Editors’ Introduction
by Sybil F. Joslyn
Affectation, the theme we have chosen for this issue of SEQUITUR, is at once relevant and expansive in its possibilities. In our present moment, as we still feel the effects of a global pandemic, international warfare, social justice uprisings, and climate threats, we as a people face a reckoning: who do we want to be, as a nation, as a community, and as individuals? What beliefs do we hold dear in our hearts, and in what capacity do we act? What aspects of our behavior are genuine, and which are performative, or rather, an embodiment of affectation? Centrally, these questions allude to a series of inherent dualities between interiority and exteriority, surface and depth, and artifice and core, and apply to topics inclusive of human behavior, materiality, and identity. It is these dualities and topics, in addition to its timeliness, that drove our excitement to call for material related to the theme of affectation.
Affectation has long been intertwined with the complexities of human self-presentation and artistic production. In behavior, appearance, or speech, it can refer to an intentionally exaggerated display, a manufactured artifice intended to deceive. In the history of art, architecture, and material culture, these impulses toward the artificial or hyperbolic might be employed by artists, practitioners, or makers to convey a certain message, meaning, or emotion. From the fanciful gestures of the Rococo to the simplicity of geometric abstraction, affectation defines the visual world we witness and the material world we navigate. In small objects and monumental structures alike, creators have manipulated materials, shapes, and formal qualities to curate a particular experience for the observer or user. Limited to appearances, the façade of affectation often masks motivations, identities, or truths that lie beneath the surface.
Another definition of affectation resists this binary and instead speaks intimately to the relationships between object and viewer, or between artwork and observer. An affective thing has an effect on something or someone, and thus affectation can refer to an object or work of art with a perceived influence or power. Over the last half century, scholars from the social sciences, folklore studies, and humanities disciplines have begun to critically study the capacity of objects to shape human behavior.1 In their links to functionality, religion, superstition, and status, objects and artworks are potent communicators and actors within the material networks of the human world. Whether they have inherent agency or gain agency due to human belief depends on your theoretical underpinning of choice, but a simple truth remains: objects and artworks have the power to move people, both physically and emotionally. Perhaps nowhere is this power more evident than in fields that prioritize the study of visual and material culture.
For instance, certain objects embody multiple facets of affectation, like a ship figurehead captured by F.W. Powell for the Index of American Design around 1938 (fig. 1). Likely dating to the late nineteenth century, the figurehead once adorned the prow of a fast-moving sailing ship, her left hand extended outward in front of her in the direction of the boat’s movement. Dressed in Grecian sandals and flowing chiton, she exemplifies figureheads of the neoclassical type that rose to popularity during the waning years of America’s Age of Sail. She appears every bit the classical goddess, the whiteness of her body and clothing carved in deep relief in imitation of the marble fine art sculpture that permeated visual culture on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet as Powell’s drawing shows us, these stylistic qualities are surface-deep; they comprise an affectation belied by cracks that have developed in her artifice, cracks that reveal the true character of the figurehead’s making. When we look closely at Powell’s drawing, chips in the figurehead’s paint and deformities in her surface allow her wooden materiality to become evident to the viewer, and weathered patches reveal pegs and joinery where her arm and cape have been attached to her greater form. This discrepancy between appearance and material nature is only one way in which the figurehead embodies our issue’s theme of affectation.
Figureheads, in their symbolic importance, also held a certain affective power for the crews of their respective ships. They were viewed as intimately tied to the context for which they were made, an embodiment of ship name, mission, and crew livelihood. Through their position on the prow, they were viewed as symbolic navigators and as the eyes of the ship, as guardians and protectors that would help ships find safe harbor at their destinations. Manifesting the superstitious lore of her maker and the seamen, the figurehead also held an apotropaic power to ward off disaster due to storm or threat in battle and to bring good omens if her form appealed to the personified sea. Akin to lucky charms, ship figureheads were a central component of shipbuilding during America’s Age of Sail and were believed to have held the power to affect the course of perilous journeys at sea. It is both aspects of affectation—artifice and affective power—that our seven authors engage with so beautifully in this issue of SEQUITUR.
Beginning our issue, Rachel Kline’s feature essay examines the facets of affectation present in the production and reception of Mexica amentecayotl, or feather pictures, in counter-reformation Europe. Crafted by Indigenous makers and featuring Catholic imagery, the material rarity and luminosity of these featherworks appealed to the tastes of cosmopolitan European consumers who favored transcendent artistic images in line with the burgeoning drama of the Baroque. Employing a primarily decolonial lens, Kline’s essay illuminates the affective power of materials and images while emphasizing the active and singular role Indigenous craftspeople played in the development of European collecting and style. Theodora Bocanegra Lang’s exhibition review of Taylor Davis Selects: Invisible Ground of Sympathy, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston, creates a meaningful dialogue with Kline’s essay. Identifying the exhibition as a contrasting collection of objects, Lang expounds upon the affective power of each of its elements. In highlighting the connections between artworks and exhibition, artworks and collection, and artworks and visitor, Lang clarifies how the elements communicate and build a bridge between viewer and art and characterizes the viewer experience as one existing between the realms of nonbeing and objecthood. While varying drastically in time period and media, both Kline and Lang address how affective power forges relationships between people and art objects.
Three of our authors take a different approach to the theme and examine affectation as a manifestation of self-fashioning or self-presentation. Through a close stylistic and contextual analysis of Sofinisba Anguissila’s Self Portrait with Madonna and Child, Emma Lazerson discusses in her feature essay the ways in which the artist displayed two modes of artistic performance and affectation in her work. By adopting contemporary conventions of courtly dress and performativity and by imitating the styles of revered artists in the embedded easel painting in her Self Portrait, Anguissila fashioned herself as both courtier and master as a preemptive gesture of belonging to a group that had yet to accept her. Michaela Peine similarly addresses the themes of affectation and self-presentation in her research spotlight but does so through an analysis of “hidden” or obscured photographic self-portraits by Jo Spence and Mary Sibande. By examining select works, Peine explores the ways each artist constructed or modified identities to present to the viewer. In this way, both Spence and Sibande embrace the multifaceted nature of identity and adopt affectation as a possible valence of the self. Rounding out this discussion of connections between affectation and identity is Ateret Sultan-Reisler, who in her exhibition review addresses the nuanced message of Philip Guston Now, a retrospective of the artist’s work that was on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston last year. Concerned primarily with providing previously minimized historical and biographical context to his work, the exhibition illuminates for the viewer connections between Guston’s lived experience and the affectation of his expressive, abstracted style. Ultimately, Sultan-Reisler tells us, Guston’s turn away from figuration to abstraction, and back to figuration, can be viewed as an artistic response to societal oppression.
Finally, two of our contributors address affectation as a symbolic manifestation of the self. In his feature essay, Samuel Love traces artistic fascination with the affected visage of the commedia dell’arte archetype of Pierrot from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1980s. By analyzing the origins of anxiety provoked by coulrophobia, or a fear of clowns, Love identifies the ways in which alternative artistic communities from the Decadents through performers of Glam Rock identified with and adopted the Pierrot mask in recognition of their marginalized status. Concluding our issue, Isabella Dobson summarizes the events of Adornment, Boston University’s Mary L. Cornille (GRS’87) 39th Annual Graduate Symposium in the History of Art & Architecture, held for the first time in person since 2019. Organized by PhD students Hannah Jew and Rachel Kline, the Symposium featured seven graduate students who presented work in two panels, “Adornment, Power, and the Collective” and “Adornment, Identity, and the Body.” Reflecting on the theme, Keynote speaker Dr. Jill Burke introduced the argument of her upcoming book, How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity, in which she makes a compelling argument that female practices of adornment during the Renaissance can be viewed as acts of empowerment and agency. While the graduate speakers addressed a wide range of topics from Ancient Assyrian burial embellishments through Chinese export embroidery in the nineteenth-century, each showed how closely the themes of adornment and affectation are intertwined. Whether to convey power, communicate identity, or relate aspiration, artists and subjects throughout time have utilized objects with affective power and carefully cultivated their self-presentation for personal, political, and economic ends. Above all, the work presented at the Symposium has elucidated how central the study of adornment is to our understanding of visual and material culture.
It is with immense gratitude that the editors of this issue of SEQUITUR thank the authors for their contributions that so thoughtfully engage the theme of affectation. Addressing subjects from sixteenth-century featherworks through the counterculture of Europe’s twentieth, this collection of essays and reflections effectively grounds the abstract theme of affectation and demonstrates the fascinating possibilities its study can yield. It is our hope that this issue will not only provide an informative and intellectually stimulating respite from these challenging times, but that it will also prompt moments of introspection on the part of our readers. By turning the mirror on ourselves, we might use these discussions of inspiration, self-fashioning, power, and identity to consider how affectation has made us who we are and who we might become.
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Sybil F. Joslyn is a PhD candidate in the History of Art & Architecture at Boston University. She studies American art and material culture in the long nineteenth century, and her research explores the intersection between material and visual culture, the expression of individual and national identities, and intercultural exchange in the Atlantic World. Previously, Sybil has held internships and fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Bard Graduate Center, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, Inc., and the Winter Show. Her dissertation examines maritime salvage as object, material, and process to interrogate perceptions of identity, property, and value during America’s Age of Sail.
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Footnotes
1. Scholarly publications on object agency include: Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2005), 64–86; Daniel Miller, “Materiality: An Introduction,” in Materiality, ed. Daniel Miller (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1–50; and Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.