THE HOUSE FOR JOSEPHINE BAKER: SPATIAL RHETORICS
For those of you tired of seeing Josephine through the eyes of Loos, I will explain how a Black gaze frees Josephine. Loos’s House represents a Black architectural type. For the type to remain a type, however, requires re-ensconcing Josephine within Loos’s voyeuristic construction. Re-evoking Loos’s house as we are doing today, privatizes and primitivizes Josephine all over again—again and again. The only way out of this trap is to demolish Loos’s House. This is difficult to do because the house was never built. It is something more entrenched. It is a sign.
The project to free Josephine was originally conceived for the 2004 Harlemworld: Metropolis as Metaphor exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. When the exhibition closed 18 years ago this month, Josephine’s dilemma remained unresolved. Working with signs takes a long time. They must be conceived, designed, and projected—then you have to wait and see.
The process of working with signs versus Metaphors, as the exhibition’s subtitle encourages, is different. The difference means entering the ring of aesthetic competition where Blackness is likely to get knocked out. This is not a game of metaphors and similes. A knockout is existential. If Loos is delivering blows via the canon, you can’t fight back with figures of speech.
This means avoiding treating Loos as a punching bag while the real culprit—the house—remains intact as a sign. Placing a sign in an unfamiliar context—with other signs—destabilizes it. The first step in demolishing Loos’s house begins with a series of Black rhetorical looks. First by evoking Josephine’s absence by replacing her with one of those ‘other’ Josephines; then by using the space of Black rhetoric to depict another house; then, and finally, using this other house to ensure Josephine is not entrapped (again) in an architectural sign of my own making. If, after considering my proposal, you insist on discussing Josephine’s legacy in relation to an architectural construct designed to dehumanize her, that’s on you.
Otherwise, no worries. Josephine is not here.
