that cannot be reproduced (one cannot properly
see it without standing before it} and that is made almost permanent by the
reception of audience and by audience's desire to preserve the work.
‘the sacred darkness—Blanchot’s concept that I apply to Woodman’s
photography—that holds us in regarding Blueprint jor 2 Temple happens
not because she participates in simple evocation of the sacred but precisely
because she does nol. In positioning the sacred—the temple—at the end of
the twentieth century as that which is made to be lust, Woodman fuses the
negation ot the aesthetic and the sacred in a work whose power is its risk and
its near Hlegibility between paradigms of reading.
% See ‘Lutter (2011), Simon (2010), Conley (2008), Phelan (2002), and Davison (2006),
all of whom, desvile rich!y divergent approaches of interpretation, do not fail ta mention
Woadman’s psychological difficulties as a kind of vanishing point that organizes her work.
 Francesca Woodman’s
- Dark Gaze
i
oo : ; : he e Diazotypes
Diazotypes «
and Other C Late Works
Vork:

Claire Raymond

i Routledge
Taylor
& Francis Group
LONDON AND NEW YORK

ee